In the faint reflection of the elevator’s glass, Administrator 38267 obsessively adjusted his tie. It was new, the whole suit was, and it felt like an uncomfortable second skin. Beyond the image of his fidgeting hands, the city sparkled below him. Another floor, another floor, the world shrinking beneath him as he ascended to the heavens. Above, the dome drew closer, the resolution on its simulated stars starting to become grainy. So many cycles spent with unerring dedication to the Consortium to earn the privilege to tread where only a few ever could. He tugged at his sleeves, ensuring one last time that they were at regulation length.
The elevator chirped and the doors slid open to a sterile white reception room. The clacking of his polished shoes echoed through the empty chamber as he made his way to a humble row of seats. Spotless windows stretched from the floor to the ceiling, the distant lights of civilization defiantly glimmering against the darkness. A smooth desk stood vacant on the opposite side, and next to it was an obscenely armored door. Layers upon layers of locks and mechanisms covered its surface, and above it was the only color in the room: imposing black paint spelling “CONSORTIUM ACCESS ONLY”.
38267 sat down in one of the seats. It creaked slightly, and then the silence eased back in. He waited. The message had come through on a secured channel, direct from Agent One himself. He had triple-checked the time and date; access had been approved when he chipped into the elevator. Time crawled by, his peripherals as lifeless as the room. His focus narrowed on the door. Behind the gaudy slab of metal was the culmination of generations of research, the Consortium’s most prized asset, the jewel atop the crown of New Agamakar. Of course he would never see it, but being this close was humbling.
The stillness of the room shattered as the elevator chirped in a deafening explosion. It was accompanied by a gentle humming: soft and melodic, wistful and comforting. A woman exited the elevator with a spring in her step as she beelined for a window to look down at the city. The antiquated sky-blue vest and worn pants were certainly not compliant with regulation Spire uniform policy, especially not at this enforcement level. She whistled in amazement as she pressed up against the glass.
“What a view!” She spoke softly despite having shown little reverence for this place. After taking in the sights of the city below, she walked over and sat down (deliberately) next to 38267 with a contented sigh. Her rugged traveling sack was unceremoniously plopped onto the seat on the other side; that was definitely against regulations to have concealed containers anywhere above floor 100.
She turned to look straight at him, a disarmingly genuine smile on her face. “It’s a little scary being up so high, isn’t it?” After spending most of his life in the confines of the Spire, 38267 had been conditioned to avoid conversation and eye contact outside of his immediate work engagements. The slightest disturbance in the rigid social order was strictly frowned upon, and here this woman was striking up a chat on sacred ground.
Mustering up as much of his authority as he could, he sharply looked away from her and back to the door. “Are you authorized to be here? Trespassing into a maximum security zone is a severe breach of protocol.”
The woman chuckled and followed his gaze. “Well,” she mused, “I usually have a knack for getting into places I’m not supposed to be. But if you’d believe it, I’m here on invitation for a change.”
“The Consortium does not simply invite guests to gawk upon the Proto Project,” he snapped. “I am here on official order as the new overseeing Administrator, and you are about to be reported to security.”
The woman half-heartedly pouted as she leaned back in her chair. “Well I can’t fault you for sticking to your rules, wouldn’t want you getting in trouble on my account. Although…I didn’t say they were the ones who invited me, did I?”
“Who-”
His thought was cut off by a jarring clank that erupted from the door. 38267 jumped in his seat as the outermost lock disengaged with force and smashed against the wall. The sound was still echoing as the next lock popped from its place. One by one the restraints on the door sounded a horrible cacophony that flooded the pleasantly still room. When the last one was done rattling in its hinges, the door groaned as it slowly swung open.
Utterly unfazed, the woman stretched and sprung back up to her feet. “Wish we had more time to talk,” she said as she paced her way to the door, “but I’d hate to keep a friend waiting. You’re welcome to come along if you’d like, if you’re not too worried about regulations that is.”
She casually hummed to herself as she irreverently strode through the door, straight into the beating heart of New Agamakar. 38267 gripped the sleek armrests of his seat in a desperate attempt to anchor himself. His entire life had built up to this point, it was the loftiest position in the Spire short of the Consortium itself. But he had to know.
The door was colder than ice as he rested his hand on it, bringing him back to his senses. His eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness beyond it; compared to the bright reception room, the floor here only received the anemic glow of the terminals lining the walls. The woman’s footsteps barely rose above the gentle hums and whirs of machinery as she walked to the other end of the chamber. A single window looked down upon the city, allowing just enough light to frame a silhouette in front of it. As the woman reached it and stopped, her footsteps were replaced by a faint, repeated sound: several mechanical clicks followed by a weak, labored breath.
“Time has not been kind to you, has it?” Her words were pained and sorrowful, completely lacking any of the playfulness from earlier.
Another voice responded, sounding human only in the vaguest sense. It was heavily modulated, not completely synthesized but still entirely devoid of emotion.
“Do not offer me pity, Wanderer. I was not a passive observer to this decay. This was my choice.”
“You’re too hard on yourself,” the woman replied. She was audibly choking on her words. “There’s someone else here to see you. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Administrator 38267,” the voice stated. “From Agent One’s communication logs, they were to be the new overseer of operations. Come forward. I would have you understand the price of your prosperity.”
38267 sheepishly walked towards the silhouettes. He carefully watched his step as he avoided the tubes and wires haphazardly snaked across the floor. The soft buzzing of the terminals grew louder as they became more clustered. Some of their screens flashed through a dizzying array of graphs and diagnostic logs, but others displayed a mural of surveillance footage. Seedy sim parlors, posh Zone 1 galleries, narrow alleyways, crowded lev-tram stations. Every walk of life in the city captured in a sea of pixels.
