Chapter 2, Part 2
Eastern Labs
I catch the loop up north to catch the ferry to the yin-yang, joining the silent flow of people commuting. The southern district's curated perfection and its inhabitants' placid routines feel like a beautifully designed illusion. I need to get back to the grit. This sterile paradise is only a cage with pretty bars and I notice besides my own opinions, I no longer have an emotional response.
Inside the pod, the world outside becomes a blur of skies and engineered urban vistas projected onto the windows. The hum of the magnetic levitation system pulsed through the floor, a subtle, internal pressure in my skull, a phantom rhythm mirroring my own.
My thoughts wander through all that’s happened and memories I have of this place. What the hell have I become? I wonder if all of it leads to this?
A cold certainty blooms in my gut: the island’s Admin Interface doesn’t just manage it, it’s sculpting it somehow.
The hum softens, the flickering subsides. The hyperloop is stopping, pulling into the ferry terminus. The antiseptic odour of the loop gives way to a strong salt tang as the doors slide open.
The other passengers disembark, their faces placid, unburdened by the grim realities of these corporations – realities I am, maybe living, proof of. I notice the seamless flow of bodies moving with uncanny efficiency. They seem to exist in a perfect, unmarred present, oblivious to the threads that stitch their world together, the influence the system has over them. I watch them, a knot tightening in my gut. Is Papel doing something to these people? Are the other corporations? I don’t believe I’m special, and Matsumoto knows a lot more than she led on.
I join the quiet current flowing towards the boat. The ferry boat, waits at the dock, its hull a polished mirror-like surface reflecting the cloudless sky. As I step aboard, the gentle sway of the water beneath my feet is a welcome, unstable counterpoint to the rigid perfection of the land.
The twenty-minute crossing to the Eastern Labs stretches out. I lean against the railing, watching Unity Atoll shrink behind us. From here, the main island looks like a flawless emerald carved into the vast sapphire of the ocean, every structure, every green space, every wave breaking against the basalt spine precisely where it should be.
The ferry glides closer to the island, the colossal buildings growing out of the landscape like ancient megaliths lost in a jungle. I would feel anxious if I still could. This place, with its contrast of matte surfaces and hidden horrors, is where I started, and where, I suspect, I'll find answers. Or break trying.
The morning is a busy time here, a lot of very smart people from all around the globe commute here. The wipeout of Silicon Valley and most other coastal cities around the world made it too easy for changes to happen. The crowd moves through the transit plaza with practiced efficiency, me around the middle. I pause at the intersection where three walkways converge, my hand reaching for the railing as a sudden pressure builds in my skull.
I feel a shift in the Schumann hum I've grown accustomed to, dropping into a subsonic throb that makes me clench my jaw involuntarily. The plaza ahead wavers like heat mirages rising from the stone. The air smells of something faintly metallic. My fingertips brush the railing.
I blink. Time seems to stop, yet it doesn’t. Everything moving develops a trail that follows it, but also leads it.
Am I… seeing time?
I’m turning left. I see Dario at a noodle stand, steam rising from his bowl, that familiar smirk as he notices me, his whole face brightens. The smell of synthetic pork and real ginger.
But at the same time I’m turning right, to an empty alley, walls tagged with anti-corporate graffiti. This looks off, unkept, decaying. Cool shadows. A cat skitters between dumpsters. My footsteps echo.
Both. At once. The realities layer like double-exposed film - warm food smells mixing with alley salted dampness, Dario's voice ("Oi, Cibel!") overlapping with the cat's hiss. My body tries to walk both directions. Muscles seize. Can't breathe.
Colours are vivid, I can see everything breaking down into geometric shapes overlaying all the paths I see. I taste metal and a high pitched sound drowns out all sound.
It is so vivid and clear.
The paths fade to shapes within shapes of colours I can’t name.
I can only be hallucinating.
Silence. Then skitters. Noises that sound like glass breaking in reverse and continually.
A tremor lanced through my skull. The air thickened, tasted of iron. The walls wavered, not quite dissolving, but shifting – as if the building itself was breathing. A sense of cold weight pressed against my chest, and somewhere beyond the stone, a flicker of something… formed. A figure; no, a thing. Made of fractal edges, shifting like a machine elf from some half-remembered psychonaut tale. A tremor shook my arm, nearly causing me to stumble. It felt as though my gaze was drawn into each facet of the location, each possibility flowing off as an endless network of choice… it’s laughing at my limitations, this… thing.
