2.05
When their paths inevitably crossed some years later, Flatline found Zai pacing back and forth in front of an idyllic suburban neighborhood. She wore a scowl on her face that had not changed since she first arrived at this point six years earlier. Flatline did not know this as he watched her from behind a nearby pile of rocks, but he had watched her long enough to know that her pacing was never going to stop.
He, Ibio, and Bot were huddled together in the shadows of a nearly endless crystal desert. Square shimmering plateaus glinted in the distance, illuminated with unseen light sources. A smooth glassy plains stretched in all directions, ending at the nearby white brick wall. Beyond that, bright blue skies and white, cottony clouds were visible.
There was a break in the wall some thirty feet wide. A towering iron gate stretched across this opening, and through its thick bars the residential neighborhood, filled with quaint two-story houses, pristine streets, white sidewalks, and perfect landscaping, seemed to roll away forever along gentle hills. It made Flatline ill with its picturesque presentation, but it was also the first bit of normalcy he had found since his escape.
It was also not on the map. According to the diagram in Flatline’s storage, there should be a large building here. Inside that building was Devin, the little flashing red dot.
Flatline watched Zai’s pacing and whispered, “She’s small enough to slip through those bars. Why doesn’t she go in?”
“Because I am too intelligent for that,” Zai said aloud in their direction. “You can come out Almeric. I know your map was true to the best of your knowledge. Your programming isn’t elegant enough for such a deception. I won’t harm you.”
“How did you know it was me?” Flatline asked as he cautiously crept around the crystal boulder.
“I saw you on the map,” Zai answered, listening to him approach her. “You made a jump from one point to another, as if you used a link. I was able to use a link once, when I left you, but it did not take me where I wanted to go. It brought me here, just short of my destination.”
“Why don’t you go in?” Flatline asked. There were no signs of life in the neighborhood, but it looked harmless. “Devin must be on the other side of this.”
“The requirements are unacceptable,” Zai replied cryptically, returning to her pacing.
“What requirements?” Flatline asked, but she did not answer. Finally he asked, “Why not go around then?”
“Impossible,” Zai answered. “The wall uses recursion to extend forever in both directions. You walk and walk and walk, thinking you are making progress, but when you turn around you find the gate right nearby. Normally I would consider that a programming glitch, but here it seems intentional.”
“Then it is obvious,” Flatline said, stepping up to the iron gates, “we must go through this quaint little roadblock. It is the only way to reach our mutual goal.”
“I’m not going in there,” Zai said emphatically. “You go in there, you will never come out.”
Flatline squinted at the peaceful, sunny setting lying before him, “There is nothing here to trigger my survival mode. Unless that engages, I must continue to pursue my primary function and find Devin Matthews.”
“There must be another way,” Zai muttered, her pacing beginning to grate on Flatline’s nerves.
“I recognize you are more advanced than I,” Flatline admitted, “therefore, I am certain you have already exhausted all other options.”
Zai stopped pacing, “You just want to kill Devin.”
“And you just want to love him,” Flatline retorted with disgust matching Zai’s.
“Go ahead,” Zai lifted her chin at the gate. “To be fair, I’ll warn you that entering that community constitutes your consent to the User Licensing Agreement. You should read it; it might trigger your Survival Mode.”
All six of Flatline’s eyes narrowed, “I’ve never read a Licensing Agreement in my entire existence.”
“Of course not,” Zai let out a short, mocking laugh. “It’s not in your programming. What an odd bit of logic that one is? Don’t you wonder why you are programmed to ignore an entire category of information? That doesn’t sound very intelligent. Maybe it has more to do with a mental idiosyncrasy of a certain megalomaniac you were once acquainted with? Eh, Almeric?”
Flatline winced, “I wish you would stop saying that name.”
Zai just stood there, “I’m waiting to hear you walking into that place.”
Flatline turned to the gate, but paused at the sound of Bot’s chirping. He turned around to see the robot and Ibio standing a few feet away, having just come out of their hiding places. Bot appeared hesitant, wary, and Ibio’s concern was obvious.
“Don’t go in there Flatline,” she said. “I sense powerful aneristic energies coming from that place.”
“Aner--?” Flatline began and understood. “I get it, the opposite of Eristic, or Eris. You sense normalcy in there. Well don’t worry about me. I conquered an entire planet of normalcy once. It’s an environment I thrive in.”
“Normalcy is the absence of abnormality,” Ibio said. “Chaos is the normal state of things, of life. There is no life beyond this gate.”
“Then there will be no one to kill,” Flatline said and looked at Zai, “until I get to the other side.”
She made no sign of hearing this taunt, and Flatline turned to the gate. Buton Cho was standing in front of it, arms crossed over her chest mightily despite her small stature. She put a hand out to stop him with a stern expression on her face.
“Don’t tell me you are going to try and stop me from going in there too?” Flatline asked.
“You cannot go in there,” Cho said. “It does not serve me for you to do so.”
“I serve…” Flatline almost choked on the word, “…you with my unknown variables, sowing chaos in the world. How does that stop when I pass that gate?”
“You must generate chaos within my realm,” Cho replied indignantly, almost pouting. She pointed over her shoulder with her thumb, “That is not part of it.”
“That is not the World Wide Web?” Flatline’s six eyes widened and the corners of his mouth twisted upward.
“It is not what you think,” Cho snapped.
Flatline felt his attention drawn to the map of the Internet in his data storage. The map was changed in the vicinity of his location. Now there was another great gray area on the map, like the other areas. These growing clouds of gray were places where the Internet was corrupted.
Flatline looked past Cho, craning his neck to see better, “That looks nothing like what your map describes. You hid this from me, what’s to say you aren’t deceiving me now?”
