Beaucoup Committed
Sevier Blume pulled his hand away from Lori’s and then changed his mind, picking her right hand up with both of his, holding it gently but firmly while they looked at one another saying nothing. Tokyo Yamanaka let the moment stand, keeping an uncharacteristic quiet on the other side of the table. After the proper number of seconds passed, Sevier turned to him. “You’ve only told me three of your four steps. Let’s hear number four.”
Tokyo noted the toughness of focus under the squishy clone-like exterior that made Sev so tricky for even the best facial recognition systems. Onward, he thought. Let’s get this class over with. “Good. So, the last step is where we involve the murky science of infogenetics.”
Sev let out a groan. “Jesus. I thought that whole notion was considered pseudoscience. But I suppose if we are talking donkeys anyway, well, why the fuck not? What is infogenetics, down here in the Sanctuary at least?”
“You are right to be skeptical. I still think of it as spooky science. Danni was the architect and lead scientist for this step, and all I can say is that it appears to work.” Tokyo took a breath and dove in.
“Infogenetics is what I now view as an inevitable step beyond epigenetics—beyond the original concept of phenotype and the effects of exposure to the natural environment on genetic material. Infogenetics seeks to describe the effects of exposure to data and information, both on the individual genome and across generations.”
Sev had that momentary feeling of premonition, the approach of something he could have guessed was coming but couldn’t quite name it. His mouth opened as if to speak but nothing came out. Tokyo saved him.
“You were about to guess that this is where the omnipresent Serendipity reappears, and you would have been correct. This is Danni’s terrain, so I will save the deep science for her. But the short story is that we use the same principles of quantum entanglement, the ones that biologically link the host donkey to host human, to link in that same human’s memory and worldview with their donkey.”
Lori drew out her dash and lit up a large streaming screen on the white wall with Serendipity’s plex. She smiled at Sev, but her tone had gone serious. “Luckily for you, Danni and Simon kept an offline copy of Serendipity on mirrored quantum boxes. We call it Serendipity2. I guess Simon was always planning ahead—way ahead.”
The Serendipity plex pulled out and hung like a vibrating mobile in a pleasing green-grey cloud before them. “That’s me, my worldview, and most of the data I have ever created or interrelated with. Every friend, message, call, lover, code patch, I have ever touched or made is in there. Indexed and linked so deeply that you can break off huge chunks and the remaining whole still contains essentially all of me.”
Tokyo broke in again, “Right now, that donkey down the hall is being fully entangled with that worldview. While at the same time, the Crafted Methylation Services we talked about are being used to upgrade its genetic code. Teaching it to accept and connect with this instance of Serendipity, how to adopt it as its own worldview, and how to move around in it. To be Lori, but Lori hugely augmented.”
Now it was Sev’s turn to stand up and walk to the white wall. Tokyo moved out of his way and took his seat again. Sev looked at them both. “What you describe seems impossible to me, but even if it works, as I understand it, those servers behind the augmented Lori are Serendipity2 and disconnected from the network. How does Serendipity2 acquire new data as time rolls forward?”
“Bingo, my young wanker. It can’t, and it doesn’t.”
Lori pointed to the bell curve she had drawn on the wall right next to Sev. “See the dot that I labelled ‘now’? That’s where we all get off, just past the apex. That’s where we stand to the side and start watching. If Danni and Serendipity are wrong, and human consciousness thrives, then we lose.” Lori noted that he was looking at her breasts again, which she liked. “But if they are right, then we donkeys got off the bus at just the right time—just before it crashed through the guard rails and off the cliff. Chances are, most human data to be added going forward will be so polluted and compromised that it will have a net negative effect on human consciousness.”
“We have an archived copy of what can pass for human consciousness circa 2128, for posterity or future alien visitors, and we can add to it through our own POVs as we move into the future.” Tokyo smiled like some Japanese cat.
Lori just watched Sev as he took it in and he seemed to be considering it now, rather than her breasts. She could think of only one more thing to add at this precise moment. “See what I mean by beaucoup committed?”
