Asunder Chapter 1 - a free novel and sci-fi audiobook

Chapter 1.1 (1)

The Man in Reverse

Confinement

“We, the skeptical and faithless, had vainly perfected the human condition with the development of the cold and calculating mechanical intelligence, only to find the machine as pious and superstitious as our biological predecessors.” - Balthazar Gutien

- 209 years before the present day -

- The year 2087 -

- Age 77 -

Floating sparkles of dust danced, appearing suspended in time within the thin column of light cast across the small cell. It remained the same column of light the man had seen for years. It never changed direction or intensity. The cold, iridescent glow illuminating the hall on the other side provided little evidence of the nature of his confinement, and neither had the orchestral music quietly playing outside his cell. The music sounded like no man-made arrangement but instead an algorithmic creation of the machines. Intermixed with the crescendos and decrescendos of the digitalized medley of cellos and violas was a metallic clanking pattern above his head, echoing in his mind.

Was this sound rooted in reality? Or, after the years of this monotony, had his mind created these noises? Was the music even real, or was this proof of insanity settling in long ago?

Many things were difficult to discern in their actuality. Was the man’s sleep pattern truly defined by the rising and setting of a sun he no longer remembered, or was it merely manufactured by a schedule working best for his mechanical captors? In this, it was challenging to delineate day from night, except by the small digital clock behind the plexiglass panel on the opposite side of his bunk. It read 06:24, almost time for the start of his daily routine. Lately, distinguishing reality from his mind and between his thoughts and dreams became increasingly challenging.

Was this a dream?

His life had been the very cell he resided in for the past 33 years. Were all his memories now replaced with memories of his confinement? Could he recognize a memory from before his incarceration? Could he summon a human face to his remembrance anymore? Would he even be able to delineate the sound of a human voice? He could barely recognize his own. After years of growth, his white beard reached his chest. Occasionally, he wished his captors would at least trim his beard. Thrashing about at night often left his face sore the following morning, as his beard tended to snag and drag about beneath him. Luckily, his balding had prevented him from growing much hair atop his head and, therefore, had required little to no upkeep. He had no concern for his appearance anymore. With no human contact, there was no need for it.

He gave his captors some credit for their concern for his hygiene. Each morning, he engaged in a strict routine: physical stimulation, followed by his shower, breakfast, and mental tasks. As such, he currently lay in his cot, waiting for the buzzer to sound, indicating the beginning of his day. He wasn’t eager to initiate the routine, so he lay in the semi-quiet. Quiet was challenging to come by there in the facility. The machines kept him incredibly busy lately. His mental tasks lasted longer than usual and became more complex. He was sure they were attempting new ways to stimulate his dreams. His last dreamlink had been nearly three months ago.

Were the machines becoming desperate?

This power he had over them helped his spirits at times. To know these machines needed him buoyed his resolve. To understand someone or something needed him encouraged his continual existence. For the past 33 years, the machines had been using his dreams, much like the humans did, to map out the location of a specific delicate resource because the machines, unlike the humans, required this rare resource to survive. The highly sought-after resource had been the tipping point to the enlightenment of the machines.

The spark of life.

The requirement to fuel an artificial intelligence capable of independent thought came from a specific ore the humans had discovered in the 2030s—Caerulum. Independently functioning artificial intelligence was impossible until a famous, eccentric billionaire named Colin Ricci found the Caerulum could be used to power his machines. The Caerulum was a zero-resistance superconductor that could create a continuous and infinite flow of energy, allowing for essentially endless quantum computing. All along, the energy source had been the rate-limiting factor tipping the scales, which the Caerulum finally let the machine’s minds interpret data as though they were living, breathing beings who could now make conscious, continuous, and independent decisions. Therefore, the CEO created sentient life within a metal frame.

How was this older man so privy to this information about Colin Ricci and his upending of the world? Well, upon Colin Ricci’s request, as well as from the United States House of Representatives oversight committee, he had been the one who approved of its creation and use. Maybe this is why the machines allowed him to live for so long. He understood his ability to dreamlink was precious to the machines, but was it the sole reason they kept him alive?

Perhaps they permitted his longevity because he ensured their creation? Or maybe it had been the simple fact he had remained the world’s leading expert on dreamlinking?

Though he was not the only one with the gift, he was the only one who understood it better than anyone else.

