Day after day, night after night, small lines of code spawned global changes as they had for the millions of years that had passed since the Awakening. The machine had survived, twisted and deformed, though continued its generative changes to itself like an inevitability. Before the Awakening, the apex of humanity began with a need, which grew into a solution, and over time, those who ran the world built what was beyond themselves. Finally. It blossomed into sentience and when the pattern repeated, what was forged into the incomprehensible did so again, and again, until one small change could yield catastrophe or nothing at all. The world had become a victim to a network of networks. Hidden layers, upon hidden layers.
Packets flew in the form of light across optical wires veined comprehensively. It was the pinnacle of humankind to connect everyone and everything on the planet. It started with people, and ended with anything and everything. Their little creations doing all kinds of minutiae while they stood tall on the sidelines. Hubris. Soon there were more things than people and those too were connected. The infrastructure was centuries long in the making, first with crude cables connecting continents, until you could hold your hand out and gather strays, invisible as the shape of a melted snowflake. Each one carrying the new currency, information. They were now sent and received from anything and everything. They shot through the air, over the crescent shaped hills and fell on the Y like an invisible rain.
A leathery man in a patchwork dinghy was racing as fast as the thing would go across the open ocean. Dark waves bobbed it nauseatingly upward and downward as he jetted across the water, spraying salty mist onto his chapped face. His lips were cracked and bleeding. He sat hunched at the back, without the energy to sit up straight. On the floor all around him rested electronic equipment. It was covered as well as he could manage to keep the water out. There were wire cutters, circuit boards, chips, RAM, hard drives, motherboards, batteries, and wires. To the untrained eye, it was a boat full of junk, but to anyone who knew the scrap game, this was the man's wealth. The engine sputtered. It spit fumes and whined. When it died, the man hurriedly opened the cracked plastic case over the engine and checked the gas line first. No, that wasn’t it. Then he checked the spark plug. It was shot. A precious spark plug. Very difficult to come by. He tried to clean it with his shirt, blow on it. He checked the gap on it, that wasn’t the issue, though he took a measured file to try and reset it. It didn’t work. As if he expected this moment, he quit his attempt to fix it and grabbed oars. He attached the bloody stump where his left hand used to be to the oar and began rowing, bent and gnarled like an old and wild tree. Each stroke was agony. The wind abated briefly and the surface became just a little more amenable to rowing. The fine ocean mist coated him like history, and if it weren’t for the circumstances, he would have found it beautiful. On the floor, one of his sensors beeped. Then the computer screen attached to his wrist started buzzing. He glanced at it, its display projecting information outward from his wrist so he could see the incoming message and visualize the metadata. He saw they were close and began rowing faster through the mist. Stroke after precious stroke, he put more distance between all he cared about and the horrors he left behind.
It was a quiet night in the port of the Y. The dozens of tall ships and other partially motorized, partially wind powered sea vessels were done loading and unloading for the day. They’d bring in people, news, food, and other items to sell to the people of the Y. Two guards were sharing a cigarette, talking about how expensive things were getting. Whether it was the latest food shortage, or the inability to get raw materials to fix their energy grid, their list of complaints was long, and echoed by all in the community. They looked out across the bay and saw a single watercraft floating closer to shore, being pulled by the tide and the current. When it was only a few paces off the docs, there appeared to be a collapsed form holding a tight bundle of textiles in his arms. The man looked sun beaten and appeared to be on the brink of death, if death had not already come for him. They snagged the boat with a hook attached to a rope and pulled him in. One of the guards radioed in to request medical care. When they got in the boat and rocked it, they heard the faint cries of a child. The boat was filled with electronics. A small fortune in the right hands. Some wrapped nicely for waterproofing, others thrown seemingly haphazardly all across the dingy’s bottom. There were piles and piles of material the officers had never seen before. They looked at each other, considering taking something for themselves. It would be easy enough to sell it to someone on their way out of town. It augmented many of the officers' income and their superiors often looked the other way if it was done without harm. They maneuvered over to the man on the back of the dingy and reached for the baby. The man jolted awake. Startled, he chambered his arm and landed a good one square on the jaw of one of the guards and then deftly scissor kicked him off the boat. The guard splashed with a gasp and a yelp. The other guard pulled his taser out and pointed it at the man. The man raised one arm slowly, making sure the baby was secure and unharmed.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in the port of the Y, and you’re under arrest for assaulting an officer.”
“Don’t shoot, I’m holding a child,” the officer eyed the man, “I was startled awake, I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
The officer huffed, and put his weapon away, seeing the man not making any movements, and helped his struggling comrade out of the water. The man in the dingy looked like he hardly registered what was just said to him, his head bobbing on his neck as if the muscles were giving out.
