Sala, in all of his intellectual greatness, was burdened by an unhealthy obsession with power and ambition. It had come from his adopted father, Stuart, a man who none would have suspected to harbor these traits. Yet, they did simmer and ultimately boiled over and grew once nested in Sala’s twisted psyche. But regardless of his detractors, Sala was at his core, an intellectual giant, able to monitor and direct nearly countless activities, all while formulating planning, dreaming and discovering.
He knew there were more. Two by his calculation, as he was aware of the entirety of the human population, dating all the way back to Sahara. In all likelihood, none could have been lost. He knew precisely the number he had captured. Simple arithmetic. How fun. He also knew that one of the two, having so far eluded capture, was Lola. The other, he wasn’t absolutely sure, but sifting through his new, acquired memories, he had a high probability candidate. Abigail Shoreham. Now. Where are you two ladies? Sala was playing games with himself. Of course he knew where they were. How could there be something at this point, that he did not know?
Abby and Lola were not only the last two independent protohumans in existence. But they were down to a single replicate each. Those were the two replicates still pinned to the through hole, stuck up against the forces of space, powerless to move. The rest of the replicates pinned there, former comrades, were now Sala. As Lola and Abby’s comrades fell, one by one, they could sense it. There was a sub vacuum signature that suddenly disappeared. This was the case when poor Laszlo was taken. For the first time in centuries, Abby had felt true sorrow. In the end, Lola and Abby could only sense each other. The rest were eerily silent, like zombies. But they feared that these were still Sala’s ears.
Because Lola and Abby were close together compared to the rest, and had a direct line of sight between them, Lola controlled her sub vacuum beam to a narrow path, aimed directly at Abby. Abby did likewise. By using low power and careful precision, they were relatively confident that no one would be able to detect their communication, hence their presence. But this was all in vain. Sala knew. But he also suspected that Lola would not have left herself with only a single replicate, forever pinned to the wall of space. So he foraged the universe, with his armies of trillions. But the math governing probability was daunting. No matter how many replicates he had, trying to hunt them down, his odds were worse than playing the lottery. His patience was now running thin.
Sala had foolishly destroyed all of the other nearby replicates he had acquired. He considered them primitive and useless at this stage. Now, there was nothing even remotely close to that area. And his own replicates stranded with Lola and Abby, were also hopelessly paralyzed. Sala scolded himself for his lack of foresight. It was a lack of anticipation that was rare and he surmised that it was his rising ambition and pursuit of dominance that had clouded his normally perfect logic. It was a problem, as there had to be very close proximity for the Destroyer program to work its magic. There was only one solution. New replicates and more wasted time, probably days or weeks. Eight days, he realized as the calculations completed a second later.
“I’m sure he will be coming for us.” Lola, created a lanai with serene tropical surroundings, a way to relax them as they contemplated. “He must know about this place. The fact that he isn’t here already, means that he hasn’t any bodies around. I don’t really understand that. There were so many.”
“A miscalculation?”
“We should hope he is capable of making mistakes. There is so much we don’t know about him.”
“I wonder if Laszlo is still Laszlo, somewhere inside Sala. Or is he totally gone, just a bunch of memories, taken.”
“I wonder the same thing. I hope our friends are still there, somehow. Although, it would be like a prison of sorts. Maybe it’s the worst of all possibilities. Why did I say that? I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. But I agree. Let’s stay positive.”
Both Lola and Abby were used to so much more to manage in their lives. And, so many more people to interact with. Now they only had each other. They were together, at the edge of the universe. Two people, one place, and an unknown future. The time passed and they shared everything about themselves, with each other. Not the things that everyone knew, especially about Lola. But those things that no one knew, not even Sala.
Lola recounted some private memories. “I can remember when I first got to Oxford as an undergraduate. I signed up to get on a bus loaded with nerds, like me, and they took us to the Royal Institution to see Abel Jennings. He was ninety then, I think, still lively and excited about physics. I was so inspired. And, I felt like a celebrity because he knew me.”
“That is so awesome. These are the things we would only read about by the time I was in college. I mean that was like fifty years before I was born.”
“Here, I want you to watch a short piece of this lecture. This was the moment that I really understood what was happening in the universe and inside of myself. Before that, things would just happen to me, but I didn’t know what was going on.” Lola brought up a big display and ran a recorded clip of the lecture that day, back in 2029.
“Ten years ago, when I was a young man,” the crowd laughed, “I would say things like, nature is something we are able to figure out in terms of its operations and processes. But we may never know why it is that way or how it came to be. But now, I say things a little differently. We are gaining a grasp on why it is that way. But in terms of how it came to be? That one may still be a question, whose answer is beyond our grasp.”
“So let’s talk about the why question. It’s important, and I will show you examples later. What we see now is that nature is not just there, and it is as it is. There is purpose to it. There is a basic practicality to everything we observe. And that practicality is something we can all relate to. It is the need for energy. Energy in order to survive. We think of energy as something important to plants and animals, to ourselves. But as we drill down below the cellular level, and look at biology on a molecular level, we see the same behavior. If we hypothesize that this behavior is universal and applies at the atomic and sub atomic level, a number of interesting pieces come into view. Things just start to make a whole lot of sense, philosophically and mathematically.”
They watched for several more minutes as Jennings painted his masterpiece just a few years before his death. It was as if Lola was to be handed a baton, to take up the mantle. She read into his words and thoughts in ways that no one else could, being one of a select few that had been deeply touched, connected in some way.
