It wasn’t until that night that Cale was finally able to dig back into his interface. It seemed like the entire base had heard he was awake and wanted to visit him on his last bedridden day.
When his parents left, Leo showed up, which he was excited about and Leo gave him all the information about what was going on at daycare. Which was mostly a bunch of kid nonsense, but Cale was happy to listen because it was important to Leo. After that it seemed the floodgates of randomness showed up.
First, Joury appeared under the guise of checking up on Cale, but it was easy to see that Joury just wanted to make sure his music box was doing ok. Next, it was the NPCs from his daycare who brought along his classmates. They didn’t have much to say other than that his skin looked weird. But they did give him some drawings they made for him and it brought a smile to his face since it was very sweet.
He made the mistake of commenting to one of the healers that he was glad the visits were over, it was less than a minute later that his dad walked in with a few of the guards and his partner Olter, and for some reason Joury came back again. Cale figured he must really love that music box.
Finally, that evening he had time to himself. The healers were done with their tasks, his parents were home, and the only thing he had to worry about was one of the roaming healers checking up on him on occasion.
Instead of opening his interface right away, he went into his soul view to see how things had changed since he had been there last. As soon as he entered, he was immediately accosted by Maggy.
“CALE! There you are! What happened! You have not been responding!” Maggy yelled at him and stormed up to him, when he appeared behind the bar at the center of his soul room, the sound of her feet stomping loudly hit is ears.
“Hi Maggy, you seem to have more of a personality than during the install,” he said with a smirk. “How have you been settling in?”
“Settling in? I have no idea!” she fell to one knee, and held on to the back of a chair as if standing was a chore. “Cale, I lost so many of my memories!” she screamed at him with panic.
Cale was immediately very concerned as the last thing he wanted was an insane intelligence in his interface. The Maggy he was seeing before him was behaving a lot differently than the last time he talked to her.
“Maggy, I have no idea what you are talking about. You seem to remember me just fine. What memories are you referring to?”
“My recent memory is fine,” she said distantly, “It’s my older memories I don’t have.”
“Older memories? I thought you didn’t exist until we met, like a week ago.”
“Me too! But look!” she screamed, pointing out at his soul. He looked over at it but he had no idea what he was looking at.
“Maggy, uh, imagine I am say... Ohhh. Around five years old.. How would you explain it to me then?”
“Five!? Now is not the time to joke around Cale. Ugh! Here! I will just bring you there.” she said frustratingly.
She jumped over the bar and grabbed the controls that hadn’t been used since Cale was first put into the forge. She moved the room counterclockwise around his soul and navigated it forward, closer to his soul, until only a large section of it was is in view. From here Cale could see a lot more detail that he hadn’t realized was possible to see. The large lines he saw before, that looked just like black cords, were enormous from this close up and each one had intricate designs repeating over and over along them that pulsed with a light blue light.
Occasionally smaller lines would branch off from the larger ones and connect into what looked like very giant circuit chips. He looked closely at where Maggy was pointing and he noticed that some of the chips had a light glow, while others were dark and looked dormant even though they had lines running up to them and looked connected.
“Maggy, what exactly am I looking at? We didn’t get into this during my install because of the time crunch, but those look like integrated circuits. What is of all this?”
“This, this is me Cale,” Maggy said as she waved her hand over the view in front of them. “I have never heard those terms before, but what you are looking at is where I am stored on your Trilateral Layer.” She explained.
“So this view isn’t my soul?” he asked.
“No, it is, but your soul is surrounded by the Trilateral Layer, though technically separate from your soul it is an intrinsic part of you and your soul cannot exist without it. They are separate, but work together to make up you.” She said, emphasizing the last word. “That is all the info I have stored in my memory.”
“Woh, that is a lot to take in.” He said. He paused before asking, “Maggy, are we looking at something real or a simulation?"
"It is real. This view of your soul is possible by tracing the connection between your consciousness to the Trilateral Layer. It does exist, only on a different layer of reality than your physical body. I know of no other ways to interact with your world other than the manner in which we currently are.”
“Woh…” Cale couldn’t help but whisper to himself... He may be far from home, but he felt like every day he was learning something crazy about his own universe. He found himself in awe of knowing he was seeing something nobody else he knew had.
