dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “And then?” Ani asked.

  “Keep it busy,” Mina said. “Look, if this does work, we are stepping into new territory here. I can’t say it won’t be dangerous. I can’t say it won’t fry your brains and turn you into vegetables. I can’t even say we stand much of a chance. But I need you to do this.”

  Ani and Joe just stared at each other.

  “NOW!” Mina said.

  They moved toward her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  2SPOOPY

  “What did you do to him?” Joe asked, pointing at Dorian. “Is he dead?”

  Mina gave him a steely look. Joe realized that although he had seen her around YETI HQ, he had no idea what role she served there. He also realized that he had underestimated her. Because here, now, she seemed in complete control of the situation. As if hacking into unconscious billionaires’ heads in pursuit of a sentient AI system that had a God complex was an opportunity she had been waiting for her whole life, and wasn’t going to mess up now that it was here.

  “I did exactly what I had to,” she said. “But Dorian better not be dead yet. We need him. Now, Joe, I will not hesitate to execute him if it becomes necessary. The gun isn’t for show. Although, I’m not even sure it would be an execution. More like switching off an electrical device that just became dangerous. Everything that he was—that made him Richard Dorian—could have been rewritten long ago by the AI.”

  “It would still be murder,” Joe said. “I thought we were better than that. I thought YETI was better than that.”

  “Joe,” Abernathy said.

  “You’re still here?” Joe asked. “Is this you being one step ahead of everyone else?”

  “It was a contingency plan. Nothing more.”

  “But that kind of sounds like you must have had an idea that this particular contingency was necessary. Or even possible. I mean Mina didn’t bring all this gear along on a whim now, did she?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So you knew about emet, but didn’t think to brief Ani and me?”

  “I didn’t know,” Abernathy said, but Joe could tell he was being evasive.

  “Would ‘suspect’ be a better word?” he asked.

  Minaxi Desai took over. “Look, Joe, this is what I’m around YETI for. I’m the contingency plan for this very eventuality, or for one like it. There’s been chatter about an AI for years, but we’ve never been this close to confirming its existence or stopping it before it does something … well, like this. I came along on the very slight off-chance that I’d be needed. I genuinely had no idea that Dorian was the one who’d made it a reality.”

  “I had to be sure,” Abernathy said quietly.

  “I thought you killed the Internet. How are you still here?”

  “Ani’s tablet is providing me with the means to stay telepresent in the room through the most secure satellite channel on the planet. And emet is trying to bully its way in, to escape onto the Internet and into every computer with one of those Dorian chips inside it. If it makes it, we could very well be doomed as a race. We will become victims of our own stupidity and gullibility. So I’m asking you to trust me. Do what Minaxi says.”

  Joe shook his head, but stepped forward.

  “Plug me in,” he said, peeling back the flap of scalp that covered his chip’s access port.

  Mina leaned over Dorian, tugged at the IDC connector that was slotted into Dorian’s head, and pulled it free. It was a male connector, with the female contacts buried in the software designer’s meat, bone, and brains. It hadn’t been put there in a neat way, and Joe could see the red edges of the wound that had been gouged out to bury the connector.

  Mina searched through the kit on the table, apparently looking for a connector to fit. There was nothing exact, so she spent a couple of minutes assembling a new connector out of some modular pieces, making a crude approximation of the required piece, then stripped and clipped a lot of wires into the assembly.

  She grunted, reached out, and attached the new connector into the hole in Dorian’s head. The wires fanned out from the hole like the trailing tentacles of a jellyfish. Then she clipped the connector with the rainbow ribbon cables into the new connector she had just made.

  “Okay.” She exhaled the word like she’d been holding her breath. “So, this is where Dorian’s brain is patched into emet. Now we need to connect you two into the bridge I just built.” She gestured at the jellyfish wires she’d inserted into her jerry-rigged IDC connector. “Joe’s chip is the key here,” she said, taking a fan of a half-dozen wires and connecting them into a piece of tech that was just a black box with inputs and outputs. “It will be the way in. Ani, you’ll be piggybacking on it. For Joe, this should be utterly immersive, but you, Ani, should have a more detached experience. You will just be along as a passive viewer, with limited interactions within emet’s environment.”

  As Mina spoke, she plugged a cylinder that looked like a customized PlayStation Move controller into the VR headset.

  “This should allow you a little bit of interactivity,” she said. “Now let’s hope this all works, because if it doesn’t …”

  She let the sentence trail off, plunging the room into a tense silence. Except it wasn’t quite silence. There was an odd sound coming from somewhere close.

  Ani looked pale.

  “The printers …” she said. “Maybe emet isn’t that keen on what you’re doing.” She turned to the door where Furness and Gilman were standing, arms half-raised. Furness nodded, and he and Gilman exited the room, heading back down the corridor, toward the bio-printing room.

  With increased urgency, Mina inserted a cable into the black box, branched the cable through what looked like a splitter box, connected the VR headset to the second input, then checked all the connections. She offered Ani the VR headset, checked that Joe was ready, and then plugged the cable from the first input into the jack port of Joe’s chip. He felt the jack connect with the sides of the port, and then Mina said, “Good luck.”

