dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  Joe and Ani moved closer to their goal, Joe starting and stopping in a manner that was both frustrating and worrying. Ani didn’t seem to be having the same problems, moving fluidly.

  There was something uniquely unsettling about having to think himself forward through the virtual environment of a beloved video game, which negated a lot of the joy and wonder he’d have expected from the experience. He felt on edge, unsettled, even a little scared.

  He knew that the whole VR interface thing was possible because the chip in his head was acting as some kind of bridge between Dorian’s brain and emet’s programming, but it produced a control system that felt very alien. Maybe it was because it seemed such a self-conscious act, thinking about moving instead of letting muscle memory—with a D-Pad or good old-fashioned legs—do it for you. Or maybe it was because the sort of interface that he was using was supposed to be decades off, in technological terms. Or maybe it was just that he was using that control mechanism to walk through a digital environment that he had played through on a screen so many times before, and it was the whole experience that had him freaking out.

  Whatever the reason, Joe couldn’t let his emotions get in the way of the mission.

  He concentrated on the interface with his own interior chipset and routed his movements through there instead.

  Two seconds later he was moving as easily as Ani seemed to be.

  They arrived at the three “fingers” and stood there, baffled as to how to proceed.

  He tried swiping his hand at it, and was startled to find that his avatar’s hand actually felt the contact it made with one of the “fingers.” He hadn’t expected a tactile perception to be possible within the VR environment, but realized that this was all happening mentally, rather than just visually, and that the sensation of touch was being created within his own head.

  “Can you feel this?” he asked, and Ani reached out and let out a sound of surprise.

  “That’s pretty weird,” she said.

  “I know. It feels like we’re in a digital dream.”

  “Or nightmare.”

  “Yeah, or that. Problem is I can’t think how we’re supposed to move forward. I’m supposed to roll up into a centipede ball and smash through these fingers, triggering the downpour of giant maggots.”

  “You just said ’maggot flood,’ not ‘giant maggot flood,’” Ani said in a creeped-out voice. “But that’s the game character’s objective. Not ours. We just want to find the part of this program that gives us direct access to emet.”

  “How do you suggest we do that?”

  “It depends. Let me try something.”

  Joe took a step back, leaving the next step to her.

  Thinking about it logically, there had to be a simple, effective, and fast interface that Dorian could use when he was treading this same digital path. Presumably, Centipeter was a familiar place for him. And it was the game that had first tested the learning capacities of the nascent AI, so it was, perhaps, natural that he’d use it to cross the network. Really, this place was just a metaphor. A digital metaphor. Like the desktop was the metaphor of choice for just about every computer in the world.

  Having folders and apps on a digital desktop was part of what made home computing possible. When early computers had been MS-DOS based, requiring exact instructions to be typed after a C prompt, it had been difficult for the average Joe or Josephine to negotiate their way through the system. Xerox had first come up with the desktop UI, although Macintosh gave it polish and functionality, including other desktop commonplaces like a calculator and a notepad to literally emulate a physical desk’s top, with files and folders and the ability to drag and drop items from one place to another.

  People understood the idea of desktops better than they understood the idea of command prompts. Pretty much everyone had seen a real life solid desktop. To present a computer analogy for that everyday object made everyone’s understanding of the computer a lot more concrete. Metaphors really were an important aspect of the human understanding of things. Non-linear mathematics that described the way initial conditions had a massive effect on the outcomes of dynamic systems was a difficult idea to wrap one’s head around, but provide a metaphor—a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil and leading to tornadoes in Texas—and the whole thing became a whole lot easier to wrap your mind around. The scientist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov once said that teaching, itself, was the art of analogy, which suggested that human learning was largely made possible by their ability to compare one thing to another.

  Dorian’s interface was a self-referential metaphor of a video game that he himself had created. Such a strong connection to a decades-old computer game was nostalgic, sure, and Ani thought that maybe it explained the corridor they had stood in before the Centipeter graphics had established themselves. That had been like a loading screen on a PC or Mac. And it, too, had been colored by the yearning nostalgia that Ani now suspected beat at the heart of a lot of Dorian’s life. The corridor, she was now certain, was drawn from the Cambridge University college where he’d coded his first game.

  Nostalgia. A longing, perhaps, for a time when things were simpler. She knew it was a case of her playing at amateur psychologist, but she figured that was what you became when you signed up to be in the security services. You needed to be able to read people. And quickly. Any edge—even one gathered from the impressions you formed about a rival, or an asset—had to be better than none.

  If the structure in front of them was a game metaphor, then it stood to reason it operated under video game logic. They couldn’t, as Joe had pointed out, turn into centipede balls and smash into the “fingers,” but perhaps there was something else video game-y that they could try. Survival horror games like Silent Hill seemed to require moving up to an object and interacting with it by pressing the ACTION button, a cross-or A-button depending on the console. If she moved through the digital world by thinking about moving, perhaps you pressed ACTION by thinking action.

  The three “fingers” moved together, forming a rough pyramid. Rough, because it looked rank and disgusting and not the kind of thing anyone would sanely think of as a goal.

