“…An Upterlife server?”
“Yes,” Gumdrool said, concerned. “And it’s not ours.”
I gave Peaches a wary glance; she sat stonefaced.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Building servers in a flood zone? The existing Little Venice skyscrapers are toppling.”
“That’s where they’ve hidden it,” Gumdrool urged me, as if he knew how crazy he sounded. “The server’s hidden in the intersection of four collapsed buildings; you have to crawl through an abandoned apartment complex before you can even see it.
“But it’s there,” he assured me. “Shiny new. Fully powered. Heavily guarded. By… by NeoChristians.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “NeoChristians hate technology. They don’t Shrive. They certainly don’t branch. And not in New York.”
Branches were a way of life back when the Upterlife started. People decided they didn’t want a Walter Wickliffe-designed heaven and created their own servers, using Wickliffe’s reverse-engineered code. It was chaotic at first, because not only were there tons of businesses with second-rate consciousness-saving servers, but governments ran their own as well.
That all died off. Sure, you could set up your own network of branched Upterlife code. But Wickliffe had every incentive to make the Upterlife as secure, pleasant, and redundant as possible – after all, he lived there. He had the best hardware, the smartest brains, the best funding.
He made a lot of concessions to France, and Japan, and Africa in patient efforts to get other countries to use his brainstoring technology. When China converted to Upterlife servers, it looked like world peace was on the way.
Then some rogue nation weaponized a branch.
Remember how the dead’s unconscious thought patterns get utilized to judge the living’s Shrives? Well, if you tweak the settings to set your inhabitants’ spare brainpower to “searching for weaknesses in the Upterlife servers around them” instead…
I’d say you can find a lot of exploits, but that’s not true. Wickliffe is a paranoid man who’s been patching holes for centuries. Yet even one new exploit can destroy lives. You can burn out servers, corrupt consciousnesses, turn the dead into living viruses.
So programming became outlawed. That leaves some folks in the Kentucky backwoods who’ve been quietly tending to their homegrown servers for generations, carrying their families in old RVs, wanting nothing to do with the “official” code. They take deep pride in their heritage. The authorities usually overlook them.
Terrorists, however, love branch servers. The Upterlife’s too spread out at this point to damage it physically… But they’re all hoping to find the big exploit that drops the Upterlife in one shot.
“If the NeoChristians have built a branch server, it’s out of our league,” I said. “This is a terrorist attack on the Upterlife, man. Call the LifeGuard.”
“No.” Gumdrool grabbed my wrist. “We need to find out for ourselves.”
“Why?”
“Because we can use this to guarantee our jobs in the LifeGuard. Look, New York just endured a population collapse. Cameras are burning out because there’s no one to replace them – imagine what the LifeGuard is struggling with as they fight to maintain order! For the first time in generations, there’s the opportunity to rise to the top while we’re alive.”
Gumdrool’s glazed emphasis on opportunity surprised me.
“If we can tell them not just ‘There’s something there’ but ‘Here’s the details of this NeoChristian threat,’ then we’ve shown our value. The fact that the NeoChristians built a branch server in New York shows how understaffed the LifeGuard are. If we prove ourselves, they’ll even give you a job. And even I have to admit the only person I know who can get me close enough without tripping their alarms is you.”
“So why so eager, Ian?” I asked. “Aren’t you as good as in the LifeGuard already?”
Gumdrool’s stiff little smile meant I’d scored a hit.
“All your cards on the table, Ian,” Peaches warned him.
He looked wounded. “It’s… it’s not enough to get into the Upterlife. I need Walter Wickliffe to welcome me to the Upterlife personally. To say, ‘Well done, Ian, you’re a man I can trust.’”
Is everything we do a reaction to the ways our parents screwed us over? I wondered. Gumdrool’s parents had left him, and he’d fixated on impressing Walter Wickliffe instead.
It was pathetic. But we had that much in common.
“All right, I’m in.” I reached out to shake his hand.
