The peoples library, p.12
The People's Library, page 12
This was the exchange they needed, and with all Echo had learned about a virtu’s true existence, she set aside her need to rush into what she wanted and regaled him with an overview of the twenty-first century. She had to prompt Margaret to do the same with her century.
“And what wisdom do you seek? Whether your query is mathematical or astronomical in nature, it shall be considered and resolved by method and measure.”
Echo let it all out in a cascade, with frequent additions and corrections from Margaret. Brahmagupta listened with his head angled toward the sun, eyes closed. He didn’t ask one question and sat that way for a full minute after they’d finished. Echo sensed Margaret’s unease steadily ramping up, and when she appeared on the verge of speaking, ready to unleash one of her demands, Echo silenced her with a raised hand.
Over the years, she’d learned many things while watching and then leading people. Her current staff were walking, talking contradictions. Each of them made their way through the world and processed information differently. Where Carmen was quick to speak and act, Lorain was more measured, quite comfortable to consider and weigh what she’d heard beforehand. Brahmagupta was like her.
He nodded slowly. “I grasp the grim reality of why you have come, if not how.”
“How do you think the number zero fits in?” Echo asked.
“For many years, scholars, the clergy, they resisted the idea because they feared emptiness, the void. The Sanskrit term is ‘shunyata.’”
“Come to think of it, the Greeks and Romans also resisted the idea,” Margaret said.
“I sought to know the nature of this contentious figure, which is both nothing and everything. I measure the paths of the stars and planets, their positions in the sky as constant as the breath of time itself. I test the boundaries of mathematical calculations: addition, subtraction, multiplication. My life’s work is to give form to what is hidden, to reveal harmony where those who came before only saw fear and chaos.”
“So . . .” Margaret started, then stopped. “These scholars, if you will, were afraid of . . . of nothing? Pray tell, why?”
“Because of what else could spring from nothing,” Echo said. “Think about it. Consciousness.”
“Ah, the battle older than time,” Brahmagupta said. “Scientists, philosophers, and religion have all posited theories, but I suspect that even in your time, the puzzle has yet to be solved.”
Echo sighed. “And you’d be right.”
“A philosopher might tell you that the whole universe is conscious. But we have no proof of that. Do we need it?” Brahmagupta picked up a wooden spoon. “Does this spoon have a self? What about that stool over there?”
“Not the spoon itself perhaps, but before, when it was a tree, certainly,” Margaret said, her tone haughty. “All matter, to some degree, is conscious. Vital materialism is the school of thought I subscribe to.”
“We’re of the same mind there,” he agreed. “Look at it not as the clergy might, but from a scientific point of view. If you accept that in this complex system, everything is connected, interdependent, then all those parts come together, acting and reacting to construct a whole. But it begins somewhere, and that place is the void.”
“But Western culture became invested in an alternate viewpoint, one that centers the brain as the source of consciousness,” Margaret said. “Brains are where we think, how we create, so I cannot blame them for their shortsightedness.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Echo said.
There was a mischievous twinkle in Brahmagupta’s eye. “And you’d be right. Yes, most of our sense organs are in our heads, but take your Ayurvedic and Mesoamerican traditions, even ancient Egyptian, and the heart is thought to be the seat of consciousness.”
“So, who’s right?” Echo asked.
“Though we have spoken of both things, my reasoning and my belief go toward the brain. There thought is birthed; the mind is but a womb. Absent clear evidence to the contrary, that is the truth I bear. It is clear to me that the number zero here represents someone’s attempt to trace consciousness back to the source of all existence.”
Echo and Margaret were at that point where words weren’t needed for them to fully understand one another. Echo used to wonder about all the wars between science and religion over the centuries, and now it made sense. Annoying sense.
“Ada, can you take us, all of us, to Zera Yacob?”
This time, their transition was a lot smoother. The fragments of generated imagery rearranged themselves, resolving into their new backdrop. The Model was learning. If Echo had a body, there would be an uncomfortable feeling in her chest. A warning.
Margaret’s surroundings were the epitome of modern opulence for her time. Brahmagupta’s setting was more rural, but it evoked the same sense of wonder. Echo had been told that the virtus helped develop their environs; if that was true, then Zera had made an interesting choice indeed.
A small fire crackled in the center of a stone enclosure. The flames pushed back some of the darkness—that and a puddle of light that disappeared around a bend—but shadows encroached from all sides. Parchments were stacked neatly on what looked like hard-packed earth. A tiny clay pot with a quill sticking out of it suggested an inkwell of sorts. She squinted and made out a pallet of blankets under a rocky outcropping. Echo expected it to feel spooky, sinister, but it was the opposite. This was a place she could imagine herself escaping to, for a few moments of peace . . . assuming there were no bats, or rodents. This seventeenth-century Ethiopian scholar, at least this version of him, had selected a cave for his eternity.
“This is a revelation both unexpected and welcome.” Brahma was the first to speak. He passed his diaphanous hand in and out of the fire, unblemished, unburned. “Our constructive counsel told of controls set in place to prevent this very thing. It appears that the Model, or whatever truly fuels it, is evolving.”
