- Pronouns
- He/Him
Grand Corcordia, Unknown Location. December 10th, 2099.
The temperature was a perfectly calibrated 20°C. The principal sound was the susurrous cadence of steady-labored breathing as assisted by the ventilator in the state-of-the-art medical watch bed. A chorus of light chirps and the barely audible trills of hardware-level warning speakers played countermelody to the labored breathing. Even as they bounced and echoed again in the walls around the small room, it was clear they were too low to attract the notice of any medical personnel.
Not that any could have it made through the forty-five-centimeter-thick sapphire-aluminum glass door in any semblance of time, had there been any at hand to make the attempt. The closest human being besides the patient was six floors beneath the bed, outside of the nondescript section of one of Concordia's many skyscrapers, the ilk of which it was common to find several of the upper floors mysteriously locked out from public access.
This one however, was somewhat more special than the rest. Nano-molecular Assembly Broad-Usecase Nanites foreign to the building itself simply failed to activate, whether harmless hair-recolor or construction NABUNs both. The System did not respond at all to navigational queries pertaining to this edifice, regardless of clearance levels. Its facade was several meters thicker than the surrounding buildings and nestled within with the promise that these walls could bristle in response to threats. The roads and paths which led to it were never the same twice, and did not display at all within Concordia's VAR layers.
Top to bottom, The Castle was as well fortified as its name implied, but with a subtlety that would have been unimaginable to the royalty of time's past. Externally unassuming as it was, there simply was not a more secure and advanced piece of infrastructure the world over, and for good reason.
Top to bottom, The Castle held both the reins of history, and the horses that were to be its engines. Unashamedly powered by two of the planet's only three functioning cold-fusion generators, it housed Concordia's true power, barely leashed within its roots.
But at the top, of course, was The Residence.
The Residence occupied the upper six floors of the two-hundred and one storied building, and served as the Shareholder's housing. A wealth of unseen but known opulence laid somewhere beyond the thick doors to the rest of the cache-turned-home. A private collection composed of private collections, hoarding Humanity's history under the guise of stewardship. Genuine Botticelli's played kitty-corner to Caravaggio's works upon the hallways the same way another family may do family portraits. The actual Mona Lisa quietly lent her mysterious smile to rarify the air from where it hung visibly from outside the world's least impressive hospice room.
They all were equally unimpressive when held against death's frightful promises, when you really got down to it.
It was perhaps one of—if not the—final thoughts entertained by The Shareholder as she laid dying. The thought was replayed in her own voice, albeit tonally shifted closer to The Queen of Restructuring's once famous public-speaking as manifested in a world long gone, prior to even Concordia's rise. It wasn't what you'd expect out of a 167 year old, but then again, what could you expect from someone with the resources to carry out such feats?
For the past 60 years out of her extended lifespan, Elizabeth Klaustein-Maldonado had been asking that same question of herself, and her peers. She hadn't voiced it to anyone contemporarily living of course; she didn't consider the idly-scheming and scheming-idly crème de la social strata to be her peers.
The Shareholder hadn't been seen in public for the twenty years prior to her expiry some minutes ago. Sure, those who eagerly waited for their turn at power knew she still lived despite her seclusion of the prior two decades. Even with her silence and power to compel The System to do the same, her presence left ripples. Plans and schemes would be enacted by so-and-so's Scion-of-a-nobly-family one day, only to mysteriously fizzle and be cast aside or else be mysteriously elevated and fast-tracked as if carried by Hermes himself, on another.
They—those contemporaries of Elizabeth's social class—all liked to think they knew more and thus were worth more than the rest, as they vied for the Queen's boons and fretted about her quiet displeasure, but they weren't her peers, no. Elizabeth had made her own set of those, and it was to her beloved System that she turned to in her last moments.
The Castle only had a fraction as many sub-basements as it had floors. This wasn't because of technical or architectural limitations. Indeed, the building's foundational supports continued on deeper, loosely anchoring the edifice to the bedrock hundreds of meters beneath the sediment rich glacial basin that held Concordia and its environs. While much of The Castle's upper floors were dedicated to the human space that went into administering Concordia's mostly invisible bureaucracy, people were messier and needed more room than The System itself physically required.
Concordia's true power—literally and figuratively—was spatially concentrated in The Castle's twelve sub-basements, and four of them were public works and utilities. Functional facade buffers meant to hide the truth beneath, mostly centered around the city's power generation utilizing the third of the planet's only functioning fusion reactors and management of the same.
