Chaacetime: The Origins: A Hard SF Metaphysical and visionary fiction (The Space Cycle - A Metaphysical & Hard Science Fiction Saga)

by A. I. Zlato

  She asked him why he had approached her, why he had come all the way to her school. He replied he had followed the Servant’s words. The latter had supposedly designated her, predicting the moment when she would be ready to join the group. Someone had known before she did … Fighter did not want to elaborate further.

  In the group, there were also Aimie and Kahila, twin sisters. Physically, it was almost impossible to differentiate them. Both were redheads, with braided hair, displaying a chubby face sprinkled with freckles. Tall, they dwarfed Iris by a foot. More important, they did not possess a chip, as Iris later discovered, unable at first to find out, given their hairstyle. Even though they were physically identical, the twins had different personality traits. As soon as one spoke, you could tell immediately who she was. Aimie was a true chatterbox. Jocular and lively, she seemed at ease in all situations. Kahila was much more timid. Also more analytical, she pondered things before acting, where her sister would kick off things without thinking of consequences.

  They, too, had a pet peeve against the Machine, a situation that had made them join the group. Their parents were Machine Engineers, and were part of the group considered the elite, those who modified programs. Before hearing their story, Iris believed in what she had learned earlier, that those engineers could access all of the programs. In fact, they could not. They only accessed a small number of code lines, unable to alter the core of the Artificial Intelligence. Iris then became aware that humans had no real grip over the Machine. It was a myth, carefully maintained, that said that It maintained the Equilibrium while humans remained in control.

  The City had to believe in this legend, to accept all of the Machine’s commands. Perhaps the Elders had engineered things that way, nobody could tell. What was certain, however, was that humans had absolutely no control over It today. Aimie and Kahila had learned that, by accident, while eavesdropping on their parents’ conversation.

  The twins first did not understand all the implications of what they had discovered. Then, every day, in school, they started interpreting course material differently, identifying all commands emanating from the Machine, over which no one had control.

  Humanity had no control over its destiny. The way the twins thought about things had an echo in Iris’ mind, and she shared their point of view. The Machine ran everything, and no one really was free from Its oversight. Aimie and Kahila would have switched to other topics, forgetting these thoughts, if there had not been Graduation Day. That day had changed their lives, completely. Until then, they were living with their parents, in the First Circle. As members of the exclusive group of ‘pure’ kids — those whose parents were both Machine Engineers — they used to live in a microcosm. They only hang out with ‘pure’ or ‘half-pure’ kids, and never (oh my gosh, never!) with other children, even those living in the First Circle.

  On Graduation Day, confident as Iris was, they stepped forward after hearing their names, convinced they would always stay, and work, close to their parents. Where Iris had felt a shock, the twins had experienced a cataclysm. They were assigned to the Periphery. A wave of surprise pervaded the crowd. Even the professor who called them up expressed astonishment. Yet no one thought about criticising Its decision. What had to be done, would be done. Immediately after the announcement, they had their provisional chips removed.

  Without affixing new ones.

  They went back home, feeling naked, deprived of their connection with the data stream. The experience of gradual withdrawal that Iris lived every day, the twins had lived it at 14 years old. For them, there was no opportunity to return to the Machine’s epicentre, to gradually get used to Its absence. They had to endure continuous and unbearable suffering, while their parents watched them, with disgust. Theoretically, Aimie and Kahila could have stayed with their parents until graduation, but that was too difficult. The way their parents stared at them, as well as the rejection by those they had considered friends, were more painful than the very experience of withdrawal from the Machine.

  They thus had requested to be transferred to the Periphery before D-day, and had learned to get by alone. Freed from the chips, they then had developed a profound rejection of the Machine. Owing to It, their family and friends had dismissed them from their lives. Owing to It, Aimie and Kahila had experienced unimaginable suffering. Knowing also that humans had no control over It, they refused to give It the right to rule their lives. When they saw Fighter and Eric, who tried gazillions tricks to get out of the City, they joined them without hesitation.

  Hearing these dramatic stories, Iris felt like a spoiled child, who was simply dissatisfied with her toy. However, the others had listened to her story carefully, and welcomed her warmly. Together, Fighter, Eric, Aimie, Kahila, and now, Iris were a diverse group, driven by different motivations and dreams, but filled with the same rejection of the system. She felt good among them.

  Once Eric, Aimie and Kahila got to the station, they all hopped on the rail, heading to the outskirts of the City, their regular itinerary. The twins could have awaited them in the Periphery, as they lived there, but they would rather come here, and make the journey along with the group. This was part of the trip. All five stood near each other in the rail, and saw Circles passing by.

  The rail dropped them where they wanted, and they strolled, with light steps, towards the Unique Forest. Their chips lost signal. Iris started aching badly, but she kept on walking. Kahila took her hand, and offered a smile. Iris saw the scar on her temple, with some envy. She squeezed Kahila’s hand, implicitly thanking her for her support, and walked straight ahead. The panic of the first day had morphed into a small anguish. That was the price to pay to clinch independence.

