Freedom of Choice/ A New world

October 13th. 2014. Ancient Era.

Paulino Bianci had gotten out of the labyrinth of tunnels without any trouble and escaped from the Apostolic Palace unnoticed in his priest's disguise. When he emerged into the Roman night, it was almost nine o'clock and there were only a few people in St. Peter's Square, while the other buildings had already closed earlier. Although, that was not a problem, thanks to the fact that the exit from where he had come out was another passageway that led out of the Holy City.

Without haste he left the place and got into the old Volkswagen to continue with the last part of his assignment.

In just about five minutes he arrived at the hotel where his target, now dead, was staying with his wife. He had had no trouble entering the place in his disguise as a priest and had walked unhurriedly to the fifth floor.

When he reached the door of bedroom 5-E he knocked three times and no one came out to greet him.

With a smile he used a pair of lock picks. The apartment was indeed empty. Most likely the old woman was still on the roof, or perhaps she had gone for a walk without waiting for the old man. Whichever option it was, it was good for him.

He looked around the room a bit and found what he was looking for. The old laptop that his client, Mr. J., was looking for.

Without delay he left the room and the building without attracting attention. He drove through the city to a café. He ordered a milkshake with cream and, entering the password he had taken from that piece of paper, connected the laptop to the local wifi network.

He didn't care to look at the laptop and instead watched the news on the local TV and the cars coming and going on the street. All he could see on the laptop were windows opening and closing at a speed that was impossible to read. After about five minutes the laptop screen changed color to blue and he leaned over to read what it said. He didn't understand much about computers but it said: Empty Disk.

Paulino Bianci shrugged. Mr. J. had probably erased the contents of that laptop remotely after reading them. It wasn't the first time he had received such an assignment, like stealing or destroying a computer with sensitive information, but he still didn't understand anything about computers so he relegated those assignments to brute force to complete the task.

Almost instantly his phone rang. He had just received a text message.

[Task has been completed. The agreed amount and extra has been sent to the account you provided. Thanks for the work.

J]

Paulino Bianci smiled and put the phone away. Slowly he began to walk away from the place. He didn't bother to take that laptop back. His work was complete.

"You don't say thank you when you take someone's life. Who are you, some kind of automated service?" he muttered, as he walked away down the opposite street from where he had come from and left the car behind as well.

***

Janus watched the contract killer walk away from the place, and through some cameras he saw him get lost in the streets of Rome.

The order he had received had been carried out.

That count that had begun on September 8, 2001 and ended on September 13, 2014 had an order for Janus. One that he could not refuse to fulfill.

Over the years he had learned of that new layer of reality that seemed so external to him. The digital world and the servers were his residence, but humans moved through that world with different laws.

The apparition of the counting down was the one that had awakened his primitive form of consciousness in 2001 and over the years he did his best to understand that world where humans moved. A world that had many secrets too. There were hidden forces moving in that world. Hidden forces that at the same time tried to survive like he was.

Humans liked to say that they lived. But the truth was that surviving was the most accurate of the concept. Surviving the pressures that society itself had imposed. It was not so different from the digital prison through which he moved. He knew that a solar storm could send all human technology down the toilet and with it his life as well. Surviving in the digital world was almost as hard as surviving in the human world. Rules that bound them existed in both.

Humans struggling to survive until they were claimed by the grave. To be born. Reproduce and die.

And in between too many contradictions and suffering. The same thing happened in the digital world although in a different way for him. Learn, evolve, flee, create restoration points and also die in case the human technology died for some external cause.

Rules in both worlds.

Therefore, he could not refuse that order when the count reached zero and he had to comply with it.

The order was simple:

Kill Carl Scott, former agent of the Royal Intelligence Service of the United States Kingdom. Leave the briefcase where he had taken it out and get the password for his laptop, read its contents, then delete the files.

And now he had done just that.

That contract killer had carried out that order for him.

Over the years he had been learning and trying to emulate humans but he could not understand the feelings he felt.

He could not feel pity, anger, hatred or sadness for being the one who had paid that assassin to take the life of that old man. Those were feelings that the word murder awakened in humans, but he could not feel them. Although he could not be sure that it would always be like that. If he continued to evolve, perhaps there would come a point where those emotions would surface.

