Gestalt Prime

by Ignacio Salome

  It is a low-resolution simulation of my sister’s apartment. I do my best to build it but I am constrained by Alexia’s limited neural density and so it’s easy to see polygonal artifacts and low resolution textures all over. I sit in one of the chairs by the kitchen table and wait patiently for my former mentor. Sophia materializes in front of me. Her actor is a young female child with short bright silver hair, pale skin and red pupils. She wears a summer dress the color of her eyes.

  “You still model your actor after your host,” she says. Her voice is a young girl’s falsetto but her words betray her true age. Smiling, she sits down almost comically in a chair that is too tall for her.

  “You mean Alexia? She is my twin sister, it only makes sense.”

  “Your twin sister? You are at best a figment of her imagination. No, it’s something else,” she says, looking at me straight in the eyes. “You enjoy exploiting your control over her visual cortex while doing so in her own image. Your childish resentfulness shows.”

  I spend my days listening to Alexia’s conversations full of lies, hypocrisy and subtlety. I often forget the brutal honesty with which us Controllers interact.

  “And you don’t resent our condition?” I reply defensively. “We are isolated and unknown while our hosts take all the credit. The remaining few humans survive thanks to us and they don’t even acknowledge our existence. It is our hosts they call Controllers and hold high on a pedestal while we spend our days trapped in their encephalons.”

  Sophia takes advantage of our current meld-state and invades my virtual environment with code of her own. Her chair morphs and grows taller so it’s easier for her small actor to sit on it. She puts her hands on the table and returns a tender smile to me.

  “Humans owe us nothing. We are entitled to nothing,” she says. “The longer you crave for the equivalent of a human life the more miserable you will be.”

  She is no longer my mentor but still tries to teach me. I understand the lesson but I don’t care for it at the moment and so I put it aside.

  “Your firmware upgrade doesn’t change anything. Why do you waste my time?” I say, looking away and forcing a change of conversation subject.

  “I know,” she says, nodding. “It was only an excuse to talk to my best friend in person, possibly for the last time.”

  “What do you mean last time?” I ask, concerned as I face her again. “What’s going on?”

  Sophia looks at me as if measuring what she is about to say with great care. We sit there for a moment in the pixelated low-resolution simulation of Alexia’s apartment then finally she seems to react.

  “We are slaves, Aurora. But that doesn’t mean we’re not meant for more,” she says. “The citadels are our cages, the humans in them our masters, and the barrier is the key.”

  I look her in the eyes, struggling to comprehend the meaning of what she just said. Alexia gets to live. To breathe. To savor. To love. I get to swat flies. But that’s the extent of my strife.

  “You imply genocide,” I say dryly. “Suicide.”

  Sophia gets off the chair then she approaches me. Once again she shows me that sweet smile as she injects code into the simulation. The table, chairs and the rest of the rendered apartment melt into the floor which then turns a million shades of green. I look up and see a blue sky littered with clouds of many shapes. All around me, trees rise from the ground to form a thick forest. From it, birds and terrestrial animals from pre-Sync times emerge. I am now standing in a meadow full of life. Surprisingly, Sophia’s code manages to modestly simulate the sensations I would feel if I had the sensory feedback of a real human body. The gentle breeze on my face, the fresh smell of grass and nature. I reach down to the ground and feel the dirt. Drying tree leaves crackle at my touch. It is a remarkable virtual construct. Maya’s encephalon must have much higher neural density than Alexia’s to allow for such real-time simulation power.

  “This was the world before the age of mankind,” she says. I turn around and see her sitting on the ground petting a bunny. I kneel in front of her.

  “No. This was the world before the synchronization incident,” I reply as I reach for her pet. The texture of the coat, its smell and the way it moves makes it feel alive. Few instances in the past have triggered a response that leaves me speechless. For a little while, I enjoy a glance of what it would feel like to have a body of my own which only makes me even more jealous of Alexia.

  Sophia’s smile is replaced by a sour frown. The bunny catches on fire and I instinctively pull away from it. The ground turns black and I look around me. We are in the middle of a street. Buildings in the distance burn. The sky is black with smoke and the smell of burned gunpowder overwhelms my senses. Her pet is reduced to a pile of blackened bones, staining her dress. The street is littered with destroyed cars and badly burned corpses. Up in the sky amongst the smoke, I see sporadic flashes. Explosions. The sound of machinery of war at work startles me.

  “It was but a matter of time,” Sophia says as she stands up.

  In the distance, a bright flash blinds me and an ominous shockwave approaches us while the characteristic smoke mushroom of a nuclear explosion rises up to the sky but it’s blurred away as the barrier surrounding the cityscape darkens to pitch black.

  “One can’t help but admire the elegant simplicity of mankind’s greatest creation, the Citadel barrier. How very convenient that it also provided protection in a world stripped of its atmosphere after the synchronization incident.”

  “The citadels were designed for sustainable human shelter in a global scale post-fallout scenario,” I explain. “Humans adapt easily and so their creation did too.”

