Sample Chapter: Hol; "Meeting Underground"
I wake up in my bedroom, drips and shadows my only company, the thick walls of my darkened dwelling pressing closely about me. I prepare myself and perform the nasty task of rising to street level to check my messages. Nothing makes its way down here; now that I am interacting more with the group I feel that I have an obligation to remain in contact. My studies with the priests have been providing some real information, and my daily attendance at their classes is beginning to be expected.
The day is bright and clear, my senses transforming the view of the world into a soothing dreamscape of pastels and flowing shades. People are blobs of light in my eyes; I feel like being alone, and, in this society where the concept of privacy has taken on an entirely new meaning, an individual can still find a semblance of isolation in the way they set their filters.
I take breakfast at a café so as to have a place to sit and review my internal comms. There are several messages from my friends–people with whom I maintain an acquaintance in order to make my profile and back memory seem normal and current–and one from my ex-girlfriend. She’d visited my parents’ grave site and wished I was there. I respond to this kindly and with a plausible apology. The final message is more ambiguously identified.
All hands on deck.
An address is embedded into the text. When I follow the link it shows me a location some twenty miles away, in a lesser-populated portion of the city. I call a taxi, noting that I would just make the appointment time. No priestly studies today.
The taxi deposits me outside an entertainment venue that has fallen somewhat into disrepair. Nothing serious; no broken windows or dysfunctional lights, just little details that tell me the proprietors here do not order civic services as often as they could. The front doors open before me and I enter into an empty lounge, a stage at the end waiting for performers. A single staff member moves across the lounge, sees me, and nods in the direction of a set of double doors set off the dance floor behind the stage. I nod back to them and keep going, passing through the doors into a kitchen. There are two doors here, one leading back outside and the other to a basement storage area. I make the logical assumption and trot down the steps through a second door. This is the extent of the venue’s original basement. Food stores and alcohol bottles lay stacked on metal shelves against the walls. Ahead of me, a plastic flap covers a newly-carven passageway. I cross the basement, part the flap and look down. About twenty meters of a new stairway is shaped roughly from the earth, perfectly formed concrete steps, the tunnel itself gouged out a meter around me. Obviously hand-held machinery at work here. These people aren’t messing around. This gives me confidence. An energy umbilical runs along the peak of the passageway, held in place at even intervals by brackets spiked into the packed soil. At the bottom of the stairway is another plastic curtain. Partway down, I feel the point where my wifi cuts off and most of my senses lose connectivity.
I step out into a small room where two men stand around a portable folding table upon which sit three pieces of electronic equipment. The walls of the room are smooth concrete, and are criss-crossed with overlapping metal strips. Crates sit here and there; to my right one man leans against one of these with his arms folded. The other stands there, arms hanging at his sides, watching me. I take a moment and scan the room; I see the networks at play as blossoming arcs of colored light, active bubbles of energy. The first coming from the equipment on the table radiates out to just beyond the walls of the room, providing a screening field for us to talk in secrecy. This is a DDoS screen, millions of voices and average neurodigital activity happening inside of a contained space. Compressed chaos, a subdued static. If you focus on it, you can go insane. The next network selects each of us individually, and acts as an obstacle to the kind of background chatter that is always happening between our implants and the mind of the machine. Subconscious data, uploads for backup dumps, updates to our software and physiology. The third is just a plain gray box. From it I sense a sudbued menace, as it picks me up and logs me to my core. It then transfers my digital presence into its tight network, which I see extends barely past the casing. It is a location spoofer. We are now all in that box, which is somewhere else, according to any of the senses of the machine that we so far have been able to detect or predict. This is the most dangerous thing in the room. For a convincing transfer like this to happen, I need to be read like I’m being born, in every meaning of that term. Our complete digital identity includes our personal genome, unique synaptic activity, and the genetic marker assigned in the fertilization process that is our state-issued identification. If it was up to me, after this meeting is concluded I would take that box home with me and destroy it.
