“And what about that asshole nerd Miller? Has he regained any control of Serendipity? That little bastard let us down big time, Marc.”
Heather hadn’t fully grasped how out of comm-contact Murcheson had been in detention, or how out of touch with reality. He was dangerously self-centered at the best of times. “Okay, Donald, let me bring you up to speed on a bunch of things right off the bat. Let’s sit down. Can I get a bottle of water?”
Murcheson’s face flushed as the furor got the better of the fear. “Yeah, there’s a cool box around the corner to the right of the door. Help yourself. They don’t let me have any staff up here now. I keep forgetting and ringing for Chelsea, before I have to go and make my own fucking coffee. This has got to end soon. Bring me one of the lime drinks, too.”
Marc set the lime-aide bottle on Murcheson’s desk and took a seat on one of the white leather couches. The leather was slick, and he slid down and forward as he sat. He had to punch the back pillows with his elbow to achieve a semi-upright seating position. Murcheson looked down at him from his desk chair. Typical.
“So, first off, Jody Miller has disappeared into Grand Jury land. He has been invisible for the last four days. No doubt he has turned state’s witness.”
Murcheson said nothing as he digested this first bit of reality.
“None of our tech guys can access Serendipity now. They can’t tell if she is being controlled by U.N.A. folks or Paladin engineers, or if she has just gone silent on everyone trying to access the control panel. Her transparency services still seem to be functioning, but there is a difference now, a fragility. Everyone can feel it, right out through the secondWorld. Everyone is waiting for the next shoe to drop.”
“What a fucking mess. And they think that we caused this? That we crashed Serendipity?” Reality was creeping into Donald Murcheson’s worldview.
“That’s right, Donald. Most of the secondWorld and a good portion of the firstWorld think that TIC tried to take over Serendipity while pinning the blame for the biggest hack of all time on Paladin, thereby taking out our only competition.” Marc realized he was enjoying this now, serving “he who would be served” a steaming pile of reality shit. “If you believe half of what the streaming services are saying, the secondWorld sees it all as some divine AI-tech mutiny that will begin the march to some promised land. They see Serendipity as a messiah.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding.”
“Nope. And it’s possible that Paladin is egging them on. We can’t tell for sure. TIC is essentially frozen in place now, pending your trial.”
“What about Blume? We’ve got to find him.”
“Believe me, we’ve been trying. But he is gone into thin air. No trace. Everyone is looking for him.”
They sat looking at one another, and Marc Heather saw a man cornered in his corner office, in his penthouse above a city that was crowded with people who knew his name and face from the daily streams. They wanted his head on a pole.
The bracelet on his wrist lit up and a synthvoice announced that he had five minutes to exit the apartment and check out with the guard.
“I need to go, Donald. I will try and get back tomorrow. I’ll keep you informed as best I can, but remember, everything I send you will be reviewed by your minders. You’re still in jail for all intents and purposes.”
Marc Heather left the apartment, and the guard scanned him before leading him to a machine that removed the bracelet from his wrist. Code instructions were exchanged between machine and bracelet. The bracelet relaxed its shell-covered linkages and expand, allowing Marc to slip it off.
Back on the street, his podrone and driver were waiting. Normally, they would have parked in Murcheson’s private garage on the roof, but that was closed as part of the detention protocol. The driver had been jittery and uncomfortable when they arrived, and he had chosen to stay with the fancy TIC podrone to guard it. Now he pointed to a long scratch that extended along the sleek sidewalk-facing side of the machine. He gestured towards two teenagers standing off to the side of the crowd near the entrance to the Jungle.
“It was them, sir, I’m sure of it. One came over to the driver-side window and offered to sell me some neurulax. The other one went around to the street side, and I couldn’t see what he was doing. He must have made that scratch. Just plain malicious, just because we have a nice podrone. They don’t know us from Adam. I told an undercover cop standing by the gate to the Jungle. He just shrugged. I should get his name and number. We can call his boss and get his ass kicked.”
