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- Herausgeber: Francis Rosenfeld
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
What can you say about a girl who was supposed to die tragically young? That her guardian angel got distracted while writing her life code and inadvertently sent her into an infinite loop, a quantum uncertainty of sorts, packed with bonus features. If you break reality you can always make yourself another one, while simultaneously improving the efficiency of the universe. Still in beta testing.
What can you say about a girl who was supposed to die tragically young? That her guardian angel got distracted while writing her life code and inadvertently sent her into an infinite loop, a quantum uncertainty of sorts, packed with bonus features. This sort of stuff can create minor issues for the rest of Creation, issues which, of course, need to be ironed out, but there is nothing that can't be fixed with good team spirit and a can do attitude, especially if you're not unreasonably inflexible about the laws of physics. Don't worry about breaking reality, you can always make yourself another one, or several, and improve the quantum efficiency of the electromagnetic spectrum in the process. Still in beta testing.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Francis Rosenfeld
Mobius’ Code
Table of contents
PART 1
Jennifer 1.0.0.
Jennifer 2.0.0
Jennifer 2.0.1.
Jennifer 2.0.2.
Jennifer 2.0.3.
Jennifer 2.0.4.
PART 2
Jennifer 3.0.0.
Jennifer 5.0.0.
Jennifer 8.0.0.
Jennifer 8.1.0.
Jennifer 8.1.2.
| Jennifer > Beta
PART 1
Jennifer 1.0.0.
“Möbius!” Afael yelled, loud enough to be heard through the thick walls.
Möbius had been waiting for about half an hour for the massive golden door to open and an assistant to invite him into Afael‘s office. All of this time he’d been sitting quietly, counting the sumptuous coffers on the ceiling, looking out the window into the seraphic gardens and gazing at his own reflection in the polished floors. He wasn’t a patient angel, it wasn’t his nature, and during the millennia he’d been working in the Hall of Human Life Design his record indicated a dedicated, albeit rather temperamental character with a passion for florid detail.
He made his way into the office, loathed to endure another one of Afael’s scolding sessions. It wasn’t the first time he had found himself in this situation, but it wasn’t possible, it just wasn’t possible for anybody with a pulse to navigate the great sea of human life design without losing it every now and then. Truth be told, writing human lives wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, like he first thought in his youthful enthusiasm, all those thousands of years ago, and after a while they all started blending into each other, an endless chain of births and deaths that had to have some sort of stuffing in between. That’s where he came in: he wrote the stuffing.
“This code could put a novice to sleep,” he often sighed, as he selected and pasted the standard life options based on life span, soul mate availability and gender.
“It’s the most sacred duty and trust to make sure that the humans in your care get the best life quality available,” his mentor had said, way back when. “What is an endless repetition for you is the only life they’ll ever have…I think…I would have to consult the records, to be sure…Anyway, you get the lesson, Möbius. Don’t be cavalier in your fiduciary duty, we are held to higher standards than that.”
“Easy for him to say, he doesn’t have to go through this mountain of crap.” All the same, not a thing he couldn’t put together in his sleep. It was simple, repeated billions of times: as long as the person was alive, they would follow the life code, until they were no longer alive, in which case their code was moved to the Department of Afterlife and, mercifully, it ceased to be his problem. Despite his moral misgivings, after all of this time, he had to admit, at least to himself, that humans weren’t all that interesting. Sure there was the opportunity, every now and then, to write the life of an Einstein, or a Beethoven, which required a superior level of creativity, but those cases were few and far between. For the most part life design didn’t require more effort than pulling in the boiler plate code and modifying the specific parameters.
