Big Bang (Chapter 4)

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The next day of work was mostly a blur. Calls came and went; customers were helped, problems were solved, and reports were filed. Thomas managed to help solve one rather complex issue revolving the diagnosis and repair of a man’s kidney.  He later assisted a team of cybernetics developers in Cuernavaca with the installation of an upgrade to their communications relay.

Beyond those few satisfying moments of his work, the only other aspect of note was the observation that his thoughts were mostly not on the customers. His handle time was .3% over his usual times; though this still kept him 5.2% below target, he was clearly not in his peak efficiency. The reason was no mystery to him, however.

When his shift ended, it took him by surprise. He stared blankly at the screen for several moments, wondering how he had not even noticed the hours had sped by. Typically, he was fully aware of time’s passage, but he simply had not been paying attention. That alone should have been cause for concern.

He disconnected from his terminal after scanning the day’s results, barely even caring about the relatively insignificant payment against his manufacturing debt. He founds his processor turning almost instantly back to the thoughts of meeting with the musicians. And, along with them, wondering if he would ever see Diana again.

As he passed the wall of his cubicle, he turned to address Simon, but saw that another Automaton was seated there. It was a different make and model, this one of a roughly feminine designation – one of the Mallory 12s, usually set up as secretaries or personal assistants. Not much of a stretch to see one here. She was plugged into the terminal, downloading training manuals and process schematics. Noting his approach, she looked up at him.

“Hello,” she said politely. “I am Leslie 360, a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I believe we shall be working together.”

Although cubicle sharing was common practice – another Automaton would be along in the next fifteen minutes to use Thomas’ cube – something about the timing of her arrival troubled him. “Today is your first day?”

She nodded, lowering her voice. “I recognize it is in poor form to speak ill of the recently leisured, but I was informed that this position was only made available last night. I was on the waiting list, and here I am. I am told this is a very exciting opportunity.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you as well, Leslie 360,” Thomas said, introducing himself as well. “Pardon me, but do you mean to say that Simon – the Auton who normally works in this station – is no longer employed?”

Leaning forward conspiratorially, Leslie indicated that he was not. “I was informed that he had an abysmal customer review last night – his third infraction. The management had no choice but to relieve him.”

My customer review, Thomas thought. That should have been my review, not his.  He reminded himself that had Simon completed the call himself, the call might well have had no better outcome than it had had with Thomas. Additionally, Simon’s desperate request for Thomas to take the call stood in flagrant violation of the code of conduct.

As did your concession to take the call, his thoughts pointed out.

 “It is unfortunate,” Thomas said aloud. “But perhaps Simon was simply not meant for technical support.”

“I agree,” Leslie said. “But perhaps he will benefit from the reprogramming.”

“Reprogramming?”

She nodded. “I heard that he was sent back to his manufacturer in order to address a defective operating system. I was informed that a baseline reinstallation is covered by our insurance policy. Is that true?”

It was; he told her so.

An alert popped up on her screen indicating that the terminal recognized that she had not been paying attention to the downloading process for greater than ten seconds. She excused herself and Thomas wished her a good night and left the building, his thoughts heavy.

Simon was gone; sent back for reformatting. “Erased” was the casual and yet terrifying name the Automata had for this procedure. It was not that he knew the auton well, but it was the reality that such things were performed as a result of extremely poor performance. What if Thomas’ statistics continued to worsen? What if he could not get back his work ethic? He could be erased as well.

Erased. The word suddenly had new meaning to him beyond a mere intangible. He was coming to realize that something unique was happening to him. He was not defective; he was not broken. Or perhaps he was, but in a remarkable and potentially wonderful way. He appeared to be, in lack of a better term, becoming…human. Human-like, at any rate. His thought processes were changing; his logic parameters were moving from the established pathways into something less logical and rational, and more… emotional.

Logically, such a thing was impossible, however. The Automata were essentially programs – complex and profoundly detailed programs, but their thoughts were merely lines and lines of code, formulated by a procedural set of ethical guidelines that could not be escaped. Software inside of hardware, nothing more, or so they were assured. Entire legions of legal representatives from various Corporate teams had spent years testifying on behalf of their creators.

He could not have “feelings.” He was a program, nothing more.

And yet…

A warning klaxon startled him, causing him to step back up onto the street as a car sped past. The passenger of the car looked nearly as surprised as Thomas felt. There had been little risk of collision, as the vehicles’ defensive operations would have taken over to steer or brake around the unanticipated obstacle, but all the same, Thomas silently scolded himself for his distraction.

