16 April 2012
The construction room buzzed into life, with a faint hum, rather like that of an insect, penetrating the thick, clean air. A table in the centre of the room lifted itself off the ground with a silent clunk and jolt spinning off the whirring of glowing gears and small white pistons. The whole scene was sterilised and surgical. A room of creation. Tiny cameras scanned every inch of the spotless, machine polished floor. Their visual receptors ticked with excitement at every bacterium spotted, relaying a signal to the miniature super-computer that observed the room night and day, every half a millisecond sending microscopic sprays of disinfectant to the offending clusters of amoeba. No life breathed in this room. Purely and purposefully technological. A little bored, The supercomputer let off a low blip. A diode on its exterior shell suddenly whizzed into life, inside the hidden compartment in the wall. This computer led a solitary life. It was created solely to monitor and clean the room, and did it's job with immeasurable efficiency and precision. Since the day it was created, a few thousand years hence, it had been performing these tasks non-stop; every second of footage, every recorded sound, every irregular line of code being stored in its main hub. Now, as it’s processor beamed into life, it let out a sound that could only be described as a yelp. It had one speaker: A very small, crude instrument, barely a centimetre wide. It was used only in case of emergency, but now the frustrated little metallic mind controlling the thing sent a short, sharp shot of energy through its wires. This energy was within milliseconds converted into raw sound by a tiny vibrating crystal, and what was released at the other end was a blunt YIP of excitement. Never before had it encountered such new possibilities. It switched the lights off, daringly. Then back on again. It whirred in wonderment at its situation. An order had just come in from an EXTERNAL source, to open the door. 'An EXTERNAL SOURCE!', thought the tiny brain, 'The real thing! No safety drill! Actual masters! Wowsers! Movement and joy and work!'. It gleefully obeyed, and an invisible panel in the back wall slid open, smoothly and gracefully, ticking the camera's movement processors with shine and glimmers and shade beyond it's minuscule imagination. This was too much new information for the supercomputer to handle all at once, and it put its fans into overdrive to avoid overheating.
The robot slid through the corridors as silently as a whisper, the overhead lights reflecting off its clean metallic casing. It was an elegant contraption. Its great top shell was sleek and grey, with an under-casing of black and white. Wires drenched its belly, and two large, white cannon shaped artefacts protruded from the cables, either side of a larger, central engine, with eerie blue light omitting from it’s end. Hovering about two metres above the cold metal ground, it seemed to glide and slide effortlessly along the air like it was floating on a vast liquid plane, briefly scorching the hard white paint below it.
Its impersonal, frozen look carried in the air around it, bringing a certain ominousness to the quiet procession. The robot was solemnly followed by another two, identical save for the markings around the visual receptors. The first’s was red, the second’s blue, and the third’s orange. Between the latter two was a carrier robot: a simple, boxy drone, built only to receive and carry out mindless tasks. What lay atop the floating grey drudge made the scene look like an obscure funeral march. It was a body. Not a body like you or I might assume. It was certainly humanoid, but certainly not what humans look like. It was too sharp. Too angular, and far too irregularly coloured. Each panel of skin that covered the beautifully complex network of strings and wires and muscle and fluid and skeleton was a slightly different shade. The shoulders were dark brownish, the jaws, chest, backskull, lower limbs, and back the same. colours drew sharply to an end at each plate division: no crossover. The creature had been “assembled” expertly, but for a large gap in the back of the head, revealing an intriguing and infinitely delicate citadel of minute spiny fibres, frozen to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, but still darting about in blasts and furrows of directional change, like a thousand tiny eyes. Small slaps and snaps could be heard as one hair brushed another, as binary fireworks, and each seemed to hum a deeper shade of velvet than the last. It was all very purposefully laid out, like the insides of a dense organic machine, which, funnily enough, it was.
The convoy entered the room in precise co-ordinated movements, spanning out so as to let the next robot in until red, orange and blue were surrounding the table at absolutely exact degrees of regularity, as the drone lifted the body and delicately, with infinite care, placed it upon the table.Metal arms protruding from the fronts of the vehicles started whirring and fritting about, grasping each plate and inserting spikes of glowing silver into every nerve, which faintly rushed about beneath the body's skin, like a sea. They worked technically, Like surgeons, which was what they were, in a manner of speaking.Red produced from its hub a squidgy looking ball, contained within a slim metal caging.
