by Kyte, Adrian
Roidon watched patiently as its occupant regained awareness. But soon Roidon’s patience lapsed; he lifted the twitching figure out. It appeared to be a woman, or an approximation of such: the curves and bumps in a dull silver form, like she was in some kind of fetish outfit.
He placed her gently on the ground and said, ‘We really don’t have much time. I will explain everything later.’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her moulded head. ‘No, this isn’t right. This isn’t real.’ Her voice a humanly calm denial.
‘Lady, I’m afraid it is.’ He put a hand on her metal shoulder. ‘To escape from this hell you will need to follow my instructions.’
After some persuasion, she helped him gut out the pod. He feigned confidence and surety as he had done on so many previous occasions, half expecting they would be electrocuted before the main unit came away from the pod shell, exposing a set of cables.
‘One of these links every pod to a central unit,’ he only surmised but spoke as if it were fact. He then fused what he understood to be the power cable with another wire. Only a small spark but it had the desired effect: the lights flickered, the status LEDs on a nearby pod flashed red.
‘Oh my god,’ the woman said. ‘Do you even know what you’re doing?’
‘Of course. But if you have a better plan, one that doesn’t involve divine intervention.’
‘I think I’d still like to pray,’ she told him.
‘Too late for that.’ A doorway formed at the end. A silver elongated teardrop shaped object emerged through it, hovering, heading towards them. ‘This is our chance. Run!’
The woman followed him without a word. He wasn’t sure if the object realized their intention; it turned to face them, making whining noises – a dumb drone’s reaction that was not designed to comprehend behaviour outside of its narrow parameters. Still, he imagined an alert of some sort had been sent, pushed up the chain.
The tunnel illuminated to an almost white grey by recessed panel lights, giving a false impression that their escape was not so extraordinary. They could run at least twice the speed of a basic human yet no end to the rising tunnel. Were they merely running into a trap?
After a long and wordless five minutes the end emerged as a gun-metal door. And as Roidon slowed to reach it, the nagging thought that this prominent exit was just too good to be true. Here they were, lab-rats at the end of long tube enticed by a basic desire for freedom.
Yet. The door simply opened with a push. Had the overseers not bothered with a lock since no one would feel the need to escape? No, this was too easy. But when sunlight blazed through, these concerns simply evaporated. Roidon thought he could see the joy in the woman’s artificial face, and then dismissed that as some kind of projected anthropomorphism. The triumph of his plan.
He took a moment to stare at the cloudless blue sky, to feel some true sense of reality. But there was no revelation; this could all be generated AR. No way to measure, to calibrate being in the real that met any scientific rigour. Just events.
The woman was now staring at him. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘I’m just trying to remember what it feels like – reality.’
‘This isn’t the reality I was hoping for. I think this might be a dream.’ Her voice still curiously calm.
‘You’re in shock,’ he told her. ‘Perhaps to some extent I am.’
‘There’s nothing here,’ she said.
He surveyed round. Not a building, not a tree or anything to break up the parched land. He recognized this area –it was the Atacama Desert.
‘How could we be so isolated?’ the woman questioned.
‘This is where they can forget about us.’
‘What about the drone?’
‘Maybe it was just a basic caretaker.’
‘So we just walk until we find civilization,’ she suggested.
‘Then it will be a long walk.’
The woman looked to the sky, in what at first seemed like reaction of denial. ‘I see something.’ She pointed.
A dot, becoming a delta shape. ‘Looks like the warning did get out.’
* * *
15
‘The train. The answer is always the train,’ Torbin told the psychiatrist.
‘Trains take you to where you want to go. They’re a means to an end.’
He was in the classic repose on the couch, a proper patient now, and she was seated a couple of meters to the side.
‘But on the train, I kept thinking: the answer is here, the right journey. But she wasn’t there. Only … he was there, someone who claims to know me.’ The psychiatrist gave a single nod which he took for him to continue. ‘And now I think about it he seems as familiar to me as the woman.’
‘But you can’t place him in your past?’
‘That’s the frustrating thing. What am I blocking doctor? Why?’
‘Perhaps something bad was associated with this man. He represents an uncomfortable truth.’
‘But you also seem familiar to me. And in all three instances I feel there is an unresolved matter. It’s like the pieces of a puzzle I need to assemble but I can’t imagine how they could all possibly fit together.’
‘You think all three of us are connected? May I suggest that it is human nature to search for a pattern, to look for significance where there is none. The creative mind taking the most accessible elements to fit a narrative.’
‘I know, doctor, you are describing the first signs of paranoid schizophrenia.’
‘I would not jump to such a hasty conclusion.’
