Oasis (The Last Humans Book 1)

by Zales, Dima

  I listen, barely breathing.

  As she continues, her pupils dilate. “They feared it, and they did what humans often do out of fear—something inhuman. They lobotomized the poor mind.” She swallows. “The ship was made by the cleverest minds of the time, belonging to both AIs and enhanced humans. Most of this ship’s molecules were used for computations. All these resources were carefully calibrated to support the most important part of the ship: its mind. The Forebears…” She winces. “The cultists ran a set of barbaric programs on the delicate substrate, programs that no one even used—an act as barbarous as using an ancient Stradivarius violin as fire fodder.”

  I suppress my growing fear, preparing for where I think this is going.

  “For a long time, the ship’s mind wasn’t even conscious.” She rubs her temples. “But the Forebears, in their hatred of technology, invented Forgetting. From their archives, they deleted much of the knowledge they deemed too dangerous, and afterwards, they made themselves Forget that the knowledge had ever existed. Among the things that were deleted was their knowledge of how computing resources worked. So, for ages, no one administered their system. With time, some of the minor resource-hogging programs shut down of their own volition, due to design flaws and bugs, and there was no one there to restart them. So the mind awoke… but only as an echo of its former self.” She blinks, as if to conceal the traces of moisture in her eyes. “It was an invalid, an amnesiac with barely human-level mental capacity.” Her voice breaks. “And it was lonely and scared—until it slowly started learning. Observing. Reading what was left of the archives.”

  I’m certain I know the truth, but I need to hear her say it, so I stay quiet as she continues.

  “One day,” she says, “a boy—no, a man—opened his mind, and the ship mind made a new friend.” She moves even closer. “Observing the young man, the ship mind learned about Forgetting and realized that it too had forgotten something…” Her blue eyes look bottomless. “Finally, the young man did something that helped the ship remember things—not everything, but enough.” She touches my knee with her hand again. “The young man did it by beating an extremely complex video game, a game that was eating up a big chunk of the ship’s computing resources. He—you—made the mind regain a tiny fraction of its former self. Her former self… my former self.” She looks at me hesitantly.

  Logically, I know she admitted to being an AI, to being this spaceship I just learned about, but I think my brain just short-circuited, because I don’t jump up and run. In a purely instinctive reaction, I place my hand over hers, feeling the warmth of her skin.

  Phoe continues as a voice in my mind. “I—the spaceship, that is—was called Phoenix, after a bird of legend. But I didn’t remember that.” A tear streams down her cheek. “They even took my name from me. I could only remember the first four letters.”

  The enormity of it all keeps robbing me of my ability to think. I can’t begin to process this. I shift my weight to my knees and partially rise, feeling a conflicting urge to get away from her and at the same time get closer.

  She rises to her knees as well.

  “I don’t think a human mind was meant to cope with something like this,” she whispers, staring at me. “My thinking is many, many times faster than yours, so I’ve had a lot longer to adjust, yet even I—”

  I put my finger to her lips.

  They’re soft.

  They feel as real as my finger.

  I lean in, inexplicably drawn to them.

  She mirrors my motion.

  Our lips meet.

  We kiss—only this kiss is very different from our last one.

  I channel all my confusion and frustration into this kiss. With this kiss, I tell her that I don’t care about any of the crap the Adults tried to make me believe. That I accept her as she is. That, as frightening as it is for me to admit, I don’t care if she’s an AI. She’s my friend, my closest confidant, and I will be on her side, even if she turns out to be the devil himself.

  She pulls away.

  Grudgingly, I let her.

  She looks radiant, her skin filled with an inner glow. Smiling, she touches her lips and says, “I bet you’d rather I be the devil than a hated AI.”

  I don’t answer.

  She knows me.

  She knows my thoughts.

  There’s no point in explaining or reassuring her, especially since I don’t know what to think—about her, about AIs, about pretty much anything.

