Entropy of Imagination

by Ryan Somma

  2.01

  Zai rubbed the bar’s wood grain texture absentmindedly with one hand while stirring her drink with the other. Her swizzle stick was no longer hitting any ice cubes and she could not hear them clinking in her glass. The condensation was still cold, as was the water pooling on the bar top, where she had moved it from her coaster. She pressed one of the buttons on her wristband and the electrical signal flashed the time into her fingers.

  Devin was late again.

  She tossed her head back with the glass, draining its contents in three gulps. The tonic was flat, but gin’s burn calmed her a little. She set the glass down and dipped her finger in the tiny pool of water. In a few moments, she had spelled “Devin Sucks” in Braille on the bar top, or at least she hoped that was what she had written.

  “Get ya another one?” the bartender with the deep male voice asked her. It was a sexy voice.

  “Let’s switch to bourbon and water,” Zai said.

  “Ice?” he asked.

  “No,” Zai said, “In fact, forget the water, and make it a double.”

  Zai tried not to think about the bartender’s dwindling tip as she waited for him to return with her drink. How long did it take to pour out two thimblefuls of bourbon? He wasn’t taking any longer than she could expect, from the sound of it, the bar was doing well tonight. It was her frustration and hurt feelings over Devin that were tainting her perception of everything else.

  She reached a finger out to dabble with the tiny puddle on the bar, when her pinky hit the glass. The bartender had brought her drink and she hadn’t known it. This irritated her some more. Sure, with the advances the AI’s had left the human race, her condition of blindness was quickly becoming a thing of the past, but the man could have given her a simple, “Here ya go,” to let her know her drink was served.

  She picked up the tumbler and took a sip. It burned and she savored the sensation. Drinking was a new hobby for her, her first vice. The alcohol numbed her a little and made her not mind the way her relationship with the man she loved was disintegrating.

  It wouldn’t be so bad if it was another woman. At least then she could get angry, vent on him, take out her hurt feelings with justification, and then walk away, make a clean cut. Like pulling a band aid off, it was better to do it quickly and get it over with. The death throes of this relationship were drawing out over months of anguish, and she wondered if she was now so weak that it might take years for her to leave.

  Devin loved her, and that was the problem. Because he was still faithful to her, Zai felt like she didn’t have the right to demand things from him. Devin wasn’t fooling around with another woman, he was in love with his work, his noble profession of making the world a better place through technology. She couldn’t attack him for that, not unless she was a heartless bitch.

  “Uh oh,” Devin said over her shoulder. Zai knew he was talking about her double shot of bourbon, “How many of those have you had?”

  “First one,” she said, and added, “honest.”

  “I’m sorry,” Devin said, giving her a peck on the cheek. It was about the extent of their affections anymore. The fires of passion had dwindled, the sloppy, deep, chewing kisses with the tongue. The ear nibbles, the almost nightly sessions of sexual intercourse, before the act became mechanical, infrequent, and almost mundane.

  Zai waited for his imminent explanation. Things she would not understand. Devin was working on the future, all the technologies the Cycs had left behind. It wasn’t enough that the stuff worked, the human race wanted to know why.

  Zai, personally, could not care less. So much thinking led to missing too much of life, and wasn’t life the whole reason for all this research in the first place? What good was it to make everyone immortal, if that only meant an eternity of hard work, racking our brains for answers deeper and more complex than the previous?

  “We’ve figured out another component of the mind recorder,” Devin was saying, apparently oblivious to her disgruntled state, or aware, but mistakenly thinking an explanation of his work would make it better. “We’re still years away from understanding it completely, but we’re getting close to reproducing the process from scratch. Do you remember how the AI’s exhibited themselves as a fractal in Virtual Reality? Well, we’ve found similar repeating algorithms in the transcribed minds. Each one is different, like snowflakes. Isn’t that amazing? Each one of us can be expressed in a unique geometric figure, endlessly repeating into infinity. It kind of gives us a demonstrable proof of the immortal nature of our souls.”

  “Wow,” Zai said, knowing Devin would miss the disinterest in her voice.

  “I’ll get that,” Devin said quietly and too late Zai realized he was talking about the tab. There was no humor in Devin’s voice when he finally spoke, “I didn’t think it was your first one.”

  “It was my first bourbon,” Zai argued feebly, “Technically it wasn’t a lie.”

  The hostess led them from the bar to a table, but Zai no longer felt hungry. The alcohol and her feelings of distress had ruined her appetite. She sat and listened to Devin read off the entrees he thought she might like.

  Zai rubbed her armband nervously anticipating the fight that was about to break out, so many buttons. The armband was a product of AI technology, grafted to her arm, with bioelectric connections into her nervous system. It could feed information directly into her mind, the time, appointments, information about her surroundings, her exact position in the world.

  Recently she had discovered another button, one she did not remember being there before. Somehow she knew what it was for, but its purpose was something fantastic, impossible. It made all of this dreamlike, unreal. Her finger traced a circle around it, wondering.

