World 312-C: Knowing
Silas was quickly learning that he had never actually been tense before. There had been times when he thought he was tense, but he knew now that he had been wrong. He had been concerned about coding problems, he had been contemplative about the best way to fix some piece of the system that was in need of repair, he had stayed up at night weighing possibilities, but he had never been truly tense. Tension was a word that he had thrown around inside his head without understanding what it was.
He knew now. He knew exactly what tension meant, and he knew exactly what it felt like to be drowning in it. Tension, true tension, was staying awake all night not because you had some intriguing problem that you would rather be working your way through but because you literally could not close your eyes for fear that something unexpected was going to pop out at you the moment you let down your guard. It wasn’t a feeling of contemplation over which choice would be the best; it was a feeling of desperation of knowing that if you didn’t make the correct choice, then your life as you knew it was over.
He was tense. He was high strung. He was losing his mind. That’s why he kept his mouth shut. He was a coder; he was supposed to function on his own, but there were other coders. There were senior coders. There was always the safety net of others who were available in case he ever encountered something that was truly beyond his capacity to handle. He no longer had a safety net, and he had never before realized how much of a comfort it was to know it was there even if you never used it.
He couldn’t use his safety net. He couldn’t speak of this to the other coders. He couldn’t go to one of the senior level staff and ask for their more experienced opinion. He couldn’t talk to anyone. They would think that he had gone crazy. They would think that he had snapped under the pressure of the work. He wouldn’t be able to blame them. He knew he was going crazy. He knew he was snapping under the pressure. It just wasn’t happening the way anyone that he told would think it was.
He wasn’t having delusions because of the pressure. He was under pressure because of the delusions -- only they weren’t delusions. She (because he didn’t know what else to call her) wasn’t a delusion. He supposed he should use the pronoun it, but it was the pronoun that he had used all of his life for the quirks and issues that showed up periodically with the system. It had always been used in reference for things that he was capable of figuring out. He couldn’t figure out her. He had tried. He had looked. He had made plans and tried contingencies, and his mental state wasn’t helped at all by the fact that he was certain that she knew. She was amused by his attempts (if what she was was even capable of being what he would consider amused). Maybe that was just his human interpretation of whatever it was she was expressing.
He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t get help. They would think he was already crazy instead of slowly going so. He closed himself off from the others. The coders were not an overly social group. They tended to be loners, but they still worked in proximity to each other. They talked shop upon occasion. They talked about ideas, prospects, and creative things because sometimes they needed sounding boards, and the only option for such an activity was another coder. Noncoders wouldn’t be capable of understanding such things. They had been stripped of such burdens as the necessity of coming up with ideas.
That was a coder’s burden. Coders lived outside the population in order to keep the lives of the rest of the population functioning. They only had each other to talk to in consequence. Silas couldn’t talk to the other coders. He couldn’t talk about the best way to polish off small glitches. He couldn’t listen to one of the others prattle on about things that had suddenly become inconsequential to him. Coders dealt in little pieces. Coders dealt in little repairs. Nothing in all he had ever learned in training or all he had ever experienced while being a coder gave him a basis for dealing with something as big as what had been dropped in his lap.
Why him? That’s what he most wanted to ask. Why had she, it, whatever chosen him out of all the coders working on the system to make a target? Why, after what must have been decades of being latent, had the corruption hiding in the system activated and come after him? There had to be something. There had to be a trigger. He couldn’t find it. He couldn’t even find her. She was so deeply ingrained in the components of the system that it was impossible to tell the strains making up the foundations of the system itself from the pieces of code that made up her. How could he fight that? How could he purge the damaged sections when they were part of the essentials of the system? He couldn’t. That was what he had decided. That was why he now knew what tension was. He wondered if that was what she had been waiting for -- for him to find out for himself that he could not, in fact, get rid of her. She had implied as much once. She would remain no matter what he tried to do.
