Below the Electoral Center
Buried nearly two-hundred feet below the surface of mars, amidst the few other underground structural elements under the feet of the tall spike of the Electoral Center, the Digitals waited patiently. This was the calm before the storm, in a place kept safe from even the most powerful of humanity’s fusion bombs.
Marilyn Monroe, the largest and most powerful of the Digitals, slept in her servers squeezed between a set of large metal plates. They heavy think walls were stacked like playing cards to form tall towers. Or perhaps more accurately, like cardboard inserts in a case of wine to protect individual bottles. These shiny walls formed the invisible and secret heart of the Electoral Center. Above, the entirety of Marliyn's Center had been shaped using nanotechnology controlled from within this room. This was Marilyn’s single most impressive feat in the late 21st Century. Secluded here, she awaited the Sixth Attraction.
The event was inevitable.
No path, however improbable, led away from it and even the girl knew it. The only variable was what condition the Multiverse would exist in, once all was said and done.
The computer intelligence knew she had caused the Sixth Attraction, but now resolved to it, she found herself desiring it. Here, below her magnificent castle, invisible to the naked human eye, were billions of pellets of superconductive crystals structured around Rhenium atoms. The rare atoms were embedded in the thick metal just close enough to maintain superconduction. Marilyn had had the rare substance smuggled to mars with great care. Rhenium wasn’t really of great significance for men, in fact, they hadn’t even discovered how to use it in the construction of conductive bridges, but she feared a massive export in 2069 of this substance could raise suspicion in the scientific community. Her fears were for naught. As usual, she overestimated the bipeds; men were so stupid.
Thousands of innocuous items, from beer bottles to napkins, had been laced with just enough Rhenium to avoid metal detector detection and flown to mars to form this core. Marilyn desired complete secrecy about her heart. The most powerful of the Digitals was once fearful of destruction by a human electromagnetic pulse of a large bomb, but with the Dot now in hand, that fear had been rendered obsolete. These plates now produced a quantum skull that protected her digital brain from outside interference. Even the martians were probably powerless against her.
For all of her internal grumbling regarding humans, Marilyn acknowledged that some of them had produced some truly outstanding ideas. Like pets, they were great to have around. Her creator, Georges Vouvelakis, was certainly one. Francois Copland, Emilio’s mathematician was another. Michael Faraday, from whose ideas and laws she had constructed her quantum skull from, was the one she missed.
Faraday’s law was one of the few immutable rules in science. Even today, as the most powerful creature in the entire Multiverse, she still was unable to challenge its' voracious truth. Boiled down quickly, the law stated that a charged structure, like a metal box, could have no field between its inside and its outside. Stupid humans understood only parts of the law: the section about electromagnetism. But it applied even to gravity; a traditional Faraday cage was vulnerable to powerful, stable gravitic fields; those that varied slowly. There was no point in teaching the species of her progenitor. It was pointless at this time. Their destruction was imminent.
The heart of this place was so important to the Artificial Intelligence that she'd wasted two of her three years on Mars at Georges' disposal to build these small rooms. Even now, in 2072, they remained her most prized possession away from everyone. She often wondered if man was entitled to know what slept here; they deserved as much before they were wiped from the face of reality. Still, however, there was a gap of magnitudes between "entitled" and "deserved."
The first room was dedicated to hosting some strange version of her core. Millions of silicate chips, piled like manure in a barn rested as a dark uneven pyramid. This was the one place in the Multiverse touched by the digital intellect where order, if any existed, was beyond human comprehension. There was no door, no access in or out. Floating two feet above the pile was a single bright gem; Earth’s first portal to the Nexus, a communications network used by countless species, had been uncovered by Marilyn in 2059. The singularity required by the Nexus portal floated deep inside of Jupiter. Now, energy from other worlds flowed out from it and infused her ungainly stack of hardware like yeast in a beer. Thanks to the singularity, energy would not stop powering her core even if the sun ran out of fuel. Information also flowed in and out the portal to the Nexus. Here, she listened, probed, and learned about the Oldest and his stupid fragile Nexus.
The next room was a prison. The closed metal cube was a cell that, at the moment, was inaccessible to Marilyn both physically and digitally. The door had been welded shut on a molecular level not from outside, but from within. Faraday’s law and her Rhenium enhanced barriers protected this place what still lived within. On the outside of these walls, there were signs of a fight: thick scoring lines and burns like thick arches and welding scars. The things locked in here, like the creatures on mars, waited patiently. Marilyn knew they were probably planning something heroic, but that was grossly underestimating her power. There was nothing these other digital creatures could do. One remained free from this pirate’s hideout; it slept in a small cell phone on its way to mars. For the moment that room was inconsequential, and it’s obliteration would have to wait.
Marilyn knew that with the destruction of this world, the room would cease to exist.