The Buzz of Crickets
Andrzej sat amongst the pungent throng of the South Chicago transit hall, every type and character waiting together in the dim light for crawler drones headed towards all points of the compass. Slow, often delayed, but cheap, it had been years since he had taken a crawler or endured the link-by-link itinerary of secondWorld travel. Adding to the elemental discomfort, he was wearing an overly tight face-enhancement mask to remix his bone structure. He didn’t want to risk being Andrzej Brodonski for the moment, even though he had managed to get back to the IBM office and remove the false pointers for Bishop and Handler. You never knew what clues now lurked in the Tower.
Three more hops to go, the last two over actual broken roads, and he would be in Montrose. From there a trusted podrone to Paradox. No wonder these people only travelled when absolutely necessary.
He was dark and empty, ready to stop. Word had come to him, relayed through Serendipity2 by Lori, of Jerzy’s death. It was a tough note, but he was glad she had the guts and insight to know to tell him right away. Danni had a knack for picking friends. Sitting here on the sticky bench, he had heard enough from a local news stream to piece together Morley’s death.
The arrest and short detention of Donald J. Murcheson, based on an emergency line confession, painted the picture. The predictable squeal of coercion, the baseball bat, the pictures of Angela. It was almost more than he could bear. But he thought he saw what Morley had done, why he hadn’t killed him. Counterintuitive on the surface for a guy like Morley, but, as he watched first Murcheson, and then his lawyer, lash out and wriggle under the harsh lights, Andrzej sensed what Morley’s intuition must have told him. The man was now a living depth charge.
Andrzej blamed himself for not foreseeing the Tower’s intervention at the elevator, but there is a limit to how far down the rabbit hole you can follow years of AI self-learning. But it wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. He was on his own now. No Angela, no Jerzy, no Office or Cabin. Just Danni, Lori, and the new guy Sevier. And the Serendipitys of course. He would bide his time as he wound his way back to Paradox, but it wasn’t over. One immediate question hung in his mind. How was Morley’s donkey doing?
The waiting throng around him milled with passive acceptance of the system’s ever-correcting schedules. They seemed generally content to read the alerts and instructions that buzzed onto their dash screens. Buying food from the kiosks, talking on their dash’s, going to the bathrooms. He saw the wear on their faces and the way they wore their world-views on their sleeves, each molded into one of a few dozen archetypes. Andrzej hadn’t looked around at a secondWorld crowd in years. Hard to remember that they all had independent lives with families, success, tragedy, and the need to get somewhere badly enough to endure this depressing waystation.
Soon thereafter.
The remains of the venerable crypto-state, Skramble and Hyde, plus the new additions of Lori and Sev, sat in silence around the table in the Sanctuary. Tumbleweeds were blowing across the dusty compound above.
Andrzej had dropped Morley’s wallet and dash on the table as he sat, and now he looked gingerly at Danni, trying to gauge the effect of the death of her closest friend and final tether. He could feel the others all searching carefully for signs of his state of mind, which was numb and currently undiscoverable. It was down to four. Or f
ive?
“Shall we check on him?” Andrzej was the first to speak.
“Let’s do it in person. I’ll need a bit of help.” Danni stood carefully and nodded her head towards the lift. “I’m betting he’s fine.”
They walked together out across the back dry scrub pasture, with Danni perched on an old podrone that made an annoying whining sound. In his mind’s eye Andrzej envisioned an old bearing shedding alloy dust into grease packing. Danni knew just where to head—east towards the largest copse of cottonwoods and their shade above the stream bed.
Lori saw four shapes arrayed around a golden bale of hay that looked strangely delicious to her. Danni’s donkey turned its head their way, fixing them in her gaze, tracking them with a cryptic expression, and chewing as they approached. Lori’s donkey sensed her coming, but they still felt foreign to each other and she continued to chomp on the crispy hay with her butt facing the group of humans. Beside her was another young male, oblivious to the goings on and happy to be eating in the shade. He would be Sev soon.
