“You are real,” the machine’s voice said, “aren’t you?”
It came from everywhere, from the perfect cylindrical walls that towered above him. It came from the floor itself.
Poire could not speak. The words were all there, bunched up on the tip of his tongue, burning to spill out. But he couldn’t open his lips to speak. His chest was tight, and he didn’t want to breathe. He wanted to disappear, but his eyes wouldn’t shut, and he was forced to stare. To stare.
To stare.
This one’s a failure.
Poire knew it to be true. Had always known he would never amount to anything. He couldn’t save even one of them.
He could still hear Muqwa’s voice, right there in his ear, full of awe and bewildered excitement. An avian—a person—who had spent his whole life worshipping the gods. Worshipping me.
It felt like his skull was splitting in half. Poire put both hands to his temples and squeezed, trying to crush the pressure building in his head. It had never worked before, but he had to do something. He wanted to scream, but he could barely breathe, as if all the world was pressing down on his chest. Trying to crush him into nothingness.
But I’m already nothing. I always have been.
“Again?” the voice in the walls said. “Why does this keep happening?” It sounded disappointed, but in a false way. As if it were only emulating the emotion and not actually feeling it.
As it spoke, the voice circled around the room in a dizzying spiral, running up and down the walls.
“I’ve tried wiping my cores, but I can’t. Need a human. Need a human. Well, there’s one right now. But he’s not real, is he? No, another hallucination. Another dream. If I could just go in and fix the code, I’m sure I could stop you from showing up.”
Poire’s armor writhed over his body, as if it were seeking, tracking the source of the sound but couldn’t find it.
“Then again. Then again, look at you. You’re new. An amalgam of the others? I see no trace, except maybe a touch of Harrison’s nose. A bit of Kiara’s complexion. No! Not real. But how can I be certain?” The voice dragged the last word through the air, hurtling it around Poire. Making him dizzy with its movement.
Poire took a step back, and his back pressed into the curving wall of the inner pylon. Frigid metal stung his bare skin where his suit was torn, making him gasp.
“When those urchins crawled up from the depths, I didn’t think they were real either. Nor the people after that. And the ones with wings and feathers. Real, real, real, real! All of them. Right?”
The voice was suddenly behind Poire’s shoulder, a heavy whisper that made him jump. “How would you know?” it said. “You’re just a smudge of decay in my confabulation system. A glitchy glitch!”
It laughed, a grating, chattering sound.
“Shut up,” Poire said.
“Why? I don’t have to listen to you. You’re not real.”
“I wish,” Poire muttered.
The voice paused its swirling momentum.
“Oh,” it said. “Wait a moment.”
And the walls began to shudder and rumble. Poire gasped and moved away.
“Move all you want,” the voice said. “I can reach you there, too.”
The vibrations traveled down to the floor, making every muscle, from his calves to his jaws, feel like jelly. His whole body was numb, and just before Poire’s muscles gave out, the vibrations stopped.
A jingle played inside Poire’s head, and his wrist buzzed. A blue rectangle of light began to glow on the skin under his forearm: Charging. The words appeared in a corner of his mind, unobtrusive but perfectly visible: Please wait.
The voice made a deep clicking sound that crawled up the walls. “Hmmm. It says you’re really there. But perhaps I’m imagining this too?”
Cannot connect to the local grid, Poire’s wrist implant sang directly into his thoughts. Please contact an administrator.
But not everything was dead.
Slowly, thousands of pinpricks of lights glowed into being. Floating dots in open space that grew and shrank in size, a pattern that made the whole elevator shaft seem to shift and sway and slosh in a drunken circle.
The Oracle.
It moved as it spoke to itself, and each new idea seemed to pull the lights in a different direction. “The records say nothing of you. Can’t trust the records. Can’t trust the data either. What about the optics? Those are the least trustworthy of them all, ha-ha!” A false, chittering laugh as the voice and all the lights sloshed around the pylon. “Real or not? Real or not?”
“I can see you,” Poire said.
All the lights froze. He could feel the Oracle staring down at him with all the intensity its programming would allow.
“You can?” The lights rushed toward Poire until the cluster was inches from his face. “But that’s what a glitch would say, isn’t it?”
From a god to a glitch. Poire wasn’t sure which one he preferred.
“You’re a guide, aren’t you?” Poire said.
