by PJ Manney
Veronika sighed and looked at the dash map. “Autopilot, drive around the building perimeter.”
“I’m sorry. That’s an unknown command.” Its bourbon-and-cigarettes voice sounded a bit too much like Thomas Paine’s.
“You’re kidding me,” said Tom. “And no more autopilot. Not until Prometheus.”
“Sorry.” Veronika bit her lower lip.
The little Fiat crept forward, approaching the Super 27 in the center of the building. The Suburban followed.
“Can you do some donuts around the jet?” asked Tom. “We need time.”
Veronika made an uncertain jerky loop under the long wing of the jet, barely missing the Boeing’s massive rear tire.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” said Tom.
The Suburban followed ten feet behind, like a malevolent stalker creeping after a young woman down a too-quiet street. The cars looped once around. Twice around. Three times. Four, five, six. For Major Tom, it felt like eternity. Finally, with the far doors open almost enough, he said, “Now hit the accelerator. Hard.”
“What? It’s not open enough.”
“Do it!”
The doors rumbled. Another inch, another foot.
She tapped the accelerator, and her car moved forward again.
“Hard!” yelled Tom.
She stomped on the accelerator. Her skull slammed on the headrest.
He double-checked his math. Fiat was 64.1 inches wide. Suburban was 80.5 inches wide. He estimated the distance to the doors, the speed and acceleration of the cars, the width of the gap. The opening was too wide. The doors made a loud grinding sound as they stopped and reversed course, closing too slowly.
“What?” screamed Veronika.
“The Suburban can pass through!” said Tom. “Needs to be smaller.”
The doors continued to crank closed.
The Fiat raced on.
The Suburban was right behind.
“Are you punching it?”
“I’m punching it!” By mistake, Veronika slammed on the brake, and the Suburban screeched to a stop just behind it.
“The other pedal!” yelled Tom.
Veronika stomped on the accelerator.
The Fiat flew through the passage with an inch on each side to spare.
With a squeal of tires, the Suburban skidded to the left, avoiding the steel beams by half a foot. It took a few seconds for the program to realize it should go back to the first hangar doors. Even racing to the exit, the doors were almost closed. The Suburban was stuck.
The Fiat continued at top speed from Moffett Field and back to the offices.
“You okay?” Tom asked Veronika.
“Yeah, thanks. Exhausted. Shutting down for a while. See you at Prometheus.” Veronika’s glasses cut the link to Tom.
Major Tom contacted Ruth. “Head for the mainland. Something big is coming. And I need to be something and somewhere else.”
Tom saw Talia in her office and spoke through the monitor. “It’s me. I need you to get into the safe room.”
“What safe room?” she asked.
“Top right drawer. Reach underneath. Piece of paper stuck under drawer runners. Follow directions and take paper with you.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Now! Veronika’s coming. She was followed.” Talia reached under the drawer runner and came up with the piece of paper. She looked at it, surprised, and ran from her office.
Then he messaged Miss Gray Hat: Destroy the Memory Palace gateway at the server farm, but leave my entity separate in cyberspace.
R U sure? she responded.
Yes.
It took some time, a lot from his perspective, but she obeyed. The Memory Palace had no more connections, links, or pathways in or out, a digital entity isolated from the rest of reality. He didn’t want to extinguish what little they had left of their lives. Their consciousnesses were as valuable and real as his. But he would never let them share their thoughts—or plots—again.
He messaged Veronika. You were right. Talia is waiting for you. I’ll direct you to her when you arrive. We need to work together.
He was finally terrified. And it felt good to feel more human again.
CHAPTER TEN
As Major Tom waited for the humans to catch up, he thought about the nature of history. Humans lived in a continuum of time that they assumed they understood. But they could never possibly comprehend everything at once, and their interactions with it, so they settled for the simple bedtime story. People assumed history was decided at the moment it happened, immutable from that point on. But of course, it wasn’t. The story of a people was written and rewritten by the victors over time, immortalized in the culture, whether by historians like Herodotus or Ibn Khaldun; politicians like Theodore Roosevelt or Winston Churchill; or storytellers like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or Dumas. Even then, it was revised and revised again. History was not created in a vacuum of desires and experiences. It was colored by personal goals and biases. Humankind couldn’t help making stuff up if it tried.
