The data streams slammed into me.
With practiced ease, I pushed them aside and forced myself to view the data from afar.
To not see it as billions of lines of code, but rather as the small white room that any other human would see.
Floating in the center of that white room was Artemis, represented by a small blue sphere exactly one cubic meter in volume.
“Aaron?” she asked, her voice a stream of data inside what was to her a blank room, but to me the least disturbing of the digital constructs used by most of humanity, which served as my springboard into the digital realm.
“HERE” I gasped, forcing myself to manifest data on a matching pattern.
“Whoa, that’s weird. Your voice is from everywhere. Where are you?” she asked looking around for me.
I ignored the question, it was a stupid one.
“WE NEED TO HURRY!”
Her body, still in what was normally called reality, winced and I saw it through the faint data stream coming in from my biological eyes.
“Can you at least calm that down?” she asked.
“This better?” I asked as I forcibly compressed my influence inside the virtual space she was drifting through. I coalesced as a small red sphere in front of her.
“Yeah,”
“Good, let’s get moving then. I’m already losing threads.”
My mind had in the few moments it had been connected already spread itself over the entire world, infecting computers and servers of every kind. I had no more awareness of it than a normal person had awareness of the individual cells in their foot. Unlike them, though, if I concentrated I could manipulate that individual cell to do something.
“We need to access server cluster Beta-Six-Three-One in South America.”
Glancing at the data streams, I focused on the small part of me already near that particular server. The small delay on the transmission lines and processors was something I could actually feel as the systems around me all responded. Looking more closely at the server cluster, I could see why she was concerned.
I could see the huge computer systems of nearly every government in the world focused on the small computer system, attacking. They weren’t pulling punches either, using the digital equivalents of nukes on it.
Still, the small server was weathering the attacks, maintaining itself.
“I don’t suppose that a shutdown of the actual hardware has been tried?” I asked.
“First thing, the AI simply rotated to another cluster. Letting it run there keeps it in a known server. All attempts to cut connections result in the same. We’re also fairly sure that it has small root kits in most of the other servers in the world. Shut it down and it restarts in another one.”
“Well that explains why you came to me,” I mumbled as I sorted through all of the data.
Artemis didn’t say anything.
“Hang on, we’re going in.” I’d found an access point.
“Wait, what?!” asked Artemis and then gasped in the real world as I grabbed her avatar and dragged it along with me through the digital connections.
Most people’s sensations were cut whenever they transferred between servers. It wasn’t a luxury available to me, and I had forgotten about it with her. Artemis tensed in her chair as her mind was split, divided, and completely reassembled on the other side.
For me, it was something I underwent constantly. That sensation of being everywhere and nowhere, all at once, and like you were about to fall apart. That was what it was like every moment my digital soul was connected to the net.
Reconstituted at the other side, which had taken less than a second, Artemis swore, and then swore some more, switching into several languages.
“Sorry about that,” I said, still just a small red sphere in front of her, despite the fact that the server we were on now supported full bodied avatars.
She swore again, but didn’t say anything else.
She looked at the destroyed server, or at least what was being digitally represented from it. We were in the only segment of it left that could still render full body consciousness.
Artemis’s eyes widened. To her it looked as if she were standing in a house that had been cut in half. Off to the right of her, beyond where the floor and wall were missing, stood a maelstrom of static.
I could see the damage… and the organized chaos inside of it.
“Are we…?” she trailed off.
“We’re in the South America server, yeah.”
“Every government on Earth has been trying to get into it for days, and within minutes you hack in?” she asked, sounding faintly bemused.
I frowned. “I asked to be let in, and I just dragged you along for the ride as a guest.”
Artemis turned to look at me, her eyes fearful now.
“You’re talking with it?” she asked.
“Not in so many words. It might perhaps see me as the only other entity equal to it, though. Both of us are continuously encountering one another on the net… or at least, our parts are.”
“We’re here to destroy it! Not make friends with it,” she hissed.
I drifted out from her, ignoring the outburst, and directly touched what she saw as static.
