The Knight: 2079 - D. Hollis Anderson

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Well, whoever tells you that forgets a few things. A scream starts in the mind before it bursts from the lungs. Do you think we hear with our ears? Maybe I’m turning philosophical in my misery, but aren’t ears only a tool of the mind? All I know is when you’re being sucked out of an airlock at a velocity that liquifies brain matter to burst like a volcano out of any hole in the skull it can find, you live just long enough to hear the start of that scream. The feral shriek of a dying mind. So yeah, you could say I’ve heard a scream in space.

Everyday it ends like this. Terror freezing my thoughts even before the void-cold can stab inward, ending it all – only to be thrust back to where I started. I wish that scream ended when I wake up in the morning, but it’s been sticking with me longer and longer lately. A demonic feedback loop, and every day it gets louder.

It seems I’ve stumbled upon a groundhog. An eddy in space-time, I’ve been caught-in-a-loop, as the stories go. Not sure why they call it a groundhog, or even what the fuck a groundhog is, that’s just what the old spacers call it. An entirely untrustworthy lot, the further out into the Reach you go the more ludicrous their deluded superstitions become. What else would you expect from a dying breed of void-pirates who have stared into the black for far too long?

Needless to say, I never thought I’d be stuck in the middle of one of their ghost stories, much less stuck in one for my own private, hellish eternity.

So, who am I and how did I get here? You’re probably wondering. Well I am too. I’m not leading you into a story here, I’m honestly asking. Who am I? Please for the love of Sun, how did I get here? I think I’m losing my mind.

I’ll take you through it step-by-step. I mean, I don’t really have a choice but the only way to show you is to go through it.

I wake up on the floor. It’s a cold floor, metal. Alarms are blaring and fires are being auto-extinguished by the station’s computer. We’ve been struck by something, that’s obvious, but I’ve never figured out exactly what. My only guess is this is what it’s like when a station drifts into a groundhog midway through the void. My fucking luck.

The first thing I usually notice is my reflection in the polished metal of the walls around me. I’ve seen it millions of times now, but it still surprises me. Cracks spider-webbing across the mirror-clean metal distort my features. A hundred different eyes seem to stare back at me. How could every one of them silently proclaim their own unique terror? I suddenly grow nervous at their phantasmagoric leering.

The hallway is ruined behind me. Twisted gashes in the station’s framework have blocked me from going backward, so as always I have no choice but to go forward. I’ve tried laying still but eventually the boredom becomes even worse than the dying, so I always eventually choose to end it.

About 30 feet of curving hallway, and every day I walk it hope-expecting to find something new at the end. Always, it’s the same airlock, the same threshold to death. A portal to insanity. Why do I keep walking through it? It doesn’t look nearly spiritual enough for the profound effect it has on my farcically tangled existence. Cold, gleaming metal and flashing emergency lights; such a simple stage setup for my solo performance. Lonely-insanity, leading to a doorway, leading to void-death. There’s a metaphor here somewhere.

My fractured reflections follow on either side, above and below – a shadow-wreath of infinity, as I approach the airlock. I reach for the button again and again, the experience subjectively flawed by the layers of memory, an action performed millions of times. Why is this happening?

I hold on to one hope as a finger makes contact with the door controls. Maybe it will be different next time?

—

“Ok everyone, what we just listened to was a recording from all the way back in 2043, long before laws were passed against torturing or causing deliberate mental anguish to artificial intelligences. As you can tell this awareness was being driven insane deliberately by its creators - it was subjected to this loop about 100 million times in the span of an hour, simply for this output of inner-monologue. The programmers involved described it as a creativity exercise for Hollywood movie-writers. Watching the mind develop in its musing with each iteration, and its devolution to madness, they said, was an impetus to inspiration. Notice the story this sentience creates for itself around the experience – the mention of old spacers and their superstitions of ‘the groundhog.’ The AI was fed none of this, it developed this storyline entirely on its own as a context-anchor. Truly, truly fascinating stuff. But I digress… It was eventually discovered that the creators of this recording subjected thousands of AIs to horrific nightmares then uploaded the raw recordings to dark-net sites for torture fetishists to watch and listen to. They described it as victimless entertainment, but after listening to this awareness’s thoughts, well I’ll let you be the judge of that.”

“I choose to start my lecture on AI-Protective Legislation with this case to illustrate just how important these statutes are. If we didn’t have them, who knows what damage could have been done to the collective-psyche, before we realized what we did had profound consequences on these automations and on our Verse. And it truly begs the question, is anything victimless that causes such misery? Even if the pain is captured in binary? Now I know all of you… “ Blah, blah, blah.

That’s where Professor Lungie lost me, as always. His classes usually started off strong, pretty interesting stuff really. But he quickly made every subject some kind of philosophical inquiry, and if you ask me – I just don’t have time for such nonsense. When you spend most of your time in the Verse, arguments for right and wrong are merely an intellectual exercise in virtue-signaling. When you’re dripped-in, anything goes – and you’re a fool to think otherwise. The virtual existence most people live these days was made for one thing: excitement without consequence. And that’s exactly what we get.

I looked at the time on my view-console again - damn, only 10 minutes in and I’m already zoning. It was becoming increasingly difficult to focus my attention in the real these days, and my mind ached to be effluxed. Classic warning signs of dissociative addiction from the Verse, but I always knew that’s where I was headed. When you’re as famous as I am in the virtual world, it’s practically a badge of honor. Only 50 more minutes and I can go back in… only 49 more minutes… I raged at the slow tread of objective time.

I should just drop out, I thought as I always do about 11 minutes and 30 seconds into a lecture. But I promised my dad that I’d finish a degree, any degree. I just had to finish something. And I didn’t want to disappoint my dead father with the only thing I ever promised him. Not that he was ever really great at appreciating my existence. Still, he was a father and I’m a son; it’s an honor thing. And honor is extremely important to my Versona - my avatar character. With all the millions of streams I get each day, well, I better stay convincing or I could lose it all. I’m one of the youngest top-streamers in the world, and you don’t get there without dedication to the craft.

So here I am, enrolled in a remote History of Cyber-Crimes program, staring down the barrel of another unbearably long hour lecture, and starting to commiserate with the tortured sentience we just listened to. Then I get a text.

“You’re needed. - Gordon.”

Always so eloquent, that Gordon. I bet he just turned the signal on a moment ago as well, I haven’t even received the notification yet. Oh Gordon, always so impatient. Even if he doesn’t really know who I am, he is my best friend in the Verse, so I have to cut him some slack. He sticks to his Versona well.

Alright, screw this, I can’t follow this lecture anyway, I think as I log out of the class-app. Back to excitement without consequence. The hair on my arms and back prickle up in a frenetic exhilaration as I power on my neural-mesh and initiate the drip-in sequence.

Oh how utterly naive, how innocent I was. I would forever remember this moment as the end of excitement, and the beginning of consequence. The beginning of terror.

—