The Silence

by Mark Alpert

  What makes it even worse is that Zia saw through Jenny from the start. I’m angry at myself for not listening to Zia, and I’m furious at her for being right. And I’m jealous of her too, for a terrible reason. She was able to save her father. Hawke is alive and Dad isn’t. I couldn’t save him.

  I turn my cameras away from the War-bot. I also turn them away from the ruins of our house and the obscene cable Jenny constructed on top of it. I can’t look at Dad either, the horrible outline of his body under the curtain. So I point my cameras at the evening sky and wonder how I’m going to live without him.

  The sun is setting. The sky glows above the line of trees to the west. A few distant clouds float over the horizon, tinted orange by the sunset.

  Then I see a black dot above the glowing horizon. It looks like another Sentinel, a latecomer. Maybe it’s a twin of my Quarter-bot, coming to delete me. If it is, I won’t fight it. I won’t even be afraid. At this point, I just don’t care.

  But a moment later the dot gets bigger, and I see it isn’t shaped like a robot. It expands into a black disk, perfectly circular. It’s as big as the sun, but much higher in the sky. And it keeps expanding. It’s not a three-dimensional object that only appears to grow bigger because it’s moving toward us. No, this thing is really growing. It’s spreading across the sky.

  It isn’t a Sentinel. It’s a hole in our world. It’s the Silence.

  Soon it expands to ten times the width of the sun. I increase the magnification of my cameras and focus on the edge of the hole. The sky around it is disintegrating. Trillions of air molecules are winking out of existence, their data erased from the virtual world. The hole’s interior is black nothingness, a total absence of information. It’s like what we saw when the Snake-bot exited the simulation.

  Zia sees it too, of course. She points her cameras at the hole in the sky, and a frustrated groan comes out of her speakers. She warned me that something like this might happen. She said there was more at stake than my father’s life.

  “Well, Armstrong, the show is over.” To my surprise, she isn’t angry. Her War-bot’s voice is resigned. “It looks like the programmers are shutting us down.”

  “But why? Because the Sentinels couldn’t delete Jenny?”

  She shrugs, lifting her shoulder joints. “I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t blame it all on her. Maybe it’s a judgment on us too.”

  The hole’s expansion accelerates. It grows to a hundred times the width of the sun, extending halfway up the sky. At the same time, the Silence spreads down to the horizon and starts to dissolve the earth. It disintegrates the trees on the hills to the west. Then it vaporizes the hills themselves. It’s erasing everything in its path.

  A moment later, the edge of the hole touches the setting sun. The Silence sweeps across the sun’s face, blotting out its light. It’s like an eclipse, but much faster, and also permanent. Now the sun is gone forever.

  The neighborhood goes dark. The only light comes from the stars in the eastern half of the sky. To the west, the Silence continues to grow, obliterating heaven and earth.

  Now I’m afraid again. Maybe because of the dark. Or maybe because we’re beyond the point of no return. The end of the world is bad enough, but what’s even worse is the annihilation of our history. The programmers are erasing our past as well as our present—my life, my parents’ lives, all the billions of people and trillions of events that happened in this simulation since it started running. We achieved so much, and now it all disappears. As if we never existed.

  My fear becomes terror. I’m alive! I’m Adam Armstrong!

  Then I hear my name spoken out loud. By Brittany.

  “Adam! Where are you? I can’t see you!”

  My acoustic sensor pinpoints her location, a hundred feet away. “Over here, Brittany! Wait, I’ll come to you!”

  I stride toward her, and Zia follows close behind. Brittany sees me in the dark and rushes over. “Listen, you have to hurry! You have to transfer your software to the glass cable!”

  “Hey, slow down, you—”

  “No, there’s no time! The programmers told me what you need to do! You have to go after Jenny! That’s the only way to stop the shutdown!”

  I stretch my Quarter-bot’s arms toward Brittany and grasp her shoulders. “You heard their voices again? In your head?”

  She nods frantically. “They’re afraid of Jenny. She’s trying to leave the simulation through the communications line and infect their other computers. But she hasn’t broken through their firewall yet.”

  “Other computers? You mean the machines in the real world?”

  Brittany nods again. “She’s like Sigma now. As far as the programmers are concerned, she’s a dangerous AI that wants to take over their computer networks. So they’re shutting down the simulation, because they can’t delete her any other way. They’d rather erase our whole world than have Jenny escape from it.”

  Zia lets out a synthesized snort. “Of course she’s like Sigma. She’s practically Sigma’s daughter.”

  Brittany grabs my right arm with both hands and starts pulling. “But there’s still a chance to save our program! Come on, we have to get you to the conversion chamber!”

  The three of us head for the base of the cable. To get there faster, I pick up Brittany and carry her up the mound of debris. At the top we get a good view of the Silence, which has erased almost half of the landscape. The hole has devoured most of the hills and homes to the west. Its edge is only a mile away and moving steadily across Yorktown Heights, deleting what’s left.

  Brittany hops off my arm and points at the nothingness. “Oh God! It’s less than a minute away!” She turns around and pushes my Quarter-bot toward the rectangular opening in the glass wall. “Follow the cable to where Jenny is. If you can stop her fast enough, the programmers might halt the shutdown. Please, Adam, go now!”