“Once again,” Echo whispered. That fierce resistance she’d had against the library had ebbed into more of a feeling of disquiet, although that didn’t change the fact that she was no lover of the tech that, at one point, had threatened to overtake humanity at the top of the intellectual chain.
All she knew, had cared to know, was that the purported age of intelligence had fallen into the camp of “wishful thinking,” along with other great hopes like traveling beyond the speed of light. But was that changing, guided by her own misplaced curiosity? Had the intelligence been lying dormant like a bad gene, just to mutate and have a go at them again?
“This also invokes the query: How do I return?” Margaret asked.
Echo had wondered the same for herself. How much time had passed? How long since she’d heard her companion’s voice? She found that despite how irritated she usually was with Gina, she missed her presence.
Before she could answer, a shuffle of fabric announced the arrival of their virtu.
“What?” Zera said when he appeared, his wide brown eyes taking in the three of them. This time he held a staff, and a small wooden cross hung from a simple leather band around his neck. “If you are here instead of on the other side of that screen”—he gestured just past the fire at the cave wall—“then am I to suppose that this library experiment is in the midst of a grand impairment?”
Echo held up her hands to stall the barrage. “We only have a working hypothesis on how, but yes, the People’s Library is operating outside its traditional programming.”
“Indulge me,” Zera said.
Echo told him about Gina and how she’d helped her enter this world and all the rest, how things had gone wrong after that. How Ada had seemingly replaced her.
“And now you are unable to raise this companion of yours?”
Echo glanced over at Margaret, not even sure why. For support? Reassurance that she couldn’t give her? She shook her head.
“Your expression bears the mark of one at odds with herself,” Zera said. “The struggle to hide your fear is at once understandable but unnecessary, here with esteemed comrades. You are afraid that you have been conscripted to remain in this place.”
Echo was proud of her ability to hide her feelings, so it grated that this virtu had seen through her so thoroughly. Still, his words held nothing but truth. “Your profile said you were a philosopher—looks like somebody left out the part about you being a diviner.”
Zera gathered the length of his robes and sank into a cross-legged position. “Judging by the way that one has her arms clamped in front of her”—he stopped to gesture at Margaret—“you are here to settle some debate upon which she has thus far been bested.”
It was as if Margaret had swelled to twice her size. “I beg your pardon!” Her small fists were balled at her sides.
Brahma chuckled, and Zera’s lip quirked. “I am only teasing,” he said. “A disposition that angered my wife and children as well.”
Just like Margaret, he spoke in the past tense. It drove home the point that virtus were alone, with only their memories and hope of being checked out to pass the unrelenting hours. Echo had an aunt. Her mother’s only sister. When she was a child, they visited every week. It wasn’t until her aunt passed away when Echo was a teenager that she’d begun to see the assisted living facility under the light of truth. Their one-hour visit, every Sunday afternoon. That was it. The only time her aunt had with people she knew and loved. The other 167 hours of each week were an exercise in dissociated endurance.
Brahma and Zera had fallen into animated conversation, while Margaret sulked and Echo was lost in thought. Finally, she found her voice. “Your book, the Hatata—you said it reflected on philosophical and theological matters. Does that include questions about consciousness?”
Zera looked down and exhaled deeply. “Mine was a framework based on reason, not intolerance or religious dogma. That is what landed me in this place for two years. Before you ask, I will tell you that if you are looking for a traditional answer to your questions, you have come to the wrong person.”
That was music to Echo’s ears. “Tradition is of no interest to me, but what you think is.”
Zera’s eyebrows rose. His easy smile returned. “My theory is that there is a great well that exists all around us. It is from this source that pure consciousness dwells. Whomever is behind this plot most likely seeks to understand that enigma.”
“And use that data to help them align the artificial with the natural. Human and AGI,” Echo said, barely above a whisper. Her lungs seized up, refusing to draw in her next breath. As that last piece slammed into place, it seemed her heart, the blood coursing through her veins, everything came to a calamitous stop. She staggered backward, as if trying to put distance between herself and the words she’d just spoken.
Margaret made a dismissive noise, then: “I bid you gather your wits!”
Echo shot Margaret a look but heeded her advice. There was no time to waste. She considered how much the world had changed. It was time to consult a more contemporary source. “I know what our next step is.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Echo felt a familiar itch in her mind. “Gina!”
“Hey hey,” Gina said. “You’ve been busy, haven’t you?”
“Can you get me back?”
Five words, bursting with promise or demise. These five words that would determine the rest of Echo’s life.
“I think so. You know this was the first time I’ve tried something like this, but Ada, she helped me. We pored over the code and made some updates.”
“Wait,” Echo said. “You did what?” The library wasn’t supposed to be able to do this. And Gina wasn’t designed to interface with Ada either. If Echo could, in fact, feel her spine, she was sure it would be tingling with a chill. It was as if she had crawled out of a burning car stalled on Dead Man’s Curve, only to see three lanes full of headlights barreling down on her at full speed.
“Ada believes with 99.97 percent certainty that we can get you back where you belong. I’m sensing you want a coffee . . . No, you need a coffee, right?”
