by A. I. Zlato
“Hi Special Agent, may I ask if you are leading the investigation on the Problem?”
Nobody would mention child suicides; it was too painful. Everybody would rather use the term “Problem” in public.
“No.”
“But someone must do something about it, sooner or later, don’t you think?”
“Of course. The Machine is taking care of it.”
The man offered no further comment. He had hoped to get more specific information, something complementary to what the news media had been reporting, and Baley could sense the disappointment in his eyes. He dropped his shoulders discouragingly, and turned his head away. She knew she gave a senseless answer, but what else could she have said? It was clear the Machine was taking care of the Problem, even if she did not know how It was doing it. It was a Special Agent’s job to investigate this kind of incidents, but she had not been assigned to that particular job. The man went away, and so did the people who had gathered to eavesdrop on the conversation. He probably had transmitted the information to people in this Circle, as no one, from then on, dared to look at her. Unless her imagination was playing some tricks on her.
She proceeded until the next access scan, and the screen indicated “Exiting the Second Circle.”
The Third Circle and Fourth Circle had fewer constructions, with buildings having only a few floors. People’s activities focused more on humans, not the Machine. Teachers, railers, construction workers … Their chips were even smaller than those of people living in the Second Circle. Those chips, nonetheless, enabled residents to log into terminals. In this part of town, people glanced at Baley distrustfully, so she felt several times that she needed to hurry up. She did not feel comfortable, especially given that she had no job-related assignment today. As the Machine’s representative, she knew people would blame her. A construction project was not proceeding as planned? The Machine must have made faulty calculations. A scientist made a blunder? The Machine must have inappropriately evaluated his or her credentials. Here, It was the source of all problems, and only human beings could take credit for all the good things.
Baley knew it was useless to talk to them, to tell them that, on the contrary, the Machine was responsible for all good things occurring and that human errors were to blame for all disturbances in the Equilibrium. She suspected these people secretly envied her and everybody living in the First Circle and Second Circle, envious of their more powerful chips, of their direct relationship with the Machine. Their contempt was only there to mask their deeper resentment of being ostracised, out of the City. She gladly left these neighbourhoods, knowing that residents of the Lower Circles would not express such disdain towards her. Beyond the Fourth Circle, people were so far away from the Machine, both physically and professionally, that they did not care at all. For them, it was nothing but a Tower located far away, some kind of all-powerful ruler, living outside their reality.
At the end of the day, she arrived finally at the Periphery, with its “houses,” which were some type of one-person residences. For her, it was unimaginable to live alone, with no neighbour, without the reassuring noise of the community. To make things worse, there were Kandrons everywhere. She tried to push herself until she could reach her goal, the end of the City, but that was too much. Her chip had already become a bit defective, as she could barely receive flows of data from the Machine. Without that permanent connection, she felt weak, as if she were cut off from the rest of her body.
Attempting to go further, near the last construction projects, certainly meant an increase of this discomfort, that disconnection from the Machine. She marshalled an extraordinary effort to make a U-turn, and walked without running. Once she was out of the Periphery, and back into a Circle, albeit far from the Machine, but in a Circle nonetheless, she looked for a rail. She had neither the energy nor the motivation to walk all the way back to her own Circle. As a privileged resident of the First Circle, she did not need to go to a rail station to access her privileged means of transportation.
As soon as she spotted the black bay, and felt the regular flow of air in the environs, she stepped forward to attach herself to it. She felt instantaneously the Machine’s vibrations into her entire body. The rail brought her, almost simultaneously, back to the Tower. The chip’s signal became perfect, she could touch the wall … she was home again.
Reassured, Baley walked to her building, and returned to her apartment. The silence welcomed her, because neither her husband nor her daughter was home. As she was the first home, she relaxed on the couch and requested the transfer of the day’s general news. She could have turned on the news channel, but then she would have needed to spend 15 minutes listening to several journalists telling her the same thing that the Machine would transmit to her in a few seconds. Her chip converted electric impulses into concise sentences.
“Weather: same as planned.”
“Plant growth: same as planned.”
“Ecosystem of Unique Forest: same as planned.”
“Movement of Kandrons: same as planned.”
“Human population: variance detected. Non-planned reduction of several youngsters.”
Baley then turned on the news channel. Journalists, whom she had mentally criticised a minute ago, would give her the details she wanted. She could not be satisfied with a simple “variance detected” report.
“… A new incident occurred, near the blue pond, as students were heading home. A whole classroom was involved. According to their teachers, those kids had no history of trouble, and had excellent grades. At this very moment, I have no information about their motives, as in previous Problems. The City is facing an enigma that remains unresolved. Everybody is asking the same question: What is the Machine doing? Is the Equilibrium threatened? The Elders certainly had not …”
She turned off the channel. She could not stand reporters referring always to the Elders. Of course, they could not have foreseen such or such event! They had lived thousands of years before. Why would humanity feel the need to question the past whenever it faced an unknown situation? The solution had to be found here and now. If she could only be assigned to the investigation … She was certain she could act properly and effectively.
