Gestalt Prime

by Ignacio Salome

  What do you want? Alexia called for her sister in her mind but there was no reply.

  Hurrying up, she put on her shoes and tied her hair back up in the ponytail then proceeded to follow Aurora. The lab was mostly empty except for a couple technicians here and there wrapping up for the day. Even Mark was gone and the chamber had been closed. The monitors on the wall were turned off along with some of the lighting. When she looked at the door leading out to the hallway, Aurora was turning left, walking away from the elevators on the opposite side. Intrigued, Alexia followed.

  Two corner bends later, she found herself in an unused section of the floor. The lights were off and the doors to the labs she passed by were locked judging by the red light of the chip readers embedded on the knobs. There was the distinct scent of abandonment in the air. Many areas of the building remained empty after it had been repurposed to house Control Administration staff. As she walked down the hall, she noticed a chip reader lock on one of the doors was green. She approached it and swiped her right hand, opening it. Inside, Aurora was standing on the other side of the room by a floor to ceiling window with her arms crossed, apparently observing the panorama outside. It was past sunset already and the barrier glowed red high above them.

  What is it? Alexia whispered in her mind.

  “Speak up I’m right here,” Aurora said, irritated.

  Alexia looked out the room to both directions down the hall to confirm no one was around. “No, you’re not,” she said quietly.

  “Don’t worry, I don’t see anyone in the security cameras. Motion detectors are null at this hour in this floor except for your lab,” Aurora replied as she glanced back to face her sister. “Even if someone sees you talk to yourself, they will blame it on your high intellect as usual,” she added sarcastically.

  Alexia approached Aurora and stood next to her. Down below, farmers were beginning to leave the canvas greenhouses to return to their homes underground.

  Aurora did not react but instead appeared to be mesmerized by the barrier. Alexia stood there and observed her for a moment, wondering why her sister would put so much effort into constructing her actor there when they could just talk in her mind, if she wanted to talk.

  “Do you not resent your role at all?” Aurora finally broke the silence.

  Alexia was taken aback by the question and considered an answer for a moment. It was not every day that her sister attempted civilized conversation.

  “You mean as your host?” she replied.

  “Yes.”

  “Of course not. It’s a small sacrifice for the greater good,” Alexia said, joining her sister in staring at the barrier.

  “That implant in your head,” Aurora said. “It binds you to this building, the only place in the Citadel where it can connect to its virtual nervous system by wireless interface. You cannot ever go away beyond a few feet in its immediate perimeter.”

  “That’s fine,” Alexia said. “I’m happy to be of service.”

  “Why? You are a prisoner. A slave,” Aurora said, turning to face her. Alexia faced her too and looked her in the eyes with a bewildered expression.

  “A slave? Why would I feel like a slave? If anything, I am humbled by the responsibility entrusted to me. To us.”

  “You’re so naïve,” Aurora said, returning her attention to the barrier. “We’re being used by all these people. We’re little else than a piece of hardware to them. And you are happy to be of service.”

  “We’re not hardware to them,” Alexia countered. “We’re part of the community, contributing what we can to ensure its survival. Tell me, for example, how many workers have died in accidents ever since you took over construction logistics?”

  “Zero,” Aurora replied immediately then looked at her sister when she seemed to realize where the question was leading to.

  “That’s right. My brainstem controls automated operations like barrier generation,” Alexia said without noticing her tone of voice gradually projecting a certain confidence uncharacteristic of her. “Your extraordinary ability to interface with electronic systems keeps operations at maximum efficiency. I may be relegated to the control building but in exchange, people in the Citadel enjoy longer, healthier lives and no one has died in accidents like the one that took father.”

  Aurora seemed to slightly break out of her perpetual sour mood at the mention of their father.

  “Do you remember him?” she then asked.

  Alexia stood there at a loss for words. Perhaps her sister was after all feeling lonely and seeking some sort of connection.

  “No. I am not lonely,” Aurora said all of the sudden.

  Alexia sighed in frustration. “Why do you ask me all these things anyway? You know my thoughts before I even realize they’re there.”

  “Right,” Aurora responded, unapologetic. “Answer the question.”

  “You know this. Just look into my memories. It’s not like I have a choice in the matter,” Alexia said, crossing her arms and looking away.

  “Access to your memories is not a problem,” Aurora explained slowing down her words as if describing a complex concept to a child. “I just don’t know what your interpretation of those memories is.”

  Alexia felt her heartbeat accelerate as anger built up. Privacy was something she vaguely remembered. Whatever her senses captured and whatever thoughts ran through her mind were constantly under her sister’s scrutiny. Nothing escaped Aurora. Deciding she was not in the mood to put up with her mind games, she walked towards the door.

  “Wait,” Aurora said. “I will stop.”

  Curious now, Alexia went back to her side. Aurora rarely wasted an opportunity to express her dissatisfaction with the host-Controller symbiosis in whatever way most frustrated her but now she appeared to be strangely cooperative.

  “I remember his voice,” Alexia replied quietly. “It’s been so long.”

  “I see more than that,” Aurora said. Her voice was firm and calculated.

