When the River Ran Dry

by Robert Davies

  “I don’t know,” he replied automatically. “Let me make some calls, but it’s going to be a trick getting past the transit guards without Mae’s influence.”

  Ricky looked on with a grimace of disbelief.

  “What about One Nine’s identity? She’s still in there!”

  “Not anymore,” Jonathan replied softly. “I’m sorry, Richard, but the program has been erased from these drives.”

  “Didn’t any of you fucking geniuses ever think to make copies of her profile before you sent her inside this damn thing?” Ricky thundered, but the desperation pushing him couldn’t change the unique and delicate construction of who One Nine had been.

  “It’s not possible to copy her program the way it was when she first came out from the array,” Valery said softly; “her personality and emotion layers live within her human framework and beyond our ability to replicate.”

  Ricky sat in cold silence, shaken again by another crushing loss. His father’s death and again when Daniel ended Elden’s life on a filthy Novum street corner. Now, the emptiness returned and he sat in silence. He wanted to scream or cry out, but the weight pressing in upon him left him with nothing to say. Valery returned to the problem of One Nine’s body and the urgency to remove it to the Boomtown laboratory as soon as possible.

  “You have travel passes, Jonathan; it shouldn’t be difficult to arrange transport on a train.”

  “Travel passes that don’t include a comatose body!”

  “This is vitally important, Jonathan,” Trend said; “Do whatever you must, but do it soon. If you need money, we can make it happen from here.”

  “All right, but I’m not making any guarantees.”

  Deep inside the Boomtown complex there was also silence as Valery and the others considered the sudden, terrible effect of One Nine’s identity, lost in the Custodians’ server cluster. The excitement and promise they felt turned instead to profound sadness by what they all knew it meant; One Nine’s incursion into the cluster was discovered and the unseen battle that raged inside a computer’s drives and circuitry had taken a life. No matter the place or manner of her birth, One Nine was a person and they felt the ache of loss for her as they would have for any among their group.

  Jonathan looked again and found in Ricky’s face only the dull and bleak expression of one who knew better than to ask ‘why.’ He among them, perhaps, felt the deepest regret. The hours spent with Neferure translated in an odd way to a friendship with One Nine, but knowing it couldn’t soothe the emptiness.

  After a while, Trent sat before Valery’s display, holding the brave face of conviction and duty to complete their mission.

  “Can you determine if she was successful with the immersion gates?”

  Jonathan returned to his console, but he saw a new and different computer landscape open before him and it was nothing like the file structure he monitored as One Nine penetrated ever deeper into the cluster. Instead, the icons pointed to something more and he squinted as each selection directed him to a complex system of gateways and applications—staggering in its proportion and seemingly endless. It took minutes before the answer was revealed, but when it arrived, he sat back and nodded slowly.

  “Yeah, Commander, she got the gates all right.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “See for yourself,” he replied, focusing a remote camera so that Trent and Valery could view each scrolling page where the whole of the Starlight array’s infrastructure and constituent programs lay bare. They knew the stunning truth of it, but Jonathan described it anyway.

  “It’s the entire simulation’s architecture,” he said softly. “I don’t know for sure, but I’d say no one outside Jamison’s organization has ever laid eyes on this, not even Mr. Fellsbach.”

  “Wait,” Trent said at last. “Where is the Custodians’ server cluster? It should be among these files.”

  “That’s just it, Commander,” Jonathan replied with a sad smile, “it’s gone; One Nine didn’t just remove the immersion gates, she blew away the entire cluster. She said she had to get deeper in because they were trying to isolate her program.”

  “But they didn’t?” Ricky mumbled.

  “Not before she gained complete root access; One Nine got them before they could get her, just like we thought.”

  “We don’t know that yet,” Valery cautioned, but Jonathan nodded and smiled.

  “Yes, we do,” he said, pointing at an empty operating system folder with nothing remaining but its name: ‘CS1.’

  “The CS1 system drives are where the Custodians’ collective core programs were installed. One Nine identified them after the comm logs came through. I think she wanted me to know her destination, maybe because she understood the risk.”

  “The Custodians have been…deleted?” Valery asked in a strange, hushed voice.

  “Not just deleted, Valery,” he replied. “One Nine found the power distribution transfer and removed its modulators. When she did, the polarity burst sent back through on her command would’ve melted the Custodians’ host drives.”

  “But her program was resident inside that cluster!”

  “Yeah, it was,” he mumbled sadly.

  The details would be sorted out later, but in that moment, it became clear One Nine sacrificed herself to eliminate the Custodians in a single stroke and with that purposeful destruction, wiping Victor Jamison’s AI project from existence and any hope of achieving his single-minded goal and dream of immortality. They looked at the unique file names and alpha-numeric designations now moot in the aftermath, knowing the lives of the 33 would go on unhindered. It didn’t matter none of that discrete, targeted group would ever know, only that each Starlight user Jamison would have co-opted to his evil purpose would not become puppets to that design.

  Jonathan and Ricky looked in silence at One Nine’s body. They should’ve felt gratitude that it still breathed, but to what purpose? Without its missing identity—the person it once held—there was little remaining to consider.

  “Why is it still alive?” Ricky asked, and Valery answered softly from the lab far away.

  “One Nine’s core autonomic functions are separate from her consciousness, Richard. An embedded input-output system regulates blood flow, respiration and normal metabolic functions. Those systems keep it alive, just as it was when you first saw it on a treadmill before we joined it with One Nine’s identity.”

  “So, she…it…is in a sort of coma?” he asked solemnly.

  “In many ways, yes, and that is why we must return her body to the lab; it cannot survive indefinitely without our help.”

  “And then?” Jonathan asked quickly. “What good is a body without a person inside?”

  “Do what you must to get it back to Veosa and we will decide the answers to that question.”

  “What about Maela?” Ricky said.

  “Never mind,” Valery replied; “there’s no way to know how this has affected the Detective, but we need you to return One Nine’s body immediately. Maela will contact us when she’s ready, Richard.”

  The link closed abruptly and Jonathan stood beside Ricky.

  “Any ideas?”

  “I can probably borrow a van from my friend’s dad, but getting out past the wire is another matter; they’re not scared of us the way they were with Maela.”

  Jonathan shook his head at the prospect of a confrontation with MPE border guards.

  “That’s not gonna work, Richard; we need to think of something else.”

  Ricky waved a hand and said, “Maela’s offline; I just tried her comm and she’s not answering.”

  Jonathan paced in a tight circle, searching desperately for a way; a method that wouldn’t invite official interference, but one fast enough so that One Nine’s body wouldn’t fail before they could return it to the Boomtown laboratory. Ricky sat in silence as he struggled to find an answer until Jonathan suddenly went to his console.

  “What is it?” Ricky asked.

  “A long
shot, but maybe…”

  A moment later, his comm connected with an unseen recipient on the far side of Novum.

  “Galleria Primary Care,” a voice answered blandly.

  “I’m looking for a Doctor Cason?” Jonathan replied.

  “He’s not on duty tonight.”

  “Okay, but we need his help, so maybe you could call him for me?”

  “Is this an emergency?”

  “No, no, we just need to talk to Doctor Cason, okay?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “This isn’t a social call,” Jonathan said; “it’s crucial that we speak with him immediately.”

  “Who is this?” the voice asked warily.

  “Look, just tell him the girl who saved his ass sent me, okay? I know he’s laying low right now, but you could find him if you wanted to, so find him!”

  “Hold please.”

  The connection went into standby mode and Jonathan held up crossed fingers.

  “Maela told him to stay off the grid,” Ricky whispered; “how are they supposed to find him?”

  “Cason’s not about to sit in some dingy hotel room after the shit Daniel tried to pull; he has to have alerted somebody.”

  “Hold on,” Ricky protested; “you’re going to put him at risk!”

  “Look around,” Jonathan answered, “we’re all at risk!”

  “All right, but let me try it,” Ricky said; “I know him.”

  Jonathan nodded and they waited out the seconds until another voice came online.

  “This is Steve Cason.”

  “Doctor, it’s Ricky Mills; I’m calling about that thing in the tenements near the Galleria—the violent episode, remember?”

  “How the hell do you know about that?”

  “The girl with you that night is a friend and she knows what you did for me. A lot of things have happened since then, but we need your help with a sticky problem.”

  “She told me to stay off the grid; you’re putting me in a lot of danger, goddamn it!”

  “I know, and I’m sorry about that, but this is important.”

  “Why didn’t she contact me herself?”

  “She’s not available right now, but I know she would approve of us asking you for help.”

  Ricky could hear Cason swallow.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Ricky waited at the cargo door on the east side of the Institute’s central research building until a standard, orange and white ambulance hissed and spat as it moved in over the dormitory blocks. When it settled, Cason appeared alone, hurrying to the entryway where Ricky coded them in with Jonathan’s identification chip. Ricky needed to explain, but Cason waved him off, unwilling to hear the things that could bury him even deeper into a dangerous game he never meant to play. Ricky persisted until Cason understood, shaking his head in frustration and fear at the notion of a patient made both of tissue and titanium.

  When the elevator opened onto the darkened pod section of the ninth floor, Jonathan maneuvered a sturdy equipment cart toward them down a long corridor. Upon it, Cason saw the still body of a girl, unconscious, but otherwise unharmed. Cason reached for her pulse instinctively with one hand as he applied a thermal reader and when he was satisfied she was in no distress, he nodded silently. The big elevator took its time, making the painful suspense even worse. Jonathan knew the security cameras above would betray their movements and present a video anyone would quickly suspect, but there was no other way; the administrators would surely move to dismiss him in the morning, he thought with a sad smile, but it couldn’t be helped.

  At last, they eased the cart—and One Nine’s body—across a wide, concrete apron to Cason’s ambulance and a short ride across the city to the western transit portal. The machine settled into a medium altitude traffic lane as the doctor hurried to tap words into a data pad. Ricky looked on and asked what the information was meant to do, but Cason only glared.

  “I have to create a history for this bio-mech of yours,” he scowled, “and that means I’m deliberately falsifying medical records; I could lose my license for this!”

  Ricky understood the risk Cason was taking and what it might mean if they were challenged by border guards at the train station. The text described a Veosan citizen called Elise Mackey, homeward bound for treatment and placed into a temporary, chemically induced coma to slow brain functions and reduce swelling caused by an injury suffered from a fall. It seemed a plausible ruse, but more importantly, one that would draw no special attention. An elevated landing pad for air cars was Cason’s target, but it took little time for the Customs agents and MPE guards to approach.

  Ricky held his breath as they stood at a distance with Cason, examining his documents between furtive glances at the ambulance. Cason motioned for them to remove a litter where One Nine’s body lay beneath a thermal blanket, strapped securely in four places along the torso and legs. Cason fixed an oxygen feed to her nostrils and an intravenous tube was secured to her left arm. To his relief, no one noticed the absence of a needle where the plastic tube rested beneath a strip of surgical tape.

  Jonathan completed the advance ticketing process with a transit official, clearing One Nine’s transportation gurney to be taken directly aboard the train and secured in a carriage where postal or special cargos waited delivery to Veosa. Beside her, two abbreviated seats were folded down for Jonathan and Ricky, which indicated the train people, at least, were comfortable with the administrative details. The MPE cops noticed, too and Ricky wondered if the process and preparations helped to convince them of the authenticity they expected to find.

  After a certificate of medical transport was finally issued to Cason, and another in turn to Ricky and Jonathan as legal agents of custody, the border guards wandered away toward the gates, no longer interested in an ordinary patient transfer. Beyond, a thin stream of passengers were boarding and it surprised Jonathan anyone would choose to travel at so late an hour. The Commission’s newly created Ministry for Travel and Commerce trumpeted loudly the new, 24-hour timetable, but seeing it in-person brought an unexpected satisfaction knowing conditions between the cities had improved in the years since the war.

