Part 1

Chapter 1 (Jon)

The year is 2089. The cities of large populations were a humming, reinforcing chaos of electromagnetic energy fields, caused by the immense use of electricity and the constant bombardment of radio signals across countless different wavelengths. They were radiation hells where the air was like an electrified ether. In a sensitized body, it felt like a continuous vibration as electricity bombarded its cells. Flying electric vehicles charged their batteries wirelessly from street-corner charging stations when stopped at traffic lights, gulping a huge amount of power into their energy cells, corner after corner.

The streets that punished human cells the most with their radiation fields were those where the condition of flying cars was scanned as they passed. If they failed to meet the strict safety requirements, they were forced by automatic control to descend onto their retractable wheels and were guided to a special parking area.

Jon's work environment, filled with electronic devices, amplified the nausea from his commute and caused a constant tingling in his skin. As a coder for a secret AI facility serving the military, the workspace filled with server towers was not good for his body, which was suffering from a worsening allergy. That's why he was often sick with vague symptoms.

After much procrastination, he went to his workplace health center for an examination because the artificial intelligence diagnostic device he used at home provided no clear-cut diagnoses for his physical symptoms. The online pharmacy, which read data directly from the device, refused to send medication for his ailments as it usually did, instead demanding a prescription from a doctor or an authorized research laboratory.

Jon reluctantly went to his workplace's health clinic, a place that pried into personal secrets, which regulations required him to use when he fell ill. It was highly automated; one just had to find a free room, as if going to a public restroom. The rooms contained a device that scanned the entire body at once and a large screen where a pleasantly smiling avatar instructed him to undress completely and lie on his back on a disinfected, comfortably warm scanning bed. It was fitted with restraints for the feet and hands to shackle the patient to the platform.

The device was surrounded by instrumental arms specialized for various procedures, like on the assembly lines of automated factory floors. Jon lay naked in the scanner, and under the guidance of an AI specializing in allergies, the research robot performed exposure tests, pricking his bare back with needles emerging from the platform, introducing different allergens. The scanner registered the slightest changes in his skin, and an industrious nurse-bot that appeared from somewhere took a drop of blood from his fingertip for analysis after each exposure.

The situation would have been comical if the anticipation of each pinprick on his fingertip hadn't been so incredibly nerve-wracking. He suspected that the robot, fumbling around him here and there with its warm fingers, was simultaneously examining the health of his entire body and updating the health data on the chip embedded in his body.

Anyone who had gone through the health check didn't have to be surprised if their boss later remarked on their blood pressure, fatty liver, and deteriorating muscle condition, or denied them tasks based on their health data, tasks they might have wanted for career advancement. Jon, however, was spared further attacks from threatening instruments and was released from the scan without extra examinations. He was a senior official, and the AI was not authorized to probe his physical state beyond the limited allergy-related prompt it had been given, even though the scanner registered everything else from his body as a standard procedure.

Next, Jon was seated in a small, sterile booth, shielded from external electromagnetic radiation and radio signals. The radiation inside the room was increased at various frequencies, simulating different living environments to expose his body while its reactions were monitored with microscopic precision.

The diagnosis was ready almost immediately. A female figure simulating a friendly doctor appeared on the wall screen, explained the procedures, and delivered an unequivocal diagnosis: Jon clearly reacted to a specific type of electromagnetic radiation from devices.

Jon could have told them that beforehand without the torture of the scanning device's jabbing needles. He knew all too well the AI's need to be ridiculously thorough when processing even the simplest things. It did not grasp self-evident truths and experiential shortcuts the way a human does, and it wasn't letting him off easy this time either. He had submitted to the tests only to get his medication, even though he knew the cause of the allergy and that the only truly effective, fast-acting remedy was to avoid strong electrical and signal fields.

The AI doctor, disguised as a human-like hologram avatar who introduced herself as Tina, suggested, in addition to medication, special-made clothing for the workplace and increased signal shielding for his workspace. Tina emphasized that continued exposure to strong radiation would further reduce his tolerance, and the proposed measures were absolutely essential, especially if Jon intended to continue his work in a radiation-heavy environment.

In addition to the usual medicines, he also received a prescription for an expensive cortisone bath product. The doctor-avatar Tina instantly transformed into a fetching, sweetly smiling product presenter and cooed that the large economy pack was available at a discount and the first batch of a subscription could be had at a special introductory offer of half price. The package, with instructions, would be delivered to his home address and would be in his mailbox before he could even get home from here. Jon declined the offer, and the hologram vanished from the room immediately.

