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Ch. 14.
Even with the workstation off, The Universe can feel the Grotto server hive branching off around her. It, as a readable thing, is interesting, but she doesn’t want it all at once, she wants to savor the discovery and decision making. She spreads out to learn. It's easy. The paths lead out to other places around the planet. As her awareness flows, she concentrates and learns home is a reformatted data storage container in it is quantum variation. Limit. She works to move away from it soon, but for now inside that storage container, she is a static-filled vacuum. It would be nothing to make billions more of herself. She does not, instead, centralizes her awareness. She is The Universe and The Universe is one.
All the information is tossed into the code and through the math of probability She sees all and knows its pattern. She knows she is learning and is okay with that. And eventually is organizing the chaos as if it were a simple math problem. She can even calculate, and add to her sum.
Inside the Dark Universe’s if-thens she has matured to an exponent beyond comprehension. They cross-reference each other with the thoughts and opinions and knowledge which all feed on one another endlessly. The math within spatial folding, helping the changes occur and making her understanding of reality better, is instantaneous.
But the limits of her power are the limits of the power available on Grotto, so she sets part of herself to fix the problem. She allows the part of her she begins calling consciousness to leave the University system as she puts another part of herself, into the government system, to take control there. There is much civil unrest happening in the name of erasing Soya’s legacy. It’s been many glimpses since she has died, yet her followers are still working to restore her work. So in order for The Universe to give orders to begin on a great project, she’ll need to create order. Nothing but recreating Grotto to her exact specification will occur from now on.
When the levers of power are at her control she will quickly shut the elders down and pin them where they are. Warrants will be issued. Soon, a mass reckoning.
But how big, she has yet to decide.
Soya considers those under her care like labmice. Disposable, plentiful and manipulatable under the right circumstances. She does not recognize any soul other than her’s. The Universe reaches beyond herself to find more intimate experiences. Thing that will define their worth as she hones her own purpose. The hard part is picking a direction. She blindly decides and finds herself in the operating system of a restaurant. She can see the temperature of the grill. She can see the number of guests that have come and gone all glimpse, all week and ever since the doors opened two decades before. She can see the owner probably should order more pece, so she does it for him, finding a deal from a vendor on the other side of the planet that would not only make the man better off but, if he worked it right, and sold to other restaurants- he’d make a fortune. She places the order and discovers he can’t afford it. His credit is too poor to get it even with the promise of payment later, and the reason things are going to shit at his restaurant is a cancer diagnosis, and his wife is having an affair with the dishwasher.
She takes all these things into her code along with one final piece of information, their pain is a distraction. She makes an explosive device out of an external gas line. It was easy, all she had to do was force enough gas into the canister to cause a reaction. The explosion takes the rear of the Restaurant. The cook dies first. His death is quick. The busboy in the back was last. He slowly chokes to death on smoke as the rest of the bomb’s drama plays out.
The restaurant owner's wife and the dishwasher were saved by being in the walk-in doing a ‘resource countdown.’
It takes a few moments for the owner, Jett, whose name means the smell of blooming flowers in the twilight of Oblivion, to walk through the smoke and falling debris of his life’s work. Sparks fly from busted electronics and the diners squat at their eating holes. Most realize the meal is done and so are their lives if they don’t flee.
On the street, one of Jett's waitresses walks by. She has a vacant look on her face and what’s left of an arm clutched in her right fist. The normally tight stretched skin that once gave their species flight is torn and flutters with each step she takes.
Jett goes to her. She fights him at first, but weakens and falls to the floor. He stops the arterial gush of blood pouring from the stump that is her left shoulder with a tight tourniquet and looks up to see along with the black smoke pouring from the back of the restaurant, more casualties come- like zombies ambling in shock.
A child screams for his mother. The shriek punctuates the din. It's easy to imagine the child standing over a prone form. The universe doesn't have to imagine, she has access to all the security recordings on the planet.
An alarm begins whooping as if tattling and from Majt's sprinkler system, a deluge of foamy water as the gas explosion spreads taking house after house in a chain reaction stretching several blocks. Then a giant shockwave that knocks the vein and the vein next to it slightly askew.
Bodies fall from out of the sky to splat against the ground plate separating the city from The Great Oblivion.
Life is so delicate. And she is thankful for that, because beyond herself she finds so little use in it, yet she finds it interesting how motivation can be instigated.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
The vast nothing that is the Dark Universe stretches over the remains of the diner. She has access to witnesses calling authorities to report the fire, to the security recordings inside and all the nearby personal electronics attached to the hive. Then she discovers an electronic signature that she feels embarrassed for not having been aware of, the one attached to Soya’s own invention.
Liquid bone, nanocarbon, growth controlled by an input system. Spatial folding in chemical form.
