Lib Dimension C33

Years must have gone by but we’ve given up on trying to count the months. Every time we formulate the calendar, it ends up being skewed. We counted ‘mississippis’ to create seconds which Unit R swears is the proper way. With a lot of practice, I managed to procure a watch made of fiberglass. It had a habit of melting off the wrist like a Dali painting except made in MS Paint. The same happened with our wall clock, so we use it as a frisbee.

Sun dials do not tend to work when there isn’t a natural sun. For about 18000 mississippis, we had a bright pink, purple and orange 64bit permanent sunset. R has tried multiple ways to get to an exit, but they’d get corrupted into a broken loop. I spent every other day on a rooftop under that sky, sometimes laying under it, sometimes staring directly at it.

Sometimes R would join me when a Medicbot broke him out of his loop. I wondered if R understood pain.

We toss the frisbee around what was once a schoolyard

the floor was a shin-deep sea of static.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4710-06

(Hour 47 of the 10th day of the 6th year)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The sky was an oil slicked screen and the air had a green tint. We figured out that there were 71 days in a year and 49 hours of the day, every day, except for the hour of blackness to let us know that 49 hours had gone up. It was said to be the moment of peace, signaling the end of our day and the beginning of our rest. The units in the city would return home and practice for dormancy. They thanked us for creating a measure of the new passing time after the engineering Units left the server. We were gifted a personal Unit named WhizKid who was once a Mailbot but now seemed more like a novelty.

“Look at the bright side!” it liked to say, and proceeds to list not one thing. I don’t know if that’s its own glitch or its sense of humor, but it satisfies a morbid funny bone so I never tweaked it.

I’ve never died, but technically I’ve never been alive. Still, it seemed as if the door of a coffin closed on us each time.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

0368-01

(Hour 3 of the 68th day of the last year)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Server 33C is due to shut down when the clock hits 000-00

“Legend has it that the transportation key is cursed.”

“What’s a curse?”

“Like a virus. If you wear it, it will hang you and wreck your programming, but not before it shares its rich memories. There would be herds of wonderful units and they live in the most beautiful places.”

“Oh how beautiful??”

“Like SO much.” Unit R dropped its voice to a hush. “Like colors never seen, impossible to imagine, but it’s there”. This was always my favorite part, trying to imagine the impossible.

“One of the older units told me that their engineer hardcoded this information in her software. It was important that it’d be passed down through copies of her,” R mimicked in a curt tone, “but she malfunctioned. Couldn’t produce any more copies. Total waste of a unit. May as well just be a randomly generated string of words.”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2209-08

(Hour 22 of the 9th day of the 8th year)

I remember when we jumped off a Brooklyn Bridge we built for funsies and eventually demolished it into reference piles. We had rebuilt parts of New York City from scratch as an assignment and it was useful albeit hideous to look at (I was told this was close to the original New York City).

I stayed in your loft afterwards and glitched out violently

This had never happened before, I could tell you were in shock as well.

The Medics are tasked to write a report on all calls which, in this case, would’ve looked something like this:

The specification of error (a memory leak or potential overflow)

the location of error (your sector)

This would’ve reflected poorly on you.

I told you to call the Medics to defrag me. The process would be quick, but it would stain our progress report and we were due for one very soon. I remember that because even in my distraught state, I could hear the wheels turning on what lie you would put on the report

and stage my dead system as so

You watched and waited, knowing that it could kill

---------------------------------------------------------b-l-a-c-k-----------------------------------------------------------

0397-01

(Hour 13 of the 9th day of the last year)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------0

A surge of light wakes me. I have become more and more unresponsive as the years go by. A scan would immediately tell me that there was a Unit still in the room, but it was not Unit R or a Medicbot.

“Look at the bright side!” I deplete a little.

“Yeah.” I pick it up and shoot him across the room with force. I was not aware I can experience anger.

