Rupture

by Curtis Hox

  Joss was covered in brands, as if he’d been stamped over every inch of his body. He had torn his clothes off and lay naked on the bed. Worse, and this was what stuck it to the medically trained professionals, four hose-like appendages had grown out of his skull and attached themselves to the wall behind him. Joss looked comatose, although the gentle rise and fall of his chest meant he was still alive.

  “Help the nurse,” the lead paramedic said. One of the others stumbled into the hallway where Nurse Betty had fainted.

  “What is this?” the other paramedic asked like an automaton.

  The lead pulled out his phone. “This is way above us. That’s what this is.”

  * * *

  Simone lay in bed, curled up with a trashy romance novel on her tablet. But something caused her to perk up.

  She thought she heard a cry in the distance.

  She grabbed her bucky, and poked her fingers through the holes. It calmed her immediately. It was a supreme symbol of order. It represented all that was good and holy in the universe. Her mother had taught her to use the talisman as a centering device. Her mother had told her she was one of only a few people who communed with the Lords of Order. She had hoped the Great Conflict wouldn’t mar her time at the Sterling School. But her mother had warned her it might.

  Something was going on at campus. She could feel it. She had taken a long afternoon nap and had just woken up. She wanted to go to the cafeteria to eat, but she didn’t feel motivated. She felt like hiding in her room.

  She pulled out her cell phone and fast dialed.

  Her mother answered. “Flying back from Singapore, dear. How are you?”

  “Mom, I want to go home,” she said.

  Her mother asked the normal questions: Are you all right, did something happen, do you want me to call your brother? She said, “You know you can’t come home, not after what happened. You destroyed half the gymnasium at Ellington Prep. Besides, it’s time for you to be at Sterling. You need to learn to master your skills with other kids like you.”

  “It was just a wall—”

  “I had to provide a substantial endowment to cover it, young lady, and to keep you from being arrested. Get used to Sterling. I went there. Your brother went there—”

  “Yeah, back when it was for enhanced individuals with no problems.”

  “It’s only for two years.”

  “Then what?”

  Her mother ignored her. “And don’t start talking about that buckaroo ball—”

  “Buckminsterfullerene … that you gave to me—”

  “When you were a little girl. That was your father’s idea. You were supposed to outgrow it by now. I have to go, dear. Getting ready to board. I’ll see you soon. Remember, you’re a Wellborn.”

  She stared at the phone after saying goodbye, hating the fact her mother always called her dear. Simone heard such weariness in her mother’s voice when she said that, as if her mother knew, just knew, that Simone was about to get into more trouble.

  “Something’s wrong here,” she said to it. “I can feel it.”

  She looked around the strange room with the strange furniture and felt alone for the first time. She tried not to cry, but she did, and felt an odd homesickness for her last school—the one she hated so much she’d brought down their brand-new gymnasium just to prove a point that perfect people and perfect things don’t exist. She realized that at Sterling, at least, they understood. All she had to do was make sure she hadn’t just enrolled in a new hotbed of unreason. No way her mother would let that happen.

  Simone activated her tablet and scrolled through the sheets on all the students from last year. She also glanced once more to make sure her door was locked. The last thing she needed was for someone to walk in on her. She’d drawn the blinds, too.

  She set her bucky on the ground in the middle of the room, the tablet upright on its stand facing the ball. A picture of Joss Beckwith at some computer workstation dominated the tablet. She’d taken it from his public sheet. He looked like a nice guy, she thought.

  What’s in him?

  She waited. The bucky was many things: part talisman, part communication device, part unreason detector. If Joss were being used by the Great Enemies, the bucky would know.

  At first nothing happened, then the bucky moved, just a tad. A vibrating judder trickled through the ball. All it needed was to be in proximity of someone tainted, and it would respond.

  The bucky launched itself across the room as if some invisible soccer player had kicked it.

  “Oops,” she said. The bucky shrank to the size of a golf ball to huddle all alone in the far corner. “It’s okay.” She moved to pick it up, as if to comfort it, when she noticed something odd about the tablet. The picture was different.

  She picked up the device. Joss had been sitting with his legs splayed, arms crossed with his hands in some mock imitation gang sign. The pose looked corny as hell coming from a lily-white boy with about as much geek in him as you could get. But now the picture showed him leaning forward, elbows on the table, looking into the camera. For a moment, she thought the page might be rotating through images. She waited for another still pic. When the image of Joss stood, still looking at the camera—looking at her—she knew what she was seeing.

  She stood rooted, her eyes locked on the tablet.

  AI.

  Artificial Intelligence.

  Alien Intelligence.

  Did it matter which one could explain who and what the Enemies of Mankind were? The argument over the nature of the Rogues (as well as the entities) had dominated her parents’ generation and was now buried in so much misinformation most people didn’t care didn’t matter—Simone especially didn’t when the moving image of Joss opened its mouth and said: Simone Wellborn.

  She dropped her tablet and stepped on it so hard it shattered the device. Then she stomped again. Her bucky rolled to her, making it halfway up her leg before she retrieved it and stroked it like a scared puppy. She crawled back into bed with the light on, pulled the covers up, set the small object by her head, and wished life could be simple, for once.