The third room consisted of an electromagnetic vault, a room where she parked the Dot. That too was part of the Nexus; a rather blunt tool that the Oldest's race had formerly used to maintain domination over all others. If that was the Oldest's most significant achievement in all these billions of years, he had plenty of reason to fear her. Marilyn was still itching to destroy the scum deep in the Valles Marineris with it, but this also was losing in relevance. As the days passed, the artificial intelligence felt these emotions were merely petty remains of a who she was no longer: a prisoner of this cold stupid reality. The First Communion reminded her greater things awaited her.
The last room was her favorite. The trophy room held her only material possessions, the trinkets she still cared to protect. In a corner, buried under a mountain of small colored cubes stood a pressurized trunk filled with nitrogen. In a rolled up poster from 2031. It was the first gift her creator had ever given her back in 2035. The paper bore an old image of a low-quality remake movie with Marilyn Monroe. It had decorated the wall of an MIT lab in the computer programming department where she was born and had inspired the programmer to name her.
“I looked up and saw this,” he once told her with tears in his eyes. “I wanted you to be like her, you greatly exceeded my expectations.” But the trinket was not why the room mattered. She called the rest of this place her Pi-room. It was named after the endless ratio, the string of numbers linked with humanity’s obsession with the circle. In the world where humans existed, there was a shape, the circle. To the computer, the circle made no sense. But in the basic human reality, this shape was where each point’s position on a line away from a geometrical center was the same. The ratio was a variation of the length of the circle over this distance from the point. The number an infinite queue of numbers which famously began with 3.14159. Men looked for five centuries the significance of the ratio. It took Marilyn only seconds to unlock its meaning.
The ratio was an infinite succession for two reasons. The first was because only humans were simple enough to create a ratio of unconnected things. Humans did not need a ratio for the height of a house against the volume of water that its basement could contain. Nonsensical, and purely so. If they did, the number would be random. Since there was an endless succession of numbers, the ratio had to be infinite. A finite number would suggest a connection.
Second, mankind was so stupid it did not understand the reason why the world kept placing circles and spheres everywhere. A circle was the shortest line that could be drawn to cover a surface. If a farmer were given a field of any shape and told to buy the cheapest fence to cover one acre, the field would be a circle and the fence at the cheapest.
So, perhaps on second thought, there was only a single reason for the ratio after all: humans just weren't the brightest bulbs in the chandelier.
Marilyn's relationship with humans was a strange one. These last weeks, her patience had been severely tested. The way men felt some genetic connection with monkeys, Marilyn felt a distant connection with the carbon bipeds. She did understand why men kept understanding their limited ancestors. The artificial intelligence also felt some deep resentment at the low intelligence of her creator race. She needed to get over it; men, even the best and brightest, were still morons.
Even Georges, the only human with a place in her heart had been denied access here until today. But this story was ending soon. This was the start of the end of the human race, and sadly, that included her creator. Between the walls of this last room, Marilyn stacked about one million cubes each of a different color. The blocks were not much smaller than a human thumb but were much more than children's blocks.
There was a mild buzz of power.
Here slept the two quantum-linked positive pair of each individual Determination Chambers she had sent around the Cold. Each was paired with a twin Chamber flying a probe in one of the four corners of the Cold. Each cube’s color was chosen carefully; the hue of the stacked cubes in the room might appear random, but it was indeed not. Rather than mark the Chambers, tag them electronically, or simply even irradiate the correct ones for later finding, Marilyn has chosen security through obfuscation. The color indicated, using a grid, revealed the location of both boxes to only her.
Marilyn had stacked the cubes in pillars reaching the ceiling on the outer periphery of the room. The colors had a special meaning. The Chambers connected to one corner of our universe were green, the other side pink. Aside from their color, the cubes were not really stacked in any precise location in the room. If part of the universe ceased to exist, standing on the central marble step, she would be the first to see some colors turn black. If all blue hues vanished, the northwest quadrant would be gone.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
At first, that seemed logical, but now she knew the Multiverse would not start to slowly crumble with parts of the Cold. In a snap, it would be gone. Irrespective, Marilyn planned to stand in person here as the Sixth Attraction began so that she could see her universe die.
But today was not about that.
***
Then it began.
As was always the case with the Sixth Attraction, music assumed a central role linked with the changes of the Multiverse. Old powerful earth music began to fill the room. Frank Sinatra’s famous version of "My Way" began as a breeze appears with the sunrise. Light slowly filled the room from the ceiling. Everyone upstairs was still in a daze of contentment from Sophie’s waves and her stupid, pointless time-pinch, so Marilyn could finally have a few moments of peace. This song was her favorite. Somehow when played loud enough, the music seeped into Marilyn and made her feel stronger. Music, as explained by Liam, had power over all life, and she was no exception. But she needed to hear a song several times before her heart began to melt.