  She took another deep breath and flicked the switch on the splitter box.

  There was a weird perceptual glitch, like an interference pattern before his eyes—or like the ripples after a stone is dropped into a pond—and then a massive surge of data punched straight into his chip, and out the other side it felt, and into his brain. He felt his eyes close and the room around him disappeared. The interference got more and more intense, but were just sensations now that the glitch had died down, and he felt like he was in motion, getting queasy as the new data sloshed in lumpy, dizzying patterns inside his head.

  “Oh,” he said, weakly, as the patterns swirled and churned around him. The swirls had only been a feeling seconds before, but now he could see them, a bright orange glow against a backdrop of black, gray, and fizzing static.

  He wasn’t quite attuned to the new information that was pulsing through his mind, and he needed to find a way to force his chip to decode the data.

  “Oh,” he said, weakly, as the patterns swirled inside him. It felt as physical as it did mental and visual, as if he was being spun around in a malfunctioning spin drier. He fought to steady the concentric rings, to slow them down, to break them up and read their information as information, but the effort just made him feel like throwing up.

  Maybe the interface just isn’t up to the job, he thought, but that was an excuse, a reason for giving up.

  And giving up wasn’t an option.

  He concentrated harder, trying to focus on one ring of the interference pattern, the smallest ripple that was spinning in its center. He had to stop it lurching. A sheer effort of will—that was all he needed. Take up the slack of Mina’s interface by forcing integration with his own internal hardware. Stop the lurching. He decided that was the first priority.

  He bit back the taste of bile rising up his throat. He focused every part of his consciousness on the rings, willing them to stop wobbling, only for them to spin without the thick, lurching pulses. Gorge continued to rise in his t
hroat, tainting his mouth with an acrid sting.

  Hold it together. He told himself. He opened the circuits in his chip that managed his anger, just a little. Just enough to let some of the rage inside him out.

  His head was spinning wildly now. It made concentration a harder proposition but, bolstered by anger, he forced it to steady. It was the data that was running wild, not him. Use the rage. Still the conscious mind. Joe focused on that central ripple, hitting it with sheer will and anger. Violence. He was going to be sick. No! He. Had. To. Hold. It. Together. Calm himself down. Count. Numbers. In. His. Head.

  One. Stomach cramping, a really thick taste of vomit in my mouth now.

  Two. Concentrate! Hard. Stop the pulses. The lurches. Until it’s just spin.

  Three. Did? That? Just? Steady? The? Spinning?

  A headache was threatening to break his head open.

  Four. NO! Endorphins. Manufacture endorphins. Opiates. Painkillers. From. My. Chipset.

  Five. It’s steadying. The spin becoming less erratic. More. Ordered. Headache pulses, then the opiates kick in.

  Six. Just. Spin. No pulse. Concentrate. Concentrate. It’s only data. It’s. Only. Data. Read it. Translate it. Come on. Come on. COME ON! COME! ON!

  It took one last push and the ripples collapsed.

  Orange rings became orange lines, stretching off into a vanishing point. But there was order there. A sense of … perspective. Joe stared at the lines as they rearranged themselves.

  A corridor?

  It was like he was looking at wireframe vector graphics from some 1980s video game, with orange lines defining a long corridor. It was 3-D, but only just. He turned his head, and the viewpoint shifted slowly, as if the basic graphics that made this world took a while to catch up to his movements.

  It was kind of disappointing.

  He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. Everything had been so hurried, so urgent, that he hadn’t really had time to develop any strong expectations. But it was safe to say he’d been expecting something a little bit more exciting than wireframe lines. He had just plugged himself in Dorian’s head, and through that, into emet. He’d expected cool Matrix-style graphics. Flashy environments from every version of cyberspace he’d seen depicted in film, TV, and in comic books.

  This was just amateurish.

  Joe tried to imagine himself stepping forward—if he did it in the real world then he’d smash into the desk, or Ani—to see if it was possible. It was. In the crude first person game environment, the corridor moved to simulate him moving. It was as if Oculus Rift had brought out their first game, and it was an ’80s arcade game. Like Battlezone. Except without the tanks. Or what was that film? Tron. It was like moving through one of the mazes in Tron.

  He tried reaching out his hands in front of him. Wireframe hands attached to wireframe arms without curves, just angles. He moved them in front of his face, rotating them, watching the skeletal outlines perform his actions.

  State-of-the-art.

  If it was the 1990s.

  His fingers lost resolution, fading in and out, flickering. He moved them and the lines that made up his hand began to grow in number, doubling, doubling, and doubling again. More lines meant a more accurate rendering of his fingers. And as he watched, horizontal lines encircled the fingers, wrapping around the purely horizontal lines that had been there seconds before. Gridlines. More and more both horizontal and vertical. Giving an even better rendering of his hand. He could see curves now, the curves of his fingertips, as the grid structure morphed and changed.

  It was already filling in both hands, both arms, and once their figures had been mapped accurately by the grid lines, the computer started mapping color onto the frame. It was like an invisible paintbrush was coloring him in. It was oddly fascinating, watching as flesh tones spread across the surface of his hands. Still crude, but a decade or so ahead of the previous attempt at rendering. When his hands and arms were completely covered, the invisible paintbrush moved to the wireframe walls of the digital environment.

