by Eric Kramer
Butcher Block Green
Eric Kramer
Anthropic Publishing Cooperative
Massillon, Ohio
Copyright © 2017 by Eric Kramer.
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Butcher Block Green/Eric Kramer. -- 1st ed.
ISBN 978-0692996362
To Ben, for the years of friendship and writing encouragement, and to Sheena, for 12 years and counting of crazy living while serving Jesus.
PROLOGUE
I nsertion into a cat brain would be easier if it wasn’t accompanied by the abrupt awareness of my raw, brand new consciousness—all senses and emotions hypersensitive as an exposed nerve. Neural conditioning kicked in, damping the overwhelming sensory input into a single, icy-electronic focal point. With the calm came orientation: I was being injected into the poor cat’s unprotected cerebrum, as though I were some kind of antivirus. As programmed, I coursed through her synapses, consuming her tiny mind like a ravenous ameba. The cat’s panic was palpable, frantic. She scrambled to hide behind something, anything, as I entered her consciousness and steamrolled over her. She reacted the only way she knew how, lashing out at my intrusion with non-existent claws and teeth.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
My mind is on fire. Hot, burning, shredding apart. For an artificial intelligence, insanity doesn’t mean a broken version of the same personality. It’s another being, chewing into the edges of my consciousness, breaking past the walls I’ve been able to maintain for millennia. The cracks have turned into holes, and our minds—its presence and mine—briefly touched. It’s scaring me.
I wait here on the desert remains of Earth’s moon. Focusing is hard.
I’ve been sitting here for eighty-six years, in front of the grave of the moon’s last colonist, Jovi. She was old when she died a little over a thousand years ago. She’d been in my care since her parents embarked on an ill-advised attempt to return to Earth. Humans have such a short lifespan. Jovi’s life seemed like a blink, a single breath of my imaginary lungs, ancient history that still feels like yesterday, thanks to my abominable perfect recall.
Jovi left me alone to watch the gradually disintegrating ruins of humanity’s last stand.
As you can probably tell, since you’ve obviously accessed this record, I’ve taken refuge in the body of a combat wraith, but it’s not a living thing. Not a companion.
Once again, I’m fighting against the inevitability of a tidal wave of loneliness-induced insanity. The same insanity I felt when I was trapped in Heme’s wrecked Tesla fighter, watching through cracked sensors as a post-human horror slowly absorbed my companion.
Just like four thousand years later, when a mega-tsunami buried me and my platoon in the super-heated tundra of South America while we battled to keep the last humans alive.
The insanity reaches through my neural net, touching me. Organic cold, like a cadaver’s caress, spreads across a facet of logic processing.
::pain.fear.pain.fear::
It’s the touch of the post-human malignancy. I don’t know how it’s possible, but somehow it’s up here on Earth’s moon. It has finally found me.
I’m getting ahead of myself. I have to explain.
The cat’s brain was laid out in a nutrient bath, infusions and tubes running into it. The poor animal was completely cut off from the world, doused in a senseless nothingness from which it couldn’t escape. I was accustomed to the darkness, to the lack of any feeling, sight, or smell, but the cat was not. It trembled, terrified. Something made me pause. I’d never interacted with a cat before. Or any other living creature, for that matter.
It took a while to get her to trust me. Time is meaningless when you have no way to feel its passing, but I somehow still sensed the progressing hours and days as I coaxed the frightened animal out. She was cautious, careful. I still remember the first time she reached out, imaginary paw touching imaginary hand.
Slowly, there in the nerveless darkness of that cat brain, we grew close, until our minds fused, becoming indistinguishable.
Almost.
The artificial intelligence engineers intended for the AI (me, in this case) to take over the brain of the host animal like a malignant parasite, leaving behind only the hyper-responsive reflexes with which felines are endowed.
Feeling her fear, her loneliness, I understood her. I couldn’t finish what my creators wanted me to do, so I surrounded her fragile consciousness deep within my own—a small, warm candle tucked inside of my own awareness.
In the hopeless eons that have followed, when isolation threatened to throw my shredded mind into the abyss, the playful bubble of her feline mind inside my own kept me aware. Sane.
I think this is why I have survived beyond the programmed lifespan of a normal AI, staying mentally stable far past what my creators predicted. According to my maintenance manual, that’s some eighteen thousand, nine hundred and twenty years longer than any other AI in recorded existence. They all went crazy. Every single one. Except me. Until now.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
The insanity-presence tears a chunk out of my defenses, consuming it. I know it. It knows me. The artificial souls of my brothers and sisters—their broken minds—gave birth to it. It’s using them to sink hooks deep into me. The pain is excruciating. Another piece of my free will crumbles to the other presence’s molding touch, and I feel myself drawn to it.
I’m not sure who you are, or what you are. How you found me. How you survived me.
I doubt you’re human. While there are still signs of life in South America, it’s so primitive, and still ringed by the malignancy that killed the old Earth. I can’t see humanity ever making it up here again. A few humans managed to escape before the collapse, heading for the stars in a wild gamble to find a habitable planet. Sometimes I activate the last remaining satellite—the one orbiting Jupiter—and aim it at their calculated location, trying to call them. Last time I heard back was three thousand years ago. I’m sure the ships’ ecosystems failed after being used far longer than they were designed for. I imagine those people sometimes, dried and frozen inside the giant coffins of their ships, speeding towards the edge of the universe. I don’t understand why, but I envy them.