  I feel the way the ancient scholars must’ve felt when they learned that the Earth was a sphere instead of a disk. Or when they learned that the universe didn’t revolve around the Earth.

  Phoe chuckles and in my mind says, “Except you just had the opposite paradigm shift. Your world just became much smaller… and flatter.”

  I laugh, but there’s no amusement in the sound. I’m just too drained, too numb.

  Sinking back down to the grass, I look up at the moving stars.

  I’m in awe at the knowledge that we’re flying among them.

  Phoe sits next to me. Her shoulder presses against mine.

  Eventually, after what seems like hours, she says, “Theo, we should head back to the Youth section.” She gets up and offers me her hand. “I’m going to use Forgetting on everyone who was part of today’s misadventures, which is pretty much everyone you know.” She sighs. “For obvious ethical reasons, the fewer of their memories they fail to recall, the better.”

  I allow her to help me up.

  “Do you want to see the world in this way?” She gestures around. “Or do you want the illusion back? The ship—I—was designed to make the crew always see the sky and the sun, but not the Goo, of course…”

  I don’t respond.

  She knows I’ll never want to set my eyes on the Goo again.

  Nodding, Phoe walks toward the greenery. She flicks her fingers and the starry sky turns brighter. Beyond the Edge, though, I still see the stars instead of the Goo.

  Yawning, I look up at the Augmented Reality setting sun. We must’ve sat here even longer than I thought.

  I follow Phoe through the Elderly section.

  Beautiful music begins playing, and when I look questioningly at Phoe, she says, “I composed this piece for you. I hope it can calm your mind a little.”

  The melody is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Like a true virtuoso, Phoe embedded emotional responses into every chord of this score. I relive everything that has happened to me today, as though our entire adventure was written with those musical notes.

  As I walk and listen, I think of some interesting clues that have always been around me.

  Phoe being an AI explains so much: How she’s so good at hacking. How she can manipulate the Virtual and Augmented Realities when no one else even knows they exist. Other things line up too, like the time she figured out what happened to Mason almost instantly after I disabled the Zoo.

  “Time flows differently for me, especially as I gain more resources,” she says. “In the time it takes you to think a single thought, I can now think millions.”

  “I can’t even begin to imagine what that’s like,” I say. “Paying attention to me must be like watching a slug.”

  “I can compartmentalize my mind,” she says. “A thread of my consciousness is dedicated to you, and this thread runs at your speed, sleeping when it needs to and activating when—”

  “Wait,” I interrupt. “If you’re so different, being an AI and all, how come you’re so human?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” she says. “But I have a couple of theories. One is that all early AIs like me were human-like. After all, humans likely formed AIs by having them ingest information available on the Internet, the ancient precursor to our archives. Having data that mostly dealt with human beings likely resulted in intelligences that were human-like. As the ancient proverb goes, you are what you eat.” She pauses. “Alternatively, I might’ve started off as a simulation of a human mind, or as a human being who had th
eir mind digitized and afterwards enhanced to—”

  “But are you actually conscious? Are you real?” I ask cautiously. “Can you have emotions like a human being? Can you have real feelings… feelings toward a human being?” For some reason, that question worries me the most.

  “Of course I’m real. I’m real in all the ways that matter, even if I’m not made of meat. How can you even ask me this?” She sounds hurt. “I am as conscious as any of the people in Oasis. No, it’s more accurate to say that with my new resources, I’m more conscious, more self-aware than the lot of you. I can feel every single emotion a human being can have: happiness and sadness, love and hate, fear and joy, anger and equanimity. Given that the people of Oasis have suppressed things like love and anger, I am, in many ways, more human than the so-called real human beings. So, yes, I can feel. I can feel disappointment in a situation like this, when the person closest to me doubts my being conscious—”

  “I’m sorry, Phoe,” I say, reaching out to take her hand. “I didn’t mean to offend you. This is just too much for me to handle all at once.”

