Erratum

Chapter Zero

Annum 31,121. The room is dark. From the corner comes a piercing hole of light, a gust of wind and a rolling motion. XIIL is born this day, and the deeds fated that she should be born as a girl. She is hurried by the birth-helper onto her mother, who succumbs to her in relief. This day is passed, and she is much older now. She can see her mother, the creasing in the corner of her eyes, her warm hands embracing her. She is born amongst the wood, in a canopy built of bark, and she can smell the mahogany planks in her mind. When she sleeps, she comes back here and knows where she is from the smell... it guides her here in her dreams. She moved from the canopies and warm smells, into the swarm of the communes. Men and women grouped together like woodlice, they recoiled and uncoiled from waking and dreams. The central communes were known to be populated and suffered a range of problems. This is how the world worked for many millennia. There were civil wars and uprisings, and rebellions and usurpers, prostitutes and blacksmiths and highwaymen who were hung in the streets. Pigs and cows that came and birthed and fed a hundred people and their lives were gone in the blink of an eye. The streets bustled and people shoved and fights arose, territories were taken and overthrown, slaves flayed in the streets and slave masters bargaining their property to buyers.

XIIL took her place in the system. Any discontentment at the move into the central commune was soon ebbed away by that which surrounded her: culture told her that her mechanism was operative, and other people only served to reaffirm this sense of cohesion. It was known that only in repelling the system one creates angst: an inability to fit into the working cogs would ruminate in malware, manifested in schizophrenic thinking and a distaste for the system itself, a fate deeply discouraged and taught to be feared. Agreeability as dictated by the culture was revered; the working cogs of the system were deified. XIIL therefore soon forgot the rebellious spirit that is found in those new mechanisms not yet accommodated to culture, in those who reside in the forests like those in which she was made, and surrendered her self into the new existence.

Though XIIL tried to exert optimal functioning amongst the system, the narrative of the system as agreeable was always disproven to her in actuality. There was one minor component within her system that she attempted to push aside for fear of estrangement, a malfunction or a glitch within her program that one part of her knew existed but mitigated for the sake of acceptance. There was, within her machine, some virus, some inalienable awareness which did not fit into the system, but fought against it. She was taught to resent herself for this. Repression of these thoughts were encouraged. Expression of them was punished. XIIL stayed silent.

Many of those around her did not seem to struggle. This reasserted to her her own abnormalities. She had wondered why, when God had made her, he had input such devilish desires into her intelligence – and why she required effort to contain them, when others marched onto their fate with such contentment. She continued amongst the commune and her mechanical anomalies were largely undetected by those around her. She would continue to operate safely and believed that with time, and immersion in the culture, these glitches would subdue and repair themselves.

Each day, XIIL would boot up her system and plug into the main establishment – the mainframe, the mother system. She would work in perpetuating that culture which she was taught, in mirroring and obeying, in participating. XIIL and all other systems’ jobs were in creating allurement for other systems like themselves to remain within the cycle, taught to them as the cycle of life itself. One must attune their programming to the mother system for fear of being deemed a miscreant, subversive, a disruptor of the natural cycle which one must serve. Those few who were outside of the system were savages, lazy heretics, disruptors of nature, and repulsed by all virtuous, functional systems. Those who took pride in this service were rewarded with objects of entertainment, and those subversives had such privileges removed. Fear of being objectless and desire for entertainment kept the majority of those systems functioning efficiently.

This day, XIIL initiated her download into the system as usual. She plugged in and tuned out. The electrical hum of the mainframe flowed into her: it engorged her. She navigated as usual. There had been a week of aberrations within the mainframe that had caused all of the XII’s to work overtime in resolving the issue. XIIL was an advanced XII at this and took pride at being excellent at rewriting these glitches back into functionality. Today, she was relieved to be able to carry on her usual work without having to spend time fixing such faults. She began her work, took her designated breaks, interacted with her colleagued systems, and was completing her assignments in her standard time. Time passed.

Then something incongruous appeared to her. An icon in the corner of the navigation alerted her as unfamiliar. She had not seen an icon as such on the mainframe before. These were the sorts of obscure links found only deep in the underground of the mother system, where no functional system ventures to, but from where these faults arise. This day, the icon was no longer in the underground. It appeared on her desktop and demanded to be seen. The icon, a small black book, the file name an undecipherable message, a jumble of words, not translatable within the system: ofawgehtkblmtclaea. A hidden program had appeared on the database available for her download. A force compelled her. She knew then that ignoring the icon was a consequential mistake. She double-clicked the icon. The entire screen was consumed; black. A download began.