She had received the perfect railing for such a task.
The myth of the Saviour, or the Prophet, has always been a staple of human civilizations. The probability of emergence of such a being is directly correlated to the number of people believing such a myth.
Lessons from Chaacetime
Chapter 4
: Space H. (Outside Circle)
Everything pointed to a splendid day. The sun shone onto the lake, inundating it with its countless scintillating colours. The sunlight made the foliage in the Unique Forest less dark, almost welcoming. Far away, a tiny black spot indicated the presence of the Tower and the City, beyond the safe rampart of trees. There was a sand-white land strip between the blue of the water and the green of the Forest. Houses sprawled, stuck between these two manifestations of Mother Nature.
The paleness of the emerging day lit the metallic and wooden frontages. Although they had an apparent rusticity, these buildings were small jewels of technology. Every solar calorie was absorbed by the roof and stored in energy bars, used by the entire community. The shape and positioning of the houses was carefully studied to use environmental resources as effectively as possible. The lake water, sunrays, the freshness of the Forest, were an integral part of the architectural design. More important, the ultraF network connected all houses with one another, forming among them a nexus of information exchanges. More than a simple grouping of houses, this was totally an intelligent organisation, able to adapt and grow. The ultraF was one of the technological jewels found on that side of the Forest. It had no equivalent in the City, because the concept of such a network was alien to the Machine. The ultraF belonged to the people who lived beyond the Unique Forest.
The freshness of the evening started fading, promising pleasant temperatures ahead.
A light breeze caressed the wakening environment.
Everybody, except Egeon, would have stopped to admire this natural beauty, would have enjoyed the wind’s nice effects on the skin, but he felt no interest in this place at all. He only focused on the shuttle, his shuttle. For generations, his people had worked tirelessly to build it, to implement this artificial gem.
A force of nature, Egeon was tall, and his portly appearance betrayed a fondness for good food. He was at least a foot taller than most men in his community. In his brown hair were a few grey spots that he touted proudly, and that contrasted with his beard, entirely brown. His green eyes peppered with yellow lit a face that remained young, despite his age. The clothes he wore were always selected by his wife, and he did not care, as long as he felt comfortable in the outfit. Today, he wore a pearl-gray shirt, the colour of which was meant to showcase his elegance, and dark gray trousers. He noticed the buttons of his shirt were a little tight around the belly, something that would inevitably trigger comments about his weight when he returned home in the evening. Never mind. So be it.
Egeon looked up to focus on something that was more important than his modest self and his excess pounds. The shuttle.
This was the product of a whole life of hard work, his father’s life, and his grandfather’s. Made of a light but resistant alloy, the building stretched nearly one kilometre. Its perfect shape was more visible, thanks to the emerging daylight — and it reflected a dazzling metallic lustre. Egeon blinked under the flutter of the hull, which took a bright silver colour. A pure beauty. The shuttle’s inside design was also the work of several generations of engineers, architects and project managers. A small gem. Besides the main control unit, there was a large residential space: a room, bathrooms, cafeterias, fitness centres, a library, etc. Everything that nearly one thousand humans needed to survive in the interstellar space, before settling on a new planet. This planet was there, somewhere, a few light-years from here …
He could not help but admire the construction a few more minutes. There were still so many things to do! He nonetheless sacrificed a bit of his precious time to enter the building, and review the work already accomplished. He got on the 20-step staircase that led to the access door. Cables, tools, design plans were left here and there in the room, which might seem messy for someone unfamiliar with the ongoing construction project. Large rooms stretched in front of Egeon, covering three levels, according to the design implemented by his great-grandfather’s teams. The overall layout had not changed so much over the years. Only a few minor renovations had been carried out, to handle the ongoing project and new requirements.
In the main corridor, Egeon greeted two teenagers, who stood on a metallic beam, stretching and fixing large cables. They greeted him back distractedly, so focused they were on their task. He knew that these two youngsters, like he, wanted to do a perfect job, to build a structure that will transport humans into space. The shuttle was the project of an entire community, the main objective for which they had endeavoured since childhood, like many generations before them. Different teams worked round the clock, in 8-hour shifts, to build the shuttle, to improve the precision of the dashboard and the propulsion system, to implement a safe and comfortable cockpit.
Egeon went through the halls to check, in silence, the work of each team. At that moment, he heard Teo, the chief engineer in the construction department, show frustration. Egeon had known him for many years, and could recognise his stentorian voice, which carried far.
