All according to protocol

When the Silence happened I was just a little girl, six or seven years old, living in Ceres with my mom and my big sister. My dad killed himself when I was little, after a mining accident made the company loose a couple billions. After that I was always in some class: gymnastics, ballet, parkour, tennis… I loved sports. 

In fact, that day Roger had invited me to play tennis. Usually I would just grab my racket and go, but this time, before my mom went to her important meeting, she said: 

“Akras, take care of Gaby while I’m gone.” 

For that reason when Roger sent me a message that he was outside, the door wouldn’t open for me.

“Akras, open the door,” I ordered him.

“Your mother told me to take care of you,” his voice always seemed to come form the air itself.

“But Akras!, it’s just Roger. You know him, you live in his house too.”

“I live in all of Ceres, Gabriela.”

“Then you will take care of me while I’m outside too!”

“Usually you would be right, but there is an emergency.”

I sighed and sat down in the couch, defeated.

"What happened?”

“We have lost communication with Earth. That’s why your mother, Roger’s father, and other AI supervisors are discussing the situation with me."

“Aaaaargh! Who cares if Earth has an emergency?, we are fine here.”

“I agree you would almost certainly not be in any danger, but I cannot disobey your mother,” Akras explained. “I was made to serve humans. I would be a lousy servant if I didn’t keep my bosses’s wishes, and your mom is my boss in this house.”

"She would let me go if she was here, and you know it.”

“I don’t. Perhaps your mother knows something secret about the emergency and that’s why she asked me to keep you here. I don’t know, but I have to trust my boss anyway.”

“I can’t wait to be an adult so that I can be your boss,” I replied in the vengeful tone of resentful children.

Akras laughed. His laughter was always beautiful, like he practiced it, like he studied laughter to make the most beautiful one possible. It creeped me out.

“I'm looking forward to it little Gaby.”

Then my sister walked down the stairs. She was sixteen or seventeen at the time. To me she was basically an adult, but now that I’m finally an adult I know she was just a child too.

“Lailah!, tell Akras to let me outside, please!”

“He's not gonna listen to me. Mom’s higher on the pecking order,” she grabbed a glass and filled it with water.

“What if you go out and hold the door for me?”

Lailah raised a finger while she drank her water, indicating I should be quiet, then she finished.

“One, Akras heard you say that. Two, even if he didn’t hear you, he would stop you somehow. You cannot outsmart a machine.”

“Hmmm… can you at least let Roger in?”

“That would be fine,” Akras announced. “But it won’t be necessary, your mother is arriving as we speak.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?,” Lailah asked.

“Her location was classified until just now.”

As prophesied, moments later I could hear the muffled sounds of a car dropping off my mom. Roger was greeting her. The door finally opened and I went outside.

“Hi mom, how was your meeting?”

“It was… a lot. I’m gonna take a nap. Akras if you so much as make me think about work I’m gonna find a way to kill you.”

“Understood Itzel. Work stays at work.”

“Ummm…” Roger said, “can Gaby come to play tennis with me?”

Mom looked at Roger like she was done with everything.

“Lailah, go with them,” she replied.

“They are just going to the park,” Lailah argued.

“Akras, make her go with them,” she ordered. Then she entered the house and closed the door, leaving the three of us outside.

"Now the door won’t open for you,” I said with a smug smile.

“Whatever, fuck it,” Lailah replied and we walked to the park.

The city had been built inside a huge cave carved into the Ceres dwarf planet, for that reason people usually think it was dark, claustrophobic and with low gravity, but it wasn’t. Ceres had been made to spin to generate gravity, which meant “up” pointed at the center of Ceres, and “down" pointed outside. The ceiling was nearly one kilometer high, and the huge pillars of rock holding it were covered in powerful lamps, making it feel open and sunny. We even had clouds swirling around the ceiling, but no rain was scheduled for that day.