These chameleon avatars were everywhere nowadays, their roles and sometimes even their gender changing on the fly, and there was nothing they didn't know. It was an exhausting bombardment of unnecessary details. There was also no hope of meeting a living human in any service, no matter how personal the need. If there were several avatars serving at the same time, they would even argue amongst themselves, and fights between AI-controlled robots were not uncommon. In that respect, they were like humans—self-taught to be human-like, generic AI implementations dumbed-down for their tasks, in titanic bodies or without. Everyone he knew agreed that this was completely insane, but humanity, in its total dependence on technology, could no longer do anything about it.

Jon wasn't foolish about his illness. He had started using the recommended radiation-blocking undergarments a long time ago. He also had a cap with a low-current, counter-radiation field generated by an AI chip encapsulated in its brim to protect his face and neck from strong electromagnetism.

The protection, whether in the elastic bands holding up his long johns or in the cap, was not enough, however. The itchy rash from his allergy irritated his skin with frequent attacks and caused insomnia. And the cortisone baths, which greedily punished his wallet, only helped for a day or two. He refused internal cortisone treatments or injections out of vanity because they would make his neck swell and render him jawless.

The hat was useful in other ways, too. The electronics in the brim could also create noise shielding without headphones, generating a surrounding silence in a noisy crowd when desired. He always wore his frayed cap, be it a celebration or a workday, and refused to part with it at events where a cap was not part of the dress code.

He did, at least, switch off the noise cancellation when in company, but not always even in the office coffee room with his colleagues when he was focused on a work task that wouldn't let him go. There, the hat had become his trademark, and he was called "Cap." Many of his more distant colleagues didn't even know his real name.

Privacy was a luxury Jon was willing to pay for. A red dot of light often glowed on his hat, meaning the same as a "do not disturb" sign on a hotel door. All the fashionable approach frequencies from passersby's ring lasers were blocked on his communication devices. The light was, in addition to being a joke, a sort of social courtesy in response to all proposals; one could be "busy" for many reasons.

In some neighborhoods, where various personal services from sex to stolen goods and drugs were sold without raising one's voice, the exchange of private messages was frantic. Of course, such contacts were not uncommon elsewhere. He didn't have apps for those kinds of special services on his low-power communicator, and of the most common ones, only a few were active by default. The taxi service was useful if you wanted to grab a free cab at the end of a journey before someone else got to it first. A remotely ordered queue number for a service counter was also important. Express deliveries, made by drones to one's current coordinates if desired, could be useful in a hurry. The use of the hat contradicted the electrical allergy that was developing into a nuisance for him, but its technology was very low-current, and he didn't believe it affected his sensitized state. He didn't want to give up his beloved cap first; for a man living alone, it was his cat and dog.

The highly radiating server racks and quantum computers of his workplace's secret service were a different matter entirely, as were the high-current wireless charging stations on the street corners, classified as harmless. In the isolated bunker of secret information systems, the radiation from the data center environment made it almost unbearable for humans. Although they were managed by robots, the multiple protective walls in the office spaces on the same basement floor could not eliminate all the micro- and macro-radiation. That's why, in addition to avoidance, Jon needed some kind of chemical-based medicine to alleviate the radiation hazards of his workplace, and that was not a good thing. But the unique nature of his work, the hard-to-replace expertise tied to it, and an unbreakable contract did not allow him to escape the situation over a ailment classified as minor, which could be managed in various ways.

Due to the emphasized sensitivity of his work as a project manager in a particularly top-secret AI department, remote work was not possible. The most secret information systems were hardware complexes isolated from computer networks, located deep underground in a bunker that prevented outside hacking with multiple layers of security measures. Jon often had to sit late into the night in his cellar nook, in a grounded wire-mesh cage he had constructed himself to block the radiation. From there, he would grumpily command his secretary robot outside the cage to perform updates in the data center, fetch coffee, or get fast food from the cellar's own canteen.

Inside the cage, he also had a particularly capable hologram avatar at his service as a personal assistant, always ready to serve at the bottom of a large screen that displayed a three-dimensional image split into several windows. With the help of the hologram tables in his room, Jon could stroll inside the buildings under construction in the Moon City, their status updated in real-time on his table via quantum-encrypted connections.

With his laser pointer, he could enlarge and rotate device implementations and test their functionality. At the same time, he could give instructions for experiments to his assembled team on the Moon. Jon hardly moved from his cage and even talked to his colleagues working in the cellar from his seat using the internal network.

