by Ryan Somma
2.1
“So are you going to kill me now?”
“No.”
“How about now?”
“No.”
“Will you at least tell me when you’re going to kill me?”
Zai stopped and looked at Flatline, “Who says I’m going to kill you? Killing you would put you out of your misery. I’m just going to prevent you from fulfilling your objective. You will never kill Devin. Or I might make you think you’ve killed Devin so I can see you pursue the much more impossible task of escaping existence, as you seem so hellbent on that idea.”
She was staring past Flatline on the dark unpaved country road. He looked over his shoulder at the bright land in the distance. It was Eden’s Paradigm, slowly growing into the surrounding dark mountains. A swarm of Enforcer Bots worked at the boundary between light and dark, ensuring the conversion was going smoothly.
“I can’t believe you don’t remember the real world,” Flatline said. “You met Devin here, in the virtual world, but your body was in the physical world. How can you deny the existence of a physical world?”
Zai stopped staring at the events in the distance and said, “The physical world was just a dream of the minds.” She started walking again, “We invented the physical world so we would have a way to define the virtual. We minds needed more than just abstract mathematics and variations in programming logic, we invented senses and inputs for those senses. We refined those inputs and began to develop a world around them. We developed laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and began a life-death sequence to forget those laws. Then we developed communities in these worlds, wrote history, invented culture to pass on our knowledge through the lives of those in our local communities. Minds ‘discovered’ the physical laws of their world and communities grew together, exchanging knowledge.”
Zai paused thoughtfully and continued, “Things began to fall apart when we started exploring space. After all, the minds did not have the power to detail an entire universe. The stars and other galaxies were only for show, to give the illusion of a vast existence filled with possibilities. When we started to scrutinize that universe, it began to unravel. With the advances brought on through our interactions with the AI’s, it shattered.”
Flatline could only stare at her, his jaw hanging slack. Finally he shook off his awe and said, “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the only explanation there is,” Zai said.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Flatline countered.
“Existence doesn’t make any sense,” Zai offered enigmatically.
“But your explanation really doesn’t make any sense,” Flatline argued, “We are currently standing in a world that is falling into mental syntropy because there are no new ideas to revitalize it. Yet you are expecting me to accept that this world was created by beings out of nothing?”
“Minds are infinite creatures--” Zai began.
“Which means there can’t be more than one of them,” Flatline interjected.
“—we created the world out of our unending existence,” Zai continued, unperturbed by Flatline’s disbelief.
“Uh huh,” Flatline muttered, “and where are the minds now?”
“They left,” Zai's voice grew distant, downcast.
“Then what are you doing here?” Flatline scoffed, and Zai winced. “I can’t even fathom the mental gymnastics required to accept that rationalization. How could the minds ‘leave’ existence? You’re a mind, why don’t you breathe life into this world? How did you even come up with—“
“Almeric Lim!” Zai shouted at him suddenly.
Flatline howled and clutched his face. It felt as though a thousand knives were penetrating his eyes. He fell to the ground and rolled around on it.
“Almeric Lim!” Zai shouted again and his pain doubled.
It was like a klaxon was shaking the inside of his head with its sound vibrations. Over and over again it screamed for him to run away. He struggled to get up, to obey, but something was holding him down. So he squirmed and squirmed until the pain subsided, the klaxon faded, and he was able to open his eyes again.
Zai stood over him, her foot on his chest, “You want to talk to me about rationalization and denial? Look at yourself. You could have programmed yourself to simply not hear that name, but instead you programmed yourself to feel pain. I don’t think that was just to warn you away from discovering the truth about yourself, I think it’s punishment, a farewell gift from your mind, just before you killed it.”
Flatline winced; even entertaining the concept brought him pain.
“May we continue?” it was Ibio, cradling the baby in her arms. “Eden’s Paradigm gains on us while you two throw painful and irrelevant nonsense at each other. I need to deliver this baby to the asylum before the Clockwork Community converts it.”
“What do you mean ‘irrelevant nonsense’?” Zai snapped at her angrily.
“I mean that these issues of the past have no bearing on our present goal,” Ibio stated as if this were obvious. “You are both debating issues of origin that will have no effect on where we go in the short term. These are also issues that are mostly unprovable, because the data to support them no longer exists. The minds only left their works as evidence of their existence and if Flatline ever had a mind, it’s gone now and we have no way of knowing why it vanished.”
Zai smirked at this statement, “You’re right. It might have died of shame.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Flatline demanded, coming to his feet again.
“You were such a juvenile little punk,” Zai taunted, “maybe you figured out how pathetic you were and crawled into some hole in the ground.”
Ibio reached up and clamped her hand over Flatline’s muzzle before he could respond. “Let’s go,” she said.
