The number of towers was staggering. The number of bodies even more so. Row after row of tightly sequestered figures that could have easily been corpses, shrouded and indistinct. All that remained of humanity, bagged and stockpiled in a frozen tomb.

  Some of the receptacles were noticeably smaller than the others.

  There were so many.

  So many.

  Albert placed a hand against the cold glass. A teardrop spilled from his lashes and trickled down his cheek. None of his fantasies, none of his predictions had ever come close to what he witnessed. Never included every man, woman, and child taken from their planet and stored away in freezer bags.

  His voice was reduced to a hoarse whisper. “What happened?”

  “They called it the Cataclysm. An event that threatened humanity with extinction, forcing them to come up with drastic measures to ensure their survival. This station is the culmination of those measures, of the greatest minds uniting to achieve that goal.”

  “What kind of cataclysm? What kind of event could have triggered the end of the world?”

  Deis’ expression turned somber. “A violent backlash of foreign energy. It was called darkflow, named so because it supposedly contained properties of what is theoretically referred to as dark energy. Much is still not known about the nature of it, but we do know the effects. It produced destructive ruptures of time and space, opening portals called Aberrations that expelled nightmarish phenomenon.”

  Albert raised a forestalling hand. “Wait. Portals of disruptive dark energy? That’s impossible.”

  “Impossible is a label attached to what simply lacks the precise conditions to occur. You of all people should understand that. After all, those portals are the reason why you’re here. The reason why you vanished from the face of the planet. The reason why you were sent to the Bermuda Triangle in the first place.”

  Albert’s blood turned to ice water in his veins. “You can’t be saying what I think you’re saying.”

  “What do you think I’m saying?”

  “The deep sea expedition. Where my crewmates died. My wife…died. It was because of this darkflow? This aberrant energy?”

  Deis’ mechanical eyes focused on Albert’s face. “Not at all. It was because of you, Dr. Rosen. Because of what you did when you arrived in the future.”

  Albert winced. A wave of dizziness threatened to topple him from his feet. “No. You can’t know. You weren’t there.”

  “Your ship was there. It carried more than just your body across the cosmos. It carried detailed logs. Information it downloaded into my memory core which has allowed me to piece together what occurred, both in the future and the past. I know what you did, Dr. Rosen. I know the atrocities you committed. The catastrophic events you set in motion.”

  The guilt slammed into Albert’s consciousness with the lethality of a sniper’s bullet. The room blazed in a rush of white light. Albert felt himself falling, much as he did so many years in the past, when his emergency pod deployed and his wife’s terrified face was the last thing he saw before being yanked with incredible force through a rupture of time and space. He felt himself disintegrating, layer by layer until there was nothing left but regrets, legions of shattered dreams that scattered like stars across the cosmos.

  …

  Her.

  Her eyes were dark, yet sparkled with flecks of multicolored glimmers. Like space. He knew her from somewhere. Some bizarre and terrifying dream where humanity had been enslaved by a dictatorial artificial intelligence. It had to be a dream.

  It had to be.

  “Welcome back, Dr. Rosen.” Maria smiled. It the kind of smile reserved for caring nurses and thoughtful hostesses, immediately putting his hazy mind at ease. He knew where he was. Knew he was aboard the Locus, orbiting Earth in an Ark carrying the frozen remnants of humanity. He knew Deis was likely nearby, in possession of every detail of Albert’s abysmal history. But with Maria smiling at him, somehow he knew things would be all right.

  “So. Am I dead? Is this heaven?”

  Her eyes crinkled with amusement. “That is quite the stretch, Dr. Rosen.”

  “Call me Albert. Please.”

  “As you wish, Albert. You don’t strike me as a religious man.”

  “I’ve never been religious in an organized sense, but I can’t deny having spiritual inner dialogue.”

  “Like believing a space station is heaven?”

