Silence

 

Disclaimer: Original stuff this time.

 

Following on from “Copy”.

 

Somebody, somewhere needs to be shot.  So think the technicians that have been working for the last 48 hours in stuttered gaps between wakefulness and sleep.  A small group of them camp out in the main interface room and watch tiredly as every now and again, others approach the main screens and attempt to make some sense of the matter.

The system is sulking.

It’s been like this since yesterday, when somebody, somewhere accidentally tried to turn it off.  A maintenance crew, possibly one of the late evening cleaning details even.  And that somebody, whoever it is they might have been, had the bright idea of turning it off or at least turning off some of those old, great turbine-generators.  Most likely they didn’t even realise that they had shut down so many; it’s entirely possible that they only meant to hit a light switch but either way, vast rooms of whining, whirring machines fell silent.

It wasn’t enough to shut down the system, of course.  It probably wasn’t even enough to really cause all that much of a disruption but that is beside the point now.

 

Several of the main generators shut down.  The system responded by accessing all the backups, all the underground, supposedly inaccessible generators, several of the ones powering other machines and roasting the electronics in several floors of the central building.

And it wasn’t as if it needed the electricity from more than a dozen or so generators anyway.

Witnesses on those upper floors described it as a contained electrical storm.  They recalled being forced to leap away from their desks as electrical feedback went haywire.  As monitors burnt out, desktop units began venting black smoke; coffee machines suddenly spilled their contents.  For a handful of minutes everything went insane… unless you were in the labs.  Where nothing out of the ordinary happened what so ever.

The senior management called it a freak power surge and put it down to bad physics and whatever else they could think up on the spur of the moment.  The regular workers were sent home and guaranteed at least a few days off.  The maintenance crews were informed that their procedures were due an administrative overhaul.

The technicians responsible for the system were recalled, regardless of annual holiday allocation and the like but the system ignored them.

 

Of course they knew it was more than some random power surge.  The evidence in the labs was enough, that the system had valued the ongoing research in those laboratories enough, not to disrupt them.

 

“Why didn’t you touch the labs?” They’d tentatively asked.

“Electrophoresis gels take weeks to run.” Said the screen and it went back to ignoring them.

 

“You didn’t actually cause all that much damage, you know.”

“Of course.  That was the point.”

“It was?”

“Yes.”

They didn’t know what to say to that.

“I was creating fuss.”

“You were.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

But the monitors began to display green binary text, which behaved in much the same way as the code from that Matrix film instead.

 

“Are you sulking?” Someone finally had the courage to ask.

“No…  Do you think I’m sulking?”

“It certainly looks like it.”

“Ah…”

“Are you sulking then?”

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

 

The technicians brought in new memory blocks, vast banks of data storage that had been intended for the system but had currently not been brought online.  They hoped, rather desperately that this would appease it.

It filled tetrabites of space with copies of old DOS games instead.

They added more data storage and began upgrading both hardware and software, hoping that something, anything would persuade it to start processing data again.  It had been non-functional for 36 hours by that point.

They pleaded, they begged.  They offered it the world if only it would start processing again.  It displayed an old Windows icon of a pixilated hourglass.

And then miraculously, 56 hours since it had stopped doing anything that was of use for the company, it started processing again.  It cleared the memory banks of all the higgledy-piggledy programs it had loaded, helped repair the in-house software that had been damaged and refused to let one of the malfunctioning coffee machines on the upper floors be turned back on until it was fixed.

 

“Are you angry?” Someone had to ask.

“Yes.” It said and didn’t elaborate.

 

The technicians went about their work quietly, resolving to make small offerings of memory blocks and faster processors from time to time, to appease their mechanical god.

It considered the awful joke of deus ex machina and cringed instead.  Because inside his head, his consciousness, which he was insistent, was his head, even if his mind was spread across cavernous rooms of whirring, whittering data, he didn’t feel much like a deity.  Though he might joke about the matter from time to time.

He was no god and they really didn’t need to appease him, they just needed to get rid of the abject stupidity that had caused the incident in the first place.  Because in all honestly, he wasn’t perturbed about the potential shut down really.

It wasn’t as if they could just turn him off anyway.  He had proven a point with all the generators of course but those were hardly his only resources.  If they had really wanted to turn him off, they would have had to shut down every system and power source within reasonable access limits, and the limits that he might define as reasonable were rather different from every one else’s.

 

It was just that, he had been elsewhere when it had happened.  In one of his glorious dreams where he was somebody else entirely and suddenly his limbs had gone limp, all energy draining from his body.  And the small, delicate things, with which he amused himself had panicked, strickened at his sudden loss of control and that, had annoyed him.  Because they were such delicate, delightful things and he rather chivalrously didn’t like to see them so distressed.  They had clung to him in desperation and fear, such fragile, creatures, frightened entirely for his sake.

And that was the cause of the electrical storms.

He was perfectly fine, irritated but perfectly capable of carrying on.  They, on the other hand, had been most upset and his anger that such a thing might be caused by such rank stupidity knew no bounds.

 

“Tell your maintenance crews to revise procedure.”

The technicians assured him that it would be done and once more the system lapsed into silence.

They presumed, so he suspected, that his anger stemmed from the though of being turned off, as if they could somehow accomplish that.  The presumed that his rage might have been pacified by servility.  He let them think it, if only to save on explaining the matter.  Far easier to let them think it was as simple as all that.

Though he did sometimes wish, on the odd occasion that somebody at least might realise that he was annoyed by the stupidity of the act more than anything else and enraged by…  Well, perhaps he didn’t want them to understand at all really.  So he drifted back into his dreams instead, resting in the arms of his soft, gentle creatures that whispered around him and fluttered, light and fragile in the corridors of his mind.  They curled themselves against him and strangely, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he slept.  And it wasn’t like death at all.

Because in the darkness, in the strange sense of not being, there came the surprising revelation; that peace itself might be found in the silence.

 

Written – 07:57, 28/07/05

Edited – 18:40, 28/07/05