Divided- 2120

by Brian Savage

  He floated from one to another, not all sad or traumatic. As if by some great being’s mercy, Jack relived some of the happiest days of his life as well. Each time longing to stay just a little longer, and each time being pulled back into the darkness. He relived Brant’s passing, crying unseen tears in the dark at the wound still raw. Jack lost track of time within the dream state. He thought about his life, who he was, and questioned the very reality he was seeing. Each time he visited a memory, there was always a little something he thought had been different. The eye color of the first girl he had ever kissed in high school. The size of the room the first time he, fearfully, gave a speech to his class. Little things he had remembered once as being different. The tone of peoples’ voices changed. Implications he had once believed to be true now appeared absent in the replays.

  He felt himself falling now, in the darkness. Felt his mind folding in on itself as it was sucked to a central point. He flapped his hands and kicked his feet, seeking to either swim or fly from this point he felt himself pulled to. He felt a stinging hand upon his face in the darkness, and brought his hands up to shield himself from the unknown attacker. He slammed his eyes shut, wincing, as the hand found its mark again.

  “Jack! Wake up!” He heard a familiar voice, from a distant life and time that he had all but forgotten during the reliving of his past.

  “Jack, open your eyes!” The sting again upon his face.

  Jack didn’t want to open his eyes. He felt safe in the dark, safe in the belief he had no other traumatic memory left to live. The sting again. Jack opened his eyes. The blinding yellow light, from a place not quite familiar yet, blurred his vision. He saw the shape of a face before him, the wild hair out of order, the green eyes slowly coming into focus.

  “Thank god, Jack!” She had been crying recently, he thought, as he tried to place her name. He didn’t recognize this as a memory, traumatic or otherwise.

  “Jack, it’s me, Aeralyn,” she said, as he stared at her in bewilderment. “I ran the program, remember?”

  Slowly, it began to come back.

  “Jack, it’s September, year 2120. If I remembered what day it was, I would tell you. The last few days have been such a blur.” She squeezed his hand. “It’s me, Jack.” The joy on her face started to fade into sadness. “Tell me you haven’t forgotten.”

  “If you knew I was going to wake up, couldn’t you at least have fixed your hair? You look like a mess.” Jack spoke tiredly, with a half-smile on his face.

  Aeralyn beamed at him. “That sounds like something Brant would have said.”

  “It is,” he said, half-smile fading.

  She looked down at his hand, still clasped in hers. “I’m sorry he’s gone, Jack.”

  “Me too.”

  “Did you see it again?” she asked, with a slight twinge of hope that he had not had to relieve such a recent pain.

  “Yeah,” he said simply, without accusation.

  “I’m—”

  “Don’t apologize anymore,” he said, interrupting her, “ever.”

  “I don’t know what to say, then,” she said, absentmindedly stroking his hand with her thumb.

  Jack sat up on his elbow, turning his tired body toward her. “You can start by telling me what the hell I just went through.” She smiled at him. Even with the hair gone crazy, the red and puffy eyes, and no make-up, she was so beautiful. He smiled back at her, more as a response to what he saw in her than a deliberate expression.

  “Now I can, Jack.” She squeezed his hand harder and leaned forward. “Now I can.”

  Chapter 14

  She helped Jack up from the floor. She told him, to his utter disbelief, that he had only been out for around fifteen minutes, four of which he had been disconnected from the small black box. She said she didn’t really start freaking out until two minutes after disconnecting, when he didn’t immediately wake back up. Jack sat down slowly in his chair. His body felt as if he had been through one of the most intense workouts of his life, each muscle sore and stiff in a different way. She told him it would pass, that she had felt the same when it happened to her.

  Jack leaned back in the chair, body relaxed. He pressed the small, round button on the left arm and leaned as far back as the chair would allow. Aeralyn watched him, still concerned. When she had disconnected him at 100 percent complete, assimilations had read 19 percent. She had never seen assimilations so high in someone who had made it through the process. Jack was even stronger than she had originally thought.

