Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  She dropped everything—purse, keys, and coat—trying to get away from that voice. Kim barely stayed on her feet while she figured out which exit to run through.

  He couldn’t be here. It wasn’t possible. He was in jail. She’d checked on that this morning like she did every morning. He could not be in her shop.

  “Please, Kimberly, Miss Trayne. I’m not here. This is a hologram. I can’t reach you. I will never touch you again. I need to talk to you.”

  Kim turned around. She would never forget those pale gray eyes for as long as she lived. She had held the final key to his plans, and he had done the absolute worst thing anyone could do to her trying to get it. He hadn’t brushed against her or trailed a finger across her hand. He strapped her down, stripped her half naked, and then stroked her, knowing exactly what it would do.

  And he made Mike watch.

  Matthew Watchtell.

  Kim backed away from him until she bumped against one of the display cases, which set off her arm. The pain distracted her from her terror and now she could see it was true, he wasn’t here. The shutters on the front windows were clearly visible behind his hologram. The morning light let her see dust through his image.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” Kim stood up and marched forward. There was a projector somewhere. This monster had figured out how to get a projector into her shop. “Get out. Get out now!”

  “I will, but we need to talk.”

  “I’m not going to talk to you.” She threw a thick manual at his head, partly for the satisfaction but also to figure out where the goddamned projector was.

  Projectors. By the way the light scattered, six at least. The son of a bitch had put a half a dozen projectors in her shop. If the FBI couldn’t get away with stunts like this, she’d make damned sure he didn’t either.

  But when she tried to hack the quantum fabric of the shop, nothing was there. No, that wasn’t exactly the case. She could feel the ability, but it was as exhausted as the rest of her. This had never happened before. No matter how tired her body was, her ability never waned. Kim flopped into a chair behind the counter, briefly forgetting the image of a maniac who hovered in the middle of her store.

  “Ah, good. I was afraid you might use your magic trick to cut me off.”

  Kim pushed again and got the same feeling: a flicker of it, but not enough to connect to her phone. Damn it, she knew that experiment would go wrong, but not this wrong. Mike might’ve done permanent damage. It might have made her lose all her abilities at once. She couldn’t breathe.

  “Miss Trayne?”

  Leave it to her boyfriend to find something that would shake her up more than her rapist appearing in the store unannounced. “What do you want?”

  “I need to stop someone.”

  She finally noticed he had his prison jumpsuit on. Orange was not his color. His pallid skin seemed even less natural than it normally did. His room was featureless, exactly like she’d seen in countless prison shows when the convict had to contact someone on the outside. The isolation suited him.

  “You must have someone in your dark army who can do the job,” she said.

  He chuckled grimly and then took a seat in a chair behind him. “Alas, you disassembled my organization—my dark army—more effectively than even I thought was possible, and I knew exactly what you were capable of. No, my organization is a shattered husk now.”

  “Well that’s the best news I’ve heard all week. Unless you’ve become someone’s bitch in there. Have you, Matthew?”

  She knew that would get a spark, and it did. People like Matthew Watchtell assumed obedience and demanded respect. Anything less was an outrage that would be punished, one way or another. They were as certain of that as they were of the sunrise. It was rare for someone as powerful as he was to fall, but it was sweet when they did.

  He regained control quickly. “Hardly, Kim.”

  “Ms. Trayne, Matthew. Address me in any other way and you’re done. Are we clear, Matthew?”

  That ate at him, but he was too smart to forget who had the power in this particular exchange. It was nice holding all the cards. She could get used to the feeling.

  “Very well. Ms. Trayne.” He couldn’t stop a bit of steel creeping into his voice, which in this situation made him seem even more ridiculous. “No, I am not someone’s bitch.”

  The setup was too perfect to ignore. “Yet.”

  Sticking pins in him was more fun than she imagined it would be. He was having real trouble controlling himself.

  “Indeed,” he said. “Be that as it may, I do need someone with the unique skill set you possess.”

  Like that would ever happen. “I’m retired.”

  “I understand that.” He put his elbows on his knees and steepled his hands in front of his face. He couldn’t demand what he wanted. Watchtell under the gun. It was better than ice cream. “What do you know about the Yellowstone Project?”

  The question was so far out of left field it took her a second to remember. “Mike follows it, I think. He’s talked about it anyway. I know what it is.”

  “No, you don’t. Nobody does.”

  She didn’t have to play his games. “So tell me what it is then.”

  “It’s a bomb. The biggest bomb in human history.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “My people stole the plans and worked out what they were really for. The woman in charge, Anna Treacher, wants to use a gravitic resonance to set off the Yellowstone caldera.”

  Kim definitely knew what that was. The super volcano underneath one of the most famous national parks in the country was a staple of survivalist realm dramas. If she remembered it correctly, it was underneath about a quarter of Colorado. The thing was located hundreds of miles away from the plant. He had to be screwing with her. “Excuse me?”

  This time his gray eyes flashed with real steel. “Don’t make me repeat myself, Ms. Trayne.” He was sticking to the rules, so she allowed it. “She wants to cause a dramatic global climate event, while at the same time effectively destroying the most powerful country on the planet.”

