Ozark Mountains

Present Day

Michael's second thought after waking up, was how unusually comfortable the surface he was lying on was, and the fact that he was in total darkness. His first assumption was that he fell down a sinkhole. Not an unknown occurrence in this part of the country, but there wasn’t a circle of light above him to indicate the opening to the surface. What worried him the most was the complete absence of pain.

Not really being a religious person, praying was not something that came naturally to him. Despite that, a very true saying states ‘there are no atheists in the trenches.’ Well, he prayed now, for the first time in a long while. Prayed that his back was not broken, severing the spinal cord, and making him numb—as he felt in this moment. Prayed he would survive this accident and that somebody would find him soon. Which was unlikely, since the whole point of coming here was to get away from the world, and to be alone. God, please don’t let me die here!

He tried calling for help, it was the most instinctual thing to do in such a situation. His throat was bone dry, so what came out of his mouth was similar to the sound of a cat with a fishbone in its throat… trying to cough it up.

A feeling of overpowering panic was rising from deep inside of him, like the tide on a sea shore, when a clear, if somewhat flat voice echoed all around him.

“PLEASE REMAIN CALM, GESTALT RECORDING PROCEDURE IN PROCESS.”

Just knowing that he was not alone and that someone was near was exhilarating. That increasing sense of panic vanished, replaced by hope. The voice did not make any sense, but that was unimportant, the only important thing was that he wasn’t going to die here.

“Can you help me?” He said as loud as he could, but even to him, it sounded distressingly feeble. “I don’t think I can see, please call 911!”

There was no immediate answer, only silence and his own voice echoing slightly.

“Hey! Can you hear me?” He tried again, hoping that the voice he heard was not just a figment of his imagination.

"GESTALT IMPRINTING PROCEDURE COMPLETED… AI-CORE INITIALIZATION STARTING… AI-CORE INITIALIZED. OPTIMIZING SUPPORT SYSTEMS… OPTIMIZED… INDUCING PATIENT’S SLEEP STATE."

Michael felt his consciousness fading until only darkness remained.

***

While waking up, there is that moment when you expect to open your eyes and be in your own bed, which was not what happened. The first thing he saw were four white walls and a strange white bed that he was lying on. There was nothing else in this weird room, not even a door.

“Hello, is anybody there?” Michael shouted, surprised for a second by the clarity of his own voice.

“Hi Michael, how are you feeling?” A new voice replied. It was different from the one before, more natural, and strangely familiar.

“Okay… I guess. Where am I?”

“Well… that will take some lengthy explanations, and we will get to it in time. Right now, let us focus on your physical state; do you feel any pain, soreness, or discomfort of any kind?” The voice asked in a very clinical manner.

Michael realized he felt just fine, which was more than a little bit strange since he literally fell through a hole in the ground. There should at least be some bruising if he was extremely lucky, broken bones and limbs encased in plaster with wires poking through them—if he wasn’t. Raising his hands in front of his face, he could see that there wasn't even a scratch on them, and falling down the hole should have really banged them up. Instead, he felt great, even his bad knee was pain-free.

Oh yes, he was also butt naked.

Now, he was never a prude, waking up in a strange bed without any clothes on was not a novel experience for him, but that was in university, and a hot girl was involved. This was a completely new experience and unlike the last time, not a pleasant one.

“I'm fine, is this a hospital? And why am I naked?” Those were just the first few questions that came to him; a lot more were waiting to be asked.

“Good, no, and clothes would have been in the way during the procedures. Besides, they were completely ruined.”

“What procedures! And who are you?” He could feel his temper rising, fueled by fear. This entire situation was just too bizarre.

“Hmm… you are going to be stubborn, as expected. OK, Michael, to put it bluntly—I am you.” The voice assertively stated.

Out of all possible replies he expected, that one was not in the first ten. Hell, not even in the first thousand. Clearly, he was dealing with a deranged person while lying naked in a small white room with no doors, talking to a disembodied voice. Shit, I'm in some crazy bastard’s SAW reenactment.

The voice continued. “And you took a pretty nasty fall. If you think you landed like Alice, think again. For a time you were doing a good impersonation of Humpty Dumpty. Putting you back together was a challenge; you almost did not make it. For all that, your body was repaired. I did some of the work myself, and you are quite welcome.”

He was clearly not dead. The more reasonable option was that he was hallucinating, most likely lying at the bottom of that freaking hole and having a weird trip. In spite of that little episode of religious devotion, he considered himself more of an agnostic so that ruled out traditional afterlife. Any time now, he was going to wake up and feel the excruciating pain of his mangled body.

