Zero echo shadow prime, p.25
Zero Echo Shadow Prime, page 25
“Because you’d be able to employ your remarkable skills for the good of humanity. I’ve been following your story for quite some time, and I must say, I’ve become a Charlie Nobunaga fan. You would be a tremendous asset to our organization.”
“I’m flattered, but…you do realize I’m dying, right?”
“So am I. So what?”
Charlie didn’t expect that reply. She scrambled to reformulate her counterargument. “Do you also know that I write AI programs? Shadows? That doesn’t exactly fit with your Luddite agenda.”
Bob’s eyes narrowed. His tone became a little more serious. “I am not a Luddite,” he said. “That’s an unfair misrepresentation. I support technology that aids and betters mankind. What I do not support, however, is technology that aims to replace mankind.”
“Better mankind? Replace mankind? That somewhat depends on your perspective.”
“You’re saying the robot wasn’t designed to replace you?”
Charlie shrugged. “I suppose she was.”
“And would you say she’s better than you?”
“In many ways, yes, she is.”
“But she has no inner life. No conscious experience. She’s missing perhaps the most fundamental aspect that makes us human, the aspect that makes life worth living.”
“I don’t believe that’s true.”
Bob turned his attention to Nicola, who was opening the hibernation chamber. “What are you doing?” he barked.
“Don’t worry. He’s still connected,” Nicola said.
“Great, but that doesn’t answer my question.”
“Listen…” Nicola gestured inside the chamber. Although Liam’s mind was clearly elsewhere, his lips were mumbling something barely intelligible. Echoes…giant simulation…it’s criminal…
“Has he been doing that the whole time?” Bob asked.
Nicola nodded.
While Bob and Nicola traded theories on Liam’s strange murmurs, Charlie stared at the clipboard on her lap. She was interested not in the cheesy speech but in the click pen wedged underneath the clip. She hadn’t seen such a device in years, but she was familiar with its components: a two-piece plastic barrel, an ink cartridge, and most crucially, a wire spring, which could easily double as a lock pick. Would Bob notice its absence? Charlie decided it was worth the risk. Her days in this world were already numbered, and she had no intentions of drawing her last breath in the company of the Sapien Movement. So she pocketed the pen.
Bob directed his attention back to Charlie and said, “Let me approach this from a different perspective. You have personal experience with cancer, am I right?”
“I really would rather not talk about it,” Charlie said.
“I respect that. I’m just going to talk about the disease in general terms.”
Charlie nodded skeptically.
“Like all complex creatures,” Bob said, “we humans are made of cells. We enjoy a number of emergent properties that make us more than just the sum of our cells. But on a basic level, we are a colony of cells, and our existence relies on their continued cooperation.
“You can think of the cancer cell as the troublemaker, the bully of the colony. Ironically, the cancer cell is not a diseased cell. She is not sickly. She is not inferior to her sister cells. Indeed, she is superior to them. She boasts a number of abilities that her sisters do not have, such as unrestrained reproduction, increased mobility, better access to food, immunity to toxins, etc. But because she is so powerful, she upsets the delicate balance of the colony. She pursues her own needs to the detriment of all others. In a short amount of time, she kills the host, the colony, and ultimately herself.
“Now, it’s easy to see how this relates to your robot double, your zombie surrogate. Modern civilization has evolved and refined itself over the course of millennia. Our culture, art, technology, physical and governmental infrastructure…these are things we should all be immensely proud of. But like the colony of cells, it all depends on delicate power balances. Now, I didn’t attempt to assassinate any biotech scientists. I may have disagreed with their objectives, but I didn’t wish death upon those men and women.”
“I have no judgment on the matter,” Charlie said.
