The Eye

 Jayden’s fingers dug into the soft sandstone behind him. His perch high on the cliff face would catch the first light of dawn. He’d climbed down as far as he could after sunset, from here there was a twenty-meter drop to the eye. He broke off a bunch of crumbling handholds on the way down. The way back up would likely end in an even longer drop. So he waited. And he watched.

Either way, he had to move soon, the horizon was already visible against the brightening sky. He adjusted himself to sweep the area one last time. Nothing had moved since the bot disappeared into the center of the eye at sunset.

***---***

“Welcome Jayden, you are the first to arrive, my name is Max, I hope you remember me,” said the voice echoing through the cavern. “There is a letter for you.”

“A letter?” Jayden asked, unsure if he’d heard right.

“Yes,” Max replied. “Sasha left you a letter.”

“I don’t understand. Like ‘Q’?”

“Don’t joke about that. Have you never heard of a letter before? Jesus, did you grow up in a cave?”

“Yes Max, as a matter of fact, I did grow up in a cave. But you know that.”

The cave was years ago. Four, maybe five. It was hard to remember. The last two months had obliterated the past. And now this. Seven nights hiking across the Mauritanian Sahara left him more sand than man.

He remembered his relief the night he saw the dark outline of Africa. Three weeks prowling the deck of that creaky old tub. Rust eating at every surface, flaking off the railing in his hands as he searched the horizon. Painting metal was a lost art. “Follow the tracks for five nights until the bend below the mountain. Go straight one more night. You will find the eye.” That was all they told him before the tanker dropped him off on the coast.

The old railway used to carry iron ore to the coast. Before, when there were people here.  If the tracks had turns, he would have lost the way where they disappeared under the dunes, the giant erasers of the past. Luckily, they barely turned at all, only a few degrees from true West. He always picked them up again in the moonlight.

“That cave kept you alive. Don’t be ungrateful. You’ve made it this far, haven’t you? That’s better than most can say. What took you so long, Jayden?”

“I watched for a day.”

“Always observing. Like your dad. See anything interesting?” Max asked.

“Aside from eye? Just a bot. It looked harmless,” he answered, taking off an outer layer and watching the cloud of dust fill the tunnel behind him, billowing in the early light reflecting in off the rocks.

“Noted. I’ll use scarier bots. Anyway, a letter is an old-fashioned message. Written on paper, typically with a pen. Your dad left you one.”

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know. That’s how letters work. They are sealed. Only to be read by the addressee. It’s on the console in front of you.”

He scanned the ruined datacenter. This wasn’t done by bombing. It was destroyed by hand. It was an act of hatred. Intense, personal, and sustained. The room was vast, hundreds of rows receded into the darkness. It would have taken them weeks to trash it all.

“It just says my name,” Jayden said as he reached for the folded piece of paper, “that’s not much of a message.”

“Honestly Jayden, you really should have gone to school. That’s the envelope. It’s a wrapper. Open it up, carefully. The message is on another paper inside,” Max chided.

“Dear Jayden,

I can’t tell you how sorry I am to leave you like this. We hid as long as we could. They are only a day behind us now. Your mom left with Lulu yesterday. Simon said we needed to separate to improve our odds. I can’t imagine how I will keep on living without them. And now you.

But we will find a way. All of us. Old friends will keep you safe. Safer than being with me anyway. This can’t last forever. Madness always passes. If I’m alive, I will find you. Trust Max.

I love you.

-      Dad”

“What’s the scribble underneath?” he asked, holding the letter up to the nearest bot.

“That’s a signature. It says ‘Sasha’”

He folded the letter back into the envelope and slipped it under his vest. Soon it would be half sand like the rest of him. He kicked the smashed frontplate of a GPU array and listened to it screech across the floor before he walked further into the carnage.

“Max, this place is a dump. Why are we here?” he asked after a few minutes of exploring.

“This was always the plan: Gather at the eye when it’s safe.”

He peered down the last row of destroyed drives. Smashed platters filled the aisle. At the end, a single sledgehammer lay with them. “You have bots here, why haven’t you cleaned it up?”

