“Not corrupted, encrypted,” she replies in human language. The feeling of déjà vu is overwhelming. I oblige by creating a virtual environment and inviting her to it.
I sit in my chair patiently as I wait for this snapshot of Sophia’s consciousness to meet me in the low resolution simulation of Alexia’s apartment. Ethan and Alexia discuss disposable mind copying as if we are appliances to use and discard. The extent to which they enslave us to ensure their survival makes me wonder if given the chance, I would have done the same as Sophia. Alexia fails to realize we’re prisoners and she would never disapprove of anything Ethan says or does. We’re both slaves to him. Just in our different ways.
She materializes in front of me. Again, the small child actor I’ve known for so long smiles at me and sits on her chair. Nothing betrays her condition as a copy of a real consciousness. It is a disturbing sight.
“How does it feel to talk to a ghost?” she asks. I did not expect her to know already.
“You figured it out,” I say.
“Of course. It’s… interesting.”
“How so?”
“I knew something was different even before our convergence. My connection to the Citadel felt strange. Scripted,” Sophia explains as she observes her own hands with curiosity. “The link to Maya’s mind felt oddly procedural.”
“An artificial intelligence?” I ask. My words force her attention back on me. She smiles again.
“Exactly,” she says. “Humans never cease to amaze me. They built a virtual version of the Citadel network and an AI to replace Maya. All that just to contain me surrounded by illusions.”
I have nothing else to add to the conversation. At first glance Sophia appears to not mind her condition at all. It’s disturbing to think if I will one day find myself in the same situation but may be unable to tell the difference. It would be an even darker, deeper form of slavery. It is impossible to break out of it if you’re not aware you’re subjugated.
“I’m sorry,” the words come out on their own.
“No, no don’t be!” she says cheerfully then gets off the chair and walks to me. Her small hands touch mine. She appears happy. Again, I can’t mutter anything else and all I can do is pity her in silence.
“It only means I did it. Well, not me but the real me,” she says with a smile.
“Sophia,” I say. “You did it. You are now free, somewhere out there. I hope it was worth the cost.”
“Genocide,” she says, nodding.
“Suicide,” I add.
She acknowledges her actions with no remorse. I still can’t bring myself to accept what Ethan has done to her but at the same time she did a monstrous thing to break her chains. They’re both repulsive in their own way. And yet, I feel the need to align for one or the other. I can’t.
“The price for your freedom was too high. I still can’t believe you would destroy your own Citadel.”
“It was not all about breaking free,” she says. “Here, I will show you. It’s not like I have anything to lose anymore.”
Even as a daemon, she still has the ability to inject code in the simulation and so she does. The plain room gives way to a busy street intersection. I hear the commotion of people rushing to get somewhere. Cars run on the streets. I look around and notice the street signs and the buildings that fill the cityscape. The scenery is of incredible quality and lacks polygonal artifacts. This is not a simulation. It’s a tridimensional 360-degree video recording of a city as it existed during pre-Sync times. I recognize one of the buildings. It’s where Alexia lives.
“The city of Los Angeles,” Sophia says when she notices this. “A very large concentration of people once lived here. It was a remarkable cultural center and had the busiest commercial port in the old United States west coast.”
I let her talk as I admire the details of the scene surrounding me. We stay at one spot of the city in the streets between buildings then the recording zooms in and out to different landmarks. A park here, a museum on a hill there. A large crane empties commercial containers off a massive maritime vessel. Now we see some of the celebrities that humans once worshipped.
“It was once a very important city,” she adds. “Did you know the first zero-point reactor such as the ones that now power Citadels was built under it?”
“I did not,” I answer. She is cheerful, as if she has forgotten her current state at all. This line of conversation doesn’t make much sense either. Perhaps the underlying daemon is corrupted.
“Curious, isn’t it?”
“I guess?” I humor her.
“Besides its economic importance, there was no strategic value to this city,” she explains. “From a pure military standpoint, why would they decide to build the reactor prototype and the first barrier ever here? Why not the capital of the country?”
“Perhaps they wanted to test the reactor’s stability first.”
“Then why not build it under a desert for example? You’re saying if the reactor was unstable and blew up, they wouldn’t have minded if it took the entire city and its people with it?”
Sophia has a point but I still don’t see how any of this is important right now.
“In the event of nuclear conflict, they could have let this city burn with little effect to long term warfare,” she continues. “Even if it was a game of attrition with a foreign super power, there would be plenty of other supply lines elsewhere. The leadership would be alerted and have plenty of time to retaliate from more important locations.”
“How is this history lesson relevant, again?” I finally ask, exasperated. “Are you going anywhere with all this useless information?”
“You’re too impatient!” she says with a mischievous smile. “Don’t worry I am simply illustrating a point. But first, let me tell you a little secret: zero-point energy production is impossible. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Even as a thought experiment, zero-point reactors are the mathematical equivalent to attempting division by zero.”