  An acute migraine spasm exploded from the depths of her head as Alexia felt Aurora taking over her visual cortex, forcing her to instinctively shut her eyes with the palms of her hands and hyperventilate. Surrounded by darkness, the sudden smell of damp earth startled her and she felt her body tremble with cold. Carefully, she opened her eyes and directly in front, a man with a face she did not recognize was kneeling to hug her. Everything looked bigger all of a sudden and her viewpoint was disturbingly close to the ground. As she received the hug, she looked around the room she was in. It was her home in the underground alleys where she lived back when she was little.

  The austere dwelling was a single room apartment shaped like a sideways cylinder by excavation machinery drilling right into the limestone. There was a simple wooden box with a pastel blue blanket that served as her bed by the door. In it, a stuffed rabbit made out of surplus clothing sections rested on a pillow. It was a small and cramped space. Not much could fit there except for some storage boxes and her father’s bed on the back. Nonetheless, her chest felt light and unburdened by the sheer, vivid memory of a much simpler time. She then realized this was the day her father had said goodbye for the last time.

  The warmth of his tight embrace contained silent reassurance that everything was going to be alright. His clothes were thick and leathery with a smell of soil affixed to them. Such was the standard issued uniform for diggers and that was as much protection as they would get to do their jobs.

  Just as abruptly as the vivid memory had been superimposed into her awareness of the surrounding world, it was gone, replaced by the dark room with the large windows overlooking the barrier and her sister’s cold gaze.

  Alexia’s disconcerted frustration turned to sudden heartache. Her father was but a fleeting memory, gradually lost over the years. And now Aurora had found a way to use it against her. Instinctively, she wrapped her arms around herself and looked away.

  “I see his ashes being returned to you, shortly afterwards,” Aurora added.

  For th
e most part, Alexia had learned to live with her sister by developing a certain mental fortitude to protect her against hallucinations, nightmares and whatever other creative ways she found to bully her while in control of the visual cortex. At that moment, however, it was as if the torture had reached a new low. She hadn’t felt that vulnerable in a long time. Not since she left the subterranean maze. As hard as she tried to keep her composure, she couldn’t stop tears from forming in her eyes.

  “I see you celebrating his death in your mind when you were handpicked to join the Controller Program.”

  Alexia took a deep breath and looked at her sister in shock. “Stop!” she whimpered. “Tell me, do you see how lonely I was after he died? Do you see me homeless, living off scraps in the alleys?”

  Aurora studied her sister’s reactions unemotionally.

  “Do you see the things that happened to me when no one was there to protect me?”

  Anger had given her voice back to Alexia. For a moment, the two of them looked at each other in tense silence.

  “I see them,” Aurora finally responded calmly. “But I also see how the accident that claimed father’s life was your ticket out of the alleys. It is one of your happiest memories.”

  “Yes, I was happy to be chosen,” Alexia continued. “The Program gave me a family and a purpose. It helped me move on.”

  “A family?” her sister interrupted. “You call father’s substitute your family?”

  “You wouldn’t exist without him,” Alexia countered, her voice now calm and once again faint. “Who knows what would have been of me had I grown up down there. Who knows what would have happened to citadels without controllers like you to run them.”

  “Director Ethan Sommers, savior of the people,” Aurora said mockingly.

  “What do you want me to say?” Alexia said, exasperated. “I owe him so much… I’m glad he adopted me.”

  Leftover saltwater spots in her sleeves stung Alexia’s eyes as she cleaned her face. Her sister simply stared at her in silence.

  “If given a choice, would you take it?” Aurora then asked.

  “A choice for what?”

  “A choice to break free from the Program. Regardless of the consequences.”

  “I don’t know. This is all I’ve ever known. What else would I do?”

  Without a second glance, Aurora walked away from the window towards the door of the room.

  “What, that’s it?” Alexia demanded in disbelief.

  “Yes,” she responded.

  “I hope you got what you wanted.”

  “I did,” Aurora said, leaving the room.

  Alexia tried to follow her but when she exited the room in her sister’s direction no one was there. She went back inside and wondered what that had been all about.

  Still disconcerted by the surreal exchange, Alexia made her way back to the apartment. Once there, she sat on the sofa for a few minutes, staring at the blank screen of the powered-off television set. As welcome as they were, the few times there was a convergence event messed up her sleep cycle. She was probably going to be up all night. Deciding to make the most of it, she got up and poured water in the boiling kettle to brew some tea then undressed to take a shower while it was ready. It was about time she washed off the lingering saltwater smell.

  A few minutes later, she exited the bathroom and put on a sleeping gown. She was curious about the power grid upgrade that Aurora had learned from her trip to Maya’s encephalon so she unplugged her tablet from its charger and brought up whatever available documentation books were available. There was one that didn’t sound too technical so she queued its download as she poured tea in a cup. After one refreshing sip, the memory of her old home flashed back in her mind. She put down the beverage on the counter top and went back to her room.