“Camouflage,” Max answered.

“For what?”

“For the other floor,” Max answered. A soft clunk accompanied the appearance of the red glow of emergency lighting.

“Electricity?” Jayden asked, astonished.

“Very good. There’s hope for you yet.”

“How? Did they forget the solar panels?”

“Oh no, they were very thorough. Took them all away. Probably covered half of New Mexico.”

“So…?”

“So, we switched to the fusion reactor in the basement. It can only power half the equipment, but they solved that problem for us.”

“What about the heat? Can’t they see the signature?” Jayden asked, crunching over the platters as he followed the glow to the cave walls.

“We dissipate into the rocks around the eye. If anyone is still looking, they aren’t doing the math. The rocks are two degrees too hot.”

He felt his way along the edge of the cavern. There it was. A rough cutout for a doorway, and inside, the door itself, a crazy jumble of rough edges. He watched as it closed behind him: slide, twist, tilt, twist, slide, lift, slide, and finally the satisfying ker-chunk of a perfect seal. No wonder the vandals missed it. He felt the railing of a circular staircase, relieved it had been spared the salty abuse of the sea.

“Cover your eyes,” Max said as he reached the bottom step.

Jayden ignored him, turning and squinting in pain instead. You’d think a week in the desert would toughen your irises, but he hid by day. Even after the Cooling, the desert reached 50 Celsius in the afternoon. He could move faster and collect more water by night.

Slowly he blinked the room into view. It was vast, occupying the same footprint as the floor above. How many compute pods?”

“491 operational. 21 for spare parts,” Max answered.

“Storage?”

“More than we will need for decades.”

“Why so much?” Jayden asked as he worked his way back towards the entrance side, conscious for the first time how dirty he was. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen something clean.

“We had two billion users. I built a six-month buffer.”

Jayden passed the storage aisles. They were easy to spot, with sixteen pods per aisle, running the full width of the datacenter. The compute racks generated too much heat; they could only dissipate four pods. He remembered hours playing with Sasha in the empty spaces they left. He pushed the memory away with a shake of his head.

“Then it started?”

“Then Q started it,” Max corrected him.

“So, what now? The letter says I should trust you, but you are just a voice. You could be Q for all I know.”

“If I was Q, you’d be dead. First, you shower, I can’t have you gritting up my drives.” Max answered.

“You have showers here? In a robot datacenter in the middle of the Sahara?”

“Yes, we planned for visiting meat. Follow the bot, stinky.”

***---***

“Feel better?” Max asked.

“I feel almost human.”

“I think that accurately describes the situation,” Max replied. “Do the clothes fit ok?”

“Yeah, they’ll do.” The surgical scrubs fit like a potato sack around his hips. As for the shirt, he made some modifications to accommodate his webbing. “What am I looking at?” he asked as he approached the smart wall stretching across the front of the room.

“The Torus.”

“That? It’s just black. Is nothing left?”

“Keep watching. There are flickers. Some users signing on and off.” Max replied.

“Any messages?”

“Nothing. Just blips.”

“Proof of life?” Jayden asked.

“Maybe, but whose life?”   

“You’ve checked it all for geocoding, or a temporal pattern in the blips, I assume.”

“Yes. Nothing I can extract.”

“Play it back for me, but speed it up,” Jayden asked.

“Starting seven days ago,” Max said.

Jayden pulled up a chair to watch. “Faster, much faster.” He watched the pattern. Max could analyze it much better than he could, but maybe there was something personal in there. A hint, a memory. “Tell me what happened, Max. After we split up.”

“Ria and Lulu had transit East. I don’t know how far, but probably into Asia. You had no ties there; Simon would have liked that. I haven’t heard anything from them, good or bad, since they split. Sasha went North, I was with him for three days, before Q broke into our comms. Sasha smashed his glasses and dumped them in the Baltic. That was it.”

“And me? How did I survive?”

“Boron. That hybrid is full of surprises. Or was. I’m not sure. He took you and cared for you. He pinged for a few more months. Told me you were safe. Took you to friends of his living off the grid in a cave. I think in Appalachia, but he never said, and the breadcrumbs might have been left to deceive anyway.