‘Listen, I know I have been deemed on the edge if not fully insane. So I want to know: have I really tipped over the edge into nutterdom?’
The psychiatrist smiled, gently shook her head. ‘Torbin, if you were truly insane you would not be questioning whether you are.’
‘So instead I’d be thinking the world had gone mad, that reality is not all it appears to be; that there should be something more real than this, and that Roidon, Emelda, and you – doctor – are somehow the key to it.’
She audibly drew breath. ‘I do believe, however, you are going through a crisis.’
‘Then what should I do about it – take medication?’
‘You are doing something about it already – by being here.’
‘I have a good life, and I can’t accept it. Too good to be true so it can’t be real. About as perfect as it can get, I used to think … until … ’ He shook his head to scrap what he’d considered saying. ‘Then maybe I need to be suffering, something visceral. If I threw it all away for nothing. Well, I’d never forgive myself. But if there is just a chance to finally find the answer.’
‘First you need to find the question.’
‘All those billions of people. They seem to have an unquestioning purpose, just going about their lives. But do they wonder: how do I fit within the grand scheme, how is my life more than just helping to maintain the homeostasis?’ Torbin exhaled deeply. ‘Just one of billions; why should I be more important than a component in a vast machine?’
‘Torbin, many people wonder that of their lives, but they just get on with it because others depend on their doing so. Those who don’t, they tend to visit me.’
‘Do they say they don’t feel they are really living but just going through the motions?’
‘I am not permitted to relay specifics.’ She then caught his attention with a seemingly rebuking stare. ‘But you, Torbin, given the importance of your work, how could anyone consider yourself to be a mere component?’
‘Because I feel like I’m being guided through every stage. Constrained by parameters, rules. Always rules. Not enough freedom to think creatively.’
‘You feel frustrated by your lack of control?’
‘It’s just that they make me feel like I’m in control. But I know I’m not.’
The psychiatrist exhaled, in a way that seemed like a suppressed sigh. ‘Torbin, what you describe its very common. I am myself constrained by rules.�
�� A few seconds silence. Then: ‘There is treatment, but---’
‘But just give me the right medication. Or send me for some brain re-sequencing.’
The psychiatrist said nothing for a while. Torbin stared up at the ceiling; he heard her place an object on her desk, a PDU he guessed.
‘I understand what you are going through,’ she finally said. ‘It is commonly referred to as the midlife crisis. You see there were other routes, forks in the road where you saw the possibilities span out. You made what you thought was the best choice. How much better not to look back at what might have been. But the might-have-beens eventually catch up with us, and we have to deal with them.’
‘I will deal with them, doctor. But I need space. I need the freedom.’
‘Then I’ll recommend a non-medical solution.’
‘Thank you.’
* * *
16
Here was Torbin, his life laid bare in text and images before her, a troubled man, a man who thought he could stop the inevitable.
‘Zoraina Kardoz. Diary 4b. Open.’
He did stop the inevitable. But at what cost? The ones who benefited tried to repay him in the only way they understood: they gave him a new body, made him so much stronger, so much smarter. Now, like all the others, he was in denial.> close file.
It was never her mission to rescue him from that virtual life. But with Roidon’s assistance the game-plan had changed.
Patched into his life, she felt like a voyeur. His intimate moments with his wife, his lengthy consultations with a psychiatrist. His life unravelling. His brief moments of insight – that there should be something beyond. She had the capability to move into his realm at any point; it was her call, thus her responsibility if it all went wrong. But there never seemed to be the right moment. Whenever she chose, he would be freaked for sure. One time, when he was alone in his living room, when all was quiet, she thought he could detect her presence; he was glancing in her camera-view direction. A look of puzzlement on his face, as if he were trying to see something beyond the façade. ‘I am here, Torbin. Can you sense me?’ But he turned away. The human reaction of dismissing what the subconscious is sensing. The program relied on the mind’s understanding of the visually normal – the expected. That shadow in periphery; the brief rushing by of an unknown shape; a momentary pixellation post rationalized as the mind playing tricks rather than a glitch in the program feed – because the idea of that must be absurd.
How often had these glitches occurred? How often had they been dismissed. The system had to maintain a reality for over a billion of the captured, all with varying degrees of interactivity and bespoke conversationalist Even in the most advanced AR programs errors inevitably occurred. Frankly, the overseers had no real interest in ensuring it all ran smoothly; that would simply be down to a low level supervisor. But with Torbin it was different, surely? Was he not their special charge? Yet the temporal repetitions must mean the program was breaking down on a more fundamental level. Maybe his inkling of his world not being true had created the error, and the program agents were reacting.
