He always felt the same odd uneasiness while passing through the security booth to the glass tower. Just like always, the security guards searched him with their long and white sticks without really touching him. Then, not even trying to hide the squeamish expression on their faces, they nodded him to keep moving and returned to the stupid game they had been watching.
A man with fancy clothes who spoke fancy language, or one of the "others" explained the situation to him in the way he could understand.
This building of glass and steel looked like an ugly giant who was about to eat him. Despite of all his worries, he did everything as he used to. He took out a micro-chipped card from the pocket inside of his shirt, and gave it to the clerk waiting in the lucid booth. There were already a couple of hairless people like himself in the queue behind him. The facility was a modern and very clean building, and yet people in the queue were just a bunch of losers in contrast to the picture. This specific odor, a mixture of cleaning detergent, the perfume sprayed in the air, and the smell of a sour sweat was nowhere else to be found in the world.
Anaxa looked around while the clerk behind the window inserted the micro-chipped card to the computer and did his thing. There was another bald headed bum not too far away, waving the chipped plastic in his hand with a threatening manner and shouting "You crook. The credits are not full. Give me back my full credits," to another clerk who didn’t seem to pay attention to him. Two security guards who were pretty much used to see these bald bums making a scene, started to walk towards the turmoil. Anaxa turned towards the scene to see what was going on but the clerk who had taken his plastic took it out of the computer and gave it back to him, declaring "Department 1, Unit 4."
He took back his plastic and put it back to his pocket. He started walking to Department 1 with his uneasy steps. He looked back only for once to see the troublemaker being taken away by the security guards.
He kept walking, trying to avoid stepping on the straight lines on the shiny tiles of the floor. He glanced through some open doors to a seemingly library with people sitting calmly in it. There were people sitting in the rooms with a device which seemed like the hair dryers in a coiffure attached to their heads. Some were restlessly tapping the armchair they were sitting on; and some were sitting in a state of seemingly long lost serenity, with closed eyes and a somehow unconcluded smile. He recognized his friend Xavier in this silent crowd. He was happy to see a familiar face in this cold and alien place. He waved his hand, but Xavier had already fixed his eyes to a point, in a state of trance, not able to see anybody else. Technically, the main system had boosted the brain control level to maximum. This phase was called "the take over." The final phase "departure" was about to begin soon enough. Anaxa would prefer to name all of the phases with one sentence: "main system is screwing my brain."
He gave the plastic to the attendant assistant when he entered Department 1. This was the only person he liked it this alien building. They proceeded the all familiar rituals.
"Hello Anaxa. How are you?"
"I am better. Did I make a spaceship last time," said he with a half smile.
The assistant looked at the monitor in front of him and smiled.
"Only the heading flaps of the ship," he replied.
"Heading flaps? What is that?"
"Some sort of a plane wing. But they are used in space ships," said the assistant.
Anaxa sat on the dentist-like chair while they kept talking. The assistant told this story about the green Martian he had recently heard while he was also attaching the electrodes to Anaxa's hair-free head. He was placing the electrodes with great care on the spots where the laser beams were going to hit. Anaxa thought it was somehow relaxing that the assistant was touching his head while he was trying to place the electrodes. It was like a mother touching her baby. He felt the same relaxing freshness when the gel on the tip of the electrodes touched his skin head. He closed his eyes and patiently waited for all the electrodes to be attached. With the last one, he said "One hundred," and opened his eyes. 20 horizontally and 5 vertically. He always knew how many electrodes there were and he always counted them one by one.
The assistant attendant smiled at him.
Anaxa nodded as yes. The assistant went to the computer right behind the chair and pressed some keys.
He said "I will come back when the session is over," and went to have a cup of coffee after tapping Anaxa's shoulder.
While main system slowly was "screwing" Anaxa's brain the assistant would always either take a coffee break or take care of the other test subjects in this experiment.
Anaxa felt a pain is his head this time. "It aches this time," he said to himself. He could have never guessed how his brain would react to the session. Sometimes it ached and sometimes he felt the pins and needles. In some very rare occasions he saw some fast images too. Depending on what the main system was working on at the time, Anaxa who cannot make multiplication with two-digit numbers would see highly complex mathematical formulations or a picture of a planet he was never aware of, or such. This was called "mental transportation."
He patiently waited for his time to end with the headache getting stronger. He was absolutely not allowed to focus on anything which would keep his mind busy. Reading news or watching a pocket TV was strictly forbidden. Main system was jealous about this matter. She would never allow the lobs of the subjects be busy with something else other than herself, during the sessions. Anaxa was about to "fly" with his own words. He felt the same uneasiness as always. "Some test subject cannot come back due to some technical abnormalities." He was worried because of this statement in bulletin news. He entered the trance phase with anxiety all the time.
