Chapter 36 - Development Hell

Syahos picked up the dropped tablet and looked closer. There was no doubt about what they were seeing. The young Glyph who had just teleported twenty feet across a bare room was themselves. The youth in the video was still lavender, barely a teenager, but their resemblance to who Syahos saw in the mirror was unmistakable. As they replayed the video, they watched again in disbelief as their younger self entered the room, stood across from the older, uniformed Glyph, and teleport to the middle.

“There has to be a trick to this, “ Syahos thought, shaking their head in denial. They closed the video and pulled up the next, in which a different young glyph teleported to the far side of the room before collapsing. Syahos jogged forward to further in the list and played a video in which a Glyph blinked out of existence. The video was sped up while the uniformed Glyph and the security team stood patiently waiting. Eventually the young Glyph blinked back into existence. A ten-minute time jump, almost on the nose. Was this a goal of Project Millenium? To create Glyphs who could engage in time displacement without the use of an engine?

As they pondered that thought, they pulled up another video with their younger self, who was designated the number, “Twenty-Three.” The younger Syahos stood across the room from the Paradox Prevention Unit Glyph. A second PPU Glyph suddenly appeared in a blink, standing next to the younger Syahos. The elder Syahos nearly dropped the tablet again. The older Glyph was jumping without a temporal displacement engine as well. Their organic mind seemed to be short circuiting at the visual of it. It went against everything they understood. Their QPU, however, gave them the most likely and logical conclusion.

Glyphs could displace time without an engine.

They reeled with the implication, nearly falling out of their bed. Were this the truth, it raised a lot more questions than it answered. PTICA had been telling the galaxy for as long as the Glyph line had existed (centuries now) that the Glyphs only directed the flow of the energy, helped calculate destinations, and smooth out arrival turbulence. With the truth in front of them, Syahos couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the scale of the deception. Thousands of Glyphs made jumps every single day ... were they all doing so by some organic process?!

They looked in the directory for the folders regarding implancements and QPU installation. There were no journals or data logs here, it was all code and programs. They began digging through the entire section of it, looking for the parts that were now missing from their own QPU. The connections to the TDE, in particular.

As an AO, this code existed but had been blocked from Syahos visually. It had acted on them automatically, no need to seek consent or permission. The bitter rage and hatred bubbled within them anew. It was time to finally see what this programming did with their own eyes, rather than through a lens of PTICA filters.

Their QPU digested the data quickly, and eventually reached the information they were seeking. They tapped their fingers impatiently against the sides of the device while it worked, and as their QPU processed the nature of the code, a picture began to form in their mind. The Temporal Displacement Engine served three functions. The primary was simply moving in space like any planet-locked or intergalactic travel vessel would. The secondary function was for short range teleporting of individuals wearing the neural bands. The best this could muster was limited planetary travel, certainly not across the galaxy. This also made up the function of the tether that bound them to the vessel, it seemed.

It was the final function that confirmed Syahos’ growing suspicions. The TDE acted as a guide rail for a Glyph’s temporal displacement and channeled the energy into the malleabite comprising the ITSTU and all people and items within. In fact, the only functional section of the code they found seemed to help prevent minor anomalies by helping with calculations around weight and mass. The implication of it crashed down on them at once: Glyphs didn’t need the ITSTU, the ITSTU needed them.

They leapt to the floor and began pacing. The memory of the few times that they had jumped and teleported the ITSTU for the users (especially the initial jumps to and from the twenty-first century) replayed in their mind. They had always felt a physical feeling of exhaustion after these jumps. It made perfect sense now. It’s not like a computer became tired. It was always them that was performing these feats. Expending themselves.

And the question passed them over again. Why the deception? What was the point in lying about the capabilities of the Glyphs? What did PTICA gain from convincing the galaxy it was an engine that time traveled rather than an AO?

What was the actual goal of Project Millenium?

They went back to the director’s logs and found the first entry past the training phase. The first entry under a new phase called, “Experimentation and Testing.”

Zas Sirrk looked worse for wear. Her eyes were sunken and her brown plumage was disheveled, in need of a wash. She had a lit cigarette in her beak and a few more burnt out in an ashtray near her.