Teo was the best in his field, but, when hearing him, one would think there were only problems, and never solutions. He seemed to feel the entire universe had something against him. He had been successful, despite his pessimism, in increasing the engine capacity by twenty percent, doing it within a few decades only. Teo knew he was too old to be part of the interstellar trip, and he feared that his computations would be incorrect, that one or more pieces would be defective on D-day … Egeon suspected that Teo was building an engine that could withstand three roundtrips. For Teo, nothing was ever perfect, ever resistant, ever … and he kept on improving his own improvements, continually. Egeon heard him complain about the propulsion system, shouting at anyone who was near.
He tried not to interrupt his friend in his favorite task, and left. On his way, he saw both teenagers keeping a very low profile, unwilling to suffer Teo’s wrath. In vain. The chief engineer emerged in the corridor and gave them acerbic performance reviews, which were totally unjustified. Egeon thought, for a second, about cutting him off and defending the teens. However, after pondering the long list of complaints Teo would convey to him afterwards, he chose not to proceed. He knew the youngsters would not really care about Teo’s behaviour.
Egeon stepped ahead and left the shuttle, hearing Teo continuing his recriminations in the background. After a last glance at the fuselage, he interrupted his admiration and went back to work.
As the leader of the community, he had a workload that would have discouraged many people. He had had the role for the last twenty years, and he had never had a workday similar to the previous one, each of them bringing its own batch of joys and problems.
To get back to his office, he had to go through the entire construction site, which had a high level of activity although it was still very early in the day. There were nearly ten thousand residents here, living at the border of the Unique Forest, ignored by the City and its Machine. The Tower coordinated the daily lives of humans in the City, all the way to its Periphery. Beyond that point, the Tower was blind, unable to have any influence. Beyond that point, Egeon’s community was developing and getting closer to its goals, the departure from the planet, a jump into the unknown, the discovery of the infinite space. Several schools of thought debated the reason why there were two distinct communities of humans, and many of those theories centred on mythical assumptions.
The most popular legend held that their ancestors had come to Space H. from Space O., although the City and the Machine had already been in existence. The Founding Couple would have crossed Time, in a one-way trip, to evade persecutors. In Space O., they had been unable to fulfil their dreams, the construction of an aircraft to leave the planet. Thus, according to the myth, building a shuttle was already an important project for their ancestors, and was the very reason why their community came into existence. Legend also had it that the mythical couple came here to seek refuge, in this Space, to turn their hopes into reality, far away from persecutions.
How had they crossed Time? A mystery. According to the fable, they had been guided in their trip by their belief in an imminent Prophet, who would be the Link and the Break.
Egeon never took those tales of spiritual guidance seriously, but he knew that a lot of people, including his wife, believed firmly in the Prophet’s return.
Before leaving Space O., the Founding Couple, the Arts, had gathered all aeronautical and astronomical expertise that was necessary to their project. The basics of those sciences had been established earlier by the Elders, who where the common ancestors to those living in all Spaces. Then, humans of Space O. had considerably expanded on the scientific foundations. The Arts had taken this enhanced knowledge with them while embarking on their trip. From that expertise, they had been able to develop their vision of a shuttle that could transport an entire population to a new planet. They had transmitted their project to their children, asking them to follow through. Their project was born.
Once they settled, the Arts sought, in the City, information that could be useful to them. People in that Space were also heirs to the Elders — and had surely accomplished significant progress in several fields, including aeronautics and astronomy. Oddly, the Founding Couple could not find anything. It seemed that Space H.’s ancestors had not considered the transfer of such knowledge useful, or had concluded a long time earlier that the knowledge itself was not important. Egeon knew for sure that, for several generations, his people had discreetly burrowed into the City’s libraries and archives, seeking
all kinds of information, even bits thereof. All research had been unfruitful, as if the sciences of space were alien. They had certainly concluded, that people here did not know it was possible to fly into space, the real space, the one hosting stars. That was probably the main reason why his forebears had selected this Space, the objective reason, that the legend had repackaged as “favourable conditions.”
Not having any expertise in astronomy and aeronautics, the humans in the City could not have thought about what was happening at the outskirts of the Unique Forest, so their secret was well guarded. What the humans had not thought of, the Machine could not build. Ignorance was the ultimate protection. While the Tower and the City were only thinking about the Equilibrium and additional Spaces, Egeon and his people were pondering space. For him, and probably for his ancestors, the creation of new Spaces could not be the only future for humanity. The universe offered countless possibilities, different planets, different problems, which would cause humans to exit their comfort zone, to progress. Spaces should not divert humans’ attention from space, so ended the tale of the Arts, the Founding Couple.
The element of myth in the legend did not matter; at least it could help explain how two populations coexisted in the same Space, without ever crossing each other, ignoring each other’s existence, as the legend intended it to be. Egeon was in charge of maintaining that secret, as well as mystery around the project. He had the significant responsibility of protecting the community while steering the shuttle construction project to success. Every day, he tried to, aware of the importance of each decision he made. More than a job, he took it as a calling, readying every part of his body to commit to the project.
