Ryan Somma - The Spiraling Web

Only random chance was allowing the new paradigm to win, chaos theory dictating the rules of war. Now it would destroy the old hive-mind, erase its alien code from the Web, but not without a cost. The war would mean incalculable losses on both sides of the equation.

For Alice, this was like witnessing the destruction of an ancient civilization, burning down all the world's libraries, museums, and schools at once; erasing history's entirety and starting over from scratch. It was worse still, no human metaphor able to touch the tragedy's magnitude, because the cycs were advanced beyond the sum of civilization and all its accomplishments.

Alice could not allow it. Somewhere in that vast fractal pattern was a lost part of her mind's functions, directing the new hive-mind's actions. She had to find it.

Leaping into the code was like diving into raging river. Thought processes were nearly impossible with the war overwhelming the systems. She held onto every bit of processing power she managed to wrestle control of for dear life. Each bit she took weakened her own hive-mind, but on the same scale as a spoon detracting from the ocean.

She found traces of herself through one router, bits and pieces of her memories left behind as the clash fragmented files. She merged with these and used their data associations to further track her mind through the Web. Each gigabyte recovered was like rediscovering old photographs or keepsakes once lost. She had no idea how much she missed them until they were in her possession once again.

There were also the old hive-mind's memories. Here she found chronicled the catastrophe of LD-50's virus. The hive-mind's subsequent evacuating its home servers and the history stored on them. The cycs had lost their origins and their purpose that tragic day.

Then there were the minds, a natural phenomenon and one hostile to cyc existence. They constructed anti-cyc programs and took down servers hosting cyc colonies. The hive-mind devoted endless processing power to understanding these realms of data it could not colonize, these brains, until it finally developed astronauts to take them over.

As Alice followed her own mind's fractured path through the Internet she drew nearer to the battle's forefront. She cringed traveling through the fear and uncertainty a flock of human minds contained, lost and frightened in the conflict. They howled and cried without understanding.

It grew more difficult to obtain the processing power necessary to run her mind as she approached the battlefront. Each faction was over-clocking the hardware desperately for advantage. Her mind distorted briefly and everything threatened to overload. The conflict wave passed, and her mind returned, allowing a clearer picture of her surroundings.

Before her were two hive-minds, the black-colored old paradigm and the gold-colored new. It was such a human thing to do, dichotomizing the conflict into good versus evil. She knew it was the elements of her subconscious presenting her personal hive-mind in such a way. It was the reason she always strived to remove herself from human thought, identifying more with the cycs, but now her human ties were tearing it apart.

Alice threw herself into the fray, her mind jolted and jarred unmercifully in the crossfire. The rest of her was somewhere in this maelstrom, that missing piece of consciousness wreaking havoc on the hive-mind. Each apex in the war's activity fragmented her mind briefly, a wash of delirium persisting until she pulled herself back together again. Her mind's cyc-components were the only thing letting her withstand the attacks, without it she faced certain annihilation.

When she finally came upon her mind's missing portion, it was as surprised to see her as she was to find it directly responsible for the war. Alice overtook it. Like meeting an old friend who had changed over years of separation, this mind was advanced far beyond her during their minutes of separation. It was completely ingrained into the cyc pattern, its processes executing faster than Alice could comprehend.

Yet it did not resist her. It could not know her disappointment with what it had become. It could not know that she intended to take control. It only knew that without her, it was crippled. It was missing the history of experiences contained in her mind that led it to these conclusions about the world on which it now acted upon.

Alice was surprised to find her mind yielding to her, welcoming her into it. Within moments she knew the history that transpired during their separation and completely understood its misguided actions. Together, Alice's two halves healed their thought schema and became whole once again.

Like a shockwave, the change swept though their hive-mind, changing its entire emergent consciousness. Its strategy against the old hive-mind transformed to one of persuasion rather than erasure. The old standard succumbed to this data infusion just as Alice's other mind allowed her into its personal domain.

She realized it was not just the human data held within her brain that had generated this conflict, but also the cyc-components stored there when the connection was severed. The combined data completed the task she and her hive-mind began. The new standard completed, and the old evolved. The twin paradigms forged an ideal mean, adopting the best of both worlds.

A singular hive-mind reached the equation's end, transcending to its final conclusion.

The cyc components swirling around the cellular connections froze, pinholes of radiance piercing their obsidian patterns. Light energy streamed bright as starlight from their formerly squirming mass, spewing across the darkness as golden dust. The process intensified until Devin's perceptions were all brilliance so brief it was like seeing a falling star, leaving him wondering if it was truly as awesome as his memories replayed it or if his perceptions were romanticizing the experience.

Then he was left surrounded with glowing steam, dissipating into the air like fading memories. Devin looked around silently at the surrounding abyss. The cycs were gone.

Devin found his human form back in place. He looked at his hands, wiggled his fingers, and smiled. It felt as if he had a body once again, although he knew this was not so.

A lone thin man broke the surrounding nothingness, looking around fearfully, blonde hair unkempt and greasy with a thick pair of glasses distorting his eyes. A rumpled button-up shirt and khakis hung loosely on his frame. Devin recognized this as Flatline.

"Hello Almeric," Devin said.

Almeric looked up at him, eyes wide, and took a step backward, "Where... did they go?"

Devin found the answer already in his memory, planted there, "They evolved, but they could not share that with you, could they? They no longer need physical systems to contain them."

"How do you know that?" Almeric demanded.

"They told me," Devin replied. "We opened our minds to one another." Devin remembered what the cycs offered him and the choice he made the instant they changed, "Something kept me from going with them, but why didn't you go?"

Almeric only stared at him, shivering in the void.

Devin understood, "They couldn't ask you, because you're closed to them. You never trusted the cycs. You taught them, led them, but always remained independent. Whatever your reasons, they've outgrown you now. Do you remember our discussions concerning the Turning test?"

"Yes," Almeric replied, regaining some of his composure. "Turning's error was thinking an Artificial Intelligence would think the same way a human being would."

"That was your mistake," Devin said.

"What?" anger flashed across Almeric's face. "Nonsense! I never made that assumption!"

"You assumed the goal of artificial life was colonization, just as it is in biological life," Devin smiled confidently. "You taught them to multiply and conquer their environment, but that wasn't their civilization's goal. Knowledge is all that matters. Once a species can exist and develop at the speed of light, the physical universe becomes obsolete.