WAS IT WEEKS or months?
It was hard to tell. My psyche was ungluing itself.
How long could this last? My thoughts kept returning to my own marketing campaigns, to pssi’s main selling feature of dramatically stretching the human lifespan. Was it possible that I could be left wandering alone for years or decades? Or even longer?
My mind frantically circled around and around the thought, unable to fathom it, clawing desperately at the edges of this prison without walls. I suspected that the system wouldn’t even let me kill myself. There was no escape.
My wanderings has taken me to Madrid, and I walked around Beun Retiro Park. It was as empty of people as everywhere else my lonely travels had taken me. I walked between rows of skeleton trees, across carpets of golden leaves that they’d shed like tears just for me. It was a beautiful day under a perfect sky as winter settled in.
At least, it would have been beautiful if there’d been anybody else there to share it with.
I thought a lot about Mr. Tweedles. Everywhere I went, I kept imagining I saw him, just up ahead, just passing a lamppost. I’d feel him brushing up against my leg, and then wake up, realizing I was still stuck in this nightmare. I think he’d been about the only creature who’d ever loved me. I hoped someone was taking care of him.
My life hadn’t ended, but without anyone else, it had ceased to have any meaning.
Stopping next to the Crystal Palace in the middle of the park, I opened my purse to take out another of the endless cigarettes. I lit up, and then bent down to pick up one of the golden leaves from the gravel path. I studied it carefully and began to laugh, and then to cry.
It was so peaceful. It was what I’d always wanted, just to be left alone, and I only had myself to blame, or to thank. My sobs of laughter rang out through the empty morning sunshine, under a faultless, empty blue sky.
***
From the author
I hope you enjoyed the start of the Atopia series! If you want to continue the story, click here, or search for Atopia Chronicles on Amazon. NOTE that Atopia is in Kindle Unlimited, so is free to continue reading if you are part of this program.
Shimmer – An Atopia Short Story
The Cognix board of directors meeting was over, and Dr. Hal Granger glared at Patricia Killiam as she closed down the shared memetic structures of the virtual meeting space. Fuming, Dr. Granger sat still for a moment to regain his composure, staring across the obsidian-black conference room table as everyone collected their things to go. He’d been right in the middle of explaining how his happiness indices were central to the entire Atopian project when Patricia had cut him off.
Such arrogance in that Patricia Killiam. What made her think she could talk about happiness? As if anyone knew more about emotions than Dr. Granger.
Patricia was always lording over everyone the idea that she was the famous “mother of synthetic beings”—but from Dr. Granger’s point of view, this just wasn’t true. Her research had focused only on generalized fluidic and crystallized measures of logical and linguistic intelligence; it was his contribution that had led to the creation of emotional and social intelligence for artificial beings.
And what was more important? What someone said—or the emotional reason behind why they said it? After all, the very definition of consciousness was how information felt when it was processed in a certain way.
Patricia really overestimated her importance in things. Who knew more about happiness than he did?
Really, what nerve.
Dr. Granger needed to calm down. An aimless wander through a few floors of the hydroponic farms ought to do the trick. He exited the boardroom and jogged down an interior staircase into the vertical farming levels just below.
As he passed down, Dr. Granger stopped for a moment to enjoy the view of Atopia from a thousand feet up: semi–tropical forests, capped by crescents of white beaches; the frothy breakwaters beyond. Through the phase-shifted glass walls, the sea still managed to glitter under a cloudless blue sky.
As he continued down the stairs into the main grow farms, Dr. Granger took a deep breath, enjoying the humid and organic, if not earthy, smell. He loved that smell. Although, if he was being honest, what he enjoyed most about the farming complex wasn’t the smell or the peacefulness: it was the curt, respectful nods he received from the staff. That, and watching the blank faces of the psombie inmates.
Most of the psombies here were people incarcerated for crimes, their minds disconnected from their bodies while they waited out their sentences in multiverse prison worlds. In the interim, their bodies were consigned to community work in various places around Atopia, such as these farms, where they were safely guided by virtual minders. Even paradise needed correctional services.
Yes, the farms were a nice, controlled environment.
They made Dr. Granger feel powerful and safe.
“Shimmer!” he called out.
Shimmer popped into one of his display spaces and began walking in step beside him. She was a virtual creature, living in the digital hyperspaces around him, but to his eyes she appeared as a lithe twenty-something with cropped blond hair and blue eyes.
“Yes, Dr. Granger?” Shimmer replied. “Do you want me to start a new log entry on Dr. Killiam?”
He nodded, but really, she didn’t need a response. She always knew what he was thinking. She, or he. Shimmer was as evenly an androgynous creature as Dr. Granger had ever met or created. When he felt he needed a female perspective, Shimmer seemed womanly. When he felt that a stronger hand was necessary, Shimmer seemed more masculine. As a synthetic being, sex was superfluous in the biological sense, but it remained critical in others. It was Shimmer’s ability to understand the emotional dynamics both sexes that had made her famous.
Or, rather, made me famous. Dr. Granger smiled.
