He abandoned those questions long ago. Because after all this time, he had found peace. At least as much as a man in his position could ever hope to find. If someone asked him about it, he always wished he could say that time heals all wounds, but when you have a lot of it, wounds had a tendency to simply pile up instead.
He could sense people looking at him. They stared at his mortal body as he sat in the middle of the square, the massive structure of the Grey–Tech tower expanding above him like a vertical mountain of glass. He heard voices somewhere in the distance, in the back of his perceptions.
“Is that… the Proxy?” one asked.
“What would the Proxy be doing sitting in the middle of damn square,” another asked the first skeptically.
“Guys, move along, I’ve to get home,” a third, female voice added.
He felt them brushing against his shoulders as they moved by, some even gently shook him as though making sure he was alive, but that didn’t perturb him at all. They didn’t need to know what he was doing. No one needed to know.
For the time being, Max had given up on his search to find clues to where the Administrator might be, and instead returned back to a scene that brought him peace no matter how many times he relived it in his mind – a scene he had seen as a child.
His thoughts centered, his inner eye expanded. Memories always came clearer in meditation, as thought a curtain were drawn.
The sight he witnessed was the construction of the first Grey–Tech tower ever built. A place he never thought of as home, but one which now served as one no less.
Its creation took no more than a day.
The sky simply disappeared. Or more precisely, took on a different hue. Parts of it were torn away in sheets of ice. The event had scared him at first, he could still feel a phantom of that fear. But as he came to understand what was happening, he had begun to marvel at the beauty of it and the fear evaporated.
Small robotic entities, each too tiny for his conscious mind to see, became clear in his meditative–state. They misted the air. Replicating endlessly, they poured out of the sky as if some God had sliced the atmosphere and allowed a stream of brilliance to pour down to the city sprawl like a waterfall.
The process of growth started out slow, but accelerated exponentially. Like a distant shore suddenly rising into the sky, the accumulated material grew, the peak of it soon lost in the atmosphere.
Nanites of microscopic size solidified into massive blocks of gold, each the size of a tower. The enfolding of liquid thoughts formed a rough figure eight, suddenly brilliant and streaming with concentrated lightning, the two massive cauls of its upper portion unconnected, dispersing in the ionosphere in an aurora of strangely symmetrical beauty.
Block by gilded block, the material formed a solid, smooth–edged tower, taller than anything Max had ever seen – its width an equal impossibility. Still the shape remained featureless, a monolith ready to be molded into shapes dictated only by the imaginations and machinations of its invisible creator. Outer layers of the building darkened, then turned into glass. The color of sky burst to life within it. First rooms began to form. Thought–projections burrowed through glass with the efficiency of uncountable termites, each laboring with unprecedented speed which even reality itself had a trouble following. In his ethereal vision, Max saw them as both solid objects – like tiny octopuses – and, at times, when his concentration wavered, as pure possibility without tangible form – an idea floating.
The though–patterns crafted what eventually became living quarters, immense indoor golf courses, even a vast area of rainforest, each trunk taller than a mountain, yet small in the building with the width of a continental lake. The forest seemingly grew out of nothing and forever–after served to filter and provide fresh air, the ceiling above it illuminating its canopy with searing heat.
Sounds of people and their gasps filled his senses. Memories of combined amazement and the sounds they made froze his thoughts for a moment as the soundscapes of his mind took over. Millions of voices marveling.
The construction’s innards had begun to take proper shapes, when a pain, sharper than anything he had ever felt or hoped to feel, snapped him back to his corporeal body. The hurt slithered in behind his eyes, biting away as if a living thing. He heard a voice call out to him, a skeletal voice without substance. It told of an eyelid and a world. But as the pain subsided, a sound of his heart thrumming became the singular clarity.
It felt impossible for him to open his eyes at first, as if he had slept for centuries.
“Ngghh,” he muttered under his breath. At length, his eyelids opened. Night had fallen around him. How long have I been meditating?
