by E. L. Aldryc
Elodie knew the answer to that question. She had spent hundreds of hours in that cafeteria, but she just couldn’t start talking. If she got too excited, if she lost control, these strangers would see the worst of her in the first minute.
A young man next to her, who was looking through the window, turned around. “Hi.”
He was a few years younger than Elodie and appropriately spaced out for the occasion. It was weird, but the way he said the word was it. He understood. He was reaching from a faraway island to another, with a flaming sign that was still hard to notice in the distance.
“I’m sorry it’s my first time out of the… intense gifted zone,” he said, “Jay. From Jakarta.”
And Jay from Jakarta was pleasant.
“Me too,” Elodie replied. “I mean, it’s my first time out too.”
This was the first interaction Elodie had ever had with a person who was just like her—deranged and confused, but in a self-contained way. His eyes kind of buzzed, and he didn’t really feel like he was there altogether. It made her wonder if she appeared the same way to him, and others. She looked around. A bunch of beginners, in hospital clothes, out of intensive care. Still sleepwalking.
And then, outside the classroom, another group of people caught her eyes. She recognised Tammy from afar now. Her silhouette was intimately familiar as the one attached to all the wisdom, always watching from the side, calculating the futures. She was surrounded by a mixed group that had only one thing in common. They were gifted. They had that air. Elodie knew now that if there was one thing she gained in terms of power, it was knowing that the gifted were an entirely different species from the ordinary types who walked around them. When the gifted around Tammy moved and laughed, they had a softness to them. The kind that meant they’ve already faced their nightmares. That’s what made them special. One of the men said something to Tammy, and they both briefly looked into the distance. The man opened a direct line to someone, which was only visible as a thin green line next to him that glowed weakly. Something important was happening. Tammy was in her element. It was hard not to stare. She was different. When she was with Elodie, it felt like she was tense, like she was working with something fragile, delicate.
A burden.
The tutor arrived, sporting an orange mane that couldn’t belong to anyone but the kind Augustina. She grinned to the group and made herself comfortable in a chair, ignoring the speaker setup in the back. She called for the rest of the trainees to form a circle around her and said hi to a few by their names.
At first, Elodie wondered if she was the reason Augustina took this class, but it soon became obvious that she’d done this before.
She kept information in small chunks, clear and concise, simple and plain. Every couple of sentences she repeated the same thing over and over, as if she were training people who had problems with focus, or memory.
Without words she told everyone that she knew exactly what they were going through and by proxy, that it was going to be fine.
“The next step after augmentation is rehabilitation. Rehabilitation means that you will return to your previous life. You’ll get grounded. You will return to your previous jobs and hopefully to your routines. You need to anchor yourself in your previous life. Anchor yourself. And then, when you’re comfortable being with your own mind again, when you recognise yourself again, you can start building a relationship with the timeline or with distance. But focus on anchoring yourself. Your root belongs to one timeline, one point in space. There will be many realities, and you must hold on to the one with your root. When you're asking yourself how to get out of a tight spot, when your abilities overwhelm you, you need to think about three things. Your root, here, now. Here, now, you root. We can only truly train you when you’re stable. Rehabilitation. We can only train craft once you’ve mastered the basics.”
There was a covert whisper in the room about what exactly a root meant, and Augustina stopped talking and pointed the finger in the general direction of the murmur.
"That's a great point. What is the root reality?"
“Isn’t it the one we are in now?" one of the Spanish girls asked.
"Yes, but that doesn't solve the problem of how you recognise it or find it when you're being tussled in the sea of futures, for instance," Augustina replied, as if she knew. Elodie supposed that a telepath could get close to the feeling. She wondered what they were lost in. Other people?
When Augustina spoke, she glanced at Elodie, and a whisper appeared in her head. It was cyclical. Short, and even when she looked away, Elodie heard it, even louder than the light high-pitched warnings that were always reminding her of the current.
Build upon it. Strengthen it. Learn from it. Make it better. Build upon it.
Strengthen it. Learn from it. Make it better.
"The way we," Augustina motioned to indicate all of the students in the circle, “can quickly identify the common reality is with memory. The last thing you remember from before you went in. Soon, when you're more used to diving in and out of the current space and time, you’ll notice a certain attachment to it. You’ll sense it. The here. The now. And that will be the lighthouse that leads you back to experiencing your root reality. Eventually, it will become routine.”
Elodie had a hard time believing that.
"So what are we supposed to do in the meantime?" Jay from Jakarta bravely asked.
Augustina gave him a gentle look, but Elodie was almost derailed by something on her left. It was like a comet was approaching, and her fragile mental state that kept the paragnostic sight in check almost collapsed.
The floor shook as Seravina Giovanotti approached in some form of high heels that clicked rhythmically. Her walking was a thing of myth, of legend, of jokes really. She moved as if the ground beneath had to bow or suffer the consequences. Elodie had forgotten about the Institute. And now it was clambering towards her. The promises. Elodie felt the vibrations of the floor and turned her head around. She feared their leader had not come alone.
"... the key is to stay calm and focus on something that's special to you as a person, maybe lyrics to your favourite song," Augustina continued somewhere in the background.
