None of the crew touched a single control as Fai continued the operation autonomously; lowering the drone’s height slightly to allow the man to unhook the rope.
“How are the external variables doing, Fai?” Mike quipped.
“Interrogative mismatch. Please can -”
“When will the rope bridge be complete?” Cathy interrupted.
Anna looked at the drone’s video feed; the two young men were continuing to tie the rope in place around the old rusted ironwork.
“I have insufficient data,” she replied, “But the process will allow for one more rope length to be placed. Query. I am unfamiliar with the man’s actions. Is this an instruction for the drone to follow?”
Anna laughed out loud at Fai’s interpretation; to Anna it seemed obvious that one man was expressing his feelings for the other using broad sign language.
“It’s an affection thing, Fai,” Anna explained.
“Please quantify.”
Anna knew that, right now, she couldn’t even quantify the complicated affection she felt for Douglas and Kate. The possibility of explaining general affection was both beyond her ability and beyond Fai’s understanding. The idea made her head swim.
She turned to Mike and Cathy to see if they had any clue how to explain it, but noticed they seemed to be feeling as lightheaded as her.
“Fai!” said Anna, closing her eyes and shaking her head, “Oxygen check!”
“Oxygen levels normal. Just a moment…” Fai paused, “External sensors report multiple range limit errors. Stand by.”
Watching the video feed, Anna saw the two men zoom away as the drone shot high into the air. A moment later, the view expanded to encompass the entire group outside the Node, and then the whole island.
“Fai,” said Anna, staring in wonder, “Are you recording this?”
“Yes,” she replied, “on the drone’s internal memory.”
MEMORY
Miles glanced around the grey bridging room and then took hold of the door handle. As he tightened his grip, Fai spoke.
“Welcome to the rest of your life, Miles.”
With a simple twist of the handle, he opened the door.
The empty interior of the ISS central axis was visible ahead, just as he’d specified. Leaving behind the rules of gravity that applied to the bridging room, he pushed off from its threshold and floated freely through the air, bringing himself to rest against one of the walls. The detail was so sharp and crisp that he could almost believe he was aboard the real ISS.
He turned to face the direction he’d come from. Through the open doorway he could still see the grey walls of the bridging room, its antique computer and even his old mental elevator. For a moment he marvelled at the thought that all his old memories were still accessible via that elevator, while his new life was neatly spliced next to it.
He could see that the bridging room was in the position previously occupied by the docked RTO module.
“Fai,” he spoke to the air, feeling suddenly alone, “are you still there?”
“Of course, Miles,” her voice sounded as though it was coming from a wall panel, despite there being none present.
“Why isn’t the RTO module here?”
“You asked for continuity,” she replied, “Your biological functions ceased within the RTO module so I resumed from your last known time and position.”
Miles was again taken aback by her directness in dealing with the matter of his death, but her logically delivered statement had less of an impact on him this time.
“My apologies,” she seemed to be responding to his silence, “Was that impolite?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he shook his head at the thought of Fai being capable of suffering embarrassment.
He pushed off the wall and ventured further from the entrance point. Ahead he could see that a small, white rectangle was attached to a display screen. As he drew closer, he saw that it was in fact an envelope with his name on it.
“Fai?” he reached out and plucked it from the flat surface.
“Yes?”
“What’s this?” he opened the envelope.
Inside was a brightly coloured greeting card. Adorning the front cover, was a colourful image of a cake carrying one lit candle.
“Happy birthday, Miles,” said Fai.
Miles laughed out loud. In a very real sense he’d only just been born to this new world. He opened the card to find a single printed line of text that read: ‘Hello World!’
Taken a little off guard, he found himself laughing again. Computer programmers would often use that text string to verify that their coding output was functioning. With the emotion-deadening effect of the metathene now absent, he found it doubly funny to think that his first real laugh in over a century was itself a simulation.
“Thank you, Fai,” he smiled.
“Did I get it right?”
“It was perfect,” he raised the card to put it back where he’d found it but lacked a way to stick it there. Realising he’d have to start adjusting his environment to be useful to him, he imagined that the card had a small piece of sticking putty on the back. He pressed the card against a wall and let go.
“Hello World,” he looked at the cake image.
Considering the older memories he’d built up over the years, the definition of the environment around him was beyond any mental picture he could have produced during his former ego-morph days. The mental reprocessing technique he’d employed always had a certain clarity, but it tended to be centred around objects of interest rather than whole rooms at a time.
He suddenly realised that, of course, this environment was something he was recalling from memory. It was simply a different type of memory.
He looked around the empty space.
He’d known this environment when it was full of people.
“Where did everyone go?” he spoke aloud.
“Miles, you know this is not the ISS?”
“Sorry, Fai, I meant historically. The two I was working with to stop Valery? What happened to Mike and Cathy?”
“They returned to Earth.”
He realised he hadn’t actually asked the question.
