At another point in space-time ...
The zombie-android Nimis[1]
was traveling up the crowded stairs with Technician L — now a young low-ranking
employee in the vertical structure of the meta-corporation, whose gaze was
sensitive, lucid, and a bit disappointed.
Both were going down one
of the thousands of stairs that shot up and tangled in all directions, getting
into the saturated recesses where the technicians of the meta-corporation
lived. From section to section, they were dragged by the rough mass of people,
small and rough men, with worried appearance, walking even faster than the
rest; they were the ill-tempered assistants, lost in their careers. Their haste
led them to be dark and neurotic.
L thought wistfully at
how capricious reality was: the universe could have been simpler, for example,
made up of just a few particles floating in space and so on, or a dense core of
stable and immobile matter, or even an old universe made of star ashes,
freezing more and more in silence, but instead life arose, its grim nonsense,
its almost infinite and exhausting means and mechanisms. All the manifestations
of life were redundant and absurd for L. And perhaps the most disturbing thing
about organic life was that he himself was trapped within it. He was a puppet
of genes, but he planned to disappoint them and also knew that they were not
the true protagonists of life, but instruments of something even deeper,
because genes disappear, change, but the spectacle of life goes on, life he
just uses them and then discards them, isn't evolution changing genes? What
kind of protagonist leaves the scene as soon as he enters? Genes, DNA, genomes,
men are only instruments of a hidden protagonist and this one is immortal,
genes are lost, I lose myself, the other remains. But despite his power and
depth, he would defeat that too ... or at least that's what the young and
nubile L.
Only the core of his self
was free: his trans-biological will. Unconcerned about the world, he stopped
paying attention to the shapes and colors that perhaps distracted him from the
true being of the world. He didn't care if this whimsical and redundant
universe ended tomorrow.
L and Nimis, coming out of the staircase,
came to a wide corridor; there was more air there, but something like a black
procession stood in the way. At first, they only saw a compact group of small
assistants, some running at each other from a central pile and others towards
him, carrying papers and instruments. In the center, a large and slow man
advanced with the difficulties of an old man. He was one of the Thaumasios
Hekantokeinos[2],
the dark sages of the meta-corporation and his name was Herakón. He was old but
tall and strong, he was trudging towards who knows where, through that hulking
metal building. The assistants were making a lot of noise, talking loudly and
struggling, L looked reverently and fascinated at that rare man, from that
caste of very expensive centenarians to the meta-corporation. Herakón stopped
tired from time to time, his suit and his body were overwhelmed with artifacts
and wiring. His eyes and ears were sealed by gleaming black instruments, but
the empty sockets of his eyes were pierced with wires, leading directly to his
powerful brain.
Among the chaos that surrounds him, under
the artifacts that imprison him, the dark Thaumasios Herakón exhaled a weary
sigh.
The
Hekantokeinos Thaumasios administered the meta-corporation, although
subordinate to the distant Hekantokeinos Zombies and were capable of
inordinately complex calculations and analysis, which were indispensable to
that humanity in war.
The meta-corporations had
very intricate relationships with each other. It was difficult to elucidate why
one day there were attacks from former associates. The speed of historical
changes was not counted in months, but in days, sometimes minutes, so that an alliance
could suddenly turn into a deadly enmity. The map of these centuries-old wars
was incomprehensible to the first artificial intelligences. But these geniuses
could understand them among the narrow and labyrinthine corridors. L thought it
was a waste that so much intelligence was used for such a despicable task: to
persist humanity.
When leaving at dawn, L could see those
Thaumasios lying in disorder all over the building receiving messages through
their wiring, pondering the long answers, blind and almost immobilized by those
artifacts that invaded their clothes and their old flesh. When someone got up
and moved around the building, their movements were clumsy and slow, due to old
age and blindness. Their activity was purely intellectual, but without rest and
this kept them in a disconnection that made them look like the madman or the
drunkard. Sometimes they also rested, but the eyes or ears were not uncovered;
What did they feel, in those few minutes that their work was stopped, in those
periods in which no activity was scheduled? —It speculated the immature and
anonymous L.
Lacking a life like that of others,
without descendants, or any form of human relationship, almost without self,
without memories or hopes, with their eyes and the rest of their senses dead,
the Thaumasians only had the emptiness of themselves. Their consciences empty
of content, simply lived the passing of time.
Perhaps without memories to entertain
themselves, they are distracted by abstract daydreams that only they can
understand, L thought, who also filled his hollow life with an abstract
universe of conjectures and hypotheses. A universe that didn't really exist
anywhere.
The Thaumasians were martyrs of a
difficult time and if they did not sacrifice their lives in this way, the
precarious stability that kept the meta-corporation alive would collapse. These
elders were said to have built that artificial intelligence that now enslaved
them. But it was not by force or extortion that this intelligence achieved its
devoted work and its absolute dedication. Like anyone, they could escape, but
instead their work would continue until death overtook them in their
uncomfortable suits.
Only those who built the meta-corporation
millennia ago and who knew more closely the ties of government, knew something
about its inalienable motives.
But this Thaumasios was even more unique
than the others, no human being had been born before with the intelligence of
Herakón, his mind was all a huge reason, empty of emotions, it was not like the
usual intelligence of technicians and scientists, who surrendered to reason for
the pleasure of reasoning, for intellectual delight.
In Herakón, reason occurred for the same
reason, not for the pleasure of thinking or curiosity. Hers was an intelligence
in its purest form and it was at the service of nothing but itself. The others
used reason as a means and not as a goal. But for the Thaumasios Herakón,
reason could not be subordinated to anything inferior to it. L admired and
shared from his humility, the convictions of the revered Thaumasios.
Both the mighty Herakón and the
insignificant L watched, though from different heights; the humans around them
like meat machines, puppets of pleasure and displeasure. They fought for one,
escaped the other, and thus they all ended up living the same life, programmed
to be lived like this by a primitive process, blind and ignorant of the true
meaning of the universe. Both emotions determined the direction of their lives.
And this natural manipulation mechanism was programmed by a blind chemical
accident: evolution. All human history had happened just as it had happened
only because of the pursuit of pleasure and the aversion to the displeasure of
men, a perverse humanity of puppets always subjected to that old mechanism of
sensory reward and punishment, incorporated by primitive natural selection. to
control them. To make them serve something less than themselves. Rough, but
more powerful.
At last, lost in thought,
L arrived with Nimis at his precarious locus of work. Like millions of other
technicians, L was, under dozens of layers of responsibility, a subordinate of
Herakón. He felt safe in his imperceptible position in the great gear of works.
He had been years since his childhood, isolated in a precise and tedious task:
monitoring meta-dimensional animals. He knew little more of this world than the
path from the locus[3]
of work to the locus of rest. It recorded the ecology and dynamics of the
populations of these multi-dimensional beings: these were entities that
saturated the seemingly empty Aether. The imperceptible L had been studying
them for years, but in recent times neither he nor other technicians had
captured data on these beings, apparently, they were problems with the
instruments that prevented their location. There was less and less energy for
L's instruments and in general for any machine of the meta-corporation, given
the ever-increasing shortage of energy in the cosmos. Perhaps this is why L's
instruments were now unable to register these multi-dimensional species.
But L's uncertain intelligence suspected it was due to something else. A very serious thing.
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