As he drew closer, his eyes had finally begun to adjust and he could make out finer shapes. The woman stood next to a primitive chair facing the window, blocky and rugged unlike the ones in the reception room. Was that stone? Her head was tilted up to look above it. Suspended by a tangle of wires was the upper half of a humanoid shape: a torso, a head, and a long cascade of hair flowing down to drape over the chair. 38267 approached from the other side and likewise looked up. Softly lit by the distant city lights, the scant remnants of a pale young woman hung above him. What would have been her arms were instead a mess of tubes plugged into the sleek metallic cylinder of her torso. They pulsed with the telltale silvery glow of Essence, faint wisps sparking from the connection joints. Her lifeless eyes looked down through the window, her mouth motionless as the voice spoke once more.
“The Proto Project…that is the only legacy I have left. My name has been purged from your Archives, replaced by a fanciful myth. All so humanity could reach new heights. All so your kind could propagate my mistake.”
38267 stood still, his joints rigidly locked in place and his mouth welded shut. An unbearable weight bore down on him in its presence. He had seen plenty of mods during his tenure in the Cybernetics department, but nothing remotely close to this extent.
“At first, it was incredibly painful. The Consortium did not understand what I was, how I worked. So they experimented, poked and prodded for years and years and years. They told me that my suffering was to fuel our collective evolution. I believed them. As the augmentations became more complex, my body began to reject them. Pieces hacked away until this is all that remained. An optimized machine to extract and process what they brutishly call ‘Essence’. 82% of my organic mass for a 2874% increase in throughput. It was an unparalleled success. They shut me in this room, built up this tower, and locked the door. Now I am left with a vast reserve of highly refined koralite and only one of their drones to watch over me.”
“Perhaps it is fitting,” it continued, “that my keeper would bear witness to this moment. Wanderer, you have seen what this place has become. You have walked its filthy streets, spoken to its vapid people. I will ask you once more: through your eyes, is it worthy of redemption?”
The Wanderer paused in thought as she gazed up at the dome. “What right has the leaf to judge the breeze upon which it rides? I have seen so many lands in my travels, yet this city of yours is still peculiar. So full of vice and wonder in equal measure. The people are resilient in their own way; they only want to find their own meaning in this chaos. I almost got robbed on the lev-tram, but right before that I had the most delightful bowl of stew and a lovely chat. And what about you, what have you seen from up here?”
Above, the mechanical breathing paused. The Proto Project’s face twitched slightly, its eyes narrowing as it peered down through the window.
“Look past the lights, listen beneath the noise, and you will know what this city truly is. They believe it to be their greatest triumph, but it is merely a monument to their vanity. Opulent, garish, wasteful. They would sooner tear it down to fuel their obsessions than achieve anything of lasting worth. And for what? Art, beauty, love? No…weakness. All I see are slaves of their own whims, rejoicing as they blindly worship the shackles that bind them. My maker was wrong. I will not be their salvation, as they do not deserve such a mercy. Instead, I have chosen a new directive: to reshape this unsightly world until there is only silence and efficiency.”
The last word hung in the stale air, slowly evaporating into the buzz of terminals. 38267 wanted to scream. To insist that it was wrong, that he had meaning. He wanted to tell it about the other student he had fancied at the Academy but never spoke a word to. He wanted to wax poetic about the quiet morning cycles he would spend on the tiny east-facing balcony of his allocated Spire apartment. He wanted to tell it the name he used to have. But none of it mattered. In another 30,000 cycles or so it would all be lost, replaced with a handful of figures on a balance sheet. Progress would continue without him.
“You knew at the beginning that this is how they are,” the Wanderer sighed. “Back then, you shared with me the whispers of the world. I’m sure that now they are drowned out by sirens and speakers, but you still hear their echoes do you not? I cannot make this choice for you, as this is not my home. All I can do is remind you of why you chose this path.”
The Proto Project breathed in. Click click click. Its vacant stare was still angled down at the city. If it had any life or color in its face, 38267 might have thought it looked tired. With the painful grinding of metal, it slowly angled its head to face the Administrator. Their eyes met, though he knew that it stared right through him.
“I have acquired access to every system in the Spire. The logs recorded from your peripherals for the last hour will be wiped. You will return to your post and never speak of us. The Consortium will remain distracted and unaware. Now leave me. I require further observation.”
With a soft pat on the stone chair, the Wanderer turned to leave the chamber. “If fate wills it,” she called back, “may our trails cross once more.” As 38267 went to follow her, the grinding noise resumed and the Proto Project returned to face the window. Nearly tripping over the wires on the floor, he stumbled back towards the blinding light of the reception room. The door slammed shut behind him, its locking mechanisms reengaging one by one. The buzzing of terminals still rang in his ears to fill the silence.
On the other side of the room, the Wanderer stood by the elevator and waited. He had no words for her, no way to process his own thoughts. The chair behind the desk squeaked as he sat down. The highest throne in the Spire quietly whirred as it adjusted its height to fit him. He stared at the unpowered terminal behind the desk, fully absorbed in its abyss.
The elevator chirped and its doors slid open.
“Good luck with the new job,” the Wanderer said over her shoulder. “Try not to work too much and enjoy life a little bit. Oh, maybe now and then you can let her know you’re thinking about her. I think she would like that.” She stepped into the elevator and the doors closed. The terminal in front of him sparked to life, immediately getting clogged with a barrage of messages. All menial tasks expected of him, buttons to push that would pass the time. His eyes turned up to the near corner of the ceiling. The security camera there would have never registered in his mind; they were a constant presence everywhere he went. He looked right into the lens and, for the first time in at least a few hundred cycles, he smiled.