“Not so fast,” Gumdrool said. “Before I bring you along, I want to see your latest Shrive. Even I can’t get you into the LifeGuard if you’re Mortal. And I want you to sneak me into someplace new, as a test. Not the orphanage; a secure location you haven’t broken into before.”
“That’s fine,” I replied. “I have one condition of my own.”
13: THE KHAN-TIEN PARKING GARAGE MORTUARY
* * *
“Peaches, you can’t be serious,” Dare said, hopping from foot to foot like he had to pee. “Breaking into our parents’ mortuary? What if we get caught?”
“We do not have to get caught,” Peaches replied, staring up at the stained walls of the Khan-Tien Mortuaries. The Khan-Tiens were notoriously cheap, so you could still see the centuries-old, faded 24 HOUR PARKING signs attached to what had once been a parking garage, with a flapping tarp that said KHAN-TIEN MORTAL REMAINS STORAGE tied over it. “We didn’t ask you here. You just want in because Amichai’s involved.”
“Someone’s gotta talk him out of your crazy schemes,” Dare muttered.
“Quiet,” I shushed them, staring at readouts on my IceBreaker. My upgraded IceBreaker put intimidatingly effective technology at my disposal, but it wasn’t a magic wand. The Khan-Tiens were cheap but paranoid – they needed good security, because the pray-and-stay Christians stored plastic cups, rare metals, all sorts of pre-crash valuables inside their portacrypts.
I scanned the locks. My preliminary analysis showed they used no obvious passwords, and had lockout protocols. If I flooded them with attempts, I’d trip alarms. There were finicky workarounds I could use to mask the number of attempts, but those could take hours to fire off…
Gumdrool watched with interest. I hunched over to hide the controls; I didn’t want him to figure out how to do this on his own. Still, it was a good sign that he hadn’t slugged me and hauled the IceBreaker back to Beldon.
“What if he fails?” Dare whispered.
“Then I tell our family this was a security analysis to test our defenses,” Peaches sighed. “I swear, have you no imagination, Dare?”
“‘Imagination’s for when brute force fails,’” I said, quoting Mama Alex, then slapped my forehead when I saw the solution. “Wait! I’ve got it. Peaches, open this door.”
“I can’t.” She gave me an are you nuts? eyeroll. “The point is, you have to break in, Amichai.”
“Let’s try that again: open this door, or I’ll drop all my camerashields, trigger the alarms, and tell your parents how you encouraged me to steal from your business in an attempt to get me into the LifeGuard. They hated it when Dare bought me a pony – imagine how they’d react when they discovered you were helping me out! What was it they called me again, Dare?”
Dare chuckled, shooting me that shy smile. “A criminal and a malingerer.”
“What d’you say, Peaches? How would you feel about me ratting you out to your family?”
Peaches grinned, reaching up to touch her earputer for the access code. “Oh, my. I guess I have no choice but to open the doors for you under the leverage of such a scurrilous threat.”
Gumdrool grabbed her wrist. “That’s cheating!”
“That’s social engineering,” I told him. “Why waste time cracking networks when you can blackmail the people who own the codes?”
“I suppose that’s how you got access to the sprinkler system.”
“I neither confirm nor deny your colorful s
prinklers. But I will say that if you tell a senior you can troubleshoot a malfunctioning fire alarm for them, you get all sorts of interesting passwords.”
“Clever,” Gumdrool said appreciatively. “It’s good to have you using your tricks for my benefit, Amichai.”
My feeling of triumph wilted. Gumdrool as my boss? But that’s the job I was auditioning for.
We walked onto the mortuary’s cracked asphalt – one big road sloping up around the corner, enclosed in old concrete vaults held up with rusted beams. You could see yellowed paint outlining the old parking spaces – but squeezed into every two slots was a slanted Rose Cottage, which looked neither like a rose or a cottage.
The Rose Cottages were, in fact, squashed replicas of oldtime New York apartment living rooms.