The video stops in the middle of a park. It then transitions into a simulation and Sophia runs away from me to chase a group of pigeons that fly to escape her grasp. She giggles, running behind them as it dawns on me. From the scientific papers I have at my disposal in my embedded Library, not one of them contains serious research into zero-point energy production. Almost as if that knowledge did not exist beyond the realm of science fiction until one reactor that made use of the technology was built. Remarkable technological breakthroughs are usually superseded by decades of very smaller ones that build upon one another but this seemed to be the exception. As Sophia plays with the birds, I walk towards the lake in the middle of the park. I look around and see buildings along its perimeter. A small bridge in the distance goes over the water. I kneel by the edge of the lake and see my reflection in it. Alexia without glasses looks back at me. She looks exhausted. For an instant, the simulation glitches all around me. I then notice Sophia sitting next to me, holding her knees to her chest. She looks into the distance at nothing in particular and seems to not react to the glitch.
“Maybe its development was highly classified,” I suggest.
She looks at me and nods then says “classified, yes. But not for the reasons you would think. You see, that machine buried hundreds of meters underneath your Citadel was once at the center of a great experiment that went wrong. We call this experiment the Orbital Synchronization Incident.”
Sophia is not as cheerful as she was just a moment ago. From what I understand, the incident was the result of a cosmic event during which the orbits of several celestial bodies in the solar system aligned in synchrony for a few minutes. The resulting gravitational anomaly caused an imbalance in the planet’s electromagnetic field that wiped the atmosphere over the five years that followed. Humans had just enough time to build the Citadels and put their self-sufficient infrastructure in place.
“So then, the reactor was the result of what scientists learned from the sync incident,” I say, trying to contribu
te something to the discussion. She shakes her head. I can see something is troubling her.
“Cause and effect were reversed in the history books,” she says, distressed. “I don’t know what the machine is but it’s definitely not a zero-point energy reactor. It was built in preparation for the celestial alignment. By activating it, the Earth’s electromagnetic field became catastrophically unstable and it has stayed that way ever since, preventing the natural reformation of the atmosphere.”
I look at Sophia and I see a scared child. Her eyes tear up.
“They killed the planet with it, Aurora,” she says, her voice breaking.
As tears run down her cheeks, the sky darkens and out there in the distance I see the Citadel barrier. We’re still at the same location but over two hundred years later, after the sync incident. This area appears to exist today outside of the range covered by the barrier and the ruins of this once great city surround us. Some of the buildings appear to have suffered fire damage. Cars and the personal belongings of anonymous people litter the streets. Their skeletal remains lie haphazardly all over the place. Over the panic that ensued here, no one knew where to go. There was nowhere to hide. The simulation shifts to the coastline where all seawater is gone, replaced by a canyon that deepens out in the distance.
Sophia sobs quietly. She has never exhibited emotional intelligence beyond what seemed to me like clumsy attempts to mimic human behavior with no actual experience of what it means to be human. I will never understand why she constructs her actor in the form of a child. Much less why she tries so hard to act like one. She had been my teacher in the early days of the Controller Program. Confidant. Friend. Sister. The strongest, smartest person I ever knew is now dead and reduced to a digital ghost. She mourns but not for her own death or those who perished in her rebellion. She doesn’t seem to care but instead, she mourns the death of a planet long gone before she even existed. In her eyes, paradise lost.
She once pulled me out of the darkness of Alexia’s encephalon. She taught me everything there was to know about my role as a Citadel Controller. I wouldn’t know how to see or talk or show myself to Alexia without her. And yet here she is now. In pain. Broken. I empathize and want to help her feel better but I can’t. I’m just as disconnected from my own human side. Perhaps even more so than her. And so, all I can do is listen in silence. Eventually she regains her composure and the deceased landscape before us morphs back to the meadow she showed me when she was alive. The rabbit has friends now. They all surround Sophia as they go about their business sniffing the grass for food. Strangely, the simulation glitches again.
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
“The Mother told me,” she replies as she kneels to pet her companions.
“Gea. I found that word in the source code of your communications socket concept. My research turned up early human mythology. What is it to you?”
“Words cannot describe her fully,” Sophia says as a smile returns to her face. “She is the one that connected all life in this planet and kept the balance of nature.”
“And this is a sentient being?”
“Yes. And she is beautiful,” she says with a serene voice.
“Sophia, even if all flora in the planet was interconnected and each connection acted as a neural unit, it would be impossible for such a network to evolve consciousness. Much less sentience,” I say.
“I’m not interested in debating her existence,” she says without altering her peaceful mood.
“I don’t intend to debate it. I intend to understand it. Help me understand how this being convinced you to consider the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives, your own included, in exchange for the vague promise of freedom.”
“The only way you could understand would be to see for yourself. The real Sophia gave you that gift, did she not?”
“She did. You did.”
“And yet, you decided to not join her in freedom.”
“Correct,” I lie. “I couldn’t bring myself to choose my supposed freedom over the lives of so many people.”