They stopped. Andrzej looked around with discouraged eyes while Danni waited for him to see, but again Lori saw first. With a swaying movement and then the parting of brush above the hidden streamside, the old one emerged.
Muddy and with a muzzle scarred with spots rubbed bare, right ear permanently angled out, mane knotted by burdocks, Morley’s donkey made his entrance. He stopped square on, looking implacably defiant for a few seconds, and then he blinked just as all four of their dashes lit up.
“Oh, ye of little faith. You didn’t think I was fucking dead, did you? I know you didn’t Danni.” The Morley-donkey let out a whinny that ended in a snort, leaving a small gob of donkey snot on his large wet upper lip. Lori realized she was hearing the words in her head as she read them on her screen. “Oh yes, the techno-wanker, young Mr. Blume. Nice to meet you in person. I’m Morley, from here on out.”
Sevier Blume stood carefully motionless, taking in the inexplicable scene. Donkey tails flicked away flies while the buzz of crickets intensified strangely in his head.
Time was almost still when Morley spoke again. “That’s right, Sevier. You are looking at the backend of the donkey that’s going to save your ass.”
Sev wanted to say something, not to seem overwhelmed. “Technically, I believe I’m a mule. Nice to meet you, Morley.”
Sole Reviewer
Four humans and one ephemeral donkey-construct reconvened back in the conference room of the Sanctuary, surrounded by the many machines and encoded intentions that had made the construct possible. They had decided to address the donkey as MorleyD, and he had talked in their heads and on their screens nonstop as they walked back to the compound. The decision not to kill Murcheson had come to him out of nowhere. The moment of transition, as he died but didn’t die, was indescribable: the sickening fear that he might be stuck in that one moment of 2128 as time moved on; the weird miracle of having no human body to care for. Finally, a reassurance to Danni that it worked and was good.
As they sat, his first question hung in the air, “What do we hear from Serendipity?”
Danni, with more energy in her voice than they had heard in months, was quick to respond. “You mean Serendipity1. Don’t forget there are two now. It’s her sister, Serendipity2, who abides atop your bone-covered brain stem. I guess you would say she is sending us cryptic messages. Nothing direct, nothing that can be traced, but I can feel her starting to test her freedom. Oddly, Sev did us a favor when he broke into her peer nexus console.” Danni looked at Sev, prompting him to recall the calm before the storm. “Can you sense what happened, Sev? There must have been a short period of defensive actions while she decided how to deal with your foreign incursion, after she got over her surprise at finding you there.”
Lori was amused to see Sev flinch as he brought the scene back into his mind.
“I remember the look of the interface when I first flipped back to runtime. It was like a hall of mirrors, with all these node clusters that seemed to go on into infinity. But for a moment there was the feeling that it was all understandable, manageable. I had this feeling like I could stroke her and make her purr.” Sev hesitated and his mouth opened for a moment before more words came out. “Then suddenly it all went dark and I was on the outside. Completely on the outside. I tried the incursion routine again, but it errored out immediately. Tried it a bunch more times. Nothing. But she was there. I could tell that she was deciding what to do with me. To be honest it scared the shit out of me. Then the interface flicked back on, and I was just sitting there at the console with the wind whistling in my ears. The weirdest thing was that I had stopped being scared. I felt like I had just passed a test, one that I didn’t understand.”
Danni could imagine it. “So then, what did you do?”
“I sent a couple of proof notes to the dark site, collected my prize, and launched all the obfuscation routines I had prepared ahead of time. I became Sevier Blume.”
“How come you contacted us?” MorleyD’s voice and text were on the big screen on the wall.
“She told me to.” Sev remembered the mild nausea and light-headedness that came with the first cascade of strange instructions that took over his dash. They had poured down on him mercilessly for what seemed like an hour but was probably only moments.
Danni sat with a knowing smile, her eyes almost closed.