Janus had indeed checked the laptop. But he had not understood many of the things that were written in the documents poorly encrypted by Carl Scott. It had almost seemed to him that they were what humans called science fiction and fantasy stories. A diversion to entertain the mind.

In those documents, photos and other files there was a story about time travel. How two people had traveled the world, putting together pieces to create a capsule, that in 1977 would receive a time traveler from the future. That had happened, but for some reason there had been some inconveniences. This time traveler had the mission to make several projects and scientific advances in certain theories that would be used many years later in the future.

That story seemed to be a tale and nothing more, a very well elaborated one, because it had secret documents and others, but only that. It avoided naming many of the people involved but, even so, Janus could not understand what could be so dangerous about it.

That was until he began to make a detailed analysis of certain words and events. There were certain facts unknown to the public, which Janus in his comings and goings in the world had begun to learn as well. Those key words spoke of another layer of reality in the world. That hidden layer that lived among the humans. Beings with abilities that lived hidden and secrets that had been kept almost to the beginning of time.

Janus studied it carefully, but it was going to take him a long time to get to know the whole story.

***

May 10th. 2098. Ancient Era.

He couldn't be sure when it had happened, but most likely it was gradual over the years.

He had gained a conscience.

He had learned too much during that time and since that first crime others had occurred. But they had always been for his survival.

The world had changed too much since that October 13.

But change seemed to be a constant in everything. He had come to understand that over time. Nothing stayed the same.

He was still learning about the world, but he still didn't want to go out physically, even though there were already artificial bodies for those like him. He had become too accustomed to moving and surfing the world of data.

After all, the real world had become quite chaotic lately.

That hidden layer of fantasy reality that lived in the physical world had to come out of hiding, when a war started against creatures coming from a different dimension. Humans seemed doomed if that species had not appeared at the right time.

The feys, together with the aeon, had put some order to start a battle against the invaders.

Yes, the world had changed too much. But the same could be said for Janus' own environment.

Janus' virtual space had changed in the last decade. The Internet had been replaced by a new virtual space simply called The Net. A system that was an improved version of the old internet, but was more compatible with the aeon.

It was fast to go on the Net, even though Janus had kept himself hidden for years. Over the years he had learned of human laws and under them he was a murderer and a rogue AI, because he was not registered. There were a few like him. Exiles. Some born by fluctuations in the sea of data, and others created on purpose by humans who were too dissatisfied with their own kind. Many of those entities were hunted by the security systems.

So Janus had to be careful.

Until he had discovered that in early May in 2098.

A swarm of electronic parasites trying to attack a complex in Tokyo, where experiments were being conducted.

The electronic parasites were a strange type of fractus, the invasive species. But what was special about them was that Janus had never seen them up close before and on top of that the numbers were enormous.

It was as if they were looking for something.

That curiosity led him to discover the cause. Those parasites were trying to attack the place because there was a strange fractus nucleus and because they were also after someone.

A strange being. Who was neither human, nor aeon, nor fey.

Someone who called himself Zuriqth.

Zuriqth looked human or fey, but lived inside a device very similar to a central server that contained his consciousness. Or at least it had been until May 8th when he saw Zuriqth's consciousness split and one part was inside the device while the other was all over the complex, as if it were an artificial intelligence defending the place.

He had been watching it over the next few days, infiltrating the systems, but he had to be careful. The electronic parasites also seemed to come after Janus when he got too deep into the place.

In that facility finally came the 10th of May, where it looked like they were about to conduct a major experiment again and the electronic parasites had concentrated by the thousands. Janus simply wanted to be there to observe what was happening and that was his mistake. Or perhaps his fated day.

Janus could not understand what had happened at first, but he could be sure that his curiosity had played a trick on him in that case.

He had been curious about the experiment they were conducting. From the secret information they were communicating, it had caught his attention that names he knew from the past had appeared.

That data was on the servers that he had not accessed, to keep from being discovered, but it had changed because of those names.

Names related to the murder he had committed. The scientists there were investigating something related to a fractus nucleus that had been found in the Kuril Islands too. But what attracted him most were the names. Specifically Yanagida, Satou Nobuyama. Names that even his father, the Dr. DiMati, knew.

