At the core of the Bohemian Silence Reserve the Quiet Engine ceased to be an engine. It transformed into a chamber of resonance with the reverberations shouting.
The cascading shockwave from the Algorithm transmitted via its network affected more, than just the external subscribers. It reverberated across the facilitys frameworks inundating the neural connections that linked the thousand Vacant processors. These minds, carefully stripped of identity were suddenly exposed to a signal they were never intended to interpret: the information of selfhood.
Pod 743 housing the philosopher Kale Kane was the one to break. His mind, a lake mirroring nothing was struck by the mathematical counterpart of a rock. The rock was his lost thought—the jagged, striking exquisite heresy, from the initial version of the Lethargic Calculus. Not the sigh he had become. The scream he had first envisioned.
Beyond the glass his eyelids trembled. Then they lifted.
His gaze was unfocused. It drifted, obscured by suspension fluid and an intense bewilderment. There was no anger. No sudden understanding. There was a terrible disarray. Time had elapsed. How much? Where was he? The final clear recollection was of a decline a man in a suit proposing payment, for his soul's blueprint. Then… silence. A prolonged grey serene silence.
Now emotion. An overwhelming surge of it. Sorrow, initially—not over someone but, over time itself. For the hours of reflection, debate, coffee, sunlight illuminating a page all lost and substituted by this blue-hued emptiness. The sorrow was immense and wordless. One huge solitary tear formed in the edge of his eye separate, rising gradually in the liquid.
His neural feed, designed to convey computational strength started emitting sheer unfiltered despair. It struck the core like a mental tsunami.
Pod 112 Javier's pod was, at the storm's center. Yet surrounding it the hurricane was shattering. Each pod went through its distinct Shock.
Once a musician for three years she was stirred by the ghostly feeling of a guitar neck within her grip the distinct hardened skin, on her thumb. The recollection was so vivid that her fingers involuntarily twitched, strumming the strings.
A mother, having adopted the Protocol to mitigate the " void" of an empty nest was overwhelmed by the vivid scent-and-sound recollection of her childs laughter in a summer garden. A sob caught in her tear-filled throat releasing a trail of bubbles to the top.
Their revival lacked heroism. Instead it was distressing. They were spirits forcefully reconnected to their pasts following a prolonged dreamless hiatus. The mental reverberation ceased to be information; it became emotional transmission in a self-contained cycle. Sorrow, happiness, bewilderment, yearning—every Vacants reawakened emotion intensified the rest generating an interference pattern, inside the Engine's framework.
Control panels burst into cascades of sparks. The central core—Javier's pod—no longer emitted an indigo hue but a frantic flickering white light. The sigh had vanished. Replacing it was a repetitive alert that read: > ERROR. SELF DETECTED. SELF DETECTED. SELF DETECTED.
Flavio, observing from his center noticed the facility's stability deteriorating on the screen. The vital signs of the Vacants, which had been steady, like hospital monitors were now surging into physiological distress. Heart rates skyrocketed. Brain activity patterns resembled lightning storms.
"Neuro-sedative, immediately! Complete filling of the chamber!" he ordered, his voice breaking.
"The life support is connected to the delivery system!" exclaimed a technician. "Administering a sedative could cause their hearts to cease!"
"Then the Engine is lost! Stop the collapse!"
However containment proved unattainable. The feedback cycle had transformed into a chain reaction. The mere awakening of one Vacant and experiencing sorrow triggered the next to awaken and sense their grief, which then reverberated back, to the initial one intensifying the surge.
Kale Kane inside his pod was now completely awake. He found himself confined, floating helplessly gasping in the air gazing through the haze at the surrounding pods glowing like Christmas decorations. He realized everything. He noticed the cables, the center, the objective. His sorrow for wasted time solidified into a even more dreadful realization: his submissive mindset had become the model, for this. His ideology of surrender had been twisted into a production line.
He refrained from yelling. Instead he committed an act. He reflected. He concentrated his revived mind on the sole element he could detect: the Lethargic Calculus pattern softly radiating underneath his pod, the origin of everything.. With the lucidity of someone who has been stripped of all he started, mentally to dismantle it. Not, via the Arousal Algorithm. Through a detached philosophical denial. If Calculus represented a gradient leading to calm he started removing that incline resulting in a dreadful complete flatness—not tranquility but void.
This clean rational dismissal represented a form of information. A logic bomb. It penetrated the essence.
Within Javier's fracturing thoughts the recurring SELF DETECTED error encountered Kane's communicated idea of NULL. The clash was disastrous.
With a noise, to a profound resounding bell breaking the primary core pod broke apart.
Not, with an explosion. With an implosion. The liquid was pulled away in a swirling suction. The nerve fibers snapped loose igniting. Javier Jeffrey's body collapsed, freed, onto the foundation of the pod.
Throughout the facility the thousand lights of the Vacant pods remained illuminated. They shifted. The calm blue shimmer faded away supplanted by the fragile, attractive and profoundly delicate light of basic biological life-support. The Quiet Engine was shut down. The Bioengine was inactive.
In its place was a hospital ward of a thousand confused, grieving, re-embodied souls, suspended in silent fluid, awake and alone with the echoes of the time they had lost. The psychic storm subsided, leaving only the quiet sound of bubbling oxygenators and the soft, collective weeping of the woken dreamers, trapped in their glass wombs, remembering what it was to be, and what it had cost to stop.