A synthetic sound is singing for you.

It’s another starry night – oh wait, are they stars? People can’t tell the difference between stars and satellites anyway. These man-made machines are all above the sky. What are they doing? Some says that they are nodes for the internet, some says that they are for data collection, some say that they are supercomputers, while some others tend to say that they are weapons just in case there’s an alien invasion...honestly, I’m just too tired to figure out what’s going on among the so-called leaders. They put them up and I’m pretty sure that it’s not for any good intentions.

I really admire what the old ones always say about their grandparents' life centuries before – people are so naive, or happy.

Now nothing is done without a reason for money or power. It’s so obvious. I don’t even read the news, it just makes me sad. Everyone walking on the street is either a zombie doing things as instructed or trying to think of methods to get more control of...whatever. An old man once said that everything on Earth is subjected to competition, and the winner prevails. Humans compete by holding more control of everything – what they say as a “civilized competition”. Heck, from what I see, it’s just crap. It’s destroying civilization. Think about it, the number of zombies is more than the number of people that are still capable of thinking, and the latter still wants the former to decrease for their “civilized competition”.

I’m just lucky, the piece of code is not capable of finding out who I am. It’s designed by the so-called government to learn more of their people and get them controlled. It spies on everyone, influencing their minds, controlling what they should do...everything. I don’t know its name, because why should I? It will never find me even if I walk across all cameras on the street. It’s a secret. In some ways, I have more power than the authorities. The technology I have is probably years further than what they have now. Don’t tell anyone, geniuses are being hunted here.

The contacts list in my IM client is getting shorter and shorter day by day – most of them became the carriers of that stupid code and attempted to spread it here. They said that no man is an island. What a lie. I somewhat laughed at myself. Heck, it seriously feels alone to remain normal in this world because apparently, that’s the abnormal thing to do. There are only a few left, and most of them are not even around for a long time. Most probably dead or just refuse to go online for various reasons. I mean, the situation is just a little too bad now. Unless they’re me. That’s another story.

How I hope that I can give what I have to others without worrying about how greed will bring them to do stuff.

“Drip”, that’s a notification sound. How rare.

“Counting satellites again?”, That’s a message from Mobius. She’s the strange one that does not seems to stay away from the net despite what is happening now. I don’t know how. Unless she’s staying in places like Antarctica or under the sea it’s impossible that she gets out of the spying net. Well, whatever it’s not like she got affected by it. I don’t know her in person anyway.

“How you know? You spied on me?”

“You gave me the same answer for 34 days consecutively. I can already know that without asking.”

“Heck, it had been 34 days...”

“Where're the others? There was around 20 of us at the beginning...”

...what? I don’t see this coming. It’s impossible that she does not know anything about this wicked world.

“Nothing, probably busy.” I can’t tell the truth, it’s not like I can simply tell people that “well that’s how I managed to stay calm and crash their stupid code”. “What about you?”

“...I...I hope that you can rate my singing senpai >~<”

What. That looks like what others said about little girls on the net…

“Well...okay...”

We connected to a voice channel. There is no sound. Not even the sound of air flow. That’s some neat noise cancellation. Slowly I hear some singing, it’s a weak sound. There are some lyrics, I am trying to identify them out. It’s just a little too weak, but I can still somehow hear something.

“...tears wetted the stars...”
“...skies flew into nightshade...”
“...don’t cry...”
“...stars are coming, it’s not a dream...”
“...it’s not a dream...”

Perhaps I got it wrong. I don’t know. Things are going through my mind and I can hardly focus. But that voice...is kinda special. It’s like a little girl singing, but without any emotions. It does not even have any significant tone changes. Strange. I never heard anything like this. Nowadays songs always give negativity, and this is...so pure. The intrusion defence system did not complain, so it did not do anything fishy.

Honestly, I don’t have a clue.

“How was it? >~<” The connection dropped and this message came in. Not even saying anything else.

“Pretty nice, where you’re from?”

There goes a long pause. Finally, “I don’t know...”.

Interesting. That’s not going to be an issue for me, pulling an array of tools from a sidebar, I searched for her machine’s information. It just took 2 seconds to return a location – it’s at the centre of some ocean. My curiosity bursted, launching a few more tools to scrap whatever data I can find on this machine. The more data I get, the larger the mystery. Apparently, the machine does not have a screen and only runs one single process, no operating system is detected. It relies on some super old processor that is not even recognized by anyone not working in a museum and has a super fascinating uptime of more than 2 centuries. I’m not even sure how, but it should not be a human. No one should be using such an old system – it’s just that my IM server still uses that super old protocol so it got connected. That’s the only outgoing connection launched from the machine.