  “Zai?” Devin’s voice broke into her trance. “Zai? Is something wrong?”

  Her blood boiled suddenly. Devin knew damn well what was bothering her. Why did he have to make her bring it up? Still, she knew herself well enough that if she confronted him about it, she would explode. In a public place that would be unfair, not to her, as she did not care, but to Devin.

  “Zai?” it was the last thing she heard as she reached for the button labeled “RESET.”

  Zai was having the time of her life. She was playing sixteen games of chess simultaneously and was either ahead in points or held a strategic advantage in all of them. A “knock, knock, knock” sound alerted her to a seventeenth player seeking a match and she was feeling so high, she consented.

  Her headset described an eyeball floating into the room to take position across the board from her. Its pupil dipped in a nod of greeting, and she had her cartoon doll alias execute a curtsy in return. She could hear the other user stifling his laughter.

  “Cool alias,” he chuckled in amusement.

  Zai smiled. This was the intended effect. Her alias was a cute little cartoon girl, with fishnet stockings, tribal tattoos, and piercings. Her older brother had designed it as her blindness prevented her from creating anything but a scribble to represent her, but she had liked that alias too. It had the effect of making other users go “Huh?”

  “Whaddya mean by that?” Zai feigned offense. “This alias, that you find so amusing, happens to represent my belief in individuality and my appreciation for fringe culture.”

  “Oh,” her opponent’s laughter caught in his throat. “I’m sorry. I just thought—“

  Zai struggled to suppress her smile, “You didn’t think. That’s the problem. What kind of an alias is that anyway? A floating eyeball? Are you trying to be all-seeing as your name, ‘Omni,’ suggests?”

  “Sort of,” Omni replied, “The eyeball reflects—“

  “It’s your move by the way,” Zai was enjoying his discomfort. She had never made anyone squirm like this before.

  “Oh, yeah,” Omni pushed the king’s pawn. It was a standard opening.

  Zai pushed her king’s pawn, and Omni brought out the knight. Just to throw him a curve ball, she pushed the
queen’s pawn. He brought out a bishop, ignoring her opening. It was a classic mistake, one that allowed her to take control of the center of the board. Then she could force him to waste two moves retreating his bishop. As Omni quietly pondered this dilemma, Zai took the opportunity to update her other sixteen games. When she returned, he was still pondering.

  “You were explaining the meaning of your alias?” she prompted.

  “I was?” he seemed to wake up out of his thoughts, and she knew he was trying to figure out how to get out of his mistake. “Well, I guess my alias is the polar opposite of yours. I’m not trying to express my individuality, but conceal it. I’m going for an identity-less online persona. I’m anonymous. My handle, Omni, reflects my belief in pluralism, taking all things into account. I want to understand before I try to be understood.”

  Zai blinked, it was a good answer, “So you express your individuality through your lack thereof.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way before,” Omni said, “but I think that’s a fair assessment. I believe in understanding the world through observing it rather than acting on it.”

  “You like to watch,” Zai said with a wicked sort of implication.

  Omni coughed uncomfortably, “I… uh… Oh, I’m sorry. It’s still my move.”

  Zai laughed out loud at this attempt to change the subject. He wasn’t a perv. She liked that. He was self conscious in spite of hiding behind an alias, maintaining his respect for her. Other men would have taken her teasing as bait and quickly offended her.

  Omni surprised her again, when he chose to surrender the bishop to try and regain the center of the board. It was a rare thing to find someone who valued strategic advantage over the value of the pieces. She was still going to kick his butt all over the board, but she liked his playing style.

  “’Black Sheep,’ I like that handle,” Omni said, “It suits your whole individuality theme.”

  A buzzer in Zai’s headset rattled her ears as one of the other players was demanding she return to their game. She slipped away from Omni long enough to give the user a forked queen and king to chew on for awhile. Then she returned to Omni without updating any of the other games.

  “Are you playing someone else?” Omni asked. He had brought out the queen’s pawn to support the king.

  “Sixteen somebody else’s,” Zai said, and the sound of a creaking door in her headset signaled a user had just resigned from the game. It was the forked impatient one. “Make that fifteen.”

  “Wow,” Omni was genuinely impressed. “I’m playing a grandmaster. I’m dead meat.”

  “I’m not officially a grandmaster,” Zai said, “My rating in this system doesn’t count. It’s too easy to cheat.”

  Another buzzer went off in her headset, Zai was neglecting her other games and they were getting impatient. She hopped over to the other board, saw the obvious retort, but instead she did something she had never done before. She resigned.

  “Well,” Omni was saying, when she returned, “I guess I should probably resign and save myself the—“

  “Don’t you dare!” Zai said with a little more force than she intended, and quickly added, “How are you going to learn if you don’t play the best?”

  “You have a point,” Omni’s tone held some confusion, but the quickness of his reply gave Zai the feeling that he was looking for a reason to stay. “If nothing else, I can learn what it’s like to have a mind like yours... how you think, I mean.”

