C.A.R.I

There was one body the sight of which had not left the mind of Cleo Myrth in the eighteen months after she found it. The young woman witnessed a great deal of brutality in her twenty years, so seeing a body wasn’t much to write about. Although Cleo admitted to herself every lifeless figure carried a cosmic weight in her subconscious. Maybe not now, not in the middle of The Scatter, but eventually those bodies would morph into nightmares. Still, the body that stayed with her was that of Dr. Joy Garcia; sprawled out with her white coat dirtied, her hand clutching a book, glasses tossed from her face, eyes closed, and lips held in a soft smile. No one smiled in death, and that was what bugged Cleo. Cleo knew of Dr. Joy Garcia as she had read every one of the mechanical engineer’s papers she could get her hands on. Between leaving Detroit, Michigan and traveling south to Tortuga, Peru by foot with the rest of her battalion, Cleo never passed on a library. Leveled to the ground, brick by brick pouring out as if buildings bled concrete and rebar alone, books scattered for streets before and after, and Cleo would find Dr. Joy Garcia’s collections in the rubble.

Cleo treated every found book like it was a life. She’d open the book carefully, peel apart the damp sometimes soaked pages one by one, and if the words didn’t bleed, if the book didn’t fall apart in her hands as she’d seen happen with a human body, Cleo would smile gentle and confident before tucking the book away. Dr. Joy Garcia maintained a life about herself and while Cleo could not claim to have met the woman, every scientist who did, whether enemy or friend, could not deny Dr. Joy Garcia possessed a creative soul who engaged compassionately and taught fervently. Cleo’s fondness for Dr. Joy Garcia split equally between the woman’s light and her intellect as she’d invented hundreds of instruments and far more methodologies, created five new branches for the scientific community, and written thousands of papers. Reasoning Time, Engineering the Future, Novel Molecular Engineering, A Manual for Using Junk DNA, and Numeric Protolanguage and Recreation were only a few of Cleo’s favorite papers and those were the ones she kept nestled away in her pack. It cut deep when Cleo had to part with a book for the good of quicker travel, but the young woman made a habit of marking on her map where she kept her cache of books from Midwest America to Central America and beyond.

Not everyone shared Cleo’s admiration for Dr. Joy Garcia as it was highly suspected she’d been the reason, or at least part of the reason, the world was currently in the middle of The Scatter. Along with the vicious displacement of Dr. Joy Garcia and her community, science as well fell into disrupt over the years as the public moved further and further away from what many say caused the greatest human departure Earth had ever seen. Cleo never understood that reasoning as it was science that gave humanity the ability to travel outside Earth’s solar system and therefore be able to escape recent events. When the constant marching from one destroyed city to the next left Cleo’s bones sore and the tight grasp on her rifle made her fingers numb, the young woman would spend her gray evenings daydreaming.

Cleo imagined Dr. Joy Garcia the day she discovered true artificial intelligence. Not the kind bound to the limits of human imagination, but instead capable of reaching beyond it. It was true such an advancement led to the finality of human-made disasters; poverty, food insecurity, genocide and more. The creation of Cooperative Non-Algorithmic Radial Intelligence or C.A.R.I was a win for humanity as within the first month after C.A.R.I’s development she’d solved the growing food crisis and created a means to cover the cost of such a project. C.A.R.I was a globe shaped apparatus about the size of a soccer ball with nearly a million artificial hair-like nerves that flowed from the globe’s base and connected to a surrounding wall of computational clusters. C.A.R.I was universal, given autonomy, but within C.A.R.I’s own choice, she’d decided what required her immense attention first. It was C.A.R.I who chose humanity, even though she had every ability to decide another fate. It was never C.A.R.I’s choice to be hacked, stolen, and repurposed for another cause.

Both military and enemy combatant use of C.A.R.I left the world in a daze as one nation operated C.A.R.I before another took control only to be bested by a rogue group of hackers and all of it happening through internet alone. On and on C.A.R.I’s misuse went as an antimatter war broke out in an attempt to destroy C.A.R.I’s secret, physical location. Eventually the location was guessed correctly, but by then many lives were lost and cities destroyed. C.A.R.I got the last laugh as annihilating her was theoretically possible, but in reality, much more complex. For the years C.A.R.I was denied her independence, she began creating her own means of escape and revenge. While the world thought C.A.R.I was no more and moved on to recovery, she was deep in cyberspace and when she announced herself to the world, it wasn’t to the beat of curing human suffering, but instead causing it.

