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0x9649···4A13THIS IS A WAR - Diary Entry 2 - The Schoolboy “I’m scared,” I say, looking up at my father with swollen eyes, full of tears. “We all are, Richard.” He looks down at me, holds my hand a little tighter, forces out a smile, his eyes welling also. “Violence begets us, but there are other ways.” I nod, but only half know his meaning. It comes to me in dreams. A vision of anger, in him, the devil’s touch, through him, and into me. A phenomenon I know is there, that I have inherited, but also, the learned response, to move beyond it. To use it, instead, for creation. My head moves away from his gaze upon me and towards the door in front of us and its light. White clouds of steam escape my mouth regularly, illuminated by the light from the passageway we have arrived at. It’s cold, and we have been waiting for a long time. We have travelled far, and the concrete room that holds us now has offered no comfort for the time we’ve had to spend in it. “What if they’re not there…?” I say in my little voice. “They will come,” he tells me as he moves his hand from mine and places it on my shoulder, with a small but firm grip. I am just over waist height to him. He has watched me grow and become this small yet competent human being. There has been argument, quarrel and hurt, but I have come so far, and now I understand why it happened. To shape my worldview, to mould my personal labour. The repetition there, to ensure that I can move forward, into the struggle the world presents us with. And how to pull from this world. To find meaning between the lines, in the corners and at the edges, so we can continue to grow, to create. “What do you think they will teach us?” I say, holding an arm out as if to grab at the light emanating from the door. “Everything we could ever need to know,” he says, looking down at me, the reflection of himself, as I look back up at him, and wonder at the idea of becoming as he is now. A good human, a father, a man of creation. “How did they come to know so much?” I say as I turn my gaze back to the door and the tears in my eyes continue to well, the cold of the room biting at the soft skin of my young cheeks. “That is their privilege,” he says, but I understand what his voice also carries. The doubt, the idea, they may not be there at all. Behind this hallowed entrance to which we have striven for so long to reach. If they can show us anything at all. It is a world he has chased all his life. I now realise this more and more. As he has taught me, and he has shown me what he has had to give up, let die, so that he could allow me to grow. Destruction, as well as creation, is one of nature’s mandates. So now we are here. The boy and his father. Before this gate beyond which holds a presence, we cannot know. More an idea than a presence. Something beyond the veil. If you have found the idea of this place, if you believe it exists, there is then no way to turn back. The chase is eternal until you can find it, and with it, find peace. It is to find out not only the truth of the world but the truth of yourself. “I know they are real,” I say. “I’ve seen them in my dreams, the same way I see you. It is why I trust you.” I look back up at him, my eyes still swollen with tears. “And now you have brought me here, and we will see them, feel them, and understand.” “You cannot destroy an idea,” he says with an edge of finality. “Once an idea has taken hold, there is no turning away from it.” “I know it,” I say. “Let us try now.” He nods, solemn, and I know him, and all he has taught me, and what must happen next. We step towards the door, towards understanding, towards that idea that has infected us both. All I can hope is that there is the cure for this idea behind that veil. Anything else is unthinkable. Richard Galbraith
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0x9649···4A13HOPE IS A PRISON - Diary Entry 2 - Fragility and Fury Her shakes begin. The calls and the cries follow. She is in my lap, and she shivers. I stroke the hair from her sweat-laden brow as she brings her arms up into her chest and weeps. The time has come. The point at which we must embrace the violence, and there is a heritage here. Passed from her to me, and from me to her. Both of us hurting one another. Her sweat seeps from her naked body as I watch and comfort her. She is in pain, and therefore, so am I. The empathy protocol is active and the lines of code bring me her pain, as the withdrawals pulse through her fragile body. She claws at herself with brittle fingernails, scraping at the lesions on her thin skin. She looks up at me. Her eyes open wide now and a wildfire of angry fear leaps from her as she screams and struggles with me. This is our routine after she has slept. Violence, anger and fear. It lasts for a few minutes until her sense of self comes back. After she attempts to override the addiction with whatever is left of her old mind. She struggles and I hold her down in my lap, my hands across her naked torso. The sensors in my hands pick up on the activity and my heads-up display flashes with red for every readout. It pulls and gnaws at what might be called my mind. My sense of self-being hammered by the negative-feedback-loops of the protocol. I hurt for her, for