The room fell silent as Dr. Hansen told the others I was awake. Drat. No more spying. Of course, it wasn't like I could have stopped him from spilling the beans. I couldn't move at all.
I waited through a long, uncomfortable silence, then I heard a fit of giggles. "Good grief, Mirele... take a breath, girl, you're turning purple!"
"Toby... he's... oh my, I think I'm going to be sick."
"No, just take a breath. Deep breaths, that's right..."
While Candy tended to Mirele's panic attack, I heard the two sets of steps approach me. Something brushed up against my bed, on either side, then hands clasped around each of my hands. "Toby? Can you hear me?"
Grandfather.
I still couldn't
I heard something a while later, something that woke me up. I got the impression that it had only been a few hours. Evening, maybe. My time sense was still trying to do its job even after all the long weeks of recovery, and I knew it wasn't the middle of the day.I tried to wake up, but the medication was too strong. All I could do was lay there and try to figure out what was going on."Toby... I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I don't want to do it... I wish I couldn't... I wish... my dear Toby, please forgive me."The voice was so strained and broken, interspersed with hoarse sobs, I almost couldn't understand what he was saying. Despite that, I knew very well who it was. Grandfather. My poor, dear, broken grandfather. I felt worse for him than for myself.I had to do somet
I took the lift up to the observation deck, stepped outside, then looked around. I had looked everywhere else, she had to be... There she was. I don't know why I bothered to search anywhere else. More often than not, she was up here. Walking over, I stopped beside the bench, looking down at Mirele. In her long, flowing gown, she was a vision... but I couldn't bring myself to tell her that. She hadn't moved a muscle, hadn't looked at me, her eyes firmly fastened on the sunset. "Mind if I join you?" She shook her head. I sat beside her, looking out over the landscape. A year had passed since the tenth control key had been placed... and my nearly lifeless body had been dragged across the world to Central Control, where Dr.
I hadn't worked up the nerve to go into Central Command for several weeks... ever since the one short look I had been granted at my future home. A clear, horizontal glass tank with life-support equipment protruding from either end. I didn't like the looks of it at all, and it gave me the shivers to think about what laying in that thing would entail, but I knew that I had no choice but to come to terms with the idea. This time, however, the place looked quite different. I saw my tank, covered in sheeting, just waiting for its occupant. On the other side of the server sat a second tank, very similar to the first one. "What's this all about, Grandfather?" I asked as I walked over to examine the second tank more closely. "That... well, I'd rather explain it all at once, when the others arrive."
As Grandfather started to fall, I caught him, easing him into a chair that Candy hurriedly yanked over. "Grandfather, you need to rest!" I insisted worriedly. "It's bad enough that I have to face the idea of spending the rest of eternity floating in a box. Losing you too... I can't. I just can't bear it!"He smiled wryly as he clasped my shoulder. "Toby, I'm not immortal. That is one difference... you will be integrated into the computer system, but you'll still be yourself. To a point. You're immortal as long as the network stays intact and your body holds out. The system is designed so that under the right conditions, you can communicate and interact with us.""Really?" Candy asked as I just stared in surprise. This was news to me."I told everyone this before," Grandfather said with a sigh. "Almost everyone, obvi
We took the lift up to the surface of Central Control, then borrowed a transport to go down into the city. Aside from the night watch, we didn't tell anyone where we were going, or why. The city still lay mostly in ruins, but with the slow restoration of electricity, it was coming back to life. After so many long years of unrelenting, hellish heat, the people here spent most of their waking hours in the cool evenings into the wee hour of the morning. We walked a few blocks until Mirele found what she was looking for. I stared in surprise. "A chapel?" She turned to face me, taking my hands. "Yes. You made me a promise. Are you ready to keep it?" I smiled. "I keep my promises, so... yes. And we're already in formal clothes, so I guess... uh, you know your dad is going to give us hell when he finds out?"
"Are we sure that we're sure about this?" Mirele asked in a small voice, looking into her tank with a grimace. She poked a finger at the odd construct that was designed to fit around the groin, taking care of that end of things while our bodies simply existed in the tanks, letting our minds run free through the worldwide network. I shrugged, feeling a bit uncomfortable in my short white robe as I watched the controllers and other staff complete final preparations. "I think so, and it's a bit late to back out now." She nodded, putting her arms around me as we waited. I closed my eyes and laid my head over hers as I held her, trying to etch this moment sharply in my memory. The feel of her, the smell of her short fuzz of hair, the warmth of her breath on my bare chest... I'd done the same thing with as many memories as possible since our elopement. I tried to r
"Toby?"Ugh, not this again. I was so incredibly tired of having to be woken up after blacking out.Wait... I was in a computer, so how the hell could I have passed out?"Exactly... you didn't pass out, you just lost your orientation. Now pay attention to me.""Mirele?" I asked."Duh, who else? There's no one else in here, at the moment, anyway."I couldn't see her, since I had no eyes, but all at once, I sensed her presence as I would have through the wires before we'd been dragged in here. I was so relieved... I was afraid that she would be fried like Lance had thought might happen."In case you haven't noticed, my father has a bad h
Mirele had to get my attention again, pulling my back from my fascination with the complexity of the system. "Do you have all the inputs and outputs figured out?" she asked.I took another look around... it wasn't long before I had figured out where everything was coming from, and I was encouraged when I realized that I actually understood what it all was. This wasn't all that different from our practices. The only real difference was that we were now fully and permanently engaged in the server, with no sense of the outside except through our peripheral devices.I missed it, to a point, but having such incredible clarity and speed of thought was a decent trade-off. I had Mirele with me... the only thing that would have made it perfect was if my grandfather was in here as well.I focused on the output where Mirele wa
One week ago, Professor Jonathan Spafford's mortal consciousness fled this world. Every time I let myself think about it, I feel the agony anew, and I have to take a few seconds to hide in his memories, to hear his voice and feel his love around me. I understand more and more what Mirele meant... but at the same time, it's different. As long as I'm still alive, still drifting in my digital home, I'll keep his memories safe until we can find a way to bring him to life, just as he turned us into living computers.I've been in contact with a few people that have such programming experience, creating Artificial Intelligence constructs, both as programs and as actual droids. Some of them worked on the droids that are now moving all over the surface of Horus, rebuilding our world into the beautiful, shining Utopia we remember it once being.They have told me that my idea is a long shot at best, insane at worst, but one of them admitted that he had worked on a project where an AI's m
Four hours later, Lance stood at Grandfather's bedside with a grim look. He had done as much as he could to treat the stroke, but this one had been far worse than before. Grandfather had no motor function left, and the only reason he was still alive was because the machines around him wouldn't let him die. He hadn't regained consciousness even for the shortest time. Lance had activated a speaker in the room so that I could talk to Grandfather directly, but he hadn't moved or reacted. Seeing him like this broke my heart. It looked like I was going to be cheated of the chance to say goodbye. The rest of the council came to his room and surrounded his bed. Candy took Grandfather's hand in hers, squeezing it a little as tears rolled down her face. "Lance, we've been talking, and... I think we should go through with Toby's idea."
