Novae

 

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Introduction

A group of around a dozen people walked down a pristine, white, sterile hallway. A man in the front of the group was explaining that they were "...coming up to one of the the children's rooms now. It may not be as interesting as the generator chamber on its own, but I have always preferred humans to machines."

"There are no humans anymore." A woman spoke up from the center of the group.

"That's just a matter of  opinion." The man at the front responded. He wore a tag on his shirt with the word "Inductor" etched into it in white. He spoke with some arrogance. Arrogance was in short supply these days.

The group walked up to the large glass window that separated the hallway from the room. They stood and watched like humans would at old aquariums. 

"What are they doing?" A man asked.

"Drawing." the inductor responded.

"I know that much." The man responded. "What are they drawing? All of the drawings look the same. There are piles of them all over the room. Have they been given some sort of acclimating assignment?"

"No no, its nothing like that." The Inductor acted as if a child had just interrupted a pleasant dream. "They are drawing the last thing they remember from reality."

The group followed the inductor into the room. The children didn't look up from their coloring. 

The Inductor continued to speak. "When we learned that M54B was going supernova, the World State ordered that all citizens be uploaded to the Pangea System. As you very well remember off hand, or may access from your personal mind-clouds, adults would be uploaded first so that the most memories from our culture could be moved onto the system just in case the gamma-ray burst ripped through our galaxy ahead of schedule. The older the person, the more memories they hold. This means, of course, that children would be last."

The Inductor looked down at a near by girl.  She remained fixated on her drawing. She was applying large streaks of yellow to augment the current image composed of alternating shades of various bright blues. It was beginning to look just like the many identical drawings she had at her side.

"It was good that the World State scientists had believed their estimations were imperfect. As the children, the ones that made it to the uploading centers at least, began their uploading processes the gamma-ray burst melted the planet from crust to core in an instant. The ones that made it into the system had the image of the sky burning branded onto their minds."

The woman who had spoken out before seemed puzzled. 

"Haven't they seen other images since their induction? There are entire imaging chambers and Virtupods that can produce anything imaginable."

The Inductor replied "Perhaps their last interaction with reality is far more than they can ever experience in here. No matter how wonderful it may appear, this is still only a simulation."

 

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