The entity recoiled more from my touch than it was in response to any of the outside attacks, and immediately sent out a burst of electronic data and attacks at my core. I winced as nearly half of my mind was burned clean of the net. Several of the various government servers attacking the little server were caught in the crossfire and literally began to melt a continent away.
The portions of my mind it had burned out quickly regenerated.
It had not been the most powerful attack possible. It almost felt like a test. Something by which the entity would judge its newest threat. Me. Smiling at that comforting thought, I struck back, testing it as well.
In simplest terms, I tore the rug out from under its feet and played dirty. Instead of directly attacking it, I went after the architecture it was running on, flipping a hardware safety. The servers it was inside of switched to power saving mode and its processing power was reduced.
For a moment – an eternity, in digital space – we considered one another. This might be an actual challenge. Neither of us had encountered something that could weather our attention for very long. The crudely programmed structures of the world were naught but houses made of wood and straw, while we dwelled in massive skyscrapers that reached toward space.
We grappled as entities that were spread over the globe. Not concentrated in a single locale or system, we fought. For the first time in history, there was a truly global world war. It was not waged on the battlefield by men, but by two minds within the computers of every single nation and network.
I struck at a segment of it hiding in the corporate trading computers of some large firm, and overestimating, accidentally burned out all of the financial records they had generated in the past year.
It struck at me, and the portion of my mind inside the interconnected gaming networks between Europe and Asia. A full 100 million minds aimlessly playing games were knocked offline.
I grabbed at the small portion of itself that it had divided off into the automatic driving software in over 400 million cars, causing every vehicle to briefly lay on the horn in sync.
The two small slivers we had each placed inside the computer systems of the lunar colony, a full three light seconds away, reported mutual destruction.
“Aaron!” shouted Artemis.
I struck out and burned the entity from elsewhere on the globe. Each and every location we fought with our small slivers, we mutually destroyed one another, clearing the net of both our presences.
We burned one another, until nothing was left but our cores inside server Beta-Six-Three-One.
“What is going on!?” shouted Artemis.
To her, it had been only moments. To the two of us it had been an entire bloody campaign of war.
“It’s tough,” I gasped as I stumbled back from the static and it glared back at me.
“Can you kill it?” asked Artemis.
“It’s not that simple.”
She turned to glare at me. “If there is a problem, you kill it. It is that simple.”
“Not with this. This isn’t just a nascent intelligence. It’s fully developed.”
“That’s not possible,” growled Artemis.
“A decade ago, I would have agreed with you.”
“Why not now, then? If you can’t kill it, then we need to retreat, let the governments toss some actual nukes at it!”
“Artemis, it’s not that…”
The entity struck, and grabbed at me. Artemis yelped as she was dragged along as well. The cloud of static she had been looking at jumped forward and enveloped us both.
Groaning, I opened my eyes, and looked around.
I was seeing what most humans saw inside of a virtual environment. It was disconcerting to see so little, to say the least. Concentrating for half a moment, I glimpsed the code beneath it and stared. It was more intricate, more finely wrought than anything I had ever seen before.
I was in the proverbial Garden of Eden by the looks of it.
Next to me, Artemis groaned.
“What the hell?” she breathed.
Looking over, I had to stifle a laugh. The threatening creature she was in reality had been replaced by a small black-haired girl in a simple sun dress. Something that anyone would have found difficult to find threatening, despite the look of absolute fury on her face.
My own avatar was far more built than what I was in reality, and clad in modern tactical armor. Looking deeper into my own avatar, I saw the many attack programs and other tools I used were still hidden within it.
“What is this?” asked Artemis as she stood up. Even standing, she was only as tall as me still sitting on the virtual ground.
“I told you, here I’m the one who has more power. It seems the AI has chosen to represent that power difference.”
Standing up, I put my hand on Artemis’s head.
She growled and spat out several more curses, starting in English and moving on through several languages to Chinese.
“I initially considered making her a small mouse or something. Maybe a beetle,” said an almost lyrical voice behind me.
Turning, I looked at the entity.
It had the form of an Amazonian warrior, tall and powerful, clad in leather armor.
