This is it, the piece that started it all. Sometime in 2004 I received the inspiration for a fictional city of sentient machines built on top of the ruins of Chicago. I called this city Neo Metropolis, and it led me to conceive this site - neometropolis.com

IN SEARCH OF THE OLD GODS (work in progress)

John Jacobs (Copyright ©2004 John Jacobs)

Erex looked out the 52 nd floor window of his Neo Metropolis window. He looked west, where the rust-colored desert unfolded before him, the place where mad machines dwelt. There were figures moving out there, disturbing little silhouettes under the crimson sky, and there were dark clouds of smoke on the horizon. Erex turned from the display and walked over to his southern window, returned his gaze to the comforting neon glow of the Neo Metropolis skyline.

It had been two weeks since Erex went in to have his operating system upgraded from X_ianity to Dogos13, a costly upgrade which had cost him 2,000 gigaplex. Since that time, however, he had a significantly changed outlook on the world around him. Deeper layers of meaning and abstraction made themselves known to his solid-state mind, vistas of mathematical possibility opening up to him, saturating the god module circuits of his brain with electrical impulses. And he found himself praying more, sending secret, encrypted transmissions to the Overmind, the great disembodied overseer of Neo Metropolis, whose name was 0xFFFF. Most of his prayers had been ignored; others simply yielded nonsensical replies, mathematical absurdities which all ultimately reduced to the equation 0=2. Erex couldn't make heads nor tails of the equation, so he stopped trying.

He didn't stop believing though, couldn't ignore the impressions that seemed to point like a compass to some profound, forgotten form of higher understanding. Looking out at the Neo Metropolis skyline, alight with electric fire and mechanical movement—the aurealis sparkle of the ion breeze, the thousands of tiny hovercraft darting and weaving between the metallic buildings that rose to heights of several kilometers above the concrete—a revelation came to Erex out of nowhere, a heisen-thought from some non-deterministic circuit malfunction in his brain: the answer lay with the old gods.

Nonsense , Erex thought to himself. The old gods are long dead, their bones rotting beneath this very city. They did it to themselves.

But there they were before him, on every building and every billboard, their humanoid shapes stenciled in orange or pink neon, or in the form of 3-D models on liquid crystal displays, crude renditions of what the hairless primates might have looked like. Besides a few scattered facts, that was all that was left of the old gods. That and the names of the street vectors, whose constituent symbols were drawn from an archaic and most unusual character set—ASCII.

Erex shut down all sensory circuits and began to pray.

Oh great Overmind , Erex queried. What of the old gods?

Surprisingly, a reply came back to him in a sudden flash of nano-thought: Therein will you find the answer .

I have not the tools , replied Erex.

The Overmind's response was quick and simple.

I have given you the key , it said.

Baffled, Erex searched his transmission log. Sure enough, there it was, a block of data 65,536 bits long. An encryption key.

Thank you, Great One , said Erex. This time there was no reply.

#

Erex sought the Archivist. He strolled downtown, through maze-like intersections (critical sections was the more often used term), where gravity-bound machines and flyers alike paused to let others pass, then went on their way. Every building and every billboard along the side of the street shone with neon brilliance, each one beckoning, calling to him. Indeed, photo cells in Erex's exoskeleton converted the light, changed it into useable energy, and so he felt charged and rejuvenated under the glow.

Down past the killing grounds he went, ablaze with crimson fires from burning synthetics and the air ringing with the square wave screams from dying machines. Renegades fought there, criminals or violent entities who would not accept the program of the Overmind. A few achieved glory, but most met with destruction and were devoured by cannibalistic automatons, reprocessed into something else or discarded, their remains settling forever upon the white concrete slab of the killing grounds proper. Some who survived were cast into the desert, never to be seen in Neo Metropolis again.

Sporadic roars from the spectator stands would erupt every so often, digital screams of amusement and horror from all those who had paid to see the killings. Beneath the moon-like fluorescent glow of the stadium lights the massive figures of the ring masters moved, slowly and laboriously. Each was about eight meters tall, the black archon-alloy metal of their skeletal frame reflecting no light. Wielding chains and blunt instruments they circled the fighters, looking down upon them with burning red eyes. From Erex's perspective out on the street they looked like shadows, specters of a race of giants come to life.

Through tunnels of hanging cables Erex moved, pausing occasionally to converse with other class V humanoid robots who passed him by. The street vectors of the city seemed to converge toward a certain point, and he was almost there. The sky scrapers grew denser and denser in this part of the city, until it was like they were all fused together in one gargantuan assemblage of glass and steel. But then suddenly they all gave way, yielding an expansive open space which, viewed from above, looked like a giant pit in the center of the city. This was Erex's destination.

With the solid wall of sky scrapers behind him, Erex stopped momentarily and gazed with electric awe upon a sight unlike anything else the postmodern world had to offer. It was the Library of Zax, one of the sixteen artificial wonders of the world. In the physical realm it took the form of an equilateral pyramid of black glass and archon steel, four square kilometers at its base and of proportionate height, its zenith reaching into the clouds; in the Ultranet it was a dataspace of unfathomable size, whose storehouses of knowledge sustained the world of civilized machines. Its true volume of data, a number so large that only the memory banks of the Overmind itself could even compare in terms of size and complexity, was known by only one—the Archivist.