“What have we here?” he yawned and pulled a new array into the system. “Female, life span 29, seriously, who is putting together this slop? You can’t get any good code out of that, there is just not enough there to warrant interesting outcomes.” Sure, his mentor would have given him a never ending lecture full of examples of people who had managed to achieve their purpose early in life, only to emphasize the concept that there are no human lives that are too short or unimportant, only lazy angelic hosts who don’t apply themselves. “Whatever!” he thought, and went back to the data. “Midrange college, on again off again boyfriend, average starting job, why don’t you try and turn this into Sylvia Plath. I’ll just pull another life that’s similar enough and modify it.” He didn’t understand why they were still working life designs in the old system anyway, since they were days away from the upgrade, which promised a much more streamlined process, with less chances of error, and as such, less opportunities for headaches when implemented. And that’s when Möbius’ heretical thought emerged. “Just once, just for the heck of it, I wish I could get the chance to write something interesting and extraordinary, not this crowd optimized slop! What’s it going to hurt? I’ll put it in an else loop, it’s not going to execute anyway, a human can only be alive or dead. I wonder what that would look like.”
A rebellious streak of his personality showed up immediately to assist in the process, and for the remainder of the day he coded and chuckled with glee, excited by his little pet project. At the end of the day he couldn’t bear to instruct it to go to the end, since he figured that anything other than dead or alive was not a real possibility, so he set the code on a loop, with an infinite number of variations, based on information from several Akashic libraries.
He was so excited about his little project, which was quite the masterpiece, if he could say so himself, that the next day’s summoning to Afael’s office came almost as a shock, even though he knew exactly what the latter wanted to discuss.
“This is an embarrassment, Möbius! I can’t believe I have to gaze upon this plate of bad code from an angel of your caliber. Writing information that won’t execute! Copy pasting life designs without paying attention to the variables, he pointed to a blatant error in the code, which scheduled activities for the age of thirty five, six years after the subject’s demise. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“I’m sorry, Afael, I don’t know what to say,” Möbius made an attempt at an excuse, with so little conviction even he felt bad about it.
“Listen, Möbius, I know everybody is tired and hassled with the upgrade coming in, so I don’t want to waste my time discussing something like this,” he pointed to the document with non-dissimulated disdain. “Delete this nonsense before the upgrade and I don’t want to hear any more from you this year.”
“Figures,” Möbius went back to his work area, morose. He moved the code to the trash bin, to be processed by the nightly maintenance, and tried to put it out of his mind, so he could concentrate on the details of the upcoming upgrade.
Fate works in mysterious ways, even in the angelic realm. An energy fluctuation interrupted the reboot exactly at that file, counting it first deleted, then active, which gave the master servers the signal that it needed to be restored, so they put it back in the system, to be incorporated into the upgrade in due time. Fortunately for Möbius, neither he nor his superior noticed the aberration, which would have been a cause for much sound and fury, but instead the little unorthodox file made its way anonymously into the vast amount of data and waited patiently to be executed.
***
“Hey, Möbius! Remember, we’re all one, man!” one of his colleagues passed him by and saw fit to treat him to a reheated version of the old tease that resulted in his nickname.
“How does that never get old? I’d be bored witless by now,” Möbius thought, and that said a lot since he himself was no a stranger to pranks and prattle. He still had the urge to kick himself for sharing his heartfelt belief that the universe was a wonderfully unified place where everything affected everything else and one was no more different from an ant or a cloud than one could be from one’s own hands.
“What the heck are we all doing here, then?” his mentor asked, in a rhetorical tone that left no doubt about his personal approach to the subject. “If everything is one and we’re all good, what on earth does humanity need us for? Face it, Möbius, there’s always going to be good and evil in this world, we all have to pick a side.”
“There is only one side!” Möbius blurted before his brain had time to call back the words, stirring a roar of laughter.
“Our beloved brother here managed to get the nature of non-duality to reveal itself to him,” his mentor taunted mercilessly. “Maybe we should all be in awe of his wisdom.”
Möbius looked down, beet red with embarrassment and furious that he saw fit to put such a personally relevant belief out in the field for all to kick around. “A whole eternity of this! Nobody can put up with this for eternity!” he thought, as burning nerves were fighting to burst out of his skin.
“You’re like an ant on a Möbius’ band,” the mentor continued, visibly entertained, “no matter where we put you, after a while you end up on the opposite side. Why are you so bent on challenging the way things are?” he eventually asked, in a slightly friendlier tone.
