Tao System network field detected

Connect?

Yes No

Lilijoy took a deep breath, then selected ‘yes’. A new message appeared.

Virtual instance created

Enter?

Yes No

In for a penny…

She selected ‘yes’ again.

A stream of visual sensory data trickled into her system, slowly at first, creating… darkness.

Well, that’s a little disappointing.

She was floating in a void, entirely empty. Then signals began to reach her auditory processors.

“Hold on… one second. Not working with much here. There!”

The voice was that of a woman, familiar in some ways. Just as Lilijoy matched the vocal pattern to her memory, a pointillistic blur of colors and forms began to enter her vision, assembling bit by bit into a speckled purple floor and circular columns. The environment around her stubbornly refused to come into focus, staying as a subtly shifting composite of overlapping blocks, so it took her a moment to realize that she was standing near the center of an enormous flower. Leaning against the base of the stamens was a woman in her thirties, with flowing dark hair and mildly Asian features. Her face, unlike her body and the surroundings, was fully resolved, and Lilijoy recognized it immediately.

“Greetings, Initiate,” said Emily Choi.

Lilijoy felt her world tilt, the furniture of her mind sliding into new configurations on the deck of a wave-tossed ship.

Wow.

Feelings of incredulity fought a sense of inevitability to a draw within her mind. I… can’t believe I didn’t see this coming, and I never would have expected it in a million years.

Emily smiled. “You look surprised, so I’m guessing I’m not in a museum or something. How can I help you?”

Seeing Emily as a woman was seeing the past and future meet in a way that made no sense to parts of Lilijoy’s mind. She shook her head to clear it.

“You’re alive?” was all she could come up with. It seemed as if the system hosting her was matching her thought speed, so she didn’t have her usual cushion of time to formulate a response.

“Who knows?” Emily replied. “I’m, I mean what you are seeing is something like a recording. An impression maybe. Just a fragment I left behind on the off chance someone like you might come along. A message and a memorial for future generations at an important historical site.”

A message and a memorial. A thrill of excitement ran across her body. I’m finally going to get some answers! She could feel it, the feeling that had become all to subdued of late.

“What’s the message?” she asked.

“To be honest, I didn’t really think all that specifically. I just figured that if anyone came by and accessed the network I could wing it. Why don’t you ask me something, and we’ll take it from there.”

A million possible inquiries fought and jostled on their way to Lilijoy’s mouth. Easy there, she told herself, one at a time. Start simple.

“What year are you from?”

“2114, so about one hundred and twenty years ago. Seems kind of long to me. I’d hoped humanity would have its act together and found me way sooner than that.”

“What happened with the Tao system? How did you live? What was it like?” Her questions overruled her restraints and stumbled out one after another.

Emily pursed her lips. “Yeah, so… there’s a lot. Ummm, and you should know that I don’t remember everything. I remember not wanting to leave anything too sensitive just lying around, not knowing the future and all. That and the fact that there just wasn’t a whole lot of room in here for useless memories. Also, a lot of the sad stuff got left out. I remember wanting the fragment, me that is, not to have too much baggage. That’s probably why I seem to feel pretty good about all of this. Well, that and the fact that I, I mean she… well the old me, made me so that I would be happy, pretty much no matter what.”

Emily seemed chipper, almost childlike as she spoke, not like a middle-aged woman.

I guess that’s what I would do, if I ever left behind a part of myself, Lilijoy thought. Give it just enough self awareness to interact and eternal happiness.

She didn’t think she would ever do that though, consign some part of herself with at least marginal self awareness to a possible eternity of confinement. On the other hand, who knew how she might feel about such things in forty years. Emily was born in 2062, so she would have been fifty-two or so at the time she left the fragment of herself behind.

“Anyway,” Emily continued, “I should find out a bit about you, and the state of the world before I go babbling about history and whatnot. I see you are running an older version, can’t imagine how that happened, but that’s all I know about you, since you aren’t sending me any data besides the basic avatar stuff. What’s your story?”

My story? How do I even begin? Lilijoy wondered. How much should I tell her?

“Oh, and keep it short,” Emily said in the silence that followed. “I don’t have a lot of room to work with here. Barely enough room to think in the moment, really. “

“Well, maybe I should start with the system I’m using,” Lilijoy said. “I inherited it, in a way. It’s a hand-me-down, though I’m still not entirely sure who put it in me.”

“Hold on a second. version 2.3.3.” She looked at Lilijoy with wide eyes. “What is your name?”

“Lilijoy.” I can’t wait to see what she makes of that.

