Beyond being post-pain, the E10 promises a state of being post-feeling. Imagine such a world—all sensation, all emotion, is but a distraction from true, ethereal stillness. What yogi could have predicted that this was the path to inner peace?
Arnon D’Bvaym
CORTEX’S MIND SWAM such that he wasn’t sure if he was awake or still dreaming. His vision came fuzzily, shapes and colors becoming somewhat distinct, only briefly, before fading away again. In rare moments of near clarity, he thought he could make out two figures—one very short and gray—Cortex wasn’t certain why, but he could only describe its movements as like sand in the wind—and a large figure that looked almost like a gigantic snake hanging down from somewhere above. Cortex shook his head and blinked his eyes but found his vision going black again. What was happening to him?
Am I asleep again? Cortex wondered. Is this . . . another dream?
Then, through the darkness, Cortex felt a man’s voice, deep and commanding.
I sensed that the boy had promise, and he did well. This is a most unexpected gift. Almost good enough to overcome my disappointment that you lost the core processor.
There was a moment of silence. Then Cortex heard a feminine voice slither through his mind. For a technomancer, a few hours in the cell is only barely noteworthy.
You saw how quickly the boy’s mind moved. True, he’s a youth, their minds are all flexible and quick; still, we have no reason to believe that his master gave him this sort of training, which does make his speed significant. Taking that into consideration, I’m impressed with him!
Divinity, I must disagree. There is nothing unusual or significant about it at all. We couldn’t even do a pure neural connection—it had to enter the room via a hand jack. A hand jack! Pitiful, ancient technology. His master must have mentally been in the stone age.
I will not hear further debate on this; the elder had his own neural jack, and so he must have decided to wait till the boy was older before giving him the same. Speaking of the elder, is there any update on his condition?
I’ve been working on him, but the old technomancer is in a firm coma, and it will take some time to draw him out of it—and rehabilitation as well, I presume. The man has taken extensive internal damage—for example, it appears that almost his entire frame was somehow burned away. Thank your . . . our Creator that he’s still alive.
You weren’t able to draw his memories out anyway? Id, this is very unlike you.
The elder was careful. Many of his memories were offloaded into an auxiliary storage unit, and access to his side of the loop is well protected. Still . . . unless he is also disguising how much data is in there, or unless he has remarkable compression technology—doubtful, I think, given the dated tech built into the child’s systems—I’m concerned that I’ll put forth a great deal of effort to crack the code only to find nothing of use.
You say the elder uses dated tech, that he lives in the stone age, yet his old ways are proving a stubborn obstacle. Perhaps there’s something we can learn from that. Anyway, our scans suggest that the chip in the boy’s brain is . . . remarkably sophisticated, to the point where we must reverse-engineer it should the boy expire. It seems to me that the elder preferred reliable over modern, in most instances.
The elder is still an enemy to progress. Regardless, I will continue to work on his memory systems, and if he awakes, I will use other reliable, more traditional methods of extracting information.
Isn’t torture a bit barbaric, Id? Stone age, if you will?
Pain is the only pure sensation. Pain is real—all other emotions, sensations, creeds melt before it, are revealed to be mere illusions. There is pain, and there is not pain. I will be his teacher.
I will need to cure you of this errant thinking before you are integrated with the Hive. Love is the strongest emotion—love—for the Creator and His creations—is what drives us. The Creator is, after all, love, and it is with love for His creations that we go about our duties. The enlightenment of man stands on love.
I apologize, Divinity. Should I change my thinking?
. . . No, not immediately. Not until we learn what we need to from the elder. I have business to attend to, but alert me when the boy comes to, and I will return as quickly as possible. I wish to speak with him.
It shall be as you wish . . . Divinity.
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CORTEX’S EYES BRIEFLY opened, then clamped shut; he curled up on his side, lying on something soft and clutching a blanket, coughing violently. He felt spittle fly onto his forearms as his coughing turned into dry heaving. His throat and mouth burned madly.
Cortex felt a hand on his shoulder. Eventually his coughing fit subsided; he rolled to his back, feeling sweat covering his body, as he focused solely on breathing evenly and slowly. Then he felt something at his lips, pouring liquid down his throat. Panic flared through Cortex like fire taking to dry leaves. He tried to spit the liquid out, tried to fight back, but a hand clamped onto his mouth like iron, holding it open, while the liquid continued pouring uninterrupted. After a moment, Cortex realized that cool, pure water was being poured into his mouth; his struggling turned into desperate gulps and gasps as he tried to drink as much as possible, grateful as the burning in his mouth and throat subsided.
The hands retreated. Wiping his face with his arms and the blanket, Cortex sat up and blearily looked around, then rubbed his eyes and then the glass port in his forehead, which was itching. The heavy dimness of the room combined with blurry vision made it take a moment for everything to come into focus. Cortex thought he was in a lab. He sat on a cot in a corner, surrounded by complicated-looking machinery covered in tubes and wires, computers that squatted glumly in the deep shadows of the room. Before him stood a woman with short, dark hair; she regarded him blankly, her eyes as glassy as buttons on a doll.