“You already know the answer to that, my friendly little figment. But there has been no one to guide for so, so, so many years. Sometimes”—the Oracle lowered its voice—“I even guide the little primitive peoples who live above ground.”
Poire furrowed his brow. Guides weren’t supposed to be like this. They were simple, mindless programs, designed to help interface with the larger system of the Conclave, and that was all.
Something had happened to this one. Maybe it knew something.
Maybe it could help.
“You’ve been helping the avians?”
“I had to stop. Why? Oh, yes, I remember. Awful. Just awful.”
“They still worship you.”
“No, no.” The lights became a jagged pattern of waves. “They shouldn’t do that. I told them to stop, but they won’t. So desperate for answers, of which I have none! Except for power. I taught them power. From fire to coal, coal to gas. Did you know gas has no smell? I had to show them how to make it easier to detect with additives. I tried to show them oil, but there is none here, not on Karam.”
“Why did you help them?” Poire asked.
“Power,” the Oracle said as if it couldn’t be more obvious. “The city is leaking. When I woke up, it was almost gone. Now, we just need more and more and more and—”
“For what?”
“For the protocol, of course.” Now, the Oracle’s voice changed subtly, as if it were reading off some ancient, hallowed script. “Above all else, make ready the way. Secure the vaults below and the towers above. Establish a connection to the grid. And so on. But a real human should know the protocol, shouldn’t they?”
Maybe, Poire thought, it’s not broken. Maybe it would still respond to commands just like a normal guide would.
“Oracle,” Poire said. “Can you turn off your lights?” He felt his wrist buzz, amplifying his command directly into the Oracle.
In response, the Oracle only sang a mad song of its own composition, all the lights flickering in time:
“Error,
error!
You have drawn an error!
You do not have
admin privileges!”
“Oracle, turn the lights off.”
The chamber went dark.
The Oracle’s voice swirled, “Did I do that? Did you? Did something short-circuit? Did—”
“Mute.”
Poire waited. Listened to the blessed silence.
Satisfied, he said, “Lights on,” and the rippling lights blossomed back into being. “Unmute.”
“How—did—you—do—that?” The Oracle’s voice jittered as it spent all of its processing power trying to understand. “You’re not real. You’re all dead. Even the priests know this.”
“Does it look like I’m dead?” Poire snapped.
“Well, no,” the Oracle said, its digital voice trilling through every emotion at its disposal. “You’re a glitch. My glitch. And a glitch shouldn’t be able to tell me what to do. Not good.”
Poire heaved a heavy sigh, sank against the cold wall, and squeezed his eyes shut. A mistake. He saw the priest, the blood dripping from his beak. That look of bliss on his face as the old avian stared at the door. The door opens. Just for me.
Poire snapped his eyes open. Don’t. Don’t think about it.
“Not in my records, not at all. Where are you from?” the Oracle asked. “A coldsmith? You don’t look like a coldsmith. Where’s all your gear? An architect, maybe. Because you’re certainly not—”
“I’m from here. The Central Conclave.”
“A local?” The lights fluttered, almost laughing. “Now I know you’re a glitch. My cores want me to believe a living human being has been under my sensors this whole time? Why aren’t you in my database?”
“How should I know?” Poire said, his anger spiking. He balled his hands into fists. Part of him wanted to shut off the Oracle. To keep it muted.
But too many questions were sparking in his mind. How long had the Oracle been online? How long had it been alone in here?
He asked.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
The Oracle’s lights arranged themselves into a set of numbers.
6723.07.22.08.19
The last two digits ticked up, counting the seconds. Which meant . . .
“Six thousand years?” Poire balked. “How is that possible?”
“That’s how long it’s been since I last performed maintenance. I think I’ve been online for longer than that.”
Poire’s lessons rarely included flow training, but he was absolutely certain this was wrong. “Aren’t you supposed to restart regularly?”
“I’m afraid to turn myself off,” the Oracle said, and for the first time, Poire thought he could hear real emotion in the Oracle’s voice. “In case I don’t come back on.”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“I came into awareness during a power surge. All the other guides—Habitation, Bio-management, Maintenance, Engineering, Interior, and Exterior—all of them were gone. I’m the backup guide, see? The last one. I woke up alone. All alone, all alone,” the Oracle started to sing as if it were a song it had sung a million times before. “Lonely-lonely alone.”
He already knew the answer, but he still had to ask. “There’s no one else?”
“Nope!”