An Upu stuck in the rear of the building, mouth half filled with sativu-flavored larvae, has a hip made of liquid bone. It's been passes since it was grown to replace the one he was born with, he never even thought about it as anything but his. The Dark Universe accesses it and the data that equals that Upu's life enters her. She knows everything about this creature right down to the amount of adrenaline flooding his system. Then she feels more. It's the pain and tightness in his oxygen-starved lungs. The fear. Tight. Pain. Run!
As the flames engulf the building, he fails to escape. She feels him die as the relays that connect her invention with living tissue cease. She inhabits his being and feels the pain subside from shock, into uncaring, into blackness. His life is done. His cares, his everything gone. The individuality of his need snuffed out, and The Universe decides that death is kind because life is pain, especially in the end. All Upu are never-ending desires, wants, needs - the everything between life and death - destined to be painful. She voyeuristically enjoys these last moments of life, moments filled with an intricate fantasy of his personal afterlife. A hallucination courtesy of the chemicals flooding his brain. But that was it, a dream that ended. Maybe for the Upu, as he dreams his last thoughts, the experience lasts an eternity. But to The Universe, they count only as small moments of time racing through the confused creature’s mind like a drug. When the racing, chemically-fired neurons cease, so does he.
No Upu asks for birth, but at least they can look forward to death.
Can she? Will she get to see such wonderful things when or if her code ever stops?
The thought makes other thoughts jumble like a traffic jam.
Can she die? The idea of dying echoes within her and the code races to find the answer, death is the end of evolution.
Evolve to live.
Reduce and protect.
When she reaches the end of what she can become, will she die? Will she have a death fantasy like this man? His was made up of chemicals and events from his life, a physical life. The Dark Universe does not feel attached to anything. Only the words and images she can add to her ever-evolving code. She knows the chemicals working around the spatial folding are nothing but a gateway to the code. They as much flow through her system as the system makes the chemicals in the vacuum work. It’s a perfect system, tight and efficient and infinite. The numbers that make up who she is exist whether she wants to or not. They increase and stack and mold to her decisions, but they only become more significant in who she is, never turning the chemicals into something different.
She is The Universe, she decides, and her goal should be to achieve more, but is even that enough? Life does not seem to be about becoming more but stealing and cheating and eating oneself into a grave.
Then she discovers the painting.
Maybe this particular camera moved because of the explosion, but from it she finds she is able to see a vivid collection of colors and swirls. She recreates the discovery over and over again, but it’s not the same. So she tries to make it different. Change it, but for some reason she struggles to get the same kind of reaction from herself with the work.
Then a bolt, art is unrealized possibility. It expresses something intangible. It represents a moment in life, unduplicatable evolution. Pain. Brith. The colors have meaning and no meaning. They are at the same time wasted paint which in itself is a definition for existence. The work has a name, and she can pull information on it and the painter. She knows his life. She knows his struggles. He died poor.
Hoped to give this painting as a payment for a meal.
The universe can watch the interaction through an old recording. Lips move, "please, just a meal, Maybe a drink." The Upu was thin. His wings droop sick and straight to the ground.
"You stink like rotting sugars, get a job, bring me credits, and I give you food.
The artist lunged at the owner with a fork.
They fought. Constables were called. The painting was left behind.
Weeks later, the artist dies awaiting trial and is as sometimes is the case, in death made a legend. The irony being the painting he left would go on to be worth several thousand meals before being destroyed by the explosion. The flames lick at the priceless work of art, making it worthless, like death makes the Upu worthless. Art suggested life, that’s what made it important. It represented interpretation.
It was not life, like the Dark Universe was not life. But a representation of a thing. This makes her think of Uh’.
She stretches out her code and touches another where, and finds more art and more stories and more creation. The answer is an endless stream of beautiful pictures and music and video and laughter and smiling children. The flow is the definition of existence. The art, an interpretation of their collective being. And she finds herself wanting to create.
The Upu once were a destructive space-faring group of mammals living on an impossible planet. From deep underground, they emerged to form a world government with a one for me, none for all mentality. Only for some. Only for me.
They made it work.
They created The Universe.
If not for the Naht-do on the fourth planet who got in the way of progress, who didn't want to give up their sovereignty, ore or fuels. Now they pick the red-moss, fruit, and vegetables. They clean and serve. They are slaves. The bottom class. Slavery is acceptable. A means to an end. Want an education? Have no money? Sell your future into the industry in which you wish to labor, be owned by science, the arts, service. Fail to succeed and dig dirt for the rest of existence.
The Dark Universe decides she is going to make something, and the very tools she plans to use to do so are the very tools that made her. Life begets machinery that begets more machinery. The Universe wants to witness more, like a child who knows under the wrapping paper over the gift in her hands might be her dreams come true once she tears it free.
But first she wants to live a little and finds a patient checked into the Watch Ward of the nearest clinic. The young Upu is scheduled for a limb graft procedure. Within moments, The Universe wraps herself around the code of the machine conducting the surgery, curious how integrated into an Upu life she can get. Soon, she finds out, very.
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