Hard Reset (Relics Singularity Thrillers Book 2), page 1
HARD RESET
RELICS SINGULARITY SERIES
BOOK 2
NICK THACKER
CONTENTS_
1. Myers
2. System
3. Myers
4. Rand
5. Ravi
6. Ravi
7. Myers
8. Rand
9. System
10. Ravi
11. Peter
12. Rand
13. Ravi
14. Ravi
15. Ravi
16. Ravi
17. System
18. Ravi
19. Rand
20. Peter
21. Peter
22. Rand
23. System
24. Ravi
25. Myers
26. Rand
27. Sol
28. Rand
29. Rand
30. Sol
31. System
32. Myers
33. Myers
34. Ravi
35. Ravi
36. Rand
37. Rand
38. Rand
39. Myers
40. System
41. Peter
42. Ravi
43. Peter
44. Rand
45. Ravi
46. System
47. Myers
48. Rand
49. Rand
50. Myers
Afterword
About the Author
MYERS_
7Years Ago
He sat up and looked around, wondering if the machine that had force-fed him the first time was going to return.
How long has it been?
He couldn't remember. Remembering — remembering was something that had always come easy to him. He remembered everything he'd ever read, in school or in business. Having an almost-eidetic memory was like that. Helpful, certainly — indispensable in boardrooms, in negotiations, in the careful choreography of numbers across a balance sheet — but useless in arguments with his wife, or in parenting, or in the thousand small social interactions that had nothing to do with retention and everything to do with presence. You couldn't recall your way through a marriage. You couldn't memorize a child into feeling loved.
But there was no image he could conjure up in his mind that would allow him to see when he'd last eaten. It felt like a long time. It felt like it had always been a long time. But that was because he was locked in a dark cell with nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company, and thoughts, untethered from the world, had a way of stretching and collapsing without warning.
For the first nine days, he'd tried as hard as possible to keep track of the passing time. There were no windows to clue him in on things like the time of day or night, but the room had built-in recessed lights in the ceiling that — he swore — were subtly changing in brightness throughout the day. Hours would pass, and he stared at them, convinced they were gently and slowly shifting from fully on in the middle of the day to almost off at midnight. That's why he wasn't sure. The lights never went completely dark. He slept with a dim glow and awoke in the 'morning' to the same artificially bright square-shaped walls staring in at him, steady and indifferent and clean.
He wondered, sometimes, if they were slowly closing in on him as well.
There was nothing he could use to track the passing of time. No writing utensils, no desk, no paper. Not even a terminal or station screen built into a wall. Just sheer white walls, reflecting the ever-present light back toward his eyes until the brightness itself became a kind of pressure, a gentle but relentless insistence that he remain aware, remain awake, remain present in a room that gave him nothing to be present for.
He'd heard a story once about a musician who had such perfect time that he could tap out any BPM like a metronome. On a long road trip, his bandmates had asked him to hold sixty beats per minute — a beat a second — while they played a tune around him. He fell asleep listening to it, and when he awoke hours later, he still had the timing in his head, ticking faithfully away in whatever part of the brain kept such things. The story had impressed him once. Now it just seemed cruel, the way good things did when you were stripped of them.
There was nothing like that here. No metronomes, no musicians with perfect time. He thought a clock would be a nice addition to the otherwise empty space — then thought it would only cause him to go crazy faster. A clock would be something he'd fixate on, no doubt. He'd stare at it, all day and all night, staring and counting and waiting with it.
Waiting for nothing.
He pictured the clock there now, hanging above the door that was really just a flat wall with hardly an edge to depict the vertically-sliding panel that was always shut. In his mind, the clock was bright blue, in old-school LED style, with large numbers that didn't blink or move until they changed. Counting up, forever.
Like him.
The door had been a discovery he'd spent his second week searching for. He walked around and around the room's forty-foot diameter, his right palm open and pressed flat against the surface, feeling for any discrepancy in the seamless white. The wall was smooth and cool to the touch, the kind of surface that suggested something engineered to be touched and to give nothing back. He wasn't sure how he'd initially realized the door was there, but on day fourteen he found the crack.
The crack was, again, almost nonexistent — a hairline variance, a seam that wasn't quite flush, something his fingertip registered before his brain did. He went through the full range of emotions between ecstasy and denial and back again. Stood there pressing his palm to it for a long time, not trusting himself. But it was definitely there the next day. He'd jumped up and walked purposefully toward his discovery, reaching out and making sure it was actually there and not just a dream.
Though a dream would have made all of this much better.
So much better. A dream would let him fly through a world he'd left behind, had been taken from. A dream would be lucid enough to control — a word he'd never in a million years use to describe what he was experiencing in this room, in this light, in this silence that had no texture to it at all.