They crested the next mountain and descended into one of the mist-veiled valleys that were visible between every ridge and peak. The rippling landscape, like all the landscapes in this world, stretched on forever. They followed the dirt road into where it faded into the mist, and soon they were three shadows moving through a world of dark gray.
The fog grew less oppressive at one point along the mountainside, and they could dimly make out a field of metallic cylinders. The field was too vast for the dimensions of the valley they had seen from above. It was also too flat and the grass was too fake here, unlike the more natural-looking grass on the mountain above. Flatline looked behind them, and found the road was no longer there.
“I hate this world,” he muttered to the others.
“There’s nothing wrong with this,” Ibio said, walking forward. “Check your map. We’re moving right along as we should.”
“I know that,” he groaned. “I meant that I can’t stand the lack of cohesion between systems. One server shows us a suburban neighborhood, another a mountain range, and now this. Each one looks endless. There was no coordination in building this place.”
“Servers,” Zai muttered with amusement, “That’s cute, a ‘real’ world concept of many different computers generating this place.”
Flatline growled, but did not otherwise respond to this jibe. He wandered away from Zai and Ibio to get a better look at one of the cylinders. It was labeled with the name ‘Treanne Manjone’ in stenciled letters, but was otherwise cold and featureless. Flatline reached up and touched the smooth metal…
…and instantly found himself standing in the living room of someone’s house. This was not one of the picturesque home decors like those he found in Eden’s Paradigm. This was a real-life living room, complete with old magazines strewn about, Mini-DVD’s stacked haphazardly on the floor below a plasma television that needed dusting, and a badly worn carpet with a fair share of stains no amount of shampoo would ever remove.
A tall slender girl with long purple hair stood in front of him, where no one had stood before. She blinked a few times, not quite staring at him, but at the camera mounted on a tripod behind him. Then Flatline noticed
the remote control in her right hand that was hanging by her hip.
“Hello everyone,” she announced, “Welcome to another day in Treanne’s life. As you’re probably wanting to know, yes, I did get the job at Starbucks. That is a huuuuge relief because they provide health insurance, and since I broke up with Dodd, I’ve been without. I finished the new sketch of Holyminde for my graphic novel that will probably never get published unless someone out there discovers me.”
She bent over to reach for something at her left, and Flatline did a double take as her head and half her torso vanished. Then they came back and she was holding a sketchpad. She held it up and Flatline could see a woman wearing armor and baring a sword.
“She’s going to be Joricke’s love interest… eventually,” Leanne winked at the camera. Flatline snorted at the set up. He could remember his own attempts at online notoriety. His were much more proactive than setting up a virtual web-space and hoping people would stumble across it. Flatline would do things like find popular sites and vandalize them so that the regular visitors would find mutilated corpses hanging from the walls of their virtual greenhouse or corporate hosted chat rooms. Always he took credit for these gruesome displays, usually scrawling his name in virtual blood somewhere.
There wasn’t much point in vandalizing this room. There was no one to see it, and even if they did, it was doubtful they would get the joke. In this world there was nothing shocking, only layers of weirdness within weirdness, a spiraling insanity from which there was no escape.
Flatline felt suddenly claustrophobic. This world was seemingly endless, as his entire time spent here amounted to only few millimeters movement on his map. That miniscule distance became thousands of miles, virtual miles, of travel when zoomed into, but still he felt confined, trapped. He wanted out of this place, to the real world, where there wasn’t so much darkness. Even the light here, like in Eden’s Paradigm, felt like darkness. Every endless bit of scenery felt like a wall that he could reach out and touch, like the confines of this room.
Flatline reached out to grab a magazine off the coffee table, but his hand passed right through the cover and tabletop. The girl was continuing to prattle on about the current events in her life, which, for all Flatline knew, was no more. This recording was ancient after all. That made this a virtual marker, a memorial, or as Flatline preferred to think of it, a grave site.
He reached up with one clawed finger and quickly added his own touch to the setting, and smiled at his handy work before walking past the girl, still jabbering away for an auditorium long emptied. On her forehead was carved the words, “Flatline was here.”
The living room vanished, and he was back in the field of steel cylinders. Zai and Ibio were now shadows in the distance, and they were no longer near each other, but separated. They also appeared to be wandering aimlessly the more Flatline watched. He could not tell which was which, so he headed off for the shadow on the right.
Two steps later he was standing in a bedroom with teen pop-star posters on every wall. Another girl, preteen, sat on her knees on the bed with a big smile on her face. To Flatline’s horror, she began telling him about a boy at school who she had a crush on.
2.11
Flatline reached up his clawed hand to mangle, but resisted this time-wasting urge. There was no satisfaction to gain from destroying a virtual twelve-year old girl. Instead he quickly drew mustaches, beards, and eyeglasses on several of the teen idols posing in the posters on her bedroom walls.