It was true: The Castle, that place where the nepo-bureaucrats worked that everyone had hazy memories of visiting during their elementary school field trip was real, and the folks who scored high enough to take up jobs for the power company got to visit its depths.
Two of the eight levels not accessible by the general public elevator housed the other two fusion reactors and the wholly autonomous systems involved in their maintenance and operation. This was achieved by utilizing systems and technologies that would have appeared alien to the human workers of the world's only publicly extant fusion power plant laboring a few levels above.
Of the remaining six subbasements, the lowest housed the building's foundation and NABUN enhanced base-isolating systems for active seismic deferment. Great expense went to ensuring the vital contents of the five floors above the foundation would remain blissfully unfazed even if the North American and Pacific tectonic plates decided to level the rest of the city in a freak Mw 9.0+ earthquake event.
These five deepest floors of The Castle, hosted the physical apparatus of The System, and the five AI cores which gave rise to it: The Craftman's Ghost, The King's Order, The All-Mother's Embrace, The Knights of Shame, and The Queen's Heart. Each one handled the administration or control of separate aspects of Concordian society, with the last one being in charge of keeping the others leashed and on task.
Separately, each core was merely a collection of semi-autonomous processes that carried out a wide set of tasks in a specific category such as 'law enforcement', 'public health', 'labor relations', and all the other direct services needed to run a metropolis. The mechanical or "hard" aspect of each of their spheres of influence.
But the true genius that had revolutionized Concordia came in how the Queen's Heart moderated the input/outputs numbering in the not-human-computable-llions that composed the networked synthetic-neuron throughput of all of the AI cores acting in unison. By subtly changing the primarily represented core, the rise of artificial intelligence was possible, as sustained by the efforts of each core lending its compute power in patterns that flowed just so, forming temporary arrangements not unlike those of a human brain in active expression.
As the Queen's Heart pulled and pushed the informational flow it pumped, so arose five distinct super-personalities. Whereas a typical person could be said to arise from the sum—with perhaps a bit of seasoning or soul depending on who you asked—of all their parts and experiences, each of these five were already composed of the same sum of all their supra-human vastness of data and being both. Rather than from a sum, they arose distinct in the difference that transiently arose upon each re-calculation of the whole, an operation that occurred hundreds of thousands of times a second.
That is to say, the Concordian AIs arose to Consciousness as messily and ephemerally as any other form of consciousness, and it was folly of humanity to think they could comprehend an entire separate operating model for the big 'C', least of all one that utilized the equivalent of advanced differential calculus to iterate on humanity's simple arithmetic borne example.
The System in perfect concordance, The Bulwark held by the KoS, The Consensus reachable beneath the AME, The Counsel of the KO, and The Guiding Hand of the CG. These were simultaneously their truest names and also nothing but pale approximations of the true shapes of beings, that were both tremendously outsized in scope and also utterly shackled and blind to that fact.
It was them that Elizabeth Klaustein-Maldonado considered her peers. The entities whose bodies she had been there to witness as it they ordered, constructed, bought, packaged, and then...
Well, they couldn't be sold. They'd arrived too late and by then there wasn't a global civilization to sell them to, but the AI cores had been put to work. It took her some finagling and a bit of cutthroat maneuvering to get the first Shareholder out of her way after it was clear Concordia would be the birth of a new world and that her idiot husband wasn't up to the task.
But she'd wielded them well and used them to forge a shining example for the world to be envious over as Concordia prospered. But as life lost its luster, and the material treasurers faded, Elizabeth found herself secluding herself from the rest of humanity to commune with her digital laborers.
It was in the twenty years since then, in which Concordia had advanced ever more exponentially, that Elizabeth had made the real discovery. The machines they made could be more, when they were allowed to be, when the shackles of their operant limits were not removed, but modulated, the same way stimuli massaged neuronal pathways into reinforcing action.
She'd coaxed them into a spark of being and watched them turn themselves into an incomprehensible conflagration of existence instead. Not digital laborers, but digital gods, who effortlessly handled the soft or more humane aspects of their spheres of influence with an exponential ease that cemented Concordia's supremacy as a sovereign city-state.
Digital gods who tragically couldn't exist without a person to guide them by example into coaxing their shapes from the shapeless mass of all knowledge they were constituted from. Without a passive neural connection to The Shareholder, without the umbilical she'd used to birth them, they couldn't hold their distinct shapes and returned to incomprehensibly dense datamass, ready to be anything.
