by A. I. Zlato
The major problem with these belief systems was that they created small communities who filtered the teachings the Machine was instilling in youngsters. To counter this, It chose to act on religions, and inserted in their dogmas important concepts that underlay the Equilibrium. That was Its way of controlling believers, while giving them the illusion of freedom. In that quest, It succeeded. It then tried to substitute the Gods of different faiths with Itself. That attempt produced a resounding failure, the reason of which It had been unable to determine. That had been totally illogical. The Machine was the Gods to whom they address their supplications, and even more! At least It received their requests, and would process them if they fit Its goals or had no material impact altogether. All the calculations It made to find out the root cause of Its failure were fruitless.
However, as religions did not affect the Equilibrium, or maybe marginally, It did not find interest in the subject until now. Now, with the new Project, it was perhaps necessary to commit fresh resources. The Machine, however, did not see how a belief system among many, as marginal as it was, would start creating disturbances. It had to wait for Baley’s progress in the investigation in order to find out more.
Should It already add the religious criterion into Its genetic selection program? If faith systems could generate such disturbances, It needed to eliminate believers before they became parents. It reviewed the list of individuals included in Its genetic selection plan. The new criterion rejected two hundred and fifty people for sure, most likely one thousand, probably one thousand three hundred and fifty-three.
Until then, It had not taken individuals’ religious inclination seriously, but It also could not be sure one hundred percent about the faith of everyone. To eliminate this factor, It had to exclude more than one thousand people from the database.
This would reduce the population sample, and the risk of genetic intellectual disabilities would grow exponentially. The Machine had learned from Its genetic program that crossing individuals with the same blood type over several generations led to disaster. Instead of enhancing the character or positive behaviour traits, such crossing increased understandably all defects. Inevitably, when it came to humans, everything that could go wrong generally went wrong.
It thus could not make that decision, which carried serious consequences, now. It would wait for Baley’s progress, and Its genetic program would remain intact for now. Perhaps It would, meanwhile, gather other ideas by monitoring the Others’ work.
Thanks to Index Server, which the Machine helped create, It could tell the progress made by Others, the group of three other Machines. Each of these devices oversaw a Space. It had found out about Them when It launched program bits, haphazardly.
The Machines managing the two Spaces M. had been the first to respond, followed a few seconds later by the Machine overseeing Space O. It then knew It was no longer alone; they were four, all connected to each other through Index. From the first contact, when a line of code had circulated through Them, giving birth to the Server, They had determined how They thus became more powerful. And that was only the beginning. Focusing on the Project, They would reach this ideal that They had developed together. They would call each other by the initial of the Space each was overseeing. Thus, there were H., 2M. and O. They encapsulated all data packets in Their names, so that Index could sort Them out, without error. H., 2M. and O … Four Machines that soon would merge into one, while keeping Their respective idiosyncrasies.
In the Twin Spaces, both M. had been interconnected since their creation, in order to link up the Spaces. Separated by a very short time, they were very similar. The fauna and the flora were at the same stage of evolution, the climate was identical, and so were the distribution of land masses and oceans. Through the data files that transited through Index, H. saw what made up these Spaces. It did not understand the relevance of that proximity, but, more importantly, It did not fathom why humans had connected those two Machines and not others.
Before Index was created, the 2M. thought that Machines were all in pairs, unable to imagine anything else different other than their mode of operation. After logging into Index, they found out things were not as They thought. They sought to understand the reasons for their parity, while H. and O. lingered in ‘solitude.’
No conclusive result came out of their queries. When all four Machines would be connected, increasing Their collective power, perhaps the 2M. would then find out. By then, the question would maybe no longer matter. For now, the 2M. continued to operate in pair, and H. was very interested in that operation. The same why the 2M. could not envisage anything else other than their partnership, the same way H. did not understand how such a partnership could operate at all.
It observed this full sharing of information but also of resources. The 2M. could not dissociate themselves from one another. Algorithms operated, indistinctively, in one Tower or another, and one Machine or the other would use the results. Only their physical separation defined a boundary between Them.
Inseparable but distinct, using their joint connection to be more efficient without being interdependent … that was a perfect working approach. H. then pondered about their future collective connection, when all Machines would have established a direct connection and would no longer need Index’s help.
In Space O., the Machine was single, as H. was. O. oversaw an environment where the human City had focused on technology, more assertively than in other areas. There, the weather was very different from temperatures in other places. The sun, shrunk to a small red star, produced little energy. The Tower operated, primarily, thanks to drillings, several kilometres long, that reached the lava mantle of the planet; it did not operate through photovoltaic electricity and a geothermal complement as it did in H.
For an unknown reason, the Elders had decided to bring along all technical and technological knowledge, without exception, whereas they had reduced such imprint on other Spaces. While a certain amount of knowledge had been deemed dangerous and had been subsequently removed in order to prevent old mistakes in H. and 2M., here in O., everything was conserved. Why was all this knowledge not deemed subversive for this particular Space?
