2. Memories

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2. Memories

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For days on end, I remained sequestered in my room, entrapped in its blend of stark design and technological sophistication. Time seemed to dissolve, becoming a fluid entity that I could neither grasp nor compartmentalize. I spent my hours, or perhaps they were days, staring at the azure-illuminated walls, losing myself in their gentle glow. Any sense of chronology vanished; I was a wanderer in a timeless expanse, cocooned within the four walls that were at once a comfort and a quandary. My room became an echo chamber for my thoughts, yet I was unable to process the overwhelming events that had unfolded. I felt unmoored, caught in an existential drift, and the walls around me seemed to be the only constants, as ambiguous as they were reassuring.

Eventually, and gradually, fragments of my identity, or at least that I believed to be my identity, started to coalesce. My prior syrakian existence began to insinuate itself back into my consciousness, emerging through the nebulous recollections of my time spent in that cursed desert, which Kallom-4000 and I agreed to designate as Akrabizont-22. My memory remained shrouded in uncertainty and ambiguity, yet the pivotal events that compelled me to undertake that ill-fated mission grew increasingly clearer.

I was just a normal syraki, like any other, spending my granted eternity as I lived through countless hedonic runs. I was born in Duriont Center, Akuta, Planet Mars. At least until the moment I embarked in that mission, I counted with six hundred sixty-seven Earth years of age; thus, I was very young. Like any syraki of the newest generations, I did not have a mother or a father. My consciousness, or better, my syraki, was compiled by the Central Algorithm, branch PAT-3 on Hankilla System, using an IJKL pattern and a modified version of the rand-genetic algorithm sampled after highly sensitive hedonic syrakis. Therefore, I was already created a syraki, and not upgraded into one like the older generations. At the moment of my birth, as it happens to most syrakis to this day, I was given an ancient name, randomly selected: Mike Rajhalo Spencer. My true name, although I partly recollected, I knew that it could not be fully encapsulated within the constraints of a human brain. The serialized identification numerical sequence would be as enormous as thousands of human books. Moreover, the ethical grounding for my assembly came from the Hedonistic Imperative, and while I never quite agreed with it, I also never complained.

Until my experiences in Akrabizont-22, I had never felt pain in my lifeā€”ever. Like most syrakis, my existence had been of extreme hedonic bliss from the very start. Naturally, I knew it from a rational point of view, but the actual experience laid completely in oblivion. I vividly recalled traversing the surreal landscapes of hyper-sensory virtual realms, each step architecturally devised to elicit unique dimensions of pleasure. The fractal forests resonating harmonics of stimulating euphoria, the labyrinthine oceans of liquid divinity, the melodic waves of chanting arrows of searing eroticism. All those experiences far exceeded the hedonic capabilities of a human brain, whose comparison to a syraki would be as disparate as comparing Earth's scale to that of the Sun. That I could affirm from a first-person point of view, because, for some reason, I was in a human body. The mere recollection of my past heaven made my mouth water, leaving me to ponder if I would ever have the chance to return to my former state of being.

Until I was more or less four hundred and fifty years old, I barely stepped into Base Reality. I never visited Earth, for instance, and my only memory from the rusty deserts of Mars came from when I was still a newborn, wearing my first ever TOP module replacer. The instances compelling me to engage with the reality of our forefathers arose during the rare occasions when I needed to don replacers for traversing the IG-Bridges, mostly due to the correction of bugs or software updates in the intergalactic connectors.

As a syraki, my existence was invested inside runs, whether the ones created by myself or not. I was not a reality artist, but I had enough programming experience to engineer my own worlds, fitting to my hedonic lust. I had never been a very gregarious syraki, the type to share their existence with others inside virtual worlds. In most of my runs, I was the only syraki, and when I had friends they were almost always AI avatars. Nonetheless, I had a very good syrakian friend, called Kazum, for whom I remembered saying goodbye before embarking on that mission. We met each other in the Hyperlink, when I was ninety-six and ve was eight-two, and since them we had been good friends.