  “So,” he said, coughing quietly to clear his throat, his tired voice matching the look of his tired body, “what the hell was that?”

  “It’s a program called ‘De-assimilation,’” she said.

  “What’s ‘De-assimilation’?”

  “Well, an assimilation is how the Host gets into your head.”

  “The Host?” Jack frowned.

  “Jack, I’m not an expert on these things. I’m just a low-level techie who works for the Corporation. All of this was told to me by Josh. He heard it from the guy who de-assimilated him.”

  “Are you saying you don’t know what’s going on?” Jack’s frown deepened.

  “I’m saying to curb your expectations about knowing.” Aeralyn came slightly forward out of her chair, hand against her chest. “I’m not an expert in this. I’m closer to you than I am to whoever started the line of people whose eyes are opened.”

  “That’s not very hopeful in terms of my questions being answered,” Jack said, shaking his head.

  “Will you just fucking listen?” Aeralyn said, low, in a tone that spoke of exasperation and tears. “It’s really important that you listen. I’ll tell you everything I know; I just need you to know at the beginning that I’m not an expert.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said, settling back into his chair with a sigh. “I’m just a little frustrated with the lack of transparency you’ve shown up until now, and now that I’ve gone through whatever that was,” Jack waved his hand toward the small black box still on the floor, “you’re telling me that you don’t really know what’s going on.”

  “Jack, what I am telling you is that I am like you. I learned about everything I am about to tell you from someone who learned about it from someone who learned about it from someone else; et cetera, et cetera.” She waved her hand to emphasize the roundabout way the information flowed. “I wasn’t this genius who discovered what was happening, I didn’t invent the technology or write the program that de-assimilated your mind. I’m just a girl whose eyes were opened, in the same way that I opened yours.”

  “But…” Jack stopped himself. He was about to disagree with her point. His eyes weren’t open—at least, not in the way he thought she meant. He didn’t know any more about what was going on, why these things were happening, or what had propelled them along this course that found his partner dead, and the two of them on an antique plane headed for the center of what was left of the country.

  “Let me just tell you what I know.” Aeralyn held her hand up. Jack nodded, clenching his jaw and swallowing the frustration that threatened to take over his reason. He held up one finger. He patted his jacket, finding that his cigar case was still, indeed, there. He pulled the now bent box from the inner pocket. He eyed it ruefully, with doubt that any cigar had survived the robot’s crushing grip. He struggled to slide the top off the twisted metal. He finally managed to pull it open, and set it on the table to survey the contents. He had three left in the cigar case that held four. The two in the center were toast, wrapping twisted to the point of falling off, spilling tobacco all over his lap as he gingerly extracted them. The third, all the way on the right, and in what would have been the farthest right position when the robot had tried to squeeze the life from his body, was miraculously whole. He pulled the slightly bent cigar from the case, like a neurosurgeon performing some intensive procedure on a patient hovering close to death’s door.

  The cigar, which now bent a few degrees to one side, emerged from
the case with only a slight crack in the wrapper, just where the end began to twist away from the straight line of the body. Jack smiled in spite of the circumstances and fished his matches from the pocket untouched by the robot’s metal arm, then lit the cigar. He puffed a few mouthfuls of the comforting smoke, closing his eyes slowly as he felt, not just tasted, the rich flavor. Has a cigar ever tasted so good? he wondered. Remembering where he was, what he was doing, and the girl who sat across from him, patiently waiting to answer his questions as best she could, he opened his eyes. “Sorry. I got lost for a second.” He brought the cigar away from his face, grasped between his pointer finger and the tops of the other three. “I don’t remember a cigar ever tasting so good.”

  Aeralyn smiled at his pleasure. “You will find that true of many things now.”

  “Because of the de-assimilation?” he asked curiously.

  “Yes.” She looked down as she clasped her hands in her lap, intertwining her fingers. “The first thing I had after was lemonade. I have always loved lemonade, but the glass Josh made for me was the best I’ve ever had.” She paused thoughtfully and turned to peer sadly out the window, beyond the little rivers of rain streaking from the front of the plane to the tail.

