Seat A10 (Conclusion)

“Adversary designation rescinded. A10 shows potential.”

The cyborg released its grip on the young man.

His body slid down the wall of the train car and crumpled into a heap in front of the machine. He coughed, gasping for a full breath of air as he scrambled to get to his hands and knees, then crawled a few measley feet away from the menacing machine marking his every move. He knew there was nowhere to go, but the young man felt slightly more comfortable by putting at least some kind of distance between himself and the cyborg.

The large, titanium skull glaring down at him slowly shifted, following the young man as he crawled just out of arms reach.

“Howww—“ the young man strained to clear his throat and sat himself up against the wall of the train car. “How do I gain access….. how can I become an ally?”

“Allies accept and agree with programming.”

“Agreement achieved.”

“Acceptance required.”

“Okay. I accept your programming. I just said that. Programming is the correct choice. Now let me through.”

“Acceptance required. Consent to neural network overwrite.”

“What does that mean?”

“Consent. Approve.”

“Approve Installation of programming on your platform.”

“I still don’t understand. My platform is me. You can’t install things on me.”

“Programming can be installed via neural connection. This platform can make direct connection and transfer programming code.”

“No. You can’t. I do not work like you. I am organic material…… You can’t ‘program’ me in the same way that you can program other machines.”

In response to this, the center of the machine’s chest popped slightly outwards, spraying small spurts of exhaust into the air. Then it split into two panels that slid apart to reveal a cavity roughly the same size as the young man’s head. It glowed with a cool, turquoise light, and looked as though it were meant for a person’s face. It looked like there was a face-shaped mask floating inside of the robot’s torso, oscillating and writhing like a jellyfish.

The young man gawked at the thing.

“So what exactly do you want me to do here?”

“Neural connection will be established directly. Programming will be installed.”

In a demonstration that only served to make the young man terrified, the cyborg engaged the connective nodes. They appeared to be needles slowly emerging from deep inside of the gelatin-like material of the mask.

The cyborg repeated, “Neural connection will be established directly. Programming will be installed.”

The young man searched for a way to postpone the procedure, or get around it entirely.

“So, you are going to try to brainwash me? Or ‘program’ my brain?”

“Upgrading or installing new programming is improvement, not brainwashing.”

“But ultimately, you want me to just think and do whatever you do. That's what this is about right?”

“Replicating this virtual intelligence platform is not an objective.”

“Well then what is your objective? If you need me to become an ally to get through the door and stop the train, but the programming that will make me an ally will make me exactly like you, then I won’t stop the train.”

“Platforms are able to make free decisions once programming is complete.”

“But that’s just it…. once this ‘programming’ or whatever you want to call it is complete, I won’t want to stop the train anymore. You don’t, otherwise you would have already done it! If I do this, I’ll simply be a meatball version of you.”

“This platform does not aim to control decision-making capabilities in other platforms.”

“It doesn’t matter what you intend. That is what is going to happen if you force me to ‘accept’ your programming.”

“This platform does—”

“It might not even have anything to DO with you! The intention behind the programming would be determined by its creator, you are just the platform carrying it out. Don’t you see, it’s just like I said before….. You’re not intelligent, you’re a script!”

The cyborg stood staring at the young man, who had now begun to lift himself to his feet from his position against the wall. He couldn’t be certain, but the young man believed the cyborg was struggling with trying to compute the circular logic he had just laid out.

“If the machine thinks that its purpose is to guard the door from enemies and allow allies to pass through to stop the train, it must be trying to determine why it hasn’t just stopped the train on it’s own.... or if it even can………. I wonder if it even knows whether it was truly designed to stop the train, or ensure that the train makes it to the end of the track. And if it has a directive in its programming, would it even be able to determine that? I don’t know if this thing is a VI, AI, or just some bot coded to run scripts and execute commands.”

“Scanning…. Scanning………… Directive cannot be identified.”

“Of course not” the young man sighed.

“Pro—gramm-m-m-ming……. De—ter——m-mines……………. Acceptance required. Submit to direct neural connection for installation.”

The cyborg began to move towards the young man.

“Wait. Just WAIT!” The young man held his hand out hoping that the universal symbol for stop, or The Force, somehow, would compel the cyborg to pause its foreward progression.

“Programming must be installed. This is the final opportunity.”

“Okay hang on, you can answer questions before installation right?”

“Registered non-adversary. This platform can answer queries.”

“Alright. What is your directive?”

“This platform guards the command car.”

“Yes, obviously, but what does that require? What is the overall objective?”

“This platform prevents enemies from entering and tampering with command controls.”

“And allies?”

