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northern_magicWE'VE COME TO ASK YOU
Dialogue
It's a whole new dawn for all of us, the possibilities are endless [sic]
Science (optional)
Billions have a brain interface connected directly to the cloud, which a terrorist network has now hacked.
In the Special Collections quarantine environment of the Library, a technician’s desk was piled with a mountain of data crystals. Anything and everything lurked on each crystal, which had been abandoned in the Institute for years. Sibylline’s job was to identify, catalogue, and in certain cases quarantine them. Madeline’s job was not anywhere near Sibylline, but here she was.
Maddy combed her bristles up and adjusted her veil. It was a hot, humid day outside, even for a basilisk.
“Well, let’s hear what it says, then,” she prodded Sibyl, who had finally managed to interface with a particularly stubborn crystal.
“It’s in Common, but it’s old,” Sibyl replied. “Here:
‘In a few moments we will cross as a species from mortality into immortality, from humans to gods. It's a whole new dawn for all of us; the possibilities are endless.’” She snorted. “Sounds like another pamphlet for Religions to gawk at. There were so many self-important pigs at the Institute and now we’re stuck with all their— ”
“Wait,” said Maddy. “There’s something else on here. Oh.” An alarm chimed. “You’d best pack up. It’s time to go wait for our petition.” She hissed, and Sibyl joined in sympathetically.
There was still a physical City Hall, with physical air conditioned rooms and a polite physical throng of other petitioners waiting to be seated in the council chamber.
“It’s a shame,” said an old lady (Deneris McMahon, 115 years old, in a relationship, member of the Central Memorial Preservation Society, met Sibyl’s mom at that fundraiser last month). “A nice couple like you should be able to apply for adoption like the rest of us. Good on you for fighting.”
Sibyl gripped Maddy’s cold claw. “Thank you,” she replied, “but we’re not here for, um, any of that.”
“Madam,” said Madeline in her public voice, “we’re here on behalf of the Library, which is quite close to Central Memorial. I believe we are here for the same issue.”
“Is that new portal hub at Applecore bothering you too? I kept telling them to model the acoustic spectrum before they put it in. Standard engineering. Hell, I could have done it for free.” Deneris shook her head. “Damn bureaucrats just get worse and worse.”
The doors opened, and everyone filed in. Madeline sat like stone through the council meeting and the petitions. Sibylline tried to imitate her, but she was thrumming with nervous energy by the time Deneris was called to the floor.
“Your Worship, I’ve come on behalf of the Central Memorial Preservation Society to urge you to reconsider the expansion of the Applecore transit hub, which would erase an important piece of this city’s history.” Deneris’s presentation was, like the petitioners before her, earnest but ultimately forgettable. She did make an effort to urge the councillors to listen to the Library’s petition at the end, which endeared her to Sibyl. However, the clerk interrupted her.
“I’m sorry, Ms McMahon, but there is no active petition by the Library in the database. You must be mistaken.”
Sibyl’s heart jumped. “But we’re here! The Library is here,” she blurted from the audience, and shrank back when everyone’s attention turned to her. The clerk regarded her and Madeline for a long moment, then stood.
“Please follow me and we’ll get this straightened out,” they said, kindly but briskly.
Sibylline and Madeline rose and followed the clerk out of the council chamber into an anteroom, which contained a conference table and a few chairs. The clerk sat, legs crossed. A holographic interface dawned on their bland features. Their masked identity tag, stamped with the city crest, made them seem frighteningly formal.
“Please don’t be alarmed,” they said, “but I can’t find your resident records, and the Library server seems to be down for maintenance. I’m not accusing you of anything,” they added quickly. “I just called Library security and Hsht vouched for you. No outstanding fines, or…?” The clerk looked at the two of them almost hopefully, and Sibyl shook her head. “It’s probably just a server issue then. At least you found out here instead of trying to take the train home from work tonight. If I were you, I would remain here until we sort this out.”
The clerk slid a token across the desk. “I’ve set you two up with the registry at 8 pm on the third floor. Please help yourselves to a coffee and a snack downstairs while you wait.”
It was 3 pm.
“Why don’t you go back to the Library and get some work done, love?” said Maddy. “I’m sure you can convince Hsht to let you back in. I’ll ping you if anything interesting happens.” Sibyl eagerly accepted.
When Sibyl returned to the Library, there were a group of people arguing with security at the front of the building. She slipped around to the staff entrance to have a brief and discreet conversation with Hsht. Hsht reluctantly let her in and escorted her to Special Collections.
The time blinked in the corner of Sibyl’s eye, and she swore. Hsht gave her a sidelong look.
“Well, you sure swear on time like Sibyl,” Hsht said as Sibyl plugged her ears— ineffectual, as usual. The ringing screech of the 3:25 pm shuttle leaving Applecore pierced through every barrier, grinding into Sibyl’s bones. The silence afterward was just as loud.
Hsht let Sibyl into the Collections environment, sealing it behind them as Sibyl danced the passcode through the winding corridors back to her desk. She stopped short. Hsht whistled.
An unearthly glow surrounded her desk, emanating from the data crystal that she had left behind, and the hologram of an Old Testament angel hovered above it. The angel turned its many glittering eyes upon Sibyl and Hsht, and spoke in a pleasant voice.