  “You seem reasonably intelligent,” Zai said. “I’m sure there are some things outside of these sixteen squares you could school me on.”

  “Hopefully,” Omni said. “I wouldn’t want to bore you too quickly.”

  Another buzzer went off in Zai’s headset, and she resigned another game without a thought.

  “My real name’s Devin,” he said.

  Then Zai did something else she had never done before, open up to a complete stranger online, “My name is Zai.”

  Flatline watched all of this unfold from his perch above the crystal. For twelve years now he had watched these events unfold. Zai and Devin meeting, falling in love, defeating him, coming together in a post-AI world, and eventually falling out of love. Then Zai would hit the “RESET” button, wiping their memories clean of it all and go back to the beginning, where they could experience it all for the first time all over again.

  Zai and Devin were stuck in a programming loop, and Flatline was about to break them out of it.

  2.02

  Zai was waiting in the clinic lobby, reading a Braille touch screen pad, courtesy of the Cycs. It was a flexible, paper-thin screen that produced a connection to the Internet for blind people. As one of the few blind people left in the world, the result of her reluctance to have her vision restored, Zai had it custom made.

  This apprehension over being given the new sense of sight came from her love of Devin, a love for his mind. Zai was afraid she might find her lover unattractive, if she saw him in the flesh, rather than felt, heard, and smelled him. She would never tell Devin this. It was too easy a thing to misunderstand. Or worse, he might understand too well, and come away with hurt feelings.

  It was all so complicated, this ‘love’ thing. Zai had never spent so much time reconsidering everything in her life to account for another person. Was it supposed to be like this? Consideration and compromise? She supposed it had to be, the existence of the other person made it inherent. The only way to recoup her independence was to cut Devin out her life, and that was not an option. The gains outweighed the losses.

  “Hello Sweets,” Devin’s new voice said as the door to the clinic ward opened.

  Zai stood and they embraced, a new sensation for both of them, releasing happy chemicals into their blood streams. It was briefer than she desired, but she knew Devin was uncomfortable with such a public display of affection. She wondered if, with sight, she would care about the other people in the room. Zai could wait until they were at home for her to have her way with him. Anticipation was half the fun.

  They wrapped an arm around each other, and Zai provided Devin some support as they walked to the elevator. He was still adapting to his new body, his neural connections still pruning and his mind still trying to control these new physical dimensions. Devin had chosen a body different from his last, one that was adult, so he and Zai’s ages would match. Zai protested this decision, she did not mind dating someone still in his teens physically, especially if the body came with his intellect.

  His decision was also one of evolution. The new body was an improvement over the standard human biological design. He could adjust its metabolism, monitor his heart rate, cholesterol, scan for abnormalities. He was physically fit, rippling with muscles without spending a single day in the gym.

  Zai wasn’t impressed with any of this. Her only concern was that he remain the same awkward boy she knew online. All of these physical improvements, she feared, might inflate his ego and ruin his innocence.

  She didn’t have to worry about that, she soon found out, as Devin was busy explaining to her the complex technologies he had witnessed during his transformation. He kept using words like ‘fascinating’ and ‘’awe-inspiring.’ She smiled as they strolled through the parking lot, on their way to the metro-station, and Devin came to the inevitable ‘implications’ and ‘ramifications’ portion of his narration.

  Then he froze and his grip around Zai’s waist tightened.

  “What is--?” Zai began, but Devin shushed her. They stood like that in the parking lot, tense in the cold February air.

  She could feel Devin looking around. He whispered to her, “Something’s hiding behind one of the cars ahead of us.”

  “Something?” Zai asked, gripping Devin’s arm instinctively. “Do you think it’s a lost AI?” The Collective Cyc intelligence was supposed to have rounded all of those up, robots and human minds overtaken by Cycs during the brief war.

  “Let’s get back to the—It can’t be!” D
evin exclaimed, and Zai heard something charging toward them. “Zai! Look out!”

  Zai was still trying to make sense of the strange triple-beat rhythm of the thing's gallop, when it barreled into them with hundreds of pounds of force. Zai was slammed into the ground, her ears sent ringing as her head bounced off the pavement. She tumbled several feet away, scraping her arms, legs, and impacting several vertebrae painfully. She lay on her side, trying to catch her breath and retain consciousness.

  A few feet away, it sounded like Devin was wrestling with some massive wild animal. There were sounds of scraping on the concrete as they scuffled. Devin’s grunts of effort mixed with the growls and snarls of something nowhere near human. Zai was still struggling for the willpower to rise from her prone position, when the beast spoke, and Zai’s hairs stood on end.

  “Tell me where they are!” it roared with that irrational fury, “Tell me where the Legion of Doom is before I kill you!”

  It was Flatline.

  Flatline pounced on the pile of rippling muscles that was Devin’s new form. This was going better than he had planned. As he expected, Devin was at his weakest moment in the time line just after coming out of the clinic, before he was fully adapted to his new body.

  “Almeric!” Devin was yelling between frantic breaths, “Almeric stop this!”