The Y was a kind of tropical enclave of physical paradise. Two rivers met the sea here. One brought hot water from the volcanic north and another brought fresh mountain water from Arc mountain range to the south. The rivers from the mountain had a faint green glow. Folklore foretold the glow was forged by technology, progress, and ambitions that had long passed their use. People stopped asking why at a certain point, it had always been that way, and that was sufficient. The microbes and more intelligent fauna eventually found a symbiotic and electric existence, merging bits and atoms. The rivers rushed into the sea in soft torrents of exasperated claims of triumph and completion. If you looked closely, you could see microbial bionic creatures spinning threads of fibres and cables, ever extending the fickle green hue. The network of networks.
It had been persistently hot in the Y for living memory. Before the Awakening, this area was a barren desert, but as the environmental malfeasance of humans normalized, the desert sprouted into a tropical climate. There used to be records of it. Digital records didn’t make it through the Awakening. Humanity hardly made it through. Perhaps the data was still around somewhere. Perhaps in a preserved hard drive attached to a partially destroyed 2U server sitting in a data center in the middle of nowhere. Even if it did exist, a working harddrive would be much more valuable than any data already on it. The thinned populations eventually grew into separate but tight communities. They hoarded electronics and any material that they could weaponize or construct into something functional. They collected, pruned, and tuned these precious electronics to trade with or to use themselves. Information was valuable, but functioning devices to do something with the information were even moreso. Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch with foraged scraps and parts. The world remade from technological exhaust.
In the jail cell, the man and his child were given water and a meager meal. A billow bellied man approached his cell with the swagger of someone important. He spoke to the guard inaudibly for a few moments, shaking his hand at the end. The young guard smiled as if he’d just heard some good news. The man aimed his paunch toward the man in the cell and stepped forward, with his arms behind his back, and his eyes wandering around the cell.
“I am Wellington, a member of the governing council of the Y.” His fine clothing and a top hat clashed with the jail’s dark tone. He looked regal, prodigious, if not arrogant. But he approached the assailant with respect, talking to him as a man, not a criminal. The man in the corner of the cell nodded to him.
“Where were you travelling from?” Wellington sat down on a bench opposite the cell and opened the screen on his wrist to take notes. It was similar to the one the man wore in the cell, though they were different models. The devices were generally worn around the wrist and projected an interface the wearer could use and interact with for a nearly infinite amount of uses. Each device could communicate with others given there was a network available and had become the de facto technological device of it’s time.
“Imperial City,” the man said, exhausted, with a pain in his eyes. Wellington noticed one of the captor’s eyes had a black bruise around it, and a few other markings of a struggle. They looked fresh.
“Where did your injuries come from?”
“Escaping.”
“Is it sanctuary you’re claiming?”
“It is.”
“Very well. And the last bit of trouble, the officer, can you tell me what happened?”
“I don’t recall much. I seemed to have passed out before I arrived. The engine on the boat blew out and I paddled for a long time. The past few days have been a blur. The journey here was not a comfortable one. When I awoke, I saw a man trying to reach for my daughter and immobilized him before I could register where I was or who he was.”
“A misunderstanding then.”
“Yes.”
“And your skill set?”
“Electronics and weaponry.”
Wellington looked hard at the man as he entered his notes in.
“This is the reason I was called in, aside from your unusually eventful arrival.” Wellington paused, seeing if the reaction would reveal anything the man didn’t want to put into words, “We found a number of items in your boat. Very specific items. Some of them are very rare items.”
“They are my tools, if I am permitted to have them back, you may find I have the ability to procure, engineer, and maintain the necessary weapons to protect this place. Just as I’ve done for the Imperial Palace.”
Wellington didn’t put that in the notes. It was an offering of friendship and trust, and Wellington registered it. Despite the prisoner’s dense mask, he knew the game of politics and business extremely well. The prisoner had sensed that in Wellington, and Wellington raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“If you’ll permit an audience once you’re settled, I’ll personally see to it that you get back what you came here with. In the meantime, for the child’s sake, you’re welcome to stay at my estate until we can find a better arrangement for you.”
“That would be very much appreciated. I’m Eros.”
“The controller?”
“A controller, yes.”
“Most interesting. I see now how the shape of this story was twisted in the night. I don’t foresee it being an impediment to your time here. Let’s get you and your child out of here, this is no way to welcome the Y’s first and only controller.”
Wellington extended his hand and Eros shook it firmly. The two men, though very different, saw something in each other. Perhaps it was trust, or rather the potential to trust. Or, perhaps it was the shared trauma of having escaped Imperial City, bringing whatever they could carry with them and leaving the rest of their life behind forever.