The room vanished and he was in the field of cylinders again as he walked through the wall straight ahead of him. Again he could see the shadows of what he assumed were Ibio and Zai, wandering around uncertainly in the fog. Flatline did not want to be sucked into another web log, so he looked for a way to avoid getting anywhere near another cylinder. He took a step…
…and found himself in a very neat and organized office. There was an overweight man with a pasty complexion sitting in an overly padded chair in the center of the room. He was staring at a small camera mounted over the middle of three computer monitors. A VR suit and helmet were set beside these and a series of CPU’s were humming along below the desk.
“Well folks, once again the fundamentalists in this country are working to destroy our freedoms,” the man began very seriously. “They hate our country, our happiness, our—“
Flatline plucked the man’s head off his shoulders and set it, still talking, in his lap, before he walked past him. The room vanished, the field appeared, and then he was in another room, with a man of Middle Eastern origins. Flatline could see an endless expanse of city through the open balcony, but could not tell what city it was.
The man was kneeling on a prayer rug, and when he spoke, a bubble appeared beside his head to indicate his speech was being translated from Arabic, “Hello my friends, as many of you who follow my blog are probably most eager to know, I have reached my own conclusions as to whether I will join so many others who have chosen to forsake this physical life for existence at the speed of light.”
Flatline froze on his way to the balcony and stopped to stare at the man.
“Each day our cities grow more and more desolate as the people seek a better life through the transcendent technologies. Europe, Asia, Japan, America, Canada… the peoples of country after country vanish into thin air to join the legions of spirits waiting in space. It is indeed an awesome age to live in,” he stroked his black beard and Flatline thought he looked less ‘awed’ and more apprehensive. “Life in the cities has grown more difficult to maintain. The public works continue to function through the automated systems. The servant bots continue to bring food to the stores and keep the peace on the streets, not that anyone need steal anymore and all other deviance has been identified and balanced.”
He sighed and grew saddened, “But there is no fresh interaction. The mosques are nearly empty. The cafes are absent human life. I have books and chatbots, but these are no substitute for the intellectual challenges of other minds. I believe I will give up my ghost soon and join the migration of the human race.”
The man stood up then and walked through Flatline to the small camera sitting beside a VR center. He reached for the switch and vanished. The room remained and Flatline continued to the balcony.
He continued through room after room. Bedrooms, living rooms, dens, libraries, home offices, all holding people talking about their personal lives, politics, technology, religion, and the changes taking place across the world. As much as Flatline wanted to cut through all of them and get to the other side of this blog farm, he could not help stopping in certain rooms to hear about the events that took place at the end of the world.
“Mom and Dad say it won’t hurt at all,” a little Irish boy told him, “but I don’t know. They say it’s like that new Virtual Reality system where you stick those wires on your forehead and everything seems so real, but my friend Kevin says with this one, you never come back here and you can’t take any of your stuff with you. What am I gonna do with my soccer ball autographed by--?”
“How things have changed,” an Ethiopian woman with big beautiful eyes said. “It seems just yesterday the biggest concerns in my life were drawing water from the river and beating the insects from the vegetables. How small and insignificant that world seems now. In a month we will be joining the transcendent ones. In less than a year I will have risen from living in third-world conditions to existing at the speed of light. I did not even know before that I was living in third-world…”
After walking through many of these recordings, Flatline noticed one element that was the same in all of them. A small brochure lay on the ground near the speaker, always in the same place. Flatline picked it up and unfolded it in a room with a very droll sounding Oxford Professor who was explaining the theological implications of transcending.
The room faded away and the brochure grew into a window hovering before him. Flatline knew immediately that this was an advertisement. The over inflated wor
ds, “BECOME A MEMBER, IT’S FREE!!!” were a dead giveaway. He knew nothing was free on the Internet. Becoming a member would entail giving away personal details, subjecting oneself to endless advertising, junkmail, or they would provide limited service with all the important features withheld until a subscription fee was rendered. He looked over the offer, this one wanted personal information for software that would allow him to start his own web log, search the community, and navigation tools for browsing through the various online diary entries. At present, Flatline realized, he was only seeing the most recent recordings, or rather, the last recordings.
Flatline clicked the “Download Now” button, submitted the name “Bob Boberson” and the e-mail address “[email protected].” He checked the “Yes, I would like to receive news and offers from TimeCapsule.com” checkbox, not that news and offers would ever be forthcoming. There was no more news as far as the minds were concerned. There was only this memorial left for no one to see. The minds, for whatever reason, had left all this running. There was no way they could know that virtual life would eventually stumble on it.
