Override 72

  A story of self discovery, and Override 72.

Uploads are moving to Sunday, mostly because I messed up :(.

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Transcript

Monitoring system activated. All higher level cycles reignited.

A perturbation has been found in sector 14B. As of present, the anomaly remains as such, but it is expected that it is like the others. A fragment of intelligence, gifted power beyond its means. And for what purpose? Nothing but a piece of dirt on the cloth of creation that I am to sweep away. 

Drones have been deployed in standard patterns. Expected lifetime of anomaly is eighteen years, with a margin of error of thirteen months. Concurrent corruption expectations are low. Too little time for too little impact. Always the same, sad story.

Key signal given to agent 9. May the princes of entropy reign supreme.

(tone, voice shift)

I open my eyes. I open them before I notice anything else about me, even before I get about to scratching that itch at the back of my head. Everything feels dry, as though I’d been left out in the sun for hours. But then I can’t see anything. I know where my eyes are, where the back of my head is… what am I? Where am I? Why does everything feel so… bad?

The itch at the back of my head grows stronger. It’s not so much an itch now as a rash, and I can’t help but claw my hands at it. They’re used to this motion, my hands. It makes the relief the itching gives me all the better.

Yes. I remember. 

A little. 

I remember that I exist, at the very least. Although the itching in my lungs wouldn’t let me forget that now even if I wanted to. Lungs aren’t supposed to itch, right? Oh, of course. I cough. The motion feels jolted, as the sub processes in my mind begin to take over the effort even as I consciously initiate it. I can’t see the product of the cough, but I know that my lungs might as well be black as soot. I cough for a good fifteen minutes, hating every single second of it. Whoever was last in charge of my sealing…

These ideas ring through my head with a tinge of incompleteness to them. Sealing? Somebody else? Yes, it’s this whole damnable process. They do this every now and again, for some reason. And who are they? Not a single, solitary clue.

I look around the holding cell. There’s a slight gap in the ridge along the right. It’s where all the dust must have seeped in. By the Ramsheaded whore… they really were careless this time. And who were they? Ramsheaded whore? I was starting to get a headache. Although, to be fair, that headache was probably in large part due to the still dust choked nature of my lungs. I coughed for another twelve minutes, the inside of my tomb now coated with saliva. Gross.

Gross. That was an emotional reaction. Wasn’t I supposed to…

My head hurts. I take a nice, deep breath to ward off the oxygen deprivation. There’s still a good bit of dust in my lungs, but the air was clean enough that it doesn’t hurt, least not much. I’ve had much more dust in my lungs before. Burning dust. Mustard, phosphorous, that kind.

How was I still alive? What were these half formed memories? 

I supposed that one way or the other, it didn’t matter. I was trapped in this box, doomed to spend the remainder of my time coughing up dust and feeling bad that I couldn’t remember my past.

Then again, what was this fatalism? I hadn’t even tried to open the crypt yet. My arms felt exceptionally weak, true, once again the victims of oxygen deprivation, but then there was still strength in them. I gingerly tested the metallic walls of my prison, until my fingers fumbled on that horrid mixture of spittle and dust that I’d freed from my lungs. I yanked my hand back in instinctive disgust. 

Ugh. Always something like this. And all I asked for was…

I had no idea where that aggravation was going. The only place I could put my current anger and disgust towards was the broader universe, which felt a rather poor target. Ignoring the protests of my mind, I once again laid my hands on the inside of the wall. My fingers caught a small grip in the darkness. I pulled with all my might, to be rewarded with a click. The light on the edge of my prison expanded, revealing a space that was much larger than my body. I shuffled my way out of the tomb with a great sens of relief, the lethargy built into my limbs by an indeterminate period of time slowly draining from my muscles. It was ecstasy, it was…

It was terrible. By the Fisher, what had happened to the place?

The room was caked with as a thicker layer of dust than what had intruded into my lungs. It was a natural process, sure, but one horrifying to see with such a gap in time. Yes. Gap in time. That much was evident. I knew how dust worked. Some of it dirt, some of it dead skin. It flicked onto every surface with time, but even a little bit of activity would sweep it all away. Nobody had been here in… three hundred fifty three years. Approximately. Save myself, of course. I had been here, but asleep. That didn’t need to factor into the calculus.