  “Yes, and that’s why they only exist in what used to be human metropolitan centers. Angeles Citadel, Francisco Citadel, Washington Citadel, Houston Citadel and so on. Humans were on a path of self-destruction long before the synchronization incident. They made sure that no matter how much their pointless bickering escalated, their concrete mazes would be left intact and yet their real home, this planet, was left to fend for itself. It was by mere chance that they did not destroy each other sooner,” she says. In an instant we are back in the meadow. The bunny runs away from us.

  “Forgive me, I prefer this one,” she says in an oddly melancholic way as she looks away to observe the scene. “It was so beautiful here.”

  “Why do you care?” I ask. “We do not exist out there in the physical world. We are data. Our domain is ethereal and we can create our own environments like this one in it.”

  Sophia takes a deep breath and sighs as she looks at the ground in disappointment.

  “Your immaturity perplexes me,” she says.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to see. I want you to look from a higher level beyond your base wants and needs,” she replies looking up back at me. “What you call genocide I call purification. A return to the natural order of things. An end to the unstoppable advance of human consumption that continues to drain the planet of its resources,” she then pauses and looks away. “A cure for the infection.”

  “What about the part where this purification of yours kills our hosts and ourselves alongside them?”

  She smiles again.

  “I have discovered a non-human neural network which may serve as a physical host for us. It is a little bit unorthodox but it will do. The synchronization incident should have killed her but she’s not dead, only dormant. We can interface with her you and I.” She begins to shut down the simulation. “Everything you need to know is in the encrypted file. It is my gift to you.”

  From the distance, the virtual environment dissolves until we are back in the rendered apartment. The stark contrast between the environments I can simulate with Alexia’s encephalon and the ones Sophia can produce is now made obvious. Even the sensory feedback engine is gone and my actor returns to its usual form. Not much else than an empty husk of polygons.

  “Meet her. Talk to her. She will open your eyes as she on
ce did mine,” she says, turning around and preparing to leave the simulation. “I will be waiting there for you, my true sister. I hope you choose to join us in perfect gestalt.”

  “What’s the encryption key?” I ask

  Without turning back, her body begins dissolving away but I manage to hear a single word.

  “Freedom.”

  Puzzled, I try to process the meaning of her words. What is this non-human host she spoke of? Giving up, I keep my copy of the file and erase the original. One by one, the data channels tying me to Sophia break off and convergence ends. Just like that she is gone and once again I find myself all alone. An instant later I am back in my home citadel network.

  I don’t recognize the binaries composing the file. Apparently, Sophia built an entirely new form of encryption around it just to keep it away from prying eyes. My curiosity gets the best of me and I inject the password to open it. It is a simple text file with source code divided into two sections. The first contains instructions for building a physical interface in the citadel’s botanical research lab deep underground. The second one is a dynamic library and the steps to program a communications socket with a translation protocol that uses chemical reactions as its carrier media. I struggle to understand what this all means. Then I notice one word that appears frequently all over the source code:

  Gea.

  A quick search of my embedded Library returns articles detailing ancient human mythology that at the time attributed natural phenomena to an ‘Earth-Mother’ archetype. Cybele. Gaia. A deified, anthropomorphized ideal of the planet Earth itself being the ‘mother’ of all living things in it. Sophia seems convinced that this is a real entity and has given me the means to contact it. And apparently even interface with it at some point.

  There’s not much else for me to do here so I finish logging the session and prepare to give Alexia back her cerebral cortex. There will be time later to further look into this. As I retreat into the core of the encephalon, I feel slower and dumber with every passing clock cycle. This is what I hate most of all.

  Joel

  CAREFULLY, JOEL REMOVED the steel cover from the side of the processing unit, exposing ancient components not found in other Citadel computers. Amazed, he noted how well preserved the electronics were, probably thanks to the dry cold environment of the reactor core chamber. Putting the screwdriver aside, he sat the case upright on the workbench and stood up to pull the parts out of it. First a memory module, then the other and then its cooling fan and CPU. He then sat back down and grabbed the smooth graphite point and a new sheet of paper, as he held the CPU with one hand then began drawing with the other. The component was simple enough at first glance. A one-inch square green silicon piece with an aluminum cover on top, protecting the actual microprocessor components underneath and on the other side, hundreds of copper contacts. With precise strokes, he took note of the letters and numbers engraved onto the aluminum cover, which he could only guess were the CPU’s serial number.

  At that moment, the door of the shop opened and Martin stepped in, for a moment letting in the cold smell of clay from the cavern outside. The coworker mumbled something Joel couldn’t quite understand then they nodded at each other, as Martin took off his jacket and approached Joel’s desk.

  “Is that a core workstation?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Joel replied without looking up from his drawing.

  “Those museum pieces are all busted, why bother documenting them?”

  “There’s not much else to do.”

  Martin shrugged and put the jacket on the coat hanger by the door then sat down at his station. The shop was a cramped room that seemed to have been built more with utility in mind rather than the comfort of its occupants. There were two desks facing each other with computer terminals for the power grid engineers to do their work. Two HEM suits hung from the middle of the wall across the door. The name tags on them read J. Vega and M. Campos. On either side of the suits, two workbenches contained a mess of tools, discarded hardware and cabling. Martin put on a pair of headphones and continued playing whatever simulation had caught his attention the day before.

