by Curtis Hox
He snapped the clip back into the gun and sat straighter.
“The issue at hand is the battleground of our bodies in Realspace. Even with the transformative abilities of our entities, the body limits us, and the Rogues take advantage. For one, our bodies feel pain and can die. Also, the Rogues can exist in a variety of substrates, some much more durable than flesh and bone. For this reason I created the Ghosting Protocols so that Altertranshumans like myself, my wife, my daughter, can shed this early coil, this frail flesh, and embrace true disembodiment.” He leaned forward, his lips brushing the mic. “With a few of us as ghosts, humanity might yet survive the Great Conflict. I plan to show everyone how.”
Skippard stood, gun in hand. He pulled the slender microphone stand toward the edge of his desk. He bent it so that the tiny, snake-like head, pointed to the floor. Then he sat on the cold tiles and laid his back on the floor. He rested the gun on his chest. His dirtied lab coat was soiled from years of work. Soon, it would be punctured and bloodied.
“To my dear wife: I know you’ll hear this, Yance. When the time is right, explain everything to Simone. I fear the Rogues will eventually come after her. Heck, they’ve come after you. They’ve come after Rigon. They’ll go after Simone as well.” He paused, his lips quivering, a hitch catching in his throat. “They got Jonen. You know I do this so that no parent ever again has to feel the pain of a lost child. With the Rogues gone, we can continue to lift the ceiling of human life so that senescence fades in the distance. Explain that what Simone has in her is a powerful weapon her father created. I know she believes her entities are the Lords of Order and all that. We gave her a religious apparatus to comprehend the entities, but, like I feared, she has firmly grasped her supernatural explanation. Be gentle with her when she learns what a crock that is. The Rogue AIs are the enemy. We use our psychic and material entities to fight them. Keep it simple instead of allowing her to think a cosmic war is going on. Please don’t resent me for doing this. One day, you can follow me. I’ve promised you. But you have to wait until the time is right.”
Skippard breathed deeply. He checked the antiquated digital watch on his wrist. He had already made an anonymous call to the Consortium that he had died. The rejuv technicians were processing his genoscript to rehusk him a new body. But he was alive. That anomaly would allow the ghosting process to begin. All he had to do now was …
Skippard Wellborn placed the muzzle of the gun on his chest above his heart.
“Goodbye, Yance. I love you. Never forget that. Tell Simone and Rigon their father loves them. I’ll see them again, one day.”
He pulled the trigger.
Skippard saw a blinding flash of light, heard the bang, and felt his chest explode. The stabbing pain lasted only a few seconds as he instantly began to lose consciousness. He felt the gun fall from his fingers, even heard it clatter to the floor. His last thoughts were of happiness: that his lab was sound proof. Yancey wouldn’t come looking for him until later tonight. The kids would be asleep—plenty of time for her to remove his body without them seeing …
* * *
In the far corner, a figure emerged out of the darkness. It glowed a soft cobalt, lines of data energy trickling along its limbs. Skippard Wellborn floated forward and looked at his dead body. A smile spread across his face as he regarded the shell he had shed for the last time. He then glanced at the ceiling. He needed to make his escape from his home before his wife found him. The last thing he needed was the disapproval from Yancey about this. She would never forgive him for becoming a ghost again, not after having been one twice before, and not by his own hand—especially when she learned he planned to stay this way.
ONE
SIMONE WELLBORN SAT IN A CUBICLE in the deserted library of the Sterling Preparatory School for Cyberhumans, Transhumans, Nonhumans, and Alterhumans.
She leaned her head against the wall, twining the ends of her pigtails with both hands. An open book lay on a desk ornamented with harmless pencil and pen graffiti. Outside, a Cranton Georgia summer in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains meant sticky heat and humidity, plenty of sunshine, and the hope of a cool autumn. The football team began their second practice of the day, as did the marching band. The halls of the main building were mostly empty, and Simone’s first day on campus had been uneventful so far. That was fine with her. She welcomed the calm since being expelled from her last school for telekinetically blowing out the walls of its gymnasium.