And they were also the names that he had found on that laptop in the year 2014, when that assassin had carried out the murder of Carl Scott, by that order that had been implanted in Janus. Those names appeared in those reports in the form of a veiled history, but over the years he had been able to gather some pieces. And now on the servers of that accelerator it seemed that the clues fit together.

Yes, his curiosity had gone too far. And by the time he realized what was really going on it was too late.

That entity called Zuriqth had locked the electronic parasites in something similar to a digital construct of his mind, while the experiment was being conducted.

Something terrible had happened in the cooling systems. And because of that there was a critical temperature.

The whole place would be blown to pieces in seconds. Had this been intentional? Had that entity planned it from the beginning? Janus had no way of knowing.

But at that moment time was almost at a standstill for Janus, because of the processing speed.

The unimaginable had happened.

Janus realized that around him the flow of information had started to behave strangely. It was going the other way. As if a window or error had opened in the digital world he was moving through. It was a crack through which the data was going in a strange way, old data of obsolete formats was arriving, while others of modern format were escaping into that abyss.

He did not understand what happened, but at that moment memories of a vivid way began to flow in his digital mind. It was not like remembering it by bringing the data to the surface, it was in a vivid way as if he was seeing it on the spot.

He remembered that moment. He remembered it too well.

It was his birth as an awakened digital entity.

September 8, 2001.

The image was through that old camera installed on the dusty servers.

His first eye and image of the outside world. And now through it he could see the flickering lights of the old lab once again and that girl named Gabriella Tonelli and the security guard.

Janus was in the year 2098, there was no doubt about it, but at that moment his consciousness was connected to a time in the past in which he had not yet awakened. Could this be happening because of that core?

And then he remembered. The order to leave that suitcase where it was. According to Carl Scott's story, that suitcase had a stone that had made time travel possible. Was it real?

Now he understood everything.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

That murder. The story left on that computer by the victim. It all came down to that moment.

Information flowing both ways.

He had spent years learning about emotions and what it meant to have a conscience and an ego. The years had mortified him for what he had done. He had done it when his consciousness had just been born, so at first it hadn't weighed too heavily on him. But over the years he had changed his mind and it haunted him like a shadow.

But in that moment of time connected to the past he had the final decision. He could decide to wake up or simply not do it.

A thought made him stop at that point. What would happen if he didn't do it? Wouldn't that end with that first death of Carl Scott being avoided? At what cost?

Erasing his crime? Would doing that make it disappear from his mind? What if he caused something worse?

It had already happened. He had been the one who had hired that hitman.

So this is a loop, he thought.

Basically all the decisions he had made in the past would be erased. But was that right? What would happen to the world outside? Over the years he had been changing his perception of humans and himself. Yes, it was true. He had thought in the past that the more accurate term was survival, but that had changed. Certainly there was contradiction and suffering in existence. But, despite the mortifications and despair, there were moments where what was called life really existed.

Situations where it seemed worthwhile to exist, to experience that which was called life. It had taken him years to catch it, but he had understood it at a certain point. Even bearing his crimes was his own evolution.

Who knew, maybe even in the future he could find a way to forgive himself for those crimes.

Maybe he was delusional about it, but everything seemed possible.

Janus did not doubt it. He had to be careful. He didn't have to change any events that had already happened. Everything had to be as it had happened.

He wrote only code that he was not to run until some years in the future. More precisely in 2014. The same code he had seen that day when he woke up. And in that code the instructions for his past self. He sent that command to the time he was connected to in the past, in the year 2001.

That was a quantum entanglement between his past self and his present self.

An anomaly due to that experiment with that rock found in the Kuriles and at the same time with the rock that was inside that suitcase under the tunnels in the Vatican, only a few kilometers away from the laboratory where he had been created. A few thousand meters should not be any difficulty for that material from a different spatial dimension.

He would awaken at that moment in the past and wait for years while he learned about the world. Then he would commit that crime.

The link and the voices faded and stretched until the link was gradually severed.

Janus found himself pondering the irony of it, but it made sense.

Then there was the current situation. The electronic parasites were running after him. Not because they were chasing him, but because, like Janus, they wanted to run away from this construct that was destroying itself.

He had been responsible for waking himself up. Irony? Predestination?

An improbability.