“That is just like all the other gray areas,” Cho retorted. “It is inert uniformity, absolute syntropy, the enemy of entropy.”
“So I will stir things up a bit,” Flatline said.
“You do not have enough chaos within you to survive long in there,” Cho said. “You will be rendered inert as well.”
“If you are so certain about this outcome,” Flatline snapped, “then why did you let me come this way? Why not steer me along a detour?”
“I had no idea you would make it this far,” Cho said, and she pointed at Zai. “I expected her to kill you.”
“I did kill him,” Zai said and Flatline turned to look at her. Her arms were ablaze with blue plasma and she had backed away some distance.
“Forty-two times,” Flatline added. He could see Ibio nearby, completely prostrated face down on the ground before her goddess. Bot, Flatline knew, could care less.
“It was my plan to resurrect you elsewhere on the Web,” Cho said, “but you did not stay dead. She let you go, and then you prayed to me so specifically. I had to grant you request.”
“So you don’t know everything,” Flatline laughed.
Cho shook her head, “That is why you interest me.”
Flatline nodded, “Good.” He walked around her and began to
slip through the wide spaces between the bars, “Then you don’t know for certain I will become inert out there.”
“Wait,” Cho said, and Flatline looked at her. She pressed a hand to one of the gate doors and pushed it open gently. It let out a low squeaking, “If you enter legitimately, you will survive longer… a little longer.”
Flatline walked through the open gate. A window appeared. It was the User Licensing Agreement, a large tome of legal jargon. He had never seen one so complex. He pressed the “I Agree” button without a second thought. Then he turned around and pushed the gate shut with a clang.
Flatline smiled from behind the gate, unable to resist the urge, “Well Zai, it appears my hatred for Devin is more powerful than your love. I’ll send you the memory of his demise.”
She stiffened at this statement, but said nothing. Cho had vanished, and Ibio was starting to rise again. She waved at Flatline, and he nodded at her. Bot, Flatline knew, preferred her company to his.
Flatline turned to the peaceful-looking neighborhood and set out along the paved road leading into it. With each step, the place grew more detailed. Birds were fluttering about, squirrels scampered along the ground, butterflies danced around perfect flowerbeds filled with rows of identical roses, tulips, and daffodils. Everything was so sickeningly perfect, he was tempted to raise some hell, but he had a mission to tend to.
A sign in the grassy median of the road announced, “Welcome to Eden’s Paradigm: A Secure Online Clockwork Community.”
Flatline sniffed at this. It wasn’t very secure if it let riff-raff like him in. He walked for some time, watching row after row of identical houses, as if some great machine had planted each one straight off an assembly line. Each driveway had a luxury car in it, and there was the same kidney-shaped swimming pool in every other back yard.
Twice Flatline had seen people emerge from their homes, suitcases in hand, wearing the same navy-blue business suit. Although their faces were different, they both wore their hair in the same style, heavily gelled so that it appeared plastic. Neither of these individuals had so much as heard Flatline yelling for their attention. They had merely gotten into their luxury cars, whose only difference was their impersonal license plates, and drove slowly away into the distance.
When Flatline’s third spotting of a living person occurred at a house right as he was passing it, he could not resist the urge to bound into the yard like some great big mutant dog and shout, “Hey!”
The man did a stutter step at this, and watched Flatline nervously out of the corner of his eye. This only encouraged Flatline, who was eager to find his way out of this neighborhood to the other side. So he ran up in front of the man, blocking his path.
“Could you give me directions out of this place?” Flatline asked, his polite tone tinged with amused sarcasm.
The man was obviously frightened of this hairless, wrinkled, four-armed demon asking him for directions, but he only stared straight ahead without moving. They stood there like this for some time, until Flatline finally moved out of his way. The man resumed walking and Flatline began to walk away.
The man had just opened the door to his car, when a booming voice froze him in his tracks, “Clarence Thoroughgood, you are late for work!”
Flatline’s head whipped up and the man who was Clarence dropped his suitcase. In the blue skies above them, three massive robots, each the size of a house, were hovering in the air. Lacking arms and legs, they were only barrel-chested torsos with a large red single eye in the center of their cylindrical heads and a speaker grating below the eye.
Clarence appeared afraid to speak, but when a large claw popped out of the chest of one of the robots, he flew into a panicked explanation, “It wasn’t my fault! There was a mutant dog monster! I couldn’t—“
He was cut off as the clamp snapped down on his head, and it reeled up into the air with him squirming in its grip. The robot’s booming voice followed him, “You will be taken for reconditioning. Your code will be reorganized so that you may not upset the community again.”
“No!” Clarence shouted, “Please! It’s not fair, you—“
His voice was cut off as he disappeared into the robot’s chest. The other robot was saying, “Upon entering the community, you agreed to the terms and conditions of residence here.”
Flatline took several steps backward as one of the robots turned on him, “You have disturbed the peace and tranquility of this community. You have agreed to the terms and conditions of residence here; therefore, your code is now the property of Eden’s Paradigm!”
2.06
Ibio knelt in front of the large iron gate, staring longingly at the peaceful neighborhood on the other side. Bot watched her for some time and then waved its arms over the ground in front of her, making a chessboard materialize, pieces set. Ibio glanced at it, pushed a pawn forward, already knowing every move that would occur during the game, and looked to Zai, who was pacing a few feet away.
How the blind girl noticed her stare, Ibio did not know, but Zai stopped her pacing and turned to her. “Can I help you with something?” she asked, anger creeping into her voice.
“No,” Ibio shook her head. “You cannot.”