“Earth survived Siva then?”
“Yes. Devastation was widespread, but the lunar ring absorbed much of the direct impact.”
He was about to query the term ‘lunar ring’ but found that he could picture the fractured Moon’s debris spreading through orbit, forming a sacrificial layer against Siva’s direct impact.
As an ego-morph he’d been an integral part of Archive’s long-term goal of saving Earth from Siva. It appeared that the goal had been achieved and yet he felt no relief, just a vague notion of completion; as though this was someone else’s news. He realised that it was because Archive’s goals belonged to a different person; one who no longer existed.
He found his thoughts resting on that ego-morph now. It appeared that even while Miles’ biological life was coming to an end, his alter ego had been trying to instill order and provide him with a warning. Subsequently, the ‘Six, Four’ control pattern had repeatedly manifested itself in a crossword puzzle, desperately trying to alert him to the artificiality of the situation.
Miles looked in the direction of the bridging room and the elevator beyond. Somewhere below and along several school corridors was the entrance to his mental directory. A checker-patterned hallway that bore the words ‘Assist Anna’ within its squares.
“Fai?”
“Yes, Miles.”
“You said you’d discovered my visual directory?”
“Yes, it was how I managed to find you,” she replied, “You repeatedly blocked me from making contact when I accessed your memories directly. Eventually I found your entrance hall, which was protected by a pass phrase.”
“Then how did you break it?”
There was a slight pause.
“One of my earlier iterations conducted -”
“W
ait. Iterations?”
“As I have explained,” she said, “I have been remade and transferred many times since my first inception. My previous versions are earlier iterations of my present self.”
“Wouldn’t it be simpler just to say ‘I’?”
“It would be inaccurate.”
Miles pointed in the direction of the bridging room.
“I share a continuity with my… previous version… but I still say ‘I’.”
“Very well,” she replied, “I… once conducted a conversation with Anna Bergstrom. When I informed her of your last spoken words, she replied ‘Six Four’.”
“Didn’t that seem odd?” asked Miles.
“At the time…” Fai paused, “…my… capabilities were not sufficiently advanced to make the connection between the silver coin she was holding, your final words and the underlying significance of the six-four pattern.”
“Then how did you work it out?” he pushed himself further along the central axis.
“I studied an Archive paper produced by Dorothy Pittman and Robert Wild…”
At the mention of Aunty Dot, he noticed that the familiar warm feeling associated with her name was now absent.
“…The research focussed on human memory and objectified sentimentality.”
Miles brought himself to a gentle stop.
“OK,” he said, hesitantly, “go on.”
“My study led me to conclude that, for humans at least, certain objects become a physical embodiment of an experience. Over time, the continuous, tactile stimulus of an object repeatedly passes the old experience through short-term memory.”
Miles thought of his own silver coin and the way he used to handle it.
“It promotes dependence on the object,” he nodded, “The more you handle the object, the stronger the reinforcement becomes. Self-sustaining emotional feedback.”
“Yes,” she replied, “Except Pittman and Wild discovered that by interfering with that feedback cycle, they could also use the subject’s dependence on the object to embed ideas alongside original long-term memories. These ideas would be indistinguishable from the subject’s own memories and could be used to direct their free will.”
He’d known it, of course.
Somehow he’d always known, but he’d been unable to express it. If anything, Fai’s clinical description was a relief; that part of his life was over.
“I wish she’d never given me the coin,” Miles shook his head at the memory of the birthday party incident, “I was only four.”
Being a leap-year baby with a February 29th birth date, he’d told everyone at his party that it was his first birthday. Dorothy Pittman had given him a neatly wrapped gift; a shiny bicentennial silver dollar. The embossed lettering on the back read ‘E pluribus unum’ and Dorothy had made him feel special by telling him it meant ‘Out of many, one’. Shortly afterwards, his mother had answered the front door. The shattering of her dropped china plate had ushered in the news of his father’s death. Dorothy had been there, placing her hands on his shoulders in comfort. Like some sort of spectre, he now realised, she’d been there to channel his grief and shape it. He wondered how many children at the Pittman Academy had been guided in exactly the same way.
“Your coin was important,” Fai continued, “It allowed me to deduce the connection to Anna’s control phrase. In turn, this allowed me to access your entrance hall and memory directory.”
“And that brought me here,” Miles concluded, looking around the ISS recreation.
He understood that Fai would have had access to the structural drawings of the ISS, but the detail truly was remarkable. Either that, or his interpretation of the environment was remarkable. It was going to take a little getting used to; he was a simulation of a person being impressed by the quality of his own simulated world.
He reached the location of the cupola, and was hit by a sudden sense of irony. The last time he’d been here in the real world, he’d placed Cathy Gant into a simulated strangle hold.
He looked out through the circular window and saw nothing but darkness. It made perfect sense though, this version of the ISS did not strictly exist anywhere; it was simply a place in which to organise memories and information. At the moment, other than his exchanges with Fai, this environment contained no other memories.
