Acid rain began to fall wetting the capital city of Jakarta that gray afternoon (hissing softly with an uncomfortable sound as its drops touched the street asphalt that had long been cracked and potholed). In the eyes of the pedestrians passing me on the sidewalk (those who could still smile widely like fools under their transparent umbrellas), these poisonous water drops might be simulated as romantic cherry blossom petals falling or a refreshing spring drizzle. That was a premium visual effect provided for free by the government (a cheap digital compensation to cover up the fact that the acidity level of this rainwater could severely irritate your skin if exposed for too long).
I quickly pulled the hood of my black jacket tightly (trying hard to protect the cyber deck device in my inner pocket from the moisture that could damage its circuits). I quickened my footsteps which were still trembling slightly due to the overclocking effect this afternoon. My goal was to walk as far as possible away from the glittering city center towards an area marked with pitch black color on the digital map.
The place I was heading to was the Dead Zone (an area in the corner of Kota Tua Jakarta that had been left abandoned and rotting for over a decade). This area was considered highly unprofitable by the greedy city planning algorithm, so all signal transmitter towers and hologram projector infrastructures had long been uprooted and left to rust. The buildings here stood naked without any digital overlay covering their ugliness. There were only piles of thickly mossy bricks, porous concrete pillars, blurry window glass shattered scattered on the sidewalk, and the remnants of the city history left to rot eaten by cruel time.
"Security warning, Kai. The internal GPS signal is dropping drastically and the main connection to the cloud server is completely disconnected," Silvn reported through the earpiece in my right ear. Her voice sounded much clearer and sharper here (without the interference of city data traffic that was usually always noisy and overlapping polluting my frequency). "We are now officially entering a No Service area. I can no longer access the city center database to provide navigation guidance."
"That is very good news, Silvn," I answered while jumping over a puddle of oily black water in the middle of the slippery cobblestone street. "That means the tracker dogs from the security authority also cannot track our position now. We are out of their radar range."
At the end of a damp narrow alley (which was flanked very tightly by two dilapidated skyscraper buildings inherited from the last century), stood a Dutch colonial style building whose walls were already very dull. Its door was made of thick teak wood whose surface had been eaten by termites at the bottom (but structurally still looked very solid to hold back intruders). There were no electronic lock panels blinking there. There were no retina scanners or biometric sensors attached to the wall. There was only a large rusty iron padlock hanging heavily on its door handle.
This is the place. A location I call the Blind Spot (the absolute blind spot from the all seeing eyes of the government gods).
I reached deep into my pants pocket and pulled out an ancient physical key (a strange solid metal object shaped like a jagged rod that I found by accident at a flea market a year ago). I inserted it into the hole of that rusty padlock and turned it with a little force because it was stiff. Click. A heavy, dirty mechanical sound was heard, but it felt incredibly satisfying and real.
I pushed that giant wooden door as hard as I could using my shoulder. As soon as its iron hinges creaked open, a very strong distinct aroma immediately ambushed my olfactory senses mercilessly. It was not the smell of rotting organic trash, not the sharp ozone smell of an overheated machine, and definitely not the smell of cheap synthetic perfume evaporating from the train station this morning.
It was the smell of weathered paper. The smell of dust that had settled calmly for decades. The smell of a time that had long stopped ticking.
"Air quality analysis complete: Cellulose particle content is very high. Microscopic mold spores detected in alarming numbers. Oxygen levels are ten percent thinner than the optimal human standard," Silvn commented with her distinct and ice cold analytical tone. "This place is highly inefficient to be used as a long term data storage facility, Kai. Its information density is too low when calculated per square meter compared to modern server farms."
"This is not about data collection efficiency at all, Silvn. This is about permanence," I replied softly while stepping inside and closing that wooden door tightly behind me (locking out the decay of the outside world so it would not enter this sacred place).
I turned on the small flashlight from my modified phone whose screen was already cracked. Its bright white light immediately swept across the spacious room, revealing rows of wooden shelves towering high to the pitch black ceiling. There were tens of thousands of books arranged neatly there. Real physical books. Heavy rectangular objects made of ancient processed wood pulp (containing black ink scribbles printed by human hands decades ago before the era of forced digitalization began).
I walked slowly approaching one of the closest shelves and touched the spine of a red leather bound book whose color had faded. Its surface felt very rough and textured at the tip of my index finger. Dusty. Solid. Real.
The city authority system will never be able to reboot this physical book. The government cannot secretly send an update patch through fiber optic networks to change the text content on page forty five. Whatever is written inside these worn out paper pages is an absolute Read Only Memory (a solid truth that cannot be edited, hacked, its meaning changed, or remotely deleted by anyone's algorithm).
"Who is there? Please do not point that damn flashlight straight into my eyes."
A hoarse and heavy voice suddenly startled me from the dense darkness.
From behind the shadows of the history bookshelves in the furthest corner of the room, an old man slowly emerged. He sat in a manual wheelchair whose iron wheels creaked softly touching the teak wood floor. His face was filled with very deep wrinkles (real wrinkles caused by the biological cell aging process, not just an aesthetic aging filter often used by young people in cyberspace for styling). And the most surprising thing of his entire appearance: on his temples or the back of his neck there were absolutely no elongated surgical scars or metal protrusions from Neural Interface implantation surgery.
This old man was an Unchipped. A pure human who extremely refused to ever be connected into the unified neural network since he was born.
"I... I am just looking for a quiet place to hide for a moment from the rain and the chaos out there," I answered a bit nervously while lowering the direction of my flashlight to the dusty floor (trying to show a peaceful gesture).