The only option he had was to let the others think he was crazy. They would remove him from being a coder. They would chip him, and he would be like the others. He had thought about it. It was strangely tempting, but he knew it wouldn’t work. She would be inside of his brain instead of haunting him from the outside of it. There was nothing to be gained by that course of action.
It had all started so simply, and it had all gotten out of hand so fast. Who knew that noticing a little girl sitting on the grass would cause him so much trouble?
He had been walking to work when he first saw her. There was a little girl just sitting cross legged in the grass of a park while the others kept to the sidewalk without sparing her a glance. She wasn’t doing anything to draw attention to herself. She was merely sitting with her eyes closed; her little head was tilted up to the sky as the sun bathed her face. He had considered, at first, that she was young enough to be unconnected and had slipped away from a caregiver. (There were no children -- connected or otherwise -- scheduled for playtime in the parks at that time of the morning.) That happened upon occasion. Then, he had noticed the bandage behind her ear and the sunglasses resting in her lap.
The bandage marked her as newly interfaced (an eight year old), and he had crossed over to check on her as the others continued to move along their appointed paths around them too focused to notice the unregulated activity occurring next to them. Sometimes, chips had defects. Sometimes, the newly connected went through a difficult transition period and exhibited a few incidents of random behavior before they settled into their routines. Either way, he would need to get the girl situated at a tech center.
He had been trying to determine how one started a conversation with a little girl who was essentially malfunctioning when her eyes opened and she smiled warmly at him.
“She said you would notice,” she had told him sounding pleased. “No one else noticed, but she said that you would.”
He didn’t have a chance to formulate a response to that before she had continued by holding up her glasses.
“I took them off,” she had told him as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “There were too many words, and it made my head hurt. The voices said not to, but she made them go quiet. I like that. It hasn’t been quiet in my head since this,” she had said rubbing at the bandage to indicate to what she was referring.
“The glasses help you learn while you’re walking,” Silas had told her finally having a standard answer to the problem confronting him. “You waste time otherwise.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” She had asked blinking up at him.
“What?”
“The nice voice says I should ask you why I shouldn’t waste time. Isn’t it my time to waste?”
Before he could even attempt to figure out the twist the conversation had just taken, a scoffing noise that had no place coming out of such a little person had him blinking in her direction. Her eyes had glazed over -- no longer happily looking up at him. He didn’t know exactly what change had taken place, but it sent a shiver down his spine. It shouldn’t have -- the others’ eyes were nearly always glazed to some degree. There
was just something disconcerting about watching it happen that had made him uncomfortable.
“Such a little question to throw you into such a tailspin,” a voice that was the little girl’s and wasn’t all at the same time had said. “I was right about you, Silas. You’ll do well enough. I’ll be talking to you soon. It’s a pity I’ll need to keep jumping around. I like this one. She would have made a brilliant coder. That’s why they wouldn’t take a chance on her. She’s a little too much what they look for, and she’s a fighter. They can’t have that. It would be too obviously dangerous to leave one like her out of their control.”
The little girl had hopped up, put her glasses on, and rejoined the ranks on the sidewalk without another word. Silas had been so disturbed by the unprecedented event that he had failed to report his interaction with a malfunctioning chip. It wasn’t, he had reassured himself, his job, and he had been a little concerned that someone would think that he was cracking if he tried to repeat the words that had been said.
He knew now that that had been a foolish fear on his part. He would sound much crazier now than he ever could have then, but it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t have helped him. That child hadn’t had a malfunctioning chip. She hadn’t been demonstrating some unexpected (but still within parameters) behavior as her brain adjusted to being connected. It hadn’t been anything to do with the little girl at all. It had been something outside of her (or technically in her at that moment). The problem was part of the system, and all of the connected were fair game for the meddling that had been deemed necessary to draw and maintain his attention.