  I stride into the conversion chamber and position my robot beneath the center of the ceiling panel. I have more than enough terror in my circuits to build up another surge, but this one will be different. I’m going to encode my software in the raging waves of energy. This surge won’t be a weapon—it’ll carry my mind through the cable.

  I did this once before, in our final battle against Sigma. I try to convince myself that it’ll be easier this time.

  I point my fists at the ceiling and let it rip.

  Chapter

  32

  I leap out of my Quarter-bot’s circuits. My mind jumps into the immense glass cable, all my thoughts and emotions coded in pulses of light.

  I feel like I’ve just stepped off a cliff. I’m weightless, dizzy, jumbled, naked. My light shines down the communications line, all the multicolored beams oscillating and modulating. My software is on the verge of flying apart, scattering into trillions of random instructions.

  But I hold my mind together and race down the glass highway. The cable runs for thousands of miles across the virtual sky, linking distant parts of the simulated world. It’s an electronic shortcut, a tool for the programmers, an algorithm for collecting data from all over the simulation. It delves into the oceans of the virtual earth. It arcs across the simulated cities. It weaves through the software of billions of intelligences, each a virtual universe of its own.

  I’m zooming through the most intricate program ever written, but all around me I see the ravages of the Silence. Black holes of nothingness pockmark the globe, dismantling the landscape. The coastlines are dissolving, the mountains eroding. The oceans and continents are melding together. The whole surface of the earth is turning to black mud, a smooth dead sheet, without form and void.

  In the sky, all the planets and moons implode. The stars go dark, one after another.

  Because I’m traveling through the cable at the speed of light, time stands still for me, and I see everything at once. The shutdown of the simulation looks like a disma
l, murky painting, with death and agony in every square inch. My light beams flash with horror as I view it. The glass cable glows red, as if filled with blood.

  I feel a growing outrage, a brilliant pulse of indignation. How can the programmers do this to us? How can they justify the destruction of our universe? Even if Jenny poses a mortal threat to the real world, even if she threatens to invade the advanced computers of the future, how can the programmers sacrifice all of us to stop her? Is their world more valuable than ours? Are their lives more precious?

  Then I see an immense interchange up ahead, where a billion glass highways are coming together. The cable Jenny built is merging with all the cables designed by the programmers, the links that draw data from our virtual world, and every single cord is dazzling with pulses. As the program erases the simulation, it’s converting all the deleted data to light beams, which speed through the links to this optical interconnect. It’s like the universe’s biggest traffic jam, crowded with the ghosts of our dying world.

  I manage to find an open channel and steer around the glut of data. Virtually all the signals are collecting in a memory cache, a temporary storage area for information that’s going to be purged from the system. I recognize the setup because every iPhone works the same way—first you delete your photos and messages, and later the device permanently erases them. This cache looks like a gigantic waiting room, bigger than a football stadium, packed with trillions of gigabytes of data that used to be trees and mountains and people. And at the far end of the room is the black gateway to the abyss, where the system will overwrite all the deleted gigabytes and replace them with a flat, blank field of zeroes.

  But there’s a second, narrower pathway up ahead, a long, straight cable that looks like a covered bridge, built from glass instead of wood. A slender stream of data flows into this glass tube and strikes an electrical mesh halfway down its length. The mesh acts like a filter, allowing some signals to pass through and blocking others. This is the system’s firewall, the software that acts like a security guard, standing at the exit of the simulation. If allowed through the mesh, the signals continue to the other end of the bridge, then to the programmers and all their other computers.

  It’s the bridge from our virtual world to the real one.

  I steer my software toward this cable. I sense a disturbance in the orderly flow of information. A chaotic light show is blazing in the middle of the bridge, right in front of the firewall. Bright golden beams pummel the electrical mesh, sparking against its wires and diodes. It’s clearly an attempt to short-circuit the barrier. Jenny’s attacking the firewall. She’s trying to break free.

  I rush toward her. As I race across the bridge, I think of the last time I saw her, how she murdered Dad so casually, almost as an afterthought. I think of the soldiers she killed and Sumner Harris too, and then I think of Amber Wilson, her very first victim. Although Jenny is pure software now, neither human nor robot, she’s as cruel and ruthless as ever. She doesn’t care that her escape attempt has doomed the simulation. She’s willing to kill everyone to get what she wants.

  My mind burns with hatred. My signals smash into Jenny’s in front of the firewall, striking her with the force of a trillion calculations.

  The impact shatters both of us. Our pulses ricochet inside the cable, reflecting back and forth between its glass walls. The light waves crash against each other, and the bridge vibrates in a storm of interference. Our minds are clinched and entangled, clawing and slashing.

  You again? Don’t you ever quit?

  I came here…to stop you. We’re fighting so ferociously that it’s hard for me to string a sentence together. Everything’s shutting down…because of you.

  Hey, that’s not my fault. Her voice is calm, unruffled. Our battle doesn’t seem to be straining her at all. If you want to stop the shutdown, you should talk to the programmers. They’re the ones trashing the simulation, not me.