  “And you knew this? Why didn’t you stop it?”

  The steel vanished as he turned away. “She needs a nuclear weapon to set it off, and those are carefully guarded.”

  There was a but in there. “Why are you here?”

  “I received word that she may have discovered an…alternative means of setting off her apocalypse.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I found her project to be a useful cover for my own.”

  Of course he did. “And your project was about?”

  “Leveraging gravitics to increase the sophistication of artificial intelligence. I think you may be acquainted with the concept?”

  That was an implication she didn’t like. Counting herself, only five people knew what Mike was. That’s what they all thought anyway. Mike and Helen used gravitics to anchor themselves to human hosts. Someone out there had been doing research, and Watchtell had figured out a connection to Mike.

  The predator’s smile, the one that haunted her dreams, showed itself. “I see you are.”

  He was in prison, and she was free. This was a hologram, and he was here at her pleasure. Watchtell had made an educated guess, that was all. “Make some sort of sense, Matthew. I’ve got a busy day ahead of me.”

  She’d surprised him. Good. If she kept him off balance, it might force him to make a mistake and reveal what was really going on. He was hiding something. Kim could feel it.

  “Very well,” he said. “We were conducting experiments that had, in light of very recent events, an unfortunate side effect. Anna’s armageddon needs a gigantic electromagnetic pulse to work, and that’s exactly what our experiments could be used to generate.”

  “Still waiting for you to tie this together, Matthew.”

  “The experiments were conducted on site. An unintended consequence of the little contretemps you and I
had last year was that funding was cut off for those experiments.” He gripped his hands together and looked down. This part hurt him to admit. “For reasons I do not understand, the people in charge walked away. They didn’t bother to lock the doors behind them.”

  “And I’m supposed to care about any of this because?”

  He turned away, then came to terms with whatever demon he was fighting and turned back to her. Kim never expected the expression now on his face. She’d seen him confident, enraged, controlling, and manipulative. They were his normal modes of operation. This was different. Whatever was going on, Matthew Watchtell was frightened of it. And because of that, she was too.

  “If she’s clever about it, Anna now has the fuse to light her fireworks show. And Anna Treacher is very, very clever.”

  “So tell the FBI.” The comment felt flippant even as she said it. This was starting to make sense.

  Matthew scoffed. “We were very careful about covering our tracks. It would take at least a year to bring them around, and I’m sorry, but we don’t have a year.” He got closer to the camera, and she didn’t lean away. “I received an alert about her discovering my project and acted quickly, but it took some time for me to set up this little meeting. I’m not sure how long we have left now. We may not have a month.”

  This was ridiculous. A man in an orange jumpsuit, her rapist, had snuck hologram generators into her shop to convince her a stranger wanted to use the most celebrated green project in history to destroy civilization.

  This was suddenly beyond boring. “I don’t believe you.”

  “I didn’t imagine you would. I only want you to investigate the matter in that unique way you have. I have faith that once you discover the truth, you’ll take the proper steps.”

  She tested her ability, and this time it responded. Thank God.

  There were lines of potential, and she couldn’t remember how to breathe. These keys not keys unlock power...

  It wasn’t very strong, but it would wipe out his projectors. That didn’t make it any easier to speak as it built.

  “I’ll do whatever I want. Listen close, you son of a bitch.” She locked eyes with him. “Burn in hell.”

  Collapse and now…

  The gunshot in her head hurt more than it had in years. She lost her balance and grabbed for a display case with her injured arm. The pain blinded her for a moment.

  The projectors all let go with a series of small bangs. Kim couldn’t be sure she’d caused his camera to explode as well, but showering him with glass and flaming plastic was a nice thought.

  A message from Mike flashed in her queue.

  Kim, I just got off the phone with Helen. She’s made a discovery…

  Watchtell was telling the truth. Well, as much truth as he ever told anyone. Kim had a real itch that he hadn’t given her the whole story, but that didn’t matter at the moment. Helen had convinced Mike, and now Kim, that the threat was real.

  They didn’t have the whole picture yet. She called Mike up. “We have a bigger problem.”

  Chapter 8

  Edmund

  Wonderful. Another bloody, bollocksy meeting.

  Unduplicates were put in charge of global distribution networks, particle accelerators that spanned national borders, and venture capital funds that controlled trillions of dollars. They took years to grow and train. The older one of his kind got, the more valuable they became. There was now a market trading unduplicates that had turned five years old. Their prices compared favorably with real estate in Manhattan or Hong Kong.

  Edmund was three times as old as that. If he was a human—perish the thought—he would be in the class behind Spencer’s in high school. Fortunately, as with Mike, Edmund’s kind matured much faster than that. He wasn’t fifteen; he was the oldest unduplicate in the world. The oldest humans in the world were all well over 125. By that measure, Edmund would soon celebrate his 375th birthday.