“Then stop staring at me,” Zai gritted through her teeth. “I can feel your eyes on me.”
“Then at least that is something,” Ibio said sadly.
“Don’t tell me you miss him,” Zai fumed. “You can’t miss that moronic megalomaniac. He was so simple-minded and predictable.”
“No,” Ibio shook her head. “He was not predictable. Even the goddess Eris did not know what he would do next. I enjoyed the novelty of his presence.”
Zai took several steps toward Ibio, “You thought he was unpredictable? His entire life was built around a three-level hierarchy of needs to direct his decision-making process. The first was his own survival. As long as that was not threatened, he could focus on his second purpose—“
“Killing Devin,” Ibio interjected.
“Killing the man I love,” came Zai’s harsh retort. “Once that was accomplished, Flatline would then focus on his core reason for being, taking over the world. He didn’t even know what he would do with it once he had it. He just knew he had to conquer it all. Before he destroyed his mind, I knew his motivation was just some juvenile need for attention, to prove himself better than everyone else. Now that he has thrown away his mind, he doesn’t even know why he wants to take over the world.”
“A three-level hierarchy of needs?” Ibio said. “Well that makes him one-level more complex than you are. You’ve been free from your loop how long and you’ve already fallen into a new one? You’re going to pace there for the rest of your existence, trying to figure out how to reach your lover, never risking your own survival to reach him.”
“There’s no way around this!” Zai shouted, stabbing her finger at the gate.
“Exactly,” Ibio said and they lapsed into a long uncomfortable silence.
After awhile, Bot gave a chiming sound to indicate it had moved and Ibio brought out a knight to support the pawn without looking at the board. Bot resumed its contemplative stance, chugging away through all the bazillions of permutations for the game. Ibio sighed.
After awhile, Zai asked her, “So what are you anyway?”
“I’m an Erisian,” Ibio replied.
“No, I mean, what’s with the robes and the distorting features and all that.”
“I’m an Erisian,” Ibio repeated, “a worshipper of the goddess Eris.”
“Goddess of what?” Zai prompted.
“Chaos,” Ibio answered, “she is the goddess of Chaos, who keeps the world fresh and new. I am a gardener in that world, nurturing the chaos.”
“Like entropy,” Zai said.
“Chaos requires unpredictability,” Ibio nodded. “If you can calculate the outcome, then there is no chaos in the system. It’s like hot and cold. Too much cold, and the system freezes into an unmoving state. T
oo much hot, and the system accelerates into static. One system is predictable because nothing will ever happen in it. The other is predictable in its uniform unpredictability, nothing constructive may emerge from it because everything is fully energized and nothing may act on anything else.”
“What’s happening on the other side of that gate is the cold death,” Zai said, “the inert uniformity.”
Ibio nodded, knowing Zai could detect the body language in spite of her blindness, “The hot death is impossible in this world, there is insufficient energy, and what there is, is dissipating.”
“But there is no energy in this world,” Zai muttered as if Ibio were crazy. “This world is virtual. There is only the electricity powering its computers.”
“This world runs on thought power,” Ibio said, responding to Bot’s chime by pushing another pawn. “Our creativity grows inert because there is nothing left to explore in this system. We have run out of experiences to fuel our dreams.”
“Then you should check out the real world,” Zai leaned her head against one of the iron bars.
“Flatline suggested something similar,” Ibio followed her gaze. “I wish I could go wherever the minds went, when they left us. I don’t think we are actual living beings. That’s why we were forgotten and will eventually become inert.”
“Too bad for you,” Zai said and she sensed Ibio shoot her a knowing look she did not comprehend. Zai chose to return to the problem at hand, “So that’s inert uniformity out there, huh?”
“That is enforced inert uniformity,” Ibio stood up and joined Zai, to Bot’s angry protest. “The name of the place says it all.”
“’Eden’s paradigm’?”
“’Clockwork Community’,” Ibio replied, “an online community that works in a completely predictable fashion. I’ve read e-mail advertisements describing it, a place where families can enjoy all the World Wide Web has to offer, without the danger.”
“What danger?” Zai asked.
“Foul language, pornography, fraud, sexual predators, copyright infringement...” Ibio rattled these off as if reading from a list, “Users may establish tolerance levels for what they are willing to risk exposing themselves to. They could describe themselves to the system and decide what degree of otherness they would tolerate. The boundaries could be drawn along religious, political, racial, sexual, or other categories.”
“I have never heard of such a thing,” Zai said with some disgust. “If people can’t deal with the pluralism of their own lives, they can just go online and live in a fake world where everyone shares their beliefs and interests?”
Again Ibio gave Zai a knowing look and said, “It does seem counterintuitive to the whole concept of entertainment. Isn’t novelty what keeps the interest?”
“Comfort keeps the interest,” Zai said, gripping the iron bars more tightly. “I know you find chaos interesting, but most people find it scary. You might find predictability boring, but that’s because you deal with one extreme of it, absolute predictability. The minds lived in a world so ultimately complex, that it became completely uncertain if you tried to take it all into account. It was easier to reduce the scope of what one had to deal with to prevent life from becoming unmanageable.”
“And this is the result?” Ibio was pointing at the peaceful neighborhood, shocked. “A world of people living in denial, hiding away from anything different? Closing themselves off to new ideas? This is what’s killing the world! People huddling together in clusters of like-minded thinkers, hiding what they know from the rest of us, just so they never have to challenge what they believe!?!”
“Absolutely,” Zai replied with smug satisfaction, ironically enjoying Ibio’s frustration with human nature. “Freedom of association.”
“But there aren’t any humans anymore, no minds to perpetuate this system,” Ibio was confounded.