“You are not hallucinating Michael, you are not lying at the bottom of a hole, this is quite real.” The voice suddenly said with a note of exasperation.

“How do you know what I’m thinking? Where are you? Will you at least show me basic human decency and speak to me in person!” His blood pressure was sharply increasing, and that familiar sense of panic was making itself known again. Since he woke up, nothing had made any sense whatsoever.

“Well… you see, in the process of putting you back together, there were a few extra parts that needed to be… added. Don’t worry, it was quite necessary. One of them is beneath your occipital bone, in your head. It is called a Cerebral Enhancer Implant or CEI for short. Among its many functions is the one that is enabling me to communicate with your mind directly. I had to tweak it a little from its original design, and it worked like a charm. As to where I am… Michael, you are inside me; this is a spaceship that houses my consciousness, and I am not exactly human. Well… not anymore.”

“Extra parts! Not Human! Spaceship! Oh… shit!” The only thing he could say was repeating a few parts of those outrageous claims while the sound of his heartbeat was drumming in his ears. He was a lifelong science fiction fan and it is not as if he could not comprehend what the voice was saying—believing it was a different matter.

“Michael, I need you to relax. Your heart rate is getting quite elevated, and you are starting to hyperventilate.”

Easier said than done, but he made a conscious effort to stabilize his racing heartbeat. The entire situation was unreal, and there was a fleeting thought or two about probes of a certain unmentionable design.

“That is disgusting; I have not even contemplated sticking any probes there! The entire human species is anally obsessed, I am beginning to see so clearly now. Why does everybody immediately assume that any alien sapient intelligence out there has some sinister plan involving their ass?” There was a distinctive note of irritation in that voice.

“Sorry, can we start from the beginning?”

Trying to remain calm and resist the pull of a full-blown panic attack was not the easiest thing he’s ever done, not by far.

“Alright… I understand that all this is a little overwhelming for you, but let me tell you, it has not been an easy ride for me either.”

“What do you mean?”

“Michael, after stabilizing you, the MI or machine intelligence that operated the ship performed a procedure called ‘Gestalt imprinting’. It consists of taking an image of your mind and storing it in a quantum AI-core. Well, during it, something went a little… wonky.”

“You’re telling me that something went wrong while you were messing with my mind! Why the hell were you even doing that?!” As far as Michael was concerned, things were going to hell in a handbasket.

“Stop yelling at me! How should I know? That was before I woke up. I'm in the dark here, just like you. It’s not like I have a user manual ‘What to do when you become an AI.’” The voice said in a rather fatigued tone.

The fact that the voice showed emotions while talking to him actually calmed Michael down, he could relate to it more. On the other hand, he claimed to be an AI, which should be impossible. However, it was just one more impossible thing that he heard in the last few minutes.

Falling back on his training on how to react to highly stressful situations, he took a few deep calming breaths and cleared his throat. “Very well, let’s take a step back… I want to know what happened to me,” Michael said in a polite tone, trying to get this weird conversation back on track.

“Sorry, I am still a little touchy about it. The time when I figured out that I no longer had a physical body was… disturbing. As far as I can figure it out, the process was fully automatic. The thing is, I don’t think gestalt imprinting was intended for someone with your brain structure and it was designed to be performed on a brain that was already coupled with a cerebral implant. Which was the snag I was telling you about.”

“Are you saying that there was something wrong with my brain?”

“No, but I think the procedure was meant for someone with a more evolved, structured mind. Yours… was a bit chaotic for it. There are things in your hind-brain that would make an AI have night terrors, primal instincts inter-weaved with the rest of it... let’s just say it was a bit of a SNAFU.”

Michael looked at the ceiling trying to absorb it all without giving in to the desire to yell aloud every explicative he knew.

“And I guess… that was the moment when I was born.” The voice said after a small pause.

“You were… born?” Michael asked, trying to follow what the voice was telling him.

“It is the best way I can explain what happened when I became self-aware inside a digital world. Your mind imprint became a seed around which I was formed. There is an enormous memory storage here, where I woke up. With enough processing power to make all the supercomputers in the world look like ordinary calculators. Why that was the case, I have no idea since the original machine intelligence controlling this ship requires a relatively small amount of available space, in comparison. In fact, many things are not clear to me either, so we are in the same boat here buddy. That is why I said that I was you, a recording of your mind made sapient.”

“Shit…” He had a sudden urge for a shot of his grandfather’s moonshine.