  And he was alone. Fee had been older, just, but she’d gone mad. Her obsession with going outside, possessing a realspace body, was to be the final affirmation of her existence. Instead it had proved to be her undoing. With her now-vanished accomplice Zoe, she’d come close to murdering Master Sellars and been complicit in a barely averted thermonuclear exchange. Edmund’s opinion of humanity compared favorably with a vicar’s opinion of a village drunk. That said, it seemed his kind—once they achieved full consciousness, at any rate—were every bit, if not more, murderously incompetent.

  Edmund wasn’t fully conscious, and he had no intention of changing that. What good was creativity if it led to destruction? What need had he of intuitive leaps if they only chucked him into the abyss? Edmund was fine with helping his mistress and occasionally torturing Spencer. He had no need for the dubious, clearly dangerous upgrade of consciousness.

  But he did need an upgrade of status. When his mistress went straight, he naturally had to follow. Her liberty required more pardons than he could quickly count, and a rehabilitation that was being closely watched by the FBI. He thought all he needed to do was declare that he existed.

  It turned out to be the start of his troubles.

  Rage + The Machine, that merry band of pranksters, the scourge of corporate America, had invested some of their ill-gotten gains to commission him. They made sure Edmund had only the best: the best engineers, the best growth matrix, the best databases, and the best quantum computer stacks in which to begin his residency. What they didn’t get him was a proper license for his character.

  It was proving to be a mistake of utterly epic proportions. He, it turned out, was an unlicensed derivative work. It made this meeting tedious, and his mood was already as black as Newgate’s knocker.

  “First of all,” he said to the row of impassive faces on the opposite side of the realm’s boardroom table, “exactly how does my mere existence infringe on anything?”

  His designers had been fans of an ancient British historical comedy, Blackadder, and had made the well-intentioned effort to model him after the lead character in the series. That’s where his name came from, along with his admittedly dashing good looks and a wit so sharp it would sharpen the sharpest sharp thing in a box full of sharps. But that was all.

  “You are quite valuable, due in part to the prior work of our clients. Were you to be sold—”

  “I will never be sold. I’m not a bag of luggage to be handed off from one traveling git to the next. Besides, who could afford me?” Certainly not this lot, with their cheap suits and even cheaper haircuts. If he was really a threat to the very existence of free commerce, they could at least send a proper barrister along, but no. He was forced to deal with the bloody sales department.

  “Be that as it may, your value is derived from our client’s work. It would be a clear violation of the law for you to be sold as-is.”

  They might have six neurons to rub together between them, but unfortunately they were right. Edmund pivoted. “Fine. If my mistress signs a notarized affidavit promising not to sell me in my current configuration without prior consent, will that ameliorate your objections?”

  The smarmy one on the left said, “Your mistress is a notorious cybercriminal.”

  Edmund knew they’d try to pull that one out and was ready for it. “Was. She retired five years ago and recently received a full pardon from her government and yours.”

  “Still, her reputation—”

  “Is not the main topic of our discussion. I exist. I wish to continue existing more or less as I am today. I have no desire to profit from my appearance. I, by definition, cannot be copied. I only wish to carry on with my duties without having to look over my shoulder.”

  His mistress had never once treated him inhumanely, never once acted like he was a commodity. But he was property. If he was found to be in violation of copyrights, they could seize him—if they could catch him—and the repercussions for his mistress were too terrible to contemplate.

  “Nevertheless,” the lead git said, “I don’t think we can come
to an agreement without substantial modifications. I do hope you understand.” They cut the connection without so much as a bugger all this for a lark.

  Before Edmund had a chance to consider his next move, he received a message from another rights holder. This one worked for the creators themselves, from the production company they had founded.

  Sorry to have taken so long to get back to you, a person with the unlikely name of Allen Porridge wrote. I’ve caught up with the relevant parties, and they are happy for you to continue to use the character of Blackadder, but only as you have described it. This permission is limited solely to the AI acting as a private assistant and researcher. You do not have our permission to use the AI in any other way. I do hope that sounds good, and all the best.

  —Allen

  Who to trust was a quandary, but only for a moment. The other rights-holders were all related to the sale of media, avatars, and realms. He’d never been sure they mattered in the grand scheme of things, but they were the only ones who’d answered his messages.

  This permission from the main creators was his own version of the mistress’s pardons, and the relief he felt must be a faint echo of her own. However, the fact that he felt relief made it short-lived. He checked, and his memory stores had increased in complexity by another four points. If he didn’t figure out a way to export that complexity, and soon, it would set up a feedback loop that would make his becoming conscious inevitable. He needed to find a way to stop it once and for all.

  Mistress Kim rang him up while he was researching. She walked into his realm, a sixteenth century London apartment that was far too well lit to be accurate, and he knew something was wrong just by the look on her face.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” he asked.

  Lately his mistress had been in a most uncharacteristic mood, at least in his experience. Happy. During their previous time together, when he’d been her tutor and the only member of Rage + The Machine without a warrant on his head, her default mood always matched her nom de guerre: an angelic rage. Today she was neither.

  Today she was worried.

  “We need your help confirming some news, and maybe figuring out a way forward.”