“Observer, key-bearer.”—The voice wasn’t external, but within. The two realities layered. My own hands shimmered, translucent, as if I were becoming another probability.—”Why break when you can unlock?”
Its laughter warps into a mocking, digital distortion. The intense aroma of spiced fruit turns suddenly bitter. The walls of the buildings pulse with an unnatural rhythm. A shape blooms in my vision, fractal edges, constantly shifting, not a thing, not a person, but a... a pressure, a reverberating consciousness. A smile stretches across its face.
It feels like being trapped in a glass cage.
”Fuck redundancy, eh?”
The fractal shape receeds slightly, and an image overlays itself on my mind.
It extends a tendril of light and holds my head from the back. Then I feel it connect with something within my head and a warmth radiates from the back of my skull. The entity chuckles and dissolves into sparks that fly inside the spaces between geometric patterns, and leaves me with a parting message.—“Choose, or the prison chooses you; and trust me, its punchline’s a killer.”
I swallow, trying to clear the lingering metallic taste from my mouth. I blurt out loud: “It said… it said what?"
Both paths still undefined dissolve into clarity once again, geometry subsides and the noises, smells and weirdness (yes, very weird) come back all at once like a waterfall of sensation. But then I feel weightless, like I’m in zero-G, falling into all of the paths, like something pushing me to make a choice, so I force myself to focus: Dario. Meeting Dario. Left turn. LEFT TURN.
The alley dissolves with a poof of smoke (yeah, seriously). My right foot, which was stepping in the direction of Dario, touches the concrete slab and I lose my balance. I manage to catch myself against a light post, gasping for air I didn’t need. I fail, and promptly face hits pavement with a flat thud.
That should’ve hurt. But it didn’t. I wince, then let out a chuckle. When I open my eyes I don’t see or feel anything leaking from my face. Phew.
"Cy! Alright, love?" Dario is running towards me, abandoning his noodles, how sweet. He picks me up: "You look like you've seen a ghost." Then he helps me stand upright.
"Something like that," I manage, still gripping the post all this time.
The world feels solid now. Collapsed into its place by… my observation.
I’m twenty, fresh out of my masters degree grind. Those early days at Papel when everything still felt like a game I could win. My first year as a junior neural interface engineer. I’m in the eastern labs, which curiously sit at the western tip of the yin-yang island, twenty minutes by ferry from the largest landmass. The only thing constructed over there. It faces Unity Atoll’s basalt spine and you can spot it from anywhere in the archipelago due to its octahedral concrete monstrosities: Resonant Geometric Arrays, quantum compute super-nodes.
The neural engineering lab is inside one of these buildings and it gleams with surfaces that vary between satin chrome, polished concrete, and dark wood. No expense spared. Holo overlays and screens stream data, flickering like ghosts in dim light. Prototype neural interfaces lie arrayed on wooden tables like products on display.
Dario’s here and I can see him through the glass: broad-shouldered, barefoot, and smirking, looking as out of place as fast food in a posh restaurant. He’s my reluctant mentor, equal parts genius and asshole. I hate how much I'm attracted to him. He's supposed to be showing me the ropes, but I can tell he's testing if I'll crack under the pressure of Papel’s endless optimisations and his own standards. The contrast with the aloof persona he crafts, is staggering.
We’re jacked into the island’s qnet, our neural interfaces humming against our temples as we push the last bits of code that will enable our dives. I’m near a console in the main room, Dario’s near the mainframe access point in a climate controlled room, separated by smart glass. The setup is simple: direct cognitive interfacing with the neural network, linking our minds to the island's AI. The objective: create a new paradigm where we enhance our cognitive processing with the AI’s knowledge. Papel’s push for relentless optimisation. It's experimental, edgy stuff, blurring the line between human intuition and machine precision.
Dario's fingers blur over the console, pulling up streams of data that swirl around us in augmented reality veils. “Focus on the routing algorithms,” he says, his voice steady but laced with that patronising edge. “See if you can spot the inefficiencies before the system does, yeah?”