“Where am I?” Cortex asked. He wondered if he was still dreaming. He looked down and saw a bandage on the arm that had been bitten by the rozie head—it was wet from wiping his face.
The woman nodded, then turned to walk away. Her movements were jerky, stuttery, almost like she walked in a strobe light. “I am to inform the goddess when the boy is awake,” she said, voice slightly slurred. Her figure slowly dissolved into the shadows that coated the room like cobwebs.
That sounds blasphemous, Cortex thought. He slowly stood, then looked around the lab more. Though he didn’t smell any mist or smoke, he felt that he sat in the middle of a fog cloud; he could see in a dimly lit bubble around him, and everything beyond that faded away into blackness. He was unsure of where the light came from.
Cortex looked up and couldn’t see the ceiling: whether because it was too high or just beyond the obscuring nature of this strange place, he couldn’t tell. He looked around and saw that, unlike his dream, the walls and floor were largely made of stone or wood, or that’s what he thought—the dark made it hard to tell. Metal panels with buttons and dials on the walls were scattered here and there. The room that he was in felt simultaneously large—the darkness making it impossible to know how far the room stretched—but also claustrophobic from densely draped shadows and the clusters of machines. He still couldn’t comprehend their purpose, but he noticed a small brain suspended in a liquid solution in one machine and hoped he wasn’t here to be the next experiment.
A slow slithering sound caught Cortex’s ears. It sounded like a loose metal coil being dragged across sand, or an impossibly large snake, slowly winding its way through the laboratory, searching for small boys just the right size for its gullet. Cortex looked around him for somewhere to hide, but the counters holding the lab machines weren’t accessible underneath, at least not from this side. There were hallways leading out of the room, hallways with no doors. Were they the best escape?
Then a dreadful figure materialized from the dark.
Cortex first noticed the thick bundle of tubes and wires extending from the darkness of the ceiling. Many of the tubes contained liquids of different colors and viscosities, some pumping downward, some upward, some bubbling, but many were still. The wires were of various diameters, some almost invisibly thin, others thicker than Cortex’s thigh. The whole mixture, bundled together, looked like a strange tree trunk extending down from the black heavens to the earth below.
But instead of roots at the bottom of the column of wires, Cortex found a woman. The column mostly extended from the woman’s back, leaving her suspended in the air and leaning forward just slightly, but dozens of wires and tubes extended from her head and neck as well, combining with the column early on. The tilt to her body caused her arms to hang slightly, and her legs twitched in weak imitation of walking as she slithered forward through the air.
As she got closer, Cortex was able to make out her face. She had clear tubes running out of her nose, which ran toward the back of her head and disappeared into the column rising upward. One eye had a drooping brow and eyelid, and the other was replaced with a large, green orb, which matched the small glass port in her forehead in color. Her slow, quiet breathing sounded labored. Cortex shivered as she stopped near him.
They stared at each other for several moments. Then words entered Cortex’s mind, unwanted, like burglars stealing into a guarded room. Welcome to my home, the voice said. The woman smiled, but it seemed that only half of her face worked properly, while the other half sagged; the result made it look like she was smiling and frowning at the same time. Still, despite the gesture, Cortex sensed no warmth from this woman. After becoming aware of your presence, Prophet has requested that you be looked after until he is available to see to you, and he required that I treat you . . . cordially. I have work to do, so follow me and we can accomplish such things simultaneously. The woman turned in place, her feet unmoving; then she began to mimic walking again as she slid forward through the lab, the tubes and wires running straight up above her. Her arms swayed in the air as she moved.
Cortex swallowed, then looked around the lab. What other choice did he have? He stood and followed the woman, the cool floor chilling his feet through his slippers.
Do not touch anything, the woman whispered into Cortex’s mind as he followed. At this moment, I do not want you injured beyond repair before I deliver you to Prophet. The Divinity—you might know him as Prophet—does not take kindly to . . . disturbances in his plans. He must accomplish the will of the Creator, after all. We are but pawns in that great game. As the words formed in his mind, two rozies materialized out of the darkness and began walking side-by-side with the woman. The first was the dark-haired rozie from before; the other had also once been a woman, this one with long, colored nails. The technomancer attached to the pillar of tubes and wires paid them no mind, except to tilt her head while one rozie dabbed some spittle away from the corners of her mouth.
The machines they passed looked interesting, although to Cortex they were all as incomprehensible as the machines he saw in the first room. Cortex wondered why the robot lady was talking about the Creator in the first place. “Are you a rozie?” he asked.
No, the thought whispered in his mind. It sounded spiteful. I still have shreds of my will left. I am a technomancer, like you.
Cortex felt nervous, and when he was nervous, he usually felt the need to talk. “I had a very strange dream before waking up. I was stuck in a room; the walls were vibrating horribly, and they were so rough that they destroyed my robe. Then I thought I heard talking as I got out of the room, but I don’t know who it was or what they were saying.” As they walked, Cortex’s skin prickled like goose flesh.
That dream was a test, the robot woman said. And, for Prophet, you passed. She glided around a corner and in front of a large glass window, then stopped, as did her rozie companions at her sides. For his plans it might have been sufficient, but I need to see more.