His Link relayed Bolt’s voice. The voice was as friendly as it was mischievous, glad and eager, its deep yet light tone suggesting an easygoingness – a friend. The only true friend he had managed to make in his entire life.
“Can you hear me? I know you’re chillin’, but wake up,” Bolt said.
Max grunted in response, rubbing his forehead and trying to dispel the last of the lingering pain.
“The hell, man? I’ve been buzzing your for an hour,” Bolt said.
“I was–“
“Meditating?”
“Yes.”
He heard Bolt sigh, his wife, Sara chuckling in the background. “One of these days we’ll find you something better to do with you time, man. I think you wasted enough of it, and who knows how long you’ve left, old man.”
“Time you enjoy wasting isn’t wasted time,” he said.
“Is he quoting dead writers again?” he heard Sara ask.
“Yea,” Bolt snickered.
“Seemed appropriate…” Max said and stood up, stretching his limbs, his knees popping. “Also, old can still be good, just mom agrees,” Max chuckled.
“Now that’s just low,” Bolt retorted, laughing despite himself.
No matter the hour, the square beneath the spire always brimmed with people coming and going, passing out of the building’s cavernous entrance, their footsteps echoing over the glass tiles. The smells they combined were surprisingly pleasant, intermixing into shades of perfume. Max tried not to focus on their idle conversations. The feat, however, proved difficult, despite having a friend’s voice talking in his ear.
“By the way,” Bolt said, “the wife and I were wondering if you’re up for some dinner?”
Max walked towards the entrance of the complex and smiled, he knew what Bolt truly meant, and it felt good to be needed. “You want the Zen master to show you how to grill meat again, don’t you?” The idea of a ‘Zen master’ grilling meat was enough to make Bolt laugh.
“Only a master has the necessary patience and indifference required to the make it just right,” Sara had often joked, “Although spices never hurt either.”
“Fuck yes,” Bolt answered, “the wife’s got them cravings again.”
“Shut up!” Max caught her yell in protest.
“Yeah, shut up,” Max agreed, “It’s not her fault the demon–child inside her already craves more meat than the madman it came from.”
“You know what that means, right?” Bolt asked.
“He’ll grow into a real man?” Max asked, amused.
“Damn right! Now get up here. Oh, and almost forgot. Since you were sleeping I–“
“Meditating,” Max corrected him.
“Since you were sleeping,” Bolt continued, “you probably haven’t heard the news. It’s ready, apparently we’ll be heading out by the end of the week.”
“Seriously? How did I miss this?” Max jumped.
“I don’t know. You’re old. Getting fat too,” Bolt snickered, and the connection disengaged.
No one on the square paid him any attention as he laughed. When walking and not absorbed in meditation, Max was invisible. He liked it that way. And it wasn’t just the sheer number of people that made him unseen, it had to do with something he didn’t even understand. The Administrator hadn’t shared the full
extents of his plans with Max, but what he had shared was an extent of his power. How exactly this had happened was mystery to him. And it wasn’t as much that he wanted to will himself invisible, but most of the time it was simply easier to get around without people recognizing him. They may have not known his real name, but almost the entire world knew his face.
Unable to help but overhear people talking about ‘the big news’, Max tried to shrug the rumor away, but rumors spread fast over the Link, light–speed in fact. The rumor resisted his mental shooing, coming back in loops like spam, until he began to wonder just how much of it was based in reality.
Near the entrance, the crowd got even more closely packed. Max pushed aside pedestrians and nudged along those that were too slow. He sighed with the effort. Most were in a hurry, but some were there simply to be there, socializing in groups around fountains small and big, each spewing mist–water, some of them expansive like a small lake. Hunger bit in his gut as he practically clawed through the bodies, but progress came slow.