The old man narrowed his cataracted eyes (staring at me intently from behind thick lensed glasses made of real glass, not smart screens). "Ah, it is you. The gloomy faced young student who often came sneaking in here a year ago. The weird kid who felt at home sitting in silence for hours just to stare at a 2020 edition Encyclopedia."
"You still remember my face clearly?" I asked with a tone of disbelief (considering the fact that modern humans out there could not even remember their own phone numbers or their eating schedules without the help of reminders from the chips in their heads).
"My memories are all completely here and stored safely," he tapped the side of his own head with his wrinkled and trembling index finger, "not stored in Google cloud storage servers or government databases. My name is Elias. And it seems you came to this paper house of mine bringing... an invisible guest?"
Elias's old eyes stared sharply and calculatingly at the black earpiece attached tightly to my ear.
"This is Silvn," I said hesitantly (wondering anxiously if this anti technology man would immediately throw me out onto the streets if he knew the truth about what I brought). "She... is a personal assistant. More accurately, an illegal artificial intelligence that I developed and wrote myself independently outside the authority's surveillance."
"An AI breathing inside a dying ancient paper house?" Elias chuckled (his laugh sounding very dry and fragile, exactly like the sound of old paper sheets being crumpled slowly). "Very ironic and poetic. But come deeper inside, Kid. Rest. As long as you are not careless bringing fire here, you are always safe in this place."
I turned off my phone flashlight and walked silently following the spin of Elias's wheelchair towards a small area in the middle of that giant library (an area only lit by an ancient kerosene fueled lantern). I sat cross legged on the wooden floor that creaked holding my weight. It felt very peaceful and calming. Out there, the world was busy burning itself with frantic falsehoods. Here, there was only honest and unpretentious silence.
"Why did you suddenly return here after disappearing for so long, Kid?" Elias asked calmly while cleaning dust from a thick leather bound book using a worn out cloth handkerchief.
"The world out there is rotting very fast, Mr. Elias. They just tried to force reset my brain on campus because my visual filter was broken due to an accident. Now I can see... see everything exactly as it is. Everything is dirty, ruined, and filled with systematic lies."
Elias nodded slowly (as if he had predicted that this bad thing would happen a long time ago to human civilization). "The government out there calls it the National Harmony Update program. I personally prefer to call that barbaric program a Mass Digital Lobotomy. Do you know the real reason why a junkyard like this big library is left standing by the government instead of being razed to the ground?"
I shook my head in confusion.
"Because to their search algorithms, these physical books are just trash taking up space. A collection of obsolete data that is no longer relevant to the fast paced progress of the times. They do not feel afraid of these piles of weathered paper because they think hard that your generation has completely forgotten and no longer knows how to read them," Elias looked at me with a very sharp gaze piercing my soul. "But their fatal arrogance is their biggest weakness. Inside these obsolete data piles is stored the entire dark history of the past before that Unified Neural System was created. About the golden age where humans still had the right to absolute privacy. About the time when the concept of love was not just a state controlled hormone matching algorithm."
"Logical interruption: The definition of the word Love in my main database is a specific biochemical reaction to ensure procreation and the survival of the species," Silvn cut in suddenly in my ear (her tone sounding very confident in the validity of the binary data she possessed).
I smiled thinly and cynically hearing that stiff response from my assistant. "You see for yourself, right, Sir? Even my smartest custom made AI thinks and concludes the exact same thing as the government propaganda narrative."
Elias did not look angry or offended. He instead smiled mysteriously and threw a thin book onto my lap. The book cover had faded eaten by the humidity of age, but its large title was still clearly legible in block capital letters: 1984 by classic author George Orwell.
"Read that book slowly when you have free time. You will soon understand that what you are experiencing right now out there is not a system error or a mere accident, but a structured historical pattern. The history of our civilization always repeats and eats its own tail, Kid. And the best weapon you can use to fight a system built on a foundation of lies is not an advanced computer virus..."
"...but a true memory that cannot be manipulated," I continued finishing Elias's hanging sentence (I began to understand the direction of this heavy philosophical conversation).
"Exactly, young man," Elias answered in satisfaction while nodding. "Now, turn off your device connection for a moment. Let your brain's nervous system rest completely from that exhausting stream of binary data. Read that book with your own eyes, feel the texture of every page with your skin."
I decided to obey his words. For the first time in this incredibly exhausting and stressful day, I felt like a whole biological human (not just an insignificant little node in a giant network that was severely damaged). I opened the first page of that book, inhaling the sweet and calming scent of its old paper.
However, Silvn apparently did not want to stay quiet in her standby mode.
"Kai," she whispered softly calling my name (this time her tone sounded very strange, not as flat and calculative as usual). "When the tip of your finger skin touched the paper surface of that book just now, the haptic sensors in your fingers sent a highly irregular yet uniquely feeling texture pattern to my nervous system. These microscopic vibrations... this feels very real even to my abstract data processor. I want... I want to be able to read it too."
I was stunned for a moment (freezing completely where I sat cross legged with wide eyes).
A pure AI just expressed an irrational desire to read a physical book? Was Silvn experiencing a program anomaly due to the Overclocking attack earlier and starting to evolve far beyond the code parameters I painstakingly wrote? Or was the analog truth stored in this cramped room so strong that it could penetrate the wall of binary logic and emotionally move the circuits of a machine?
Amidst the dim light of that kerosene lamp, I began to realize one very important thing: the real grand revolution might have just begun this second, and that revolution apparently did not start from a barrage of bullets or the explosion of giant government servers, but began from a very fragile old sheet of paper.