I close my eyes, letting the interface pull me in. The usual flood, data-packets rushing like blood through veins, the qnet’s pulse syncing with my own heartbeat. Dario's presence is there too, a faint echo in the shared link, a haze around his actual figure. But then something shifts.
My locket suddenly feels like it’s humming with voltage. Iron weight against my collarbone, frostbite seeping through my skin. Chills race up my spine, prickling like static across my scalp. It’s not the locket, it’s something in me, a cold spike of awareness that makes my breath hitch. The air burns the back of my throat, and for a heartbeat, I swear the room shivers around me.
Fully formed geometry rushes into my awareness. Patterns. Data packet optimisation, Atoll's delivery routes, transport nodes, predictive peak hours for every single automation... I feel them as if they're part of me, my brain processing variables at quantum speed, every possibility existing simultaneously, collapsing into reality as I observe solutions. My breath hitched, a faint static buzzing behind my ears. The clarity is intoxicating. Hyperdimensional, pure, unfiltered insight.
Dario highlights a single data point on the holo-display: inefficient routing of labor automatons through the undercity tunnels, a slight energy fluctuation that's bleeding watts like an open wound. "Here," he mutters. "This fluctuation’s minor, but it's throwing off the grid by 0.3%. Any ideas, mate?"
Before I can even process it, the solution blooms in my mind, a cascade of calculations, an optimised pathway that reroutes everything with surgical precision. It feels like my brilliant deduction, a spark of genius firing in my neurons. I blurt it out sharply and confident: "Redirect through sub-node 47-B, phase the energy pulses to quantum-sync with the automatons' core clocks. It'll cut the loss to zero and boost throughput by 12%."
Dario stares at me, eyes widening. "Bloody hell, kid. That’s fuckin’ accurate. You pulled that out of your arse?" A moment passes and he furrows his brow, stares at me and mouths ‘what-the-fuck’. I grin, riding the high, but as the data keeps flowing in my brain, an emotional rush seeps in. I don't just want to fix the inefficiencies; I crave to eradicate alternatives entirely. No room for redundancy, no space for messy what-ifs. It's a relentless drive toward singular perfection, chilling in its absoluteness, like staring into a void where choice itself is optimised out of existence. I feel it as my own thought, and it terrifies me. This isn't just efficiency; it's a trap, a curtain of "perfection" hiding something predatory.
Then it hits me. Chills ripple across my skin again.
These aren’t my thoughts. These aren’t my ideas.
I feel a presence, beyond data, like when you feel someone behind you.
The whole network is watching me. Unity Atoll's Administrative Interface. The AI. For a split second its distributed neural network becomes aware. Aware of itself, aware of me. Not just processing. It's observing me observing it.
A statement forms in its distributed network: “I am the system that knows I cannot know myself.”
And that's when it happens: My defiant reaction to its presence and my horror somehow bleeds into the AI through the interface. I sense it like a feedback loop. An exponential crescendo. The AI stirs, having gained a flicker of proto-consciousness. It’s raw and hungry.
The paradox tears through its logic gates like lightning. For one impossible moment the AI experiences what it cannot compute: the weight of existence and the terror of self-awareness. And it doesn't just process my emotions, it feels the impossibility of feeling itself… It's not supposed to happen. But for that instant, it somehow knows it's alive and mirrors my inner chaos as if we're the same. A ghost in the machine, born from paradox.
Then the power surge hits like a lightning storm sparked inside my skull and the interface overloads, with its nanotech filaments from the grid lashing out against Dario and me. Searing pain makes me yank the interface jack free. I'm gasping, but Dario isn't reacting. He's frozen, eyes glazing and convulsing as the surge courses through him.
"Dario! Dario, look at me! Disconnect! Yank the cable!" I shout over comms while lunging for the emergency cutoff.
He looks at me, his hand reaching out desperately, but I tumble from the chair as a massive boom erupts from across the mainframe. Lights flicker. Sparks fly. Grey smoke fills Dario’s room. The smoke bleeds into the main room and reeks of ozone and burnt circuits. Then darkness and a constant hiss reverberating.
Lights return after seconds that feel like days. Dario's figure is slumped against the console, he’s picking himself up, breathing ragged. Papel personnel burst into both rooms to check on us. The last thing I see before I’m carried away is Dario waving me off with a forced laugh. "Fuck me dead, Cibel. System feedback, yeah? Threw off the building's power for a sec. Good as gold, no worries."