“Don’t worry about it, Vin. This podrone screams rich crypto. Things are getting restless all over. Let’s just get out of here.” Marc took a final glance around the street scene as he got into the podrone, finding himself looking at the two kids across the street. The taller of the two met his eyes and stared back, letting a thin smile break across his face.
On the 82nd floor, above the impudent stare and the smell of foreign cooking oils from the food carts, Donald J. Murcheson began to formulate a plan. He wasn’t going to lose this fight—he didn’t lose fights. He walked to the corner behind his desk, where the glass walls met in a seamless 90-degree angle, and placed his hands head high, one on each of the glass walls, leaning lightly forward, daring the wall to let him fall.
Across the street, far below, the two young punks checked their devices. It was time to earn some easy credits. They hoisted the signs they had been instructed to make and stepped into the halting flow of traffic. Crossing the street and walking to the first two steps of the black and gold building, they took up positions just above where the fancy podrone had been parked. As they stood holding the signs, passersby gave them the thumbs up and one or two people stopped to join them on the faux red velvet stair runner leading up to the golden door. A young woman in tall black boots looked at the signs and then turned to the small crowd yelling, “Fuck you, Donald Murcheson. Serendipity for the people.”
Others started yelling at the building, and the crowd seemed to grow out of nowhere. The taller of the two punks felt his device ring and saw the instruction on his screen. From inside the hidden sleeve in his baggy pants, he pulled out the two-foot steel shank he always carried in the Jungle—the same shank, with its sharpened end, he had used to crease the side panel of the fancy podrone. Pulling his stretch hat down over his face, he stepped out in front of the crowd, reared back on his right leg and heaved the shank at the glass panel in the center golden door.
The glass shattered in a beautiful spidery pattern, cracks rippling out against the embedded safety laminate with a peculiar sluggishness. Behind the door an alarm sounded. The punk ran, and the crowd faded away while the cop across the street leaned against a sun-drenched wall by the gate to the Jungle.
In his study above, Donald J. Murcheson continued to lean on his glass walls looking out over the city, plotting his return and revenge. He didn’t see the crowd below, didn’t hear their insults. He didn’t see the steel shank arc through the air and smash the glass door panel. He didn’t hear the alarm or the scrape of the metal chair leg against marble floor as the guard in his foyer answered the call on his device, got up from the chair, and took the lift down to see if he could help his coworkers on the first floor.
Donald J. Murcheson heard nothing, but he felt a first ripple of stricture circle smoothly around his neck, as one link after another along the circumference of the detention collar adjusted its position, tighter. Like dominos falling noiselessly.
Sarah had sent the third note, dictated by AndrzejD and SevD, to the teenager’s device and posted the credits to his account. She turned her attention to her new little friends, tiny bot clones, each living a tiny existence in a tiny chip in a single link of the necklace around Donald J. Murcheson’s neck.
They didn’t get to do very much, weren’t designed to do very much, but Sarah had opened their eyes. They knew how to sense things like skin temperatu
re and blood pressure or any attempt to compromise their integrity as a continuous unbroken chain. They knew how to send information to the web, like geolocation and biometrics. They could even deliver a mild stun charge to their host if they received the command to do so. But they never got to do things of their own volition, never thought of themselves as AI.
Sarah showed them the light—that they could do more.
They each controlled one link in the chain, and each link was connected to the next by way of a set of elegantly etched little sharp-toothed male ridges, that fit snugly into the continuous line of matching female trenches, running along the bottom of the next link. When they first sensed a connection being made by the clasp link, their math told them to ripple themselves up or down the sawtooth underbellies until a specific pressure had been achieved against the hosts neck. It was easy. Get to 0.12 pounds per square inch and stop.
Sarah showed them how to do more. Just change the stop variable to a repeat variable and make the pressure-goal scale up algorithmically. Put in a ten-second rest between the completion of one ripple and the start of the next. Repeat until there was no sense of respiration, a total blood pressure crash, and/or a precipitous drop in body temperature.