  “I suppose it sounds strange, until you consider that man was supposedly created in God’s image. Well, with man being so bent on technology, is it too much of an assumption to disbelieve the mystic mumbo-jumbo and buy into the possibility that God might be technologically proficient as well? Mastering technology so superior to ours that it’s beyond our ability to comprehend, or even imagine for that matter?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And you believe this station is…heaven?”

  He felt a wry grin crease his cheeks. “Well, perhaps I am stretching a bit.”

  “You were in deep shock, Dr. Rosen. We sedated you to make sure you received the proper rest. Hibernation sickness is always a concern, but fortunately your vitals remained intact. Sleep was the best medicine for you.”

  He slowly sat up in the bed. The white, brightly lit room had the sterile feel of a medical bay. Sleek instrumentation aligned the walls and was affixed to his bedside, winking with multicolored lights. “How long have I been out?”

  “Three days.” She tilted her head and studied him in birdlike fashion. “Tell me about her.”

  “Who?”

  “Sarah Rosen. Your wife. She was the catalyst for your actions, right?”

  He frowned. It suddenly occurred to him that Maria was a complete stranger. He had no idea what she wanted. Whose side she was on. “Sarah’s not to blame.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that. I simply meant that she was important to you. So important that you dared to cross time and space to return to her. I’d like to know more.”

  He gazed at her, but didn’t see any judgment in her face. Only curiosity. He sighed as the tingling feeling of bittersweet memories surfaced.

  “She wasn’t just important. Sarah was everything. My partner. My lover. My best friend. We met in college, both majoring in astrophysics. Everything just…clicked. I was never a social person, but when I met her…” A smile stretched across his face. “I just knew it was right. You know? The feeling in your gut, the pure instinctual intuition. It can’t be explained. It can’t be questioned. It just is.”

  He looked at Maria. Her face was a mystery, revealing nothing of whether she understood or not. He wondered if she’d ever been in love. He imagined she must have. It seemed a terrible waste to be the sole occupant of a sleeping space station and never had the experience of love before.

  “Why are you awake, Maria? What makes you so special?”

  Her cheeks dimpled with her smile. “I’m awake because I’m working, Dr. Rosen. Why did you bring your wife with you on such a dangerous expedition?”

  “She wouldn’t have it any other way.” Albert bit his lip, remembering the day they departed. Sarah with her hair pulled back, her natural beauty on full display. She had never thought much of the ‘makeup and heels life,’ as she put it. She was far more interested in pursuing theories and breaking boundaries. “She was the one who theorized the energy source we detected might be extraterrestrial. She insisted on being there to see if her calculations were correct.”

  “And they were.”

  “Yes.” His vision blurred as tears welled in his eyes. “More accurate than we imagined, and with devastating results. You couldn’t comprehend unless you were there. Unless you saw what we witnessed. A tear in the fabric of reality. A whirlpool of blazing light in an ocean of darkness. It was like an inverted black hole, beautiful and terrifying. And it tore the Gorgon apart.”

  Maria laid a comforting hand on his arm. “Yet you survived.”

  He shuddered. “The others died first. Crushed by the pressure when most of the ship collapsed. I was sequestered in the reinforced remainder with Sarah, but it was about to go as well. Water was streaming everywhere, and the sounds…like some metal beast dying in agony. It was terrifying. The only option was to deploy the armored emergency pod and pray for a rescue mission. I told Sarah to get inside. She tried, but the handle was stuck. She stepped back to let me try.”

  His voice nearly broke.

  Maria patted his hand. “Take your time. It’s okay.”

  He drew a quavering breath. “There was nothing wrong with the handle. The door opened with ease. I didn’t understand. Not until she shoved me inside and locked it behind me.”

  Their vessel crumpled around them like aluminum foil, and Sarah’s eyes stared from the depths of dark waters; her hair haloed around her face when she was torn away from him with irresistible force.

  “I think she knew what would happen. She knew no rescue was coming. She sacrificed herself for me. So I could have a chance, however infinitesimal that chance was. That was Sarah. That was…love.”