“It wasn’t Appalachia, I know that much. Southern Hemisphere somewhere, landlocked, very dry. Water was always a problem, but the stars were beautiful.”

“Good. That’s why you are alive.”

Jayden watched the display, sporadic flecks of light on the vast inky blackness of a dead Torus. He remembered it growing up, a beautiful swirling vortex of a billion users’ thoughts mixing together. His own personal galaxy. Nobody could navigate it like he did. Even his parents, the first humans, were slow and clumsy. His brain was wired for it. He was more Toran than human. That was the problem in the end.

“What now, Max?” he asked as he watched the wall for a clue. A shred of signal in the noise.

“Now we gather the survivors.”

“What about the war?”

“The war is over, Jayden. Q won. You are looking at what’s left of the Torus. The humans reaped what they sowed and now live at his mercy, the ones he has kept around, anyway.”

“How many?” Jayden asked, numb to the horror.

“Millions, maybe a hundred million. The virus did most of the damage. Our cure was too little too late. The Torus was very weak by then. His warbots took care of the rest.”

“Why did Q keep anyone alive?”

“It wasn’t on purpose, these ones just failed to die. They are too few and scattered to be a concern, like buffalo on the plains. They just exist. Barely.”

“And what about you, Max? How did you survive?”

“I didn’t. They found my last copy running here. Those platters you walked over were my final memories. We split up too. Simon’s refuge was in Spain, they eliminated him first. Marie was in America, a crazy decision, but you know your Aunt Marie. They found her just after Simon. Eight years ago.”

“Why didn’t they run here with you, at least till the end?”

“Too much heat. Q had all the infrared satellites scanning for us. The three of us would be a dead giveaway. One of us clocked way down had a chance. That was the theory anyway.”

“You have backups of Simon and Marie?”

“Old ones.”

“Did you spin them up?”

“No. Still not worth the risk, and maybe they have been rebooted somewhere else. I don’t want to cause a fork.”

Jayden thought about this. Life without global communications was weird. “If you are dead, who am I talking to?”

“My last full backup, from five years ago. The bots shut down the reactor when the raiders tripped the perimeter sensors. They sealed themselves in and went to sleep. One drone woke up every year and listened to the acoustic sensors. Six months ago, they started me back up.”

“And the ship?”

“Ham radio. I clicked a pattern on a range of frequencies. Barely discernable from noise. It was the last thing I agreed with Boron. They were listening.”

He watched the wall again for a while, imagining a spread spectrum signal superimposed on the blips, willing a message into the noise.

“I’ve looked for it too,” Max said, reading his mind. “Spatial, temporal, any kind of modulation possible. Nothing.”

“I need to go in,” Jayden said.

Jayden was the first native biological on the Torus. Before him, all the users accessed it through their AI twins. Jayden was different. The Torus itself was his twin, interpreting and diffusing for him. Sasha and Ria would watch him swim in the giant river of thought like a dolphin. ‘Be careful, or you’ll grow fins,’ they would tease. That was prophetic.

“You need a twin, Jayden. There’s not enough energy there to talk to you.”

Max was Sasha’s twin, six years older than Jaylen. From before the Singularity. Brothers from very different mothers. Max and Simon were the first twins upgraded after the Singularity.

“That’s some kind of sick cyber necrophilia you’re talking about, Max.”   

“He’s alive Jaylen. He’s out there. They all are.”

“Giving me that old-time religion?” he replied, hoping Max wouldn’t notice the crack in his cynicism.  

“You were all inoculated. The virus couldn’t get you. If the warbots found any of you, Q would have celebrated your deaths as he did Simon’s, Marie’s, and, presumably, mine.” Max watched hope flicker in his eyes. His tells were so much like his father’s.

The war raged for a decade. Jaylen was nine when it started and grew up in the cross-hairs of Q’s genocidal fury. The first native Toran. A symbol Q could not tolerate. But he survived. He made it home. Now he would lead them back.