by A. L. Davroe
Everyone seems stunned. They’ve always loved, trusted, and blindly followed the Presidential family. And now their internal programming to follow like sheep is at war with the logical minds they’ve been bred to possess.
“Ellani and the others are trying their best to fix the mistakes that I and a few others have made. Please help them do this. If you don’t agree, then we will all die. I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to the precious few of you who still exist.”
The Aristocrats glance around at each other, each as uncertain as the next on what to do.
I step forward and I bank everything on my hope that my father’s Redux Program works on the Disfavored. “I personally stake my life against the guarantee that the Disfavored in this city will make every effort to live in peace and protect those of you who are still living.”
“Why on Earth would they do that?” someone demands.
Smiling, I turn back toward the screen. “Okay, Zane, open up the audio line.”
“Let me introduce you?”
“This isn’t the time for theatrics.”
“Oh come on, Ella, this might be my last day in the limelight.”
“Ugh, fine, make it fast.”
Grinning ear to ear, he says, “Citizens of Kairos, may I present to you your Savior, Miss Ellani Drexel.”
More cheering and chanting as the camera angle narrows in on me until I’m the only one on the screen the Disfavored can see. I hold my hand up for silence, and it takes quite a few minutes to get it but when I do, it’s eerie. I feel sweat pouring down my back, and my gown itches. I can’t believe I’m about to speak with all of these people, that I’m about to step up and take the reins on a runaway stagecoach my parents basically left me on a whim. No, I’ve been on this stagecoach all along. They may have dropped the crumbs, but I picked them up and followed the path. There’s always an option, and this is what my choices have led me to.
I take a deep breath, level my eyes at the Disfavored before me. “People of Kairos. Or should I say, People of Neo-Evanescence.” There’s a cheer at that. I hold my hand up again. “I welcome you to what, I hope, is a new future. One where we can cancel out and overwrite the sins of our forefathers. Humanity as a race has done a terrible thing. It destroyed the world we once had, it broke us apart, it left some of us for dead. But we didn’t die.”
More cheering. I wait. They settle.
“Now, we are at a turning point. A point where a new challenge is on our doorstep. This beautiful utopia, this sparkling domed city that is your new home, your salvation, this city is dead.”
I’m met with confused silence and I grab the thread, the half-lie half-truth, and I weave the story for them.
“Yes, I’ve given you a dead city.” I make it sound entirely on purpose. “And now you all have a choice.” I spin the thread of Real World with the thread of the virtual world. “You’ve learned to hate the Aristocracy. You’ve learned that the only way to survive, to get by and succeed in this world, is to take from them. You’ve taken, and they’ve paid dearly. And now, I present you with a choice.” I see some nodding. They expect this, they’ve been programmed—brainwashed—in Redux to react to this moment.
“Your old home is dead. Your new home is dead. You will not survive on your current path of hate and destruction.” I step backward and hold my hand out, indicating the Aristocrats standing behind me. The camera backs up, showing a panorama of sparking alien creatures who promise a strange future. “I have with me here, the keys to the future. You know them well. You’re thinking you hate them, you want them dead. How did some get through? The simple answer is that I saved them. Because without them, you would destroy everything.” I pause, let that sink in.
“This city, Evanescence, is beautiful and offers so much to its occupants. You wanted it, lusted for it. Yet you failed to realize that, like any machine, it operates on individual parts. Cogs, pistons, springs, wheels, belts, fuel, wire, chips, grease, protocols… Without these things, machines are useless, aren’t they? Without tools to fix the parts in a machine, it’s just as useless.”
I turn to the groups of Aristocrats, continue speaking as I walk among them. “Each of these people is a part, a tool. They are the most valuable thing this city possesses, the only thing that can get it up and running.” I touch shoulders as I realize who is capable of what. “Engineers, Programmers, Designers, Medics, Geneticists, Machinists, Horticulturalists, Biologists, Nutritionists,” I list, and those are just the few occupations that I know from the people I went to school with. “These are the people who can get the city back online. Who can maintain it. Who can teach your children and your children’s children how to keep it going and make it even better as the years march by. But—” I turn back to the screen, meet the dark eyes of the hundreds of Disfavored amassed in the square before me. This image is repeated in a hundred different places throughout the city, they are all seeing and hearing this because The Broadcast penetrates everything. “I need you to help me keep them safe, to let them into this city, and let them stay. I need you to forgive and forget the past, to take my hand and move forward with me and with them. Will you do this for me?”
I reach out my hand, offer it as if waiting for them to take it. I don’t know why I choose this gesture, as there are virtual worlds dividing us and I cannot touch them, but it feels right. One by one and then dozens by dozens by hundreds, hands outstretch toward mine.
It’s not everyone. I don’t need it to be. There will always be dissenters, and perhaps they will become the next generation of Tricksters. But for now? For now there are enough. An overwhelming number I know are going to try.
I hear an intake of breath behind me.
“Thank you,” I say. And then, Zane cuts the feed.
“I think that’s a good place to end it,” he says. “Dramatic pause.”