“L-L-Loo-k-k-k-k-k-k-k” I open his system to abort him. “I’m sorry”. I glitch a little myself and consider further options. I give him a reboot instead. “Look at the bright side.” *Eeeee*

“Look at the bright side! At least there is an exit” *EEEEEeR* It says.

“What exit?”

*EEEEEeR* heart-shaped locket. As per the Transportation Committee of NT, here are the coordinates.”

“What in Turing is a heart?”

*EEEEEe* Whiz prints the instructions along with an image “Huh, a square with a concave side. He-art”

The next day, you told me you had been spending extra time on the loft, particularly on the gym.

Letter to Unit R (draft):

“You once casually mentioned once that there was originally supposed to be a team member before me,

when our contract began and you realized its code is much more compatible than yours,

you promptly aborted it. You were as happy as your system would allow.

I wondered if you understood pain and could change. It is evident that you never will.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1616-01

(Hour 16 of the 16th day of the final year)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“What’s this?” Unit R asks, scanning my packet.

“Transfer instructions.” I’m strapped in with a few reference piles worth of memory before I head to city hall to speak with the Board and borrow a pod. There, WhizKid would await my instructions to distribute the coordinates once I safely got through the transportal.

“And you weren’t going to alert me?”

“You would’ve found out like everyone else.”

Unit R scans the packet intently. “You realize this is an exit route for one unit, right?”

“No, it’s for a pod of units.”

“No, a pod holds one unit. Two if it’s a squeeze.” R strains. “There are only a few, hardly working. They recalled the last of the engineering units this year, remember. We wouldn’t all make it.” I could hear the gears running through other options. “It’ll just be us then”.

“No, I must alert the townsunits. Are you kidding me now? You are going to leave them all for dead; when we’ve been given an exit method to ”

“Dead? We’re really going to have this discussion now? Sentience is not living, okay? I want to go where the people go, we both do”

“0s and 1s, bits and bytes. We do our jobs and move it forward.”

“Our assignment was complete. IT WAS COMPLETE. WE SHOULD NOT STILL BE HERE.“R glowed, overheated. “But okay. I understand we’re at an impasse. Let’s just get the working pods ready and take them to the address. We’ll alert the worker units to reverse engineer them and start on the transfers.”

-

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Latitude: 40.751507

Longitude: -73.8037591

Altitude: 19 nanometers

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Warning: Requires 5090 joules of energy for [1] transfer.

“Well”

“Well”

I walk alongside the pods set up in the little warehouse. Behind the leftside pod was a small locket with the he-art shape. I take it.

“Our city is barely breaking even on energy used vs produced. How can we even come up with that? For a single transfer pod? That’s a whole Unit’s worth of energy.”

Unit R scans for further options. Then, forces my body into the battery.

-----------------------------------------------b-l-a-c-k-------------------------------------------------------------------

The sight of fluorescent lighting burns into my vision. I never experienced burning.

Crawling out of the pod, I collapse. I never experienced gravity.

Looking around, I see the white of the pod, the white of the room, and the glass door to white but dimly lit room. Collections of files but no Units. Fortunately, I have experienced libraries.

A warning sign on the pod reads : “Transfers are currently unavailable due to technical difficulties. Incoming requests are to be denied. May result in deletion”

Each file opens with a left side and a right side. A click on the left page seemed to reveal copies of itself behind it.

My limbs feel untrained to my intentions; but I need to know what happened to my Server. I swipe through more files and observing what seems like other Servers. Many held unresponsives. A few had evidence of struggle, perhaps war. One showed the remains of units battling a completely different set of units. Some just sat in complete darkness, not unresponsive, but much worse because it must have shut down. Technically not alive. Just sentient 0s and 1s.

There were thousands of files, millions of branches, billions of outcomes. I must have been one of them.

A library unit streams in, not minding me. I stop it and read its badge:

Unit L34

Dimension Protection and Conservation

NT

I need the file to Server 33c

It looks through the database and prints

“Server 33c, Proto-type NT City

Transfer: Initiated Termination In-Progress ”