She looked for a USB port, or some other way of connecting another device, but couldn’t find one. Maybe the booths were controlled from a central computer.
Joe was checking out one of the other booths, and Ani remembered him showing them all photograph of the melted worker while they were back at the village. She went over to him and looked into the booth. The poor thing was still contained within, but it didn’t look like it had been melted or dissolved.
It looked more like a mistake had been made in a manufacturing process.
She called the others over.
“How would a bio-printer for monsters work?” Ani asked.
Dr. Ghoti looked in at the creature in the booth, winced, and then grew thoughtful. “Presumably, there would need to be a programmed template,” she said. “A how-to-make-a-monster recipe, but it would need to be worked out cell layer by cell layer. Every structure, every organ, every blood vessel would need to be built … I mean the immense amount of data required to create even the simplest living creature alone would …”
“… require some kind of a supercomputer?” Ani finished. “But what would such a life form be made of? What would the printer use to print living tissue?”
“Living cells.” Doctor Ghoti said. “You need to build using pluripotent stem cells … or totipotent stem cells. But it’s just not possible.”
“But let’s just pretend it is for a moment,” Ani said. “Stem cells can become any cells in the body …”
“Well, yes, sort of. But also, no,” Dr. Ghoti said. “Look, we are at a point in stem cell research where we can see the potential for future treatments of diseases and injuries, but it’s all still theory. Scientists are investigating the possibilities of using stem cell therapies for degenerative diseases, like arthritis, muscular dystrophy, diabetes. But the only stem cell therapy in everyday use is the very crude form we’ve been using for forty years or so: bone marrow transplants, as far as I’m aware. So how we jump from theories about how we might one day cure degenerative illnesses to creating living creatures from scratch … It’s simply not within human capabilities. I’m not saying it won’t be possible someday. I’m simply saying that it isn’t humanly impossible now. There has to be some other explanation for these pods, booths, whatever you want to call them. And there has to be another answer as to what that thing is in there.”
Ani knew that Dr. Ghoti was right. But she had also spotted the loophole that the doctor had built into her analysis of what was possible with stem cells. And the pieces that she had been slotting into place in the puzzle in her mind suddenly started to show a picture that made some kind of insane, dark sense.
The loophole was the doctor’s use of the words “human” and “humanly.”
It was not with human capabilities.
It was not humanly possible.
So, what if they weren’t talking about a human agency being behind this at all?
Joe showed them around the storeroom, more because it was the last door in the sequence rather than because he believed that there was anything in there pertinent to the investigation. Which was why Dr. Ghoti’s reaction to the vats sitting on the shelves in the room surprised him.
As she studied them, her demeanor shifted from curious to interested to shell-shocked to horror.
“I don’t believe it,” she said, and her face showed that for her that was an understatement. “Can you smell that?”
Of course, Joe could. He’d noticed it the first time he was in the room. An awful coppery smell, moist and … and somehow familiar.
“Do you know what it is?” Joe asked. “I mean it seems as if I recognize it, sort of …”
“Have you ever been in a slaughterhouse?” Dr. Ghoti asked. “Take out the fear and excrement, home in on the blood and raw meat, and that’s kind of what we’ve got here. Except it’s been processed. There are chemical notes mixed in with the rest of the odors.” She turned to Ani. “You know what you said about building monsters?” She sounded like she could hardly believe the words she was speaking. “And I said you would need stem cells of a very complex and specific type?”
“Pluripotent or totipotent,” Ani said, showing memory skills that Joe would have needed to access his chip to replicate.
“I’d need to test the stuff in these vats, but I’m reasonably sure that it’s human bio-matter, a soup of human tissue. If it was imbued with the right stem cells, prepared the right way, then I think it’s the kind of stuff that you’d need to build living tissue. Organs, perhaps. Or organisms. Sometime in the far future, of course.”
“Human tissue?” Joe said, his mind suddenly full of horrible possibilities. “What, like harvested from humans?”
Dr. Ghoti shrugged.
“It’s one heck of a lot of bio-matter,” she said. “That’s one heck of a lot of donors.”
“And the recipe for one heck of a lot of monsters,” Joe said.
Ani called from where she had wandered deeper into the room and was looking at the vats stored there.
“This stuff is different,” she said, tapping one of the vats. “These are labeled ‘polylactic acid.’”
“A plastic,” Dr. Ghoti said.
“The kind of stuff you’d make … I don’t know, a plastic skeleton from?” Ani asked.
Dr. Ghoti’s silence was all the answer they needed.
“I wonder what’s behind that other door we passed on the walkway,” Ani said, more to break the spell of the revelations.
They journeyed back to the walkway and stood in front of the other door. Another tuning fork engraving, another tuning fork vibrating.
The door opened onto a corridor.
“Shall we?” Joe asked.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ALT + F4
The corridor was just that.
A corridor.
