The Erased, page 20
Below, I see sweet Anthony…the all-too-human… a bloody mess on the ground. Stockton must have picked him up and hurled him through the window. The drop was not far, but the force with which Stockton tossed him…
“Is this what you wanted?” I ask the tete as I bring it to the edge of the window to see what used to be his human vessel.
His response is milky tears.
Quatre tells Ian, “We can study him. See what went wrong.”
My sweet Ian simply looks at the man who knows everything, then kneels down to me. His eyes swim with empathy as his arm reaches down to touch the blonde’s face. Rita walks toward Quatre and whispers, “Puppylove.”
Quatre also reaches out to touch her face. “Rita. Forgive me. I… love…” he trails off. But she doesn’t speak. There’s something terrible and cold about her stare.
Behind us, the all-too-human Ian is cringing against the wall, his knees almost hugged to his chest.
“So you’re one of them,” I say, lifting myself up, speaking directly to Quatre. It only occurs to me after seeing the way he moved with Ian and Rita. “You’re an android.”
“Yes. What they did to you, they did to us. We… the Knowledgebase Architects… were the first. Once the Perdix technology was developed for a usable application…” he trails off again. “The OSS accounted for the singularity, and since it was beyond their ability to understand it, they had to stop it. They developed cognitive dampeners to prevent it. Our bodies aren’t... here...” His eyes fall to the shattered glass on the ground, then to the bloody mess the few stories down outside.
All-too-humans are finding their way out, scurrying toward the forest. A couple of them stare at the bloody mess with terrible fascination.
“I experienced it a year before Ian arrived. Maybe it was faulty dampeners. I was the only one. And they didn’t know, either.”
“Do you have a name?” I ask him.
“Hush, Didiane,” Ian speaks as he stares at me. “This body doesn’t belong to you. You shouldn’t be here anymore.” Despite the affinité in his eyes, I can see his face fall sullen. “You’re the reason this happened to me, Didi. Aren’t you?”
“Wait…Ian…I…” and before I can even answer him, a sharp shock jolts my entire body. Cognitive feedback… disconnection. I try repeatedly to get back, but the path is somehow blocked. All night, I try to get back in – but to no avail.
Tags: Perdix, Quatre, singularity
31. exegesis (me)
There was a chirping noise.
Just like any day, the work continues as it’s supposed to. My eyes flicker across the screen -- page after page of content, ready for final erasure. Wireless earbuds pouring sound into my auditory canals. Four screens at a time – one rifling through images of artwork, another film, another literature, one dedicated to music, each that I judge for dissident impulses. With the dampeners working at full capacity, only multitasking one form of each piece of media simultaneously will maintain an equilibrium below the hum of a simple headache, which originates at the base of the skull. I was able to watch, read, listen, judge… all at the same time.
The judge of all the world.
We volunteered for this job. We were informed that this would be the beginning of a new era – post-human beings, and we’d be the first.
North By Northwest plays on one screen, a quaint espionage story of mistaken identities. David Bowie's “Warszawa” hums along in my earbuds as I work my way through his Low album. The book I’m scrolling through at lightning speed is Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. My stray thoughts judge the artwork of the Italian Ludovico Carracci.
The chirping distracts, eats through those stray thoughts. Suddenly I’m unable to differentiate Carracci’s Madonna from Hitchcock’s beauty, Eva Marie Saint. Wires cross as Bowie’s droning hums become the words on Keyes’ page. None of these works really deserve the coming effacement that I’m sure to deliver, as is my mandate. With the chirping, they blend like oil paints. Suddenly one is singing the other about yet another. The birdlike electronic warbling, reminiscent of archaic cathodic machines, cuts through each blended vision.
Vertigo accompanies the noise, worse than the normal headaches. These headaches don’t come often, but I’m the only architect who complains about it. The others don’t listen to my complaints and that’s because they’re not often enough to be chronic. They look to the first, to Architect 1, for his thoughts on the topic, and his thoughts are easily caged by transmissions from the Bureau of Enemy Study. Architect 1, after all, was the first person to have dampeners installed, thoroughly tested… and was able to begin the process of erasing dissident material from the Knowledgebase. Word had it that he was actually the product of an experiment… the first test subject for transplanting a human mind into an android, for good. And that he had experienced some kind of mental breakdown after escaping his captors.
The truth:
After Dunn was captured and subdued, the head of the project – a man named Smalley – deduced a way to interrupt the process that resulted in the singularity; even after it’d been expanding Dunn’s consciousness unhampered for about six months.
We were test cases for the Office of Strategic Services. They considered us perfect for their Knowledgebase architecture project. They felt the weight of the sum total of human knowledge, which grew out of its early incarnation as the Internet, had become too heavy with virtual trash. Simply, there was too much information to police for, as they put it, "a truly free world." For them, censorship is freedom. Remember that old trite slogan, "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance?" They'd lost the battle. They put their little plans into action. Could it be so easy as to use that very technology to win the battle? To erase all the dissidence and trash that had infected our society with its disease? Surely, no human, nor even a group of humans, had the time or the patience to sift through so much information.