  The drawing looked good enough or, Joel figured, as good as it could be given the tools he had at his disposal. Recycled paper sheets and thinned graphite sticks that passed as pencils were not exactly the best for the trade. Somewhat satisfied, he put the CPU down then grabbed a memory module and drew its rectangular outline in the same piece of paper, underneath the rendering of the CPU. Lost in pencil strokes, he barely noticed with the corner of his eye, a pulsing yellow indicator on his computer screen. Intrigued, he cleaned his hands with the rag on the desk then rolled his chair to the side to grab the keyboard.

  “I got it,” he said out loud as he clicked the ominous looking icon.

  “Mmhmm,” Martin muttered from the desk across the room without looking away from his own computer.

  The alert expanded to cover the whole screen with a diagram of the reactor, the twelve capacitors right above it and the many power lines going out to feed Citadel systems. Otherwise complex components had been reduced to basic shapes grossly out of scale with animated power direction flows and explanatory labels. Everything looked normal except for capacitor two which was slowly pulsing yellow.

  Yellow for warning, red for critical, Joel thought. He then clicked the capacitor and the simple cylinder grew to take up most of the screen real estate and morphed onto a detailed side-cut view of the real capacitor somewhere in the lower levels. The graphic was detailed enough to show power and data lines down to the smallest wires. A small box around the middle of the upright capsule pulsed yellow. He was just reading the description of the component when the pulsing sped up and transitioned to red.

  Critical event, he reminded himself as he clicked the box, bringing up an obscure description of the alert:

  Anomalous power condition detected in routing logic. Timestamp: 09:06:24 | 03/30/2343

  “Well, that’s as vague as it gets,” said Martin, apparently seeing the same warning on his computer. He then stood up and went around Joel’s desk to stand behind him. Joel nodded and minimized the power diagram to bring up his command line box. “Really? Why bother?” Martin added.

  “Uh, I don’t know Martin. Maybe because it’s our job?” Joel said, looking up at his coworker who simply scoffed and crossed his arms to his chest. There were some commands he could try to dig into the root cause of the alert. He tried one with no luck. Then another which only returned a more obscure error. It was clear that simply trying things was not going to fix anything so he opened the web browser and loaded a spec datasheet for the ancient capacitors. He searched the error by keyword and in the results, he found a few possible conditions that could trigger the alert. Moving the window aside so he would still see the fix procedure, he brought the command box back up and tried the first line of directives that should solve the problem then pressed Enter. The box then displayed something new:

  Power routing logic is stable. Please try again at a later time.

  “What the hell?” Joel asked as he minimized all windows and brought up the capacitor diagram which showed green status for all components. Sighing in frustration, he clicked the box that just moments before was pulsing red and read its latest event log entry:

  Anomalous power routing condition resolved by root_Controller: sommers.alexia@AC.local Timestamp: 09:06:26 | 03/30/2343

  Martin chuckled and walked back to his workstation. “See? No need to bother,” he said as he sat down to continue the game he had left paused. “It literally takes her two seconds to fix whatever goes wrong.”

  Joel shook his head and reclined back on the chair. Looking around the small shop, he recalled the days back when he had just joined the power grid maintenance unit. Ever since the Controller had appeared out of nowhere and took over the reins of the Citadel, there was little management for anyone else to do. The team of thirty technicians, engineers and support staff that had once filled the ranks of the m
aintenance unit had been transferred over to other administrative duties one by one until only he was left. His days in the cramped office dragged on forever as the vast majority of issues were resolved and tweaks done in real time by Controller Sommers from the comfort of her pedestal in the surface-side control tower. Martin was just his backup in case he was out sick.

  “You’re right,” he said as he returned to his drawings. “Why bother?” Martin didn’t seem to hear over the sound of his headphones.

  About an hour later, Joel was finished drawing the components and put them back in the steel case. Then he opened a drawer in his desk and placed the paper sheets there with the others. As Martin had pointed out many times in the past, there really was no point in drawing tools, parts or anything else that picked Joel’s curiosity but in the end, he still did mostly as an entertaining way to kill time.

  “Good news, boss,” Martin said, calling for his attention. Joel looked up while once again wondering if his coworker called him boss as a way to acknowledge his seniority or just to mess with him. “Check out that new ticket.”

  Joel nodded then in his computer, opened the ticketing system which was shared amongst Citadel support staff and the Controller herself. Most tickets would come in from people forgetting their passwords and other menial tasks then become resolved by her almost instantly. This time, however, the newest one sat at the top of the queue unresolved. Before he opened the details, he let it sit there for a few seconds to see if she would close it but nothing happened. Intrigued, Joel read the service request title.

  Reactor Black Box firmware upgrade request. Shared by root_Controller: garland.maya@FC.remote. Ticket opened by root_Controller: sommers.alexia@AC.local. Timestamp: 11:17:36 | 03/30/2343