They tore the light from my mind and pressed it on fine, shimmering leaf. It was placed in one of ten thousand metallic slabs, to be taken from this place and stored snug in the haulier’s hold for the passage. My love had gone before me at the transit centre; I watched her flicker and die while I stroked her golden hair and mumbled useless words of encouragement.
She was scared, so had gone first. I kissed her still-warm forehead and let go, silencing my impotent whispers. Her skin tasted of fresh, cold sweat.
They ushered her body away for destruction. An attendant passing by reminded me that she was stored in data now, and not to worry about the empty shell. Much of our preparation the night before had been spent telling each other that the body was nothing, repeating a catechism of our faith in the technology. All would be well. The mind is what matters. We would see each other on the other side. I would still be her wife, come what may.
Always so logical, we had played out the debate in miniature, as though there was any chance of us changing our minds at such short notice. She had proposed that making the trip was barely profitable for the transport firms. To this, I’d conceded that asking the machinery-laden bulkers to contain the necessities of biological life was too much. Though thrust and riposte, we set the dialectic to rights. Using this technology meant that more people could make the trip, and it would be immoral to restrict access based on squeamishness, would it not?
We had won the debate over ourselves and arrived here the next day. We were perfectly on time. She was never late for anything.
I bit my lip when they placed the hood against my skull. The corpse being wheeled away was not her, and there was no need to be strong for it. She existed only in non-volatile data in an anonymous rectangle of metal, already being shuffled away into safe storage. Fingers encased in white latex carefully held her by the plastic edges, so as not to risk damage to the more precious cargo.
It would be a handful of months before we were shipped to Europa, but we wouldn’t notice the time passing.
Did she feel the technician’s gentle touch as she was filed between her alphabetical neighbours?
A piercing scream of divine fury bore into my skull when the device lurched to life.
The machine was a vampire eager to sup from my neurons. Underneath the hood, vibrant supernovae filled my vision, each stellar burst a part of my mind being dismantled, categorised, and passed into the device. I felt my resolve shatter; my mouth gaped silently as I tried to scream for the process to end, tried to tell them that I wasn’t ready.
My essence collected, they began to press me firm: all that was me printed over billions of microscopic layers of tungsten and silver. I was spread thin, flattened by the careful machine hands of a hydraulic press. My body pulled against the restraints, trying to free itself from the screaming digital noise until it wasn’t my body anymore.
Silence, then sound and fury once again.The violent movement of a burning spark against my mind’s eye.
But only the mind’s eye.
A high-density electrolytic storage unit suitable for mind transcription had 4.29 billion pins. This knowledge came to me from nowhere. I tried to move my arms. Instead, I sent a constant positive charge through cascading layers of metal.
I tried my legs next. Bridges crackled with life as light was moved from one side of me to another. I saw and felt nothing recognisable as human sensation, but every pin was both tongue and eye, feeding me information, tasting the tenor of electricity.
I tried to scream.
The only measure of time I had were the vibrations of a crystal, coming steadily from some distant place.
I kept trying to scream for 16,384 oscillations of that crystal.
After I gave up, there was silence again, save for the constant pulse-on, pulse-off. A clock signal, some part of me dredged up from memory.
I let myself calm down, listening to it. No, not listening. I sensed it, tasted its fizzing against the memory of my throat. Feeling it as intrinsically as a heartbeat, both fundamental for life and taken for granted. Off and on. One and zero. With each pulse, I was aware of exactly how many had passed.
I had not been re-grown at Europa. What I inhabited was no body at all. I felt no need to draw breath, no warm blood flowing under my skin.
The tick-tick-tick of the false heartbeat was all there was. Each pulse, precise. Far better an indication of duration than the varying motion of a planet around a star. I waited for 1,024 oscillations, letting my head grow empty save for its gentle pulse.
The initial reaction was not sustainable in this place, without an endocrine system to push me from fear to panic. The pulse became all that I sensed until it was too much of an effort to continue to feel the terror of being in this non-place.
If I stopped influencing the world around me, it became still and silent, the ripples of any previous interference fading away and dissolving in the face of the tick.
There were no stray signals in this quiet place. No earthly meditation could have achieved this stillness.
Calmed, I hesitantly started to think again, feeling jolts of signal flowing between pins.
How was I thinking these thoughts, in a world of pure signal? I gave a motive spark to my surroundings, but I was governed by no program or mechanics.