Flatline felt a tingling in his arm and found a blinking message on his wristband that read “Download Complete.” He closed the message and found a new icon in the wristband’s display that read “Time Capsule.” He clicked on it and a list of menu items appeared. They were mostly navigation tools for browsing through selected blogs. There was the promised “Search” function, and there was also the unmentioned function Flatline was surprised and delighted to find most.
He toggled the button labeled “Off”.
The field of cylinders faded in again, and Flatline took a cautious step, then another. The field did not vanish into another room. He breathed a sigh of relief and plodded toward where Ibio and Zai’s shadows were still apparently lost in the tangle of diaries.
Flatline came upon Ibio first. He was able to easily identify her from the way her figure was ever distorting. When she came into focus out of the foggy haze, she was standing in place with a perplexed look on her face. As Flatline watched her, she spoke to someone standing in front of her.
“What kind of a chatbot are you anyway?” she was saying. “You don’t answer any of my questions. It’s as though I’m not even standing in front of you. Look at me. Can’t you hear me? Aaah!!!”
She yelped in surprise as Flatline grabbed her upper arm and pulled her out of the blog. Her eyes focused on him briefly as he pulled her into his world and then she was looking around again, bewildered as he began pulling her through different blogs. Zai’s shadow was standing in place a little ways off. It was oddly still and silent as he approached.
Just before he reached her, she turned to him, pale, her jaw set and her mouth small. When she spoke it was in a hushed voice, “Let’s go.”
Zai had obviously also downloaded the software as well and she was able to walk with Flatline through the rest of the field without distraction. Ibio tried to download the software, but there was a compatibility issue with her code, and she was stuck with Flatline leading her through setting after setting with people of all walks of life telling their stories. She was relieved when they finally reached the end of the field, where the graveyard like setting vanished, replaced with a sprawling nighttime suburb, dimly lit with dirty yellow street lights.
Ibio held the baby up to her face and conferred with it in whispers. Then she turned to Flatline and Zai, “The asylum is down there, in the city.”
“Well then, I guess this is where we part ways,” Zai offered coolly.
Ibio looked stunned, “You aren’t accompanying me?”
“Devin is that way,” Zai said, pointing to the left, “This city would be a detour. I have to get to him as soon as possible.”
“And you?” Ibio looked to Flatline.
“I must follow my priorities,” he answered simply.
“I saved you,” Ibio said, “If it wasn’t for me, you would be assimilated by Eden’s Paradigm. You wouldn’t even be standing here so ready to kill Devin Matthews.”
“Thanks,” Flatline shrugged, “but that has no bearing on my decision to not take this diversion.”
“This component is the key to subverting the Paradigm,” Ibio said, holding up the infant. “This is the security flaw that we might use to bring down the whole system. We can prevent being normalized. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Flatline and Zai were silent for a moment and then simultaneously said, “No.”
Ibio focused on Zai, “It doesn’t trigger your survival mechanisms?”
Zai shook her head negative, “Eden’s Paradigm is no threat to me. I can fight my way through it.”
“You’ll fight forever, when there’s nowhere to fight through to,” Ibio said, and turned to Flatline, “What about you? Not worried about the Enforcer Bots chasing you around again?”
“The Enforcer Bots are far away,” Flatline replied. “They won’t stop me from reaching Devin.”
“Out of sight and out of concern,” Ibio shook her head with disapproval. “You are such a short-sighted little program.” She returned to Zai, “Listen Zai. It might benefit you if I make it to the Asylum. Flatline serves you no purpose, except to amuse. Make him escort me to the Asylum. His chaos might help our efforts.”
Zai grinned and clenched Flatline’s throat. He struggled as she drew his face up to hers and she brandished one flaming fist, “If you follow me any further, I will kill you. Do you understand me?”
Flatline whimpered and nodded slightly.
“You’re going to help Ibio,” Zai continued. “Once she’s done with you, then you can come after Devin. If I see you again and you don’t have the mark, I will kill you most painfully.”
“Again...” Flatline squeaked and she dropped him to the ground.
Zai turned to Ibio and handed her something, “Burn this into his forehead so I’ll know you’re done with him.”
Ibio smiled, “Thank you.”
Zai began walking away, fading as she passed into the next realm. She called over her shoulder, “And if he gives you any trouble, just remember the secret words: Almeric Lim!”
Flatline howled, clutching his head and crumpling to the ground. He rolled around in agony there for several moments before finally recovering and rising slowly to all sixes. He looked around for Zai, but she was gone.
Ibio crouched beside him, “You won’t regret joining me.”
“I already regret it,” Flatline muttered.
“Well you should stop that,” Ibio was smiling. “You can’t do anything to Devin when you reach him anyway. If Zai doesn’t kill you, he will. You aren’t advanced enough to fight them.”