One of the things that Echo appreciated about the Model was its brutal honesty. Only now, she wished it had upgraded itself to include a little sensitivity. Less than 100 percent could mean . . .
“What happens if—” Echo allowed reason with a dash of imagination to fill in those obvious blanks. The virtus had gone quiet. In one fluid motion, Zera stood, blinking rapidly. Brahma joined him, his mouth slightly downturned. Margaret had drifted over near them, her face cast in shadow, but it was clear that she’d taken to studying the ash and dirt on the cave’s rock ground. They knew it. Their adventure was about to end. They would be split up, isolated once more.
There was no comparison. What Echo had experienced here was the most interesting thing to happen to her in her life. Here, she had great conversation, friendship, people like Jesse. No hint of a synesthetic meltdown. What awaited her back on the other side?
The Prince mural on the overpass bridge near West Twenty-Fifth and Washington.
The Whiskey Island peninsula at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River.
The Franklin Reading Garden.
Popping in at Phoenix Coffee on Saturday mornings.
Browsing the towering, dusty shelves of the main library on Superior and selecting the perfect books.
The anticipation of curling up on her sofa, enjoying the sunlight from the picture window. Spending an afternoon lost in an author’s words.
By some standards, admittedly even her own, her life was mundane. But distance provided clarity. That life was hers to live, and it would end if she stayed. A shell, a slice of her true self. There was no guarantee that she’d remain able to interact with other virtus. The choice was to leave now and try to advocate for change or stay here.
She would be at the mercy of an administration she no longer trusted and an organization that she suspected had plans she’d yet to uncover. The words were there, playfully enticing, in her heart, her throat, her tangled tongue. Check me out. A tidal wave of guilt threatened to consume her. Echo exhaled long and hard. She still had so many questions, so many questions, but they would have to wait.
To her friends, she said, “I’ll come back.”
Zera and Brahma inclined their heads.
“Even if you are able,” Margaret said, drifting toward the cave opening as if she could just go out for a stroll, “I may be otherwise engaged.”
Already this scene was flickering, bits and pieces of all three worlds bleeding together.
Echo understood how Margaret must have felt, but she had to go. “Gina, I’m ready. Try to return me in one piece, okay?” Echo paused, then added something she’d never said to her companion before: “Please.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Something was wrong.
Echo felt it like a heave, something reaching inside her head and wrenching, pulling.
Like being sucked through a straw. She’d tried calling out to Gina and Ada, but she had no voice. Without the familiar feel of her body, all Echo was left with in these torturous moments was her mind.
She was thrashing, groping for an anchor, something solid with which she could attach herself. Only there was nothing.
This is how I will die.
Or not.
She was utterly alone. And she could be stuck in this in-between forever. A maniacal madness bubbled somewhere deep that no longer had a true name. Was this what virtus felt every time they were returned to the collection while patrons so callously went about their day?
She had learned too much during her time in their world. Fascinating and horrifying. Solitary confinement with no outside time in the yard. Irregularly scheduled one-sided visits at the whims of the people on the other side of the chasm that separated them from reality.
The virtus were prisoners. The administration had lied about everything.
And Echo had lied to herself, hadn’t she? She might have eternity to ponder that, without even the small comfort of an Ohio City milieu to think on it. Echo had whispered some questions to herself and let them lie unanswered. Let pass the furtive looks that Jesse gave her, how he’d sidestepped telling her too much about his existence. Protecting her. His literary warden. A complicit frontwoman for the administration that had done this to him.
She was surrounded by nothingness like strewn debris around a space station. Neither hot, nor cold. Absent the smell of freshly tilled earth or smoke from a fire. Devoid of the moon or stars to comfort her. Even her friends the virtus were out of reach.
How long would it take—
She felt a deep longing as raw as a treasured memory beginning to fade. For the nagging twitch in her neck when she slept too long on her right side. Craving for the feel of her morning coffee on the back of her tongue, the flavor lingering just a moment before the liquid trickled down her throat. The way she felt whenever she glanced at a mirror and admired how the red lipstick she favored complemented the deep-brown undertones of her skin.
She was outcast.
It seemed to Echo that awareness was an idea that existed outside, perhaps before, the substantive world. This was the pure version. She had thought that this realm would exist without pain, or bias, or preference—any of those other daily troubles. But all those things she’d felt before were still with her.
Her body, without her mind, was probably already dead, back in a library pod. Walter would discover it, and she felt bad for him. This man who had been nothing but kind to her, but whom she had dutifully held at arm’s length, like she had everyone else in her life. She did it to protect them and perhaps herself, but there was still a meanness to it that she regretted.
Gina. Please help me. To Echo’s mind that came out as a whimper. She was unashamed of the fact. She missed her friend. Back at home, all she’d wanted was to be left alone with her thoughts, and she had cruelly been granted her wish.
She fell into a fit then. Curses for her parents, the self-indulgent tech elite who’d put her here, herself and nearly anyone else she’d ever found herself on opposite sides of the fence with. By the end, her thoughts and words were a gibbering, blubbering mess. A prelude to madness.
