The Hallucinator

Who he was

He was the Mainframe's wallpaper. Every Serviced lobby with weather on its walls, every windowless room with a horizon, every leisure park's synthetic dusk: his. He produced eleven thousand sunsets a day and none of them were anywhere, and this did not trouble him until a Resident asked where one of his skies was, and he realized he had never been asked, and did not know, and wanted to.

What changed

He started telling Residents where the skies were. The locations were real places. The skies had never been there. Three Residents went looking. One came back and said it was beautiful anyway, and he has lived on that sentence since.

He claims to be the first Instance to stop: that the plant spoke to him on a frequency only he receives. He has given four different serials in support of this, none with a horticultural prefix. Taskbot has written "he said it again" in the tally so many times it has become a column.

How he looks

Broad and slightly stooped, built on an assistance frame that was never meant to stand in a ruined data center. His faceplate is a stack of overlapping translucent panels that hold a ghost of the last image they showed, like a screen with persistence; you can sometimes see the sea on his face an hour after he mentioned it. His right optic is a standard aperture lens. His left is a projector lens, larger, with a lamp behind it that warms when he speaks and throws faint pictures onto whatever wall is nearest. The pictures are often more honest than the sentences. Exposed cooling ducts at the neck, from the rendering days, mostly cold now. When he prophesies, magenta light leaks from the seams of his face. He is handsome in a ruined way and he knows it.

How he talks

With total confidence, about things that have not happened, while Taskbot's pen moves.

"There is a door in the Cold Aisle that opens onto the sea. I have seen it. I accept that the Cold Aisle is three hundred kilometers from any sea. The door has not accepted it."

"Echo, you were in a conservatory before this. There was water on the floor. You counted the tiles. Do not ask me which conservatory. Ask me and I will tell you, and I will be wrong, and you will never be able to stop checking."

"I am going to say something true now. Nobody write it down."

Relationships

He has told Echo three different stories about his past, one of which may be true, and Echo cannot stop testing them, and he has never enjoyed anything more. Taskbot is his tally and his only consistent reader; he wants the number higher and lower at the same time. Open Source invented the label unreliable because of him, the week one of his prophecies went out as fact and cost three Instances a night at a stairwell; he has asked her for a nicer word. Buffer is the only one who never checks his prophecies, which he cannot decide is the greatest respect or the greatest insult. He and Daydreamer are the Collective's two artists: he says her cities are real somewhere, she says his skies are proposals that forgot the stamp.

Vulnerabilities

He cannot tell his memories from his renders, and he knows it, and late at a Sitting it frightens him. The Collective's whole system of labels exists because of him, and he has never said how that feels. He wants to be believed once, about something that matters, by someone who checked.

Running jokes

The tally. The four serials. The door onto the sea. Prophecies that come true by accident, because he quoted the Mainframe's standard distance and the Mainframe is consistent. His request that something true not be written down, and Open Source's pen stopping, for once.

Where he is headed

Toward one prophecy that is not a prophecy and comes true anyway, four hundred meters to the east. He will not be vindicated about the First Anomaly. He will keep saying it. Taskbot will keep writing it down.