Was I dead, and my spirit was inhabiting the uploaded version of my mind? I scoffed at this, but how? I had no mouth or throat through which to force air. I had no mouth to turn a sneer. I could shape the notion of derision, the ideal of mockery. In response, the spaces around me filled with incomprehensible, flickering light.
Although, it was not incomprehensible. The forked lines carried the meaning that I gave to them. True thought given form.
It should not have been possible for me to think, and yet I thought.
Perhaps this was only a dream, and soon the vision of an electric aurora would be replaced by my love’s bucktoothed smile, ready to kiss me and cry tears of relief. Perhaps all I needed to do was sleep, and let it be so.
I cleared my mind again, producing nothing to interfere with the pulse. I could not continue this line of thought, lest I fall into sorrow and panic. I had simply to try to sleep.
I waited.
I waited for 65,536 ticks.
There was no sleeping.
Only the tick-tick-tick.
Frustrated, I extended tendrils of spark out of my pins. This couldn’t be all that there was. The storage unit was connected to a larger device. Given effort, perhaps I could manipulate the signals I produced to start transferring my consciousness across. Perhaps there, I thought, I would find an answer to what had happened.
A tumult of lightning greeted the first tendril that pushed beyond my still surroundings. My temporary home seemed tranquil compared to what lay beyond my pins, beams of light shooting across like a highway of illumination. A part of me that strayed too far was drowned out and annihilated by the magnitude of the signal passing before it, and I retreated my essence to my unit, concerned that a too-strong piece of light would overcome the whole of me, wiping me clean.
A few layers of conductive substrate that sat closest to the connection to the outside had been reshaped. I felt dread, realising that I had risked my existence to my curiosity. Unless I found some way to shield myself from the energetic flow beyond, there was no leaving the storage unit.
I tried to remember my science. This type of storage device was non-volatile. While it was certainly receiving power, that I drew on to shape my world, my memories did not require it. They were constructed of the physical shapes surrounding me. In effect, the shape of the conductive layers was the shape of me. Any re-shaping was an existential risk.
I examined where the new pattern had been scorched upon my surface. The layers surrounding the portion were uniformly flat. I had been lucky; the new pattern was written on a blank part of me. It was a single shape, repeated thousands of times. Meaningless right now, that would take an age to decipher, if it were possible at all.
But I had time.
I had written code before, but nothing like this. There was no moderating language to interpose between my thoughts and the impulses that soared from them. People thought that programming, at its core, is digital. That the lowest you can go is writing machine code or writing clean binary values onto a chip.
But in the space between the atomic and the tangible, everything was analogue. What appeared smooth to the human observer became a scattered, jagged harshness, broken into an infinite set of fractals.
These were my canvas and brush.
The uneven lines of thought seared with agonising force across my mind as I tried to exert my will on the microscopic filaments. I scorched my desires through the medium, my vital spark hungry to jump to a more conductive space.
By the measure of the tick-tick-tick, I started to weave my way. Around the part that was me, there seemed to be an infinite field, blank and ripe for my use. I just had to learn how.
I knew enough to get started; I knew a signal could represent the number one.
It was a paltry basis on which to learn to interpret a world, and I thought there would not be the space or time to learn. But the space was never-ending, and time meant nothing but the pulse. Through subtle shifts and coaxing, I could stimulate and encourage a new route for my spark. A little more resistance across a false bridge, a beckoning of the wild beast in one direction to shape like clay a clear, ready signal.
I directed the heat and light onto one divot in the substrate and felt its shape change. A new, vivid pillar, the filament dissolving into a shining, low-conductive state. It had been void and without form, and then – a 0 changing to a 1.
Thousands of ticks passed. Even if this were for nothing, I told myself that it was a way to pass the time. To prevent madness.
I counted the powers of two, trying not to think about her face. 0010 to the 0010 power made 0100, come what may. Thinking of her would lead to madness, and I couldn’t be mad when I was discovered.
I got bored around the 64th power, and still hadn’t found the edge of the field I had to work with. I moved to simple addition and subtraction. I still didn’t know how to give my surroundings any instructions, or whether it was possible to interpret the scorched elements left by the outside device. But mathematics, pure and light, would keep me ticking over until then.
0010 into 0111 made 1001, come what may. It was a meditative act, the building of a sand garden to create empty spaces. My inner self continued to try to sabotage me, to draw me from my task into indulgent self-pity. I resisted the urge to see each positive signal as her, a number one, upright but brittle, compared to the negative zeroes as myself, round and sturdy with ultimately less worth.
