Difference between revisions of "Erik Landvik"

Revision as of 17:15, 5 January 2023

Erik Landvik awoke to his wrist vibrating, his fancy smart-watch managing to catch his attention before the ping on his phone did. They would both be the same notification, he knew; he still checked his watch first, then his phone, always in that order. He had found some rare comfort in the routine, as it helped him process the same information twice, sometimes even in two different ways. Redundancy was key at this facility. Backups, backups, and more backups.

The message was from his boss, @GordonMathis, who was a resident of one of the servers that Erik maintained. "Wake up," the text message began, "your shift begins soon, and it's time to inspect the coolant systems this quarter." Erik resented the fact that the vitals data from his watch was being sent to his boss. @Gordon - and possibly the rest of the data center - knew when he was sleeping, and when he was awake, and when he was on the move and how fast. The bio-monitor functions could not be disabled, at least, not with this version of the watch; it was a model from a few years before he'd joined the Digital Preservation of Humanity project, from before the collection of said data legally required an opt-in. A rare blessing from the bureaucrats in the local government - local, now, meaning "present on the servers in this data center." It felt worlds away to Erik. He knew he could still speak to them, in the same way he spoke to his boss, but he was never able to abide the idea of talking to a computer, much less one based on the neural image of a real person.

The Office of Digital Preservation of Humanity, DPH, had existed for more than a decade now, and their data centers had been fully operational for at least half that. The five years prior to that, then, had been spent on exhaustive testing of the limits of the systems and agents within them, defining boundaries of how far either one was allowed to reach, and perfecting their MRI-based imaging platform. A platform that, Erik mused, he'd never be able to use.

It wasn't so much that he was unwell, or damaged in any way. Not now, at least. He couldn't remember a lot about the incident in question anymore, only that he had needed a fairly substantial skull reconstruction when he was young, and that his brain was not in any condition to be imaged. The maps no longer made sense, he had been told by the doctor back then, which was a remarkably strange thing to be told about one's own brain.

But the short version of it was that Erik was never imaged. He could not exist within the servers that he maintained. He would never experience life as a digital being, among the millions of people already archived and operating on the DPH's servers. But that, he had been told, was exactly why he had been hired as one of the DPH's five custodians. Custodian, Erik had thought to himself, was such an improper word for the actual work he was doing for the DPH. It brought to mind janitorial duties, mopping floors, emptying trash cans, tending to spills. Not the sort of data-center work he had been doing for the last few years. But as Erik scanned server room 17-B with the thermal camera on his phone, checking for correct ventilation from the server racks, and making sure that the halon reservoirs were not leaking, he pictured himself wearing the stereotypical cover-all uniform, with the yellow rubber boots and elbow-length rubber gloves.

The one thing Erik definitely remembered, ten years later, was how it had been explained to him in the job interview. "Anderson's Paradox" was how the man behind the desk had called it. "The fact that you have not already been imaged makes you the ideal candidate for this position. It reduces the risk in you meeting a copy of yourself." Erik had wondered at the time if the interviewer had been talking about time travel instead, but for the time he'd spent rotating that moment in his mind, he eventually understood the reasoning. If he had found out there was a copy of himself, living on the server, he would probably resent that copy for being able to experience things that he physically could not. And perhaps, the copy would similarly come to resent his physical form. What he would have done in such an event, Erik did not enjoy pondering. But as the one remaining human on site, he didn't exactly have a way to keep his mind off of it.

Satisfied enough with what he'd done here, he tapped the Home button on his phone and opened a text message to @GordonMathis, carefully dialing in the letters that formed, "17-B inspected, no flaws. Bldg.B complete." He realized that he could have written it faster with the voice keyboard, or even called @Gordon and spoken to him, but Erik did not like to use his voice. He had always been a quiet man.

He began moving towards the building's "exit" - a skybridge, leading to the next building over. The DPH facility here in Norway used to have exits for foot traffic, but the blizzards were so severe in recent years that Erik couldn't actually leave through them. The complex, a two-by-two arrangement of two-floored data center buildings with adjoined office blocks, was located in a central part of Oslo, occupying all four corners of a busy intersection, with skybridges linking each one from their second floors. Erik had been assigned to this building in the midsummer, before the snowstorms were bad enough to impede traffic. Even when the snow had come in, he could at least still tell where the roads were, intersecting down below him. Now, being in the middle of an unprecedented polar vortex, there was hardly any traffic around at all. The snow drifts had not just covered all the roads, they'd piled up around the buildings so high that it almost seemed like the DPH complex never had a second floor to begin with.

Erik spared a thought for the other four custodians. He couldn't remember what they were like, save for the one, the young man from Bangalore, who had professed a strong love for old American cartoons. But wherever they'd all been assigned, he hoped that the world was treating them better than it was treating him. He could not leave his facility even if he were cleared to do so. It was just fortunate enough that the place had been designed to be self-sufficient for a single occupant. Maybe the other four sites were, as well; the ultimate goal of the DPH project was that the servers could eventually run themselves, after all, and the only need for outside intervention would be to handle the physical aspects that a digital being could not.

A familiar, irritating buzz resounded through Erik's left wrist. It was @GordonMathis again. "Why did you stop moving?" @GordonMathis had asked. "You've got building C to inspect next. Don't give me that look," @Gordon had texted next, as if he were able to tell the expression on Erik's face through his watch. Perhaps he could; it did have a camera on it, after all. Erik had even bought the watch specifically because of said camera - he had always had fantasies of making calls on it, like some pulp comic detective, or that bumbling cybernetic inspector.

That was Erik's original dream. Not to solve crimes, but to become immersed in his technology. He had read the stories of the people who would implant small magnets in their fingertips, so they could sense magnetic fields by touch. Of the IT Services worker who became so tired of forgetting his badge that he had it surgically embedded into the back of his hand. That pair of glasses that would project heads-up information into the lenses. Hearing aids, exoskeletons, ocular zoom lenses - he'd read about all of them, and wanted them more than any young man he knew.

Erik stepped into server room 1-C, through the first door he saw upon crossing the connecting bridge. The blinding white light from outside gave way to similarly blinding fluorescent bulbs over plain white walls, plain white server racks, and raised metal flooring that might as well also have been white. The noise of the room full of server fans - funny enough, this would also be called "white" noise - made Erik feel like he needed to breathe deeper. He was never sure if he preferred the constant whirring din, or if he preferred the dead silence of the offices and common areas in which no other human had worked since slightly less than a decade ago. The office blocks didn't really need to exist anymore, but he found it comforting to sit down in one of the empty cubes once in a while, content that nobody was going to walk by and catch him napping.

Buzz. "Check the network cable from rack 1W9G," came a text message from @Gordon.