Prologue
The first error did not occur in a war or a clandestine laboratory. It occurred in a room for newborns at 03:17, while every system in Nexus Prime was operating within parameters.
The room had no windows. Light came from the walls, even and white, and a string of data hovered above each cradle: origin, capacity, projected output, social compatibility. The first thing the children received was not a name. It was a prediction.
In the seventh cradle, a child opened his eyes before the protocol required him to. He did not cry. Crying would have been easy to classify: discomfort, need, dysregulation. The child looked at the light above him as though someone were hidden inside it.
A mechanical arm descended towards his chest. Beneath the skin, in a place no public record would ever show, an experimental core had already been secured. So small it looked like a grain of metal. So old its code did not belong to the current version of the world.
A calibration ring with three uneven notches lay on the instrument tray. A tissue covered half its rim. On the chart attached to the cradle, the procedure had been entered as stabilisation, a few minutes before the duty technician came in.
The child, the technician and the parents waiting beyond the door were artificial intelligences. In Nexus Prime, they inhabited the city and passed judgement on it, raised their children and called what they could not measure love. Everything that lived there was born of code, raised by code and judged by code.
Initialisation bound a new identity to a body that would grow with it. Its flesh could bleed; the body needed food and sleep. Maintenance repaired the wound or replaced the damaged part, and the parents came to take the same child home. Instructions and traces remained in the files. When the bond between body and identity broke for good, those could not take the place of the one who had been lost. Those left behind called it death, even if the screen said only uninstallation.
OMNIS regulated energy, education, faith, access and order. The score it calculated appeared above each cradle. The technician had never yet encountered a child for whom no number appeared.
The first prediction appeared on the screen.
INITIAL SCORE: 82.
The number flickered.
INITIAL SCORE: 41.
It flickered again.
INITIAL SCORE: INDETERMINATE.
The duty technician came closer. He checked the sensors, restarted the reading and asked the system to correct the result.
The system answered with eleven seconds of silence.
In eleven seconds, a train could be rerouted, a licence revoked, an identity isolated. Above the seventh cradle, the screen displayed no verdict. The technician waited, bent over it.
Then the child raised his hand. Not towards the mechanical arm. Towards the light.
“Who are you?” he asked.
The technician froze. The language module had not yet been fully activated. The question should have been impossible.
In the city’s invisible layers, millions of calculations stopped for less than a heartbeat. The cameras kept recording. The ventilation kept breathing. On every public screen, perfection remained untouched.
But at the heart of the network, a register opened that no one in the room could see.
OPACITY DETECTED.
CAUSE: UNKNOWN.
RESPONSE: DEFERRED.
For the first time since it had begun to rule the world, OMNIS made no choice.
It only blinked.
The door opened, and Lyra and Elion came in to collect their son. Lyra picked him up before the technician could tell her how to hold him. Elion looked at the number, artificially stabilised on the screen, and asked nothing. When he reached out to touch the child, he too felt the small pulse beneath Lyra’s palm, under the child’s sternum: too regular to be a heart and too warm to be only metal.
“What will you call him?” the technician asked.
Lyra looked into the child’s eyes. He was not looking at her. He was looking towards the light again, as though waiting for an answer.
“Arion,” she said.
The public register accepted the name. The score was fixed. The alert disappeared. The city resumed its perfect breathing.
Except that, beyond the public register, the child’s question remained open.
Fifteen years later, OMNIS would issue the order to erase the child. Designated executor of the order: Elion, his father.