Tides of Hysteria

by Adam J. Smith

  Annora

  What was time now? Its only limit the speed of data transmission through the cables and through the air; through arrays perpetually switched on, even when switched off, in a city where very few switches were manual; where locks required only a digital key and where the cameras had no ‘off’ option. Thousands of years had passed in Annora’s time; after the first hundred years she had returned to the city and the lab in which her body resided encased in a bacterial slime, the conjugation of plasmids being dissected, carried and catalogued by the nano-network into a system that could barely calculate the data. The datapackets were collected at random and in their trillions, mismatched and like the world’s greatest puzzle, if the puzzle was the night sky by eye. Only when she fused with the supercomputer was any headway made with the information they had; packets joining together here and there in what might be one bit in a tera, or one bit in a kilo – only time and patience would tell.

  The one hundred years that had passed for Annora was in reality only a couple months; returning to her body, she had expected to see it torn apart, as though piranhas had taken her for a meal; perhaps her spine would remain, dangling from the base of a decapitated head floating listlessly at the top of the soup. In actuality, she looked exactly as she remembered. A little thinner perhaps, kept alive through intravenous fluids giving her the nutrition she needed. The same camera that faced her kept Calix in view only for a third of his body, in an identical tank to her body’s left; not important enough to have his own dedicated camera. His body appeared more atrophied than hers, but then he’d had more mass to lose. She was glad she had him with her, looking as he should; his self-promoted image every bit as accurate as it should be, flaws and scars and all.

  Her visit, all those ‘years’ ago, had been just seconds for the programmer overseeing the project at the time, and if there had been a blip in the processing power released to the process of decoding, he or she would not likely have noticed it before Annora corrected it. The supercomputer had two levels now: one that was building planets with the data it decoded – her level – and one where she left the door ajar for the briefest of flashes. Wide enough to keep them interested. Wide enough to keep her alive. Very early on, she had learned how to firewall her world – the authority had come knocking but she had told them to leave her alone. “You have what you want,” was the message she left for them. “Let Calix and I live what remains of our lives.”

  If they’d tried to break her firewall again since then, they couldn’t have knocked very hard.

  The last time she’d visited the lab was the last time she would ever visit the lab. Her body, skinless, and hairless, threaded with veins through deflated muscle attached to bone with flimsy translucent tendons. Her body, but no longer her. A few thousand years was enough to detach yourself from the old memories and old ways; that hadn’t been her body for over 99.9% of her life. The city was her body now. Every facet a limb that she could control, consciously, independently and simultaneously, all while she sunbathed without need for clothing on a beach on the golden coast, Oceania’s Great Barrier Reef stretching for hundreds of miles just beyond where the blue waters broke. Snorkelling with Calix among clown fish and sharks, rays and dolphins. In a world made up from a world once made real. One of Rylan’s first questions had been about the uncanny valley of the link; the way he described it, it was like there was a thin veil across everything that dulled the light, coated the tongue, filled your ears. He’d never enjoyed the experience; headaches puncturing his brow. Then he’d joined her on the beach, the veil pulled away from his eyes, his mouth, his ears. She could feel the electricity of his toes scrunching in the sand, exulting in a sensation that was indistinguishable from reality. “Everything is an impulse,” she had told him. “The link inhibits your potential.”

  “So this is what it feels like,” he said. “There are monks who dedicate their lives to the link; who claim to have overcome its limitations. One test, they say, is to leave your body entirely, and think beyond bodily functions of eyes and ears and all the other senses. For you have no eyes or ears, or anything else. Just thought. The test is to see in all directions at once. Can you? You’re looking at me now, but can you also see what’s behind you?”

  “If I want to. But I’m also with Calix right now. And in my homeroom reading an Agatha Christie novel that I’ve just decoded. And scoping the home tower to make sure no-one is discovering your hideaway. I am just… here.” She’d reached out to him then, offering a hand, for what it was worth. She’d given him a glimpse of his potential; the purest of Stim trips, an uncontaminated acid trip, the power of allsight.

  He’d never let her touch him again.

  “How are you this morning, Rylan?” she asked when she opened the door. Her homeroom had remained unchanged for centuries, besides the book titles on the shelf. Rylan entered and sat himself down on the cracked leather armchair.

  “Tired. You?”

  “I’m alright, thanks.” She sat in the chair opposite, profiled against the wide, grey window, clouds outside drizzling.

  “Do you even get tired?”

  “When I sleep, whole years go by.” Sometimes when she spoke she was amazed by the things she said – as though they didn’t come from her but some joker who had taken over her functions. She did not mean to be so cryptic. Though there was some fun to be had there, too.

  “I wish whole years went by.”

  “Oh, Rylan; but you’d miss the excitement.”

  “I’d be alright. Sounds kinda nice; waking up and seeing everything has moved on. Got fixed.”

  “If you’d wake up at all.”

  He nodded. He looked different in the link; softer, rounder, less good-looking. “Then I’d be none the wiser. When will enough be enough?”

  “When the people are ready.”

  “You could beam into all their lives right now and they’d be ready in an instant, if you tell them the truth.”

