by A. I. Zlato
It was not hurting people for fun, but the procedure was necessary. The population of the Periphery agonised for hours before dying. When the silence became total, It opened the doors of the outer Circle to let out the cleaning equipment. When this was complete, It would send Its hybrids to transform the Periphery into a genuine Circle, as if non-hybridised humans had never existed. This problem would then be solved.
In the M. Spaces, there was also no definable concern. Only some clones persisted in having divergent behaviour. After all ... what made that different? It wanted to combine the three programs. It could already select the clones who gave full satisfaction and use their genes as the basis of the genetic program, just as It would choose individuals in Space H. Besides, It would have to select the best hybrids in order to have a relatively wide genetic pool prior to cloning and then hybridising. It launched algorithmic instructions accordingly. Already, in M. Spaces, It had to eliminate the problematic clones.
It was not necessary to retain individuals whose genes were irrelevant. Obviously, the targeted clones had no chips, as they were born before the introduction of technology in these Spaces. How to reach them? They were also scattered throughout the City. The Server could obviously wait until they die of natural death, but It wanted to crack the conundrum immediately. That way, the only thing left would be Space H. and its little problem of suicides; everything else would be perfectly in order for the completion of the Project.
What to do? It had no means at Its disposal. It looked thoughtfully at the two Cities, following the problem with clones, and then turned towards the horizon. The dunes. It had the solution It needed. It sent instructions, to assign the concerned individuals on a special mission. As they were regrouping, It imported from O. two transportation devices that did not exist there. It ordered the humans to hop in. It took a while to compel them to do so. They were scared, did not know the technology, did not know where they were going, and asked a deluge of painful questions. When they were all aboard, Index locked up the doors and sent them into the desert.
The transport cargoes rode for hours on dunes, so that the City would no longer be accessible by foot. There, Index ejected the two groups, one in each Space, into the burning sand. It hesitated to recover the cargoes, and then changed Its mind. Humans certainly would have the idea to cling on them like ticks on a dog. Yet they needed to stay there, without water and food, in order to die quickly. The twenty individuals quickly split into two groups, the distribution of which varied from one Space to another.
The first group decided to stay with the cargo shuttles, finding shelter as long as possible in their shadows. The other chose to walk in the footsteps of the cargoes, hoping to reach the City. The footprints on the sand were quickly windswept, and the group became more heterogeneous, unable to agree on the way forward. They all died, ultimately, of sunstroke and thirst in a few days. Case closed on that concern, too.
Now that It had solved the problems within the Spaces, except — a small exception, that is — in Space H., It turned Its attention to the common subjects, far more complex. There were, first, the Guardians, called Servants, Defenders and Pillars, according to the respective Space. From the time Index was only a small amount of processors hosted by the Machines, It had calculated that these splinter groups were not a threat. It had to recognise, however, even if it was painful to the Server, that It had a small error of assessment, which proved ultimately to be beneficial for It, but an error nonetheless.
A super-instruction had been programmed within each Machine in order to protect the Servants.
When they realised their nature was, in reality, digital and not organic, the super-instruction had completely locked them out. Index was able to absorb each Machine thanks to that super-instruction. The Server’s underestimated assessment had allowed It to exist fully. Though It rejoiced, It had identified clearly the danger of this instruction, which It had to overcome in order to control the Guardians. It needed to remain the only artificial entity; It needed to control everything.
Leaving entities — and worse, mobile entities — to go about their business, to fall under the control of programs unknown to Index, was no longer admissible.
It wanted everything for Itself, for Index alone. Guardians could become perfect mobile extensions of Itself, and they could oversee the hybrids.
It threw half of Its processors onto solving this problem. It was going to attack the instruction from all sides, and force the latter to accept defeat. Each line of code in the instruction would be broken, and annihilated. This was only a matter of time. And Index had time.
Finally, Its biggest concern was the organic entities living in the Ocean, the Forest and the two Deserts, all of which connected to the Gateways.
Those Gateways were a real scourge. Given their overview of the different Spaces, and especially their ability to differ them, they were the only ones able to block Its path. By design, It had been aware of this fact very early and It had developed a strategy that the Machines unwittingly relayed. Its tactic had been to be invisible to Gateways as long as possible. Its presence was easily concealable. Its initiatives, however, were harder to hide. It first analysed how the creatures found the information in each Space. Fortunately, they acted the same way in all four Spaces. It had seen them divert the data stream from the digital frame, in order to read them, before reinserting them back into Space.
Index could thus easily extract from the frame all information bits It wanted to hide. It had removed the accelerated hybridisation program, the Pioneering Area, and the chips on clones. If the concealment had worked well in the beginning, the very lack of data had attracted the attention of a Gateway. The latter had questioned H. about the issue. H. had replied that it did not know, which was the truth. The façade was the product of Index’s manoeuvring. That was a brilliant idea. By hiding the data itself, It had allowed the Machines to ignore the very concealment. Through its answers, H. had unknowingly masked the Server’s action, and thus fooled the Gateway. Even if the latter ended up discovering the early stages of the Project, it had remained blind to the origins of these cover-ups. Index congratulated Itself of having been so impressive. Nothing matched, and would ever match, Its intelligence.
