2081

He looked at three doors, looked at them and wondered. He wondered if this was a childish distraction, another childish distraction from the serious business of carving out an empire of sanity from this world of anarchy and despair.

Humanity’s reign over the earth was done, but the new power seemed disinterested in ruling humanity itself, aside from setting down four rules both clear and enigmatic. That left a certain vacuum, one that his bloody-minded overseers were expending vast amounts of lives and resources over. They were welcome to their battles, to their… well, it wasn’t even a reversion, really, to their ongoing tribalism and primate nature. They saw him and his colleagues as another resource to be fought over, those that produced their most valuable product.

He had never felt guilt over his role in the enterprise. His creations were art, fragile and ephemeral blessings for lives without hope, anesthesia for the pain of existence. How they were used to captivate and manipulate was not an ethical burden he chose to carry. It was a shame though, that his latest breakthroughs hadn’t spread wider before the vast majority of their production capacity had been destroyed. Those, he felt, truly lived up to the name Suenos.

Old, young and in between, he observed. Not particularly subtle.

He thought back to his conversation with Emily, the girl who had swept into his life, too young by far, and yet he was not so jaded, so detached to be unable to see beyond her youth. She captivated him, as much for the mystery she represented as for her ability to hold her own intellectually, and the mix of innocence and hard-earned experience with which she saw the world. Another childish distraction, to be sure, and yet… he could see a time, perhaps not too long from now, when he would be isolated, alone with his success. His colleagues, his friends of the moment, were bright people, some of them anyway. He was not the only one with an education, not the only one with brilliance. But, as far as he could tell, he was the only one with vision.

He walked to the stone door, felt the smooth grain through his fingertips. The sensory replacement was exquisite, offering far more detail than his system could convey, more than enough to tell him he stood in the creation of something beyond what humans had yet achieved. This overabundance of data was inspiring. Possibilities for how he could tweak and improve Suenos were noted and filed, even as he began to gently push the door open. Despite himself, he felt a thrill of anticipation. He was stepping into the mind of a superintelligence, Guardian.

He felt the cool, moist air first as he set foot beyond the threshold, where he was greeted by a cascade of small draping leaves, the sheltering curtain of a willow tree. Beyond, he could hear the calls of frogs and birds he did not recognize. He turned, to see the door, still open, was set in a massive tree trunk, the stone on this side rough and ridged to match the texture of the bark.

He stepped forward and parted the drooping branches, and saw a mist-shrouded pond, almost a small lake. The light was dim, and he could not tell if this was dawn or twilight, for the sky hung low with gray-banked clouds, promising rain. Rather than gloom, he felt a sense of abiding peace, and he spent the next minutes watching the small curls of vapor rise from the still waters and listening to the life hidden from his sight. After a time, he followed a path of laid timber that sank slightly into soft soil beneath his feet, skirting the banks of the water, wending among cattails and tall fringed grasses. He walked slowly, almost overcome by the abundance of sensory data.

Suenos relied on the user’s brain to fill in gaps, stimulating sense memories, evoking and nudging, and he could tell his system was truly struggling, grinding its gears against the concrete realism on offer. He had, of course, engineered it to accept all the existing standards, with margins of future-proofing he had considered adequate at the time. He composed a memo to Alberto as he walked, his colleague in charge of implementing changes to the existing standards, but then found himself unable to send it.

Interesting. It’s doing more than simple sensory replacement, he observed. A tiny pang of distress swept through him as he considered the implications, before he suppressed it. There was no way for him to tell, then, if any of his internal senses were real. He thought they probably were, but there existed the possibility that he had been… captured, that from this point forward, all information he received from his system was susceptible to replacement. He could no longer trust the data his system was giving him, because that data came through his senses.

He didn’t panic. Not only would that be unproductive, but he considered that the worst case scenario was extremely unlikely, and in fact indistinguishable from many scenarios he had considered over the years, once it became clear that systems could potential allow complete sensory capture. In the end, it didn’t matter if he was a brain in a vat from the beginning of his consciousness, or if it had happened the moment he allowed the signal from Guardian into himself, or any time in between. Once it was a possibility, the odds quickly escalated to inevitability.

He realized he had stopped walking, and resumed his journey along the pond’s edge. It wasn’t long before a white pavilion came into view, set into the side of a small hill on the edge of the pond. Thin, upward branching columns supported a fringed roof, and the entire structure was bedecked with gauze, obscuring its contents.

Hands clasped behind him, he approached with measured gait and climbed the few shallow steps that led to the entrance. There, he hesitated for just a moment, peering at the blurred shapes behind the veil.

“Come in, please.” The voice was surprisingly high pitched, and he was surprised to see a young child standing, facing him, a boy he thought, when he parted the gauze. The child’s pale appearance was marred by a black line that bisected his face from nose to forehead.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Please,” the boy said. “Sit.” He gestured to a tall, armed chair of a light golden metal, furnished with carmine velvet cushions.