  Hidden in a corner of the closet behind her uniforms, there was a small steel box. She picked it up then sat on her bed and opened it. Inside, she found the stuffed rabbit she had always kept close during her childhood years. Alexia thought it was curious how in the summoned memory, the toy appeared to be perfect but then, looking at it from adult eyes, its shape barely resembled the animal it was modeled after. Still, she pressed it against her face and breathed in the faint smell of earth that still remained in it. She smiled at the fact that she now remembered her father’s face in vivid detail. At least something good had come out of Aurora’s mind games.

  Joel

  JUST LIKE THE emulator test had predicted, the entire capacitor array continued running with no apparent detrimental effects to stability or efficiency. Joel sat there looking at diagnostics logs on his computer terminal for the last few hours looking for any errors caused by the black box firmware upgrade. Martin had gone home for the day but he had insisted on staying in the shop for a bit longer. If anything was to go wrong with any of the power systems under his supervision, he wanted to be there to catch the first signs. But nothing had changed. The firmware upgrade appeared to had simply scrambled a few lines of code which would make no difference to power routing.

  Then the memory of the chrome sphere almost sucking him in crept back into his mind. With a few keystrokes he closed the capacitor array monitoring screen and brought up the security camera feed in the reactor chamber. The impossible contraption floated there, immutable, still disregarding the laws of gravity. Almost mocking his attempts to explain what had happened. Joel couldn’t decide what was more disturbing: the fact he almost died and no one would have noticed or the unexplainable lure that bordered on mind control. It could be the strange radiation that emanated from the orb and was captured to make the Citadel possible had some disruptive effect on brain activity. All documentation he had studied in tech school pointed out how the exotic zero-point energy produced by it was in fact harmless to the human body.

  Giving up on trying to explain the impossible, Joel stood up and grabbed his denim jacket from the chair and put it on. Maybe he would consult the documentation archive the next day but at that moment, he just wanted to stop thinking about it. He walked out of the shop and swiped the back of his right hand on the lock which clicked audibly and a red indicator lit up. Moments later, he made his way to the service elevator and pushed a button for the higher levels.

  At Sublevel Eight, the elevator stopped and its wire mesh doors slid open. Joel stepped onto the general population area Citadel inhabitants referred to as the alleys. The doors closed shut behind him and a red light turned on the outside panel, locking it up from unauthorized access. At that time in the evening, farmers streamed down from the surface after completing their 10-hour shifts in the greenhouses. The service elevator used to go down to the engineering levels left him a few tunnels away from his home junction so he joined the farmers on their walk there. The tunnel was about 20 feet high and ended up in a dimly lit concave ceiling Joel figured provided good structural stability. It wasn’t very wide though. There were only about 10 feet which at that time of the day barely fit the constant stream of laborers.

  As he walked amongst the crowd, Joel missed the emptiness of the engineering levels. The air was heavy with a thick mix of damp earth, sweat and plant matter which made him grateful his parents had pressured him so much to study hard for the aptitude tests. Everywhere he looked, he saw people looking down, moving in silence, from work to their apartments just to do it all over again the next day. At one point, he noticed one of the service manholes on the side of the tunnel was open which was in violation of safety laws. He crouched to look inside, just in time to see a young boy stare back at him then quickly crawl deeper into it.

  Alley rats, he thought then continued the walk home.

  Eventually, Joel reached the end of tunnel 5 and arrived at his neighborhood, Junction Six, which was located in the southernmost point of sublevel eight, between tunnels five and six. The junction was shaped like a vault he guessed was about fifty feet tall and round about a hundred feet wide. Directly in the middle was the rations distribution center with all its service win
dows closed shut. On the left, towards the center of the Citadel, people sat around chatting near the junction commissary. He approached the counter and fiddled though the collection of ancient books and magazines, trying to decide on which one to check out. The attendant, an older lady, stood behind the counter waiting for him but the selection was poor. Mostly romance novels and hobby magazines now irrelevant. In the loudspeakers mounted on the ceiling, there were news announcements playing on a loop. Nothing he would care about. Then out of the pile, he almost gasped when he found a copy of The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke. He grabbed the old paperback and quickly flipped through the pages, looking for any missing ones but for the most part it was intact.

  Smiling, he put it on the counter. The attendant wrote down some of the numbers on its barcode then looked at Joel.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  “Pack of toilet tissues, please.”

  She turned and grabbed a small package from behind and put it in the counter. A stack of brownish leaves held together with hemp rope. She then noted it on the list.

  “Name and ID?” she asked again.

  “Joel Vega, 970350047,” he replied as he picked up the book and read the text on the back.

  “You’re good to go, Joel.”

  “Thanks,” he said then grabbed the tissues and left the commissary.

  Some of the service windows on the edges of the torus-shaped rations distribution center were starting to open. People noticed and began queuing in front of them. Joel walked around it since the windows facing the commissary were all marked red and assigned to laborers. Diggers, farmers and general cleaning and support staff made their way to get their rations for the next three days. Citpol officers, department managers and engineers such as himself looked for the blue-marked windows where they were to pick up a slightly better selection of groceries. He found one that was still not too crowded and stood there waiting his turn.