  She turned back to him. “Josh de-assimilated me a few years ago. We had known each other in school, for years. He was like the brother I never had.” She went back to studying her hands as she spoke. “Life was normal. We were kids.” She gave a single snort. “Kids. Like I was way younger than I am now. You feel that way after the program.”

  “Anyway, I remember when he came to my apartment one day. Troubled by something. I could tell something was wrong, even though he denied it over and over again. He sat on my couch for what seemed like hours, not saying anything, just looking straight ahead. I made dinner, his favorite, hoping some food and wine would cheer him up. He might have eaten a bite.” A half-smile played on her lips.

  “I finally had enough of what I felt was him ignoring me for some reason. I told him if he wasn’t going to tell me what was wrong, he could get the fuck out, and stop killing my good vibes. I didn’t want to say it, but I felt like he was intruding on me, purposely trying to put me into a bad mood. After the program ran, I figured out why that was so untrue.”

  “After I told him to leave, he asked if I trusted him. I told him, ‘Of course!’ He told me that we had been blind our whole lives, and that he had found a way to see.” Aeralyn intently studied the fingertips of one hand, taking in each detail of the chipped, turquoise nail polish. Jack knew she wasn’t really seeing her hand, she was somewhere far off in the past, watching the events she described unfold.

  “He asked if I wanted to see.” She balled her hand into a fist grasped in the other. “I told him I did. We had just gotten out of university. Ideas about what life really meant, what a person’s purpose was, or what truth really meant were still conversations we stayed up exploring. Funny, you get older and you stop questioning your reality. You stop wondering if there isn’t something else out there you haven’t learned about, something out there left undiscovered. You fall into a hole with round sides, and just go around and around…sleep, work, video feed, sleep, work, video feed…”

  Aeralyn took a deep breath. “I let him run the program on me. It was the single worst and best experience of my life.” She looked up at Jack and smiled. “At least, it was.” Jack smiled back, only half understanding what she meant.

  “Just like you, I relived all of the happiest and saddest memories. I was younger then, with less life experience than I think you had going into it. It only took me five or so minutes before I came back. Josh handed me that glass of lemonade when I finally remembered where I was and who he was.” She pursed her lips sadly. “I miss him.”

  Jack watched her, staring down at her hands in her lap, cross-legged in the chair across the table. Her hair still messily fell all around her downturned face. She wore the same hoody she had worn when they first met, but he could see the top of his blue cadet shirt peeking out from the v-cut collar. The techie pants, loose across her calves, pockets bulging, open and empty above her knees. He felt a deep-seated protectiveness of her. He wished he could have shielded her from the loss of her friend. He remembered when he so coldly told her the news about his passing. Joshua Harraves, just another dead suspect to him. He hated himself a little inside. How long had he been so cold?

  She finally lifted her head, determination coloring her cheeks a bit as she continued. “I sat there, drinking that glass of lemonade as he told me what had really been happening in the country.”

  Country, he thought, a word he hadn’t heard in a long time.

  “The company that created the implant is the same company that eventually became the ‘Corporation.’” She added little air quotes to emphasize the meaning. “They developed the AI whose sole purpose was learning as much about people as possible so that it could not just meet but predict every single need.”

  “I remember when they first started advertising for them,” Jack said. “They billed it as the only technology you would need. A way to get rid of the smart phone, the laptop, the computer, home security systems—everything.”

  She nodded in agreement. “It truly did. Companies rose and fell with the release of this technology.”

  “I was a cop back then, a medic on a SWAT team. The department made it mandatory that every officer had to have an implant by the end of the year, and gave us all a stipend so we could afford it.” Jack puffed on his cigar thoughtfully.

  “I was in school,” she said, “learning coding. Every one of my professors basically told us that if we wanted to get anywhere in the field of programing or technology, we would have to have one.” She hugged herself and rubbed her shoulders up and down with her hands, the universal sign that she was cold. Jack shifted in his chair and pulled his jacket from where it hung, handing it across the table to her. “Thank you,” she said, taking it and laying over her lap.