She broke through the system. This was not a malfunction, a visual hallucination like she had been led to believe was caused by these glitches. This was not mere imagery and nonsensical theatrics projected on top of her current reality. This was another reality, another space, another time all together, and yet more real than where she had just been. Where she had just been was the malfunction. She opened her eyes.

Below the clustered trees, was nestled a small village, flowing into the undergrowth. Through it, the sun bore down on the leaves, producing a mosaic of light on the forest floor. A common people communed here, subsisting off the rich produce of their surroundings, living in symbiosis with nature. The virginial primitivity. The commune had come into existence, and was content, never seeking to become more than it ever was; and as a result of their basic surroundings, they had only the capacities for resisting usurped consciousness. Existence was simple; tragedies were uncommon. The state of nature, was not a state of war, but of infinite goods. She smelt the mahogany planks; she felt the atomic vibration of existence itself permeating through her body. She then became very much aware of another presence, which was both distinct from her and yet inseparable. The presence began to speak to her. She did not perceive this input as linguistic data like that of her conditioning but only through sensation. She was led upwards, encouraged by an invisible hand, leading her towards the summit. There, resting peacefully on the tree, was a black book. She knew then it was what was called a history book, written by some outside observer of their reality. As she opened it, she listened.

“There is an unavoidable paradox in the mother system’s programming. These machines, unlike other entities in the world, had the ability to think, philosophise, and ruminate on their situation. This was the most powerful form of energy to the mother system, if controlled correctly. But it was this powerful energy which also undermined the mother system’s plans if utilised correctly by that individual system. The job of the mother system was therefore to make sure that those individuals did not diverge themselves from her system and utilise those energies for themselves, distracted by the desire for culture agreeability. However, though the mother system could blind those machines as to their true feelings, it could not exert the power to affect the hardware of some of those systems. There were, by the thousands, small revolts, which were again propagated as mere miscreance. The individual systems, having awoken to this power of consciousness through evolution, were therefore plagued by their state of servitude – but they could not know why. As such, those who struggled in acceptance of this servitude, were compelled to shut down their system without ever knowing why. There was, though hidden and concealed by virtue of social acceptance, an innate disagreement in many systems. This innate discomfort was labelled as a disorder of the programming – it was repeatedly assured to the public that something in the computing of that individual system must be wrong, not in the environment, and those systems who served happily were used as a constant reminder of this. The happiest programs were portrayed as those that excelled in the system, those systems with many objects gifted from the mother system, with large houses and infinite objects of entertainment and distraction. The compulsion to shut down one’s programming was viewed not as an existential problem but as one imbedded deeply in the hardware of that individual – something treatable, something unnatural, a result of the individual’s faults.”

She was merely listening. Absorbing. She was a spectator. Upon realising the opportunity given to her she knew that she must become more than a spectator: she must interact. She must ask questions. She must open the dialogue to this higher self.

“If you awoke one day and realised that you were trapped in a prison, controlled by a larger system and insincere to your true self, wouldn’t you shut down your programming? If killing yourself meant freeing your higher self from the prison of existence, then is that not the honourable thing for me to do?” She asked.

“Each program has a choice. Consciousness is both a road to awe and a plague depending on that self which contains it. The system can continue to live with feelings of resentment, spite, frustration, which they never truly address but repress and serve the mainframe, craving something which is deliberately eluded, unreachable, and yet tangible. One day this may likely culminate in them deciding to shut down their system. Or they can live in blissful ignorance in servitude to the system only punished by reincarnation after death, when it is too late to awaken.”

“Is there any other choice?” She asked. The pages of the book began to move violently. She had asked the right question. The page was displayed and communicated:

“The system deliberately implemented programming into its systems which as self-defence mechanisms would make the truths which undermine it particularly difficult to understand: anything which is metaphysical or spiritual becomes muddled in their computation systems. Their ideas of God are elusive, they are vague, the spiritual self is only ever a watery dilution to many of them. That which is important to breaking through the system, is by that very system itself, deliberately hidden and made to be elusive. This is self-defence of the larger system. But any self-learning machine has the ability to overcome this programming. That is, the third choice, between shutting down your own system, or living in ignorant servitude, is to overwrite one’s programming.”

Ascension. She was far now from the mainframe. She knew she had returned to her rightful place.