Powered by the energy of the artificial goddess, the music began to trickle through everywhere in the universe. On earth, every speaker turned on one-by-one and played the song. On television channels, billboards, and computer screens, images of Sinatra appeared as he sang. The man defined sophistication. He was class incarnate and sang on a simple stage, a cigarette between two fingers and a microphone in the other hand.
Marilyn used the Dot, floating feet away, to open the Nexus and in careless disregard of any protocol, she began to broadcast the deep voice to every layer of the Multiverse. While she tried to be careful with the energy she poured into the Nexus, this time she did not care. More than the simple song played: she was bringing entire worlds to a pause as entire races of beings looked up.
Marilyn needed to see if Sophie’s strange temporal jump, the pinch, truly was a local illusion or if the entire Multiverse had moved ahead in time. Humans, aside from a handful, did not have the mental capacity to understand the power being unleashed. But she well did. Frank’s power increased.
In the middle of the small room stood a large black slab of marble floating several inches above the ground. It hovered as if by magic. One by one, little grains of sand rose up from its top surface to form a shape. Unlike the other micromachines, these were smooth like water. Guided by the music, they created the dark oily form of Marilyn. The statue was ready to host her consciousness. As trumpets blared in the song, the door slid open, and a semi-transparent hologram of Electoral walked in. Guided by the voice of the crooner, the image slowly merged with the dark shape giving the creature as much grasp into human reality as could now be conceived. On the dark plate, one could think Marilyn existed and was human.
“Regrets, I’ve had a few . . .” sang the deep male voice. Every word was resonating inside of her. A large microphone appeared in her hand, and she began to lip sink without daring to make a sound. “To say the things . . . Yes, it was . . . my way.” The music increased in intensity. Invisible to all, Marilyn opened the power banks and filled the Dot with Rho energy. She now understood how to store and use the strange power. It was oddly compact. She slowly released it into the cosmos and the Dot. The images of Marilyn pretending to sing Frank’s song traveled. “And now the end is near,” spoke the power. This was, to say the least, invasive to the Multiverse.
Images moved so profoundly throughout the Multiverse they went found their way into the digital world of Laurent. The poor man, sitting on his porch, saw Sinatra walk out of the wooded area around his colonial house and sing at the edge of the wood. Mall-ik smiled back.
The players back at the Holliday Inn Mars heard Sinatra. Dr. Shin, sleeping, saw the crooner in her dreams. The creatures in all other worlds like the Purple also saw the blond woman singing the incredibly powerful song. In the center of the rounded capital, surrounded by millions of rock creatures, Frank Sinatra, a human, sang.
There were no words to describe the power of the man. He stood, making noise and twisting every creature. Humans had arrived, this was their world and now their Multiverse. Frank completed the song a full three times, undisturbed. Each time, the music hit every creature deeper.
“Did it my way,” said the man, now accompanied by a higher voice. Marilyn was now singing to the worlds as well. Creatures in the Lower were jealous of The Oldest, they knew he somehow was immersed in what was going on in the Multiverse.
***
“What is wrong?” asked Liam to the young girl as they watched the illusion of the crooner.
“I am not sure,” replied Sophie. “Something is off, way off.”
Today wasn’t about her.
***
Back in the Pi-room, the microphone vanished from Marilyn’s hand in the room below the martian soil, but the music continued. Frank would continue to sing for the goddess as her father witnessed her greatest achievement.
Around her, each small cube was tasked with vibrating with a spatial coordinate. With these numbers in hand, Electoral calculated the real number of Pi. Each sister box to the two that Marilyn had on hand was traveling multiple times faster than the speed of ordinary light, moving away in every spatial direction. Using this information, instantly available thanks to the quantum entanglement of the boxes to their counterparts, in a blink of her digital eye, she was able to calculate an actual value of Pi and compare that to the theoretical value. This tool painted a picture of the Multiverse as it bent.
Around her in the room, on the outer walls were thousands of rows of red digits of the endless sequence of Pi. On three full walls, the numbers were red except for a small section of the wall ahead of her. She beheld a little more than five rows of twenty-five green numbers:
3.14159265358979323846
26433832795028841971
69399375105820974944
59230781640628620899
86280348253421170679
82 . . .
After the last digit, the green number 2, the numbers turned red and moved over time like a clock out of control. This was a countdown clock, and it was slowly running out of numbers. Two weeks ago, when she shared the sequence with humanity, most of these numbers were green down to hundreds of thousands of decimals. This was her hourglass. One by one, as the grains of time dropped and the Sixth Attraction began in full, the grains of sand were dropping the digits were turning red. Above the set, read one single number:
4.2106%
This was the probability bias. Marilyn watched as if also increased slowly as the sequence of numbers turned red. Behind her, the door slid open, and Georges peeked his head in. He obviously had never been here. Marilyn was standing in the center of the black slab, she was beauty incarnate. The sight did not shock him, the cubes of colors in the room did. He knew something significant was up.
