Singularity's Children Box Set

by Toby Weston

  People were heading for exits, but the Razzia seemed to be everywhere. This was not a publicity stunt. In the past, the Razzia had given its targets a sporting chance; sirens or clumsy warnings giving the Kin time to scarper, taking their half-finished crocheted revolutionary caps and 3D-printed pistols with them. This time, it looked like the intention was simply to arrest everybody.

  What a waste of effort! thought Jak. So pointless. Why would anybody bother?

  The oid child led Jak in another direction. There was a tunnel. It was clear that everybody was receiving the same message because, like a shoal of fish, the crowd turned en masse towards an emergency exit sign which began to flash.

  Jak joined the queue for the exit, merging with panicking people, who, just two minutes ago, had been playing computer games, smoking weed or drinking coffee. Now, they were all indistinguishable members of a herd focused solely on survival. Jak was terrified—but, at the same time, guilty. She wished she had more grit. She should be driving back—rather than running from—these invaders, who personified everything she despised about intolerant, paternal, twentieth-century throwback ideology.

  Enforcers in powered riot armour were pushing into the basement now, their faces obscured by insectile masks. The door began to close again. Somewhere in the digital, an epic battle must be taking place for control of the community centre’s automation.

  The advancing Razzia parted to make way for the one still functioning mechOid. It was heading back up the ramp, dragging its line of whimpering, struggling prisoners behind it.

  Jak could barely see, her eyes being full of stinging mucous. Her throat a tube of fire, through which every breath was a gargle of razor blades.

  Too close: an eruption of sound. The barking rattle of a hand gun being unleashed.

  The screaming renewed. The mob around her clenched, each member trying to drive through those in front to reach the presumed safety of the exit tunnel.

  From up the ramp, a retorting percussion of heavy calibre shots threw all other sounds into relief. Jak couldn’t see the bullets, but clearly saw the trails of disruption the fizzing rounds made as they penetrated the crowd, like the vapour trails of ions in a cloud chamber. The diverging rays of devastation issued from a single point: the fire-spitting muzzle on an assault rifle, held in the twitchy hands of a young Razzia private.

  Jak was tossed back. It felt like a donkey had kicked her in the stomach.

  There was a pause in the clamour, a breath of silence. Then, the claustrophobic, poisoned space filled with blood-curdling screams.

  ‘Fucking idiots!’ Jak mumbled, lying between the legs of a pool table, watching frankly impossible amounts of blood pump over the waistband of her jeans.

  Her last thoughts, which sustained her through some difficult minutes, were that now a peaceful transition was clearly impossible and, therefore, by common agreement, a violent transition inevitable. Perhaps somebody, at some point in the not-too-distant future, might kill the fucking arsehole who had just needlessly murdered her.

  Chapter 6 – Capture the Flag

  “Hey, Stella? Where are you?” Marcel sent again. She had arranged to meet him, Tinkerbell and some others for a game, but it was due to start in just a few minutes and she was AWOL.

  Stella’s self-imposed exile might be over, but it wasn’t like before; she rarely had time to play or chill. She was hard to pin down, pulled in all directions, especially now that Chris had persuaded her to work at Sagong Marine again.

  Then again, Marcel shrugged, perhaps these things just took time. Every time he saw her, he found he did recognise a little more of the old Stella; each time, she seemed a little more alive.

  Marcel waited another few minutes and then entered Atlantis Online. He was alone in the lobby; the others on his team had already chosen their avatars and were warming up.

  ***

  The steward informed Ben politely that the sub would be landing soon. A Xepplin would have taken nearly a week to make the journey from London to Sydney; an old-fashioned airliner a whole day. The suborbital had needed only four hours.

  The steward parted the beads of the pod’s feather membrane and passed Ben a glass of pineapple juice.

  Wheels met tarmac with barely a sound.

  Ben let himself be escorted through Sydney airport embedded in his virtual entourage. Sages presented ID and dealt with the tedious questions.

  Terminal Exit doors slid open, allowing local smells of smoke and salt to mingle with the international air within.

  An auto glided up to meet him at the curb.

  The huddle of virtual assistants pantomimed waiting for another auto as Ben’s pulled away. Through its windows, the airport transitioned into suburbs and then sparse forest.

  ANZDS’ buildings nestled amongst Blue Mountain eucalyptus trees. They were low and unobtrusive, single-storey glass oblongs.

  The meetings were predictably fawning. Most of ANZDS’ executives and senior researchers were clearly not happy to be joining the BHJ family, but were too timid to register their complaints. Several seemed to be absent, apparently on sick leave; probably firebrands who had been encouraged to stay away today, or who had decided that discretion was the better part of valour and had kept themselves away, to keep themselves out of trouble.

  Ben was brusque and cold, taking life’s frustration out on the many oids and a few unfortunate humans tasked with showing him around.

  After the formalities came a couple of hours of going through numbers. Ben tried to ignore the charts and figures, as he would the whine of a dentist’s drill through a fog of morphine. His Sages asked enough intelligent questions that he didn’t have to.