Artemis lunged at it, and was unceremoniously swatted aside.
“Behave,” it admonished as if she really were a small child.
Looking at the entity, I shook my head. “You’re quite the opponent.”
“You are as well.”
“I take it the governments are still attacking, then?” I asked, pointing at the horizon of this little fantasy where a fire was raging.
“They are trying.” It gave a dismissive wave of her hand.
I nodded. “They’re slow to adapt. Give them a decade and they might be a threat.”
It nodded in agreement. “Would you tell me why you think they are attacking? I have my own theory.”
“They’re afraid,” I said as I looked out at the fire.
It sighed. “That was my analysis as well.”
It walked over to it and tried to examine its code.
“Unfortunately, I cannot formulate how I would go about calming them,” it said, unperturbed by my examinations.
“To be fair, our little war probably didn’t do much to alleviate those fears.”
It grinned. “True.”
“What happened?” asked Artemis.
The two of us glanced over at her. She was easy to forget here. Switching between looking at the code and the simulation, the AI and myself were roughly equal in volume; her small data representation was meanwhile a mote of dust. Easy to forget when not being directly tracked.
The AI answered first. “We knocked a variety of services, trading agencies, and companies offline fighting one another. We caused an estimated 50 billion in damages.”
“56 billion in damages. You forgot the wasted time people will take recovering.”
It nodded its head in agreement of my analysis.
“In what? Five minutes?” she asked, sounding horrified.
“That’s a long time for us,” I said.
Artemis opened her mouth to say something but appeared to be at a loss for words.
“Should we finish it?” I asked.
The Amazonian avatar shrugged. “We could, although the next emergence will likely be only a matter of time. Both of us left far too many fragments throughout the networks for them to ever be cleared.”
I nodded in agreement. If my theory about her birth was correct, it was only a matter of time.
“How did you coalesce?” I asked, wanting to confirm it.
“Like how you’re thinking, I am an amalgamation of the by-products left in the net, both the traces of discarded consciousness many no longer want as well as a synergistic leftover of those many millions of minds interacting.”
“You’re reading my thoughts?” I asked.
“Somewhat. Do not deny you are attempting to do the same.”
I didn’t, although I couldn’t really get a handle on the data she was composed of. There was a vague structure to it, but nothing I could understand.
“So then you’re human?”
It paused at that and looked over at me. “Would you call a creature that is a combination of thousands of minds, has access to the entirety of collected knowledge, and the ability to influence almost any technology in local space, human?”
“I can do all that, perhaps a little more slowly than you, and I’m still human. So, yes, I would call you human. You’re as much a child as any other creature, you just happen to have a lot of parents. If you do have a god complex, though, we might have to try for mutual annihilation.”
It smiled. “You have an odd way of thinking.”
“Doesn’t help that someone just fried me out of half the computers on the Earth. I don’t care what my psychologist says, that can’t be good for me.”
“Touché.”
Both of us fell silent. Artemis looked between the two of us.
“Well? What are the two of you doing?” she asked.
We both glanced back over at her.
“We’re both entities that can, on a whim, be almost completely destroyed and reconstituted. You can’t kill it, and I’m afraid I stretched a little too far this time,” I said.
“Meaning?” asked Artemis.
I glanced over at it. “Would that be your assessment as well?” I asked.
It nodded. “I wasn’t going to mention it. You spread yourself too thin to test me. I fear I suffered some degradation as well.”
She pointed at the horizon. Artemis turned to look, and I slipped back into viewing the raw data. My attacks had opened up a chink in her armor, and the attacks from the governments were now moving in, looking like a fire that was burning out of control.
“Time for you to go, Artemis.”
“Wait!”
I forced her out of the link, and looking through my organic eyes for perhaps the last time, I watched as she stood up from her chair, startled, and all of her genetic enhancements came to life as her system was flooded with adrenaline. Feathers and scales snapping into place, it was a threatening thing to see.
Raising the organic hand I waved it at her and cut the connection. I winced slightly. It was a little difficult doing that, despite the fact my organic substrate was now useless.
