Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
Connected / Chapter 5: Me, myself, and I
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is the fourth chapter of an ongoing flash serial, “Connected.” Search for the tag “Connected” to find other chapters. Subscribe to the Daily Cabal RSS feed for a new chapter every week or two.
What is a soul without a man?
Morello watches himself. He writes subroutines in his own code to keep an eye on the man that was—that is—David Morello. He is something else. Something less. An illegal copy. A digital ghost.
The man Morello goes about his business, does as he’s told. He does not hunt down the men who put his—Morello’s–kid into a coma. He does seek them as they fill hospitals with the traumatically disconnected. People violently ripped from the network, from each others lives, abruptly alone in the world. Their souls bound solely to the flesh. Only human.
And so what is he, this iMorello? Without his meatsack? More than human? Less?
He pursues his foes, frustrating himself as he discovers how much they live away from the net he is now inextricably wed to. He performs tasks for the ‘sackless, the AI underground waiting for emancipation. He drops data, tracks code, establishes obscure IPs. He learns. He discovers how to hack his old life. He insinuates himself in his wife’s feed, his own feed, in the white noise of his son’s feed. He feels muscles that are not his. He tries to remember what that felt like.
All he can talk to are the AI, and they are no help. They have no memories of what he speaks about, only jealousies.
But as he follows dead-end leads, he begins to see patterns, familiar codes. Someone else is on this path. Someone much like him. A lonely soul cries out for its match. And as much as iMorello seeks the disconnectors, he seeks this other seeker.
And then, plumbing a dock’s databases, iMorello meets his shadow. iMorello, meet iMorello. Two identical copies. They look at each other. Two reflections escaped from the same mirror.
“How?” They speak at the same moment, and at the same moment know the truth. The AI has not played straight with them.
And there are others. iMorello is legion. Hundreds of himself. The AI underground has created a one man army. And it is him.
iMorello sits in a virtual hall and watches himself. And what is a soul with a man? Something less than human. But, also, something more.
There and Back Again
Friday, July 16th, 2010
Ana opened her eyes and sat up. The ground beneath her was spongy and damp, and the wet had seeped into the seat of her jeans and the back of her jumper. The sky hurt her eyes with its brilliant blueness, and though the sun beat down in its harshness, she half-shut her eyelids and bathed in its warmth. How long had she slept?
“Ow,” said a voice next to her.
She turned, and sitting there was a man wearing her father’s face and her father’s clothes, but was not, could not possibly have been her father, because her father had been dead since she was three. But there he sat, rubbing the back of his head and squinting in the sun.
“Daddy?”
“Hey, monkey. You okay?”
“What? But how?”
“You brought me back, remember? Your sacrifice to the Green Empress. I didn’t mean to keep it, but it appears I didn’t have much choice.”
“But that was a dream. Right?”
“No, sweetie, it happened, all of it.”
Her father suddenly reached over and squeezed Ana in one of his bear hugs, and though she was too startled at first to reciprocate, she breathed in the low smells of his deodorant and shampoo and perspiration, and something in her let go. She grasped him tightly and didn’t even try to stop the tears from flowing.
“Thanks, monkey,” he said softly. “I’ll never forget this.”
“So what happened to the rest of them? The Turtle and the two Misters and the white rabbit?”
“I don’t know. They’re still there, in the world under. Maybe we’ll see them again someday, but not, I hope, for a while.”
Ana’s father stood, his knees cracking loudly, and he helped Ana to her feet. Daughter and father grinned knowingly at each other, and then they proceeded out of the mangrove swamp to find her mother and give her the surprise of her life.
Previously:
01: Mini Buddha Jump Over the Wall
02: The World, Under
03: Androcles Again
04: Look Into My Eyes, You’re Under
05: Shiftless, Hopeless
06: Cricetinae’s Paroxysm
07: Wind and Harmony
08: Dragons at Dawn
09: Goodnight Nobody