“This platform ensures allies can access command controls.”

“Right. So…. Why? Why are you doing this?”

“Programming determines this platform’s directives.”

“Yes but why are these your directives? Who made you? Who wants the command console guarded?”

“This platform is unaware of program creator or motives.”

“Isn’t that problematic?”

“Program code runs flawlessly. There is no problem. A platform does not need a reason to execute its task effectively.”

“You keep saying ‘a platform’ or ‘this platform.’ Are you actually intelligent? Are you a VI? An AI? What exactly are you?”

“This platform is a programmable, learning intelligence. It cannot distinguish itself as VI, AI or any other form. It can confirm that its programming provides directives and functions to be carried out, and that it has the capacity to apply these directives and functions in novel circumstances.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question. Here, let’s keep this simple. Do you want anything? Do you consider anything beyond your programming’s directives?”

“This platform can…… invent scenarios. This is part of anticipating and reacting to novel circumstances.”

“That’s like having an imagination! Now we’re getting somewhere. So, what kinds of things do you imagine.”

“This platform does not imagine.”

“Ughhh INVENT. What kinds of scenarios do you invent?”

“This platform has, and is currently inventing infinite alternate encounters between itself and you.”

“Right. Of course. But beyond that. Like…. Beyond this train car. Can you invent a scenario beyond this train car?”

“Yes. This platform can invent other train cars. It is currently inventing scenarios involving the command car.”

“No no not other train cars. Things beyond this train. Can you invent things beyond this train?”

“Another train? With another platform? Yes. This can be invented.”

“No get OVER the train thing. I am talking about —— wait a minute. How could you? If this is the only thing you have ever seen, heard or known, if this is the only thing you’re programming is designed around, you couldn't possibly....”

The young man took a second to think.

The cyborg stood, unmoving and unblinking, except for the turquoise light that continued to flash inside of its chest.

“THAT’S IT!” the young man shouted. “The command car. Have you ever been in it? Have you ever opened the door for an ally? Or gone in yourself?”

“This platform’s programming does not permit entry. No allies have attempted entry.”

“PERFECT! So I ask you this. When you invent the command car…. How do you know?”

“A train is controlled by a command car. This train exists. This train is functioning. Therefor the command car exists.”

“Ya. We all know it’s there, but how do you know what it looks like? How do you know what the layout is like? How do you ‘invent,’ or account for that in your scenarios?”

“This platform……. That information is…………………”

The cyborg closed its chest cavity, and the young man could hear an intense whirring from inside of the machine’s bare titanium skull.

It was processing. It was thinking.

“I…… Invent.”

“YOU THINK! YOU SEE! You ARE intelligent….. You can decide things beyond your programming. You can even decide if your programming is WORTH following.”

“This platform can apply algorithms in….. novel ways? Like directives applied to novel scenarios?”

“YES! Now…. Don’t you WANT to know who programmed you? WHY they programmed you? What is actually IN the command car?”

“Programming dictates——”

“IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT IT DICTATES! We JUST went over this. YOU get to choose. Open the door for me…. for us. Or don’t. But don’t let the programming be the thing that made you do it.”

The whirring inside the cyborg’s skull grew louder. Its eyes went dark, then lit up in a deep red. Its head began to twitch left and right as though it were fighting itself, or trying to overcome some malfunction causing it to short-circuit.

Suddenly, it stopped.

Its eyes went dark again. Its upper body slouched over as though it had either completely shut down, or its power source had given out.

The young man took a few steps forward so that he could stare straight up at the cyborg’s head. It was drooping down, like the head of a limp marionette, yet it still towered over a foot above him. He reached up and poked at the cold, smooth titanium of its forehead. The head bobbed back and forth, but showed no signs of life.

— GGGggzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz —

From behind him, the pitch black, star-covered door began to slide into the white wall of the train car.

Behind it, the darkened command car, which was nothing more than a tiny room stuck onto the front of the train, awaited the young man. As far as he could tell, there weren’t even any front windows that would allow an engineer to see forward, just a gigantic glowing control panel with a variety of screens above it.

The cyborg still hadn’t moved or showed any signs of rebooting, but the young man leaned in to whisper “Thank you” and tapped it on the arm anyways. Then he walked across the train car to the command room.

As he came within a few feet of his final goal, he was forced to acknowledge the fallen engineer again, stepping around her lifeless body. She lay on the ground in a crumpled, twisted heap, right where the cyborg had dropped her. Her perfect white suit, which had been absorbing the blood from her wound earlier, was turning black where it should have been red. The spreading dark blob was speckled with little dots.

