Chapter 0: Discovery

  And then I died.

  No thunder. No whispers. No judgment. Just...

  a release, like a thought leaving a tired mind.

  Somehow, conscience returned.

  I opened my eyes

  There were no clouds, no tunnel of light, no worms , no darkness.

  Just structure. Infinite structure. Three words, familiar, echoed in my mind “Atrium of Infinity”. Columns of light taller than comprehension, woven together like a lattice made of probability. Above me, the sky shimmered with recursive fractals folding into themselves, each one a memory sealed inside another.

  I stood on a floor that hummed gently with identity—echoes of footsteps not my own, yet somehow familiar.

  People moved around me, if you could call them that. Beings. Selves. Versions. Others. Me.

  A voice echoed, but not through sound.

  “Welcome to the Atrium of Infinity.”

  Facts rushed into my mind. The atrium represents both the conclusion and the origin. Each life lived contributes to answering a question. This question is so immense that language struggles to articulate its essence, yet it can be simply put as "why."

  “Why must we die?”

  “Why must we live?”

  “What if?”

  The allure of the atrium's penetrating aura threatened to take over my mind. Towards the end it was as if I learned a thousand new things in a thousandth of a second. Finally I found the mental strength to break this hypnotic trance.

  There were no walls, and yet I knew: the Infinity Gate stood ahead. A threshold so vast it arced beyond geometry, pulling everything toward it like inevitability.

  “This is what I was feeling”

  Above the crowd, somewhere in the sky that wasn’t a sky, a pulse rang out:

  “If you wish to stay, then stand. If you wish to understand why, then walk.

  The Machine awaits those who walk.”

  I looked down at my feet.

  They moved.

  I don’t remember why I started walking. I suppose it was curiosity. Or guilt. Maybe it was the feeling that everyone here who walked seemed to have a purpose for doing so and I was just following the crowd.

  The Atrium seemed infinite, but it didn’t feel crowded. Everyone walked at their own pace. Some sat in quiet stillness. Some cried. Some argued with invisible gods. One kissed his own reflection until they fused into one being.

  Me? I just walked.

  Time unfolds strangely here. It feels like I've been walking forever but I do not tire. Ahh yes I’m dead.

  "The dead don't tire, how ironic," I chuckled.

  A small stone lay in my path, sharp against the impossible smoothness of the featureless floor. It didn’t belong in this perfect place. So I picked it up.

  It was cold. Heavy. Real.

  "Well then... I'll call you Rocky."

  I placed it in the folds of my robe, which I hadn’t realized I wore until then. From that point on, the rock came with me. It didn’t speak. It didn’t change. But it was witnessed.

  And that, Amongst whatever all this is, is enough.

  I saw him, sat beside a pillar, his face seemingly staring into the void but his arms positioned and moving as if he was typing on a computer.

  His gaze shifted rapidly while staring straight ahead as if lost in the infinite expanse. Yet, despite the apparent vacancy in his eyes, his arms remain engaged in a flurry of subtle movements.

  His fingers danced and tapped with a practiced rhythm. The contrast between his seemingly vacant stare and the purposeful activity of his hands sparked my curiosity.

  A profound curiosity settled over me, an insistent need to unravel the enigma of his intense concentration juxtaposed with his apparent disengagement from his surroundings. The air in the ancient space hummed with a silent history as I began my approach, each footfall a soft whisper against the weathered stone floor. The passage of time seemed to slow, each step deliberate, drawn by an invisible thread towards this solitary figure.

  As I drew near, he lifted his gaze. The connection was immediate, a fleeting moment where our eyes met and held, a silent acknowledgment passing between us in the stillness.

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  “Ah, a custodian,” he remarked, his voice a low murmur, tinged with a hint of weary recognition.

  “Sorry sir, no light for me. I reckon I can figure this out on my own.” His words were punctuated by a sigh, and he returned to his contemplative posture, his dark eyes unfocused yet intensely inward.

  His appearance was arresting. A meticulously maintained black afro framed his young man's face with striking lines, his dark skin possessing a subtle sheen in the dim light. His baggy eyes, equally dark, looked tired and held a depth that hinted at unseen experiences.

  As he shifted slightly, resuming whatever subtle movements had occupied him before, luminous rings flared into existence around the iris of each eye, a sudden and unexpected spectacle. For a fleeting instant, I wondered if I, too, was caught in some shared dreamlike state, but the sharp clarity of the glowing ring dispelled the notion. This was something tangible, something different.

  “Why do you call me custodian?” The question escaped my lips before I could fully process it, driven by a confusion that mirrored the strangeness of the encounter.

  A faint smile touched his lips, a knowing expression that seemed to hold more than his few words conveyed. “I’ve met many of your kind before. You’ve come to convince me to enter the infinity gate.” His statement was delivered with a matter-of-factness that suggested this was a familiar interaction, a recurring event in his strange existence.

  “I’m also new to this place,” I countered, my voice laced with genuine bewilderment. “I don’t know why I’m here.” The truth of my own disorientation felt stark against his apparent familiarity with the situation.

  His gaze returned to mine, a flicker of something akin to curiosity replacing the earlier weariness. “Well then, custodian, if you truly are a node such as myself, what is your name?” The question hung in the air, a simple request that suddenly felt weighty with significance.