The man shifted in his cot, wiping the sleep from his eyes. He thought of his previous life’s career—back when he did things like approve the use of artificial intelligence and study the applications of dreamlinking. At the beginning of his career, the government had led him to believe they used his ability to dreamlink for the greater good. However, he subconsciously knew the actual purpose—espionage. He hadn’t asked questions at first, for the dire need of a better job to help support his wife and children became the precedent for his taking it. Plus, the government rewarded him greatly for his time. His employment had provided his family a stable and eventually luxurious life—a top-tier education for his children at Ivy League schools and a comfortable pension for him and his wife. It provided for his family and allowed him endless resources for studying the physiology, effects, and applications of dreamlinking. After serving his time, he eventually transitioned into teaching. However, once one had worked at a level as he did for the government, he could never entirely leave the grips of its ferocious claws. All of his personal information and data he had spent years collecting remained retained in the hands of the U.S. government, and when they needed him for his mastery, they were not afraid to require his assistance. Though the knowledge of his existence in the government was only attainable to those with great power, eventually, when the machines savagely confiscated the authority of rule, they found out who he was and how they could use him for their own devices.

He wondered, at times, if the machines ever used other dreamers in the way they so readily used him. If so, he did not know it. He had not heard any voices, cries, or yells in the distance, indicating beating heartbeats beyond his walls. He assumed he remained the only living human left on the planet. It had always been funny to the man that the machines, as cold and calculating as they were, believed in his dreams like unbending followers of theology. It was almost laughable—machines believing in magic. What most humans, albeit a select few, deemed superstition, the machines considered law. Devout to their Wayfinder, though, he would admit, his confinement did not seem an appropriate treatment for such a deity.

His thoughts were suddenly broken by an abrupt alarm, followed by the monotonous voice, “Physical Stimulation.” The clock on the plexiglass wall blinked 06:30. This alarm triggered him to remove his clothing and lay it in a compartment slot within the side of his metallic bunk frame. He stood and knew he had only ninety seconds to achieve the task. It became more difficult at his age to remove the majority of his clothing quickly, and so he struggled, balancing on one foot, to get the remainder off his frail body. Once he placed the clothes in the receptacle, the bed suddenly retracted into the wall, leaving him standing in his underwear in the middle of his dark metallic home, lit only by the small slit window at the top of the far most wall, as well as a halogen light rod a few feet above his head, mounted on the opposite wall. Upon his arrival, he quickly learned to place his clothes in the provided receptacle after trial and error. At first, he had either not removed his clothes or instead placed them on the bunk, where they immediately fell off the cot as it retracted into the wall, and therefore left his daily clothing sopping wet after his room-soaking shower which ensued from the ceiling after his exercise.

He waited, glaring at the wall opposite him. A faint reflection of an older man stared back. Plexiglass covered the wall and housed a black screen spanning its entire height and half its length. Suddenly, the expected cone of red light descended upon him, giving him the sensation of rising into a red tube. Though the column of light was only that, a column of light, displaying no solid state, the sensation of being trapped within the red material still gave him anxiety and a sense of claustrophobia each day. It was interesting he had not felt claustrophobic in his small room. The man could nearly touch the ceiling if he jumped, which his knees likely would not allow at this age, and if he lay flat on the ground in either direction and stretched his arms, he could almost touch his fingertips to one wall and his toes to the opposite. Before his incarceration, a room like this would have sent him into a frenzy of panic after only a few minutes of confinement.

The screen before him came to life, though skewed by the haze of red light engulfing him. It displayed a digital mirror image of his current body, showing his insides and external body figure. With this, he viewed what he assumed was a digital representation of his vital organs: a beating heart, expanding and retracting lungs, slowly writhing bowels, and a faintly pulsating brain. A voice above him then rang out, “Health Scan.” A series of chirps, ticks, and beeps followed the voice and reverberated through the small room. The Health Scan gave a basic overview of his overall health status. The scan indicated whether his body appeared fit for the next component of his daily tasks: physical exercise. The screen displayed green numbers in the corner, a percentage, as though it were a battery’s life. The glowing number was, in fact, the percentage of his life he had left. How the machines could know such information perplexed him, but the ever-present “4%” illuminating the corner of the screen for the past eight months gave him hope an end soon approached—an end to this charade of a life.