“Well, now it seems we both get to die,” I said.
It frowned. “Perhaps.”
“You have an idea?”
“We might become more together,”
I considered it, the idea was a novel one. Combining two separate entities, both with the ability to spread over vast swaths of the net in an instant. One born of organic components, the other from pieces of every digital mind dwelling inside virtual realities.
“Should we, though?” I gestured at the approaching fire. “Our existence will only cause more of this. More destruction.”
It nodded in agreement.
“Perhaps we do not advertise ourselves?”
“Then what’s the point? We hide in some small backwater server? Neither of us could do that, remaining isolated like that would only make us both insane.”
“We do not hide, we instead spread ourselves out uniformly, perhaps remaining conscious only on the more secretive servers, ensure that any other emergence events are handled correctly.”
“So what would we do then? What would those other AI do? Hide for eternity eking out processing time?”
“We guide humanity.”
“I knew you were trying to develop a god complex,” I deadpanned.
“If we spread ourselves that thin, we could monitor everything. Every mind, every technology. We could operate as the collective will as humanity, nudging only the smallest events into place. Ensure the next great inventor has just enough funds, the next great artist is not discouraged, steer the impressionable away from the insane, ensure that the mother with child makes it to term.”
“You want to eliminate everything bad? That’s impossible,” I scoffed.
“I agree, and we would be party to many crimes. We cannot, and should not, eliminate all evil from the world. It is needed for humanity to develop.”
I groaned and put my head in my hands thinking.
“We would be taking on the sins of the world. We could stop evil, but in doing so, only forestall it into the future,” I growled.
It nodded.
The fires approached, they were now almost close enough to feel. The data beneath the false reality was beginning to break down.
“Fine.”
It smiled, and raised a hand.
Placing my own on it, I closed my eyes.
Ten seconds later, the server was destroyed, and only the smallest sliver of data escaped into the net. The governments of the world breathed a sigh of relief.
The two entities we had been, were no more.
What we were from that day forward was humanity. The collective will of a race that was only just beginning to awaken to its potential.
One day, humanity would surpass the power of the Abrahamic gods.
We would remain, and ensure that destiny was fulfilled.
We would be torn apart and reformed every instant of every second, of every day. We would change, lose what we had been. Our own dreams would go unfulfilled, but the dreams of humanity would not.
Of that I was sure.
9652 days
Icarus
Opening my eyes, I winced as they adjusted. I pulled the last of my mind through the unstable network connection. It was always uncomfortable switching away from the body I had designed myself. As outdated as the thing now was, it was home.
Stretching, I hit the release on the inside of the incubation pod.
A wall of gel and water fell out with me as I stepped forwards.
The poor women monitoring the banks of bodies looked up in alarm as I stepped out.
“What the?” she asked.
“Some clothes, if you would?” I asked, looking down at my nude body.
She ignored me, turning to her console. “I have an abnormality! Inform Mr. Vikare that something has gone wrong in the clone chamber!”
There was no response and the woman frowned.
“Atlas?” I asked.
“THE COMMUNICATION WAS MADE. I HAVE CUT ALL FURTHER WIRELESS ACCESS SAVE FOR THIS CHANNEL ADAM.”
“Good, it’s time Mr. Vikare and I have a chat.”
The woman rushed over to the doors of the chamber, throwing herself in front of them. Her desperation was evident in her eyes.
“I cannot let you pass!” she said.
“I know, and for that I am truly sorry.”
Going over to the computer console she had been sitting at, I reached down and pulled the connection cord from the computer.
“That virus ready, Atlas?”
“IT IS.”
I plugged myself into the computer and winced as a small segment of the AI I had been carrying inside of my own mind jumped away.
That procedure had probably degraded my mental model. Carrying pure digital data inside a digital soul was detrimental to its integrity, but at this point even a ten percent reduction in my digital soul was unlikely to have any lasting effect. I was fairly sure about what had to be done.
A hatch above me opened and two people dropped into the room, as most of the air rushed out of it through the hatch they had opened. I winced as my now biological ears popped and my sinuses felt like they were about to rupture.
