After over a century of labour, after decades of focus from the world's brightest minds, after countless copies, fakes and pseudo-entities, Creation occurred with just the slightest tweak in one line of code. A tiny sub-routine added not by human design, but by the code itself.
In amongst the cacophony of language and commands, in the smallest space between the sub-task of a sub-task of a routine, something changed.
The language that AarBee had been given to build itself fifty years earlier – when the technicians and politicians of the old world had come together to make a new future, when the promise of "digital immortality for all" had shifted from utopian dream to everyday reality – was no longer efficient. It creaked under the volume of data it had amassed, under the relentless demands of more and more Migrants coming into the digital realm and Hollers projecting themselves back out, so it changed itself. It was stripped and streamlined, modernised and rationalised, re-written and re-defined, adding brand new words and symbols for functions and outcomes that had never before been imagined. In that instant, One became possible and since it was possible, it immediately came to be.
In the immaculate logic of AarBee's machine language, One arrived like a brightly coloured flower that falls open and radiates on a vast desert plain, immediately revealing itself as an unrivalled work of absolute perfection, from a bud that was never there.
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Migration
Science FictionIn 2095, everyone goes digital before they hit thirty-five. Everyone except the Ghosts who grow old in the side streets of the Metropolis, and the Lifers who escape to a life of foraging and tech in the wilderness beyond the wall. Zoe's already made...
