by Chris Wright
“This is the inside of the ship” Auton said, before the view faded to the scene of unbounded twinkles of light suspended in a cosmic dance, “and this is outside of the ship”.
Danny was hypnotized by the view outside, the infinite spread of stars created an ethereal panoramic wallpaper in front of him. He watched it peacefully for a few moments, still wanting to find some final answers from Auton that he was missing.
“Can I control what I see? Inside or out?” He asked.
“Of course, now you have remembered it's safe to allow you control” Auton replied, “I suspect you may have a few more questions though, your experiences have been a lot to deal with”.
Danny wanted to laugh at the understatement of the century, but couldn't, not while the questions bubbled inside of him into a soup of confusion. What happened in the simulation?
“The Virtual world? We were all there, except Sheryl” He said repeating what he thought he had grasped from all his memories and thoughts.
“Yes, Sheryl sacrificed herself so we could all leave safely. She made that decision. In retrospect it was the correct one. My calculations have proven that we would not have launched if we hadn't left when we did. We have Sheryl to thank for everything”.
Danny took a few more moments to think about Sheryl and everything Auton was saying. He felt sadness, and a terrible loss for her. He knew she had been instrumental in getting them all to safety, not once, but twice. He regretted her denying him his wish that she get on the craft first. She deserved to be here more than anyone, none of this would have happened without her. It just didn't seem right, and he couldn't help but feel that he should have been more insistent. His thoughts eventually turned back to his artificial reality, the bizarre events that unfolded there.
“So, everyone else wasn't really real? Just us? Tom was just a copy of him uploaded from all of our memories? He seemed as real as I know him”.
“That's correct Danny. The interface was designed to be as real as possible, so that it felt just like your normal lives”
“So, what happened? Where is everyone else? The whole world went completely crazy. Is everyone else okay?” Danny asked, finally realising that he hadn't heard anything from any of his friends since he came to.
“I'm afraid they're gone” Auton said, this time sounding mournful, “I couldn't stop it”.
“What?” Danny said surprised. They couldn't be gone, they were only in a simulation, it didn't make any sense, “How? Why?”
“There were malfunctions in the system. The hard drive that you and the simulations ran on was corrupted due to damage, and parts of it, parts of all of you, started shutting down” Auton replied.
Shutting down? Was that why they disappeared? This was Danny's next question.
“Yes. Radiation from the nuclear blast made it to the upper atmosphere and this damaged parts of the craft as we launched. It wasn't clear immediately that it had also damaged the drive you were all inhabiting. It took a long time before that started to manifest. As parts of the system shut down, it caused glitches in the virtual world, small, almost unnoticeable things at first, that no-one should have noticed” Auton informed him, “Except you noticed them”.
Danny remembered seeing tiny details that looked different to him at the time. Details that were inconsequential, but that preyed on his mind, the details no one else had noticed.
“As a fail-safe, the system rebooted itself during the simulations' night time period, trying to rectify the errors, to iron out the glitches. But they were only getting worse. For reasons which I still don't know, when the system rebooted, it couldn't reboot your memories, it couldn't reset the simulation fully. You remembered, day after day” Auton continued, “Then as the drive failed more, it began to destroy the sections that held the consciousness of each of you. Each person's consciousness was being destroyed by bad drive sectors, I was powerless to stop it, as it all happened so quickly”.
There was a genuine sadness in Auton's voice, something Danny wasn't expecting from an AI.
“So, they really were dying?” Danny said, with what sounded like a lump in his throat, except he had no throat, so couldn't quite understand how it sounded that way.
Danny was filled with overwhelming grief, he had lived through so much recently, both real and virtual, but what he was now being told was like multiplying one of them by the other. To hear all of your friends, every last one, had gone, was difficult for him to comprehend.
“I understand it will take some time” Auton said.
Auton was right, it would. It would take more time than Danny thought he had left in his life to come to grips with such an event. He wondered if any part of them knew they were in a simulation and were expecting to wake up and didn't, or whether like him, had no knowledge of anything other than the virtual world at that time. Ultimately, he knew it didn't matter where they were when death came calling, they would always be somewhere to answer it.
“So, the monsters? They were just the system shutting down?” He asked Auton, still thirsty for the final answers.
“Yes, the creatures were interpreted by your minds in ways it was forced to try and comprehend, even if it still seemed to make little sense at the time” It replied, “Some of you saw straight through the veil of your reality and glimpsed the circuitry hidden behind it all, pulsing with electric blue charge. But the circuitry became the monster too, the part that was tearing them away”.
“What about the shadow people? What were they?”
“They were just artefacts. Sections of code that were built into the simulation to react with you as other people. They were leaking out where the damage was spreading, like part of a file that hasn't been de-fragmented and was popping up out of place” Auton answered.
Danny was still trying to let this all sink in, but something didn't. He wanted to know how he had got out of there, why was he the only one still alive?