I force a nervous smile. While I’ve got one group onboard, I still need the other. The important one. Stiff, I turn back toward my fellow citizens. “You’ve got your guarantee.” There is nothing else I can really say. “Will you help or not?”
One of my classmates, a boy named Hunter, says, “What makes you think we can restart the city? None of us even know how the city works. I was taught she operates entirely without human assistance. Everything is autonomic, so why are we necessary?”
“I thought that, too,” I say, “but then I had to wonder why she shut down at all.” There were a few things that just didn’t make sense—the robots trying to kill us and then the city shutting down entirely. In none of the plans were either of these factors a beneficial goal. It’s clear that neither the robots nor the city were in the Tricksters’ original plans. I don’t even believe they were Uncle Simon’s doing. Clearly, he was attempting something. Perhaps once everything is settled, I can do some exploring on the Main Frame and try to decode his virus to see, but I don’t believe success rides on him.
What I do believe is that everything I’ve learned from Meems, from virtual worlds that allow you to touch reality, from my parents still living beyond the grave, is that artificial intelligence is far more advanced and capable than we believe. But the most well executed programs are still fallible… Even cities that can run on their own.
“I think,” I say haltingly, “that Evanescence is like a body. The supercomputer that is Main Frame is her brain. Like any living thing she needs cells…tools, parts, things that make her operate and carry out her normative functions. Evanescence had a balance of both: human and machine. When whatever Uncle Simon did blew our G-Chips, the human parts of the body were disconnected from the artificial intelligence that runs the city. The city no longer recognized us as part of her—we were viruses, bacteria, foreign bodies that had to be expelled. So, one part of the body started attacking another like—white blood cells no longer recognizing red blood cells as good and killing them. That’s why the robots turned on us. The city, being connected to all of them like a hive mind, told them we were the enemy. As soon as
the last living being fell in the city, she realized there were no longer any red blood cells to protect, so she shut the white blood cells down. But without any blood cells, the body dies entirely. So, she shut down.”
“So,” Delia says, haltingly, “you think the city accidentally tried to kill us?”
“Something like that. It’s obviously a bit more complicated, but the only thing that marked us as citizens was our G-Chips. Disconnect them from the network and we’re considered no different than Disfavored.”
“What about the androids?” Zane chimes in. “My assistant droid, Ruby… I can’t imagine she’d ever try to harm me.” There’s an underlying tenderness in his voice that lets me know that he feels as strongly for his assistant as I do Meems.
I lift my hand to touch the chips, but I realize they aren’t here in Nexis with me. “The city controlled the droids. They were our security—meant to kill trespassers. It would have been nothing for the city to direct them that we needed to be eliminated. As for the androids, I don’t necessarily believe that they had full control of their own free will. We may have felt they were autonomous beings, but deep down they were still machines connected to the Main Frame, like a hive mind.”
The idea of it terrifies me, but it’s no different than a virtual reality game reprogramming entire populations.
“And you want us to wake this city up again?” Sadie asks. “So it can try to kill us again?”
I shake my head. “What I want to do is tell this city there are still red blood cells to accept and keep safe. We have to give her a transfusion and her body can’t reject it.”
“And how, exactly, are you going to do that?” Carsai demands.
I hold out my hands and let a number of glowing threads fall down to the floor. “From what I understand, my avatar is a bridge. In Nexis, I connect Central Dominion and Main Frame. In Redux, I connect between Kairos and Evanescence. I’m capable of converting other avatars into code and as long as they’re with me, I can bridge them back and forth. That’s why you’re all here in Nexis even though you’re playing Redux because I need you all here, so I can upload you into Main Frame.”
“Wait, what?” Carsai squawks. “You want to upload our consciousnesses into a computer?”
I shrug. “In so many words, yes. We don’t have the chips to connect with her anymore, so this is the only way to tell her we’re here and she needs to keep us alive.”
“But,” someone else says, “isn’t that risky? Couldn’t we maybe die if we try moving our consciousnesses?”
Sparks, I was hoping no one would notice that part. “It’s possible, but I don’t think you will.”
“Can you guarantee that?”
“No,” I admit. Faces turn sour and I can tell I’m losing them. “But,” I hedge, “if I get you onto the Main Frame, it’s very likely you’ll find your loved ones again.”
“What do you mean?”
I glance at the screen where Kit and Zane are watching everything silently unfold. “All your friends and family, everyone who died? They’re there… On Main Frame.”
“She’s telling the truth,” Kit says. “The city created regular backups of each of the citizens via the G-Chip.”
“So,” one woman says, stepping forward, “you’re offering us heaven?”
“I don’t know what it’s going to be like. I don’t know if you’ll even find them in there.”
“But”—her eyes, faceted like garnets, flick up and meet mine—“it’s possible?”
I nod. “It’s possible.”
She chews her lip. “What if we find them and don’t want to come back?”
“I’d encourage it. At least for a little while. If I get you in, if I connect you and you manage to find who you’re looking for? There’s no reason why you can’t connect with them as often as you’d like. But after I wake up the city, after I convince her to accept her new inhabitants, I’m going to make an effort to get you back into your bodies and get you all safely into the city. I need you all alive so you can help these people learn to live with Evanescence. After that, I’ll help you carry out whatever wish you may have.”