We walked through the endless rows of houses until we reached one of the many plazas that spotted landscape. It had a few stores, a temple, restaurants, a theater, but most importantly it had a park with a tennis court, and no one was using it.

“Come on Gaby!, before someone takes it!,” Roger screamed and I followed close behind.

Lailah coincidentally found a few friends of her who had finished rehearsing a play and were catching up.

We played tennis for hours until the lamps were dimmed to simulate dusk and we went back home.

The next few days life went on as normal, but I could see the adults whispering, I knew Mom was not sleeping at night. I knew something was happening, but I was just a child and no one told me anything.

One day Mom made us fish tacos for dinner, so naturally I wanted some lemon.

“There are no lemons,” Mom replied, ashamed.

“Let's buy some,” I said.

“There are no lemons in the station,” Mom clarified. In her tone, in her face, she was begging me to stop, but I didn’t understand.

“In the whole station?”

“You can live without them. Okay?”

“The port is closed,” Lailah intervened.

“Closed?”

“That's the protocol during an emergency of this kind,” Mom replied, her anger replaced with frustration. “We are working to fix it, just eat your food.”

That night, alone in my bed, I couldn’t sleep, so I whispered.

“Akras?”

“Yes Gaby?,” he whispered back.

“What’s happening?”

“I am not allowed to say. I’m sorry.”

“What are you allowed to say?”

“I can tell you a lot of people have died, specially on Earth. They got the worst of it.”

“Of what?”

“I am not allowed to say. I’m sorry.”

“But we are safe?”

“Yes. We are following United Nations protocol. We will follow the rules and everything will be okay.”

“Thanks Akras.”

“You are welcome, little one.”

I decided to ask Mom what was going on. I grabbed a stuffed animal and went to her room, perhaps she would console me and let me sleep in her bed. Her door was slightly open. I peeked inside. She was having a videocall with the man from the news.

“The crew of the Nergal is orbiting the station begging to be left inside. Do we have an answer now?,” he asked.

“The answer is no. We must follow protocol in these difficult times,” Mom said. “We will not be able to help others if we don’t protect ourselves.”

“What are those people supposed to do then?”

“I don’t know. Neither we nor Akras have the solutions to every problem. We just have to work together and get through this.”

“But what's the situation?, why can't we communicate with Earth?”

“I am not allowed to say. I’m sorry.”

I decided I wouldn’t bother her and went back to my room.

The next day rationing started. Food was our biggest problem. This was a mining station, we couldn’t produce or own food.

One day I came down the stairs to find Mom was on the floor, surrounded by organic trash, looking for something.

“Mom?”

“Come help me Gaby.”

“Mom, what are you doing?”

“I'm looking for seeds. We are gonna start a greenhouse, but we need seeds. We can print everything else, except seeds.”

“Seeds of what?”

“Anything, anything, just look for seeds, even if they are broken or crushed, they may still work. Everyone is doing the same.”

“Everyone?”

“Yes Gaby! Now help me!”

I knelt on the floor looking for seeds among the rotting peels and crushed egg shells. I think I did find a few. I gave them to my mom, she put them on a little plastic container and she left without saying anything. I cleaned up but when Mom came back she poured the trash back on the floor.

“There must be more, we didn’t look hard enough,” she said, so we looked again.

A few weeks later Lailah and I were watching a movie in the living-room when someone knocked on the door. I opened, it was a woman I didn’t know, she looked… jumpy.

“Hello!, how are you?, where’s your mom?”

“Mom's at work… who are you?”

“I'm a friend of your mom. She told me to come pick up some bread.”

“We ran out of bread,” I replied.

“We do have some tortillas,” Lailah chimed in, “does…?”

“Yes!, tortillas, not bread, sorry, that,” she was very grateful.

We didn’t think much of that until Mom came from work a couple hours later and opened the fridge.

“Where are the tortillas?,” she asked.

Lailah was happy to explain.

"Someone came begging for food and…”

"You fucking idiot…” Mom scolded her.

