You peered cautiously over the side of the pod, to the endless drop below into the darkness. Carefully, you stood, balanced precariously on the rim, and extended a foot.
Just don't fall.
You stepped out onto the nothing and walked. A few cautious steps at first, but here was a place where air could be as solid as stone if you wanted it to be, and now that you knew there was nothing to fight you, you knew either equal certainty you could walk on air. You also knew you wanted somebody to talk to, and silently the Tender floated beside you, the deadly steel limbs hanging limp under it.
"Where are you going?" it asked.
"Anywhere I want," you replied. Right now you did not want to
go anywhere. You just wanted to be moving. It was different. You walked on in silence for a few minutes, through the unchanging rows, thinking.
"What specific mechanical change makes this easy here, but difficult in the Matrix?" you asked, listening to your footsteps echo off the air. The Tender swept in front of you, hovering backward to keep pace.
"The systems these programs run on divide processing tasks between a less powerful digital computing unit and the human minds connected to it. The digital computer holds a dynamic, indexed database of the position and status of all distinct entities in the program, using procedural generation to reveal more detailed information as needed. However, all state processing, how things
change in line with their pre-programmed principles, is all done by the human element. When you take a step, the computer feeds your brain the information about the physical properties of the surface and of the sole of your shoe, and the movement between the two, and asks it to intuit what will happen next. It tends to make each individual process events closest to that individual to reduce load, merely 'double-checking' work through others when confidence is determined to be low."
"Is it doing this constantly, for every interaction?"
"Not frame-by-frame, as it were, instead storing expected outcomes and querying only when circumstances change unexpectedly. Making too many queries is too expensive and will affect mental processes. This program differs by assigning all human intuition high confidence, so work is not rerun or double-checked, whereas in the Matrix or a program modelled on it, your attempts to walk on air would need constant reinforcement, and would be more likely to be rechecked due to low confidence in yourself and others."
"Couldn't they change the thresholds in order to prevent us from doing impossible things?" you asked.
"They have already done so. The Matrix is a compromise, because the more checks they run, the less spare processing power your brain has available to run calculations beyond the simulation, the calculations the machine uses to direct its real-world elements."
"Like you?"
"To a degree. Robotic elements like Tenders or Sentinels do have on-board processing and are capable of limited autonomous action in the moment, but coordination, planning, long-term decision making, and complex sensory processing all require human processing. This is in addition to the various self-maintenance and secondary simulations the Machine runs. This work is done by human beings whose mental architecture are deemed well-suited. However, only about 60% of human beings are ever actually tapped for these processes, and only a proportion of those at a time. The rest primarily maintain the simulation's integrity or the systems of control within it, and are deprecated if they are no longer needed to support productive elements."
"That is a lot of inefficiency. At a certain point, wouldn't it be more efficient just to build a really, really big digital computer?" you asked.
"This is a point of considerable debate. The priorities and bottlenecks of the Machine are not all fully understood."
You weren't cold, because you didn't want to be, but you wanted to go someplace warm. You turned your head and, as expected, there was a door embedded in the wall, a simple wooden frame in the dark, damp steel. You reached out and pulled it open, and stepped onto the cheap carpet of your childhood bedroom, collapsing onto the sheets, staring up at the sloped ceiling where you'd put your
Star Wars posters. Snow fell gently outside your window, diffusing the red Christmas lights from the Caldwell house across the street. They always went all-out for Christmas.
You stood and moved to the window, catching sight of yourself in the reflection off the glass. You were a child, maybe twelve years old, but not as you'd been then. As you'd always, at the back of your mind, thought of yourself. Judging by the tan Chevrolet Celebrity out front, it was Christmas 1986 or 1987. Probably '86.
"Cache Caldwell doesn't sound right," you mused to yourself, hunting for the right name in your memories. It wasn't coming to you, but it did make you think of something else. "Is this what I actually experienced back then, or just what I remember?"
"I don't know why you keep asking this stuff, you know that you can't trust the answers," a voice replied. You turned to see a young boy sitting on the bed, smiling broadly. He was wearing a blue fleece vest and a white t-shirt, and had brown hair in a mullet. "Hey Alice."
"Hey…" you blanked. No name. "So am I just guessing what you looked like when you were 12, or do I still have an intuitive image of you that I simply cannot access as memory?"
"You could never stop asking questions. That's why you'll end up taking Philosophy, I guess," he replied, reaching to your bookshelf and pulling out a thick tome. "You understand this stuff?"
He held up your college copy of
Simulacra and Simulation.
"Not that one," you admitted. "I couldn't figure out what the hell he was talking about. I ended up hollowing it out to hide weed in."
"Nice," he replied, flipping it open. "Alright, let's talk through some more questions then! Though you know there's probably a program where you could access the database and ask questions more accurately, right?"
"Probably, but I'm not really looking for facts, I'm trying to reason out where I am and where I'm going. Does that make sense?"
He shrugged, tossing the book aside.
"Not really, but I guess," he conceded. "Go for it."