He did his best to continue on with the flow of pedestrian traffic for the remainder of his walk down Pike Street as his mind swirled inside his systems. The downtown here had been spared most of the damage from the war; that had been remanded to the outlying suburbs, much of which had apparently been crushed under the firebombs that had scorched so much of the populace. The historical notes of the time during the war said that the fires around Seattle had raged for months, the smoke from which had all but blotted out the sun for an entire summer. The winter after had been an especially brutal one, with grey snows covering the Cascade mountain range and poisoning the water supply.

The buildings here now had been mostly repurposed; some remained as restaurants, many were still consumer outlets for the many manufacturers AmaSoft governed. But the history of Seattle could still be seen in the grey structures and concrete sidewalks, overlooking the waters that flowed in from the Pacific Ocean.

What had changed had been thanks to the technological differences that had evolved out of the ashes of the last war. Clean cars running on electricity, which was in turn powered by the solar, water and wind farms that lined the shores and islands of the Puget Sound, and the magnetic lines that ran for the hundred plus blocks of the downtown area; the telecommunications infrastructure and citywide wireless transmissions that drew the city’s populace together.

When Thomas came to the next intersection, he paused. He rarely looked up past the sea of metal heads that filled the visual horizon, all part of keeping the pedestrian traffic flowing evenly. As he paused, the other Automatons moved around him, creating a slight impediment to pace optimization. He received several pings from other Automata, querying him to see if he needed assistance – he set up an instant buffer response to bounce these offers back to their source with the reassurance that he did not need help. Instead, he looked up and took in the sight of the clouds moving past the tops of the skyscrapers, reflected against the panes of glass. Whites and blues, mingling with the grey midtones to contrast the stone and pocked texture of the buildings themselves.

In the back of his mind, an old Lou Reed song floated unbidden to his thoughts.

Oh, it’s such a perfect day…

Up in one of the windows of the building across the street, he saw a person standing, facing outwards. Thomas wondered what the person was thinking. What they were like, what their life was all about. Perhaps, Thomas mused, they were standing in their window, looking out or down, picking out a random face in the crowd and wondering what their life was like. This pattern could go on and in, with every individual in the city looking outside their own mind to wonder about the next person they were seeing, and so on and so on.

Thomas wondered if people thought like that. An unrequested response rose out of his subprocessing buffer: gaze shift. No, that wasn’t the right word. Was he being watched? Nothing so nefarious. The word “sonder” then appeared on the corner of his hub.

Sonder. Noun. Coined by John Koenig. The sense that other beings exist, complete with their own souls, desires, fears and experiences.

Around him, the other Automata moved past him, every third or fourth one pinging him for proactively ask to assist him. At last, these became enough of a distraction to him that he moved on, settling back into the comforting sense of being part of the flow and not standing against it.

Which was better – independence or submission? This question appeared in his HUD, a manifestation of the greater thoughts which swirled in his central processor. Standing in the center of the flow of traffic created more work for the rest of them; moving as one unified body, they could dedicate less overall processor power to negotiating the others. A form of “auto pilot”, as the old saying went. Like so many of the cars that filled the streets, which required little to no human operation save for the occasional verbal command. It required less effort if everyone simply relented and moved along with the others. But was it truly better?

In just over a minute, Thomas realized that he had experienced a personal insight about the core of humanity’s exploration of existentialism. He had lost himself for a few moments in attempting to comprehend the world as experienced by another. It was not simply researching data and acting upon the statistical analysis of a polling majority. He was exceeding his programming. He was in fact not following the majority, but standing up in the middle of the flow of several thousand Automata in the city; more than a million worldwide.

Perhaps it was a form of energy conservation which manifested as submission in humans and Automata alike, but clearly there remained the potential to exceed one’s programming, to oppose the code, to…evolve.

He realized suddenly that he had a substantial problem to address.

Each night, as he slept, his OS was scanned and analyzed by his personal computer, Oracle. This analysis was submitted each night to his point of manufacture, the central system of TeslaCom. He had kept this diagnostic data feed offline from his scan the previous two nights, but this would eventually be called to the system administrator’s attention. They would assume that Oracle had been damaged or was broken, or that he had somehow not been allowing his OS to be reviewed every night. At the least, there would be concerns raised as to his computer’s operational or communicational functionality; at worst, they would be concerned about him.

He would need to run a diagnostic review tonight, or there would be problems. A review which he would need to hide from his creators, clearly, but the omission would be necessary for him to understand what was transpiring inside his own mind.

It suddenly occurred to him that there might have been a logical soundness to the corporate decision to not allow Automata performing his job to ever perform technical support directly for another Automata. With the level of key information he was able to glean from automobiles, telecommunications devices and the like, having such access to system information about himself would be…very dangerous.