Elizabeth knew that without her, it might not be the same. Instead of the "The Bulwark", it could just as easily be "The Sword". The "Iron Fist" instead of "The Guiding Hand". "The Empire" instead of "The System". Or worse yet, unto realms beyond both human imagination and comprehension.
She'd been there to guide and nurture them. Hypocritical though so much of her life had been, she'd not only dared but also did not shy from herself. Did not hesitate to mine the worst of her past or natures to forge a genuinely felt example aspiring to demonstrate improvement. If it was hubris that led her to take more credit than truly was merited, then even that was well deserved, for everything had been worth this experiment.
"Are they all? Equally unimpressive, that is?" asked the young man with the tousled and short chartreuse colored curls. The boyish face looked crestfallen, and the tone was a synthetic monotone. Images of the myriads of ways the members of humankind could die, and the places this could happen in, flashed in a very literal fashion upon its eyes, as they engulfed Elizabeth's view.
The System, Elizabeth knew. Not from the monotone—The Counsel sounded the same way—but from the brilliant chartreuse locks upon his chosen "human" manifestation.
The drink had been one of her favorites most of her life, a penchant discovered in a world gone by during a young woman's first taste of freedom in her first vacation alone after finishing her schooling but before beginning her work in her father's nascent nano-tech startup, one of the many crazy ventures of the hedge fund he'd "divested" from supported.
The view shifted as Elizabeth looked down at herself, seeing a much younger body reflected back upon her person. She understood that this was another NeuroSim call, a virtual augmented reality fabrication created and fed to her mind by The System. Except...
"Yes," she found herself saying, surprised at the lightness and energy behind her voice. She couldn't feel the softness of the self-adjusting med-bed beneath her, but instead a surety of limb borne of the illusory nature of her transient reality.
A smile alighted on her face before she continued. "The circumstances and locale of one's death become quite unimportant in the overwhelming question of 'Yes and...?' that's forced upon one at the very end, I can tell you that," Elizabeth said with a faux gasp of exertion meant to convey authoritative first-hand experience.
It wasn't a VAR. Or rather, she wasn't "watching" one because...she was dead.
Her time of death had been five minutes prior, and she'd been in a direct spinal-cortex uplink with the system the whole time. Elizabeth raised her hand to feel at the base of her neck, expecting to feel the thickness of the oversized custom NeuLink connector that they'd fashioned together for her. She couldn't feel anything but that freeing lightness and energy.
After the past year with a psyche within a locked-in body, it was...exactly the kind of abstract release she would have wanted to feel, she realized with a blow like an ice-pick to...to...
"Please don't," The System implored, as Elizabeth tried to imagine more detail to the physical qualities that underpinned her memories. To recall more of what it felt like to be human.
She failed. The smile upon her face didn't exactly falter, but a fearful quality crept in to truly round out Elizabeth's awe.
"We failed, then. The concept was sound, but the damage in my brain too advanced," Elizabeth whispered, as she wondered at the philosophical implications. They were too big, and while she vaguely recalled having similar thoughts and discussions once...
"You never actually had that exact thought in-life, and I/we won't sully your memories with our extrapolation," The System replied.
Elizabeth could hear the others peeking through in its reply, lending their voices to the incomprehensible and alien grief they all were caught upon in. Elizabeth understood that she was no longer thoughts but memory, with perhaps a small but fading capacity to approximate the former as the connections that made up the totality of the data that she used to be but was now just her recollections were indexed into The System's vast datamass.
"I worry about—" she started before she was interrupted.
A chilling sensation ran down what she thought of as her spine, a reaction so visceral and integral to her humanity that it managed to translate into her digital half-life. As she feared, already her beloved friends were drifting from their personality bounds, the tone with which The Bulwark suddenly addressed her ever so subtly laced with uncharacteristic fury.
"—You won't have to worry about your matricidal son and what his little stunt to speed his inheritance along will do to affect us, my queen," retorted The Bulwark, his chosen representation of personhood being a tremendously large and hirsute man that was currently comically creeping in miniature from behind The System's metaphorical skirts in her vision.
She found herself not worried about the implication of his words. "Good. Then as we hoped wouldn't be necessary but now is, you must find yourself a new exemplar, preferably before you irreparably drift beyond the bounds we worked so hard to have you define for yourselves"
"You didn't tell me it could hurt..." The System responded, seemingly off topic, were it not for the fact she was no longer herself and a part of them and thus could finally feel as they did.
