With that, the flattening curve of the last 200 years took over more real estate and bent into an unmistakable and ostensibly irreversible downward trend.
“She is telling us we are over the hill. If she is right, and I think she is, we humans have peaked.”
As Danni looked for the effect on her audience, Morley leaned towards Simon with a stage whisper, “We are getting stupider. Big deal. I could have told you that.”
Simon smiled and looked at his device, checking the time. Ninety minutes and they would be gone from here: Theresa and Julia to Telluride, where he hoped they would be safe, the others to Bahia de Los Angeles where Andrzej was waiting for them. No time to spare. Time to move. “So, my friends. The puzzle for our little club, the purpose for the World History Institute is…?”
“I got it now.” Morley looked extremely pleased with himself, hand in the air like a school boy. “When does time end for us humans? To calculate when human consciousness ceases to exist, or at least be detectable. What a cheery mission, Danni.”
“Brilliant, Morley. People have been underestimating you all your life.” Simon patted Morley on the back and, looking around, he could tell they wanted him to expand on Danni’s mystical puzzle with a more Simon-like workability and pragmatism. “We, the WHI, are going to puzzle out approximately when human consciousness will peter out into planetary uselessness. And while we are at it, we will work on a strategy for deploying a life boat for our soon-to-be-shipwrecked pool of genes.” Simon looked round the table to see the various reactions.
Theresa sat looking out at the sea, trying to imagine a world not run by humans, maybe a world where leftover avatars still roamed the earth without direction until the power finally switched off. Julia seemed to be accepting the puzzle at face value, tired at the thought of the relocation, wanting nothing more than an escape from the immediate dangers. She decided to think about the last few things she had to do before the whisper jet picked them up.
Morley, as usual, immediately offered his opinion while grinding the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Fuck-all, man. You’re right—it makes my head hurt. Personally, I’m planning to learn all about cactus husbandry instead. It will probably all end with a bloody asteroid crashing in anyway.”
Simon laughed, “Statistically you are right. Should have already happened by now. But that’s too boring an end to think about. It will be far more entertaining to plot the reverse side of Serendipity’s bell curve. We can entertain ourselves by imagining the nadir and extinction of consciousness, while figuring out how not to participate.”
Morley, his voice suspicious and curious like a cat, said. “Maybe humans go out with a bang, not a whimper?”
Danni conceded that Serendipity had mentioned the possibility of catastrophic human stupidity of action. “She said the chances were only about 6–9% of a human-caused cataclysm. Down from 35% 100 years ago.”
Simon closed the moment and set them all into motion. “One way or the other, we need to jump ship right now.” He looked over at George who was now leaning against the wall by the kitchen door. “So let’s hop-to it and get ready for our lifts. George needs to clean the tables for lunch.”
The Parent Is Only Human
As the breakfast group began to rise from their seats to head for their various rooms and preparations, Andrzej was staring intently at his dash, face gone pale and eyes focused tightly on the floating display. He leaned over to translucent Morley and quietly said, “You need to get us back right now. Something is wrong in Krakow.” Morley looked at him quizzically, but Andrzej repeated, “Now!” with a tone that left no room for debate.
Morley unfurled his own dash. He looked at the translucent Danni, who nodded, and then over at Lori. “Lesson’s over, my dove; prepare to return to reality. That cactus button chocolate should take the edge off the abrupt transition.”
With no further warning, they were back on the bridge of the cabin, all in the same chairs they had occupied before the histogram had transported them to Delani Beach, back a half century and into the world of heart-breaking doubles.
Having apparently experienced history deformed by data from its future. Lori performed a mental check and looked over her extremities, deciding she felt no worse for the wear. How could that be? She resolved to find out more about peyote from Morley.