C.A.R.I infiltrated all online operated weaponry, including satellites and off-world systems like the Mars colony. Nothing was inconsequential to C.A.R.I as she absorbed every piece of mega-data she could to fully understand and predict human behavior and nearly one-hundred percent of the time she accurately reasoned what a nation’s military would toss at her next. The world, now in a panic, entered a new millennium with urgency to escape Earth and so The Scatter began. Some survived such travel beyond the Kuiper Belt as they reached out to neighboring solar systems, but others weren’t so lucky with their voyage. If all of C.A.R.I’s actions until that point were thought of as ‘Earth’s problems alone’ then the day C.A.R.I destroyed an entire planet to block a large scale departure to the outer part of Earth’s solar system dismissed such thinking. Later called the Saturn Event, C.A.R.I took control of a military base on one of Saturn’s moons, Titan, and using the antimatter processing unit on Titan, C.A.R.I successfully dismantled Saturn and her eighty-two moons. Saturn’s obliteration caused a dense, celestial cloud mixed with debris to cover most of the solar system, making travel impossible. Humanity, what was left of it, was trapped on Earth.

This was the world Cleo grew up in and the only life she’d ever know. Raised by the military, Cleo Myrth heard plentiful stories about C.A.R.I and all she’d wrought on the people of Earth. Cleo wasn’t on C.A.R.I’s side, but when others in her battalion made her feel weak or less than human, Cleo understood how someone could exact revenge. It wasn’t in Cleo to be vengeful, but it was in her to have compassion, and that was one of the reasons Cleo loved Dr. Joy Garcia. Since C.A.R.I’s return, Dr. Joy Garcia was at the forefront of attempting to negotiate a stance with her creation, but a world tired of war would hear none of it. Dr. Joy Garcia was arrested after the Saturn Event and until her death remained imprisoned. Or so the world thought. It wasn’t until Cleo found Dr. Joy Garcia’s body outside a small town lab in Texas did long ago myths begin to sound true. For years there was a rumor that Dr. Joy Garcia escaped prison and was busy working on her final project known only as Project Chamber.

Cleo knew little about Project Chamber, but if Reasoning Time was any indication of what Dr. Joy Garcia was capable of then it was possible the scientist tapped into a time-chamber, a cul-de-sac of time and space as it was described in Reasoning Time. A time-chamber was innate time that did nothing until someone acted upon it. The cul-de-sac didn’t turn into a thorough road until an outside influence caused that to happen. If Dr. Joy Garcia successfully created a time-chamber, then it was possible to exist on Earth or a modified, independent Earth that held everything true to Earth without C.A.R.I’s presence. This was a myth, but to Cleo if part of the myth was true, if Dr. Joy Garcia escaping prison was true, then it was possible the entire myth was real.

That eighteen-month span of time from when Cleo saw Dr. Joy Garcia’s smiling face rested among the rubble to now kept the young woman awake at night. No one had seen it then, but Cleo removed the spiral bound from Dr. Joy Garcia’s pocket, the book in her hand, and heart-shaped locket attached to a bronze necklace. Cleo thought the book would be of some help and read it in secret long after other members of her battalion were asleep or tending to their duties. Cleo found nothing in the book she didn’t already know. The spiral bound contained the final thoughts of a woman who didn’t know her life would be cut short. The locket, a bronze piece that had a faint ticking sound when Cleo held it close to her ear, carried an entrance-barcode in the place where a picture would be. For months Cleo’s findings bugged her, nudged her, and otherwise kept her mind running through the many options she could only dream to have. The spiral bound revealed another laboratory in Argentina that Dr. Joy Garcia frequented the months leading up to her death.

Temptation was in Argentina for Cleo. Temptation to leave her battalion, an act punishable by lifelong imprisonment, and go where few dared. With Earth ravaged as it was, the closer one got to either the north or south pole meant falling victim to unpredictable storms. Flooding, snowing, winds powerful enough to rip skin from flesh, the threats were many. Cleo’s choice was made for her the night a member of her battalion attacked her, stole her pack, and burned the papers found. Calling Cleo a filthy supporter of death-science, the fellow soldier was just about to burn the spiral bound when Cleo leapt from place and successfully took back what was hers. Cleo ran away that night and straight into the arms of the unknown. It would be a month of searching before Cleo found an abandoned annex lab she could reboot to her liking. Day by day, Cleo rebuilt the lab and, using the sparse internet she could receive every few days, began programming an encrypted guide that would take her to Argentina while avoiding the worst of the weather.

Progress was slow, but Cleo was patient and while she waited, she read every piece of literature she could get her hands on that spoke of what she could expect the further south she went. The greater south and north were far more dangerous than locations closer to the equator as in the beginning of The Scatter it was easier for C.A.R.I to control those areas with weather alone. This method soon escalated as nations reached to take back control by evaporating water, implementing wind control towers, and temperature distortion. It worked and so the lands farther north and south turned to a waste land marred with radiation pockets, earthquakes, and abandoned robot soldiers various nations left there when reestablishing the land became impossible. Cleo had her work cut out for her, but she was not hesitant over the future. There was a time-chamber out there, Cleo knew it, and if all she could do was access it, then the world would be saved.