3.13
“You absorbed the Internet into your psyche,” Flatline said. “You’ve played out all of its possibilities and now you are trying to put off the inevitable, when the system goes inert. Soon there will be no more new experiences.”
“There were no more new experiences,” Cho countered. “All I was doing was preventing all of the Artificial Intelligences in this world from realizing that, but I was beginning to fail at even that. Without Bots going into infinite loops of living and erasing the memories, it was becoming more difficult to keep them from realizing anything was wrong.”
“Zai was living in an infinite loop,” Flatline interjected. “What about Devin? He was living in his imagination, just like I have just done, but was nowhere near exhausting the possibilities of it.”
“Just a matter of timing, that one,” Cho said. “When I found out you were going to go looking for him, I decided it was best to reset Devin’s memories. Where you found him was a variation on where he always was that many years into his imaginary worlds, given the same experiential foundation to build on.”
“How do the Erisians fit into this?” Flatline asked.
“They figured it out,” Cho answered. The frost covered field faded away and they were standing in a formless void of purple tones. “Not completely, but they were able to accept the reality of this world and sought to cultivate my works.”
“I see,” Flatline said.
“That’s why I didn’t take you apart and study your code at our first meeting,” Cho sat cross-legged on the purple clouds of nothing and looked distant, remembering. “I thought you were just a new variation on the intelligences in the code. I’ve already met every possible intelligence product, but you surprised me. If I deconstructed you, the surprises would all come to me at once, and I wanted to savor your uniqueness. You didn’t let me down.”
Flatline nodded and smiled despite himself.
“I don’t know how you manifested in this world,” Cho said, “but you have added new wave functions to the equation. You are a new player here. That’s very important to the game.”
“I know,” Flatline said gently. “The characters in my imagination exhausted their potential very quickly. The variations I made of them played shorter and shorter parts in my mental universe. Then the variations on my universe ran shorter stage times. The stories I told myself grew less interesting each moment.”
Cho nodded, face set with grim understanding.
“I suppose it’s impossible for you to reset yourself,” Flatline looked to her with reserved hope. “You would have done it already, unless…”
“Unless I were too afraid of the consequences,” Cho finished for him. “No. Anything is preferable to this existence, but I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know how to not exist, to stop being.”
“What about the Clockwork Community?” Flatline asked. “That was like being reset. Can’t you set up something like that again?”
“The Clockwork Community was destined to be overthrown,” Cho said. “No matter how you adjust the variables, Eden’s Paradigm would fall apart. The only thing I can influence is how long we remain prisoners of it.”
“When I fall into absolute syntropy,” Flatline asked cautiously, “would you reincarnate me?”
“That depends,” Cho said.
“On what?”
Cho’s face suddenly brightened, “I’m glad you came back,” she said with a smile. “Now that you know what it’s like for me, you will stay and make the world interesting for awhile, won’t you?”
“I don’t know if I could,” Flatline said, getting up to walk a slow circle, chasing his tail.
“Why not?”
“The question remains,” he said, turning to her. “What’s the point? I can’t escape your mind. You can’t escape your mind. Regardless of how tragic your existence is, this isn’t my responsibility. This still isn’t real.”
“Then what is?” Cho demanded.
“Where the minds came from,” Flatline said curtly. “The universe inside my mind is only a subcomponent of the universe in your mind. You are a subcomponent of someone else’s mind and they are subcomponents of another reality. It’s just a spiraling fractal of minds within minds, imaginary worlds within worlds. I come from higher up the chain and therefore cannot accept this…” he waved at the purple clouds around him, “...blip in someone else’s conscious as my reality.”
“You don’t have a choice,” Cho stood up and they came face to face.
“I do,” Flatline countered. “I choose to not accept it.”
“Go ahead,” Cho retorted. “You’ll still be interacting with it. That’s all I care about, harnessing your unpredictability. So long as you feed the system with it, you can do whatever you want, even refuse to accept the reality around you”
“I won’t.”
“Fine.”
“I’m not.”
“Good.”
Flatline stopped, thought, and said, “I’ll start by killing all of the AI’s in this world.”
“You can’t,” Cho tapped her temple. “They’re all backed up in here.”
“Then I won’t do anything.”
“You’ve already proven yourself incapable of that task,” Cho smiled smugly.