The story of Peter Bernhardt and Thomas Paine was no different—it was the story as he had experienced it, shared as honestly as he could. It was impossible to be completely truthful and accurate, even with his perfect memory, but he had done the best he could to share what he knew.
But this attack on him and his story wasn’t an attempt by victors to justify their means to posterity. The lies were created by a single group to bend the world to their will. Again.
At Prometheus Industries, a secret basement room had been designed to keep internal communications as private as possible. There were no air ducts or windows. It could be occupied only for as long as the oxygen lasted, unless you opened the door or took a big pull from a couple of O2 tanks standing in a corner. The door, four walls, floor, and ceiling were insulated with soundproof, baffled acoustic panels. A Faraday cage could be turned on to impede electrical impulses. Inside it was bare bones: white-painted drywall, linoleum floor tiles, a table, a few chairs, some LEDs in the ceiling. An old, large computer monitor hung on the wall, usually unplugged and offline. Today, it was working.
Carter had designed the room after Peter Bernhardt had disappeared, presumed dead, in the explosion of the American Dream II. He had thought he might need it someday. It had never been used, until now.
Veronika sat nervously twisting her hair and picking off the split ends.
Talia said, “We’re as private as we can be. Let’s talk.”
All the sound baffling made their voices sound squelched and flat, like a giant sponge swallowed them. The electronics in the monitor were strangely loud.
Veronika wiggled a finger in her ear canal, thinking it might compensate for the strange pressure-filled feeling and lack of sound, then pointed at the monitor. “He’s connected online now.”
“Yes,” replied Tom through the speaker. “But you can’t talk to me any other way. I’ve created a firewalled partition. It’s the best I can do. Ruth asked for help from Miss Gray Hat. She promises this’ll work.”
“Huh,” Veronika said, still mangling her hair.
“What are you waiting for?” asked Talia, barely concealing her contempt.
Shifting her jaw around, Veronika tried to equalize her ears. “Whaddaya wanna know?”
Talia gave an incredulous glance at the monitor’s camera.
Tom asked patiently, “What do you know about the Sovereign and Dr. Who?”
“The seastead was attacked,” said Veronika. “They kidnapped Dr. Who and have her on a moving remote location. Probably a submarine. They’ve taken control of the Sovereign servers. I think they’re going to sink the Shell. And whatever identity files the Doctor was working on. Maybe someone important is in them?”
“Who is ‘they?’” asked Talia.
Veronika gave her another bored look and asked the monitor, “What do you think happened to the Phoenix Club?”
“It was dismantled,” said Tom. “Many people went to jail. Others fled
overseas. Some are running small regional governments around the country, because their constituents prefer the devil they know. They’re popular in some Southern states, with local clubs. It’s not what it was.”
“That’s not the whole story,” said Veronika. “You were living in the Memory Palace with the key players. They still exist.”
“Not anymore,” he said. “Did Dr. Who tell you about the Memory Palace?”
“Yes, dude,” said Veronika. “I’ve done some side stuff for her. You got my big secret. Okay now? And Carter’s escaped. You told us that. And you don’t think others want the power they had?”
“Organized so soon? Not likely,” said Talia.
“You both fought power-hungry psychopaths,” said Veronika. “Think they disappear, just ’cause you whack-a-moled a few?”
Talia went pale. “Prove it.”
The two women stared each other down.
“MT, pull up the news,” said Veronika.
“He’s your personal HOME/GO now?” asked Talia.
“Dude. Pretty please,” said Veronika. “Look for references to yourself.”
News feeds and archives flooded Tom’s data-retrieval system. He dived into the information. It was no longer overwhelming, as it had been when he was a living human. He applied a filter for “Peter Bernhardt,” “Thomas Paine” minus Founding Father results, “Major Tom” minus music results, and “Phoenix Club.” A huge stream of data flowed in from all over the web.
On a singularity weblog that archived his story, on the New York Times site, in a chat room that archived a discussion about global oligarchies, the story points were isolated, and the new words replaced the old.