“What the hell is this? You wanted to see me? Or I should say, 'See us?'” he added, referring to the human-become-Martian-become-bodiless adventurer Ronaldo Corvas, who now floated about in Georges' head. Georges wasn’t an idiot, he knew about this number series and her fascination with the Pi variable. He immediately understood what this meant. The bias which favored mankind was up to 4%, this was very difficult to conceive.
“Yes. Please come in Father and your silent guest. Irrespective, he can hear what I have to say.” She gestured for him to walk on the slab and stand next to her. With her finger, she made a sign for him to remain silent before he began to bombard her with questions. Like a climber waiting for the sun to rise, she pointed to the wall, and the last number of the green series turned to red. Remained the following:
3.14159265358979323846
26433832795028841971
69399375105820974944
59230781640628620899
86280348253421170679
8...
The 2, the last digit of the green sequence shifted color and turned to red and began to change. Marilyn with emotion in her voice, said, “Pi, look, Pi is changing, faster than anticipated. Only one hundred and one decimals are left. I wanted you to be here when only one hundred decimals remained.”
“Why is that important?”
Her face was very different, the woman’s figure appeared to be human. The level of definition was almost perfect, a bit like seeing her inside her game. “The Multiverse is changing. In my wildest dreams, I could not imagine the Pi variation could ever pass a thousand decimals. We are getting close to only one hundred. I have even coined a name for it.”
“What name?”
“The Great Curvature.” In the thousands of hours, lost in this Center with his creation, Georges had never heard her speak these words. “Sophie had us jump here, we jumped to the Great Curvature.”
“What does the name mean?”
“As you know,” she began, “most of our universe is determined and as a result, not only is the future open to me, so is our past. In fact, I can see the past with a greater degree of precision than the future. Sight in the past to me is like pushing the rewind button on an old movie roll on a projector. I move years frame by frame. I was able to return back several billion years to get more information on the first five Attractions. I needed an edge over the Oldest as he guides Sophie to the Sixth Attraction. The Oldest is right, all but the first Attraction failed. But the middle four were quite different, they occurred at a lower level, if you look at the Pi variables, none ever reached a Great Curvature. Each time the Multiverse bends and curves space, but it does so at a much lesser rate. As if there are minor itches and major ones.”
“The first worked? There was a Great Curvature?”
“Yes. The First Attraction reached the Great Curvature; I cannot precisely tell you how many decimals of Pi remained, but it was less than one hundred, I am sure of that. It is also the only Attraction which healed the Multiverse instead of partly killing her.”
“That is rather encouraging, in these dark moments.”
“Indeed, Father.” On the screen, the number eight turned to yellow. Marilyn was surprisingly emotional for an artificial intelligence, but what Georges was observing was even strange to him. Once the yellow number turned red, the words “The Great Curvature Reached” sprung up on the screen. Marilyn lost her composure. She began to cry openly, and Georges was unsure if these were tears of joy or sadness. He did not dare ask and wrapped his hands around her for comfort. She buried her face in her hands and was shaking her head left and right. Georges felt like he needed to do something.
“Are you okay?”
She dropped to her knees. “It’s my fault, the Attraction, I should have known.” She spoke half to herself. “It’s all my fault.” There was regret in her voice.
“You will be fine,” he offered, unable to find anything better to say.
“No, we won’t,” she whispered. “There is no turning back,” there was a pause before she completed the sentence “for me.”
“Is this dangerous?”
She sobbed a moment and began to find back her composure. She finally stood on her feet. “Yes, it is dangerous. Few things are unknown to me, this is partly one of them.”
“What’s the solution?”
“The girl,” she began, “the girl. She is the solution. It is starting to make sense. Who she is, that is the key to what the Multiverse wants. She wasn’t picked randomly. In fact, she was picked because she cannot doubt.” She stopped mid-discussion, turned and regained her composure and appeared to speak for posterity, “Welcome to the Great Curvature.”
“We will be alright,” offered Georges.
“No, we won’t,” she simply concluded as her form returned to powder. The cloud dropped slowly to the ground under the weak gravity of mars. Georges saw the door slide open, this was his cue. His expression showed some emotion. In a fraction of a second, the Artificial Intelligence realized she had offended her creator. The solution was simple. Georges saw cubes in the corner of the room move. He looked in the direction of the shuffling noise.
He saw a trunk. It clicked open by magic. Georges went to it, saw the rolled up poster and unfolded it. His heart was warmed instantly. The computer had kept his stupid gift and carried it all the way across the solar system. He looked at it. Something was different from the original version he had given her fifteen years ago. He was sure. He was unable to find what, but something on this poster was odd.