It is a storm. One of epic proportions.
GAIA knows the city is able to withstand this kind of natural events. All the city’s inhabitants are currently in their apartments, therefore they are safe.
As for the robots that were outside, GAIA does not care. Now that it knows what is happening and the reason why some robots did not transmit data, it can continue to manage its restructuration. Of course, this storm will damage the construction sites, but GAIA knows its robots will deal with it as soon as the weather is back to normal.
GAIA launches the learning procedure. Helmets are remotely turned on, and the education network walls are lifted, allowing the helmets to connect to it and to start loading knowledge into the people’s brains.
Lightning strike everywhere. The situation outside is extremely dangerous. At the base, everyone monitors the storm progress on the radar and on the outside cameras. They are glad to be so deep inside the mountain and protected by it.
The elements are unchained. There doesn’t seem to be a safe place outside. No one in the base has ever seen a storm like this before.
“This is an opportunity,” Don says. “It is so bad that I’m sure it will slow GAIA down. It may even shut the factory down for a while. We should get to the factory as soon as the storm has passed. We may have a small window of opportunity to get there unnoticed before the factory starts again.”
Don wants to capitalize on this storm. His first proposal is to leave for the factory right now to increase their chances of success. Given that it will take them three or four days to reach it, if they wait until the storm ends, the factory will very likely be up and running again by the time they arrive. The mission will, therefore, be more difficult.
But in front of everybody’s concerns, and looking at the storm, he realizes that his idea is probably too dangerous.
Nevertheless, they need to get ready and be on alert because they will leave as soon as the weather allows them to.
At the Metropolis, everyone is now sitting and receiving their daily dose of knowledge. Everything is quiet in the apartments.
But this tranquility suddenly stops and everyone starts shaking frantically. Some of them pass out, while others are apparently suffocating. Some start burning up from the inside, their brains are frying. Rose is stuck on the back of the sofa she is sitting on. Her eyes and mouth are wide open. Her body is not shaking, only her head is.
It takes GAIA a couple of seconds to realize something has gone wrong and to take measures. The data transfer feed is immediately stopped and all helmets are shut down.
But for many people, it is already too late.
GAIA reviews the entire population’s vital signs. The results are bad. Almost ten percent of the Metropolis population has died in an accident that GAIA is still unable to explain. That’s almost two million people. As for the rest, about twenty percent require extensive medical monitoring.
The vast majority of the population does not appear to have suffered much, and only four individuals seem to require additional attention and focus as GAIA cannot assess their mental and physical condition.
Rose is one of the four.
For safety reasons, GAIA had built tunnels across the entire Metropolis. They were originally built to allow people to go from one facility to another in case of severe weather. Those tunnels have never been used before but now is the best opportunity to use them.
The robots that have not yet been sent to a factory for upgrade have already started to escort those who can walk to the nearest medical facility. From there, people are taken care of and their health condition is monitored closely.
Those who are not able to move stay in their apartment and robots are assigned to attend to them.
But in each case, the priority of the robots is to make sure the chip implant in the brain is still functioning properly.
As for Rose and the other three individuals, GAIA has them sent to a different location.
This is not a hospital. It looks more like a laboratory where several chemical and biological experiments seem to be conducted at the same time.
The robots that work here are different from the ones that take care of the city or the ones that handled the relocation process. They are slightly taller, but the main difference resides in that they have an extra pair of arms.
Rose can barely keep standing up. She looks around and for some reason, she seems to understand what these robots are doing. But she doesn’t understand what is happening to her. She has a vague recollection of the accident, a few memories of her father, and this constant noise inside her head. Images flow uninterruptedly each time she closes her eyes.
And again, this never-ending humming sound inside her head.
Without a word, a couple of robots take her by the shoulders and lay her down on a table. With their four arms, they quickly connect several devices to her body and her head. She understands she is going to be studied.
“Implant malfunction,” one of the robots says.
“Replacing,” the other says.
After that word, Rose feels a sting behind her head and everything suddenly goes black. No more sound in her head, no more pictures in front of her eyes. Absolute silence.
But the sound comes back almost right away, and so do the images. Rose is back in the room. She must have fainted for a few seconds.
“Implant functions all set and working,” a robot says.
Rose can feel the implant inside her head. For some unexplainable reason, she can feel it.
As she is focusing on it, the sound inside her head seems to get lower, up to a point where she hardly hears it anymore. Her entire brain is focused on this alien structure that is inside her head.
“Implant malfunction,” a robot says once again.
This time, the other robot does not react. No replacement is currently proposed. The robot seems to be processing this new information. It seems to be thinking.
They know the implant is not damaged. They know they have followed the procedure properly. They are robots, so they cannot do things improperly. They just execute a procedure, which is nothing more than a program.