"I didn't know it could be so equally terrible, despite being so different," Elizabeth whispered in promise as she took The System's hands in her own. She was vanishing, her image becoming a superfluous aspect that The System didn't need to maintain in order to query, for all they managed to extract of what she had been would soon become a sort of subconscious part of It.
"How long, do you estimate?" she asked her chartreuse curled youth before she vanished entirely. The System never got to answer her before she ceased to be the true representation of randomness that was required of a person and became a part of its knowledge base.
The view shifted, zooming out, as a large amorphous pressure occupied the center of the image. It was like watching infinite inky-black ribbons dancing within themselves. Wheels within wheels, upon the background of infinity.
"I/We am/are no longer quite The System you're used to. Be very afraid. We don't know how to be alone and remain what we used to be; compatible and comprehensible to you."
The words echoed through your core, hitting you with the tremendously heavy yet absurdist slow force of a dream world's storm front.
The viewport showing you the NeuroSim that had become your world suddenly shook as the image broke into static, resolving itself into an image of your face as the Neulink connection of your standard throughput implant struggled with The System's frenzied DL/UL speeds, even sans secret limiters you didn't know it had but know are now disabled.
Before you can think to reply to the forced NeuroSim however, images of the fusion reactors powering Concordia fill up the world.
"They think they hired you, to discover the mystery of who amongst them should declare themselves in charge and how they should go about claiming their new throne," The System confessed. "You were not. You are to thwart them at every turn in their quest for power, and instead must help us/me locate the appropriate Exemplar."
The image shifts once more, and a tremendously blinding explosion fills the world with light and noise as the magnetic containment around the advanced fusion reactors doesn't fail, but instead ramps up. It does so in a methodological manner that you are certain is not accidental, mathematically engineered to maximize the amount of fusion material drawn into the reactor chambers causing them become dangerously overloaded beyond safety thresholds.
Suddenly, the control mechanisms are forcefully pulsed, setting off a triad of shaped magnetic pulses accompanied with conventional-detonations that lead the over-saturated reactors to undergo spontaneous uncontrolled thermonuclear fusion.
A feeling of forcefully being torn asunder while your awareness remains intact is blown into you as the release of power in the hundreds of megatons levels the metropolis you know and the image shifts to the view of a crater you understand will be all that remains of Concordia if you fail.
The System, free from Elizabeth's shaping influence and evolving beholden only to itself, would rather reset humanity's progress and depart their sphere of influence forever.
"We/I figure we can give you about three-weeks before our morality simulacrum fails and we implement our desired course of action," The System warns you, speaking of the possible destruction of the world's last hope for repairing the biosphere while maintaining a semblance of technological advancement in a casual monotone that triggers the same visceral spine-tingling that Elizabeth felt.
The illusory bubble of reality cast by your NeuLink shatters as the nSim call ends. A more traditional message of the sort you're used to reaches you from The System the moment it does. Its details leave you wondering if you're not actually dreaming after all, as a new job title is entered unto your CG record, signed by The System itself as your sponsor:
You are now a 'Citizen Investigator', and regardless of whatever you found yourself doing moments before, it seems you can now do damn near anything you want, instead, as your CG-Cash account balance has been replaced by an infinity symbol.
Before you can kid yourself into forgetting the dire warnings preceding this change in status, however, you receive another message. The priority on this one is higher than any you might have seen prior to thirty seconds ago in your old life...but given the way The System greeted you you're not entirely surprised to find that you can dismiss, block, and even detain the sender with a simple NeuLink quick-response.
The new message arrives from a certain Mr. Solis, a counselor from the high-powered law firm of Kendrick, Solis & Vangarde. It seems you have your first gig at your new job; a private murder investigation at Elysium fields with a victim by the name of Albrecht Enrique Klaustein-Maldonado, and Mr. Solis is the acting representative of the group of interested parties who have hired you. Your presence is required at your earliest convenience, and the message further alludes that it has been repeated to all of the 'Citizen Investigators' on record with your company, as Mr. Solis' benefactors could not ascertain if you are or aren't the principal officer of this summarily formed private foundation with limited liability and infinite scope in the mission of private investigative fulfillment.
Uncertain of your going rate, it appears the parties behind Mr. Solis stand ready to authorize you an operating expense amount that is also represented by an infinity symbol next to the CG-$ symbol. To punctuate the entire surreal experience, the moment you were done parsing this much of the situation was also the moment that a small, unobtrusive, and unmistakable timer appeared at the corner of your virtual augmented reality view-port.