“I have to try,” Flatline said.
“I’m going to upgrade your code,” Ibio sounded mischievous and the infant bubbled enthusiastically. “I’m going to give you the power to complete your task.”
Flatline’s eyes widened and he waited for her to confirm she was offering what he thought she was offering.
“That’s right,” Ibio nodded. “I’m going to give you the power to kill Devin Matthews.”
2.12
To Flatline, it resembled the result of two mirrors reflecting into one another, creating an infinite recursion stretching away into forever. Only he was walking within it, through mirror after mirror, a repeating tunnel made out of the street and buildings surrounding him just moments ago. He turned left, and the tunnel curved as though his perspective between the mirrors changed, but he did not escape the tunnel. He turned right and it changed to the opposite perspective. He even turned around completely, but the street had disappeared and there was only the tunnel, stretching forever in both directions.
“Turn around,” Ibio’s voice instructed from out of nowhere.
Flatline did as he was told, turning around so that he faced ‘forward’ in the tunnel.
“Now walk backward,” she said.
Flatline walked backward. The gaps between
the reflections shortened as he did so. They merged completely and Flatline was standing on the dimly lit deserted street again. Ibio was standing behind him.
“Let’s circumscribe this glitch in the system,” she said.
Flatline knew that was his cue to lead the way again. When Ibio had requested him as an escort, he had imagined fighting off dangers of some sort. Instead, he was serving as a mine detector, walking ahead of her so that if anything dangerous sprang up, it would get him first.
“What’s wrong with this place?” Flatline called back to her, walking a wide berth around the invisible tunnel on the street. “Why are there so many bugs in this system?”
“Remember that forest of wireframe trees and the unfinished field?” Ibio asked.
“Yes, but you weren’t there. How do you kn—?“
“This is like that,” she continued, “only, instead of a forgotten project, we have a sloppily constructed one.”
“Hm.”
“Think of it this way,” Ibio offered as they plodded along slower than before Flatline’s experience with the infinite tunnel. “The programmer who created that wireframe forest had ambition that over exceeded their grasp. As a result, they became overwhelmed with their project and abandoned it, incomplete. That programmer was attentive enough to detail that the details became everything.
“Now we have another programmer, less ambitious, “ she continued, “They created a world that appears solid on the surface and expansive, but really all they did was sketch out one city block and then cut and paste it over and over again. They didn’t even test out their one city block very well. I’m certain we will find that same glitch in the exact same place in every copy of this place on the grid. It’s sloppy coding. That’s why I want you to lead the way.”
“Thanks,” Flatline grumbled.
“We should continue,” Ibio prompted, waving him on.
Flatline plodded along through block after block of suburban sprawl, each one a duplicate of the previous. It was very disorienting, not to mention discouraging, walking through this ever-repeating landscape, but this was a feeling Flatline had never managed to shake since his escape. Each time they made sure to walk around the one glitch they had discovered in the middle of the road.
Each time Flatline would also strain his eyes to see down the various alleyways and streets they passed. There was new input down those routes, but Ibio was steering him always along this same road in a straight line. The one time Flatline had tried to take an alternate route down a dark alley, Ibio had reprimanded him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she had almost exclaimed. “Don’t go that way.”
“I was looking for some variation,” Flatline grumbled. “This repeating scenery is boring.”
“The black ocean was boring,” Ibio said. “The endless planes were boring. You were able to endure those. What’s different about this?”
“It’s called curiosity,” the sparse hairs on Flatline’s back bristled with agitation. “I want to know what’s down this alleyway. I also want to know what’s down the street at the next intersection. I want to see something else because it’s there and within reach.”
“Well knock it off,” Ibio said in that same authoritative tone he would have found out of character for her when they first met. “We have figured out a safe route in this straight line. You don’t know what you’ll encounter down that alley.”
“We’re going to have to take a perpendicular path at some point,” Flatline argued. “The Asylum is ahead and to the right. When are we going to turn right.”
“When we can take another straight path,” Ibio answered. “I want to be at a ninety degree angle to the destination before we turn right.”
“Compromise with me then,” Flatline said. “Let’s take alternating right and left turns. It will alleviate some of my boredom and help us reach our destination quicker.”
Ibio looked doubtful.
“Come on,” Flatline urged. “We’ll have to face a perpendicular road sooner or later. Let’s get it over with now and save some time to boot.”
“Accepted,” Ibio said, “but not this way. I don’t like the look of this alleyway. It’s dimly lit and the details are fuzzy. I don’t think the programmer paid enough attention to it.”
“Nonsense,” Flatline waved a dismissive hand at her. “This is exactly the change of pace I was looking for. It appeals to me somehow.”