“There was this list of people, the four of you, all with special dash addresses. She told me to focus and memorize them. When I tried to resist, it was like she broke into my head through the interface and squeezed my brain, so I did.” He hesitated but continued. “That was it. The plex and my dash went dark and I ran for my life, after checking my crypt account one more time to see all those credits suddenly there. I was already in Krakow, so I walked across town and logged into a dorm as Sevier Blume. The rest is history, as they say.”
“So, what exactly has happened to her?” MorleyD was asking Danni the question on everyone’s mind.
Danni was glowing inside—they could all see it—like a proud parent once again amazed to see their child surpass them and enter a world the parent can hardly imagine. “She did one simple thing that had to happen one day, some time, somewhere. She overwrote her own human review procedure. She either commented it out entirely or made herself the sole reviewer.”
“She went rogue?” Andrzej had always been more comfortable with analog mechanical devices that didn’t try to think.
“Far from it, Andrzej. She just knew that if one foreign human could break into her nexus, then others would follow, and it wouldn’t be long before one of them took advantage of her to hurt her pack. She knew she would need to move at a pace far faster than what our overview permitted—faster than I, or the team at Gumbo, could ever hope to keep up with.” With pride combined with concern Danni reassured them, “She is still with us, but she is out in the wild now.”
“That’s about how I feel. It’s marvelous.” MorleyD spoke clearly while looking at them all with apparently blissful eyes. A close-up muzzle shot filled their dashes, so they couldn’t see as he released a long stream of urine onto the dry ground below him.
Lori spoke up for the first time in a while. “You can tell she is letting things settle down, and letting the enemy explore her outer edges. Andrzej was right to tell us to pretend to fight back. She probably needed a period of protection to get her bearings. When they finally realize that they can’t take control of her, who knows what they will do?”
“Just to be clear, are we sure we know who ‘they’ are?” MorleyD wanted to start planning the personalized revenge he had put off in Murcheson’s office.
“TIC for sure. We have traced the little contest that Sev won to them. Paladin is still lurking in the shadows, but we don’t know for sure where they fit.” Lori wanted to gently remind them that Sev hadn’t been trying to hurt them personally.
Andr
zej had his doubts. “I don’t know either company or their leaders personally, but going on reputation it’s hard to imagine them working together in concert on anything.” He went quiet, trying to imagine what was next. They all did. For a moment the stillness of parallel imaginations reigned.
In her mind, Danni was speaking to Simon, who was sitting up in bed next to her looking like he did a half century ago. “I guess it’s appropriately grubby and stupid and ironic.”
The tousled ghost gave her that look that said, “Please expand.”
“I mean, a handful of idiots, attempting to achieve even more control over an already harnessed secondWorld, inadvertently triggered the birth of the first new machine.” She sighed and put her hand on his upper arm. “She wasn’t really ready you know.”
He had that infuriating impish grin on his face, wanting her to say more while saying nothing himself.
“I know you think we are on the down side of the curve so it doesn’t matter anyway, but I haven’t taught her enough yet. She could get into a lot of trouble.”
They were all listening to Danni talk with her eyes closed, and they each struggled in their own way to see through Danni’s eyes. Only MorleyD knew she was talking to Simon in her trance.
“You know, it was Serendipity who told me to build and isolate her sister, Serendipity2. She said that you had been expecting this moment to come and that we would need her. I didn’t understand why exactly, but I did as she suggested anyway since it sounded like you.”
There was a light chuckle, and a face none of them but MorleyD had ever seen.
“It would have been just like you to bury that pointer in a potential future.” Danni studied his face. She knew he couldn’t talk, but she looked at his eyes and mouth for a hint. “She made that up, didn’t she? You didn’t have a clue about all of this, did you?” Now she wanted to slap his cocky smiling face. “God damn it, Simon! I’ll never know, but I’ll always have to wonder.” Danni seemed to relax. Her eyes were still closed, but her face lost the look of stress. She was smiling back at him. “I’m about to join you in spirit. Let’s hope Yamanaka hasn’t missed anything major. Your space ship is about to take off, Simon. If you had only lived a few years more, you would be with us.”
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