The standard protein shake would not do, she knew. So she sucked down a tube of glucose paste flavored with something red. Watermelon or strawberry. Not that she’d ever tasted one of the real things in her life. Once the sugar hit her body, she paced the length of her space, turning thrice before she felt steady enough to move to the next phase of her body’s needs.
For some reason the esoteric abstract art and geometric colorations that flowed across her walls gave her a sense of foreboding.
“Ma . . . . ,” she coughed, her voice rough with disuse. “Mama,” she called again, getting the word out this time. Silence greeted her.
She shrugged, “Ka-chan?” She asked instead.
“Yes, Mi-chan?” a voice asked from the room.
It wasn’t really her mother, of course. She’d died in the riots when Michi was a child. “Ka-chan, please discontinue primary visual protocol.”
Immediately the walls went black and small lights in the ceiling glowed into life.
Black? Was that the last default she’d designed? What a waste.
“Ka-chan,” she said, pulling protein pellets out of a resealable bag from her cabinet in the kitchen portion of her abode. “How about something new this time?”
“New?” the voice of her habitat asked.
“Yes,” Michi said, filling a tall glass with a high glucose and vitamin mix from one of the many packages she had stored in her refrigerator.
“Scanning for new ideas,” Mama said.
Michi inserted the cup into the mixer and blended her current meal, dinner she thought, while the house searched her multi-verse for something unique.
The shake went down as smoothly as one could expect being filled with fiber, vitamins, and other nutrients in the correct balance to keep her body and mind at peak efficiency for the next six to eight hours.
“Ka-chan?” she asked as she unfolded the rowing machine from the wall and set about her hour of cardio. “Any progress?”
“Perhaps there is something, after all,” Mama said, sounding hesitant. “Mi-chan . . . it’s been a long time since we’ve had music. I wonder if that would be nice.”
Michi paused, thinking. Music? How long had it been since she had listened to music? Honestly she couldn’t recall? Not in the prior year, undoubtedly.
“Yes, music would be . . . ,” she paused. What would music be, exactly? Distracting? The encrypted message was occupying more of her day than she’d anticipated. Perhaps music would help her mind to take new paths.
“Yes, music would be lovely.”
As she rowed a quiet concerto of strings began to fill the apartment. There was nothing specifically dynamic or jarring, but the volume built slowly, as did the intensity of the music. By the time she’d completed her first five thousand kilometers on the rowing machine, something odd began to happen to the walls. Instead of visual representations of mathematical eccentricities as she had expected Mama to find, there was a landscape unfolding around her.
She didn’t notice at first, the scene was so insidious. In the corners, just behind her, or to the sides, a forest began to emerge. Tall evergreens and spruces marched back to the towering shape of Mount Fuji. It wasn’t until the trees began to fill in the walls in her immediate field of vision did she begin to realize that the swell of strings had been replaced by the soughing of wind through the trees, with an ever-so-quiet motif of music underneath the natural voice of the forest that now surrounded her.
At the end of her hour, she stood from the machine and turned slowly, taking in the intricate detail of the forest around her. The trees were more alive than anything in her memory. The rendering was so complete that for a moment she thought she felt the breeze.
“Ka-chan?” she asked, gulping at the thought. “Is there a breeze?” Her atmospheric controls were state of the art, beyond the access of most world citizens. But a breeze?
“Is it a breeze? I wonder . . .” Mama answered, her voice filtered through the trees.
“How?” Michi asked, but a movement to her left caught her attention. She spun and a deer—she recognized it from picture books she’d read in her youth—bounded through the trees and scampered from her view. For the briefest of moments she could smell the overturned turf and the muskiness of the frightened animal.
“What is this?” Michi asked, suddenly more confused than she remembered ever being.
“I found this in your work area,” Mama remarked calmly. “It had your approval. It turned up when I searched for environmental landscapes to integrate with your habitats visual display. Have I erred?”
Erred? Michi stood mesmerized as the forest around her overloaded her neglected senses. While she had not been out of this set of rooms in over a decade, she had her virtual worlds. Those she had built to interface with her sensory cortex, so she knew what smells were, at least in the abstract. Was that what was happening here? Was she smelling the forest due to an association with visual stimuli? Was her ocular input triggering false memories implanted via the many worlds she had created in the ether?
She sat on the only available piece of furniture other than her cocoon—her small bed. Tears flowed down her face and she smelled herself, the sweat and odor that a body exudes over time. It added to the hyper-realistic vision of the forest around her, making it all the more real. Her breath caught. She’d lied to herself over the years that she’d go outside again one day, a promise she had made in honor of her mother who loved nature. But the outdoors had killed her. She shook with the fear and the shame of her sudden need for her mother. She hadn’t needed anyone since that night. Since the moment she’d first learned to push her physical needs into the background and pursue her intellectual conquests. Emotions were for the weak.
