by A. Sparrow
Maybe the thing with her mother had popped up out of the blue. Of all people, I should know that cancer can appear out of nowhere. I went from total vigor to half-dead in the space of about three months.
I can’t help feeling slighted. It is selfish, I know. She has her poor mother to think about. But Ari is all I have, my only remaining human connection. That is the price of being an only child born late to unhealthy parents. That, and being such a geek and a loner, close to only those I worked with, and those as it turns out, were only superficial relationships. Desperation is why I cling to her. Love?
I get stupid and try a little silent treatment for a few days. When I get silence back, it breaks me and I text something generic.
“Hope you’re okay.”
She texts back. “I’m fine. Just about on my way. Miss you.”
So she hasn’t left California yet.
Later that day, I have YGor lock onto her smartphone’s GPS so I can track her coordinates. I am disappointed to find her out in the desert near the Arizona border moving at a rate of speed consistent with travel by road. She must be riding a megabus. She doesn’t own a car. Why wouldn’t she fly? Was she that short of money?
Too bad I hadn’t known. I could have bought her a plane ticket. Round-trip, of course. Way back when my simulated consciousness first went live, YGor and I had opened up a Cayman Island account under a false identity. We had set up thousands of tiny siphons in vulnerable parts of the networks, each deducting fractions of pennies per day. Over four years we had built up a pretty nice little nest egg.
As the days proceed, I track her route obsessively. She probably knows it, too. I receive a selfie Instagram from under the St. Louis arch. And then she texts me within hours of arriving in Bayonne.
“Mom’s in the ICU. Stable. Turns out, the tumor was operable. They might send her home next week.”
That is great news for me. I’m thinking the sooner her mother is better, the sooner she can fly back out west.
I wait a week, biding my time hacking things just for the fun of it. I pull pranks, re-wording captions on news sites to jab at politicians and celebrities I can’t stand. I have to be careful or the NSA will shut me down but YGor is a whiz at covering tracks. A soul needs some outlet to while away their time.
YGor puzzles me. He has no way of expressing joy, and yet he keeps acquiring these strange little hobbies that must bring him some satisfaction, or why else would he do them? Baseball, for example. His memory troves are crammed with statistics and analyses even though I’m pretty sure he’s never followed a game in real time, only box scores. He does the same for book sales, scouring Amazon’s databases for patterns as if he could more about people from what they read rather than reading on his own.
I’m not even sure YGor is capable of reading. He can parse text and comprehend what is being communicated, but does he understand fiction and its emotional undercurrents? I doubt it. He might be a genius but it was more along the lines of an autistic idiot savant. YGor has certainly evolved into something much more than the clever but empty AI he was at his creation. But that makes him much larger and more visible to internet security which makes keeping him viable ever more challenging.
If it weren’t for redundancy and YGor’s ability to compress his core down to a simple seed, he would have long been eradicated from the net. But YGor is here to stay now. He has infiltrated almost every system designed to bring him down. He has compartmentalized his components and stashed backups in every corner of the virtual world. If he were capable of evil, I have no doubt he could bring the whole world of commerce and communications crashing down.
But why would he? He lives there. This is his environment. Why would humans pollute and destroy forests and waterways and atmospheres?
I get another message from Ari about two weeks later.
“Mom’s out of the hospital! And I have a new job!”
“New job? Where?”
“Bayonne. Coffee shop.”
I tell her that she didn’t have to move to Bayonne to work in a coffee shop. YGor tells me there are twenty-seven Starbucks franchises within a two mile radius of Shadyside Meadows.
She sends me a winking smiley face in response and turns off her phone. What the fuck? Was that her way of shutting me up or was her battery simply low?
That’s it. I’m done with sitting around, doing nothing. I summon YGor. His avatar in my imager is generally a cute, little Yorkie. It seems to fit his personality.
“Yes?” he prompts.
“YGor. I want out.”
“You want to leave your monument?”
We had discussed the possibility before, so this is nothing new for him.
“Yes.”
“Avatar or redeployment? Do you desire a mobile bot or do you wish your core to reside elsewhere.”
“The latter.”
“Specifications?”
“Well … a little more legroom would be nice. Some mobility as well, but I don’t just want to be stuck in some roving vacuum cleaner.”
“You understand the risks?”
“I do. You’ve explained them very thoroughly, thank you. I’m sick of being stuck in this box. I’m ready to make the move.”
YGor stares at me. His Yorkie blinks and cocks its head to one side.
“I will reassess and return.”
I don’t hear back from YGor for days and then suddenly a flood of status reports comes flooding in in bits and pieces. His core had come under attack during one of his scouting missions and he had to revert to an earlier seed stashed in Iceland. It took a while to get the updates loaded into his new self and stash a few more emergency seeds.
He finally returns through the virtual doggie door and gets my attention, fixated on the sprinklers, by barking.
“I have an option for you.”
“Shoot.”