The Khan-Tien Mortuaries used to be the Khan-Tien Parking Garages, back when cars were cheap and life was cheaper. Then the Peak Oil crash hit just as the Upterlife was causing theological havoc. If you were a Christian, wasn’t the Upterlife the new Tower of Babel – an attempt to outdo God? Was the Upterlife-you a soulless replica, or your soul distilled? What if the Rapture came, and your soul was trapped in the Upterlife?
The Khan-Tiens, left with all this empty real estate, made a compromise: you’re not really dead. Your brain’s just externalized. We’ll store your body until Jesus returns… At very reasonable prices.
The NeoChristians rejected this idea violently, splintering off into a terrorist sect. The pray-and-stay Christians ate it up. And the upper-class pray-and-stays wanted their body kept in a nice, pleasant place – hence, the Rose Cottages.
Dare stopped, looking at the rows of drab, locked doors.
“They look awful from the outside, I know. But inside, each one’s a unique capsule of past beauty. They really knew how to make things back then – tiny churches, jazz clubs, arcades…”
“No wonder you’re in love with architecture,” I said. “You repaired a different home every day.”
He gave me a wistful grin. “If it wasn’t for my relatives, I could have happily spent my life maintaining these old rooms.”
“Charming. Shouldn’t you be breaking into a place with a computer terminal and a Shrive Point?” Gumdrool asked.
“That’d be space #137,” Dare replied. “Mr Fiore was a landlord. He lost faith after a decade in the Upterlife, so he won’t check in…”
“Sounds excellent,” Gumdrool said.
We crammed into the room. Mr Fiore must have spent his whole life collecting crucifixes: stained-glass crosses over the windows, bronze crosses on the walls, ceramic standup Jesuses lining the coffee tables. He’d even carved a cross into the hood of his Shrive Point.
It made me sad, seeing a lifetime of faith abandoned. Mr Fiore’s freeze-dried body knelt by the bed, forever praying, a useless stub he’d saved on the offchance he might be wrong about heaven.
“All right,” Gumdrool said, edging respectfully around the Shriveled body. “How do we log in?”
“They used keyboards,” I told him. “You know how to type?” A subtle insult; only hackers typed these days. Everyone else just pointed at screens and subvocalized.
“I’ll dope it out.”
Dare paced. “That’s not programming, is it, Amichai? My architecture applications are in for Career Day – a scandal could destroy my chances…”
“You’re such a waste!” Peaches blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. “No wonder you always get caught. If you’re going to do something sketchy, commit.”
“Like those four boys you were kissing earlier tonight?” Dare asked. “They looked sketchy, but you were doing them like you meant it…”
Peaches lunged for Dare. Gumdrool stopped her.
“The new population- rebuild laws say she’s mandated to have a child by twenty-one anyway,” said Gumdrool. “Viewed in that light, her amorous antics are simply… patriotic.”
Gumdrool hunt-and-pecked in his login credentials; Peaches unconsciously tapped her feet along with his rhythm, spurred into minidances by the slightest sound. When he was done, he squeezed my shoulder hard enough to leave bruises. “Don’t use my account for anything illegal,” he warned, clearing a space for me by the keyboard.
“You think I want to get caught before we start?” I replied.
Though I might have videotaped his painfully slow typing with my earputer to harvest his keystrokes for later.
I shoved him aside, typing with one hand and mousing my way through dialog prompts with the other. A frozen snapshot of Therapy, taken from the Sins of the Flesh video, stayed constant in the lower right corner – but the rest was a sea of menus and checkboxes. The dead had so many more controls than the living had access to. But I pulled up tutorials, walking through the advanced settings.
He peered in closer. “I’ve never seen those control panels before.”
“That’s because you never looked.” Put the living in front of a screen and they froze, choosing the simplest options lest they get themselves into trouble.
I cackled in triumph. Buried under hundreds of administrative controls, I’d found the setting I’d hoped for: visual expression match. I circled Therapy’s image with a lasso tool, clarified the image to widen the range of matches I could find, then dumped the cleaned-up vidclip into the search trap.
“What are you doing?” Gumdrool’s chin was almost on my shoulder.