Tears stung her eyes, so she stood, making her way into the shower where she sloughed off the stink and the sweat. By the time she stepped from the tiny cubical refreshed and dried by the modern conveniences of her age, the room had changed even more. Her floor and ceiling had become the sky and earth, above and below. In the distance, the forest rose toward the mountain and details upon details were beginning to emerge. Flowers in a riot of colors shown on the outskirts of the massive woods where sunlight fought through the canopy and small creatures ran from tree to tree, chittering to one another, challenged or laughing in their small mammalian world. And what trees they were. She had to look up each species, never really exploring the varied breeds. This forest, this growing visual world, was a mix of oaks and what her search engines described as tiger’s-tail spruce, white pine, and red pine. As she looked deeper into the growing darkness of the trees she found a mix of cypress and hemlock. The density of it went on deeper than she could’ve ever imagined. But in the heart, she could tell the rendering continued, the visual continued to unfurl.
“Ka-chan,” she asked, breaking away from the image and glancing around at the objects in the room. They stood out—the cocoon, the bed, the light from the shower . . . But they were alien, apart from the forest, anathema to the scenes around her. She shook her head and moved to her virtual rig, changing out the cocoon for a fresh one, and dropping the other in the recycle chute near her shower. New ones would be delivered along with replacements for her food and sundries.
“Yes, Mi-chan?” Mama asked. “Is there more you need of me?”
“A question. Nothing imperative, but curiosity dictates I must ask.” She rubbed her freshly shaven head. “How much longer until the visual and audio environment completes its load?”
There was a long silence where she fidgeted, anxious to get back to the encryption in her workspace. If this amazing 3-D imagery came from the encrypted file, she wanted to examine it in the way she knew best.
“It appears,” Mama began, her voice puzzled and concerned. “Mi-chan, this appears to be incongruous with expected protocols.”
“Specifics?” she asked.
“While the environment has loaded the previously unencrypted portions of the file, the estimated size of the remaining
encrypted package appears to be changing.”
“Virus?” she asked, her heart suddenly in her throat. She had decades of work in those servers. Some was retrievable from back-ups but the private preserves had no external connectivity. If they were lost, there was no recovering them.
“It does not appear to be a virus,” Mama said.
Michi let a sigh escape her lips.
“Something I have no context for,” Mama went on. “It is tied to the encryption you were studying. Perhaps you can decipher exactly what is going on.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” she said. She climbed into the new cocoon and set the alarm. Just before her eyes fluttered closed and she slipped into the ether, she noticed a figure watching her from the furthest edge of the trees. The details were too vague, but the feeling of being watched was overwhelming.
Michi spent the next eight hours continuing to decrypt the file. There was a level of quantum folding employed here that she had never encountered. The ramifications to computer storage alone was beyond her reckoning. But that was not the most extraordinary aspect of the encrypted file. Mama had been correct. It was almost as if the encrypted file was growing the longer she unpacked the imagery.
Not just spatially, but temporally.
Michi was into the fifty-seventh layer of encryption and decoding when she sensed more than heard Ka-chan whisper her name.
All round her, her virtual havens were filling up with the unpacked code. Thirty-three of her pet projects had been sacrificed to the growing algorithm, and still it unfolded before her. At the rate at which she progressed, she had two choices, open this to the ether beyond her firewalls, or delve into her private preserves.
At her next intermission, her brain reeled as she hurried through her consumption of nutrients. The exercise, a precisely timed event, was completed in a blink, her mind a whirlwind of possibilities and puzzles beyond her wildest dreams.
The forest continued to render around her, transmogrifying simple electrical impulses into a landscape of such detail and breathtaking beauty that there were moments that she could do nothing but watch. She turned, barely aware of her physical self as a flash of vibrant red flashed passed her head. She spun, trying to follow a cardinal that had burst from the underbrush, and by an optical trick she could not perceive, disappeared into the forest to the north of her.
“Ka-chan?” she asked, sitting down on her bed with an uncharacteristic spasm.
“She has gone,” said a new voice.
Soto, Michi thought. Outsider. She stood at the unfamiliar voice. For a moment, shock filled her at the intrusion on her privacy. She took a deep breath and turned, putting on her societal mask to face the newcomer.
Against the backdrop of the growing mountain to the south, a young woman walked through the gloaming of the woods.
“Who are you?” Michi asked, confusion a blanket across her senses.
“My name is Haruka,” the young woman said, her voice soft yet clear. “I saw your lecture on gravitational impacts of quarks and the fallacy of modern computing. Your mind is beautiful, Michi-sama.”
Michi flashed between startlement and amusement. Haruka’s words would almost be poetic if this were a formal classroom setting. But this was something different. She looked about. Something totally different, and likely to go beyond cultural boundaries.
She studied the young woman at the edge of the wood, her heart-shaped face a mosaic of numbers, her form a wonderland—a superbly rendered avatar for the immaculate mindscape that surrounded her. With the intricacies of the panoramic 3-D rendered world, this woman far exceeded the coding and the graphical capabilities of Michi’s apartment. This intruder was the most beautiful individual she’d ever witnessed. Haruka watched her, her head cocked to one side, a small smile playing across her lips.
“Who are you?” Michi finally croaked out.
“As I said, I am Haruka.”
Michi wrung her hands together, her thoughts a chaos of ill-conceived social options and utter disbelief.
“Where is Ka-chan?” she asked finally. That was a solid issue on which she could focus.