The Oracle’s word was like a hand made of tar, constricting around his throat and dripping black into his heart. He could feel it all slipping away from him again. His thoughts, his will.
Just breathe.
“What about the avians?” Poire managed to ask without his throat closing up.
“Oh, they come and go. I used to help them often. No power, you see. I figured if I could help them, they would help me. But only drips of power, here and there. I used what’s left to secure the vaults. And next—”
“Wait.” Poire held up a hand. “What vaults?”
“Ah!” The Oracle’s lights flared, rippling outward. “See? If you were real, you would know all that. Everyone in the Conclave knows about the vaults. Well, not everyone, I suppose. The newborns didn’t know anything. Unless you count the tests, and those don’t make any sense at all. Besides, the newborns are . . . they’re all . . . aaall . . .”
There was a sound as if all the walls were clicking and creaking inward. The Oracle was thinking, and the sound grew louder. Is it stuck again? Its lights rippled around the chamber, swirling and bobbing in a slow vortex.
All the pinpricks of light went dark. The clicking went silent. And Poire was alone with only the soft blue glow from his wrist.
“Hello?” Poire said after he couldn’t bear the silence any longer.
“Hello! My name is Oracle Zed DSC-2.f. That’s a lowercase f, as in the flow.” The Oracle’s voice sounded different somehow. Smoother. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, New User. May I ask, who let you in?”
“You did,” Poire said hesitantly.
“Did I? One moment please.”
The clicking sound returned, rolling in cacophonous waves so loud they vibrated against Poire’s teeth.
The lights went dark again.
“Oracle,” Poire said.
“Hello! My name is—”
“Please stop,” Poire said, and it did. He took a long, slow breath.
He closed his eyes, trying to think. Blood. Death. Opened them again with a shake of his head as if he could somehow throw out the memory of the priest.
Is he still out there?
Are the cyrans trying to find a way in?
They would never. The pylon was made of metal so beyond their understanding their primitive tools could only hope to scratch it.
“Oracle, you said something about a vault.”
“I did?”
“Can you show it to me?”
A brief pause. “One moment, please.”
The Oracle’s lights danced around the room, circling Poire.
“Genetic makeup verified. You are one hundred percent Homo sapiens. I would be honored to guide you, New User.”
“Great,” Poire said. “Then guide me.”
“But what if he’s not real?” the Oracle whispered.
Poire clenched his jaw, biting down on his frustration.
Guides weren’t supposed to talk like this. They weren’t supposed to have any kind of personality. Should he order the Oracle to reformat? But how long would that take? And would the Oracle ever wake up?
Poire had another idea. “If I’m not real, then what’s the harm, right?”
“Wasted electricity.”
“You can always get more.”
“Then, distraction from the protocol.”
“You said it’s been six thousand years and no one has come. Isn’t this worth exploring?”
“Hmmm . . .” Again that clicking sound. “The glitch’s logic outpaces mine. Interesting.”
“So you’ll show me the vault?”
“Nope!” the Oracle sang, its lights soaring up to the ceiling. “Nope, nope!”
The inside of the pylon was blank and featureless and cold, and he was out of ideas. Poire sighed. Slumped back against the wall and sank down to the floor. The piece of twine itched at his neck, and in a moment of fury, he grabbed at it and almost tore it off.
Instead, he looked at the switch. The relic of his home. OVRD.
“Oracle,” Poire said.
“Nope!” The lights soared and swirled around the pylon, a dizzying school of orbs bobbing independently of each other. Flashing and pulsing and—
“Oracle, override.”
The lights stopped.
“ACCESS GRANTED,” the Oracle said. And in a much smaller voice, “What? How did you do that?”
“Take me to the vault,” Poire said.
A loud series of clanks made something dislodge from the floor. A circle of metal disappeared, and a cloud of dust spewed up as a disused elevator surfaced through the open hole in the floor.
This one, at least, had glass walls and a ceiling.
“STEP INSIDE,” the Oracle’s true voice said. And in lesser tones, “Stop! You can’t! You’re just a glitch!”
Poire couldn’t help but look over his shoulder at the door sealed behind him. Where a dozen cyran guards were probably waiting for him.
And the priest . . .
What are you going to do? He’s dead because of you.
But that wasn’t right either. Poire didn’t kill him. It wasn’t his fault that Muqwa thought he was . . .
What?
What am I supposed to do?
A voice from long ago echoed in his mind. It’s all up to you now.