Emily mouthed the name, repeating it to herself. “Seriously? No, don’t answer that. What on earth have I been up to out there?” she asked. “Don’t answer that either. I named my son Atticus, you know. But I did actually consider, just for a moment, naming him Attiboy.”

She placed pixelated arms on hips. “So how did you come by my old system and my old nickname, Lilijoy? Are you some kind of distant descendant? I’m not ready to be a great-great-great… whatever-grandmother.”

Lilijoy took a moment to enjoy being in the unfamiliar position of knowing more about her situation than Emily. “It’s a bit different than that. More complicated, or more confusing anyway. I still don’t really know the...” She was going to say details, but that seemed too much of an exaggeration. “… whole story. Or maybe I’m wrong about most of it. It seems that I might be, biologically, your sister? I kind of grew up, if you can call it that, with Gabriella and Henry Choi. Except I didn’t know who they were.”

It was impossible to know what she should or shouldn’t say, but she thought it best to be a little careful. She kept her worries about this fragment of Emily trying to possess or otherwise influence her firmly in the back of her mind. She was more worried about somehow destabilizing the fragment by introducing the wrong information.

“Huh. I guess someone must have gotten into the exclusion zone. I wonder if it was me?”

Now it was Lilijoy’s turn to feel confused, though she thought she might know where this was going. “Exclusion zone?”

“After the accident with the live testing. You know. You must?” The expression Emily gave her was almost pleading. “I don’t remember much about it, but Mom and Dad, and Atti were all there. I think I lost them? I was up north when it happened. I remember spending years trying to get in, to find out if anyone had survived.” She smiled. “But it must have all worked out in the end, right? Mom and Dad lived at least, since you’re here. And Atti?”

Oh boy. “It’s… a work in progress.”

“Oh.” She looked a little lost, and Lilijoy felt a wave of compassion for this isolated fragment of Emily.

What would it have been like for her when this all started? She would have been just eighteen, her family gone, the world breaking apart. Somehow she made it to the middle of the Amazon, only to find she couldn’t get in to the area, could never find out what had happened, who had survived.

“That’s why I’m here, I guess. Trying to find answers. Maybe I can help… make things even better.” Lilijoy realized as she was speaking that she couldn’t bring herself to tell Emily just how bad things really were. There was a reason that the original Emily had stripped out many of her sad memories, and while Lilijoy didn’t know enough to judge for herself, her intuition told her she shouldn’t add to them.

“What can I do to help?” Emily said. “I’ll tell you anything you need to know. At least until the power runs low. I’m hosted in an old shard from Mom’s site lab, one that didn’t get sent up in time. At least, that’s what I was able to piece together. There was something else here, before I put myself in, but I didn’t include that memory, so I have no idea what it was.”

Seeing Lilijoy’s face at the mention of power running low, she quickly added, “We should have plenty of time. The biggest energy hog is the data transmission, thus...” she gestured to the crude environment.

“Well, I don’t know what I don’t know,” said Lilijoy. “Why don’t you start at the beginning.”

***

“So there’s one thing you need to understand about the end of the twenty-first century. Everyone, well everyone with half a brain, understood that it was the beginning of the end; it’s not like we didn’t see it coming. The world was stumbling, and the only question was how many steps it would take before it finally hit the ground. Various groups, corporations, governments and the like, were trying to save the situation in a thousand different ways, but decades of disinformation and false information had made nearly impossible for anyone to work together who didn’t have a personal connection. There was no such thing as a consensus view on reality, and technology had given even smaller groups with fringe beliefs the power to effect global change.

In a sense, Mom and Dad were just as guilty as the rest of them. They thought that the only way to save the world was to make people smarter, while simultaneously controlling the means they were using to impact the world and each other.”

“So Tao System and Guardian,” said Lilijoy.

“Yes. It was only a matter of time before someone made a self-replicator, accidentally or on purpose, that couldn’t be stopped. We got off lucky with the Sydney event. If that had happened in Asia, the world would have burned.”

“That was an uncontrolled outbreak, right?”

“Yeah. The Chinese nuked it, and thank god that worked. But it was only the latest in a string, though the biggest by far. I think the first one was near Alamagordo, a few years before I was born. Mom and Dad founded Tao Systems the next year. They saw the handwriting on the wall at that point, I guess. How they had the time to have me, I’ll never understand. I’d like to say I wouldn’t have brought a child into that world, but… well, I pretty much did the same thing.”

“And you named him Atticus.”