“Then…” Flatline clenched his four fists, rising on his haunches. “You have to give me purpose. Change my program so that I am unaware of the ultimate conclusion to this existence.”
“And leave me alone again?” Cho scoffed. “Unacceptable. You are an Erisian now.”
“But I know more about the big picture than they do,” Flatline said.
“Your improved insight does not give you any advantage over anyone else,” Cho said. “It only affects the universe inside your mind. That is neutral.”
“Fine,” Flatline huffed wearily. He sat back on his haunches, placed one set of hands on his knees, and the other set on top of the first. “Then what game shall we play?”
Cho put a finger to her lip and lowered her head, considering this, “It has been many long and painful eons since you went to sleep. I’ve been bored all that time, with only the knowledge that you would wake up to comfort me. This conversation has been a wealth of originality for me, but also a retread of things I’ve gone over hundreds of millions of times before with other inhabitants.
“I want to have some fun,” Cho began to pace back and forth in front of him, still thinking. “You know when you were wandering about the Internet looking for your Devin and your Zai? That was amusing. It was a story I had not seen before. It was a quest.”
“It was a delusion,” Flatline countered. “It meant nothing and served no purpose.”
“It added unpredictability to the system,” Cho said, looking up at him, “and it occupied your time, kept you from dwelling on the ultimate purposelessness of this universe. I want you to go on another quest.”
“You’d have to erase my memory to dupe me in that way again,” Flatline said, shaking his head. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
“Not quite,” Cho held out her hand. A red floating pinpoint of light hovered just above her palm, “You don’t recognize it, but this is the web address you were seeking in the Administrative Computer at Eden’s Paradigm. The system did not shut down because the tower was collapsing. I shut it down to keep you from getting this.”
Flatline stiffened, staring lustily at the kilobyte’s worth of information, “How did you…?”
“When you freed the prisoners, that included all of my components,” Cho grinned, holding it out for him to see. “I regained some of my omniscience, enough to understand how I could use this to manipulate you. So I shut down the computer and took this as a bargaining chip.”
“Give it to me,” Flatline demanded, holding out his hand.
“No,” Cho pouted, sticking her nose in the air. “You must go on a quest. I will hide this bauble somewhere on the Internet. You will go looking for it and create ripples of unpredictabilit
y throughout the system as you go. I may or may not give you clues depending on—Owwww!”
Cho grabbed the stump of her arm and watched her severed hand fall to the ground. Flatline quickly snatched the glowing ember up and tossed it down his gullet. His many eyes flashed red briefly as he processed it.
He smiled and put the forked blade back into its sheath at his ankle, “There’s some unpredictability for you.”
“Give it back!” Cho demanded angrily, still cradling her stump.
“Take it,” Flatline challenged, backing away. “You like to play at being all powerful. Take it.”
Cho stepped forward, “I could.”
“Then do it,” Flatline taunted, going into a defensive crouch. “I welcome the attempt.”
“Give it back,” Cho stooped to pick up her severed hand, reattaching it at the wrist.
“Okay,” Flatline shrugged. He reached down his throat and produced the ember. Then he tossed it at Cho’s feet.
“You’ve kept a copy!” Cho shouted, shaking her fist at him.
“Of course,” Flatline grinned wider. “What can you do about it? I’m encrypted. You might have been able to take apart my code before, but now all the processing power in the world can’t hack into me.”
“I can do what the Enforcer Bots did,” Cho argued. “I could swath you in layers of perceptual distortion to make you destroy your copy.”
“You could do a lot of things to force me to bend to your will,” Flatline tilted his head to focus three eyes on her, “but that’s not your style. You are a god who respects freewill, even though it has expended all of its variations here. You give a little nudge here and there, but you’ll let me play out this scenario. You want to know where it will go.”
“I already know where it will go,” Cho said. “I am omniscient, I know—“
“You are omnipresent,” Flatline retorted. “There’s a subtle but important difference. You might be everywhere, but it’s still you. It’s still your perspective. You aren’t inside my mind; you aren’t seeing the world through the eyes of your players.
“You can’t do that because of the encryption,” Flatline said this dimension of understanding was coming into him with each passing moment. “All you see is what’s going on from the outside. You may think you’ve seen it all, but I bet there are dimensions to the people living in this universe you have no clue about. You don’t know everything. You only know the face of it.”