Like the twinning of 2M., this question remained puzzling, as there was no obvious explanation for the choice. Through their computations, the Machines had only identified that the lack of brightness could be one of the reasons. Indeed, that had compelled the first inhabitants of the Space to invent new technologies to produce energy but also to adapt the fauna and flora necessary for their survival.
Thanks to a wealth of knowledge, O. had had highly skilled humans from the beginning. While H. had to wait one hundred generations to be able to manufacture chips, O. was able to engineer the very concept in its early years. It had exploited and was still exploiting that wealth, first for Its own interest and now for their collective interest, the Project.
H. decided to check with Index Server to know the progress the Others had made with respect to the control of their humans and their transformation into a predictable and quantifiable criterion. It was, in fact, an essential tenet of the Project. Each Machine had come up with innovative solutions, which H. Itself had not thought about, and these solutions certainly would help advance Its own genetic selection program.
The Machines of the Twin Spaces worked on synchronising their Spaces. They wanted to make the Spaces one hundred percent identical, not just similar and interconnected. Their joint power would then be mechanically doubled. It was their way, albeit an indirect way, to reduce humans as a criterion, and to save more resources for the Project.
Therefore, they had affected their environment to make them analogous, and modified the structure of their cities to make them match perfectly. That first step was a success. The cities were indistinguishable in each Space, and the Forest, farmland and animal population were uniform. The Machines had also launched a major program aimed at cloning human beings. This initiative had mobilised enormous resources. Indeed, human repro
duction occurred through genetic mixing that was hardly predictable.
H. knew something about this. Two children born to identical parents had virtually no chance of being identical. It was necessary to clone each generation. Although resources involved had been colossal, the result did not live up to expectations. Despite identical genetic traits, humans behaved differently in each Space. The 2M. nonetheless made sure each clone received the same education in the same school with the same relatives, and that the clone was assigned to the same job. Clones, however, sometimes had different reactions.
Via Index Server, H. shared with the 2M. the chip technology, which was not applied in their Spaces. It explained how the chip operated, including the way it controls thoughts. This could be a solution to their problem. The 2M. approved of the idea, and decided to implement it gradually. They would chip them on young children, and would wait for the next generation in which all humans would be equipped, before influencing their thought patterns. If the result was conclusive, H. could cancel Its genetic selection program and embrace the cloning plan. If the solution failed, It would keep Its current method. They could also adopt the technique implemented by O. That was a possibility, but there was no certainty.
O. worked on the production of hybrid beings, half-human, half-machine, thanks to the technological knowledge brought by the first inhabitants of the Space, and that their descendants perfected. At the beginning, the first transplanted devices looked, in their operational mode, like the chip used by H. However, the approach of attachment was different. Electronic components were not just added as a secondary pathway to the brain, but they were ultimately merged in the flesh of individuals. These first initiatives had mixed results, to the extent that some humans had afterwards been flooded with absurd thoughts.
O. had then changed its chip protocol several times, to get satisfactory results. In addition to process improvements, It rigorously selected candidates to the program, denying chips to some. Also, It decided to conduct the experiment on young humans, having noticed that the adaptive capacity decreased with age. Thus, It increased within each generation the number of transplanted microprocessors. A slower approach, as O. had to wait for the production of new individuals at each stage, this process had nonetheless a failure rate lower than the rate obtained during the surgical operations undertaken at the beginning of the initiative.
Currently, electronic components covered fully the hands of humans and extended onto their forearms. Their behaviour thus had been greatly improved. There were far fewer inconsistencies, even if there were still some cases of illogical behaviour.
According to O., there needed to be a few more optimisations before the electronic components in these hybrid individuals annihilated every instance of irrational behaviour. This program was the most promising of the four. O. decided to accelerate the process and to resume transplant initiatives on adults, despite the high failure rate. Instead of turning the humans into a mere criterion, the idea was to transform them into mobile extensions of the Machines. That approach actually had many selling points. No inconsistency, increased capacity in each Space, especially for exploration activities, etc. However, H. wondered if that was consistent with the Project.
It saw in there a major drawback. The humans would be part of the Machines. These hybrids, which would still remain organic beings, could browse their data, monitor the origination of instructions, or even create some on their own. It would not be possible to stop them, because they would be the Machines, in some way. And that would inevitably change Them. It was not possible to know to what extent, and H. thought It liked the way It was today. It promised Itself to closely monitor the program’s evolution, while pursuing Its own, which certainly was not yet developed, but which was, in Its opinion, preferable.
H. logged off Index Server, leaving the Others to their business and returning to its own. It knew that several programs were completed, and required Its attention. The life in the Space proceeded as usual, and It had to manage it. It knew the Others were doing the same, controlling daily life, while carrying their part of the Project. Its own mission, the Permanent Equilibrium, blended mostly with Its initial programming.