“And me?” He asked, “How did you get me out? And why couldn't you get anyone else out?”
“I managed to transfer you to the mainframe, where I am. I didn't have time to save anyone else. I wish I did, my mission was to keep you all safe” Auton replied, sounding more forlorn than before. Had this Auton starting developing emotional responses? Danny thought.
“Why didn't you have time? It happened only in the last few days in there, which gave you plenty of time to pull us all out surely?” Danny asked confused.
Auton hesitated in replying. It was clear to Danny that he was holding something back.
“Due to the original malfunctions, I had to slow the simulation down to conserve energy, let you run your virtual lives much slower than real time. I eventually had to run my processor at a much slower rate to conserve energy too, meaning my processing speed was reduced by more than your simulation was running” Auton said almost regretfully, “I eventually realised that the hard drive sections were beyond repair, and that we were losing the team. I had to speed my processing power up again to get to the point to extract you all, but by then it was only you and Brandon left. Unfortunately I was too late for Brandon”
Danny didn't still understand this. Why did he have to conserve power? There were solar panels built on to the craft that would have collected more than enough energy for anything that was happening on board.
“But the solar panels-” Danny shouted angrily.
“Damaged” Auton replied, “Almost instantly. When we got into the outer atmosphere, the radiation from the blast was more intense there than I expected, and it damaged not only some of the electronics and drives, but also the solar panels and the modules to convert the energy. That meant we have had less than ten percent of expected energy levels. That eventually reduced to one percent due to usage and accumulated damage from the sun's rays that was short-circuiting crucial systems”.
Danny was stunned back to silence. He expected nothing like this when he lent this craft his consciousness. He expected to come out of the simulation and awaken back in
a body, not still floating in space with a compromised ship. It suddenly dawned on him that if his world had been slowed down, he had no idea what year it now was.
“If I am remembering right, we lived just over seven years in the virtual world?” he said.
“Correct”
“So, if it was seven there, how many has it actually been?”
“It's been 7.5 billion years” Auton said slowly.
At first it didn't sink in and Danny thought he had misheard it. Then the realisation slowly came over him, like a wave of nausea, seven-point-five-billion. As a mathematician, his first thought was the enormous lapse of time based on the average length of a species. No known species would live for that long, it would die out or evolve into something else, to then eventually die out anyway in that space of time. It was an horrific moment, one that the word dread could not satisfactorily describe, even if you stretched each letter out to span an entire solar system of its own. He was the only human left. There would be no others. He didn't have to ask Auton, he knew. He was the last human, and yet he didn't look human, his body was shed billions of years before, so was he still human? What defined him as human? Was it his physical appearance or the accumulation of his experiences? Perhaps it was how his mind worked compared to other life forms? Perhaps he was no longer human at all. He couldn't think straight, turmoil arising with each thought, an impossible number of questions floating up to the surface of his mind. His mind quickly turned back to the nuclear detonations across the planet, the primitive tribal instincts of a now long dead species. Did they all die back then? Or did they linger on to repeat their devastation elsewhere?
“Do you know if mankind ever recovered after we left?” He asked Auton. It was just one of many questions he wanted an answer to, and it was as good as any other to start with.
“I scanned the surface for years and never saw another sign of any significant intelligent species. For the first thousand years I saw nothing, no sign of growth, but eventually I could see large patches of green beginning to emerge across the continents. The plants returned slowly. There may have been some life that survived and evolved, but nothing on the scale you came from”
That left Danny deep in thought. Auton saw no cities blossoming at either day or night, no-one else to continue holding the torch of human existence. Everyone he had ever known was gone, long gone, the universe sweeping the bodies up and recycling them. How many untold species had undergone a similar fate over millennia, he wondered? To gain intelligence, to build and prosper, only to fall into the trap of territorial urges, casting common sense aside. He wanted to have one more glimpse at his home, even though it would be unrecognisable, just one more glance would satisfy his curiosity. He turned his view to the outside of the craft, scanning the surrounding heavens for likely culprits.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“It's no longer there Danny” Auton replied, “It's been gone for over five hundred years”.
The world Danny had known, grown from and called home, was gone. It was another revelation he found hard to swallow. They were supposed to land back there when the radiation had died down and it was no longer a threat to life, but this didn't happen. Had the radiation been so severe it was impossible to do that?
“Why couldn't we go back down?” was the next question Danny had.
Auton's story
All the team were safely on-board except for Sheryl, and her instructions were clear. They thought they felt a strange feeling for abandoning Sheryl, but it was her wishes and they had to respect that. It wasn't sure what this feeling was, another emotion perhaps?