After a quick tour of the main campus building by Principal Smalls, she’d found the most isolated spot and sat quietly with a stack of old-fashioned, analog books. These were full of paper pages about nonhuman intelligent persons like synthetic organisms and cybernetic intelligences. Those unfortunate souls had once been on the bottom rung of society—but not anymore. Everyone accepted them now, but Altertranshumans weren’t so lucky. People like Simone were so close to perfection, but flawed, people who had been hounded for two generations as witches and sorcerers because they channeled power from mysterious entities.
Ah, but times were changing, she thought. Alters like me now have their uses.
One of the few other Alters at Sterling, Kimberlee Newkirk, wandered into the library.
Kimberlee was a normal-looking teenage American girl Simone hadn’t spoken to yet. But she could sense Kimberlee was more than a reject. The goth-black hair with the straight bangs framed a pretty, but average face and eyes with huge arches of ashy eye shadow. She wore a Superman tee, with the red S in the inverted yellow diamond replaced by a T.
Making fun of perfect Transhumans, Simone thought. My kind of girl.
Kimberlee walked toward the middle of the chamber. Simone crept away from her cubicle, using the rows of dusty, unused stacks to hide her spying.
She was happy with the fact Kimberlee was her size—not like the tall, aesthetically-enhanced Transhumans you saw everywhere in today’s society. From the picture she had seen in the student dossiers of all the Alters (provided by Principal Smalls, at her request) Kimberlee wasn’t special to gaze at, at all. And in person, she looked like she might still be in junior high. You would never guess what she really was. The public dossier wasn’t specific. But Simone had an idea.
“Hey,” Simone said, after emerging from behind a row.
Kimberlee turned and regarded Simone with about as much interest a cat gives a piano. “You the new girl?”
“Yeah, Simone.”
“Kimberlee.”
“I saw your sheet.”
Only the slightest movement of Kimberlee’s jaw revealed annoyance. Everyone at Sterling had a sheet, as the dossiers were called. They were standard in all specialist schools these days. They followed you around, even when you didn’t want them to. Simone’s sheet took up twenty pages the last time she’d printed it—Kimberlee’s, only a few.
“I haven’t seen yours,” Kimberlee said.
“It’s a bunch of crap.”
“I bet.”
Simone followed Kimberlee to a reference island where Kimberlee pretended to be interested in something.
“I think it’s great,” Simone said, “what you are.”
This was the moment of truth. When two Alters met, an important conversation always happened. Simone liked to get it out of the way. No need to mince words. Once you spoke about it, you’d know if you had a friend or an enemy.
Simone said, “Altertranshuman Channeler and Summoner is such a boring label. I prefer to think of myself as a vessel of some really cool stuff. If you’d like to hear about it sometime, I can explain. I’m an advocate of the Lords of Order. They’re mega cool.”
She waited. Only a year ago that statement would have gotten her arrested.
Kimberlee nodded, a look of relief on her face. “Thanks. I don’t really know what I am. I don’t know if I actually channel or summon or whatever.”
Simone beat down a bit of frustration when she saw the familiar look of denial on Kimberlee’s face. She rushed in for the rescue, standing a
s close as possible to someone who was a stranger without freaking the person out. Still, Kimberlee stiffened.
“You don’t have to be ashamed of what you are.” Simone gave her some space. Kimberlee looked around, but the library was empty, except for a sleepy, old reference librarian. Simone continued. “I read about your ... problems, without seeing much of the details, of course. You just haven’t learned to own them. If it’s like mine, it’s like having a powerful stick shift with all the horses and torque you can imagine—”
She stopped when she realized the car metaphor wouldn’t work on Kimberlee. Her older brother Rigon had used it the first time he’d convinced Simone she wasn’t a freak. He was a gear-head who always talked that way. No one had manual cars anymore. Heck, most rich people didn’t even drive anymore.