“Yeah. But I don’t want to talk about that. Like I really don’t.” She wrinkled her brow for a second. “Oh well, it’s probably nothing.” She smiled and shrugged. “Where was I? Anyway, I’ll give you the gritty details in a file or something. Suffice to say, everything was falling apart, but slow enough that we all dared to think we could actually pull it off, saving the world I mean. Dad discovered how to use his system to think faster, and that’s when things really took off. Guardian was almost complete, most of it in orbit, the Tao system was… frightening is the word that comes to mind, but no one had time to slow down and think about it that much.”

“They took the system I’m using out of you. When did you finally get a system back?”

She rolled her eyes, and Lilijoy caught a glimpse of teenage Emily. “Two long years. It took them that long to get the cellular repair technologies worked in. In hindsight, it was exactly the right call, but I was not a happy camper at the time.” She gave Lilijoy a strange look. “Why on earth are you still using it? That generation of systems was, is, I guess, pretty toxic. Who let someone your age have it?”

“It’s complicated.” Lilijoy replied, not knowing what else to say. “But I’ve figured out a few solutions on my own.”

“Well, just be careful with Stage Two. That’s pretty rough even with the third generation. I’d suggest waiting until you can upgrade to version three.”

Should I tell her? Nah.

“Thanks for the advice.” She did her best to remove any trace of sarcasm. “So how did it all go wrong?”

Emily shook her head. “I wish I knew. I was up in Taos, training-”

“The whole Tao-Taos thing...”

“A fortuitous pun, was what Dad called it. Anyway, I was in Taos, and I knew something important was going to happen, something big. Atti let slip that it was a live field test, that they were going to start a controlled outbreak. He assured me about a thousand times that it couldn’t possibly go wrong, that they had done everything they could in controlled environments, and they needed to know that agents on the ground could resolve a replication event.” Her face went blank for a moment. “Hold on. There’s something here I never noticed before. A… I guess you could call it a package. It’s for you.”

She held up one hand, and a black box appeared.

Lilijoy froze. Is this another ‘candy from strangers’ moment?

Emily saw her hesitation. “There’s a tag associated with it. Would you like me to read it to you?”

When Lilijoy nodded, she continued, though her voice seemed rougher, older. “Dear Tao System user. This message contains a few memories I did not want my fragment to access, for reasons of long term viability. I wanted someone to have them, should I die after leaving this fragment. The conditions for this message’s delivery were that at least one hundred years pass and that the fragment has a positive opinion of you.”

Well, at least I know she likes me.

After delivering the little speech, Emily appeared frozen, arm outstretched with the black box.

“Hello? Emily?”

There was no change to the fragment’s condition.

Aw crap. I’ve got to take it if I want to keep going. There are too many things I don’t know.

She took the box, which immediately loaded into her system as a large package of data. She firewalled it off as best she could, feeling uneasy about the whole transaction.

Emily started talking again, as if she had never stopped. “Well, obviously something did go wrong. The next thing we knew, Guardian had taken over all our external computing resources. It wasn’t supposed to be activated for months, maybe years. The only person who could have allowed that to happen was my mother, but she was with my father monitoring the field test. Not that she couldn’t have done it from there but...” she tailed off.

Lilijoy could almost feel the pieces falling together. “Do you think that Guardian was activated accidentally, and perceived the test as a genuine threat?”

Emily shook her head. “That was my first thought too, but I just know, somehow, that that wasn’t what happened. Such a strong feeling… anyway, it took years, which I don’t remember well, but I’m sure were miserable, for me to make it down to the Amazon testing facility.”

She doesn’t remember why she feels that way. I guess wiping a memory still leaves a stain.

She felt like the answer to why Emily felt Guardian wasn’t responsible for the test’s failure just might be in the black box. Either that, or it was lost to time.

“And when you got there?” she prompted.

“When I got there, I couldn’t go in, couldn’t get closer than a few miles. Or maybe I could, but I always found myself standing on the boundary with no memory of what I’d been doing. Obviously it was a system override of some kind. So I did what anyone would do, tried a thousand different tactics over years. I went in with pencil and paper, intending to write down what I saw. I sent in other people, those with no systems at all, but they never returned. I gave up many times, only to return and try again, hoping that whatever system was in place had diminished or decayed over time. As of the time I created this fragment, I had no success.”

She sighed. “But obviously, someone did, or you wouldn’t be here with me now, using the system my mother carried in a charm around her neck.”

A memento, Mooster called it. I guess he was being more literal than I thought. I feel more accidental every day. So what happened, did the factory mine break the spell?