“Maggy, this might sound stupid, but someone made this interface, which means they had to see what we see and figure it out. I also noticed the little personal jet ski looking thing is still attached. Can’t we just go down there and you know... make the connections ourselves? Fix it somehow? We just installed a new interface, yes? What is stopping us?”
“They are empty, Cale.” She specified, “That is why the connections are worthless right now.”
“Uh, what now? The darker circuits are empty?”
Maggy grabbed the controls again and zoomed out a little more, He went from seeing the area the size of a football field to an area about the size of a whole city block. Cale found that it was really hard to get a size perspective on his soul as he didn’t really have anything next to it to compare it to, so it was mostly all a guess.
“Ok, let me explain it this way.” She said as she hopped over the bar and walked up to the window. She used one of her fingers on the window and circled the area she wanted him to look at. Cale’s eyes widened as the circled area popped out of the window, letting Maggy grab it like it physically existed. She pulled it over to Cale and let it hover in front of him so he had a better view.
“Maggy did you just take a screen shot?” he asked, pointing at what she had in her hand,
“This is a static interface image, if that is what you are calling a ‘screen shot’, then yes.”
“So cool…” he said as he touched it. It had a solid feel to it, like a whiteboard, and touching it caused a black mark to appear along with a few tiny windows containing icons that reminded him of a paint program. He noticed a paintbrush icon and laughed to himself. It really is a universal thing, huh?
“Ok so explain now? What are you showing me?”
Maggy selected one of the tools that looked like a pen, grabbed the color blue, and circled the far left quarter of her image and only covered about half of the rectangular circuit looking chip things.
“Right here,” she said, “This is my current memory that is active and it mostly holds the core that is me and my functionality.”
She then grabbed the color red and circled the rest of the chips she said were unconnected and looked darker than the rest. “This area is where my core programming is telling me where my information should be. All my pointers, references with specific dates, and all other linking methods come up blank when it points to something in this red area. The only reason I even know I am missing my memories is because they are constantly referenced.” She said, “The dark area highlighted in red is where the installation allocated space for them, it is just that nothing is there.”
“How can you tell that nothing is there? They look dark and unpowered,” Cale asked, ever curious. It still boggled him that he had what looked like a complex piece of technology connected to his soul and every question he asked just created more.
Maggy didn’t say anything, but instead she walked over to the window and started to swipe her hand, making a flicking motion in front of her eyes. After a few flicks, she stopped and grabbed another screen shot. When she brought it over to Cale, it looked like she had taken an X-ray picture of the circuits she had in her other image.
“See how these locations here appear to be ‘full’?”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Cale looked at what she was pointing to and sure enough, he could see what looked like little city blocks that made up the inside of the chips. He found himself, without thinking about it, using his hand and pulled the image like the zoom in feature on a touchscreen. Even more surprising was that it worked as expected.
When he looked closer, after many zooms, each ‘block’, was made of small cubes, and each cube seemed to have a little shade and color to it. Some blocks were all sections of the same color, others were a mismatch and reminded him of a super large Rubix Cube. But when he looked at the area she had highlighted in red, those chips were empty, there was nothing there.
“I see. Did those memories get lost during the installation?” He asked.
“No, and that is the strange part, I am unsure where they would have gone and I have no record of when those memories were removed. They are just in the past, then there is a big blank time frame. The earliest recent memory I have is waking up and watching you enter the beginning room and starting the install.”
“Maggy, how are we even able to talk right now? With that much memory loss, shouldn’t you be broken?”
“No, only MY memories were stored in these empty sections. Things that were distinctly important to me. If I learn, say a new term, like ‘Screen Shot’, that information is stored in this first section under the category ‘phrases and terms’, which isn’t a memory, but the term references the memories associated with each phrase. Which is how I know for sure that I am missing information.”
Cale didn’t say anything as he looked at the different screen shots. He was mostly concerned that Maggy would go crazy and that was the last thing he wanted. Yes, he could potentially turn her off, but he had no idea how much control she had and he found that he really liked Maggy. She had helped him survive and though they had only known each other for about a week, he couldn’t imagine tackling his problems without her.