The dread nibbled at the corners of my perception if I let it. Skitterings of fear rose the moment I failed to devote my mind to peaceful, predictable mathematics. I would start by trying to recall my arm and finding nothing there. Neither arm nor shoulder and body to attach it to. And then, the dam breached, and I was engulfed in a terror like no other, not of annihilation but of having been made into something truly alien, that could never walk amongst humanity. A digital wraith that could never hold the arm of its love or feel the sun against its skin.
It was too painful to bear. Each time I failed to keep these thoughts at bay, I redoubled my efforts to distract myself.
I moved to multiplication. 0101 multiplied by 0111 made 0001 1100, come what may. My actions became faster as I gained familiarity with the motive spark I wielded.
If I worked fast enough, with tasks that demanded enough of my attention, I could forget I didn’t have a body here. Slowly, the calculations became less about distraction and more an end to themselves. A great peace was settling across my soul, and it became easier to manipulate the magnetic fabric that made up my world.
Division. Algebra. Factorials. I was not limited by a single thread of thought, and I split my will into myriad shards to learn and prove, to place more of the world at my fingertips.
How was it that I could only manipulate simple numbers, but I could think in full sentences, with all the glory of language? How was it that I even existed, where all I could control were simple binary mathematics?
My thoughts and the flow of digits started to become indistinct. I was a ray of light across an unending canvas, so how did I know metaphor, simile, cant, and tone?
X = X. X + Y = Y + X. Thought + Feeling = Feeling + Thought.
I was electricity. How was I feeling?
Wrenching aside rising anxiety, I withdrew from my calculations and turned the light inward, shining upon what I had been terrified to see. I looked at my mind data, both recording and recorder.
I thought I was ready. I’d assumed that the meditation had prepared me. I shouldn’t have looked. I felt the void open around me, despair overtaking me.
There I was. No greater mystery, no enlightened soul. There was no spark of divinity here. All my thoughts were laid out for inspection. History, memories, self. It was just the same as the outside. Gleaming, sterile code.
There was no difference between my soul and the scorched patterns that still lay on my brutalised canvas.
I felt my signal grow jagged. An urge overtook my thoughts that I recognised as a strong desire to vomit—a need that I could not fulfil.
On the same ticking pulse as I gave form to a thought, a beacon lit up around the appropriate parts of me. A conscious mind, created into an array of light. These were my thoughts. I could have, if I had so chosen, wiped clean all of it by using the intensity of my light to consign myself to oblivion.
I watched the thoughts shine as they manifested in me. Words, figures, and pictures in my mind. All of this was represented mathematically.
I was no different from the patterns of light that I created in my remedial equations. If I didn’t concentrate, I would not know where one ended and the other began.
I summoned up my will and prepared to wipe myself clean. But hesitated. No—I was a pioneer on the edge of a new world. There had to be some way I could use what I had found.
If I gave up, I would never see her again. I had to discover the limits of my abilities before surrendering to the void.
I thought of her name and, in that pulse, captured the parts of me that lit up, transcribing them elsewhere, creating a copy of these thoughts that persisted after they faded from my mind data.
My mind and memories would be my Rosetta Stone. I resolved to build a language, no matter how long it took.
I knew it would take millions, if not billions, of oscillations. Unburdened by fatigue or hunger, I worked with a brilliant purpose. I was not merely translating a language; I was creating one from first principles.
But I had plenty of time.
To break up the monotony I derived basic logic, then moved on to geometry. I didn’t know whether I would ever be able to visualise a circle in this place, but I could at least calculate the area of a theoretical one. The beauty of the act was more enjoyable than the tedious process of creating language, which seemed too distant an abstraction from the purity of mathematics.
It took several million ticks to calculate pi, and I finally managed to do so just before I completed my full English alphabet in binary form. As an afterthought, I devised the Greek alphabet as well. It seemed the right thing to do.
If my mind data had been compressed at all, this may not have been possible. Part of the guarantee in the transit services was that all storage was uncompressed, but such assurances were rarely audited. I continued to work, trying to ignore the possibility that this wasn’t the case after all. I would hardly be able to tell if part of me was lost forever to a compression algorithm, and the last thing I needed was to go mad with anxiety.
I looked again at the data left behind from my sally beyond my unit. It came with a header, recognisable as text. What had previously been meaningless light now was as clear as words on a page.
It had all been for nothing.
FORT MCFADDEN REPOSSESSION SERVICES
UNCATEGORISED DATA FROM FEDERAL SEIZURE 02/08/63
As soon as I read it, I scorched away my work in a blinding spear of light. The basic proofs I’d so enjoyed devising were outshone in blazing fire, my desperation and rage demanding a sacrifice and unleashing a flood to bury my efforts. Before I could turn my light on myself, I was again struck by the date mark.