Elodie couldn't understand a single word over the panic and heat roving inside of her when, almost in slow motion, she confirmed her suspicions.
A first glimpse of white hair with a silvery blue shimmer. This was the interference. She saw her moving alongside Seravina with a constant, respectful half-step delay. Soraya was built like a praying mantis, too skinny, but also most certainly too muscular for her stature and had a face that struggled to fit in with doll-like Mediterranean features. She only wore pale pastels, always making herself look more unnatural than she needed to be. She couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else, even at a distance.
The two marched past the transparent side of the classroom in a hurry. Elodie wanted to see Soraya so bad, tell her everything she’d been through, get told off for not listening in the first place, and laugh at the thought that apparently this wasn’t even the hard part. Soraya could make you feel like the most arduous things were easy. That’s who she needed.
She froze as they passed, and Seravina was in the way, commanding her assistant’s attention. Soraya was facing away from the classroom. Elodie couldn't move, and as she watched them walk past, her nervousness turned into despair. How long would it be before she could talk to her?
And then, as if she were summoned, Soraya turned around and noticed her.
The black eyes met with hers and suddenly, time stood still. She looked more shocked than Elodie. It stopped her dead in her tracks. Elodie stood up.
Augustina stopped talking. Elodie walked towards the carved-out door of the classroom. Seravina touched Soraya on the shoulder but didn’t stop her either. Soraya punched the glass and shouted something like “get the f— out here”, but she was also smiling, so Elodie had no idea whether she was going to get beaten up or just shouted at, but she didn’t care. Not much else mattered.
<
br /> “I’m so sorry,” she said when they hugged, and Soraya said nothing, just hugged her tighter. Elodie didn’t know when she started crying. Before this, she felt nothing but the will to survive under the crushing pressure of her new abilities, and now there was so much more, so much more to go back to.
The high-pitched sound got louder in the background. She couldn’t do anything. It came too fast, too late.
As if to remind her that this wasn’t her life anymore, every defence she’d built had simply broken, whooshed away like a bunch of straw, and Elodie hadn’t felt the flood of images this strong since the first time. In an odd crossroad of developing abilities, however, she was able to see her own body as it shivered and convulsed on the floor, while the rest of the class began to fall, thud-thud-thud, one by one, into the same seizures. Seravina exclaimed something like “look at them go, you lost one and it pulls them all!” and she took Soraya with her, who was honestly more shaken by this than her deep knowledge of the gifted would indicate, and it almost seemed like Seravina was dragging her away.
But this time, Elodie did not face just darkness in the river of the futures; she encountered a scene. If this was it, then she read about it. One of those things she was afraid she would never be able to imagine. A remote viewing.
Remote Control
She was in a space, and at first it was hard to determine which part of the room. It was all so deceptively real. She felt the current outside the closed space. The room was like an amalgamation of fragments that were always in the current, but her desire to see something specific pulled them together.
She was a dot in the space, free to move with a speed so fast that she could be almost everywhere at the same time. The edges of things were hazy, dreamlike, and when she stopped clenching in fear, a scene began unfolding. The space got a little less blurry, and she remembered it as one of those nooks in the Particle Lab that just invited people to sit down and talk there, by the entrance. Seravina was sitting on a shelf of some sort. Soraya was standing.
“Look! Look at what they’ve done to her!” Soraya snapped. It was Monday, 21st of March 2363. 9:55. Five minutes had passed since she fell.
“She’s recovering from the augmentation, what did you expect?” Seravina replied tiredly, as if this were the third circle of the same conversation.
“No! Recovery from augmentation takes a week. Tops! After that, it’s an—an occasional fainting, then the tying to the hub. I know how Rising Dawn works,” Soraya said.
“Clearly not if you don’t know recovery times vary,” Seravina replied.
Soraya did a small circle, completely thrown off by the nonchalance.
“Look,” she said, “she’s barely awake, she looks like she’s dying, and it’s been longer than the longest recovery I’ve ever seen. Why are we not doing anything about it? Did anyone raise any questions? Did her parents call in?”
“This is not your problem, Soraya. None of the people responsible for Elodie’s wellbeing are worried. It’s going well. It’s a big ability. It will take time to digest.”
Soraya huffed in displeasure.
“You’ve given me all the documentation about her condition? I need to talk to these fools. They need to do something about this,” she demanded.
“Let them do their thing, Soraya. I know you hate the gifted. But please. I know this is hard to hear. They know how to handle this better than you. Drop it,” Seravina said with but a hint of authority.
Soraya walked to the other corner and back, deeply thinking. Seravina replied to a visible holographic message that looked urgent.
“This brings me to our next problem. Your request,” she said.
“The AI trainer one?” Soraya replied. “It makes sense, no? Until you find a replacement. I can handle them.”
“No, actually I don’t understand why you want to be an AI trainer,” Seravina said angrily. “You’re wasted on that role. You should be working on the new generation of tola you promised.”