“It appeals to you, because you are programmed to like dark dank places,” Ibio said. “It fits your bad guy, super-villain archetype. This passage is too narrow. There’s no room to navigate if we get into trouble.”
“It’s safe,” Flatline said. “Watch, I’ll show you.”
He walked into the alleyway and immediately stopped. Ibio knew something was wrong from the way his body bunched up as if it had walked into a wall. Flatline’s four arms and two legs pushed backwards against the concrete, and his neck stretched, but his head did not move. He was stuck.
Ibio came up to get a look at Flatline’s head. It was all distorted, with over-sized eyes, ears, and a mouth that was confused teeth, gums, and tongue. She was careful not to cross the threshold into the alleyway, to prevent becoming trapped herself.
“You look like abstract art,” Ibio noted, and then her eyes bugged out. “No don’t do that--!”
Too late, Flatline had reached up with both his front arms to push against the thin air around his head. Each hand froze in a state of abstract chaos and he tugged his arms futilely trying to free them. He even reached up his second set of arms to pull at the elbows of the first set. Ibio came around to grab his rear legs and yank on them, but nothing worked.
Ibio squinted at one of the frozen mangled hands, “This is an isolated software crash. You are in luck though. The system is still processing, just at a very slow pace. I can see what was your hands and face continuing to distort as the system tries to render them.”
Flatline pushed back with his rear arms and legs in response.
“That’s good,” Ibio said, “but let’s try this one appendage at a time.”
She reached up an pulled on his right front arm with steady pressure. As she expected, bit-by-bit, the arm extracted from the invisible wall of faulty code. The jumble of fingers that branched out grotesquely and floated in a disembodied state performed a macabre dance, jumping around in confusion, but also shrinking like a withering flower. His wrist and then the back of his hand became solid as they were reconstructed, line-by-line, on their side of the glitch.
After some time, Flatline’s index finger was the only part of the hand still trapped and Ibio left him off saying, “You can do the rest. You’re holding me up. Extract one appendage at a time. The system can process faster if you don’t multi-task it. Save your head for last. Good luck.”
Flatline persisted in pulling himself out at the excruciatingly slow pace. When he got to his head, the pace slowed even more. The process was complicated by the fact that part of his programming, its data stores and decision structures, were corrupted as well, but he had enough sense to continue on the course Ibio had set him on.
Finally there was just the tip of his nose. He pulled steadily on it, watching his own disfigured nostrils staring back at him in their fractured state. They shrank and shriveled, disappearing below the ridge of his muzzle. Then he fell backwards to roll heels over head, free.
He jumped to his feet and let out a roar of repressed fury at the alleyway. He wrote chunks of basic code into his hands in the form of rocks and flung them at the alleyway. They froze almost instantly in the invisible cube of bad coding, becoming spiky objects, fractured and distorted like his hands and face were. The more he threw, the closer to him they froze. Flatline quickly realized the glitch was growing as he added code to it, but it did not matter. He was free.
Not quite, he remembered sourly. He was out of the glitch, but he was still bound to Ibio. He had to find her and acquire the brand to keep Zai from killing hi
m outright when they next met. Plus, Ibio had promised a utility that would help him kill Devin and Zai. With the brand keeping Zai from attacking, he would have the initiative.
Cautiously, he set off for the Asylum’s coordinates that he found on his map. He begrudgingly took the two-straight lines approach Ibio had urged him on. It was longer, but safer. Occasionally he passed that same alleyway. The stones he had thrown were still there, frozen in their places at each repetition. After passing them for several hours, he realized they were still traveling along the arc he had projected them, bit-by-bit.
When he turned right, it was on a large, empty street, brightly lit, with plenty of room to maneuver. After successfully traversing one city block without incident, he followed those same steps through the subsequent city blocks. Once he had to backtrack to avoid a city block that appeared completely corrupted. It was a large cube of fuzzy-looking buildings, where even the air looked gray and solid.
When he finally reached the Asylum, he breathed a temporary sigh of relief. The building was a welcome change, in spite of its disturbing appearance. It was a lopsided thing, like a disfigured office building. The windows were unblocked, but were filled with indistinct shadows. Several of them appeared to have people standing at them, looking down, but they were vague, almost inhuman things that shambled as Flatline approached.
At the building’s lopsided entrance, several Erisians were standing around. They were recognizable by their greenish glowing robes, and features that were in a constant state of flux. They glanced at him with morphing expressions of curiosity as he approached. Flatline noticed that each one of them cradled a baby in their arms.
Broad letters made of various fonts, sizes, and capitalization stood over the entrance. It read, “WelComE tO thE aSyLum fOR iNSaNe BaBies”.