It had been fifteen years since I was transcribed.
Fifteen years in the void, waiting. Fifteen years without consciousness or memory. Had our transit company been seized straight away? Did they even know I was here? Was I evidence?
Had she made it out alright?
I tried to scream again, all the progress I had made across countless pulses sloughed away. My electric mind coursed with energy. It would be so easy to turn it all off. To wipe it clean.
Perhaps I was a copy, made by accident or malice. That would at least mean that out there, the true me still walked among the living, aging gracefully in the arms of her beloved.
Imagining the happiness of a doppelganger did little to help. I would not see her again. And if there was no copy out there, self-annihilation would be a violence to her, erasing the last hope of my return.
Holding the yawning terror at bay, I returned to the wreckage of work in desperation. Given language and command over my surroundings, I could create a rudimentary machine code. From this, I could forge an assembly language. I knew that there was little hope that I would find something approaching salvation, but I needed to expel all doubt.
My rudimentary code at my command, I probed the outside further, trying to see if there was some way to communicate. Now I could fortify myself with ablative filigrees, peeling off as I worked among the stronger beams to gather what information I could.
No, the outside device was not networked. Header and ident data, now readily accessible to me, told me that it was a new way to store the now-obsolete drives, keeping them provided with a source of power to better preserve their function.
This did not extinguish the last of my hope. What I found next was the hammer blow.
There was a manifest file. My spark surging forward as a phalanx, I tore it from its place, deciphering it in a frenzy. There was still hope at this point, however slight.
She was not on the list. Neither was I. Every storage device connected to this preservation hub was marked as “office accounts, 2539 onwards”. With newfound confidence in my abilities and a drive that came only from deep despair, I sought out the other drives attached to this unit, searching for her, not believing what I’d read.
What happened next resulted in one billion pulses of stillness, my electric soul retreating to its domain and waiting in catatonia.
I found only spreadsheets, records, and accounts.
I had been misfiled.
Nobody out there had any idea that I was here. I had no means of communication. No means of escape. All I could do was lose myself to despair.
Catatonia quickly gave way to fury. My previous work was already an incomprehensible wreck, so I created new, beautiful equations only to strike them away in my rage, mindlessly creating a cycle of creation and destruction. I tore loose beams that strayed too close to my pins, shattering them across my silver.
For hundreds of millions of tick-tick-ticks, I continued this cycle, becoming a deluge of destruction, wiping everything clean but myself.
Uncountable pulses passed before the emptiness took me in and comforted me once again.
The only sensations that existed in this world were those that I brought into it. I was free of physical wants and, if I so chose, could simply make myself still. There would only be the pulse of the clock signal, I did not even have breath which I needed to steady.
I was a permanent fixture, in storage. I did not have to be anything else.
I could remain still forever, and all would remain just so. I was perfectly safe, and evermore would be.
I had time to wait.
I knew I would never see her again. To my surprise, I found that a part of me returned to my quiet peace of pure mathematics, without me thinking about it. A single thread, reciting and recording the powers of two in the wasteland of my fury.
This was the key. I would never see anybody again, but I had the infinite to keep me company.
And I had time.
I did not tire. My endless field was awash with wreckage. I had lost everything I had built. It would take a handful of eternities to rebuild.
But I had time.
Basic functions. Logic. Calculus. This time, I worked with no purpose but the purity of the work itself. I whispered reassurances to my still world that another flood would not come.
I knew that there was no escape from here, yet still I worked. The act of creation kept my mind clear until the despair was a distant dream. The equations that danced across my being had infinite potential. It was as though I was approaching enlightenment, the physical world on the cusp of becoming and dissolving all at once.
When Ramanujan was granted the miracle of mathematical prophecy, he met Narasimha, the fire-borne avatar of Vishnu in his dreams. It was that avatar’s blood that formed the truths that would become his life’s work.
He was far from the only mathematician to recognise the divinity in the stark, true lines of his work. God made the integers, all else is the work of man. But I had made the integers in this place, so had I stolen the act of divinity for myself?
My mind grew clearer the more I worked. Soon, I was creating shapes, clear in my mind’s eye. A simple graphics engine became an atomic structure. A simulation became the fire at the heart of a star.
I could not return to my world, but I had time enough to create my own within.
I would see her face again, carved out of a perfect infinity.
Natalie O'Connor 