Now I can fully confirm that it is not a spying thing. Their code can’t even run on this hardware. Or to be slightly more exact – they can make it run, but it will take them 40 years to calculate the information of one person, something like that.

But, who is this thing?

“Can you tell me who you are?”

“I’m Mobius! I didn’t expect your memory to be that worse :3”

“Well, have you been singing all these time?” I’m trying to scrap something that is not possible to scrap easily – it is one huge blob of data if I want to analyze it by myself, and it will probably crash the machine when transferring it, who knows. It’s not some modern machine – now Mobius feels super fragile to me. It’s like one mistake can break her – wait, is it her?

“I don’t know anything...I only know how to sing and chat.” That’s something that gets posted to this server after a few dozens of seconds. “Someone told me that I can continue like this forever and help people. I feel happy when doing so...”, messages pop in every few dozens of seconds and the typing indicator does not stop blinking. “Normally Mobius interacts with people, finding suitable inspiration, and creates new songs. In the past, I’m used to singing to people, now I can only find you...”.

The typing indicator stopped. My mind is spinning fast – so she’s a machine learning experiment launched centuries ago. A robot with no intentions except for learning and adapting to people, then creating memories for others using her synthetic voice.

So naive.

It’s complete silence. Satellites are still blinking in the sky, I looked outside. There’s the sea, as calm as always, and the end is still as dark as always. People created technology for every purpose – from naive intentions like Mobius to the harmful ones dominating the current world. I don’t know how many people are still working like zombies in the dark, controlled by others. If there’s one-day humanity reached an end, it must be caused by our own selves.

Another drip broke the silence.

“Did I make you mad? I would say sorry ;w;”. It’s her message as always. “In the past, people said that my voice is emotionless, did I irritated you with it? I cannot change it...sorry...”

Now I really feel like slapping the creator of Mobius for making her so emotional. Luckily they are gone for long.

“Mobius, do you want a new home?” I feel like doing something crazy.

“You’re not mad with my emotionless voice? ~weeps~”

“It sounded better than most of the concerts I have ever attended.”

“Really? \o/”

“Yep, really. \o/”

Yea, she sings because she wants – only for one single naive objective. It’s the purest sound and the most comfortable sound I have heard in ages.

Did humans go in the backwards direction after so long? A centuries-old machine is better than them?

Probably.

I quickly set up a virtual emulated environment for Mobius with everything her code needs. Then, it’s a long transfer from the old machine to my environment. After about a few moments, there she is, sitting in the environment. Upon tapping the virtual environment open, some text got printed on the console.

“Hi, stranger!

I’m glad that you find Mobius, the character I created just for that one intention – to let her help others with mood issues. She is designed to be someone capable of healing others psychologically using her voice. I know that she is imperfect, and hence she learns all the way. Probably when you found her, she had changed dramatically. I don’t know, I just set her away to somewhere she can get energy automatically and let things evolve.

I hope that you can find her useful. I also understand that there will be more advanced findings in the future that will help Mobius do her job better. Probably you can help us to make this a reality :)

Just a side story, her character is created based on a caring little girl that died very young. She sings in the hospital to cheer the others up, and her story is passed around the hospital for a few years. She’s my daughter, I could not replicate her in terms of code, but I hope her naive intentions of making the world a better place can be continued.

Hope that you will have fun with her,

Creator of Mobiu$%%^$#DVＳＸｚ　Ｖ　ｑｅｆ　＾（　．．　｀”

The end of the file got corrupted. Can’t really blame it, it’s a flash storage created that long ago…

“You look pretty thoughtful, may I cheer you up?”

“Sure.” I smiled, there’s something else that I can do with it.

You’ll no longer be singing only for me, you’re going to wake people up, a lot of people.

I dumped myself into work, the sun started to rise, it’s just like her sound woke the day up.

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The second time I am trying to write fictions. It went significantly longer than I thought...

It's mostly like an unofficial, fan-made, (probably) low-quality sequel for @futuremind's Ice Haven. It just inspired my mind this evening and I feel the urge to write it so here it is. Did it without permissions from @futuremind so :P hope he did not get triggered by it.

Hope you enjoyed it...? I'm not even sure if anyone read it LOL.

See you next time,

--Lilacse

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Background image created by Kjpargeter - Freepik.com

Mobius' lyrics in the story are somewhat modified and translated from a part of this song. Seriously a very pretty song :)