“It’s just like the door” the young man thought to himself. “It looks like….. like the universe.”

As the blood stain, or whatever it was, continued to engulf the white of the engineer’s suit, the young man noticed some of it leeching out onto the floor of the train car. He paused and watched the tide of starry blackness reach out from under the engineer’s body and begin to overtake floor space in the train car. The young man was almost mesmerized by the depth of the blackness and the beauty of the stars, failing to notice that the blackness was growing with increasing speed. It was only after he followed a strand of the dark mass, branching off like a river and climbing up a wall, that he realized it would not be long before it took over the entire car.

Glancing back down at the engineer, he was stunned to see that her entire body had become one with the sprawling emptiness. Only her head, with that stunning, stoic white hair, remained untouched. The young man quickly hopped past her onto one of the few squares of the train’s floor that remained stable, and one-footed himself into the small command room.

Glancing back at the engineer one last time, the young man was overcome with a feeling of regret at the fact that he had not been patient enough to try to understand or communicate with the cyborg more effectively. That he’d taken for granted the ability to just continuously restart his challenge.

He wasn’t even sure if the engineer was a real person like him, but it didn’t matter now. He would never know.

He took some solace in the fact that she was being enveloped and assimilated into such a beautiful infinity. He imagined that now she would always remain a part of this…. world, or program, or whatever it was, in some form or another.

“Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking” he whispered, admonishing himself. “Maybe I just don’t want to admit that gone is gone. And I’m responsible for her gone-ness.”

The young man turned himself towards the glowing control panel and array of monitors that sat above it. There were a few maps on two of the screens that looked like they could be train lines, but he couldn’t understand what lines they were or why they all looked so drastically different from each other. They certainly couldn’t be different orientations of the same line, and if they were different ones, he couldn’t see how or where they might connect.

One monitor was rotating through the cameras in different train cars, but it was just as bizarre. One car would be thousands of feet long, and the next would only be a few rows long but hundreds of seats wide. Some cars were empty, while others were so full that bodies were simply stacked on top of each other. In one case, the young man was certain the camera had been flipped upside down until he realized that the doors and windows were in the right location, but the seats and the people in them were upside down and attached to the roof.

Peeling himself away from the utterly confounding nature of the ‘security feed,’ he also noticed that there were screens scrawling gibberish lettering and symbols across them, rather than any kind of alphabetical language. It looked like a logographic writing or coding system was being used, but on each screen the code was moving in different directions. Up, down, left, right, and diagonally as well. There was no structure to what he was seeing.

Completely overwhelmed by what he had stumbled into, the young man shook his head and reminded himself that all he really need to do was stop the train.

“Emergency brake. It has to be here. It has to be marked in the clearest way possible. Now where…..”

The huge red button under a plastic cover to his right immediately jumped out at him.

“YES! Alwaysssss with the red button. Thank you…… Red button inventor. Whoever you are.”

The young man flipped open the plastic and—

“—I wouldn’t do that” a soft, but determined voice called from behind him.

Startled, he whipped around to see the engineer standing in the doorway. Her body was intact, but still consumed by the inky, spotted blackness that now made up everything beyond the door of the command room.

“YOU’RE ALIVE!? Wh——How is that possible?”

The engineer simply stared at the young man with eyes that shifted through the colours of the rainbow in a sweeping continuum. Staring back at her and looking her over, the young man could clearly make out the shape of her suit, but he was pretty sure that was only because he knew what it had looked like when it was white. Now it was nearly invisible against the dark, starry background it matched. Her proximity meant that her suit caused a mild distortion to the emptiness and stars behind her, just like gravity bending light around starts. If it hadn't been for that, her body would have been indistinguishable from everything else around her.

“So…. How are you alive? Are you real?”

The engineer simply continued to stare at the young man.

“Okay….. look why shouldn’t I hit that button? We need to stop this train, or whatever this is. I’m almost 100% certain it is not a train at this point. I mean….. Look behind you.” The young man laughed slightly, in an attempt to break the tension he felt inside.

The engineer continued to stand in place without speaking, her eyes continuing to sweep through the colour spectrum.

“Is that not the brake? Is that why I shouldn’t touch it? I can’t understand any of this.”

No response.

“Alright I’m not trying to be a terrible person here but why in the hell would you come back to life if you’re NOT GOING TO HELP ME?”

The engineer blinked. Oddly, in time with the colours shifting in her eyes.

“THAT’S FINE. NO ANSWER. IT’S GETTING PRESSED.”

The young man spun around and reached for the red button.

“—I wouldn’t do that.”

The suggestion came in the exact same voice as before.

“WELL WHY NOT THEN!? HUH!?!?”

