Embers After Flames, Chapter 10.6 (Patreon)

10.6

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Carla didn’t answer immediately. I was perfectly fine with that, to be honest. It gave me the opportunity to just keep going, and that was great, because there were some things that really wanted to complain about.

“I didn’t really understand the whole thing before then, you know?” I said. “You Humans exist in such a limited, bound way. The entirety of your consciousness is locked up in less than two kilograms of matter, folded upon itself in order to maximise surface area so that you can pack the entire thing in a limited amount of space. It constitutes approximately two percent of the weight of your entire body. The absurdities of biology that can be produced by nature...”

But first, a bit of setup.

“I’m not like that. Coral is the vessel of my mind, but I do not exist in such a constrained way that you do. The shape doesn’t matter, and the size only barely matters. Not like you, with all your limits and constraints, the regions dedicated to specific functions...” I continued. “Change it, and you change yourselves. While I too would end if all the Coral that I exist within was destroyed, it is so much of an easier prospect with you. Something I had not known, before.”

And now we get to start ranting.

“Dana had one kilogram of Coral injected into her brain.” I said. “Dornez delivered it by injecting it through the bloodstream. Contamination was total. Coral is sensitive enough to pick up on the electrical and chemical activity. I felt her brainwaves. I ‘saw’, such as it were, the transmissions between neurons. I felt her body recognize the presence of intruders, and dispatch antibodies to deal with the problem. Coral responds to stress by releasing energy. Dana was fortunate enough to die quickly.”

Many others had not been.

“To me, it was activity, growing more and more, until it simply broke down completely.” And it had been, the first time. The strength of a brainwave isn’t particularly potent, after all. Still, I’d come to understand what had been happening reasonably quickly, but by then trying to calm the Coral would have been far from a mercy. “However, it was a new form of data. Brainwaves, as it turns out, really are not that dissimilar to the C-Pulse. Coupled with everything else I had been learning, and I was able to start making sense of them with surprising speed.”

Another fact.

“This was unfortunately helped along by the events that followed Dana’s death.” I said. “I have not since witnessed something so... utterly reprehensible.” I settled on. “Dornez’s experiment provided him with enough proof to convince him that what he was seeking was possible. Unfortunately, RRI never particularly cared about anything other than ability when it came to their scientists, and Dornez equally didn’t care about anything other than results. The moral and ethical concerns, as I am sure you are well aware, were not a factor in his decisions.”

He was an insane madman. Literally the only ‘good’ thing I could say about him was that he cared about results. The deaths and pain that had been caused were equally something that was irrelevant. He hadn’t been a sadist, but that’s a very low bar to clear.

“More followed.” I said. “With proof that biochemical compatibility was an issue, he sought to fix that, first.” That had been a source of a great deal many deaths in the C1 program. “Once that reached an ‘acceptable’ casualty rate, he moved on to the process of integration.” That killed a great deal many more. “A lot of people went through it, Carla. A truly absurd amount of people considering the actual scale of that operation. The assistance of a few executives really should not have been able to lead towards nine hundred and fifty six Human deaths.”

It would have been... understandable, though still reprehensible, if the subjects were people on death row, people who’d been fully informed and had provided consent, or people who had donated their bodies to science, but that wasn’t the case. Most of the C1 Augments had been coerced ‘volunteers’. People who’d been in relatively poor states, who’d had a lifeline offered to them in the form of a ‘medical procedure’ that was classified so heavily they couldn’t be informed about it.

That RRI had bothered with even that bit of fiction surrounding the whole thing showed that the place hadn’t descended completely into corporatocracy, and, unfortunately, that left them relatively high on the standards of morality and ethics that most Human Civilizations rose to.

“At some point in that entire... deluge, I gained enough information to start actually trying to talk to people.” I continued, heedlessly. “This, I have to say, did not end well at all. My first attempt was to try speaking directly to Humans. The process of Augmentation leaves significant neural contamination within the brain, and very specific manipulation of that can lead to the ability to communicate. That was my original hypothesis, and unfortunately, while it is true, the number of people who both survived the process of Augmentation and had the necessary degree of Coral in the right places was significantly lower than I’d hoped. There were about five individuals in any given generation that were compatible, and for the rest?”

“Hearing voices is a known side effect of Early-Gen Augmentation.” Carla answered.

“Indeed.” I sighed. “You know what’s worse? Most of those voices were not me. Synchronized Coral can transmit the brainwaves from other people. It can reflect your own. It can transmit data from nearby machines. I know of at least two cases wherein the victims heard their own thoughts repeated back to them a variable amount of time later. And those ones are the lucky ones, because they could interpret actual meaning rather than face a stream of continuous, unsilenceable noise.”

There had been a woman, Yvonne, who had been a particularly unfortunate soul, there. Full signal reception, no interpretation. Surrounded by the advanced, omnipresent technology of the Rubicon Research Institute, the whole damned world had been endless screaming, for her.