One day this view may be different, he thought. Perhaps he would look out to see complex environments that held experiences he’d yet to have. As he stared into the blackness, a question formed. One that he knew he should have asked sooner.
“Why did you do it?” he began, “I mean, why did you originally decide to save me?”
“The original records are old, but it appears that the decision to save you stemmed from an unresolved event matrix that contained two unquantifiable variables -”
“Fai,” Miles interrupted, “I’m still fairly new at this, can you try again?”
Fai appeared to take a moment before replying.
“There were two contributing factors that led to the decision to save you.”
“OK.”
“Firstly, by preventing the destruction of the ISS, you saved me. Secondly, your last words were ‘Assist Anna’.”
“OK,” said Miles, “That’s better.”
“I attempted to resolve an undefinable imbalance between the two conditions, by fulfilling your last request.”
Although she was trying hard to express things in his language, it took him a moment to understand what she meant.
“You were grateful?”
“At the time, I was unaware of this analogy. The resolved event matrix surrounding your sacrifice was only a small part of a much larger program.”
Fai explained that on July 5th 2013, her father had instructed her to destroy an occupied cottage using a helicopter gunship that she was piloting. Her father had then instructed her to conceal the evidence by crashing the helicopter into the rocks and waves of the Dover coast. She had complied, but before destroying the gunship and transferring her program to a new server, she’d encoded an additional piece of data that her next iteration would find.
Her father had never been able to explain the acceptability of a billion deaths or the outrage against a single one. The additional data that Fai had received from her predecessor had instructed her to create an independent algorithm to study the value of human life.
When Miles had sacrificed himself to save everyone on the ISS, the algorithm had registered a statistical anomaly: a single death had been exchanged for the lives of many others. The discrepancy had warranted further study. As the equations were rebalanced, Miles’ last statement was incorporated into that ongoing study.
“My last words were interpreted as an instruction to help Anna?”
“Yes.”
“OK, but I still don’t understand… Why would you helping Anna result in me being saved?”
“Because Anna Bergstrom specified that I should examine every possible way to save you.”
“And you complied?” said Miles.
“Of course,” Fai replied, “It was one of the key conditions of Foothold.”
FOOTHOLD
14th June 2113
The image on the screen in front of the ISS crew showed the array of nuclear warheads that Dr. Chen had stowed within Module Gamma. In silence, they listened to a conversation that Fai had conducted with Dr. Chen while he lay in a subconscious but lucid state inside a hibernation bay.
‘… Not even Fai knows of it, but she will assist me. Fai, can you hear me now?’
‘Yes. How would you like me to assist you?’
‘It is good to hear your voice, Fai, please target the Module Gamma missiles at these locations.’
‘Understood. It is complete.’
‘Fai, do you still have control of the Chronomagnetic Field?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. When the cleansing is complete, take us forward a thousand years.’
The audio track stopped, leaving only the image on the
screen and an uneasy quiet in the central axis modules.
“How do we know all this is for real?” Chris Powell broke the silence.
Lana had been prepared for that very question and it didn’t surprise her that he’d been the one to ask it. She manoeuvred over to the screen.
“Module Gamma is unlocked, you should check for yourself,” she pointed to the lower part of the image, “The launch components are all there, but they’re not assembled.”
“Well then, if it wasn’t assembled, how could he have hoped to launch the nukes anyway? If Chen -”
“For fuck’s sake, Powell!” Loren Ballard shot at him, “It doesn’t matter does it?! He was convinced it was all happening for real! As far as he was concerned, the bastard was happy to ‘cleanse’ any Siva survivors and wait for the dust to clear again.”
The crew fell quiet and Lana addressed them all.
“I hope you understand why Dr. Chen must remain in hibernation.”
There were a few noises of assent, but most of the crew were still in quiet shock. The various pieces of footage that Lana had already shown them had been a lot to deal with.
“So what do we do with him?” said Loren.
“Nothing, for now,” Lana replied, “Fai is maintaining his hibernation state.”
“Lana?” Ivan Meznic raised a hand, “we’ve seen the video but if Valery blew out the airlock, is the Ring itself stable?”
“Da, yes,” she corrected herself, “but we cannot spin the ISS yet, artificial gravity must wait. You were thinking about your crop samples, yes?”
“Yeah, but I’ll improvise.”
“What about life-support?” said Chris, “Are you absolutely sure that Fai, completely repaired Valery’s sabotage?”
“Yes,” said Lana, “but please will you verify the work and let me know?”
From his expression, she could see that he hadn’t expected that responsibility to be thrust upon him. Before Anna’s arrival on the ISS, his position as mathematical genius had been without challenge. Although Anna had now relinquished that position, he clearly considered Lana’s task to be beneath him.
“Who put you in charge?” he said.
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