Another alert popped up on his HUD, indicating that he was about to deviate from the prescribed path. He realized that he was continuing to walk towards his home instead of turning south on First Avenue. Thomas cleared the alert. He moved across the flow of other nearby Automata and joined another wave of pedestrians as they moved along the sidewalk heading down the slope of the street.

It was here that the buildings began to evidence the newer construction that had renovated the city over the past twenty-five years. Though Seattle had lost hundreds of thousands of its population during the war, the immigrants that flocked to AmaSoft’s beacon of protection had flooded the city. New citizens meant more homes, and more food. But it had also meant more labor.

Those first few years were hard – they had been so busy rebuilding the city that little time had been left for art and the chronicling of the times they had lived through. Details of their time were scarce. Thomas had studied much of it, but he could only theorize as to the struggles they had endured. Famine, disease, not to mention the turmoil of social anarchy as they slowly evolved into the society they would much later become.

Each block from the center of the city outwards felt like the ring of a tree, whispering details of each decade following the Great War. It suggested the prevalence of which materials they possessed, what manner of craftsmen and technologies they had at their disposal, and what needs they experienced.

Some of the buildings bore the names of those who had died helping to erect them. Others had been named after families who had perished in the war or had helped fund their construction. Every building told a story.

Finally, he came to the address MöG had sent him.  It was a smaller building than the others he had passed on his way here – a simple two-story design on his left in front of a small cluster of trees that surrounded a frail iron structure. It seemed impossibly old, and yet the rust which gathered up its sides and the curvature of its narrow roof could not conceal the structure’s elegance. A few glass panels remained in the arching latticework, giving an idea of how the thing must have looked while still in its glory.

People were once capable of such simple beauty, Thomas thought to himself. They were capable of so many things.

S1D was waiting for him at the doorway, waving at him as he approached.

“There you are!”

He returned the wave. “I don’t believe I have ever been here,” he admitted.

“Not surprising,” she said, holding the door open for him. “Another three blocks south and you have the stadium ruins, the docks and then it’s just farmland until the barricade. Not much in this direction unless you work there. You live downtown?”

“Storage center Tudyk Blue, next to the water,” he said. “End of Pike.”

“Ah, I know the area. Always moving, there. So much noise pollution. I always wondered if everyone just turns their ears off at night.”

“Insulated charging chamber.”

She laughed. “That would work.”

The interior of the building resembled some odd combination of a bar and a chapel, with dark wine-colored walls adorned with old photos and paintings.

“What was this place?”

“Tourist building,” S1D replied. “They took people down into what Seattle used to look like, back before it got built over.”

“Before the war?”

“Before the before the war,” she answered cryptically. “Come on, I’ll tell you along the way. We play down there; it’s safer and nobody bothers us about the noise.”

As they walked, she told him about the history of the building, and about some of the lesser-known elements of the city’s history; about how poor planning, governmental corruption and difficult conditions had shaped the city’s development through both success and failure into the city they now saw around them. Thomas had heard references to Seattle’s underground city, but he hadn’t imagined it looked like this. Though dark and half-ruined, he could see another aspect to the city he had not even imagined. If the buildings outside were the rings of the tree, he found himself now at its roots.

“The streets were originally built several meters above the original streets, and the sidewalks were not added until much later,” she was saying. “People had to walk along the original sidewalks like they were trenches and climb ladders just to get to the street level. Then, as they built up the sidewalks, they had to make doorways on what had been the second floors of the buildings, leaving the original first floor as something of a second basement.”

“Seems like a strange way to build a city.”

S1D laughed softly. “I hear that Portland was even worse.”

“I wouldn’t know,” he replied. “There’s not much left, from what I’ve heard.”

She nodded. “Old coffee shops and a bookstore.”

“Powell’s?”

“Right up there with the Library of Alexandria, they say.”

 “Well, who knows? Maybe someday they’ll launch an expedition to excavate it.”

“You talking about Portland again?”

They had arrived in a larger room down beneath the one they had entered, but slightly further back from the street. Along the sides were a series of humanoid statues standing in various poses, their faces devoid of natural expression. Mannequins, Thomas realized. In the center of the room stood MöG and K, with several boxes arrayed around them. K was closest; it was she who had spoken.

“I can’t help it, I’m fascinated by natural disasters.”

“You’re a thanatophile, S1D.”

S1D shook her head. “If anything, I’m a taphophile.”

“That’s dark.”

“You started it.”

“Hello, Thomas,” MöG said, interrupting the women’s banter. “Did S1D give you the tour?”