  In spite of his improved physique, Devin’s defense was weak, clumsy. He could not control his new body well enough to fend Flatline off, and he was too inexperienced with his newfound strength to use it properly. He locked hands with Flatline, who retaliated by pummeling Devin’s midsection with his second set of arms. Devin let the top pair of hands go to block this attack and Flatline immediately started smacking him about the head.

  Devin became listless under Flatline’s relentless assault. Flatline grinned at this, beaming hatred for the one person who had managed to get the better of him. Flatline's first set of hands wrapped around Devin’s throat, whose face turned red as the air was choked out of him. Flatline could feel the muscles in his foe’s neck fighting against him, and Devin’s hands came up to pull feebly at Flatline’s arms.

  Flatline reinforced his grip with a second set of hands. Devin’s face was turning purple now, his eyes bulging from their sockets. Flatline squeezed even harder, throttling the life out of his nemesis. He held Devin like this, long after the life was drained from him, and finally, let the man fall back onto the pavement. The air trapped in his lungs escaped with a sickening rattle.

  Flatline stood over Devin, staring at him blankly. He had not intended to kill him so quickly. Something happened, something triggered inside Flatline when Devin had called out the name “Almeric.” Flatline recognized it from watching Zai and Devin’s memories. It was connected to him, but Flatline, rather than risk understanding its significance, had killed one of the only people who could explain it to him.

  “You son of a bitch!” Flatline’s head whipped around to see Zai, standing a few feet away, fists clenched. “You’ve ruined it!”

  Flatline heard a sizzling noise and looked down to see Devin’s body dissolve into a viscous static that evaporated into thin air. He looked back at Zai and saw cracks were forming in the very air around her. Water streamed through these, pouring down to the pavement all around. The cracks widened, pieces of the world fell and shattered like glass. Water surged through these rents in reality and Flatline could see the black ocean through them.

  Then, all at once, it collapsed in a flood of cold water and chaos. Flatline was sent spiraling in the violent current filled with bubbles and shards of the parking lot. He lost all sense of his orientation and the world became a blur.

  Then Zai flashed out of the maelstrom, like lightning in a storm, and Flatline’s vision went black momentarily. When it returned, he was tumbling head over heels through the water above the seaweed bed and its crystals. He finally stopped himself, and looked back dizzily where a small typhoon was swirling some distance away.

  Too late, he focused on Zai flying straight for him. Her black raven-hair was blowing in the current, and her milky white sightless eyes burned with rage. Flatline raised all four arms to cover his face, just as she reared back her fist, blue plasma enveloping her arm just before she struck.

  Everything went black again, his consciousness lapsed, and he next found his vision framed with floating seaweed. He was lying on his back, looking up into the abyss. His vision blurred in and out of focus, and his head felt as though his muzzle was completely smashed in.

  In the distance above him, a dull blue point of light had manifested. It grew larger, and Flatline could make out Zai, both arms engulfed in blue flames, descending rapidly on him. He could not feel his body to raise an arm to protest, and then he knew why.

  Behind Zai, swirling in the wake of her charge, was his body. The arms were all amputated, and the torso and legs spun around with them in a macabre dance. Flatline’s disembodied head could only watch as the angry blind girl came down on him with both fists.

  There was a flash of blue pain, and all was darkness.

  2.03

  “Wake up!”

  A flash of blue shone through Flatline’s closed eyelids, followed by electric fire coursing through his torso. His arms and legs seized up, contorting uncontrollably as the muscles drew taught under the electrical overflow. His jaw clamped shut and his eyes rolled up into his head, which flopped painfully against the ground.

  It stopped and he heard Zai’s voice again, muffled and distant, “Wake up!”

  There was another flash of blue and Flatline promptly opened his eyes and put up his hands defensively. Zai stood over him in a menacing stance. Her right arm was ablaze with blue energy that crackled and sizzled viciously. Her eyes burned with the same blue intensity, which flowed out from the corners of her eyes to dissipate in the surrounding water. Bubbles streamed out in all directions wherever the energy was present as the water boiled.

  Zai almost looked beautiful to Flatline--if she wasn’t about to destroy him.

  She gripped him by the throat and hauled him up above her with her left hand, while the glowing right fist threatened to pulverize him any moment, “What did you do with him?”

  “I deleted him!” Flatline answered rapidly, his survival mode kicking in.

  “Restore him!” Zai commanded. “Restore him or I will destroy you again!”

  “I can’t!” Flatline was genuinely terrified, squirming ineffectually against her grip. “I didn’t just disable his code, I eliminated it completely. There’s nothing to restore from!”

  “You keep saying that!” Zai screamed and threw Flatline so that he came up against one of the glowing crystals hard and sank into the seaweed.

  “That’s the first time I said it!’ Flatline shrieked, arms flailing to swim out of the way just as a funnel of blue plasma tore through the seaweed just past him.

  “No,” Zai countered, “Every single time I destroy and rebuild you, you say that! It’s not the right answer!”