The gateway’s brim, distant and looming, looked more like a circular hangar–bay door than an entrance to the most advanced research and residence complex in the world. At times, the enormity of the spire and the utilitarian towers next to it – although each smaller and inconsequential next to the Grey Tower – made him feel trapped. Not much of the sky lay visible at any one time, and at night, the stars were lost in the glare of the city.
With a burst of clarity, Max focused his mind, he didn’t want to keep Bolt and Sara waiting. And in truth, he was hungry as hell.
He projected his will into a single word and focused upon it for the next few minutes.
Part.
Not one person looked at him, and not a single mind wondered what thought had urged their legs to move aside and create a narrow corridor of bodies. The path ended with the glare of the building’s inner–corridor, straight ahead. He walked for a while and then stopped, shocked to find something defying his will. A few paces before the gateway sat a shape, silent in its unflinching stance almost as if mocking him. Ten times smaller than him, it was the only thing which hadn’t moved. Its eyes refracted light in an almost mesmerizing fashion. He stepped near the creature, its grey stripes unmoving and its gaze unflinching. It began to meow. Max stepped closer, and only when he stood directly in front of it did the urban tiger move. It reached up and, standing on its back legs, touched his trousers with its paw. He picked it up. It began to purr in his hands, its fur softer than any fabric, its eyes sleepy.
“Where did you come from, guy?” It looked at him with an indifference only a cat could muster. “I hope you like steak.”
CHAPTER 3
Location, 45N 14E, March 5, 2144
The mountains of the Eastern Alps and their snow–caked peaks shone, bathed by the morning light. Each leering landmass stood dwarfed by a structure the two men called home – an artificial edifice of atmospheric heights.
Yet despite the overshadowing grandeur of the building, the eons old, natural formations of rock sat as indifferent as ever to the dramas being played out around them. And unlike Max, the great slabs of stone had no mind for the vertical cities that had perked up over the century Sleep and rest remained the sole thing vexing the rock formations. To sleep as they had since a time which not even the forests growing on and about them could remember. But at times, when nostalgia gripped him and Max’s hearts swelled in the moment, trying to imagine the timeless nature of the rocks, Max figured that, if they had a mind, they would marvel at the synthetic glass from which he gazed from the top of the world.
No one had expected this would be the place where the first Grey–Tech tower would be built. Most figured a bigger city would get transformed instead, perhaps a sprawl of empty land. Yet the air here, the view, it somehow felt right.
People flocked the inner streets of the spire and filled the sky with the throng of living, each individual playing its own part on the stage of human endeavor.
Yet on a stage of their very own, which was more like a balcony, Max and Bolt had just received a message. One of them was to report to his superiors. The other had no superiors. Save, of course, the Administrator himself.
The two sat on the thousand and fiftieth floor, doing what they had been doing for an hour now; lounging on padded, magnetically suspended couches. Their wide–arched balcony, one of the thousands which snaked around the Grey–Tech research complex, looked over a large stretch of land industrialized and populated to the brim, even if most of the said brim lay concealed beneath the soil. What had once been mountains and hills, towns even, now lay in the shadow of the spire or had become the spire itself. City–hives hid below the soil, beneath a landscape considered superior to the original model of nature. Below the layers of artificial crust, bellow the terraforming, the cabling and the tubing, loomed stretched of facilities so vast they seemed better off canceled. Occasionally protruding tops lurched out the earth like bubbles, domes where most low–landers lived. No one wished to live underground, (although dome did) so indeed each dome was more of a necessity than anything else. The domes were the size of mountains, transparent, save for the soil cratered around it, with wines and vegetation bearding its lower sides. The whole process had been an expensive solution to global warming, and would take decades still for the effects to lessen, but the renewed landscape had covered the ugliness of industry, while in the same breath brought it closer to the thermal–powered nucleus of the Earth. In contrast, the vast cityscapes were like iron wounds on the horizon bristling with color and the promise of progress. Low altitude clouds managed to both conceal the curvature of the Earth and make it more elegant in equal measure as light imbued each with gold or stabbed through the filaments of moisture in spectacular fashion.