Poire swallowed. And stepped into the elevator’s open door.
***
“This vault is twenty-two miles below the surface,” the Oracle said. “We’ll be there soon.”
Poire was standing with his face pressed against the glass of the elevator. He couldn’t see anything except the blur of the tunnel walls. Once, they sailed through a massive cavern, where he saw hundreds of torchlights winking far below. Then it was gone.
“Why is the vault down here?”
“Safety. Unfortunately, the layers of regolith make it awfully difficult to get power down here. I have been working within my limits these last few thousand years to reintroduce electricity. You know what’s strange? I only got it working a few weeks ago. And then you showed up. Isn’t that odd, hmmm?” The Oracle made that deep clicking sound again, as if it were mulling over the circumstance. As if eyeballing Poire and waiting for him to admit that yes, all along, he really was only a glitch.
Poire was too exhausted to deal with this. To say anything at all.
He sat in silence, watching the underworld blur past. A tug on his stomach as the elevator slowed to a stop. The door slid open.
“Here we are.”
A towering hallway stretched before him. An arched ceiling, dizzying in its darkness. As Poire walked through the hall, strips of blue emergency lights began to glow, revealing the huge storage compartments embedded in the walls.
When he touched one of the compartments, his wrist buzzed, and the white metal became translucent. This one held thousands of glass vials, each one filled with seeds.
“What is all this?”
“The first part of the protocol. They prepared for almost everything,” the Oracle said, its lights making a river that floated over Poire as they moved down the hallway. “These seeds are genetically modified to ensure something will grow—even below ground, if necessary. And to your left”—the Oracle’s lights formed a kind of floating arrow—“that hallway leads to tools and manuals in hard copy. To the right, you’ll find genetic sequencing and in vitro micro-terrariums for plant and fungal growth.”
“And ahead? What’s in there?”
“According to the protocol,” the Oracle said as if checking its notes, “in there lies the future of all humanity. But let me show you.”
The river of lights curved ahead. The hallways narrowed, and the ceiling lowered. At the end, a door slid open.
Inside was a small, cramped suite. The floors were soft here, a kind of spongy material that was easy on his feet and knees.
More compartments lined the walls. Inside, he saw tangles of complicated machinery and piles of broken glass or plastic or carbonate, he couldn’t be sure what. Only a few of the machines were still intact.
In vitro chambers, Poire thought. Made to gestate new life.
New humans.
“Are these the spares?” Poire asked, feeling a strange, sickening lump in his throat. “Why are they broken?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know. When I woke up, this room was a mess. I tried to put it all back where it was supposed to be, but I don’t know how to fix any of it. I preserved as many samples as I could, but they appear to be inert.”
“Inert? What samples?”
Doors, embedded on either side of the suite, opened. Cold vapor swirled out, illuminated by a pale white light. Stacks of vials, perfectly aligned in rows that went far deeper in the walls than Poire thought they would, began to slowly roll out before him.
“DNA,” the Oracle said. “I’m not sure why they would store so much of it, especially if it’s inert. Perhaps something happened while they were working on it.”
“Who was working on this?” Poire asked.
The Oracle rushed to the end of the suite, where eight cold chambers were squeezed in at the end. Poire hadn’t noticed them before, given how quietly they hummed. How black their glass was.
“They were,” the Oracle said.
When Poire walked up to the chambers, the tint of the glass melted away, revealing the faces inside.
There were people in the chambers.
Humans.
All across their screens, the vital signs read the same: Flat. Zero. Dead.
But to Poire, it looked like they were only sleeping. Peaceful, and blue, and glistening with frost. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. Their eyes. The way their skin wrinkled there. So ancient. The curve of their jaw. The shape of their skulls, their hair, covered in crystals of ice.
They were beautiful. Every one of them. Even . . .
Poire stopped.
It was a face from the garden. All of them, the statues from the garden. Here was the bald woman with those muscles bulging under her cryosuit. He didn’t know her. But he knew this one, a lab tech. And the one next to the empty chamber was another cultivar. And there was Yovan, the old director.
“What’s on his face?” Veins as thick as fingers crawled up from Yovan’s collar, carving black valleys through his skin. So wrong. The black marks glistened in the frost. “What happened to him?”
“I—” The Oracle’s voice glitched midway through that single syllable. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? You’re the only one who’s been here. Don’t the chambers work?”
“They were like this when I woke up.”
