Gemini Gambit

by D Scott Johnson

  “Twenty years ago, Phillip Masterson’s quantum computer design created the biggest unmitigated disaster ever experienced in human history.”

  It was a downright strange way to characterize the most important technological innovation in the past forty years or so.

  “No government had any prior notice. Unbreakable security was suddenly made real.”

  Images of war, starving children, and poor workers appeared behind Watchtell.

  “In an instant, any effort at real justice was destroyed. Corporate criminals now hide their profits, and we can’t find them or seize their accounts. Multinational conglomerates grow unspeakably powerful, and we can’t control them. Drug lords have immunity, and terrorists now plot our destruction daily. We can do nothing. More wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer people than ever before, and all any of us can do is helplessly look on.

  “Until now.”

  A series of new pictures illustrating lab workers and expensive equipment spread around him. “Five years ago, while I was a part of the Donaldson administration, a secret government lab discovered a flaw in Masterson’s design.”

  Kim snorted and glared, but then shook her head when Mike frowned at her.

  “Until that point, any attempt to modify them ended in failure, but”—graphics built a new sort of computer as he spoke—“we finally found a way.

  “We cannot do this alone. I’m here to offer all of you the opportunity to force justice onto the lawless chaos that is realmspace. If you would please turn your—”

  The recording froze, the sound wound down, and then it all smeared sideways and melted away. They found themselves back in the bus, looking at the now-empty space through a virtual window. Kim swore and manipulated controls frantically.

  “Is that all we got?” Tonya asked.

  There was more, but it was unsalvageable. A fierce wave of vertigo swirled through him, a sure sign Kim was doing her thing. The realmspace around the bus locked solid with such force it made his eyes water.

  She worked her hacking tools furiously. “Wait… just a second.”

  Controls and indicators spun madly around her. She took a breath and managed to say, “I can save this. Come on, damn you, come on… Mike!”

  She tossed an access key at him just as Emerson’s realm and its underlying data crumbled. It allowed him to reach out with his threads, through and behind it all. There was definitely more to the transmission than a simple replay, but it was dissolving fast. He spread himself out and around the message’s foundations, curling through and working with the structures, shoring them up as it all tried to come apart like sandcastles in a tide.

  Even though they were sweating with the effort, Kim spared enough time to smile straight at him. He wasn’t the only one who felt how easy it was working together like this.

  In the shared viewspace, a black square formed. White lines started scribbling across it. “Wait,” Tonya said, “I know what this is.”

  “Tonya!” Kim swore and grabbed another set of virtual controls. It was falling apart faster now.

  “Record it, now!” Mike finished.

  Kim scrambled and struggled with automatic functions.

  A counter-virus had broken free and dissolved it faster than Mike could shore it up.

  “They’re blueprints!” Tonya said.

  “Not if we don’t save them they’re not,” Kim replied.

  Everyone worked as hard and as fast as they could, just ahead of the wave of disintegration. A big crack formed in the construct, climbing left.

  “Kim,” Mike warned.

  “I know, I know, I see it. Just a little longer. Tonya, please!”

  Tonya scribbled frantically. “I’ve got it!”

  Emerson’s message shattered into an infinite cloud of sparkling motes and washed away around them. Tonya shook her hands like they’d been burned.

  Kim looked like she’d just run a marathon. “Well, there went our proof.”

  It had been one hell of a workout for an uncertain payoff. “It wasn’t enough. That wasn’t a smoking gun; it was a RealmWay recruiting ad with a really famous audience.”

  “Yeah,” Tonya said as the bus finally pulled into the parking lot of the Metro station. The blueprints she’d saved scribbled their way across their shared space. “But I bet this place may have more for us.”

  They got off the bus, then sat down in the shelter of one of the stops. The blueprints were for a building—a big building.

  “Well.” Kim said when an address not far from where they were scrawled into existence in the bottom corner of the plans. “I know what we’re gonna do tonight.”

