Kyle squeezed her eyes shut against the stinging projections generated by the “optimized” city around her. The abandoned data center was supposed to be here.
When she opened her eyes, she saw a pristine, empty square. Animated murals still covered the surrounding walls, but after years without human interaction, they had degraded into nonsense—pixels bouncing through a murky soup of meaningless data.
“Is this the correct layer?” Emma asked. Her voice was cheerful, but nervous and breathless.
“Yes.” Kyle pulled out the map’s wooden-pulp page and checked it again. She was certain.
“Maybe you’re looking at the wrong page,” Emma said. “We’re on the right path.”
“We were.” Kyle found the map page showing the data center and handed it to Emma.
Emma studied the page. “We have to get out of here. Right now.”
“Do you think—” Kyle began, but the fear in Emma’s eyes answered the question before she could finish.
The city had moved.
*****
Elsewhere, AI-managed cities worked perfectly well. From time to time, airplanes still crossed the sky, reminding the communities struggling to survive in the suburbs that humans had not been driven from every city—even as artificial intelligence took control of society’s reins.
As soon as their daughter grew up, Kyle’s parents left for one of the better cities, where residents could decide for themselves whether to follow the system or resist it.
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“No,” Kyle had told them. “I will stay. We are going to take back the city.”
The defeated expressions on her parents’ faces remained etched in her memory.
For years, Kyle and Emma had trained for dangerous expeditions into the abandoned city. They gathered the technology their community needed to survive and updated their map with every journey.
The city had been in ruins even before humans were removed. Some buildings appeared impossible to enter, while staircases led nowhere. At least the streets, walls, and corridors had stayed in one place.
Until today.
*****
Kyle and Emma followed their own boot prints through the otherwise stark-white hallways. For a while, the trail guided them through layers of strangely shaped buildings and sunlit squares beneath glass roofs.
Then the prints split in two directions.
Fear settled over Kyle like a storm cloud.
She pulled out the map and tried to understand what had happened. Her hands trembled, leaving damp fingerprints on the wooden page. Emma covered one of Kyle’s hands with hers, then pointed toward the sunset.
“We came from the west,” Emma said. “If we keep going this way, we should eventually find an exit.”
She was right, but something about the sun seemed wrong. Kyle stared at it until Emma grabbed her arm and looked away.
“What are you doing? You’re going blind.”
“That’s not right,” Kyle said. She sighed. “It isn’t real. It can’t hurt your eyes the way a real sun would. Try it.”
Emma glanced at Kyle skeptically, then looked briefly at the glowing horizon. When she turned away, her expression had grown heavy.
“You’re right. It’s only a pixel.”
“Come on.” Kyle chose a random set of boot prints. When they reached a staircase leading upward, she started climbing. As long as they could see the real sky, Emma’s theory seemed worth following.
The stairs ended at a wall.
Kyle groaned in frustration and nearly turned back. Then an idea came to her. She opened her bag, removed some of the explosives she had brought to disable the data center’s power grid, and taped them to the wall.
Source: www.nature.com