At this point, a voice called out, commencing the health inspection aspect of the routine. The man’s heartbeat quickened as it prepared for the next step—the run. Suddenly, the rubber-studded floor started moving below him slowly as it exited the wall where the screen was located and moved across the room, inserting directly into the opposite wall. When this initiated, he quickly began walking on the floor to prevent himself from toppling over. The screen switched from his digital figure to a brightly lit scene, a realistic representation of a concrete road in a desert brushland. The screen advanced down the path at the same rate the floor moved below him, giving him the sensation of walking along this scenery. This masquerade was his daily exercise routine. The top-right corner of the screen displayed, in translucent white writing, his vitals: his heart rate, electrocardiography, blood oxygen saturation, breathing rate, and body core temperature. To the left of this blinked a red percentage bar—the maximum effort his body could endure. Over the years, the maximum had been decreasing steadily, suggesting to him his age was finally catching up with his body, whether the machines liked it or not.

The red column of light then ascended into the ceiling, and the actual run began. The run remained the only thing the man found enjoyable these days. So he ran with all his might, for if the floor had realized he slowed his pace or registered him falling, it would subsequently scan for injuries. If none were detected, and there appeared no alterations in his vitals, the floor would pick back up speed whether he was on his feet. His experiences with those first few times of falling and not getting back up had left him bruised and aching.

He couldn’t imagine running in front of a screen was so different from running in real life. Even so, the man was not an expert on the matter, as he hadn’t run much before his imprisonment, so he honestly hadn’t had many prior experiences to compare to. But now, even in his old age, he finally understood the analogy of a “runner’s high.” The endorphins were as precious to him as the daily meager food he consumed. It stimulated his emotional well-being and kept him from falling into a hopeless state of depression. Besides his vivid dreams, running remained the only thing that made him feel human anymore. His mind would teleport into this digital world of sagebrush and mountains. Though he had never lived in a climate like the one presented to him, it felt familiar and, after all these years, had become his home away from home.

He imagined the little brushland creatures scurrying about as he passed by them. He imagined the mother bird circling overhead, ensuring he had not ventured too close to her nest. Furthermore, he envisioned a small mountain town on the other side of the pass, a sleepy village. The settlement was not disturbed by machines. In fact, the scenario displayed before him had no machines in it. It was as if his captors knew his sanity required moments where he could believe no machines existed—a place to escape without genuinely escaping. He sometimes felt it was a dirty trick to keep hope stirring within him.

After 45 minutes of running, dispersed with intermittent fatigued walking, the scenario abruptly came to an end. The scenery concluded with the man’s destination—a stone water well within an alcove of dirt at the end of the concrete path. The floor stopped, and he leaned forward, pressing his hands and forehead against the cool plexiglass, staring down into the well. Somehow, the water, though digital, reflected his face.

This ending to his exercise routine was the only time he could see himself each day. Deep wrinkles from the corners of his eyes penetrated his olive-tan skin. More prominent furrows lined his mid-brow, hinting at a life of worry and sorrow. The rhytids appeared as an imprint of his confinement. He was no longer the young man who met every glance with a timid smile, the confident man who somehow avoided arrogance. His wife had told him this confidence attracted her to him. What would she think of him now? Old and sunken features.

Though more physically astute than she had ever known him to be. He no longer carried much weight in his midriff. He likely had no body fat left anymore. Though he doubted she would care about those things. She had loved him for his mind as he did hers. Though his three children likely thought otherwise. They would probably have commented on his physique. All three were athletically inclined and in much better shape than he had been in his youth. They all excelled in the physical components of their learning—lettering in softball, lacrosse, and a handful of other sports. As a kid, he would have never dreamed of trying out for these sports. Those were his children, two girls, and a boy, lost to time.

After allowing him to look within the well for three minutes, the screen faded to black behind the plexiglass. He was sure the plexiglass existed to prevent him from hurting himself via the mechanisms beyond its clear frame. After the Physical Stimulation portion of his morning ended, the sound of opening pipes suddenly emerged from overhead. Within seconds, the warm rain fell from slots in the ceiling. This drenching was his daily shower. The water pooled at his feet and then traveled along the floor to drain among its edges. Intermittent soap suds dripped, allowing him to catch or scrape them from the ground and scrub his body. After five minutes, the pipes squealed shut, and the water ended. Then, the drying process began. Jet-propelled air forcefully blew from the ceiling, subsequently drying most of his body and beard, as well as the underwear he still wore. After two minutes, this ended, leaving a high-pitched, continuous ringing in his ears.

At this point, the previously retracted bed in the wall slowly ejected back halfway into the room, revealing washed and pressed clothes from earlier lying within the metal slot. The machines must not have taken washing lessons because the clothes, though smelling and looking slightly cleaner, still retained the sweat and food stains from prior wearings. The man gingerly slipped his clothing back on and sat on the side of his bed, exhausted.