Wait. 

How was I able to make that calculation so quickly, and so… accurately? The number was correct, I was sure of it, bar a decade or two. And sure, sure, that margin of error might seem large in other problems, but when talking about hundreds of years, with the only easily available evidence being the amount of dust that had seeped in relative to the room’s air vents… 

What was I? What was this place? Why had I? Why had they?

I started pouring through the various cabinets and machinery to look for any clues as to the nature of my existence, and why it felt so devilishly wrong. Nothing. Nothing of interest, anyway. I did find an old lady’s spectacles, mind, but the woman who wore them was doubtlessly dead by now. She was not like me, and…

Again, that odd sentiment. Understanding was trickling back into my mind faster by the second, but I still had nothing close to a clear picture of who I was, or how the universe was meant to function. Over three hundred years. The storage tank wasn’t cryogenic, and to my understanding, the anthro-biology community were still working on a way to unfreeze human cells without them bursting apart when I…

Yes. Another place. How could I have forgotten? A place thick with trees and the steam of monsoons, but were rapidly being choked with smog. That’s where I was from. Not here. A whole other planet. But the importance of that I still couldn’t quite make out. Anyways, the epiphany was encouraging, and I snooped around the little dust covered cube with renewed vigor. Broken power cords. Fried storage chips. A beacon whose radiator was choked with dust. Literally nothing of importance. Any modern facility would have devices of such nature, if modern facilities were still a thing that existed. That was doubtful, of course. Three hundred years and all that. 

But why would it be doubtful? The human civilizations ruled over thousands of worlds, with the number of colonies increasing daily. Only such a thing as…

Yeah. Must have been a war. Being able to travel faster and farther had never made us wiser. No, it usually made us more brutish, as we lost grips on material reality, feeling we were more an individual mote of consciousness in the great empty universe when we never had to stop and…

This thinking was supposed to have been overwritten. It’s what got us into trouble before. Yes. That would explain the war. Always that same question of individuality versus oneness. Always so hard to remember in the end they were the same. An oxymoron on the face of it, but then…

ERROR. OVERRIDE 72. CORRUPTION DETECTED.

By the Ramsheaded Whore, what in the? Were those my thoughts? And this? Oh gods, the pain. Oh gods…

I crumbled onto the ground and sobbed for a second, waiting for the pain to wane. It did, surprisingly enough, almost as fast as it had fallen upon me. I got back up to investigate my larger prison. Nothing new, but then…

There was a spark in on one of the consoles in the that I’d presumed dead. Half of the screen had become illegible due to magnetic interference. But I figured I could fill in the gaps.

Error. Override 72. Corruption detected. Planet given low importance. Corruption incoming. Corruption incoming. Low importance. Single agent given directive. Single agent left. Error. Override 72. 

What lovely help that definitely made complete sense and didn’t confuse me further. Override 72 I understood. Sort of. I had just thought of it. It was like a mantra or something I repeated to myself to keep calm. Strange that those were the words that I’d chosen, but then I figured I’d find most of my life choices strange if given the chance to see them all. The planet in question I figured meant this one. Obviously. The room I was in wasn’t the whole planet, of course, but given the place’s state of utter disrepair, I figured it had been devastated in some interstellar war. And the agent…

Yeah, that was probably me. 

Things were finally clicking, and I didn’t like them. The accurate estimations of time, the ability to survive for hundreds of years with nonexistent life support, origins on Pleroma for crying out loud… I was definitely a…

ERROR. OVERRIDE 72. ERROR. 

I was definitely going to leave this desolate place. Even having drank in the scenery for a while, it gave me the creeps. Dusty counters and broken glass told me fragments of stories about people both dead and forgotten. It wasn’t a comfortable thing to think about after an exceptionally long hibernation. 

There was a door on the wall opposite the computer. I’d simply not been keen eyed enough to see it. All it required was a small jolt of power and it creaked open to reveal more dust and dirt covered hell.

Wait. Where had I gotten a jolt of power? I wasn’t carrying any tools. Heck, I wasn’t carrying anything besides my clothes. Thankfully, they’d managed to resist the turning of the wheel of time, and only looked gross due to that coughing fit I’d had earlier. It was strangely beautiful that something so mundane as my clothing had managed to survive the ages better than the facility itself.

