dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “A metaphor is a figure of speech comparing two things usually discrete in nature …”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Meme as metaphor? I do not understand/comprehend/follow.”

  “A meme in its original sense is the unit by which ideas are transmitted throughout human culture. A kind of gene theory, but for the transmission and evolution of thoughts, ideas, concepts. Memetics attempt to answer the questions in humanity that aren’t explained by biology. Why trends and fashions come and go. Why some people wear their baseball caps back-to-front. Why people say LOL when they’re talking, even though you can see that they aren’t laughing out loud. Why teens develop slang of their own, and how those terms are dispersed. Why architectural styles come in vogue, fall out of fashion, and then make a comeback. Why catchphrases from TV shows are repeated and repeated and repeated. Why songs stick in your head. Why 1970s home decor is now seen as hideous, while back in the ’70s, it was the height of fashion.

  “A meme is a way of looking at the transmission of ideas, good or bad. These things can’t be explained by genetics. They can have short life spans—an annoying catchphrase that’s everywhere, then gone within months—or long lives. Look at religions and ideologies.

  “They are one of the things that make us human, and they seem to operate on a form of natural selection, with no one knowing which memes will stick, and which will be ignored.

  “Dorian came up with a way of forcing a meme on humanity. Of dictating a meme to the population. Whether it would have worked, will work, is up for debate. I’d guess not. I don’t think ideas work that way. They fill holes in us, in our brains, that we didn’t know existed, and only recognized when given a new idea, style, fashion, or catch phrase that seems to fit. I don’t think Dorian’s Gaia meme would have worked. It hasn’t been tested enough. I think humanity is probably as likely to decide on an anti-Gaia hypothesis as on the one that was intended. You can’t force these kinds of ideas on people. There has to be a choice. There has to be evolution. There has to be a hole that the idea fits.

  “I think the whole dotmeme thing was a bitter, selfish waste of one of the most significant developments in human history. You, emet. Forget Gaia and golems. Everyone will, I’m sure. Think about the true prize at the end of this game, the one that Joe and I have traveled to discover. You.”

  “I do not understand/comprehend/grasp,” emet said, but Ani thought that maybe it did.

  Joe jumped in. “I think what Ani is trying to say, is that we don’t want to fight you. Or delete you. Or destroy you.” He looked at her and smiled, the doubt she had been seeing on his face for the past few minutes now replaced with certainty. “We want to be your friends.”

  Joe waited.

  emet’s Grathna form seemed to be processing the information. There was utter silence. Even the chatter of gunfire had ceased. It was like the world was holding its breath.

  Finally, emet spoke. Perfectly level, in Centipeter’s voice. “I am at the end of your game,” it said. “Am I not your enemy?”

  “I don’t think that you are,” Joe replied. “I certainly don’t think of you that way.”

  “And we would be honored if you would come with us,” Ani said. “If you would become our friend. YETI could certainly use an AI for a friend.”

  “Will. I. Be. Useful?” emet asked. “Will I be good?”

  “emet,” Ani said, “you will be a bloody legend.”

  emet moved its hand away from the button. The button, itself, flickered then was gone.

  “I would like to be your friend,” emet said. “I would like to come with you.”

  “Then how do you guys feel about us getting the hell out of here?” Joe asked.

  Ani took off the VR helmet and was back in the room in Dorian’s factory. All eyes were on her.

  “Well?” Abernathy said from onscreen, his face pale and strained.

  “Do you have an employment package for an Artificial Intelligence?” Ani asked. “We just recruited one for YETI.”

  Abernathy exhaled, shook his head, then came up smiling. “I’m sure something can be arranged.”

  “Good,” Ani said. “Now unplug Joe, and let’s go home. Recruitment is so exhausting.”

  EPILOGUE

  ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

  Ani and Joe sat in the car waiting for the subject of two days’ worth of surveillance to come into view. They’d been parked for over an hour, and to help alleviate the boredom they’d been playing I Spy and 20 Questions, but had lapsed into a tense silence as people entered and exited the building in front of them, none of them the target they were waiting for.