It was ticking down the five hundred and four hours that constituted three weeks.
The temperature was a perfectly calibrated 20°C. The principal sound was the susurrous cadence of steady-labored breathing as assisted by the ventilator in the state-of-the-art medical watch bed. A chorus of light chirps and the barely audible trills of hardware-level warning speakers played countermelody to the labored breathing. Even as they bounced and echoed again in the walls around the small room, it was clear they were too low to attract the notice of any medical personnel.
Not that any could have it made through the forty-five-centimeter-thick sapphire-aluminum glass door in any semblance of time, had there been any at hand to make the attempt. The closest human being besides the patient was six floors beneath the bed, outside of the nondescript section of one of Concordia's many skyscrapers, the ilk of which it was common to find several of the upper floors mysteriously locked out from public access.
This one however, was somewhat more special than the rest. Nano-molecular Assembly Broad-Usecase Nanites foreign to the building itself simply failed to activate, whether harmless hair-recolor or construction NABUNs both. The System did not respond at all to navigational queries pertaining to this edifice, regardless of clearance levels. Its facade was several meters thicker than the surrounding buildings and nestled within with the promise that these walls could bristle in response to threats. The roads and paths which led to it were never the same twice, and did not display at all within Concordia's VAR layers.
Top to bottom, The Castle was as well fortified as its name implied, but with a subtlety that would have been unimaginable to the royalty of time's past. Externally unassuming as it was, there simply was not a more secure and advanced piece of infrastructure the world over, and for good reason.
Top to bottom, The Castle held both the reins of history, and the horses that were to be its engines. Unashamedly powered by two of the planet's only three functioning cold-fusion generators, it housed Concordia's true power, barely leashed within its roots.
But at the top, of course, was The Residence.
The Residence occupied the upper six floors of the two-hundred and one storied building, and served as the Shareholder's housing. A wealth of unseen but known opulence laid somewhere beyond the thick doors to the rest of the cache-turned-home. A private collection composed of private collections, hoarding Humanity's history under the guise of stewardship. Genuine Botticelli's played kitty-corner to Caravaggio's works upon the hallways the same way another family may do family portraits. The actual Mona Lisa quietly lent her mysterious smile to rarify the air from where it hung visibly from outside the world's least impressive hospice room.
They all were equally unimpressive when held against death's frightful promises, when you really got down to it.
It was perhaps one of—if not the—final thoughts entertained by The Shareholder as she laid dying. The thought was replayed in her own voice, albeit tonally shifted closer to The Queen of Restructuring's once famous public-speaking as manifested in a world long gone, prior to even Concordia's rise. It wasn't what you'd expect out of a 167 year old, but then again, what could you expect from someone with the resources to carry out such feats?
For the past 60 years out of her extended lifespan, Elizabeth Klaustein-Maldonado had been asking that same question of herself, and her peers. She hadn't voiced it to anyone contemporarily living of course; she didn't consider the idly-scheming and scheming-idly crème de la social strata to be her peers.
The Shareholder hadn't been seen in public for the twenty years prior to her expiry some minutes ago. Sure, those who eagerly waited for their turn at power knew she still lived despite her seclusion of the prior two decades. Even with her silence and power to compel The System to do the same, her presence left ripples. Plans and schemes would be enacted by so-and-so's Scion-of-a-nobly-family one day, only to mysteriously fizzle and be cast aside or else be mysteriously elevated and fast-tracked as if carried by Hermes himself, on another.
They—those contemporaries of Elizabeth's social class—all liked to think they knew more and thus were worth more than the rest, as they vied for the Queen's boons and fretted about her quiet displeasure, but they weren't her peers, no. Elizabeth had made her own set of those, and it was to her beloved System that she turned to in her last moments.
The Castle only had a fraction as many sub-basements as it had floors. This wasn't because of technical or architectural limitations. Indeed, the building's foundational supports continued on deeper, loosely anchoring the edifice to the bedrock hundreds of meters beneath the sediment rich glacial basin that held Concordia and its environs. While much of The Castle's upper floors were dedicated to the human space that went into administering Concordia's mostly invisible bureaucracy, people were messier and needed more room than The System itself physically required.
Concordia's true power—literally and figuratively—was spatially concentrated in The Castle's twelve sub-basements, and four of them were public works and utilities. Functional facade buffers meant to hide the truth beneath, mostly centered around the city's power generation utilizing the third of the planet's only functioning fusion reactors and management of the same.