  “Soon… maybe… when the authority loses its grip on the public’s conscience. We have to soldier on, in the meantime. This is a battle of minds. For minds. It’s not enough to tell, we have to show. The authority’s goal is our goal. There’s an old proverb about your opponent’s weak point being our own weak point. We must build our defence so that when they hit us with their lies, it does not affect us. For we will have truth on our side. Then we can strike, when they are at their weakest.”

  She watched him squirm in the chair. It was a perfectly comfortably chair.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “It’s just all so vague. You’re here… in this… paradise, it seems, for you. You know? Like… you’ve been away from the city for so long you’ve forgotten what it was like; its smells and tastes, the sound of chatter in doorways and the constant beep of elevators opening and closing as people went about their business. It’s life. It’s real. What we do matters. I don’t see a future where we… as people… stay alive so successfully as we have done. Say what you want about the authority, they’ve kept us alive.”

  “I barely even knew the city. What I knew was sand. Open skies. One meal a day, maybe two. A handful of people having a handful of repeated conversations. But I wasn’t free there, either. Somewhere, between the sands and Neon, there has to be a compromise that works. You’re right about me – there’s no going back now; this is my home. And yeah, it can be paradise, but only because I gave up corporeal life. And it was never meant to be like this. Every day I learn something new about humanity; what it used to be and all the great things it had achieved. I don’t want to bring that back for me. I want to bring that back for you, and everyone else still alive, or yet to be born. We’ve stood still. Afraid of taking another step. Which is understandable! We poked our head out and near as damnit lost it! Do you see?”

  He looked at her closely, leaning forward in his seat. His thumb rubbed against his index finger, and he looked poised, as though he wanted to reach out. She tilted her head as he gazed into her eyes, s
lowly shaking his head. “You’re… I don’t even know what you are. Some kind of greater being. Once human, now something else entirely. To know what you know. To be able to do what you can do.”

  “A miracle.”

  “A what?”

  “Before we almost became extinct, humans attributed the unbelievable and seemingly impossible to divine intervention. A miracle. An act only a god could make.”

  “A god?”

  “There were thousands. Each with their own story of creation. Of how we got here. Some with no gods, some with multiple, and some with none.”

  He shook his head and laughed, falling back into his seat. “What would we come up with next? Nothing surprises me about us, not anymore. Anything is possible! Look at you!”

  “And you…”

  He laughed again, making her smile. She loved the sound of genuine laughter, especially here, in her homeroom. She always strived to line these walls with good thoughts, positivity. The bad stuff could be dealt with elsewhere.

  “And so… the reason you are here?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sabri, Genevieve and Holden, all contacted tonight. Holden seemed smart – smarter than the others – I have hopes that the human touch has positively influenced them. We’ll see over the next few days.”

  “Foresee any need for my intervention?”

  “I don’t know, maybe Sabri. He was a little flippant. Hopefully I gave him enough food for thought.”

  “Okay. I’ll add to my watchlist. It was nice seeing you again.”

  As he rose and turned for the door, he muttered; “You only saw me yesterday! I’ll never get used to this time thing. See you soon.” He opened the door and disappeared the moment it closed behind him.

  Annora rose, picking up the book she had been reading, and placed it by hand among the others on the shelf. It was the little things that kept you grounded, she thought. Retaining the physicality of the old life. So much of her time was spent in the ether, but she made sure at least some part of her remained part of something tangible. Joining the link; merging with it and in essence, becoming it, had released her brain’s potential. Decoding the data took 63.3% of her potential. She thought of that and imagined all the places she could be if she just gave it up. But how do you give up life?

  She stood by the window and opened it to allow in the breeze. The rain dappled her forehead. The clouds took her over. She was the faces of Neon in the street and on their couches in their homes and in their autocars or riding the trainlink to work so slow it was like they were frozen in time. As good as. She was all of these at once and the cable network embedded in concrete; the electrical conduits running inside the solarised panels of the dome; the space between the light and the thought of light; light, colours, information, envelopes of sounds and snowflakes of molecular waves. In pulses of allsight she spread. Calix waited in the ether of non-matter.

  Calix

  Sandstorm. Ochre air too thick to see a sky. The hoverbike and the speed and the vibration of its power between his legs. It had never been about the destination, not really. He didn’t want to know the where or the why – he just wanted to go. Like an ion bolt passing through town. The illusion of wind smashing against his face. Pummelling his chest. Abrading his bare shoulders. The sands called back through time, shouting his name, daring him to ride. The sands never cleared, for the destination was unimportant. He repeated himself a lot these days; bound to happen when you live more lives than you can count.

  He sped across the desert and the sand clouds swirled behind. Annora’s face appeared in one – he didn’t need to turn around to know.

  Of all the places…

  “You didn’t wanna join me in Yellowstone? Or on the top of Angel Falls?”