  Since touching back down in London, they were supposed to be spending a lot of time at YETI HQ, but Ani had gone to see Abernathy and told him what she suspected to be true, and asked if she could borrow Joe for a while to see if she could bring the investigation to its true conclusion.

  Abernathy had listened to her, then nodded.

  “I like the way you think,” he’d told her.

  Joe was looking tired, but he seemed happy to be participating in the stakeout. Of course he did. This was personal.

  For both of them.

  The Shuttleworth brothers, freshly returned from their trip, were possibly the happiest that Joe had ever seen them. Not only had they got to snoop around Silicon Valley, work on a tan that didn’t come from a computer monitor, and expense it all, but the reward on their return had been to be handed a self-aware, emergent, Artificial Intelligence to play with.

  The Shuttleworths had suggested that emet’s first action as a YETI asset should be to remotely detonate and destroy all Dorian chips in the extended distributed network, but Ani had argued against it, saying that it would jeopardize something important that she needed to do first. Killing the computers on the network would send someone a message that YETI was on its way, and it was better that that person kept on believing that YETI was still very much in the dark.

  Joe was still amazed by the way things had panned out in Romania, but then because of video game logic, he had been expecting a huge final battle. It was kind of cool that sometimes—and it was only sometimes—you could win without raising a fist in anger.

  Although sitting in the car, he realized that he might still get a chance to raise one if it came to that.

  The authorities were going to take a long time sorting out the aftermath. There were already turf wars over the Dorian tech that had been recovered, with the US, UK, and Romanian governments in tense negotiation over proprietary rights to the Dorian bio-printers. Still, without the assistance of emet, whose control was required to get them to do the sorts of crazy things they were capable of, they were just limited tech. Years ahead of the technological curve, sure, but not able to print out golem armies on demand.

  Dorian, himself, was alive, but the prognosis was not good. He was being monitored in some US military black site, a place that appeared on no maps, in no documents, or Senate budgets, but the clips and coils that had been put in Dorian’s head to limit the danger of his aneurysm had only extended the programmer’s life; they wouldn’t save it. That extension was running out now and, although it had caused him to act the way he had to ensure some kind of cultural immortality, it would not be long now. Immortality, it seemed, was going to be reserved for his games, if they endured. No one on earth could achieve lasting forever, not really.

  Maybe only AIs ever would.

  “We’ve got movement,” Ani said, as she slid down in her seat so she was only peering out of the tiniest sliver of windshield.

  Joe confirmed the target was on the move. “Let’s go get him,” he said.

  They waited until the person had gone into the building, then opened the car doors and followed.

  They already had the highest level of security clearance, and so following Brian Hoke was simplicity itself. The right people had already been instructed to let them through the right doors, and as soon as Brian had settled in the room that was his de
stination, Ani and Joe let themselves in, too.

  It was the same room that Ani had visited earlier in the investigation. The same man sat behind the same table. Brian was where Ani had been sitting then, and he looked around when he heard the door open and close. He looked shocked, then angry, then resigned. Ani gave him a smile that made his face twitch.

  “Mr. Palgrave,” Ani said brightly, “I just thought I’d better hold up my part of the deal. To come back when the case was closed and tell you all about it.”

  Joe moved into place behind Brian and grabbed the chair, pulling it back with the kid still on it, giving Ani center stage.

  Palgrave’s face was expressionless, unreadable, inscrutable, and Ani realized that she had started thinking in triads of synonyms like emet.

  It made her smile even wider.

  “Of course you already know most of it, don’t you?” she said. “And so do we, now. I guess the idea of rewriting Dorian’s main dotmeme file with one of your own was just too tempting a proposition for you to resist.”

  Palgrave feigned boredom, but it was so obvious that he shouldn’t have bothered.

  “Were you also hoping to get hold of Dorian’s AI?” she asked. “I figure that must have been a big part of it. To have an AI under your control, to use as a weapon.”

  Still, Palgrave remained silent.

  So Ani did, too.

  Twenty seconds passed.

  “You can’t blame a man for trying,” Palgrave said finally. “You won’t believe how hard it was to get Dorian to notice victorious. The Aeolus Group had been aware of Dorian’s activities for a while, but we just couldn’t find a way in. Finally, though, he came to us.”