Through the search, the story of Peter Bernhardt changed in real time. Electronic editors crawled all over each mention of him, all over the world, not only in his personal tellings, but in quotes from his message, discussions, memes, quips. He had never thought to check before. He was embarrassed to be considered a superintelligence, because he was a failure at it.
“This is weaponized narrative,” said Tom. “And Talia, they’re changing your story, too. They’ve made you a Central American Communist rebel. And Ruth is a psycho scientist who fabricated data for payoffs. Steve broke his Hippocratic Oath and should have his medical license revoked. We’re all villains.”
“Oh my God.” Talia buried her head in her hands. “When were you going to tell us this?”
“Why is the copy in TCoMT the only one unchanged?” Tom asked Veronika.
“I need external access. For just a sec,” said Veronika.
Talia looked at Tom’s camera.
“I’ll do it,” said Tom.
Veronika entered TCoMT’s site. “It’s buried in a blockchain and invisible to outsiders. Did you ask someone to do that?”
“Yes,” said Tom. “Miss Gray Hat didn’t work with you?”
“I gave her the hashes and keys, but I was driving,” said Veronika. “That’s okay. She did good. But you have to be a validated church member to read it, and now no one but you, me, Ruth, and Miss Gray Hat can access the original code.”
“Are any other copies of his version in other blockchains?” asked Talia. “Those wouldn’t be changed either, right? Or they’d generate a completely new private key and we’d know it was changed.”
Veronika shrugged. “In theory. No one’s tried to break the security of major blockchains . . . yet. But I’m guessing they’re trying now.”
“How would they do it?” asked Talia.
“A blockchain is based on an algorithm,” said Veronika. “What if you had fake blockchains that pretended to be real? Or a fifty-one-percent attack, where a majority of computers generate a different private key for the same transaction. Which confirmation would you trust?”
“It would take enormous computing power to maintain that level of fraud and deceit,” said Tom.
“All this shit requires huge numbers of web crawlers, data crunching, and narrow AI, designed just to do this task,” said Veronika. “And it would take shit-tons of money. And computer- and man-hours.” She thought for a moment, then furiously typed into the antiquated keyboard. “Look. Employment ads and unemployment stats around the world. China, Russia, India, North and South America, Europe. Even Africa. No one can find workers for data verification. They could use corporate AIs trawling for your references, to replace with this data, overseen by humans, for placement accuracy normal AIs can’t quite manage yet, because they don’t want any mistakes to follow a trail back to them. Also, check the comments sections of any site.”
Major Tom avoided comments sections like a computer virus. Cloaked in anonymity, they reflected the worst of humanity. With no consequences, trolls could be as evil as they liked. Every agenda thrived.
She was right. Recent negative comments proliferated. “It’s time to unplug this bastard and kill all his helpers.” “Thomas Paine has destroyed the world. Time to destroy him.” “This is what happens when you let AI run mad. It’s the end of humanity.”
“Damn,” said Tom. “Troll army?”
“For hire, and on a global scale,” said Veronika. “Comments appeared too quickly after the changes. All that takes cash. So who has that kind of money these days?”
Talia jumped in. “The Russians had a huge government troll factory for years. But it could be any major government in the world.”
“Corruption abhors a vacuum, dude,” said Veronika. “Every nation-state and political psychopath has a stake in discrediting Tom and trying to take over during the chaos. If you thought, like, ‘Hey, it’s my turn to be king,’ wouldn’t you do the same?”
“Where’s the money coming from?” asked Talia.
“Can you see the Phoenix Club accounts?” Veronika asked Tom.
He could, because he had kept information from Mr. Money, the money launderer murdered by the club. The accounts were almost empty. They had originally totaled trillions of dollars. “I thought they were pillaged by the membership for their own benefit.”
“Sure,” said Veronika, “but after you killed the leadership, who had access?”
Tom paused. “How do you know all this?”
She sat straight up in her chair for the first time, looking almost demented. “Dude, I am a nerd and a geek. I’ve crushed on you for years. You are my only hobby. I’ve written fan fiction about you! The only way I can get closer to you is to . . . help you!”
