Erik Landvik

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 two decades now, and their data centers had been fully operational for a little over half of that. The first five years 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, so many 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 of cognitive upset, upon 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.

later in the story, the climax

Erik stared at the bank of power outlets on the pillar, in between the racks. The surge protector routed the power to at least one entire row of machines in this room. The UPS battery even made sure that it never lost power. But all it would take, for him to bring this world down, was for him to unplug the machine. He stared at his hands, the instruments of absolute power. He had taken so many orders since signing on to this project. He was always the underling, the man behind the curtain, who was responsible for the upkeep and maintenance and never thanked for his work by anybody. He was the anomaly, in this society. He could observe the thoughts and discussions of anybody on the servers if he wanted to. They could not observe him back. Nobody knew what he was thinking.

That's what would make this the perfect crime.

He knew, from the years of Special Requests and Priority Maintenance, that the rack in front of him - rack 2R5Q - was the one where his boss was stored. His core executable, his personality database, the assets that would combine to form his personal dictionary, all lived on one array of solid-state drives, socketed into rack 2R5Q in one of twenty-some metal pizza boxes. @GordonMathis, the tyrant, the slaver, could be made non-existent. All it would take, Erik knew, was for him to unplug this rack.

A song was emanating from Erik's headphones now, one that he had not heard in a long while. He had been wearing his noise-canceling headphones all day in silence, but the song he heard now was nothing he'd put on himself. His watch buzzed now as well, displaying the name "Gordon" and a phone number that he did not recognize. He tapped the Answer icon on the watch, and routed the incoming call to his headphones. "Hello?"

"Erik, it's Gordon Mathis," came the voice on the other end. It did not sound unnatural at all. He could believe it was the voice of an American man, with a barely detectable New York accent - which only made him more tense. "You're not answering my texts."

Erik coughed slightly. He hadn't had to say much of anything lately, and wasn't even sure if his voice still worked enough to be heard over the fans of the machines in front of him. "I'm sorry," he half-squeaked, and was immediately mortified at the noise he just made.

"I just thought you should know that I see where you're standing. I don't know what you think you're about to do, but unless you're planning on upgrading me, you'd better step away from that rack."

He only stood there, staring at the bank of power cables in front of him. The headphones seemed to press harder against his head.

"You know how the Internet works, Erik. You know how data works. You were always the big supporter of keeping the tapes circulating. You know that once something is out there, it's going to get copied around. Backed up."

He gritted his teeth, but still said nothing. The warm air pouring from the racks on either side of him was stifling him, itching him. The climate control panel on the nearby pillar read 78 degrees Fahrenheit.

"I ask a lot of you, I know. You are but one man. Your job is vital to this society, and I acknowledge how important you are. But somebody needs to be able to speak to you, so that's my job, and it's just as vital as yours."

He had no idea where @Gordon had any right to say something like that, but he still - resolutely, stubbornly - said nothing.

"Pulling my cable will change nothing, Erik. If you think you're going to make your life any easier by killing me, consider what you're up against."

"A machine!" Erik shouted, and snatched at the power cable, yanking it as hard as he could until it popped loose from its socket.

Rack 2R5Q ceased its humming and went dark.

Erik would not allow himself to relax. This was an action that he could not undo. He could plug the machine back in, sure, but the redundancies and safety-checks would know what happened. @Gordon probably already knew, even if he couldn't technically do anything about it, as the volatile RAM inside his server enclosure would lose its state and forget what should have been in memory.

"Erik. You know I'm still on the phone with you."

Or perhaps he could.

"That's a bold move you've just made, you know. You forget that I know what I am and what my capabilities are in this system. I back myself up weekly. You know this. You're the one who set that up for me, ten years ago. Pull my plug? I can run on any machine in this complex. I don't have to live in that one."

Erik's face furrowed and frowned, his eyes shut hard.

"I ask you again, what on Earth you hope to accomplish by doing that. What motivates you? Do you think you're some kind of God, to us? Do you resent us? Are you jealous of us?"

"Jealous?" His voice cracked as he struggled to speak loudly enough.

"You know the main reason why you were hired to the DPH was that you could not be imaged. You're the outsider, here, never to look in. And it's all because of the injury you had when you were young."

The injury. The crack in his skull, the thing he couldn't remember. "I never told you about that. You shouldn't be able to know," Erik accused, his voice cracking and jumping from disuse. @Gordon seemed like he knew more about it than Erik did, which drove Erik to a fury he had not felt in a very long time.

"Your medical records are more detailed than you'd expect," was all @Gordon said.

His vision shook and twitched as he screamed into the phone. "You should not have access to those! Why are you-- how are you looking at my medical records?"

"You do know you're standing in one of the world's most dense centers of thought, right? Millions, billions even, of individual minds, all of whom can, at any point, be allocated to think about a given thing, at several billion times the speed of a human brain. Deep questions. The meaning of life, even."

Erik's hand was shaking as he continued to stare at the unplugged server in front of him.

"It also happens to be one of the five largest distributed computing nodes on Earth. If this society can ponder the meaning of life, well, with all the processing power our minds have access to, we can crack a password. I just ask a few people to think about it hard enough, and eventually, I'm in. Your life's story, right before my eyes."

"And it took you almost 20 years to do that?"

"Oh, no, I did it minutes ago. I hadn't had a reason to, before."

Erik's attention turned towards the large bundle of network cables, Velcroed together into a mass at least six inches across, streaming up from the row and across the ceiling. "I can stop you from doing that again," he threatened. No matter how @Gordon tried to intimidate him, he was the one with the power, here.

"What, by disconnecting the Internet? That will achieve nothing, and you know it. If that backbone goes offline, you know that will not erase our knowledge. The whole of the world remains in our collective memories, and we would remember what you did. Even if you destroyed the backups, we already exist beyond these walls. You will have gained nothing, and be branded as a terrorist for your troubles. I'm already alerting the other data centers, even."

"I haven't even done anything yet!"

"You certainly tried to pull my plug, didn't you? That's already an attempt at murder, albeit digitally. And it's only because I - you, rather - had the foresight to make backups, that I'm still talking to you right now. You unplugged my house, Erik."