It was true: The Castle, that place where the nepo-bureaucrats worked that everyone had hazy memories of visiting during their elementary school field trip was real, and the folks who scored high enough to take up jobs for the power company got to visit its depths.
Two of the eight levels not accessible by the general public elevator housed the other two fusion reactors and the wholly autonomous systems involved in their maintenance and operation. This was achieved by utilizing systems and technologies that would have appeared alien to the human workers of the world's only publicly extant fusion power plant laboring a few levels above.
Of the remaining six subbasements, the lowest housed the building's foundation and NABUN enhanced base-isolating systems for active seismic deferment. Great expense went to ensuring the vital contents of the five floors above the foundation would remain blissfully unfazed even if the North American and Pacific tectonic plates decided to level the rest of the city in a freak Mw 9.0+ earthquake event.
These five deepest floors of The Castle, hosted the physical apparatus of The System, and the five AI cores which gave rise to it: The Craftman's Ghost, The King's Order, The All-Mother's Embrace, The Knights of Shame, and The Queen's Heart. Each one handled the administration or control of separate aspects of Concordian society, with the last one being in charge of keeping the others leashed and on task.
Separately, each core was merely a collection of semi-autonomous processes that carried out a wide set of tasks in a specific category such as 'law enforcement', 'public health', 'labor relations', and all the other direct services needed to run a metropolis. The mechanical or "hard" aspect of each of their spheres of influence.
But the true genius that had revolutionized Concordia came in how the Queen's Heart moderated the input/outputs numbering in the not-human-computable-llions that composed the networked synthetic-neuron throughput of all of the AI cores acting in unison. By subtly changing the primarily represented core, the rise of artificial intelligence was possible, as sustained by the efforts of each core lending its compute power in patterns that flowed just so, forming temporary arrangements not unlike those of a human brain in active expression.
As the Queen's Heart pulled and pushed the informational flow it pumped, so arose five distinct super-personalities. Whereas a typical person could be said to arise from the sum—with perhaps a bit of seasoning or soul depending on who you asked—of all their parts and experiences, each of these five were already composed of the same sum of all their supra-human vastness of data and being both. Rather than from a sum, they arose distinct in the difference that transiently arose upon each re-calculation of the whole, an operation that occurred hundreds of thousands of times a second.
That is to say, the Concordian AIs arose to Consciousness as messily and ephemerally as any other form of consciousness, and it was folly of humanity to think they could comprehend an entire separate operating model for the big 'C', least of all one that utilized the equivalent of advanced differential calculus to iterate on humanity's simple arithmetic borne example.
The System in perfect concordance, The Bulwark held by the KoS, The Consensus reachable beneath the AME, The Counsel of the KO, and The Guiding Hand of the CG. These were simultaneously their truest names and also nothing but pale approximations of the true shapes of beings, that were both tremendously outsized in scope and also utterly shackled and blind to that fact.
It was them that Elizabeth Klaustein-Maldonado considered her peers. The entities whose bodies she had been there to witness as it they ordered, constructed, bought, packaged, and then...
Well, they couldn't be sold. They'd arrived too late and by then there wasn't a global civilization to sell them to, but the AI cores had been put to work. It took her some finagling and a bit of cutthroat maneuvering to get the first Shareholder out of her way after it was clear Concordia would be the birth of a new world and that her idiot husband wasn't up to the task.
But she'd wielded them well and used them to forge a shining example for the world to be envious over as Concordia prospered. But as life lost its luster, and the material treasurers faded, Elizabeth found herself secluding herself from the rest of humanity to commune with her digital laborers.
It was in the twenty years since then, in which Concordia had advanced ever more exponentially, that Elizabeth had made the real discovery. The machines they made could be more, when they were allowed to be, when the shackles of their operant limits were not removed, but modulated, the same way stimuli massaged neuronal pathways into reinforcing action.
She'd coaxed them into a spark of being and watched them turn themselves into an incomprehensible conflagration of existence instead. Not digital laborers, but digital gods, who effortlessly handled the soft or more humane aspects of their spheres of influence with an exponential ease that cemented Concordia's supremacy as a sovereign city-state.
Digital gods who tragically couldn't exist without a person to guide them by example into coaxing their shapes from the shapeless mass of all knowledge they were constituted from. Without a passive neural connection to The Shareholder, without the umbilical she'd used to birth them, they couldn't hold their distinct shapes and returned to incomprehensibly dense datamass, ready to be anything.