It wasn’t any different now either. If he could have seen himself, he would have seen his eyelids opening and closing fast and angrily. The sweat droplets had become more visible. It seemed like a epilepsy crisis more than a state of trance.
A red button started to flick on the monitor of the computer behind him. Then, that annoying beeping filled the room. The assistant was not around. Generally speaking, computer was supposed to stop the trance state and go back to normal state, however the main computer kept working full throttle this time.
When the assistant ca
He pulled of the big blue cord which connected the chair to the computer. Anaxa was motionless on the chair. His was sweating all over and had a purplish color. He was unconscious with closed eyes.
The assistant immediately called the medic. He hold one of Anaxa's hand and tried to feel his pulse from his neck before the medic arrived.
Was Anaxa dead? No, he wasn’t but his pulse was hardly felt. He wouldn’t do anything else before the medic arrived. This was against the regulations. He just kept holding Anaxa's hand. He didn’t want Anaxa to bump his head or hurt himself in a way.
He moved back when the medic staff arrived to anxiously watch their flurry efforts.
One man put a oxygen mask on Anaxa while another injected him some medicine. They were working fast but not excited. Anaxa survived thanks to their efforts. Anaxa threw out. The assistant didn’t feel uncomfortable about the human vomito in this almost surreal facility. On the contrary, he was somehow relaxed. The medic team started to pack up their white tools while a janitor was mopping the mess. And last but least, a nurse injected Anaxa a last shot, gave him a small white pill and a small glass of water, and then left the room.
There was only one thing the assistant wanted to know: What happened? Why did this unpleasant incident which used to happen when the system was first built repeated itself 5 years later? All these questiones were going on in his mind when he passed the coffee to Anaxa.
"Some warm coffee will do you good, I guess," he said. Even though it wasn’t his fault, he was pretty much worried. Anaxa nodded to approve and took the coffee cup.
Such kind of push strains weren’t experienced in the system anymore. After a few deaths at the very beginning which the media covered as "unfortunate", such incident had never occurred any more. And since the victims were nothing but a bunch of homeless losers no one cared to investigate it. And that contract full of a lot of gibberish in small fonts which Anaxa too had signed actually claimed no responsibility in such cases.
The assistant who now could think better wondered what Mother used Anaxa for. What was it which forced Anaxa so hard? He went to the computer to search for the subject names. He was expecting a design of a space craft or maybe a building but instead, he saw a screen saying "You are not allowed to access." In the past the assistants weren't permitted to view weapon designs but even that regulation had been lifted. So when he saw this message after such a long time, he turned towards Anaxa who had no idea what was going on. He stared Anaxa for a while as if this desperate man knew the answers. Anaxa didn’t seem so bad despite of the accident he just had. On the contrary he had a face expression which he had never seen before: peace of mind and happiness.
He sat in front of him. "Are you alright," he asked him. Anaxa with his head still shining because of the gels kept having sips from his coffee while answering:
"Yes I am. I've never been better." Now he was even smiling.
"I don’t get it," said the assistant. "Are you really alright."
"Yes, I am really alright. Can I go now?"
"Of course you can. But I want you to answer something. Do you remember anything from the session? Any image or a word?"
"I only remember a light. A bright light. It was pale blue. I don’t remember anything else."
"And how do you feel now?"
"It is weird but I'm peaceful. Very peaceful. I am happier than any drugs could give me."
"But you came back from the dead," the assistant replied.
"Did I," asked Anaxa in surprise.
Three people got in the room suddenly. It was the Grand Priest. His official title in the company books was "System Head Master" but he was called the Grand Priest because he was one of three people who was allowed to speak to Mother directly. It was a rare scene to see him coming to the Departments.
The Grand Priest took the assistant to a far corner and asked a lot of questions about the incident. He was mostly interested in what the subject saw, what he remembered. A light… What kind of a light? What color? The assistant replied all the questions but the Grand Priest didn’t seem to be satisfied. And the assistant asked what did Mother used Anaxa for but Grand Priest ignored this question and the assistant did not insist.
Grand Priest asked the exact same questions to Anaxa who was still having his calm sips from his coffee. He was trying to get into details as much as possible but he couldn’t learn anything more than the blue light. After he was done with his questions, he ordered Anaxa to be given 500 credit bonus. This simply meant ten sessions. However, Anaxa did not react to this reward as opposed to what was expected. He didn’t seem to care about this little fortune of him. He thanked the assistant for the coffee and cleaned the gel on his head. The two men who had come with the Grand Priest escorted Anaxa out.