“What was the test?” Cortex stood near the woman, nervous that the rozies would suddenly attack him, but they stared forward blankly. Cortex tried to look through the window they stood before, standing on the tips of his toes to do so, but whatever was on the other side was shrouded in darkness. He almost thought he noticed movement, the briefest glimpse of light.
A test of willpower, among other things. Prophet believes that you are a unique gift. She cast Cortex a baleful glare. I believe that you are just another creature. Then she smiled creepily. But I mean no offense, of course—I have been required to be cordial, after all.
Cortex frowned and looked down. He didn’t like how this robot woman made him feel—small and insignificant. That seemed to be his lot in life—to be made small.
A scream split the air. Cortex looked up, into the windowed room, which was now lit with a harsh, bright light. He saw a girl with black hair, about his age, in dirty and tattered clothes. She had dark bags under her eyes, scabbed cuts on her skin, and was curled in a ball in the corner of the room, her side pressed against the wall. She screamed again and pressed tighter against the wall. Cortex looked at the other side of the room and felt his heart quicken.
A rozie.
Cortex knew it was a rozie; he felt that in his bones. There was nothing graceful, dangerous, or intelligent about its movement, unlike Hannah, or a strange jerkiness to its movements, like the other rozies that Cortex had met recently, but it gave an implacable sense of danger in the way it lurched unerringly toward the girl—it acted much like Cortex had grown up expecting rozies to act. Its mouth opened horribly wide, opening large tears in its synthetic cheeks to do so.
“What are you doing?” Cortex said, pressing his face against the window. “Stop this, now!”
The robot woman was silent for a moment. When the rozie was halfway across the room, she mentally whispered, This girl can only be saved by you. This is another test.
“Stop!” Cortex screamed as he slammed the glass with his palms. The rozie took another step forward, without the barest hint of acknowledging Cortex’s command. The girl screamed again and tried to press herself deeper into the wall. Her eyes were wide, white at the edges, bloodshot around the irises.
Cortex’s mind raced. What could he do? He managed to command the rozie head, and he managed to stop the rozie that tried to eat him, but in both instances, he was touching the thing. Not only was this rozie well out of reach, but also out of sound.
“This is wrong. Stop! You can’t do this!” Cortex begged Id.
Id stared at the girl. Any sacrifice is worth the salvation of mankind, she whispered, but her words sounded hollow, rehearsed. The rozie was mere steps away from the girl now, moving at the easy pace of a predator with cornered prey.
“Please!” Cortex grabbed her arm, but Id gave him a look of disgust. Her head twitched and Cortex was pulled away, then slapped, knocking Cortex to the ground; the dark-haired rozie stood above him, blank eyes staring down at him. Cortex clutched his face, shocked, feeling the heat of the slap; for reasons he couldn’t identify, his only thought was, The master would have never done that.
A stillness settled over Cortex. Whatever the evil robot woman said, this was no test—this was evil, and she clearly wasn’t going to do anything to stop it. Cortex stood, eyeing the rozies next to Id warily, and looked into the room. The rozie down there was reaching toward the little girl. The master tried to teach me to do things with just my mind. Cortex imagined the rozie was a Therexe Cube and concentrated on it.
Stop, Cortex thought. The word felt powerful, and Cortex felt the port in his forehead heat slightly; the rozie towered over the girl, but it stopped just before grabbing her. She scrambled around the rozie and ran to the other side of the room, tears running down her face, and slammed against the wall in her haste. “Please, help!”
Impressive, the thought slithered into Cortex’s mind. Perhaps you are more than a mere thing. But, you have merely reached its shell. Now you must crush its mind, else the rozie will still kill the girl when you leave.
A sick feeling blossomed in Cortex’s stomach. “No!” he said, reflexively. Then he thought for a moment. Why did this feel so wrong? “It’s a rozie—but there’s still a human brain in there. Even in this state, I . . .” Cortex couldn’t put into words why Id’s command sounded abhorrent to him. As his focus drifted from the rozie, it twitched and began moving again, turning to face the girl. The head had obeyed him even when he hadn’t actively focused on it—why wouldn’t this rozie? Cortex felt a pit form in his stomach when his attention slipped; the rozie turned to face the girl, who had stopped crying and now stared at the rozie numbly.
You can sit here as long as you like, but eventually you will tire, and your focus will drop. Then the rozie will hunt the girl again. Or, perhaps, Prophet will call for you, and you will be required to leave, and then the girl will die—slowly, horribly, and you will know that you could have prevented it. The creepy half smile, half frown returned to the robot woman’s face.
Cortex refocused on the girl and the rozie, racking his brain. What do I do?
Cortex’s attention slipped and the rozie lurched toward the girl. Cortex concentrated and thought Stop, freezing the rozie in place. But already he felt a headache forming in the center of his head. This was all real—this was all too real.
“What do you want?” Cortex asked. His body trembled with fear and exhaustion as he spoke.
Only to see what you can do, little bug. I will watch, Id replied.
Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow
Boo Ludlow 