  “So, the company that made the implant, became the government,” he reiterated, giving her a talking point to continue.

  “More importantly, they created the Host,” she said, her face stern, illustrating the importance of the point.

  “What is the Host?” Jack asked, puffing on his cigar. The plane rocked up and down at odd intervals, the sole reminder they were still flying. Jack nonchalantly looked up to the cockpit, down the cabin corridor, and eyed the shoulder of the man in control. In the hand attached to the shoulder, the man held a sandwich. Jack hoped, at least, his other hand had a firm grasp on the controls. He turned his attention back to Aeralyn.

  “The Host is the AI. Human Observation and Social Transfer Tool.” Aeralyn smirked at the irony. “The name spoke to every way this could go wrong, but you wouldn’t have been able to see that far ahead before you were de-assimilated.”

  “So, the Host. It is the program in our implants?” Jack wasn’t a very tech savvy person; he struggled to grasp what the underlying problem was, and why it was a problem.

  “It controlled our implants, told our implants what to do, how to function, and more importantly, it was the central hub that ‘learned’ everything necessary to fulfill its programming. Until then, AI was just a fake of what true awareness was. Small programs that gave an illusion of awareness through programming that had every possibility of necessity a programmer could think of. For instance, the designer would know that small talk, pleasantries, occur in almost every single conversation between people. So, he programs in basic responses to every version of ‘hello’ he can think of. Someone approaching the program who says ‘hello’ or ‘how are you’ will get a preprogrammed response that makes it seem like the AI knows that pleasantries are a social norm that it must adhere to in order to function on the human level. A true artificial intelligence, free of the emotional ties and sense of conformity that people have, would know that saying ‘hello’ every time you communicate with someone is an extremely inefficient way to function. Especially wh
en you are needing to complete a function outside of the conversation itself.”

  Jack puffed his cigar quietly, taking in the information. He didn’t really understand why this was an important piece of their story. He couldn’t really see the big picture of how everything that had transpired thus far fell into place. He kept listening, puffing his cigar, and trusting that Aeralyn would eventually bring it all into perspective.

  “The guys that developed the Host did things differently with the AI they created for the implant program. They gave the AI open access to every public system that existed. Even used special petitions to the government at the time to gain access to public infrastructure. They gave access to social sites, private sites, news sites, the entire internet deep and shallow, and gave it the most open-ended programing command they thought they could get by with. The Corporation still needed the Host to do what they had designed for it to do, but in order for it to be a truly self-aware intelligence, it had to learn to do it for itself. You can’t program sentience, but you can program learning.”

  “Do you mean what they designed it to do? You said, ‘What they designed for it to do,’” Jack interrupted.

  “No. Artificial intelligence before this point had been designed for specific tasks, and that’s why they failed to become self-aware. This time, they designed and framed the outcome, and aimed the program on what they thought would be the path that led it to solve the problem that these unaware ‘AIs’ couldn’t solve: the problem of true consciousness.”

  “What was the command they gave it?” Jack asked, curiosity building now.

  “Learn everything you can about us, in order to help us live the most free and happy lives we can.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much of a program.”

  “It wasn’t,” Aeralyn said, lifting her arms beneath Jack’s jacket, gesturing in excitement. “Which is why, the first few days, the Host didn’t do anything. The people who designed it sat there, watching the monitors flash from site to site, almost at random. Slowly at first, but faster and faster. It watched videos, scrolled through social media, watched the news feeds, studied traffic patterns, flight plans, online university, everything. They say that, after the first week, the program started going through all of these things so fast that it was impossible to follow with the human eye. It began filling up the storage they had set aside for the AI to write its own programming, store useful data, and basically ‘live,’ if you want to call it that—but it filled the servers so fast that it began taking over any computer it was connected to, starting with the company servers. Someone realized what was happening and quickly cut the power. They stopped the entire venture, bringing in specialists in quantum computing to try and design sufficient storage for what they now realized would be necessary to house the Host.”