“Doing a global search for something that looks like that.” I pointed at Therapy.
“Searching where?”
“Everywhere.” I rested my finger against the blue progress bar inching towards completion. “Every living feed in New York.”
Gumdrool rubbed his eyes. “That’s crazy. We don’t have that kind of processing power.”
“The screen begs to differ, my friend.”
“If you can do that, then why is the LifeGuard asking us to scan for dark zones? If it can find a single pony in New York, then it must be trivial to develop a formula that finds inoperative cameras and triangulates the most vulnerable blank spots…”
I blinked. Given one sample of the cameras’ capacities, he’d extrapolated other logical uses.
“They used to do that,” Peaches said. “Before Boston, all the cameras were monitored by AIs. Then President Wickliffe started making noises that the dead had lost touch with the living. Too many people were dorking around in the Upterlife without a clue what the living needed; they were voting in brutal laws that caused meat-world riots.
“So Wickliffe rammed through a legislative act that switched off the automated scanners in favor of a crowd-sourced solution. How did he put it? ‘A window to the world, a reminder of your duty.’”
“Wow. He got the dead to change their minds?” Dare said, both skeptical and awed.
“He burned a lot of political power to do it. The dead hated working for the living’s benefit, and the living despised him for how many people he’d voided putting down Boston. It was a landmark moment in history, if any of you lot bothered to pay attention to politics: it was the first election where practically everyone living voted against Wickliffe, but a narrow tie among the dead was still enough to get him elected. It was the day we living realized our votes had become statistically insignificant.”
Gumdrool traced his finger along the monitor, lost in thought. “So only the dead watch the feeds?”
“That’s when he created Sins of the Flesh,” Peaches shrugged. “He had to offer Upterlife prizes to encourage them to monitor the meat-world. I mean, what else can they use?”
“Doesn’t sound too efficient,” Dare groused. “A handful of corpsicles watching the feeds?”
“It’s not a ‘handful’ of dead,” Peaches explained, treating her brother to yet another gaze from her vast selection of disappointed looks. “Even if only one out of a thousand watches, that’s still millions of snoopers.”
“…but it’s desegmented,” Gumdrool concluded. “You’ll catch the little crimes, but the big picture stuff suffers. Becau
se none of those millions are talking to each other.”
“Right.”
“I’ll fix that.” Gumdrool straightened the medals on his Junior LifeGuard uniform, and in that moment I could imagine him changing the world into something darker.
I had to help him. LifeGuards had pull. The pull to make Izzy’s life easier.
“You won’t fix anything, you idiot,” Dare said. “He made our lives less safe, so it’d be more interesting for his people to watch. That’s the way Wickliffe wants it.”
“That’s why I need to talk to him.” Gumdrool’s voice was curiously distant. “He needs to understand how badly things are decaying in the physical sphere…”
The monitor beeped, showing several locations timeplotted across a narrow arc.
“We have achieved pony!” I said.
“I can’t believe you did all this to search for a stupid horse,” Gumdrool said.
“I didn’t. She’s a pony. And that was my condition before taking this mission.” I clicked through to some grainy videos of Therapy. It was hard to make her out – most of the clips were from a distance, as if the people involved were dodging cameras – but in the clearest clip, she was being surrounded by a bunch of black market vendors with electrified nets.
They flung the nets over Therapy. She lashed out with her hind legs, catching a vendor in the chest hard enough that he crunched into a coral wall.
Then there was the sparkle of a net-taser and Therapy fell to the floor, twitching. They closed in on her – one vendor took out an autobridle, its drill whirring, ready to install itself in Therapy’s brain…
“Greenwich Village,” I said, headed for the door. “We’ll break her out and then head for the branch.”
Gumdrool blocked my way.
“We head for the branch now,” he insisted. “It’ll take us two days to get there, and void knows what those NeoChristians will do before then.”
“But Therapy–”
Peaches cut me off. “Amichai, your pony’s not time-sensitive. This is. Ian, will you let him use the cameras again once we get the branch info?”
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