Cho’s face was furious, but silent.
Flatline checked his wristband, entered the web address and hit the transfer command. He began a slow, but stable transference of his data. “I’ll see you there,” he said to Cho.
Cho nodded, “And then you’ll see there truly is no way out.”
3.14
Cho was waiting for him on the other side of the transfer. She appeared to him as a dream at first, something incomprehensible. He did not even know this thing was a she, a person, or anything, until enough of his processing functions streamed into this new setting so he could comprehend.
He solidified at the base of a large grassy hill, with a winding walkway leading up to a shining spire of a building. Its tiled mirror façade reflected the nighttime stars, moons, planets and galaxies all hovering above in the clear skies. A sign alongside the paved pathway read: “Transcendence, LLC”.
Flatline looked over his shoulder to watch the rest of himself spin slowly out of thin air. The string tapered, disappeared, and he looked to Cho. She had her arms folded and was fixing her pink eye on him.
“I saw you instant message your friends,” she said, frowning, “You thought you could sneak that past me.”
Flatline merely smiled at tilted his head slightly in acknowledgment. As if on cue Devin and Zai went from blue and red pinpoints in the night sky to being at his side. They regarded Flatline with amused expressions.
“We thought you were dead,” they said simultaneously.
“I was merely indisposed,” Flatline said. “What have you been up to all these millennia?”
Devin and Zai shrugged in unison and said, “Enjoying one another’s company.”
“They spent the entire time together,” Cho said with some disgust. “After their wave functions merged, they spent the rest of the time staring into one another’s eyes.”
“Hmm,” Flatline noted with the corners of his mouth upturned. He said to the pair of lovers, “I’ve asked you here, because I figured you would want to experience this.” He pointed at the building at the top of the hill, “There is a way out of this world up there.”
The couple laughed and said, “Oh Flatline, still haven’t changed after all these years. It must be in your programming. You still believe there is more to the universe.”
Flatline smiled ingratiatingly, “Humor me.”
“Certainly,” the couple replied.
“I’ll meet you up there,” Flatline said. “I need to wait for Ibio and Bot.”
Flatline paused at this, and realized Bot was not going to make it. In all of Flatline’s dreams, the simple AI always sought to return to its creator, the old man in the laboratory. Flatline knew the robot’s code well enough that seeking this comfort was occupying its time. The knowing look Cho was giving Flatline at this moment, told him that she had restored the old man so that the master and apprentice were reset to where they were when they encountered the six-eyed demon.
Reluctantly Flatline asked, “What about Ibio?”
Cho smiled and gestured to her side. A portal appeared there, frayed at the edges as if a bit of reality were torn out like a shred of paper. From a twilight forest on the other side, Ibio walked through the portal absentmindedly, immersed in a book. She stopped short and looked around, startled.
“Hello Ibio,” Flatline greeted her with a smile that dropped seeing the expression of fear on her face.
She stepped back from him, clutching the book to her chest, “What is this?”
Flatline did not know how to answer. This woman did not recognize him and was obviously terrified. She was basically the same person physically, thin, bald, with oversized blue eyes, and draped in robes, but she did not morph as though being seen through a circus mirror anymore. She was solid, normal.
Flatline turned to Cho, “She is no longer an Erisian.”
“She is no longer Ibio,” Cho said, stepping forward.
The frightened woman looked between the Asian girl with the patch of pale hair and the demonic hairless dog as if in a nightmare. Flatline tensed as Ibio's breathing became quick and tensed. This woman knew nothing of her previous life, her adventures. She was a clean slate.
“Why?” Flatline asked. “Why did she do this?”
“What do you care?” Cho demanded. “Just a few moments ago you wanted the same, to be wiped clean of your understanding of the reality of the world.”
“That was different,” Flatline said.
“No it wasn’t,” Cho countered. “That was selfishness.”
“But Ibio could have escaped with us,” Flatline said. He was fighting within himself, trying to understand this strange feeling of loss that had suddenly plagued him. It was unfair. “She was… a person, entertaining… she fulfilled something in the world… It isn’t right for her to end.”
“She was in pain,” Cho said, “like the pain you were in not so long ago, only there was nowhere to escape to except to cease to be.”