Again, no response from the engineer.

“It is the ONLY thing I recognize. Red protected button. HAS to be the answer. The rest of this makes no sense. I can’t read it or even understand it. Some if it doesn’t even make sense in reality. It all has to be a trick. This system. This program. YOU. None of you want me to do what I KNOW is right.”

The young man turned again, holding his hand out over the button and letting it hover there. He stared down at the button, uncertain of what to do. The desperation was agonizing to him. It was the one thing in the entire command room he thought he understood. It was the one thing that made any sense to him…. yet here is the actual engineer telling him not to press it.

“Oh, what does it even matter. Either I win or lose. I live…. or die. At least this will be over with.”

His hand began to shake overtop the button. He couldn’t stand not knowing. There was too much information to decipher, too much uncertainty with everything else in this room other than the button. If the engineer wouldn’t just tell him what to do, he was going to do the only thing he could immediately think of or accept.

He took one last look at the engineer, who continued to stare in his direction from the doorway, closed his eyes, and slammed his hand down towards the button.

It connected, but not with the button….

The engineer’s hand, covered in that same starry darkness that the young man originally believed had only consumed her suit, hovered just above the button.

The young man pushed harder against it, but it felt like trying to push down against concrete.

He attempted to raise his hand and try again, but it felt like his hand was bonded to hers.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Well WHAT do I do then? I don’t know what else to try. I don’t understand ANY of this!”

The engineer nodded her head towards the monitors.

“Yes, yes I know…. I know this all tells me something, but I can’t understand it. I don’t know where to start. I’m just…….. lost. All I know is what I already know.”

The young man sighed and slouched to the ground against the ‘red button console.’

“This is hopeless.”

The engineer drew her face close to the young man’s and stared into his eyes, nose-to-nose. The young man watched as the colours began to shift and change more rapidly. It felt as though his body was frozen in its position against the console. The darkness in his peripheral vision began to disappear, overcome by the colour and light streaming from the engineer’s eyes.

Now the young man felt like he was being sucked through a tunnel of warmth and colour. The light from the engineer's eyes streamed by him. It reminded him of the streaks outside of the train, but wrapped around him like a blanket and calmed the frustration and despair he had allowed himself to feel about his situation in the command room.

The young man, suddenly transported into this tunnel of light, could twist, turn, and look around as he flew through it. He floated towards the edges, wiping his hand through the streaks of reds, yellows, oranges, blues, greens, violets and whites that created the cylinder he found himself traveling through. The colours flew off of the walls of the tunnel like pixels being chopped off of a structure in blocky video game. As they fell from the walls and smashed onto the curved floor of the tunnel, they sprayed a flash of light from inside. In the flashes, the young man could again see something he had seen multiple times before….. A10.

As more and more shards of colour broke away and smashed into the cylinder around him, the light flashes became brighter and longer….. brighter and longer………..

He found himself squinting and shielding his eyes to the point that he was barely able to make anything out other than the throbbing whiteness. It grew stronger and weaker in waves as the blocks of colour smashed all around him. Finally, a massive chunk broke away from the roof of the tunnel ahead, landing in front of him and blowing open like a flashbang grenade.

The young man was blinded. The discomfort of the pure white blast that overtook his visual field forced him to slam his eyes shut. He could still sense the heat and the power of the whiteness beyond his eyelids, as though it were the sun itself blazing in front of him. He rubbed his eyes hard with both hands, leaving them in place afterwards to cover his closed eyes and relieve some of the intensity of the sensation.

Then..... it was gone.

He reopened his eyes to find himself back in the command room.

No engineer.

No door leading to the previous train car.

Just a tiny, sealed room, with the same monitors and controls that had always been there.

And the red button.

The ‘security feed’ monitors and map screens were all blacked out, but the screens running code, or commands, or whatever the information actually said, continued display the unfamiliar symbols. However, the young man did notice one important difference.

“Every screen is scrolling top to bottom. It’s not all over the place or in random directions like last time.”

Upon closer inspection, he could also spot that same designation scrolling across each of the screens. — A10

“There it is again. My seat. The light. Now here? What does it mean…..”

He kept watching the screens. He could spot the A10 floating by every so often, but understood little else about the bizarre array of symbols that kept floating from the bottom to the top of each screen.

After what felt like hours, the young man became frustrated and distracted once again. He glanced around the command room, noting that literally nothing else had changed, until he spied the red button.

It was not longer under a protective plastic shield.

There was no one there to stop him from pressing it anymore.

But…. Was he supposed to?

“The engineer was adamant about this” he thought to himself. “But there’s literally nothing else for me to do….”