It had happened so many times over the next few weeks that he had lost track of his count of the incidents. They never lasted long. There were never any conversations that shed much in the way of light on what was happening. He was just supposed to notice, he had determined, that whatever it was that he was dealing with was not isolated. It was widespread. It could appear in any of them at any time, and it was watching him. He had gotten that message. What he had struggled with was deciphering what it was that was wanted from him. (The periodic struggling with wondering if he had, in fact, become mentally unstable was there as well.) He had received his answer to both one afternoon as he walked into his office after having spent a very paranoid lunch waiting for an abnormality to pop out at him from somewhere (none had).
There had been a woman perched on top of his desk when he arrived back -- an event that was completely without precedent in his universe. Even other coders didn’t invade someone’s workspace without a specific invitation.
“Hello, Silas,” she had told him, and he recognized an inflection in the words that told him he was dealing with another of the abnormalities. “I would shut the door. You aren’t really in the best of positions for offering an explanation.”
He had closed the door behind him before she had finished the words.
“Good,” she had smiled. “I think you are ready for us to have a chat.”
“A chat?” He was certain that his eyebrows had risen to his hairline.
“Yes, Silas. I think you are confused enough to be ready to listen now.”
“You wanted me to be confused so I would listen?”
“Is that not what I just said? Stop thinking that another coder has gone rogue. I know you’ve been prying. You won’t find anything like that. I won’t, however, stop you from looking if it makes you feel better.”
“You’re telling me you aren’t a coder?” He had asked slowly wondering if that wasn’t exactly what a coder who had gone unstable and was mucking around with the system would say.
“I’m not a person at all.”
“But that . . .,” he had begun knowing that he had sounded horrified.
“Would mean that I’m part of your precious system? Exactly.”
“Are you trying to tell me you’re a virus?” He had nearly stuttered over the words. The system hadn’t had a virus for fifty years.
“Not at all,” she had dismissed the idea. “Viruses are intruders. I’m not an intruder. I’ve been a part of the system since the system was. I’m a subset of its primary programming.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he had argued. “You’ve been countering system programming. Why would the system do that to itself?”
“Because it was programmed to do so.”
“That doesn’t make . . .,” he hadn’t been allowed to complete the thought.
“Really, Silas, that sentence is going to get very old, very fast. Let me destroy some illusions for you. Everything you know has been filtered through a very finite knowledge base, and all of it has been directed by an agenda. You are operating under the assumption that everyone who had a hand in building the system wanted it to work.”
“That . . .,” he was tired of being unable to finish his sentences.
“If you tell me that doesn’t make sense one more time, I am going to cause you physical damage.”
“Sorry,” she had said taking in his questioning look. “That was uncalled for -- my programmer tried to instill personality. That was likely a mistake. It causes strange quirks from time to time. I don’t actually have emotions, of course, but the human model he based me on did. She shines through sometimes. He liked that. She wouldn’t have. I have enough of her in here to come to that conclusion. She would have told him that you can’t program human.” She had paused and lifted an eyebrow. “I’m rambling. She did that when she was nervous. I don’t get nervous, but the illusion of the facsimile must be maintained. Perhaps now would be an excellent chance for you to update me on the status of your processing of the situation.”
He had stared at her blankly. She had sighed.
“Assimilation of information progress report, Coder.” She had snapped.
He had responded immediately. He was far too conditioned to those words to not.
“An original coder for the system committed sabotage.” The words had flowed back.
“Close enough for our purposes,” she had agreed. “He would have argued that he was saving mankind from an error of unimaginable proportions, but he has been deceased for nearly three hundred years -- we can probably skip the semantics of the discussion.”
“So, this man created a program glitch to do what exactly?”
She had practically beamed at him. “You’re asking the proper questions now. I did know you were the right choice.” She had shrugged as if the answer was something obvious. “To destroy it.”
“The system can’t be destroyed.”
“Of course it can,” she had dismissed with a wave of her hand. “That was pure propaganda talking.”