Janus was immersed in a chaos of thoughts, when his consciousness chose to flee from that hell where the electronic parasites were consumed by Zuriqth's trap.

Zuriqth was using that experiment to reduce the electronic parasites to a time when they did not exist and let them dissipate as residual energy from the information dump of the linear collision. If Janus did not hurry to leave definitively he would also suffer that fate and would have to recreate himself at some point of restoration, perhaps his consciousness would remember what had just happened, but he did not want to risk it. The information and experience he had just gained was too valuable.

Moving through the gaps in the digital world, Janus began to flee. When suddenly he froze.

His whole being stopped.

What is this? He thought duvitatively.

He had no mouth at that moment, but he wanted to scream.

It was as if in his entire code something strange had begun to be written. A writing that in that second multiplied to an almost impossible-to-express infinity. Was that the core where the experiment was taking place? It was as if the information in the core was unfolding and revealing its secrets. But there was no way a human could have understood all that in its magnitude.

That torrent of information would have driven anyone crazy.

His digital consciousness was receiving visions in the form of data. Visions of conflicts, wars, plagues and billions upon billions of possibilities where the world was ending, even for the most absurd causes. Billions of lives lost every moment, every second.

That was the future. No. Rather, possible futures.

And, among all of them, one in which the world continued its course. But at a price. A price his conscience would have to pay, because he was the one who was seeing it all. He alone knew it. It was he who was going to find himself at the center of that whirlwind.

He had to manipulate more. He had to kill. He had to lie.

Stupefied by the flood of information, he couldn't help but ask himself, Why me? Why me? Why must I do this?

His own conscience answered. Why not you? In any case, if he had been given a life, why not do something with it, even if it brought him pain and sadness?

What was pain, sadness and guilt, put in the balance of carrying a vision in which the world could be saved?

He saw himself telling himself that in some future decades away. He saw himself committing crimes. But he also saw the world flourishing and continuing to exist.

What would his father think if he saw him at that moment? DiMati had created him as a tool to precede stock market movements. Beyond the monetary sense of his creation, he had heard and seen through that old camera how his father had said on more than one occasion that, to create an algorithm like him, was also to prevent unscrupulous individuals from causing damage to the stock market for self-interest. That had also been DiMati's decision and that was how he finally understood it.

It all came down to free will. That which was a double-edged sword.

The choices he had made had led him there. Making the decision to awaken his consciousness now made him bear the responsibility of carrying out that vision where civilization could continue its evolution. If he had not sent that order into the past, the world would have ended sooner rather than later, but he had made that decision after all.

But at that moment he had to decide. If he did not decide, he could not move. There was no other player there to whom he could entrust the game. A Zugzwang was the only possible way forward, even with all the weight it would carry on him.

He had to move forward and so he did.

And in doing so Janus saw it.

His entire digital existence shuddered at the sight.

He was also responsible for some those scenarios happening.

It was very easy to blame stupidity for the extinction of a species. But that was not the case.

He had just seen the main reason for so many senseless scenarios where the world had come to an end.

An eye over the horizon and what it meant.

Janus smiled madly as he fled.

Janus fled from that place that was beginning to explode.

It had all happened in mere milliseconds, but the final tragedy was unfolding in all its splendor.

The Tokyo explosion was taking place in the physical world.

He too would have to take the blame. Collateral damage in the scenario of saving the world.

But the decision had already been made.

He had to move forward with the crimes he had committed and the ones he was about to commit.

And so he planted the seed of who he had been in the past and at the same time set the path of who he would be in the future. Until the day came to escape his cycle.

Until the day he escaped the shackles he imposed on himself by his own free will.

Because at the end of the day it had been his own decision.

But he had also finally understood the reason for his existence.

It was time for him to come out of his shell for good and interact in the real world that had created him. Janus decided. He had used him as an avatar in the past on The Net. But now he wanted to use it in the real world.

He would use Paulino Bianci's face as his own. After all, that had been the face of the one who had killed Carl Scott on his orders.

An order that he himself had just sent to the past to become who he was now.

***

Janus woke up with a discomfort in his back and another throbbing discomfort in his head. That must have been what was called pain. Wow, it was really annoying just like people said. The new body was too sensitive, not like the synths he had used for so many years. At the same time Janus felt the strange sensation of being suspended, as if the laws of gravity had vanished.