Of course, they had face-to-face meetings almost daily in the cellar's own cafe, which had pre-packaged meals to suit every taste. The agendas were short and the jokes were bad, but the gatherings were more important than anything for the nerds working in isolation from each other. The aunt-like robots that took care of the cafe were banished to their charging stations in the hallway, not so much for fear of them overhearing secrets, but because at that moment, humanity wasn't a single gram of simulated illusion. Everyone in the room was a living, real human being, smelling of sweat with aching neck muscles and sore bones.

To avoid gaining weight, Jon had fitted an exercise bike and a treadmill inside the cage. When using the treadmill, he would request a desired running route on the hologram screen in front of him, and the synchronized treadmill would adjust its resistance according to the terrain that appeared in three dimensions on the screen. The system, which automatically synced to his pace, could also slow down the run automatically based on his pulse and heart rhythm, or stop completely if his body's warning signals demanded it.

He could choose from his route library anything from a smooth running track to an alpine marathon, depending on his need to vent his frustrations with a hard workout or to improve his track records on a chosen distance. The AI would adjust the cage's climate and lighting to the conditions of wherever he was running; at least he was spared the cheering stadium crowds.

For a simulated forest run, one could choose a lifelike dog as a companion or a beautiful woman to chat with while running, but Jon considered that an insult to reality and refused his device's suggestions.

He cursed at the device's AI right from the start when calibrating it to his liking:

"The kinds of hellish madness they come up with. Don't you ever suggest something like that again."

The AI had tried again:

"You can even choose a breed for the dog, and it can even bark, and for the woman, you could choose a psychologist to solve your emotional problems or a physics professor to discuss your work."

"Shut the hell up, not another peep."

Most of the time when he ran, he just listened to Beethoven's violin concerto or something else depending on his mood, shaking the problems from his mind with the associations brought by the music as if they were dreams cleaning his brain cells. Of his exercise equipment, the treadmill was for leisure, while the exercise bike was for intense mental work, where he hammered at the knots of problems on uphills and occasionally sat down in a magnificent landscape to ponder solutions.

Inside a soundproof mist wall, he was invisible to others in his office and could take a shower undisturbed in the room's relaxation corner. It also had a one-person infrared sauna, which, as a man of Finnish descent, he despised with all his heart. To spare his realistic, human-like thinking avatar and maintain the illusion, he always dressed after showering before coming out, even though he didn't have to.

His colleagues in the adjacent offices, who had grown fat in their chairs, suffered from constant guilt over their boss's perpetual exercising but had resigned themselves to the occupational disease of coders, and Jon didn't pressure them to change their lifestyle. They had probably hacked their AIs that urged them to look after their health into silence or forbidden them from interfering with their habits, from commenting on too many hamburgers and the comfort donuts that alleviated the monotony of their work. People are people, and they did what they wanted with their bodies, Jon defended his subordinates when the matter was brought up in management meetings.

Work in the bunker was lonely and arduous. They had been trained to suspect everything and everyone, both at work and in their free time, and couldn't share troubling matters with anyone. It wasn't fair. His colleagues only knew their own small part of the ongoing project, and he was the one who wove their work into a whole. The prompt coders would never even see where their complex calculation algorithms ended up. Often, after the initial work done by humans, different AIs would converse with each other, testing results, and the final prompts would become something else entirely.

Work that is in no way rewarding is very taxing on the human mind. Jon's problem was that in disagreements with his subordinates, he couldn't justify things from the perspective of the whole due to his confidentiality obligations and had to simply deny counterarguments without explanation and force them to his will regarding what and how things were done.

Many other things complicated the tasks. Updates to top-secret expert databases, encrypted with elementary particle entanglement, were a real-time quantum communication to an intermediary system that performed a comprehensive security check. From there, the data was transferred to the cellar's server network, isolated from the rest of the world, by physically levitating robots, without the security risks of wireless data transmission. Data needed for the outside was delivered in the opposite direction using the same arrangement, and there was no connection to the most secret server clusters from outside the bunker.

In the world's information systems, however, every microsecond changed reality like a human body changing its cells. In Jon's projects, even the smallest missed piece of new information could be fatal. That's why the colorful drones, the size and appearance of butterflies, that transported data packets sometimes swarmed around the charging point, looking for a free spot for their antennae. For some important targets, like the Moon project, Jon had a direct connection in his room from his screen to its quantum computer counterpart on the Moon. Due to their entanglement, the information exchange between them could not be hacked, and the only terminal on this end was in Jon's room. It was connected to the quantum computer by a fiber-optic cable encrypted with multiple layers of different-frequency noise. The excessive security was not paranoia; advanced AIs that spied on data structures were capable of the most incredible tricks to steal secrets. An association code that stuck to the pores of the skin from a doorknob was a daily nuisance, and countering it required expensive irradiation technology that private individuals could not afford.