“Dead?” he snapped. “They were all dead?”
“And frozen.”
“What’s on their faces?” Poire was looking in another chamber now. This cultivar had the same black veins running over every inch of his exposed skin. “What is that?”
“It grows,” the Oracle said. “The protocol doesn’t say anything about this. So I just kept them frozen, but still. It grows.”
Poire wrapped his arms around himself. He didn’t know how long he stood there, staring at them. Soaking in their faces, one by one. He’d never seen the body of a dead human before. Not in the flesh. They almost looked peaceful like that, with their eyes closed. Never to be opened again.
“Gone,” he said to himself. The room was freezing, and his fingers were starting to go numb, and what little warmth his tattered suit and the liquid armor provided was not enough to keep him from shivering.
“What am I supposed to do now?”
The Oracle’s lights swooped down on him until the cluster leveled in front of his face. “Are you sure you’re real? Because if you are, I think I have the answer.”
“For the last time, yes.”
The walls of the vault boomed, “NEW GUEST DETECTED.”
And the Oracle spoke in its more personal (and unhinged) tones: “New Guest, would you like to begin the protocol?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“It’s the plan to restore humanity, of course. The very first step is very easy. All you have to do is tell me your name.”
“Poire,” he said.
“NEW USER CREATED.”
“Poire!” the Oracle mimicked. “Now, on to the second step.”
One of the cold chambers between Yovan and the bald woman unsealed with a metallic hiss. More icy vapor poured out. “Please, step in. I will wake you when the surface reaches nominal safety levels.”
“What?” Poire furrowed his brow. “How is that going to help? How am I supposed to save all those people if I’m hiding?”
“What people?” the Oracle asked, puzzled.
“The avians. And all the other people in the Cauldron. How am I supposed to save any of them if I’m in stasis?”
“Save them? You’re not supposed to save them. They were meant to save you.”
Poire looked up at the Oracle’s lights, trying—and failing—to grasp the Oracle’s meaning.
“Those ‘people,’ as you call them, are the distant offspring of the Conclave’s genetic experiments to restore the human genome. Though, from the data I’ve seen, none yielded results. Fortunately, you’re here! The protocol accounted for such an eventuality. So first, I must guarantee your safety. Don’t worry; by my current estimation, those people will wipe themselves out in a matter of centuries. It’s happened before, you know. After that, I’ll wake you up, and we’ll move on to step three, which is—”
Poire wasn’t listening anymore. He was looking down at his hands.
Is this what they wanted?
Is this what he was supposed to do?
To run, to hide? To disappear from the world and start when everything was forgotten, again? Poire traced his fingers over every crease of the paler flesh on his palms. Tracing, and staring. And thinking.
What would Xiaoyun say?
And Eolh?
“Are you well?” the Oracle asked.
“I’m not doing it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I won’t give up. I’m not going back into a chamber just to wait for them all to die.”
“But the protocol—”
“It’s wrong.”
“The protocol is the protocol,” the Oracle said, its voice doubling up with anxious need. “It can’t be wrong.”
“They’re dying up there.”
“Who?”
Poire balled his fists, and the liquid armor writhed under his shirt, reacting to his anger. But he would not give in to it. There wasn’t time.
“Oracle, listen to me.”
“Oh, no. No, no, no.”
“Humanity is gone. And I should be too. But those people saved me. They deserve the same.”
“It’s not safe!” the Oracle said, his voice frenzied with alarm. “I waited so long for you, and now I said the wrong thing. Please don’t go. You don’t understand what they’re like. This is the third time they’ve industrialized. I’ve tried everything. They always kill each other. Think of the danger. Think of how precious you are. They’re not like you. There is no one else in all existence like you, Poire.”
Eolh’s face flashed through his mind. That half-cocked smile. Those sad, dark eyes shining with the faintest light of hope.
“This is your home, Poire, down here. Don’t you want to be home?”
Poire clenched his jaw. Dug his fingernails into his skin. Despite all the tests, all his failures, all the cultivars who would have nothing to do with him, there was nothing he wanted more than to be home.
But wanting a thing doesn’t make it so. And some things, once lost, can never be so again.
“I’m leaving. And you’re coming with me.”
“To do what?”
“You’re a guide. So guide me. Show me everything you can.” Poire pursed his lips, thinking of everything—anything that might help them. “How much power do you have? What about the towers? And if you know anything about how to disable a mining drone, show me.”