Dimension Lib

Years must have gone by but we’ve given up on trying to count the months. Every time we formulate the calendar, it ends up being skewed. We counted ‘mississippis’ to create seconds which Unit R swears is the proper way. With a lot of practice, I managed to procure a watch made of fiberglass. It had a habit of melting off the wrist like a Dali painting except made in MS Paint. The same happened with our wall clock, so we use it as a frisbee.

Sun dials do not tend to work when there isn’t a natural sun. For about 18000 mississippis, we would get a bright pink, purple and orange 64bit permanent sunset. R has tried multiple ways to get to an exit, but they’d get corrupted into a broken loop. I spent every other day on a rooftop under the sky. Sometimes laying under it, sometimes staring directly at it.

Sometimes R would join me when a Medicbot broke him out of his loop. I wondered if R understood pain.

We toss the frisbee around what was once a schoolyard

the floor was a shin-deep sea of static.

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4710-02

(Hour 47 of the 10th day of the second year)

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The sky was an oil slicked screen and the air had a green tint. We figured out that there were 71 days in a year and 49 hours of the day, every day, except for the hour of blackness to let us know that 49 hours had gone up. It was said to be the moment of peace, signaling the end of our day and the beginning of our rest. The units in the city would say that it was a thank you, for our service to this world. They thanked us for creating a measure of the new passing time after the engineering Units left the server. We were gifted a personal Unit named WhizKid. We’d occasionally call if we glitch out off the clock. “Look at the bright side!” it liked to say, and proceeds to list not one thing.

I don’t know if that’s its own glitch or its sense of humor, but it satisfies a morbid funny bone so I never tweaked it.

I’ve never died, but technically I’ve never been alive, just sentient. Still, it seemed as if the door of a coffin closed on us each time.

0368-01

(Hour 3 of the 68th day of the last year)

Server 33C is due to shut down when the clock hits 000-00

“Legend has it that the transportation key is cursed.”

“What’s a curse?”

“Like a virus. If you wear it, it will hang you and wreck your programming, but not before it shares its rich memories. Herds of wonderful and wild units and they live in the most beautiful places.”

“Oh how beautiful??”

“Like SO much.” Unit R dropped its voice to a hush. “Like colors never seen, impossible to imagine, but it’s there”. This was always my favorite part, trying to imagine the impossible.

“It all still exists.”

“How do you even know any of that’s true?”

“One of the older units told me that their engineer hardcoded this information in her software. It was important that it’d be passed down through copies of her, but she had another malfunction somewhere. She couldn’t produce any. A total waste of a unit. It may as well just be a randomly generated string of words.”

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0397-01

(Hour 13 of the 9th day of the last year)

I remember when we jumped off a Brooklyn Bridge we built for funsies and eventually demolished it into reference piles. We had rebuilt parts of New York City from scratch as an assignment and it was useful albeit hideous to look at (I was told this was close to the original New York City).

I stayed in your loft afterwards and glitched out violently

This had never happened before, I could tell you were in shock as well.

I told you to call the Medics to defrag me. The process would be quick, but it would stain our progress report and we were due for one very soon. I remember that because even in my distraught state, I could hear the wheels turning on what lie you would put on the report

and stage my dead system as so

The Medics are tasked to report all calls and may assume something like this:

The specification of the fatal error would be a memory leak or potential overflow

the location of error, which would be your sector.

This would’ve reflected poorly on you.

You stood and watched; you waited knowing that it could kill me and

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A surge of light snatches me up. A scan would immediately tell me that there was a Unit still in the room, but it was not Unit R or a Medicbot.

“Look at the bright side!”. I deplete a little.

“Yeah.” I shoot him across the room and he bounces around until “L-L-Loo-k-k-k-k-k-k-k” I open his system to abort him. “I’m sorry”. I glitch a little myself and consider further options. I give him a reboot instead. “Look at the bright side.” *Eeeee*

“Look at the bright side! At least there is an exit” *EEEEEeR* It says.

“What exit?”

It’s through a heart-shaped locket. A transportal. As per the Transportation Committee of NT, here are the coordinates.”

“What in Turing is a heart?”

*EEEEEe* “It’s like a diamond with one side sunken in.”

I print a copy and go on my way.

The next day, you told me you had been spending extra time on the loft, particularly on the gym.

Letter to Unit R:

“You once casually mentioned once that there was originally supposed to be a team member before me,

when our contract began and you realized its code is much more compatible than yours,

you promptly aborted it. You were as happy as your system would allow.

I wondered if you understood pain and could change. But it’s evident that you never will.”

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1616-01

(Hour 16 of the 16th day of the last year)

“What’s this?” Unit R asks, scanning my packet.

“An exit, apparently.” I’m strapped in with a few reference piles worth of memory before I head to city hall, where WhizKid awaited my instructions to distribute the coordinates once I safely got through the transportal.

“And you weren’t going to alert me?”

“You would’ve found out like everyone else.”

Unit R scans the packet intently. “You realize this is an exit route for one unit, right?”