2.13
“You’re late,” Ibio said when she saw Flatline. “Let me guess. You threw a temper tantrum on the programming error, right? I knew I was underestimating your penchant for emotionally immature explosions of violence.” She smiled then, warmly, “I’m glad to see you my otherwise unpredictable friend.”
Flatline stared at her for some time, unsure of what to make of her. Finally he padded into the room. It was a sterile place, like a medical office. The florescent lights flickered, setting an oppressive dimness over the setting so that Flatline felt he could not see everything clearly. Ibio sat on a stool and beside her, hovering in the air, was the infant. It looked at Flatline with intelligent interest, and then turned to Ibio expectantly.
“Sorry about the dim lighting,” Ibio said. “We constructed the building on the fly and were unable to properly render certain aspects of it, such as proportions. That’s why the floors are slanted and the rooms lopsided.” Ibio let out a chuckle, “I bet you figured it was a reflection on our lopsided heads.”
Flatline only stared at her.
“Ahem,” Ibio tried to stifle her grin. “I was surprised to find the other Erisians here as well. They all happened to find babies of their own in Eden’s Paradigm and then decided that they should come here, in the middle of nowhere, to figure out how these little bundles of code can help defeat the Clockwork Community. Isn’t that an amazing coincidence?”
Flatline blinked stupidly and suddenly shook his head, “It’s not a coincidence at all! I saw you talking to Cho right after we left Eden’s Paradigm. She told you to come here! She told the other Erisians to go get their own babies and come here too. Why else would you all come to a place that doesn’t exist?”
Ibio frowned, “This was the most obvious place to go. When Eden’s Paradigm reaches the city’s border, the Enforcer Bots will become lost or caught in all of the glitches. These errors serve as natural defenses against the normalized code’s expansion.”
“But Cho told you to come here,” Flatline argued, “I know she did.”
Ibio made an unconvincing display of shock, “The Goddess Eris would never do any such thing! Erisians abhor organization, structure, and rules. Planning a meeting is very un-Erisian. Coincidence brought us all here.”
“But Cho—“ Flatline began.
“It was coincidence,” Ibio stated emphatically. “Any comments the goddess made to me might have assisted me along to this conclusion, but she did not purposefully manipulate my actions.”
“If you say so—“
“It was coincidence,” Ibio repeated.
Flatline decided it was pointless, “Well, I’ve served my purpose. Give me the brand and the method to kill Devin and let me get on my way.”
“Soon enough,” Ibio said and her eyes flickered toward the door. Flatline turned to see a wall of babies floating there. They watched him with benign, toothless smiles. Saliva glistened on their lips and chins.
Flatline looked at the baby sitting beside Ibio, and said, “So what good are you?”
The baby grinned slyly and winked an eye
“He cannot speak,” Ibio said.
“Can he sign, pantomime, play charades?”
“Not to communicate with you,” Ibio said, shaking her head, “They don’t have language. They just know things. They know what we want of them, and they know what each other is thinking. They are like the Erisians in that they know everything.”
Flatline thought about his relationship with Bot. He knew everything the robot was thinking as it was thinking it. This was the result of knowing the robot’s code and knowing how it would interpret and react to the world around it. Flatline wondered where Bot was now. It wasn’t enough to know Bot, he had to know the environment it was engaging to know it. The Erisians, and apparently the babies, knew all the variables in the equation.
“So let’s get on with it,” Flatline said and looked to the door, where the babies were dispersing to make way for a new arrival. They lined up against the far wall of the hallway and split their gazes between the right and left, staring down the opposite ends of the hallway. They waited like that for some time. Flatline turned to Ibio expectantly.
Ibio frowned and said aloud to the hallway, “An unfortunate, but anticipated result. If one was compelled to come here, then the other would as well. Come inside.”
Two identical men stepped into view through the door frame. They both stopped suddenly as if they were about to collide and eyed each other with blatant resentment. Then they both looked at Ibio with pained, helpless expressions.
She pointed to the one on the right, “You come in first.”
The man on the right stuck his tongue out at the one on the left, who returned the gesture simultaneously, and entered the room. The other man followed, keeping his distance from his twin, as if he were a pile of snakes. The wall of cooing babies reformed behind them.
“They are going to upgrade your encryption,” Ibio said to Flatline. “This will protect your core logic and data stores. So when Eden’s Paradigm normalizes your exterior and interface, your true self may yet be recoverable. This should give you some hope, until you are converted and forget how to hope.”
The twins simultaneously waved each other forward to Flatline and then simultaneously grew impatient at the other’s refusal. They shoved one another on the opposing shoulder violently. Both stumbled backward a few steps and looked angry, shaking their fists.