There were no rooms leading off either side. It was just a long path that led down to a door at the end. Unlike everything else in the factory—which was defined by a minimalist style, white and almost completely lacking in character—the corridor was plush, decked out in red, and seemed designed to provide or build atmosphere. Red paint, red wallpaper, and red curtains. It was like something you would expect to find at the end of a video game quest, as the protagonist was approaching the lair of the deranged bad-guy behind the events of the game.
That was the moment that Ani slotted another couple of puzzle pieces together.
It was exactly like the end of a video game quest.
And the madness in Poiana Mazik was the kind of event that only occurred in video games.
Or movies.
And Dorian made interactive games that were a clever fusion of those two things.
Great video games with narratives were an art form. They were hard enough to be challenging, but not so hard that you couldn’t get to the end of them. What would be the point of creating a great story that no one could get to the end of? There had to be a planned tradeoff between difficulty and entertainment.
Games always gave you another lead to follow: a linear thread that led you from one game area to the next; a trail of breadcrumbs pre-laid by the game’s designers; clues to be picked up along the way; non-player characters that either gave you another way to look at things when you were stuck or signposted the way forward or presented you with backstory essential to the understanding of the in-game narrative.
In short: everything that had happened in her and Joe’s investigations.
Joe found the missing kids, which had revealed the Dorian chips, which had led him to the US. There, he was directed to Romania, experienced a lot of weirdness, was led to the village where he was attacked by monsters, and to the clues that had led back here.
Ani had trapped the kid in Yeovil, played minigames that let her infiltrate victorious where she’d been led to a character from a previous adventure, and then to Brian, the dotmeme file, Romania, the factory.
Two investigations that had turned out to be the same investigation, just
like her first adventure with YETI.
A two-character campaign that had led to this corridor.
Coincidences?
It sounded insane even to her—that somehow Richard Dorian had laid out his whole plan along the lines of one of his own video games—but once she considered the idea, it was almost impossible for her to shake.
She and Joe had been led here.
Crazy as that may sound, she felt it to be true.
They made their way down the corridor, and Ani realized that she was actually waiting for a jump scare. Video game logic pretty much demanded one at this point. At the very least, there should be a stab of some atonal music. Instead, they just walked down the corridor, reached the end, and stood in front of the door. Joe reached for the handle. It turned easily. The door swung open. It didn’t creak, squeal, and nothing popped out at them.
It opened onto a spacious office dominated by a huge desk with an array of widescreen monitors covering a lot of its surface. Monitors adorned the walls, too, bigger and even more impressive. In the midst of the tech, Richard Dorian was sitting behind the desk, but his eyes were closed and there was an odd gray sheen to his skin. Ani was shocked by how sick Dorian looked, and wondered if he was even alive. He was a tall man, dark-haired with only a minor sprinkling of gray. He wore an immaculately tailored suit, but the hands that came out of the sleeves were tight and rigid, almost like claws.
She moved toward him with the intention of checking his pulse, and that was when she saw the cables that snaked from one of the computers and disappeared behind the gaming guru. It distracted her from her immediate mission, making her feel even more concerned about the man’s well-being.
“Mr. Dorian?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper. “Are you okay?”
There was no reply.
Dr. Ghoti hustled past her and took the man’s wrist between her fingers. She adjusted her grip, found what she was looking for, looked concerned, felt around a bit more, and then nodded her head.
“He’s alive.” Dr. Ghoti said. “But his pulse is bradycardic …” She looked at Ani’s blank expression. “His heart rate is slow.” Then she looked puzzled herself. “I … he … look, my diagnosis goes no further than I think there’s something very wrong with him.”
“Might it be something to do with this?” Ani pointed to the wires, made her way around the desk until she was standing behind Dorian. She gasped. For a moment, her mind refused to accept what she was seeing. A long ribbon of colored cables connected the nearest computer terminal to what looked like a custom port in the back of the programmer’s head.
“Come and look at this,” she said, and Dr. Ghoti, Joe, and Mina all did as she asked. Furness and Gilman waited at the door, weapons ready.
“I hope this isn’t the new tech that all those Dorian fanboys are waiting for,” Joe said. “Google Glass was a hard enough sell.”
“Hey, don’t knock tech wired into your brain.”
“Mine’s a little more discreet than that.” Joe grinned at his joke, but ended up sounding defensive.
“I can’t believe that anyone’s still using 1980s rainbow ribbon connectors,” Ani said, pointing to the harness of wires. “I mean, they carry data, but they can really overheat.”
“So what are we looking at?” Mina asked.
“An innovation in human/computer data sharing?” Ani said, not one hundred percent sure herself. “Using ’80s tech. I mean, you still find ribbon cables inside computers, but as computer-to-peripheral connectors, using IDCs, people just use single cables these days. They’re just more sensible.”
“Is it hurting him?” Joe asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Ani said.
She moved to the computer terminal the ribbon cable was connected to and woke up the screen with the space bar. She was expecting to find some Linux terminal windows—minimalist green text on a black background—but what she found was a graphics user interface that she’d never seen anything like before. She used a mouse and keys to navigate around the display, and the screen seemed to shatter and morph before reforming, lining up into a set of vertical columns, all of different colors. Passing her mouse over one of the columns made it explode outward into an array of files and documents. Passing the mouse over the contents of the column made the files zoom forward, offering up a graphic preview of each file type and its contents, along with strings of numbers and characters that meant nothing to her.