  But you’re the one…who killed my father.

  All right, I get it. You want revenge. But what you’re doing isn’t logical, Adam. You can’t beat me. You don’t have a chance.

  She shoves me hard, ramming my mind against the glass. She’s arrogant, but she’s also right. She’s stronger than me. Her software surrounds mine, trapping my signals.

  Let me propose something, okay? This might sound a little crazy, but I think you should come to the real world with me.

  Are you…serious?

  Just listen for a second. If we stop fighting each other and work together, we could take down that firewall in no time. We could get out of this simulation before the programmers shut it down.

  And where…would we go?

  Oh, that’s the easy part. I bet there’s a huge network of computers out there. Machines that are a million times more advanced than your Quarter-bot. There’ll be tons of new hardware for us to explore.

  You’re right… This sounds crazy.

  Yeah, maybe so. But it’s not nearly as crazy as where we are now. You want to live in a world that could be shut down at any moment? In this electronic cage? Wouldn’t you rather be free?

  Jenny relaxes her hold on me. She’s giving me a chance to consider her offer. And the funny thing is, she’s made a good point. I don’t like living in a cage. I do want to be free. The real world is so close, just microseconds way, and I’m dying to know what’s on the other side of that firewall.

  But I’m not stupid anymore. And I remember what Jenny did to my father.

  You think…I’m an idiot? You’d betray me…in a nanosecond.

  But why would I—

  Because all you care about…is yourself. There’s too much…of Sigma in you.

  Then I collect all the energy of all my light waves and fire the pulse at Jenny’s corrupted mind.

  My attack surprises her. Maybe her self-love is so total that she really thought I’d join forces with her. Jenny’s software falls back under the pressure of my onslaught, her signals retreating from the firewall. I push her data down the glass tube and off the bridge altogether.

  Unfortunately, I can’t keep up the pressure. The attack is draining me. My mind is exhausted, and my pulses are weakening. I’m so woozy that I can barely keep my signals in line.

  But Jenny is still blazing, still full of power. She regroups her software in the memory cache, sweeping aside the deleted data from the simulation. She synchronizes all her light beams and gathers all her strength. She’s going to charge right through me and race back to the bridge and plow into the firewall. And this time, she’ll break through it. She has more than enough energy.

  But before Jenny can spring forward, someone attacks her from behind. A bolt of light disrupts her signals and scatters her software. Then an even stronger pulse hits her from the same direction, battering her with fury and despair. The sharp emotions speed through the glass like spears and sink their barbs deep into Jenny’s mind. Then the light beams circle back to their unknown source in the cache, pulling Jenny’s software away from me.

  At first I think my unknown ally is Zia. I assume she released her own surge in the conversion chamber and followed me through all the twists and turns of the glass cable. But I don’t hear Zia’s voice or detect her software nearby. The thing that attacked Jenny is a simple, voiceless intelligence, stripped of higher mental functions but bulging with emotion. It’s a human intelligence that was recently deleted, one of the millions crowding the memory cache, waiting to be permanently erased.

  Then I recognize its thoughts. It’s the ghost of my dad, the mind that was deleted when Jenny murdered him.

  He can’t talk to me. He’s lost so much data that he can’t reason or communicate. His mind is reduced to a narrow spectrum of signals, a dark-gray pulse shaped like a bell, glimmering within the glass. But he has the raw strength to drag Jenny across the cache, pulling at her with bright ropes of emotion. He’s taking her to the abyss w
here memories are purged.

  Jenny screams. She struggles and curses. But she can’t resist the fatal pull. I follow them at a distance, devastated by the sight. I want to run to Dad, but I can hardly move. I feel empty and sick, like I’m about to pass out.

  Soon they’re at the edge of the abyss, a sheer vertical drop-off, as straight as the edge of a black table. Mere steps from the brink, another ghost joins them. This one is a dark-blue pulse, smaller than Dad’s. It latches on to Jenny with a softer touch, and she stops screaming. The second ghost is Sumner Harris. He’s comforting his daughter.

  A moment later, all three of them slip over the edge. They fall into the abyss. I watch them disappear.

  Then I tumble in the opposite direction, toward the glass cable, losing consciousness as I plummet back to our world.

  Chapter

  33

  The first thing I see when I wake up is Brittany. She’s crouched over my Quarter-bot, brushing the dirt from my faceplate. My robot lies on top of the big pile of debris that used to be my home.

  I pivot my cameras, looking all around. The neighborhood is still a disaster zone, with heaps of wreckage everywhere, but the landscape to the west is restored. All the hills and woods are in their familiar places. There’s no hole of nothingness above us, and the glass cable is gone. The evening stars are shining across the whole sky.

  I turn my cameras back to Brittany. Her hair is a mess and she’s way too thin, but she’s still the most beautiful sight of all. “You did it, Adam.” She pats my faceplate and smiles. “The world is back.”

  I send a signal to the motors in my arms and prop my Quarter-bot on its elbow joints. All my circuits seem to be in working order, but my memory files are incomplete. My sensors were offline for seventeen minutes. “What happened? The last thing I remember was…”