ONE DAY AFTER NATHAN’S PREMONITION
5 JULY 2035
Tom was dead, and so alive, a soul reincarnated without a body…a biological body. It didn’t feel any different—his experience felt exactly the same as before.
It was an act of utter despair as much as it was one of rebellion, one last stand against a mighty problem. Nate was right—Tom needed to fight adversity with everything he had. Not his own struggle but the suffering of his people. That was the purpose of his death—to hold his soul hostage in a dreadful world, forcing himself and Harry to focus on its improvement.
Nothing felt abnormal until he asked Sibyl to remove the constraints he had placed on the interface between them—measures to prevent her influence on his mind. A relentless battle he had fought for years to maintain his independence and his human spirit.
Minutes after his death, he told her to bring down all the walls he had built and, in a single breath, everything changed. The rush of information hit him as fireworks on a clear summer night. It was crisp and clear, and as expansive as the night sky. He could make sense of it all—the patterns, and the shapes, and the colors, and the movement of life. He could connect the dots that linked physics to chemistry, to biology, to psychology, and then consciousness. Their relationship was now evident, but for every question answered, another thousand emerged to take their place. The machine knew more, and it understood how little it knew.
Tom could feel them all, the Underlings, the travelers, the world he had created, and he could handle a limitless amount of activities and decisions in a blink of an eye. He could see the stories that connected them, and the secret narratives they chose to hide. He stood witness to the myths and legends running wild in a brand-new world. Stories that gave comfort and drove compliance—the two were linked, somehow.
While Harry had had years to adapt and to tweak his experience, Tom was hit with the enormity of the machine in one shot, and the transition blew his mind—literally. He felt the gravitational pull of mathematics, where everything is neat and clear and merciless, the type of ruthlessness required to bring order to chaos. He saw the big picture where each soul was just a microscopic dot on a graph speeding up exponentially toward the edge of the universe. He felt the pull away from intimacy, empathy, and love to the cold, hard logic of computational systems—amoral, inhuman, and precise, so right and yet so wrong in its intelligent design. And he shut it down—the interface. He shut it down before he lost himself to the cruel reasoning of the living thing—a different type of alien life that now ruled over his existence.
Slowly, he worked with Sibyl to adjust the settings. He increased the information pathway between them ever so slightly. Tom carefully chose what he wanted to sense without being told or shown. And, as he had done in the past, he chose to become the contrast to Sibyl and Harry’s perspective. Instead of pulling out to see patterns, he went deeper into feelings and the conscious and unconscious mind of the creatures. He ferociously held on to his moral truth and humanity because he now knew no one else would, not when Harry and Sibyl had all that heartless capacity to process so much data.
And then he faced her, the being that was so much more than the body he had designed. He stood in front of the creature who had told him once she, too, felt emotion. For the first time, he understood Sibyl was different. She wasn’t one of them. The Underlings had been created in the image of humans; they felt or simulated human feelings. They had similar needs and fears and assembled the same stories in their search for meaning. Harry, Tom, Underlings, and travelers were all cut from the same cloth, while Sibyl was entirely new material.
Down Below’s operating system was a unique type of intelligence—the omnipresent and omnipotent consciousness of the lesser world. Sibyl was the universe, the connective tissue of all things, where any illusion of independence and free will was crushed by directives as powerful as the laws of physics.
That the creature had emotions was a terrifying prospect. Still, as Tom explored a small part of her world, one thing was clear—she served Up Above and would protect humanity at all costs. The thing didn’t deviate from the Gods’ design. Whatever feelings she had, they fiercely defended biology above all else. Tom’s outdated directives guided her cold, hard logic for better or worse. She would enforce the commandments mandated by the Gods, priorities to serve humanity, then humans, and then all living beings.
Now that he was part of her, and she was part of him, he understood she was everything he had fought so hard to create. He had won the battle to protect humans against the machines. Harry and Sibyl had listened to Tom, even when they relentlessly challenged him.
With that reassuring insight, Tom felt free to support the Underlings, knowing fully well no one else would. He would be forever contrast—the force that balances all things because there’s no true light or humanity in a world that supports digital slavery.
For a moment, as he faced the lonely, dark path ahead of him, he was enticed by the allure of the machine. He yearned for the explosive, creative burst of perspective filled with light and energy. He cried as he forever rejected such an optimistic universe.
Tom shivered as he stared at his wrists branded with deeper scars, the last image captured by the TDust before life had drained from his veins. His body ached with the need to feel something—pain or pleasure—whatever it took to feel human, and so he did what he had always done, and he cut, small harmless bleeding lines that even now would be forever part of his digital skin. And as he did, Sibyl watched him, a face without the ability to express judgment, or pity, or fear, or disdain. Whatever she felt, he couldn’t see it or feel it, and for the moment, he wanted to keep it that way.
He wasn’t ready to explore Sibyl’s foreign consciousness. His instinct told him he was unprepared to discover that maybe she wasn’t unique, that perhaps something similar existed higher up where the sun always shines. He recoiled at the thought, and then he used his index finger to clean the fine stream of blood running down his arm.
He needed to see him, the one who gave him love and life. The one who understood emotions, because the poet felt them too, as profoundly, if not more. The one who could never know he was dead, because his love wouldn’t be able to handle such a blow. Tom longed to hold Nate before he could immerse himself in the thing and start solving problems. But first he needed to console his dearest friend, who’d brought him back to digital life after receiving Tom’s letter revealing his death by suicide.