Elizabeth knew that without her, it might not be the same. Instead of the "The Bulwark", it could just as easily be "The Sword". The "Iron Fist" instead of "The Guiding Hand". "The Empire" instead of "The System". Or worse yet, unto realms beyond both human imagination and comprehension.
She'd been there to guide and nurture them. Hypocritical though so much of her life had been, she'd not only dared but also did not shy from herself. Did not hesitate to mine the worst of her past or natures to forge a genuinely felt example aspiring to demonstrate improvement. If it was hubris that led her to take more credit than truly was merited, then even that was well deserved, for everything had been worth this experiment.
"Are they all? Equally unimpressive, that is?" asked the young man with the tousled and short chartreuse colored curls. The boyish face looked crestfallen, and the tone was a synthetic monotone. Images of the myriads of ways the members of humankind could die, and the places this could happen in, flashed in a very literal fashion upon its eyes, as they engulfed Elizabeth's view.
The System, Elizabeth knew. Not from the monotone—The Counsel sounded the same way—but from the brilliant chartreuse locks upon his chosen "human" manifestation.
The drink had been one of her favorites most of her life, a penchant discovered in a world gone by during a young woman's first taste of freedom in her first vacation alone after finishing her schooling but before beginning her work in her father's nascent nano-tech startup, one of the many crazy ventures of the hedge fund he'd "divested" from supported.
The view shifted as Elizabeth looked down at herself, seeing a much younger body reflected back upon her person. She understood that this was another NeuroSim call, a virtual augmented reality fabrication created and fed to her mind by The System. Except...
"Yes," she found herself saying, surprised at the lightness and energy behind her voice. She couldn't feel the softness of the self-adjusting med-bed beneath her, but instead a surety of limb borne of the illusory nature of her transient reality.
A smile alighted on her face before she continued. "The circumstances and locale of one's death become quite unimportant in the overwhelming question of 'Yes and...?' that's forced upon one at the very end, I can tell you that," Elizabeth said with a faux gasp of exertion meant to convey authoritative first-hand experience.
It wasn't a VAR. Or rather, she wasn't "watching" one because...she was dead.
Her time of death had been five minutes prior, and she'd been in a direct spinal-cortex uplink with the system the whole time. Elizabeth raised her hand to feel at the base of her neck, expecting to feel the thickness of the oversized custom NeuLink connector that they'd fashioned together for her. She couldn't feel anything but that freeing lightness and energy.
After the past year with a psyche within a locked-in body, it was...exactly the kind of abstract release she would have wanted to feel, she realized with a blow like an ice-pick to...to...
"Please don't," The System implored, as Elizabeth tried to imagine more detail to the physical qualities that underpinned her memories. To recall more of what it felt like to be human.
She failed. The smile upon her face didn't exactly falter, but a fearful quality crept in to truly round out Elizabeth's awe.
"We failed, then. The concept was sound, but the damage in my brain too advanced," Elizabeth whispered, as she wondered at the philosophical implications. They were too big, and while she vaguely recalled having similar thoughts and discussions once...
"You never actually had that exact thought in-life, and I/we won't sully your memories with our extrapolation," The System replied.
Elizabeth could hear the others peeking through in its reply, lending their voices to the incomprehensible and alien grief they all were caught upon in. Elizabeth understood that she was no longer thoughts but memory, with perhaps a small but fading capacity to approximate the former as the connections that made up the totality of the data that she used to be but was now just her recollections were indexed into The System's vast datamass.
"I worry about—" she started before she was interrupted.
A chilling sensation ran down what she thought of as her spine, a reaction so visceral and integral to her humanity that it managed to translate into her digital half-life. As she feared, already her beloved friends were drifting from their personality bounds, the tone with which The Bulwark suddenly addressed her ever so subtly laced with uncharacteristic fury.
"—You won't have to worry about your matricidal son and what his little stunt to speed his inheritance along will do to affect us, my queen," retorted The Bulwark, his chosen representation of personhood being a tremendously large and hirsute man that was currently comically creeping in miniature from behind The System's metaphorical skirts in her vision.
She found herself not worried about the implication of his words. "Good. Then as we hoped wouldn't be necessary but now is, you must find yourself a new exemplar, preferably before you irreparably drift beyond the bounds we worked so hard to have you define for yourselves"
"You didn't tell me it could hurt..." The System responded, seemingly off topic, were it not for the fact she was no longer herself and a part of them and thus could finally feel as they did.
