Codename: Angelus

Prologue - Codename: Angelus

The name’s Camilla and this is my holodiary.

I was born in a devastated world. The catastrophe happened sometime at the end of the XXI century. You may think it was because the three great superpowers, the United States of Eurasia, the Advanced American Alliance and the United Emirates of the Middle East waged war against each other. They didn’t. Or rather, the catastrophe prevented a war from happening at all. It wasn’t war that brought about the catastrophe. It was a research aimed at preventing the war that brought about the world’s demise.

If you’re watching my diary, it’s likely you never even heard about Geneve Research Center for Advanced Technology, formerly know as CERN. It was a huge laboratory that had been hosting the infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research and powerful data-processing facilities since the XX century. It was established in 1954 AD. The facilities grew in both scale and function during the XXI century. When the accident happened, scientists were tampering with dark matter, cosmic energy and time travel. We do have records of what happened as part of the Organic Life Preservation Project, but I don’t have access to that data, so I have only partial knowledge of the accident. What I know is that some brainiacs foresaw the catastrophe and made preparations in advance. They built a network of shelters to prevent life from exstinction.

I don’t actually know how the surface looks like. I was born in a shelter. I’ve never been on the surface in all my life; then again, we’re not allowed to and — anyway, I have no desire to leave the shelter. Now comes the tricky part. I’m just a small cog in the huge mechanism that is the Organic Life Preservation Project - or, as we call it, the Project.

Not every human chosen for the Project is aware of being part of it. Actually, they don’t even know the catastrophe happened at all. The branch of the Project I’m involved with is called Angelus and it’s a computer simulation of a XXI century-like world run by the computer. Our subjects are kept in cold sleep and their brains are connected through the machine; they share a collective, lucid dream which, for them, doubles as reality. They are not aware of the simulation. Only us Angels are.

But let me tell you a little more about the Angels. In order for the simulation not to go haywire, there is a small team of dedicated engineers and other staff members watching over the machine. We are wary of self-aware machines and other thingamabob tech stuff — which, we believe, was what ultimately led to the catastrophe. So we have engineers watching over the code.

We Angels watch over the Dormants. As I said before, the subjects themselves are - how should I put this? Tricked into thinking that the dream is reality. But everynow and then they become aware that the reality they’re living in is fake and get rejected by the machine. I believe it’s some kind of fail-safe mechanism to preserve the integrity of the dream. We call them the Awakened.

If they’re young enough to be integrated into the Community we make them members of staff. Yet the shelter does have limited space and resources, so we cannot integrate each and every Awakened into our society. This is why we must make it so they can be re-integrated into the Dream. Or they never leave it in the first place.

This is our role as Angels. We prevent the subjects from awakening. There is only a handful of Angels. We take shifts. We are aware we are dreaming but we can’t stay connected for too long - it would put too much of a strain on our bodies, since we don’t go into cold sleep when we connect to the machine.

You may be wondering how we Angels connect to the machine. We use this capsule — here, a holo with a detailed explanation of how it works. Oops! It’s time for my shift. I’ll stop here for now. See ya later!