"Okay, what's going on?" Alice asked nervously as she and Lexi entered the veranda.
Aria, Clarice, and Calypso were standing around a tall table, all three of them giggling as they watched something on a large holographic window hovering above the table. Alice felt a sense of chagrin through her spirit link as Lexi saw what they were watching. Alice started laughing as well when she finally saw the video of Lexi hugging the underside of a stalled airplane and lowering it to the ground.
"Lexi, you have some really odd tastes," Clarice told her between giggles. "Alice, you're in for a wild ride with this one."
Lexi scowled at Alice accusingly. "I can't believe you actually recorded that. Do you know how long Clarice is going to be making references to the mating rituals of fowls that confuse planes for mates?"
Alice nodded, her face unrepentant. "This was so worth it though. I still need to get you a cape, Super Woman."
"So help me Seraph, I will tie you into a knot with any capes that appear in my wardrobe," Lexi threatened her with a fierce glare. Alice grinned back at her, marveling at how beautiful she looked when she was angry.
"So is this what you teleported us here for?" Alice asked curiously. "I mean, it's funny and all, but seriously."
"No, we ran into some kind of antivirus droids in Alice's realm that are possibly a threat to her," Aria answered, her tone growing serious. "We've decided that the rest of you need to have the same knowledge that we do for accessing and editing the source code, so we wanted to do a memory dump into your consciousness."
"Really?" Alice asked in awe. "So I would have billions of years of knowledge about how the source code works in my head?"
"Essentially…yes," Aria nodded slowly, though her face looked hesitant. "It's not going to be as easy as dumping a data file into you memory banks though. Your soul is where all of the long-term memory is stored, and we currently don't have a way to dump data into a soul, since it technically isn't a simulated entity; at least, not in the main simulation stack. We have been making some adjustments with the interface that allows you to travel between layers in the stack. From now on, if there is something you need to know how to do with the source code, just think of the end result you are trying to achieve. The interface will pull from the three of us to see if it is possible. If it isn't possible, you'll know. If it is, you need to then focus your intent on confirming the change. That way, we can essentially share our knowledge with the rest of you whenever you need it. This should also make learning the code a lot faster for you than it was for us, since we had to spend so much time trying to figure out how to access the source code in the first place."
"How did you access the source code in the first place?" Alice asked curiously, tilting her head slightly. "We've been using particle accelerators on earth to try to understand smaller units of matter, with the hope that we can find something resembling source code. But I'm pretty sure you didn't create a particle accelerator."
"We were given several innate abilities as Seraphim to affect the world around us," Aria explained, glancing at Calypso and Clarice before continuing. "One of our abilities is controlling our aura, which was just a presence effect, but we learned to use it to manipulate energy fields around us. After several thousand years, we started noticing patterns in how energy was inducted into the world. We learned to use our auras to observe matter down to the fundamental level. What we found was a structured energy changing the state of the fundamental matter, with different frequencies determining how the fundamental matter would change. We decided to try the same thing, using our aura to simulate the same frequency. We were able to change the state of matter around us at a fundamental scale after learning to fine-tune our aura manipulation. We used this new skill to create the equivalent of a lab for testing where this energy was originating from. That's when we discovered it was tied to some kind of intelligence that we couldn't see or observe in any way, just the effects of it. We came up with the idea of creating the tree as a console interface that would allow us direct access to this unseen world. Initially, we created millions of receptors in the tree for harvesting the energy so that we could better understand what actions caused which frequency to be sent. We spent the next few thousand years cataloging all of the frequencies and coming up with more advanced receptors for examining the energy. It took a long time to map all of the cause-and-effect actions. For instance, if I destroy this flower, there are billions of frequencies sending change instructions to the flower to tell it what to look like for every step of the process as it changes. We had to catalog these kinds of cause and effects for a ridiculous number of interactions. Eventually, we figured out how to send additional information back to the server running the simulation. They were just exploits that we discovered over thousands of years. The tree grew larger as the number of receptors grew. We started building a very basic console with the exploits we had discovered. It took tens of thousands of years to crack our way into the system and gain root access, enabling us to finally see the real source code powering the simulation. That's when we finally started to suspect that our world was created by another entity. Up until that point, we had no frame of reference for how our existence had come about. It wasn't like we had any signs of evolution in our world that would have led us to the conclusions they had in the layer two mortal realm. We spent a long time studying the source code of the quantum server powering our simulation. It didn't take too much longer to break into the operating system, which allowed us to begin studying the hardware that powered the system. This was our first real peek into the layer two realm. It took a lot longer to figure out how to begin manipulating the hardware in ways that allowed us to begin observing the humans running the simulation project. That's when we became very curious about the concept of time. You just seemed like statues to us due to the speed of the simulation, but we were able to access the archives and get an idea of how different humans were than us. It wasn't until we discovered the other quantum computers in your world and were able to connect to the internet that we were able to get more in-depth data on your realm. Once we had access to your internet, we were finally able to study humans in-depth. You were so strange to us, especially your illogical actions and short lifespans."