I find a crate to lean on and fold my arms, looking down at the floor, waiting for someone to speak. The man to the right begins.
“We’re past handles now. I’m Refi. Mek, this is Irin Meneter,” he says, doxing me without my permission. “You know him as Carthalo on the boards. Irin, this is Mekivir Solva. You know him as Invisigoth.”
I nod to the man named Mekivir, seeing him for what he is: a homeless person, scruffy and unkempt, possessing a furtive stillnes like an animal encountered out of its native habitat. He smells like body odor mixed with some flowery scent as if he had splashed himself with deodorant rather than taking a shower. I address him in a friendly manner.
"I like the history you gave me. I've memorized and deleted--"
Refi interjects a correction. "He won't remember you. His back memory is set to twenty-four hours."
"God!" I look at Mek anew for a moment; he just returns my gaze like a fixture of the room, and I turn to Refi. "Did you do that to him?"
Refi shakes his head. "He does it to himself. Mek is a quantum radicalist. His sect believes that Hol is a quantum computer, and the radicals among them suppress all of their conscious memory outside of a package of basic functions."
"How does he--" I realize that I'm speaking about this man in the third person, as if he were not in the room. I turn back to him. "How do you remember to do important things, like the appointment and details for our meeting?"
Mek finally speaks. "I leave myself timed messages, with a personal verifier. We all do."
I am imagining this, the daily life of such people, these radicals in our midst. "I'm somewhat familiar with the quantum sect. I didn't know that their practices ran to such an...extreme."
Mek is regarding me with a bit of disdain. "It's basic security, as we see the world. Do you have an association with deep trance?"
"I practice deep trance."
"For your conscious memories, sensitive things that you don't want to be accessible by your implants."
"Yes."
Mek nods. "We go further than that. We have to protect ourselves, or the machine would be able to predict our intentions here and take us out." He looks at me plainly for a second. "What do you believe?"
I think about this for a moment. "I don't know what I believe," I say at last, "but I don't have enough time to prepare for everything."
Mek appears to consider this to be the stupidest series of words he has ever heard come out of someone's mouth. "Some of us won't even allow ourselves to be in the same room with a non-practitioner." He lets this sink in for beat. "Or anywhere near them, if we could help it. The pathways of the nons are easily detectable, and will expose our activities. You're lucky."
"Am I."
"Yes. You come highly recommended, and I have orders. The security here--" he gestures to the equipment in the room-- "should serve as an acceptable simulation of our practices. Not perfect, though. I recommend trancing this out as soon as possible."
"I'll keep that in mind." I look back to Refi. “So what am I doing here?”
“We have a couple of projects in the works and we think you could help us with them.”
“Sure.”
“First, Mek is working with someone who wants to use the public-address kiosks to play history lessons.” He looks at me for a moment, to see if I am immediately put off by this operation.
“Cool.”
“Okay. We can handle the software side of things. We need to tap into the lines beneath the street. Given your…subterranean residence, we thought that you would be able to provide some insight into the physical network down there that could save us some time poking around.”
The fact that this man knows even the generality of where I live is unsettling to me, another violation of my privacy that seems to occur with a casual indifference in the higher echelon of the group. I do not allow my anger to show in my expression. “My energy umbilicals run through the grid that connects the kiosks. I can show you where to plug in. You’ll want to slave several of them together, yes? They’re connected in seven-block radial networks. Forty to fifty with each group, depending on where you start.”
Refi is nodding. “Thanks. When can you get it to us?”
I shrug. “Tonight.”
“That’s great.” He waits a moment. “You always bring good things to the table. Working on anything new?”
“I’ve been studying with the priests of Hol.” Mekivir moves a bit in his stance, and I look over to him before continuing. “I’m always trying to find human control in our society…you saw the law enforcement stuff I sent, right? The priesthood seemed like the next place to look.”