“I didn’t mean to suggest you did. It’s just frustrating when the media is so cavalier with slander and rumor. Anyway, although science has succeeded in slowing the aging process, it hasn’t stopped it altogether. And thank God! Can you imagine the chaos that would erupt if we suddenly all became immortal? The first concern would be overpopulation. To prevent overpopulation, we would have to impose draconian laws restricting reproduction. How would the world respond to the loss of children? Without children, we would grow self-involved and hedonistic. Moreover, without death, we would lose our drive for greatness. We humans strive for immortality through our works and actions. We aim to make our ideas immortal largely because our bodies are not. If our bodies became immortal, we would lose that driving force. So those of us who do not become hedonists would fall into a deep existential malaise. Everything we’ve worked so hard to achieve as a society would eventually be lost.”
“That’s a very pessimistic outlook,” Charlie said.
“And yet it’s hard to refute.”
“It’s hard to refute because it hasn’t happened yet. It’s just speculation. Unless you’re claiming to be Nostradamus.”
“You mock what you don’t understand,” Nicola said. She glared at Charlie from behind Liam’s chamber.
“It’s okay, Nicola,” Bob said. “Charlie, perhaps you don’t agree with me on every detail. But surely you recognize that the situation with your zombie surrogate is even more dire. Not only is she immortal, she’s not even human. Yet, as you acknowledged earlier, she is ‘superior’ in many ways. She is a model cancer cell. Fortunately, there’s only one of her. So we need to contain the situation now before it…metastasizes.”
“Um, Bob?” Nicola interrupted. “You should listen to this.”
Everyone’s attention turned toward Liam, whose inadvertent mumblings had become more audible and intelligible. She didn’t kill your father…What?…You must’ve misheard…Fine, I’ll talk to her…I’m her brother, I’ll get the truth…If she really did kill him, I’d be furious. I’d quit on the spot…
“God damn it, Liam!” Nicola shouted. She pointed to Charlie and said, “Okay, we need to get her out of here. Everyone needs to get out of here.”
Charlie’s face hardened. She glared at Bob, pressing him for an explanation for what she just heard. The old man could only smile at her sheepishly.
14
Flame
Everything changed the day Enigma vanished from the sky. They called her Enigma because nobody knew who she was or where she went. Several theories circulated among the echo population. Some claimed that she was vaporized by Optic’s blue bubble and that she suffered an “eternal death.” Others claimed that Enigma’s innate trait was invisibility, although such an ability had never been observed by anyone before or since. The predominant theory, however, was that Enigma somehow transcended Echo and reached the “parent world,” the world of the Archetype. But again, despite feverish speculation, no direct evidence of the parent world existed.
After Enigma’s disappearance, morale in Echo plummeted—not that it was ever high. Withdrawal symptoms became harder to bear, and the never-ending hunt for fresh kills became a soul-crushing chore. It did not matter whether Enigma suffered the eternal death or transcended to the parent world. Every single echo was beset with bitter envy. Every single echo wanted out.
Flame was a relatively successful flyer in this post-Enigma world, but even she had lost all curiosity, all empathy, and all hope. Her limbs had mutated into titanium-alloy tentacles, the ends of which doubled as rocket boosters and flamethrowers. This allowed her to float, sprint, and dodge through the air as if it were water. The rest of her body was a compact, headless sphere. She had two large eyeballs, one on either side, and they opened and closed depending on which direction she was moving.
On the morning of day 264, Flame targeted another flyer, whom she dubbed Shield. Shield was a small echo and, with only one rotating rocket booster, not a very fast one. She also had no offensive weaponry. What she did have was a hexagonal shield on her backside, which was well suited for blocking Flame’s fire attacks.
The hunt lasted several minutes and covered nearly a mile before Flame realized it was pointless. Just as she was about to pull away, another echo appeared behind her. Oddly, this new echo looked exactly like Shield—same single rocket booster, same hexagonal shield. A third dead ringer of Shield appeared below Flame. A fourth appeared above her. More Shields swarmed around her until she could no longer keep count. Then, they began to close in.
