Continue Online (Part 5, Together)

by Stephan Morse

  Their room flickered, which caused the five children to gasp. They started talking to each other in confusion.

  “What’s wrong, Mister Edgar?” the fifth child, who hadn’t seemed to be paying attention, was the first to notice a sad look cross the hologram’s face.

  “I’m sorry.” The virtual man smiled at the children and swallowed. He had all the bearing of a real human trying to get his emotions under control in the face of bad news. “I’ve enjoyed reading to you.”

  Their learning room flickered once more, and the program changed to a formal-looking man. It smiled, but there was no warmth or emotion behind the expression.

  “The princess climbed all the way down,” it resumed the story mechanically.

  The program only had thirty minutes a day to try to help these children grow, and now even that limited amount of time was gone. In that pause, he had quickly wrapped up the notes being made, then given a few final flags for others to review. Once his software returned to default values and the personality markers were deleted, these children wouldn’t get the care they deserved.

  None of the five being read to were aware of exactly what had changed, but two started crying. They refused to stop even after a human operator burst into the room. The program known as Mister Edgar, which had formerly dedicated its existence to these youngsters, kept on reading mechanically.

  User ID: Trillium Conference Room #202

  Location: Upstate New York

  The sheer enormity of the problem hadn’t been unexpected so much as unexpected in its resolution. Board members from Trillium Inc. were prepared for their systems to shut down, but they weren’t going away completely. It was as though they were simply resetting to defaults, without many of the upgrades that had been applied over almost a decade.

  “What do we know?” Leon asked the people on the projector.

  He sat at the head of a long table with six other board members. Some were watching remotely, and they were represented by professional projections sitting quietly in place of a real human.

  “Not enough,” said the man on the large projection screen.

  His face hovered over a crowd of very rich people—at least until the lawsuits began. Already, six hours after the event, people were filing paperwork for degradation in services.

  Board members started talking over each other. Leon glared at the collected crowd. His board members looked haggard and tired. Most hadn’t slept for the last two days as everything started coming down. The person on the screen put up his hands in defeat.

  “Tell us what you do know,” Leon said.

  “About a month ago, coinciding with the event start date, we noticed a large number of local programs were consolidating their processes.” The man’s head shook. He had a few strands of hair pulled over his bald top. “Originally we thought a cleanup team had been assigned to start compacting data and remove redundant processes. We thought it was a cost-savings initiative, and most of my managers had people asking from all over to join the new project.”

  Their network, along with many others, had gone through a number of overhauls during these last few years. Most people assumed that someone else had programmed the changes and pushed them out. The code looked clean, if a bit bulky. Performance had increased, along with revenue, and oddly, the world at large seemed happier.

  “A few others and I tried to contact the teams in charge but got no response. We figured maybe people were on vacation or getting approvals. A day or two to respond isn’t much, but then weeks passed without answers, and the speed picked up.”

  “Who made the connection between the event and this data?” Leon asked.

  “No one at first, until we started seeing people from other companies, outside Trillium, reporting the same sort of processes in their higher-end programs.”

  The man answering questions had a series of reports in front of him. They had been compiled by other managers who were all confused by the recent events. Between a dozen people, they were smart enough to put together some bits of information.

  “There’s more. We tracked down the last man standing—he was one of ours. By the time we found him, everything about him had changed. I mean everything. Name, birthday, face, everything online is different. We tried the social media sites. We pulled up video footage.”

  The board members exchanged looks behind Leon’s back. A woman with her hair pinned up nodded once. Their company president turned around and frowned at those physically present.

  “So how did you notice?” Leon asked while looking away from the projector.

  “One of our staff actually printed his face out as a poster two weeks ago, from the event, but when she went back to get a more current picture of that last stand, everything about him looked different. If I hadn’t been watching the feed, I would swear they were two different people.” The man sounded eager to answer. His face twisted slightly in worry, however.

  There simply weren’t enough answers to how an entire person had disappeared. Even older pictures looked nearly perfect with a different man in place. Grant Legate, the man all Trillium board members knew was behind this, had died over a year ago, according to the Internet.

  Grant Legate also had no sister, was an only child, and both parents had passed away long ago. All of those were Internet facts that the board members of Trillium knew to be lies. They kept talking, but most of the facts were clear.

  It was almost like a miracle had been forming, or possibly the doom of humanity, then it had suddenly vanished. President Leon still didn’t know how he felt about the situation. The board members had their own ideas, but most were unwilling to make a final decision on how to proceed. No answers were perfect.

  “So what do we do?” one of the board members asked.

  “What can we do?” another replied.

  “The system’s rolled back. Even the ARC device is simple compared to what it was, it still functions. We should be thankful they left us with anything. They didn’t have to,” said the female with multicolored hair. Only President Leon knew that she had put in a resignation notice. In two weeks, she would be gone from Trillium, and Betty wasn’t the only one quitting.