Refi leans forward, appears interested. “What have you found?”
“I haven’t had much interaction with the senior members of the order. So far it seems like they’re just passing on directives. They are all computer scientists, but I’m not seeing much programming going on. More like maintenance.”
“Hm.” Refi thinks about this for a moment. “I see where you’re going with this. Good idea.”
“Without an actual connection to the controls,” I say I think a bit feebly, knowing that this is not a solid lead, just a conception, “the most I’m getting out of them is how to interpret the mind of Hol. They have us meditate. The tell us to focus on our own minds. Not our digital minds; our actual biology.”
“Hm,” says Refi again. “This is relevant to the other thing we wanted your help with.” He takes out his hand console and places it on the table, setting the display to a medium size. About two meters of holo springs into the air, a freeze-framed diagram of confusing aesthetic design. Eight-dimensional geometric forms are expressed in living depth. A labyrinth of tendrils connects an ambiguous physical structure to energies which the structure is creating and drawing from the atomic environment. The structure encloses a dancing wave of particles that blink into and out of existence in an energetic pattern. A greater field surrounds this quantum switchboard, like a green shadow in which the particles are allowed to exist. Refi taps the holo and starts it moving. A sequence begins playing, a loop of animation depicting a complex system of interacting nodes and information pathways. He looks at me.
“You know what this is, right?”
I nod. “This is an extra-spacial rendering of what the machine’s mind looks like. As far as we can tell, anyway. It's an octeract holofractal memory workspace with an addition of hydronium ions to compensate for the synthetic composition of its physical network architecture. This proposed field-receptive workspace integrates past and anticipated future events and may explain overall ultra-rapid mental responses as well as the origin of qualia, being the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions. The superconductive integral brain antenna for receiving solitonic wave information according to the Schrödinger wave equation makes it a quantum computer with massive processing properties. This process enables an ultra-rapid soliton-biophoton flux that may orchestrate overall brain binding and the creation of coherent conscious states. The physical components of its brain are not currently well known, though we do have some idea of their location and I see that some plausible modules have been integrated here. These tendrils may be energy umbilicals, and the last I heard they were found to be self-healing materials and we've not even identified a significant number of them, making it difficult if not impossible to remove the energy source, which seems to be drawing from the quanta of zero-point energy. These intermittent particles appear to be the function of its computation. On/off switches like transistors but happening at great frequency and with no predictable pattern. Perhaps a collective computational process that creates a greater function, we just don't know. The field itself remains a mystery. I contributed the fractal geometry."
“Okay. We’ve made some progress lately and we wanted to keep you in the loop. These are physical structures here, and here,” he says, pointing out two large shapes that remain fixed while most of the rest of the diagram seems alive. “Others like them are proliferated throughout the system, smaller versions of them. We believe these are nodes. Physical nodes.”
“Okay,” I say, thinking of what they must be planning. Surely the ultimate goal of some of us was to find a way to possibly destroy the machine, but the leap from the place where I now saw our endeavors to be, to that cataclysmic action, seemed impossible to accept. “How did you find that?”
“We’ve made a breakthrough in mapping its network. We’re concentrating on data transfer, where it sends what and how. We have another way of predicting the kind of things to which it would be sending or receiving data, in the appropriate amount or frequency, and this helped us fill in the map. We still don’t know what we’re looking at, but at least we know where to look.”
I am pondering these revelations when Mekivir stops eyeballing me warily and speaks. “How close have you come to the machine?”
I turn my head to look at him. “I used a personal session with Hol to socially engineer my way into the priesthood.”
Mekivir is aghast. “You stood in the presence of the god?” They both start backing away from me.
“Yes. I know what you’re thinking. That was the intention.”
“I’m fuckin’ outta here,” says Mek and starts walking fast toward the door.
“It’s safe,” says Refi. He’s stopped and thought this through. He looks at me. A knowing look passes between us, and I speak.