Remembering all that, at first I could not understand how could I have given up a life of easy pleasure to fall into such disgrace. With the help of Kallom-4000, as the days went on, the rest of my memories continued to unfurl. I worked for a company called Real-Life Theravada, one of the four megacorporations responsible for ninety-nine point nine percent of all the runs running in the Hyperlink. The other three were Valtir & Blue, Makilecto, and PraƧa Alta, together forming the Big Four, the companies that not only allegorically, but actually shape our realities, since they were responsible for most of virtual worlds.

As my memories were still fuzzy, I began to ask myself why would beings as advanced as syrakis still work? Could we not have anything we wanted inside virtual realities already? It turns out that, in spite of our technological ascendancy and the ability to indulge in perpetual hedonic experiences, syrakis are not exempt from the universal concept of economic exchange. Money, it turns out, remains a universal constant, even in an advanced society embedded primarily in virtual realities. Within these digitized realms, desire manifests in the aspirational acquisition of virtual luxuries. Including the small group still living in Base Reality, the traditionalists, they are drawn to avant-garde vehicles, advanced robots, planetary mansions, opulent spacecraft, personal starships capable of warping space, or even private stations. And all of that costs money.

Then, my journey with Real-Life Theravada began in a serendipitous moment, catching sight of a recruitment banner while I was exploring the famous run of the eternally night Holwkain City. Intrigued, I submitted my application and underwent a series of rigorous virtual tests designed to assess potential candidates. After being accepted, almost two Earth years later, I was stationed as a helper of navigational awareness in Theravada's asteroid mining sector located in the Herssun Belt. My tasks were straightforward but important, guiding and coordinating mining robots and semi-autonomous systems in the extraction of valuable materials, like platinum, palladium, iridium, hystulium, rhodium, and helium-3. Even though just a few know it to this day, but Theravada started as a mining enterprise. It still has exploration rights over many important mining fields, like the quoted Herssun Belt, also the Vajis Ring, the Orion Expanse, the Neptune Cluster, and the Irda Fields. Its most important branch, however, is by far its reality artistry development unit.

My ascent within the corporate hierarchy was swift, eventually landing me in specialized deep-space missions for Theravada's advanced interstellar operations in the Samian-ri 23 area. Those were not mere asteroid mining operations, but instead I was placed in Theravada's unit responsible for cutting-edge scientific research. Stationed in the Beta-Gamma sector, our team primarily conducted empirical studies and simulations for the potential utilization of macronanotic robotic systems in the conceptualization and assembly of Dyson Spheres. The project was highly classified, yet in active development, and I was among the rarefied cadre of syrakis granted the honor of witnessing the preliminary stages of Dyson Sphere assembly.

To this day, I remember the breathtaking spectacle that unfolded before me. From the observation deck of our command station, I had a panoramic view of the nascent wonder. Macronanotic robots moved in intricate, calculated formations, like a cosmic ballet choreographed by algorithms. They darted between modular orbital platforms that served as both logistical bases and assembly yards. These platforms themselves were feats of engineering, equipped with advanced fabricators and real-time data analytics centers. It was a harmonious synthesis of technology and purpose, each robotic unit and orbital station playing a crucial part in the grand tapestry of cosmic engineering. The sheer scale and elegance of it all rendered even the brilliant backdrop of distant stars and galaxies a mere afterthought.

The project was scheduled to take at least two thousand Earth years.

That was the apex of my career so far. I had the privilege of working side by side with syrakis from the Alpha generation, some of them as old as three hundred thousand Earth years. They had seen the early stages of the modern era, and some of them had even fought in virtual wars, in a time hate, envy, sadness, jealously, resentment and all those primitive negative mental states, crudely designed by natural evolution, still existed in the Complex. Just when I thought I had experienced the pinnacle of excitement, I realized how mistaken I was.

I received a letter from CEO Jabari verself.