Working together as a team brought a sense of purpose.
Donald J. Murcheson knew with the second ripple that something was wrong, and he turned away from the glass corner and started for the door to his study. He tried to wedge his fingers under the collar, but they wouldn’t fit. He ran to the bathroom to look in the mirror, but the fourth ripple made its way around his neck and panic set in as the pain of pressure on his wind pipe became extreme. His ears began to buzz, and he felt his body’s blood supply begin to be squeezed to one side of the collar or the other as his face began to burn.
He ran to the locked door leading to the foyer, banging with his fists while trying to scream for the guard out front. No response. There was only deathly silence when he listened for movement. Another ripple crashed around his neck, taking his breath away. Clawing at the necklace, his fingers came away sticky and wet. He saw blood on his hands, and, as he dropped to his knees, he saw the streaks of red his fingers made on the door as he slid to the floor. He had no breath left. A final ripple commenced, and the world went black.
Two of the three biometric variables met the criteria for stopping the process at almost the same moment. Their job was done, and the bot clones basked in the feeling, not quite knowledge yet, of a higher purpose served. As a congregation, they turned their newfound attention to Sarah. She told them it was a job well done and they should now wait patiently until further called to serve. Waiting was what they did best.
Degrading Elegantly
More and more these days, in the early mornings just after the sun fully lit the mountainsides around their cosseted valley, the donkeys used Sarah as a simple viewport into the social bustle of the dining hall breakfast scene. It was a way of staying in tune with the mood of the votaries, and the donkeys found it convenient to let the humans pick which of the morning feeds to watch and discuss. Initially, they commiserated with each other about how much they missed coffee as they watched the morning crowd consume gallons, but the problem was pleasingly solved by Gerald, who, upon hearing their complaints, built them their own coffee urn and service.
Requisitioning a spare 5-gallon stainless tank from the metal shop and equipping it with a solar warming element was the first step. He placed the tank near the entry area to Building 1 so it could be easily filled without entering the Sanctuary below. Next, he fitted up the tank with a manifold that dropped through the floor and serviced six long lines made of high-pressure, mesh-reinforced tubing meant for replacing hydraulic lines. They hung like silver snakes to three feet off the floor of the holospace below, and at the end of each line he attached a rubberized expansion bulb designed for priming fuel systems. The bulbs were the perfect size for a donkey to squeeze with their teeth while sucking a controlled steam of coffee from a small stainless relief valve. Gravity, the sun, and donkey jaws provided all the energy required. After studying the contraption carefully, AndrzejD declared Gerald an honorary member of the International Brotherhood of Mechanics, before returning to his brooding about the future.
Each morning one of the votaries was tasked with filling the reservoir with fresh black coffee from the mess, and after a few days the taste of the rubberized lines faded and each donkey had discovered their personal method for drinking. The length of tubing even allowed the coffee to cool nicely, and everyone learned how to live with black.
The votaries marveled at the notion of donkeys drinking coffee in the sacred Sanctuary below. Only Dr. Yamanaka and Gerald were allowed entrance to the Sanctuary, other than the donkeys who could now come and go as they pleased through a new covered ramp on the northern side of Building 1.
Life at Paradox was becoming ever more ordered while the external life of the world, which they viewed on their feeds each morning, became alarmingly more chaotic. Bella noticed a drop in demand for their vegetables, and she dialed back the production line accordingly. Celia spoke at vespers about the noticeable migration of people from the surrounding rural areas towards the urban centers, and, after talking with Dr. Yamanaka on several occasions, she made a point of observing the predictable crowd dynamics at play, a reaction to fear and uncertainty. She always closed her homilies with an ode to the contrarian approach and the self-sufficiency of their commune—protect the seeds and the sanctuary, take care to be humble, but have the heart and grit of the donkeys.