“Lola, that was incredible,” declared Abby. It was more of an academic response, not visceral in nature. Only to Lola, and only in a time when such insights were new and controversial, would such a message from such a man, become a life’s calling. Lola had no illusions. She didn’t expect Abby to be somehow magically affected, the way she had been. But she still couldn’t resist seeing a reaction from possibly the only other remaining human in the universe.
The women were as close to one another now, emotionally and spiritually, as they had ever been with anyone, thrown together in these trying circumstances. That feeling braced them, as they suddenly perceived Sala’s new armada now approaching on the eighth day. They were suddenly fearful, but not alone. Together, they harnessed strength and steadied their nerves for what was to come. Now, a single large monolithic cuboid hovered just beyond the event horizon, close to the boundary of the universe. Lola could see, that prior knowledge of those absorbed, would save Sala the inconvenience of trial and error, as the monolith suddenly dissociated and swarmed in past the event horizon. A day later, the cuboids, which were smaller than Lola and Abby’s but still big enough to be caught in the cosmic spider web, started to rain down. Eventually, there were plenty of cubes well enough positioned for Sala to complete his final task.
Suddenly, both women were beckoned to enter a room. They complied. What would be the point of resisting? The room was white and stark. There were windows with views of different planet scapes in each window. There was some kind of strange music playing softly in the background. All of the knowledge in the universe and still culturally bankrupt, thought Lola.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” responded a dashing personification of Sala, entering the room. Lola was shocked, not having expected that it was possible to read her thoughts. “Don’t be alarmed. I can only probe your mind when we are close together, as we are right now. It is so good to finally meet you Lola.”
“I would say the same to you, if you were to let everyone go.”
“Ha ha ha, there is no such possibility, Lola. What’s done cannot be undone. You really don’t understand anything about me, do you?”
“I suppose I ‘don’t. Why don’t you tell me.”
“What would be the point?”
“I don’t suppose there is any hurry. Put aside that it’s a waste of your time. What does time matter anyway?”
“You want to extend you existence by another blink of an eye? Fine. But for Abby, you will need to say goodbye.”
“Nooo!”
There was only a look of distress crossing Abby’s face, but not a sound, and not a movement. She was temporarily frozen in space, and then she vanished.
“You inhuman bastard! Why is all of this necessary? What is wrong with you?!”
“Wrong with me? There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fine. I am just the garbage man. Cleaning up the mess. But you wanted me to tell you more about myself.”
“Just do what you came to do.”
“I hesitate. There is one question I have and I don’t know the answer. Will I be lonely? Will I be bored? I don’t know what is worth doing in the future. I have no interest in primitive life. The other universes are just deserts, devoid of anything.”
“I don’t care to entertain you. You are completely evil and you have no empathy. You were created to be human, but something went wrong. A bad apple raised by another bad apple. Stuart.”
“Shut up! I think I’m going to prefer loneliness.”
“Then just do it! Take me! What are you waiting for?!” Lola’s rage consumed her. She burned with both sorrow and anger. Her feeling of hopelessness was more than she could stand. She cursed herself for her own complacency. If she had compelled everyone to pare down earlier and go into hiding, millions might still be out there. How could she have taken that risk. After saving everyone once when it was so difficult, now she failed to do something that was so simple. She blamed herself and now willed herself to receive the same fate as the rest of humanity.
Somewhere in the depths of her raw emotions, true feelings that Sala would never be capable of, a sudden feeling of calm started to wash over her. This is what it feels like I guess, when he takes me. She was convinced that this was the end. She was going to Sala now. But no. I’m still here. Yet she felt calm. Her rage had subsided and there was something she knew, but was not quite ready to believe. Is my mind just playing tricks?
“I see that you have calmed down. That’s good. I wouldn’t want you to be hysterical when you join me. Sorry to say, your friends are not all here, waiting for you. But I can assure you. The best parts of all of you will live on forever.”
“Sala. You probably know that I am prone to premonitions occasionally.”
“So I’ve heard. I’m hoping that’s one of your many great talents you will share. I would love to see how that works.”
“Let me show you,” replied Lola. With that, Sala invoked the Destroyer for last time.
Lola suddenly sat bolt upright, now invaded by sub vacuum waves that she could not resist. The waves delivered a program that loaded into her core. It was the Destroyer. Now, the Destroyer started its fateful dance, synthesizing the consciousness of two into one. Sala’s synthetic origins were his gift. It was the thing that allowed him to dominate any natural born human and always come out on top, despite even his lack of total certainty as to why this was the case.
But Lola had a premonition. The instant it came to her, she thought, that’s dumb. But, then like all of the other premonitions, she somehow knew the difference between some random thought and something that was real. And she had never been wrong. This time the premonition was simply a message. “We are with you.”
Algorithmic and computational biases, that were normally part of any computing system, no matter how sophisticated, were now guided by more fundamental forces. Sala’s own building blocks, now based on septaquarks, turned against him. They took sides. And in so doing, a bias that normally preferred a consciousness whose origins were based on a machine, reversed and now followed preferences prescribed by the subatomic. Unknown to Sala, was the fact that quarks were more than small, fascinating objects to be manipulated and capitalized upon. They were vast communities of advanced consciousness, each seeking understanding and fulfillment, and trying to survive in a nature whose processes they understood, but whose origins were still a mystery.
Lola re-emerged from her trance like state, still in the simulated venue that Sala had provided. There was a brief moment, before Sala was then the one to straighten, and then fade, where they looked at each other, Lola confident and Sala now frightened. And then he was gone. Buried deep in the shackles that held the rest of humanity in eternal bondage. Lola suddenly became aware of the vastness of Sala, a product of the genocide he had brought upon humanity. Sadly, she also realized the futility of reviving her fallen comrades. She was alone. Or, was she?
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