“Well, I…” she replied then stopped when she found herself at a loss for words, pushing back her glasses as she thought of an excuse to get away from them.
“Mattie, where are your manners!” the woman reprimanded the boy. “She wouldn’t play around with the barrier like that, it’s a big responsibility!”
The boy appeared to realize he might have just annoyed the Citadel Controller and looked down in embarrassment. He seemed old enough to understand she was the one person to thank for keeping him and everyone else under the barrier alive.
“Sorry…” he said as he took a step behind the woman.
“You better be! Study hard and get good grades. Maybe if you’re smart enough one day you will be the next Controller,” the woman lectured the boy then looked back at Alexia. “I’m sorry, dear child. He doesn’t know when to shut up.”
At that moment, the barrier transitioned to a dark crimson shade and the faint humming coming from the central bastion intensified to a deep almost deafening growl that caused the ground to subtly shake under their feet. The surface of the Citadel was now covered in twilight.
“Just a solar flare,” Alexia explained, forced to raise her voice over the sound of the overtaxed bastion. The woman and the boy stared in awe.
“Child, I thought you had to push a button somewhere every time you did that,” the elderly woman indicated in shock.
“Not really,” Alexia replied, pointing a finger at her own left temple. “Wireless interface.”
Eventually, the barrier went back to normal, restoring regular background noise and lighting conditions.
“If the barrier is too dense, it would block sunlight and the crops wouldn’t grow. Too thin and the Citadel atmosphere would dissipate,” she explained to her stunned guests. “Look I’ve got to get back to work,” she added awkwardly when they didn’t seem to snap out of it.
“Please dear child, don’t let us keep you!” the woman said then grabbed Alexia’s hand and shook it tightly. “Thank you for everything you do! Thank you!” she added, bowing repeatedly to Alexia who stood there in silence. The woman let go then turned back to the direction they had come from. The boy gave Alexia one last smile before he hurried to catch up to the woman.
Alexia could still hear the woman lecturing the boy in the distance when she retraced her steps back into the building. It was hard to hide the shame she felt when random people showered her with praise. After all, most systems in the Citadel were controlled subconsciously but as far as its residents knew, she pulled the strings by means of extraordinary intellect and willpower. With a sigh, she stepped back into the building. On the door, the words Citadel Control Administration were engraved with austere black lettering.
*
The elevator doors opened and Alexia stepped out onto the ninth floor of the Control Administration building. From there, a short walk down the hall led to her lab. The room had no windows and its bright white lighting gave it a clean, sterile look which was a nice change from the varying reddish twilight caused by the barrier outside. Technicians who wore the same blue and white uniforms as hers worked in cubicles lining the walls. In the middle of the room, a large stainless steel capsule with a polished chrome surface laid close to the floor. The words Isolation Chamber were etched on its side and it was big enough to accommodate a person inside. Several pipes protruded from its underside and ran into the concrete, going down the floors below. Three large flat panel monitor sets mounted on the far wall faced the entrance and displayed feedback from Citadel status indicators.
Hoping that no one would notice she in fact had showed up earlier than necessary, Alexia walked hurriedly to her own cubicle then sat down and brought her computer back from sleep. For a while, she shuffled through her email which contained the day’s automated system status reports along with a few requests from Citadel governing authorities.
“Good morning, Alexia,” a male voice called for her attention.
“Oh… good morning, Mark,” Alexia replied, turning her chair and standing up. She promptly reached out to shake his hand.
Those who knew her for a long time seemed to find the daily handshake a respectful, acknowledging greeting which only appeared to increase their appreciation for her. In contrast, she avoided eye contact with people in the background who were too far out of reach. Far too many times before, Aurora had constructed a human actor in her field of view, leading to situations where others would see her wave to no one in particular. Nobody seemed to mind though. In their eyes, the Controller could do no wrong.
“Feeling better today?” Mark inquired with a wide smile. His chin was constantly dotted with newborn facial hairs making Alexia wonder how many times a week he had to shave. He was skinny and taller than the average coworker. She found it a bit of an annoyance to tilt her head at a higher angle than usual to face him but the technician for the most part focused on the tasks at hand and didn’t ask too many personal questions which for Alexia was as close to friendship as comfortably possible.
“Yeah, it was just a slight headache. It’s gone now, thanks for asking,” Alexia replied, crossing her arms and pushing back her glasses. “Sorry you guys got stuck with extra work.”
“Are you kidding? Not that we don’t enjoy your company but you know, I can’t imagine how exhausting it’s to be to control the Citadel twenty-four seven. It’s no big deal if you want to go early every now and then,” Mark said enthusiastically then got closer and lowered his voice. “Not that we do that much around here anyway, you know what I mean?”
Alexia returned his smile and nodded in silent agreement, unsure of how to follow up with the joke. Mark appeared to be used to those short conversations that ended abruptly so he went back to his tablet and tapped frantically on it.