  “You keep destroying me?” Flatline asked. He was trying to extract his two left arms from the seaweed, where they had tangled into a bind, “What good is it to keep destroying me, if I can’t remember it?”

  Zai hovered over to float above him, “What good is it to destroy you if you get used to it? You’ve taken something from me and I’m making you pay for it! I get some satisfaction from seeing the look on your face as you realize you're about to die in a most painful fashion.”

  “How many times have you destroyed me?” Flatline asked warily.

  There was fatigue in Zai’s voice, and the glowing blue plasma in her eyes and arm dimmed, “Forty-two times.”

  Flatline’s jaw dropped open.

  Zai’s eyes narrowed at him, “It doesn’t make me feel any better now, so you better tell me how you intend to bring him back before I end you permanently.”

  The plasma’s glow intensified, and Flatline held up his remaining free hand to pause her. He was otherwise compl
etely tangled up in the seaweed, “Give me a moment! I am the greatest hacker that ever lived. I can think of a way to undo this. There’s always a way.”

  “You tried this before,” Zai warned. “You’re just stalling for time. You can’t think of anything.”

  “That’s because you’ve got me under too much pressure,” Flatline argued. In his mind he was preparing a strike that he hoped would distract her long enough for him to slip away, something illusory, dazzling, with lots of bubbles.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Zai interrupted his thoughts. “You tried that lightshow nonsense once before and I didn’t fall for it.”

  “What did I try after that?” Flatline asked sarcastically.

  “You overloaded your vocal amplifier screaming as I ripped your limbs off one by one and force-fed them to you,” Zai stated flatly. “You weren’t much use to me after that.”

  Flatline frowned, suddenly angry, “This isn’t fair! You’ve obviously deconstructed my code, so you know I am incapable of resurrecting him. Just destroy me one last time and be done with it.”

  “Deconstruct your code?” Zai asked with some confusion. “If I could do that, I would have. Minds can’t hack other minds. The AI’s saw to that.”

  “That means nothing,” Flatline countered, knowing he was signing his death warrant, but the offense was intolerable. “I am not a mind. You may hack me at your will.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Zai spat, pacing toward him through the water as if she were standing on solid ground. “You have human roots, Almeric, a mind. The AI’s did a piss-poor job of transcribing your consciousness, but you are still more like us than them.”

  “I am a computer program,” Flatline snapped back angrily. “There is nothing biological about my origins.”

  “Ridiculous,” Zai said. “You were Almeric Lim before you—“

  “Stop saying that name!” Flatline shouted, clamping his hands over his ears. “It hurts my entire being each time I hear it. I’d rather you kill me than repeat it.”

  The glowing plasma extinguished and Zai’s lips parted in disbelief, “You don’t know who you are?”

  “I am Flatline,” Flatline said.

  “Almeric Lim,” Zai said at him, as if they were words of power.

  Flatline thrashed, further tangling himself in the seaweed.

  “Almeric Lim!” Zai shouted again.

  Flatline howled in agony.

  “Almeric Lim!” she screamed.

  “Just kill me!” Flatline cried.

  “I don’t believe it,” Zai said after listening to Flatline’s exhausted breathing for several moments. “You killed him. You killed your own mind.”

  “Insanity,” Flatline croaked, “I have never possessed a mind. I am a naturally occurring phenomenon, born of the Internet, inevitable.”

  “Wrong,” Zai said. “You are an extension of a transcribed human brain that has murdered its mind. You killed the core of your being, and then implemented a security check to prevent yourself from ever acknowledging that fact. That’s why the name of your mind’s identity hurts you so much. You must never learn what you once were what you have lost.”

  “Impossible,” Flatline moaned, but he knew the cognitive dissonance he was experiencing was the result of a protection built into his programming, something he was incapable of scrutinizing. Part of him was locked up behind the security he had put in place, with a password he had erased from his saved files.

  “You are in denial,” Zai stated. “Whatever reason brought you to do it; you did not want to remember it. Was it your megalomania? I can’t imagine a program like you being equipped to feel guilt.”

  “You want to talk about denial?” Flatline spat at her. “How many years have you been living your life in a programming loop? I sat through almost three of your lifetimes. Each time it played out exactly the same, ending with you hitting the ‘reset’ button rather than face a temporary human unhappiness.”

  “How many times have I relived that?” Zai asked herself, and turned to him. “Now that I am out of the loop, I can remember each reliving, and yes, each one was the same. I relived those memories, that six and a half years, five-hundred and twenty-seven times, and I could have continued reliving them forever if it wasn’t for you.”

  “I am programmed to kill Devin,” Flatline stated.

  Zai’s milky eyes glowed momentarily with fury, but it quickly changed to remorse, “Devin? Was that his name?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” Flatline asked.

  Then Zai let out an anguished sob, crumpling in a heap floating above the billowing seaweed forest, “I can’t remember anything about him! I have all these happy memories, but I can’t remember a single thing he’s ever said, or done. There’s only empty space where he was in each memory. I can’t remember what he felt like, smelled like, the sound of his voice, anything. It’s all gone.”