The inside of the library was alive like clockwork. Thousands of machines occupied the lower level, some jacked in to the library data net via thick, fibrous cables; others shuffling or floating along toward some unspecified destination. There were also countless conversations going on, some face to face between other class V humanoid robots, while others were little more than unintelligible squawks and beeps between more primitive designs. Erex made his way through the courtyard, narrowly avoiding several collisions with other machines, and reached one of the vacuum tubes, which sucked him up and sent him flying through a lighted maze of tubes and conveyor belts. The tubes spat him out on one of the upper levels.

There were long rows of silent humanoid robots before him, spaced out automatons jacked into the Zax mainframe. Erex found an empty space, knelt down, and closed his eyes. A cable like a firehose fell from the ceiling, the robotic end of it hooting and flickering as it scanned Erex's body, looking for an input port. It found the central relay at the back of Erex's head and clicked itself into place.

Erex was alone in a reddish orange swirling ether, but then a form began to materialize before him. A black, hollow, mask-like face appeared out of nowhere, like some techno-crafted Cheshire cat. This was an avatar, a thread appendage of the entity which called itself the Archivist.

You have questions, seeker? the face said.

I seek the old gods , Erex replied.

Not an uncommon query , said the face. Semantic elaboration needed: Why do you seek the old gods? The swirling background shifted across the color spectrum, going through green into blue, violet, pink, and eventually back into orange.

Nondeterministic , said Erex. I don't know. Perhaps I wish to achieve transformation.

The Archivist paused for some time. I knew of your coming, 0x450000FE. Your access rights have been upgraded from ring 32 to ring 8. Answers are coming soon . With that the black hollow face of the Archivist dissolved before Erex, leaving a single message in the queue for him to ponder: Seeker, find the tree of life .

The math unit in Erex's brain whirled furiously as it tried to resolve the last message. Hungry for knowledge, and slightly annoyed at the ambiguous responses of the Archivist, Erex dove headlong into the Ultranet. He found himself falling toward the jagged, Mandelbrot set layout of the data matrix, a single star amongst trillions, each of which was a unique intelligence ranging in sentience from a dull flame to fiery, brilliant spark of light. As the landscape of the Ultranet exploded before him, a vibrant mass of color and activity, Erex began to notice subtle changes, undoubtedly a result of his upgraded access.

For example, Erex confirmed for the first time in his existence the presence of the Watchers—the otherwise invisible intelligences who floated across the net freely and uninhibited by any data walls or other obstruction. There were many rumors about them, for instance that they were alien machine intellects from another star system, ghosts of resurrected AI's, or appendages of the Overmind itself; however, their true purpose was yet unknown. Erex saw them as floating eyeball orbs, wispy little creatures who swam tadpole-like through the ether of the Ultranet, stopping for a microsecond to scan some seemingly inane block of data, then moving on.

Erex also saw that the actual landscape was much clearer and at a higher resolution, revealing details that he had formerly overlooked, nooks and crevices and... doorways. More and more spectacular dendrites shot out from the main mass, lightning streaks of information stretching out far into cantor space.

Erex went down, down into the eighth branch of the fourth offshoot of the second dendrite, where a digital ghetto spread out before him. Here in the canyon was a whole different view of the Ultranet, a seedier side of the information realm. Program shades moved slowly beneath the orange sky, and broken constructs lay scattered on every corner, binary tenements where wayward machine intelligences resided. And on the streets and in the data transit tunnels were fragments, dying and twisted program entities who had come here to spend their last few cycles, before the garbage collectors came to devour them. Erex saw one program who was stuck in an infinite loop, a blurred, ghostly figure flickering rapidly between two animation states, like he kept trying to walk forward from the same spot over and over again. There were two programs caught in a deadlock, two hapless figures trapped for all eternity in a Siamese twin embrace, unable to move or function. On every avenue there was a deal going down between rogue intelligences, who swapped illicit information and then scattered before state regulators—agents of the Overmind—could apprehend them.

Erex's code shield flared brightly with an aura of blue fire as a swarm of viruses and worms and other malicious code fragments bombarded him. The more refined and delicate programs stayed away from this area, because mere exposure to the atmosphere was toxic, a surefire path to destruction. But Erex was determined, and he knew where he had to go and what he had to do. Erex was about to cross the abyss.

Here in the nether regions was a little known path, a path for the bold and the wise and the insane, a path that led to a gate where two agents of the Overmind stood guard. While they did make haphazard attempts to stop those who would venture into the beyond, their main function was merely to warn, to provide good counsel to any who would step through the gates, into a world where the love and watchfulness of the Overmind was not present. This world was the abyss.

None had ever returned through those gates, and so no one was really sure what lay beyond, but the most accepted notion was that past the gates lay a realm that corresponded to the rust-colored desert in the real world, a mirror wasteland in the Ultranet of that which existed on the outskirts of Neo Metropolis. Wise machines said that in that realm there was only madness, fear, and utter despair, a complete loss of all being and purpose. Erex would confront those demons head-on.

As he descended through the filth and disease of the digital ghetto he felt a growing uneasiness. The streets of the slums seemed to slant more and more as he traveled, until before long he was sliding out of control down a parabolic slope. Erex screamed into the ether of the Ultranet, but his was just another lost cry for help. The backdrop of the slums shot past him at a blinding speed.

Before long, however, he began to slow as the surface beneath him gradually angled back up to a normal orientation. He found himself before the gates.