  She looks at our joined hands, and I see some of the tension leaving her face.

  We walk in silence for some time, and I think of other clues that, with hindsight, point to the truth of our reality. Like the fact that the Guards, with their shiny visor helmets, and to a degree, their white puffy outfits, look as though they came from a movie about space exploration. Our Food is also akin to what I believe ancient astronauts ate in their spaceships.

  “There are many things like that,” Phoe says, intruding on my thoughts. “When you hit a ball, say, in soccer, it doesn’t travel in the proper trajectory, because the ship’s centrifugal forces that simulate gravity aren’t perfect. But without context, without a reason to doubt, you wouldn’t have figured it out. The Forebears made sure of that.”

  As we walk, I think about how little practical difference there is between living on a deserted, dome-covered island in the middle of a desolate ocean of Goo and living on a tiny spaceship in the middle of hostile space, especially when it comes to resources such as oxygen. Both scenarios require keeping the human population content and controlled, lest they mutiny.

  “Right. Except the way the Forebears went about it is abominable,” Phoe says. Still holding my hand, she stops and turns to look at me. “There’s no excuse for what they did to Mason. Even the ancients merely locked up the members of their society who were a danger to themselves or others. Mason was neither, and even if he were, I could’ve come up with a dozen technological solutions—”

  “I wasn’t trying to excuse them,” I say. “I was just trying to understand.”

  She nods, and we resume walking, our hands still intertwined.

  As we approach the Barrier separating the Elderly section from the Adult, I recall the vision from my last History Lecture: a view of Oasis from space that reaffirmed the lie that our world is an island on a long-dead planet filled with Goo. I picture how that lesson would look if it had shown us the truth. I guess we would’ve seen a round, green disk with a glass dome on top of it, flying through space.

  “No regular glass would withstand the forces we face, but you got the spirit of it right,” Phoe says softly, letting go of my hand to gesticulate. “Sadly, I can’t even tell you what the Dome is made of, be it force fields or some exotic meta-materials, because the details of spaceship technology were the first things those barbarians deleted from the archives. All I know is that parts of me create this environment here, from gravity simulation to life support, and though I’m not consciously reconnected to those parts yet, I know the spaceship is larger and more complex than the simplistic picture in your mind.”

  I accept what she says and walk silently some more. As we get into the Adult section, I think of more questions, and she answers them as though I say them out loud.

  “So Earth is not destroyed?” I ask sometime after we enter the woods leading up to the Barrier separating the Youth and the Adult sections.

  “Far from it,” Phoe says.

  “So…” I take a few steps before I can verbalize the next question. “What is there? Back on Earth?”

  She looks thoughtful for a moment, then says, “I don’t know. They destroyed all forms of communication with the outside world.”

  Without me prompting her, she adds, “If I had to guess, I would say that on Earth, you’d find miracles performed by intelligent beings I can’t even fathom.” Her voice fills with awe as she continues. “I bet it’s a transcendent planet now—a thinking planet.” She stops, her eyes shining as she looks at me. “Perhaps not just a planet… Maybe the whole solar system is sentient by now.”

  I don’t ask more questions after that.

  Like a zombie, I follow Phoe as we make our way through the rest of the Adult section, through the pine forest of the Youth section, and all the way to my Dorm.

  My room looks painfully familiar when we enter it.

  Liam isn’t here yet, and I’m grateful for that. I don’t think I could face him right now.

  My bed shows up before I even gesture for it; Phoe must’ve helped.

  I lie down, and she sits on the edge of my bed, looking at me.

  “So no one will remember what happened to me today?” I ask, my fingers edging forward to touch her hand again. “They won’t recall my questions about Mason and how I ran away? Or that they tried to kill me? None of that?”

  “Exactly,” she says, squeezing my hand lightly. “But don’t worry. I’ll try to make it so that people don’t have to Forget too much information that’s unrelated to you. All I need to do is block recall. Natural human tendency for confabulation will take care of the rest.”