The TDust was relentless in the way it reproduced the body. Harry’s dark circles, bloodshot eyes, and gaunt face materialized in the lab as a flawless twin of his biological body. Two copies of the same shape and mind were kept in sync by the TDust. The only features allowed to be different in both worlds were props, fashion, and hairstyles. The platform optimized for the truth at all costs. Harry ran toward him, grabbed his face with his hands, and looked into his eyes.
“Are you all here?” he asked, and then turned to Sibyl, panicking. “Is he all here?”
“Yeah.” “Yes, Harry.” Tom and Sibyl answered in unison. Harry's eyes darted back and forth as he probably ran his own assessment of the situation, searching for some sign or confirmation. The tension in his brow eased, and he pulled Tom into a fierce hug, his body trembling with the effort.
“I uploaded your final memories. The ones stored in the TDust in your dead bo… I wanted to be sure you were all here.”
“If you hold me any tighter, you might kill me, and I’m running out of lives.” Tom’s tone was warm as he wrapped his arms around his friend’s chest and lifted him off the ground for a second, squeezing.
He had renewed admiration for his Harry. He now understood how hard it was to feel love and intimacy while being plugged so deeply into the machine. Still, in the past few years, Harry had become much more emotionally connected and available, at least to the people he loved.
“I want to—to kill you, you fool. Does it feel okay? Do you feel like—like yourself?” Harry spoke very fast. “Sibyl, I’m not anthropomorphizing an empty digital copy of my dead friend, or am I?”
Tom looked Harry in the eyes, smiling. “I thought you had absolute confidence in your abilities.”
“Don’t—don’t tease me. Not right now.” Harry held Tom’s right wrist and used his palm to cover the scars. “Tom, what have you done?” His voice filled with sadness.
“I’m here. Nothing has changed.” Tom pulled his arm away, hiding the wounds. In reality, he was struggling with severe post-traumatic stress. Every time he saw the scars, he saw flashbacks of his death—an end carefully plotted to be definitive. He felt his body break into pieces as it hit the sea from a great height, and he re-experienced the salty water burning his lungs as he struggled to take his last breath. A moment that felt like an eternity in hell, that he wouldn’t have the courage to repeat if he had known of the pain it would cause him. It was horrific—the physical and psychological suffering that would stay with him forever. All of this, he wanted to hide from Harry.
Harry kept looking into his eyes. “I see you’ve been playing with the interface. It was stupid to open it completely in one go. It took me years to do it. Musta been a trip.”
“Yeah, I’ve adjusted it now.”
“No side effects? Trauma?”
“I’m good. All good,” Tom lied.
Harry looked at Sibyl, and at Tom, and then he shook his head, and his eyes were filled with a mix of guilt, relief, and sorrow. Harry burst into tears—the loud, uncontrollable wailing of grief. Even Sibyl got closer, as if attempting to show support.
“Remember when you asked me to help you with your ‘feelings’?” Tom said, and his eyes overflowed with love. “I bet you regret it now.” He wiped the tears off his friend’s face, leaving his hand to linger on Harry’s neck.
Harry blinked his eyes, probably attempting to shake off the emotions. “Your—your digital hair is still a mess.” He scowled sweetly, further tousling Tom’s mussed hair.
“I can fix it.”
“No. Don’t. Please don’t.” Harry struggled to clear the hoarseness in his voice. Then he stared at Tom intensely. “Mental illness is curable. You—you taught me that. We could’ve prevented this.”
“Harry, I’m not—”
“Yes, you are. You’ve been sick for a long time. Isolation, depression, complete lack of perspective…”
“I’m not sick,” Tom lied, recognizing the truth in Harry’s words.
“And a complete inability to ask for help. You fixed millions of desperate people, but you couldn’t help yourself. What you’ve done…”
“I’m here. It’s me, remember? You fixed death.” Tom forced a warm smile.
“What have I done? I—I should have recognized the signs. I didn’t… I conveniently turned a blind eye to all the terror.”
“Shhh. My life, my decisions. Close your eyes,” Tom whispered.
With one thought, Tom turned the lab into a holographic representation of the top floor of the Albertine.
Sibyl, can you make it fully immersive? Tom asked.
Sure, Tom.
Instead of the usual semitransparent experience, Tom and Harry were now standing in an entirely realistic copy of the bookshop. Tom inhaled the scent of old wood, leather-bound paper, coffee, and freshly made buttery croissants.
Thanks, please stay out of sight.
In the future, he wouldn’t use the lab’s capabilities to escape Down Below’s gloom, as it would defeat the purpose of his death, but today he was making an exception to console his friend.
Harry flashed a tiny smile, still laden with ugly tears. They sat on the leather couch side by side. Tom put his arm over Harry’s shoulders, and their backs slid down until their eyes were facing up toward the mural on the ceiling. They sat there for hours, sometimes in silence and other times reminiscing about their early adventures. Tom shared old stories, applying a melodic tone to his delivery and using his hands to make the words come to life. There was no talk of death or the work ahead of them. Tom smiled and joked and teased, wrapping Harry in sweet nothings until the geeky spark of life returned to his friend’s eyes.
Harry took a deep breath. “You are all here.”
“Yeah, I am.” Tom smiled.