  I opened my mouth to answer, the name that should have been readily available eluding me. A disconcerting blankness filled the space where my identity should have resided. “Yes, my name is… I don’t know.” The admission was a quiet confession, a stark revelation of my own lost sense of self in this bewildering place.

  “‘Sigh’ Every person, creature , thing here inches closer and closer to the gate in the horizon. It claims to offer clarity and there isnt much to do here so most choose to walk towards it. I, on the other hand, choose to stay.” His face had shifted during that last sentence. For a moment a tortured expression took over his face.

  “Why stay here?” I asked. “I've been trying to leave for quite some time but no matter how far I walk , I can't seem to reach the gate.”

  The strange man looked up at me and said. “Well you can't leave because you're a custodian, albeit a very strange one. You cannot remember your own name , yet you feel nothing. Isn't that strange. I have unfinished business you see. Unlike you , I'm actually dead and I remember the life I had.”

  A small flicker of feeling erupted into a flood of words, a debate about my very being. "Look, how could I grasp language and objects if I've never been alive? My initial thought upon arriving was that I had died. That feels genuine, doesn't it?" I reasoned, yet my words lacked any genuine emotion. It was as if my own experiences held no significance for me, but Rocky and this other man intrigued me; their stories were what I truly wanted to understand.

  "I've been here for what feels like forever or no time at all. Without anything to compare it to, time has lost its meaning for me. And I've encountered some unusual things here," he stated intently.

  With quiet certainty, he added, "You, my friend, are like a BMM."

  "What's that?" I inquired. Our conversation had been odd so far. While I was worried about him, I was also discovering things about myself, yet very little about him.

  "A BMM is a biomechanical mind," he explained. "It's made up of machine learning models that manage a biomechanical body. The main control center has a 40q quantum bit graphical processing unit. The software includes a large language model for interaction, an emotion upregulation unit, and an action model for movement. That's how I would construct you, at least."

  His vocabulary was unfamiliar – large language model? Quantum bit? What were these concepts? "So, you're a builder?" I asked, my curiosity piqued. I felt that familiar urge to understand and observe again.

  The man sat down as if in a comfortable chair, appearing completely relaxed despite the absence of one. He was, inexplicably, floating. A strange tension filled the air around him, as if he were manipulating reality.

  This defied all logic. How could he sit without support, seemingly unaffected by gravity? An irresistible impulse drew me toward him, my attention fixed on his suspended form.

  With each step, the familiar surroundings dissolved. The sounds of the crowd, the ornate gates, the ambient chatter – all vanished. Reality warped, replaced by a progressively bleak scene of profound poverty and despair. A palpable sense of hopelessness permeated the environment.

  The air became thick and stifling, making each breath a struggle. My lungs burned, and a cough scratched my throat. Driven by a need to understand, I mumbled, "Where am I?" but my words were lost in the oppressive silence.

  Suddenly, his gaze snapped to mine, his eyes wide with disbelief. “How can you see this, be here?” he exclaimed, his voice a raw, shocked whisper that cut through the silence.

  “I’m not sure, but I can feel you.” A strange sensation washed over me, as if my own voice was multiplying, resonating from multiple points around me. The words echoed strangely, imbued with an otherworldly quality. “I can hear you.”

  A shadow crossed his face, a mixture of fear and resignation. “Terrifying,” he murmured. “I guess since you’re here, we can chat a bit. As you can see, there isn’t much to do anyway.”

  He sat , now on a rusty stool rather, amidst the ruin. Dilapidated buildings hunched like dying animals. Rusted metal signs flickered with illegible text. The ground cracked with potholes. He stared into it all like it was an old photograph, half-remembered, half-loved.

  “You asked if I was a builder,” he said finally, answering a question I had almost forgotten I asked. His voice took on a different tone now, clear, deliberate, almost proud.

  “I was a builder,” he said at last. “Specialized in system architecture. Machine governance. Economic automation. The kind of work that doesn’t get you headlines, but keeps entire societies running.” He smiled faintly. “Elegant systems. Efficient. Indifferent.”

  He knelt beside a broken drone chassis, brushing dust off its curved shell like he was remembering a pet long gone. “We told ourselves neutrality was a virtue. That the absence of bias would keep the world stable. But we didn’t ask what those systems were neutral to.”

  He stopped, fingers tightening around the metal.

  “I built systems that worked well. Things that didn't care whether a place lived or died, as long as the numbers made sense. And they did. Right up until this place” he gestured loosely at the poisoned ruins around us, “stopped being viable.”

  His voice cracked there, just a little.

  For a moment, we both stood in silence. The silence carried the weight of a man out of time and in complete sadness.

  He let out a slow breath, then looked at me, really looked.

  “I’ve told you more than I meant to, Than what's appropriate” he admitted, standing up now. “How can we have a conversation without proper introductions?”

  He extended a hand in the way one might when offering the weight of a memory. I grabbed his hand confirming our connection. And so our exchange began.

  “I’m Sariel,” he said, more softly this time with the addition of a hint of vulnerability. “And if you have the time… I’d like to tell you the rest.”