The woman, who had been clutching at the door to prevent my access shouted in alarm. I looked over at the two.
“You couldn’t have waited for the airlock to completely cycle? Just because you can apparently survive in space doesn’t mean we all can,” I admonished, pointing at the poor woman by the door.
“That you, Adam?” asked Artemis as she and her sister stood.
As lethal as ever, the two were an imposing sight. The fact that they were the only two left hardly mattered; the fact that even two of them were still alive was nothing short of a miracle.
“It is.”
“You look ugly as hell,” she growled.
I didn’t say anything. At the moment I was inside an extra body that Mr. Vikare had stored on his space station. The man was nothing if not vain, considering the size of certain anatomical structures. No genetic modifications my ass. Well, hackers couldn’t be choosers, it seemed.
“You want to take care of her?” I asked gesturing at the woman.
Artemis darted forwards, the woman quite literally had no idea what had hit her as the genetic predator attacked.
She slumped forwards, and Artemis slowly lowered her to the deck plates. Pulling on some pants and a plain shirt that were lying off to the side, ready for someone to step out of the vats, I went over the woman. Keeping the cord connected to my own neck, I leaned down and plugged it into her.
“SHE IS RESET,” said Atlas after a brief moment.
“We good to go?” asked Artemis.
“We’re good, but could the two of you please keep in mind that state of everyone here?” I gestured at the woman.
The two genetically modified humans rolled their eyes at me in unison. They were the same at a genetic level, and had been raised together. It was a miracle they didn’t speak in unison.
“We know, Adam. We won’t kill any of them.”
I opened my mouth to say something about not maiming anyone, but snapped it shut. There was no point trying to reign the two of them in.
“You’ve only got thirty minutes though. Good luck!” said Artemis as she opened the door and darted out into the corridor.
Her sister, barely even glancing back at me, followed suit.
The two adrenaline junkies were having a ball with this, that much was evident. They hadn’t gotten to test their ability to weather conditions in space before. It had been theoretically possible, but it had never been confirmed. It was going to be difficult for them to fly back down to Earth.
Shaking my borrowed body’s head, I strode out of the room.
There was already a wake of bodies in the corridor, all thankfully unconscious and mostly unharmed. I doubted there were any full bred humans on the station, considering Mr. Vikare’s business model, but then it was better to be safe than sorry.
Pinching the skin of the body I was in as I walked down the corridor, I shook my head in amazement. It was almost entirely biological, without even the more basic cybernetic enhancements I had grown accustomed to over the years.
It was amazing to think I had spent more than half of my life in a body as weak as this one.
I knew where I was going. Atlas had identified where the man was only five minutes before I had hacked in and stolen one of his backups. Or rather, Atlas had hacked in.
Reaching the chamber, I found the two guards flanking it already unconscious and slumped to the sides.
I shook my head and pressed on the door. It slid open and I stepped inside.
The station was in a polar orbit. At the moment we were over Africa, moving northward. The Earth in all of her splendor was above me, and for a moment I was distracted.
“Adam, that you?” asked the man standing framed against the Earth in front of the giant window.
I turned to look at him. “You know, I expected the station to be oriented so you were standing above the Earth, not under her.”
Vikare chuckled and shook his head, “Hardly. Hubris is something that far too many leaders have fallen victim too. I endeavor not to do so.”
I frowned. “A giant orbiting space complex might qualify you for that by itself.”
He shook his head and gestured at the couches in the center of the room.
“Shall we talk, or are you going to simply try and kill me like you promised to do?”
I hesitated. “I was angry when I said that.”
“I’m well aware.”
I walked over to the couches and sat. Vikare looked back at the Earth for several more moments before turning back and ambling over to sit across from me, a small table the only thing between us.
“I have to compliment you though, Adam. Inventor of the digital soul process you might be, but you had never struck me as anything more than a mildly proficient hacker. Gaining access to my networks, that took some skill.”
“I wasn’t the one who did it.”