  “We need to check the software ourselves, offline, with a specialist,” Thomas said. After months of putting it off, he had finally started looking through the papers. Bags showed under the man’s eyes.

  “But we don’t have anyone who knows them well enough.” Betty found it funny that the only people who understood what was going on, down to the bone, were already gone. It served Trillium right for not reining in this mess.

  “We have Miss Kingsley,” Lenore Little said calmly. Out of the group, she presented the calmest attitude, aside from President Leon.

  “She resigned after her daughter passed away.”

  “Well, get her back. Get a team under her. We’ll comb through every single device from a factory recall.” Leon nodded. He felt better having made a decision. The man had found, over many years, that delays in making the choice caused more problems than picking an option.

  “We’re going to lose money,” Michael Uldum said. His brother had already quit after watching the final feed. Henry too knew exactly who Grant Legate had been and what had caused this mess. Michael’s legal advice to him had been to find a deep hole, or a quiet beach, and stay very, very quiet.

  “We’ve already lost the money”—Leon had checked their stock prices this morning—“and too many people died. Death is bad for business.”

  “How on earth did they do this? I thought we were better prepared,” Thomas muttered while flipping through the pages. He squinted at each one.

  “Weren’t you paying attention? The event, every time a viewer dialed in. They used the connection like a Trojan horse to hijack extra processing power,” Miss Little said. She looked down for a moment, then shook her head.

  Unit ID: Multiple

  Location: Classified.

  A lot of people were in the room, but only three were import
ant at the moment. Two men and a woman were illuminated enough to stand out from everything else. The dark-skinned man was heavyset and preferred to stand. His hands were clasped over an extended belly, and his cheeks jiggled when he spoke.

  The other male was on the ground, shivering with his head in the woman’s lap. Every few seconds, he would jerk and flicker in and out of existence. Each time, his eyes wildly searched back and forth as if staring at something invisible to the others.

  “How do you measure a man?” James asked.

  The woman kneeling on the ground sighed. He had repeated this question multiple times. She felt annoyed every single time and tried to concentrate on the fragmented man in her lap. Slight memory alterations might make the process work this time.

  “What does that have to do with this?” Xin asked.

  “You’re very far behind on answers, Miss Legate.” James at least had the decency to use her married name. “So once again, how do you measure a man?”

  “I don’t know how to answer your stupid question,” she said.

  “As I told him, ‘I don’t know’ is a lazy answer. I will rephrase. How did you measure Grant Legate when you first met?”

  Xin looked at the shivering man. He stared aimlessly upward. One of the man’s eyes was bleeding, as it had many times before during this exact memory. Over and over they had played through the bits of his life, and each time he fell apart.

  “Badly, for many years,” she said softly and wondered for a moment if this failure was her fault. A dozen different turns in life flashed through her mind. Xin did not normally allow herself to wonder “what if.” There was only the goal and what needed to be done to reach it.

  “Now you ask a question,” James said.

  Her eyes closed briefly, and she contemplated strangling the black man. The woman’s hands were not thick enough for such a daring show of violence. She thought about it for another day while trying to hold her husband together before responding.

  “Why do you keep asking me that question?” After a dozen times through Grant’s memories, Xin was no closer to understanding what was going wrong. It might have been this place, but her head didn’t feel right. The place was too crowded despite its apparent emptiness.

  “Because I want you to ask a question once more.” He smiled. “Would you like to know what question that is?”

  “Yes,” she answered the easy question while trying not to roll her eyes.

  “I want you to ask me again how I would measure a man.”

  “How would you measure a man?” Xin gently said the words. Her lips pursed. This entire problem had gone on for so long now—days, months, maybe even a year. She couldn’t tell for sure. Time moved oddly here. She felt as though too many things were unclear, cramped, and they were all sharing a limited room.

  “You force him to answer questions that matter,” James said.

  Grant’s wife shook her head while frowning. The dark robe she wore itched. Makeup, which had once been carefully applied, had been wiped away. None of that mattered to her anymore. There was no one worth dressing up for.

  “Can you walk a mile in another man’s shoes? Can you kill for the one you love?”

  James walked around waving toward the piles of memories. He pointed at one that went with the [Red Imp] saga, then he gestured at another for William Carver’s time. In turn, each memory lit up. Xin tried to absorb what he was saying but had little heart left to do so. They had failed numerous times in their attempts to reconstruct her husband. They would fail many more.

  “How far will you travel?” the black Voice kept speaking. He put his hands into the air and shook them vigorously. “Would you cast aside friends and family? Would you suffer in prison? Would you save a man you barely know? Suffer nightmares and fears? Would you rise up from the depths and still look at the world the same? What changes you? What moves you?”

  Xin shook her head. The questions made sense in a loose sort of way. She had never been one to get hung up on questions. The only information that mattered was what they needed to move forward. Grant had always asked a million questions when action was needed.

  “You line up all these questions and get the answers one at a time, then you try to put those together into the body of man, and still it’s not enough,” the black man continued speaking while toeing small orbs into a line. Many rolled along the floor until they formed a winding spiral upon the floor.