The Gateway had finally discovered Its actions. At that time, Its initiatives had progressed so much that the creature was unable to do anything. Index had superbly been able to fool them all. The Gateway and its peers, however, remained a real threat to the Server. The organic entities in the Spaces were a good way to attack.
This required Index to get rid of the organic tentacles that the Gateways had crept into Its Spaces. Until recently, the Forest, the Ocean and the Desert behaved as one would expect from plant and animal components. Therefore, the Machines did not realise the duplicity of their nature, until these components started producing data that disrupted the Equilibrium. It was necessary to destroy them. Each of these organic entities entailed a specific destructive action. It could not eliminate the Forest just as It would the Ocean, which itself could be annihilated as the Desert would be. Moreover, It was sure that It would find a lot of resistance on Its path. Gateways, from their Inter-Space, would defend their extensions at all costs.
That required a lot more thinking than what It had done for the problematic humans. Cutting trees, even if it was a long process, was a possible action. However, moving thousands of tons of sand was less so. As for emptying the Ocean, that was not even an option worth talking about. Of course, destroying the Gateways would directly solve the problem, but Index had no way to reach them. These entities were real wounds, parasites in Its universe. It launched a series of algorithmic programs on this thorny issue.
Finally, there was Space E.
The Machines had seen it, and ordered It to carry out an audit of Itself, a task It obviously did not execute. As It was only a sub-entity hosted by the Machines, It had not seen the exact nature of this Space. Now that It was Its full self, great, wonderful, perfect, It under
stood. Space E. was not a real Space, but a temporary projection, related to the implementation of the Project. This Space would grow, yes, but not in the sense that everyone was waiting for.
Machines and Gateways were all totally misguided.
In a Space, every problem has a solution. Otherwise, it is not a problem, but a fact. In a node, things are more complicated, because differing space, when the end and beginning are the same place, is not without consequence.
Space-Time
Chapter 56
Space H. (Periphery)
Paul saw Baley rushing out to pursue her new lead. He was sad for her, to see her so tired, stressed, desperate and yet so full of energy to find the solution to the Problem. The compassion he felt for her had compelled him to help her anyway. However, the end of their conversation had confirmed his desire to counter her. This woman was dangerous. The only thing was, thanks to him, she now had the information she was missing. He had now to work faster, to go also to the scene of the next cyclone but having previously studied the phenomenon to get more info.
Rushing into things headlong, as she was doing it, could not provide a solution. Know your enemy to better combat him or her, was his philosophy. The Permanent Equilibrium, the trap of the Elders’ dreams ... because any road followed precisely to its end, leads precisely nowhere ... that was it, his battle. To do this, he had two weapons. Thomas's diary, written by the man who created the Guardians, to combat disasters such as the Problem; and then Vlad. As Servants had refused to help him, he needed his assistant as well as his research on the beginnings of the Machine. This information could be valuable in knowing the Machine and deviating it from its final goal.
The Machine ... Vlad had been working recently on documents relating to Its construction, Its earliest era. His assistant was no longer the same man. Now he came early in the laboratory. Of course, he did not come as early as Paul, but he was now there at the same time that the majority of researchers were in the lab
A real revolution. He still struggled to decipher the ancient language, but he committed a lot of time and his work deserved attention. He was flipping through several writings and developed a fairly accurate representation of the original Machine as the Elders had conceived it. Several researchers found his work interesting, and he would sometimes go to meetings to present his results. He was all the more assiduous in his work that he adhered to Paul’s desire to get in Baley’s way. Despite everything else, he remained cheerful.
“Hi boss, is everything okay? I brought you some coffee.”
“Thanks, Vlad,” Paul replied, “what is the latest gossip in the pantry?”
“Huh? Oh, I don’t know; I didn’t stay there long. We have a job to do, right?”
“I'm really glad to hear you talk like that ...”
“Go slowly, chief, Don’t go too far, to think that I am passionate about your Earliest Space; the Machine is the only thing I’m interested in.”
“That's good, because I personally never focused on It. What you do here is really adding value. No one had ever envisaged addressing this issue.”
“Yeah, I am too much ... Another thing, I just saw Baley out of your office. She did not look good; what is going on with her? Did she fail her Perfect Dictator exam?”
“Vlad ... All this is very serious. She is coping with the fact that Problem is not solved, but thanks to me, she has a new trail.”
“Providing information to the enemy, are you crazy?”
“I could not do otherwise ... I felt sorry for her. And, after all, she still trying to fight against the Problem, even if her methods are questionable.”