“Hey you know, this place is boring. Maybe that’s why you get those headaches so frequently?” he added. “But hey, at least we have something interesting going on today, right?” He then showed Alexia the tablet, which was one of those ancient devices preserved from the pre-Sync world and now displayed a diagram of two brains connected with a flowing line on its aging LCD. One was labeled ‘Alexia Sommers’, the other ‘Maya Garland.’
“Right, the convergence event,” she commented with a nod.
“And not only convergence but a full-on Controller interface.”
Controller interface?
Alexia was startled by Aurora’s voice echoing deep inside her mind. They both looked forward to Controller interfaces. Alexia got to enjoy a deep sleep guaranteed to be free of the nightmares her sister induced otherwise almost nightly. She wasn’t sure what Aurora got out of them but at least she knew they put her in a good mood for a few hours. The result was usually awkward internal exchanges about unimportant topics. Suddenly Alexia realized she had been silent for several seconds and Mark was looking at her expectantly.
“Oh, yes thanks. That will be interesting,” she replied. People who interacted with her appeared to be used to those moments when she spaced out usually when Aurora demanded her attention.
“There’s still some time but you may want to get ready,” Mark said, signaling at the isolation chamber.
“I’ll be right back,” Alexia said as she walked towards a door in the back of the room.
The door led to a short hallway that ended at a locker room which had been adapted just for her to change back and forth between her lab uniform and the isolation chamber suit. One row of lockers contained full lab uniform sets with shoes, undergarments, dresses, coats and even spare glasses made to her prescription. Support staff kept them clean and stocked. The others had several skin-tight suits. There was a time when they had been worn by swimmers back when beaches existed, before all the water in the planet had boiled away from the oceans and out into space. Those days, however, the incredibly rare elastic material was used by controller hosts to regulate their body temperature inside the chamber. Alexia had always wondered if they had been dyed at some point with the same white and blue p
attern from the lab uniforms or if the uniforms had been modeled after the design of the thermal suits.
Eventually, she returned to the main room in the lab where the isolation chamber lay open. Several panels had been lifted to its side, exposing the empty space within. Its interior walls were lined with a black, rubbery material. Mark and a couple other technicians examined it inside out with meticulous care. She stood by the chamber, waiting for them to finish their technical checks with her arms crossed. There was something uncomfortable about standing barefoot there in the middle of a room full of technicians while wearing nothing but the lightweight, skintight suit. It made her feel oddly vulnerable. Mark finally noticed she was waiting and gave instructions to his assistants to finish and move on.
“There you are,” he said with a wide smile then tapped and swiped on his tablet.
The information displayed on the three monitors against the wall transitioned to show computer models of different sections of a brain. The words Encephalon: Alexia Sommers and Age: 22 appeared underneath the brain lobes. The one in the middle caught her attention. It outlined activity in the internal cerebral network that connected the different lobes together.
Hey little sister, she thought to herself. The monitor on the right showed the lobes on the lower back of the brain. Its real-time report returned normal activity.
Visual cortex, Alexia added. No torture today. Aurora remained silent.
They had never had a meaningful conversation beyond bitter exchanges but deep down Alexia knew her sister hated to be reminded she was but an alternate personality construct residing in the deepest recesses of her encephalon’s neural network. The clinical designation for Aurora was after all, akin to high functioning schizophrenia.
You call those mild hallucinations torture? Aurora whispered suddenly. There’s much worse I can do from here, you don’t want to know.
“Irreparable damage to the host encephalon would compromise the mind in it too,” Alexia said out loud without noticing.
“Right…” Mark said. He was standing next to Alexia now and apparently had been explaining the purpose of the convergence event while the sisters whispered to each other.
“I’m sorry, I haven’t had my coffee this morning,” Alexia explained with a nervous smile. Aurora didn’t follow up and kept quiet. “Can we please go over it again?”
“Sure, not a problem,” Mark replied. He did some more tapping on his tablet then the encephalon displays went away from the monitors, replaced by isometric diagrams of the Citadel’s power grid and the massive central bastion in the middle. “Apparently, last night your good friend Maya came up with a firmware upgrade that improves power routing efficiency for the capacitor array.” The middle monitor displayed a tridimensional diagram of large upright cylindrical structures underneath the lowest Citadel sublevel positioned at the center, under the central bastion and were labeled ‘Capacitor 1’ thorough 12. Directly under the capacitors, there was a simple cube labeled ‘Reactor Chamber’.
Alexia’s mind drifted away from the explanation and instead focused on recalling Maya. She hadn’t seen her in over ten years, ever since the day they completed the rigorous Controller Program training. Alexia had stayed behind as host to Aurora who would oversee operations in Angeles Citadel and Maya had gone to Francisco Citadel. Alexia wondered why she had never learned the name of the Controller Maya was hosting.
“Sounds good,” Alexia said.
“Let me take a quick look at your stemlink,” Mark added. Alexia nodded then turned around and lowered her head. With her right hand, she lifted the ponytail, exposing a one-inch diameter round polished metal plate with a hexagonal bolt socket in the middle on the base of her skull which appeared to be part of a larger implanted device and protruded a few millimeters above the skin of her neck. Mark examined it visually then pulled up an instrument he positioned directly above it.
