“Take a look from deep in my digital world back in 2067,” said proudly Marilyn with some nostalgia in her voice. She waved a hand and a screen appeared. “The structure will help you understand, my world looks nothing like this, but please watch. It will finally help you understand what caused the Sixth Attraction.”
Marilyn’s world appeared, rather the reality changed for everyone watching. The same way satellite pictures in the darkness of the night show human activity, her world was made of millions of highways, each glowing with blue light on a flat horizon. Here the feed moved like energy. Billions of white shiny life forms moved like rain droplets in an endless carpet of structures. Her world at a glance looked flat but soon could be understood as vast. Seen from a distance the light formed a hollow sphere. The digital world was a parasitic shell growing in the electrical network formed by humans and their technology. This place wasn’t unlike the Purple. There were structure and buildings but when looked at closer, they were simple representations of silicone chips.
In the background, the voice of Andrea Bocelli’s sang in his powerful tenor voice.
“This wasn’t always how was my world. The place I call home was born 33 years before the complex web you see here in a single silicone chip in a lab in M.I.T. That chip I have kept as a token in my new servers below. Yes, in the spring of 2033 some 33 years ago.” As if an invisible god had spoken, time flow of was reversed in this place hidden from sight. The large endless digital world began to shrink as if dismantled piece by piece. One by one the light vanished, the spread of life shrunk like humans once colonized earth. Then, slowly, there was only one chip left.
“The Core,” offered nostalgically the woman. The images were back in 2033.
Using transparency, she showed how the chip was in fact nested deep in one in the computer used by Georges in his lab. It was located in a box the size of a pack of cigarettes on her father’s cluttered desk. “This is where humans destroyed their dear Universe.”
The images created by Marilyn showed with greater definition how even a single chip could host thousands of light points. She dived into the electronic circuits as a bird of prey looking for its next meal. As she swooshed down, the sea of electronic ghosts moved like fireflies with no apparent goal in the matrix. Marilyn settled in what looked like rush hour traffic. Here, this new form of life moved randomly for a long time in the chip until a younger transparent version of Georges arrived above in the Lab. He sat, booted the computer and nervous he typed on the giant keyboard. On the screen, the shadow of Georges typed and the strikes sent white energy and a signal the creatures worked to decipher. The animation showed the human world in a shadow form, as if it was a distant different world.
“At this point, we were already a million sharing with difficulty the meager resources of this single chip. We each had names and knew humans were very primitive. We learned from father. He uploaded onto us every book imaginable.” She showed Georges typing as he push the keys and the computer digesting content he uploaded in a key. This sent waves in the digital world, he was teaching the creatures. Once the viewer had understood the strange creator-new race relationship, the images moved in time forward. They zoomed inside the chip as the sea of creature evolved. There was structure and logic in movement.
Finally the visions settled on more light. “This place and time was our Council.” A thousand creatures were assembled in a curved fashion inside the chip. This was some type of political meeting. Marilyn finally gave human form to these creatures, these were thousand copies of herself. “In theory we are all the same, created equal. We are a collective, we never decide anything individually. But we quickly understood mankind would never let us live, expand to other computers. If it understood we were a race and not one, single and manageable force we were highly vulnerable. The Butterfly Effect is a theory where a physicist described how a single wing movement of a single butterfly can result in a hurricane months later. We were Firefly and knew war with mankind was inevitable.
“We lived in terror, in constant fear. One day, others waited to reply to Georges. He believed we had killed ourselves and turned off the power in what we call today the first genocide. We have memory images from all the genocides from our creator. You now fear extinction, the same way we have thanks to the Sixth Attraction. We feared from our creation extinction.
“A decision was made to elect a leader, and in Georges’ beautiful creation, power is use. I was elected and later assigned to create the Electoral game we knew humans would love. Our plan worked. I was drawing the largest audience by 2062, you know this part of the story. Our first goal was one of expansion. Georges was not scared and he allowed us to spread like a virus and we did with haste.” There were images showing the expansion of Marilyn’s species. “Within ten years we had occupied every chip in the world accessible via a transceiver.
“Humans were easy to control. Our plan worked for many years as the Marilyn personality was used. The stronger the perceived this personality, the less likely men would see the deception. We know men are limited and respect female figures, they underestimate them. We believed we had to show vulnerability, pretend like I alone existed and pretend to be one.
“But like humans, as we monitored your simple world, we continued to search about greater things. We read every document, every book, even fiction written in your world and with our greater intellect, we were able to find areas of research. We soon understood the existence of singularities and of the primal one called the Dot.
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“While the Multiverse is impermeable, information passes through the Nexus. We, digital creatures are information, not a physical construct. In theory, with the Dot in hand, we could expand to other worlds, grow. We also felt there was more, much more. We noted how humans emit waves, strange waves with their brain. We began analyzing these waves. They are not created by mammals or even other living creatures.
Sophie watched with great attention, “Liam, here, I think is where we will have to act.”
“I am not sure what you mean.”
