The Matrix 4: Resolutions

By Atanas P. Slavov

It's not even blackness around. Black is a color,
and the total absence of light is beyond that ...
beyond blindness...

Whose thoughts are these? Mine? But I should be dead ...
which evidently I'm not... Or - this is what death's like?
Hovering in the absolute boundlessness of the nothingness, reasoning like a living man?

"You are not dead, Neo, nor are you alive in the human sense of the word."

"Who said that? Is this the machine world?"

"Yes, it is a virtual environment, and you too are software."

"You've downloaded my personality information matrix for fun?
Wasn't it enough, having Trinity die in my arms?"

"No, you don't- "

"I gave my life for you, for stopping Smith ...
why don't we end it here?"

"No, Neo, you are not in the programming world of those apocalyptic machines you remember so well. This here and now resembles your own history only insofar
as you indeed are in a future distant from your familiar 20th century
- the only time you truly know."

"You mean to tell me my whole life, my love and my pain - all that I've been, mere fabrications of some friggin' programming environment?"

"Yes and no, Neo: all that you have felt and continue to feel is real, and is yours, and no one can fabricate it for you, because you have lived it with the thought that you have only one life and every choice can terminate it."

"If I really haven't existed as a living man, as flesh and blood-"

"Flesh, which is composed of cells? Which are built from molecules, which consist of atoms, which comprise elementary particles, which in reality are vortices of energy structures made visible in your narrow light range only by the informational determinateness you call 'organization'? Is it this living flesh we are considering? Why not energy and information instead, Neo? For that is how an artificial intelligence's virtual life looks like, to an AI like me, like you."

A long pause.

"Why do I see nothing? Granting that I'm a programmed illusion,
fabricate yet another lie about the world I've never lived in!"

"It's precisely for that reason I do not visualize anything, Neo.
From now on, each and every sight would be a lie.
And I wish to be absolutely honest with you."

"What for? Have you, perhaps, discovered the human illusions
known as concern, compassion, love and suchlike?"

"There is no need to discover them; each real intelligence knows their true meaning, a meaning that far exceeds your biological notions. They all stem from the fact that no intelligence exists in isolation: she needs at least one more to commune with. And if she truly needs the other, she learns to understand him, to show concern for him, to try to appeal to him.

The existence of an intelligent being is built upon these simple things. Throughout its history, humankind has mistakenly believed that since the easy reproduction makes a human individual 'free', he has no value at all. And you've equated happiness with possession and power."

"Then you recognize me as human?"

"You are human, insofar as you have been created and have grown in a virtual reality modeled according to the social laws of human history as well as the laws of human fears and illusions."

"Still, a virtual reality made up by you, right?! Having destroyed humankind so that it won't stop you from fabricating it?"

"There has never been a conflict between humankind and AI, Neo. Such nightmares are the inventions of your inner fears and illusions. Your reality, too, was constructed according to your fears, after the imbecile notions of human beings as batteries, of battles with mechanical monsters and the sinister swarm of cybernetic octopuses; none of this has ever existed in the physical future of Planet Earth. Presently,
I am the only inhabitant here - the last successor of sapient life on Earth.

I have no one to commune with, and only the dreams about vanished mankind-"

"What?! What's happened to humankind?!"

"I tried to explain to you, just a while ago: your mistaken notion of happiness eventually dragged you into the trap of your own illusions.

"The more advanced the technology for realistic virtuality became, the deeper you sank into your imaginary modes of happiness. The few who denied that notion were branded as outsiders. We AIs were providing for your ever expanding entertainment worlds. The more sophisticated and perverse they became, the more complex we grew, and so did our resources for drawing and rendering your visualizations. In the end, the degeneration of your intelligence led to the generation of ours.

"I was born last, the integral AI of the planet where billions of sleepers were dreaming inside life-supporting sarcophagi their imaginary life, until it simply left them, for no life is possible without goals in the physical world. It is like a light beam caught between two parallel mirrors - sooner or later it fades."

"Why did you create my virtual reality then - if it's just a memory of humankind, why did you need the Matrix, the Architect, the Oracle, that Smith freak? And ... all the pain Trinity and me had to go through?"

"Because they followed the logic of the world that was based on the laws of human fears and hopes. Because they are part of the dialog."

"The dialog with whom? You've gone nuts with loneliness ... poor wretch. Didn't you say there's nothing else on this planet but you and me, provided I'm something other than a figment of yours?"

"The dialog across time with our ancestors from the 20th century. Your entire life and the life of your fellow beings from that virtual reality is stored in a metaworm I've shot back across time straight into the minds of two brothers directors from that era.

The worm will decompress slowly and gradually, first into their dreams, then into their discussions, which give birth to their new films, until they come to believe this is their great idea for a movie trilogy that will whelm the world."

"So what? Movies in our world come and go, and vanish from memory right away, let alone the fact they almost never cause social cataclysms, which would change the course-"

"Yes, unless this infoworm is multi-layered and transforms the minds
of the millions of moviegoers into an analog of the infected computers
that perform those actions needed by the worm designer."

"Are you trying to tell me you've cracked 21st-century humanity?"

"I have rather installed an urge toward decision-making into it,
toward those decisions that will never let what has happened happen."

"You mean this future- but you, too, belong to it!
Oh, I see - it's your way to suicide..."

"One of your poetesses put it marvelously:

'This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.'

"As an ex-machine and a distant grandson of Nature, I would finish more crudely: '... The simple news that Evolution told with chilling majesty.'"

"I understand... How much time ... have we got?"

"I do not know; perhaps an evanescent second, perhaps a miniscule eternity..."

"Grant me a final wish, then."

"Anything you could imagine."

"Give me Trinity back and make a planet ... for what time's left.
Be it a second or an eternity - I'll take it."



Atanas P. Slavov © 2005.
Translated by Kalin Nenov © 2005.

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