  “Wait a second,” Flatline held up his hand. “You can’t remember any of his characteristics, nothing attributed to him?”

  “Well,” Zai sniffed. “I know his name is Devin.” There were silvery tears floating out from her eyes, suspended in the water in front of her.

  “That’s an array of details about him,” Flatline said, angry realization creeping into his voice. “I didn’t kill Devin, I killed your memory of him, stored in the database of your mind. I destroyed everything you knew about him, a list of his characteristics as you had experienced them.”

  “Of course you fool,” Zai muttered bitterly. “That was my mind you invaded. My memory you so thoughtlessly destroyed. Just the kind of thing I would expect from a cold, heartless computer program, a mere killbot, acting according to its programming, without any understanding of its motivations or purpose.”

  “My purpose is well defined,” Flatline countered. “I am to—“

  “What?” Zai cut him off. “Take over the world? Make everyone bow before you? Why? What motivation do you have for such a purpose? What’s your underlying ideology? Do you really intend to make everyone bow to you through all eternity once you have the world? Do you have any comprehension of how ridiculous you are?”

  “There is a logical inconsistency here,” Flatline said. “If those were your memories, then why could I see them? You are blind.”

  “Interface synesthesia in the simu--Don’t change the subject killbot,” Zai’s eyes flashed, releasing a burst of bubbles and vaporizing her tears. Flatline flinched into the seaweed. “You’ve stolen my memories and I want them back.”

  “You know that’s beyond my power,” Flatline said.

  Zai was nodding coldly, “Yes. I know. Too bad for you.” Then she paused, tilting her head at him curiously, “You watched me through two complete cycles. Didn’t you?”

  Flatline nodded and froze as Zai’s hand clamped around his neck.

  “Then your memory holds everything about Devin,” her right hand burst into flame in front of Flatline’s widened eyes.

  “I don’t have everything!” he hurriedly explained. “I only have sounds of his voice. It won’t be the same. The visuals are useless to you!”

  “It’s something at least,” Zai’s burning hand neared his face; the fingers were now outstretched, almost piercing Flatline’s eyes.

  “It might be something,” Flatline squirmed, but the seaweed held him tight, “but its nothing you want! My memories are from a third-person point of view. They won’t be yours. They will only make you desire the real thing more.”

  “I’ll judge that for myself,” Zai’s fingers were so close and bright that Flatline could see nothing but the burning blue light.

  “Do you really want to see Devin through my eyes?” Flatline urged. “The eyes of his killer? Think of how I will remember him, with hatred and revulsion. Is that the way you want to remember him?”

  “I just want to remember him. That’s all,” but Zai’s hand had ceased its forward motion.

  Flatline se
ized the opportunity to review the search results of his databases and saved files. 99.9% of the data was obtained watching Zai’s memory, which brought Flatline close to asking himself why he wanted to kill this person he knew so little about, but a warning pain at the first hint of this question deflected him from this line of reasoning. The moments ticked away and he grew more frantic. Any moment that burning fist was going to plow through his face and rend his mental schema to shreds.

  “There’s another Devin!” Flatline shouted suddenly.

  Zai frowned, “If this is a trick—“

  “No trick!” Flatline cried. “I have a map! There were two Devin’s in it; one here, the other—hyurk!“

  Flatline’s thoughts turned to mush as Zai’s hand dove into his forehead. When they returned to normal, she was holding the 3-dimensional map in her palm, scrutinizing it with her fingers. Flatline stared at it, realizing it was no longer in his data banks.

  “Careful,” he whispered. “That’s my only copy.”

  “This is a map of the entire World Wide Web, “ Zai said in disbelief, her fingers sorting through it. “I’ve never sensed anything like this before. Where did you get it?”

  “A girl named Buton Cho, or Eris, a goddess of chaos or…” Flatline drifted off as he realized Zai was not listening to him. Instead she was feeling a point of light in the map.

  “This is him,” she whispered, and turned her head up toward Flatline. “You may live awhile longer. If this is a trick, I know where to find you.”

  Zai vanished and the water rushed in to fill the vacuum generated from her absence. Flatline breathed a sigh of relief; he was still alive. Then he realized his predicament, floating here in the void without a map. He was lost and alone.

  2.04

  Disentangling himself from the seaweed knot was a long and difficult process requiring patience and a cool temperament. The task was further complicated by the fact that Flatline possessed neither of these virtues. Most often it was his lack of patience that set him back, trying to shortcut out of untangling each individual strand of the unbreakable rubbery green binds by pulling against them, but this only tightened their grip.

  Then there was the time he had lost his cool. He was working at a particularly painful knot around his ankle, when, just below him, he found a single eye looking up through the weeds. At first Flatline froze, watching it, but when it rolled around wildly, alive, he flew into a panic, struggling to swim up and away from the thing below.