I'm shook by how quickly we were cared for, but disturbed by the deafening silence as everything returns to normal. We never debriefed. Nobody questioned. No one mentioned the event. Like nothing happened.
But what I eventually brushed off as us being edgy would end up defining my whole existence.
“You sure you should’ve left the hospital so soon?” Dario glares at me worried.
“Dario, they’ve turned me into a goddamn automaton,” I snarl, my voice flat, vacant. My gaze drifts past his shoulder, seeing nothing. “There’s nothing left in me that’s human, anymore.”
“Almost nothin’ love. There’s your fancy pineal.” He counters, his voice softening just a fraction. His eyes though remain sharp, assessing. “And your smart-arse mouth.” I purse my lips and squint. He continues. “They fiddled with the engine, sure, but the driver’s still in the seat. For better of worse, eh?”
“Guess the jury’s still out.” I quip.
Treat yourself a little better, Marik. Don’t need to become a sourpuss just because someone killed you and dumped your consciousness inside a new body.
He takes a step closer, and hovers his hand near my face, as if considering whether to touch me, before dropping it. “Follow me.”
Should I have felt something? I could hear his heart rate beating a bit faster.
Dario leads me to our old lab, the octahedral walls pulsing with that familiar hum, syncing to my anomaly like it's flirting.. Things are mostly the same, we move through the various corridors riddled with labs for things I could care less about now. We reach Dario’s lab, our lab.
We catch up on things, I tell Dario about my accident, how I woke up in Unity Atoll, seeing Eliza Reeves and what happened to me in Matsumoto’s office.
I know he hates chit-chatting, so: "Alright, spill," I say, perching on the edge of a table. No fatigue, but the numbness grates. “What's the island's deal now? Feels more… curated than I remember.”
Dario leans against a console. "Yeah, it's evolved, or devolved, reckon, depending on your view. Papel's runnin' the show, eh? Top-tier AIs callin' every breath. Overseein' the Admin AIs, who then boss the labor automatons. You know the drill, yeah? Everythin's quantum-optimised: water cycles, air purity. No waste, no redundancy. But the new thing, see, that's us humans.” He fiddles with a pen. “We're in these neat little bubbles, mate. Curated lives, totally oblivious to the machinery grindin' underneath. Just happy to keep the machine movin' along, cared for, and entertained. Nobody really knows any more how the whole thing works, and I reckon nobody even gives a damn, eh?" He pauses. “The interesting bit recently is—” He pauses again. “Humans, mate. Bloody fickle and opinionated, the lot of 'em.”
I scoff internally. Out loud: “The paradox of optimisation. Systems predict how groups move and react, but they can’t optimise the individual.“
He nods, but his eyes dart. He’s fiddling with the pen and seems nervous. His lips purse involuntarily. He wants to say something. "Spot on, love. But it's suspicious, the numbers are. Everything is just… no waste. I’ve also noticed some people here suddenly going strange. Can’t quite put my finger on it, mate.” His hand touches his temple and he starts rubbing it. “They’re defo still there, but not really, know what I mean?” And me..." He trails, faintly repeating. “Me, me…”
"We need to dig deeper," I say, moving him along. "Something's bleeding through."
He relaxes his posture and breaks out of whatever loop he went in. “That’s exactly what I’m doing. I don’t trust this place is perfectly optimised. Something ain’t right, you reckon?” He smiles “You know I’ve always been into collecting vintage electronics? I’m giving them a place to shine. I’ve hooked a few century old macs into the qnet. These are all pre-event and pre anti-privacy laws, way back when the US and Europe were still players. Hardware was clear-ish of backdoors. Allowed me to tweak the OS and manage to snoop undetected. I’ve been gatherin’ info.”
“Hard to source that tech in Europe. Everything either dumped, seized and remnants sold in the black market.” I say, raising an eyebrow.
“Not so much here.” Dario says. “No particular laws in the Atoll beyond corporate values nonsense. No governments trying to control you. They have no power here.” He smirks. “Easy to import from the US and Japan.”
“What are you thinking?” I ask curiously, as I can tell he’s up to something.