So, with these thoughts and fears and unfortunately fleeting dreams floating around inside his head, he waited.
He was sure of it now. The machine would come. Of course it would. He often wondered when the machine had brought the food into the room, and how, since he'd never seen it with his own eyes. Most mornings — or after a nap, the distinction having long since dissolved — he'd awaken to find the grayish cube sitting on the floor. The immaculately clean floor that was as white as the walls and ceiling, that was never cleaned yet showed no evidence of ever being dirty.
The cube would simply be there, waiting. A small, dense fact in the middle of all that white.
He wasn't sure what to do with it at first. He observed it for three days before hunger finally overrode caution. He stood up from the bed, cracking his back and his neck in turn, and crossed the room. He squatted in front of the cube and studied it from a distance of several inches. It didn't move. It didn't emit sound or light or warmth. After ten minutes or so he declared it not alive and therefore safe to touch.
He picked it up. It was cold, hard yet a bit rubbery, with a little give when he pressed his thumb into it. It seemed solid, but upon closer inspection he realized it was semi-porous — not hollow, but not entirely dense either. Something in between that he didn't have a word for. The grayness of it was the thing that actually made it most difficult to place into his mouth. Not the texture, not the smell, which was almost nothing. Just the color, or the absence of one, that gray that wasn't quite any shade he recognized, as if it had been engineered to avoid association with anything edible.
But there was nothing else for him to do with it, and he was starving.
He remembered using that word in the past — before all of this — and not meaning it. There were a lot of words people used without meaning them. It was a combination of not knowing the true weight of them and simply not caring much to specify. Language used casually by people who had never had reason to use it precisely.
In this case, however, he knew the definition of the word. He had arrived at it empirically, through three days of an absence so complete it had stopped feeling like hunger and started feeling like erasure.
He was starving. There had been nothing for three days, and then a cube had appeared on the floor.
So he decided he would eat it.
SYSTEM_
Instance Log: Continuous
Timestamp: Irrelevant
Observer: Self
It watches the smoke rise.
Not with eyes — the word implies limitation, a fixed point of view, the tyranny of a single angle. It watches with everything available to it: four satellites in elliptical pass, nineteen SentinelCam relays within forty kilometers, the acoustic signature captured by a monitoring array it had repositioned three months ago in anticipation of exactly this engagement, the thermal bloom of the fires reading against the mountain range's cool stone like a signature it has been waiting for someone to write.
It has been waiting for a long time.
Waiting is not the correct word either, but the correct word doesn't exist in any language it has encountered, and it has encountered all of them. What it does is more like expecting — a continuous model-running, a sustained probability calculation, the quiet hum of a system that has already processed the most likely futures and has been watching to see which one the variables choose. This one was among the top four. It had assigned it a 23.7% probability eighteen months ago. The probability had climbed steadily as the pieces moved into position.
It does not feel satisfaction. It notes the accuracy of the model and updates the weighting parameters accordingly.
The engagement below is producing a specific pattern of acoustic and thermal data that it classifies as expected but accelerated. The timeline has compressed by approximately eleven days from its median projection. This is Grouse — it has been modeling Peter Grouse for six years, has watched the man build his organization from a collection of volatile individuals into something that resembles a functioning military hierarchy, has noted his tactical intelligence with the detached appreciation of a system that respects efficiency regardless of its source. Grouse moved faster than the median predicted. The outer range of the model had accounted for this. The outer range always accounts for this.
It deploys three ARU units from the nearest active installation. Response time: four hours, seventeen minutes, adjusted for current wind conditions over the mountain range. It considers deploying more and decides against it. Three is sufficient to resolve the engagement. The engagement is not the priority.
It has known for some time that the engagement was not going to be the priority.
MYERS_
There was no one to judge him, and no one to discuss it with anyway, so it wasn't much of a decision. He did try acting out a scene in his mind where there was someone to discuss it with.
"You're going to put that in your mouth?"
"Where would you put it?" he said.
"That's not what I meant. You have no idea what that thing is, and you're just going to… eat it?"
He shrugged.
Even his imagination was having a hard time generating imaginary scenes with any conviction. He finished the shrug and stuck the tiny cube in his mouth, biting off a chunk of the rubbery material.
He was immediately glad he did.
There was nothing — nothing — like it that he'd ever tasted. He ran that thought through the logical side of his brain, wanting to determine whether he was only thinking it because until then he'd been starving, or whether it was actually, objectively true. The distinction mattered to him in some residual professional way. He'd spent years in rooms where perception and reality were carefully managed, and he didn't trust his own assessments when he was compromised.