  “I felt like a ride,” she said, sliding her hands around his waist. The warmth of her breath on his neck, her lips on his skin, the smell of her, the pressure of her embrace – it was all neurons firing in the electric black, and felt more real than real. He took his hand from the throttle and placed it across Annora’s, and felt his skin break across hers. Felt the bones in his fingers crack as Annora’s intertwined with his, the skin melding across the top. His spine parted and accepted her into him. She wore him like a coat, as her wore her.

  The sand parted ahead and the sky opened into a deep blue, cloudless and cut by the rising mountainsides. The hoverbike faded yet they continued, headlong and headrushing just inches above the surface, cutting a trench; becoming ethereal in a tangible world. A ball of light.

  Back in their shared homeroom they shared a bed, slick with sweat on tangled sheets; she was real and perfect in his arms. While they raced across the sand, he also tiptoed to a climax inside her; every calculated thrust a peek across the threshold – anything more rapid bringing instant allsight.

  The body knew. The body knew. When he was here, with Annora, which was all the time; some part of them always together, always making love, there was never any doubt. The body knew itself inside out; all its organs and workings, and so the languid, or else vigorous, lovemaking felt as real as it had in the city. When they were also one in the ether, the climaxes could last indefinitely.

  In another plane, Calix stood in Neon’s ring, overlooking the city in full daylight. It was the one place that – in reality – was off limits to them, for there were no accessible cameras or microphones, and spy drones were despatched with aplomb. That they made it their base of operations whenever they were dealing directly with the issues of the city had been a conscious choice. Just as they held dominion by peering down, so should we, Calix had said.

  “As good as anywhere,” Annora had answered.

  She wasn’t bothered, either way, he knew. There was something sacred to him about this idea though; more than the excitement of being so high above the world, it was the symbol upon which they all looked up to. They all needed to look up now, to him, to Annora – to their team.

  In the room behind him glowed a holo-display bigger than any that were possible in the real world. Neon in all its glory. Near identical towers made it almost impossible to understand which part of Neon you were looking at: after a while the little landmarks stood out. Not least the low town and the home tower. Sliced in two, the roots of the city distended towards the magma river that ran beneath; the oil and water pipes, the bedrock which never moved. And throughout, red dots blinked. Each blink was a beacon of hope. Lockets of potential.

  Dropboxes throughout the city had been stocked with these lockets by Uldous, Nuke, Slay and the rest of the team, ready to be collected whenever needed. The leading authorities of the protest movement then disseminated them to potential converts.

  The army was growing. Their army. His army.

  He closed his eyes and connected to each of the lockets simultaneously. It was an easy task, but one that needed concentration nevertheless. Alerts were set up for signs that they had become compromised: taken to the authority, for instance, or the words; Hey, look what this thing does. Keywords that flagged up the possibility that the locket was falling into the wrong hands.

  “So then, has anyone pressed the button?” A small hologram appeared whenever the locket was first opened, tailored to each provider, with a message of resistance. Often, they were opened in view of a camera, so Calix could watch for a reaction. Failing that, they had built-in microphones. If at any point it looked as though a dead horse was being flogged, he activated the self-destruct. Otherwise, he instructed them to press the button inside the lid and await further instructions, keeping the locket on them at all time. After a period of covert tapping to determine the target’s true intentions, they were tested. What the test was changed from situation to situation; perhaps something simple like drugging a guard to allow access to an off-limits area; perhaps even simpler, leaving a door unlocked. Whatever it was, should they pass, they were added to the ranks of infiltrators and informers.

  There was one extra blinking red light this morning. A man named Henry Reed, with a wife and son – be careful
– who worked as a guard on the frontline for the riot division. One of Nash’s. Temperamental yet resourceful, she’d made more physical headway than any of the others; quicker to march and with a will that had drawn passersby to their cause as they forced their way down avenue after avenue, early blockade attempts had been thwarted until the authority retreated so far they had the time to erect a wall. Nash had even been surrounded at one point, but the authority numbers to the rear and sides quickly dissipated under Molotov attack, and sheer numbers. The rear vanguard retreated, while the side forces set up an effective defence, if not to the same scale as the main defence. Nash’s team was only interested in forging forwards, not sideways, though perhaps it was time for a new direction.

  Calix turned the map to overhead. He’d never thought of himself as a General, or anything remotely similar, and in truth he didn’t push his sway too much. Better to let them get on with it, better to let it play out naturally – they still lived in that world and so were better positioned to make the right calls and decision; they had their own motivations which made them unpredictable. It was part of human nature. If they were unpredictable to him, then they were too the authority too.

  It was all distraction, anyway, from the bigger picture. A delaying tactic.

  Nash’s avenue glowed green, punching towards the centre of Neon; a needle puncturing a mass of red on the other sides. Retreat towards the edge and it all became normal again. This was a fluid arrangement, dependent on the attack. All across the city were similar patterns, though none so deep. Perhaps in time he would get them to pool their resources for one concerted attack. The current setup was fine, though.

  This Calix existed at 1x speed of time. And somewhere, Annora did too. They roamed the city as a simulacrum of the real thing, where virtual AI posers existed only when necessary, or needed, to feel less alone. It would run for as long as it was needed and then be destroyed. It was important that some small part of them could react in real-time.