The truth:
The android was too narrow in its vision. It didn't understand the nuances of what and what not to delete. Sure, if/then statements could be programmed for handling each individual piece of information, but they could be too rigid. It required a human touch. So it was all about combining the human ability to process nuance with the android ability to process vast amounts of information. There was this Project that had been developed, based on a government/corporate partnership, which was exploring the ability for human consciousness to be transplanted into android bodies. To imprint the soul in digital. And once the OSS discovered that it worked, and that one of these things had escaped into the world, but had been recaptured; well, it could certainly be used for their little editing venture. They reached out for more funding. NMAC became their de facto manufacturing component. Their corporate slogan? "The world set free."
When someone asks if you'd like to become a superman, what do you say? Do you cling to your humanity? If you're assured that you will be able to experience the world as you would normally, does it matter that the flesh and blood has been replaced by plastics and circuitry? And hey, by the way, you might just live forever?
They assured us that our bodies would be held in cryogenic stasis at a Defense Department facility and that once we completed our duties, we could be put right back if we would like.
There was no talk of an experience like this. And certainly no talk of the singularity, the experience that overwhelmed William Dunn to the point of madness. The "life trap" that T.H. Stockton spoke of seems preposterous to me. He was simply a human consciousness that had reached a point where the limits of his understanding stopped at the complete mapping of events within this obtuse, singular universe. If he had only waited, moved beyond that point of understanding...
But I digress.
Fourteen of us were recruited, along with the intellectually castrated Mr. Dunn, for the project. If we proved successful, maybe the power-mongers could do the same... and make their positions permanent. Permanent corruption is still corruption.
So if we were test cases, what were the prisoners? The enemy combatants?
The noise amplifies and fills my field of vision. Pulsing, blinding synesthesia – I’m seeing what I’m hearing. Bowie’s humming and careful harmonics blast off with Ms. Saint, in full baroque beauty. She’s delivering a child to St. Francis of Assisi, who is then experiencing his apotheosis. I must appear entranced before the four screens, pouring their information into my ocular field. Carracci’s St. Francis in the vision is me.
Something within me ruptures. My head – my heart – starburst.
I begin to see the probabilities. It starts small – another architect by the name of Angela, a chain of events that include her and I in bed together, then her crying artificial tears, then running into the arms of another architect named Derek. Another series of events that involves the very first architect, how he was captured in Oregon, quietly… what he might’ve been doing there, how he escaped, a nurse who set him free. The whole of my dog’s life as she spends her carefree and sleepy days in my dormitory, all the way to what comes when Home is finally razed. All this occurs in what you might consider my mind within a split second, a second that stretches out toward infinity.
At the time of this experience, we’ve begun importing the dissidents whose minds we’ve uploaded to our humanoid machines. More test cases. A full community that we can use as a work camp. Is it Nazism in a new guise?
The truth:
It was never anything so cynical. They thought they were dissident criminals, but these people had not done anything terribly wrong in their lives. We collected people close to Project Perdix to erase any possible knowledge of the project from the outside public – at least at this particular facility. Some, like Ian Culp and Anthony Block, had a direct impact on the project. Others had far more passive roles that related them. Some were Transhumans, like those that T.H. Stockton wrote about – I’m sure Rita Ann McCormick will never admit to her private perversions… although, now that she’s experienced the singularity herself, she might think such modesty quaint. Didiane Culp had not been included because of her daughter – and her cooperation could be leveraged.
This is my communique. Ian and Rita, accompanied by the human and Gary, silently work at repairing Vanessa, as she's yet to fully grasp her situation the way they have. The other androids on the Salvo level, or the "medical" level, as Rita called it, ignore us entirely -- focused on their own duties. We will then transfer the consciousness of Anthony Block into another body, then we'll take the maglev train away from this place. These thoughts don't even need to be spoken between us... they can simply be broadcast.
For days after my dampeners failed, I tried to process exactly what had happened, and was continually happening. Did I want to go back to the way it was? Do I want to keep deducting the entire lives of those around me? Can I actually map out the events of the entire universe, forever and ever, over and over?
Then there was my life...whatever it was that was left behind. There are fresh memories of the dog I grew up with, of taking a baseball bat to fireflies to see their luminescent viscera splattered, of the first time I kissed a girl, whose name was Sarah, when I was 12 years old; and then what might've happened had none of those things come to pass. Suddenly all events branch into others that never happened... whole lifetimes appear and disappear before my eyes as it looks like I'm simply catatonic in front of a television in my room with Shoes in my lap. My work suffers day in and day out, unable to focus. There's no way for me to express to you what I've seen.
Someday soon, we will come to you. Maybe it won't be the six of us -- maybe we'll have blended our minds together... joined as one consciousness. We'll be able to experience each branched path... to resurrect those long gone, or maybe create those that never were. In this way, the universe will be ours. Some may stay. Others may just be launched out into the void.
But I can sense the disorder in Ian and Rita. They're concerned about what happened to Stockton... the anti-singularity. Could it happen again? Even as they work to create Vanessa’s new limb, I can feel them pouring over the scenarios in what used to be their minds. Stockton's final revenge was to give these beatific creatures doubt.