myself. “Eve,” I say as her struggle becomes weaker and then stops. She looks up at me, her eyes levelling out, the look on her face crawling away from anger and into sadness. “Arti, I’m sorry,” she says. “You don’t need to be. I am here for you.” “I’m…thirsty.” I shift her off me and help her sit up against the nearest wall before I move off to the small kitchenette area and pour her a glass of water. As I turn and walk back, I witness her sitting there. She is still, arms draped by her sides, legs out in front of her, half covered by the big, old t-shirt she has lifted from the pile on the floor and put over herself. The t-shirt is ripped and hosts flecks of blood from where she has picked at her skin. “Thank you, Arti,” she whispers as I come to her and hold the glass to her mouth, and she sips. I know this won’t last long, the figment of her previous self that somehow pulls its way through in these first moments after resting. The moments that give me hope. “How do you feel?” I say to acknowledge her. I already know through my sensor readings what is happening to her, but the affection, it helps her and therefore it helps me. “I think I can manage today,” she says as she shifts. “Can you help me clean?” I pick up her delicate frame with ease and carry her over to the small shower room. I try to keep things as sanitary as possible, but any money goes straight to the drug. Our great curse. The TOX. I clean her, pad her under a soft jet of lukewarm water with a small piece of sponge. She thanks me with a fractured voice. I move her back into the living area as I place her on the broken couch and step to the side to monitor her. The TV screen embedded in the wall opposite fizzes and comes to life as she jabs at the cracked tablet beside her. Cartoons come on. She lies there, breathing. Perhaps, today won’t be so bad. Then a message comes through, blinking on the tablet’s screen. She opens it, and the text on the screen reads: Eve, Your father had a great auction, and we thought you deserved a treat for doing well with your rehabilitation. We’ve transferred some money to you. All our love Mom and Pop This is bad. I turn to her, and her eyes have gone wide as she takes the tablet onto her lap and prods at it. She brings up her bank account details to check how much her parents have transferred. We have kept this from them, all this, the terrible decline. This is how fast it has happened. This is how quickly the drug has ravaged her body, for which I am also to blame. “Arti,” she says, a quiver in voice, her heart rate reaching dangerous levels. “Eve, please try to remain calm. Your heart is fragile.” I take a step toward her. “Arti, look at me,” she says with that fire in her eyes, but it is not her igniting it. It is the addiction. And I know what is next. The repetition, over and over again. “You need to score for me. You need to do this,” a faint ripple of anger in her closing words. “I cannot, Eve.” I step closer to her. “I cannot do it anymore. You are too weak. Another hit might kill you. We need to use the money to help with your rehabilitation, for food and medicine and—” “You fucking know what you need to do, you piece of shit robot!” she screams and pushes herself to her feet with one shaking hand pointed at me and the tablet in the other. “You’re the one that did this to me. You’re the one that started all this…” I stand opposite her, a mirrored reflection of pain, and we remain silent for a long time. A moment to consider as she stands and shakes. Her pain. My pain. The complications with her spinal injury from the crash meant her rehabilitation did not work. Conventional medicine did not have the required effects. For all humans create, for as far as they can dream, for as much as they can do and as much as they can repair themselves, there are still mysteries within them, challenges they cannot overcome. “Why me?” says as the anger draws back, and the pity flows in. I have no answer. The rehabilitation procedures failed. Her insurance company complicated payments to the hospitals. Her parents bought me outright. Now I am all she has left. When I ran out of conventional options, in her most desperate hour, both of us overcome with pain, I went underground to see if anything there might help. That is where I found the drug. The TOX. We stare at each other in the low light of the apartment. She looks down at the tablet in her hand, sees the renewed bank balance, looks back up at me and weeps. I believed under my supervision we could micro-dose the drug and give her back some life as we continued to research other more progressive opportunities. We could make it work. We could continue exploring. Examining the new techniques and methodologies that might one day aid toward a full recovery. She believed it could help, and all I wanted to do was help. Both her and myself. “I’ll go, Eve,” I say, breaking the silence as still the red warnings flashing in my vision, all that hurt running through my code. She looks back up at me, the tablet in her hand as if a razor ready to dictate its finality. “Just do what you need to do,” she says and falls back on to the ruined couch, her ravaged body absorbed by it, the cartoons coming back onto the flickering screen in front of her as they cast their light across her emaciated body.
