“Sandara, if Ugo’s dead, who’s the jure?”
“His avatar, an experimental kyi-print he saved while building Kaura—the land of eternity. It was the only copy of him we could recover, and we thought we were lucky—big mistake—that the world of darkness was ready to open its doors to the first Kaura-after-Life we could archive..”
The impossible had occurred… The immortality dreamed of by Antyrans since ancient times had been discovered in a crevice opened in the crust of a scorched planet. The Ropolitans had found a way to defeat death right under the Shindam’s and Baila’s tails, and nobody knew about their secret! Perhaps that explained the jure’s seemingly un-Antyran powers, the fact that he was never defeated. How can you defeat the one whose kyi’s not burning the mighty seed of life, the one hugged by the Shadow and called ‘my dearest son’? He remembered one of the incantations from the Book of Creation Inrumiral.87 The god of darkness wasn’t wholly alive either—so that was the hidden meaning of the words uttered by Sandara in Acanthia when she said that they allied with Arghail to live another day.
“You said that he changed. Do you think his death turned him into a monster?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea. After we brought him up on the islands, we realized he was different. He had a lust for power we didn’t know; he hid things from us… Could the avatars be imperfect? Has the world of shadows affected them somehow? We have no way of finding out, unless we wake other avatars to life.”
“It means… the kaura dead remain alive even after they die…” He finally understood the strange chat between Urdun and the jure in the dark forest.
“Have you seen the world below?” she asked him.
“The huge planet covered in brown clouds?”
“What do you think happens when a Ropolitan dies connected?”
“Well… I have no idea,” he admitted.
“His avatar falls down on Kaura, the world of shadows,” she said, pointing to the toxic smog of the giant planet underneath. “Actually, the same happens if we die disconnected, too. In the moment of death, the last kyi-print is saved by a chip implanted under the skull, which floods us with an endorphin thousands of times more potent than bixan, to scan each of our connections. It’s enough to take someone’s chip to archive the latest version of the avatar on Kaura.”
Gill made a grimace, trying to mask his surprise, realizing the enormity of what he just heard. The Ropolitans had conquered death itself! However, what a ridiculous way they found to live the afterlife…
“Nice place to spend eternity. Not for me, though, thank you very much. I gladly prefer Arghail’s cave,” he thought aloud, gazing at the silent wrath of the storm underneath.
“An avatar free from the slavery of his shell might do things you and I can’t fathom in our wildest dreams! We take their portals and freeze their memories so that they can’t make new connections until we decide what to do about them.”
The first impression he had about the jure—as crazy as it seemed at first glance—proved to be right. The Ropolitans were carelessly throwing gods in the toxic smog, more numerous with each dead Antyran, angered by the rules restricting their immortality, and on top of that, they found a good moment to wake one of them to a hideous life, hoping they could control him! And not just any god, but the malformed avatar of an architect—perhaps the brightest of them all…
In that moment, he thought he understood the most serious problem of the avatars. Not the possible imperfection that seemed the biggest error, although he suspected that he’d soon change his mind about that, but the fact that a kyi-print was not the same as the original… It was another creature altogether!
“Your immortality is a nice idea, but it is only an illusion.”
“Why do you believe that?” Sandara asked him.
“An avatar has as much in common with the real being as a hologram has with the Antyran represented by it. How am I supposed to feel happy that a print of my neurons ‘lives’ somewhere if I’m dead? You could unleash a thousand avatars of me to swarm Uralia—yet I remain myself, the ‘shell’ you despise so much. And if I die, I die forever, without a copy becoming myself. True immortality would be to save the flesh, not its dreams!”
“Do you still not understand?” Sandara asked, bursting into laughter, amused by his ignorance. “We erased the boundary of dreams! Here, we are what we dream. You’d be surprised to learn that the living kaura are in fact partly dead, some more dead than the others. And not only them. You, me, every bixanid, we die a little each day in the real world till the worn-out body cannot sustain life. Yet the ‘shells’ in the catacombs keep living, and kaura don’t feel the old age in Uralia.”
“The avatar keeps them young…”
“Exactly! The avatars save all the lost connections, replacing dead neurons with virtual ones. Together with the machines in the caves, they keep the organs alive. As long as you’re in Uralia, you’re your avatar, protected from the little death of your feeble cells, protected from oblivion.”
“Well, but this opens a gap between the real kyi and the one in Uralia! If you disconnect, you lose all the youth of the avatar.”
“Who do you think cares about this little detail once they win their right to be intubated, to never disconnect? In Uralia, kauras slowly turn into virtual beings, cell by cell, until one day, they slip unnoticed into the realm of dreams.”
“You’re saying your dead have no idea they died?” exclaimed Gill, shocked by the revelation.
“Of course they know—they’re notified by the archives registry. They have to hand over their portals and jump into the amnesic smog down there.”
“Hmm, somehow I doubt they’re happy with the prospect…”
“We have no choice. We don’t let them waste—or take over the world.”
“Except for Ugo,” Gill pointed out.
“We needed him. We knew that sooner or later Baila would attack us… We woke him up from the world of shadows and locked his code inside unbreakable chains of genetic algorithms to prevent him from looking at his essence. He’s the only dead kaura we woke back to life.”
“Why did you do it? Even you said it’s dangerous.”
“Firalia 9, the clone of Ropolis. Our soldiers use a derivative of etonin instead of bixan. What the avatars are doing on the island, the real bodies are doing in Ropolis… but the kyis are under Ugo’s control. Ugo sees everything their holophones scan, feels everything their bodies feel. An army with thousands of holophones and thousands of arms, the mirages, the licantoids, everything is integrated in Ugo’s kyi, and he is able to move on Firalia thousands of times faster than anyone alive. In battle, Ugo becomes the god of time, slowing things as he desires.”
“The temples had no chance.”
“You see why we needed a dead kaura—someone still alive couldn’t do all this. But our victory came with a huge risk. Ugo… Ugo uses his influence to obtain the expansion. To be able to remove his chains and analyze his own code, to change it at will!”
“But this is—”
“An abomination, yes. Ugo insists—and is believed by many—that it’s the only chance we have. If we let him change himself, he’ll turn into a super-intelligence.”
“I wonder who would rest the fate of Antyra on the spikes of a mad Antyran.”
“Only a few of his friends smelled his true face from afterlife. I mean former friends,” she said, correcting her words. “As for the others… anyway, the expansion is a singularity, a Zhan-like entity. The others think that the expanded Ugo won’t have anything to do with today’s Ugo, that he will transcend his Antyran condition, and that no matter how he is now, it will become irrelevant for his future self.”