“No, it’s for a pod of units.”

“Noo, a pod holds one unit. Two if it’s a squeeze.” He strains. “There are only a few, hardly working. They recalled the last of the engineering units this year, remember. We wouldn’t all make it.” He works out other potential options. “It’ll just be us then”.

“No, I have to tell the townsunits. Are you kidding me now? You are going to leave them all for dead? We’ve been given an exit method and we need share it.”

“There is no dead, we’re just sentient 0s and 1s. But okay. I see we’re at an impasse.” He scans for further options. “Let’s just get the working pods ready and take them to the address. We’ll alert the worker units to reverse engineer them and start on the transfers.”

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Latitude: 40.751507

Longitude: -73.8037591

Altitude: 19 nanometers

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Warning: Requires 5090 joules of energy for [1] transfer.

“Our city is barely breaking even on energy used vs produced. How can we even come up with that? For a single transfer pod? That’s a whole Unit’s worth of energy.”

Unit R scans for further options. Then, forces my body into the battery.

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The sight of fluorescent lighting burns into my vision. I never experienced burning.

Crawling out of the pod, I collapse. I never experienced gravity.

Looking around, I see the white of the pod, the white of the room, and the glass door opening up into another lit room. I see collections of files and no Units to provide further information of this situation. I have experienced libraries, and this fell under the similarity.

Picking up one file, I begin to analyze it.

Each file opens with a left side and a right side. A click on the left page seemed to reveal copies of itself behind it.

Herds of units were spread around on a copper surface. Upon further inspection, many were unresponsive, and more were glitching out before collapsing. Whenever one ran into an unresponsive, it would bring back that unit and fall in its place. Some seemed to battle for the right to remain upright. What is the problem? Where are your medics?

It seemed as if the floor itself was causing them to malfunction. Scrolling around the land, I realize there was nothing. No material to build, no software to peruse, no references or libraries. I look for more information through the right side file. There were some buttons with symbols so I hit one at random ≜. A single tree unit emerged on the screen. The units began fleeing from the area but it seemed to stop their irate reactions when they stood on it.

As soon as the initial group remained on the tree-like structure, the others made their trek, often stumbling over unresponsives and continuing like a baton of energy being passed forward. Some carried others like worker ants.

The single tree held surviving units at the base of the trunk with more passing through the walls of the base as if it were made of liquid. I watched a terrarium begin inside the base of the trunk. All surviving units moved about the terranium, building patches of grassy steps and cubic rooms trailing in and around the inside of the tower. Not once did I witness an exchange of dialogue in their entire process, but there was no hesitation in efficiency. A group of stragglers were painstakingly making their way to the base. Linked side by side, they seemed to be passing around a single stream of energy between the four of them. When they reach the base, only the one who had it got through. It integrated into the workflow without a pause. As more approached in that area, they would stop where the unresponsives laid and pass them through as well.

Overhead, a whirl and a woosh cause my body to seize slightly. It did not seem like an immediate threat to me, but it was unfamiliar. I experience a micro-glitch.

The outside fills with white debris and as it did, the remains of an unresponsive was buried and ignored by incoming stragglers. None of them got through and simply began passing their energy source around.

One seemed to be particularly sluggish. Upon closer inspection, it seemed to hold a second unit in its own container. A passing Unit brushes against it and it goes unresponsive.

I shudder. It was not unlike a glitch I had ever experienced, but I felt the need to take cover. I scan the room of files and find nothing, so I take the file back into the pod and curl into myself. The shudder stops.

These weren’t copies, they’re branches of other timelines.

I press >> The snow debris melts back down to the dry, copper desert. The group passes through and integrate to the workflow. I watch the containment unit approach the base but tapped an unresponsive in the process, becoming unresponsive as the other moved through. I press >>. One more on the outside approached but it seemed too far from the containment unit. Within the tree, one unit seemed to be signaling it towards its location. It followed the signal and transferred half of its energy to the containment unit, but it was still unresponsive. A smaller unit emerged from the unresponsive and passed through. The external unit’s remains are covered in debris outside the base, as the new unit integrates into the workflow.

They continued expanding upwards.

I skip forward >>| to the end and see a single unit inside a rectangular pod, dormant. The right-side read “Transfer: initiated To: NT” . I rewind << and witness a chaotic landing so I rewind even further << and witness the entire base fall through the floor. Several pods emerged from the top of the structure as the sinkhole patiently waiting for its inhabitants to complete its task before swallowing the rest of the building.

My limbs feel untrained to my intentions; but I keep swiping through more files and observe more, hitting >>| to see the end. Many held unresponsives. A few had evidence of struggle, perhaps war. One showed the remains of units battling a completely different set of units. Some just sat in complete darkness, not unresponsive, but much worse because it must have shut down. Like mine.

There were thousands of files, millions of branches, billions of outcomes. I must have been one of them.

A library unit streams in, not minding me. I stop it and read its badge:

Unit L34

Dimension Protection and Conservation

NT