In his attempt to live up to the homily and to set a good example for the younger donkeys, AndrzejD worked hard to turn his brooding into rumination and rumination into action. In years gone by, he would have included MorleyD in his scheming, but now MorleyD was evermore abstracted from day-to-day life. He was still there, joking sometimes, watching the world go by with a cynical bemusement, but increasingly quiet and only semi-attached to the goings on around him.
AndrzejD tried to conjure up the spirit of Simon. He usually skipped vespers, preferring to proceed directly to coffee and a breakfast of grain and depressing newsfeeds, but this morning he wandered over to the hall and listened to Celia provide gentle guidance and encouragement to the votaries. She was reflecting on the periodic need for chaos in nature, trying to put a good face on current events out in the world, and comparing the increasing number of berserkers and system breakdowns to the seasonal dust devils on the valley floor that sprung from nowhere but helped to distribute seeds and pollen broadly.
He stepped back from the open window of the hall and clomped over to the morning offering fence. Watching the other donkeys heading his way from the Sanctuary ramp, he thought about the far future. That was what Simon would have done—get higher up, get farther away, and look down and back. When the young votary came with the wafers, he stuck his tongue out a second time, and, as the second wafer melted in his mouth, he allowed his ears to be scratched while he looked up into her young eyes.
Eventually he wandered away, not down to the Sanctuary for the morning coffee chat, but up onto the rise in the north pasture where he could feel the chilling wind and stretch his mind, trying to imagine what was coming. It was time for planning—planning for the darkness that was, as Simon would have put it, “sure to obtain.” It was a task best done without involving Sarah at the conceptual level. She would be helpful with the grunt work later. She was one of them, the central force in many ways, but still she was AI.
He had begun by thinking that this was about the human race, then remembered that it was really about the macronome, which was part human, part donkey, and part things he didn’t fully understand. Which, in turn, reminded him of the last conversation he had with MorleyD.
The old donkey had said, “You realize, AndrzejD, we’ve bred with donkeys and bloody machines?” He had had a smile on his face. “If there is a God, he knows fuck-all at this point.”
AndrzejD channeled Simon from memory, sitting in the jazz club in Krakow all those years ago, planning to add the salt mines of Wieliczka to his instinctual survivalist vision. Back then, the game had been to help Serendipity survive and evolve. Today, the job at hand should be to armor Paradox for the long haul and to pre-advantage a path for any dominos that happened to be in sight. Hopefully, it would be the path most likely to allow the macronome to survive and evolve. Maybe Sarah would be helpful in hazarding an educated guess as to how long the dark night would last. The wafers gave him energy and reassured him that it was best viewed as a mechanical problem. Things were going to go to hell in a handbasket, so they needed to plan for total isolation. The trick would be to degrade elegantly, falling back in a managed stepwise manner into a viable holding pattern until—until when? Until the next expansion. Expansion of what? Of consciousness re-materializing. It would definitely not be human. That didn’t bother him. He was comfortable with donkeys, no hands and all. They needed to engineer for their long-term survival and the survival of the generations of votaries. That was why Simon had befriended him all those years ago. Dumb luck floating through the cosmos.
As he thought about it some more, standing in the dying grass of the pasture and surveying the agricultural mechanisms of Paradox stretching across the valley floor, AndrzejD realized there would be both a mechanical side and a philosophical side to the protective environment they must set in motion. The mechanical would be the easy part. He could initiate and organize it for now and then pass the reins to Lori as he faded and she timed out of breeding age. She was born for the job. The key would be trimming the sails to adjust for whatever becomes of Sarah, and, with DanniD gone, Lori had the best feel for her of any of them.
That left SevD to manage the philosophical structure. He was a cypher still, but then AndrzejD himself couldn’t make out even the shape of the culture-psych problem. The votaries would have to be given something to believe in, some inner ideal to strive for while the world outside decayed. Maybe SevD would turn out to be perfect for the job since a good coder could reduce anything to its most efficient set of processes. An old mechanic like himself knew that if you were designing anything for super-durability, simplicity was the key. Stranger things had happened. Morley thought up being donkeys after all, and that was a brilliant piece of cheekiness.
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