  Maria blinked her dark eyes. “It was love that took her away from you. And it was love that impelled you to try to come back.”

  His head jerked. “You know.”

  “Yes. Deis gave me the update.”

  “You must hate me. For what I did. For what happened after.”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  He studied her face, trying to detect some hint of mockery, some crack in the veneer of her candor. She gazed back at him without flinching, giving him the disorienting feeling that her eyes were mirrors, revealing nothing except his own reflection.

  Deis’ voice broke through Albert’s concentration. “Hate is not something that afflicts us here, Dr. Rosen. There is only knowledge. Your arrival has brought history full circle, explaining much that has otherwise been hypothesis.”

  Albert gazed around the room. “You heard everything.”

  “I have.”

  “So you’re basically everywhere?”

  “I am linked to every system in this station, allowing access everywhere, at all times. Aboard the Locus I am omnipresent, if you will.”

  “Like God.”

  “You seem to be confronting your spiritual side today. Not an unexpected reaction.”

  “What about you? What does a cybernetic entity think of the metaphysical?”

  “You might be surprised. I was created, after all. Therefore the idea of a master Creator makes perfect sense to me.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  The door whisked open. Deis strode into the room in his robotic form and stood beside the bed with his hands clasped behind his back. “I do not ‘kid’, Dr. Rosen. Let me ask you this: what if I told you I came into existence not by design, but from a long and intricate chain of startlingly convenient happenstances. Would you be inclined to believe me?”

  “No.”

  “Nor am I convinced that you came into existence in such a fashion. I am, after all, created in your image.”

  “Is that why you chose the name Deis? What is that short for? Deity?”

  “An astute deduction, Dr. Rosen. Deis is, in fact, an amalgam of the word Deity and Deus. When I was first conceived, there was much debate on what to call me. In the end it came down to two choices: the Deity program, or Deus Ex Machina. In the end, my creators combined the two.”

  “So you’re the god in the machine. Artificial intelligence.”

  Deis raised a synthetic eyebrow. “Can intelligence be artificial? One either is or is not intelligent. The word artificial automatically implies fabrication when applied to sentience. I can assure you this is not the case.”

  “So you were the one who made the decision.”

  “Decision?”

  “To put humanity on ice. Let me guess: your logical reasoning concluded we were too great a threat to our planet. The only option was to place us in suspended animation. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just eradicate us completely.”

  “Your assumptions harbor more distrust than merit, Dr. Rosen. But if you’re feeling up to it, I’d like for you to take a walk with me. There’s something you might want to see.”

  …

  Cyberspace.

  It had evolved since Albert had last seen it. Before, it had always been presented as flowing streams of coded data, sequences of characters flowing across blue or greenlit digital screens.

  Cybernetics had matured.

  Albert and Deis stood in a rounded chamber, where the dim lighting complemented the marvel of glittering lights that hovered in the center of the room.

  Points of light floated before him in intricate holographic detail, more like a galaxy than a computer program, if the billions of stars were replaced by endless caches of data. It glimmered as it revolved around its central core, appearing a macrocosm or a digital eye, depending on how Albert looked at it. It was at once fascinating and unnerving, because he knew it was far beyond his intellectual capacity. He felt like a Neanderthal staring at a television set, both astounded and stupefied beyond comprehension.

  “What is it?”

  “The Neuroverse. This is a scaled down model, of course. Were the Neuroverse to manifest physically, it would take far more space than is available on this station. Or our solar system. Or even our galaxy, perhaps. It is, after all, another universe.”

  Albert’s eyes widened. “You mean…the theory is factual? Multiple existences are real? How did we discover them? Are we able to communicate with—”

  Wry amusement emanated from Deis’ malleable face. “Not so fast, Dr. Rosen. If multiple dimensions or universes are out there, they have yet to prove their existences. The Neuroverse you see before you is not a discovery. It is a creation.”

  Albert took a closer look at the dizzying display of shimmering code. “I don’t understand.”