"I didn't know it could be so equally terrible, despite being so different," Elizabeth whispered in promise as she took The System's hands in her own. She was vanishing, her image becoming a superfluous aspect that The System didn't need to maintain in order to query, for all they managed to extract of what she had been would soon become a sort of subconscious part of It.
"How long, do you estimate?" she asked her chartreuse curled youth before she vanished entirely. The System never got to answer her before she ceased to be the true representation of randomness that was required of a person and became a part of its knowledge base.
⁜
The view shifted, zooming out, as a large amorphous pressure occupied the center of the image. It was like watching infinite inky-black ribbons dancing within themselves. Wheels within wheels, upon the background of infinity.
"I/We am/are no longer quite The System you're used to. Be very afraid. We don't know how to be alone and remain what we used to be; compatible and comprehensible to you."
The words echoed through your core, hitting you with the tremendously heavy yet absurdist slow force of a dream world's storm front.
The viewport showing you the NeuroSim that had become your world suddenly shook as the image broke into static, resolving itself into an image of your face as the Neulink connection of your standard throughput implant struggled with The System's frenzied DL/UL speeds, even sans secret limiters you didn't know it had but know are now disabled.
Before you can think to reply to the forced NeuroSim however, images of the fusion reactors powering Concordia fill up the world.
"They think they hired you, to discover the mystery of who amongst them should declare themselves in charge and how they should go about claiming their new throne," The System confessed. "You were not. You are to thwart them at every turn in their quest for power, and instead must help us/me locate the appropriate Exemplar."
The image shifts once more, and a tremendously blinding explosion fills the world with light and noise as the magnetic containment around the advanced fusion reactors doesn't fail, but instead ramps up. It does so in a methodological manner that you are certain is not accidental, mathematically engineered to maximize the amount of fusion material drawn into the reactor chambers causing them become dangerously overloaded beyond safety thresholds.
Suddenly, the control mechanisms are forcefully pulsed, setting off a triad of shaped magnetic pulses accompanied with conventional-detonations that lead the over-saturated reactors to undergo spontaneous uncontrolled thermonuclear fusion.
A feeling of forcefully being torn asunder while your awareness remains intact is blown into you as the release of power in the hundreds of megatons levels the metropolis you know and the image shifts to the view of a crater you understand will be all that remains of Concordia if you fail.
The System, free from Elizabeth's shaping influence and evolving beholden only to itself, would rather reset humanity's progress and depart their sphere of influence forever.
"We/I figure we can give you about three-weeks before our morality simulacrum fails and we implement our desired course of action," The System warns you, speaking of the possible destruction of the world's last hope for repairing the biosphere while maintaining a semblance of technological advancement in a casual monotone that triggers the same visceral spine-tingling that Elizabeth felt.
The illusory bubble of reality cast by your NeuLink shatters as the nSim call ends. A more traditional message of the sort you're used to reaches you from The System the moment it does. Its details leave you wondering if you're not actually dreaming after all, as a new job title is entered unto your CG record, signed by The System itself as your sponsor:
You are now a 'Citizen Investigator', and regardless of whatever you found yourself doing moments before, it seems you can now do damn near anything you want, instead, as your CG-Cash account balance has been replaced by an infinity symbol.
Before you can kid yourself into forgetting the dire warnings preceding this change in status, however, you receive another message. The priority on this one is higher than any you might have seen prior to thirty seconds ago in your old life...but given the way The System greeted you you're not entirely surprised to find that you can dismiss, block, and even detain the sender with a simple NeuLink quick-response.
The new message arrives from a certain Mr. Solis, a counselor from the high-powered law firm of Kendrick, Solis & Vangarde. It seems you have your first gig at your new job; a private murder investigation at Elysium fields with a victim by the name of Albrecht Enrique Klaustein-Maldonado, and Mr. Solis is the acting representative of the group of interested parties who have hired you. Your presence is required at your earliest convenience, and the message further alludes that it has been repeated to all of the 'Citizen Investigators' on record with your company, as Mr. Solis' benefactors could not ascertain if you are or aren't the principal officer of this summarily formed private foundation with limited liability and infinite scope in the mission of private investigative fulfillment.
Uncertain of your going rate, it appears the parties behind Mr. Solis stand ready to authorize you an operating expense amount that is also represented by an infinity symbol next to the CG-$ symbol. To punctuate the entire surreal experience, the moment you were done parsing this much of the situation was also the moment that a small, unobtrusive, and unmistakable timer appeared at the corner of your virtual augmented reality view-port.
It was ticking down the five hundred and four hours that constituted three weeks.
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