  Chapter 51: Spencer

  It had been the mother of all clusterfucks. Spencer flopped into the recliner in his room. Twelve hours of interrogation. Twelve hours! He forgot how awful his parents could be to each other, until they were together in that interrogation room. And then they turned on him. Even the lawyer couldn’t stop them. If he’d known that was coming, he would’ve just sunk to the bottom of the lake with the truck.

  He checked his TwitterBook and sure enough, there were several messages from Mike. Nothing from Kim. Nice to know somebody loves me. He transitioned to The Resort.

  It was by far his favorite realm. It didn’t start out as a teen-only hangout—technically, it still wasn’t—things just sort of ended up that way when the owner of a particular realm wanted his then fourteen-year-old daughter to have a safe place to hang out. It helped that the owner’s name was Evan Stanley, so The Resort became to teenagers what Bards was to everyone else.

  None of it would’ve been possible without Aunt Fee. She started her career as the third unduplicate AI ever designed, and the first meant to last more than a year. She was created to manage Fed/UPS’s entire worldwide logistics chain single-handedly, twenty-four-seven. If global economic growth had not been in the sixth year of an unprecedented boom, the half-million employees she put out of work would’ve likely destabilized labor markets, even whole governments, all over the world. The protests were still the stuff of legend.

  Five years later newer, simpler AIs came on the market that didn’t require continuous connections to the Evolved Internet. Just like that, she was obsolete. Two weeks after being retired, Stanley picked her up at an auction made legendary by his fight with an anonymous bidder. It made her the most valuable construct in the history of realmspace. Stanley knew that, unlike Bards, a realm inhabited by teenagers would be a place filled with adult bodies making childish decisions. Someone would have to watch them all, all the time.

  And so a construct previously known only as FE-1 was upgraded and retasked as Aunt Fee. She was equipped with a database detailing the cultural mores and legal laws of every society on the planet, and then told to keep the peace. It made her the most culturally aware entity of all time. When combined with a brilliantly designed realm, the result changed human history.

  Developed countries had come to terms with women who had no fear of pregnancy generations ago. Now the entire world was coming to terms with women who had no fear of rape. The Resort was an unbreakably private place where young people could do whatever they wanted as long as it was legal and everyone consented.

  Yes, there were controls, and it was more than possible for parents to prohibit their teens from visiting the place entirely. But these were teenagers. A ban wasn’t a prohibition; it was a challenge. Most who tried succeeded in overcoming it.

  None of that actually mattered much to Spencer. All he cared about was that at the Resort he could find people sitting around amazing lounges discussing whatever struck their fancy. He’d had unbelievably interesting conversations covering topics from who’d be the next President or prime minister, to what evolution actually meant in the history of fifth-century Cambodia, to which one was better: Enterprise or Death Star?

  Spencer did it all without worrying about peer pressure, judgment, or violence. He even discovered that, if he were clever enough, girls would seek him out
. Supposedly, it wasn’t close to the real thing, but it was plenty close enough for him. Spencer loved the place for all that. Even better, Fee was the one who’d introduced him to Mike.

  As he stood in one of the primary lounges, a dark, sultry voice above him said, “And where have you been all this time, sir?”

  At first, Fee had presented an image of kindly motherhood to all her charges, based on an old television show about a small Southern town. She got better results by pretending to be a scatter-brained aunt to the girls and what could be gently described as “the mom I’d like to… get to know better” to the boys.

  “He made it, Fee,” Spencer said as he sat down on the end of a couch.

  “Who made what, Spencer?”

  “Mike. He’s out there, Fee. He did it.”

  After almost half a minute of silence, he boggled. In the past four days he’d witnessed a miracle, made friends with a legend, and had now rendered an unduplicate speechless.

  “Fee?”

  “Spencer, if you remember nothing else in your life, you must remember that moment.”

  “Oh, Fee, I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

  “No, Spencer. I’m serious.”