  While walking, she pondered their happiness, which she would have loved to share. Unlike the others, she wanted to convince many youths to follow their example. She thought that if others saw, and especially felt, what they were experiencing, the Machine would lose much of Its power. She would thus simply become what It really is, an amalgamation of electronic circuits with sophisticated algorithms, which would not pretend to rule the world. She also thought, secretly, that no child would have the desire to commit suicide, seeing that life was not planned, that they could plot their own existential options. She knew her mom was investigating these suicides, but the answer would not come from someone so committed to the Machine. The solution was a world ruled by humans.

  However, the rest of the group wanted to remain anonymous and did not want to recruit new members. They told her that others would not understand, and more importantly, could report them to the authorities. Nobody wanted to risk having the Machine’s intervention, which would mean a stricter reprogramming of their respective chips. Aimie and Kahila even feared having an additional chip, aimed at monitoring their every action. The suicides were not really their number one priority. Only Fighter seemed to understand Iris’ reasoning. He had nodded when she was explaining her point of view about the children who had taken their own lives. However, he had immediately sided with the others. It was too risky to try recruiting new members. Iris had then accepted the majority’s view, but kept the idea in the back of her head. One day, the people of the City would be willing to listen to her, and she would convince the group to speak up. Suicides would stop then, she was convinced, because there would be hope — the hope of a world without the Machine.

  Fully determined, she entered the Unique Forest. At its edge, she felt the anxiety turning into severe pain, which was bearable for now. She set foot on the ground strewn with dead leaves … she was there. She let go of Kahila’s hand, and looked around. Fighter was chatting with Aimie, and they both sat under a huge oak tree. It was obvious that these two had something going on between them. Kahila gave Iris a connivance look, and walked away from her sister. She climbed into a tree, and sat comfortably. She pulled a book from her pocket, a real paper book. Iris had never seen one before. She had always ‘read’ various documents via her chip, which instilled the content in her head
by pronouncing words with a metallic voice.

  Thanks to the twins, she had discovered a new way of reading. True that it was an archaic way, but it felt so much nicer.

  Of course, she could not bring real books home, lest her parents reprimand her, or worse, destroy the books. Here, outside the City, with Kahila, she would sometimes read though one, marvelling at the quality of the paper. Although she read with difficulty, for lack of practice, her steady progress was one more victory.

  Kahila, perched on a branch, Fighter chatting with Aimie, Iris found herself alone with Eric. She stood beside him, in silence, to enjoy this new environment. She closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. The Forest wrapped her completely. The moisture in the flora crept into her body. She smelled this mixture of humus, soil and leaves. She was in the Forest. For the first time.

  The pain was still present, but the void left by the lack of data flows was substituted by something else, which pervaded her body gradually. It was a soothing and warm presence, unlike the Machine. She even felt that this presence was trying to connect to her chip, as if it wanted to better percolate into her system. At the edge of her mind, a voice. She felt connected to the Forest.

  Her chip conveyed a consciousness, something Iris could not characterise. It was not an artificial presence, the kind she was used to; it was something else. She kept hearing that voice, in the shadows of her subconscious mind. She felt glued to the trees, her feet dipping into the soil with their roots, her head stretching towards their branches, towards the sky, towards another place …

  She stared at Eric, who offered a smile. She saw him, so close, and yet she felt so far from him. The presence isolated her from the rest of the world. Suddenly, she thought about the Kandron she had seen in the Periphery, surrounded by a magnetic field. The animal was near her, while also being cut off from the world, as she was from Eric now. The gap was not quite the same; however, she could not help but draw a parallel.

  The pain came back to the forefront, and the presence ebbed. Iris then knew it was time to return to the City. She left the Forest, completely flabbergasted by what she just experienced. When the Machine reconnected into her chip, she felt an icy shiver. This contact, these electrical impulses in her brain … it was … it was … . She headed to the rail station, with her head down, and waited for the others. She stared at the Forest, as it was darkening with night falling. She saw Eric first, then Kahila, and finally Aimie and Fighter. When they reached the rail station, she hesitated to talk about her experience. She wanted to share it, but feared they will consider her insane. The last thing she wanted was to be excluded from the group. The need to speak was so strong, that she decided to start the conversation carefully.

  “I had a weird feeling in the Forest”, Iris said.

  “It’s true that was the first time for you! So, tell us more”, Kahila replied.

  “Well, it’s difficult to describe. You will think I’m crazy”, she continued.

  “Don’t you think we are all crazy already? Go ahead, tell us”, Aimie said, encouragingly.

  “I felt … a presence. I know, this sounds crazy, but I really felt like connected to … I don’t even know what.”

  “Don’t worry, we all felt something, more or less strong”, Fighter said.

  “Really? Well, tell me”, Iris commented, relieved.

  “For us, it was rather a kind of tingling, a touch”, Aimie said, speaking about her sister and herself, “maybe because we have no chip.”

  “For me,” Fighter observed, “it was stronger. I would not say it was a presence, but rather a communion with the Forest, as if the trees were talking to me.”