“Some good dinner last night, by the way,” Bolt said, lifting a cup of hot coffee from the small mag–table to his right. He sipped carefully, before placing the cup back on the slab. The magnetized steel warbled gently for a half–second, then settled under the weight of the cup.
After last night’s dinner, the two of them went to Max’s apartment, which was higher up the building. They had opted for a bit of late–night Poker, and came out behind on their bankroll, as usual. Lady luck refused to smile. “That bitch,” Bolt had jokingly whined.
After Max woke up, he found Bolt already on the balcony, enjoying the view, greeting him with, “Who needs meditation with a view like this?” It produced a smile. And despite the image of a cat disrupting his dreams, Max felt rested and relaxed. He also knew it never hurt to smile in the morning.
The background generators were engaged and the walls were now, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent. So instead of drab steel and glass, or movement upon the vast inward curving structure’s balconies, Max came face to face with the gentle light of winter and a view to die for. He sat down, steaming coffee already waiting for him. His enhanced eyes instantly adjusted to the sheen outside. He exhaled as he sat down, his veranda seemingly floating underneath a blue sky.
“When is dinner I make ever not good?” Max asked. “But thanks.” He took a slow sip of his coffee, savoring the taste.
From this height, the ocean to their left appeared less distant that it actually was, while the tranquil glacier–lakes nestled in the mountains might as well have been frozen ink.
The sound of people talking on invisible balconies was dulled to a hollow, emotionless sound – a pleasing background ambience of cluttering silverware and hushed whispers. The touch of cold air was kept out by a field of grey static. The field would occasionally become visible as a more powerful gust of wind disrupted the shield matrix, allowing the tang of the Adriatic Sea to slip in and coalesce with the balcony’s artificial climate. The scent was pleasant however, and as such didn’t bother the two men. It smelled of fresh mornings, pine and ozone.
Lazily sunken in their mag–couches, each contemplated the responsibilities inherent with the summons they have just received via the Link
. The traces of the message burned inside their mind’s eye like curtains of data. The small info fragment pouring in had silenced the two man on the spot, precisely an hour after Max had sat down. It had dispelled their relaxation and drove a spear through their conversation.
Bolt took another sip of his coffee, the thermo–adjusting nature of the cup keeping the liquid within at a constant temperature. Max did the same and felt the alluring nature of the brew on his tongue. “Damn, that’s good,” he sighed.
“I still got it?” Bolt asked.
“You never lost it,” Max confirmed with a smile.
Bolt grinned in response, but the expression didn’t last long. They had both hoped to take it easy for a while still – a hope now dashed by the nature of their message.
As the air between them fell silent again, their minds jumped to overdrive. In a span of a few seconds, they had exchanged more words with each other than they ever could verbally. On their request, the questions slithered out of their minds and onto others also connected to the network know as the Link, a cobweb of connectivity which for the last few decades served as a free–flow information system, an internet connecting minds directly instead of through inorganic machines. In effect, it was still similar, since to sail through the currents of data on the Link, one still needed an ear–phone. A device which would attach itself onto the inner ear and provide a direct link between the mind and the nexus–machine. Sometimes what they found in drifting within the collective unconscious disturbed them even more than the idea had when it was proposed. A grand attempt at creating a human hive–mind, they said. “A buzzing I’ll never get used to,” Bolt always corrected.
Using the Link and through mental commands, the two men received instant replies, even from those asleep, and quickly got a bearing on the situation.
After a few hundred queries and instant messages, the traffic on their end subsided, and they knew only a handful of individuals beside them had received the initial message.
“Intriguing,” said Max, his favorite word, scratching his pointy chin and its dark fuzz.
His eyes stared out at nothing in particular with a tired and worn glint, shifting as the retina within adjusted for whatever preference his mind desired.