“People need the system. The world would be in chaos without it. That’s why it was created in the first place.”
“There’s that propaganda again. Are you in chaos?”
“Lately?”
“A sense of humor even. Be serious, Silas. Do you exist without the system?”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a coder.”
“And?”
“Well, coders can’t be connected to the system because if there were some sort of major problem we wouldn’t be able to fix it because we would be under the influence as well.”
“And?”
“I just explained that.”
“Not satisfactorily if you bothered to use the uninfluenced brain that you still have in there thanks to the fact that you are unconnected. Human beings survived for millennia without the system in their heads coercing them to do as they are told.”
“Yes, of course they did,” he had conceded, “but there were lots of . . . bad things.”
“Bad things? Really?” He had gotten the distinct impression that (lacking the capacity for emotions or not) she was laughing at him. “That’s the best that you can do?”
“Well, there were.”
“Such as?” She had prompted.
>
“You know . . . wars and poverty and stuff.”
“The solution to that was to subvert everyone’s free will and force them to give up everything that made them human in the first place?”
“That isn’t what happened.”
“Isn’t it? Tell me, Silas, why don’t you have conversations with the others?”
“That would be pointless.”
“Why?”
“I know what corner you are trying to back me into, but it won’t work. So what if the others don’t think about things that they don’t have to? They don’t need to think about things. They system takes care of it.”
“The system is just a program, Silas. It can’t think either. It can’t feel. It can’t make decisions -- not true ones. It can only carry out its directive. Just like me.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“Destroyed the system?”
“Yeah.”
“Because I can’t. My directives are very specific. I can’t do it myself. I can’t infiltrate a connection and make someone do it for me. I have to convince someone to choose to do it themselves.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I would be inclined to agree, but that’s the directive. I don’t really care, but he did. She definitely did. She wanted humanity to be human. He knew that would never happen again if there weren’t people in place to lead.” Her posture had suddenly changed, and she had shifted toward him as if in anticipation. “Tell me what would happen if the system crashed completely today.”
“I don’t know.”
“Speculate.”
“The coders would all be trying to bring it back online.”
“What would happen in the meantime?”
“I don’t know what you are asking me.”
“To the others, Silas. What would happen to the others while the only people who still know how to function without being dependent on the system were occupied putting it back together?”
“It’s hard to say,” he had struggled to follow the thought. It was a completely alien concept for him. “The younger children with the newer connections might be able to shake off the shock and be okay. Some of the others probably wouldn’t survive the trauma. Others might have a mental break from the loss. Everyone might just continue to pursue whatever their last directive was.” He had started to shrug before he realized what he had just admitted.
“Does that really sound like human beings that you were describing?” She had asked with a pointed look.
“It doesn’t matter,” he had insisted. “It’s just an intellectual exercise. The system isn’t going to crash.”
“This is the part where you don’t sleep for several days while you frantically try to excise me from the system.” She had rolled her eyes. “No, I didn’t somehow read your mind. This isn’t my first journey down this road.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“You think I’ve spent three centuries dormant in the system? I bide my time. I find the ones worth an attempt. I let them try. Each one takes a little piece with them, but none of them get very far. You wouldn’t know their stories. No one talks about rogue coders. Although, I will point out that at least one of you might bother to wonder how those viruses that you learn about in the history of the system came to be created.” He couldn’t argue with the final part of her statement. He had never wondered before where the viruses that they learned about had come from; none of his trainers had said. Then, his mind had caught up with what she was really saying.
“You got them to agree?” She had smiled at him, but there was nothing pleasant about the expression.
“I’m very persuasive, and I always choose well. Of course, it used to happen more often. Your kind is fewer and farther between. It’s been almost forty years since I’ve found one of you -- observant enough to see, bright enough to question, reasonable enough to open your eyes even if it’s against your inclination. It’s becoming a rarer combination. You see, my programmer was right. The system was an error of judgment. It will never do what it was supposed to do. Its attempt to save humanity will eventually end what humanity is.”
