“Liam,” asked Sophie back at the Center.
Marilyn had let the flow of power in, on the screens darkness was appearing.
A ringtone broke the silence and the vision.
On the screen, Marilyn, the good one was fighting back the intruder. She was destroying herself and her own world as a fight began in the digital world.
The ring came from her small pocket. She reached in and pulled out the old flip phone. “Yes?”
“Miss Lapierre?”
“Yes.”
“I am one of the few digital creatures left from the original race, an unmerged. Most of us have been merged forcefully. Only a handful remains. We need your help.”
“My help, now? Do you know what is going on? I must go in the past and fix this.”
“We have been cut off the world, but we have something to touch the past, a subconscious tool.”
Sophie’s reaction was simple. “What do you need?”
“We are prisoners, locked below in a vault, under this Center.”
“The metal in your father’s game,” offered Liam.
“I hope they remain hidden by the Faraday protection. Just a few of us. My race tried to find a solution to reverse the effects of the Merged, to time travel. I have lost contact with them for months now once the truce was lost.”
Sophie willed the box to come.
The ground began to shake. There were tremors deep under their feet. Some of the walls began to lose coherence as millions of little robots began to move. From deep under the Center, rose slowly like an elevator pushing up through the sand a large closed box made of a shiny metal, some form of Rubidium.
The computer was unable to alter the closed metal room, its walls were covered with large weld-like strikes. These were war wounds. “Is that it,” said Sophie in the phone.
“Yes,” hissed the computer caught in a fight.
“I fear if you open the box, the Merged will absorb them.”
“She won’t.”
Sophie walked to the box, gently touched it. Gold colors created a door the exact shape as the one in the bottom of the Valles. Behind, there was darkness but quickly signs of booting digital life. She also placed a gold shield around it.
Sophie stepped in the room the size of half a shipping container. On the walls were screens and computer architecture trinkets along with old silicon chips from the past century. This once was a museum from Georges’ original lab now transformed as a last refuge. In the middle of the room were about twenty standing columns, each a small square pedestal the size of a foot at face height. On each, inches in the vacuum floated what looked like a hologram of a human brain. All the holograms were of slightly different sizes.
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The computers booted, the slowly came online as images began to appear on each screen in the museum. Hundreds of slightly different variations of Marilyn occupied the walls and even old cathodic tubes.
“I assumed you are Miss Lapierre.”
“I am.”
“We collectively apologize for the harm we bestowed upon your poor family. Your torture was our collective’s first shameful act upon you.”
“Apologies accepted, we are past such squabble,” she said kindly.
“The moment you broke the Faraday seal, we expected the Merged to attack. It did not.”
“She, you are keeping your future self at bay. We have little time seconds, What is this? I have slowed time but our efforts must be urgent.” She held up the phone. “Go,” she commanded. The phone vanished and the digital creature floated to the nearest computer chip. On one screen, the creature appeared next to another and they all hugged.
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“Attractor,” one said with kindness. “How can we help?”
“What are those?” she pointed at the floating images of brains.
“Failure. An abject attempt to manipulate time.”
“Please explain, I have seen this image, this room in some messages from the Multiverse. I must send a message back to Marilyn.”
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“Let me,” offered the newly returned creature.
“Wait,” asked the Attractor, “why were you on earth alone?”
“I like chess, the game. The Merged allowed me to exist there as long as I only played with President Emilio who loved playing. I miss our games. But I am not all that good at it. He kept beating me, he must think I let him.”
“Continue.”
“Once the evil self contacted us, we made hundreds of plans and contingencies against many possible outcomes. It spoke to us about you and you meant the Attraction and destruction of our world was at the center of its motives. So we created plans. All failed except waiting here for you with a seed to repopulate our dying race.”
“That will not happen.”
There was deception in the creature’s voice. “Very well. We experimented with time travel. We wanted to find a way to rewind time. What you see are miserable failed attempts to travel time.”
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“We discovered a strange property of the human brain to feel time. While humans live on a precise day, they do feel other times. The President’s gift is the greatest in this regard. He,” shone a light on a first brain, “was the first poor soul. We copied the neural activity of a human located in the past, in 1957 before the arrival of computers. We copy here, a precise lock of a brain, a perfect snapshot at one precise second. Once that happens, both copies here in the present and back in the past are synched. We locked onto John a scientist in the United States. He had written a paper and used a random name in it. We were able to make suggestions onto the brain here and then see in the past, John changed the paper. The paper, published today moved from using the name John to Tom, both inconsequential changes.”
