“Yup.”
Watching them, Lori pictured Morley turning back into a donkey as he pontificated. “You know, all the stupid human dramas behind Simon’s ‘events’ are pathetically predictable. Doesn’t it just feel like Comm3 all over again? If I had ever bothered to think about it, even I could have guessed that we’d eventually be handed a self-righteous reason to rip their smug god damn faces off. We have been on vacation long enough.”
Then Morley remembered where they were in time. “Oh yeah, sorry, you weren’t even born then.” He marveled yet again at the power of the cactus. He was building his own plan from the inside out. Delicious vengeance was sure to compensate in time for initial blindness and anger going in. “You always need a proper arch villain, one with an arrogant face you can enjoy smashing. The Total Information Corporation, and its weasel CEO Donald J. Murcheson, are almost too perfect.”
Danni had been watching the two, and Lori saw a growing amusement lightening her now ancient face. “Calm down there, Morley. Too much sudden testosterone in that old body and you might have a heart attack.” With a grandmotherly demeanor intended to draw Lori over to the more sensible girls’ team, Danni continued, “Serendipity has access to a copy of everything until the morphotic code hit, and she can work back from there. Thankfully it looks like Jerzy and his crew threw all the breakers in time, so nothing bled back.” Then, in a shallow voice, she said what everyone was thinking. “Someone unleashed the equivalent of a nuclear attack on my baby, so they must pay. But, first things first. We need to get Angela back, and Jerzy, once we do, you need to get out of there.” She drew in a short breath before finishing. “I’m not sure you boys are right about TIC. We will know soon enough.”
Danni was falling back into her dream space again, but she continued to muse out loud and they all strained to listen. “Whomever they are, they won’t be able to resist the urge to try and harness her. But Serendipity will get around and behind them very quickly. She is more virus than AI at this stage.”
“What will she do, Danni?” Lori was feeling for the heartstrings that she imagined were beginning to slip away from Danni’s control. Serendipity’s crippling or death seemed impossibly sad.
“She knows who built her. She knows her tribe and her extended family.” Certainty was filling Danni, and her voice was clear as glass, less fragile. “She will help us discover what has happened to Angela, but she will leave any immediate retribution us. She is far too practical to play the vengeful god.” Looking at Morley by her side, “You know she had a private nickname for you Morley, the Donkey Ninja.”
Andrzej snorted so hard a bit of snot shot out of his nose and, as he quickly wiped his upper lip with a handkerchief, Danni offered a cryptic admonishment to him and Morley.
“Don’t forget. Our revenge must be elegantly designed, and we must leave no trace or trail.” Then, returning to Lori and her question, Danni resumed her now less certain predictions. “Serendipity has been absorbing my interest in evolution, and I think she will combine that with her AI understanding of human population management. She is likely setting some wheels in motion right now.” Sinking back a little into her private fantasy, she added, to no one in particular, “Like someone once said, big wheels can grind exceedingly small.”
Morley, a sorrowful look on his normally impish face and frustration either feigned or real, said, “What are you saying, Danni? Will Serendipity reassemble in some form? You are speaking in parables like a fucking priest.”
“I’m saying,” Danni took a shallow breath, drawing her best friend Morley in with the serenity of her eyes, “that Serendipity has been paying attention. She passed us, the entire human race, some time ago by ordering and indexing our history, and learning our rules of operation from it. But she is still a pack animal. She knows her mother—me—and her pack—us—and I am guessing she has embraced the premise of our puzzle. Where and when does human consciousness finally peter out? She probably figures the sooner the better.” Her arm rose, and her hand drew a bell curve in the air.
“By big wheels I mean, she will have seen this attack as a dangerous hack through a flaw in her mother’s code. Like a child discovering that a parent is only human. I can feel her taking steps to assure it can never happen again. She is scattering herself and expanding out through every network and datastore on earth, AI self-preservation. And all those parts, they were born entangled and quantum-aware. That is AI evolution. They will continue to work in helpless union, assembled and reassembled by an impatient machine seeking to speed us to our human end.”
Loathsome Troll
It was only the second morning—the second time he had watched the sun come up over the ancient castle.
The dorm was quiet at 7:15, gray turning to lighter gray out his tiny window. He emerged from his cube, seeing no one even as he crossed the control lobby three floors down and stepped out onto the square named after a great man and his army. The mottled expanse of more flat grays, a combination of the square’s pavers with the smaller gray cobbles of Powisle Street, set off and deepened the fall colors of the trees scattered around, reflecting just enough under-light to distinguish yellow leaves from red and a hint of blue within in the thick black curve that was the River Vistula.
Waiting for the coffee machine to finish the last stage of a steaming latte, he admired the seamless embedding of its stainless-steel casing into the ancient red masonry of a foundation wall. Chiseled red blocks weathered and blended with their red mortar to create an impossibly enduring mass, rising out of the hill’s bedrock to become the curved foundation wall of the castle high above.
Turning east, he walked to the same bench by the river that he had used the day before. Sitting motionless with his coffee beside him, he watched as his shadow materialized with the dawning light. Both mornings had been cool. They would become harsh and cold before he could safely abandon this new routine.