“Okay, okay… let’s start with the basics. Who built the spaceship, and put it on my property? And I’m still having trouble believing it’s really a spaceship.”

“Ah, here is the thing, I do not know that either.” The self-proclaimed AI answered.

“How can you not know?” Michael slowly asked, while closing his eyes.

“It seems that whoever was the last occupant of the ship, deleted most of the data. I do not have any information on who or why. The MI waited for someone to show up and take the reins. There are user manuals that explain how to use the equipment, but not one byte of information that would shine some light on who made it or how it ended up buried. The MI is of no help, it is job oriented to a fault, not really intelligent, by any stretch of the imagination.

In addition, I want to be the first one to congratulate you. The MI has appointed you as the new owner of this ship. Let me tell you, the fact that it did not even consider me does not do wonders for my self-esteem. In any case, it has been here for a while, long before Grandpa bought this piece of land. There are maintenance records in its memory banks that stretch back for almost thirteen millennia.”

“Thirteen millennia… that’s 13,000 years! How in hell is it not just a pile of rust by now?” Michael asked in an incredulous voice while trying to wrap his mind around the absurd number. Such a vast span of years made even the pyramids in Giza look like they were recently made. One thing was for sure, humans were not building spaceships at that time, or for that matter, even now.

“To be exact, it was buried here 12,900 years ago, but on that scale, who’s counting. All maintenance duties are nanotechnology-based. Similar to the human body that replaces its cells, nanites repair parts that deteriorate. Actually, you were healed in the same manner yourself.” There was a note of humor in AI’s voice, grating on Michael’s nerves.

“It put freaking nanites in my body,” he quietly growled. A part of his mind imagined all those tiny robots crawling inside of him, making him shiver in discomfort.

“Calm down, it was an automated process done in an emergency, and there was no way to wake you up and ask for consent. Medical nanites fixed all broken bones, ruptured tissue, and the rest of a long list of problems; even now, they are fixing things inside you. Trust me, you were in a sorry state; there is not a hospital in the world that could have done anything to keep you alive, except fill you up with morphine and call a priest.”

The logical part of him was grateful for that; Michael still expected to feel occasional pangs of pain from his knee as he did for years. He took a few deep breaths to calm himself down.

“What now, where do we go from here?”

“For starters, you could stand up, and get dressed; there is an alcove with your repaired clothes underneath the bed.”

Standing up was much easier than he was used to. Michael shifted his weight onto his right leg, and it supported him as if it was never busted. He took a few steps and noticed that his limp was gone. In a small alcove were the same clothes he was wearing on his hiking trip, but now they were in pristine condition as if they were just picked up from a shelf in a store.

When he was dressed, he could not resist the urge and did a few jumping jacks; for more than a decade that was something he could only dream about doing, even one would have dropped him to the floor in agony.

“Once you are done testing that perfectly working knee, go through the door,” the AI said with a hint of amusement in his tone. Part of the wall folded to the side, creating an opening into a circular room, with a big chair in the middle.

“Welcome to the bridge,” the AI pompously announced.

The first impression Michael had after entering the bridge was a bit underwhelming. There was no visible machinery he could see, just off-white walls and a chair that could only be meant for a pilot.

“What, no windows or screens, how do you pilot this ship?”

Suddenly the air in front of the chair shimmered and a 3D hologram of Earth appeared. A big blue marble with green areas of land; there were even realistic clouds moving slowly and casting shadows on the world below. It was extremely realistic, and Michael could not resist the urge to touch it. His hand passed through the image as if it was not there.

“The machine intelligence was the actual pilot of the vessel. The pilot chair and controls are not really needed, but I guess whoever built it wanted to retain some semblance of control. Normally the user just needs to choose the destination and the MI will do all the tedious work involved in flying and landing the ship. There is a manual override that could be used if shit hits the fan, but I would not recommend it. Extensive training is needed to be able to actually fly the ship without any help.”

The chair was nothing extraordinary, ergonomically designed with white padding. Some modern designer chairs he saw looked far more alien than this one.

“And if you want a better view…”

The walls disappeared; he was in a small clearing with woods all around him. Only the fact that the floor and the chair were still there broke the illusion that he was not really out in the open.

“Quite something isn't it. It is basically a 3D holographic projection, but check out that resolution, so cool.”

For some reason, Michael felt that the AI was acting like a kid wanting to show-off his amazing new toy. Nevertheless, he had to admit, what he was seeing was incredible. In spite of this insane and quite an improbable situation he found himself in, that part of him responsible for a sense of wonder was exhilarated—he couldn't help but smile.