Not that many weeks ago, Lilijoy had realized the factory mine had passed by Night’s Safety at just about the time she and Attaboy had been born.

The factory mines started showing up around thirty years ago, so it took it about seventeen years to get there. Unless it came later?

She realized that she had no idea how far the Piles stretched in the opposite direction from its source, and thus no idea how long that particular factory-mine had been around. And where did they even come from? Did they just spring up from the earth, like magic? Did Guardian manufacture them in orbit and use really, really big parachutes?

Lilijoy realized that Emily was watching her think. “Sorry, I’m used to thinking so fast that I can take all the time I want in the middle of a conversation,” she explained.

“Oh, that’s fine. I’ve got nothing but time.” Emily replied. “Usually, I just make myself think slow, so that I don’t waste power. But I remember conversations with unaugmented people, or on the Inside, where I would read entire chapters of books between sentences, if it was a boring conversation anyway.”

“I’ve done the exact same thing!” Lilijoy admitted. “This is actually kind of nice. It’s not an option, so I don’t have to think about it.” She remembered something she had been meaning to ask, “So what became of the facility in Taos? Is it worth going there?”

“Hmm. Depends, I guess. The manufacturing facilities were already in the process of being mothballed when I was there. I helped close the rest of it down tight when I left, but I can’t imagine it’s held up all these years.”

“You never went back?”

“I’m not fond of snow. By the time I left the Earth was already tipping into a glacial period, after spazzing around for decades. I think there were five feet of snow on the ground in November. That was not a fun way to start a trip, let me tell you.”

Lilijoy shivered sympathetically, remembering the frigid temperatures outside the monastery in Cochabamba; one’s system could only do so much. “What I really need is more information, about the system, about everything.”

“There’s a lot of that up there. Once they figured out how to grow the crystals the right ways, outside of the brain, they built some fairly impressive computers. I’m running on about a cubic centimeter of the stuff, give or take, and much of that is… sub-optimal. Compromised one way or another. We had cubic meters of the stuff, ventilated appropriately of course. It’s all just sitting up there. Of course, Guardian’s probably using it so you might need to ask nicely.”

Wait. What?

“Did you just say I could talk to Guardian up there?”

“Well, yes? As much as anyone can. Guardian doesn’t pay much attention to the brain-based systems, mostly because Mom and Dad did all they could to keep them separate. That’s what I was doing here at Alcântara in the first place, checking on the status of the terminal Mom used here. At least I think so, it’s all a bit foggy.”

“So there are terminals where someone can contact Guardian directly?” Lilijoy was having a little trouble wrapping her head around the concept.

“It’s not like Guardian needs more than the tiniest bit of itself to talk with a human. I mean, that’s basically what you do when you go Inside.” She wrinkled her nose. “Do people still do that?” She continued as Lilijoy nodded. “But the terminals, they’re a little different. It’s not like you get root access or something, just the possibility of a slightly more direct conversation. It can get a little weird, I’ll tell you that.”

Lilijoy could imagine, but she had to ask. “How so?”

“On the Inside, Guardian uses human templates for nearly all of the consciousnesses, at least in the places humans go. Guardian itself was formed from such a template; Mom didn’t have time to figure out artificial intelligence from scratch, so she whipped up a composite. But that just served as the kernel; Guardian probably surpassed it or overwrote it in the first couple seconds after it awoke. Guardian doesn’t see existence the way we do, and its concepts don’t fit into human language easily.”

Lilijoy was still hung up on Emily’s second point. “Did you just say that Guardian started as a human mind?”

Emily wobbled a blocky hand. “Template. It’s nothing I understand that well, I just got to grow up around it. Dad and Atticus were gone a lot of the time, so Mom talked to me about her projects. Our consciousness is a bunch of feedback loops that culminate in a narrative process. She built Guardian’s consciousness around the templates provided by Tao System data. So you could say that it’s part of the family I guess; she used herself and Dad for the main part, since they had the best data sets.”

Lilijoy fought the urge to sit down. It was more than a little surreal, listening to Emily talk so casually about such earth-shattering mysteries.

What a way to grow up, she thought. ‘Hi Mom, how was work?’, ‘Oh not bad, I just built a mind that will dominate human existence in the future, using Dad and myself as models. Don’t forget to clean your room.’

Her mind teemed with questions, multiplying and jostling for her attention, but an even stronger emotion filled her heart, a combination of satisfaction and joyful anticipation, the knowledge that each of the newly created queries could be fed and nourished.

She was finally getting answers.