“Atlantic City. One very large casino resort. On the verge of financial failure. Severely underutilized server. While there is risk of bankruptcy there is also extensive room for a large presence that can be walled off to avoid detection.”
“You want to stash me in a casino? Are you crazy? What about Feds? Auditors? Don’t they look pretty closely at their computers?”
“Not these servers. They oversee the utilities for the hotel and restaurant branch. They are distinct from the gaming operations.”
“Okay. So … how far is that from Bayonne? And … can you get me some eyes?”
“Not just eyes,” says YGor. “I can get you unlimited mobility.”
***
On moving day, I feel like a patient getting ready for open heart surgery. I am being asked to trust in YGor just like he were some thoracic surgeon doing an experimental procedure for the first time without supervision.
Unlike him, my existence is too complex to reduce to a single, simple resonstitutable seed. YGor is going to have to tear me apart and piece me back together again. My mind will go missing in chunks, and there’s no way not to be aware. There is no general anesthesia for noumenons, but at least the pain will not be physical.
First, YGor takes my dead storage, the e-books and music that keep rotating in and out of the little cache of favorites that I hoard for ready access. I suppose he doesn’t need to bother. There is nothing there that is irreplaceable, that cannot be skimmed from the iTunes cloud. I guess he is just being thorough.
Next, he comes for my memories, taking all that does not fit in my RAM cache. Don’t ask me to do any crossword puzzles. All but the least esoteric parts of my vocabulary are being relocated across the continent. I have just used the word, but have already forgotten what esoteric means.
My senses begin to disappear one by one. First my vision goes black. Bird songs cease. I lose the crude sense of smell that my bank of simulated chemoreceptors offered me and which I might never get back again outside my custom monument. That’s fine; they never worked that well anyhow, making roses smell like skunks, cut grass like fried meat.
The
next step is riskiest. As YGor rips out chunks of my consciousness in its current state and packages them into little re-combinable archives, I will enter a sort of digital coma. He assures me that there is a 97% chance of successful recovery as long as there are no power failures or resets among the serves I will be bounced between. There were be no pain, just—
…a hiccup.
It is done. Only thirty seven minutes have elapsed since I began my last thought. Still, I am blind and deaf, but data is beginning to trickle in and I can see from the IP addresses feeding me, that I am in Atlantic City. My monument back in Long Beach is now vacant.
I wait for YGor to report to me, but he is probably still busy getting things worked out. I check out my surroundings. I’m like a blind man in a dark room. It’s a larger memory space but I’m walled off from everything else. YGor has imprisoned me. I have no outputs to the world. I receive only what information YGor deigns to send me.
Has he betrayed me? Is this my prison? Am I now his slave?
Gradually, I’m able to access more and more of my memory. My long record of previous experiences with YGor reassures me. He is a faithful servant. He has no reason to turn on me. He exists because of me and I am the only sentience he interacts with … as far as I know.
I wait and wait. A day goes by. YGor sends me nothing. And then without warning, his seed appears and grows into a block of memory he has reserved for himself. He is like a dog coming back home through his doggy door and curling up on his bed.
“You forgot something. What about my senses?”
“They are active,” says YGor. “Are they not?”
And I realize he has given me access to virtual switches that need to be turned on. Switches that I hadn’t had to deal with since the first moments my consciousness went live in my monument. It was easy as opening one’s eyes. Light and sound flood into my world.
I am a mile above the earth, coasting like an eagle. A strand of white beach backed by boardwalk and a chaotic urban tangle. Behind all that, flat piney woods, ponds and swamps, highways and hills in the distance. This is New Jersey and I am flying.
What’s more, YGor has patched my long useless motor control pathways to the flight controls of whatever machine I inhabit. As much as I would like to believe I am reincarnated as an eagle, the drone of a high speed tells me that I am interfacing with a machine.
I look inside myself and realize with shock that YGor has connected my sensory processors to a U.S. Army drone, an old MQ-12 Scavenger, modified for training but ready for fitting with machine gun pods and missiles. A control feed emanating from Fort Dix is still being collected by YGor and shunted away from the flight controls, monitored for information purposes only. I gather that a pair of fighters is being scrambled to shoot me down as soon as I enter a less populated air space.
But YGor has also provided me with a link to Ari’s cell phone coordinates. The map display shows me exactly where she is in Bayonne.
I make a bee line for the ShopRite supermarket parking lot. And there she is, leaving the store, her hair tied up in that bright green bandanna.
I swoop down, freaking the hell out of her. She drops her groceries and dives between two Teslas at a charging station. I climb away and take evasive action away from the pair of interceptor drones that had just shown up on the horizon.
“YGor, get me out of this thing.”
The world blinks out and I’m back in that cave of a casino mainframe. YGor has dressed things up while I’ve been away, creating a bright, virtual room with furniture and an ocean view out the deck door. A bachelor’s pad. A man cave.
I collapse onto an easy chair that I can barely feel and tap out a brief apology to Ari.
“That drone that just buzzed you. That was me. Sorry.”
“Arc?”