It was an interesting GUI, maybe even a unique operating system, but it didn’t seem that easy to use, nor did it appear to be an improvement to a standard interface. It was almost like the kinds of operating systems you found in … well, in video games when designers are trying to show what computers of the future might look like.
Any keyboard shortcuts she tried didn’t work, any processes she wanted to examine weren’t available, and she couldn’t find a command line method of operation either. Frustrated, she was about to give up when a cursor movement brought another of the columns into “exploded view” and she saw a word that she not only recognized, but had kind of been looking for:
An icon marked emet.
She went to double click on it, but it moved to evade the cursor arrow, flipping around the screen to dodge her every attempt to open it. Then, when Ani gave up, the icon moved forward until it filled a quarter of the screen, and a cursor moved by itself, double-clicking itself.
A computer operating system with a sense of humor? Ani thought, grimly, ticking a box on her mental checklist.
A checklist she had been working on for a while now.
In her mind, the checklist was headed: TURING TEST.
She was about to examine how all of the pieces fit together when there was a sharp and startling movement off to her side, and she turned, heart pounding.
Ah, she thought, there’s that jump scare. Better late than never.
Richard Dorian’s body was jerking to life, his eyes open but showing only whites. Thick ropes of vein and tendon stood proud on his neck, face, and hands. The jerks grew stronger, more violent, and he made an awful guttural growling sound. Then, as quickly as it started, the seizure ended. Richard Dorian was leaning forward in his chair, looking healthy and awake. His blue eyes glittered, as though at some private joke, as he looked around the office at the people gathered there.
“You made it, then,” he said, sitting back in his seat looking pleased.
Pleased with himself, Ani thought.
“So, how close are you to solving my puzzle?”
Joe had thought his day couldn’t get any weirder. But he’d probably had a similar thought six or seven times today. It appeared that “weird” was a line you occasionally stepped over, but when you did, it just kept ramping up.
But this … this was nuts.
It wasn’t just the way that Ani messing around on a computer had brought a near-dead-looking Dorian back to life, although that was freaky beyond words, but it was also what happened to the computer screen when Dorian did awaken.
Joe could see Ani was trying to figure out what was happening on the monitor, but her mouse-clicks and keyboard interventions didn’t seem to affect the phenomenon one iota.
The thing on-screen looked like an unholy amalgam of Richard Dorian as he would have been perhaps twenty years ago, a sophisticated morphing program that used “space liquid” and “bubbles” as its transforming templates, and a selection of disturbing images from DeviantArt’s subcategory “Abstract and Surreal.” The clarity of the ever-changing image was breathtaking, and Joe saw that every monitor in the room was showing a version of the same image, using different morphing patterns and different underlying imagery. It had become a gallery of digital art of the man behind the desk, with each portrait moving independently of the others and the original.
“Ani Lee and Joe Dyson,” the physical version of Dorian said, and there was a cold, monotonous, robotic tone to his voice that was surely the man’s own personal version of a Bond villain telling th
e secret agent that he’s been expecting him. “I hope your journey wasn’t too difficult.”
As he spoke, the digital version of him that appeared on every screen in the room spoke, too. But the facial expressions and background imagery differed on each monitor. One laughed as it spoke, the texture of Dorian’s face made up of LOLcats and emoticons; another looked furious, with raging fire and bubbling lava skinning the 3-D model; another looked guilty, skinned in police cars, metal bars, and handcuffs, as it threw up cartoon hands in mock surrender.
“Mr. Dorian,” Ani said. Joe was proud of the way her voice was strong and level and unaffected by the strange turns her day had taken. “Or should I call you by your real name?”
In-person Dorian turned to her and stared, just as every screen-bound Dorian did the same thing.
“It’s good to meet you,” Ani said, “emet.”
Joe realized that not only wasn’t he keeping up with present events, he was twenty or so pages behind. “emet?” he asked. “Who … ?”
“I’m sorry, Joe,” Ani turned to him. “I’m afraid I’m being a bit rude. Let me introduce you to the world’s first sentient artificial intelligence, emet.” She turned back to Dorian. “We’re not late, are we?”
The on-screen Dorian avatars applauded Ani, with a variety of effects incorporated into each of the images—fireworks, ticker tape, champagne corks popping—but the flesh-and-blood one in front of her remained impassive.
“You know who I am?” Dorian asked, and still his voice was monotonous, with no highs or lows to give his speech any kind of emotional weight. He could have been reciting stock prices for all the feeling he put into his words. “That’s … unexpected.”
He didn’t sound surprised.
“But the clues you left us to follow made it quite clear who was behind all of this,” Ani told him. “Or should I say what was behind this? I have no idea which pronoun to adopt, but then I’ve never met an AI before.”
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