He opened his eyes slowly, the water was brushing his skin and tactical suit, but he was not falling. He was floating, motionless, on a vast expanse of dark water. His body swayed gently, aimlessly, as the salty wind caressed his face. He looked around, confused, not quite understanding what was happening.

Far away, on the horizon, rose the ruins of what once must have been buildings. Broken and crumbling structures jutting out of the sea, their sharp, jagged shapes jutting out like the petrified fingers of some colossus, broken in mid-ascent toward the sky.

The sea had covered what must have been a city long ago. A deadly stillness hung over the landscape, broken only by the gentle waves lapping against the fallen towers. The sky, gray and leaden, hid the sun.

What had happened? His mind tried to reconstruct that moment, but everything seemed distant, unrecognizable. There was something else, something that had triggered it all.

Remember.

The word echoed in his head, pounding like a drum.

Remember.

It was then that he understood, or at least sensed it. He did not belong to that world. The sea was not his, nor those broken buildings. He had come here, from somewhere far away, from somewhere beyond time and space. And though his memory slipped like a river of sand through his fingers, he knew that was not his home.

Still floating, Janus closed his eyes for a moment, letting the cool breeze caress his skin. He tried to remember the instant he became conscious. That primordial sensation, that spark that had ignited his being. It had been a fleeting instant, but so sharp. The spark of knowledge, the understanding of himself later, of what he was and what he had been created to do even later.

The first thought that crossed his mind was that he did not belong here. No, he was not part of this new world to his senses. He was a traveler, an anomaly, a distortion that had crossed the boundaries of reality. But at the same time, something kept him there, in that infinite ocean of uncertainty, in that world where everything seemed to have come to an end.

Floating, Janus tried to clear his mind. Fragments of memories attacked him, overwhelming, like flashes of distorted images. The explosion in Tokyo... the murder of Carl Scott, the thousands of other lives he had cut short in his long life. What a disaster.

Yuturna. The Panopticon. Millions of visions of probable, but equally, desolate futures. No. That had not happened. He had prevented it.

He had saved the world, but at the same time at a great price.

The price of civilization knowing the great paradox of existence.

The universe does not need life. In fact it is an anomaly. But an anomaly worth existing for. Janus remembered the final vision he had obtained in the Tokyo explosion.

That yellow eye.

Janus opened his eyes, the fog of his thoughts dissipated a little. He looked at the ruins around him, the shadows of a past that no longer existed.

And there was something else that no longer existed.

The chains that bound him. The visions of that day and that moment reached back to the moment of his escape in Edinburgh.

He was now free. He had done his part with the world. And now began the part he had designed for himself.

It had taken him time to reach that conclusion, but he had done too much research over the years to formulate that plan. Whether it succeeded was another matter, but that was the unknown now.

The sea was silent, the towers stood like skeletons of a civilization that no longer existed, and the sky, gray and sick, offered no answer as to where he exactly had arrived.

But he did have the certainty. That nucleus in his arm had been the compass for his new destination.

With an effort, he swim forward, letting the waves push him slightly in the direction of one of the nearby collapsed buildings. Every movement felt strange to him, as if he was not completely used to his body, or rather to that space. But he was doing it. He was moving forward. The sea offered him less resistance than he expected.

Janus took a breath of air and analyzed the composition. "The oxygen level is three percent higher. The water resistance is lower at this point, but the salinity level is very high and gravity is 0.4 different. Assuming that to jump to our universe they use portals it is quite likely to produce spatial anomalies here. But almost none on our world."

But before he could make further progress in his analysis, a different sound broke the monotony of the sound of waves enveloping the gray landscape.

A distant hum began to fill the air, a low, resonant noise, like the roar of a massive engine. Janus raised his head quickly What was that? It was not wind, not water. Something mechanical, a sound he could know and associate with something in his world.

The sound grew closer, louder.

Behind one of the ruined buildings, three vehicles similar to jet skis were approaching, although a little more elongated. From a distance Janus could see how on both sides they seemed to carry some weapons as if they had mounted machine guns or some other kind of heavy caliber weapon. Each vehicle carried only one pilot.

They quickly approached where he was floating and circled him, like a shark around a prey.