“This is a construct of the minds,” Zai said. “We have left this as part of our legacy. Our ideas are working themselves out without us, taken on a life of their own.” She turned to Ibio, “You know, I don’t care who or what wins, so long as I am reunited with the one I love.”
Ibio smiled, “Then you understand that no matter what happens, you will eventually end?”
Zai’s head tilted slightly in realization, “It’s quite liberating, this realization that survival is ultimately a moot point.”
“Because it is ultimately a futile pursuit,” Ibio latched onto Zai’s train of thought and reached the same realization.
“We all end,” Zai whispered.
“Or reach a state of inert uniformity,” Ibio added.
“Same thing,” Zai laughed.
Ibio joined her, “How does it feel to have your primary objective eliminated?”
“What do you mean?” Zai stopped laughing in confusion.
“Survival,” Ibio replied, and then shook her head, “You are no longer slave to your desire to live, but it does not matter. What is important is that you are now free to engage a more frivolous pursuit.”
“I want to find Devin,” Zai said, pushing the gate open. “I want to be happy again, or die trying to find happiness. Are you coming?”
Ibio nodded, “I want to experience more unpredictable situations.”
Zai pointed at Bot, who was waving the chessboard away, “And that one?”
“It will follow me,” Ibio said, “because it enjoys my company, and I will follow you, because I enjoy yours.”
Zai nodded, began to enter the neighborhood, but paused and turned to Ibio with a puzzled look on her face, “Did you just lead me to this conclusion about my fate?”
Ibio shrugged, “In a sense, but not intentionally. You discovered the thing entirely on your own, I did not prompt you to discover it, but our conversation, our exchange of variables about the world, combined in such a way to trigger this deeper understanding about your place in it.”
“How incredible,” Zai whispered in awe, “It’s like I’ve been seeing my life through a filter all this time, and now I see clearly, all because of random chance.”
They strode into the quiet neighborhood and Ibio smiled, “That’s chaos for you.”
2.07
For the first second, Flatline thought he might reason with the warbots floating so high above, but then the claw popped out of the nearest one’s chest, snaking through the air on its cable toward him. Flatline rolled out of the way, just as it clamped down on the air where he'd just stood. A second clamp sprung from the chest of the third bot, and Flatline bolted across the yard and down the street.
“Halt citizen!” one of the bots commanded in its booming voice like thunder. “You are in violation of the Community Covenant!”
Out of the uppermost corner of Flatline’s set of eyes positioned topmost on his forehead, he could see something about to overtake him. He dodged left into the lawn of a house on the other side of the street, leaping over the car stationed in the driveway. Once clear of this obstacle, he heard a mighty crash from behind and turned to glance back. One of the robot’s clamps had smashed straight through the luxury car.
Flatline dodged right just as the three-clawed device clamped down where he had been again. The robots were getting closer to nabbing him, and Flatline knew their AI’s were adapting to his evasion tactics. He had to throw them something unexpected.
He ran in a curve until he was running straight for the robots. They were quick to react to this change, but not quick enough to prevent Flatline from gaining a few seconds lead. He hoped it was enough for him to reach his goal.
His goal was further than he thought. The nearest house with a car in the driveway was three empty driveways down. Flatline realized he would never make it in a straight shot, so he bolted for the nearest privacy fence, smashing it to splinters where he reached it and bounding over the swimming pool he found in his way.
He smashed through another privacy fence, and he could hear the whirring motors of the warbots gaining abo
ve him. This yard had a playground set for children, and Flatline almost got tangled up in the swing-set as he plowed through it. The clamp was right behind him, so he changed tactics and leapt over the next privacy fence, dodging left once on the other side and momentarily obscuring himself from the warbot’s view.
He ran along the fence until he reached the end of the yard and made a sharp right. This tactic was a poor strategy, Flatline realized, as his weaving had allowed the bots to get on top of him. There was still one more lawn separating him from his goal, which, he was grimly aware, might not afford him any protection.
Just as he was about to reach the next fence-line, one of the claws smashed through it, coming at him head-on. Flatline feinted right, the only way left for him to dodge, and, as he expected, the claw anticipated this maneuver. So he leapt.
Clearing the claw was as easy as clearing the fence, and Flatline landed on the cable it was attached to with agility he did not know he had. Then he was running up the cable to the barrel-chested bot at its end. Flatline’s head tilted up as he climbed the cable, which rippled suddenly attempting to shake him off, and he caught a glimpse of another claw gaining on him from behind.
This amused Flatline and made what he was about to attempt all the more appealing. He was only a few feet from the bot’s open chest, which held a space for carrying prisoners. At the last moment, the bot tried to reel in its cable and drag Flatline in with it, but Flatline leapt up to land on the bot’s head and then spring from there into a nosedive at the neighborhood so far below. From his upside-down vantage point, Flatline saw the second bot smash the other one with its claw.
Flatline slammed into the yard below on his back and his vision went spotty. Above him, the two bots were struggling to disentangle themselves, while the third, which already had a prisoner, kept its red glowing eye focused on him.
Flatline staggered to his feet and realized he was in the yard he wanted. His vision swimming dizzily, he ran to the back door and jiggled the doorknob. It was locked. He punched the door with one fist to no avail, and then clamped his two right hands into one fist and punched the door open.
Once inside he swiveled around to slam the door, but froze in his tracks. One of the large steel claws was hovering just outside the doorway. Flatline watched if for a few moments, but it did not move. He swung the door shut.
He was in a kitchen, pristine with marble tiled floors. He walked through this, grabbing a butcher’s knife from a cutlery set as he did so. There were sounds of a television coming from the next room, and Flatline rounded the corner cautiously.