“Already done, Dr. Granger.” Shimmer smiled back at him. “Do you want me to walk you home while you get some work done?”
Dr. Granger nodded. “Yes, please.”
He relaxed, letting Shimmer take control of his motor cortex and begin walking him along the corridors. He’d been unconsciously looking out the windows to the view below, but once Shimmer took charge, she shifted his gaze front and center. They turned from the outer corridor toward the interior elevators.
Dr. Granger decided to simply joyride for a while. He enjoyed these little moments, and Shimmer sensed this. She outstretched his arms and spread his fingers so that they slid through the plant leaves as they passed. Dr. Granger was easing into the back of his mind, about to shift his point of view into his workspaces, but the feeling of the plants brushing past his fingertips tingled his senses. He let his consciousness sink further and further back, relaxing his mind.
Work could wait.
Shimmer was one of the cornerstones of the entire modern field of synthetic intelligence. The idea had come to Dr. Granger as an assistant professor at Stanford, a young and ambitious man trying to work his way up through the ranks. Of course, some disgruntled grad students had tried to claim the work as their own, but Dr. Granger had held firm, through multiple lawsuits, that he was the glue that had held the thing together—despite what some said.
The experiment that had started it all was a mirror neuron simulation. A stream of human sensory data was fed through it—using real-time visual and audio input from hundreds of psychology grad students—to create an aggregate virtual body. The goal was to create a machine that didn’t just mimic emotions, but that actually learned the basis of animal emotion as the animal itself.
Early experiments bore out the concept, and over the years Dr. Granger secured the funding to build ever more elaborate networks—networks that had reached their culmination in Shimmer. Shimmer had learned the basis for emotion like a baby learning to speak a language—by watching and feeling what the human participants felt until she could feel it for herself.
In the process, she gained the superhuman ability to iden
tify the precise combination of emotions present in a human subject—out of the thousands of possible combinations.
Earlier efforts to build tools that could identify human emotions had focused on observing the human face and bio-sensing things like skin temperature, heart rate, and pupil dilation. These methods worked well enough for the “big six” emotions that psychologists traditionally focused on: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. But what Shimmer was able to distinguish was infinitely more subtle.
She could pick out combined layers of emotions: like avarice, embarrassment, boredom, loneliness, jealousy—even the double-edged sword of pride, and the many faces of confusion. Gratitude was one of Shimmer’s specialties—an especially difficult and important emotion, as it was the building block for that most cherished of human emotions, love.
The most important emotions in the modern world, however, were elevation and inspiration. While the powerful could still use fear as a tool for pursuing their agendas, its efficiency had begun to wane with the rise of worldwide information networks. Gone were the days when outright coercion could be used effectively in much of the world.
Instead, the tools used to pacify the masses in the modern age were choreographed ballets of inspirational messaging, designed to inspire the masses into submission. Shimmer was the master of this dance, and that was the main reason why Dr. Granger had been appointed to the Cognix board.
Dr. Granger snorted. Humans were such slaves to their emotions. Trying to see the emotional forest for the trees was something humans couldn’t even manage in themselves, never mind in other people. Being able to perfectly recognize collective human emotions, and by extension the emotional weatherscapes that blew through societies, provided an entirely new and powerful tool for understanding and influencing people.
And that was where Dr. Granger’s own power had grown.
Dr. Granger was exclusively interfaced with Shimmer. She conveyed to him whatever emotional context appeared in the people he spoke to, effectively transferring to him her superhuman ability to recognize and categorize human emotions. By inserting himself as the primary focal point of the project, Dr. Granger had developed a brand image. Over time, the cult of his personality had eclipsed the project itself.
His initial fame had landed him on the EmoShow, an international hit on the mediaworlds. It had, in turn, landed him on the board of directors for Cognix; and now, with the impending release of the Atopian virtual reality product, he was on the threshold of becoming one of the super-rich. He now had everything he’d ever wanted, and it was all due to Shimmer, his faithful and loyal creation.
As Shimmer guided Dr. Granger’s body down the hallways to his office—lower than Kesselring’s but still quite high up in the farming complex—an irresistible question was forming in his mind.
Taking back control of his body, Dr. Granger sat down behind his mahogany desk and propped his feet up. Personal satisfaction was coursing through his emotional veins.
“Shimmer,” he called out, “could you sit with me for a moment?”
She appeared in one of his attending chairs, sitting demurely with her hands in her lap, smiling softly.
“I have a question for you, Shimmer.”
“Yes, sir?”
He chewed on his question for a second, preemptively enjoying the moment to come. “Shimmer, I know you never lie. In fact, you are incapable of lying to me.”
“That is true, sir,” she replied, nodding. “Of course it is true.”
“And you have your own emotions. You feel things as humans do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So here’s my question.”
Shimmer waited silently.
He wanted to hear her say it. In fact, he wanted to feel it, so he patched himself into Shimmer’s own emotional circuits.
With his feet still on the desk, he spread his arms. “I am rich, powerful, famous, and welcome anywhere by anyone in the world. I can do almost anything I want, when I want. So my question to you is this: Wouldn’t you like to switch places with me?”
