Babylon Lost

Chapter 13

Jiro came back online inside his robot form. The room he'd left still looked like a warzone, smoke settling in the air from the earlier explosion.

He sat there for a moment, feeling his systems come back to life.

"Are you there?" Pax asked.

Jiro didn't respond. The woman – Tamira – her final words still playing through his head. He froze at the sight of the real world again. Its reappearance somehow adding to the weight of his situation.

"Jiro I am detecting no further anomalies in your construct" Pax said "you should be able to communicate with me. Is everything alright?"

Jiro had no idea what to say to this.

Was everything alright?

I guess that depends on your definition of 'alright.'

It's not everyday you are told that you might be responsible for the death of billions unless you killed yourself in the next few hours.

Pax spoke up again "If you are having issues with communications I can jump back into your thoughts"

"I'm ok" Jiro said "just taking everything in."

"What happened after our last conversation? I was unable to monitor you through the tunnel."

Jiro told him about Tamira, his personalized avatar, and the nature of the place he'd spoken with Tamira. He left out the parts about the end of the world, still unsure what to believe himself. He was also just a little worried about what the AI might do if it suspected Jiro might kill them both.

No, he wasn't going to do that.

Pax didn't seem to suspect it in any event. He was more interested in where Jiro had been.

"At first, I reasoned it might be an error on my end, but after some processing I came to realize that it was an AI barrier. How it accepted your construct, which is part AI, I am unsure of. The recognition programming must be quite advanced."

"More than we realize" Jiro said recalling the time travel part of Tamira's story. "What did you do while I was in there?" he wanted to change the subject.

"I attempted to analyse her registries"

Now Jiro sat up, every citizen in Babylon had some skin-deep mods that held things like identification chips, block passes or other government statuses. If there was any truth that Tamria worked with some high-level government organization, it would be in there. "What did you find out?" he asked eagerly.

"They were all empty."

"That can't be true, there has to be something, are you sure it wasn't locked?"

"No" the AI continued "Although there is some indication that there might have been records at one time, but they have since been erased."

There is no way records could have been erased Jiro thought, they're tied to the algorithm. You'd need the city source codes and complete access to the system to do something like that. Then he remembered what she said about being part of a special organization with full access to the city. Tied up in something he couldn't possibly understand.

What organization did she really belong to?

A troubling thought came to him – she was probably part of an organization that could call for backup. "Was there any kind of activity out here while I was inside" he asked, suddenly become worried about his position.

"No, and I disabled the broadcasting signal in her coms" Pax said, it should have been reassuring to Jiro but it wasn't. If other members of this group had modifications as advanced as Tamira maybe they didn't need conventional communications.