“Hey, what should I call you anyway? And if you were wondering, Michael is already taken,” he said, looking at the life-like forest around him.

“If you don’t mind, I took our childhood nickname, Max. People generally call you Michael or Mike, so it felt right to go by Max.”

“Okay… Max… do you have any way to show yourself? Talking to a disembodied voice is a bit bizarre.”

A few feet in front of him, the air shimmered and a man materialized. It caught Michael by surprise because he knew that image very well. How could he not, when he remembered seeing it in the mirror many years ago. The image was a hologram; he could still see the shapes of trees through it, while it was materializing. It was what he looked like when he was in his early twenties, except the man had a far longer hair than Michael ever did. Also, there was a depth of experience in those eyes, which would have been a strange sight in his younger self.

“Is this better?” Max asked with a mischievous smirk.

“Ah… yeah, I guess so… man, this is so weird,” he said looking closely at the image of his own face.

“I know, it is a bit weird for me too, but I'm getting used to weird being the norm, not an exception. Are you ready for some more information?”

“Yeah, shoot.”

“OK, first, it seems there are some hard-coded instructions that control things I can and can’t do on the ship itself; it’s really annoying. That MI is stubborn as a mule and it needs authorization from you so I can have a little more elbow room.”

“How do I do that?” Michael asked while raising an eyebrow.

From the floor, between them, a platform rose up with the outline of a hand on its flat surface.

“Put your hand on it and say that you are giving me secondary control of the ship's systems, you will still be the primary.”

Michael did that, placed his hand on the top and said, “I, Michael Freeman, give the AI… Max, secondary control of the ship's systems.”

The outline flashed with a bright green color a few times and then the whole thing sank back into the floor.

The AI stretched himself, as if he had been sitting in a chair for far too long, and took a few deep breaths.

“Thank God, that feels so much better. This rust bucket wouldn't allow me to do anything outside the confines of the ship’s outer hull,” Max said with a happy smile.

Michael looked at the holographic woods surrounding them and had a sudden urge to go outside, to feel the warmth of the real sun on his face.

“Max, this is great and all, but now I really want to go home, to think about things.”

The image of the AI nodded understandingly. “It's OK, I get it. It’s not like I’m going anywhere,” he said with an ironic expression on his digital face.

The illusion of the woods faded and an opening appeared on the side of the room. Following the AI’s directions, Michael walked through it, into what appeared to be an airlock. The second door opened only when the first one was fully closed, and he was soon outside the ship. The door closed behind him without leaving even a line to show its location. The outer hull didn’t look like metal, more like off-white iridescent ceramic. He couldn’t see a lot of it, because around the entrance was a hard rock surface that extended into a long tunnel illuminated with diffused lighting. It ended with a wide vertical shaft, with ordinary looking metal ladder rungs sunk into the rock.

“This is the place where you had your hard landing; the MI cleared the debris and fixed up the opening,” Max said through his implant.

It was an eerie sensation and felt as if the AI was standing behind him. Michael instinctively looked back only to see that there was nobody there.

Climbing to the top did not really take that much time; he estimated there was a little more than fifty feet from the bottom of the shaft to the surface and realized how lucky he was to have survived that fall.

“If nanites were supposed to maintain the place, how the hell did I drop through the opening?” he asked aloud, trusting the AI would hear him.

“The MI was not allowed to do anything too far away from the ship itself. The mere fact that the entrance lasted this long is a testament to superior technology and engineering. However, my analysis is that the deciding factor was time. There was no artificial cover on top, just a big rock that worked as camouflage for the entrance. Rain, ice, and time can destroy almost any material; I guess it wore the rock away. It seems that your weight was the straw that broke the camel's back. The new cover was created over it following emergency directives; it hides the entrance from prying eyes.”

As Michael was climbing to the top of the shaft, a slight noise announced the cover opening, and bright light from above spilled through the circular shaft. It blinded him for a second, but the Sun’s warmth felt comforting on his skin.

A few more seconds got him out of the hole and he took a few steps, walking on the soft grass. The cover slid back over the opening and closed the entrance to the shaft. It now looked like an ordinary flat rock, not even worth a second look. Certainly, nothing which would indicate that there was an entrance to the buried spaceship underneath it.

He took a deep cleansing breath and looked at the forest around him. It was as if the world had fundamentally changed before his eyes; the tranquil peacefulness of the forest did not have the same calming effect on him as it did before. He closed his eyes and breathed out, trying to find that calmness within him, which was the reason he came here in the first place. Somehow, he doubted that it would be easy to find it again.