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Suddenly, a square on the console made a snapping sound and opened, revealing a little device connected to a long cable that was coming from the supercomputer. Eden didn’t recognize it, but she grabbed it. It extended pretty far, and the end of it looked like a SIN, but bigger...
“Put it on your SIN.”
She hesitated. She didn’t even know what that thing was supposed to do. Eden glanced toward Dante, but he was still leaning against one of the central units, visibly doing something with the cables. Had he managed to establish a connection with the Edge? Was he getting directions from A. or Nebty? Eden turned her eyes back to the console.
“Trust me. It will only help you use your SIN.”
Eden took a deep breath. Pan was her last ally at the moment, anyway... Grimacing after touching her damaged and injured SIN area several times, she finally managed to somehow plug that thing into it. It wasn’t the best sensation. It felt like an electric shock ran from her nape and throughout her whole body, making her grimace. It was a similar feeling to putting on her Parts.
Suddenly, she felt her SIN activating again. So did the computer in front of her. In fact, everything changed. In a second, everything about her surroundings changed, and she was pulled into the System.
It took a couple of seconds for the room around her to stabilize enough for her to recognize the place. It was the same environment as before. Her father’s office, with her father on the ground. Except this time, she could hear the poor man weeping, muffled cries. She instantly felt sorry for him, unable to understand why he was crying so much. Suddenly, the image paused, and something bright appeared next to her.
A silhouette, and then, the familiar appearance of a boy. Eden let out a faint sigh. Pan had used his real appearance but gave it a more... healthy look. He looked like what that child in the column would have looked like if it had been able to grow for a few more years. He had more meat on his bones, a youthful appearance, gorgeous hazel eyes, and blonde hair.
“...Hello,” he said with a chuckle.
“It’s not funny at all,” cried Eden.
“I know. I’m sorry you had to go through so much.”
His eyes went down to her legs. In this reality, her legs were perfectly fine and made of flesh. The cable was probably tricking her brain into thinking her legs were fine because she couldn’t feel the pain anymore and had no issue standing up either. Then, Pan’s eyes went back to their father.
“...That night, he had learned I would be a sick child,” he muttered.
“What do you mean?”
“...Soon after the first version of the Core was created, and a lot of people were forced to live in the Suburbs, the Core leaders quickly understood they would still have to control the growth of the population, or the Cores would be overpopulated in just a few generations’ time. A lot of the global population had been decimated by wars all over the world, but that wasn’t enough if they wished to let our Mother Earth heal in peace. So, they made a decision to control all the upcoming births.”
Pan slowly approached their father, looking at him from above.
“For a couple of centuries, women always sought doctors and medical assistance for giving birth. It was a natural process that was heavily monitored, from the conception of the child to its birth. With technical advancements, they were able to ensure a safer delivery, but also predict things such as the baby’s gender, health, and so on. During the twenty-first century, people began to be able to foretell the child’s physical appearance, personality traits, intellectual capacities, and... the diseases they carried.”
Eden was hearing that for the first time. In the Suburbs, most women gave birth alone, at home, without medical assistance. No one trusted hospitals and doctors, which were incredibly expensive and belonged to the Core. No one in the Suburbs ever made it to the level of knowledge a doctor would have, so they all relied on what womanhood could teach them...
“Our mother was a purist,” chuckled Pan. “Ironically, Dad had fallen for a woman who didn’t like machines, and still believed in the old world, when our routines weren’t regulated by politicians and their robots. She hid her pregnancy for as long as she could until I reached a certain size and it wasn’t possible anymore. But when they took her in for a test... They realized the child she carried wouldn’t pass the criteria for the Core’s newborns. That night, they told our parents I wouldn’t be allowed to come into this world.”
Eden’s heart sank. How could they say such a terrible thing... She remembered the child’s appearance, in his cage of water. His deformed foot, his missing fingers. Was that what the Core had rejected? …There were hundreds of people born with disabilities in the Suburbs! How did it make sense that the Core killed children that would have been born with the slightest issue when they had the technology to cope with it?!
The video suddenly resumed. To Eden’s surprise, their father suddenly lifted his eyes, looking almost as if he saw them. She almost stepped back in surprise. However, he quickly got on his feet and jumped on an old-looking red phone on the opposite wall. They saw him visibly crying and shouting into the little device, although they couldn’t hear the sound of it anymore.
“...That night,” Pan muttered, “Father begged the Governor to let me live. He didn’t care that I would be born disabled; he had the money to help me live a good life. My brain showed no issues, and even great intellectual capacities. If only it wasn’t for my appearance... They negotiated for a long time. The Governor refused to have any imperfect child out in the world when the rest of the Core wasn’t allowed such mercy. He was afraid of riots if people knew they killed unborn babies. Normally, they only pretended we died of natural causes in the womb, you see. But Father was too close to all their secrets to not know what was really happening. He had probably never imagined he’d be another victim of their cruel ways.”
Eden felt disgusted too. She remembered their parents had quite an age gap... Had their father tolerated this, until he had met their mom, and given birth to his own children?
“...Eventually, they came to an agreement. I was to be kept in Father’s lab or house as an experiment. I was born, but my body was completely... unusable. Perhaps the Core wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be able to ever get out, or it was truly fate. Either way, our parents really considered me a living being. In fact, Father did his best to keep me alive... but it’s hard when the body isn’t properly functioning, you see. I never even really lived like a human being. I was born, but I never had any experience of the real world, I didn’t grow up as a baby should. I was immediately taken and subjected to this strange thing that’s not even a half decent life. So, he tried to save what was left of my consciousness using what he was the best at: machines. Always more and more machines. Machines meant to teach me about the human world, to feed me knowledge of dozens of software and retain everything. I began to learn... to grow, to get smarter and smarter. Until he realized, my brain was getting smarter than what most human intellectual capacities ever naturally reached. I was still growing, and conscious, but much, much faster than any other entity, or even a normal human, going beyond the known limits of the human brain.”
Pan smiled, and turned to her, distracting Eden from the figure of their sobbing father.
“...Do you understand now? I’m not... completely human, but I am no computer either. I’m something in between, an abnormal mutation, another Chimera created by despair. But, for the first years of my life, I was mostly Father’s assistant, and the one who helped him create the very first System.”
“So… you’re... some sort of... artificial intelligence?” Eden muttered.
“No, Eden, I’m still human. I am your older brother. And I am the smartest, first brain-powered computer intelligence. I am the System’s mind, if it has one.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Eden almost staggered, not from a lack of balance this time, but from the shock. She had an older brother, a half-dead child her father had somehow saved and turned into a computer’s conscience... It sounded like fiction, and yet, in the world they lived in, she knew exactly how this was possible. No, she had actually seen it herself. Pan’s appearance... So they had simply kept him here, and connected his brain like a central unit? They had simply preserved his body all these years, so they would retain the smartest machine ever... a machine with a real, human conscience. She could barely begin to fathom it.