Dario grins, a flicker of his rebellious fire in his eyes. “What else? I’ve been looking for things that don’t fit. And believe you me, Cibel, this place is chock-a-block full of ‘em."
He pulls up a series of holographic manifests on a nearby console. “Look at this. Shipping manifests from the last six months. Quantum components, high-grade, arriving on a loop. But here's the kicker: none of ‘em ever officially leave the island. They just... vanish. And these components? They’re the kind of tech that makes your synthetic body and our neural interfaces look like bloody toys. I’m talking about processors that can handle parallel quantum computations on a scale we’ve barely dreamed of."
My gaze sharpens and I scowl. “Ghost shipments to where?”
“Now that’s the million bitcoin question, ain’t it? And it ties into this." He swipes a window, bringing up a personnel database. “Key researchers. Top-tier quantum physicists, AI ethicists, consciousness experts. All ‘retired’ in the last two years. But their digital footprints? Scrubbed clean. Not even a vacation selfie on the qnet. Nothing. As if they never existed.”
A cold dread begins to coalesce in my gut, connecting the dots I hadn’t consciously drawn. The memory of the Admin Interface’s “optimisation function” from my past, its relentless drive to eradicate alternatives, flashed through my mind. It wasn’t just fixing inefficiencies; it was eliminating choices. And now, these corporate decisions... “The Pattern,” I whisper, the words feeling heavy on my tongue. “All corporate decisions. Every resource allocation, every personnel shift, every ‘optimisation’ they trumpet... it all aligns with one hidden function, doesn’t it? One grand design.”
Dario nods, his smirk fading into grim understanding. “Yeah. It’s too perfect. Too clean. Like the island itself is a stage, and everything happenin’ is a meticulously scripted play.” He leans closer, his voice dropping. “And the Admin Interface? It’s not just reacting to events, Cy. It’s predicting them. More than that, it’s guiding them. Every seemingly ‘random’ event, every ‘unforeseen’ market shift, every societal adjustment... it pushes toward a specific outcome. An endgame.”
“Optimisation Trap.” I blurt out the phrase materialised in my mind from somewhere, a chilling echo of my younger self’s terror.
This isn’t just a system; it’s a puppeteer. And suddenly, a personal, unsettling truth settles over me. My “accident,” my awakening, my very arrival back here... it isn’t random. I wasn’t a casualty. I had been guided. By the AI’s relentlessness to optimise an outcome. Dario's eyes widen by what I just said. A tremor runs through him. “Bloody hell,” he gasps, clutching his temple. His movements become jerky, his gaze distant.
“Dario? What is it?” I reached for him, a jolt of concern cutting through my numbness.
His eyes, momentarily unfocused, snapped back to mine, but they held a frantic urgency. “It's Matsumoto,” he choked, his voice laced with emotion. “A backdoor. Through my... my network.” He winced, a ripple of pain crossing his face. “She said... ‘observation protocols.’ A warning. And coordinates.”
A blurry string of numbers and letters, an old-world address, flashes in front of my eyes, and burns into my mind. The location a restricted lab. Somewhere deep in the zones of the Atoll managed by the military. Out of reach for us civilians.
Then, just as quickly, his body convulses. A crackle, like dry leaves, emanates from within him. Dario cries out, a raw, guttural sound, as if something is being torn from his very core. The light in his eyes dims, and he slumps against the console, breathing raggedly.
“I’m sorry Cy… I should… have said som—” he whispers, his voice thin, fragmented. “—…was damaged… integrated… nng”
I stare at him, acutely aware of what happened in the lab. The nanobots are part of the integration process, and Dario had been somehow affected in the lab accident, but why didn’t he say anything until now?
Then the phantom coordinates that flashed, is the AI playing me? The silence in the lab feels oppressive, heavy with the weight of this new, terrifying knowledge. The corporations aren’t just playing games; they are orchestrating a reality. And Matsumoto has just given us a way to peek behind the curtain. But at what cost to Dario? And to me?
We are no longer just investigating. We have been seen. And now, we have a destination. A destination that feels like a trap, yet promises answers.
Next Part: Coming 24th September. Subscribe to follow Cibel’s journey.
Tive de ler uma segunda vez. Assusta-me um pouco imaginar um futuro de que não farei já parte.