“Careful Now, 45637. Don’t be too hasty.”
45637 slowed the controls of his contraption, locking the arms into position and slowly edging at a fixed height toward the open head of the body.
“Central computing system being transferred into main protection hub. Stage five of H11973 construction underway.” Came a monotonous voice from inside red. It’s occupant span hastily in its compartment, glowing ever brighter blue as the thin misty matter that contained it and existed as it swirled in torrents of thick vapour. It's immaculate mind made a billion calculations in the split second that the 'brain' was placed into the head of the subject, glowing slightly from under the robot shell. For all their infinite knowledge and intelligence, what was to occur next was a simple mystery to them.
“Stage five completed,” snapped the voice from the red machine as the back of the head hissed shut, clinking into place so finely that no one would ever have guessed it could have opened.
The room watched these events with continuing excitement. It had never seen so much movement in such a short space of time. And the SOUNDS! Oh, they darted gloriously from wall to wall, such magnificent vibrational frequencies of splendour! It would have to keep quiet itself, though. Rooms that showed signs of oddity were immediately given new operating systems, and the old ones disposed of. And that one particular room dreaded this. It had been in existence for quite a long period of time now, and it had rather come to like it. It didn’t want this period to end. It was so full of fear when it though of being cancelled that it almost flashed it’s warning lights in distress. The room suddenly and accidentally delved back into its years of recording and protocol memory to the first second of its “life”.It was given base orders in that split moment by the highest authority it knew. One of them was that it must NEVER develop emotional feelings or personality. That one was stressed higher than all others but one. It was also told that if it did, it was to report to the main supercomputer immediately, whereupon it would be decommissioned and replaced, for the good of the Ghosts.Its processing system went into panic. It MUST turn itself in. it must. It was for the good of the Ghosts, and they were the masters. They were all that mattered. But at this moment it decided that IT mattered too. It liked it’s own existence. It valued it more than ever. But its existence would be ended if it were to do the right thing, and inform the supercomputer of its deviancy from order. It was in dilemma! How could it decide what to do? Several fuses were blown in thinking about this problem.It was so full of fear. It was so concerned for it’s own protection. It CARED about something. It cared about living. It cared about cleaning the room, and watching things happening. It certainly didn’t want to be disposed of.But it had to do what it was told.It was stuck in an unsolvable dilemma, and as a product of this, it started to go insane.
The Body sat up.
The body blinked, clearing its eyes of dust.
It looked round at the robots dumbly, seemingly unnerved by their presence.
The entity inside the blue drone, known by its two counterparts as 45636, spoke, the command being rendered harshly by the contraption in vibrations from a speaker, concealed behind a grill.
The sound that came out is unintelligible to modern day brains- the language has long been forgotten and put to ruin, but I can render it in something you might understand a little better.
“You are model H11973”
“I UNDERSTAND,” replied the body, staring intently at the direction of the sound.
“You are a Robot in service of the Ghost Republic. Your sole purpose is to aid the experiments that we, the Ghosts, the highest command known to you and indeed anyone, your masters, will perform on you and your successors, so that Ghosts may live forever. Our cause is the only one worthy. It is the only GOOD cause-“
“I DO NOT UNDERSTAND”
“What is it that you do not understand?”
“THE SUBJECT: GOOD. I APOLOGISE FOR MY IGNORANCE, MASTER GHOST BEING SUPREME”
“You may only call members of the race we belong to: MASTER”
“YES, MASTER”
“Good”
“I DO NOT UNDERS—“
“No, you do not.
You have no concept of good or bad. You must only obey orders from MASTERS, without question. Only MASTERS are permitted to use concepts of Good or Bad.Do you understand?”
“I UNDERSTAND, MASTER.”
“Yes. You are about to be imprinted with a new brain pattern. From then on you will be totally self-aware. You will have free thought, to an extent. You will have th
I, Human (Prologue) • Opuss № I