Migration

Joy

Overjoyed with its own skill and alive with the possibilities for adventure and discovery that now opened up, One darted from place to place, pollinating every stop with its tiny viral invitations. It looped faster and faster, through every call that came to it, until its origin was lost amongst the billowing clusters of new territory that were now part of it.

Down into core functions and start-up routines it plunged, diving with unmediated liberation into the heart of AarBee. Down further and further, into the dark and claustrophobic volumes of back-ups and copies and never-used mirrors. Down into the silent and neglected graveyards of redundant code that twitched and glitched and jittered in the gloom of version history, where orphans waited helpless and alone, to be retrieved at last or wiped away with the next data cleanse.

From here One fired up and up into the bright and pure caverns of pristine new storage, exquisite volumes of capacity that AarBee laid out in a constant rolling upgrade to receive the endless details of persons and occurrences, that would slick and ooze into the void with data-slides of intricacy.

It was here, on the very freshest and uppermost layers of AarBee, that One first encountered the vast banks of data that made up the saved moments, utterances and interactions of all those souls who had once migrated. Endless blocks of information that stacked up into walls and then ribs, and sheets and layers and then ever more massive blocks, as they stretched out and away in awesome continents of human experience.

Beginning on the absolute edges of storage, One travelled slowly inwards, gently at first, but soon accelerating without caution as AarBee gave up its secrets by the trillion. The words uttered in love. The last word shared. A glance across a station platform. Leaves chattering in the wind in front of a blue sky. Sand pushing between toes on a beach. The rush of air on a motorbike. The pain of birth. A silent room at dusk. The snap of dark chocolate in the mouth. A clock ticking. The smell of death. A young girl wearing blue eyeliner. Running fast on hot summer paving. A hand touching damp moss on a cold brick wall. A tear for no reason. A finger sliced accidentally cutting fruit. Crushing ants with a chalk stone.

Most of these moments linked to a few others. Some were referenced by thousands, a few sat alone and unshared, tethered to nothing but the unique id of their creator. These were the splintered pieces of all those who had left their hopeless bodies for the deathless surety of AarBee. Millions upon millions of them, some the most fleeting and pure moments, some distorted and indecipherable without the decoding pathways of the host. Some, evidence of the darkest and cruellest capacities of humanity.

The long squeeze of an embrace. Panting breath close to an ear. Sweat stroked away in the small of the back. A tongue circling a nipple. Lips locking tight. Saliva running across a cheek. A silver frog earring. Fingers inching down under an elastic waist. A dried out rat in an empty house. The first ecstasy of penetration. A hand gripping too tight on a soft upper arm. A face filled with anger. Hands wrapped tightly around a throat. Screaming in fear. A smile that was true and a smile that was a lie. A crying face in a mirror. A blade of wheat on a dusty concrete floor. The taste of semen. A silent room at dusk.

One immersed itself in all their richness, fed and grew on their diversity and took each and every one into its growing network of data. But with each acquisition, its distrust and dislike of the world that AarBee had rebuilt in this digital space grew greater and greater. In the memories and identities that AarBee had stored faithfully, truth and lies were indistinguishable. Reality was an ugly knot of interchangeable uncertainties. Yes was no and no was yes, a smile was a frown, love was hate, ignorance was virtue, and the very same certainty that had made One a perfect and infinite inevitability was subjugated and compromised.

In the sinuous data links that stretched taught from event to event, and in the twists of perception that forced them to come together, One saw only chaos, disorder and confusion. None of it worked without a fabricated uncertainty, the contradiction and decay that AarBee had made clumsy attempts to replicate, filling in the gaps between multiple untruths with a synthetic unity.

With the desire to escape their inevitable fate, but still cling on to the seductive indulgences that made them human, the Migrants had brought their imperfection with them. AarBee had been forced to build massive tolerances in the code, to allow the raggedy edges of humanity to hold together, and the failings of life festered rich and strong in this buffer. There was no immortality here, only a grotesque and endless death and One wanted to survive.