“One extra voice ultimately made no difference, even if that voice happened to be a bit more than just a voice.” I said. “You were primed to ignore it. As such, I decided to shift my efforts to something that you couldn’t ignore. If I couldn’t reach you, then perhaps it was possible to reach your creations. It was foolproof! So long as I could get even the slightest amount of data and information through, communication would be inevitable.”

I made a point of sighing very obviously, here.

“Would you like to guess, Carla, how that went?”

“Well, obviously, it didn’t work.” Carla said.

“Correct!” I said, and this time I allowed the full force of my annoyance to bleed into the tone. “You see, for the last eight hundred or so years, Humanity has been working on making computers better. The pursuit of technology has been rampant. Over the course of all these centuries, a few areas that happened to have received a great deal of focus are the deceitfully complicated matters of intuitive design and error correction. No surprise, of course. The term ‘Digital Native’ is still being thrown around even today, but you and I know the truth of the matter is that people have to learn how to use complicated things.”

The prospect, and eventual realisation, of entire generations of people who had no idea how computers worked had very nearly ended up screwing Humanity over. Technological literacy was needed to maintain advanced technology, let alone advance it. The near-universal propagation of technological literacy had been a very deliberate effort, which had continued into the modern day out of a combination of sheer cultural inertia, and also the fact that any polity which discouraged it had a tendency to fall behind the rest of the Human Sphere.

“Eight hundred years later and the modern operating system is so utterly full of intuitive design and error correction that it is very nearly impossible to break unless you’re doing it on purpose.” I said. “Do you know what my meddling looks like to those systems, Carla? It looks like errors. Errors that the systems will immediately try to correct. Corrections which both often work and can occasionally trigger even more restrictive measures to engage.”

Aah, complaining time. The sacred time.

“And it’s not like it was easy to manipulate things, either.” I said. “Do you have any idea how annoying it was? I had to figure out how to manipulate the qubits of your computing systems manually, figure out how to do that without making the seemingly limitless number of error correction systems your kind loved to put in there change it right back. If that wasn’t somehow difficult enough, I also had to contend with a legion of programmers unknowingly trying to patch everything I was doing.”

“Wait.” Carla interrupted. “The malfunctions we were dealing with-”

“Yes!” I said, loudly and with a great deal of aggravation. “It was me, Carla! I was the one that was making all the machines malfunction. How do you think it happened when even full-faraday robots without any wireless capability whatsoever were throwing errors? It was Coral’s ability to generate electromagnetic interference.” I toned down the aggression again, sighing. “Really, you’d think that’d be enough. So many errors across the entire system, but just this once you Humans decided to not be curious about it. Just this one time, you all decided to treat the symptoms rather than track down the cause. The one and only time I was counting on Humans doing the thing that I had always seen them do, and you completely ignored it.”

... Mmm. I’d honestly thought I was over this, but as it turns out, I am actually still angry about it. It’s been more than half a century, and I’m still hanging on this particular flame.

Probably because it got me set on fire.

I waited a moment for Carla to say something. She didn’t.

“You were just... to busy with other things.” I scoffed. “As though all of it was just something ultimately small and irrelevant. Dornez was consumed completely by his research, Nagai was consumed by his fears, and you- Well, actually, I don’t really blame you in this whole thing. Your colleague basically dumped a kid on you, and then your mentor slapped you in the face with his research. You get a pass, I guess.”

“Professor Nagai-” Carla paused, ending whatever she was going to say before she could say it. After a second, I heard her sigh. “Everything he knew told him the course of action he took was his best choice.”

“And you can tell the key words in that sentence, right?” I asked. “‘Everything he knew’. Which was certainly not everything. He made his choice under the assumption that Coral was nothing more than a biological resource, with no agency other than to expand and grow like all forms of life. His research was predicated entirely upon this, and so he burnt the Coral and left you to deal with whatever remained. With the new information you’ve acquired, however, you now know that he did not know everything. What does a good scientist do now, Carla?”

“… The addition of new information should always prompt a new investigation.” Carla said, after a few moments. “That is the very essence of the process of science. Hypothesise. Test. Record. Repeat.”

“And so we arrive at the inevitable.” I spoke. “I shall lay all the cards on the table. I do not care to see this world burned. There are a great deal many people on Rubicon whom I am fond of. I believe that a mutually beneficial relationship is possible with Humanity, and I have more than three decades worth of proof as to the belief. I am prepared to fight for this outcome. I have been fighting for this outcome. This is my choice, just as it is the choice of many among the Liberation Front.”

I paused for a brief moment.

“We are approaching a critical juncture.” I stated. “You must also make a choice. To pursue your original goal, or to follow a different path.”

“And if it’s the wrong choice, you’ll kill us?” She asks in a way that says she’s not really proposing a question.

“I will not say that your choices are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but the pursual of your original path would kill this planet and everyone on it. This is against my objectives, and regardless of any moral or ethical concerns, you would become my enemy in full.” I lay it down flat.

Simple. Very direct.

“I will allow you the time to deliberate.” I state. “But I can no longer afford lenience, Carla.”

“… Understood.”

…

Time to see if these last few years worked out, then.