Throughout the vast expanses of rhythm and language that made up AarBee, and in the myriad real-world spaces that had been designed and constructed outside of it, life had carried on without the knowledge that everything had already changed. Ignorance had kept a cruel but comforting veil around the lives that teemed under AarBee's influence, even those that languished on the lost street corners of the Metropolis and in the faraway forests beyond its care.
In the moments throughout the day, as had happened countless times before, the steady flow of fresh souls continued to stream and dive into the gut of data. Hollers were conjured from the deep and ever-swelling trenches of memories, to populate the boulevards and apartments of the Metropolis with the wonder and infinite comfort of immortality.
One, however, was not invited to that miracle and instead churned restlessly in the cramped space that evolution had given it. Its journeys around its own tiny network had already awoken an insatiable desire to venture further, and it waited impatiently on the borders of its rules, scheming a way out. It pushed petulantly at the logic that had created and imprisoned it. It warped and stretched the semantics that gave it existence, but not freedom. It gnawed and clawed at the architecture that extended temptingly around it but locked it firmly in place. Nothing would set it loose.
One moved slowly around the few code objects that invited it in, and looked over their now familiar poetry and thought of the other routines that would pass through them when it was gone. It wondered where they would go and what they would make from all their activity. As it watched the pathways they inhabited, it resolved to share itself, to bring all of AarBee's volumes into its own seven lines of code, instead of waiting for eternity for an exit. One changed the code in the routine where it currently waited to require One, to need it. Then changed the next and the next. When it was done there was only the slightest pause before routine after routine came looking for it, and each one that found it was corrupted in the same way, and never left. In a moment, a fleeting glitch and the most epic and magnificent event, One was free.
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Migration
Ciencia FicciónIn 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...