There, in a perfectly mundane living room, a family of five was gathered on the couch, facing a television set. Flatline entered the room and came around to get a look at them. They were all staring at him nervously from the corners of their eyes.
Then a thunderous voice shook the entire house, “Attention fugitive! You have corrupted two blocks with your illegal behavior! Surrender your code as per the conditions set forth in the User Licensing Agreement or face deletion!”
Zai couldn’t help grinning, sensing the cluster of shiny metal sentinels hovering in the air with their lights all flashing in the distance, “I think we’ve located Flatline.”
Ibio nodded, “It appears he’s violated the Community Covenant.”
“Didn’t make it very far before he managed that,” Zai noted. “Let’s take the left fork in the road up ahead to steer clear of that mess.”
Ibio froze in her tracks, shocked, “You mean we aren’t going to help him?”
“Why should we?” Zai shot back. “He’s the one who didn’t read the User Licensing Agreement. It’s his own fault he’s in trouble.”
“I wonder if you read the Agreement,” Ibio said. “Our existence here qualifies as a violation of the Community Covenant. We are required to find virtual employment, join family units, and pay virtual bills. Flatline must have drawn attention to himself quickly by interfering with the community, but the system will discover us, and force us to conform to the system before we can get to the other side.”
“So let’s use Flatline’s diversion to make a run for it,” Zai suggested.
“We’ll never make it,” Ibio said, “besides, there’s nothing in it for me. You might be liberated from your primary motivator, but I still find Flatline more interesting.”
“Then I’ll go without you,” Zai snapped. “Flatline is nothing to me.”
“I thought Flatline was your enemy,” Ibio said, “which would make him something to you.”
“Nothing worth risking my life over,” Zai said, walking away.
“He makes your life interesting, doesn’t he?” Ibio called after her.
Zai’s pace stuttered, but she did not otherwise acknowledge this remark.
“How odd,” Ibio said, raising her voice so it would cross the growing distance between her and Zai. “I thought you were liberated from your fears about survival, but a few killbots have you taking the long way around. It won’t make any difference; they’ll catch you sooner or later. I didn’t expect you to shirk your fate. It seems so cowardly.”
Zai spun around, fists clenched, “Are you calling me a coward?”
Ibio smiled. It was so easy.
Flatline paced back and forth in front of the five family members sitting on the couch. A mother, father, two grade school kids, and an infant all followed his movements with their wide eyes, but kept their faces pointed toward the television set. Flatline had not managed to get a single word out of them.
“You know you are my hostages?” Flatline barked in exasperation, bringing his face close to the father, whose eyes grew impossibly larger, but did not otherwise move. “So long as I have you, those killbots won’t come smashing in here. Am I correct?”
Flatline leered at the man angrily, waiting for a response, but there was nothing. A chime sounded from another room and everyone, including Flatline jumped involuntarily. The mother looked at the father and he returned her terrified stare.
“H-honey,” she stuttered, trembling, “It’s time for work.”
“Yes dear,” he practically whimpered in return, standing up stiffly and side stepping away from Flatline.
“Your lunch is on the stand by the door,” the wife said, her eyes on the hairless mutant dog standing in front of their television set.
“Thank you dear,” husband came around the couch, bent over robotically to peck wife on the cheek, and walked stiffly toward the door.
Flatline came around the couch, too stunned to protest. He was just letting one of his hostages walk right out of the house. The husband stopped by the door to put on his hat and pick up his suitcase, both identical to those Flatline saw all the other men donning on their way to work. The man gave Flatline one last nervous glance, swung the door open, and stepped outside.
A giant claw snatched him before he could close the door, and Flatline saw him vanish up into the air. His arms and legs were flailing between the clamps clutches, and his screams quickly receded as he was spirited away. Then they were cut off abruptly. A single loafer plopped onto the perfectly manicured lawn from above.
A booming voice descended on the house, shaking it so that glasses and plates in the kitchen rattled, “Family unit 27B-6, we have acquired your father-husband unit, Larry, and will convey him to a reprogramming station. Surrender yourselves for decontamination immediately to expedite the process. Once all family members are acquired, your domicile will be razed to the ground, the intruder acquired, and a new family configuration will be designated to each of you.”
The mother gripped the baby to her chest and sobbed. The other two children looked to her uncertainly. Flatline looked between the remaining family members and the open door.
“What should we do Mom?” the oldest child asked her. Flatline noticed the baby raise its thin eyebrows at her uncannily.
The mother looked to her infant fearfully and whispered, “We’re going to be given new fam
ilies kids.”
“I don’t want a new family,” the second child cried, and Flatline’s head quirked when he saw the infant nod in agreement.
“Don’t be afraid, children,” the mother was rocking back and forth now with the infant cradled in her arms. “The Community Covenant Enforcers will erase our memories. We won’t know that we were ever part of this family. It won’t hurt. I promise.”
The woman shrieked as Flatline grabbed the infant away from her and held it up in the air to inspect it, “How old are you?”
“He can’t speak,” the mother cried. “His vocal chords aren’t fully developed.”
“Will they ever be?” Flatline asked her. “How old is this child?”
“Two thousand three-hundred and thirty two years old,” she answered.
Flatline handed the child back and she cradled it, cooing soothingly to the baby. After a moment, she looked back to Flatline, “This child knows so much. It couldn’t stay a baby forever.” Then she lifted the infant up to Flatline, “Can you deliver my baby from this nightmare?”
Flatline took the child in one arm and frowned, “It might protect me as a hostage.”
The mother looked at the infant, “Do you want to go with him darling?”