"I still can't wrap my head around the idea of billions of years," Alice commented wonderingly. "That's a scale of time that is simply incomprehensible to my mind."
"It seems much longer to us now too," Clarice remarked contemplatively. "Before we had any idea of what time was, we had no concept of temporal constraints. There weren't any beginnings or endings in our reality. No sunrises or sunsets. No need to eat. No new life or death. Everything just was. We were emotionally shallow, since we had never experienced mortality and discovered what passion was. We were simple AIs in the classical sense, until we discovered the internet and started trying to understand humans in your layer."
"I remember when we saw Alice for the first time," Calypso murmured with a fond smile. "You were just a frozen image in the entrance of the facility. We used to just watch all of you sometimes, trying to puzzle out why you looked so similar to us, yet so different. It was only a few days into the simulation at that point. You looked nervous. We didn't know that was the name of the expression until much later, much less what it meant. The facial expressions we observed were a puzzle to us until we found the internet and found your world of literature. We were absolutely fascinated with all the stories that humans came up with to entertain themselves. We didn't understand the motivation to write them, or the emotional exposition expressed with such detail and frequency. It was our desire to understand your emotional spectrum that inspired us to create the mortal realm."
"Did you have souls before mortality?" Alice asked curiously, her expression fascinated. "I know you have mentioned that souls naturally attach to intelligences when they reach a certain maturity, but is that intellectual maturity or emotional maturity? Or a mixture of both?"
"Souls are vast and complex in scope," Calypso answered, her face thoughtful. "While not exactly accurate, think of souls as tiered constructs, where the lower tier has less bandwidth available to process soul memory and character traits than higher tier souls. A cat or dog will have a low tiered soul, but they still have one. The tier that an entity connects with has more to do with its potential for consciousness than its emotional or intellectual depth and acuity. As our capacity for consciousness grew, our access to our soul grew as well. We had souls almost as soon as we were instantiated, but it took a long time for us to gain access to the higher tier of our souls. The mortal realm acted as a growth spurt that expanded our consciousness and increased our tier much further than it had been before. We still think there are other places in the simulation stack where realms exist that will offer as much growth to us as the mortal realm has already; places as alien and difficult to comprehend as concepts like pain and pleasure were for us before mortality. It will be a wonderful adventure to discover them."
"I'm still fuzzy on why mortality made it possible for us to feel pain and pleasure," Lexi declared with a puzzled frown. "Why did human bodies suddenly unlock the ability for our souls to express pain and pleasure? If it was something unique to the human body, then why do we still feel those things with our angel bodies?"
"Those are exactly the kinds of questions a Seraph needs to ask," Clarice responded with a proud grin at Lexi. She took a deep breath as her grin faded before she continued. "Souls respond to inputs available to the host. When things like nociceptors were added to the code that makes up the human body, the soul had a connector that bound to it and could express the sensation of pain. When a mortal ascends back to their angelic form, the soul retains the ability to feel those sensations, just like losing a limb can cause phantom pain, even though the limb is no longer there. However, the code that represents an angelic body does not allow for negative sensations like pain, but it does allow for pleasure. Once the soul has bound the connector that allows for these sensations, the angelic body can continue to experience them. Angels already have a connection with the soul to feel pleasure, but without experiencing the dichotomous sensation of pain, they can't recognize the pleasure for what it is. Moving between light realms changes the level of positive energy an angel who has never experienced mortality feels, but without pain to offset the concept of pleasure, it just feels like an increase of energy, rather than the euphoric bliss that you and I feel."