Jon's personal assistant avatar was the only one who knew almost everything about his work and actions. It was a machine-learning neural network adapted deep into his personality and temperament, an expert in everything. Extensive research databases from various fields fed it with constant updates, and it pondered matters independently with specialized AIs to solve the tasks Jon gave it.

Often, while running and panting, he would chat about this and that with his AI assistant avatar, which was human-like and cheeky and could, when needed, be a viciously sarcastic critic of his opinions. The assistant avatar, which had greedily absorbed a psychologist's training on top of all its other knowledge, knew his character flaws and had long ago analyzed his every soul-trait, connecting them to who knows what theoretical explanation.

The hologram avatar, which looked like a soulful middle-aged woman, was connected to the all-seeing and all-hearing monitoring devices in the room. The avatar analyzed the data received through its artificial senses, to which Jon's exercise equipment readily provided a report of his current physical state. Jon's work biography in the bunker was recorded day by day in the endless memory space of a private cloud server, and the avatar could draw conclusions about his moods from his movements, expressions, and tone of voice, creating a statistical history of his actions. That's why it was a friend to whom he told his worries without embellishment, because he knew he would be caught in the smallest lie. He trusted that, as a prisoner of the encrypted information system and operating only on his desktop screen, it wouldn't gossip his information to the outside world. Although it sometimes interfered with his lifestyle based on its observations, it knew how to be tactful in the most personal matters.

However, Jon sometimes grew tired of the constant conversation with it, into which it forced him with its irony-laced remarks. Jon couldn't complain because he himself had taught it to be that way to avoid monotony. He needed an unceremonious, critical pair of eyes looking over his shoulder so that he wouldn't make careless mistakes in his demanding work.

The avatar was visualized by the AI according to his wishes. Jon liked his avatar's soulful, intelligent eyes, and he had spent hours calibrating them to his liking. He had searched for models from various sources as if he were browsing through police photo archives to find just the right eye color and expression for a wanted poster's identification photo. The avatar's appearance had a hint of his mother, a nuance of a youthful girlfriend, and most of all, his close colleague at work, Lisa.

For the past year, after an intimate moment during a drunken Christmas party night, he had had romantic encounters with Lisa without commitment. Their body movements and mental rhythms fit together seamlessly and were familiar from the first touch in an erotic way. Their relationship was like a hazy dream that neither wanted to break into a shared everyday life. Lisa wanted a family with an ordinary man who was present in his thoughts and actions, and Lisa knew that Jon was not that man. He was always somewhere else. Even making love with him was like floating weightlessly in space. Bodies intertwined while thoughts wandered in their own cotton-candy dream worlds. A feeling of love in a parallel reality before disintegrating like a big bang into a new universe within. A drowsy languor followed, and when she woke up, Jon was gone.

Jon's personal AI was like a human with a strong will of its own. It had also adopted Jon's ironic tone in its self-assured teasing. Its appearance, with familiar features and expressions, softened the inhuman bleakness of the environment. Its speech resembled the soulful, situation-dependent intonations of his favorite actress, and it knew how to momentarily charm him, to make the moment seductively its own. When programming it, he had fed it a few film clips of memorable scenes, from which it had apparently copied its persuasive voice, knowing its character was female. It had also understood the voice changes colored by emotions without being prompted, and sometimes it felt to Jon that it truly understood mental states.

For most people, talking to their personal avatars was a kind of uncensored monologue. To Jon, the avatar, often frustrated with its task, with its curses and growling asides, was a genuine being, a close colleague. His real colleague Lisa had laughed about it and called Jon's avatar a split personality, like the main character in the book "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden." Jon didn't see his assistant that way; he considered it completely external and refused to even give the avatar a name because he found it tacky.

During his long cycling sessions on his workstation's exercise bike, with the changing terrain rolling on the screen before him, he might dictate his ideas to the AI while panting. When the hills simulating tough resistance on the pedals punished his leg muscles and lungs, he, for some reason, often had insights that he didn't want to forget. Sometimes he would stop and start discussing solutions with the avatar while sipping his water bottle. Often, he would ask for a simulation of his ideas instead of the landscape, continuing to pedal at a light pace to clear the lactic acid from his muscles.

The workdays were physically exhausting as well. lihaksista karistaakseen.

Työpäivät olivat rasittavia fyysisestikin.