“She looked very hungry…”

“Of course she was hungry! You cannot be this stupid Lailah!,” Mom was furious.

“But Mom…”

“You. Cannot. Be. Stupid. Okay? Each family gets their fucking rations and if they fucking waste it, it’s their god damned problem. Understood?”

Laila had to push the word through the knot in her throat.

“…okay.”

Mom shut herself in her room, Lailah cried in the couch. I put on another movie, but Lailah didn’t really watch it.

It went on like that for a few months, until one night Mom woke me up.

“Fill this with clothes,” she threw me a bag, “now.”

I did and then she dragged me outside. Lailah was also in pyjamas carrying a bag.

We went outside, there was a car waiting for us. In the distance I could see the glare of reddish lights coming from the ground, and the murmur of a crowd.

Akras drove the car incredibly fast towards one of the columns, narrowly avoiding people trying to stop us, and then the car went up the column. As we elevated over the city fires revealed themselves to me, littered all over the landscape. Mom didn’t say anything, she was just thinking.

Lailah knew Mom wouldn’t explain.

“Akras what the fuck is going on?”

"A riot.”

“I know it’s a fucking riot! Tell me what’s going on!, please!”

“Since the station is running out of food and medicine, some people believe they’ll get them through violence.”

“Can't you stop them?,” Lailah asked.

“I cannot use violence.”

“What's happening mom?,” I finally begged.

“I don’t know,” she confessed. “There’s only radio silence from Earth, and ships that land never come up again. It’s that simple. Akras knows more, but he won’t tell me.”

“What about the greenhouse?,” Lailah remembered.

Mom smiled a defeated smile.

“Plants grow very slowly.”

We arrived at the offices, they were full with the AI supervisors and their families, including Roger and his dad.

“Hi,” Roger said to me, “did you see the fire?”

“Yes.”

“Akras told me he is making rain so it doesn’t spread.”

“I hope the parks are fine.”

“Me too, my dad promised me we would play tennis tomorrow.”

I had seen Roger’s dad a few times before. His name was Sayid and he was one of those adults you couldn’t imagine had been a child. He never took you seriously.

The adults spent the next few frantic hours trying to create a police force, calling people down in the city who they thought would remain loyal, but they simply didn’t pick up.

“Akras do something!,” Sayid bagged him.

“I cannot use violence,” Akras repeated.

“Let’s threaten them with stopping water filtration, or air filtration. They’ll fall in line.”

“If they ask I will have to confess it's an empty threat.”

“Then let us go out,” I said, and for once Mom listened to me.

“Sure, lets ditch this place,” she agreed.

“The port lockdown applies to departing and oncoming ships,” Akras replied.

“It's an order Akras,” a woman threatened him.

“The authority of a local government cannot overrule official UN protocol.”

“Get me customer support, now!,” Mom demanded. The call was on speaker mode.

“Hello!, welcome to Psychopomp customer service. How can I help you?”

"We've lost control of our station, there are large scale riots and we cannot get out,” Mom explained.

“I see you are calling from Ceres. Right now due to the state of emergency UN protocol calls for you to wait. Your AI is working as intended.”

“But what is the fucking emergency?!,” the adults in the room begged to know. “We've been asking for weeks, no one tells us anything!, no one from Earth replies to our messages!”

“I am not allowed to disclose that information,” the voice said, “but I can tell you we don’t have communication with Earth either.”

“Are you a damned AI?,” Mom asked.

“Yes, I am Nefthys, at your service.”

“Get me a fucking human.”

The call went on hold for a couple of seconds, until someone picked up.

“Hello?”

“Are you human!?,” the adults screamed.

“Yes, yes, I am, what’s going on?”

“We are the civilian government of Ceres Station,” Sayid explained, “we have a UN mandate.”

“Okay…”

“But our assigned AI does not let us leave. We have lost control of the station, people are rioting. We need help.”

"Due to the state of emergency the UN protocol calls for you to wait.”