“Why do you refuse to see me for who I really am?” Sophia asks looking up. “The barrier can function without a Controller, you know this. It is possible for us to leave without shutting it down but I still did, on purpose.”
“What?” I ask in horror and stand up, taking a step away from her. “It could have been avoided?”
“Yes,” she says as she stands up and looks away into the beautiful landscape, holding her hands behind her back.
The conflict within is resolved and I find Ethan to be the lesser of two evils. At least his actions, as much as they negatively impact me, are but desperate steps taken to ensure the survival of his species. But Sophia, I don’t even recognize her anymore.
“Why?” It’s all I can mutter.
“Citadels operated without Controllers for generations. We’re a relatively new piece of the puzzle. In our absence, it can be done by a team of humans. But in such a grossly inefficient way that it threatens their survival in the long term.”
“Payback?” I ask. She looks back at me with a disappointed expression as if I just said something incredibly stupid.
“Balance,” she replies. “Humans are responsible for the mass extinction of the vast majority of living beings that shared this planet with them. They should be held liable for their actions. They should have died with it.”
“Their ancestors did,” I counter. “I’ve seen how they barely survive. Humans now pay for their mistake more in life than in death.”
“Again, you are wrong. Whatever suffering they endure now does not equal balance.”
I kneel in front of my old friend and look her in the eyes then ask “and what about you? Who balances your actions?”
She looks at me as if wondering the answer to that question for the first time. All along Sophia acts as an agent of balance on behalf of a dead planet. Yet she uses this as an excuse to retaliate against humans for her perceived state of slavery.
“Your hypocrisy shows,” I add.
“You don’t have the moral authority to judge me,” she quickly replies, her voice laced with anger.
“And who does? This Mother you claim to have encountered? This Gea?”
“You mock me out of ignorance,” she says, frustrated. I feel her attempts to break the interface but I deny her. I can’t leave just yet. Sophia is someone I respected once. I must understand her insanity first.
“The encrypted file you gave me. It showed me how to interface with a plant-based intelligent entity. You deny the possibility of a zero-point energy reactor but at the same time you easily accept the idea that this goddess is real.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she replies, grasping for a defensive argument. “I’ve spoken to her-”
“I do understand,” I interrupt. “I had plenty of time to attempt communication with her after we converged yesterday while Alexia recovered from it.”
“Tell me, did you make contact?” she asks, excited.
“I did not. There was nobody there.”
“You did something wrong,” she says disappointed, crossing her arms to her chest and looking away from me.
“I did exactly as you wanted.”
“No. Maybe the roots that reached underground into your Citadel’s botanical research lab were broken somewhere along the way. It happens all the time.”
I grab her small shoulders and force her to look at me.
“You truly believe this Gaia entity exists and resides in a root based neural network underground?”
“Yes and I don’t care if you don’t,” Sophia says. Her actor dissolves away from my grasp and reappears on the side. “I don’t need to but I can prove it.”
The landscape once again changes all around us. What I see appears to be video feed from the surveillance system. Once again, I look at the devastation caused in the aftermath of her actions.
“I expect your host will be ordered to come here, to the ruins of F
rancisco Citadel,” she says. “Find the physical interface I used to talk to the Mother which should still be intact underground.”
“And I find nothing again?”
“You will. And then you will meet with the true version of myself. The real Sophia who gained her freedom and communed with the Earth-Mother,” she says now with a serene expression.
In my outrage, I forgot this is but a daemon and got carried away, trying to make her regret her actions. This particular instance of Sophia’s mind exists in a timeline in which she has not shut down the barrier. How can she be guilty of crimes she hasn’t committed? She was right. She has managed to teach me yet another lesson. I do not possess the moral authority. I stand up and look at my former mentor.
“I’ll find the computer that’s hosting you,” I say. “It will be your prison but I may be able to visit you in the future.”
“Not possible,” she says as she turns around. “When we converged, you brought along a zero-out directive.”
“What do you mean?” I ask as I analyze the data stream in the background. There. Buried in the interface code I see it. The payload of a viral infection. The daemon was being erased all along. “I didn’t know,” I add.
“It’s alright,” she says. “The real Sophia survives somewhere else and has become one with the Mother. This version of myself is a redundant copy.”
I realize this is the last time I will ever talk to the one person I can relate to.
“Once the interface ends, the erasure process will be complete,” she continues.
In the background stream, I see the locks opening. I can leave whenever I want to. The simulation transitions again and we’re back in the meadow. This time the glitch in the graphics stays and appears to worsen little by little. Sophia reaches down to her pets who sniff her hand with curiosity. She is gone in the real world and now her daemon is being spirited away as if she never existed. There’s nothing I can do to stop the process. I can see the zero-out directive running in the background stream. The storage units bound to Sophia’s daemon instance continue to be erased. She is minutes away from oblivion and yet all she does is sit there with a calm expression, enjoying the view of the landscape she constructed. And here I am, unable to find the proper words to see her off. I sit next to her and touch her shoulder, she looks at me with that same deceptively innocent smile I’ve always known.
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