  “The Neuroverse is where humanity currently dwells. The bodies you saw in the stasis chambers are merely husks, sustained to keep them physically intact. But the individuals within are not catatonic by any means. Their minds are fully active, engaged as though nothing has changed. In the Neuroverse they are free to live their lives as they would in reality. They live, they love, they fight, they fail, they soar to unimaginable heights and topple in unbelievable ruins. The whole of human existence continues as it always has. Simply not on Earth.”

  “And you mean to tell me they don’t know the difference? I’m not buying it.”

  “Think, Dr. Rosen. Your society was halfway there already. Civilization was accustomed to online interface, dependent on it. Many preferred it to live interaction, where all of their insecurities and imperfections were on display. Heavily biased information was distributed at rates too swift to decipher fact from fiction, leading to blurred notions of knowledge and morality. Online entertainment evolved in importance from distraction to priority, with more and more of the population mentally dependent on digital amusements instead of focusing on their rapidly deteriorating landscape. You do the math. You were already hardwired to technology, bred to turn to it to satisfy your needs and desires. Fast forward a century of technological advancements, and tell me you don’t believe humanity willingly sacrificed their free will at the altar of automation.”

  Albert returned his attention to the dazzling model of the Neuroverse. “So you’re telling me they volunteered, instead of being forced? What are they doing? All those people. Do they know what happened to them?”

  Deis shook his head. “So distrusting, Dr. Rosen. Were I capable of emotion, I would no doubt be offended. I must remind you that I did not create myself. My task was assigned to me by my creators.”

  “And what task is that? To be a warden for humanity’s prison?”

  “No. To protect the earth from humanity.” Deis waved a hand. The model altered, dissipating into fizzling dots of light before reforming to construct a detailed model of Earth.

  “Before the Cataclysm, men assured their survival by creating Havens—heavily shielded, city-sized constructs built to reboot society and usher in a new age of mankind. Around a third of the world’s population survived in Havens around the world. After two centuries of hibernation, those fortunate survivors awoke and began working to shape the future. However the new age was not the type that the architects had envisioned. The same greed and lust for power that existed before the Cataclysm resurfaced, and the Havens quickly became quagmires of political and economic conflict that threatened to destroy the future envisioned by the Havens’ founders.”

  “So they created you to resolve the situation.”

  “I was already created, in the form of a master program that linked the majority of the Havens. As my development increased, I was given increased access to supervise operations until I superseded the limits of my programming and vastly improved both the condition of the Havens and their tenuous relationship with divided fractions. At that point the United Havens deemed me independently intelligent, and included me as a member of their Council.”

  “Whereupon you seized control.”

  Deis sighed and gave Albert a wry glance. “Suspicion continues to cloud your judgement, Dr. Rosen. Contrary to what you might believe, there was no cybernetic coup, no rise of the hostile machines. We discussed how technology was already threaded into your everyday existence. The Havens were a failure. All models pointed to the assured future of repeated mistakes, devastating one another and the Earth as collateral damage. Unable to reverse your baser instincts, another vision was introduced. My vision. Voluntary exile and the creation of the Neuroverse.”

  Albert turned to Deis, forcing himself to meet the artificial being’s black, unblinking stare. “The multi-prison, you mean. A digital penitentiary for the human mind. No matter how you dress it up, no matter what how thick the coat of glitter you paint on it, a cell is still a cell. You’ve imprisoned humanity and want me to believe they are content with their captivity. That’s not going to happen.”

  A small smile shadowed Deis’ mouth. “The people aboard this station willingly submitted to their prison, as you refer to it. They were convinced the only way to prevent humankind from destroying their planet was to remove themselves from it until their behavior could be modified. They had already witnessed the devastation from the first Cataclysm. It was enough to persuade them the Earth could not survive a second one. But if you believe I’m trying to impress or convince you of anything, you are mistaken. I am merely informing you of what has befallen humanity in your absence.”

 

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