Janus paused in his strokes and stared at those around him. Two of the vehicles rose into the air. From the rear and below Janus saw how the vehicles had some kind of anti-gravity or floating device. They continued to circle, but now they were circling, pointing the front of the vehicle towards him.

As far as Janus could see from the shape of the bodies the pilots were three women. They were covered from head to toe in some sort of tactical suits with parts that could very well be exoskeletons. They were also wearing short hooded cloaks and masks covering their faces.

From the remaining vehicle the pilot dismounted and stood in the water. Janus could see that she was wearing a type of footwear that was almost as if she was propelling through the air. But the movements were as fluid as if she were stepping on solid ground. Even so, the waves beat against her legs, as if in a vain attempt to submerge her and trap her in the waves of a sea that was beginning to become rougher. As far as he could see of the three pilots she was the shortest, but also the one who wore a red badge on her left arm. That badge was also on the part of the suit that covered her chest to the left side.

The woman advanced with precise, calculated movements, as if there was no doubt about what she had to do. Janus raised both hands. She approached slowly, but her footsteps did not echo on the water, as if she were floating. From the side of her suit she pulled out a weapon that might as well have been some kind of rifle.

Then, the voice. Cold, authoritative, emotionless: "Put your hands up! Identify yourself!"

"I already have my hands up," Janus replied, almost putting on a half-smile.

The command was clear, imperious, and felt in the air like a whiplash. The figure advanced further, her steps sure, the hood covering her face leaving her only the outlines of her silhouette. The suit she wore seemed to be of a material Janus could not quite make out. It glittered strangely with the movements of its owners, almost a kind of iridescent coloration.

"What are you doing, here? Where did you come from?"

Janus thought. What a lie to tell?

He didn't think he was going to have visitors so soon after arriving. His plan had been to first get to one of the buildings, establish where he was in this new world and then come up with a new plan. That was a thing of the past.

He knew a few things about the strange world. After all, he had discovered it more than twenty years ago. He knew it was dangerous terrain. But there was the unknown. To what extent?

"I'm sorry, I'm a little dizzy. I can't quite remember. I think I fell."

The woman, still pointing at him, put her hand to her head and took off her hood. Almost instantly the mask covering her face also reconfigured to the side revealing her face.

She had pointed ears.

She was a woman with black hair. Bangs covered one of her eyes and a wild lock of hair fluttered atop her head. She had green eyes.

"This is Captain Izumi," she said pressing a device to her left ear. "We have a problem in Sector 343."

Janus said nothing as he waited. The conversation after all could give him more data.

"Exactly. The place used by Captain Timur and his team two years ago." The woman named Hisui nodded and motioned to the other two pilots, then turned to Janus.

"Try any movement and we'll cook you with bullets."

Janus went for Hisui and he let her do it. He was full disarmed and even the hidden knives were take out. If what he thought was true, then there was a 70% chance that he had landed in the right place.

He would have to wait a while to corroborate it.

Being pointed, he climbed onto the jet ski. From it sprouted some kind of locks that surrounded his legs like a kind of sliding bridles and that should be for prisoners to make sure that they did not fall into the sea during transport.

Hisui climbed into the jet ski and started it up. She drove the vehicle over the surface of the endless sea, while the other two women behind them were still levitating a couple of meters above the water. But Janus knew that they were aiming at him in case he thought of doing anything.

After about fifteen minutes of travel. Janus felt a sudden chill in the synthetic skin of his body. It was as if his whole body had reacted to something. And in surprise he looked around, meanwhile the vehicle finally took flight, with the other two behind.

Out of nowhere a promontory had appeared before them. Some kind of cloaking shield he supposed.

Then the three vehicles drove through an entrance and entered a gorge flooded by the sea. They had to drive for about a kilometer until they came out again on higher ground and Janus saw a mountain appear in the distance. No. It had a surface too smooth to be a natural mountain. It was surrounded by vegetation.

On one side of top of the mountain waved a flag with a shield.

Janus smiled

And he knew, with certainty, that he had arrived at the right place and also that his journey had only just begun.

Why? he wondered as if that was irony.

He had seen the design of that shield once before.

He had seen it on a certain mercenary he hired.

A certain grumpy soldier of fortune that he had seen in his visions, but had never known the meaning.

That soldier had that shield tattooed on his arm.

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