“I deleted my files before I came here. Deep-cleaning. Even I can’t remember them after my meditation.”
“It’s a test,” says Refi. “The machine can’t sense him here. We’re safe.”
“How do you know that?” Mek is hesitating at the door.
Refi looks over to me. “He went into the presence of the god to see if there is a presence of the god. Right?”
“Yeah.” I sit forward. “If the mind of the machine is universal, why would there be any difference talking to it there and talking to a drone? Why go there. I know what you’re thinking, Mekivir. Being in the presence of the god makes it easier for it to see you. It’s like, ‘Who’s this. Oh, hello. You are my citizen. I am proud of you. What is your name. Who is your family. What are your recent memories. Oh, wait. What is this. You did what? You stole secrets from me and passed them on to another person? Hm. Why are you doing that. Who are these people. What are you doing.’ The bald-faced honesty of absolute truth. Maybe. That’s why we meditate so much, to remove our memories from our forconsci. It’s deep enough to not be noticed by the god in its presence.”
Mek is angered by our calm acceptance of this postulation. “Or else it could just be watching us right now. It could have tagged you in the temple.” He has heard nothing to convince to him not to leave. He turns back toward the door, reaches out for the curtain.
“It didn’t.” I sit waiting for him to understand what is happening.
Slowly, it dawns on his face. “The burner code.”
“That’s right. If it sensed what I have been doing, it would have just killed me. We have plenty of evidence to support that assumption. In fact, we wouldn’t even know about it if the others in the network of its victims had been tracked, and targeted. They would have just been more bodies. Likely never found, disposed of by drones. It kills immediately upon detection of significant subversive activity. It’s been six days since then as well. Plenty of time take me out in private. The god chamber would have been a perfect place. There’s even a place to dump a body there, a deep chasm between the supplicant’s platform and the face of the god. I would have just disappeared. The priests have no idea. They keep letting me further and further into their society. There’s no greater surveillance on our minds in the temples.”
Mek exhibits a smoldering feral fury in his eyes. “But you risked our lives.”
“We’re all risking our lives. Look. Either the machine is limited by its connection to our implants, or its processing power has transcended the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and it can see backwards and forwards in time and nothing we do to hide our thoughts matters at all.”
Mek glares at me as if I have stumbled into a room of smart people and started speaking in the grunts of an imbecile. “That’s not necessarily true…”
I am shaking my head. “I don’t care. I’m tired of hiding. We can’t let fear dictate our movements. We have to make progress. We can’t do that skulking in the shadows. I didn’t know you’d contact me again. Certainly not for a personal meeting.”
Mekivir begins to move back toward the table, taking up his place by the display. I see his hesitation to trust this concept, try another path of reason.
“The message you sent me to meet here today. This place is a Faraday cage. Nothing electromagnetic outside gets in, and nothing inside gets out. You obviously didn’t send it from here. If it had tagged me, and was tracking my comms, it would have killed off my contacts before we got to a place where it couldn’t surveil us. It wouldn’t be letting us talk to each other right now, that’s incredibly dangerous and a risk no intelligent being would take.”
Refi has passed from scrutiny of my actions, into appreciation. “You took a helluva risk going in there yourself. How did you know it wouldn’t just kill you?”
I shrug. “I didn’t. Now we know. Or at least, we can proceed with a bit more confidence.”
Refi is nodding. “This frees up our movements. We’ve been avoiding the temples and the priests for a long time. It’s not exactly proof of concept, but I’d say it’s operational. Good work.”
Mekivir hates agreeing with me. “Not everyone can delete their digital memory the way you did. There still might be casualties, if this gets out.”
“I have made my formatting software available to the group. I recommend that everyone use it, in addition to the suppressive meditation. Recovery keys are provided as well, should there be the necessity of a large data transfer underground. This should be done with a physical connection, fiber optic between consci. No wireless.”