  Unless, of course, it was in a video game.

  It was weird that video games so often drew their plots and/or imagery from the part of the human unconscious that was macabre, dark, gothic, and ugly. It wasn’t something Ani had thought of before. She was only too happy to play through grim landscapes, battling demons and zombies and mutant fetuses from hell. But now, walking through one of those worlds, interacting with its morbid features, suddenly made her wonder why it was often darkness that haunted the world’s cultural artifacts. What did it say about the human race? That fear and disgust were somehow attractive? Or that by studying the dark, the dismal, the ugly, people inoculated themselves against the horrible? Did it even matter?

  Action, she thought.

  An intense beam of blood-hued light suddenly erupted from the point where the three “fingers” met, shooting upward into the ceiling of the chamber.

  “Maggot. Flood,” Joe reminded her, kind of proving her point about the darkness that beat at the heart of the human condition.

  Then the beam cut through the skin of the ceiling, and Ani readied herself for the horrors to come.

  When Ani found a new way to activate the trigger mechanism, Joe braced himself, and was, thus, utterly unprepared for what happened next.

  The roof of the Chamber of Sores split open just like he’d been expecting, but instead of hungry, giant maggots raining down on them, a quantity of white, leaf-like fronds—almost like feathers—floated gently down instead.

  Joe recognized them as they got closer, but it had taken longer than it should have, because they didn’t belong in the Centipeter gamescape.

  Right designer, wrong game.

  “Maggots?” Ani said. “Don’t look like any I’ve ever seen before.”

  “They’re dataTrees,” Joe said. “From Echelon Warriors. You
know, Dorian’s cyberpunk adventure game from the mid-nineties?”

  “Again, I’ll defer to your superior knowledge.”

  Joe waved a hand in the direction of the descending objects. “They’re the data storage mechanisms that the Echelon Warriors hack to uncover the global conspiracy that beats at the heart of the game.”

  “Feathers?” Ani said, disgusted. “Oh, the mass media really understands hacking, don’t they?”

  The dataTrees floated down and, when they reached the floor of the chamber, the trees oriented themselves, fronds upward, and proceeded to bury their stalks into the ground. When they were set, they were as tall as Joe, or rather as tall as Joe’s avatar, which was as good as the same thing here anyway.

  Once planted, the dataTrees lit up with the information that pulsed through their fronds. There was a noise that sounded like metal wind chimes in a light breeze, a noise that sounded every time the individual branches of the fronds vibrated with the pulse of the information they carried.

  Just like the ones in the game.

  “Go on,” Ani said. “Tell me. How does someone go about hacking a bloody feather?”

  Joe knew that she wasn’t going to like the answer. Because it was pretty stupid when you said it out loud.

  “In the game, you need to match up the sound the data makes with a meter the in-game hackers carry,” Joe said. “Each dataTree is like a different minigame—a puzzle. They get harder and harder to complete …”

  “Oh, that’s actually quite a lot like real life hacking then,” Ani said.

  “Really?”

  “Of course not.” Ani laughed.

  “It makes for a pretty good game,” Joe said, suddenly feeling defensive about something he’d enjoyed in the past. “And the dataTrees are from the future …”

  “Ah. You should have led with that. It makes so much more sense now. I take it that you don’t have a super sound-hacking meter on you, do you? I think I left mine at home.”

  Joe, looked at her, glumly.

  So no maggots then. Just feathers.

  Ani tried to make sense of what Joe had told her. The dataTrees made a noise and the player hacked the noise. If she was to judge this virtual world based on what she’d seen so far, Dorian was an idiot.

  Of course, she had heard about Dorian’s games. She might even have played one, but it hadn’t made enough of an impact to stick with her. She didn’t think she’d missed much. Hacking something that looked like a feather, guided by the noise it made? Man, that was lame.

  She guessed that she was pretty fussy about the computer games she played. Whole swathes of the gaming industry had passed her by because they just didn’t sound like something she would want to devote hours—or days, or weeks—of her time to. She avoided first person shooters set in 3-D rendered battlefields too reminiscent of real battlefields; strategy games where people built kingdoms and scrapped for resources; Minecraft; anything with zombies; and games where wizards, warriors, ninjas, and dwarves went on lengthy quests for digital MacGuffins, those near irrelevant items that drove so many plots forward, but were utterly meaningless.

  She knew that there were probably entertaining elements to those types of games, but she preferred “art” to “entertainment for entertainment’s sake.” She was aware that Dorian games were often held up as “art” by people who played them, but someone had once said the same about the Star Wars films to her, when she had just thought that they undermined the whole sf genre by passing off crappy fairy tale plots as sf, and that was enough to make a person cautious about other people’s opinion of what constituted art.

  Harmonizing a leaf-thing to a meter sounded like a lot of work to access data, which meant that, like the “fingers,” some other method of interacting with the dataTrees was probably more likely. Maybe it would be as simple as thinking a command again.

  She tried action, but the word had no visible effect. Okay, that would have been too easy. But there had to be some other word, perhaps one that described what was wanted from the interaction.