  “For me,” Eric said, “it was the same as your experience. I felt a presence, as if someone were trying to talk to me, to convey a message, which I could not hear. Not yet. I am sure I would eventually melt into that presence and live with it.”

  It was the first time that Iris saw Eric display deep joy. He, who was usually full of hatred vis-à-vis the Machine, who spoke only of the bad things It had wrought into his life, seemed transformed.

  “Do you know what it is?” Iris said, perplexed.

  “Not really. I am sure of one thing; it was positive for us. Sometimes I feel like visualising another world, through this presence.”

  Another world … The idea crept into Iris’ mind, and she agreed it could be true. There was something in the Forest, an elsewhere much larger than what she could have imagined until now.

  On her way back, she became absorbed in personal reflections, dreaming of that presence, of that other universe. She tried to hide these ideas in an inaccessible part of her mind, away from the Machine’s reach. Her own universe. Against all odds, she had the impression of slowing reaching it.

  “Why?” The believer asked.

  “God is my response”, he replied to himself.

  “And why not?” The sceptic replied.

  The Legend of the Elders, the History of the Machine

  Chapter 19

  : Space H. (1st Circle)

  While heading to the Tower for her daily appointment, Baley pondered the conclusion of the interviews she conducted the day before. She finally had a lead, and would do her best to follow it, until she could stop the Problem. She took advantage of a connection on the first floor to review database reports on Chrijulam. Her queries expanded into different archive sections of the Machine, all within a few nanoseconds. She would have loved to follow the small data pack querying into databases, to become an electric current. To be a timeless digital sequence, clear, without any possible misunderstanding …

  When she received her query results, she was disappointed. There was little information available. She nevertheless learned that this religious movement was very old, which started as far back as the beginning of Space H. Old stuff … that was exactly the kind of stuff to draw Paul’s attention. She thought he could perhaps be useful, after all. There were probably, in the archives at the history laboratory, documents relating to this cult. The Machine was right, once again, to link her up to this historian in this investigation, as if It had anticipated that Bailey would need help researching old material. She would have liked to know what items had led the Machine to reach that conclusion. She regretted, once again, that she did not have the mental capacity to browse all programs, and to have an overview of the whole database. No human had that capacity, but that did not soothe her.

  She almost sent a message to Paul, before remembering that he had no chip. If he had no logged-in terminal in front of him, he would not see the message and she would lose valuable time. She then decided to go to his laboratory, where he certainly would be at this time. When leaving the Tower, she took a rail that led her straight to the building. The latter was located in a civilised environment within the Sixth Circle, with cubic towers, straight and operational streets.

  However, the building was surrounded by useless vegetation, dripping on the beautiful concrete walkways. Baley entered the skyscraper and found a very large ground floor, the role of which eluded her. She did not understand why they needed such a large area to host only the concierge desk. This was typical of Lower Circles, this waste of space, unnecessary square metres, this lack of obvious efficiency. A wall at the entrance conveyed the lab’s layout, indicating that the building was divided into blocks and sub-blocks, corresponding to departments and services, respectively.

  Physics Department, Study of Engineering Techniques service, Study of Pre-Scan Technology service, … Archaeology Department, Architecture service… History Department, E.S. service, Pre-Carbone Modified City service... — she was stunned by the staggering number of research areas of questionable usefulness. Just assuming there were two researchers in each service, the total work force could reach one hundred, and that tally was certainly lower than actual numbers.

  Not sure that the E.S. service in the History Department was indeed Paul’s, she asked the concierge. The latter first wanted to clarify that he was a security guard, no
t a concierge, and that his role was much more important than a concierge, and that … Baley could barely stop him and ask him where Paul’s office was. The guard showed her the way, and started talking again, about Paul, his Kandron, his assistant named Vlad. Not knowing how to stop this deluge of words, she walked away in the indicated direction. The guard, visibly disappointed that he was not taken seriously, let her slip into the hallway, while grumbling.

  The corridors and offices, unlike the large entrance hall, were of reasonable size. One metre wide, the corridor, covered from floor to ceiling in altered glass, had excavated openings evenly distributed from left to right. A bright filament showed the sub-block number in front of each its office, and she steered to her right, heading to B 23x. While getting closer, she found, in front, a few metres away, a large open door, indicating B 23.5, Paul’s office. She entered. The man was burrowing into an outdated book, totally absorbed, and did not realise she was there. Hands covered with foam plastic, certainly not to damage his precious document, with a magnifying glass on the left eye, he was a real caricature of the crazy scientist. His office was in his image, archaic and strange.

  A big man, who seemed lost, as his appearance and behaviour were different from that displayed by other researchers she had met, approached her. He must be the assistant the security guard had mentioned. Tall and muscular, around thirty, he offered a silly smile.

  “Hello, my name is Vlad. Can I help you?” He said, in a honeyed voice.

  Baley hated this kind flattering character who was only deferent to her chip, a symbol of her residence in the First Circle. She replied dryly.