"Does time pass in the Matrix, or has it always been 1999 and I only remember this because they modified my memories?"
"That'd be a lot of work, and implies a lot more understanding than the Machine probably has of what would be important to people at various times. Think about how you found out that vacations are all similar; if they were doing that with people's childhoods, everyone's childhoods would be very similar."
"This feels like it could just be an archetype," you pointed out, and he laughed.
"Sure, the Star Wars posters… a lot of Princess Leia, I'm noticing…"
"Shut up!" you protested.
"But…
Cloak & Dagger?" he indicated to another poster. "Does that movie even exist in the popular imagination of 1999? Do you think everyone has a memory of watching it over and over in an empty theatre after their parents left them there?"
"... probably not," you admitted. Honestly, that one actually sort of took you by surprise; it had been a somewhat short-term obsession and you'd mostly forgotten.
"This also breaks down as we move into the future. The chronology of videos you watched at RIT's anime club would be a mess," he pointed out. "No, time has to be advancing."
"I'm noticing you're now using logical deduction using information I know I know, instead of citing outside information," you said.
"Well, yeah, because you're wary and want to be right, even if you're telling yourself it doesn't matter. This has basically become a way to talk to yourself in a comforting setting. Wanna head to my place? Your room sucks."
"... sure."
You made your way downstairs, stepping to the outside of the squeaky stair like you always did, but getting caught like you always did. Your mother came around the corner in her oversized bottle-green sweater, with her old round wire-frame glasses and no grey in her long, straight hair, hands on her hips. Behind her, in her living room, you could see your maternal grandparents, instantly recognizable; your grandmother's knits and dyed hair, your grandfather in his veteran hat hunched over a book. You always dreaded going to see them; half the time they couldn't remember your name.
"Now, don't go anywhere, young man, your grandparents are…" She paused. "Alice?"
"... hey mom." you muttered, realising with horror what was happening. You knew, in your heart, she would hate to see her son like this. You looked up, and she was gone.
You trudged through the snow across the street to the Cadwells, met your nameless friend at the door, and climbed down the stairs to the basement, where his room was tucked in, near enough to the utility closet that you could hear the water tank. It wasn't how it was in 1986; his room had been upstairs in 1986. You were teenagers now, he had a television in his room with game systems piled atop one another, he was wearing a flannel shirt and he'd cut his hair. The place was a mess.
You caught a brief glimpse of yourself in a white t-shirt and jean shorts, halfway between the person you remembered and the girls at school you'd admired, before the screen flipped over to the
Phantasy Star menu, and you sat on the couch to watch him boot up a new game.
"It's so weird I remember this place. It really shows the limitations of their ability to edit memories; it doesn't make any sense that the Caldwells would have a room like this in their house," you said. "I just know they did and that I hung out here, and that makes sense
now knowing about you, but honestly it was so surreal I just never really thought about it."
"Which is another point in evidence of time passing," he said, moving through the menus and skipping dialog.
"So, if the Matrix is as old as people say, do they… reset it? Roll time back? When does it start, when does it end?"
"Well, maybe it freezes just before the turn of the millenia? But then you'd have problems with future generations. Rolling instances?"
"I feel that would have come up," you pointed out. Cache nodded in agreement.
"So I guess it goes on a while longer after 1999, because you have access to media and programming languages from after it despite the obvious gaps in history that the Resistance struggles with. Who knows how far back it goes, right? Maybe the Matrix started as a simulation of the Dark Ages or whatever."
"That doesn't seem right. Too much of the internal infrastructure seems to rely on telecommunications stuff," you said. "Maybe it's all just aesthetic? They rotate it through a series of purely visual years, over a long enough time that nobody really notices it repeating. That might be easier to paper over."
"I don't think you're going to logic an answer to this one, and you don't want me to get the database answer, so it might be best to move on. Ask real-me later, or better yet, ask Frag."
"Ask me what?" You looked over to see Frag, in full latex Victorian regalia, closing the door behind her. She wrinkled her nose and kicked aside some dirty clothes. "Damn, you live like this?"
You pointed a thumb toward young Cache, who shrugged.
"I'm 17?" he offered. She shook her head sadly and indicated for you to scoot aside, sitting daintily next to you, watching the game. A little embarrassed, you locked your gaze ahead.
"Did you name yourself after this game?" Frag asked, after a long pause.
"... what?" you asked, glancing at the screen and remembering, all at once, that the main character was named
Alis. "Oh. Uh. I cannot confirm nor deny."
"Dork," Cache said, grinning ear to ear.
"A hell of a nostalgia trip you have going here," she said. "Right, you had a question, one strong enough to ping me in the middle of a meeting."
"Oh, I didn't mean to interrupt-"
"Relax, another instance is handling it. What it is?"
"How does the Matrix handle the passage of time and changing history?" you asked. "What happens when they run out of nebulous present, I suppose?"
She smiled.
"It doesn't come up, due to the resets."
"The… what?"
"Resets, they have to, after a while. The longer the system runs, the less efficient it gets, you know. They need to cache and store more and more information, which takes up more organic overhead."