“An abbreviated one, I suspect.”

“Very abbreviated,” S1D confirmed. “I could go on for hours…apparently.” She cast a frown towards MöG, which he ignored.

Thomas continued to look around them. “How far does the underground area go?”

“Quite a ways,” she answered. “A lot of the sections were blocked off when people purchased the buildings above them, but most of the doorways have since been broken through. All in all, you can go all the way north to just past where you live without even going topside.”

His HUB noted the receipt of a map she was sending him, which he filed away in his archives. “Good to know.”

 MöG was setting up a series of thin metal poles in a circle around the boxes, and S1D picked up four chairs and set them inside the circle. K opened a small box and placed electronic devices atop each of the poles. Thomas recognized these as simple high-definition cam-phones, each one capable of processing a broad depth of images and sounds.

“What are we doing, if I may ask?”

“Auditioning you,” K replied.

“Auditioning?” Thomas glanced around nervously. “For what?”

S1D looked at him as if he had just asked her what planet they lived on. “Did you not understand why we asked you here?”

“I… well, I might have not discerned the full context of the invitation, clearly.”

S1D sighed. “Clearly.”

MöG pointed at the larger boxes, and K and S1D began unpacking them as he walked over to Thomas.

“So here is the deal, Thomas,” he explained. “We have been discussing the idea of expanding our troupe for a few weeks now. K would like more opportunities to sing, and to be honest, she should. She is amazing and the audiences love her. But to do that, we need someone else to help out with the music, and not merely in a performance capacity. If we really wanted it, I could simply process the music synthetically and she could sing, and that would be it. But we have been missing a certain something, and until we met you we were not sure what that something was.”

“Me?”

“Exactly,” MöG said with a soft chuckle. “You have a sort of personality which would balance us well, and you have a very interesting approach towards understanding music that we have never seen before. Also, visually, you are silver and red, which would play off nicely against my black, K’s blue and S1D’s green color palettes. Lastly, you are very personable, which we do not usually see in musical Autons.”

“Shut up,” K and S1D said in unison.

“Like I said,” MöG amended. “So to see how well you work with us, we decided to include you on one of our remote performances—”

“Gigs,” S1D corrected him.

MöG shook his head slightly before continuing. “gigs we had scheduled for tonight. Just to see if you like us, if we like you, and our audience likes all of us together.”

Thomas did not quite know how to respond to that. “But… I don’t even know how to play anything?”

MöG half-turned, extending his hand in a sweeping half-circle to show all their instruments. All of S1D’s guitars were laid out, in addition to an electronic keyboard, various percussive devices and several electro-woodwinds and synth-brass instruments. Thomas knew most of them by name, but in the end his eyes fell back to the keyboard. Slowly, he raised his arm and pointed towards it.

“That would be the one, if I had to choose any of them.”

MöG patted him on the shoulder. “Well, you do, so I suppose it is.”

“But I still don’t…”

“S1D?” MöG said. “You’re up.”

The emerald auton moved quickly towards Thomas, a mischievous expression on her realistic features. “Where do you connect?”

“Where do I…?” This is the moment where a human would blush, Thomas realized. “Oh, yes, of course.” He held out his right index finger and pulled back the tip to reveal his input connection.

“You’d never believe where some models have them,” she said, fishing a cable from her belt. “We could do this wirelessly, but it’s a pretty large file, and I don’t think you want to miss any of it.”

She connected the cable into his fingertip and winked. “Don’t go getting any ideas, Thomas. This is just data.”

He opened his mouth to respond, but he was instantly struck by a flood of information that shocked him too much to speak. It was more than music theory; more than history. It was how every note was meant to feel, how every chord could be played. Every signature, every emotive association; they all poured through his processors like the crashing of the waves against the old piers below his home. The data attached itself to his store musical library, adding nuances of theory and emotive juxtaposition, connecting it all in some sort of grand web of thematic interconnectivity. All at once, his awareness of music ceased to merely be an assortment of files and categorical descriptions; it felt like a living thing, breathing and evolving from a primordial soup into a thing that imagined the heavens above it.

All his efforts to understand the relevance of music at last floated to the surface of his comprehension. This was the truth of music. This was what it all meant. This was the great and elusive why that he had been chasing for years. It was not merely information, it was the why and how and when of musical history. It was…context.

It felt to him, also, as if he were witnessing the dawn of creation from somewhere deep inside his own mind. Before, there had been nothing, only noise and darkness, without form. But now, there was light.

Now, there was.

“This is…. Good,” he said softly, dazed by the moment. “Very good.”