On a typical morning, one in which Woogie did not wake him and change his life beyond recognition, Pablo would have gotten out of bed, used the bathroom facility, then made his way to breakfast and then his office to initiate the day's meetings.
He automatically asked Woogie what the time was, then looked around bemused when he received no answer. Suddenly, though, he knew what time it was. He had no idea how he knew, but he knew with certainty.
If nothing else, his life seemed to have continued into the new simulation seamlessly because he felt hungry. As he had with the question of time, he asked Woogie to lead the way to the communal dining hall just as he had countless times before. He took a step towards the door to walk to his destination, but without Woogie, he thought he would not find the path.
He suddenly knew the exact route with the same confidence as he knew how to breathe or blink his eyelids. As he entered the communal dining hall, something felt different, not about himself but about the diners' actions.
He walked to an empty chair and sat down, after which he usually gave Woogie his order, and he understood what was bothering him. He was the Prime Librarian, and even though the social status meant nothing to him, others always made it a point to either greet or acknowledge him somehow. So far, everyone completely ignored him.
A small group made their way to his table and sat down, one of them directly on top of him! He did not feel the young lady, nor suffer any discomfort, but stood right away because the experience was just too strange.
He wondered what just happened, and the moment he articulated the question to himself, he suddenly knew the answer both in general and in minute detail. He fully understood the technical jargon and implications in a way far beyond that of any Library lessons he had ever uploaded as his mind momentarily seemed to stretch nearly to infinity.
The current anomalies were an artifact of his position as part of the simulation hardware itself and concurrently manifesting the simulation within himself as the city. His perspective as a simulation was as real as ever, but he both resided within and was the physical construct.
He shifted perspective, and suddenly he could see every PDA in the room, and as he walked around, it was evident that they also saw him and avoided sharing the exact same space.
He now understood what had happened on an objective level, but he needed to come to terms and deal with his duality beyond the bare facts. He was aware of a new line of thought, thoughts that were his, but far advanced of any mental gymnastics he or any human could naturally perform.
A solution came, couched in his own thoughts, and he walked back outside the room and made sure the hallway was empty. He instantly thought that he could have known that information just by wanting to know it.
He walked back into the dining hall, and the usual barrage of 'hello Prime' and 'how-are-you' greeted him as they usually did. Being it human or alien, every resident would now see him on the same broadcast neural channel on which everyone saw their PDA's.
Another part of him remembered that there was not really any such thing as a neural channel, just a simulated program that made the simulated people think there was, but he let that thought slide. Down that path likely lay madness, assuming he had the capability to go mad.
Pablo thought he would have to be careful not to let anyone touch him but chuckled and thought a moment while a part of his extended-self wrote new rules so that they now would also experience him tactilely. It was hard to remember that every law of physics, or any other reality within the city, was simply coded into the machine.
He now was the machine as well as the code. He thought it might be amusing to come up with an excuse to make the PDA's more "real" in the future, perhaps by introducing them as robots, but set aside that thought in an internal memo because there were more pressing issues.
His first priority was to look into Earth's situation, the one in the real universe, and wondered how long it would take to travel there. The answer, he was surprised to discover, or remember depending on his perspective, was that he was currently in orbit.
He desired to cause as few ripples in the simulated universe as possible since he knew he was bound to make a few mistakes, especially at first, and was concerned because he was due in a few minutes to attend a committee of the Head Librarians. He needed to be in two places at once, which of course, was now eminently possible.
Pablo stood in place and watched himself walk out of the room. He was careful to remove his primary presence from the senses of everyone in the city and asked himself how and where he could access the fearsome technology on and surrounding Earth. He had several options, but many of them involved concurrent multiple Pablos to directly experience countless machines' sensor arrays.
He might eventually work his way to that condition, but the very thought made him dizzy at the moment. Instead, he envisioned a control room and closed his eyes to ease the transition. When he opened them again, he was in his comfortable butterscotch-yellow chair facing an array of screens that showed video, graphs, and text.
The amount of information should have been overwhelming, but his expanded machine consciousness processed it all and condensed the relative facts into bite-sized chunks with which he was comfortable.
That may not have strictly been necessary, but part of that choice was due to the limitations of the hard-wired personality that represented all that made him human. His desire was to keep his perspective restricted to that level as much as possible.