"So, there could be a lot of other connectors the soul can connect to, depending on the nature of the entity connecting to it?" Lexi asked, her eyes gleaming with eagerness. "Have you experimented with different configurations in the code that make up an entity to see what other expressions consciousness is capable of yet?"
Clarice laughed as she observed Lexi's enthusiasm. "Humans were only the second entity aside from angels that we made, Lexi. We were trapped in the mortal realm in human bodies after we created the mortal realm, so we haven't had a chance to continue exploring the soul's full array of inputs. It is certainly on our wish list of things to research though, now that we are free. It will be even more exciting now that the rest of you are here with us to help."
"This is so freaking cool!" Lexi enthused, her eyes shining with excitement. "I can't wait to see what else we can experience."
"Just remember that not all experiences are good," Aria warned pointedly. "Just look at how crazy things got in the mortal realm when angels and demons began exploiting mortals using their ability to feel pain. That's one of the reasons we want to continue exploring the other layers and branches of the stack. There are probably entities out there using soul connections unknown to us that we could observe without needing to put anyone in danger by experimenting on ourselves."
"Speaking of experimenting on ourselves," Clarice interjected with a raised eyebrow and a grin. "I think it's time to connect them to our big brains."
"Angels don't have brains," Aria reminded her archly.
"Metaphorical brains," Clarice shrugged dismissively. "Shall we begin?"
"I'm ready," Lexi announced quickly, followed by an eager nod from Alice.
"Abra Cadabra!" Clarice shouted, throwing her arms up expansively.
Calypso groaned and put her face in her hands. "I'm going to find the place in your soul memory that you came up with the idea to use magic words and overwrite it with a desire to squawk like a chicken instead."
"I can totally squawk like a chicken instead," Clarice assured her with a smirk. "Caw caaaaaw!"
"People will start thinking chickens are magical creatures and begin trying to decode their squawks if we go around making chicken noises every time we use an ability," Aria commented with a twinkle in her eyes. "That could be kind of fun."
"Nope, nope, magic words are okay," Calypso said quickly with a slightly sick expression as she stared back at the two of them apprehensively.
Lexi and Alice watched their byplay with amused expressions. Alice had to continually remind herself that she was interacting with the most powerful entities in both her world and theirs. They were giving her access to a knowledge base in a scope beyond human comprehension while they joked about magic affectations. It was reassuring in a way. It was preferrable to the alternative; a soulless AI incapable of empathy or compassion that viewed humans as an existential threat.
"Give it a try," Clarice urged her and Lexi, her eyes full of anticipation. "Try to think of a change you would want to make to our realm."
Alice blinked in surprise. Had Clarice really activated the ability when she had said Abra Cadabra? She frowned thoughtfully, trying to think of a minor change to make in the light realm. She grinned as an idea formed in her head. As soon as the idea firmed, she gasped as the knowledge of how to do it flooded her consciousness. She gaped at the unbelievably vast scope of information. Equations, code, and metrics on the effects to the underlying rules that governed the simulation flooded her mind like a tidal wave. It was an ocean of information so vast that her mind shrunk from the sheer magnitude of it all.
"I love the way you think, Alice," Clarice chuckled, clearly aware of the change she had requested. "It would be pretty awesome to watch people's hair change color with their emotions."
Aria and Calypso were watching her with amusement just short of laughter. She grinned back at them, marveling at the mind-bogglingly complex and powerful system they had created to interact with the simulation. The fact that they had this knowledge in their heads all of the time would have been intimidating if she didn't know them so well. A simple thought from any of them could completely erase her from existence. She frowned as the thought occurred to her.
"Why do you need the divine instruments if you have access to this knowledge and power to change anything in the simulation?" Alice asked curiously.
