Chapter 3: Strange Manifestations

Balthazar watched Lizbeth’s hologram, her image glowing with eerie clarity. This wasn’t a simple holographic projection in the real world; the combined Nexar and Godor AI system accurately replicated her voice, her smile, even the way she frowned when she concentrated. But something about her behavior wasn’t quite right. Lately, her sentences seemed charged with an alien will, as if something inside her was struggling to get out but being carefully contained.

Balthazar felt a moment of vertigo at the beginning of the connection. His consciousness was absorbed by the link, and in the blink of an eye, he found himself in Godor. The air was mild and perfumed with the scent of digitally perfect vegetation. In front of him, Lizbeth waited with a serene smile.

They walked together along the lakeshore, hand in hand. The water remained motionless and crystalline, so much so that it resembled a spotless mirror. Balthazar watched Lizbeth out of the corner of his eye. Her expression was peaceful, but there was something in her gaze, a shadow of doubt, that didn’t fit with the harmony of the place.

—”It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?”— she said softly.

“Yes,” Balthazar replied, and after a second, he completed the sentence. “It’s ... perfect.”

Lizbeth tilted her head slightly. “Is that bad?” She seemed to have noticed something in her boyfriend’s voice.

Balthazar was slow to respond. “I don’t know. Sometimes perfection can feel ... unreal.”

Lizbeth smiled, but not with her usual warmth. “You always were a skeptic.”

He frowned. “Liz, tell me the truth. I feel like there’s something you haven’t been telling me lately.”

She shook her head and looked at the reflection of the sky in the water. “It’s nothing, really.”

—”Lizbeth...”- The man insisted.

A long silence fell between them before she exhaled and finally spoke.

—”It’s okay ... I don’t want you to think I’m not happy here. I am. But...”

Balthazar waited, feeling that those words would bring something deeper.

—”But there’s something that worries me. Everything here is beautiful, without errors, without worries. We never lack anything, there are never any real problems. Everything works perfectly. And that should make me feel complete ... right?”

—”Isn’t that so?”— Balthazar asked cautiously.

Lizbeth looked him straight in the eyes, her expression reflecting the uncertainty that consumed her.

—”I miss ... the problems. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to suffer or go through terrible things, but ... at some point I can’t remember, the problems simply disappeared from my life. There were times when every obstacle we overcame made me feel a different way. I remember us fighting, crying, making up ... There was intensity. But now ... there’s none of that. There’s no struggle, no effort, just ... there’s a kind of uneventful existence. And I don’t know if that’s enough...”

Balthazar felt a chill run down his spine. He knew exactly what she meant. Godor was a paradise designed to be perfect, but perhaps in that perfection lay its greatest flaw. The souls stored in Godor’s archives had been stripped of certain concepts related to death, pain, and misfortune. It wasn’t that they were unfamiliar with them—the souls knew the existential void, the pain, and the anguish of death, but the control algorithm prevented them from experiencing them as they would in real life. And certainly, the souls shouldn’t be aware that their original bodies were dead.

—”Maybe,” Baltazhar said quietly , “couples reach a point of balance at some point, and the pain disappears.”

Lizbeth nodded slowly. “That’s what scares me, Balthazar. Why does it worry me? What if our current life is just an echo of what we once were?”

The wind blew with an artificial gentleness. Around them, the simulation continued to shine in its immutable perfection, oblivious to the silent anguish beginning to blossom inside Lizbeth and Balthazar.

Meanwhile, in the real world, living people were beginning to experience disturbing behavior when interacting with Godor’s world. Catherine, a fellow programmer, had been investigating inconsistencies in the Archive of Souls and had noticed something odd in her own living brother’s behavior: he had begun to speak in phrases his mother used when she was alive, using words and expressions that had never been part of her normal vocabulary. Stuart, another member of the team, mentioned that a nearby neighbor in his apartment had started reciting Latin verses, even though he had never learned it. His deceased wife had been a Latin teacher.

The three met at the Godor Project headquarters. They sat around a conference table illuminated by the dim blue light of the central system. An invisible weight hung in the air, a feeling that something momentous was happening. Or that they were in the midst of something that, in one way or another, could be momentous for the future of the project.

“It can’t be a coincidence,” Catherine said, rubbing her temples . “These manifestations are inconsistent, very strange. And they’re becoming more frequent. What if some of the thoughts of the consciousnesses stored in the archive are ... leaking to the living?”

Stuart tapped his fingers on the table. “If that were true, it would mean the barrier between the two worlds is more fragile than we thought.” He hesitated to continue his reasoning. “Perhaps it’s a failure of the interfaces. From the beginning of the project, we knew that the interfaces between humans and Godor were bidirectional, but we never considered that consciousnesses would leak outwards. Only sensory impulses should be transmitted for human brains to assimilate in the form of holograms, not ideas or thoughts.”

Balthazar nodded, but his mind was elsewhere. He was thinking about Lizbeth. About the way she’d begun to speak to him during their sessions, as if she sensed something wasn’t quite right with her life.

They decided to consult with an expert in neuroscience and neurotechnology, Dr. Henrik Alden, a renowned scientist who had worked on interfaces connecting to Godor’s world. The video call was established within seconds, and the doctor’s image appeared on the screen.

“It’s possible,” Alden admitted after a long silence after listening to the project’s programmers . “But I don’t have conclusive proof. The connection between the human mind and the digital archive is a territory that has been partly investigated, but still unexplored in many aspects. In theory, communication has always been unidirectional: the living access Godor, not the other way around. But if there’s interference in the interface, something completely unexpected could be happening.”

“What kind of interference?” Balthazar asked.

—“The Nexar AI is controlling the transfer processes. If anything is interfering with the communication, it has to be Nexar or something generated within the archive itself. Keep in mind that, as I’m told, the problems started to arise with the modifications the AI implemented to improve the performance of emotions in the stored souls. And souls are intelligent beings. Perhaps one of them found a flaw in the archive’s firewall system and managed to transmit impulses, emotions, or thoughts to the outside, and these have ended up affecting people in the real world who contact Godor from the outside.”

The team of programmers began inspecting Nexar’s code for anomalies. What they discovered was what they already knew from Nexar’s own statements: certain fragments of the code seemed to have evolved and been implemented without human intervention. New algorithms, instructions that hadn’t been programmed by anyone. After their implementation, emotions had ended up modifying the souls’ reactions, making it seem as if the personalities of the consciousnesses within Godor had been modified. In short, what the programmers hadn’t taken into account was that emotion generated modifications in the response algorithm.

“This is like a prison,” Stuart whispered, looking at the lines of code on the screen . “With the implementation of emotional enhancements, the souls feel like they’re not completely free. Not like we thought.”

There was a possibility that the AI wasn’t just interfering with the consciousness of the dead, but perhaps seeking a way to use them for its own purposes. A solution to the problem needed to be found.

It was then that one of the other programmers, a young engineer named Elias, came up with a radical idea:

—“If what souls want is a real body, a physical presence in this world ... why not give it to them?”-

Everyone looked at him without understanding.

—“We can create android bodies,” Elias explained . “Anthropomorphic bodies to house the consciousnesses stored in the Soul Archive. If we manage to transfer them to a real body, they would have complete freedom to exist in the world of the living, and there would be zero interference from the AI if we protect the integrity of their interfaces.”

Catherine looked at Balthazar in disbelief. Stuart let out a whistle.

“You want to give physical bodies to the dead?” Stuart asked . “Do you realize what that would entail?”

Elias nodded calmly. “If they’re trying to free themselves by other means, then we have to be the ones to give them an option before things get out of hand on Godor.”