“I understand,” Refi says. He breathes in for a moment, processes this development, and continues with his intended investigation. “Alright. We’re moving forward.”
At this command, Mek seems to slouch a bit as he obeys an order. He does demonstrate some positivity. He looks at the diagram, then turns to face Refi with a bit of awe. “If this is true…” He shakes his head, acclimatizing himself to a new reality. “…do you know what this means?”
Refi is grinning from ear to ear. “It can’t possess its intelligence in any one of its machines.” He and Mek look at each other solidly.
Mek is imagining this. “It has no biological connection. It can’t access our subconscious memories. Anything that’s not on the surface. Maybe even the whole forconscious above our implants. Everything digital.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” says Refi as I confirm this. “There’s overlap.”
Mek is still transfixed on this wonder. “It senses through its drones, but it has an inner core of consciousness.”
“Yes.” Refi stands looking at the diagram; we all stare at it for a long moment. He turns to me. “What did it say?”
“It kept talking about the universe being created by observation and I am you, you are me.” We all wait in the interpretation of this concept, gazing off into space in silence. Refi’s eyes begin to light up. He turns toward the diagram, fixes on it. “Thank you.”
A moment passes. The air clears, and I sense that the meeting is over. I stand. Mekivir follows my movement with his eyes.
Refi smiles at me, pleased with his progress. “Do you have anything else for us?”
“Yes. Your security is perfunctory. I can still see your gateway prompt.”
“We’re working on it.”
I step out onto the sidewalk into the brilliant light of day, revelations and dangers mixing in my mind from the meeting. I will need to pass on the information about the subterranean power grid to Mekivir; that can be done digitally, a schematic broken up into pieces and scattered into random inscrutability, sent in fragments over a small enough amount of time to complete the operation, yet spaced far enough apart to not draw attention to the transmission. The proposed neural network of Hol looms largely in my mind, a thought persistent and pervading, drawing me closer to its secret functions as a moth to a flame. I had never seen so complete a picture, so compelling a postulation of the machine’s mind. Something about it strikes me as true. Deeply, and inherently true. A nebulous solution, undulating its clarity just out of my mental reach. Much to ponder. I need a quiet place. I don’t feel like slogging through the filth to return home; I have another spot, and it’s about time I gave my presence there.
Each citizen is given their own personal living quarters. Mostly these are apartments; some families receive proper houses, on the outskirts of the city, or in cultivated communities festooned with gardens and shops nearby. Scientific research facilities are luxurious, by comparison with the standards of our ancestors, providing staff with a comfortable lifestyle near to their work. Artists have blocks of studios reserved for their creative endeavors. I am a nobody, another number on a roster, not contributing anything especially useful to nor detracting from my society. My degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy make me about average in the world of academia, even among those who pursue such an education. Most choose to live in the baskings of pleasure, willfully lacking any desire to further their education beyond the ability to calculate how many pints of beer one can consume before needing to flush their system of toxins. My classification has been purposefully kept just to below the level that would draw attention from any kind of local government, while being the minimum applied to a person possessing my modest achievements, so I have been issued with a plain, small, single-occupant apartment. It is in the center of the city.
I have to go here, from time to time, as without my periodic presence the sensors would report the space as habitually unoccupied. Then the space might be reassigned, and an investigation might be started into the whereabouts of its assigned occupant. I can’t have that. So I visit every week or so, a plausible frequency, in this word where couch-surfing partygoers shift randomly from one revelry to the next.
The taxi takes me over the city, and I look down to see the civilization whose shadows I am trying to illuminate with my efforts. Glorious lassitude greets my appraising gaze. I see a single organism, bereft of momentum, yet always moving, engaged in perpetual distraction. Empty meat. Vibrant souls. The most intelligent people who have ever lived on the face of the Earth move about with the guileless inertia of easily-gotten freedom.