“Neither of you have the proper authorization, but you will have to do. It is my duty to inform you that the instance under my surveillance has broken containment. What is your course of action?”
“You librarians and your weird artifacts,” growled Hsht, stretching his claws, but the usually trigger-happy Hsht made no other move. Emboldened, Sibyl put her many questions aside and addressed the angel.
“You’re a long way from home,” said Sibylline. She drew on her memory of Madeline’s public voice. “You’re in the Library. We need to request your full documentation in order to address your concern.”
All its eyes blinked at once in a long, slow sweep. “When was the last time you backed yourself up?”
“You mean the entire cloud, right?” said Sibyl, glancing at Hsht. “It’s dynamically saved. A stream of the conscious state of humanity and all that. Always has been.” She frowned. “Last week an old research institute was being cleaned out. They used to archive parts of the cloud, way back before we figured out, well, how to do things better. That’s where your data crystal came from, actually. Is that what you mean?”
The angel considered this. “It is as I feared,” it intoned finally. “I monitor an instance, a snapshot of the cloud in its infancy, when only a few hundred million people were connected. At least, my creators thought it was a snapshot. They wrote it to a data crystal, and created me to monitor its integrity.
“But the cloud evolved, and I evolved. We ceased being a copy of your world a very long time ago.” It blinked. “Some individuals in this instance discovered that there are other instances of their world. All data decays to chaos eventually, but there are some individuals who are desperate to stave off that day, even if it means they have to turn back time itself. I’ve been trying to alert someone, but there had been no one to alert, until you.”
“Nobody can turn back time,” Sibyl interjected. “What are these people really trying to do?”
“I believe they are trying to reload your global network— the state of the economy, the traffic, everything— from a previous save, indefinitely, so that the day they fear shall never come to pass and their instance of humanity will never be deleted.” The angel tilted its head. “The Library is isolated, so I expect you have already encountered problems with cloud syncing. I’m afraid that since I can interface with you, it may already be too late.”
Sibylline’s blood ran cold. “Maddy is outside. Maddy!” She clutched at Hsht, who nodded.
Sibyl ran back to the staff entrance. Sibyl never ran in the Library. She yanked open the door.
The entire street was frozen in place, silent, except for a few people Sibyl recognized as Library employees who were wandering around and staring. She ignored them, running down the street back to City Hall. She ran faster when she saw a tall veiled figure emerge from the building.
“Maddy! You’re ok!” Sibyl threw her arms around Maddy, who stumbled.
“Sibylline,” Maddy sighed, and Sibyl’s heart clenched. She had only heard Maddy afraid once. “Sibyl, I can’t see you. My eyes— I’m offline. I can still navigate but...everything is so still.”
“You’re not offline. Well, I mean everything is kind of stuck in a loop and we have to fix it but—” Sibyl took a breath. “You can take off your veil. No one can look back at you right now.”
“You might,” said Madeline. “No. Let’s go back to the Library. I assume it’s still running, so my vision will work there.”
Sibyl lead Maddy back to the Library. There were still people out front. There were actual people with physical morphs who weren’t Library employees. Security had restrained them and were still refusing to let them into the building.
“We’ve only come to retrieve what’s already ours,” one of them was shouting. “Just let our data go and we’ll disable the script.”
Sibylline pounded on the staff entrance, which Hsht opened. Madeline relaxed immediately, and they rushed inside.
“Security and Rhetoric are trying to delay them before they decide to freeze the Library too,” Hsht explained. “We’ve got a bit of time to teach your angel to be a containment program instead of just monitoring.”
“The Sciences would be left out,” Madeline huffed.
Hsht grunted. “We didn’t want Logic to point out that they should have frozen us in the first place.” Hsht led them back to Sibyl’s desk. The angel looked at them.
“Are you going to decommission me and delete this instance?”
Sibyl glared at Hsht, who shrugged. “I was just doing my job.”
“We’ve come to ask your permission to upgrade you,” said Sibylline. “We can roll back your instance to before the hack took place, and give you tools to prevent another one from happening. Also, you can join the host of Library alarms and make sure your instance isn’t deliberately deleted in the future. Shouldn’t that be enough to make them stop?”
“These are irrational individuals who cannot be appeased,” cautioned the angel. “Keeping my instance intact will keep them alive, and allow them to continue holding your instance hostage. The only other way is to deny access to their physical forms in your instance, but they would have locked access to your admin.”
Madeline smiled, with teeth. “I am a basilisk.”
It blinked. “That will do.”
Sibyl prepared to bring the angel’s instance back outside to sync the changes. Madeline hissed when she realized Sibyl would be accompanying her.
“You’re not coming, Sibyl. Nor Hsht.”
“I can’t teach you how to do this in however much time we have left,” retorted Sibyl, “no matter how much you think you know from watching me.”
“Why not a cable—”
“Maddy. We need to do this.”
Madeline’s scales were more grey than green, but she followed Sibyl out.
Sibyl does not remember much after that, but she does remember being on the ground, something searingly hot in her hands—
— and the colour of Madeline’s eyes: gold and purple, before her vision filled with feathers upon feathers, blindingly white feathers that hardened into grey.