The time had come.
* * *
17
Torbin reclined in his armchair and finished the bottle. It was a drug that had fuelled everything good and bad for as long as civilization existed. How many problems had it solved? How adaptable was it for each new generation? After all, there was a designer drug for every neurosis, every existential fear. And yet there was something about this millennia old concoction that somehow seemed like an answer. The answer that came so silently he didn’t know where it began or where it finished, just the filtering through into his consciousness.
‘I am no longer alive,’ he told himself in confirmation. He remembered he died. It all seemed like a dream. Only this, now, this reality was fading. It had been so good he was never meant to question it. Why question things that make you feel good? Because to be real they can never last.
‘All good things,’ he heard himself say. Yes, he was fed the lie that this was the permanent state; he’d gotten over the tough times – which were never really all that tough – and had now made it. It was the delusion of contentment. Except human beings can never accept contentment without worry that it could end, because we always look for threats – the signs. And those signs had presented themselves to him. Memory was always the greatest threat.
Now, as he watched the figure of the woman before him, he felt a sense of relief – that his answer was materializing, like some angel there to free him.
Well, I’m dead, he thought, and she is here to guide me to the rightful afterlife rather than this gilded sham.
The woman had a south American appearance: a sultry complexion, wearing a formal but tight fitting electric blue dress and matching jacket, somehow too sexy to be an angel. She considered him with a thoughtful expression before smiling, as if she had suddenly realized she had to put on a show as a balm to his fear.
‘I know why you’re here,’ he told her. ‘I accept my fate.’
‘You do?’ She was looking curiously at him.
‘Yes. You’re here to take me away to my place of rest.’
She laughed, not mockingly but with a warmth that was more of a light chuckle: the guardian angel amused by her innocent charge. ‘I am not the Grim Reaper, Torbin. I am simply here help you exit the program.’
‘You’re too hot to be the grim reaper,’ he observed, drunkenly. ‘I was thinking more an angel. Unless you’re just a figment of my imagination.’
‘I am real. I’m a b’tari.’ She smiled broadly. ‘Remember us?’
‘Some kind of alien overseer.’
‘Something like that.’ she was looking at the bottle of vodka on the coffee table. ‘And by the way, you are not really inebriated, it is just your mind accepting the cues the program provides.’
He simply could not process that at the moment. ‘Where will you take me?’
‘It’s not a question of taking you somewhere. Of course, even though my image is being projected for you I am actually at my base in a rather austere monitor room, although I am virtually immersed here.’
‘Where am I?’
‘Where you are physically – or what would constitute your body – we are not certain.’
‘Oh, that’s reassuring(!)’
‘Are you prepared to find out?’
‘Not sure I could ever feel properly prepared. Just get me out of here.’
There was a moment of disorientation; he collapsed in his sofa chair as the room swirled. He felt like he had downed the rest of his vodka; a drunkenness too far. He felt the need to vomit. Then his world receded, tunnelled away.
Something again. Just a faint light, a dim red glow in an oval band above, encompassing him. He just observed, with no thought, no fear.
Until: Who am I? – that first thought niggled at him. A baby doesn’t think this, he knew; a new born just accepts all that is there
as reality. He wasn’t accepting; he had memories, and they were seeping through.
This is not where I must stay. There is a better place, a world out there.
He pushed at the thing that was between him and the world. It opened immediately with contact; lights came on. There all for him? The world welcoming him? But no one else there. No one he could see. The others concealed within their pods, cocooned in their individual realities. The lines spanning as wide as a sports stadium and as long as a runway. Seeing them wasn’t necessary; he knew now, knew what kind of humans they were. Was he human? He saw himself reflected in the tinted glass of another pod. A poor approximation of a human; someone’s ideal of a man. Someone with a detached understanding of the right design. Had that very thought before, he knew.
And so much was coming back. Torbin: the man who saved all sentient life in the galaxy from temporal annihilation. The irony of it, the hubris and presumptuousness to suppose that he had fixed it all. And if he had done it alone, without the endorsement and assistance of those powerful and benevolent allies the B’tari, then the only answer would be self annihilation, rather than live with the responsibility. Except he’d already done that, in one last great act of heroism, a sacrifice for the whole of sentient life.
And what of that life now? It was worse than annihilation, worse than being erased from time and history. It was captured, destroyed in its most meaningful form to leave a faint shadow, but all still intact as code, a representation overlaid. There was no way to get his life back.
He wandered around, still overwhelmed by the vastness. His thoughts descending into depression.
Then a door opened at the far end, revealing a different kind of light, like a portal to another world. It was her again, the b’tari woman had found
Part Two: Outsiders