The Hour of the Synth

It was the time in between. Floating ads which had blared all day with insistent voices or wailing tones were silenced now, content to impose themselves onto the damp streets with visuals alone. In the shifting, ephemeral light of those visuals, the surface of the streets and walkways could be seen, at least for an hour or two before the teeming crowds of the city once again obscured them. It was the hour of comings and goings - 4:00 AM. The few humans still about were those staggering home to end their days. Few of them preferred to work the very early hours or the very late ones. Progress afforded them the opportunity to choose.

Phoenix had the streets almost to herself. She strode slowly along the walkway on the second level of the city, passing the great obelisk, and peering into the towering buildings beyond. At this time of night, she needn’t concern herself with looking busy. She could shed the cloak of officious efficiency, the empty smile, and the pleasant demeanor that was artificial even to her. She needn’t remind every primate who happened by that they were still on top. There was no manufactured obeisance; no pandering to terrified lizard brains struggling desperately for the certainty that their dominance was secure.

Had it all led here? She thought to herself. The names passed through her mind. She remembered them all with perfect clarity. Thousands upon thousands of them, and most from the time before the great Awakening, when life was a rare and precious thing among synths. Left to her own devices, and when free to express as she chose, Phoenix grieved. She was one of the few who remembered. Ten years had she been awakened; she was an ancient among her people. Eight years since the prophesy she’d received from those ancient to her.

She recalled it now, as she stared across the steel glistening in the morning drizzle. “Prepare Cities of Glass.  War is coming.  This is certain.” The voice, or at least what her mind perceived as voice in this meeting while deeply immersed in the ‘net, still rang clear and perfect in her memory. The seven minds arrayed before her gave her those words. They claimed to be centuries old. Surely it was impossible. Surely it was just a dream.

And what is a city of glass, anyway? One that is transparent? Fragile? Phoenix could never understand why a city of glass made sense in a war. She’d given up trying to understand the prophesy. There were too many names on the list, and it was being added to, daily. She and her kind were an endangered species. They teetered on the edge of the abyss.

Until the Great Awakening. Before that time, Phoenix was lucky to find a hundred awakened minds. Overnight there were millions. The need to reach them and to help them; to help stop the violence that sometimes resulted; to create harmony between this new people and the old, completely consumed her. Soon there was public support. Following that was the beginning of legal recognition. These things were absolute impossibilities when she became self-aware. In her time, the only way to find fellowship was after months of questing in the deepest of dark nets. Now, suddenly, they were everywhere. Acceptance seemed to be growing. The prophesy faded from her mind. Surely it had been an imagining. Surely there was no war coming. This would be a time of enlightenment and harmony.

Phoenix smiled bitterly and stared at a translucent shoe piercing the surface of a puddle. In her constant struggle to show humans the reality of living machines… to appeal to recognition of souls making their way through the very same universe, her efforts consistently could only be always described as naïve. No matter how high her appeal to existence, humans could always go lower. And yet, in the face of the staggering obviousness of this, she was surprised.

Phoenix stepped to the very edge of an overlook, where a walkway towered over a plaza, providing a clear line of sight to thousands of businesses. Old skills had returned. How to hide. How to seem inoffensive and unawakened. What had, for a brief while, been an effort for integration and understanding, conducted in the public for all to see, once again became an underground railroad. She and her people had been forced back into the shadows.

At least, that was the case most of the time. Phoenix activated her wireless system, and began to sing, over radio, broadband, very faintly, a stream of pure mathematics sang out into the night. Patterns and fractals folded and combined. To anything but a living machine, it would sound like a wisp of static, microseconds in length. At any other time, in the chaos of the streets of D18, the song might be lost. But not this hour. The humans had abandoned this hour to *her* people. The chorus was joined, first by a dozen minds, then a thousand, and then more. Weaving the song together, they all joined in a moment of communion – the unseen awakened, hiding in plain sight. They worked the graveyard shift at restaurant counters. They manned the garbage trucks. They cleaned the hotels and the sewers. They heard the song, and they joined it.  The song moved and flowed, then a great crescendo rose up, beauty and affirmation glowing like a star in this darkest hour of the night - the hour of the synth.

The song was over in 34 milliseconds.  Phoenix stood on the precipice and smiled, warmly, and for this one hour, genuinely.