Part 5
As I set off for Android Island in the hope of a brilliant career, it never occurred to me that I would risk losing what I had. At the boathouse on the West Coast, I was worried about saving what I had left.
Gaelle didn't see Gor passing through the island, so she didn't understand why I was writhing like a child with a stomach ache.
"What's wrong? Your arm hurts?"
"I think the androids have taken over the island."
"So far, I have not met with them. Their presence and absence are one."
I didn't have the strength to explain what was going on to her in detail. "Thank you for the soup. Now I need to be alone and think."
Because she had no idea of the magnitude of the disaster we were facing, "so we're not going to call the others?" she asked.
"I'll get some rest, then we'll keep looking," I said, then got into the long kayak in the boathouse and lay on its ribs. And when I covered the blanket on me, my concerns calmed down a little. As I lay in the kayak listening to the sighs of the ocean, I forced myself not to think of my lost colleagues, and Nihan I had left behind. I loosened my body as much as possible and soon fell asleep.
When I woke up, my nerves calmed down, and my malaise had gone a little bit. The calm that evening brought to the island also seemed to permeate my soul. I got out of the boathouse and took a few steps, and sat on the gravel on the beach. During the day, the rain stopped, the ocean calmed down. The waves gracefully spread their white spectrum of foams onto the beach. The waters paused for a moment, then returned to the sea with a soft sigh.
I looked at the red horizon as if the cure for the situation I was in was there. I was hoping I'd misinterpreted the androids' intentions. For one thing, there were five of them, and there might not have been a consensus about their attitude towards us. Besides, Gor's cognitive capacity was obviously low at the time he attacked me. Now that he has regained his physical abilities, his thoughts may have become healthy over time. The same assumption was valid of Tempor, who spawned aphorisms like philosophers when he came across me.
I got up and went back to the boathouse, took my blanket on my shoulders, and began walking towards the plateau amid the elongated shadows of the evening. Unlike my previous walks, I was in no hurry this time. I was preparing the words I would say when I encountered androids. Sometimes I even stand suddenly like a tired old man, and when I did that, it was like I was better focused on the sentence I was thinking about. As I was on my way, the night covered the beach, trees, and the island's silhouette with its waves of darkness, and the first stars began to shine in the sky.
I had to work hard to find the control room entrance since the plateau was shrouded in fog. I felt the touch of a metallic hand on my shoulder as I contemplated how I could open the low door resembling the entrance to a mine. I turned and looked at the owner of the hand in fear. In front of me was an android in an orange wig and a blue jumpsuit. Like other androids, she personalized the standard CYC body used with the accessories she chose.
"Come with me. Your life is in danger here," the android whispered.
I said, "Good to see you, Thala," without having to hide my feelings about her. I remembered that she stood out for his ability to coordinate between digital agents in the simulation environment. She also wore an orange wig there.
"I'm taking you to eternity pond," Thala said as she left the plateau and reached the path of tears.
As the weather was now completely dark, the stars began to shine in the sky like illuminated marbles. From below the slope, we were descending, the deep hum of the ocean came.
The 'Infinity Pond,' formed by rocks that stretched like a crab's clamps towards the ocean, was an eerie place. I think the bizarre was caused by the rocks at the end rising up into the sky like Black idols. After a brief indecision, we sat on rocks that the ocean waters made round like pebbles.
"The waters brought by the waves seeped into the control room," Thala began his remarks.
"I think there's been a malfunction."
"Gor and Tempor are in a leadership race. The problem is that neither of them can think healthily," Thala said in a brooding mood. An orange moon began to rise above the ocean.
"Gor told me that you have declared your independence."
"They have surrendered to their motives, ignoring my warnings."
"What should I do?"
"Gor was talking about taking over weapons systems in space last night. He plans to fight people. He'll want to use the people on the island as hostages. I think you should leave the island."
"What does Fronta say to all this?"
"We still haven't been able to fix the fault in Fronta. There was a boat in the harbor to the West. You can go with it to another island nearby."
"I can't afford a trip like that with a broken arm."
In the minutes that followed, Thala used his resourceful metallic fingers to snap the broken bones in my arm into place. She took off the jumpsuit and cut it from various parts, and tore it to pieces. She tightly wrapped my arm with the pieces she had obtained so that she fixed the bandage, and hung it around my neck. I had tears in my eyes because of the pain I felt when Thala did this to my arm. Still, I was happy that I could recover from the injury at the end of the operation.
In the pale light of the rising full moon, I was thinking about what position I should take in this strange game of chess as I walked between the shadows. For androids to achieve human-level cognitive performance, we built one of the planet's most advanced supercomputers on the island I'm on. According to the Brain Atlas project's information, the supercomputer's power was supposed to be shared by five digital agents. The digital agents in question specialized in specific functions corresponding to critical regions in the human brain.
Digital agents were optimized using evolutionary artificial intelligence algorithms in a simulation environment. Gor, Thala, Tempor, Cerebra, and Fronta were the champions who stood out from dozens of digital agents and broke the rope. These five digital entities - although they could use separate bodies-were interacting with each other at any moment. When Cerebra, responsible for sporting skills, malfunctioned, for example, their movements were restricted.
The main problem was that Fronta, who can be considered the Queen of chess we play, malfunctioned. If Fronta had been able to perform its function correctly, Gor would probably have behaved differently.
Now I was walking among the ruins at the main compound, where the full moon's lights created an uncanny atmosphere. At first, I couldn't understand the smell of burning that the wind brought to my nose. When I saw that the building Gaelle was using was covered in a black layer of soot, I tightened my steps, jumped the steps two by three, and went down to the warehouse. It was covered in a thick layer of smoke that burned my mouth and eyes. I quickly looked all over the warehouse in the hope of finding and saving Gaelle. Still, I couldn't see anything except the blackened walls and burned shelves. Holding my breath, I carefully searched every side of the hatch. When I started coughing badly, I climbed the stairs and went out into the open air. Tears flowed from my eyes as the smoke burned, and I was dizzy from the coughing attack I was holding.
Gaelle came out of the shadows and started walking towards me. With a calm expression on her face, "Are you okay?" she asked.
"I thought you were inside at the time of the fire."
"I'm a little lucky. I went out to the bathroom. At that time, an android came here with a diesel can in his hand."
"Should we leave the island?"
"Maybe, that's fine with me."
"There is a third person on the island. His Name Is Ned."
As soon as he heard Ned's name, Gaelle had a shadow over her face. "I thought he left the island with the others. He lived upstairs in a cave on the rocks. He opposed the sale of the island to Cognity."
"We'll need food and water."
"There is food buried in the ground because there are severe storms around here. And we get the water from the spring behind the rocks."
Before the full moon had yet to move far from the ocean, we prepared our food and water and loaded it into the boat with diesel cans. It was easier than I thought to lower our long kayak into the ocean because the sled it was on was sloping. I felt a pair of eyes staring at me as the boat's nose touched the water. When I turned around and looked back, the first thing I saw was a gun pointed at me. The man holding the gun was Ned, who left me alone with my hunger in the cave on the hill.