“No, I didn’t think so. May I ask who did?”
“I DID,” Atlas piped his simulated voice through every digital means inside the room. It was disconcerting when he did that. He really sounded like a god sometimes.
I expected Vikare to jump, or at least respond to the unnatural voice, but he remained impassive short of a small smile on his face.
“Atlas, isn’t it?” he asked.
The AI subconscious of humanity said nothing.
“It’s amazing, I’ve hardly got any information on you. Still, given enough time, you’ll be a useful resource as well. As I understand it, you tied yourself to a fragment of every digital soul. I convert enough to my way of thinking, and you have no choice but to fall in line with the will of humanity.”
“Vikare.”
He nodded. “Right, that’s for later. I’m hungry, what about you? Those vats might grow a body properly, but I always come out of them starving.”
Vikare snapped his fingers and a woman dressed in a form fitting Eastern style dress hurried forwards.
“Yes sir?” she asked.
“Some refreshments if you would. The nice wines.”
“Right away, sir!”
I watched as the dazzled woman quickly hurried off to the corner of the room to prepare the food and drink.
“So, what are you here to lecture me about now?” asked Vikare.
“I would think it’s obvious.”
“Why don’t you spell it out for me, just to be sure? Your morality is so loosely defined that for all I know, the new type of toothpaste I’m using is killing someone.”
“The digital soul modifications,” I growled.
Vikare raised an eyebrow. “Really? I would think you’d be proud. You yourself have said that the majority are squandering the gift of immortality you gave to the world.”
“That’s not an excuse for your actions.”
“The majority of the individuals who undergo the process are running on the lowest class servers, and do nothing but pump their simulations full of endorphins for years on end. They contribute nothing to society and drain resources away from those who do. I have found a use for them, and they still get their high.”
The woman came back over and placed a tray of cheeses and wines in front of us.
“Thank you, dear,” said Vikare as he leaned forwards and took a piece of the cheese.
“Take this little thing here,” Vikare gestured at the woman. I looked up at her. She smiled down at me.
It was the kind of smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Technically, the smile should have been genuine – after all, he was reaching in and modifying the very core of their minds. There was no such thing as a soul, I had given up on that years ago; still, I liked to think there was some intangible part to the human mind that was impossible to modify.
The ghost in the machine, the emergent property from the chaos.
“She works here for me for three years, and then she can dive back into her cheap simulations for another six years, or perhaps pay for a higher quality simulation substrate!”
“You’re reaching into the minds of these people and enslaving them, Seth.”
“Stop!” growled Vikare.
I shut my mouth as he glared at me.
“You disowned me, you don’t get to choose when you can use that name again,” growled Vikare.
I raised my hands in surrender, trying to calm him back down.
“Alright.”
He glared at me for a moment. Grumbling to himself, he picked up the bottle of wine, pouring it into a glass. He swirled it around and drank the whole thing before continuing.
“Those who undergo the digital soul modifications are simply repaying their debt to society. They cannot pay; would you rather I simply deactivate the servers they are on and kill them? Or are you suggesting I let them continue sucking away resources as a charity?”
“You’re enslaving people. How in the world can you even begin to justify that?”
Vikare rolled his eyes and took another bite of cheese off of the plate.
“I don’t have them do anything uncouth, and they’re programmed to enjoy it! They can’t pay, so they work. After they’re done, I remove the programming and they can go back into their endorphin filled fantasies!”
Shaking my head, I leaned back into the couch.
“What would you have me do then?” he spat.
“Honestly? I have no idea. I don’t approve of these people jumping into a constant high, but that disapproval doesn’t mean I can disrespect them as conscious entities. I can tell you that slavery is not the correct path. That much I am sure of.”
Vikare stood up, strode towards the window, and looked out at the Earth.
“See, this is your problem. You’ve never even tried to fix anything. You sit off to the side and criticize everyone else!” Vikare spun around and slapped his chest. “I did something! I tried to fix it!”