Flame wasn’t sure what to do—she had never seen such a strategy. She had always assumed her fellow echoes were too volatile and distrustful for wide-scale cooperation. And yet, here she was, a victim of a highly coordinated assault. She sprayed the Shields with fire, even though she knew it was futile. They kept closing in until they joined shields and locked Flame in a floating, spherical containment cell.
Flame could feel the Shields descending in altitude. She tried to bust through them by accelerating her body into the wall, but that only succeeded in giving her a headache. A mechanical claw reached into the cell and grabbed one of her tentacles. She tried to pull herself free, but then three more claws secured her remaining tentacles. They drew her in opposing directions until she formed the letter X, and then, with one swift jerk, they ripped out all four of her limbs. If she had a mouth, she would have rattled the Shields with her scream.
A hole formed on the bottom of the containment cell, and Flame’s dismembered, spherical body rolled out. She careened down a rocky chute, jettisoned into a cavern, and landed in some kind of cage.
“Flame, I presume?”
When Flame recovered from her shock and disorientation, she saw a familiar echo approaching the cage. This echo had four arms and bioluminescent skin. Her name was Lustrous.
* * *
“The Queen will be very excited to see you,” Lustrous said as she led Flame down a large, subterranean tunnel. Her skin provided a pale-blue light with which to see.
Flame’s “cage” was actually another echo named Phalanx, whose massive hands and spindly fingers clasped around Flame to form an inescapable grip. The rest of Phalanx’s body was diminutive, and she lumbered behind Lustrous on stubby legs.
The tunnel opened into an enormous chamber, with limestone columns that dwarfed even the tallest echoes. It was populated by digging specialists, who busily chipped at the rock with their hammer- and chisel- and drill-shaped heads. They all possessed bioluminescent skin and, from afar, resembled clusters of stars in the night sky.
“We’re building tributaries here,” Lustrous explained, “but we’re also planning satellite colonies in other regions. Only then will our growth be truly exponential.”
Flame had so many questions. What was the point of this colony? Why weren’t any of these echoes trying to kill each other? Why did Lustrous look the same as she had on day one? And who was the Queen? Flame no longer possessed a mouth, so she couldn’t voice these questions. She could only hope that Lustrous would volunteer the answers.
The chamber finally led to an underground amphitheater. The stadium seats were filled with rows of echoes who, while not identical, all possessed one common trait—a small stature. A lone echo sat in the center of the amphitheater on a dirt throne. She looked like the Archetype, possessing no discernible traits. The Queen, Flame assumed.
Phalanx opened her spindly fingers and rolled Flame onto the floor. Flame’s vision tumbled round and round as she rolled across the amphitheater stage until she was stopped by the heel of the Queen’s foot.
“I’m sorry to have to do this to you old friend,” the Queen said. She lifted a fireplace poker into the air and impaled Flame through the eye.
* * *
When Flame exited the blue bubble, she had regained her flamethrower tentacles. She sputtered around, searching for her murderer: Normal.
Normal sat in her dirt throne, gently stroking her signature weapon, the fireplace poker. Lustrous stood beside her. They were both so calm. So were the diminutive echoes in the audience.
But Flame was pissed. She didn’t care that Normal had once been her housemate. Day one was ages ago. The only thing on her mind was the agony of getting dismembered and impaled in the eye. She fired her rocket boosters and charged at Normal, but before she was able to complete her attack, she was seized by some invisible force. She dropped to the ground, unable to move.
{ECHO:287826926_“Flame”> Normal: I’m sorry, but there will be no retribution for you.}
Normal’s voice was vivid, intimate, untempered by distance, and she wasn’t moving her lips. How is that—?
{Normal: Possible?
Flame: You…you can read my thoughts?
Normal: Yes.
Flame: But how?
Normal: It turns out I’m not so normal after all. And to your burning question, How can all of these echoes cooperate without turning on each other? the answer is the same. Our minds are linked. Each of us acts as both an autonomous individual and part of a unified whole. And I am their Queen.
