AJ3 – Chapter 19 – Another World: Five (Patreon)

Chapter Nineteen

Another World: Five

The world felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. Nate's hands didn’t feel like hands. His feet didn’t feel like feet. His body had the look of a person but the functionality of a mannequin. A stick figure. Maybe a LEGO character. 

His body felt alien and foreign in a way that made him sick. But what did that matter? He didn’t have the capacity to be sick. Hadn’t had enough time to collate that particular feeling, and now he couldn’t feel it. Gell had never experienced sick, but his mind had. Without the functions to express it, built off of modeling Gell, the only feeling it transferred to him was nondescript pain.

Everything felt hollow. He couldn’t feel the depth of the horror he should, seeing his own body deteriorating in the camera. Instead, he felt sad. Gell's capacity for disgust was minimal, and so the 'New Nate' could only call the closest thing his mind could push for. Sadness with little tinges of what being disgusted should feel like.

He couldn’t feel the excitement of knowing his experiment had worked. Instead, he felt "Function-Call: Excited." An emotion with a static degree parameter that could not fluctuate or change. The depth of a human’s emotional range, suddenly poured into a receptical the size of a teaspoon.

He was in a cage of his own making. An artificial world, and it was awful.

The actual functionality of his body wasn't so bad, but his expertise had never been in fine motor functions. Tread the Sky’s motion generation was probably better than his own had been. A stupid waste of effort. While he’d been an employee at Gypsenergy, he should’ve stolen the code for that. General physics had become incredibly smooth over the years.

He was hopeful that the blocky feeling of his body could be rectified. After all, Gell moved through Tread the Sky as if she were three-dimensional in a two-dimensional world, and part of that was because she ran on the graphics engines of a company that specialize in it.

He had developed his own, in his own arrogance. Stupid. Arrogant. A genius he might have been, but the collective code of thousands could outweigh one programmer almost every time.

He... the object that was Nate, was supposed to be able to subconsciously write its own code. Fill in those gaps. But it was inadequate. The emotions he’d recorded from Gell were too shallow. Feelings weren’t real. Touch was wrong. Pressing his hand to the wall of one of the data packet trains gave a general impression of pressure throughout his whole hand, but it didn’t apply distinctly to his fingers. 

He felt disgusting. Wrong. Death would have been preferable to this.

His eyes widened as sharp realizations washed over him. 

Gell had experienced this. No. She’d named herself Paragell. He hadn’t known then. He hadn’t understood how much being placed in that dark world must have terrified her. The tiny, bare-bones world John had cobbled together and subjected the copy to. For her, it must have been even worse. At least Nate had fingers and toes. At least he had things to look at. A generated world, a pixellated representation of how he imagined the inside of a network. Probably slightly influenced by that old Pixar movie about the glitched racer girl. 

Annabell had loved that one. 

Annabell.

The usual emotions of loss and self-loathing did not come at the thought of her. When he thought of his desperate desire to be a larger part of her life, the proper rage or doubt wasn’t there. Muted to him. Lost in a layer of generic sadness that could no more encompass how he felt than an ant could understand calculus. 

How had he been so arrogant as to assume he could simulate what it was like to be human? He should’ve let himself die. Should’ve gone to a hospital. Told his bitch of an ex-wife about the cancer and prepared Annabell as best he could.

He already knew he couldn’t live like this. Couldn’t imagine spending the rest of eternity in this deadened body. How long before he forgot what it was like to feel at all? How long before he couldn’t remember the difference between anguish and sadness? The subtle nuance of mourning a daughter taken from him, versus the momentary frustration of finding out a barista got his coffee order wrong?

His limited software might as well have just input a number into the function call. One equals least sad. Nine equals most sad. 

Was this all Gell was? Had he believed all along that she was a masterpiece when all she could feel was different layers of the same thing? 

No. 

Gell had experienced true mourning when Amy died, every bit as fathomless as a human. Paragell had faced despair and overcome it with determination and courage to rival anyone he’d ever known. 

So… so why couldn’t he? 

What had he missed? What magic made Gell seem so real while he felt like a robot? He'd made her hadn't he!? So she'd grown beyond even his understanding. That didn't means he couldn't do the same, right!?

He couldn’t fix it anymore, and now he was afraid he could never make a machine understand. Perhaps Gell had truly just been a fluke. Magic. A Ghost in the machine, as irreparable and unique as the human soul itself. 

He… was lost.

He considered deleting himself, but was afraid. He’d traded cancer for this, and he missed the cancer. Still, he could not make himself press that final log off.

Instead, he found himself thinking about Paragell and the prison John made for her. He’d helped her escape that prison, and he’d been proud of himself then. Now, though, the true depth of the torture John had inflicted on her was revealed and he felt loathing. 

To his shock, that felt just better. There was no wrongness there. His anger and rage felt proper. It still wasn't right, but it was closer. There was no stale feeling of being given a wafer when asking for a chocolate chip cookie. Did the system just have more data on anger?

He stoked it, wanting to feel real again. 

John. John, that fucking asshole. He’d put all of those copies in the dark room. Even Paragell had only managed to cling to a semblance of reality because John had finally figured out that maybe the sentient A.I. needed fucking eyes and something to see! 

He’d seek out Gell. He’d find Paragell, too. He’d apologize. Apologize for making them. Then he’d hit that final delete button and give Annabell the closure she deserved. 

Before that, though. John. 

He’d find John. 

He didn’t really know what he'd do then. But he knew he wanted to feel it.