“Because there is no other side. It’s always the same side, you just can’t wrap your head around it,” Möbius kept his thoughts to himself this time, too upset to speak.
From that day on his nickname, Möbius, stuck. In time he learned to accept it as a name he’d earned for himself and after a while he didn’t even question being called by it, and people started to forget what his real name was anyway. It was just when some smart-alec decided to take the old taunt out for a spin that he got peeved by it.
“Did you rewrite the code?” Afael’s voice startled him from behind.
“I’m still working on it,” Möbius replied.
“But you did take down the old code, one hopes,” Afael left no room for excuses. “I don’t want to picture what would happen if that somehow made it into the Continuum.”
“Yes, I deleted it last night, before the midnight back-up.”
“Then how is it that I’m staring at it?” Afael asked with a calm that didn’t bode well.
“I…can’t imagine how it happened…” Möbius replied, befuddled.
“Take care of it, will you?” Afael frowned, displeased, and left.
“This cursed code made it back into the live stream just to make my life unpleasant. It has a mind of its own, I just know it. Maybe there is evil after all,” Möbius mumbled to himself, irritated that he had to deal with this stupid problem again, on top of having to rewrite that human’s life to unseemly specs.
He deleted the old code, checked twice that it was gone and started over, really irritated and trying to find a way, any way at all, to make that girl’s short life worthwhile and meaningful in some way, despite the really bad boilerplate specs. Möbius was, in fact, a good angel.
“Why on earth would anybody write this crap? I thought we were supposed to protect and guide human life, not condemn it ahead of time. This is a dereliction of duty and I’m not doing it.”
He sat, defiantly, trying to garner enough enthusiasm to go ask that this uninspiring file be given to somebody else, but what was the point of washing his hands of it, it would only ensure that whatever joy and meaning he would have been able to weave into that life would be foregone by the hypothetical bored colleague who wouldn’t even read its details. He had to admit he did that too when he was in a hurry: they all went through the specs, changed the dates and the genders to match and moved on to the next life. There were so many of them!
Unfortunately for him, he’d read enough of the spec to feel guilty about it, and knew that not making good on this particular life would nag at his conscience forever, and that was very literal for an angel and not a pleasant thought to contemplate.
“Damn it!” he cussed under his breath.
“Möbius!!” Afael screamed from his office. “Really?! In Heaven?!”
“If only he heard everything this well,” Möbius kept his displeasure to himself this time. Afael’s gift for pretending not to hear conversations that didn’t serve his purpose was notorious around the office.
Möbius worked long into the night, rearranging the details and the timelines so that the really unpalatable life read just a little better, and after all that work he had to admit that no matter what he did there was only so much one could improve on crap. Bitter, he checked the code, ran it to make sure it worked properly, and placed it in queue to be picked up by the next upload.
Maybe Providence itself intervened, maybe it was a random coincidence, maybe it was synchronicity at its finest, who is to know? Sometimes things happen that defy logic and no matter how many times you look at them you still can’t understand how, given the circumstances, they came to be. At midnight the old file got back into the live stream again, overwriting all of Möbius’ hard work from the day before. It didn’t linger on the local server this time; it waited for the midnight upload and hitched a ride into the Continuum where its light would shine brightly and reality defyingly to every appalled human who happened to be in some way associated with it.
It is true that time has a completely different meaning in Heaven, so it would be really hard to tell when the aberrant file behavior started to become apparent, suffice it to say that it wasn’t immediate. And why would it have been? The little girl was born in her average household, went to her average school, where she got her average grades, had an average social life, there was nothing about her that would make her stand out in any way. After all, for the first portion of his illicit pet project, Möbius didn’t modify the standard code at all, since he didn’t think there was any point: while “alive”, follow the specifications modified for gender until the Time of Demise, when the “dead” option took over, analyzed the behaviors during loop one and pointed the subject to Heaven or Hell accordingly. The fact that Möbius had added an “else” to the code didn’t change the first part in the least, because, by design, it wasn’t intended to.