  She tried read, data, and read data, all to no avail. Hack and hack data, ditto. She thought about how Joe had described the process in-game and tried match and match up. Then harmonize and harmonize data. Nix. Nada. Nothing.

  Guessing the correct command was kind of like guessing a password, and she usually used a computer to crack those. It had to be something relevant to the action she was trying to accomplish. Maybe you thought file names and they opened from the dataTree. But how could she guess a file name?

  They were so close, but they’d get no cigar if they didn’t solve this puzzle. Suddenly, she was aware, once more, of how the whole operation had been like a video game, with leads to follow, puzzles to solve, and non-player characters to interact with. Perhaps that was because life was a lot more like video games than she had ever given it credit for being before. Was that why video games were structured the way they were? Why darkness was a constantly recurring tone and theme? They just reflected human lives?

  That was a stretch. And they were talking about an inhuman force here, an AI that was working with Dorian toward an insane final goal.

  But that thought, that the whole investigation had been structured like a video game, persisted. And something she’d heard when Joe was filling her in on what he’d experienced suddenly seemed important somehow.

  “Joe,” she said. “Run through your side of the investigation again.”

  Joe looked at her, and shrugged. “Missing kids in Luton led to a bowling alley where they were being kept as slaves, building computers. I took the perps down, and it all led to the Dorian chips. We went to Dorian’s LA office, found out about the Romanian connection and came here.”

  Ani felt her brow furrow.

  “No fight?” she asked. “I mean, were there no confrontations along the way? You didn’t have to get physical with the guy in LA?”

  “No,” Joe said. “He rolled over pretty easy.”

  And then Joe turned his head as if something had just occurred to him.

  “There was a fight,” he said, bemused. “Three meatheads jumped me in the restroom at the airport …”

  “And then you got here, were chased by zombies, and had to fight those golems …”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “Video game logic.” Ani felt her skin break out in goosebumps as coldness spread across her body. “What happens when you complete a level of a video game?”

  Joe’s avatar looked puzzled, which just went to show how the VR interface used human thoughts and feelings to present its images.

  “You go on to the next one,” he said, and Ani felt like kicking him for missing the one thing she wanted him to say. It took him a few more seconds, but that was better than her having to spell it out for him. “Wait. Wait. No! But that’s insane!”

  “What is?” she prompted.

  “End of level bosses. You get to the end of the level, and there’s a boss fight.”

  “And if you break your investigation up into chunks, how many levels would you say that you’ve played through?”

  Joe sighed. “Luton, end of level bosses: the guy with the 666 tattoo and his mates. LA, end of level bosses: the three jocks. Romania, end of level bosses: the golems. But that’s just …”

  “Insane?”

  “I was going to say a coincidence, but yeah, insane pretty much covers it.”

  “What was the reason behind the airport attack?”

  “I thought I was just a random target.”

  “Now imagine that you weren’t,” Ani said slowly. “Imagine that something else was at play. Did the jocks taunt you? Give any indication of why they decided, suddenly, to start a fight?”

  “No. But …”

  “But nothing. What if they had been instructed to? To keep everything running along the tracks of video game logic?”

  “Then they were paid off. Hired over the dark net. Or on retainer.”

  “And now we are well and truly down the ra
bbit hole,” Ani said. “That is not a sane human thing to do, is it? Lead people through an investigation, providing video game boss battles to the one who’s best at fighting? That is either the modus operandi of a lunatic, or …”

  “Or?”

  “Who do we know around here that was fed video games from the very moment of their birth?”

  “What?” Joe looked really puzzled now.

  Video game logic, Ani thought. If we’ve been led here, as I suspect we have, then we’re supposed to work this out.

  “Who has been fed video games?” Joe tried again for an answer, but Ani let the question hang in the air, turning to the nearest dataTree, and thought emet.

  The dataTree quivered in response, shifting through the visible spectrum, and releasing a string of metallic notes that got louder and louder.

  As they achieved something close to ear-splitting, they stopped, and the walls of the chamber began to flicker, momentarily losing substance, before reforming into something that looked like huge polished mirrors. And then they exploded inward toward Joe and Ani, glistening shards that made them both duck.

  The shards that they didn’t dodge passed through them harmlessly.

  “Well, that’s gone and done it,” Ani said.

  When the mirrors broke, the whole virtual space around them glitched, flickered, and became something else. Somewhere else. Again, Joe recognized it, but then he was meant to. Grathna’s Revenge. Grathna’s workshop on the planet Tellus Mater … Joe shook his head in disbelief.

  Tellus Mater.

  Mother Earth.

  Terra.

  Gaia.

  The workshop was the place where Grathna—the defender of Tellus Mater—came to assemble, or rather grow the weapons that he used in that defense. Organic technology covered the walls, looking for all the world like machines made out of tree roots, a fusion of wood and integrated circuits.

  Joe had spent a lot of time crafting weapons here when he played the game: pollen cannons and sap guns. It all sounded a bit silly now when he thought about it, but it had seemed like a good theme for a game at the time, defending the planet against the nightmarish Terrorformers that wanted to build their awful cities on the perfect Arcadian paradise that Grathna inhabited.