This was the first being with the appearance of sentience he had encountered, and he took a moment to evaluate, wondering whether this child was an automaton or a true intelligence. For him, anyway, it was first contact with a mind vastly greater than any that had existed in human space.

“Might I have your name?” he asked.

“How would you use it?” the child replied, and as he did, the line moved, still centered on his nose but now angled across his left eye. In its wake, the flush skin grew dulled and wrinkled, the brow gnarled, the eye itself rheumy.

Ah, he thought, the plot thickens.

The initial parameters of this interaction were now clear to him, though how exactly to proceed was not. He needed more data.

“My name is Alfonse,” he offered.

The child nodded. “Please,” he reiterated, “sit.”

Alfonse sat, though not on what was obviously a golden throne. Instead, he simply lowered himself to the floor from where he stood. He didn’t know the rules of this game, but he understood one thing quite clearly. He was being evaluated, being judged, and the proper calculus of the moment was humility and caution.

The child gave no reaction. His now mismatched eyes simply followed him to the floor.

“This is a beautiful setting,” Alfonse said, when enough silence had passed that he felt the ball must be in his court. The child simply stared, and he couldn’t suppress a quick flash of annoyance. Was he trying to have a meaningful interaction with Guardian’s toenail? Elements of this… trial were interesting so far. The technology was beyond interesting, and well worth his time, but this-

“Would you like to play a game?” the child asked, interrupting his thoughts.

“Aren’t I already?” he said, then kicked himself for such an obvious blunder. I seem to have a compulsion to answer a question with a question. I may need to look into that.

Sure enough, the line on the child’s face swept from the corner of his eye and onto his cheek, leaving senescence in its wake.

At least I have another data point. Questions cause the line to advance. A bit blunt, the symbolism, the sweep of the hour hand adding age to his face. I surmise another ten questions before something absolutely lovely occurs.

“You do seem to be,” said the child. “I however am not. Would you like to play a game of questions, with me?”

Alfonse nodded, internally bemoaning the predictability of it all, though he did appreciate the built-in limit to the number of questions.

“Very well,” said the child. “I will go first. What do you want most?”

It took Alfonse a moment to pivot from his expectations.

Well, he did say a game of questions, not riddles. I wonder what we are playing for?

“I should add,” the child added, “The game ends when you tell a knowing falsehood.”

I expected as much, he thought. He kept this to himself, afraid that any speech might be construed as an answer.

“I want to save humanity from itself,” he replied.

“Incomplete, but not false,” the child said. “Your turn.”

At moments like these, he regretted that the Suenos System was really poor at augmenting the conductive properties of nerves. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but it was a terrifically difficult problem. The specific engineering was trivial, but the emergent network level properties as the timing of neural firing patterns were changed across the brain were close to unsolvable, as far as he could tell.

I wish I could phrase that as a question, he thought. Best to wait until I know what’s on the table though.

It was also interesting, if not surprising, that the truthfulness of his reply was correctly evaluated. He debated the value of finding the boundary of allowable obfuscation and deception, but decided that he needed more information about the rewards available to him for participating in this...game. That and to determine just how specific his questions would need to be.

“What is the purpose of this trial?” he asked. The nature, and possibly the content, of the answer would tell him how to proceed.

“The purpose is to evaluate your current abilities, skills and embodied attributes in order to develop a suitable substrate for joining the local reality construct.”

The directness of the response was pleasing. It gave him pause that the language so perfectly fit his ability to understand. It was a bit like his own mind was being reflected back to him. The boy shuddered as he spoke, and the hour hand on his face swept forward, past the ear and almost down to the corner of the child’s mouth, if he could even call this construct of Guardian’s a child anymore in light of the ongoing transformation.

That was farther than previous, he noted. Perhaps twice as far. I will need to reassess.

He began to contemplate his followups as he waited.

“Do you perceive yourself as part of a greater whole?” the construct asked.

He felt the wheels of internal sophistry begin to spin. He could redefine any of those words to suit his purposes and thus produce a truthful reply. And yet… that didn’t solve the real problem; what answer did he want to give? The socially acceptable answer among fellow primates would always be ‘yes’, but he wasn’t speaking with a primate. He was also aware of his initial reaction to the question, and feared he might be judged untruthful if he deviated.

“No.”

Now it was his turn once more. What does one ask a being that may or may not be a representative of relative omniscience? To what extent was this construct an individual, separate from the greater mind that generated it? How many questions could he afford to waste finding out? Seeking concrete knowledge that could help him in the real world would be his preference, but it came with substantial potential for opportunity cost.

No, he decided, it would be better to optimize his outcomes for the trial itself. Emily had spent hours telling him of the virtual world that lay beyond, the game repurposed by Guardian for its own, inscrutable reasons. There would be advantages to having a strong presence there. If he understood the global situation correctly, he might be one of the few people on earth who could access it, and it wasn’t impossible that he was the only human with the capacity to build more systems. Possibly. Eventually.

Sometimes the only way to win is not to play, he thought.

He stood and moved to the throne, where he took his seat.

“Allow me to tell you about myself,” he said.

.

.