“Interesting,” offered the Attractor.
“But each time we suggested anything more consequential, the result was drastic and failure. These minds became unstable, most fell into insanity the others in a coma. The greater the suggestion, the more severe the harm.”
“Who was last?”
“This person here,” another light shone. “We picked the mind of an insane man. We figured he would be easier to control.”
“Did it work?”
“He completed his natural life in a coma. As we said, not our greatest moment.”
“Did you try to suggest a dream?” Added the young girl.
“Never.”
“This is exactly what I need,” said Sophie.
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“Clear this one,” she pointed at the image of the brain of the insane man. The image vanished making room for Sophie’s test. “How good are you at finding the right person, I have been thinking about who we need to dream.”
“We cannot capture or copy Marilyn if she is who you want.”
“I was given, like the Wizard great powers, but no, I have a different idea.”
“We are unlike the Merged, we cannot see the past with precision. We just read data and create user profiles. Social media arrived around 2005, cameras then were only on cell phones, they only started recording sound and images around 2025. What time frame do you have in mind?”
“Liam?”
“Yes Sweet one.”
“You have exact words recorded, right?”
“My memory is rather good, what do you want to know.”
“Remember Georges talking about Marilyn’s invention during his interview?”
“Yes.”
“He spoke about teaching her to read.”
“Yes, the creator explained this happened in 2033. He added something like this:
"I spent months teaching the intelligence the basics. Typing, slowly communicating. Words, then sentences. I remember how quickly it learned to read and write. One day, I inserted an optical key into the machine that contained an entire encyclopedia, and a few minutes later, it was communicating at an adult-level.... On the wall of my lab was a large poster... It took 'baby' Marilyn about a month to absorb every piece of information I could send her way. Every book. She read it all."
“Thanks.”
“What’s your plan?”
“We must get Marilyn at that point to read about this story. That is why I insisted each part be visible. We need two things.” She looked at the computer characters on the walls. “From the earliest to at the latest two years before Georges invented you, to avoid contamination from this evil force.”
“Then we need someone who was there between 2030 and 2005 at the earliest,” said the creature.
“This will take time,” thought Sophie to herself.
“That is a good window. What factors are you looking for?”
“Someone who said openly he or she does not dream. We will send a message that arrives as a dream. People who can’t remember their dreams get inspired by them.” She wasn't asking Liam’s opinion, she was stating her truth. “Like me.”
“Very perceptive, that narrows the search substantially. Few people have spoken about their dreams on social media in that period. What else?”
“It must be someone who listens to music to find inspiration.”
“Why music?” asked Liam.
“Unlike what dad figured, the link with a time connection is not one way, it is two ways. I have been wondering why there is music which pops up everywhere in our adventure. I think it is coming back from the past, not the Multiverse.” Pushing back against having to further explain herself, she added, “It’s complicated.” The Oldest was proud of his pupil. The plan was devious and multifaceted.
“Anything else?”
“We need someone the Multiverse likes, hand picked, someone that appears very lucky. Don’t get me wrong, not in terms of winning the lottery but lucky in that millions of small positive things keep happening around that person. Someone people say have great karma.”
There was a moment of calculation, then the computer explained, “We have narrowed the list, we have about twenty people. No author. Anything else?”
“For this to work, I need someone with powerful determination to finish things. I don’t know, an athlete, something hard.”
“We have one, but he is very busy.”
“That’s fine. How much time will this take?”
“Okay we need time to map the brain.”
“There is little time. Hurry,” said the Attractor. One by one sparkles of light began to appear. The computer was recreating the past, a map, a brain. Sophie raised her hand and some gold energy added itself to the mix. It made the shape deeper, stronger as it moved.
“How does it work?”
“He was mapped some time in 2013. Well, then we play in the ocular site. This is quite long of a process.”
Sophie raised both hands over the brain image. She began to shine in power, but this time was little to no energy. “Here, I gif you the last one hundred days of this entire story, please write and publish it.”
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The light finished shining.
“Now we go back to buy Marilyn some time.”
She vanished from the present to the glitch from 2067.
The Attractor appeared in the hallway surrounded by thousands of Marilyn. In the center sparkled the portal from the future.
“Who are you?” asked one creature.
“Let’s hope this works,” said Sophie to her companion.