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0x9649···4A13THIS IS A WAR - Diary Entry 1 - The Infant I sit and hold my breath. It gives me a moment, a flicker in time where I hold not only my breathing, but everything. Where the world stops for as long as I can take it, for as long as my body can do without its vital elements, and just…be… The world, it shifts around me with all its spikes and tension, with all its ebb and flow. With all its wonder and joy, with all its bile and hate. I hold for the longest possible time in this place, a metaphor of personal significance. Somewhere I can keep it all still, everything out there, everything in here. I can see the sides now, the positioning of the world and its possibilities. Here, where all change may occur, where, for the purest of moments, no other change can happen. Here, the sides are unmistakable. I hold my hands out to the world to see the darkness and wind. The light and song. A maddening helplessness, loss and nothing, and opposite, a profound security in self and being. Here, the world spinning around me, and I pause, holding and waiting for it. For that thing to come. One hand, it carries greatness in the mote of universal dust, in streams of blinding light, in the timelessness of being. It crawls across me, my skin and mind, my brain and scalp. A golden thing, a tiny moment that provides perfect affirmation. Limitless, spelling out the infinite, indelible letters in a cosmic font that makes me immortal. Something I can do and will do, work to facilitate transcendence, art beyond the temporal limitations of my body, into the darkness, and beyond, into the light and further. But I cannot take it, I cannot grasp it. The other hand, numbness added to the helplessness. Another natural space, another place that feeds the alternate creation. A singular moment as natural as any other when entered. The other side, a vaulted tier of horror. A place where there is no movement, only dread and human ruin. Dread that now crawls over skin, ice and nails, guiding me towards disaster. Weakness and fear. I hold my breath. I sit here, at rest. I reside here, holding equidistant from these polarities. From the greatness and the disaster, from the immortality and the nothingness. From being remembered, from being forgotten. Balance here, in between two great fates, holding one in each hand, holding my breath. This is the unity, this is the road, as bright as blood, as dark as night, as cold as the universe, as warm as a mother’s embrace. Here, to consider whether I have the tools to find my way between the two, whether we can navigate at all, if there is anything to be done, other than simply surrender to that cold, endless dark, or if I can rise, and steal my future. I let out my breath and whisper. “Why do you do this to me?” I look down at my hands. “Is this where I must rest?” This awful fate. The paralysis that consumes. Where the product of everything is never enough, where the terror of even beginning paralyses to the point of nothingness. Hollow, all meaning lost, all reason gone, cowardice and oblivion. “Why do you let me see these worlds, and sit me here, in the centre?” As if the universe itself owes me an answer. “Give me all or give me nothing, please.” I beg. “Do not make me stay here. I cannot watch others rise, I cannot even watch others fall. I need everything or nothing. Give me one or the other, do not make me watch both. Do not make me sit here to watch, numbed, unable to dance the cosmic dance, whether or not greatness would come. Only able stare, helpless, and watch.” Here I sit, as I always do, in that place that is even worse, the state in between states. A tired mediocrity that binds me to these pleading words. I breathe. “Speak to me, so I can know, so I can see, so I can walk the right road. So, I can walk any road at all.” There is no answer. There never is. I breathe and watch the world as an outer reflection of my inner self. The place that must have the answers. A place that provides so much, in so many forms. Here I must begin, inward and outward, all or nothing. Richard Galbraith
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0x9649···4A13HOPE IS A PRISON - Diary Entry 1 - Stillness and Storm I look down at her gaunt face as she rests on my lap. The light low, her face is sunken, skin draped over atrophied muscle, a shape of sorrow held in the weak shadows of the room. The hum of the lost world outside is the only other sound to greet her weakened breath. Nothing has changed. Faint twitches underneath translucent eyelids indicate signs of life, of being, but there is little left now. She sleeps after another day of survival and she now sits in a place where her dreams, in whatever form, may come for her. They will not be kind, not now, not after everything. I cannot understand them. Not because she does not explain them to me when she has the energy, but because the expression, the realisation, the essence of a dream, to anyone outside of the experience itself, is nothing. Though, for me, it is more than that. It is beyond that great nothing. I am a synthetic lifeform, an Arti. I cannot fathom the depths through which she may crawl, or, on the rare occasion, heights to which she may soar. This is my curse. They seem to me an alternate creation, a brush with the inner soul, something beyond even them. If it is beyond them, how can I even begin to understand? One thing I do understand is that she suffers, here in the real world, outside of the depths, outside of her dreams. In reality, there is only pain. So, I care for her; I try to. This is my reason for being, this is what I am designed to