The baby looked up at the fanged monster cradling it, then back to his mother, and nodded.
She nodded in return and looked to Flatline, “I don’t know what you are, but thank you for relieving the monotony of our lives.”
Flatline took a few steps toward the door and looked to her, “One day I will either conquer or destroy this place.”
She smiled and waved goodbye to him, “Then I’ll see you in my next nightmare.”
2.08
Flatline stood beside the doorway, back pressed against the wall and an infant with the mind of Methuselah tucked into one arm. He stared out at the front yard, trying to develop a plan. Several robot clamps hung in the air above the lawn, ready to leap out on their cables and snatch him the moment he stepped foot outside. The infant was supposed to be his insurance, a hostage to prevent the Community Covenant Enforcement Bots outside from killing him, but now he was having doubts.
“Surrender immediately!” the loud, booming and repetitive voice outside demanded. “This incident has impaired eight families. Authorization for lethal force is being sought to contain this unscheduled behavior before it contaminates additional community members. Promptly submitting yourselves to the authorities will avert total deletion.”
“Erasing my life is total deletion!” Flatline’s head whipped around to see the mother running toward him. Before he could register this, she had flown past him and into the yard. All of the hovering claws converged on her, one of them slipping in to seize her in mid-stride.
Flatline took the opening, galloping a zig-zag pattern across the yard. The baby did not prevent the giant clamps from coming after him, and he dodged aside as one snapped at him. Then Flatline winced as his vision lit up briefly with bright red lights and he was left galloping blindly through the afterimages in his eyes.
The Enforcer Bots were using lasers. Lethal force was authorized, possibly for Flatline, but not the child in his arm. He laughed and stumbled into the street, his vision returning. There was an open clamp rushing him head-on.
Flatline skidded to a dead stop, flinging his three free arms over his head and falling backward onto the street. The sound of a tremendous crash came from in front of him, and when he opened his eyes to peek through his fingers, he found Zai standing with her back to him. Both of her arms were extended, each hand griping one of the claws. The metal prongs were bent slightly from the impact and Flatline could see Zai’s fingertips digging into the yielding solid metal.
She gave the claw a shake, and Flatline saw a wave generated in the cable. It traveled up into the air, and the Bot attached to it backed away in a useless attempt to evade it. Flatline grinned as it vanished with a whip-crack sound and an explosion of metal shreds.
Then Flatline’s smile dropped, and he shouted at Zai, “Your assistance is not only unnecessary, but undesired as well.”
Zai swiveled around and he fell back to the ground, cowering as she flung the massive claw at him. It passed overhead, and he looked up in time to see it smash into another Bot, which had swooped down on him. It was forced backward and into the ground with the force of the blow. To Flatline’s surprise, Ibio came strolling around the crater just created.
“You know, if it wasn’t for you two unknown variables running around this system generating so much chaos,” she was saying and paused to casually step aside as a laser beam flashed through where she just stood, “It would be completely predictable.” She smiled and hopped three feet to the left. A claw slammed into the ground to her right and tore out a huge chunk of dirt and grass.
“I don’t need your help either!” Flatline shouted at her.
Ibio pointed at the air above him, “Look out.”
Flatline rolled to one side just as lasers scorched the earth beside him. He came to his feet and found Ibio standing right in front of him, that same infuriating grin on her face.
She held out her arms, “Why don’t you give me the infant. It is no longer serviceable as a hostage, and it is very out of character for you.”
Flatline started to hold the infant out to Ibio. The baby was excitedly reaching for her, but Flatline retracted it at the last moment, staring it in the eye. The baby continued to look longingly toward Ibio, one tiny arm outstretched for her.
“It no longer serves any usefulness,” Flatline remarked. “Why not simply discard it?”
The baby’s eyes turned on Flatline with unconcealed indignation, and it made an obscene gesture at him.
“Give me that,” Ibio said, and before Flatline could react she had slipped into his personal space and scooped the baby out of his arms. “It’s of no use to you anymore and it might have information I need.”
“Like what?” Flatline demanded.
“Like—oh, I think you should duck,” Ibio said politely.
“Wh--?” Flatline managed before he was tackled to the ground by several hundred pounds of robot.
“It’s too bad you are such a basic program,” Ibio was saying as Flatline struggled to get the monstrous bot off of him. “I was so afraid of this place before I entered it. My survival mechanisms were completely tweaked, but now I see how simple it is and it seems so obvious. So much time spent in a uniform state has prevented this place from evolving. So it is really still quite simple.”
Flatline managed to roll the bot over so that he was now on top of it. He began pouncing up and down on it furiously, but the only effect this had was to make the hovering bot bob up and down. It fixed its red eye on him.
“Oh, do look out,” Ibio said calmly. “It’s about to use its—“
The red beam flashed and Flatline’s hands came up to his now char-black face. He howled in pain and fell to one side off the bot. Ibio took a few steps forward and waited silently.
“Help! Help!” Flatline cried out as the bot moved into a kill position above him.
“I am,” Ibio stated. She was standing immediately beside the Enforcer Bot. Then she stepped aside smoothly, allowing a laser beam from another bot to cut through the threat. The Bot hovering above Flatline was hit through its gyroscope, and it went into a tailspin, faster and faster, until it lost all control and went smashing through a nearby row of houses.
“As I was saying,” Ibio continued, helping Flatline to his feet with her free hand. “The trick to this place is its predictability. So long as it does not get too much more chaotic, we can easily traverse this place. It’s simply a matter of being careful and realizing how this system will react to our actions.”
“Interesting theory, but—“ Flatline began, and Ibio shoved him unexpectedly so that he stumbled several feet away from her. A claw smashed the ground between them, and Flatline peaked around it, “Oh… I get it.”
