“I’m getting alerts from all over,” said Tuner, staring at the display, a glowing orb flashing in the corner of her vision. “It’s happening everywhere and no one knows why.”
“What is ‘it’ exactly?” asked Holder, warily.
“People just–just falling. Just failing. They seem fine and they just… fall apart,” said Tuner, her usually flat affect momentarily shattered. “Something in the system is wrong. It’s not properly maintaining their functions. It’s reporting that they’re healthy… when they’re not. They’re dying. They’re just standing there and dying.”
“If it’s everywhere, it has to be some sort of system problem,” reasoned Holder. “That should make it easier to track, not less. It has to be something big that’s changed.”
“The systems are built to be separate and modular for exactly that reason,” remindedTuner. “There’s nothing that should affect every system at the same time, let alone in such a specific way. And no one can figure it out so far. They’ve run all of their diagnostics. Everything seems clean, uptop and down below.”
“It has to be a problem within the core programming,” Holder said, though he knew he was out of his depth. “Within the original data. What are we supposed to do?”
“We could… we could go to the Wheelhouse,” she said, tentatively. She immediately looked away, cringing slightly even as she said it. “That’s what everyone’s saying now. That we need to elect someone to go to the Wheelhouse.”
“The Wheelhouse,” repeated Holder, with a shake of his head. “No one’s been to The Wheelhouse in three decades. God only knows what’s going on in there.”
“If this continues at the rate it’s been going… we only have a decade. Maybe less, they can’t decide whether it’s increasing in frequency or if that’s just a statistical anomaly, the data set is too small,” said Tuner.
“Yes… but… the Wheelhouse?” asked Holder, hesitantly. “Exactly who is up for election in that?”
The Wheelhouse was all that remained of the eighteen developers; those who had built the very structure of the system which held all of them. They were, of course, long dead, but before they had died they had managed to save as much as they could of their memories, in a separate facility that could only be accessed uptop.
There were still scientists in the world. but there were still issues that would occur; things that could not be gleaned from intellect alone. The overseers remained as a fail safe mechanism; ever-present and as close as it could be to all-knowing, but unable to affect the world directly.
It wasn’t like taking a portrait of a person. Over time, each entity lost its coherence. Every time the overseers were consulted they had lost just a little bit of their former selves, their personalities, their wholeness, becoming these jagged creatures, amalgams of programmed thought. Photocopies taken from photocopies in an endless cycle of degradation and abstraction.
And it was for that reason that The Wheelhouse was an entirely separate system. It could not be accessed or interacted with through either the virtual world or any of the systems in the physical one. It had to be connected with directly. And that involved surviving the pilgrimage… both ways. There were countless people who had failed. Who had never been heard from again.
“There’s been a motion to select three systems, and each system will send out one person,” said Tuner. “Viginti was trying to figure out whether they could override the max uptop amount, but they haven’t been successful yet. They wanted to send pairs, but that would leave the uptop with only one.”
“Fantastic,” said Holder, his mind paging through the myriad of tales he had been told by his peers as a young boy–and the slightly more believable but no less terrifying tales he had been told again as an adult.
There were ghost stories told about The Wheelhouse. Exaggerations and extrapolations from the few who had made the journey in all the decades past. He couldn’t explain why it was so terrifying. Maybe it was because they were ghosts, in a sense; pale fragments of people long dead.
They said that sometimes the developers could not remember that they had died; that they had no knowledge of what they truly were and instead believed themselves to be living people trapped inside of a simulation.
Or, even worse, they would beg to be taken outside. They would beg not to be left there yet again.