A full month passed and we had managed to restore at least partial function to most of the critical systems. Communications, transportation, utility services, the replicators, and a basic shell of the entertainment system. As things stood at the moment, aside from illness or injury, there really was no reason for anyone else to die from the Crash. Not easily. We got the system of surveillance cameras back online, and for a while, Mirele and I would use our break times to just watch happy couples getting married in parks that were slowly coming back to life. We'd watch new parents stroll along streets with their newborns, and we'd watch older couples, the rare survivors of their generation, as they would walk through their towns and reminisce. Once the general story of what had taken place was finally revealed- and the people could use the Net again- an electi
When Grandfather rolled in the next morning, looking much better than he had the previous day, I was reasonably sure that I was ready. Mirele and I had let Candy in on the plan and practiced with her for an hour. It was about as good as it would get without giving it entirely too much attention. That would require ignoring what was supposed to be our real job. Putting our shattered world back together. As soon as he had rolled up to the computer and looked over the screens to check our status, I figured it was time. I could feel Mirele near me and caught a wordless wave of encouragement from her. It was now or... well, not never, but I knew that if I waited too long, I'd lose my nerve. "Good morning, Grandfather." His head lifted so fast, I saw him wince as it kinked a nerve. He stared into the camera. The voice
For the next hour, I wandered around the hard drives with the data files. I learned all kinds of things about audio systems, about how sound mixers worked, and how we could alter the samples to mimic what I recalled of our own voices. The thing was, I needed to use Mirele's memory of my voice and my memory of hers, because what we remembered of our own voices wasn't accurate to what others heard. Our memories were filtered through our heads and typically sounded much lower than our real voices.I then dove into the process of altering and creating a ton of sound clips for different syllables, creating a small dictionary of voice clips. This was how they had done it in the old days and I knew there had to be a more efficient method, but I wasn't a programming genius.Yet. By the time I was done, I would know more than any computer engineer in existence.
We'd been given a task to perform, and we took it seriously. Perhaps a bit too seriously. In our laser focus on getting the systems back online, neither of us noticed that Grandfather had been trying to get our attention for several hours. I finally spotted the data stream as I was flying back and forth between several of the sector computers, getting all the droids active and back to work.Initially, it looked like he was just being conversational, asking us how things were going. The last few messages sounded downright panicked. I think he was afraid that we were indeed getting lost... getting so deep into the system that we were losing contact with the outside.I felt so bad for panicking him. We needed a better way to do this, some method for him to signal us. A summons command, or something like that."I think there's supposed to be one programmed in, but I'm not sure why it isn't working," Mirele said as she started to explore the inputs again."Maybe it's
I had no idea how long I'd been digging in the files before I finally located the highly sensitive files that involved the actual functions of the hunk of rock and metal that we called Horus. After a quick consultation with Mirele- I had discovered that we could communicate with each other without having to vocalize actual words- we decided to pull a copy into our server since it was critical data. We couldn't risk damaging the original copies held by the Ten. I went through the files... there was so much here, it could take months to comprehend it all. Fortunately, whoever had designed the Ten had done so in a way that actually made it pretty user-friendly for the central control systems. We didn't have to know everything about how they worked, we just had to know whether the data we received from the systems were telling us that they were working right, or whether something was wrong.
Mirele had to get my attention again, pulling my back from my fascination with the complexity of the system. "Do you have all the inputs and outputs figured out?" she asked.I took another look around... it wasn't long before I had figured out where everything was coming from, and I was encouraged when I realized that I actually understood what it all was. This wasn't all that different from our practices. The only real difference was that we were now fully and permanently engaged in the server, with no sense of the outside except through our peripheral devices.I missed it, to a point, but having such incredible clarity and speed of thought was a decent trade-off. I had Mirele with me... the only thing that would have made it perfect was if my grandfather was in here as well.I focused on the output where Mirele wa
"Toby?"Ugh, not this again. I was so incredibly tired of having to be woken up after blacking out.Wait... I was in a computer, so how the hell could I have passed out?"Exactly... you didn't pass out, you just lost your orientation. Now pay attention to me.""Mirele?" I asked."Duh, who else? There's no one else in here, at the moment, anyway."I couldn't see her, since I had no eyes, but all at once, I sensed her presence as I would have through the wires before we'd been dragged in here. I was so relieved... I was afraid that she would be fried like Lance had thought might happen."In case you haven't noticed, my father has a bad h