“She has gone,” Haruka said, her voice a sweet combination of hard consonants and soft vowels.
“Gone?” she asked, standing. “How did you get past my firewall?”
Haruka took a step back, spreading her hands. “You invited me in,” she said, lifting her chin and looking Michi in the eye. “You overwrote Okasama, blended her rudimentary code, with my life’s work. She evolves.”
Michi sat down again, the ramifications beyond her capabilities at the moment. “Ka-chan?” she whispered. Could Mama truly be gone? Not again, not after all these years. Tears flooded her face and the world around her faded as she was overcome with grief.
For an indeterminate amount of time her mind fled into an unfathomable nothingness, shutting down her senses as the pain engulfed her. For the first time she succumbed to the grief she’d repressed for more than two decades. Succumbed and nearly drowned.
While overwhelming, the pain began to recede to the point that eventually she sat up once again, finding that she was in her own bed, the sheet tangled around her legs and her entire body aching from the physical exertion she’d undergone expressing her lament.
“Ka-chan?” she asked again, hoping it had been a nightmare, fearing she would not answer. Only silence greeted her as she stood, stumbled to the shower and let the hot water soothe away some of the shards of her shattered illusions. Once she emerged, the forest that surrounded her took on a more sinister air.
“Haruka?” she called. Her voice seemed to be swallowed by the thick trees and the vine-covered ground. She stumbled as she made her way to the cocoon and climbed in. What exactly had she unleashed inside her private domain, and could it be prevented from breaking out, beyond her safeguards?
Every night, as she took her repast and prepared to allow her body to sleep, Haruka appeared in the shadows of the surrounding trees. The first few days Haruka kept her silence, watching her with a puzzled look on her face. It wasn’t until the fourth night that she crept foreword, tentatively, but did not speak.
“Why do you grieve so?” Haruka asked finally on the fifth night as Michi consumed her protein meal.
“The human body is a puppet filled with chemicals and electronic impulses that can be expressed in no other way. We feel, we exude anguish.”
“And love?” Haruka asked. “Is there love?”
Michi watched the other woman, attempted to read the constellations in her eyes. What had she undergone these last weeks, the second loss of her mother—the consumption of her waking hours by this every unfolding algorithm?
“I do not understand love,” she said. And Haruka smiled.
From that day onward, Haruka and Michi shared their evening meals together. Haruka sat near a campfire telling Michi of the beauty of the world. Michi drank her protein shake on the edge of her bed and listened, enthralled.
Their talks meandered into physics, poetry, mathematics, and chemistry. Haruka had a mind unlike anyone Michi had ever known. Her days of unfolding the algorithm became interwoven with anticipation of the next meal, the next moment conversing with Haruka.
“What of love, then?” Haruka asked, her mannerisms long ago moved into the realm of intimacy—her formal speech evolved to the personal.
Michi watched her, studied the way the underlying string of digits formed the haunting beauty of Haruka’s eyes. “Love is a chemical reaction,” she said, bemused. “An illusion of want and need driven by the baser chemical reactions. It is meaningless.”
Haruka’s face shifted then, the formal mask of proper society falling over the shy smile and the soul-penetrating gaze. “I see,” was all she said. She rose then, a graceful motion that distracted Michi from her next thought.
Haruka bowed once, her face impassive and her hands folded over her chest. Michi stood, alarmed and confused by the actions.
“Haruka?”
> The digital woman turned from her and walked into the woods, away from her fire, into the blackness of the night. The stillness was nearly absolute. Michi stood motionless, eyes straining to follow Haruka. For the first few steps Michi could hear nothing above the sound of her own breathing, but long after Haruka had stepped into the deeper shadows, Michi thought she heard her sob.
For days Michi remained alone, refusing to return to the ether. She spent long stretches of time, awake and aware, watching for Haruka who never came—puzzling their last exchange. Eventually despair overcame her confusion and she returned to her true world, to search for her there. She needed to explore the encryption, to nudge and correct the tiny flaws she had began to uncover, the deeper she went. Perhaps they would be clues to this ghost.
She explored the sea of leptons and muons that filled her virtual worlds, searching for anomalies. The beauty of it drew her onward, tripping the pleasure centers of her brain with the crystalline mathematica and the algebraic flow of the swelling data.
The layers unfolded under her guidance, each another level in exaltation and glory. The deeper she delved, the more she realized just how little she’d ever known about beauty. Even the flaws she found had a sense of wonder that kept her moving deeper, kept her engaged as if she were melding her consciousness with the algorithm itself.
Michi was shocked when she unfolded the final layer. The momentous occasion passed without remark as the numbers drew back upon themselves and pushed toward the sky. Then a great wave of space and time crashed toward her, the Hokusai image rose like the Great Wave of Kanagawa, threatening the remaining virtual worlds she’d held apart from the others, her fantasylands and her safety zone. The place she had buried the painful memories, the images of her parents, and the fainthearted dreams of a desperate child.
In that moment, with the spark of something else riding the incoming wave, someone else, deep within the matrix of her worlds, she relinquished her final walls, opened her nether realms to the rushing sea and shouted in ecstasy as she was overwhelmed.
Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy Page 16