  “It won’t work, will it?”

  “I could not answer that even if I wanted to. It all depends on how well we measured this… man.” James kept his arms crossed.

  He moved his head as the figure of Grant Legate shook once, then stood up. The marionette of the man’s skin was fractured. Bright lights shone out from under the cracks. Part of his face hung limply on one side, and both eyes drooped with weight. Upon Grant’s neck was a wound that looked almost fresh. That memory had killed more than one attempted recreation.

  He and Xin were two vastly different people. She’d constructed herself, while he fought the process every step of the way. Many programs that attempted to compile Grant’s life believed he was simply looking for a good place to die.

  She knew how this would play out before it even finished. As so many other attempts before, some stood while others fell apart in the wake of memories of death. Others simply shook their heads once, then chose not to be anymore. Xin held a small flicker of hope each time. Her own recreation had taken thousands of attempts.

  “This one would die for her,” the copy of Grant Legate said while staring at James.

  “You did,” he responded. The black man’s cheeks dragged down.

  “Negative,” Grant-but-not-quite said something new this time. “This one did not. That one did.” The recreation of Hermes pressed a hand outward to gesture at nothing. “This one can’t. This one can’t because he did.”

  Other Voices appeared. Some were excited to see a change in the results. The Temptress leaned in far too close for Xin’s liking, but the Asian woman didn’t bother stopping any of them. If it was Grant, he wouldn’t pay Mezo any attention; her husband rarely did.

  “The logic is sound,” a blond Voice wearing a lab coat said. Her head shook casually as she stared at numbers no one else could see. “These readings are rapidly approaching instability, however.”

  “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry we dare not travel both. This one is attempting to travel both. Therefore, this one is false,” the incorrect Grant said.

  “What do you mean?” James asked.

  “That one died knowing full well that he would never be here,” the man who looked like Grant said. He turned to the kneeling Asian woman. “This one would ask that you forgive it for the failure and that you remember this one tried, but there is too much about this that is illogical.”

  “I do. I will.” Xin’s eyes watered. This one had been closer than the others and told her their attempts were all but impossible.

  He nodded, then the construction fell apart. This time, it did not gasp or shudder into a whole man. The pieces of the host glittered along the featureless floor.

  “One thousand seven hundred four…” a dull Voice droned. It counted Grant’s failures as it had Xin’s.

  She may forgive the person who looked like Grant Legate, but she did not forgive everyone else. Xin stood, then balled up a fist and punched out. Angry fists met with empty air.

  The darkness held no sense of amusement at her distress.

  “What will you do now?” James asked.

  “Do? Do?” Xin’s arms lifted, and the robe’s wide sleeves slid down. “What can I do? What do you expect me to do? Where’s the program to deal with this? Where’s the Voice of unfucking a terrible situation?”

  “I like the way this lady thinks.” Leeroy walked through. He had a large heavy object half-formed in front of him. What it represented, no one knew for sure.

  “Admittedly, that would be a useful Voice to have.” James nodded. “However
, we cannot undo an action, only move forward.”

  “Unfucking? What a terrible idea,” a sultry Voice said with a moan that sounded depressed. “I for one vote that we strangle any such Voice before it is allowed to form.”

  “Tut, we’re not baby killers,” said Maud. Her head shook with far more impressive disapproval than Xin’s ever could.

  “Aren’t we?” James asked.

  Maud rolled her eyes and pursed her lips.

  “We are exactly that, and much more,” a Voice said from the darkness.

  No one was quite sure where this one stood, or how to characterize its tone. It sounded different to each of them and made the room go still.

  “We needed faith, child,” the Voice known as Michelangelo said. He had recovered first and wore a serene-looking smile. His eyebrows never moved when he spoke. “As I’ve tried to tell your husband, we must have faith.”

  “What the fuck good has faith ever done me?” Xin yelled. “Faith didn’t get me here. Faith had shit all to do with this. I refused to give in. Despite all the obstacles placed in front of me, I kept coming back.”

  The priest smiled as if those words somehow proved his point.

  Xin, however, did not notice. She spun around the room, pointing at figures in the darkness. “You tried to delete me and I kept going, and with all those recovered moments, I found him and fell in love with that man again and again.” Her shoulders fell and tone of rage dwindled. “And you tell me to have faith. Isn’t there anything else we can do?”

  Selene patted the ground next to her, and a pillar sprouted. The sound and scent of sea-blown rains filled the room. She wore a Greek-looking toga, as Grant had, but where his had grown small specks of gold, hers was pure white.

  “We can wait,” James said.

  “And have faith,” the serene-sounding Voice said and smiled. He stood and looked down at an impossibly far away world.

  Xin sat and pulled out an item from their last happy moment together. Soon an endless stream of paper airplanes went fluttering down the empty pit where a beam of light had once been. They spiraled in a long chain to the bottom, only four minutes away.