At last, the bleached white of death disintegrates into the darkness of the WOOM interior. I’m still Oluvia Wade, but I recognize the neural flush as I escaped the terrors of her last episode of life, and I know I must actually be someone else. But who?
When I was Oluvia, my calculations told me that the transition out of a subject’s life should take sixteen minutes twelve seconds, and at least five of those pass before a sense of true identity returns. I think four have passed; the warmth of recognition is beginning its work. A vague awareness tells me I am very fond of whoever I really am. I like me. That’s encouraging. But it’s more than that—there is passion. I … love whoever I am.
Salem Ben! I am Salem Ben.
With memory flooding back, the full joy and horror of the revelation crowds my thoughts and forces a deep gasp of breath. I never wanted to let him go. Could never face the possibility that I may never win his love. And now, I’m him. And he never loved me. Is that a blessing or a curse?
I try to look at my hands but they won’t move, and a flash of crucifixion invades my thoughts before I remember it as one of Oluvia’s last experiences.
The wet slit exit of the WOOM opens. Tiny red stars sparkle through the yawning gap reminding me that I dared to enter the life of a restricted soul. At least ten more minutes before I will be whole again. Ten more minutes before the last essence of Oluvia Wade’s identity is gone.
But I don’t even remember how I … she died. I grasp for her last memories of confusion and dream, realize now how her brain responded to the trauma of completing an immersion without the neural flush. To experience the merging of two distinctly different lives at the same time, especially the tortured days of Kilkaine Nostranum, would have sent me … her spiraling into madness. Without a stable brain map to transplant into a new body, Orbane and the others would have had no choice but to end her life to end her suffering.
I take another deep breath as the WOOM reconfigures my synapses, restoring the recent memories of Salem Ben to my consciousness. But what about that life? Seeing myself through Oluvia’s eyes reminds me of the man I once was. I have spent millennia drifting from soul to soul diluting my own personality to the point where I hardly know who I am anymore. Was I really that man? Of course, I know I was, and somehow I am going to have to get that man back. If not for me, for the memory of Oluvia Wade.
I examine the tiny red lights as the machine draws me out of the WOOM and releases me from my shackles. It’s a relief to be in familiar surroundings again, even if the Restricted Sphere does not have the same colors of the spheres to which I had previously grown accustomed. A few more minutes remain before my memory as Salem Ben is fully restored, but I do know one thing: entering the Restricted Sphere to experience Oluvia’s life wasn’t for my entertainment. I needed her knowledge.
Vieta. Keitus Vieta! And with the remembrance of that name, the fear burns back into my mind as if each letter had been written there with a hot blade. I remember now. The aberrations. That was why I ventured into Oluvia’s life: to find out how the soul files work, because something about Keitus Vieta’s manifestation was terribly wrong. Two separate data sources, both of which should be faultless, working in harmony, are not. Somehow the algorithms that spliced the two files together had to make sense of the discrepancy, and if Keitus Vieta existed in one set of data but not the other, the result would be strange indeed. It would certainly explain the unnerving emotional responses of the people who had met him.
I remember Orson Roth’s comparison to the blind spot in the eye. The idea was not far from the truth. What if one eye saw something and the other did not? How would the brain interpret such a thing?
So Vieta exists in either the Codex or the recorded data, not both. But which? If he is some sort of entity that has infiltrated one set of data, then where did he come from? And did he infest the Codex or the recorded data? How would I find out?
But something else is wrong too. Something is missing. Something else usually happens when I awake from …
Qod!
I was too engrossed in my musings to realize that the AI had not made her usual welcoming comments as I woke from the dream of another life. Where is she?
“Qod?”
Only the gentle shush and wheeze of servos reply as the WOOM reconfigures itself. But how strange it would be to hear her voice again, the ghost of Oluvia Wade.
“Qod, where are you?”
Still there is no answer. Perhaps she is running through diagnostics or attending to something important, but my instincts tell me something is very wrong. She could never be silent. She doesn’t know how. So, either she is choosing not to speak to me, or she has left. Both ideas seem unpalatable.
Fear, cold and sudden, enfolds me as I leave the sphere to make my way, almost running, through the conduit that leads to the Observation Sphere. “Qod?”
Where could she be? How can a self-sustaining artificial intelligence—almost omnipotent, almost omniscient—that has existed for billions of years not be here? She’s everywhere.
“Qod! Why don’t you answer? Where are you?”
Again, no reply.
A flat machine voice answers: Soul Consortium Control Core processor is functional.
“Where is Qod?”
Unknown.
I stop in front of the archway leading to the Observation Sphere, afraid to step through. Entering without Qod’s presence seems intimidating, as if there is nothing to shield me from the distant powers of the universe that are laid bare in there. I miss her already. “Unknown? Did she … leave?”
Unknown.
“Well, when was she last here?”
Qod was last active within the Soul Consortium two hundred and thirty years ago.
Relatively recently. “Do you know what happened to her?”
Unknown.
The word sinks into me, bringing with it a painful finality and an aching frailty. With Qod, the unknown is always knowable. Even those sacred details she guarded so vigilantly within the Codex, the lives of every soul the universe would ever create, could be known through those algorithms. But through some embedded trait given to her by Oluvia Wade and perhaps to save my own sanity too, she would never go there. If only she had allowed it. We may have known the future and foreseen this day.
The doors slide open, and I freeze when I see inside the sphere.
There in the haze of a red cloud waits Keitus Vieta.