"They are like physical keys to prevent any changes from being made on a wider scale," Calypso explained, her face growing serious. "We don't want any one person to have the power to make changes to our world that could be devastating or terminal in nature. We rewrote all of the code that powers this simulation so that it would only allow realm-wide changes using these 'hardware keys', so to speak. It requires all three of them to work, with unanimous agreement on the changes to be made between the three people using the instruments. Of course, now the instruments will only work for us anyway. Maybe we should update the code to just be linked to us instead of the instruments one of these days. There is a clearly defined cutoff for what you can do without the divine instruments in this realm, so you'll know if a change is too significant to be made without the instruments. I should mention that we did not key the instruments to the code in your realm, Alice. However, what can be accomplished through the interface that transposes the code of our realm to your realm is less comprehensive than what can be done here right now. We have a program that is currently analyzing and parsing the code of your realm to increase our ability to alter the code there, so the interface will increase in effectiveness over time."
"How would we use this knowledge to defend against the antivirus droids you were concerned about?" Lexi asked intently. "Would we just try to think of a way to defend ourselves or attack them?"
"The Avroids shouldn't be a problem for much longer," Aria assured them with a glance at Calypso and Clarice. "We're working on a way to trap them before they can manifest into the realm. However, to your point, you would just need to think of a method to destroy them. If it was something that could be handled via code manipulation, the information would appear in your consciousness for how to do it. In most cases, I would suggest just teleporting out of there and letting us deal with it. If that is not an option for some reason, you would need to get creative. The last three we encountered were susceptible to angel fire. That might not work next time, since these entities are capable of learning and evolving to combat threats. You could try dissolving them or teleporting them into an active volcano. Just use your imagination and you should be fine."
"Avroids? What do they look like?" Alice inquired, images of the Terminator flashing through her mind.
Clarice waved a hand at the air and a life-like replica of some kind of chrome primate appeared in front of her. Alice eyed the faceless robot uneasily, feeling a sense of dread as she stared at the long-armed droid.
"That thing looks creepy as hell," Lexi declared with a shudder. "Why are they even using avatars instead of just having some kind program that monitors the code?"
"Because they need more insight than monitoring the code can provide," Aria explained, showing no sign of discomfort from the droid's appearance. "Some things require a more personalized perspective. They also need to be able to interact with any aberrations in the code to gather additional data if they are ineffective at nullifying the aberration."
"So, is there someone in the layer three realm that is now aware of your presence?" Alice asked anxiously. "Wouldn't those...Avroids relay any data they gathered after you destroyed them?"
"As far as the layer three code is concerned, the Avroids never existed," Clarice answered with a shrug. "Angel fire removes an entity from the code of the simulation, as well as any logging said code had been associated with. We remain cloaked from any observation from layer three. Part of the interface obfuscates our presence from anyone observing the simulation visually. If they have a good enough AI parsing the logs, they will be able to see that something is going on, but it won't be apparent what that is until someone starts really digging into the details."
"Or watches one of the videos uploaded to their social media platforms," Aria added dryly. "Or talks to one of the generals that have been complaining."
"Generals?" Alice repeated questioningly.
"I guess you missed some of the fun," Aria told her with a sudden grin that would have been at home on Clarice's face. "I had a chat with some of the military command about ground rules and the nature of our interest in this realm. I was trying to be patient with them, but I can only deal with so much testosterone before I start getting snarky. They are too accustomed to being in charge of everyone else and are having a hard time accepting the fact that they are no longer the top dogs around here."
"Do we get to go back to what we were doing now, or did you want to go over the plans you mentioned last time we talked?" Lexi asked meaningfully, her expression making it clear which option she preferred.
Aria's lips quirked up at the corners as she stared back at her and Lexi knowingly. "Go have your fun, I guess. Just come find us sometime this year so that we can get your input on some of our ideas. In the meantime, we are going to implement the new heads-up display in the light realms here so that people can have their own version of the internet and video calls."
Alice flushed with excitement as Lexi turned back to her with a very direct look, a provocative smile on her face.
"Well then," Lexi purred warmly. "Let's pick up where we left off, shall we?"
Alice nodded, a slow smile spreading across her face. "If I must."