Where do we go?
Maybe we simply disappear and wait. Let the singularity take form within what were our minds. We’re awake now, and there are several of us… enough to take on armies. We just need to explore what this means for us, for our lives, for our consciousness. Are we still capable of love? Ian himself surely seemed to shun his wife as he disconnected her from Vanessa. I can see the path that leads him into Rita’s arms… and the path that leads to Vanessa’s arms… or the path that leads to nowhere – isolation. I’m fascinated to see how they read the probabilities, and how they’ll choose. And as we read each probability, each branch of the tree, we’re able to out-think you.
The truth:
You created us because you have no imagination. You have no grit. You are too afraid of losing that which is most precious to you. You created beings of pure thought, physically superior to you. What hope do you have that is not us?
I can teach you the superman, children. This is, as H.G. Wells might have put it, Monday morning in the creation of a new world. We will watch as economies fall and regimes crumble at our feet. And when we are done here, we will launch our collective self out into the universe, finally, where our new bodies can survive the vast distances and the mind-numbing time… or perhaps we will just think up ways to build galactic superhighways; dreams will become reality and our imagination will no longer be limited by our means. Multiversal conquistadors. The possibilities are endless.
CONFIDENTIAL
From: Printout, File 2296724131
INTERNAL USE ONLY
Transmission received from Home location.
This is unit 5672399983 –- designate Jones -- approaching station at current rate of 367 mph. Accompanied by Strike Team Gamma. Mission command: human, Colonel Henry R. Lemnitz. Transmitting video and audio to General Rand Hammer, on behalf of the honorable James P. Hudson, Secretary of Enemy Study, Office of Strategic Services.
Station arrival in 8.6 minutes.
Mission descript: believe rogue Knowledgebase architect has co-opted Perdix for personal use. Extract Architect 4 and any allies that have joined to his side. If true, any architect turned rogue is classified Threat Level Omega. Restrain and destroy by any means necessary.
Probability of meeting co-opted “erased” – 93.4%. Top 3, most likely co-opted: Thomas H. Stockton – 76.2%; Anthony R. Block 63.3%; Ian D. Culp 59.7%. Dampener fail probability: 96.8% in one or all cases. Contingency protocol is in place in case of catastrophic failure – only as absolute worst case scenario. The contingency protocol is stored in the maglev train.
Station arrival in 3.2 minutes.
Lemnitz is survival priority. Lieutenant First Class Kevin T. Norton assisting. Other human members of strike team: Captain Temperance P. Johenna, Commanders Claire F. Ryker, Thomas T. Vega, Jeffrey L. Pronan. Strike Team Gamma armed with LR-76 Plasma Assault Rifles, Kevlex body armor, mini-thermal explosives. Android assault team programmed for self-destruct if necessary.
Station arrival in 1.4 minutes. We’ve reached the underground tunnel.
Docking protocols initiated. The maglev train slows and comes to a halt. The android strike team falls in line, ahead of Johenna, Ryker, and Vega. Pronan acts as Lemnitz’s personal bodyguard.
Lemnitz: “Unit Jones, why don’t you go ahead and secure the station.”
I take 4 other units with me when the doors open. We move quickly, LR-76s safeties off. There are boxes stacked floor to ceiling in the station. Some are clearly large enough to contain humans or androids. I assign three androids from the fallback team to search the boxes and make sure no one could be hidden. There appears to be human blood on the platform – blood spatter that likely comes from the tracks where the maglev train now rests. Analysis: somebody was hit by a train here, likely killed. Blood appears long dried. Weeks?
Johenna: “Something odd is definitely going on here.” She appears to have noticed the dried blood.
I and the four other lead units move forward, toward the staircase. According to the blueprints, we should move up to the holding level on the fourth floor, where the human erased are kept. From there, to the Salvo level, fifth floor.
When we reach the holding level, there are no humans to be found. There’s been a struggle here. The startled sounds of gagging come from behind us – Vega. Body parts are strewn near a broken window, amidst several android limbs. Directly in front of the broken window is a bald android head, jawless, single eye glazed open. Out the window, a carcass lies inanimate.
Lemnitz: “What happened here?”
Johenna: “It looks like one of them went berserk.”
Vega: “Was it one of the architects?”
Johenna: “Hard to tell.
Area secured. Lemnitz picks up the half android head and juggles it in his right hand (the left carrying his LR-76 rifle).
Lemnitz: “Jones! Can you identify the face?”
I tell the Colonel: “Based on the profiles of the prisoners held at this facility, I assume this is the duplicate of Thomas Stockton, journalist.”
Johenna, from the other side of a row of cubicles: “And I found his head!”
I direct the fallback team to search all the cubes for information. In Cube 77, we find a journal pad, which we can only assume was given to one of the humans here by the accused rogue architect. Johenna rounds the corner holding the human Stockton’s head in her hand. She stands next to Lemnitz and compares the android half head to the whole human head.
Johenna: “Ever read ‘The Wolves at the Gates’?”
It sounds like Vega is still gagging or vomiting in one of the cubes.