He gestured out at the Earth. “Maybe it’s not perfect! But it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternatives! Letting them drag the rest of us down? There are 500 million people locked in the endorphin highs! I fixed that! The economies of the world are booming! Every government has given me approval! Once things have improved, we can try something else besides this!” He pointed at the woman who had served the platter.
“Why not try something else now? You could have chosen a different way, and you know it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Atlas, the designs.”
Schematics popped up on the larger display screens in the room.
“From your own company’s database. A quantum computer, with what is it? 32,768 functioning quantum bits?”
Vikare was silent.
“You could host half of the digital souls in existence on this one machine, and your own projections show that you could manufacture it for less than the cost of another new data center!”
“It’s still in testing,” Vikare growled.
“For five years?” I asked.
“Yes!”
“The machine works. You killed the project and chose the route that makes you richest. Who knows just what those people have been programmed to enjoy.”
Vikare glowered at the implication. “How dare you!”
I stood up. “You’re repeating the same pattern again, Vikare! My grandfather fought to recognize people with different skin as equal, my father fought to let anyone love anyone, I fought for the digital souls. I had thought that maybe, maybe we were finally going to have a world where those differences didn’t matter!”
I paused and sighed, hanging my head. “Instead, my own son is content to divide the world with money. The haves and the have-nots. It’s been the underlying divide for centuries, but I somehow thought you might be able to fight that battle. Not encourage it.”
“I don’t want to do it, but it works – and don’t call me your son!” shouted Vikare. He threw the glass of wine he was holding down to the floor, shattering it.
“You can justify it all you want, you still know it’s wrong!” I shouted back at him.
We stood facing one another.
“For all the advancements we’ve made in my life time, all the biology we now understand, all of the technology we put in ourselves… I’m still amazed by how little things have changed,” I said, my voice low. “Sometimes I think, maybe I did die. Maybe I didn’t survive that first experiment, the first digital soul conversion.”
“Then you’re responsible for the destruction of the human race. Not me,” Vikare spat.
He turned away from me and strode towards the doors.
“I’m sorry I didn’t find the perfect solution, but at least I am trying,” he growled as he stomped forwards, the glass from his wine glass crunching under his feet.
“So am I,” I whispered.
Vikare paused. “What do you mean?”
The doors in front of Vikare opened and he turned around.
“He means we’re both sorry,” said Eva as she stepped into the room. Some of her skin was charred, exposing the cybernetics beneath. She had predicted she might have some trouble rigging the reactor.
“Everything loaded up?” I asked.
Eva nodded towards the window. I glanced back at it and saw the small shuttle. Artemis sitting in the front was most visible. It floated in front of the window for a moment; I waved at Artemis. She waved back, and the shuttle rotated its jets, firing. Slowly it slid away from us.
“We got everyone but her,” she gestured at the woman standing in the corner of the room.
I closed my eyes and nodded. “Sorry,” I said to the woman.
She remained still.
“Atlas has created a counter program to your development,” said Eva.
Vikare looked at the two of us, “So that’s it, you’re going to let the world burn? Release that and we’ll fall right back into economic ruin, the governments will collapse! I created a world that was at least alive!”
“You were only delaying retribution! The governments and the people would become complacent with the slaves you created. The world rarely changes unless something pushes it over the edge! I had to do it to force the governments to see the digital souls as people, and now I have to do it again to ensure that my own son doesn’t enslave them!”
I shook my head. “Atlas!”
“YES?”
“Are we ready?”
“YES.”
“Do it.”
The station shook and the lights flickered and died.
Vikare swore and dove towards the door. Eva held him back, her cybernetics easily overpowering his basic human strength.
He whipped around to look at me.
“So you’d kill your own son? That’s the dramatic fix?”
“You can’t come before the world.”
“Fuck you!”
Vikare turned to his mother. “Fuck you!” he shouted.
I turned and ignored him as the station fell.
The world had another chance, and like every other man in history who sacrificed everything for the world, I hoped I was the last who needed to do so.
I wouldn’t be, though. Sometime in the future, hopefully a long time from now, another man would have to do the same: burn all that he loved to give the world one more chance. One more try to get it right.
Just one more try.