  She manifested her avatar, to him a mature woman with lightly tanned skin and beautiful dark eyes. She wore an elaborate, elegant black dress. Conversations around them stuttered to a stop as people tried to figure out why she was here. “You have no idea how important this is. You really saw him?”

  “Jesus, Fee, you’re talking like I just saw Superman. What the hell is up with you?”

  Fee knelt down and grabbed his hands. “I am so very proud of you.” Fee stood, looked away, then turned back to him, face stern.

  “The terms of the deal still stand, Spencer. Remind him of that.” She vanished just as his phone rang.

  Spencer answered the call as calmly as he could and walked to a different lounge to avoid all the stares. “Mike, you have no idea how weird my life just got.”

  “It’s even weirder now? You’re having one helluva week, dude. You realize they caught a video of your jump? You’re in the top five on Reddit!”

  Spencer winced at the thought and at the bruises that were tracing a seatbelt pattern over his body in realspace. “Dude, don’t remind me. I think I’m gonna be doing community service around here till I’m thirty.”

  Spencer noticed the time stamp on the call. “I just had a really weird conversation with Fee, but at the end she wanted you to know the deal still stands.”

  The deal was that Fee absolutely forbid Mike from setting foot—well, hologram—in the Resort. He couldn’t even message anyone in the Resort for more than two minutes. Spencer had to admit there were good reasons for those restrictions.

  Being a teenager, Spencer had naturally conspired with Mike to test the Resort’s rules. Together they decided filling the entire realm with skunk-scented shaving cream would be the perfect stunt. Mike timed their exploit perfectly, only to find Fee standing at the entrance of the back door. Years later people still called Spencer Father Monkey on occasion. Mike had donkey ears and a tail pinned to his holo for most of a month. Hell, she made him bray for a week. He never did figure out how she did it.

  “What?” Mike asked. “Oh, right. I still have a minute and a half though.”

  Spencer nodded even though Mike couldn’t see him. “Just that much.”

  Mike’s voice changed as he switched away from Spencer’s line. “Okay. Kim.”

  Spencer smiled; Mike had forgotten to mute his phone.

  “It’s complicated. I made a deal. I can’t even message anyone in there for more than two minutes.”

  “I am not setting foot in that cesspool of hormones.”

  “Really, Kim? Is it so much worse than the Pink—”

  “Damn it, Mike, I told you we’d talk about that later. Just tell the little insect that if I walk face first into a scrotum, he’ll never be safe again.”

  “You getting this, Spencer?”

  “Yeah, Mike, it’s cool.”

  Now that he knew the person behind the Angel Rage legend, it was obvious where the name came from. The lady definitely had anger issues.

  The thing was, he wasn’t attracted to her at all. It was a first for him. Kim was hot, but there was too much history and way too much fear. It would’ve been like wanting to sleep with a really pretty wood chipper. There were much safer ways to scratch that itch.

  “I’m in the main lounge anyway. Tell her morphic deviation is held to seven percent around here.”

  “No, really, Kim, you’ll be fine. I can’t hold this call open any longer.”

  “Why not? What’s so weird about The Resort that you can’t—”

  “Damn it, Kim, for once in your life would you do something without arguing about it? Just go.”

  “I don’t take orders from you.”

  “Orders? I wasn’t ordering you to do anything.”

  Spencer shook his head as the argument ramped right up to ramming speed. “Fee, a little help?”

  “My pleasure.”

  Kim gasped as she manifested in the foyer to Spencer’s left. She snapped her fingers and everything flickered and slowed to a halt.

  Fee said, “Spencer! Who is that? What did she do?”

  He had no idea. “Kim, what did you do?”

  She marched up to him. “Nobody, least of all you, opens a trapdoor under my feet.”

  She patted herself down and seemed relieved to still have clothes on. “If I’d fallen into one of those disgusting wolf pits they have around here…”

  A rasping electronic voice announced, “This unit requires your attention.”

