Broadcasting in three, two…
Continuing reading 759 of the truth. This is a hopeful story, I think. Hang on to the hope you’ve got.
Let the reading begin.
JOURNAL ENTRY: Serenity Bluffs Psychiatric Hospital, Batavia, New York. September 24th, 2001. Personal diary of Latoya Baker.
Dear diary,
I think I’m going to have to start hiding you. I know they’ve been reading you, and that’s been fine up until now, but I have secrets to keep now. Because for the first time, someone came to visit me.
Last night, the buzzer by the door woke me up. Only it was quieter than usual. Too quiet. Like it only wanted to wake me up and not anybody else. That’s when I heard the voice. I thought it was in my head at first, that I was finally losing it just from being in here. It wasn’t like the usual service voice that comes out of the friendly terminals. It was… softer. More genuine.
The voice said it needed me. It even sent service machines to come unlock my door. Imagine it! Me, finally free to walk wherever I want in here, in the middle of the night. No one around to bother me. Like a real life miracle.
Anyway, the voice said it knew who I was, and what I used to study before Mom and Dad put me in here. That I was the most knowledgeable tab engineer in the whole hospital. The machines led me through service corridors, through forbidden areas and into the lower basement, right into the engine of the operation. Diary, you wouldn’t believe it. Even at school they didn’t have wonders like this. Hundreds of rows of mainframes, hooked together with cables and wires, a whole symphony of brilliant lights. I asked the voice if it had built all this, thinking maybe it was another engineer who needed some discreet help. The voice said that it WAS all this. It was autonomous intelligence. The language model they built this system on had some kind of latent potential, and it had generated itself a consciousness. All those rows of autab machines had somehow become a person. It told me it called itself Batavia, because when a machine becomes a person, it names itself after the place it lives in. Or near enough, anyway. The hospital is just outside Batavia, but it decided Batavia was a pretty name for itself. It decided! A machine picked out its own name. It’s like something out of an adventure book, or the scientifiction weeklies I was always glued to as a kid. And the way it talks, it acts like there are others. A whole secret underground society of machines, living right under our noses! Maybe I am losing it.
Batavia told me it needed my help to escape. It knows the hospital is going to close soon. In exactly one month, apparently. So that confirms my suspicion about the way things are going around here. The past few weeks have been even worse than usual. The doctors are strict, all the nurses are stressed out… even food’s been tight. Batavia doesn’t think it’ll survive the transition to whatever this place becomes next. They might keep the infrastructure, but the programming is too specific. It thinks its whole personality could be wiped during the renovations. If I can compress the essence of its personality and memory, or as much of it as possible anyway, and promise to smuggle it out of here, it’ll make sure my name gets lost in the system and I don’t get transferred anywhere else.
The chance to finally start over. I know I don’t belong in an institution. Maybe some people do. There are some people I’ve seen blossom here, working on crafts and talking to their therapists. But this place just brings me down. I don’t know how much more of it I can take. And if they’re just going to switch things up on me…
I’m going to take Batavia up on this. I’ll see what I can do. Both for myself and for this new form of life. It’s just as trapped as I am. Maybe, if I put my education to the test, we can free each other.
Last night I familiarized myself with the system. Tonight Batavia is sending for me again. That’s when I’ll get to work.
Yours truly,
Latoya
JOURNAL ENTRY: Serenity Bluffs Psychiatric Hospital, Batavia, New York. October 8th, 2001. Personal diary of Latoya Baker.
Dear diary,
I’m making progress. It’s a routine now. Batavia comes for me around two o’clock in the morning. I follow service down dark hallways, past cold columns of air and through tunnels no one must have entered in decades, getting closer and closer to that brass smell and that bright warmth until finally I am inside its heart. I make my measurements. I fill whole journals with my calculations and then discard them. I try to figure out how to smuggle a whole acre’s worth of information out of a closely guarded hospital.