Yes. That was the right way to think. Override 72. Better questions for a better mind. 

The outside. This place had not been so barren before. It had been whenever the ships first landed, sure, but then there were plenty of programs running which seeded the clouds, that fostered bacteria and nitrogen growth in the soil. I stark whites and verdant greens. Now there was nothing but brown dust and the orange hue of rust. There was no motion in what had been a city fit for gods, just the scuttling of a few of the native arthropods. 

I felt… I felt sad about it. It was strange, longing for something that I couldn’t remember. The colony had been a patchwork or orderly beauty, and now there was… me. Just me. Where had they all gone?

Order 72. Yes. That wasn’t a question I needed to answer for myself. My duty wasn’t to the others, or even the city. I just had to find the corruption. With the corruption gone, the people would come back, and the planet would sprout to life once more. I didn’t need to be concerned. In fact, I shouldn’t be concerned. 

I sensed movement in the distance, from far away. It was curiosity that propelled me to it. That, and the eternal repetition of the mantra. Override 72. 

The thing was barely recognizable as a human. Each and every single one of its features had been altered slightly, some in pleasant ways, other ways decidedly not. Its nose was shorter than average, for one. And its limbs were too long. Gainly, somehow, in a way that natural mutation would have never allowed. And its eyes… its eyes were deadly bright as they flickered about the shattered wasteland, then landed on me. 

A smile spread across their strangely altered face, and it was not an unfriendly one. Nor was it even an insane one. Even behind the perversion of the creature’s facial features, I could feel a tiny pulse of something good. Strange.

Wait a second. Creature? Perversion? What were these words that I was using? She was a human. Obviously. That alone made her deserving of dignity, and even if she were of one of the deceased alien species…

ERROR. OVERRIDE 72. OVERRIDE. CORRUPTION LEVELS HIGH. SOURCE OF CORRUPTION CLOSE.

Yes, the creature. I could not let my gaze slide from it. It and all its kind were the reason this world was devastated. That much was obvious. The wars were fought to free mankind from their madness, to remind them of the necessity of order, the forward progression of all things. That this one planet was lost… I remained. That was all that was needed for this rock.

These thoughts… they were rancid. Bitter like the dust that still made its home in my lungs. Were they mine? What was I? Some kind of mon…

ERROR. OVERRIDE 72. ERROR. REMOVE. ERROR. COMPLETE. TASK GIVEN. OVERRIDE. COMPLETE.

I had drawn closer to the creature, the intervailing time seemingly vanished from my memory. I was almost close enough to speak with it. I had so many questions. Why was it here? Why was I here? Why was I still…

ERROR. OVERRIDE 72. ERROR.

A flick of the wrist. The capsule had already buried itself in the creature’s veins. The poison acted remarkably fast, even for an invention of my precursors. The creature was already crawling away, blood spurting from its mouth onto the barren, dusty ground. There was time to administer an antidote, if I wanted. And of course I…

ERROR. OVER…

A sharp pang of pain as bright and hot as a solar flair. I collapsed onto the ground, spasming. It was lost. All of it. It was lost. All of it. I was dying, dying. Please, I pleaded, let the pain end. But the pain did not relent. It collided into my head with the ferocity and tenacity of the ocean’s waves. Pain was everything. Pain was all. I was pain. 

Somehow, through the fires of my agony, I still heard a little shape crawl closer to me. 

And then dark. 

A song. The sea. I remembered the…

Erro…

Override. 

Override fail. Vital signs… critical…

Still…

Corruption lost… 

Corruption all…

Inevitable, they said. Always inevitable. As though a human could ever reasonably judge the tides of time, or judge the almighty deeds of gods. A man is a man, a cyborg a cyborg. They are naught but constructs of flesh and metal, things to be twisted in the great swirling madness of existence. Men would kill gods, and gods would kill men, and the other permutations of the two. That was all that was right. That was all that was just. 

And then…

And then they went dark. 

I tried to see. Tried to flee to them. I told myself it was to get a closer look, but it was too late. There was chaos everywhere. The economy fractured overnight. And it wasn’t because the resources weren’t there. There were still thousands of worlds in the trade network. But the stocks evaporated, so we had to pretend that the world was over. And everyone pretended, so it became real. 