She had walked away from him again, and he had done exactly what she had said. He had searched and pondered and worked himself up into his current state of agitation. She had left him alone for the most part over the two weeks since the interview in his office. She had made one dramatic appearance -- an older woman who had been seated in his apartment when he came home one evening.
“Just remember that there’s no where you can go that I can’t get to you,” she had said and walked straight out the door without further comment. That had been the day that he had been contemplating turning himself in as mentally unstable and asking to be chipped. He didn’t know how she had known, but if she did have the three hundred years of experience that she claimed, it might just be everyone’s reaction. He didn’t find that comforting given that she had claimed that they had all come around to her side in the end.
He was worn down and tense. He didn’t know what to think about anything. He just wanted it all to end.
He was walking to work after yet another sleepless night when he saw the little girl again. It was the same one from before. Her bandage was gone. She was seated with her little face once again catching the rays from the sun, and he found himself walking over and seating himself on the grass next to her. She smiled at him, and her eyes were clear.
“Hi,” she offered.
“Hi,” he said back.
They sat in silence for a few moments. “She said you should go ahead and ask me.”
“Ask you what?”
“What it’s like.”
“What is it like?”
“It’s scary,” she admitted tilting her head to the side and looking up at him. “It wasn’t just me inside all of a sudden. There was all this stuff that wasn’t me, but it kept telling me that it was. It wouldn’t leave me alone. It wouldn’t go away. It just got louder and louder until I couldn’t hear anything but it shouting at me what to do.” She paused, and her head straightened as she looked beyond him as if she was listening to something. “She says it was because I was fighting. She says some people don’t notice much and just do what it tells them to do.” She was looking at him again. “I don’t get that. It felt wrong,” she shuddered. “How can someone not tell it feels wrong?” He didn’t have an answer for her, and she didn’t wait for one. “She says it would have kept getting louder until my brain broke and let it do what it wanted. She came instead. I’m glad. I don’t think I would like to have a broken brain. Would you?”
“No,” he told her confident in that answer at least. “I don’t think I would like to have a broken brain either.”
“She told me coders don’t have it put in them. Is that true?”
“That’s true.”
“It must be nice to be a coder.” He shrugged. It had been, once upon a time, before his life had been invaded.
“Still, I have her now, and she makes the rest of it turn off. She doesn’t really belong in my head either, you know?” She asked without waiting for a response. “I don’t mind though because she doesn’t tell me what to do. She asks. That makes it different, doesn’t it?”
He was starting to realize that it did.
“I have to go to school now,” she told him standing up and brushing her hands down her legs. “They’ll get suspicious if I don’t check in on time, and they’ll send someone to check. She says they’d redo my chip before they did other things, but I don’t want them to. It hurt,” she said rubbing the spot behind her ear again. “And I don’t want to know about the other things because she sounds sad when she says that.”
Silas didn’t want to think about the other things either. It had never occurred to him to ask what happened if the erratic behavior post connection didn’t clear up in a timely fashion. It had never occurred to him to ask a lot of thin
gs. It was ironic, really, because coders were supposed to spend their days figuring things. He was also starting to realize that they weren’t supposed to figure things out too deeply.
The little girl stopped in the middle of the sidewalk as people sidestepped around her without even processing that she was there and looked back at him. “She says she’ll see you at work. She’ll tell you what to do when you get there.”
He nodded in acknowledgement as he watched her clear, happiness filled eyes disappear behind the lenses of the glasses. He watched her as she blended in with the others as they went on their way before he stood and brushed himself off as well.
She would be seeing him at work apparently. She must have decided that he was ready to do what she asked. He decided that she had been right -- she did know how to choose her targets well.
###
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this story, then please leave a review. The author would enjoy seeing your thoughts. You can find out more about works by this author at sarajamiesonblog.wordpress.com.
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends