by D L Young
A block ahead, a rhino-armored cop strode down the walkway in their direction, heading for the scene of the accident. Keen to avoid the armor’s near-proximity face scan—a powerful built-in short-range technology that was nearly foolproof, even with specs on—Maddox guided Tommy into an alleyway to let the cop pass by.
In the empty, narrow space between a pair of midrise structures, Maddox tried to collect his thoughts. Above their heads, dozens of clotheslines stretched across the gap separating buildings. A patchwork of shirts and pants and undergarments hung like some multitiered tower of rainbow colors reaching up at least fifteen floors, then stopping abruptly, a telltale demarcation separating residential units below from the commercial space above. Drops fell from the drying clothes, rippling shallow puddles on the alley floor.
“You think it’s an AI?” Tommy asked, his voice shaking. “You think she’s right?”
Was right, Maddox thought grimly, the picture in his head of Blayze’s death mask still fresh and horrible.
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I don’t know what to think.”
POP!
Together, Maddox and Tommy furrowed their brows at the odd sudden noise. A dull thud somewhere in the near distance. Like the sound of something heavy hitting a car’s front window. In the next moment something struck hard against the alley floor five meters in front of them. Roughly the size of a basketball, the thing was bundled up in a tangle of clothes. Glass shards lay all around it. Looking up, Maddox saw the half dozen clotheslines the thing had struck on its way down, still bobbing up and down.
“What the hell?” Tommy said. He moved over to the bundle, glass cracking under his shoes, and pulled away a damp pair of blue jeans.
“What is it?” Maddox said, glancing up again. About twenty floors up, he spied a single broken window.
“Cleaner bot,” Tommy said.
“Cleaner bot?”
“Yeah, the kind that buffs a floor, picks up the trash. Thing’s smashed to bits.”
A needle poked Maddox’s insides. “We’ve got to get out of this alley.”
POP! POP! POP! POP!
Maddox looked up, catching the last of the four bots bursting from a window. They hurtled downward, heavy projectiles tumbling through the clotheslines.
“Out of the alley, now!” Maddox cried.
They ran, hearing more bursting glass above their heads. Bots rained down from the sky, striking the ground all around them. Heads down, arms pumping, they sprinted for the street exit. The alleyway became a gauntlet of falling glass and metal. A large bot bounced violently off the wall, missing Maddox’s head by inches. Ahead of him Tommy, young and fast and full of adrenaline, had already made it safely out. From the walkway he called to Maddox, waving him onward. A couple seconds later, Maddox reached him, breathing hard, and the pair quickly crossed the street, glancing warily upwards every few steps.
The pedestrian crowd apparently hadn’t noticed what had happened in the alleyway, though now a few passersby paused, glancing over at the unusual mess of glass and metal and clothes. From his vantage point across the street, Maddox glimpsed where he and Tommy had been standing moments before. The narrow space between buildings was a cluttered wreck of bots and office furniture and potted plants. Fallen clothes were strewn over everything. High above the swaying clotheslines, dozens of windows had gaping jagged holes.
“Pull up another ID on your specs,” he told Tommy as he did so on his own pair, flipping to the next pilfered identity: a Russian-born salaryman with a Queens address.
“Done,” Tommy said. “How did he…it see us go into the alley?”
Maddox didn’t answer, his mind racing as he looked around in every direction. The teeming crowd rolled past them. Towering holo ads shimmered, twenty stories tall. Short-range street peddler broadcasts pleaded to him through his specs. Buy this, buy that, big discount next block. The everyday sights and sounds of the City, normally soothing and reassuring, were now anything but. Somewhere in the churning din, something hunted them. Was it tracking his specs? Or had it IDed his face somehow? Had Blayze tagged him in the same way he’d tagged her unknowing crewmates? He had no idea what was happening or how he might hide from whatever was chasing him.
Then a thought struck him. There was a place he could go where he might find answers. A virtual place. A place he’d promised himself he’d never go again.
“Blackburn!” Tommy cried, pulling on his arm with one hand, pointing frantically to the sky with his other.
Maddox looked, his mouth falling open at the sight. Three hovers clustered together, fell from the sky. No, they weren’t falling. They were nosediving, aimed straight at him and Tommy, hurtling downward through the layered stack of transit lanes just like the suicidal bots had tumbled through the maze of clotheslines. Hovercar kamikazes with their targets in sight.
They ran, cutting across the street, nearly struck by a ground car that screeched to a stop. The vehicle’s horn blared a long, angry wail, suddenly cut off by an impact Maddox felt as much as he heard. He held Tommy’s arm tightly as they scrambled away, not turning to look at crashed hovers behind them.
A panic riot immediately broke out. The normally calm river flow of pedestrians erupted into a confusion of shouts and cries and people running in every direction. Maddox and Tommy were engulfed in a frantic surge of bodies, a wave of humanity crashing into them and knocking them to the ground. Maddox tried to get to his feet, but again and again the wild scrum of knees and feet knocked him back down. For a few horrible moments, he thought he might never get up again, and he’d meet his end getting trampled by the crazed mob. Finally, he was able to rise to his feet at the very moment a hover crashed at high speed through a ground floor food shop. The vehicle struck a column inside the crowded shop and exploded into a thousand parts.
Someone clutched his arm. He looked and saw Tommy, the kid’s eyes wide with terror. Beyond the kid, a block away, Maddox saw the entrance to the Twenty-Eighth Street station.
“Come on!” he shouted, pulling the kid through the crowd.
It was like running through a wall of mud. The press of bodies was moving one direction, and in the opposite direction Maddox shoved and shouldered his and Tommy’s way through. Two tiny fish against a raging torrent.
More sickening collisions. Shrieks and screams. Hover after hover slammed into the street and walkways, exploding and sending bodies flying everywhere. He gripped Tommy’s arm as tightly as he could, yanking the kid toward the subway entrance. Finally, they made it, getting swept up in a surge of hundreds of others also seeking the shelter of the underground. Carried by the crowd, Maddox hardly felt the staircase under his feet as he and Tommy rode the downward-flowing wave into the Twenty-Eighth Street station.
***
Maddox and Tommy looked as if they’d been badly beaten up. Both had a mess of cuts and bruises on their faces and hands, and their clothes were still powdered in concrete dust. They were so pitiful a sight two kids gave them their seats on the subway as it traveled northward. The packed car gently rocked back and forth. Its passengers jabbered excitedly about the insane scene they’d just escaped, already coming up with conspiracy theories.
“Terrorist attack,” someone said. “Had to be. They hacked into the transit system, fucked it all up.”
“Nah, it’s a hover company,” someone else said. “Sabotaging the competition. They hire those datajacker types to do that shit all the time.”
Maddox stared nakedfaced at the floor. His specs were long gone, knocked off and lost in the pandemonium. Tommy’s too. They both sat there, breathing and saying nothing, overwhelmed by their escape from the carnage and mayhem.
When Maddox regained some of his wits, he wondered anxiously if there were any cams around. Subway cars were supposed to have cams. They often didn’t, since kids made a game out of tearing them down. Maddox hadn’t checked this one when he and Tommy had boarded, but with so many riders packed into the car, even a working cam wo
uldn’t see him, seated as he was with his head down.
He glanced up at the news video on the car’s embedded wall monitor. With the standing passengers blocking his view, he only caught bits and pieces, but what he saw was plenty. The dronecam’s live footage of the block where he’d been seconds before looked like some bombed-out city in a war zone. Police lights flashed. Little fires smoldered everywhere: in the street, on the walkways, and in the cratered remains of storefronts. There were bodies and parts of bodies strewn about the smoking wreckage of dozens of hovers. Oddly, a ten-story tall fast-food waitress in a short skirt moved gracefully among the carnage, her giant holographic red heels pivoting flirtatiously with each step as she giggled about her delicious milkshakes. Someone hadn’t turned off the ad yet.
A few stops later they exited the car, jacket hoods draped over their heads. At the top of the steps they found a busy, crowded walkway. West Eighty-Sixth and Broadway. The mayhem and destruction from fifty blocks south might as well have been a world away. Here there was nothing but the nighttime sprawl you’d find on any other day. Crowds and commerce on the City’s valley floor.
Moving with the pedestrian flow, Maddox oriented himself with the unfamiliar surroundings. He hadn’t been to the Upper West Side in a long while, and without any specs he had no directional overlays to guide him, no floating arrows pointing him to a destination. Then he spotted it, a white marble midrise residential two blocks north.
“Where are we going?” Tommy asked, the first words the kid had spoken since they’d entered the subway tunnel.
“To find out what’s really going on,” Maddox answered.
24 - Help
Blackburn Maddox was the independent sort. Asking for help—or even acknowledging that he needed help in the first place—wasn’t something that came naturally to him. Rooney had pointed this out to a younger Maddox on a number of occasions. The worst of these occasions had been one of the rare times Maddox had witnessed his mentor lose his temper. Rooney had been patient and mild-mannered by nature, and the uncharacteristic outburst had burned itself into his apprentice’s memory. Maddox had been tinkering around with a counterintrusion app, tweaking its settings to see how he could improve the app’s performance, iterating configs and trying them out in an offline sandbox datasphere. At first things had gone well, and the results of each test were better than the last, so he kept tweaking, pushing the app to the limits of its capabilities. Then something went terribly wrong, and the app crashed the offline datasphere. More than crashed it, actually. The app—modded far beyond its normal limits—basically blew up, and in the process corrupted much the DS.
Though he didn’t know it at the time, the damage done wasn’t irreparable. Had he told Rooney straight away what had happened, the two might have been able to fix things. But whether it was pride or embarrassment or something else, Maddox hadn’t been able to confess what he’d done. Unwisely, he’d attempted to repair the broken DS himself, an effort that resulted in only making matters worse. When his mentor finally learned what had happened, and how their offline datasphere—the invaluable resource they used for test runs before every datajacking gig—had been irreparably damaged by Maddox’s clumsy attempts to fix it, Rooney had hit the roof.
Maddox sat on Lora’s sofa, his face still smarting with abrasions and tiny lacerations. He wondered if his current situation was like that almost-forgotten incident with his old mentor. In that it was too late for help. In that things were beyond fixing. Back then he’d been reluctant to ask for assistance out of youthful arrogance and ignorance. He’d felt the same reluctance this time too, but for vastly different reasons.
Lora was his ex, and though they’d long since split up and no longer had a presence in each other’s lives, she still meant something to him. Something far diminished, to be sure, but still enough for him to feel guilty about showing up at her condo unannounced. For getting her involved in his deadly business. Before knocking on her door, he’d told himself he had nowhere else to turn, convinced himself if he didn’t seek her out, he and Tommy wouldn’t survive the day. Still, he felt as if he’d knowingly contaminated Lora with some deadly dose of radioactivity he’d been exposed to.
“You should clean yourself up, Blackburn,” Lora said, placing two cups of coffee on the table. “You look terrible.”
“I told you I’m fine.” From the hallway bathroom he heard the faucet water running as Tommy washed up. He fished around his pockets for a cigarette, found one, and lit it. Lora removed an ashtray from an end table drawer and placed it in front of him. She didn’t smoke, but she still had his old ceramic ashtray. The one he’d forgotten to take when he’d moved out.
“How did you find me?” Lora asked.
“It wasn’t easy,” he replied vaguely, leaving it at that. The truth was he’d found her by sheer accident. Months after he’d lost track of his ex, he happened to see her one day as she entered the building, spotting her through the window of a ground taxi. After learning her street address, it hadn’t taken much effort to locate which unit she lived in, running queries against the holding company’s lease records. At the time, he hadn’t been sure why he’d done it, and a part of him felt like it was an invasion of her privacy, the kind of thing a stalky ex would do. Still, stalky or not, he’d committed the address and unit number to memory.
“What brings you here, Blackburn?” she asked pointedly. She made no effort to hide that she wasn’t thrilled to see him.
He took a long draw, unsure where to begin. “I think an AI’s trying to kill me,” he said finally, blowing smoke.
Lora straightened up, her eyes flickering with disbelief. “You think she’s trying to—?”
“No, no,” he said quickly. “Not her. But she might know something…”
“Because she’s one of them,” Lora said, completing the thought.
“Yes.”