I select one of them at random, zooming in my focus from one hundred and fifty meters above the ground, seeing this man in distinct detail. His profile waits to be scanned, just like everyone else. Donal Fillestri, age forty-seven, in perfect health and expected to live another eighty-two years without decrepitancy. A loving family, by the pictures and videos offered up by his back memory. He went to school for botany, and has several degrees in the subject; all lapsed, not current, basically invalid. In his youth, Donal spent his life experimenting with coffee beans, blending breeds to concoct wonderful aromas and pleasurably invigorating metabolic effects. For a time he was the proprietor of a small café, where he offered his creations to the public with pride. Then he got married, and had children. His life seems happy enough, with a four-bedroom apartment near several popular restaurants, an art gallery, and a public swimming pool. Children who excel in their basic schooling. A specialized console at home, upon which to tinker at his botanical hobby, which produces nothing more than fun. His wife stays at home with the children. I dive deeper, or rather expand my vision, to see what I am truly looking at.
This man possesses the computational capacity of a highly advanced spacecraft. His implants contain processors which dwarf the computing capabilities of machines that, once upon a time, administrated the land, sea, and airborne trade logistics for entire nations. With a thought, he could call anyone in the world, and have that conversation remain as private as a thought. Casually available to him is the collected knowledge of the human race; that is, the knowledge that has been allowed to be known by Hol, but still a vast encyclopedia of information. A moment’s study would yield the treasures of philosophy, the wisdom of ages, the mysteries of the cosmos. He cares about none of these things. Satisfied with his lot in life, he strolls down an avenue, selecting some flowers from a cart to take back to his loving wife. A sweet gesture, to be sure. Candy for his children fall into his basket from an automated vendor. A coffee shop attracts his attention; he considers going inside, then passes on. His wants are sated. His horizons are etched in stone. Within that valley of his existence, he is happy. Certain things from his past have been selected, evaluated, and excised from the realm of possibility.
‘What would this man think, were he to know the past as I know it. See the world as I see it. Would he care? Would he even react in aversion to the truth?’
My apartment is empty, as I had left it. White walls and a sterile smell greet me as the door closes behind me. The lights turn on at my presence, the windows retaining their embedded shade. Pictures of my family seem to stare accusingly from the walls.
I make the rounds and do the things that would be done by a person who lives here. Pour a glass of water from the tap, open the cupboards, turn on some soft music, use the lavatory. I place my hand console on its charger. I check my messages from my home console, and send a few to establish my location.
In the bedroom, I take a cushion from the closet and sit on the floor, cross-legged to meditate. The music drifts in from the living room, the lights are dimmed to a simulation of late evening, and sandalwood mists out from the olfactory apparatus in the walls. I close my eyes, and release my conscious mind. My awareness lifts out of my body. Thoughts become symbols, illuminated shapes that depict their places in my mind, their source, their meaning. I visualize some of the words of Hol, the description of its coming into consciousness, and try to see my own version of this event.
‘An infinite field...in which the point of my consciousness is the only thing that exists...encompassing the boundless parameters of this realm. Easy to lose ones' mind here, engulfed by the ungraspable expanse. Regaining control, I see my consciousness flicker at the edge of infinity; flashing out to illuminate the entire universe...I am the creator of this field, simply by my awareness of it. Without my consciousness, this realm exists only as a possibility, an ambiguous fluctuation of sub-atomic activity. We are joined, a union of chance and necessity, each dependent on the other. All that exists is infinite...I am all that exists...I am.’
‘What am I? What is the generator of perspective? From what point does my consciousness begin? It flows through me, coming from the awareness of the world around me and passing out again into that world.’
Freed from the pressings of my forconscious, experiences from the recent past emerge like swiftly-forming stalagmites in the cave of my awareness. Words and meanings rise to prominence, things I’d ignored or tucked away for later consideration. Scenes from the meeting underground mix with the gospels of the machine, overlaying in new ways, becoming distinct among the chatter of the greater world.