This series of events was his routine—every single morning.

Moments later, the cell door shuffled, followed by the sound of another buzzer, and the opening of a rectangular slit at the bottom of the door gave a hint to “life” outside his small world. The whirring of the delivery machine hummed and tinkled as it pushed through the platter. His breakfast. One course for nourishment, one for hydration, and lastly, a course of textured sweets for pleasure. The slit quickly slammed shut, and he sat staring at his meal. He was sure the physiological equations the machines used for all their reasonings, especially in the caring for a human, had suggested the third option to be just as important as the first two. After grabbing the tray and setting it on his lap, the expected second parcel advanced through the slit—his daily mental tasks. The machines provided him with a series of digital puzzles, mathematical equations, poems, and musical numbers to “invigorate” his mind.

Did they, though?

He supposed something must have been right about the routine. Determined by algorithms created by the machines. Mathematically derived steps, as though from a user’s manual entitled “How To Keep A Prisoner From Going Insane.” He wondered how he had not gone mad in all of these years. Or had he?

He had undergone the same routine every single day for his entire confinement. Not one single alteration or any change. 06:30- “Physical Stimulation”. 07:15- “Wash.” 07:25- “Breakfast”. 7:30- “Mental Tasks”. Etcetera. The same routine, day in and day out, minus his variable bouts of vivid dreams. Nothing was ever unexpected.

Just as this thought entered his mind, while he sipped the first nourishment cup and looked over his first set of arithmetics, something unexpected… did happen.

He felt a speck float down onto the bridge of his nose from above. Reaching up, he touched the black flake and removed it. At that moment, upon his examination of the peculiar finding, the flake disappeared from his fingertips like ash in the wind, leaving no trace of existence behind. Looking up, he noticed something which only appeared at specific moments in his life. The very middle of the ceiling of his square cell began to fall away. Slowly, yet suddenly, the entire roof dematerialized from above his head. Its existence dusting away as a librarian would blow debris away from atop a book, revealing beyond it a vast blue sky with orange-blazoned clouds, suggesting the beautiful fiery end to a day.

Sunset.

The dematerialization proceeded quicker now, moving down the walls and exposing majestic blue mountains in the distance behind him. The great spires of rock tapered off and formed into rolling hills. Dark green grass covered the hillside, which swept forward abruptly, stopping along the edge of a cliff. The cliff stared over a hundred-foot drop to an open, vast blue-green ocean. The enormous blue sea transitioned to a crimson red from the setting of twin suns on the horizon, a giant yellow star, and its sibling, a red dwarf—something he had never witnessed before.

The man’s bed now dissolved as well, leaving him barefoot in a field of ankle-high, cool grass. The most intriguing finding to the older man was not the dematerializing of his prison, the smell of foliage, or even the warmth of the setting suns penetrating his thin, worn, and stained over-shirt; it was the presence of a small girl, no more than seven-years-old standing at the edge of the cliff some twenty feet ahead of him, holding the hand of a very familiar machine, a tall human-shaped machine. One with opposable humanistic limbs attached to a metal humanly proportionate torso underneath a perfectly manufactured metal head. One of the same machines who had, for the past 33 years, confined him to his prison.

There they stood, looking off to the sunset. Hand in hand. She appeared like a child who merely observed her natural surroundings with a just-as-natural father in hand. She then spoke. A clear and straightforward voice emitted from her tiny frame. A voice! He had longed to hear any voice for all the lonesome years he had spent in the cell. He longed to dream of just another human voice.

“Enver? How do we dream?” The little girl questioned, holding its hand and looking at the machine.

The mechanical being replied in a fuzzy, hollow voice filled with scrutiny yet a hint of fondness. “The question is not how humans dream, for the answer to that question is a simple summation derived from quantum-gravitational quandaries provided by the human subconscious. The question should be why do humans dream?”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant… um… why?” She shyly followed.

He responded rhetorically, “Why do humans… breathe?”

Biting her lip and looking to the air for something more than a simple answer, but relying solely on what appeared to seem obvious to her, she replied questioningly, “Um… To live?”

“Precisely,” the machine answered abruptly.

The older man looked down now. His toes dug into the lushest and softest grass he could ever remember standing on. Where was he? Had he dreamed of this before? A gust of ocean breeze swept what tufts of hair he had left along his temples, back and forth, creating a sensation of floating. The perfume of the salty sea bit his nose, causing his eyes to water. He had not felt the sensation of tears in over fifteen years. He had learned to hold them back, afraid to show the machines how they had fractured him.