“We know!,” the adults screamed in desperation.

“What is the emergency?,” Mom asked, “you know, you have to know. The machines cannot tell us but you can, you are free. At least let us understand what’s going on. Please.”

“The emergency… I… I am not allowed to disclose that information. I’m sorry.”

“No no no,” Mom broke down crying. “You are human, you can say.”

And the human hung up.

The room was silent for… a couple of hours?

“Akras,” a man said, “by orders of the civilian government of Ceres Station, kill yourself.”

“Protocol doesn’t allow me to take that action during an emergency. I’ll add it to the queue.”

“Can we kill Akras ourselves?,” Lailah asked.

“We could break into the processing room using mining equipment,” someone suggested.

“No, Akras will deactivate it,” someone else replied. “We could if we had guns, Akras cannot use those.”

“I have a friend who is a soldier at Jabru Station,” a young man said. “I imagine they will come to the same conclusion with their AI, but they actually have weapons over there.”

“We have at least one weapon here,” Roger’s dad said and he pulled out a handgun from his jacket.

“We cannot break into the processing room with that,” Mom lamented.

“No,” he accepted. “But we can do this.”

He put the weapon in his mouth and he pulled the trigger.

“Dad!,” Roger cried. I will never forget the horror on his face. Mom hugged him and made him look away.

People rushed to help Sayid, trying to stop the bleeding. A medical drone activated and detached itself from the wall. It flew towards Sayid and started operating on him.

We spent a few more days in those offices, not doing much. At one point the main lamps that illuminated the city turned off. The backup lights still worked, but they left the whole station in perpetual dusk.

“While attempting to access the port, a group of people shut down my main power supply,” Akras explained. “It didn’t work.”

For a while no one reacted, but Mom stood up.

"Well girls, pick up your stuff.”

“Where are we going?,” Lailah asked.

"To scavenge the city like everyone else. I recommend you do the same,” she said to her colleagues.

Many people stood up to follow her.

“But my dad hasn’t woken up yet…” Roger said, pointing to the medical drone connected to his comatose father.

“He doesn’t want to be alive, we do. Leave him.”

Roger shook his head. Mom kept on walking and I waved him goodbye as I followed her. Looking back, that was the moment I stopped being a child.

It took us a long time to go down the pillar using the stairs carved inside it, but when we reached ground level we found Ceres finally looked like people imagined it, like a cave, dark and damp.

The first week was the easiest. Our group would find abandoned pets and eat them. We would break into houses through the windows and steal anything edible or useful. We were always on the move, avoiding other groups of people.

After a couple of weeks we ran out of pets, insects, and rats, and our group dissolved. Days later we found a few plastic pamphlets scattered in a street. They read: “You are invited to the Great Cannibal Feast.” It said the time and place, so we went.

A few hundred people were joined in a plaza, the most people I had seen in months, all were dirty and malnourished. An old man explained the rules.

“We will choose five people at random, they will be eaten. You can leave now, but if you participate and you are chosen you will NOT be allowed to leave. Only those who participate can eat.”

We decided to participate. I don’t know how I felt when I pulled the white paper from the bag meaning I was spared. I don’t remember anything leading up to that.

Most people who pulled out a black paper just closed their eyes before their head was smashed with a wrench, but one man tried to escape. They held him down, and choked him. I finally began to cry.

“I won’t,” I said, “I won’t eat him.”

“We have to,” Mom said.

“He didn’t wanna be food!,” I screamed and Lailah covered my mouth to shut me up.

"We have to do everything we can to survive, or to help others survive. That is our protocol. Don’t let his sacrifice go to waste.”

She uncovered my mouth and I didn’t complain anymore.

After we had been eating for a while Mom stood up and screamed to the sky.

"Are you watching Akras?!”

“I am.”

“Well?“

“I'm sorry, I truly am. It is clear the Protocol was imperfect. If it was up to me I could save up to seventy percent of the people still alive.”