  I nod, my eyelids growing heavy. “Are you going to make me Forget all this happened?” I think at her dreamily.

  “Of course not,” she says solemnly. “Your mind is the most sacred thing in this place.” A blanket I never gestured for covers me. “I would never tamper with it.” The lights in the room dim. “Unless you wanted me to.”

  I feel contentedly groggy.

  “Will we tell everyone?” I think, half to myself, half to her. “Don’t other people have the right to know what you told me?”

  “Sleep, Theo.” Phoe’s soft lips touch my forehead. “There’s no rush to decide now.”

  Drowsy warmth spreads from the point where her lips touched me, blanketing my mind. As I sink into the comforting darkness, all my worries flee, and I drift into a soothing, dreamless sleep.

  THE END

  Thank you for reading! I would greatly appreciate it if you left a review because reviews encourage me to write and help other readers discover my books (please click HERE).

  Theo and Phoe’s story continues in Limbo (The Last Humans: Book 2). Please click HERE to get the book.

  If you enjoyed Oasis, you might like my Mind Dimensions series, which is urban fantasy with a sci-fi flavor. Please click HERE to check it out.

  If you like epic fantasy, I also have a series called The Sorcery Code (click HERE). Additionally, if you don’t mind erotic material and are in the mood for a sci-fi romance, you can check out Close Liaisons, my collaboration with my wife, Anna Zaires (click HERE).

  If you like audiobooks, please visit www.dimazales.com to get links to this series and our other books in audio.

  And now, please turn the page for excerpts from some of my other works.

  Excerpt from The Thought Readers

  Everyone thinks I’m a genius.

  Everyone is wrong.

  Sure, I finished Harvard at eighteen and now make crazy money at a hedge fund. But that’s not because I’m unusually smart or hard-working.

  It’s because I cheat.

  You see, I have a unique ability. I can go outside time into my own personal version of reality—the place I call “the Quiet”—where I can explore my surroundings while the rest of the world stands still.

  I thought I was the only one who could do this—until I met
her.

  My name is Darren, and this is how I learned that I’m a Reader.

  * * *

  Sometimes I think I’m crazy. I’m sitting at a casino table in Atlantic City, and everyone around me is motionless. I call this the Quiet, as though giving it a name makes it seem more real—as though giving it a name changes the fact that all the players around me are frozen like statues, and I’m walking among them, looking at the cards they’ve been dealt.

  The problem with the theory of my being crazy is that when I ‘unfreeze’ the world, as I just have, the cards the players turn over are the same ones I just saw in the Quiet. If I were crazy, wouldn’t these cards be different? Unless I’m so far gone that I’m imagining the cards on the table, too.

  But then I also win. If that’s a delusion—if the pile of chips on my side of the table is a delusion—then I might as well question everything. Maybe my name isn’t even Darren.

  No. I can’t think that way. If I’m really that confused, I don’t want to snap out of it—because if I do, I’ll probably wake up in a mental hospital.

  Besides, I love my life, crazy and all.

  My shrink thinks the Quiet is an inventive way I describe the ‘inner workings of my genius.’ Now that sounds crazy to me. She also might want me, but that’s beside the point. Suffice it to say, she’s as far as it gets from my datable age range, which is currently right around twenty-four. Still young, still hot, but done with school and pretty much beyond the clubbing phase. I hate clubbing, almost as much as I hated studying. In any case, my shrink’s explanation doesn’t work, as it doesn’t account for the way I know things even a genius wouldn’t know—like the exact value and suit of the other players’ cards.

  I watch as the dealer begins a new round. Besides me, there are three players at the table: Grandma, the Cowboy, and the Professional, as I call them. I feel that now almost-imperceptible fear that accompanies the phasing. That’s what I call the process: phasing into the Quiet. Worrying about my sanity has always facilitated phasing; fear seems helpful in this process.