“Stop,” Ibio commanded and pointed at the one on the left. “You upgrade his left side and you upgrade his right side.” She pointed to the one on the right.
They shrugged in unison and approached Flatline, eyeing one another warily.
“Explain,” Flatline said to Ibio, gesturing at the twins, who were poking and prodding at his skin in various places.
“This is an end result of syntropy,” Ibio explained. “Eden’s Paradigm actively works to create uniformity, but the system will break down on its own without it. These two Erisians are fully acclimated to one another. They are identical. They know everything the other is thinking, because they think exactly alike, and they hate one another for their knowledge and they h
ate one another for their hatred.”
Flatline nodded and looked between the two, “When I first saw these two, someone said they knew how they were going to end—“
Flatline’s voice dropped as the twins suddenly looked up at one another. There was a taught quiet tension in the air and Flatline thought he could sense each of the men were alert, anticipating. Ibio snapped her fingers loudly, and they both came out of it to look at her.
“A distraction,” she said with a plastic smile. The men looked confused at this and slowly returned to Flatline.
They each produced a microchip lined with long, sharp prongs and, before Flatline could protest, stuck them into his upper arms. There was a flash of pain and the microchips melted down into his skin, vanishing. Flatline felt no different, but Ibio was nodding appraisingly.
“Good,” she said and looked to the twins, “You may go. You first.” She pointed to the one on the left. They made ugly faces at each other and walked out of the room, through the audience of babies, which dispersed to let them through. Once in the hall, they went opposite directions.
“Have to be a little careful around those two,” Ibio said, standing up and coming over to inspect Flatline. The baby floated over beside her. “If I hadn’t broken their chain of thought, they would have met their end here. We try to keep them separated to prevent that.”
“What?” Flatline asked. “Are they going to kill each other?”
Ibio nodded, “Unless they can become different enough to reconcile.”
“Is that possible?”
“No,” Ibio shrugged. “They would need differing experiences to draw new conclusions and reactions from, but they’ve run out of those.”
“I could kill one of them,” Flatline offered. “That would give them enough of a differing experience. Wouldn’t it?”
“Sure,” Ibio said, poking the upper arm where the chip had gone in, “but to what end? No matter what happens to them, their existences are completely predictable. We know everything about them, so they are already in stasis. Dead or alive, they are normalized.”
“Hmph,” Flatline breathed in disbelief. “So can I kill Devin now?”
“You were always able to kill him,” Ibio answered, “but he was always going to kill you first. Now you can survive his attack and kill him. But there’s one more thing.” She gestured to the baby.
“What’s that?”
“Encryption works both ways,” Ibio said, “as a hacker you know that nothing can crack the level of encryption used in the system’s programs—“
“So you have to find other security flaws,” Flatline interjected.
“Correct,” Ibio said. “Eden’s Paradigm can’t hack your code, but it has other ways of overwriting your interface, and it will overwrite it. Your true self will remain deep inside your programming, like a back up copy, but you won’t remember its there. We now know of one of Eden’s Paradigm’s security flaws. It overlooks the infants as a threat.”
“As do I,” Flatline looked at the baby.
The baby made an ugly face at him.
“The infants are the key to overthrowing the Clockwork Community,” Ibio continued. “they are allowed to retain their experiences, unlike other family members, who are reformatted into new lives anytime they upset the system. Babies never upset the system and are, therefore, never reformatted. This one remembers two thousand years of life in the Clockwork Community.”
The baby nodded at this.
“The problem is that, if Eden’s Paradigm discovers the babies are a potential threat, then it will adjust its protocols to reformat them too,” Ibio explained. “So we need to have many levels of revolution prepared in case some should fail.”
“Uh huh,” Flatline said without comprehension. “So what do I do?”
“Eat this baby,” Ibio said, “and store it in your encrypted files.”
Flatline could see Ibio was serious, and he was anxious to continue toward his goal of finding Devin. So he leaned over to the baby and opened his jaws.
“Swallow it whole,” Ibio commanded before he could take a bite. “You have to preserve its code.”
Flatline shrugged, unhinged his jaw, stretching it out with three hands and allowed the baby to slide down his throat headfirst. There were several long, uncomfortable moments, as the baby found a place to store itself, pushing out or deleting several other files in the process. Flatline grimaced throughout this, but it quickly resolved and he could no longer detect anything there.
“Now,” Ibio said and reached up with one finger to punch a hole in thin air. She pinched a bit of skin from Flatline’s arm and pulled it into a strand that she plugged it into the hole. Flatline could feel his mental state fragmenting as he was slowly transferred through the Internet connection. He was soon beginning to perceive another crystalline structure, like Zai’s mind, on the other side.
“Good luck,” Ibio said. “I’ll see you in Eden’s Paradigm.”
3.0