The girl approached the age of twenty nine, completely oblivious to her fate, like mere mortals tend to be, neither happy nor miserable, neither excited nor scared, rushing blindly to the next activity, propelled by the ubiquitous sequence of ifs and buts that quietly directs all human life. It was only when she reached her TOD that all hell broke loose, if one is allowed to use such a word in this context.
“Möbius!!” Afael screamed for the third time, so loud that the foundations of Heaven shook. “I want to see you in my office right now!”
As I said, time passes differently upstairs, but still, enough of it had elapsed between the release of the fateful file and its peculiar effects for Möbius to have forgotten all about it, and when he found himself face to face with Afael he had no idea what had generated the brouhaha.
“You did this on purpose, didn’t you?” Afael thundered from behind the desk, shoving the delinquent file in Möbius’ face.
“What is…How…This is not possible!” Möbius gasped, quietly assessing the consequences of such a creative release.
“If you are looking at it, it is possible. Especially if you made it possible, it’s possible!” Afael snapped back.
“I didn’t…” Möbius tried to explain himself, but the former stopped him with a gesture of his hand.
“This is what happens when we get entangled in misguided attempts to get creative. Why do you think the standard specifications were conceived in the first place?” He threw the code on the table as if to dismiss it. “I’m not dealing with this problem. You created it, you fix it.”
“Can I get a little more information about what happened?” Möbius made an attempt to appease him.
“Why would you need any? You wrote the artistic interpretation of our sacred standards, you should be thoroughly familiar with what’s in it.” He pretended to work on something else, while Möbius was wondering if he should stay or leave. “Are you still here?” Afael asked without lifting his eyes from his work. “I don’t expect to see you back until this problem is solved.”
“Back from where?” Möbius asked, because in his eternal existence as an angelic host he’d never been anywhere else but here.
“Earth, of course! You’ve earned yourself a guardianship. Go guard!”
“A Guardian Angel?? I have no idea how to do that, I didn’t get any training…” Möbius tried to protest, shocked at the prospect.
“You should have thought of that before you got creative.” Afael retorted. “Why are you still here?”
Möbius returned to his desk and pulled the file, trying to figure out how it could possibly have blown up in his face. The code was bulletproof, if anything it was so dull it couldn’t break if one forced it to. Everything checked out, the life details were correct, the death details were correct, he was so sure of it, and then he saw it, the miserable line that had turned his existence upside down, the timeline inconsistency that involved a significant life event at the age of thirty five.
“I can’t believe I missed that!” he worked through the logic of the program, trying to follow where the error would lead. “But that’s not possible!” he stared in disbelief at the “else” command.
“You’re the one who wrote it in the code,” his colleague didn’t miss his chance to express opinion. “You know what they say, garbage in, garbage out.”
“But that would mean she’s neither living, nor dead,” Möbius babbled in disbelief.
“Congratulations! Your code worked exactly as intended.”
“But that’s…”
“Not possible?” His colleague scoffed. “You’re an angel, Möbius. If you wrote it in the code, it’s possible.”
***
The sun was high up in the sky when Jennifer woke up that Saturday morning, and she wasn’t eager to get out of bed at all. It had been a grueling week at work, her on again off again boyfriend had canceled their date at the last minute and she knew that somewhere on the coffee table in the living room, which, as usual, was covered in an unholy mess, was the receipt for the blouse she wanted to return. She didn’t understand what had possessed her to buy it in the first place: it was the wrong color, and it had a very unflattering fit for her body shape, which made it pull and tug in all the wrong places, making her self-conscious.
The fact that now she had to make an extra trip to return it, if she was lucky enough to find the receipt in that mess, made her gasp in exasperation. She couldn’t figure out what she could do about her life to make it more manageable, as the facts stood right now she never seemed to have enough time to catch up with it. If somebody sat Jennifer down and made her write down all the duties she had on any given day, she would have understood that it wasn’t feasible to cram thirty six hours of activity in twenty four hours of life, especially if one had to use a few of those hours to sleep, but Jennifer would never waste her time analyzing her life like that, because she was too busy already.