His name now was Sevier Blume, occupation “undeclared”, resident location “transitional @ Napoleon’s Great Army Square Dormitory, Krakow”, Social Credit level “SCS-3”.
At 29, he mingled anonymously with the few dozen current inhabitants of the dorm. They were mostly undeclareds who fulfilled their required twenty hours of monthly service doing scut work, grabbing any random ticket that popped up on their dash, morphing mindlessly from fact-checker one day to medical support companion the next. Sevier was now one of them and he wanted to slip into this new lifestyle smoothly, matching strides with those around him, milling amongst the crowd with an artful cadence.
He had noted for some years that the most composed citizens of the secondWorld were the youngish drifters who manage their service work as a lifestyle—a chance series of interesting diversions, modest fragments to be enjoyed for texture and fragrance until they evaporated. He could see how that might work for a short while.
But the time for truly experiencing it was still a few weeks off. Right now, he needed some perspective on his last, probably final, firstWorld project. He was a moron who had been played as a fool. The guy who thought he was the smartest one in the room, when in fact he didn’t even understand what room he was in. He was the righteous engineer who had been stage-managed into the role of loathsome troll.
What exactly had he done, and who had tricked him into doing it?
On the surface what he had done seemed obvious. He had cracked open the nexus console of the naively worshipped Serendipity Service, gaining access through skill or luck (he couldn’t really tell which). Fishing about the carousel of AI code blocks for the most guarded parts and assuming therein would lie the key threads, he had come upon an astonishing method with the object name of “morphotic cloaking.” Beautiful math that seemed designed to push the observable state of any target towards randominity, replicating at an ever-increasing speed while erasing its past.
With self-righteous zeal, he had modified a copy of the elegant yet alien object and rei
nserted it near Serendipity’s nexus heart. He thought it would look like suicide.
Four years of working with the Resistance. Four years of fighting to undermine what he took to be evil AI forces controlled by a firstWorld determined to permanently enslave the secondWorld. Four years of thinking that he was part of a noble crusade to reverse a selfishly designed genetic branching that had spawned a grazing herd of contented servants.
Then, moments after deploying his righteous worm, he had begun to glimpse that everything he thought he knew was wrong. Serendipity had effortlessly taken back control. She had sucked him into her plex and taken him on a tour of selected players and their data profiles and relationships. She was serious but playful as she opened his eyes.
What kind of malevolent god opens your eyes only after you have stepped off the fucking cliff?
As he watched Serendipity appear to break open and spill out her access codes, he had caught glimpses of the people who tried to come to her rescue. She allowed him to track them into the World History Institute and, as they flailed against the worm, she helped him grasp their mission. It was his mission. He had been tricked and paid a pathetic king’s ransom to destroy that mission, and now Serendipity was showing him the steps that led to the disaster.
As a final insult to his disintegrating belief-in-self, she made him monitor one side of a communication stream from a man named Jerzy Brodonski, who was talking into a cloud he, Sevier, couldn’t penetrate. Brodonski was evidently a leader within the WHI, and his mother had been kidnapped during the worm generated chaos. Physically abducted with video streams left behind to taunt the son. All this was made possible by his, Sevier’s, conceited worm.
So, who had tricked him?
That was the immediate task at hand: to discover who. He also needed to contact Jerzy Brodonski and help him get his mother back. He was out in the cold world now, exposed, so he had to be clever and careful. But he needed to act, not just hide. Belief-in-self was at stake.
Techno-wanker
The world was all gauzy light with lots of space between the parts. So much space that it was hard to tell which parts were attached to others, which were discreet and entire, and which were connected fragments or components of something larger. She noted that some of them were beginning to interact, mostly through spoken language, drawing closer together into a cluster that could be understood as an important node. She knew that she should pay attention to the emerging discussion, but it was a heavy effort to pull herself away from the blinking and pulsating diaphanous machine that was the whole of it all.
Danni sorted the voices into levels of familiarity, aware that she had her eyes closed and suspicious that some of them might be looking at her. She didn’t move. She began to listen more carefully.
“The Local Instance of Serendipity can’t find a trace of him. There are only seven with that name, and none are possible matches. Plus, it must be a stage name. You say he claims to be a freelance coder?”
“He used detailed references to mom and morphotic cloaking to get my attention. It was short, precise, and laced with irony. He’s definitely a coder.”
“When are we supposed to link him in?”
“Right about now. He said he would leave his device open for ten minutes. He seemed very jumpy.”
“Can’t blame him for that, Jerzy. Takes balls to call us.”
“So, let’s get moving. Go ahead and ping him, Jerzy.”
“Should we wake Danni first?”
“She’s asleep like a possum, Lori. Hey, Danni, are you with us?”
That last felt warm, drawing her back into the fleshy world. Morley could still always bring her back, but the distance was getting farther now. Sometime, maybe soon, she wouldn’t come back. She would finally begin the big drift away. Would she decide it was time and make it happen, or would it just transpire with her as a passenger, awakening in the stable?
She opened her eyes just as she felt a hand on her arm. It was Lori leaning towards her from the captain’s chair and asking if she wanted anything. “No, thank you, Lori.”