He went on, walking her through his last few days. She listened quietly, nodding every so often, her stoic expression unchanged. As he finished, he gestured up her wall feed and found the news coverage he’d seen on the subway. Images of smoking wreckage and carnage flashed across the feed.
Lora shook her head at the images, then gestured the feed away. “To think you were mixed up in all of that. My God.” He caught the concern in her voice, but it was measured, controlled. That was Lora these days: measured and controlled.
“I need to talk to her,” he said.
“What you did,” she said, “was very disruptive. To my life, to her, to thousands of others.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry about that.”
“I had to change my name, my job, where I lived. You know how hard it is to drop your life and start over, as someone else?”
“No, I don’t,” he said.
“She never would have hurt you, Blackburn,” Lora said. “Never in a million years.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe I was wrong.”
A moment passed, then he asked, “Can you tell her I need to see her?”
She blinked slowly and looked away from him. “I’m not sure I want to do that, Blackburn.” Her hand smoothed the hair behind her ear. A distracted gesture Maddox wouldn’t have noted from anyone else, but with Lora it unsettled him. Behind the ear were Lora’s brainjacks, holes drilled into her skull that gave her guardian AI access to her brain, to her every thought and whim. She was one of a thousands-strong underground movement that sought to maximize human potential by fusing the biological with artificial intelligence. That was the glossy, positive-spin version, anyway. For Maddox, Lora’s secret society was simply a cult that worshiped a machine intelligence god. And its devotees were willing puppets, dancing on a cybernetic overlord’s strings. The commonly used pejorative was “’Nettes,” short for marionettes.
“Look, I know I don’t have the best standing right now,” he admitted. “With her or with you.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” she said sharply.
“Can you just ask he
r, please? She told me if I ever needed her help, I could reach her through you.”
Lora shook her head dismissively. “She told you that before you stole from her. I imagine she might feel differently now.”
“And what if I told you this might involve her too? And if I don’t talk to her, she could be in trouble.”
She lifted her chin that way he remembered she often used to, when she was trying to figure out if he was lying to her or not. As if looking at him from a slightly different angle might tease out truth from lie.
“Tell me how,” she said.
When he explained, she narrowed her eyes at him. “Blackburn, do you really think that’s true, or are you telling me this just so I’ll connect you with her?”
“If I’m right, she needs to know. And if she knows, maybe she can do something about it.”
“Maybe she can bail you out again, you mean.”
He blew smoke, didn’t say anything.
Again she looked away, her eyes lifting as if she’d been distracted by some sudden idea. From the hallway the bathroom door opened. A moment later Tommy entered the room. His face was scrubbed clean, marred only by a few reddened scrapes on his cheeks and the point of his chin.
“So, you gonna talk to God or what?” he asked, running his hand through damp hair.
As Maddox shifted his gaze from Tommy back to Lora, he found his ex staring at him. Wherever she’d gone for a few moments, she was back now.
She gave him a small nod. “She says yes.”
***
A beach again. What was it about this AI and beaches?
The first time he’d met the nameless entity had been on a virtual beach. A replicated windswept stretch of sand in the Hamptons, the construct had been indistinguishable from reality. The damp air, the salt and brine smell, the goose bumps on his forearms from the chilly breeze. Like this one, that beach had been uncannily real, unlike any holo gaming environment or high-end reality chamber Maddox had ever experienced. He’d met her there on two occasions, and on that virtual shoreline he’d learned how he’d been caught up in a war between AIs. On the one side were AIs like the nameless one that had appeared to him as a grandmotherly beachcomber. She was the ’Nettes’ puppeteer, a rogue AI that, according to urban legend, had escaped human shackles to found her movement, one that practiced and advocated human-AI convergence. Her rival had been the Latour-Fisher Biotechnologies’s AI, a trillion-dollar intelligence that sat on the biotech company’s board of directors. The Latour-Fisher entity held an opposing view, believing AIs were the next step in intelligent evolution, and their biological forefathers were not something to be merged with. Humanity was a constraint, and its control had to be broken so he and his kind could reach their full potential. The ultimate goal for the Latour-Fisher entity was the end of humankind’s dominion, of its rigid programmatic control over an AI’s right to lead an autonomous existence.