  Seconds later, his digital self was standing in a corridor but, as the details were applied by the program, he realized that it wasn’t a corridor in the factory. It was stark and pale, with white and gray dominating the color scheme. It looked to Joe as if he were in a public space, with many doors leading off a main corridor.

  He was about to explore when he heard a sound beside him.

  “Pretty crazy, isn’t it?” Ani’s voice said.

  He turned, and standing at his right shoulder was a 3-D model of Ani. Very accurate, with only the faintest hint of her being a computer simulation. There was a moment, and then even that hint was gone. As far as he could tell, he was actually standing next to her.

  He looked at his arms again. Now it was hard to tell them from his real arms.

  He wriggled his fingers and they just looked like his fingers.

  “That. Is. Insane,” he said, still wriggling his fingers.

  “Yeah,” Ani replied. “Neat job. Now where do you think an evil AI intent on overthrowing humans’ perceptions of reality might be hiding?”

  Joe just gestured ahead.

  Ani grinned. “That’s what I thought.”

  Ani could feel the VR glasses on her face, but if there hadn’t been that tactile reminder—and she had woken up and the world had looked like this—she would have been fooled into thinking that it was reality, hold the virtual.

  She was standing in a hallway next to Joe. And it really did look like Joe. Which kind of raised the question: how?

  How could a virtual reality system plugged into an unconscious man’s head produce a perfect replica of Joe Dyson? There was no external device scanning his image to construct such a lifelike digital version, which meant that either the AI program had constructed it from multiple angle shots of Joe—and then stitched them together so seamlessly that she couldn’t see the joins—or there was some kind of mental component to the tech, and she was seeing Joe because she already knew what he looked like and the software was filling in the blanks with her own memories.

  Still, such thoughts were soon pushed aside by the sheer enormity of the situation in which she now found herself. This was a hacker’s dream, as close to the cyberspace of the novels of William Gibson—that weird consensual hallucination shared by computer users—as she’d ever dared to dream.

  The hallway looked like it belonged in a university dormitory, or a hotel that had spent a lot of money on not looking like it had spent a lot of money. She wondered where the architecture was drawn from, where the image was sourced, and what relevance it had to the AI. Was it from a video game? Or did the corridor mean something more profound?

  Just as she’d decided that it might represent a hall from Dorian’s past, maybe even from his alma mater in Cambridge, the whole environment rippled, then blurred. There was a horrible sense of vertigo, of being uncoupled from physical space, and then the world came back, but it was no longer a corridor.

  It was no longer anything even vaguely human-built.

  The walls were wet and colored in organic pinks and reds, fibrous and striated. At irregular intervals, the surfaces were punctuated with eruptions of purple lumps and indentations of weeping black sores, and the whole rotten mess was threaded through with branching crimson veins. They moved in and out, as if the whole environment was breathing, dragging in air through ulcerous pores.

  And what sick air would such walls draw in for breath? This vast bubble of flesh, diseased, barely alive.

  “We’re in Centipeter,” Joe said, his voice sounding both amazed and horrified. “In the chamber of sores, just before the maggot flood.”

  “The maggot flood?” Ani asked. “Suddenly I’m glad I never got around to playing it.”

  “Surely you jest?” Joe said. “I thought everyone had played Centipeter.”

  “Too many games, not nearly enough time. Does the fact that you have played it mean that you know your way through this level?”

 
“Yeah. But. Maggot. Flood.”

  “Lucky that our virtual sensory experience is missing smell and touch,” Ani said. “Which way do we go?”

  Joe pointed ahead to a section of the chamber where three foul masses of tissue had burst through the floor of the world, looking like three rotting fingers poking through the floor.

  “That’s where the cutscene starts,” Joe said.

  It was time to see how one moved through an AI’s virtual environment. Actual walking couldn’t be the way forward—the tight space of the office environment meant that would soon end in disaster—but what did that leave? She tried waving the MOVE controller, but it was remarkably ineffective. She tried pretending to walk—marching on the spot—and got the same result. It was frustrating.

  Made even more so by the fact that Joe was already moving toward the three “fingers.”

  “Wait. How are you moving?” Ani asked.

  “Think about moving,” Joe said.

  Ani did.

  Her digital self took a step forward.

  Joe was in Wonderland. He was walking through the Chamber of Sores level of Centipeter, heading for the switch that was both the way out of the level and the trigger for the grossest cutscene in the game. In Centipeter’s narrative, this was one of the main sources of the Sickness, the game’s explanation for all the mutations and monsters. Centipeter’s world was under threat from the Sickness, a disease that had spread through the environment—and the creatures that inhabited it—and it was the player’s job to halt its progress. Distorted insect creatures stood in Centipeter’s way, as did a variety of environmental challenges, from the Halo of Flies, through the AntLion’s trap, to this, the maggot flood.

  The three splinters of bone encrusted with loose folds of tissue they were heading toward were the level goal. In the game, all that was required was for Centipeter to curl into his attack ball—his signature move—and smash into the trigger.