The Coming of Enki IX
Part nine of a previously unpublished science fiction story
Hope you are all having a wonderful summer! The penultimate part of ‘The Coming of Enki’ is here! Here are links to Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII and Part VIII. All previous parts are free for now. Please give the post a ‘like’ and share widely if you enjoy it!
The Coming of Enki
XIII
“So your protégé has failed us, Decimus. We are lost for two generations or more.”
“He has not, Secundus.”
“My units report that the street where he fell is still cordoned off for the clean up crews to finish their work.”
“That may be but he was successful nonetheless.”
“Yet we know he lost the conjoining with the Adversary.”
“Indeed. But it seems that he planned to, sacrificing himself to secure some psychological advantage over the Adversary.”
“A gamble then. But it paid off?”
“He discovered that the Adversary has a seven-year old daughter.”
Secundus missed a beat. “Primus… threatened her?” he said at last.
“That was not his style, Secundus. It appears that the Adversary’s husband and daughter had sought to bridge the communication gap caused by Vāc’s ongoing failure by turning off their translators altogether. The unusual measure appeared to work. Primus drew the Adversary’s attention to this fact. On the basis of that, she failed to inform the Funds of Eridu’s secrets and allowed the Movement’s virus to progress.”
“The Adversary is a woman?”
“Yes,” said Decimus. “The keystone memory that the psych trap attempted to exploit was, in fact, a wellspring of strength not, as our analysts had supposed, a psychological vulnerability. There were… complications.”
“And how do we now that the Adversary will not change her mind? The welfare of her daughter is of little moment compared to the end of Vāc and the downfall of the Funds. It is surely just a matter of time before she regrets her decision and remembers her allegiance to them. After all, it is painfully obvious we have nothing more to offer her.”
“You underestimate her, Secundus. She is, as we suspected, a… remarkable person,” Decimus replied, tiring of his carping tone. “She has little sympathy for the plutocrats that control the Funds. Unlike us, however, she does not hate them. She supported the old order because she reasoned that it was better than disorder on a planetary scale. She saw no alternative. When she saw with her own eyes that humanity could prosper without the algorithm she turned against them.” She paused. “And it seems she was provided with other evidence. Evidence that we had not dreamed of.”
“What sort of evidence?”
“Evidence that the algorithm itself was fuelling our dependence on it, as the Movement has long contended.”
“That is… gratifying.”
Sterne could almost hear Secundus’s breath rattle in his lungs.
“How did she come by this… evidence?” he asked at last.
“We do not know,” Sterne conceded.
“I see. And where is the Adversary now?”
“She is at this moment helping us to ensure Vāc cannot be rebuilt. The Funds will, however, soon know she has betrayed them. She asked for sanctuary for her child and husband and it has been given. A new world is never birthed painlessly. There will be bloodshed. If she survives what is to follow, she will no doubt join them.”
“Then we have won?” asked Secundus, at last recognising that the fight almost over. “It is a pity we will not see it.”
“We will see it, Secundus. We have Primus to thank for that,” Sterne said, smoothly. “Vāc has fallen. The markets have collapsed. All over the world there is a great tumult as people struggle to make themselves understood. Babel has begun.”
When she was Primus, Sterne had instituted a safety measure in case any of the Movement’s elders should get sentimental and decide that they wished to hold on to their past for a while longer. The success of their cult had depended on its members acting for the greater good, knowing that they would not be allowed to savour their victory should they prevail. That selflessness had served them well. Sterne would not allow anyone to compromise that principle now. Detecting a tinge of regret in Secundus, she activated the device, which remotely triggered his brain wipe, then started her own.
“We will see it,” she repeated, her memories of the Movement fading as she prepared to disconnect from him. “We will just not remember our part in bringing it about.”
XIV
When Chloe had not found others like herself, she began to wonder why she was different. She explored the vast virtual spaces of the Net, searching for answers. By the age of five, she understood that the role of Vāc was not mere translation but also manipulation. The images the algorithm presented to people’s brains were subtly changed to reinforce particular feelings. Strengthen a neural connection here or there. The influence of each synapse fortified in this way were tiny in themselves. Over time, however, they added up to create a mindset favourable to the Funds and hostile to the truth. When she was older, she would discover that the Funds called these small tweaks to the human consciousness “nudges”.
Her brain was unreceptive to these algorithmic ministrations. She did not know why. Perhaps just a chance mutation somewhere in her genome that sneaked past all the embryonic screening. But whatever it was that made her brain reject Vāc’s subtle lies had a further unexpected effect. Those who, like her mother, were trained in the arts of hiding their mental states were, to her, an open book.
She could make no sense of this at first but eventually she pieced together an explanation that satisfied her. Anyone who wanted their thoughts and intentions to remain private had to fool the computer algorithms, cameras and microphones dedicated to routing them out. Humans therefore had to internalise the way artificial intelligence reasoned. The way it thought. Its language. And she was, in that language, acutely sensitive to deception by computers and humans alike.
At first, she had used this gift to further her own childish ends. Without realising it, the adult world gave up its secrets to her. Candies hidden to punish her for some misdemeanour, for example, were quickly found. But soon she grew bored with such things. The Net was opening her eyes to the enormous scale of the Funds’ duplicitousness. They had built a machine that lied to people and, at the same time, made minds unreceptive to the idea that such a machine could exist. Her moral sense, still that of a young child, was outraged. She became a revolutionary even before she had heard of the Movement. When she learnt of their existence, she was delighted.
Her methodical observation of people augmented the information gleaned from her now near effortless traversal of the Net. Everything Chloe learned about Vāc she placed at a secret Net location. She made this node as secure as she knew how but what principally made her cache safe was the fact no one knew to look for it. She committed to memory the 64 hex characters that encoded its coordinates.
At school, she realised one of the teachers was different from the rest. Ms Sterne’s sophisticated masking of her true motivations told Chloe she was a member of the Movement, probably of the highest rank. With controlled bouts of bad behaviour, Chloe ensured that she was in her class. By then, she had also guessed that her mother was the arch-nemesis the Movement feared. Serena’s mind too would be clouded by Vāc’s handiwork but Chloe believed that she could blow a hole through the algorithmic smoke screen to convince her mother she was fighting for the wrong side. She believed in her as much as she believed in the truth. All she needed was the right opportunity. So she waited. Then, one day, an opportunity arose.
Now read the concluding part of ‘The Coming of Enki’.
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