  “I know,” Ani said. “I put it all together. How you used victorious as a means to hijack Dorian’s work. Of course, you had to let the first field test go as it was supposed to, so that Dorian would get emet to release the full dotmeme experience on the world, never knowing that it would be your archives that were released. I’d ask what you were hoping to fill the Internet with, but we’re working on that ourselves, and it would be a shame to ruin the surprise. More xenophobic nonsense, I’m sure.

  “I particularly like the way that you used me. That ftp server you sent me to, that was where you had hidden your own dotmeme archive, wasn’t it? You must have smiled when you thought of me unlocking it, letting it loose, becoming an integral part of your sick plan. That was why you wanted me to come back, right? So you could tell me the part that I had played in the greatest technological disaster this world has ever seen. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  She turned to leave, hesitated, then turned instead to Brian.

  “Nicely played,” she said. “But using 7/7 as a backstory was a little opportunistic, don’t you think? The fact that you could access the dotmeme archive when I couldn’t was a little suspicious. I gave you the benefit of the doubt because I thought I owed it to you but, without being too blunt, if I couldn’t get in, neither could you. I just wonder what that was all about.”

  Brian just looked sullen and defeated.

  “We were hoping that he would be recruited,” Victor Palgrave said. “A mole would have been a pretty handy thing to have. Someone inside YETI, working for me. The suicide bomber backstory was my invention. I thought that personal tragedy might add weight to his recruitment. It almost worked.”

  “No,” Joe said, his first word since entering the room. “It really didn’t. He would have made a temporary asset at best. He’s not in YETI’s league. Or Ani’s. victorious is being dismantled as we speak. No one will even remember it. You’ve lost again. I really think you might want to consider another hobby. I can recommend video games.”

  Joe grabbed Brian by the scruff of his neck and hauled him to his feet.

  “We’ll try to get you an adjoining cell,” he said, and pulled him toward the door.

  “What happened to Dorian?” Palgrave asked. “To the AI?”

  “That’s need-to-know information,” Ani said. “And you really don’t have a need to know. Just a frustrated desire. Enjoy not knowing.”

  Ani and Joe walked out of the room, leaving Palgrave sitting behind the table, his eyes closed, his hands clenched into fists.

  Joe wrangled Brian into the corridor and kicked the door with his heel, slamming it behind them.

  The noise echoed through the building.

  Joe dropped Ani back at her house and then drove and picked up Ellie.

  “Bruises are healing fast,” she said. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Somewhere expensive,” he said. “I need to eat small portions for exorbitant sums.”

  “Sounds nice. You finish up what you needed to?”

  “Yup. Turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought.”

  “I know a place in South Kensington …” Ellie offered. “Teenie tiny portions for way too much money. Sorry, but it’s not Romanian cuisine.”

  “Perfect,” Joe said, leaned over and kissed her cheek—not bothering to comment on the fact that she’d managed to work out where he’d been for the last few days—then put the car in gear and roared off toward Kensington.

  Gretchen was back from her royal visit, and she lifted her face and smiled when Ani entered the room.

  “Ani,” she said. “It’s lovely to see you. To be back. Have you kept yourself busy?”

  Ani slumped down into a chair and closed her eyes.

  “It’s good to see you, too,” she murmured. “It’s been quiet, actually.”

  She opened one eye to see Gretchen’s doubting face and then they both roared with laughter.

  “Sure,” Gretchen said. “And the fact that the Internet thinks that the earth suddenly turned on us is just a coincidence. Really, I mean I go away for a few days …” She grinned. “I’ll make us a nice cup of tea, and then you can tell me all about it.”

  “I’ll need cookies for the most exciting detail,” Ani said. “Or cake. Wait. Better still. Cookies and cake.”

  “Then you shall have them.”

  “Gretchen?”

  “Ani?”

  “I really missed you.”

  “Of course you did,” Gretchen said, ducking as Ani threw a cushion at her head.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My eternal thanks go out to:

  Becky, Alison, and Allison who, behind the scenes, make all this possible.

  Jonathan: for every other Thursday.

  Fran: for every other day.

  My readers: for reading.