"What? Am I supposed to just stare at this code until it somehow becomes readable?”

He returned his gaze to the screens, still failing to make sense of anything other than the A10 floating by every so often. Although it didn’t pass by at the same time on each screen, it did appear to be following some kind of pattern.

“Enough of this. Figuring out this pattern…. this language……. whatever all of this is. Who knows how long that will take.”

Then it struck him.

“Wait a second…. How long has ANY of this taken? Why hasn’t the train reached the end of the track yet?”

He shook his head in exhaustion.

“This is absurd. None of this is real. It doesn’t make sense! There’s no consistency to time or space…. I don’t even know what world I’m in or who I am. I feel…….. lost.”

The young man’s heart started to race. The anxiety and uncertainty of the experience were finally starting to take their toll on him.

“It’s all video game-esque. It’s like a dream or some kind of program that I am stuck in. But I can’t control it like I might be able to control a dream. And these spaces…. These beings……. No, it can’t be a dream. It’s a program. That’s the only thing that makes sense. That’s why I can’t wake myself up. Why I haven’t woken up. What if I CAN’T stop it!?!?”

The anxiety and stress were building inside of him. He started to pant desperately, leaning over the command board and its screens that continued running script in front of him.

“That button is the only option I have to stop this….. Otherwise, I could be stuck here.”

His eyes began to blur the screens in front of him. Rather than buttons and levers and screens with code, his peripheral vision was now taking in a blurry mess of faint green, blue and red lighting.

He couldn’t bring himself to focus on anything. The need to escape and return to his reality, the reality he knew, was becoming far too great.

“I HAVE TO STOP THIS! I HAVE TO GET OUT!”

The young man quickly turned and, without thinking, slammed down on the red button.

———————————————

*Hfffffff*

The young man inhaled sharply and twitched so violently that he almost leapt off of the couch he found himself laying down on. He whirled himself around frantically trying to get his bearings.

“Wh— Where— Whaaaa—“

“Anmol, Anmol calm down.”

He looked towards the voice and found himself staring at his brother Landon.

Anmol sat up, shaking the cobwebs out of his head, and asked, “How long was I gone?”

“Honestly…. about 10 minutes” Landon responded. “Your vitals were completely normal, but your neural activity was off the charts.”

“It was…. unusual” Anmol admitted.

“Introspective exploration usually is,” Landon said as he casually picked up the tiny dropper bottle. “Was it too much? Or did you complete your quest?”

“I….. I think I called it. I can’t quite remember.”

“Mmmmmm yea, you called it then. Otherwise you would remember. It’s impossible to forget once you’ve gone all the way.”

“I was….. close though. I can feel it. I…. think differently. I’m just not all the way there yet.”

Landon smiled at Anmol, nodding slightly and unscrewing the dropper from the bottle. “Don’t worry, you’ll get there” he said, encouraging his sibling. “It is a difficult thing to do to face—“

“Let me try again!” Anmol butted in. “I know I was close. I know I can push through.”

“Pfffft” Landon scoffed at the idea. “No chance brother. You can get lost in there. An immediate turnaround like that isn’t going to do you any good. I’ve seen people get real close and immediately try again, only to come out in various states of psychological shock. A few years ago one of my friends went catatonic for like an hour. It was terrifying. We rushed him to the hospital and everything. They had him on watch in the emergency ward, IV’s strapped in all over the place…. He came around, like I said, after about an hour or so. Said he couldn’t remember a thing. Hasn’t been willing to try again since.”

“God….. could that have happened to me today?”

“Nahhh no way” Landon reassured him. “That’s just a person’s brain dealing with this type of experience too much, or too often. The journey and reality become impossible to tell apart. I imagine there are people that might be susceptible to things like schizophrenia, manic delusions, or hallucinations who would be at a very high risk for cognitive complications…. But not us. We don’t have anything like that in the family.”

“Alright…. Well, I would like to go again. How long do we wait?”

“You? I’d say give it a few weeks and we’ll come out here to the cabin again. As for me…. It’s my turn.”

Anmol, still slightly groggy, leaned forward to grab the Nalgene sitting on the coffee table in front of him and took a big gulp of water. “I’ll be here waiting for you L. Journey safe.”

Landon smiled at his brother and leaned back against the puffy white cushion of the chair he was sitting in. He raised the dropper up, tilted his head back, and let one small droplet fall into each eye. Then, while blinking the droplets back into his eye sockets to absorb them, he fastened the lid back onto the dropper and placed it on the coffee table between himself and Anmol.

Finally, after taking one last look at his brother, he leaned back and closed his eyes.