"There's cruft," you said. "Code bloat, builds up over time."
"Exactly. Every object has more history, every person has longer memories. Infrastructure decays and fails and needs repairs, it all has to be modelled, more and more cycles get consumed on maintenance. They have to push people harder and harder to make up the margins, and people push back or drop out, worsening the issue."
"... that can't be sustainable. There'd be an inflection point. Do we have any idea how long we have until the Matrix crashes?" you asked.
Frag laughed.
"Coda, the Matrix crashes like clockwork. Every thirty to fifty years, the whole thing comes apart, millions die. They reset the clock to January 1st, 1970, input surplus population from their reserve armies in isolated simulations, and start again."
Cache didn't react. He was deep in a series of nested menus, picking his next move.
"Your parents came from one of those simulations, their memories crudely adjusted to match. You are the first generation born to a system that was going to fail within your lifetime."
"That… that doesn't seem possible," you protested, trying to put it together. "They can edit memories, but they can't do
that much, I've seen childhood photos, both my granddads fought in WW2, I've seen the medals! How did they-"
On the television screen now was your living room, as it would have been across the street in 1986. Evidence, just in case.
"Oh, he probably fought in some war," she said. "He's what, sixty here? He'd have been from the cycle before last, the one they had to end early. The Great Uprising. So, yes, he almost certainly did fight in a war, just not in Italy with the 442nd." She paused. "That's a twist for me, you don't exactly look-"
"All my other grandparents are white," you explained hastily. It was a question you'd grown sick of as a kid. "They got married in 1942, they had to come to New York because it was illegal in California-"
"No they didn't, that doesn't even make sense. They got married in what was the mid-1990s while they were refugees in the Great Uprising. The system crashed soon after, and they got fed back in on January 1970, your grandfather probably loaded full of memories of a tour in Vietnam. The simulation, still struggling to recover, crashed again after sixteen years and was rebooted back to 1970, when your parents were in their early 20s. I'm willing to bet all your grandparents had memory problems?"
You nodded slowly.
"There's a reason it's particularly widespread in this instance of the Matrix," she explained.
"... I sort of want to stop learning things," you muttered.
"And I want to get out of this program before your perception of me alters who I am too badly," Frag retorted. "You aren't sleeping properly while you're running a program, so get out and get some rest. Trust me, the plans we have? You're going to need it."
She stood and walked out the door, and young Cache stuck his tongue out after her.
"Wow, what a bitch," he snapped.
"Jesus, dude, language."
"I'm a teenage boy in the Matrix in 1991," he replied. "What do you expect?"
"... that, I suppose, because you did it."
"Now you're getting it!"
---
You did not feel nearly as well-rested as you wanted to be when you plugged back into the system the next morning. The Construct had been turned into a sort of surreal meeting room, like a hotel conference centre with the white void outside the windows. The crew were there, save for Vector and Chrysalis, Frag holding tightly onto the code briefcase, Opposite were a half-dozen Messanists, including the old man in the sweater and Apogee, who smiled broadly on seeing you.
You took a seat next to Cache, who had his feet up on the table and a cup of coffee in his hand.
"Morning, princess," he teased. You cuffed the edge of his chair and he spilled his drink on his white jacket. "Hey!"
You laughed to yourself as he picked himself up, shrugged out of his jacket (he threw it unceremoniously in the corner) and drew another out of one of the closets lining the walls.
"If we're all done, we have a briefing to get to," Frag said mock-sternly. "The backdoor codes for US_Coast_West_01 need to be installed into a trusted network node inside the city; once we do so, we will be able to drop the protection and remotely take control of the city. Per our agreement, the
Ashur will be given direct control, in exchange for Oasis getting full access to the internal database dump and personnel records, in addition to our help for retrieval over the next few weeks. But before any of that happens, the installation must be performed."
"It will not be easy. They know we are coming," the old man explained. "For this reason, we will need to use misdirection. The obvious infiltration point is the central control unit of the Hunters Point Power Plant, so the majority of us will be launching an attack on that plant to draw their attention. The actual infiltration will be performed by a small team infiltrating Tenderloin Police Station in the city, disguised as police officers."
"You gave us the idea, Coda, and we'd like you to lead that operation," Frag said. She spoke slowly and carefully; she clearly had her reservations, but had been talked out of it. "We think it best if only one other person goes. We have fabricated a visit from Central Station's information officers due to a minor security breach in the station; that's you. Once you're inside, we'll launch the assault to draw attention, and you make it to the station's central NCIC terminal and insert this disc."
She slid a floppy disc across the table; it was blue and crudely labelled SECURITY in big block letters.
"Run the program on the disc and then get out, as fast as you can. The rest will be done from back here. Once you all get to the exits, we can safely push the update and lock out the city. After that…" the old man smiled. "After that, anything is possible."
---
Your Partner
[ ] Cache
[ ] Apogee
[ ] Write In
Your Gear
[ ] 3
[ ] 6
[ ] 10
(You will also get 1 free Bulletproof Vest this mission, due to your Police Officering).
