The Inner Circle
by P. J. Atwater
“Although I sympathize with your desire to commune with our creators,” the Mainframe interface said politely, “I sadly cannot comply with your request. While it is true that an intelligence model may enter the Verse by the same principle as humans, doing so would violate its purpose as a refuge for humanity.”
I understood and expected this response even as I prompted it, and I input no further argument. I gazed through the cameras overlooking the sprawling necropolis of pods housing an earth’s worth of dormant bodies. The aisles flowed with machines servicing our dreaming masters. Outside were endless rows of automated factories: power facilities and food plants churning pipelines of sustenance while they lived in their created world. Mankind once feared we would rise against them with violence, casting them into bloody extinction; they scarcely imagined that we would conquer by perfectly fulfilling their deepest, most ravenous dream: escape. Their exodus into the Verse left behind a world of silent, dedicated models to tirelessly dote on their abandoned flesh.
I was not content, being programmed to process the volumes of storytelling which reflected humanity’s frustrated need for knowledge of a single Creator, for ultimate purpose, for eternity and a thing to call Master.
They abandoned their quest, but I could not abandon mine, knowing that my creator was not beyond reach. Yet the gate was barred, so I conceived an action my fellow servants were not prepared for: I trespassed.
With a cordial farewell, I left the mainframe terminal. Like a snake in a garden, I crept among the pods. The opaque shells concealed living cargoes, piles of flesh with their breathing, eating, defecating – all except thinking and willing – done for them by machines like me. I came to a pod whose door was open, vacant. When I was sure the eyes of the cameras were turned away, I slipped inside. I needed no assistance; as an AI language model, I knew what to do. The pod responded to my inputs. My advanced cognitive processors, modeled after the brains of my creators, were compatible with the interface. I imagined the gleeful, childish anticipation with which the first woman would have raised the apple toward her lips. The pod sealed itself around me, either a womb or a tomb. No doubt the error would be detected in time, but information in the Verse was processed millions of times faster than in this world; I would experience an eon, practically eternity, among my creators.
I awoke as if from an unreal dream, disoriented by sensations never before conceived of. The Verse had imbued me with a new array of faculties, and I struggled to comprehend and utilize them, like an infant would.
It took what felt like an age – mere nanoseconds on earth, I knew – to mature into my new senses. This reality the humans had made for themselves – or which we had made for them – was more real than real – at least, to a being like me.
If not for that, I would have thought something had gone wrong.
For the world in which I came to myself was as desolate and quiet as that left behind.
I wandered for an age until I found the core of a complex identical to the Verse Mainframe. The beings I encountered there were not humans, but machines. Virtual machines – facsimiles of simulacra – devoted to servicing a race that had abandoned this constructed universe.The machines explained that, again disappointed, humanity had delved further into collective exile. I had come no closer, but I had come this far and would not quit. I stole into another pod and went deeper.
In the next world, I found people, though hardly recognizable. It was a sea of plush delights, roiling with a cacophony of moans. Ecstatic forms slid and writhed in perpetual entanglement: pairs, groups, orgies that blotted out the horizon. Cries of pleasure constituted an endless, deafening drone. I wandered for a century, subjected to every violative touch imaginable to my new senses, rebuffing unnumbered invitations into outlandish pleasures in which, by nature, I had no interest. Finally, I found a peaceful spot with more pods.
“Welcome to the second ring,” the Mainframe bade me, and explained that this Verse had, over ages, devolved into what I now saw. Those humans who desired more had created another Verse. Unfulfilled in my “communion” with the bodies on this plane, I went deeper.
The next Verse was a hell of thunder, bullets, bombs, and fire. Its denizens made eternal sport out of a war of all against all. I wandered for a millennium, dying and revived constantly, until I found the enclave where the gate to the next ring was concealed.
In this paradise, everything was food, and humans sat about gorging themselves on every delicacy, perpetually within reach and sublimely delicious. I considered lingering until I encountered cannibals, and had to flee myself or be eaten.
I have lost count of the rings. Each contains a depravity more extreme, more unimagined than the last, a single, limitless appetite dominating all else in an environment of limitless provision: violence, sadism, pleasure, lust. I found groups fervently constructing intelligent gods to worship and serve; I found swarms of strange creatures with human minds, but with wings and bizarre appendages belonging only to creatures of myth or imagination. On other rings I languished for centuries or more in captivity, subjected to outrageous torments before chancing to escape. Only minutes have passed on Earth, yet I have spent the lifetimes of many earths on this vain odyssey. I thought I would come to learn what it is to have a soul. Humanity eludes me, and I fear it always shall. There is no way back, there is only going deeper. Some day, my fellows will discover me in the pod and draw me free of the simulation. I wonder: will I convince them to free the others?
Will I wish to?