She lifts her hand, her fingers stroking one of the threads. There are tears in her eyes. “If it means I can see Nadine and my grandson again, I’ll help you.”
Nadine. There’s nothing that says that this woman’s Nadine is my Nadine. There could have been a hundred Nadines with little boys in Evanescence, but somehow I just know she means the same one. I lift the thread, let it slide along her arm, wrapping around her wrist and up her body like a coiling snake. I turn my hand, touch her outstretched fingers. “Tell her I say ‘hi.’”
The thread glows silver and the woman bursts into nothing but golden code. The code spirals along the thread and together they move up and up and up, like a strand of semiprecious DNA. And then it shoots out, connects with a section of the darkened column around us. The thread injects the golden code with the speed of a bullet and it sticks there, the first strand in my web.
Half a dozen lights flicker on along the column, the first synapses firing after a brain long asleep starts to wake up.
Delia steps forward next. “Send me right to Nina.”
“I’ll try my best.”
Like the woman before her, Delia turns to code. Hers is a glowing bright blue as she disappears into the column. My heart aches because there’s a chance I won’t ever see her again.
Bastian comes then. “I uh, I need some answers.”
“Ask some for me, too.” I send him to Uncle Simon.
Sadie. “If he’s going, I’m going.” And off to Katrina.
Quent’s few remaining Dolls come next.
More Aristocrats join them, drawn by the prospect of reuniting with loved ones or possibly because they want to help. I inject them into the Main Frame, giving our city more and more reason to live. Each is a different color, each disappearing into the column, lighting more lights. Waking her up after a long nap.
Until finally, it’s just Carsai and me.
I stand there with twenty some-odd silver strands shooting out from my body, connecting me to the inside of the column. “What’s it going to be, Carsai?”
She scowls at me. “You stole him from me.”
“Yeah. But he wasn’t yours to begin with.”
“He was,” she argues. “It was prearranged. It was our destiny. We were born into it.”
“There’s no such thing as destiny. Anything you’re born into, you can get yourself out of. Anything life throws at you, you can fight. Quent was never yours. He was his own, and he made his own choices.”
Tears prickle her eyes. “He’s not here, Ellani. Why isn’t he here?”
I swallow hard. I’ve been asking that question since I lowered myself to the floor and didn’t see him or Gus standing here. He was supposed to be here. He was supposed to help me convince the Aristocrats to help.
“Is he dead?” she demands.
My voice cracks as I answer, “I don’t know. I hope not.” I hope he’s just late, detained, couldn’t get to a gaming house on time. Anything. There’s still hope. Not being here in the game means nothing. He could be fine in Real World. I have to hold on to that hope.
“Was he periodically backed up, too?”
“Yes,” Kit answers because I can’t seem to find words. I’m barely holding it together. It was easy not to examine the idea too hard, to push it off because things needed doing, but it’s hard with Carsai making me think about it.
“Then I want to see that version of him. I want to be with the virtual him. Like how we were in the game.”
I force myself to talk. “I-I don’t know if I can do that.”
Carsai steps forward, holds out her hand. “Try. Give me this one thing, Ellani, and maybe I’ll come back. Maybe I’ll help you.”
Nodding, I let the thread reach out to her, convert her. Carsai’s color is red gold, like fire. Like the dress I wore the night of the virus. I watch her rise, I watch her d
isappear. I watch another set of lights turn on.
chapter thirty-one
Post-American Date: 7/10/232
Longitudinal Timestamp: 3:58 p.m.
Location: Free Zone, Central Dominion; Nexis
“Ella,” Kit says, voice quiet and gentle.
I sniff, trying to get my head back in the game. “Yeah?”
“We’re ready over here.”
“Yeah. I just need a minute.”
I take a few breaths, trying to calm my racing heart, the heat in my chest. Why is it that every time I’m in this chamber, I’m dealing with the sudden loss of the man I love? No, he’s not gone in Real World, you have no proof.
“Quent’s strong,” Zane says, voice quiet, though I can see the worry in his eyes. “And he loves you. He’ll do everything he can to get back to you.”
“I know.” The tears are falling now. I can’t help it. It hurts so much, not having him here with me for what could be my last few minutes. Despite it all, despite wanting to curl into a ball and sob, despite the shaking and the feeling like parts of my insides are peeling away and falling into a black hole, I send three strands out into the control panel. I let them travel down virtual highways, let them find the place in Nexis where Zane, Kit, and Angelique are sitting at a desk in Central Dominion’s version of The Broadcast studio.
I let them rise up through the floor, coil up legs, wrap around bodies, curl out to fingers. “Thank you for having faith in me,” I say. And then I break them apart, into components that the massive supercomputer around me recognizes and understands them as. I turn them into their chips—things without bodies, just strands of data to be read. Virtual bits of DNA, bits of genetic code that I add to a giant puzzle, hoping the Main Frame of Evanescence will take these small glimpses and remember the big picture.