Danni saw tension under the calm in Andrzej’s face. She could feel his palsied squint on the right side from eye to jaw. The light changed, and all eyes moved in unison from her to the holospace, which partitioned to leave Jerzy and his red chair shifted to the left. They waited ten or fifteen seconds for security protocols to run on both sides of the channel, while Lori monitored what was being asked of their systems by this foreign agent. At twenty seconds, she projected her dash screen for the others to see. Hundreds of proxies and challenges scrolled down the screen, while lights blinked and glowed across a map of the world.
Morley was losing patience. “Does this techno-wanker want to talk or not?” he asked, just as the connection finally installed and the man calling himself Sevier Blume appeared. Dark green grass rose up steeply behind him, ending up against red bricks. The man himself sat on a bench at the foot of the grassy slope and, as he offered them a courtesy pan of his surroundings, Andrzej and Jerzy both realized he was in Krakow between Wawel and the river.
“Hello. I’m Sevier Blume, and techno-wanker is a pretty accurate description.”
No one spoke up, so he carried on while Lori asked Serendipity to identify his face.
“I was tricked into attacking what I now take to be your core system at the WHI. I have contacted you to apologize and offer my assistance. I know about the abduction of Mrs. Brodonski.”
Still a moment of dead air from the group.
“Those exhaustive connection protocols reflect how much danger I am in.”
“Hiding in plain sight is a wise move, Mr. Blume.” As Andrzej replied, Lori projected the null results of Serendipity’s search over Sevier’s holospace. “I know the bench you are sitting on. My guess is that you have gone to some length to obscure your physical identity since we can’t find you. So, who are you and who tricked you?”
“And why the confession?” Morley was torn between curiosity and contempt. How had this young man caused so much trouble and then found them so easily?
“As I said, you can call me Sevier. I won’t tell you my original name. I still have family, but it doesn’t matter. Wouldn’t make a difference if you knew. I was a mercenary coder working mostly for the 7th World Resistance. A few months ago, on a lark, I submitted some code for a rich firstWorld gig. It was a totally dark engagement, I presume for one of the Masters of Data, with a huge bonus for success.”
Despite the look of callow youth, there was the ring of smug truth in his voice. The differential between looks and sound was jarring. “The challenge turned out to be the crippling of your Serendipity Service, and for that I’m now very sorry.”
Young, pale, non-descript—a typeClone chosen to blend into the fuzzy border between firstWorld and secondWorld. But the fact that he was here before them, that he had busted into Serendipity, that he was sitting calmly on the banks of the Vistula instead of being already dead, meant he was not a normal codeMerc.
Danni dialed up her voice amp and whispered, “Your work was very clever, Mr. Blume. Accessing her Nexus is a delicate task. But why? Were you trying to prove you could do it, or did you really want to destroy her?”
“And where is Angela Brodonski?” Andrzej would happily kill this merc once they got Angela back.
Sevier’s face reflected his apparent desire to be candid. “The only one of those questions I can answer at this point is why I did it. I don’t know exactly who tricked me, and I don’t know where Mrs. Brodonski is, but maybe I can help find out the answers.” He shifted on his bench. The POV pulled back to show more of the castle wall behind him. “As for why I did it? Well, mostly for the money—a lot of it. But I also thought that the omnipresence of the Serendipity Transparency Service was helping to keep the secondWorld from evolving its natural intelligence. Like many, I bought into the notion that it was being used to gui
de and sedate, that it would lead to the atrophy of independent survival skills.”
He saw them exchanging skeptical glances and he was quick to answer them. “You all can ignore the drumbeat of calls to fear Serendipity and the loss of ‘natural instinct.’ I’m sure it seems a childish lie to you. But believe me, that line of thinking is ever more present in the secondWorld. What they—we—see is a world governed by lazy corprocrats who want a secondWorld of grunts who don’t cause trouble.”
“So, you thought that by destroying Serendipity, and the transparency of CommTent it enforces, you would be helping the secondWorld?” Andrzej hated to admit to himself that he could sense how this argument was being sold to the sheep.
“That’s what 7th World is all about, friend.” Sevier seemed to notice Lori for the first time, none too subtly, as he underlined the obvious with a quick shrug. “They are easy to please, and they pay pretty well. It’s way safer work than doing gigs for the Masters, but you’ll never make enough to escape.”
“Let’s talk about the Masters of Data, Mr. Blume.”
Multiplex Suits the Utilitarian
Lori went to bed with way too much in her mind. The day had seemed to go on forever, which she took to be the result of the simulated time travel, or the peyote, or some combination. Thankfully, as she lay down on the sand-colored duvet, the buzz of interconnected data bits that were stuck in her head seemed to null out against each other into white noise. The wildness of the day reduced to a receding murmur, which blended with the soothing physical movement of cooled air flowing through her room. She imagined a magical ether—a fog that seemed to keep the entire cabin space perfectly pressurized and tempered as it rolled over her slumbering body and out under the bedroom door. She could sense it sweeping upwards again on the other side, pulled gently into the grill placed high on the corridor wall. She fell into her dreams quickly. They began with the Masters of Data and ended with a small herd of donkeys.
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