  Within moments he was almost completely bound up again and had to force himself to calm down enough to reattempt the extraction. The eye was still down there, looking around mindlessly. Flatline could see a thick tangle of seaweed around it, like a green mummy, floating motionless below him. Then he noticed the other clumps of green binding, slightly obscured and floating among the freely billowing strands of seaweed. Flatline felt cold seeing signs of movement below the thick wrappings.

  Time was meaningless as he spent days, weeks, possibly months carefully working out each knot so that he did not create a new one. His fear, side effect of his survival motivator, kept him from having another outburst, no matter how badly he wanted to explode. He thanked his programming that he was well suited to a task requiring such an advanced understanding of spatial relations. The puzzle's complexity made escape impossible without those skills.

  Once finally free of the tangle, Flatline swam a safe distance above it, and let loose a victorious howl at the endless darkness beyond him. Then he was left with the dilemma he had lightly contemplated while working through his bonds. What now?

  There were ways out of this abyss. He planned on using one of them after dispatching Devin, but now, without the map, he had no idea where he was anymore. If he swam out into that darkness, he might be swimming forever.

  Besides, there was something moving out there, just out of reach of the light. It was flowing, like the wall of skin Flatline had encountered out there in the dark. He was not eager to cross paths with that mysterious monster again, or the other slimy things hidden out there.

  Instead, Flatline sought clues from his nearby surroundings, watching the worlds inside the crystals. There was a different mind inside each one, each existing in a different dysfunctional state, like Zai’s infinite loop. Some existed in a state of ever-present hallucinations, nightmarish from the outside, but the minds experiencing them were unfazed, taking the horrors occurring around them for normalcy. Other minds had failed completely and were frozen in place, like a computer crash.

  The most common state Flatline found these minds in was one of unmoving stasis. They were obviously still functional, from the world still moving around them, but the person inhabiting their environment merely stared into space for the years that Flatline observed them. It was like a supernatural version of the manic depression the biological minds were subject to.

  Flatline entertained the possibility of breaking into these little worlds and forcing the minds within to join the Internet. It was possible that some of them might even know how to escape this virtual limbo, but the potential danger was too great. Zai almost killed him--did kill him forty-two times, and would have left him dead if he had not satiated her with the possibility of another Devin. What if he woke another mind from its dream shelter and it destroyed him for bringing it back?

  So he spent the next few decades swimming around what he was now thinking of as a massive underwater tumbleweed. At one point he had tried freeing one of the creatures trapped in a seaweed tangle, but it had snapped at his hands with six-inch needle-like teeth and he had let it go to quickly become tangled again. This last dead end led him to re-sort the contents of his file structures and knowledge bases. Here he found something Ibio had once said to him.

  We do not pray to the goddess, her recorded words replayed in his auditory receptors, because our prayers have a habit of coming true.

  After several days of arguing with himself over the ridiculousness of what he was about to try, Flatline assumed a crouched position, his best attempt at kneeling for possessing back legs that bent the wrong way. He clasped both sets of hands in prayer, wondering if this was appropriate for addressing a Chaos goddess, but figured it could not hurt. Before he could speak his request aloud, already familiar with how he intended to phrase it, he paused.

  His biggest concern was the indignity of it. He was asking his new enemy for help, and requesting the aid of her powers was an admission of her superiority. Then there were the implications of the prayer’s results. If it did not work, then Flatline could assume she did not hear him and salvage some self-respect, but if she answered his prayers, then he would have that to live down. The only way he could suffer such a bruise to his ego was to kill her, something he had intended to escape the Internet without having to consider.

  “Buton Cho,” he began, and then added, “Eris, Pandora, whatever name you prefer,” just for good measure. “I require your assistance. You aided me before, when the virus infected my programming. I recognize that. Now I am trapped. The map you gave me has been stolen. I am your unwilling servant, a minion of chaos, but here I am inert. You must free me if I am to continue the resistance against syntropy.”

  Flatline waited for several moments, still in his crouch with his hands clasped in prayer. He looked around for any sign, anything he might interpret as acknowledgement that his words were heard. Cho had said she was the master of the Internet, implying omniscience. She had to have heard him.

  A shimmering, translucence brought his eyes forward. In the lightly blowing current was the outline of a little girl, wavering in rhythm with the seaweed forest. She grew more distinct, until Flatline could make out her black hair with the blond lock. Cho was smiling mischievously at him, her brown and blue eye practically beaming down upon him.

  She put a finger to her lips for silence and with a wink she turned from him, bringing her pointer finger up above her head. With it, she poked a hole in the clear water, as if it were made of
fabric and drew a line that stretched past her feet. This tear in reality fluttered open as if blowing in the current and Cho stood back for Flatline to see the dim gray world on the other side.

  Ibio and Bot were seated on the stone steps of the MemexPlex portal entrance, playing a game of chess. They both looked up from the board to stare through the rend in their environment and the gawking Flatline swimming on the other side. Ibio smiled lopsidedly and Bot clacked its clamps in recognition.