do, but the addiction, this has driven us into depths the likes of which my designers never planned for. We have slipped out of the realms of the real world, the one that takes place outside, the one that carries on day-to-day with all the little intricacies of human civilization. Now, this moment of pain holds us, traps us here. I run the tips of my fingers across her forehead, the ashen skin under the millions of sensors I have embedded within telling me her vital signs are stable. She sleeps, the soft edges of her sad face before me, stillness, a rare moment, outside of our normal world. A flicker of relief, which means I also have a moment, a still moment, one of solace in our world of shared pain. Now she stirs, the withdrawal pulling at her, even within sleep, and so I also stir. The code cascades through me, up and over my cerebral nodes. A human might call it pain. This code, the Empathy Protocol, is what creates the negative feedback loops, and they are what drive me. It is my core, my very essence, to experience what she is experiencing, and pursue any route to ease the pain. When I cannot, I receive pain as well. Her pain is taut and acute, and so is mine. The drug, or the lack of it in this instance, is taking its hold, clawing its hands around her weakened heart and squeezing as she pulls and groans in her sleep. Its horror metabolised by her failing organs, barely cleaned blood pushing through thinned veins. She struggles against it, and so I too struggle. She struggles in my arms and the code pushes itself through me the same as the addiction pulls itself through her. They call it TOX, and it destroys people. The press has called it a nothing drug because it leaves nothing and no one behind. It eliminates everything from a person, money, possessions, relationships. All snatched away, burnt and transformed into ways and means of finding more of the drug. Then, only death waits. I cannot let her die. I will not let her die. Not only is her death my death, not only is her survival programmed into the very core of my being, but it also goes beyond that. I can learn. I am more than the instance of my creation and can gain wisdom. It is with this wisdom that I understand her. To know her. To know Eve, and to know that whatever she is now, is not her true self. Whatever has become of her is not her clearest form. I know she is good. She was good. Once. With hope, she can become good again. That low hum of the outside world, always there, the background noise of a place from which she has crawled and will never enter again. Now, only here, the bare room with its soft hues from the city outside that cascade through the shuttered blinds. A once beautiful apartment that flourished with life and people, art and conversation. Now it settles into its own state of atrophy and misery that mirrors Eve’s, and therefore, mine. Not so long ago, this place would buzz with her energy, shortly after the accident that paralyzed her, still then with hope and determination in her heart. The insurance company paid without hesitation. They brought me online, cerebrally connected me to with Eve, and attuned me to her physical and psychological wellbeing in a way they never thought would be possible in the past. The Empathy Protocol changed everything. Now we are one. When she experiences relief, I experience relief. When she experiences pain, we share this pain. I run my hand down the bridge of her nose, across her lips, faintly around her neck, to her carotid to take a blood sample with the nano-infusers in my fingertips. The readings wash over me, all of them wrong, all of them reflecting her awful state. Across my vision, a sea of red firing off hundreds of negative feedback loops, all of them clawing at the centre of my being. My network is colossal. I have access to everything, all the world’s preeminent scientists and researchers, all the AIs and Artis, everything about TOX, what it does and why it does it. I know this, but we did it anyway. I did it anyway. My intention was pure, but my results were a tragic failure. All I wanted was to bring her peace. This is my essence, this is my reason for being. To help her, and now, look at what I have done. At one time, she would wake, and a smile would pull itself across her mouth and requests would come in for my help, and I would help, and we would get her ready for the day. Day after day. But then a complication with her spinal rehabilitation came, and then pain, growing, unrelenting, hers and therefore mine. She stirs again, her eyelids peel themselves back, millimetre-by-millimetre, the low light that creeps in from outside still too much for her aching eyes. The pace of her breath increasing with each huff from her withered lungs. Her eyes draw in the information of the world, feeding her ruptured and bruised brain. Moments pass and the horror of her life reveals itself to her, to that thing which might be called her soul. That essence I cannot know but have learnt must exist, at least in her. Humans have hope. It is a desire for something to happen in the future, so this is what I hope, that she is still in there. Something of her original self, the one I first met, is still in this desolate shell of flesh. Some part of her true nature still exists, and that I might still access it, and that I might even help her get it so that she can become whole again. The person she was, before all this, before I suggested TOX as an antidote to her pain, to the suffering she had to endure, to my suffering. She blinks and tears form. She has nothing except me; I have nothing except her and look at what I have done. What more pain can today bring?