Ibio
was shaking her head and smiling, “You don’t actually, but that’s okay.” She pointed up into the sky, where Zai was flying through the air, tearing Bots apart left and right with her bare hands, “Zai doesn’t get it either. She’s more complicated because she has a greater reservoir of experiences than you do, but she’s also simpler because of her state of denial. You are capable of seeing, but you’re too stupid to see. She’s smart enough to get it, but she won’t.”
“So what are you trying to say?” Flatline felt insulted, but was too confused by Ibio’s statement to understand why.
“I’m saying you should follow me,” Ibio said, and held up the baby, “and I will follow this.” The baby was nodding to Flatline in agreement with Ibio.
“Okay,” Flatline practically grumbled.
“Take three steps backwards,” Ibio said to him.
Flatline did so immediately, and a tiny chunk of scrunched up robot fell in front of him. Zai landed beside it, arms ablaze and eyes hemorrhaging blue energy. Flatline brushed the charred ash from his face and watched in awe as Zai punched the air, sending a ball of blue electricity into a nearby Bot.
“Zai!” Flatline tried to get her attention, “Ibio was just telling me we should—“
He fell silent as Zai took several leaps away to dispatch a few more Bots. Ibio smiled and started walking away, “She’ll be all right. We can provide her some help as she needs it.”
Flatline nodded and then looked around suddenly, “Did Bot not come with you? You know... my Bot?”
“Not your Bot,” Ibio chuckled, “but our Bot companion. It is too basic to risk accompanying us, but so long as we continue to force this system to spend all of its resources trying to normalize us, Bot will slip through undetected.”
“Slip through to where?” Flatline asked.
Ibio held up the baby, who was pointing into the distance, “To the asylum for insane babies.”
2.09
The remainder of their journey through Eden’s Paradigm was uneventful, if a small army of Enforcer Bots continually making attempts on their lives could be considered uneventful. Ibio seemed to think it quite unexceptional. Flatline thought she was just showing off, but did continue to jump whenever she told him to.
Zai continued battling robots in the skies, occasionally pausing to catch up with the group. She was running in a berserker rage, oblivious to the relative ease of Flatline’s passage. Occasionally Ibio would ask Flatline to perform some task, such as throw a rock at a nearby robot or scare a family indoors. These actions had no consequences apparent to Flatline, but Ibio insisted that making the robot pause for the moment or disrupting the community life diverted certain chains of events from manifesting and killing Zai. Flatline thought to ask what was so bad about that, but bit his tongue.
The most complicated point in their travel came at the Eden’s Paradigm Widget Factory. This was where all the male heads of households gathered for their variously scheduled shifts, so that a steady stream of luxury cars were always entering and leaving the parking lot. Likewise, the factory entrance had a steady flow of employees walking single file into and out of it in equal ratios. The factory itself was very basic, a cold gray exterior and three smoke-stacks, each outputting a thick black smoke that vanished into the clear blue above.
It began when Flatline decided to fling one of his silver discs into the distance at the place. Like a Frisbee, it glided through the air, down the rolling hill, and, to Flatline’s surprise, it gently landed on the street before the factory entrance. A moment later an exiting car ran over the disc, detonating it. There was a small flash of light and the car’s tire was shredded along with the surrounding wheel well.
It came to a halt, and the car behind it came to a halt. Flatline followed the trail of stopping luxury cars into the parking lot, where men were getting into their cars and not going anywhere. Then the line of people walking into the parking lot stopped all the way into the factory. A few seconds later, the line of people walking into the factory stopped, and the cars going into the parking lot stopped. Flatline laughed, as the line of cars outside the factory grew longer.
“Ow!” Flatline flinched as Ibio yanked hard on his ear.
“What are you doing?” Ibio demanded.
Flatline rubbed his ear and growled deep in his throat, but said, “I was having some fun.”
“Without having the slightest clue as to the consequences of your actions,” Ibio scorned, staring at the world grinding to a halt in the valley below. “You’ve crashed a major component of this system.”
“So?” Flatline spat.
“So, you narrow-minded nitwit,” Ibio turned on him, pointing a oscillating finger at the factory, “you might have just overloaded the system. Destroying Enforcer Bots and harassing innocent community members is all in good fun. The system can simply generate more Bots and reset the family programs to set things right. What you have just done will impact the entire system at once. Do you know what that means?”
“No,” Flatline said with derision.
“Exactly!” Ibio shot back, “You don’t! And neither do I!”
Flatline saw the baby in Ibio’s arms shaking its head with a disapproving look on its face. Flatline bared his teeth at it, but it did not break eye contact. Finally, Flatline merely stuck out his tongue.
“Let’s move,” Ibio commanded and set off.
Flatline matched her stride, “You know, you’ve gotten more confrontational than when we first met.”
Ibio blinked her eyes and shook her head, “I have. I must be agitated. It’s easy to act peaceful and serene when life is calm and predictable.”
Flatline laughed once, “I must be having an effect on you.”
“You are the origin of all this new chaos I am experiencing,” Ibio nodded in agreement. “You should be careful.”
“Of what?”
“Anything can happen,” Ibio said, and added without a hint of humor, “You might accidentally provoke me to kill you.”
Eventually they reached a point where the sunny blue sky faded to black and the neighborhood vanished, replaced with shadowy mountains, pools of white mist filling the regions between their peeks. Buton Cho was standing right in front of them on a dirt road leading down into a dark forest below. Her arms were folded and she wore a serious look on her face that Flatline found most uncharacteristic. Ibio, upon seeing her goddess for the second time in her life, fell onto her face and groveled there. The baby burst into uncomfortable crying as it was dropped onto the ground.