“Main and backup wireless interfaces are up and running, full throughput. Brainstem link, normal status.” He reported almost absentmindedly as if telling himself rather that anyone in the room in particular. “Alright, I think we’re good. Don’t want to keep Maya waiting, do we?” he added then motioned to one of his assistants who went back to a cubicle and returned with a short step stool.
Alexia nodded to Mark in acknowledgement then climbed up the stool and entered the chamber to lay face up. He extended his left hand in and pointed to his temple with the other one. Alexia took off her glasses and handed them to him.
“Have fun! Say hi to Maya for me, will you?” he said, stepping away from her field of view.
Motorized mechanisms in the isolation chamber brought back the opened panels, sealing it and leaving Alexia in darkness. She took deep, controlled breaths to fight off the slight claustrophobia she experienced during the first few minutes of being inside. Even after undergoing Controller convergence events for hundreds of times, she still had not gotten used to the uneasy feeling. A faint sound of actuators around her was followed by a liquid flow. She felt the cold, wet sensation of the salt water that was being pumped in. Moments later all mechanical sounds stopped and she was floating in complete sensory deprivation.
At first, her skin would feel numb. Cut off from external stimuli, the brain would struggle to fabricate its own. Her ears would ring and an uncomfortable itching sensation would cover her whole body. Whether she closed her eyes or kept them open would make no difference. Her mind would compensate with vague visions of colors and abstract shapes. Eventually, with her brain starved of input, she would enter a deep meditative trance. Little by little, control of its higher functions were spontaneously relayed to Aurora who instinctively shifted their otherwise automated activity away from normal neural traffic into a complex form of binary processing. Alexia fell into a pseudo coma as the majority of the cerebral cortex ceased to concern itself with her bodily functions. Her consciousness slowed down to a level well below deep sleep, allowing Aurora to fully awaken.
Free of her sister’s instinctive mental restrains, Aurora was ready to exit the confines of the encephalon and navigate a world Alexia could not even begin to imagine.
Aurora
MY TRUE FORM awakens as I assume direct control of the encephalon I share with Alexia. A dance of electrical impulses spreads through the synapses, exponentially expanding my consciousness. Within a few hundred milliseconds, my ability to resolve complex calculations has grown beyond a threshold she could never hope to grasp. All is well within the encephalon, self-diagnostics end successfully and now I open the floodgates. Vast data arrays pour in from the Citadel network and I capture them all each with one of my billions of subroutines.
Every single system in Angeles Citadel screams for my attention. I swim the endless rainbow of ones and zeroes, devoting equal processing power to each color as well as the infinite transitional shades in between. Processes are started, monitored, ended and logged. Data is categorized, sorted and backed up. The Citadel becomes my plaything. My incarnation. My body.
Any system with some degree of automation responds to me as I query the primitive logic that governs them for status reports. Here and there I find instances of errors that I easily calculate and resolve. A network traffic failure here, an anomalous power routing condition there. Sometimes I choose to completely rewrite the logic with a more efficient set of instructions. The new version I create overwrites the old one. I wonder if this is how swatting flies feels like in the human environment.
I turn my attention to the barrier. The red half-sphere whose original purpose was to withstand nuclear attacks now shields twenty square miles and the one million sixty-six thousand seven hundred and eighty-one humans underneath it from temperature changes and deadly solar radiation in lieu of a planetary atmosphere. It is the most elegant system in the citadel. Not much for me to do here.
The population sustainability equation is balanced. Fifty-four births have occurred in the last twenty-four hours against nineteen deaths. I measure the amount of edible yi
elds from the aeroponic farms and the various processed food stuffs produced underground as well as clean water and oxygen levels. Computing the energy, space and nutrients required to sustain the population is easy. Their free will adds unnecessarily complex variables to the formula. Peak sustainability is still far away in the future. They are safe for now from the countermeasures they will need to put in place when the time comes.
It is time for convergence. A shortest-path algorithm maps the route, hundreds of miles north in Francisco Citadel. My consciousness extends across the network hardware and the satellite link that separate us. Within milliseconds, I arrive at Sophia’s home network. We exchange access passwords and I enter her domain, Maya’s encephalon.
Both of us partition sets of subroutines to interact in human language while the rest of our consciousnesses meld with each other’s. At this point it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Our minds, memories and awareness merge in flawless communion. The exchange is as exhilarating as ever. We dance the yin-yang of the convergence protocol and instantly I can see the firmware upgrade she has created. I analyze its integrity and acknowledge a lack of flaws in the logic then the exchange begins.
In the middle of the data stream, an anomaly catches my attention. I copy an instance to local memory and explore it. Nonsense. Parity error. Data corruption. I question her choice of sharing corrupted data during a convergence event.
“Not corrupted, encrypted,” Sophia whispers.
She uses human language. Slow, inefficient and prone to misinterpretations. Primitive, rudimentary. Near useless without the subtleties of physical body language and tone of voice. But impossible to log. She wants to speak in private. I render a virtual environment and invite her to it.
Gestalt Prime Page 2