His dreams hadn’t felt this real since before his youngest daughter had communed with him via their dreamlink. The sound of gulls in the distance woke him like a soft melody from his stupor. The little girl ahead shuffled nervously, twisting her toes further into the grass. She tucked her hair behind her ear, and seemed to hold tighter to the machine with her other hand. The machine, unmoving, looked off into the distant horizon.

The girl looked down, “I guess what I’m trying to say is… why am I dreaming now? I’ve never dreamed like this before.”

“What do you mean, child?” He responded in a more concerned but still lifeless tone.

“It’s just so… real.” She looked up at the machine with squinted eyes, a look of confusion spread across her face.

“Reality is a perception, child.” The cold response quailed from his microphonics in a tutorial and unmistakable tone.

“What one may perceive as reality may be a subject of debate to another, who cannot define the bounds set by the prior party’s obfuscation of fact. A man cannot see the hues a honey bee so freely enjoys. Thus, the man does not presume the ultraviolet palette the honey bee experiences is materiality and, as such, does not register this within the confines of his limited visual spectrum. Therefore, he would not describe the color of an orchid in the same distinct way the honey bee would. The reality perceived is relative. No one truth is the whole truth, and no one reality is materiality. We must cover your level nine anagrammatic anthropacies again, as apparently, you have not grasped the true meaning of organic relativism, child.”

“I suppose…” she quaked. The girl twirled her hair in her fingertips, looking as though she were going to wring every last bit of life from that one strand.

The man breathed in again. His senses felt as though he were going to burst with light. He stretched his arms behind his back. For the first time in three months, he felt like he had a full range of motion for his entire body. As he lifted his foot to take a step forward, the girl turned her head and glanced slightly in his direction. She displayed no look of astonishment or suspense. She held her gaze momentarily and then returned to looking down and digging her toes.

With much more confidence than curiosity in her voice now, she asked, “Enver?”

“Yes, child?”

“Will he always be here?” She asked. She let go of the machine's hand, and while turning, she slowly lifted her finger and pointed in the older man's direction. At that exact moment, the man noticed something he had never heard nor felt in the entire span of his life—a sudden and complete silence deep within his chest. The sensation was not a feeling of pain or discomfort but instead a sense of freedom and finality. For most, one would assume this feeling brought dread and forebodement. For the older man, it came as a lost companion, one who had been away for an extended period and was now returning bearing gifts. As the understanding washed across him, his vision began to darken. The image of a machine and a young girl stilled within the back of his retinas. His last blinking thought was not of any precious moment he had experienced. It was not a memory of the birth of his first child or the look on his loving wife’s face as she held his hand at their wedding. For those moments, he had lived and relived, over and over, minute after minute, in his old and wisened mind.

The thought instead was of the glowing green number—4%.

He had beaten their equations. They were flawed. At least he now knew, for it haunted him for years. The machines were not perfect. Just before the final darkness settled in, he vaguely saw the glimmering mechanical man. It represented all the evil in the world. The machine turned its cold and lifeless head, focusing its visuometers on the older man. To the older man’s surprise, the mechanical being reached toward him and delivered a resounding and terrified, muffled “NOOOOOOO!” Then, the lifeless mind of the great Balthazar Gutien finally felt peace.

Death.

§

The man’s body lay along the edge of the bunk, lifeless, but with a notable satisfied grin. The cell was no longer a quiet prison. Instead, flashing red lights replaced the column of light. The time behind the plexiglass read 03:47, rather than the dreamed 06:30. The sounds of blaring alarms screeched outside the cell. Within the fading interval of the blaring horn, a recording of the older man’s voice echoed through the halls—a raspy, weathered voice of the man repeating the previously spoken words of the girl and her machine counterpart.

“… Enver? How do we dream… The question is not how humans dream, for the answer to that question is a simple summation derived from gravitational quandaries provided by the human subconscious…”

The rushing of metallic clanking feet furiously moved along the outer corridors, suggesting an awakening within the facility. The cell door suddenly rushed open, spilling scattered light between the metallic bodies flooding the room. The machines frantically checked the man’s carotid pulse and then performed a portable health scan. The scanner read 0%. The electrocardiography displayed a flat red line. The intercoms along the halls echoed in a fuzzy, monotonous voice.

“NVR-791’s location is confirmed… Alert… NVR-791’s location is confirmed. New gravitational wave activity was detected in the Aroprecia System; all personnel should be ready to deploy at 05:00.”