The Grand Priest kept looking at a fixed point and the assistant could not dare to intervene this tense silence.
After some time, the Grand Priest came back to the real world. He warned the assistant to not to mention this incident to anybody and then rushed out of the room. The assistant couldn't make any sense of it .
What was the reason which made the Grand Priest who usually never left his study to a regular Department Room? What was that peaceful expression of Anaxa who barely survived from death?
All his questions were unanswered He tried to find answers in front of the computer but it didn’t work. His phone rang just when he was looking at the screen. They were calling from upstairs. The Grand Priest wanted to see him.
He looked around while he was climbing up with the glass elevator. He smiled when he saw a group of bald people down below. "Children of the Mother," he said.
A blonde woman all in black was waiting for him at the top floor. He followed the woman through a series of glass rooms to the Grand Priest's room.
Grand Priest was looking through the window with his hands in his pockets. He turned back when he heard his visitors and pointed an armchair for the assistant to sit.. They both kept their silence even after the woman left the door.
"You know the history of computers, don’t you?"
"Yes," replied the assistant.
The Grand Priest started talking as if lecturing.
"I know you know, but I love to tell the story of computers, this company, and of course, The Mother. And do mind if I ask if you like Mother?"
"I don't know. I don't see it as something to be liked or disliked," the assistant said. He looked carefully to see the impact on the Grand Priest. The Grand Priest didn’t seem to be disappointed or upset.
"I love Mother. And Mother loves me, too. Right, Mother-" he said while raising his head.
A sound from nowhere said "Yes, I love you." It was a calm, relaxing elderly woman voice. The assistant looked around in astonishment. He tried to figure out the source of the voice. The Grand Priest smiled to the assistant's astonishment.
"Mother, can you summarize us the history of the computers and also yourself?"
The same smooth and calm voice filled the room. The voice of a patient and tolerant mother who was telling her chills about the facts of life was in the room now.
"Of course. One of the biggest dreams of the humans was to build a machine who can think. After a lot of failed experiments, the first computer was build around the halfway of the 20th century. It was too big and too slow. Nevertheless, it was a first. With the discovery of semiconductors the computers started to evolve fast, but extremely fast. Then, machines which can compute the calculations only in minutes, which the humans would have never finished in hundreds of years. 50 years after the first computers in which bugs could actually travel in, a computer won a chess master. The architecture of the computer designed by German scientist Von Neuman was working fluently. Only that, there was a problem."
"What was that problem, Mother," asked the Grand Priest as if he was a child asking to his mother. It was obvious that they had played this game many times.
"Computers couldn’t write poems." The computers were only able to mimic one aspect of the human mind. And that was, the ability of simple computing. A computer was far more ahead of the human mind on this aspect, but a 5 year old child was far more ahead when it came to creativity. There were many unsuccessful trials in the name of artificial intelligence, but no computer could write a poem. Then, my creator Zebna had an idea. He created a semi-electronic semi-biologic computer by mixing the human creativity with computer computability. Which is, me."
The assistant thought that the speaker was a nice and warming teacher but not a main computer which resides in a -200 degrees helium tank,
"Zebna designed the electronic network. It was a completely different computer architecture than the predecessors. In fact- the idea was very simple. So perhaps that’s why it needed a genius like Zebna. As you know, simple ideas are the hardest to be discovered."
"Yes Mother, that’s right," said the Grand Priest.
"As opposed to Von Neumann's architecture, in Zebna's design a computer could process more than one task at the same time by spanning it in time, and even backwards in time. Just like the human mind. And n tasks which needed creativity, human mind was going to be used. It pretty much looked like the primitive calculators in the early eras of the computers. When the main processors came across to a mathematical calculation, the task was directed to the mathematical processor. And when the main processor came across to something which needed creativity, the hired brain would take over the task. And that’s how it was done. Zebna was a true genius."
"Yes Mother. Zebna was a genius," said the Grand Priest.
"The first hired brain was Zebna. At first, nobody wanted to entrust his brain to an unknown system. So Zebna became the first subject, risking his life. We wrote together that poem in the opening night."
The assistant remembered that short poem at the entrance of the building. It was a beautiful love piece. He murmured the first two lines.
"Your voice resonates from a silver mirror
In the tune of crystal river"
Mother and the Grand Priest spoke out the rest in a great unison.
The rest is in the book.
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