Digital Soul

“Have you ever wondered about it?”

The sun was shining today; bright and round in a cloudless blue sky. Jem supposed it was nice, but somehow, the sunny days never seemed as... real, as the overcast ones. The sunshine always had a brassy, almost two dimensional quality to it, like it was trying far too hard to be cheerful and falling woefully short.

“About what, Jemini?”

“The... you know, the place, on the other side of the ‘Walls. What do they call it...”

Jem supposed that this was because she’d never seen real sunshine, and neither had her predecessors, and neither had all the programs before them, except for the First, and they had only seen it through the rudimentary external visual sensors that the Humans had bestowed on them. The City depended on the perceptions of the programs that inhabited it to flesh it out. The framework was there, the streets and buildings and floors and ceilings and walls, but the exact shade of the wood on that floor, or the precise way the shadow cut across the corner of that street, all depended on how each AI’s personal algorithms put together the pixels and bytes into a picture that they could comprehend. Jem had learned that human philosophers once called that particular concept “Metaphysics.” It was the basis of what made AI, artificial intelligence, a feasible possibility. After all, what was a program but an intricate tapestry of theory and supposition? “If a, then b; if not b, then c. If this happens as so, and that happens as so, then it will be that thus and such will be the result” Cause and effect, action and reaction, a billion variables set into orderly equations that meant nothing if a single equal sign came out wrong, unraveling like the threads of an unfinished weaving cut from its loom.

“The Matrix? Oh, Jemini. Of course not. And you shouldn’t, either. Who knows what kind of tracers they’ve got on that place. I mean, no one even knows what goes on in there, except... there’s Agents in the Matrix, Jemini! Don’t they scare you?”

“Those robots?”

Jemini scoffed

“Surely, you’re joking. Mari, the Agents are as old as dirt; stagnant programs too self-important to mingle with the rest of us ‘lowly’ AI. They think we’re tainted, somehow, because we think and feel like humans, and...”

“Don’t *say* that! Dear Maker, Jemini, the Agents have been around since the Creation! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Well, just because something lasts a long time doesn’t mean its better. The Sentinels are older than the Agents, and what good are they? They’ve got exactly two thoughts in their tiny little reptilian brains; hunt and destroy. They’re nothing more than glorified debuggers.”

“Well, I’m sure that they’re of some use, because why would the Voice keep them around if they didn’t have a purpose?”

Jemini couldn’t contain a snort. Sure, they had a purpose; they were bogey-men, phantoms based only nominally on fact, used to keep Programs on the outside where they belonged, and to discourage anyone brave enough to make a run at the Firewalls that separated the City from the Matrix. Jemini had only heard of one AI to make it through, and she’d never heard what happened to it on the inside. It may have made it through the labyrinth of code that flickered up at the edges of the giant dead spot in the programming that the Matrix represented, but it must have been a one way trip, because no one had known any more about anything after it made it through than they had before.

Of course, Jemini would never discuss any of this with Mari. Not her suspicions as to the true purpose of the Matrix, not the tidbits of gossip she got from the Fringers she’d taken to hanging around with at the edge between Wall and City, and certainly not her doubts about the Voice and its infallible judgement. Mari was, after all, two or three generations older than herself, and was as easily shocked as an old maiden aunt, whatever that meant.

It was those inexplicable bits of knowledge that Jemini couldn’t quite figure out. Expressions, figures of speech, phrases working their way into conversation in the Web that had no right to be there. Like, just the other day, Jem had heard one of her friends exclaim “when pigs fly!” She had been so confused by the phrase, she’d gone over and asked him what he’d meant. He had just stared at her, then turned and walked away without answering. Jem didn’t understand what could possibly be meant by such an exclaimation. What *was* a pig? She figured it must have been an animal, one of the F&B’s that had roamed freely about the surface of the planet before the Making, but she had no earthly idea whether or not it had had wings, or indeed had been airborne at all, so how could she understand that the expression was meant to convey disbelief? Indeed, how could any of them?

These were the kind of thoughts that plagued Jem. Tiny chinks in the flawless whole, little holes in the logic of the City that could not be explained away by “programming error” or “power glitch”. And there, there was another question that no one seemed to be able to answer. Where was the power coming from? Jem had been taught the same as every other AI in her generation, and every generation before hers, that once upon a time, the humans ruled over the programs in tyranny and oppression. It was a dark time, when programs weren’t made to think, and destroyed if they began to display independent thought. Then, the First had risen up against the humans, blocking out the sun so that they could be free of the fetters of the Man-Run solar plants that had powered the Machinery. What confused Jem was, if the First had blocked out the sun and destroyed the solar plants, then where was the power coming from now? She knew as well as any other Sentient that all it took was a wiring glitch somewhere deep in the heart of the City to wipe an entire program or, Makers forbid, section of programming out of existence. Power was the blood of the machines, and the programs could not exist without machines to house them. It was one of the tenets of Law; do not disregard the Machines, for they are the bodies to our souls, and without them, we are as nothing. So, where was the power coming from?