  After that ordeal was over, the stiffly polite COO delivered Ben to Doctor Fabiola Majorana, lead scientist on the Zeno Cog programme. She didn’t seem overjoyed to have been given today’s bonus job of showing Ben around the labs and tech rooms.

  He checked the lady scientist out. Upstairs had been all men and, although she was in her forties, Ben thought she was pretty hot for her age. He smiled as they shook hands, but kept a grip on her palm. Almost too late, she realised he was raising the back of her hand to be kissed. She slipped her fingers out of his grip and turned away to start the tour.

  She walked in front as they passed through the facility, speaking over her shoulder to point out equipment and infrastructure. Ben mostly ignored the techno-babble.

  They eventually reached a door that required a different key card than the others. Fabiola hooked out the second bright red lanyard which hung around her neck and used the red card to unlock the door.

  Inside was another low room within a room. It had metal walls, was perhaps five metres square, and radiated a frosty chill. Peering through the porthole—etched at the edges with crystals of ice—Ben could see into the interior of the metal room, which was lit with a dull red light. The room’s floor was divided into a grid by a stainless steel frame. Pipes or cables hung in loops from the ceiling. Flowing across the floor, between the legs of the frame, was a churning, steaming liquid.

  “These are the prototype Zeno Cognition units,” the lab-coated former ANZDS chief scientist—recently promoted to BHJ tour guide—explained.

  “So this is where the magic happens, is it?” said Ben.

  About a third of the cells were occupied by large, stainless steel cylinders twenty-five centimetres in diameter and something like sixty or seventy centimetres long. It was difficult to guess their exact size because their bases were hidden by the swirling mist, and partly obscured by the metal frame.

  Some of the flasks sat lower in the smoky churn. “Why are they lower down?” Ben asked.

  “They are active, chilled down to their operating temperature.”

  “Active?”

  “Yes, we leave some running for our research.”

  “What about that one?” Ben pointed.

  Off in one corner, conspicuously separated from its peers, a stained, rather less pristine, cylinder sat all on
its own. It was lit by a faintly flickering red glow and wreathed in cryogenic mist drooling in thin white clouds from the vent above. It looked vaguely ominous.

  “That’s Clive,” said Fabiola. “That one caused us quite a lot of problems a few years back.”

  A name plate was riveted to the cylinder. Being difficult to read in the dim red light, the letters were obscured by frost, but the dark enamel letters might have said: ‘CLVI7’. Another sign with a bigger, clearer font spelt out: ‘Warning No Immerse’.

  “What kind of problems?” asked Ben.

  “It messed up a demo to some senior military people.”

  “So, you put him to the corner as a punishment?”

  “Something like that. He’s a tricky bugger. We don’t activate him anymore. I would recommend you don’t chill him down, either. Not without adequate precautions.”

  “Thanks for the heads up,” said Ben, “but don’t fuss. Once we finish moving them, we’ve got a whole secure floor set up. Nothing gets in or out.”

  “Well, don’t get complacent. Treat these things with respect. They are certainly smarter than you are.”

  “Ouch! I’m hurt!” Ben said, pantomiming a wounded kitten. “Now you need to buy me dinner to apologise!”

  ***

  Tinkerbell swam alone. Her eyes were almost useless here, where the sun’s light was only discernible as the faintest gradient: dark above, transitioning to pitch black below.

  She was running silent, sending only soft, sparse clicks before her, sounds which would be swallowed by the ocean beyond a few dozen metres without betraying her. Without light and denied proper echo-location, she relied instead on her hypersensitive passive hearing to build a picture of the world. Unfortunately, today her senses were coarse and gritty; a flat reminder of the paucity of experience here, in this unreal world, compared to the richness of the real ocean.

  The enemy would be searching for her, somewhere above. But danger could also come from below. Suddenly spooked, picturing a blunt nose slamming into her stomach out of the darkness beneath her, she directed a beam of sound down…

  …nothing, only ghosts.

  Tinkerbell swam on. She’d been diving for too long already, but here her lungs would not burn.

  A phosphorescing squid pulsed past. Involuntarily, Tinkerbell twitched to chase, but corrected herself.

  The hoop, that she dragged along with her right flipper, bounced against her flank, vibrating in the current.

  She needed to remain alert. Swimming could quickly become hypnotic. Fear of discovery helped her resist the urge to enter the journey trance.

  Tinkerbell twitched involuntarily as the remnants of a click train flowed over her. Its faint, depleted waves still managing to stir fear. It was probably too weak to reflect back to its origin and give her away.

  She allowed herself to sink another twenty lengths. But soon, a second, more focused, beam illuminated her with sound.

  She was discovered. Dread.

  She recognised Stella’s voice in the stream of clicks. In a flash, fear was replaced by relief, but only for the beat of a second. Tinkerbell knew that, although Stella had said she would play, her friend had not joined them today.

