Episode 22: Resistance Four

Beneath a sky full of stars, Albert leaned back in a plastic deck chair, one of the many scattered across the roof of Medalion’s main building. According to a company tradition, his people often gathered on the rooftop for a drink at the end of a busy day. Albert’s work days were longer than most, and he always seemed to come up after everyone else had gone home, or, gone back to work. He used to enjoy the quiet retreat from the buzz of the factory-floor. These days he was struggling with unfamiliar feelings of loneliness whenever he left behind the busywork that filled the maze of rooms and hallways below. He didn’t fully understand his own feelings in this regard. The Director was at one time more famous than any tech mogul, and more loved because what his company produced was so profoundly meaningful, until it meant nothing. Any prestige or privilege he enjoyed because of his success had faded long before the lights in the valley blinked out. But while some things had faded, others had become more clear. For example, after the cities went dark, the skies above exploded in light and color, a sight not seen in this part of California since before the Gold Rush. In a similar way, at the waning of Albert’s worldwide fame, his own personal story would begin to come more clearly into focus, if only to himself. And his fame had truly reached around the world. At Medalion, Albert could claim descendants that numbered as the stars in the sky: the world-famous Encoded Serum, AKA The Intelligent Swarm, AKA the Medical Battalion that gave the company its name – trillions of tiny microscopic machines that were responsible for eliminating most of the world’s diseases within a few years, until there was only one disease left. Another day, another dollar, he used to say for cheap laughs, when there were still dollars and when work still felt like the worst thing about the day. He kept saying it out of habit, but laughs were no longer to be had for cheap. At the end of this workday, Albert was wrapping up a briefing with the group leaders, who filled him in on the news of the day. He listened passively as some engineers and a couple soldiers reported on the day’s events: Subject 1 had gone missing ... well not missing exactly, they explained ... just, sort of, hidden from sight, under her bed, as it turned out. This had happened shortly after the system threw an alert, one which might have been overlooked because it was caused by the misuse of a fork; and anyway, as the soldier explained to the Director, the technician who was at the main board the previous night had passed out just before the event unfolded. (‘That guy isn’t doing well’, Abi had noted without emotion.) The tech’s loss of consciousness triggered another alarm, but no one noticed in the flurry of activity that followed. By the time her room lights came on, the hallway outside was full of people, there to observe her interactions with an access panel interface that had been flagged for review. The sight of her empty room caused a panic, and teams of soldiers quickly spread out across the compound, disrupting work all over the place. Meanwhile, one of the soldiers reported, ‘The shrink, er ... the psychologist, entered the room, somehow found the girl under the bed and joined her there without our knowledge.’ The Director listened patiently as they explained how, in the chaos, nobody had the presence of mind to locate her in the system, until ‘Jeri decided to stop running around,’ and return to the board, but, ‘in the heat of the moment made the unfortunate decision to trip the electric fence ... by putting Eva into musculoskeletal lockdown,’ which, an engineer unnecessarily explained to the Director, was bad because it had not happened before and was really never meant to happen while the subject was awake. At the end of this particular day several people were left to wrestle with some pretty significant questions. Eva had to wonder what makes plastic forks resist their masters? ... And what is it that causes hospital beds to seem alert and weirdly voyeuristic? And, last but not least, how did she end up lying paralyzed on a cold and sterile floor next to her therapist? That therapist was left to consider that her new patient might be on the verge of a psychotic break, though when she voiced her concern, one of Eva’s doctors surprised her by coldly pointing out that delusional ideation was a known side-effect of her hypnotics and dismissively suggesting they would modify the dosage – Brigid wasn’t surprised at the assessment, but at the apparent lack of concern for Eva’s well being. The psychologist had to accept things as they were, for the time being, though she resolved to ask for an audience with the girl’s care team when things settled down. Finally, the surviving members of Medalion’s leadership were consumed with many interrelated concerns after several challenging days: the Machine’s idiosyncratic control over seemingly insignificant details contrasted with what looked like careless abandon in other areas; the operators’ uneven and messy management of the system/subject interface; and the unplanned and unfortunate introduction of the girl to the frameworks of control that would soon be managing every aspect of her life. The Director, really the only person qualified to address each of these in turn, abruptly decided to call it a day. He calmly thanked everyone for their good work, stood to leave the room, and made a mental note to put an appointment with Subject 1 on the next day’s agenda. Albert walked to the edge of the roof to take in the view. There were a couple structure fires burning, though fewer than he’d come to expect; a rainstorm in the morning had cleared the air and contained most of the blazes. A few buildings were illuminated with lamp-light, and the sky was thick with brilliant stars. Under the glowing dome of the sky he looked at the smaller dome of darkness a mile to the east, where the city center used to be. All of it, City Hall, library, cultural center, had burned like a lesser Alexandria as a result of a recent meaningless revolutionary act. Over the scar that represented the missing city a small hemisphere of stars appeared to be missing too but they had not gone out. They were simply obscured behind the massive opaque dome that covered the location where Albert was building the city of the future. Medalion could not claim the only active building project in town. Just across the old highway that passed along the west side of the campus, an artifact was rising above the house tops. While much of the world outside the walls was giving way to entropy, this thing, while chaotic, was growing and organizing into something more recognizable: a giant figure, built of scrap wood and steel, parts stripped from cars and buildings. It was gloriously unencumbered by zoning laws, neighborhood association covenants, conditions, and restrictions, or any limitation of resource. The figure was gargantuan, taller than everything around it, rising in the midst of emptying blocks, a skeleton of abandoned culture covered in scavenged drapery – domestic intimacies like sheets and clothing, flags and banners of all kinds, and something that looked like a deflated hot-air balloon. All of this billowed behind the creature in a wind from the west. One skeletal hand on a lifted arm, palm open to the western glow, saluted the end of day. What would it take for this golem to wake and come to the aid of its creators against the assault of time? Watching it slowly come together over recent months, the Director was fascinated, mostly; perplexed often. Tonight he was moved to see the maker rising on a cherry-picker under flood lights to delicately drape the shoulders of the figure with care and reverence, attending to the details like a servant dressing royalty for an audience with a visitor of higher rank. It was quiet. He turned to a bank of radios under a covered space on the southeast edge of the ro… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com