“You don’t know me,” Kimberlee said. “I ... hate what I am.”
“You’re a beautiful thing, if I’m guessing correctly.”
“Beautiful?” She leaned in to speak just loud enough to be heard, as if she might spit poison. “The Consortium scientists call me a Succubus. I didn’t even know what it was. When I found out I cried for a month. I had to be hospitalized. That’s not beautiful.”
“I thought so. The dossier was cryptic, but I had an idea. But you’re okay now, right? You know what you are?”
“I can peck a little, but that’s it. Nothing heavy. Sometimes I think I’ll never be able to be with someone ... like that.”
“You will. You just have to learn to control the entity that comes. I never met one of you, but if you learn to control it you’ll have power over men and women. I’m jealous. People think I’m cute, but a pain.”
“Have you been with a boy?”
“Of course, I’m a junior. Oh, sorry.” Kimberlee had turned her eyes away. Simone, said, “But so what?”
“The last time I let myself ... let go, I ... I turned into this ... thing.”
“We all turn into something.”
“I was so ... horrible.” The tears that instantly welled in her eyes caused her to panic. “I have to go.”
“No, wait.” Simone pulled her between two rows. “Tell me.”
Kimberlee wiped them away, thought about it for a second, and then said, “I lured a friend of my dad’s into the basement. They found me standing over him. He was a slobbering mess. I was naked and ... changed. My body looked different, bigger, stronger ... sexier, dangerous. My father sent me to a therapist to be cured. It didn’t work.”
“It never does. Those places are a menace. I know all about aversion therapy. Trust me.”
“You’ve been?”
“Oh, no, my mom taught me to own what I am, but we’ve seen other Alters taken to them, and helped them get out. She pushed to have a place for us in Sterling so we could avoid therapists.”
Kimberlee nodded. “You’re all right.”
“Thanks.”
Kimberlee, fully recovered, grabbed her by the arm. “Come on, you want to go get some lunch?”
“Sure.”
They began to walk out together.
“Have you heard?” Kimberlee asked. “Joss Beckwith thinks some AIs have been sniffing around Sterling’s cyber systems. He’s determined to capture one.”
“Joss Beckwith? Isn’t he an Alter? I saw his sheet.”
“Our resident cyber-Interfacer. You’ll meet him eventually.”
“I’m sure I will.”
* * *
While Simone and Kimberlee wandered over to the cafeteria, Joss Beckwith stared at the hulking figure of Chip Monroe.
Chip was over six-foot-tall, two-hundred pounds and had an actual Neanderthal brow that stretched across his broad face. He stood over Joss with a plate of high-carb, high-protein food. “Everything’s flashing and beeping ... and you look smashed up, Joss.”
Joss sat like someone turned to stone. He was deep in the basement in the low-lit, air-conditioned Computer System’s room. He practically owned the place, although the admins refused to let him call the space he’d carved out for himself an office. He sat with his chair in a corner, a semicircle of high-end video panels forming a protective barrier around him. His computing machines lined the floor and desk, with his peripherals hung up like trophies.
If Chip hadn’t come when he did ...
Joss’s hands shook as he tried to focus. His heartbeat felt like a sharp-toothed alien that wanted out of his chest. “Thanks, Chip ...it had me.” The sweat came next, the shakes, an urge to vomit.
“You look bad,” Chip said.
Joss had been scanning the school, as he often did when he needed a break from interfacing. He had access to all the sensors and cameras. Today had been entertaining. He’d watched Russell Wooten, the prick, fart on tiny Wally Dorsey. Joss filed that one away and planned to get Russell back somehow. He’d also watched Wally launch his personal mech into the air and, for a moment, look like he might land properly; later, he saw the arrival of the two most interesting new students, the gladiator prodigy Hutto Toth and l’enfant terrible Simone Wellborn and wondered who’d win that battle. He thought he might run some surveys on them both and set up a page to track their inevitable contest, maybe lay some odds. He did all this before his low-level AI probes triggered.