Everywhere he looked on Earth through the countless remote sensors, people seemed to have gone to sleep in mid-step. There were inevitable deaths from machinery and other moving vehicles that were suddenly on their own recognizance, and fires broke out as flaming instruments were dropped without regard to safety.
He wanted to analyze the world and everything on it, but first, he needed to reprogram the scheduled destruction. He found he only needed to envision an "off" button, and once pressed, automated sub-routines took care of the rest.
The procedure to re-awaken everyone was somewhat anticlimactic. The moment he decided to do so, a specific energy pulse emitted from an orbiting machine, and it was done. He could have delved into the details and watched or controlled any or all of them, but he was trying to learn and maintain a balance that kept his humanity.
The next few days, as he sat and watched the world recover from near annihilation, he kept one small screen focused on a particular five-year-old and the boy's beloved Grandfather. He debated with himself, literally, by re-creating his old companion Woogie.
This was only a simulation based on everything his expanded-self remembered or knew about the original. He also knew that it was more a reflection of himself. From his human perspective, it was a great help.
With the advanced machinery under his control, Pablo could direct all human endeavors towards whatever paths he found fit. His first reaction was to remove all nuclear weapons, and then made a list of environmental catastrophes he planned to tackle from the top down.
The subconscious hidden-iceberg part of him caught his attention. He calculated that specific countries' likely reactions could kill millions just as efficiently with alternative weapons and would likely do so if they suddenly felt defenseless.
He set a portion of his sub-mind on further analysis and created multiple solutions. He decided a lighter hand would more likely succeed in bringing about his desired goal.
He faced the same dilemma on a much smaller scale as he watched Papi and his younger, original self, grind through their daily lives. He could easily arrange for them to become instant billionaires if he wanted, but what effects would that have on the impressionable boy?
It may have been ego, but Pablo thought he came out of his simulated adolescence reasonably well, and it would please him for the physical Pablo to follow in his footsteps, at least ethically and morally.
Papi was a large part of that, but who knew what continued poverty and his jailed parents' influence would have on his development once they were inevitably paroled. After all, Woogie had found him to be the best out of billions of individuals to lead both the virtual and real worlds.
Pablo hoped he could be instrumental in raising Earth-Pablo into an adult that might become a leader of his own world in his own right. There was a lot to decide, but there was time, almost an endless supply of it at the speeds he could now think, as well as the intellectual power to make use of it.
He looked into his other aspect that currently filled the role of Prime Librarian. The previous weeks' worth of memories came back in an instant as he merged with himself. Everything was going well, but there were many avenues of improvement now open that Woogie had been reluctant to implement in his desire to remain as hands-off as possible.
Pablo was human, or started that way, and hoped to stay as close as possible, but he also felt comfortable making changes that may not strictly come from "natural" causes.
He had a flashing concern about the other three races, plus the twenty-two thousand five-hundred and eighteen others if he counted all of those in archive that Woogie already physically destroyed.
Technically, all the others were extinct, and everything he did could be to the benefit of humankind without interfering with their natural development. He planned to extend that goodwill to any new intelligent aliens who arose in the far future, but that would depend on their own growth towards maturity.
~Epilogue~
Pablo separated from his Prime Librarian secondary self and withdrew once more to his control room and companionable Woogie and decided that Papi needed a companion. There surely must be a good woman among the entire world population that could be encouraged into a relationship.
Pablo looked through the physical world's recent archives that resided in the virtual one to make changes and ran simulations to find the most likely match. It turned out several choices were reasonable, but the best, in his opinion, just happened to be a wealthy widow.
Pablo sighed in contentment, then turned a good portion of his thoughts to pursuing the late Woogie's goal of finding the best way to lead disparate intelligent beings, not only to survive but to thrive together.
He had another subsidiary thought and wondered if he could take all this equipment, initially designed for destruction on an unimaginable scale, and turn it to constructive use. The ultimate goal, so entirely ambitious that it sounded ridiculous as he stated it to himself, would be to rebuild every extinct race's world and manipulate evolution until the aliens as a whole, if not the original individuals, might live again.
He was also concerned about the elusive soul and whether he could replace that which had been lost. He took a long time to work out the answer, a possible yes, and an even longer epoch of detailed simulations. The problem with simulations was that they only simulated what you already knew, but the soul's secret was an unknown and could only be experimented on with real subjects.
The experiments began.
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