That morning, however, she had decided to cut herself some slack and catch an extra hour of sleep. The sunlight bothered her and she got mad at herself for forgetting to close the curtains the night before, but she didn’t want to let this detail annoy her, so she closed her eyes really tight and pulled the comforter over her head.
“Are you going to sleep all day?” a voice sounded out from the other side of the room, startling her into a wretched panic. Frozen in fear, she wasn’t able to open her eyes, and she waited for the intruder to make his move, terrified by the prospect of impending death. No other sound emerged from his direction, so she wondered if she’d hallucinated the whole thing, or maybe she was still between dream and reality and didn’t realize it. The mind does play tricks like that every now and again. She opened her eyes slowly, to reassure herself that it was all in her head, and she saw him sitting in the chair by the window, looking very bored. She instinctively pulled the comforter around herself, in an absurd gesture of self-defense.
“Please don’t be afraid, I mean you no harm,” Möbius uttered the standard phrase described in the operation manual for angel-human encounters, and it sounded so unconvincing, even to him, that he wished he didn’t speak at all. Jeniffer, however, seemed to be less terrified, as much as it was possible under the circumstances, so he thought to himself “what do you know, those stiffs at the nanny camp really know what they’re talking about, what a shock.”
“Get out of my room,” Jennifer managed to mumble. She tried to sound forceful, but her mouth was dry with fear and the words came out with gurgling sounds due to the uncontrollable shaking.
“I knew that was a mistake,” Möbius blamed himself. “I should have met her at a coffee shop or something.” He then realized that if she was so terrified to see him before she even knew why he had shown up, breaking the news that she was, for all practical purposes, a coding error, was not conducive to improving their chances of mutual trust.
“Get out!” Jennifer picked up some nerve, encouraged by the non-aggressive demeanor. “I will call the police right now,” she threatened, playing for time to think of a way to get out of there, and since he shrugged his shoulders she figured that she might be able to dial 911 before he had a chance to approach her. The phone rang for the longest time, while her calm intruder continued to sit in his chair, and when somebody eventually picked up they explained that they don’t get involved in this sort of dispute and wished her the best of luck in resolving the situation amicably.
“Didn’t you hear what I said? There is an intruder in my room right now! Please send somebody! Hello? Hello?”
“Did he hang up on you?” Möbius asked, unperturbed. Jennifer decided to try another approach, to maybe talk her way out of there.
“Who are you? What do you want from me?” she asked.
“I am an angel,” Möbius graciously obliged.
“Oh, a mental patient,” Jennifer tried to mask a sigh of relief, even though having to deal with a person who didn’t have a good grasp on reality didn’t seem a whole lot safer than dealing with a sane individual intent on malfeasance. “Maybe I can talk my way out of this after all,” she thought.
“No, Jennifer. I’m afraid you can’t.”
“He can’t possibly read my thoughts, I’m so afraid I’m making this up. Everything is going to be fine. Calm down, Jennifer!” she told herself.
“Yes, please, do calm down, Jennifer, we need to talk.”
“How can you possibly know my thoughts?” She didn’t even realize whether she had asked the question in her mind or out loud, but it didn’t seem to make any difference either way.
“Well, for lack of a better explanation, I wrote them. The general outline, at least.”
“This is going nowhere,” Jennifer thought, and as she did she watched with surreal calm as Möbius dipped his hand into the side table as if it were made of water, and then pulled it back out.
“You were about to ask me how I got in here. Rest assured, you did lock your door. I checked after I arrived, you can never be too careful, with all the crazies out there, although right now it probably doesn’t matter all that much,” he frowned trying to figure out if that was in fact the case and didn’t seem to draw any conclusion. “Or maybe it does, I really don’t know.”
Jennifer’s mind was slow running all of the impossible scenarios that would make this bizarre circumstance possible.
“I must still be asleep, that’s it. Wake up, Jennifer! Wake up, Jennifer!” she closed her eyes, trying to shake herself out of this persistent nightmare.
“You know, logically speaking, if you wanted to wake yourself up you should be opening your eyes, not closing them,” he offered advice, but then he met her terrified stare and reconsidered. “Don’t mind me. Take your time.”