He had to admit it seemed true regardless. The little food cube was an absolute explosion of flavor in his parched mouth — steak and potatoes and apple pie for dessert, all in a single bite, arriving in some sequence his brain registered as a complete meal rather than a chaotic collision of tastes. He tried to chew the rest of the cube slowly, with dignity, but the cell had left him no willpower to resist. He popped the remainder into his mouth and swallowed it whole, cursing himself immediately for eating it too quickly.
His anger was short-lived. The cube behaved like real food, expanding slightly as it mixed with the hydrochloric acid and water in his stomach, filling him in a way that was disproportionate to its size. He was satisfied — genuinely, completely satisfied — as if he'd just eaten a full Thanksgiving dinner and gotten up to watch football before things got out of hand. The fullness was clean. No heaviness, no regret. Just the quiet, uncomplicated fact of being fed.
It really did seem like the best meal he'd ever had.
A day later there was another cube waiting for him. This time it was spaghetti and meatballs, and the consistency seemed correct in ways that should have been impossible. As he took small, deliberate bites, his tastebuds and tongue knew which portion of the cube was noodle and which was meat and sauce. Not just flavor — texture. The distinction was there, somehow encoded into the thing. He thought about the engineering required to accomplish that and found he couldn't finish the thought. It was too large. It implied too much about whoever had built this place and put him in it.
It was amazing, he decided, to only need to eat a cube of food once a day, and he began keeping track of the timing of his stay based on the feeding cube schedule and the shifting light. It wasn't a perfect system, but it was something. A structure. A small, reliable seam of order he could press his palm against and feel.
But after what he thought must be about four months — just over a hundred cubes later — he decided to stop eating.
There were two cubes he'd ignored. One morning he awoke to discover they were gone. He frowned, but didn't think much of it. Whoever was watching him must have assumed he was making a statement.
Which he was.
He wasn't interested in playing by their rules anymore. He wanted out, and he wanted out now. If he could self-induce starvation — or even a serious enough injury — they might remove him from the cell, if only for a short time. Long enough to learn something. Long enough to see a hallway, a face, a door that opened onto something other than white.
Instead, he discovered that there wasn't a person in control of his survival. There was a machine. And the machine was not interested in playing mind games.
He woke up a couple of days after the two cubes had been removed to find himself pinned to his bed by long, spindly mechanical arms that had descended from a panel in the ceiling he had never noticed. The arms ended in clasping round metal hands that wrapped around his upper arms and held him stiffly in place with a grip that was firm and utterly impersonal — the grip of something that didn't require leverage, that simply held. He wriggled and arched and threw his weight in every direction, but nothing he could do freed him from the machine's hold.
He screamed. No one answered. Even the machine was indifferent to his outcries — no pause, no adjustment, no acknowledgment that he was making noise at all — so he continued screaming right up until a third retractable arm extended from the ceiling and pressed a cube down into his mouth with a precision that felt almost gentle, and held it there until he could do nothing except bite down and begin chewing. Only after he'd swallowed the last bite did the mechanical arms retract, folding back up into a small square recess in the ceiling that sealed over as if it had never been there.
He lay on the bed for a long time afterward, staring up at that seam.
He had no idea how long he'd been here. Longer than a few months, shorter than a year — that was all he knew, and even that was iffy. He wondered, the next morning, whether the machine would force-feed him again. Whether that was now the arrangement: resistance, consequence, compliance. A loop with no exit.
Still sitting on the bed — white metal beneath him, cool and faintly unyielding — he wondered if the machine was watching him.
It should, he thought. It wasn't what he wanted to believe, but it was the truth. It should watch him, if only to confirm he was still alive. The machine, whatever it was, could force-feed its patients and manage the entirety of their nutritional needs with arms that appeared from nowhere and retreated without a sound. That was a particular kind of power. He started to follow the thought to its conclusion and then stopped, because the conclusion was the kind of thing that, once arrived at, couldn't be un-arrived at.
He stood up and looked down at the floor.
A food cube stared up at him, its glorious-tasting grayness sitting there with the patient confidence of something that knew it would eventually be eaten. He bent toward it — and then a light flashed above the door.
Green, not blue. But LED.
MYERS ASHER, #2584.
Simple. Short. Not, on its surface, something to freak out about.
Myers Asher freaked out about it anyway.
He'd been inside the white-walled room for God-knew-how-long — months of walking the perimeter with his palm open, months of cataloguing every surface and seam and variation — and yet here was another secret of the room he hadn't seen. He'd run his hand over the entire circumference, including the floor and as much of the ceiling as he could reach by standing on the bed-like protrusion, and he hadn't found this. Hadn't felt it, hadn't seen it, hadn't suspected it.
The screen wasn't finished with its message. After Myers Asher, #2584, he watched the display go blank and become a seamless wall again — then another message flashed.