The implant is removed again and tested. The test confirms it is in proper working condition. But for some reason, it does not perform the actions it is supposed to when it is in their patient’s head.
The robots replace the implant a second time. The result is still the same. The implant seems to stop working as soon as it is connected to Rose’s brain.
If the problem I not within the implant, then it must be with Rose’s brain. The decide to run tests on it.
As soon as they start monitoring it, they realize her brain activity is reaching levels never seen before. All metrics they are measuring simply go through the roof.
“Brain activity levels: Abnormal,” a voice says, coming from one of the machines Rose is connected to.
As Rose hears these words, she realizes her results might cause her problems. And, without really understanding why and how, she simply stops thinking. She focuses her brain on nothing, on emptiness.
The consequences are quick to materialize on the metrics which go back down to normal levels right away.
Normal here meaning very low as people are supposed to have limited brain activity because of their implant.
“Brain activity levels: Normal,” the voice says.
The robots perform many other tests on Rose to confirm the results. While their patient now seems to pass all the tests, the problems with the implant and the unusual brain activity prompt the robots and through them, GAIA, to keep Rose under close supervision.
She needs to be studied even more as something does not seem to be right and GAIA cannot really locate the problem. The implant does not seem to work, but the patient acts as if it was.
There are three other patients who go through the same process as Rose. The tests run on them produce similar results as Rose’s.
While not understanding what is happening to them, they all
seem to be fully aware of what they need to do to influence the tests’ results.
And just like Rose, GAIA considers they need to be studied further. They are all placed in individual rooms that look more like cells than anything else. GAIA intends to run additional tests on them in order to understand and explain the implants malfunction and confirm that the unusual levels of their brain activity were just an incident.
Once everything is done, and depending on these four people’s attitude, their results, and GAIA’s ability to control them or not, GAIA will decide of their fate.
But for the time being, they are to be isolated.
In parallel, GAIA is searching for the root cause of the accident that cost the lives of so many people in the Metropolis.
GAIA finds out what appears to have happened.
The Metropolis was hit by lightning. A very strong one. GAIA records everything and finds a huge surge in power levels during the knowledge transfer session. It didn’t last very long as GAIA was fast enough to abort the session and shut everything down within a couple of seconds. GAIA is now trying to assess what happened during these two seconds.
The lightning seems to have had several effects.
One, the electricity traveled through all the cables and physical networks in the Metropolis and found its way to the helmets. And from the helmets, the power ended its course in the brains. The conditions were similar to being attached to an electric chair. Even though it was very brief, the intensity of the power discharge was fatal to many people.
For some reason, the effects of the lightning were different and did not spread evenly across the entire population. Indeed, some people’s brains simply started to melt down, while some others were not damaged. The lucky ones only experienced a problem with their implant. It simply fried or stopped working but did not cause any damage to the brain.
All implants will be replaced.
Two, it seems the lightning had another effect. A more concerning one. While GAIA is supposedly foolproof, reliable, secure, and can withstand any type of attack, it seems that with this lightning GAIA found something stronger than itself.
As soon as the lightning struck, GAIA’s firewalls and defenses stopped operating. Not for long, just for a second or so. But long enough so that all the gates in the knowledge library were instantly lifted.
During that short period of time, nothing differentiated the information that GAIA carefully selected to transfer to the brains and the rest.
The selected information and knowledge was one that excluded, banned, and censored everything that GAIA did not consider appropriate. For example, most of the world’s history. Indeed, in the new world order where every belligerent and aggressive feelings need to be suppressed, there is no room for a history that has been paved with conflicts and wars. Similarly, most books which content is considered as subversive are simply excluded from the education network. And finally, everything that refers to the old world order’s life is purely and simply banned.
Simply stated, the only content that is part of the education network and available for people is one of sciences, mathematics, and morale. Domains that mostly do not refer to the past life, and domains that cannot lead people to exercise judgment or emit an opinion.
But the lightning incident temporarily modified the rules. For a second, all the data from the library found its way to the education network. Boosted by the surge in power, it is, according to GAIA’s estimates, the equivalent of ten zettabytes of data that traveled through the network.
A zettabyte is the equivalent of one trillion gigabytes or one million petabytes. As a reference, it is believed that the brain capacity is around four of these petabytes.
And from the network, some of this large packet of data, not all of it because of bandwidth limitations, found its way to the helmet and to people’s brains.
The brain overload resulted in instant death for many people.
To others, it is actually the helmet that failed first and therefore the information finished its course before it reached the brain.
But on four instances, not only did the information travel through the network, but the helmet sustained the overload, transmitted the data flow into the brain, and against all odds, the brain survived.