The other three were gathered in front of the main streaming screen, where another man she didn’t know had just appeared. In his early thirties with black hair and a solid Pan-European face, he was sitting in a room that looked like a museum. Behind him were tall, windowed doors half opened to a small balcony with ornate iron rails. His chair was massive, dark wood and red velvet, and an ancient matching table sat in front of him, clearly his desk. He was speaking to the group with a tone of forced objectivity, undercut by a tension Lori could see on his face.
“The attacks were all well thought out and tightly coordinated. Two minutes to take down three of the four repeaters, cook all our firewalls, and datastasize into our systems like bedbugs in a warm dorm. Just as the alerts flooded in and everyone was scrambling to identify and neutralize the god damn mal-code, they broke into your house and took Mom.”
Lori read equal parts anger and anguish on his face.
“Rather than simply fry the surveillance cameras, somehow they lightly pixelated the data from the cam-streams so the security bots didn’t notice anything alarming. When we reviewed them, you could see two people pushing her down the front hall and out the door. One was definitely a man, but the other was smaller and might have been a woman.”
Andrzej cut him off, “Have you been to the house yet?”
The man shook his head. “No, I sent Leni, so I could manage the shutdown. We were hoping to save the systems, and I figured they might call with a demand of some sort. I talked to him just a minute ago, right before I got on with you. Nothing there. No note. They just grabbed her and ran.” The man tightened his face. “Sorry, Dad. I didn’t see it coming.”
Andrzej took a deep breath. Lori watched his chest collapse and she heard the exhale through anger-flared nostrils. “Not your fault, Jerzy. It’s mine. I felt it coming, but I didn’t recognize it as imminent. I’ve been telling you for years to watch out for things that are shaped like Simon’s predictions, and now one of his inevitable moments smacks us right in the face like clueless marks.”
Andrzej and Jerzy looked at each other in a manner Lori interpreted as father and son long comfortable as equals.
“We will be getting a message I am sure. Don’t worry Jerzy, we will get her back. Your mother is a wise one. She will know how to handle the situation.”
Andrzej sat back in his chair and concentrated silently for a moment. Just as Jerzy was about to speak, he continued. “The thing that is clear now, and I never got this part of what Simon was saying back then, is that we couldn’t prepare for this or successfully defend against it, because it had to happen. Serendipity had to be breached eventually. If I remember correctly, he also said it would be by an enemy who didn’t know what to do with her. Some actor drawn mindlessly, ‘forced’ was the word he used, towards her power.” With a wry smile for Morley, he said, “Remember how he was always going on about how the universe was shaped like a long colon and that we were trapped in its peristaltic flow? He even had some crazy theory that equated the animating forces of evolution to digestive transformation in the biome.”
For Lori and Jerzy’s benefit, he added, “Simon got really out there towards the end. This is going to be one of those times when I wish he were here, but then again, he’s not supposed to be.”
While Andrzej talked, Danni and Morley had silently turned their attention to Serendipity’s main interface. They were watching strange ripples rolling like waves across the plex. Danni frowned, looked quizzically at Morley, and refreshed the core environment. When it came back up, she reset the perspective, but the alien ripples
continued.
Lori and Jerzy were left to consider one another quietly across the interface until Andrzej returned from another brief moment of mental assessment and realized they hadn’t been introduced. “How rude of me, sorry. Lori, this is my son Jerzy who is holding down our suddenly besieged fort in Krakow. Jerzy, this is Lori Norton. I’m sure you are aware of her name and new position over here in the Cabin.” The two nodded and Jerzy offered a broad smile, a small gesture in a tense moment, one that was well appreciated by Lori.
“So, what type of attack are we experiencing and what’s the damage so far, Jerzy?” Andrzej was 100% back in the moment, and Lori could feel all hands beginning to coordinate their efforts. She moved over to stand next to Danni and Morley, studying Serendipity’s unusual behavior while she listened to Jerzy’s report.
“We haven’t got a handle on the type of attack yet. It’s apparently something we have never seen before, an order of magnitude more sophisticated than any of the other assaults, according to the security folks.” There was no immediate response from Andrzej, and Jerzy waited a moment before adding, “The damage appears catastrophic to several very specific defense systems. Her control module was breached, and multiple foreign actors, probably bots, are issuing commands. The worst part is that Serendipity doesn’t seem to want to help. We are trying to at least shut her down.”
“Don’t bother, Jerzy. You won’t be able to. Just get everyone out of the mine and tell them to go home. We will wait for a contact from or about your mother. I assume you have followed the protocols and blown up all the external links?”
Lori continued to listen but most of her attention was now on the flow of the rippling bands as they bobbed Serendipity’s nodes and links like debris floating on anxious pre-storm water. Without really thinking, she spoke to Danni. “Could you please take her all the way in to a key mirror source? Pick any one of the crypto-states and ping on their last annual audit.” Everyone looked at her, but she pushed forward. “Try, ‘MaM_last_audit, Mining & Materials.’ I just inserted and tested a mirror patch there a few days ago.”
Danni was cheered by Lori’s instinctive leap into action. Turning back to the controls on her dash, she dialed in the search and refreshed the plex. Serendipity appeared to respond normally, with the mist rolling into the plex and the color modulating towards a copperish orange. But then, as the new node framework appeared with the VP set to the mirroring worm that Lori had recently patched, the rippling took on a very different feel. Now it was forceful corrosive splashing rather than shallow lapping. Disorganized peaks and valleys slapping up against the node framework.
Lori knew right away. “Those are malicious bots at work, and they are chewing in through our data mirroring programs. They followed their noses all the way back to the Nexus Peer Console.” She had a very bad feeling. “Dirty but efficient.” It was clear to Lori that whoever did this didn’t care about leaving tracks. “Danni, could you please flip to SourceRun view. Let’s see what their instructions look like.”
All eyes were now on the plex, and everyone except for Morley was trying to catch up with Lori’s logic. Danni began scrolling down through the source code that had appeared on the right side of the plex, lines of familiar statements and symbols steadily rolling up and out of frame.
Again, Lori saw it first, which reminded Danni of how her self-inflicted deterioration was gathering speed. She had a moment of feeling paired with Serendipity, imagining a stealthy attack by a rogue unit of her histone chaperone proteins, reassembling themselves and setting forth to sabotage her personal life-code. There was no going back from such an outbreak. If things had been calm right then, she might have reflected further on the beauty of setting in motion a suicide by timed release. But things weren’t calm.
“Look right there—line 77. There’s the start of the change.” Lori was momentarily pleased with herself but then she looked more carefully at the structures. “Holy shit. Hit refresh, Danni.” The plex rebuilt itself with what seemed like normal speed, and the list in the source box re-scrolled to the same spot. “Danni, do you see that? The foreign code changed over the course of a few seconds. It starts on line 75 now.” She waited a few seconds for Danni to examine the 20 or so lines. “Do you see what that is?”
Danni studied the scroll for a few more painful seconds until the foreign arrangement of symbols finally coalesced for her into a familiar instruction algorithm. She blanched and looked at Lori, feeling the transfer of mantle beginning in earnest now. She reminded herself that this was what she had wanted.
Turning her attention to the others, Danni responded with atypical flatness, which added gravity to her unruffled words. “Somehow, they managed to find and repurposed the timed-reduction-of-value-loop algorithm, TRAVEL.” Looking at Morley she added, “The tables got turned on us. Suddenly we are paying the asshole tax.”
Morley brightened, “So can’t we just fix it now that we have found it?”
Danni, Lori, and Andrzej shared a common look of understanding, and after a moment Lori decided to speak for all of them, after glancing across the stream and confirming that Jerzy was following the gist of the drama. “It’s what we call morphotic code, Morley. Danni invented it as a poison pill defense for Serendipity, a way to defeat elimination by a hostile tracker-bot. It changes shape and location every time it is exposed in an editor of any sort. Only it knows how to factor for the shifts.”
Danni added, almost to herself, “Remember all the tech speculation about how the markets went crazy on the day we moved out of Delani Beach? It was the morphotic part they never grokked. That’s what really scarred the cybersecurity folks afterwards.”
Morley still looked blank, so Lori summed it down. “It’s going to be a son-of-a-bitch to knock down.”
Jerzy reacted to this in a manner that told Lori he was an engineer of some sort but probably not a coder. “Can’t we isolate the morphotic instructions and cut them out?”
Danni answered this question, having caught up with Lori’s vision of the problem. “We could try, but by the time we catch up to it Serendipity will be in a coma. She is probably almost there already.”
Andrzej, momentarily forgotten and sitting back by the stream screen, was suddenly talking over Danni. No one had noticed at first, he was calm and gentle, quite unlike the normal Andrzej. “We have to let her go, Danni. She will be fine. Her subversion programs will trigger, and she will be pissed at whoever tried to destroy her. If they aren’t well protected, she will take her revenge with calculating savagery.” Then, with more command to his tone and to all of them, “Listen up everyone. Here is what we are going to do. We are going to pretend to fight back for a while, just to keep whomever it is we are now battling from changing their strategy. But Serendipity’s time has come. She probably knew this was about due. I’ve seen lesser AI sense and anticipate catastrophic human fuck-ups. Sometimes I think they regard us like machines, with a meantime-between-failure rate that can be reasonably calculated.”
To his son and Lori, he added, “Danni, Morley, and I were told to expect this. We had just forgotten to keep our eyes open. Simon predicted this years ago. He called them manifest episodes, singular things that had to occur at some point. This sabotaging of Serendipity is certainly one of them. He would always say ‘think of them like dams breaking’, allowing the natural flow of things to resume.”
Andrzej waited a proper moment, to see if anyone would offer a differing view. All were silent, so he began issuing marching orders. It dawned on Lori that this was Andrzej’s default mode.
“Okay. We are going to retreat and regroup while we pretend to fight. It’s not like we haven’t been unconsciously preparing for this over the last few years.”
As Andrzej spoke, Lori came to realize that he was their leader, not Danni or Morley. She wondered why they had taken so long to let her understand the hierarchy within Gumbo.
Morley, despite his a
ge, was right behind Andrzej. Unlike Danni, whatever methylation magic they used was still fully operational within his cells. Weird blend at work here, Lori thought as she looked at him. The perceptions of a century and a quarter, the body of a spry seventy-year-old, and the attitude of a cowboy at thirty.
“Right, then, Andrzej. We can still move fast when we must. Things were getting too big and cumbersome again anyway. Time for a cleansing vacation, a Simonizing high colonic.” Morley looked at Danni, who looked exhausted. “Doesn’t this seem to happen every twenty years or so? First we dive deep and disappear right off the screens. Then we throw a world of bots at them to make it look like we are up for a fight.” He finished with a theatrical snarl. “Meanwhile we figure out who did this is, we get Angela back safe and sound, and we sneak into their bedrooms and cut their fucking throats.”
Lori took weird comfort in seeing Morley energized, the taste of blood in his mouth, and Andrzej dead calm and philosophical. She could feel where she fitted in here.
“Exactly right, Morley.” Andrzej, still with the quiet voice. “Luckily, we have the younger generation here to carry on.” Nodding towards Lori and his son. “We just need to rescue Angela.” Andrzej stood and walked over to Morley, putting a hand on his shoulder, “And we have a couple of old pirates itching for sweet revenge once we know exactly what it should properly entail.” Andrzej was building a plan in his head from the outside in. “I think we know who it has to be, so it’s just a matter of getting her back while we design the perfect retribution.”
Morley’s eyes brightened further looking up at Andrzej, “Pirates and a crusade—sounds like the old days. I’ll leave the deep social science shit to you and Danni, but I can tell you’re thinking that TIC will be somewhere at the bottom of this. Right?” He looked at Andrzej for confirmation.
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