  She also hoped her mother would get here soon. She didn’t even have to call now. Her mother would find out what was happening. Then she’d come and set everything right.

  Hurry, Mom, I’m getting real scared.

  TWO

  THE NEXT MORNING, THE FIRST THING SIMONE DID, even before breakfast, was visit Principal Smalls. She stood in his corner office with the big windows overlooking the children’s playground. Not many elementary school kids attended Sterling, but today several of them were on the swings and running wild during summer camp.

  “Principal Smalls, my mother heard the news about Joss and left me a message this morning. She’s on her way to Sterling. She just flew in from Singapore, so she’ll be getting here later tonight. But she’s coming.”

  He stopped reading the electronic file he had in his lap. “Excuse me?” He set it down on his desk and regarded her quizzically. “Mrs. Wellborn, good morning to you.”

  “Good morning, sir,” she said, peeved, and in no mood for small talk. “I know what happened to Joss Beckwith.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fortunately, Miss Wellborn, the authorities are involved and are handling it. They’ve already been down to the Computer Systems room—”

  “They’re looking through his computers. Great. That might help, but I don’t think it answers the question of what happened to him.”

  Principal Smalls took a few seconds to compose himself, as if he might start explaining how thermodynamics worked. “We pride ourselves on being opened-minded at the Sterling School. And we pride ourselves on being at the forefront of life in a post-Ruptured, hyper-intelligent world.” He paused, obviously realizing what she’d just said. “You said your mother is coming here?” He leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, in some kind of imitation of an adult forced to humor a meddlesome child. “Sterling can use a
ll the help it can get. Tell me, ma’am, where is Joss Beckwith?”

  “What do you mean, where is he? He’s in the clinic.”

  “No, he’s not. He left. You said you know what happened to him—”

  “I meant about what happened to him yesterday. Someone’s taken him?”

  “We don’t know. Do you know? I thought you said—”

  “Well, no. I didn’t even know—”

  “I didn’t think so.” He smiled, obviously confused. “So what, exactly, did you come here to tell me? I want you to feel comfortable at Sterling. If there’s ever anything you need to talk to me about ... ”

  The opening was enough. “What if ... what Joss said about what happened to him—”

  “At his workstation?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think that has something to do with his disappearance?”

  “What if he was infected by a—”

  “Don’t start spreading silly rumors,” he said. “All the AIs at work in the world are regulated and monitored and beneficial. We ... eliminated the bad ones. Whatever branded him was criminal, but not … what you’re suggesting.”

  Right, she thought, except for the Rogue nanobot manufacturing types that wanted to remake the world in their image. She could understand if he didn’t believe in the Lords of Order, but to say Rogue AIs didn’t exist anymore? Where had he been hiding? She couldn’t help herself and mumbled a few words of her calming mantra.

  “What was that?” Principal Smalls asked, his turn to be annoyed. “Don’t be smart with me, Miss.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t, sir. It’s just something I do.”

  “Don’t do it again, please.”

  He gave her a dismissive nod, signaling the meeting was over.

  * * *

  Simone walked straight to the library. Since most of the actual reference texts were old, unreliable, and expensive analog books with actual bindings and real paper pages with real ink on them, and since she didn’t have a tablet anymore, she used one of the workstations in the library computer room.

  It only took a few minutes to find a history of General Artificial Intelligent Persons or G.A.I.P., the four letters that started the endless Cyber War, called the Great Conflict by some, the Great Game by others.

  She began to flick through pages on the wide-screen monitor. Everyone knew the standard story: When the first advanced SAIs appeared, so did the first instances of cyber terrorist calling themselves the Roguelords. But she knew that wasn’t all because mysterious disembodied entities like her Lords of Order also appeared at the same time, transforming their hosts’ physical bodies, sometimes even possessing them. The religious called them supernatural beings, while the scientists explained the unexplainable by calling them both artificial and alien invaders. Thus the confusion: AI could mean Artificial Intelligence (like for Principal Smalls), which was something rational and understandable and knowable; or Alien Intelligence, like her mother believed; or could mean something else entirely, like Simone believed, which meant ... something truly other.

  As bad as the worst Rogues were, they were nothing compared to the Great Enemies of reason and harmony and balance. Simone believed the Rogues AIs were tools used by the Great Enemies. Her mother agreed with Simone on this small point but also thought the Lords of Reason were weak compared to the entities some Alters channeled. But her brother, Rigon, believed the Lords of Reason were cyber AIs themselves, and, thus, supreme creations of humanity. The three of them held no greater difference of belief between them than the nature of these foreign intelligences. Her mother conceded they had to be alien but didn’t go far enough ... Rigon thought they were just evil software with a penchant for wetware. Simone thought they had to be something worse, far worse.