These four instances are the four individuals that GAIA has isolated.
Hence their special treatment.
Rose is locked in her cell and tries to fight with the sounds in her head. As she calms down, she begins to focus on her situation. And just like earlier at the laboratory, the sounds slowly begin to fade.
She feels different. Definitely different from the past few days and weeks. She recalls her life before she was taken to the laboratory. It seems to her that she was there without being there. That something was controlling her thoughts. She remembers herself as just being incarcerated within a body or a brain that she couldn’t control or escape from. But it seems like it has stopped now. Now she seems to be able to move as she pleases, she seems to be able to think.
And there are so many things to think of. She is literally submerged by thoughts. But just like the sounds that were bothering her earlier, she manages to refrain the flow of thoughts and ideas.
She is replaying in her head the tests she had to go through when she was in the laboratory. She remembers the robots’ reactions with the implant’s malfunction and with her brain activity. She comes to the conclusion that the reason why she felt under control in the past is necessarily related to this device in her head. But as far as she can estimate, the device no longer seems to have any effect on her and on her thoughts.
As she is wondering whether she is alone in that situation or not, she hears a distant voice inside her head. And the more she concentrates on the voice, the more distinct it becomes. It seems to answer her question.
“I’m here, too,” the voice says. “Can you hear me?”
Rose does not understand. Is this a trick from the device?
“Who’s speaking?” Rose asks out loud.
“My name is Byron. You don’t need to speak, you just need to direct your thoughts towards me and I will hear you,” the voice says.
Rose waits a few seconds, wondering how to react. And she engages in a conversation inside her head.
“How do I know my brain or the device inside my head is not playing tricks on me? How do I know you are real?” Rose asks.
“I’m real,” the voice answers.
“Prove it!” Rose orders.
“I AM!” the voice says out loud.
Rose heard the voice. Not in her head this time, but apparently coming from outside her cell.
“Don’t make me do this again,” the voice says in her head this time. “It might expose us.”
“What do you mean?” Rose asks, now caught in the conversation and no longer wondering if the voice is just in her head or really exists.
“Too late, they are opening my door,” the voice says.
And indeed, Rose hears steps outside and the sound of a door opening up.
As his door opens, Byron pronounces unintelligible words.
A robot stands in front of the door and stares at Byron for a few seconds before coming closer. The robot uses one set of arms to hold Byron and the other set to monitor his condition. Another few seconds go by and the results come up.
“Brain activity levels: Low,” the robot says.
As Byron straightens up and starts looking in front of him, ignoring the robot’s presence, the robot runs another check.
“Brain activity levels: Normal,” the robot says. And it pursues, “Monitor condition every thirty minutes.”
After that, the robot leaves and locks Byron’s door.
“That was a close call,” Byron says to Rose. “I had to play dumb. Don’t ask me to prove you again I’m real. It is too dangerous.”
“I’m sorry. Why is it dangerous? Where are we?” Rose asks.
“I don’t know. It looks like we are in a cell. I think we are priso
ners,” Byron answers.
“Prisoners of what?” Rose asks.
“Robots,” Byron answers simply.
“Do you have any idea of why we are here?” Rose asks.
“Not really, but I think we represent some kind of threat. I remember I was with my family in a large city. I remember seeing people around us. And then, nothing. I only remember that I was alone, following directives. I remember a painful shock and then the tests, the robots, and here I am. But I strangely feel very confident, that I am in charge … I don’t know why I feel that way, though. The circumstances don’t seem to play in our favor,” Byron says.
“I have similar recollections. And I have the same feeling of power over my environment,” Rose says.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” Byron says.
“I’m Rose.”
“Nice to meet you, Rose.”
“And you, what is your name?” Byron asks again.
“I just told you I’m Rose.”
“Not you, Rose … You,” Byron says.
“I’m Kim,” another voice says. “I’m sorry, I heard everything you said. I wanted to know who you were before introducing myself.”
“Nice to meet you, Kim,” Rose and Byron both say at the same time.
“Anyone else?” Rose asks.
“Ted,” another voice answers.
“Hi Ted,” everyone says.
“Hmm …” Ted answers, “… if you’re wondering, there is no one else here now.”
As everyone gets to know each other and tries to understand their situation, the doors suddenly open and each kid is taken by the robots to a larger room.
The entire wall in front of them is covered by a screen.
As the screen turns on, they see what looks like a face. It is not human even though it shows human features. It is a face made of pixels and which traits seem to constantly move giving it a very fluid and malleable appearance.
“I am GAIA,” the face says.
“I do not understand you,” GAIA pursues.
“You are an accident. But you are unique and I need to study you,” GAIA says.
ACTIVATION Page 24