“I would say her methods are freaky .... Well, what do we do then?”
“I still intend to solve the Problem before she does ... and I have my theory about the causes of this Problem. Broadly, I think that the ultimate outcome of the Equilibrium is stagnation, death. The Problem is a consequence of this extreme. To fight against this drift, we need to go back to the origins. You work on the Machine; I study with my manuscript.”
“Oh chief! Questioning the Equilibrium? Are you now part of the anti-Machine movement?”
“No, no, I am only talking about the excesses. It's just a certain part of Its original programming that I question. Finding the Equilibrium is good, but not the Permanent Equilibrium.” .
“Why would the Machine suddenly start doing absolute stuff? Why would your manuscript provide the solution? And how will it help us solve the Problem?”
“Why now, is a part of what we must find out, because that will help us find the solution. As for the manuscript ... its author said something revolutionary. For him, the Earliest Space had survived. After creating the concept of Spaces, some Elders had made life possible again in surface habitats (they lived in the underground, owing to pollution), and destroyed all traces of the ancient world. However, according to Thomas, there are still remains, which he called stigmata.”
“So?”
“Finding these stigmata means finding the Earliest Space, where it all started, where the Equilibrium was invented. Making this discovery would mean having an unexpected opportunity to better understand the past in order to change the future. And therefore to stop the Problem.”
“In other words, nothing new under the sun. These are simply part of your usual speech.”
“The beginning, Vlad! Find the beginning to see what is causing the drift we see today! Imagine that we discover the original source code of the Machine ...”
“Of course… to rewrite the part you want about the Permanent Equilibrium , it would be perfect ... Let's assume, once again. What makes you think you can find these traces, that is to say, why do you think Space H. is actually the Earliest Space?”
“I have no evidence for now, but we have Thomas’ diary, and he speaks of it. I think he wrote his pages for a reason, to tell us that he is a human who stayed here ... in the Earliest Space. And his diary is 'here' with us! I'll assign excavation teams in this perspective, beyond the City, outside our usual coverage area.”
“And what if you find nothing? Will it prove the opposite?”
“This will show that I have not looked enough ...”
“Ah ... very optimistic, huh boss? Good, but this type of excavation will take infinite time, and the Problem is now, then what do we do?”
“I need to tell you something, Vlad, but first you have to promise to hear me out and try as much as possible not to take me for a fanatic.”
“Sounds good ... go!”
Paul told him about the circular distribution in suicide scenes that no journalist had mentioned, the discovery of the cyclone, and the presence he had seen, the proven connection to the Problem, and finally the algorithm predicting the next occurrence of the phenomenon.
“You are going crazy here, aren’t you?”
“Baley believes my hypothesis! She is even heading there.”
“It's pure nonsense ... And then you also want to go? You will get there together, with coffee and biscuits around, waiting for the thing to occur?”
“Did you hear what I said? I want to prevent Baley from harming people! It is therefore necessary me to go, too, but to act before she does.”
“And how do you do that?”
“I'll do some research to learn more about the cyclone, and especially on the presence. I have about ten hours to get the job done. Then I will go there. Not to prevent children from getting closer, or applying any other Baley’s crazy approach, but to understand what is really happening, understand the causes ... and act at the source.”
“Of course ... Between you and Baley, I wonder who is the craziest! She might have weird ways of doing things, but at least she is trying to prevent children from dying. You, you ... you know what? I'd maybe need to get involved here.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“I don’t know yet ... Well, well, good luck, let me go back to work. I owe you a report. I also think I have discovered a revolutionary thing, but a r
eal thing! ...”
“What is it?” Paul asked, while noticing the sudden change of topic that his assistant had engineered.
“You'll see ...”
“Something related to the Problem?”
Vlad did not answer, and went back to sit at his terminal. Paul did the same. He was eager to embark on the search for the famous stigmata. That was his job, after all ... He decided to devote two hours to that topic, before focusing on the cyclone. The phenomenon would not happen before tomorrow; he had time.
He then pondered how Thomas described his dying world. The underground locales he spoke about must have been destroyed, as had been all traces of the ancient world, given that such was the initial purpose. The pollution generated by human overactivity also had to be absorbed to make outside life possible again; plant and animal populations had to grow necessarily after overexploitation stopped ... What indications could he find in the manuscripts?
The Elders, after destroying traces of their world, had ensured that their descendants forget their origins, forget what had almost definitely destroyed humanity ... any mention of any stigmata would be only coincidental. The upcoming research seemed tedious and time-consuming, but that did not discourage Paul.
He was a researcher and therefore was accustomed to lengthy work, to months spent studying documents without success.
He decided to use the one which always helped him, even if the latter did so in a convoluted way.
“Edgard! I really need your help. Edgard, I mean, 5th Hexa!!!”
“I'm here, as always. And I would prefer that you keep calling me Edgard.”