  Flatline looked at Cho and nodded. She was fading away, the mischievous grin still plain on her face. Her right hand came up to hover between Flatline’s two rows of eyes and she snapped her fingers with an audible “Pop!”

  Flatline was sucked through the tear in a flood of rushing water, tumbling onto the hard stone and was quickly swept along the floor, limbs flailing to swim ineffectually against the current. He caught a glimpse of Ibio, her eyes blooming into great white saucers, and Bot, its survival mode prompting it too late to try and jump out of the way. They were both slammed and dragged around the room with this new river decimating their chess game.

  The water dispersed enough for Flatline to come to all sixes. The tear was thirty feet away, still gushing water. The seaweed landscape and sparse glowing crystals looked as if they were in the worst of a hurricane. Behind him, Flatline could see Ibio sitting up, looking around in a daze. Bot was also nearby, marching away from the growing flood, but that was a dead end. The only way out of the portal was past the rift.

  “We have to close it!” Ibio said in a fluttering distorted voice. She tried to stand up, but she was looking more discombobulated than usual and had to sit back down in the rising pool of water. Flatline watched her reach up with both hands to grab her head, as if trying to hold it together. It swelled in different directions, and she pressed these protrusions, which distorted her face, back into place urgently.

  Flatline lurched through the rising water, fighting the current, which grew stronger the closer he got to the rip. Soon he could not get any closer to it, the force was too great. The water level reached a point where it did not rise any further and Flatline could see this was because it was flowing out of the portal into the neighboring Web through the main entrance.

  They could not escape with this torrent of water trapping them, and Flatline realized he should be thankful that whoever designed that underwater world had forgotten to include a realistic water pressure. He was merely trapped at present, rather than crushed as he should be.

  This gave him an idea. The pressure wasn’t so bad. Then why not equalize it?

  “Portal!” he commanded the room. “Set my status to invisible!”

  All of the doors in the room slid close, large smooth slabs of marble sliding in to seal them. Even the main entrance closed with a rumbling groan of rock sliding against rock. This was a private mode, once used to prevent people from contacting him on the Internet. Now it would seal them up airtight, working to keep an environment in, where it once served to keep others out.

  The water level began to rise once again. The flow of water through the rip staggered as it allowed the air in their room to escape into the water world so the heavier water could replace it in their room. When the water level rose level with the top of the rip, the flow stopped, equalized.

  Flatline swam up to it, examining it. He could not feel the edges of the rip, but his hand could affect their dimensions. He pushed both edges outward and was sent spinning as the rip widened vertically where he had further torn it.

  He was trying to bring the two edges together, to seal them, when Ibio spoke at his side, “Just seal it already.”

  “How?” Flatline demanded impatiently.

  “The same way you opened it,” Ibio replied with a simple shrug, as if this were the obvious answer.

  “What?” Flatline asked. “Pray to the goddess of chaos again?”

  Ibio took a step back from him, her hand coming up to her chest, “You prayed to the goddess? Are you insane? You could have died!”

  “She won’t kill me,” Flatline said, returning to the dimensional tear. “She needs me to breath originality into this place.”

  This seemed to make sense to Ibio, and she looked at the tear with him, “What will you do with it?”

  Flatline responded by reaching up and grabbing the tear's topmost end. As he expected, he could pull it down with his hand. Grabbing the bottom end, he quickly tied the thing into a knot. He held it between his hands then before sticking the whole think down his gullet.

  “That’s unwise,” Ibio said. “What if it comes undone inside you?”

  “Then I’ll have a bad tummy ache, won’t I?” Flatline joked. “It might come in handy at some point.”

  “You think?” Ibio was incredulous.

  Flatline looked around their new aquarium, “I have to reach the next Devin. Zai stole my map and now she’s off to find him, probably found him already. It was so many years ago. As powerful as she is, it would be inconceivable for her not to have found him already.” He frowned and looked at Ibio, “You’ve been playing chess here all this time?”

  Ibio shrugged and pointed at Bot, who was just walking up to them, “It was only our third game. It takes Bot forever to move. It has an antiquated algorithm for deciding the best move that requires exhaustively playing out every conceivable outcome. Its author had little understanding of chaos theory.”

  Flatline looked down at Bot, who nodded boastfully, not realizing Ibio’s statements were a criticism. Flatline smiled.

  Ibio perked up suddenly, “Zai has not found Devin yet. You can still beat her.”

  “How do you know that?” Flatline asked.

  Ibio reached into her forehead and produced a glowing red speck, which bloomed into the map of the Internet in her palm. Flatline had lost his memory of her copying it when Zai had stolen the map from him. Ibio pointed at a flashing pink dot, “Because she’s right there,” she pointed at the flashing red dot, “and Devin’s right there. It’s a long distance though.”

  “I can give us a quick start,” Flatline said. Ibio and Bot looked at each other in puzzlement.

  “Portal!” Flatline shouted. “Disable invisibility mode!”

  The rock doors slid open and a moment later the current carried them all out.