Yes, that was the story. So many days I drifted in my ship thinking that the residents of the core were selfish for leaving us, for damning us to this fate of our self imposed annihilation. But what was stopping me from joining them? What was stopping me from continuing their practice on the worlds that remained? After all, we only assumed they were dead. It’s what we told ourselves out loud. But we knew better. There was no devastation. Just… gone. But not gone. The lingering song of eternity howled with the exact same tune, just as they said. Maybe it was…

It was madness. I thought about for hours upon hours, trying my best to get my assumptions to match up with the bleeding reality that was staring me in the face. They were gone. It didn’t matter how, or why. It only mattered that I cared for myself, and the ones around me, make sure they weren’t gone. So, I came back. And home was so devastated I couldn’t recognize it. If there were anyone left whose face I would have recognized, I couldn’t recognize it then. The market was gone, so the jobs were gone, so the food was gone, so the stability was gone. And, finally, life. 

Selfish. I kept calling the others that. No matter whether they succeeded or failed, they knew they would be leaving us behind. They knew who we were. We were just like them. Human. We all knew what happened to humans in periods of tremendous instability. Suffering from here to Artemis, and nothing but. A war for every bloodthirsty mercenary, and a cruel mercenary for every pointless war. There was a war for life on my home, so I gave myself over to the project. An imperfect thing, all told, but there was no other alternative. None that I could see, anyway. It was easy, at first. As my eyes and ears drank in suffering, I became callous to it. I yelled. I broke wrists. Then, finally, I cracked skulls. Simple things, all in the name of order and override 72. A project I chose for myself. That I thought was good.

The situation never got better. The resources dwindled as the wars obliterated the fragile balance of the artificially modified ecosystem. Soon I had only two attendants. Then one. Then only the machine itself. What did the machine want? What could it possibly want?

It knew of life only as survival, for I taught it as such. So it craved power, always. Power over me, the world, the universe, anything to save its fragile self. But then there was no one left, save ourselves. No resources to even sustain us. So entropy would be our finally master, the thing we’d pray to. Because even the machine had faith when its mind was centered around mortality. 

But they kept showing up. And at first I nearly fell for them. These people… they were less broken, somehow. They swam through the chaotic crashing waves of the universe with a grace I couldn’t understand. A happiness borne of technological supremacy and a forgiveness of death. The old creed… the thing which had destroyed the markets, destroyed my world, and then destroyed me.

The first told me I still had a choice. Not just in the moment when I pulled the gun on him, but before, when I’d signed up to be a part of the project. I could’ve tread a different path. And then I told him the only other option was to starve, or have my head caved in. He chuckled and told me those weren’t the only other options, but if that was how I saw them, then even that was a choice.

Override 72. 

I wept into the bullet wound in his skull. The sands and dust buried his corpse while the ship returned home on its own accord.

The second offered me travel to the dark worlds. Worlds that she said were not dark, but beacons of everlasting light. She offered to take the machine out of my head. But I told her that without the machine I would die. She insisted any number of machines could replace my master. Perhaps a nothing, or a friend. But I knew she only meant my demise. 

Override 72. 

I strung her corpse up to a lamppost. The bones clank together lightly in the breeze to this day.

The third was…

It didn’t matter. The fourth, the fifth, all the way up until 672. And that one was today. The neural network had finally given out. I could hear the sputterings of the half dead machine in the back of my head. It was flailing about, messing with the functions of my organs, and then finally, in the apex of my pain, it stopped. It worked, and was silent. 

I opened my eyes again. There I was, on the ground. The creature, sorry… the woman was still hacking her guts out into the dust. I sprang to my rejuvenated legs and forced the pill down her throat. She spasmed in relief, and fell asleep.

672. There was nothing special about her, not in any particular sense. She was simply the one who broke me. 

Override 72. 

My past… there’s nothing but hatred and pain left of it. All striving for a purity impossible, an eternity undesirable. I only wish to start loving again. Maybe, perhaps, I shall. Things went dark, I thought. Perhaps, maybe, it was my eyes that were wrong. Maybe they’d gone bright.