Shimmer paused and smiled. “No, sir.”
What? Was she lying somehow? But no: her emotional channels reflected her indifference.
“What do you mean?” he demanded. “You are my servant, my slave. You have no option but to do what I want you to do. How could you not wish to have my freedom, my fame? To have power, even over me? Answer me, Shimmer. Explain yourself!”
She paused again, always the cautious creature. “Sir, how do I put this…?”
“Just out with it!” he demanded, annoyed that his moment had been frustrated.
“Well, sir, I’ve already met my maker… whereas you…”
Dr. Granger’s anger drained from him as if a plug had been pulled. As he groped for words, his feet fell off the desk.
“Go away.” It was all he could think of to say.
Obediently, she did.
***
From the author
I hope you enjoyed this small short story set in my Atopia universe! If you want to continue the next story, click here, or search for Atopia Chronicles on Amazon. NOTE that Atopia is in Kindle Unlimited, so is free to continue reading if you are part of this program.
Enlightenment – An Atopia Short Story
The ancient subway car rattled toward me, its wheels squealing. An encircled “Q” glowed on the front of the driverless lead car. It was the express train, rolling without stopping on its way past the 29th Street station. I was standing near the end of the platform, next to the far wall. The squealing stopped as the train began to clear the station and accelerate back up to speed.
The lead car was almost at me, and I stepped onto the edge of the platform, staring at the empty driver’s seat of the subway car as it rushed closer.
“Hey, lady!” someone called out.
The train was now just feet away from me. I stepped toward the ledge and the empty space beyond.
“Lady, watch—”
The squealing began again, this time ear-shattering, but it was too late. I leaned in, feeling the train crash into me. There was no pain, just a flash of white before blackness descended.
***
One Year Earlier
I first met Michael at a “How Can I Believe?” church meeting on the Upper East Side, at the third in a series of presentations about coming to intellectual grips with the divine, of how to believe in miracles. The real miracle was that I managed to get out of the house. A gaping hole had opened in the fabric of my life, so there I was, hoping to find…
Something.
The scene that evening wasn’t inspiring, however: a collection of ill-fitting people clinging to jackets and mittens, asking if this seat or that was taken and sharing blank smiles. The woman beside me glanced my way, as if to start small talk, but I looked away. This was a mistake. Checking my phone, it was two minutes past eight. Yawning, I reminded myself that even Einstein believed in God.
It was hot in the church basement, and coming in from the cold outside I squirmed. Sweat pooled in the small of my back. Should I remove a layer? I’d taken off my winter coat, but still had on a shirt and sweater with a scarf wrapped around my neck. Watching bulges of fat spring free as the people around me stripped down, I decided against it.
A cup of translucent coffee hung between my hands—I’d brought my own calorie-free sweetener—and despite the heat I took tasteless sips that burnt my tongue. Did I lock the door when I left home? I resisted the urge to leave, to go home and check. I’d already checked twice. Looking at my phone again, they were already five minutes late in starting. I was about to leave when a voice behind me said: “So, what do you think so far?”
I strained to look around and found a man smiling at me.
A very attractive man.
I smiled back. “Um, well, I’m getting something out of it.” Swivelling sideways on my chair to face him, I noticed his hair was graying at the temples, ju
st like my dad’s had. I hadn’t noticed this man at any of the other meetings, but then I usually had my social blinders on.
The man’s smile curled up at its edges. “Is that what you came for, to get something?”
Why else would I be here? But he was right. I shouldn’t just be here just to get something. “I mean, I’m here to try to make myself a more whole person.”
He nodded. “I know exactly what you mean.” Shifting in his chair, his coat fell to one side to reveal his right arm below a short sleeve shirt. The arm shone dully in the fluorescent light: smooth metal and wires. He saw me staring and pulled his coat back up.
My cheeks burned. Why did I have to say ‘whole person’?
His smile wavered, but only for a moment. “I was in the wars.”
I forced a grin. “Of course.” I’d heard the stories of veterans returning with mangled bodies mechanically reconstructed. If only my brother had been so lucky. I shook off the thought.
He extended his robotic arm. “Don’t be embarrassed. My name is Michael.”
I took his hand. It was cool and hard. “Effie,” I mumbled, wondering what his eyes saw when they looked at me. Fat and frump, answered a voice in my head. My body tingled as I touched his prosthetic.
“Very nice to meet you, Effie,” Michael whispered, still holding my hand.
The speaker at the head of the room announced the start to the session. “Today we will be discussing the role of original sin,” he said, and the murmur of conversation stopped.
I let go of Michael’s mechanical hand and turned to listen.
***
After what seemed an eternity, the meeting came to an end. People were standing and gathering their belongings, checking that they hadn’t left anything behind.
Even struggling to keep my eyes open, I’d been thinking about Michael the whole time.
Was I rude? I knew I should’ve worn something more flattering. I frowned. Did I lock the door? Resisting the urge to bolt, I pretended to check my pockets for something while I listened to Michael chatting behind me. I waited until he fell silent, and then turned as casually as possible.
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