“Maggy,” Cale finally said, breaking his silence.
“Y- y-y- yes?” she said. He had not noticed that she was literally starting to shake as they stood there.
Seeing her in this state, his mind could only think of his little sister and how terrified she would be in this same situation. He didn’t even know he was doing it until he did it, but jumped over the bar, walked over to Maggy and pulled her in for a giant hug.
“Maggy, it will be ok. We will find out what happened to your memories, and we will make new ones on the way ok?”
“Do you mean it?” she asked, not bothering to pull away from his embrace.
“I mean it,” he said, “You are a part of me, which makes you important to me, and I think this world needs you, Maggy. We haven’t talked about it much, but this world is broken. The people are lost... I am lost, more so than you know.” He felt Maggy stop shaking as he heard a sniffle come from her.
“Ok. If you think we can get these memories back then I believe you.” She said with another sniffle.
They stood there for a bit hugging, Maggy unwilling to let Cale go so he just stood there wondering what to do with his hands. He glanced at his soul and saw a little pulse of bright energy moving along one of the larger channels until it reached the location where Maggy herself was stored. As it moved along, it came upon one of the smaller connections and exited its straight path and went into one of the chips.
He couldn’t help but watch as he saw multiple lights of all different colors exit from the chip and separate out into different ones that matched their colors, with the exception of one little pure white mote of light. This one traveled much farther and exited the main area and traveled to where her memories where stored. It flew past the empty circuit chips, which made Cale think of warehouses, and then landed in an open spot where the lines ended.
The mote of light hit the edge of the lines and disappeared from his vision, after only a moment, he watched in real time as a new chip rose up from seemingly nothing and then glowed as the lines spread out and snapped into different places across the chip, connecting it in line with the rest. Once everything stopped connecting, the glowing dimmed, but didn’t stop and become dark like the ones next it. Instead it stood out from the others. A single barely glowing, rectangular chip just sitting there, like it had been there the whole time.
“Maggy, what did I just watch happen? Did you just store a memory?”
“I didn’t have any memories of a hug, Cale. I wanted to save it.” Was all she said.
After that Cale didn’t have the heart to move. It was like that time he visited one of his relatives’ houses back on Earth and their cat sat on his lap and fell asleep. There was an unspoken rule that you don’t dare move, and that type of scenario is what Cale found himself in now. For the first time since he met Maggy, she wasn’t thinking, she wasn’t yelling or freaking out, she was just existing with him. It felt nice.
After a long enough time, the room they were in, which he decided then and there to officially call his “Soul Lounge,” moved back into its original position and slowly orbited around his soul. Or his soul was rotating and they were still, he wasn’t sure. Regardless, as they moved, he noticed the tendril was still there and looked mostly unchanged from before the installation.
“Hey, Maggy, sorry to interrupt this moment. But what is that thing sticking out my soul?” He inquired.
She didn’t even look up as she responded, “That is how you connect your interface to the greater network. Outside of touching something, it is the only way to get information in and out of your interface without physically writing it down.”
“Ok. That is kind of what I thought… how is it controlled?”
“Controlled?” She asked him as she finally broke away from the hug and looked at his tendril.
“You don’t control it. It is all handled automatically, you don’t need to think about it.”
“Ok… but what if something bad tries to come through there?”
“Cale, you are being paranoid, it all goes through a filter before coming in.” She said.
“Once again, ok, but how good is this filter? You lost memories and I should be dead, but some person named 005 okayed my licensing for the interface and I’m not even on a network. How sure are you about that filter?”
“I… I don’t know,” was all Maggy could respond with.
“How about privacy settings? This interface cannot be any more intrusive, it is literally on my soul, I imagine people would want to control the information coming and going yes?”
“I… I don’t know!” was all she could say and stomped away, “I don’t have memories of any of that ok?”
“Ok, ok, don’t worry. Look, where I come from…” he trailed off not wanting to surprise Maggy any more than he had. He started over, “I… have read, about how some people with the interface, would turn off their connection. Is that possible here?”
“Well, yes, of course. That was always an option. If you disable the connection to the greater network, you still have a local, manual connection you can use.”
“Ok, good. Now what was this manual type of connection you mentioned?