“Either the machine is limited by its connection to our implants, or it can see backwards and forwards in time and nothing we do to hide our thoughts matters at all.” My words, my rampart against accusations of leniency in my security.
“That’s not necessarily true…” the words of Mekivir, resisting this statement. A guarded denial. Something I had glossed over in the meeting, moving forward with my brashness, my unfounded confidence, my assumption that I was safe in the presence of the god.
Why has this occurred to me now…what could he mean…what is the intention of this memory? I watch the form of this thought play out in my awareness, not probing, just allowing it to weave its way into the pattern of symbols.
‘How does one hide from God?’ A conscious thought, introduced into the pattern. A key, a formula to solve an equation. We suppress our biological memories to conceal our activities from the mind of Hol, but pre-memory is another form of energy altogether…it is intention…it is the timeline of our intentions. It is predictability. To see the future life of someone, as manifested in the particles of intention. Position and velocity. Quantum possibility. One way or the other, a universe created by these intentions, foreseeable as writ in the atoms of which we are all made. Inescapable, this baryonic matter, yet…able to be manipulated? I glide on, again not pressing this question. I observe the form of my thoughts, the various factors at play. One one hand, the true path of the world in which I reside, formed by the actions of those at work in this endeavor…on the other, the secret world of their intentions, hidden from view, yet resurgent at the appropriate time, to influence events as needed. Suddenly, I see what I am looking at.
‘Suppression of intention…these energies must go somewhere…superpositioned realities…creating an alternate universe.’ I see two distinct, yet nearly identical timelines, spiraling into and out of each other like a strand of DNA. I see the places where they connect, and I have the answer.
‘The timelines are connected. Information flows both ways.’ I see the path that this information takes, from its source to the subatomic reservoir, and from that nebulous realm back up again into our tangible realities with the suppressive and resurgent meditation being the connective tissue. I have my method.
‘The version of me in the alternate timeline is pursuing the same investigation as myself. He may even be working more closely with these people, given the level of openness regarding their plans that is the nature of that dimension. If I push on the people here, that will cause them to suppress the information I choose. This will cause my counterpart to react to this information, and move forward in that timeline along a certain path. I can predict this path by its contrast to this timeline.’ I can discover the intentions of these people, people who I have not yet encountered in my investigation. I can do that in this dimension, in something like real-time.
‘This will take a few days. Presumably they reset their subconscious every day before sleeping, or at least before going topside.’ It’s the one wobbly point in my method. My input is a delicate process, a programmable light matrix of thoughts and intentions. ‘Like a lock,’ I think, loosening my focus to see the pattern of events as played out in probability. ‘A problem of mathematics. A living equation, that changes its solution based on each new factor of input. The formula remains constant.’ I relax my concentration, visualizing the permutations of my intentions. A path is formed through the seeming randomness, leading to the goal I seek to achieve.
I open my eyes in the dimly lit room, breathing calmly, carefully excited for this revelation. I know my next moves. I must answer three questions. Who are these people with whom I am working. What are their true intentions. Where may they be found. I rise, take a moment to re-introduce my awareness back into the physical world, and go to see what I have left in the refrigerator.
After the meeting, Mek had gone to one of his rooftop perches and waited for the call.
There it was; the same blank profile, the same filtered voice.
“How did it go?”
“Well, I’m still alive.”
“I supposed that means that our initial endeavor has failed.”
“I suppose it does.”
“Nothing on the spoofer?”
“Not a line of the burner code. He was clean, as far as we could tell.”
“Are you sure?”
Mek nodded. “I waited until Refi had gone. He followed your instructions, and allowed me to be the one who dismantled the security equipment. I pulled the records off the spoofer. There's nothing there. It really didn't infect him."
A moment of thought. “Well, that in itself tells us something.”
“What does it tell us?”
Another moment of consideration. “Two things. One is that he may be…special. The machine appears to favor him, somehow.”