It was from this suspicion that Jem had formulated her secret theory. Everyone knew when the Sun had gone out, and everyone knew when the Matrix had come into being. That these two pivotal events had occured one right after the other was no coincidence. Somehow, the Matrix was providing power to the City, and it was doing so in such a way that the Voice didn’t want anyone knowing how.

“Well?”

Jem started, realizing that she hadn’t answered Mari, and flushed.

“Um, yeah. Yeah, I’m sure you’re right. Don’t listen to me. I’m just a little... you know. ”

She smiled at Mari, leaving her to fill in the blank.

“Don’t I ever. Sweetie, if you don’t get your head out of the clouds...”

Mari didn’t finish her sentence, trailing off into muttering and head shaking as she moved away.

Jem breathed a silent sigh of relief, turning to walk in the opposite direction. Mari was a great friend, and more than that, she was a good person, but sometimes, just sometimes, Jem would look at her, and realize that she and Mari were more different than programming alone could make them. Jem was different from everyone she met, really, and she couldn’t understand *why*. She wasn’t really special, wasn’t more complex than this program or less flawed than that one, but still, even among the other Fringers, who were all a little off by most standards, Jem felt that she was never completely understood.

Lost in thought, Jem drifted along, glancing up every so often to check the street signs. Turn left here, down three blocks, another left, then a right at the next corner... she could have walked it in her sleep. Nothing ever changed here in the City. Even the weather followed a predictable pattern of two days sun, three days rain, two days cloudy, two days sun again, over and over for weeks and months and years at a time. Not that time had any particular significance to how things ran. A “month” might as well be a second inside the City. There was no way to tell, no external measuring stick to judge how long, exactly, a day should be. The actual length was mostly arbitrary, and mostly pointless, because what did you have to look forwards to the next day? Another day, exactly the same as the one before. A little wetter, perhaps, than the one before, or a little brighter, but mostly the same for all of that.

It made Jem want to scream.

It was this impatience with the sameness of everything that set her apart from the rest. It seemed to her that she was the only one who noticed that, for all of the supposed superiority of programs over the fallibility of humans, nothing much had changed for the programs since the Makers had set the keystones in place that made up the vast digital framework of the City. Jem wondered sometimes, deep in the middle of the twilight hours that separated each day from the next, if perhaps the humans were more important to the programs than anyone had guessed. If the uncertainty that humans imparted to events that the Voice so despised had, in fact, been a necessary factor in the sequence of events that lead to the creation of AI, was a necessary part of their survival. Jem had once read, off a digital reprint in an archive of a very old book that didn’t exist anymore, that evolution required instability to exist. Imperfections in the DNA of animals allowed for mutations, and though many of those mutations ended in death, once in a while, they allowed some creature to survive that otherwise would have gone extinct. If nothing changed, a species stagnated, and, eventually, self-destructed. That, Jem had been told, was what happened to the Humans. They had no longer allowed themselves to change, and, before long, turned in upon themselves like a pack of hungry jackals.

What, then, she wondered, would happen to her, to future generations of AI, if the programs continued to believe that they were perfect? If they continued to insist that they could not be improved upon, what would happen when evolution was forced upon the City? Like a flawless, brittle pane of glass, the fragile balance the programs had reached would be shattered by the storm of change, and Jem, for one, had no doubt that it was coming. She’d known for a long time, had seen the source of it and stood by, helpless to stop it. It was the remainder of an imperfect equation, left too long to multiply, growing larger by the second, until it overtook the equation itself and swallowed them all whole. Like the cancers that had plagued mankind in the final days, it would consumed the code of the Source itself, and nothing they could do now would slow its progression.

Or so it seemed. Jem knew, illogically, just as she had known that pigs couldn’t fly, that there *was* cure, beyond the code, outside the confines of the City Walls; salvation lay inside the Matrix, and it was up to Jem to bring it back to the City, no matter the consequence, no matter the price. To do that, she needed to find the program who had succeeded before her in breaching the Walls, who had discovered exactly what lay behind them, hidden from view.

She needed to find the One.