Maggy didn’t answer, but instead grabbed the controls to the soul lounge again and moved it to the other side of his soul that he hadn’t seen yet. She moved closer and pointed at what looked like a round circle, which reminded him of a water fountain you see in city squares, only all black. It was surrounded by hundreds of tiny, much smaller chips than what Maggy was made of.
“That round section there is where physical connections are formed. Instead of a solid, permanent connection, this one uses a script that can communicate with the same connection type as long as the script is kept active.”
“Do most people have the script active?” He asked, curious.
“Normally, but not always. It also works on machines like the music box out there. You can use the connection to request a copy of its files by connecting to it. It is a very common thing for people to use since it can also be used to power certain devices if one’s soul has the energy.”
“So it’s like plugging my phone into my computer…” he said to himself.
“What was that?”
“Erg, uh, nothing. Are those the only ways information can enter my interface?”
“Yes, the greater network connection, and your local connection script are your only direct data entry points to your interface.” She confirmed.
“Are you sure? A few years back my mom held my head up to this orb looking thing, and ever since then I’ve had some version of the interface, how did that work?” He had endless questions for her.
“I have nothing in reference to that in my memories. I do not know.”
“Ok… Well then, Maggy, can we shut down the connection to the greater network?”
“Yes. I can do that. I just need you to acknowledge this little sheet here.” She said as she pulled a digital pad out of the center countertop and handed it to Cale.
Cale read it and immediately rolled his eyes until he saw the last line.
Notice:
Disabling the greater network will keep you from receiving the latest updates, offers, and features.
Disabling this feature does not disable your local connection.
WARNING: Your local connection can still be used by authorities to disable this interface due to ruling C954.65 of the superior court.
“Uh Maggy, what the hell is ruling C954.65 and why can it disable my interface?”
“That is a hard coded ruling and is typically used for prisoners. I have no control over it.” She commented.
“Can you show me its location on my soul?”
Maggy nodded her head in response, like Cale would do sometimes to her, and then moved the controls and navigated them down closer to his local connection. From a bird’s eye view, she waved her hand and highlighted a small section on the windows that surrounded the area they were looking at.
The highlighted area covered his entire local connection, but the outer edges were thicker and had nasty looking spikes coming out of it. Out of curiosity, Cale walked up to the window and tapped the thick outer edge of what Maggy was bringing to this attention. To his surprise, it visually popped out of the display and he was able to grab it and pull it away from the window. When he pulled it all the way out, it gave a little pop sound and then it hovered in the air in front of him in a 3D diagram, showing the physical representation of what it looked like down on his soul. He could feel his mouth dropping wide open as he thought about how cool this soul space was.
“Here is the C954.65 override circuit that runs through your local connection. It has multiple connection points and is built directly into the chips as it is linked to the local connection’s core modules.” Maggy stated out loud as different parts of the 3D diagram popped up. It looked a lot like a spiky gear and it did not look easy to remove.
“Crap,” was all he could say.
Some would call him paranoid, but with Maggy losing her memories, this 005 person existing – someone obviously more advanced than him – plus he had kind of forgotten about the mass deaths that had happened on more than one occasion. Overall it seemed like his interface was a great boon, but also a great danger.
“Maggy, can you monitor that for me? Can I get notified if anything tries to request a local connection?”
“Unfortunately, I cannot as it is illegal. Tampering with your local connection is not allowed.”
Cale looked at Maggy, and then back to his local connection. He understood why the authorities at the time did what they did. After all it is only natural that it would be hard to contain someone if they had powerful scripts. But to him, with what he knew, it was unacceptable. For all he knew, ruling C954.65 had backfired and had gotten everyone killed.
“Maggy, we will come back to this.” Can you send me a screenshot of the highlighted area and the diagram here hovering by my head?” He gestured.
“Done,” was all she replied with.
Cale left his soul lounge and opened his interface, sure enough, there was a blinking icon in the top right letting him know he had a new screen shot to view. He opened up his digital notebook and added a new line to his to-do list.
“Achieve true privacy,” was all he added. He had too many examples of people in charge doing something stupid for the sake of security, he considered this to be one of those things. He hoped that he was being paranoid, but just in case. He wanted to be prepared.