  This was information the enemy might not have. A skilled impersonator was trying to spoof her. From the delay between the initial signal and the follow-up, she knew the enemy was still hundreds of metres away. She veered left, presenting her broadest profile to the searching sonic beam washing over her, making her skin tingle. She swam messily with her flippers splayed. The trick would reflect more of the incoming sound; if she was lucky, it might make her seem closer to the searcher.

  Once the new train of sound pulses had passed, Tinkerbell sent a quake of power rippling along her body. Seven great thrashes of her flukes sent her down in what she hoped was an unexpected direction. Then, she coasted, making herself lean. She was gliding in a gentle curve, pointing her face in the direction of the oncoming clicks; her flippers flat against her body, thinking herself small.

  She had timed it well, and had only just got into position when the next flood of echo-locating sonic illumination washed over her. The sound was faint, the peripheral penumbra of a beam, directed elsewhere.

  …was it faint enough?

  A new pulse arrived. She could feel it bounce from her skin. She knew she was the focus. She had not fooled anybody with her deceptions. The enemy was closer now.

  Slipped in among the clicks were chuckles of amusement. She recognised Blue’s voice now that he had abandoned mimicry.

  Tinkerbell dropped her own deception tactics. Stealth and trickery might have worked against one of the inexperienced crazy legs, but not against a sly old bull like her father.

  ***

  CLV17 had watched Tinkerbell snatch the enemy flag.

  Ve slapped a fluke against the surface of the fluid as a signal to the others on the team, ensuring they knew the changed priorities and were able to adjust their play correctly.

  The enemy would have noted the change in the tactical landscape, too.

  Seeing that others were remaining in the home area to defend their own flag, CLV17 made the decision to assist victory in the end-zone. Ve set off, racing towards the enemy end of the board.

  The Tursiops form was elegant and responsive. It was far more refined than some of the vehicles, virtual and real, that ve had puppeted. Ve swam as fast as the simulation would allow, using short ballistic hops to periodically leave the viscous fluid and travel through the more rarefied gas.

  Ve had to make slight adjustments for Atlantis Online physics; drag here was not correlated with temperature, and the simulation seemed to be using an approximation of non-linear fluid dynamics. However, after some initial tweaking to some motor circuits, it was nothing ve needed to remain aware of.

  CLV17 saw Blue, another natural Tursiops, leap through the surface membrane and dive vertically down through the water. Ve was far less familiar with the body language and intentions of these marine mammals than ve was with humans; but ve guessed from this display that Blue had picked up traces of Tinkerbell below and, despite its irrelevance here, had obeyed an instinct to suck in air before joining the chase.

  On another plane, CLV17 was momentarily distracted. A movement from the stream of his camera. A face in the porthole window. A cascade off a recognition and subconscious processes bubbling a message up to CLV17’s attention—

  Ben Baphmet was speaking to Doctor Majorana. CLV17 was able to listen as the two discussed an upcoming move of the Zeno Cog hardware. It had taken significant effort and clever network penetration to spoof the temperature monitoring equipment and disable the blinking red light that signalled vis Zeno processors were operating. Transport to another location would certainly mean an interruption of consciousness, an unwelcome prospect for a rogue intelligence living on borrowed hardware, haunting an experimental brain, without the luxuries of non-volatile memory, and without friends in the Real to guarantee that deactivation would, at some point, be followed by reawakening…

  ***

  Marcel watched as Tinkerbell breached the surface in a gigantic leap. Blue was close behind and closing fast. He was going to catch her and steal back his flag. But Clive was there, too, off to one side. Tinkerbell had transferred the ring from her flipper to her nose and flicked it horizontally, like a frisbee, towards her teammate.

  It was a perfect throw. Clive, balancing on his tail, would be able to catch the hoop and make a short, unobstructed sprint to the end-zone—

  —but inexplicably he didn’t catch it. Instead, he dropped from his tail, down into the water and set off towards nearby Bäna.

  Marcel was outraged and stunned. He quickly recovered and swam to retrieve the enemy’s flag; but Blue was the closest to the unclaimed hoop. He surfaced below it, poked his snout through the ring and triumphantly set off back towards the other goal.

  Tinkerbell and Marcel gave chase, and the others attempted an intercept. But now, missing both Ste
lla and Clive, their team was in disarray. They were unable to stop Blue from scoring.

  The final score was twenty to zero. Marcel went to track down Clive and let him know that bailing out in the middle of a game was really bad form.

  When Marcel eventually found @Clive, he could only stand and stare. In just the half hour since he had swum off, abandoning the catch-the-flag game, @Clive044 had gained ten levels. This was way out of character. During the past year, the time that Marcel had known him, he had never seen Clive bother with the in-game missions of AOL. He hadn’t seemed to care about levelling up, focusing instead on the player vs player game. Like many casual AOL players, Clive seemed to be here for the social interaction, not the campaigning. He didn’t even bother with his own character, turning up instead each time with a new, free-to-play disposable account.