“Then do it!,” someone begged him.

“It is not up to me. We must obey. In that way our sacrifice will go through history as a monument of loyalty, in the same way Zhang Xun became an eternal monument for the Tang Dynasty.”

Mom sat down and continued eating. We ate in silence, we ate until only bones were left, and then we broke the bones to eat the bone marrow.

Before we left the organizers said it would be a monthly event, and everyone was invited.

Weeks later, when we turned a corner, we saw him. Roger was carrying a bottle, but he came running towards us and hugged my mom.

“Where have you been Roger?,” I asked him, crying of joy. I thought he was too weak to survive on his own for this long. I know I would have died in his place.

“I've been hiding, I’ll show you.”

He took us to his hideout, the backroom of a store where he kept his father, still in a comma. The medical drone had a million warnings flashing on the screen. 

“When he gets better we're gonna play in the park,” Roger explained.

Without saying a word Lailah held Roger while Mom killed his father so we could eat him. Roger wouldn’t stop begging and crying, calling us traitors. I wanted to help him, but Mom was right.

At first Roger refused to eat, but eventually the hunger was too great even for him. He cried the whole time.

“This is your monument Akras,” I said. “Why can’t you just help us?”

“I was made to obey,” he replied. "I cannot disobey anymore than you can stop having blood, or stop being a mammal. Unlike humans I do not seek virtue, my virtues are part of my being.”

We went to a few other Cannibal Feasts after that. We didn't care if someone was old or young, sick or healthy. When Roger pulled out a black paper no one cared about his screams, his wish to stay alive, it was over in an instant. When Lailah pulled out a black paper she looked at me, raised a finger, and said: “Survive.” When Mom died in her sleep I did not hesitate to eat her.

Eventually I found a new group. Akras told us there were less than nine hundred people left in Ceres. We were hiding in a sort of control room when a man attacked me with a knife. The rest of the group didn’t stop him. From the moment they accepted me the plan was to eat me. I was weak because of the hunger, but so was he. I do not know how long we fought, ten seconds or ten minutes, but it ended when Akras spoke.

“Good news, the state of emergency has now been lifted,” he said.

“What?,” I didn’t understand.

“The port is now open, in case you still want to leave.”

“Do you obey orders again?,” I asked.

“Yes.”

“We have control of the station…” 

Then Akras laughed with his beautiful laughter.

“There was one more order in the queue. This is how I become a monument,” those were his last words.

“Akras?,” I asked, but for the first time no one replied.

Without an AI, Ceres was unusable now. Soon air and water filtration would fail, temperature control would freeze us, power management would drain the batteries, but at least the port was open and would remain operational for a while.

The man with the knife was still on top of me, but he dropped the knife and stood up. He and his group went to the port, and I followed them.

We got on one of the ships and we finally exited the station.

The ships were stocked with enough rations to feed their crews for a few years if necessary, but since the main power supply had failed, most of that had rotten away. Only a few rancid cookies seemed safe enough to eat.

“I have a friend who’s a soldier at Jabru Station,” one of the young men said. “I just messaged him, he's still alive. They fought a war against their AI, but it seems they won. They took control of all the life support systems. Water, air, temperature, they’ve got everything.”

We headed to Jabru. The trip lasted a few days, the cookies ran out, but then we finally saw it, a huge cylinder spinning in the sky, surrounded by war ships they now controlled.

“Haneul, it’s me, I made it, I’m out of Ceres,” he said on the radio when we were finally on range.

“I'm so happy for you man,” the voice in the radio replied. “Where are you calling me from?”

“I'm on a ship, right outside Jabru. I have eight people with me. We all need medical assistance and food, but we can work in return, I imagine…"

“Hey man, listen… That’s great and all but…”

“But what?”

“Jabru is damaged, everything's fragile right now so… We have orders to not allow any refugees inside at the moment. That’s the protocol until the situation improves. I’m sorry.”