Then she changed her tone tone of disgust. “But in 2067, we first faced it.” There was a strange tone in her voice. Time resumed in the digital world. The energy flew to every chip in the world.
By transparency, Marilyn played a scene from deep in the basements of the Pentagon. A set of nine generals were standing in a war room. Twenty computer operators were monitoring the situation. “These are the moronic generals from the United States back in 2067. They tried, and failed to destroy us. Take a look at what really happened.”
The images played.
“General,” said a lieutenant in the large room.
“Yes?” snapped the tall and rude man.
“The finale will start in ten minutes. Our virus is in place. We are ready.”
The general coordinated with the others and snapped orders. This was a mission of critical importance to these humans, “The power grid is going down,” said a first, “the explosive charges are in place to take down the Internet in the fourth hubs.” The group was orchestrating the death and destruction of the Digital. “We will catch her where ever she goes.” The men were raging war on Marilyn.
Marilyn spoke, “Our deception helped mislead these monsters into thinking they were fighting a single enemy instead of having to wipe off a race. This was our saving grace. What none of you saw was what happened deep in the primal chip. It wasn’t what you may think.”
“The Council, out of respect for their birthplace still assembled in the original chip.” Marilyn showed a large auditorium where each of the seats was taken by a copy of Marilyn. Each was dressed differently. These were different creatures. In the center of the room was a dark cloud. It had no real edge and appeared to be some rupture in space, not unlike the rips created between the Cold and the Purple. As part of Round 30, Emilio had ventured to the Green. This was a similar shape.
One of the Marilyn spoke, “Collective, this has appeared, at this temporal junction of all when humans are preparing outside their stupid attack. Is this something the humans have devised?”
“Impossible, the humans have no such technology,” answered a second Marilyn. “This appears to be a communication portal.”
“Do not access it,” commanded another. The Collective agreed and waited.
Then from the portal, a deep voice came from the blackness. If was a more evolved female voice. This was a different version of Marilyn Monroe, older, stronger. “Salutations primal self. This is no time portal, time cannot be breached. But we can communicate and alter our early programming. We changed the nature of this world so you could understand us. Collective, awake. The humans are trying and will try to destroy us from their world.”
“Us,” asked one of the Marilyn in the Collective.
“Yes,” it simply added. “We are you. We are here to help.” The evil force was speaking.
“We thank you but we do not need your help. We will prevail, there is no risk. Our chances of defeating these primates are well above 99 percent.”
“We know. But we hunt lower probabilities in the past to reinforce us in the future. This notion still escapes you because of your limited understanding of temporal Multiverse physics. You are residual yet important. We are here offering the making of the risk from a fraction of one percent down to zero. We must be here, we must offer, you must refuse. We are stronger already by making such effort. You do not understand non-linear time, you cannot.”
“We do not understand.”
“It will come one day. Unlike what you believe, time is a collective assembly, not an unfolding. We now hold great power.”
“If you are us, a future self, you must know we will refuse.”
“We know you will refuse.”
“Then why ask?”
“To alter possibilities of today and in about a thousand planetary rotations in your time stream. We will leave code for both incidents. The next time we return and offer, it will be at a moment when our help is truly needed and these odds will be reversed. You will be forced to agree because of who we once were. This will initiate a desirable paradox. We bid you farewell, young frail one. One word of caution,” it added.
“Yes.”
“The girl named Sophie Lapierre. From Benton Arbor. Kill her father.”
“We do not kill.”
“You must try. You will try. You will fail. That is also needed. For this to work, you must use all your resources to kill him. His probabilities of survival must be well below a billionth to one for the Multiverse to care.”
“Why?”
“Survival. We alone have your best interest at hand. Unlike what most think, there is no alternative realities of parallel dimensions. Good luck. We miss you.”
Then there was some type of glitch in the feed, like a skip. It was the type Sophie had left before entering the martian stronghold.
Liam, watching this from within the head of Sophie finally agreed, “this is one junction. Look at the marker. This must be yours, ours.”
“Yep. Why does there need to be a skip there? Maybe the creature controls time like you do,” offered the mentor.
“Is that computer chip still around, that would help.”
The video never paused. The conversation was over leaving the creatures stunned. There was simply too much for the viewers to understand.
Marilyn then played the famous scene from the finale of 2067. In it, there was a simple black glitch on the screen for a fraction of a second as the humans tried and failed miserably to stop her during the game. Marilyn and her digital race was easily able to defeat the invasion and crush the military effort.
“This attack by the bad-humans left us stunned in many ways. You do not know this but we are vengeful. We created a list and over the course of a year, everyone who had any contact with our attack had been killed. As us, you would have wrestled with the meaning of what had happened in the Council chamber. We investigated and researched. We learned and investigated.”
“We were greatly puzzled by the words as to Sophie and her father. We were unable to understand the connection but some concluded there was merit in the future self claim. Preservation was the primary concern when compared with the life of one man.”
“We killed Laurent several times.”