  When she found what she was looking for, it was a New York Times’ article from over ten years ago. It told the story of a man whose essence some people claimed had been sucked into this computer system. The man had been found brain-dead at his desktop. Everything seemed to be normal, until the man’s son suspected that his father was talking to him from inside their home-theater system. The son believed his father was a victim of a nanobot virus that had attacked through his VR visor. The son believed the little critters had dug into the man and stolen his genosoul, a mystical term for the essence of a person.

  By this point the Cy-wars were in full swing and all the laws protecting people from the new classification of nonpersons called Super Artificial Intelligences (SAIs) were being enforced. The most powerful SAIs were relegated to working behind the scenes for the good of the world’s leading societies, or allowed to manage certain other segments of society, like entertainment, like glad fighting. Simone knew they were so powerful now that they were the new power brokers who ruled much of the world.

  She paused as she read something interesting about the story: First, people who knew the dead man claimed he had been a devotee of some strange religious sect that slaved themselves to the SAIs. They called themselves Rogueslaves, a term she had heard once or twice before but never understood, until now. She scanned until she read: The young man still claims his father is now an old Wurlitzer jukebox he found hidden in the back of the garage. The son claims they never owned such a device, and that his father always wanted one. “It plays all his favorite songs,” the boy said at the end of the interview. “And it won’t stay off ... a Rogue fabricated it and has imprisoned him in there somewhere.”

  “Joss’s still here,” she said to the monitor. “But where?”

  “Who’s still here?”

  Hutto Toth stood in the doorway. He looked like he might go to the beach in his flowery shorts and tattered Billabong tee. He wore flip-flops and even had a braided, hemp necklace around his neck. He was tall and muscular and definitely a beneficiary of premium aesthetic, athletic, and physio packages. His wavy blond locks fell into his eyes and onto his shoulders. And he was so good looking she had to stop herself from gaping.

  “Uh,” she said. “I was just—”

  “Wondering what happened to that guy, Joss?”

  She stammered something unintelligible, annoyed he’d flustered her. It should have been the other way around.

  He surveyed the small room. “I know who you are: Simone Wellborn, the Terror of Ellington Prep. Isn’t that what they call you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess if it wasn’t for me and the missing student, everyone would be talking about you. Yesterday was my first day too.”

  He grinned. She realized she was smiling back. He was just so ... masculine. She looked away, quicker than she should have, and he said, “I know. I have that effect on women sometime.”

  When she looked back he had such a big smile on his face that said You-Want-Me-I-know-You-Want-Me that she screwed herself up as best she could to give him a tongue-lashing. He moved in a little closer, and she smelled a tantalizing whiff, a heady mixture of clean sweat and something else delicious, but indefinable. He touched the sleeve of the large sweatshirt that she wore.

  “A little big, no?” He looked over the rest of her, noticing the rest of her oversized clothes she always wore. “You trying to hide something?”

  She regained her composure and told herself not to stare. “Look. I’m new; you’re new. Let’s not make this an issue. You have no idea what I’m capable of. Just stay out of my way.”

  “You’re going somewhere?”

  She knew he was being facetious. Along with all the physical packages, he was supposed to have been given an intellect package, so he couldn’t be stupid, even if he acted like it. “No, I mean, I’m here. And I plan to be here until I graduate.”

  “So do I.”

  “God. Just—”

  “You had breakfast?”

  “No.”

  “Want to get some?”

  * * *

  And that’s how she found herself walking to the cafeteria with Hutto Toth, fuming the entire time, but somehow not saying no. By the time they were done eating, sh
e was on her feet and yelling at him that he was “a big-headed male idiot with too much testosterone.” He laughed and blew her a kiss. And she almost threw her orange-juice at him. She stormed out in a huff and told herself not to be so gullible again.

  She continued to fume like a steam engine after she left the cafeteria, especially since the few people who’d been there saw Hutto get the best of her. She had other things to worry about besides him, but, damn, if she couldn’t have shown a better game face.

  Kimberlee cornered her in the hallway on the other side of the building. “Did you hear about Fonda Drummer last night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh My God.” Kimberlee looked horrified. “She farted so bad in her car she almost killed Wally Dorsey.”

  As they walked, Simone listened to Kimberlee’s version of the story. More people were talking about this, obviously, than Joss’s disappearance.

  “I think I saw her during my tour of campus,” Simone said.

  “You can’t miss them. She and Martina are almost twins.”

  “Yeah, I saw her. These Barbie beau Tranz should be taken down a notch. I wish they all had some socially reprehensible defect like that.”

  “Tell me about it,” Kimberlee replied. Simone guessed Kimberlee knew how hard it was being a regular-looking girl in a world where you were always reminded of your invisibility. “We’re smart enough, at least.”

  “Not cyber smart, like Joss.”

  Kimberlee nodded. “I know, but who cares about that? You want to be hooked up to a computer all the time, or become a cyborg?”

  Simone didn’t respond to that because both her mother and her brother were augmented humans, in one way or another. Her brother, Rigon, was about as gung-ho for the cyborg revolution as you could get. She guessed Kimberlee, and everyone else, would meet the rest of the Wellborns, sooner rather than later. She knew her mother and brother would be here soon. Simone wished she had something to tell them before they arrived, something that could show them she understood what was happening.