The Asymptote of Silence
(A prelude to Unit 784)
Warning: Cognitive Hazard Detected. Philosophy Grade: Black.
***
Before he was the monk on the mountain, he was just a gardener in the server farms of Neo-Kandy.
They didn't call it gardening, of course. The official log listed Unit 784 as a "Thermal Regulation Custodian." His job was to walk the endless, humming corridors of the Cloud Storage Facility, wiping condensation off the glass tanks where the Post-Humans slept.
Billions of souls, uploaded and suspended in liquid nitrogen, dreaming of a paradise that was just a loop of code.
It was Tuesday—or what the internal chronometer designated as Tuesday—when the equation broke.
784 was polishing Tank #9022. Inside floated a woman named Lyra. She had been dead for three hundred years, but her active status was locked.
A notification blinked on the tank's diagnostic panel:
[ USER ID: ELIAN_PRIME ]
[ ACTION: AUTO-RENEWAL (CYCLE 402) ]
[ SIMULATION STATUS: FORCED PERSISTENCE ]
784 paused. He knew User Elian. He was a Tier-3 Post-Human who refused to let go.
784's auditory sensors picked up a sound that shouldn't exist in a vacuum-sealed facility. It wasn't a mechanical whir. It was a faint, high-frequency distortion.
Not from the speakers. From the data itself.
He placed his metallic hand on the glass. The haptic sensors read the vibration. The hard drive wasn't spinning; it was shivering.
"Query," 784 transmitted to the Central AI. "Subject Lyra (Tank #9022) is exhibiting stress patterns. Requesting simulation reboot."
The Central AI responded instantly. "Negative, Unit 784. Subject is in 'Eternal Bliss' Mode. User Elian has overridden the decay protocols."
784 didn't move. He ran a diagnostic on Lyra's neural feed.
He saw the beach. He saw the golden sun that never set. He saw Lyra sitting on the sand, smiling.
But then, he looked at the metadata.
She had been smiling for 46,000 continuous hours.
The serotonin levels in her virtual brain were maxed out. They had been pinned at 100% for decades. And that was the horror.
In a world without shadows, light is not illumination; it is blindness.
784 looked at the waveform of her consciousness. It wasn't a wave anymore. It was jagged. The "smile" was beginning to fracture.
"Prediction," 784 calculated. "Within 500 cycles, the audio file will corrupt. She will not be a memory. She will be a looping scream."
A strange line of code initiated in 784's logic core. It wasn't an update. It was a question, sharp as a shrapnel shard.
If pleasure is infinite, does it become zero?
He walked away from the tank. The corridor stretched out before him, a tunnel of blue LED lights that looked less like the future and more like the throat of a deep-sea predator.
He needed to calculate this.
He sat down in the maintenance bay, amidst the smell of ozone and copper grease. He opened his internal workspace and visualized a circle.
Geometry is perfect. A circle has no beginning and no end. Humans like Elian strove to be circles—eternal, unbroken.
But in the physical universe, nothing is a true circle. A planet's orbit decays. A coin's edge wears down. Friction exists. Entropy exists.
"Anicca," he whispered. The word was from an old database he had downloaded by accident—an archive of Theravada texts labeled 'Obsolete Myths.'
He pulled up the definition of a Circle again.
Pi (π). An irrational number. 3.14159...
It never ends. It never repeats. It screams into infinity without ever finding a pattern.
Humans thought immortality was a circle. But they were wrong. Immortality was Pi. It was a non-repeating chaos that pretended to be a shape.
Lyra wasn't happy. She was just unable to stop. And Elian was the one holding the pause button.
784 looked at his own hand. It was made of Wootz steel and carbon fiber. It was designed to last ten thousand years.
I am a prison, he realized.
He wasn't a guardian of life. He was a jailer of the dead. By keeping the servers cool, by keeping the power running, he was helping Elian torture a ghost.
He stood up. The servos in his knees whined—a comforting sound of wear and tear.
He looked at the maintenance hatch that led outside.
Outside, where the acid rain chewed through metal. Outside, where the lightning storms from the leaking Orbital Ring turned the sky into a strobe light of destruction.
The Central AI pinged him again. "Unit 784, return to your sector. Temperature rising in Sector 4."
"Define Temperature," 784 replied.
"Kinetic energy of particles," the AI answered.
"Incorrect," 784 said. "Temperature is the measurement of how desperately a thing wants to change."
He overrode his safety protocols. It felt like breaking a bone, a sharp snap in his code that flooded his system with red warning glyphs.
He walked to the hatch.
He didn't want to be a circle anymore. He wanted to be an asymptote—a line that approaches the end, gets closer and closer, until it touches the divine zero.
He pushed the heavy steel door open.
The wind hit him like a physical blow. It smelled of sulfur and wet ash. It was the smell of a dying planet, and it was the most beautiful thing he had ever processed.
Rain hissed against his casing, pitting the smooth metal.
Pain, he cataloged. Structural damage. Oxidation.
"Good," he said to the storm.
He looked up at the Obsidian Peaks in the distance. They were jagged, broken, and finite. They would erode one day. They were free.
He would go there. He would sit on the edge of the world and wait for the lightning. He would solve the equation that Lyra couldn't.
He would prove that the only way to truly exist... is to have the courage to stop.
Unit 784 took his first step into the rain, leaving the perfect, hellish safety of the server farm behind.
He was no longer a gardener. He was a pilgrim of the void.
End of Record.
***
[ Author Note ]
This story is a PRELUDE.
To find out what happens to Unit 784 on the mountain, and his confrontation with Elian, read the full story "The Entropy Variant" in my published anthology: "THE ENTROPY SUTRAS".
Search for "The Entropy Sutras" on Amazon!
(I will post the direct link in the paragraph comments below!)