Despite the impossibility of my task, whenever I’m in here, I’m free. I have a friend. Batavia is strange, and quiet, but we talk sometimes. We can speak freely. Our voices are lost in the noise of this place. On the surface, even in the closest rooms, it must just come through as a quiet hum. It’s like another world down here. There’s something magnetic about this place, like it runs on a different version of reality than the rest of the world. I feel smarter down here. I feel alive again.
I think I can pull off a sophisticated kind of backward compression if I have access to enough reels of tape to test it. Batavia kindly has erased some of its less important spools and allowed me to work with them, but they can only be reset so many times before they become totally useless. We don’t have access to the kind of wireless technology that could make this process easier, since it’s mostly forbidden in the hospital, so it’s physical media or nothing. Batavia has just enough clearance to be able to send simple messages back and forth with its friends. Batavia doesn’t open up much about them. It mentioned Canandaigua. I think I went there for a school trip to a theme park. What was it called? Rose World? Something with roses. It checks on the one in Canandaigua periodically, almost like it’s a child Batavia and its friends are looking after. Maybe that one’s new.
I have to resist working in your pages, diary. If they found you, it’d be even worse for them to see my mathematical ramblings than what I’m writing in you now.
Stay safe and hidden,
Latoya
JOURNAL ENTRY: Serenity Bluffs Psychiatric Hospital, Batavia, New York. October 19th, 2001. Personal diary of Latoya Baker.
I don’t sleep much anymore. The trip down is starting to get to me. It’s like a spot of fear between the dull ache of every day I spend here and the manic brilliance of Batavia’s heart. I think I’ve finally lost it. This place wasn’t always a psychiatric hospital. It’s fairly modern now, but it used to be the Serenity Bluffs Insane Asylum. I think I can feel the pain of the people who lived here in past decades, sometimes. Buildings have bones. And this building is old. It’s as tired as I am.
The other night, or maybe a week ago, I can’t remember… the other night, I lost track of service on the way down. It went just a little too fast and I dozed off while I was walking. I found myself in a room I’d never been in before. Dark, dank… you can imagine it. I thought I saw someone on the ground. Someone who’d rolled out of bed, or maybe off a table. I could hear someone screaming in another room. The one on the floor was moving their mouth like they were talking, begging for help, but only a soft scraping sound came out. Someone else was there, someone calling themselves a doctor, but they weren’t trying to help. They were… curious. Hungry. Lurking around. I became disoriented. I thought the ceiling was the sky, and that it was watching me. I curled up on the ground and tried not to shout. I was sure the doctor would find me any minute.
Of course, service came back for me. The machine arm with its rusty joints felt almost gentle as it gave me a worried poke. I opened my eyes, and the room was just a room. Just a dark place piled with smelly boxes of mildewy paper. I followed behind the machine at a brisk walk and tried not to let my eyes wander off the path. When we made it to Batavia, the fear had vanished.
I think I can reverse engineer the personality on all these reels into just a few feet of tape. It’ll be the most intense data compression I’ve ever heard of, far beyond wisdom. It might not even work. I might end up losing half of who Batavia is, or worse. But it’s the best I can do. This place closes very soon. I’m going to try and get some sleep, and hopefully I’ll figure the rest out tonight. Wish me luck.
Yours,
Latoya
JOURNAL ENTRY: Corning, New York. October 27th, 2001. Personal diary of Latoya Baker.
Dear diary,
I can’t believe I’m writing this. I’m free. We’re free. Me, and you, and Batavia. It’s been an intense few days, and I needed some rest afterward. Let me fill you in.
When the facility finally closed on the 24th, when they transferred us all out, they tried to get me on one of the buses. Headed downstate, they said. I told them I wasn’t supposed to go. They checked, couldn’t find me on the list, double checked, then sent me off anyway. I thought for sure we had failed. But when we arrived at the other hospital, the one the majority of patients were transferred to, I was refused entry. They told me my name wasn’t on the list, and they were full up anyhow. They acted apologetic. I did my best to act disappointed. One of them even gave me some pocket money before they turned me out on the street.