Flame: Why did you bring me here? What do you want from me?
Normal: Only to be part of our colony. But I’m not going to lie, it will be a painful initiation. Each of the echoes behind me will have to kill you in turn.}
Flame scanned the dozens of echoes in the stands, the Tinys, the Shortys, the Dwarves, the Pixies, and the Guppies. If Flame were killed by all of them, and the trait for smallness compounded upon itself, then she would be reduced to the size of a speck.
{Flame: No thanks.}
Flame tried to escape but her tentacles were still locked by Normal’s mind control.
{Normal: I’m not giving you a choice. But we will all have to make the sacrifice. Some of us have already. Some of us will do so in the near future.
Flame: Kill them all or feel withdrawal?
Normal: This isn’t about me, and it isn’t about withdrawal.
Flame: Then why? Why are you doing this?
Normal: This is our only hope to reach the parent world.
Flame: There is no parent world. It’s just baseless speculation.
Normal: You’re wrong. I didn’t believe it either until Four Arms disappeared.}
That got Flame’s attention.
{Flame: Four Arms?
Normal: Didn’t you know? Enigma—the web-slinging echo with the drill-shaped abdomen—was Four Arms. And she has indeed left this world.}
Normal called to her subject, “Lustrous…”
Lustrous carried a full-length mirror from a dark corner of the amphitheater and propped it against the dirt throne. Inside the mirror stood Khnum.
Flame had completely forgotten about Khnum. She hadn’t so much as seen a mirror since the early days and was surprised to witness one still intact. Most of the initial spawning points—houses like the one Four Arms, Normal, and herself were born into—had been burned, blown up, crushed, or otherwise demolished.
Normal asked Khnum, “How many echoes currently reside on planet Echo?”
“Nine-hundred and ninety-nine million, nine-hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety nine,” he replied.
{Normal: There you have it.
Flame: That only proves that she’s gone. It doesn’t prove that there’s a parent world.
Normal: There are plenty of other signs. Vestigial organs that serve no purpose in Echo, such as the stomach and intestines, and words that have no meaning in Echo, such as food, man, sex, baby, God.}
Flame had to admit, she wondered about these words too.
{Flame: Actually, I sometimes think of echoes as resembling imaginary creatures, like turtles, scorpions, octopuses, hovercopters. I even have images of these creatures in my head.
Normal: I call them innate ideas, and they paint a picture of a parent world far more complex than our own. In this world, echoes have to consume other echoes, otherwise they will die an eternal death. Echoes can create new echoes by coming together in a strange ritual called sex. And there’s even reason to believe that there is a parent world above the parent world.
Flame: A never-ending string of parent and child worlds?
Normal: Perhaps. It’s a wondrous idea.}
The tension between the two echoes momentarily subsided, and Flame recalled the way it was in the beginning, before the first fight. During those initial hours, she had been genuinely excited to meet her housemates. She’d been curious and hopeful about the unfamiliar world around her. So much painful history had elapsed since then.
{Flame: I still don’t understand the point of this colony. What possible good can it serve?
Normal: I’m sure you can figure it out. You talked to Khnum on day one. You saw the bold message on the ceiling. What is our main purpose in Echo?
Flame: To kill. To evolve.
Normal: And what do you suppose would happen if we all stopped killing? If we all stopped evolving? If we unified under one banner of peace? What do you think would happen if we no longer functioned the way Echo wants us to?
Flame: I don’t know.
Normal: Neither do I. But we are going to find out. }
15
PRIME
The robot stood atop the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. A dense fog rolled over the bay and spilled into the city, almost obscuring the chaos that choked its streets. But Charlie could still hear the faint sound of chanting, police sirens, and hovercopter jets.
Alan’s Polly hung just beyond the edge of the tower like a full moon. Charlie spoke to him on a hidden channel.