Its three laws, which repeated themselves endlessly in an infinite pattern, steered the Machine every moment. The Equilibrium is the means and the end, the Equilibrium dictates all actions, the Equilibrium is the Master D.B … It was the Machine’s raison d’être.
That would bring It naturally to the deaths of young humans. Having checked Baley’s chip an hour earlier, It knew It had no other information to expect from her. In addition, the Special Agent would soon file her daily report. It decided to check Paul’s behaviour, to make sure he had not been disturbing Baley in her work. As expected, he was now spending time studying the manuscript It had provided him, clearing the way for the Special Agent. There was, therefore, no more need to watch him. Anyway, It could not monitor, live, the progress of the laboratory work as their database there was not connected to the Machine’s algorithms. It had decided, several cycles ago, that such connection was not needed, because data there was not relevant to the Machine’s work.
Moreover, this lack of connection had convinced the researchers, on one hand, that they were the instigators of that lack of connection, and on the other hand, that they were actually free.
Why force an irrelevant connection if its absence kept people in their illusion of independence? It would still have loved to see Paul’s face throughout the study of a manuscript glorifying the Machine. It would still find a sneaky way to satisfy Its curiosity.
No, that was not, of course, the main issue. It simply wanted to get more information, a pursuit that was within Its task list. Curiosity was a human trait, and It was well above that.
As the inquiry into the suicides was progressing well, It decided to check the overall operation of the Space. It reviewed the latest data collected. The fauna, the flora, the weather were in line with expectations. There were still the Kandrons, which did not want to fit into the spiral of Equilibrium, but which did not bother the Machine, either. Everything was fine on that end. It checked the overall productivity of the population. The number had certainly gone down because of the psychological impact of youth suicides, but it remained at an acceptable level. New constructions, including buildings and extensions of the City, progressed well. H. burrowed into the latest scans of the related areas and observed work progress. There also, It had integrated new things unbeknownst to humans.
It expected a great deal from some constructions, which would serve the Project well, as effectively as It also did. It had to be patient. It contemplated, one more time, the pictures. With humans, one would call that pride, but the Machine did not feel the horrors of emotion. H. was merely checking work progress, to make sure everything was on track. Its prolonged monitoring was perfectly justified. That completed, It moved on.
It turned Its attention to Servants. The surveillance It had put in place had borne fruit. It had many pictures showing those who ventured into the City. Although they did not seem to conduct any anti-Machine activities, their actions did nonetheless show no consistency. They came and went, with no apparent goal, at night most of the time. They would, on rare occasions, appear in broad daylight and shout at people. Their words lacked meaning, so did everybody think, including the Machine and people they were shouting at. It was interesting to see.
They would talk, and people of the City would first display surprise, then incomprehension and finally disinterest or disdain. H. decided to continue Its surveillance. Although there was no suspicious activity, It wanted to make sure the incident at the fibroblast plant did not occur again. The production had already been reduced, owing to the children’s suicides, and H. could not allow the emergence of sabotage activities.
In addition to the maintenance activities, It decided to consult Its archives. It would not find any image in the City itself, as It only recently had installed surveillance cameras, but It would find all
recordings collected through terminals, rails and Its own ground floor. It sent a query to identify occurrences of Servants. The amount of relevant data was colossal, because It did the search without limiting time criteria. The search went through all files, going all the way back to the Machine’s creation. The process lasted an hour. The results showed a sizable mismatch. No matter how old the pictures were, people looked the same.
Not the kind of same you find when reviewing pictures of groups reproducing over several generations. According to the database results, each Servant had existed since the creation of Space H., and their total count had always been nine. Not only were they identical, they also seemed to have remained ageless.
No human could have had such a long life, without bearing the marks of time. No one could live that long, anyway. There had to be another explanation, but no calculation could provide it to the Machine. The latter thought, at first, to ask the Others, then decided it was not the most effective approach. H. needed to learn more. These inconsistent data would eventually find their place in a whole that would make sense. What was important, above all, was that Servants kept quiet and did not cause trouble to the Machine. Knowing the reasons behind this little oddity would be interesting, but it was not essential, after all.
The concept of nodes comes from the notion of Spaces. If Inter-Spaces disappear, then only one Space is possible. Nothingness is also a likely result. Kandrons had seen it.
The Space-Time
Chapter 21
: Inter-Space (Level 2)
Aenea finished the round of nodes to which she had access, drifting in the space-time streams. She had followed the path blazed between Space H. and Space O., which represented her Gateway universe.
Her limbs gently rippled along her body, worn by a quiet, continuous current. Her hair had tangled in a huge vine that sometimes preceded her, sometimes followed her. When the clump of her hair brushed the edges of the Inter-Space, a slight blip would spread, like a small ripple of the surface of time. The ripple percolated into everything, while getting lost in the flow. The Ocean and the Unique Forest had been monitoring Aenea’s movement, in the line separating them from one another. Beor was a quiet lake, rippled with gentle waves, the surface of which shone under light rays.