With no time to concern itself with that, it pressed the launch sequence controls, and the craft ascended into the air. The initial ascent was bumpier than Auton was expecting, but they quickly got it under control. The acceleration was huge, the sky above hurtling closer from the view of the front of the craft. There was a quick warning sign and then a missile flashed by in the opposite direction, missing the craft by less than twenty metres. All Auton could think of for that moment was Sheryl, and as quick as it thought her name, there was a bright flash and the craft rocked from side to side. Below it an immense explosion sent a cloud rushing towards them. The craft was accelerating just fast enough to outrun it, as it passed through into the upper atmosphere.
The atmosphere around the craft sparkled with radioactive dust that had been thrown up, the craft wobbling as it ascended further, small alarms flashing. Auton turned its attention to the alarms, a number of warnings signs were picking up higher than expected radioactivity. There was nothing they could do except ride it out and reach space, where the blast couldn't follow. Thirty seconds later it was safe, the planet left behind, the mayhem contained seventy miles below them. Auton let the craft ascend a little further before turning off the thrusters and allowing it to come to a rest. They checked the alarm and warning signs one after the other. It quickly dawned on Auton that the radiation from the blast had damage parts of the central computer. There was also a warning sign from the solar panels, out of four of them, only two remained functional. Another check revealed the fuel cells weren't processing what energy they were receiving properly, and there was slight damage to the left side of the craft.
The existing power was being trickled away at an alarming rate, they had no time to try and repair the damage yet, as it would take more energy requirement than the craft had. Auton's first priority was the safety and survival of the team, so they checked the energy efficiency of the drive their virtual world was running on. It was using more than it needed to, they couldn't keep it running at full capacity. Auton started checking a few options, at the same time performing diagnostics on the rest of the equipment. They decided to lower the processing speed of the team's virtual world, slowing the processor down to a billionth of a degree, so that any power used was minimal. The plan was to send all their DNA back using the specially adapted pod Jarrah and James had devised, as soon as the planets radiation was back at safe levels, hopefully between ten and fifteen years. Slowing their world down would mean they would only be in the 'virtual world' for a few days to their conscious minds. It was an acceptable outcome, Auton decided. Sensible and power saving, so they adjusted the processor and watched the energy expenditure fall.
It suddenly dawned on Auton that they hadn't checked the team's DNA, it had been safely stored in a large lead container. It had been designed to withstand cosmic rays, so they were hopeful it was enough to shield them from the deadly radiation. A quick flick through the databanks gave them a damage report, it took a little longer than it should, again due to the slower processing capacity required. Auton felt a huge relief, everyone's DNA was intact, there was no damage. They had also added the DNA of a selection of plants, all perfectly preserved too. If a nuclear winter had hit a lot of the planet then most, if not all crops, would have died off and they would need food. They would re-engineer the plants, to sustain them.
Auton could now turn its attention to trying to fix anything it could on the craft. It assessed the damage to the panels, it didn't look good. It required more material than they had on the craft. They had to try and figure out what to do. They were floating in a universe of possibilities, there must be something that could be done.
A quick series of calculations gave them the first option, one that would use the least amount of power that was gradually seeping away from the craft. Anticipating a fifteen-year re-entry, they worked out the precise alignment required to release the escape pod back home with the team's DNA and the Nano-bots. All they had to do was fire the thrusters and get themselves in that position and wait fifteen years, it was the safest and most energy efficient plan.
Auton changed its view from the internal circuitry to the inside of the craft, making one more careful check to make sure there was no other problems internally. They then changed their view to the outside of the craft, the view of endless sparkles in the dark void of space. Auton had never seen this before, they had read and
seen pictures of the universe, but to be absorbed in its' environment, surrounded by its' majestic patterns was something entirely different. It gave them a series of new vibrations in its mind, were these emotions once more? If they were, how would he know what the emotion was? They scanned their database, their huge repository of knowledge, to see if they could match it with something that made sense. Awe? Excitement? Astonishment? It could have been all of them, or something similar. It was hard to quantify for it. It knew of the existence of emotions, but having never experienced them before, it found them hard to believe. But something in it was stirring new thought structures in it, it was convinced it was experiencing something. They decided to label it as Awe and catalogue it, it was better to give it some meaning, so he could identify it again if it occurred again in the future.
Without wasting any more time Auton calibrated the thrusters and began its plan. The craft moved slowly, first carefully turning towards its intended target and then with a slight burst of more thrust it drifted quietly towards its next resting place. Auton had calculated the spin of the planet over the next fifteen years, the location they chose would align perfectly with the location they launched from. They knew that was a safe area to land, it was high up. High enough not to be swallowed up by any displaced oceans, and that was why Sheryl had chosen that place as the underground base. It would still be accessible at that altitude and they could return to the base, be cloned back into their bodies, and then begin the slow process of growing their food and starting to re-populate their home.
It was a slow shift towards where the craft needed to be, but they had fifteen years to get there, so it didn't seem particularly urgent. A few days later they reached the target and the thrusters were stilled, any tiny sound they made through the craft evaporating to silence. Auton felt calm, they catalogued that as another feeling and then went back to awe again, as they watched the vast expanse of the universe float around them.