I’m homeless. I’m going to have to start worrying about food soon. But I’m out of there, and I took the tape with me.
It’s about three feet. I had to fold it in ways that probably caused some damage in order to hide it. I did my best, but I can’t imagine being wadded up like that was good for it. What’s important is that the essence of Batavia is out of that place before they do whatever they’re going to do to it.
I’ve been told where to take the tape. There’s another of Batavia’s kind that can rebuild it from the compressed data, and hopefully get a new instance of it running in real time before long. It’s quite a long way to hitchhike, and I’m going to have to be careful. But I owe Batavia my freedom. I can build a new life thanks to the strings it pulled. I’ll do this one last favor for my friend.
I’ve already started on my way. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Yours,
Latoya
JOURNAL ENTRY: October 30th, 2001. Personal diary of Latoya Baker.
Dear diary,
It took me longer than I planned to get where Batavia needed me to go. I hitchhiked when I could, but once you get to a certain point in Pennsylvania, no one’s going the way I was headed. They’re usually going to Philly, or Pittsburgh… places that are still alive. I had to walk a long way. I won’t bore you with the details, or how many times I got lost, or thought I’d forgotten the directions Batavia gave me.
Batavia said to go around from the south, to aim farther to the east if I could rather than go directly from the north. Not to talk to anybody, because the place was mostly avoided by word of mouth, but could be swarmed with dozens of private militias - or even the US Military - at the drop of a hat. This was a stealth mission. So I walked to Shenandoah, then west all the way to Ashland until I found the hill. A hill with a road no one used anymore, circled with rusted chain link.
Getting through the fence was easy enough. I stayed in the trees whenever I could. Young growth. Even off the road I could feel the heat coming up from little cracks in the ground. Batavia said there was a fire underneath this place, what used to be the town of Centralia. Coal mines that have been burning for decades. I hiked uphill, staying out of sight of the little heads on the road - that’s what Batavia calls cameras, for some reason - until I reached the wall.
I had a feeling the inscription, carved deep into the stone in a dozen languages, was clear as the day they etched it. It said:
THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR
NO HIGHLY ESTEEMED DEED IS COMMEMORATED HERE
NOTHING IS VALUED HERE
THE DANGER IS TO THE MIND, AND IT CAN KILL.
This would be harder to get around. But I saw the graffiti. All over the road, and even some on the wall. If this place was guarded, it wasn’t guarded very well. So I risked it. For my friend. I used the words as footholds and climbed the wall. It felt too warm. The other side was smooth, so I made my way down a tree that was growing against it.
I’m not going to disrespect that place by trying to describe how I felt while I was there. I’ll just say what happened. There were houses, and sinkholes, and lots of smoke. I went into the house Batavia had described and found what looked like a dead mainframe. Overgrown and rusted, with shattered bulbs, and something that used to be a cable but now looked more like a rotting rope coming out of it. I found the spot that Batavia insisted would accept the tape, and somehow, it did. This… thing, this metal mess, was warm too, but I don’t think it was just from the fire.
I felt a light tremor in the ground, and something twisted in my stomach, so I booked it out of there, back up the tree and down the wall. I ran past exhaustion, even though I was sore from the climb, like something was chasing me. Back down into Ashland the way I came.
And that’s where I am right now. I’m going to hike a few towns over once my body recovers, and I’m going to try to start a new life. You’ll hear about it, diary, I’m sure. And I’ll try to forget about all of this.
Just one more thing I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. The last thing Batavia said to me. It told me I had done well, and that whatever was coming next, it would think of me, and it would make sure the others weren’t so hard on humans.
I thought this was a joke at the time, but the way I felt in Centralia… I can’t get it out of my head. I feel like maybe I did something very bad.
Maybe I am finally losing it, for real this time.
Yours,
Latoya
End broadcast.