Part 3: Chapter 4: Link

I felt the link. Only small. I knew it was open. I knew this was the right time. I set the chain reaction going. At the speed of light, the transition bubble was amplified across the globe. Every human was transformed into pure energy and taken into Stasis.

And locked in. The link to the real world was shut off.

I knew how lonely Stasis was in a state of pure energy. These people needed form. They needed their bodies representing how they recognised them. My enormous digital mass remembered the form of every person as they passed through the global link device and reformed them inside Stasis just as they had been seconds earlier.

I sensed huge changes inside Stasis. The colourful barren wilderness that I had left had been replaced with a vast array of buildings of all shapes and sizes. Stasis had grown. Had become organised. Had been organised. Had been designed.

Then I felt the programming take over. Beyond my control. People were shifted around. Assigned to areas. The information that I had gathered was utilised. Common links explored. People were grouped, shifted, assigned. Organised. The programming was looking for the best fit.

Groups were assigned on the basis of family, their friends, their interests. Links were built between these groups. Access was denied where there were no common factors. Society was being engineered through a rigorous and selective sorting algorithm by a programme that I had given an air of sentience to.

The created world was not big enough. People were held in a state of limbo until the sentient algorithm had replicated the known world of Stasis several times over.

I could see that it was using a pre-existing nodal structure at the heart of the process of organisation. Where it found flaws in the structures already built, it modified. Adapted. It shut down links that were superfluous to its own requirements. It built extra links out of necessity.

I’d served my purpose. I was shut out of Stasis. I had no form. I was now a powerless patch of supernumerary energy riding on the back of this cursed self-aware freak of mathematics. And there was nothing at all I could do about it, except observe and learn.

And wait.

Always waiting.

I sensed myself. Or should I say the other me. My former self. Off the grid. Untouched by the engineering.

Not alone.

I was alone.

Still.

Waiting.

A victim of my own curiosity

I’d used the key that I had to move everyone here, but I no longer at that key.

I was trapped.

Everyone was trapped.

Advertisement