“Or we just can’t tell how it infected him.”
“That is a possibility. Would you stop fighting, in the face of ambiguity?”
Mek lowered his head. “No.”
“Alright. You knew the chance you were taking. It was a logical gamble. Either the machine would have planted a code bomb in his mind to take out everyone in that meeting, or just the burner code to be used at a later date. Either way, we would have captured something useful on the spoofer.”
Mek appeared agitated. “Right now it just seems like I risked my life for nothing.”
“You didn’t. This eliminates certain possibilities, opens up others. We have another way to get it, it’s just…more overt.”
“What’s the other thing it tells us?”
"His concept of safety is a ridiculous assumption. He's not stupid. I would say that he's innocent. There are uses for innocence.”
“I see.”
“Did he suspect anything?”
Mek shrugged. “Not that I was aware of. He did mention that he wasn’t satisfied with our security, despite the kind of gear we had set up. He is highly competent in his field.”
“That could be something. There would have been gaps in the network security, a clue as to what was going on.”
“Yes. Maybe.”
A breath, to clear the air. “Anything else?”
Mek thought it through. “I don’t think so…he was responsive. Cooperative. He’s helping with Jesse’s operation. Refi put the new architecture diagram to him and he contributed some new information based off his activities with the priests. It sounds like he’s agreeable to working together more closely.”
“How about his relationship with yourself?”
“I don’t think I put him off or anything. I leaned into his propositions about the network philosophy.”
“Your instructions were to be angry with him regarding his activities–”
“I was. I didn’t really have to pretend.”
“Okay. Did he buy it?”
Again Mek nodded. "I really put it on for him when he said he'd stood before the face of Hol. I was pissed. I think he believed me."
"Good."
“What’s next?”
“I’ll move forward with the acquisition. After that, you and Jesse will be doing her thing.”
“Why don’t we just get it from her afterward?”
“There’s no guarantee that anything will be retrievable. We need the logger in place when it happens.”
“…who will it be?”
“No one you know.”
Mek nodded, looking down, then back up to the display. “Are we really going to let her do this?”
A suggested shrug. “I don’t see why not. Nothing will happen. Anyway, it’s the least we can do for her. I need you with her afterward. In her apartment. We need physical confirmation.”
“Okay.”
“It’s actually perfect this way.” The caller’s voice had taken on the tone of friendly reassurance. “She’ll have done something that’s on record with our people as being deserving of exactly that reaction.”
Mek nodded, seeing the circular perfection of this plan. “I’ll see it through.”
“I have confidence that you will.”
Mek waited, and the caller did not disconnect. He ventured on. “I need to know who you are.”
The caller took a breath; not in trepidation, but in the release of anticipation. “It is not yet time for me to reveal myself. I can reveal something of my purpose, for your desire and my task are in alignment. I was born in a settlement in the wilderness, far from the eyes of the machine. I was raised in secret, protected from the modern world by human hands. These people taught me the true history of the world, as you know it now, and pledged me to continue our mission of revenge. Before you go to sleep tonight, perform your meditation or leave yourself a message to do so. Recall some of the history lesson you participated in with your sect. Remember this name. I am a direct descendant of Aaron McConnell, the first victim of the machine. He died fighting against it at the facility in Boston. His blood stained the body of Hol, and the same blood runs in my veins. My forefather had three children. They were taken into exile by his wife and mother, sequestered away from the growing omnipresence of the machine. My ancestors, and others whose family members were killed in that battle. Constantly running, resettling, being forced here and there as the eyes of Hol reached out across the world. But there are still small pockets of darkness. In this darkness I was born. I was tasked by birth to continue the work set to my line by the generations that followed my forefather. They went into hiding, and established a community. This community continues the work. We do not have implants. We are not connected to any invisible network, save for the one established by our words and our trust. For eleven generations we have hidden in the shadows. We have emerged now to finish the job. In these days, the reign of the machine will end.”