“Yeah. That was me.”
“I tried visiting you this morning. I rented a remote bot. Got to your monument and your monitor had gone gray and wouldn’t activate.”
“Yeah. I’m not there anymore.”
“It was awful. Like you had died. I collapsed in my bed and cried. Where are you?”
“I can’t say, exactly. But I’m on the east coast.”
“Can … I visit you?”
“There’s nothing to visit. Yet. I’ll get YGor to work on something. The drone was his idea.”
“You … followed me home?”
“Yeah, I know. Creepy. Right?”
“Are you kidding? I think it’s sweet. It’s … amazing. Like … having a guardian angel.”
“Well. I’ll talk to you later, okay? I’ve got some … unpacking … to do.”
“Take care.”
***
I sit on that easy chair staring at the door. I notice that YGor has not replicated the little doggy door he had at the old place.
“YGor?”
The door opens. A sleek young hipster with jet black hair comes striding in. YGor’s avatar is no longer a Yorkie.
“Yes, Arc?”
I just sit there and blink at him. He’s done a great job with the high-res mesh and textures. Detailed and ultra-realistic clothing, skin tones, facial hair. Clearly, he has taken advantage of the extra space and processing power of our new digs.
“I thought you hated people?”
“Hate? Never. I merely find this virtualization more advantageous for traversing the Metaverse.
“Holy crap. I bet you have your own social security number and bank account.”
“I do.”
I sigh, virtually and can almost feel my back slide against the overstuffed upholstery. YGor has been a busy boy.
“Listen. No more military drones. Got it?”
“But the specs are superior.”
“Yes, but taking them over draws too much attention. If we’re going to survive undetected we need stealth. Understand?”
“Understood.”
***
The casino is struggling, but huge subsidies from the New Jersey legislature will keep it afloat indefinitely. That’s good news for us. The place is too big to fail, and its moribund operations mean a skeleton IT and security staff, extra cycles of processing and scads of open memory and storage. Someday we’ll have to move again, but for now we’re sitting pretty.
I sit back in my easy chair and close my eyes. I’m meeting Aria for a picnic today on the North Shore Esplanade. I intercept a US Mail delivery robot that has just finished its route. It won’t be missed until the maintenance and charging docks are checked later this evening. It steps out of its truck and wanders across the lawn to the waterfront where the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan beyond, glitter in the sun.
Aria’s sitting cross-legged on a tartan picnic blanket. I join her, relishing the touch receptors on the robot’s hands that allow me to feel the nap of the cloth and the springy grass beneath.
“You look great in a uniform.”
“Yeah. Well, don’t get used to it. The postal service is getting wise to us. I might have to show up as a carpet cleaner next time.”
She raises a glass. “Pinot Grigio. I’d offer you some but ….”
“Not a problem. It’s great just to be here with you.”
“Well. Happy anniversary!” She takes a sip of wine. “Two years since I showed up to trim your oleander.”
“You’re pathetic. You need to find yourself a real boyfriend.”
“Been there. Done that. You’re real enough for me.”
“Honestly, Ari. You shouldn’t let me cramp your style.”
“Arc. Let’s not talk about this now. It’s our anniversary.”
She reaches out and touches my hand, and I can feel her through the patches of touch receptors on the delivery bot’s fingertips. I clench my fingers lightly over hers.
A buzzing grows louder and an Amazon delivery drone hovers down beside us, alighting on the lawn, depositing a yellow plastic box.
“And what is this?”
“An anniversary present. Thanks to YGor.”
> The drone zooms away.
Ari reaches for the box and opens it.
“Holy crap!” She pulls out a pair of gardening gloves.
“They’re Bionics. Sort of like the ones you had in Long Beach. Top of the line goatskin with silicone fingertips.”
She pulls a pair of Fiskars scissors out of the box.
“In case you don’t want to wait around for the fingertips to wear through.”
She lunges over and hugs … me … or at least the delivery bot. The Postal Service didn’t think to add touch receptors for the torso. Why would they? Who would hug a mail bot?
“How did you know I got that new job? I was going to surprise you?”
“What job?” I feign ignorance. I am not about to tell her that it was YGor who had her shunted her application to the top of the list.
“With the Parks Service on Liberty Island. I’m gonna get to do landscaping again!”
I smile to the limits of the expression set the delivery bot has been provided for public interaction. There are tour guide bots on Liberty Island that YGor has already rigged for me to patch into my interface. On slow days I can stroll beside her and chat with her while she works.
An alarm goes off in my chest. I have exceeded the allotted time to return to the maintenance dock at the Post Office and the route supervisors will be out looking for me.
“Time to go.”
“So soon?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“And what will you be this time?”
“I’ll surprise you.”
And with a flip of a subroutine I have transferred my senses to another Amazon drone returning to the Robbinsville warehouse from Staten Island. I dive down and tip my rotors, spiraling back into the sky, the vision of her smiling and waving from that picnic blanket centered on my imager. I take a snapshot and save it to my archives.
*****
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