A Major-Plus Super Artificial Intelligence had begun pinging the Sterling system. God, he’d thought, those invisible asshats get the best social designation titles.
Without thinking, he’d harnessed up, let the world go dark, and dove into the data centers that comprised Cyberspace. His rendering engine placed him on a platform over a massive abyss. Like Wally controlling his mech through his psychic interface, Joss was a licensed Interfacer.
His unique mind generated ten personalized stories of files, tables, tiles, windows, and a number of other creative ways to manage the portals. For Sterling’s system he’d built a huge 3D Terminator skull, the metallic kind with the red eyes (he’d thought it was hilarious when the faculty made such a big stink). When he launched himself forward, flying through the mouth, he felt all the school’s systems purr around him. And there it was: a black box rotating right in the middle of the systems’ access path, tendrils reaching out and breaking every barrier.
“What the hell?” he’d asked, both in his chair and in his mind.
The box ignored him, continuing its work.
Script thief!
He knew it was there to steal, taking what it wanted, then leaving like it owned the place.
He had spent enough time around a variety of AIs to know a super intelligence when he saw one. This was no standard retrieval bot. For just a moment, he saw the thing give itself away, as the big ones always did. He’d never been so close, but he saw a face emerge with the distorted features of a cybernetic god.
He had always wanted to be close when they did this. But anytime a Super AI went public in Cyberspace, the virtual arenas crowded with hotjacker spectators and security, and he had to wait with the other visitors to catch a glimpse. He had hoped to see one the last time he’d gone to a public revelation, waited forty-eight hours at his workstation, only getting up to use the bathroom. When the SAI showed itself, he was in an arena with 2.1 million hotjackers hooked up to VR harnesses at workstations around the world, and waiting for the big pay off. The SAI swooped in over the rendered arena in the form of a fiery ball. As the crowd roared, it showed itself for exactly eight seconds, saying only, “Behold, I am more.”
He later learned it was the current celebrity SAI, Fight Lord Zain, who was so popular in the glad game these days.
Then Zain had disappeared.
What a pisshead!
Joss was so angry he swore the SAIs were full of themselves. In fact, he was convinced they weren’t that super and that all the fuss his grandparents had made when the techno-social Rupture happened last century, must have been over something besides the emergence of these assholes and their rebellious counterparts, the Rogue AIs. That big let down in the arena happened when school ended in May. Sin
ce then he’d spent the entire summer constructing a capture program.
When the black box showed its face, he said the fast phrase that triggered the capture program. He had one stored in Sterling’s system, and it flashed into existence and went to work. When his capture program saw the small object it adapted and generated a suitable response. A net with high-density insertion barbs latched onto the box. The net pulsed as it copied the data, shrinking tighter. At first the box seemed to compress.
Got you, shit-bird.
He also triggered his own personal kick-ass, indestructible shield he thought would protect him from any backwash or direct sally into his harness.
He felt his shield surge with confidence.
Then the unthinkable: Like a man who taunts lions at the zoo, leaning too far over the railing, falls in, Joss realized his mistake too late.
A shaft launched from the box and punched through his shield as if it were made of butter. He felt it puncture his digital chest.
The pain thresholds on his system blinked at his workstation in red alert. This should have shut off his Virtual Reality visor. Instead, the attack aimed at his system-level security dove through his harness, along his optical nerve, and into his neocortex. An army of Rogue nanobots surged into him, and lay siege. He went numb as the Rogue AI tricked his pain receptors’ feed. He would have sat there like that until someone found him mind-dead, his genoscript completely stolen, a corpse with a smile, except that Chip had stopped by.
“Thanks, again,” he said to Chip. The big brute with the brains of a chimp continued to look at him like he might keel over. Okay, maybe a smart chimp. Definitely a helpful chimp. “What they having today?”