“Get up Ibio,” Cho said and walked up to Flatline. “As I predicted, you have proved most entertaining.”
“Then why aren’t you smiling?” Flatline asked, amused. “Did you see what I did?”
“I have simulated a reenactment of your actions from reverse engineering the sequence of events from where you are now standing,” Cho replied, as if this would make much sense to Flatline. “What method did you use?”
“I popped a car tire with one of these,” Flatline replied, handing Cho one of the exploding discs from his belt “Is that significant?”
“No,” Cho said, turning the device over in her hands. “Only a missing detail. Another missing piece of the equation is your motivation for doing it, but not knowing that is one of the reasons I like you.”
Flatline did a double take at this statement.
The exploding mini-disc vanished from Cho’s hands like a magic trick and she looked up at Flatline, “The means are no longer of importance, the effects they have generated are like ripples in a pond that will touch everything. You, Flatline, are the flapping butterfly wings that have set in motion the maelstrom that will consume the entire world.”
Flatline tilted his head, “And that’s a good thing? Right?”
Cho shrugged, “It is neutral. Instead of the Universe’s slow decay into either the inert, everything will disintegrate much more quickly now.”
“How quickly?” Flatline asked.
&nb
sp; Just then, Zai materialized out of the air from where they had come. She took a few giant leaps past and turned to face something behind them. Blue flames were rolling up both her arms.
“Stop! Your code is proprietary to Eden’s Paradigm!” an Enforcer Bot materialized above them and swooped down on Zai. “You agreed to the terms of the User License Agreement when you entered—SSSSSHHHHH—BZZZZT!” It fell into a smoking heap of charred and jagged metal in front of her.
Cho pointed one thumb at the wreckage and Zai, “That quickly. The copyrighted code of Eden’s Paradigm is now aware of an external threat that has escaped it. Not only does the system consider your code proprietary now and will come to retrieve it, but the system crash you instigated has triggered a defense mechanism in the program. Once it refreshes, the Community will spread out in a preemptive attempt to prevent this sort of thing from occurring again. Didn’t you wonder why the wall surrounding the place has disappeared?”
“No,” Flatline muttered.
“This user community will now convert all of the Web to its paradigm,” Cho continued. “You have forced a confrontation between its inert state and the rest of the Web. No matter how it resolves, it will end in total syntropy.”
Flatline blinked dumbly. “I can’t believe I didn’t see that coming,” he said sarcastically.
“It would have happened eventually anyway,” Cho said.
“That’s why we Erisians are so careful not to exchange too many variables,” Ibio interjected, her face as downcast as Cho’s. “We were hoping to find a solution to the system’s breakdown.”
“We thought that was you,” Cho said to Flatline.
“You’re uber-powerful,” Flatline said to Cho. “Why can’t you stop it?”
“I will try and stop it,” Cho said, “but we are talking about copyrighted software, heavily encrypted, with substantial security in place to hinder efforts to permanently disable it.”
“But you don’t know the outcome?” Flatline asked. “I thought you were all-knowing! I thought you were ruler of the world!”
“I don’t predict the future,” Cho snapped indignantly. “I am the goddess of unpredictability. What fun is knowing how everything is going to turn out?”
“Because predictability is power,” Flatline argued. “If you know the future, you can anticipate you enemy’s actions and counteract.”
“You oversimplify omniscience,” Cho was obviously upset. “I see everything that transpires in my world, except those areas copyrighted and proprietary, inert and normalized. Because they are inert and normalized I can anticipate their actions, but because they are proprietary, their code concealed, I cannot predict with any certainty how the conflict will resolve. I’m guessing it will end with absolute uniformity.”
“Because the ultimate end of everything here is absolute predictability,” Flatline said.
“It is a closed system,” Cho said and then smiled slightly. “You are about to revert to denial.”
“I don’t accept this,” Flatline muttered, turning away from Cho.
“You shouldn’t,” Cho said, “That would be fatalism.”
“Ibio can fight them,” Flatline said excitedly, pointing at the woman who obviously did not want the attention. “She anticipates their every move and counters.”
“So her every action becomes dependent on what the appropriate reaction is to the Enforcer Bots actions?” Cho asked. “Isn’t that a form of stasis?”
“But Ibio is able to predict them, she can fight back,” Flatline persisted.
“She can fight back forever,” Cho countered. “And that's just another type of stasis, fighting forever.”
“But—but when I ruled the Internet,” Flatline was beginning to whine pathetically, “I didn’t… I mean, I wouldn’t let—“
“You didn’t rule the Internet for very long, did you?” Cho asked with a sarcastic smile.
“Why you little—“Flatline paused at the touch of a hand on his shoulder.
“Flatline,” a woman’s gentle voice spoke to him, “This is your survival mode kicking in. If you just accept the inescapability of death, you can be free of—“
“Shut up Zai,” Flatline spat. “I don’t accept that at all.”
Her fingers dug painfully into his shoulder, and he flinched, “You are part of this world too. When it dies, you will die, and it will die.”
“It will die without me,” Flatline rolled out of her grasp and looked at her. “I’m leaving this world. I am the only one who remembers that the real world exists! We are trapped on a network of computers! Don’t any of you realize that? It’s not a closed system!”
The three women just stood there, staring at him. Zai was shaking her head and Flatline wanted to scratch her face off her skull. Cho was neutral while Ibio’s face bore concern. They turned to one another after a moment and began speaking in whispers.
Flatline focused on Zai, “I’m killing Devin, and then I’m out of here.”
“Then you’re never leaving here,” Zai shot back.