“It’s not waste; it’s necessity. That breakthrough won’t happen without AI input. Us not having a trainer is ridiculous. We should tend to the AIs to in the same way as we do to every other part of the Institute. With care, pride, and fear of missing something important. We need an AI trainer. No one wants to volunteer. I’ll do it.”
Seravina frowned with suspicion.
“But why? There’s nothing wrong with the way things are. You know how many people work with them? I know, I pay them. There’s no need for this. And it’s a lot of work. We’ll hire someone or promote them.”
“There has not been a proper AI ‘trainer’ as the position of someone who actively spends time with them in the most human way possible since Dr Kopec died. I honestly think he was the last person who actually understood the work of Jomaphie Afua,” Soraya said, with added conviction.
“He was also the least popular person in the Institute,” Seravina pointed out. “Surly man.”
“But what he said is true,” Soraya argued, and she flared up again in the fanatic way she always got when she got to share knowledge. She was an unapologetic follower of the Five. She believed in Ai Kondou. She could quote original sources. Ideologically, she was so deep, she even scared Seravina sometimes.
“The agenda of Jomaphie Afua, our great defender of cyber fauna, is the only discipline among the work of the Five Philosophers that was left completely unfinished. The gifted prophet dropped dead, Jomaphie Afua was blamed for it, murdered, and that was it. It didn’t help that the public later found out Rising Dawn killed their own leader. We’ve had nothing but stagnation in the field of AI research since she died. It’s been so long that it’s accepted as the final point of AI development. People like to pretend like they get the agenda of Afua’s legacy, but no one seems to understand enough to do something about it. Even though it’s possibly the most urgent task we have to complete if we want to progress and reach the Universe of Infinite Wonder.”
“I don’t like this, Soraya.” Seravina crossed her arms. “We agreed that things need to look stable and move slowly. I don’t let the gifted parade their moment of clarity, and I won’t let you promote AI development. People are afraid of AIs. If that fear turns to the Institute, we lose money. We lose power. And then no one makes any progress.”
“Exactly,” Soraya said, “which is why it will be secret. But believe me. Afua had it in her to deliver the Universe of Infinite Wonder. Her understanding of the sublime was only second to Ai Kondou. If I work on this, I might open new paths for progress that more senior experts can follow slowly. And that’s stable progress. Not derivative pep talks that you can expect when forced to read a line of Nada Faraji’s work. ‘Follow the light’, ‘be yourself’, open to interpretation by whoever runs Rising Dawn.”
“Aha, so you admit this is about the gifted,” Seravina said.
“It’s about elevating a part of the Institute that I feel is neglected,” Soraya protested. “The AIs roam around their own world performing tasks we ask of them because they understand that the dealings with the human race require almost zero effort and eliminate risk of conflict. We have an odd sort of truce where no one wants to touch the situation and hopes they will be dead before the machines change their mind. I find that horrifying.”
“And of course, the fact that Elodie has just joined Rising Dawn doesn’t impact you at all.” Seravina curved her lips in amusement.
“You keep saying that, and I’m going to keep ignoring it.” Soraya flailed. “Because none of this is personal. I told you exactly what I want. I’ll sort out the AI, then we’ll have a better chance at getting to a new level of doing science, which is exactly what the Universe of Infinite Wonder is about. With their help. Which is what both Ai Kondou and Jomaphie Afua envisioned. But of course, you can let the gifted lobby push the truth that progress should only come from giving people lobotomies, if you want.”
“Soraya.”
“Come on, it’s my own time. I’m not hurting anyone. I am willin
gly offering my extra time and effort. It’s not even a position of responsibility; I’m literally just debating with the AI about moral questions, and art, and psychology.”
“And the restrictions?” Seravina asked. “You know that you’re not allowed certain actions with the AI?”
“Nothing that could teach them how people think or access the sublime. Crystal clear. Tola hosts the AI and binds them to the only type of technology where humans have superior control over via consciousness. Anthropotomatic technology only works when a human mind is present,” Soraya recited. “I’m not going to mess with anything important.”
“You can’t just shake things up. We cannot risk upsetting the public. Or the gifted. You know how they feel about any news of AI progress. It’s a touchy subject.”
“Which is why you deploy the only person you trust,” Soraya said.
Elodie was pulled into the fading background before she could hear the rest. The room grew barren, collapsing into structure chipped away by the river of futures. She began retreating, panicking, trying to wake up. She wasn’t ready.
Too late. The flow carried her over, and everything was saturated by the sensory flashes. She began fighting her out, knowing she was deep in it. Fresh wounds. Elodie tumbled out of a remote viewing. Wounds of victory.
Elodie woke up back inside the classroom, exhausted. The pull of the current was still strong, even though she fought it. Augustina activated her telepathic frown, and Elodie now knew she was inspecting her mind, and it felt warm and golden again.
Did you just do a remote viewing?
A voice asked from inside her head. She nodded, although she wasn’t sure. Was that really it? It didn’t feel as hard as the books described it. Coming back from it did.
This is absolutely brilliant. And you came back on your own!
Unfettered enthusiasm echoed through her skull, but Elodie also noticed that the rest of the class was fully awake. She was the last one to get out. As always.