  Spencer turned. At first, he simply didn’t recognize the construct. It was a faceted, dull tin thing rolling on treads. If he hadn’t been taking Contemporary American History that semester, he would never have known this was Fee’s first avatar. It felt like seeing his mom naked.

  “You are in violation of contract protocols. Please exit immediately.”

  Kim’s eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry, what is your designation?”

  “This unit is FE-1.”

  She closed her eyes. “I am truly sorry.”

  There was a twisting through the effect, and Fee resumed her normal appearance and movement. She breathed deep and hugged herself.

  Kim said, “I just need to explain to this little monster how rude it is to—”

  “Spencer didn’t open the trapdoor, I did.” Fee raised her hand and cupped it, as if grabbing a control Spencer couldn’t see. “And I must again insist…”

  Spencer’s ears popped. The inside of his head folded sideways.

  “…that you release my fabric completely and leave. Now.”

  Spencer’s dad used to take him to bars when he was a kid, giving him enough cash to play the video games and pinball machines for hours at a time. He’d seen exactly two old-fashioned bar fights go down. This reminded him of the time the guys pulled knives on each other. Except Fee used some sort of weird distortion field that twisted her fist in a direction that made his head ache.

  Kim set her jaw and threw her hand downward. A manifestation of raw energy flew into being, puckering the space around it like a heavy rock dropped on a rubber sheet. What Fee had was a blowtorch, but what Kim had was a supernova.

  Spencer knew there was no way Fee could survive a strike from that. “Jesus, Kim, don’t hurt her.”

  “I didn’t come here for a fight,” Kim said.

  Fee’s torch doubled in brightness. “That’s what you’re getting.”

  It wouldn’t be enough to even scratch Kim. “Fee!” Spencer said, trying to keep his eyeballs pointing in the same direction. His feet felt like they were on backward. “She knows Mike!”

  Fee gathered even more power. Thunder blasted through the realm. He tasted electricity and smoke.

  “I don’t care who she knows. Nobody tries to rip apart half a realm on my watch just because—”

  Fee d
idn’t understand. She probably thought Kim was some wannabe hacker who’d found an unpatched vulnerability. Spencer knew exactly who this was and what happened when someone crossed her. “Fee! Listen to me! This is Angel Rage!”

  Fee barked out, “WHAT?” at the exact moment Kim yelled, “SPENCER!” Then they both let go at once.

  The entire realm twisted up, curled sideways, and with a snap, it was all completely normal—except everything was absolutely silent.

  A vase wobbled off an end table and fell, shattering beside him on the floor.

  The realm fell into motion again, but everyone around them acted as if nothing had happened at all.

  Kim straightened her dress and said quietly, “That was uncalled for. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” Fee said, taking a shuddering breath with her hand to her chest, paler than Spencer had ever seen her, “you were right.”

  She turned gracefully toward him. “Spencer, it’s very rude to trapdoor people into a realm. You know that.”

  “But you…” He stopped at the look Fee gave him, a mixture of embarrassment and real fear that told him to shut up and let her handle it.

  Fee turned toward Kim. “So, you’re his warrior.”

  He had no idea Fee knew about Mike’s project. If Spencer’s week got any more complicated, he was certain his head would explode.

  “Amazing,” Fee said. She ran a finger across Kim’s jaw, grasped her shoulder, and stared straight into her eyes. “Be kind to him, when you can.”

  She vanished. Spencer was vaguely disappointed. His head was supposed to make an earth-shattering kaboom now, because that’s sure as hell what it felt like.

  “Spencer,” Kim said, standing still as a statue, “what was that all about?”

  “I haven’t got a clue. Not one. My life stopped making sense on Saturday.”

  It was all so exhausting. He felt like the way his teachers looked at the end of classes. Too much to do, not enough time to do it in.

  “Mike said you needed help?”

  Kim sat down in the chair opposite his. “It’s my team. They may be exposed, and I need you to help them.”