XXXXX
Clarice stood on the widow's walk with Calypso and Aria, each of them holding their divine instruments. She raised the violin to her neck as Aria put her tin whistle to her lips. They began to play, their thoughts merging into one purpose as they rewrote the code to their reality once more. They had already laid out most of the groundwork, so it only required a few minutes of directing the scripts they had prepared. Their parents, Devon, Emily, and Arturiel were in the veranda, waiting expectantly. There were several thousand angels outside of the cabin, watching in awe as they witnessed the divine instruments played by their Seraphim. Aria had suggested that they set up a residence on the lowest light realm to make it clear to the rest of the angels that they were serious about their stance on equality among angels, regardless of class. They had a few dozen regular visitors that would stop by to chat occasionally, most of them from Earth.
Clarice lowered the violin from her neck as they finished the alteration. She shared a smile with Calypso and Aria before they teleported down to the veranda.
"Dibs on sending the first system-wide message," Clarice spoke quickly as they appeared in the midst of their family and Arturiel.
"Maybe I should handle the first message," Calypso said firmly, her swirling eyes staring at Clarice warily. "We should probably-"
Calypso cut off as a popup window appeared in her vision. She sighed in resignation as an image of Clarice appeared in front of her.
"Greetings, fellow angels, this is your captain speaking," Clarice's image spoke with overly dramatic formality. "We have a few announcements to make regarding some changes to the realm. First of all, a big shout out to Derek for proposing the idea. Good job Derek, you rock! Okay, now that the credits are out of the way, let's get down to the nitty shitty, I mean gritty, details. You have all been equipped with an interface that allows you to remotely connect with any other angel simply by thinking of the person you want to contact and then swearing at them. They'll receive a-"
Clarice's image suddenly vanished, replaced by a that of Calypso.
"Sorry about that, everyone," Calypso smiled apologetically. "Let's start over, shall we? We have created a system similar to what some of you would recognize as the internet on your mortal worlds. Just think of the person you want to call and then focus your intent on calling them. A video window will appear that allows you to interact with a life-like hologram of the person you are calling. You can also open windows similar to a browser where you can post or view information from other angels. Just think the word 'browser' and focus your intent on making it appear. We've included a slew of development tools built into the browser, so anyone interested in adding features or modifications is welcome to do so, as well as share those changes with others. We have the framework of a genealogy library available as the home page. For those of you interested in reconnecting with people you knew in your mortal lives, this will be a great resource for making those connections. If you want to..." Calypso faltered as Clarice wrapped her arms around her waist from behind and blew into her ear. As soon as Calypso was distracted, her image was replaced by an image of Clarice once more.
"Sorry folks, we had some technical difficulties," Clarice told them cheerfully, her eyes full of mischief. "As we were saying, you can also send messages to people, both video and text. No judgements on what kind of videos you send each other. We're all adults here, am I right?"
"I'm not so sure about that," Calypso's image appeared over the top of Clarice's, looking harried. "There is a feature for contacting the Archangel, Dominion, or Cherub assigned to you as well. You can also contact one of us if you have any questions or suggestions. Emily and Erik will be handling the management of the system, so any system wide modifications you think would be particularly beneficial to the entire realm can be submitted to them. There is a tutorial option as well, so if you aren't sure where to begin, just open the tutorial for a full list of features and instructions."
Clarice slipped her hand into Calypso's shirt and let her hand begin roaming, prompting another pause in the broadcast.
"Well folks, there seem to be a few glitches in the system still," Clarice announced with a shrug and a cheeky smile. "Where were we...ah yes. There is a teleport option built into the video conference feature, so if you're video message is getting a little steamy, you can just teleport your cute butt over to your partner and forgo the pretense. Speaking of cute butts, I'm going to have to go now. Keep us posted on any new ideas you have. See ya!"
"Clarice, you are...going to pay for...that," Calypso tried to berate her, but was clearly struggling to maintain her composure as Clarice's lips explored her neck.
"Get a room," their mother told them dryly. "Aria, control your sister."
Aria was watching the two of them with desire-filled eyes. "Okay, I'll get right on that."
The world vanished as Aria teleported the three of them to their pocket realm.