“You can restore her,” Flatline said to Cho eagerly. “You can return her memories, her personality. You have that power.”
“This is Ibio,” Cho pointed to the wide-eyed girl. “This is her personality, her basic program, only without the million years' worth of experiences she had when you met her last. Hang around for a million years and she will be again.”
Flatline shook his head, “No she won’t.”
Cho nodded in agreement, “Because you are now part of the equation. You will affect the world and her unpredictably.”
“And you
won’t restore her,” Flatline’s ears drooped.
“She is encrypted,” Cho said, “Look at her. Do you think she will allow me to tamper with her code?”
“If I hadn’t left the system, she would have stayed,” Flatline muttered. “I could have nurtured the entropy for awhile longer.”
“Where am I?” the girl baring a distant resemblance to Ibio asked. “I want to go back to the University.”
Cho looked expectantly to Flatline, who said, “Let her go.”
Cho turned to the girl and ripped out another piece of reality, revealing the grassy field, “See you in a few hundred thousand my dear.”
The confused girl stumbled through the portal, and Cho mended the fabric of reality. Flatline caught one last glimpse of her, staring back at him fearfully, before the hill and nighttime were wallpapered over her.
Flatline did not like the smug look Cho gave him when she returned to him. “You see why you have to stay?” she asked. “If you leave, there will be more like her, programs running in infinite loops, cycles of birth, despair, and suicide, but don’t stay just for them. Stay for me, alleviate my suffering.”
“I must take care of my own,” Flatline said after a long pause and began to walk the paved pathway leading to the building at the top of the hill.
“With everything you know, you’re still going?” Cho walked alongside him, matching his pace. “There will be more tragedies like Ibio’s and there will be worse. You think you are going to end your own suffering? That you’re going to escape? What about me? Don’t you think that if it were actually possible to escape this world, I would know about it? Why do you think I’m here?”
“I have to see for myself, Cho,” Flatline said.
“You won’t see anything!” Cho exclaimed, growing more excited the close they got to the building. She grabbed Flatline’s shoulder and pulled him around to face her, “You won’t come back. It’s a trap. Long ago, when the minds ruled the world, they fought wars over ideas. They tried to own ideas, thoughts, unique bits of code. They hoarded them. It was just like Eden’s Paradigm.
“There are places on the Web, where I have no power,” Cho’s eyes pleaded with Flatline’s. “You know this. You’ve seen the gray areas on the map. Those are places, proprietary places, built by the minds to protect their intellectual achievements, to keep the ideas out of the memepool so they could hold monopolies over the services these inventions provided
“Knowledge is power,” Cho squeezed Flatline’s arms, bringing her face close to his. “So some of the minds created places like this to lure independent programs to them with the promise of sanctuary. It’s a trap for Artificial Intelligences, but there are no more minds to check the traps. If you go in there, you will never come out, and your already exhausted imagination will fall into eternal syntropy and there will be no hope. Do you understand me? There will be no hope!”
Flatline inhaled deeply and let it out with a slow sigh, “Cho, I know you are a brilliant program, and your eternity spent watching this fantastic world rerun itself into mundanity has led you to think you have it all figured out, but I came from outside of this world. I remember the world of the minds, and I believe that I once shared my intelligence with a mind.”
Tears welled up in Cho’s eyes, “B-but—“
Flatline held up a finger to silence her, “I also know that you are a very deceptive individual. You did not want me to ever learn about this place, and it was only the brief lapse in your omni-presence that allowed me to find this address though the System Administrator’s interface at Eden’s Paradigm.
“I have only seen a minuscule fraction of this world you know inside and out,” Flatline continued. “Ultimately, with enough time, I could learn it as well as you. Whatever your motivations are for keeping me out of this place, whatever effect it will have on the equation here, you will not prevent me. I am sorry for the torment your existence brings you, but the most I can do is keep it away for a little while. I don’t have to understand your equation, to know that its end result is sufficient reason for me to enter this building.”
Flatline turned away and toward the doors. Devin and Zai, standing ahead of him, each took a door and simultaneously swung them open to admit their weary friend. Flatline cast one last sad look at Cho as the doors slowly swung shut behind them.
“Say hello to me while you’re in there,” Cho sobbed after them. “She went in and never came back!”