  At last, it was time and they felt the pressure and nervous hesitation ease as their train lifted on the invisible power of its electro-magnets. The sleek machine’s interior lights dimmed and beyond, Novum’s sprawl turned to a blur as they accelerated into the sudden darkness made by the city’s border, speeding west toward the vast Broadlands. Ricky looked out through a small window, smiling with satisfied relief at the wire far below and a dangerous barrier they managed to avoid. One Nine’s ‘platform,’ as Valery called it, was safe and stable, but questions lingered in his mind.

  What had become of the Starlight simulation after One Nine’s invasion into the Custodians’ server cluster, he wondered? Had anything really changed with the destruction of thirty-three immersion gates? It was true; the innocent lives of weak, addicted people were saved from a life in the service of Victor Jamison’s insane plan, but Starlight would remain and thousands would be added to its rolls each year. The cycle continued and nothing was learned.

  And what of Maela, he thought suddenly? Was she overcome with an unexpected sadness, knowing One Nine’s brief existence had been brought to an end regardless of the noble intent and bravery she showed within the unseen recesses of a machine’s circuitry? There was no way to tell, but Ricky’s mind drifted further still as occasional, dim lights from communal settlements in the distance flickered out to him from the darkness.

  He thought again of Felicitas and Bartholomew, but also of Joshua and the young girl at the center of a hand ceremony. Had she moved to her new home? Was she satisfied with the bargain and what it meant? Maela regarded the image with disgust and clear disapproval, but Ricky understood the way of Agros. The distinction wasn’t important to anyone else, but their journey by land might well have been something different without it, he decided.

  It was hardly surprising
, but the image and memories of Neferure returned to his thoughts, too. He felt honest and understandable sadness at One Nine’s passing, but the despair tugging at him was at least as much for the Princess as it was for the person her program became, freed at last from the array and set upon a path of liberty and a normal life. Either way, the force holding him tightly was colored in the shades of guilt and regret. Half an hour into the journey, he finally settled, determined to sleep a while before they arrived at the gates of Veosa.

  A faint glow in the east announced dawn’s arrival when their air shuttle eased gently onto the snow-covered lot alongside the Boomtown laboratory complex, but a flurry of activity in the alcove to the administrative building looked odd to Ricky as Valery and Trent stepped carefully through the slush to greet them. A strange expression on the Commander’s face seemed out of place, but they waited until four staff members eased One Nine’s motionless body onto an electric transporter and sped off toward the entryway. Valery turned to Jonathan and Ricky, motioning for them to follow.

  “Did you see the news feeds on the train?” she asked.

  Ricky and Jonathan exchanged confused looks and it was clear they had not.

  “We slept for most of the trip,” Jonathan replied.

  “Let’s get inside and you can see for yourselves.”

  The warm air felt good as they hurried through twin double-doors and the oval atrium where dozens of researchers and assistants gathered, looking with wonder at the big video screens and on them, a rare story from Novum’s news networks. Ricky bristled at first, hoping diplomatic relations between the cities hadn’t soured again, but an image from MPE headquarters told a different, shocking story when a hastily assembled news conference announced the arrests of three Commissioners and the end of a scandal that rocked Novum to its core.

  Speaking at a dais in the frigid morning sunshine, Esther Lowe, Commissioner for Municipal Patrol and Enforcement, continued her description of treachery and gross abuse of authority committed by Victor Jamison, Edward Kirtland and Levi Ross in violation of a dozen City laws. Ricky blinked with astonishment when the video feed showed a late-night raid and the downturned faces of each man being led away in handcuffs to waiting police speeders. A news presenter spoke over the video, telling viewers those few details published in the early moments of the event and what it meant to Novum as three of the most powerful figures in the city faced prosecution and sentencing for crimes that would send them to the punishment cylinders, perhaps for life.