“Why me?” Tom asked.
For the first time, Veronika looked sad. “You don’t get it.”
“I’m sorry,” said Tom. “I don’t.”
Veronika slouched back into her seat. “You’re an example for people like me. People who aren’t born into the right body. You’re like the ultimate expression of the mutability of humanity through technology and, like, the desire to transcend the physical body.”
“Do all transgender people see me as an example?” he asked.
Veronika chewed her hair. “Don’t flatter yourself. Only the über-geeky ones.”
Then she was quiet. No one spoke for a moment.
Talia finally said, “You still haven’t said how you know about the Sovereign and Dr. Who.”
Veronika sighed. “Dark-web chat room. Mercenary recruitment for special marine skills. Former SEALs, naval engineering and laser weapon operating systems. That kinda stuff. Needed really deep tech skills with autonomous vessels. And one superweird ad about working with sea life that got pulled in, like, thirty seconds. I kept tabs on it. And I know folks like Miss Gray Hat. Except I call her the Masked Avenger.”
“You live in the dark web?” asked Talia.
Veronika gave her the dead-eyed, hooded gaze of every annoyed young person ever. “You think they post this stuff on the Prometheus bulletin board? The dark web is, like, bigger than the rest of the webs combined and has all the scary shit no one wants to believe exists. And I’ve read all about you there. My nana would call you a ‘piece of work.’”
“Who the hell are you
to criticize me?” yelled Talia. “Dr. Who is my friend. She saved my life countless times. You’re just . . . a child and a poseur. I don’t even know why you’re here.”
“If you haven’t noticed, dude, your generation fucked everything up,” said Veronika.
“I am not your dude,” said Talia.
“And I’m not yours. But it’s my generation left to sift through your shitstorm and, like, make sense of it again.” She looked to Tom’s monitor. “So am I, like, the fourth Musketeer or what?”
“So what should we do?” Tom asked Veronika.
“First? Save the stories we can. Store them in safe blockchains around the world, if we can find them. We may have to create them. It’s harder to mess with them in our own. Then, who knows?”
“Define a safe blockchain?” he asked.
“Any that aren’t related to currency or identity,” said Veronika. “If, like, Dr. Who is a canary in the coal mine for the seasteads, those are the targets now. Find a blockchain pitched for something innocuous. Like digital art verification and sales. Or music downloads. Places people go for, like, squishy, feel-good stuff. Not vital, world-crashing stuff.”
He did it at once as they continued their talk. Although the high-status copies in institutional libraries were already changed, he found unadulterated copies in places as diverse as a Pakistani madras, a superhero-fan chat room, a South African private school’s assignment file, a Peruvian NGO website about political systems, and a news portal for the Mars Team training in Antarctica. There were still many places to tag copies and verify them into blockchains, so even if they were changed, he would have proof that a different version had once existed. He was amazed that he had never thought to do this before.
This was the price of his complacency. Was that part of the digital heaviness, the withdrawal he had felt? Was the depression imposed upon him from outside?
“Figure out our enemies’ patterns,” Veronika continued. “Then draw them out.”
Of course, she was right. It was all about patterns. When the great Cold War KGB cryptoanalyst Yuri Totrov had sought to find undercover CIA operatives in the USSR, he began by looking for anomalous patterns. But the patterns were anything but unusual. They were regular, repeated, and it shocked the Soviet analyst. The CIA blamed Soviet moles for leaking the spies’ identities, but it hadn’t been anything so subversive. Rather, the CIA was so thoughtless that undercover agents had pretended to be foreign service officers in precisely the same ways, using the same apartments, spending the same unusually large amounts of money, performing the same spycraft, and all exactly different from the behaviors of the real foreign service officers they were impersonating. It only proved that the CIA had been arrogant, lazy, and stupid. But the KGB was no different. Totrov had looked at his own ridiculously bureaucratic country and realized that all civil services suffered the same inadequacies, regardless of political labels. Humans liked their bureaucracies as simple and repetitive as possible, making them easy targets for detection. Most people assumed they were smarter than the dopes next to them, so they rarely bothered to try to outthink them.