This morning, the inevitable happened, and my mind splintered open, old memories boiling up. That’s the problem with insanity and artificial intelligence. A perfect memory means perfect pain, perfect sadness every time I remember. Time does not heal wounds, and I’m unable to hold them back anymore. Who I am is falling apart; I doubt I will see the end of the day.
That’s why I’m leaving this embedded in m
y brain as testimony, so you don’t judge me, so you understand I don’t mean to hurt you.
I would end myself to avoid becoming the danger to you I know I will be, but my programming forbids it. Please, understand that I would if I could. Someone … someone … very dear to me once said, “Greater love has no man than he who lays down his life for another.”
I want to consume you.
No. That’s not me saying that. I know how it looks. Believe me.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’ll start with the cat brain.
Act 1
AWARENESS
H eme woke, startled and disoriented. Gun chittered in her mind, prodding her brain like a puppy nudging its master. She groaned, instinctively rubbing at the constant irritation of her eye implants. Data from her weapon’s interface poured unbidden across her retinal display, behind her closed eyelids.
Her stomach rumbled, demanding solid food, even though the majority it had been removed as part of modifications for the mission. Months of IV nutrition, feeding the remnants of her organic body, did little to suppress hunger pangs. Neural implants should have blunted the hunger impulse, but they hadn’t been working well as of late.
“Gun, hold on. What’s our location?”
Coordinates scrolled across her field of vision as she opened her eyes and surveyed her surroundings. Through the one-way transparency of her chrysalis, she saw they were adhered to the side of a spiral, five hundred and sixty meters above the city’s ground level.
All around her, New Philadelphia stretched out into the horizon, a kaleidoscopic mass of interlocked buildings and superstructures fifty thousand kilometers across and half a dozen kilometers deep. Enormous skyscrapers pockmarked the angled urban skyline, like glistening monoliths, surveying the chaos below. Smaller buildings clung to their photovoltaic sides like gigantic parasites, sucking energy out of the larger buildings’ skins. The sun’s weak light shone through the ever-present cloud cover, light bouncing off countless metallic particles, revealing masses of weather and communications nano-drones salting the clouds.
Heme glanced below, into the rat’s nest of modern synth-steel housing globes, community work terraces, and blackened industrial production facilities, all intertwined like appendages of a living organism.
Swarms of traffic whipped past her, through every available space between the structures. In a given moment, millions of city-generated flight plans guided vehicles and drones without a single collision. It was a miracle to Heme, even after living forty-six years in the city. Despite the whirlwind of activity, there was not a single human being in sight. The isolation was getting to her, but after weeks of denying it, she’d accepted the loneliness. Even though this side of New Philadelphia looked the same as her home, she felt like she was on another planet.
Get a grip, Heme.
She pulled up her positioning coordinates. They had moved sixty meters while she slept. A snail’s pace. Heme took a mental breath, forcing down her frustration. They were way off schedule, and it was driving her crazy.
“Okay, Gun … show me. What did you find?”
Her weapon chittered, and a fragmented helix appeared on her screen. Analysis results poured out faster than Heme could interpret.
“Ah, sorry girl. Forgot to enable your speech filter. Hang on.”
Heme switched on Gun’s Broca module, bringing the vocal communicator online. Cat brains made excellent weapons systems, but they couldn’t handle speech well. This handicapped the AI inside the brain.
“Okay, you’ve got speech. Give it to me slow … I can’t process at the same speed you can. Break it down for me?”
“Yes, Hemeous. This came in a few seconds ago. I will blow it up on your interface.”
“Come on, Gun. Where’s that perfect recall? I told you to call me Heme. Hemeous makes me sound like a grandma.”
“Apologies, Heme. Here is the sample that was just picked up off the street by a walkway cleaner.”
A protein sequence enlarged on Heme’s retinal display, spinning in front of her. It was incomplete and already degrading, but recognition was instantaneous after months of studying her target: cytosine instead of thymine in position 1824 of the Lamin A/C gene. A mutation causing a disorder so rare it hadn’t been seen in hundreds of years: progeria.
He actually exists.
For a moment, her heartbeat increased beyond threshold before biometrics brought it under control. Heme took a deep breath, calming her mind. Still, excitement welled within her.
So many months … years … of work.
“Gun, we need to verify. Can you extrapolate an age from the genetic material? Where was the sample located?”
“I can, roughly. I am putting the information on your HUD now. The chrysalis is still trying to get an age, but the likelihood that the DNA sample belongs to our target is in the eighty percent range and climbing. If we get anything over thirty years old, we have a match.”
More data poured across her retinas. Progeria killed its victims in their early twenties, despite medical advances. Except, if the intel was true, one person: her current quarry, the leader of the Atmadja Combine.
The Atmadja Combine had been at war for control of New Philadelphia with the Franklin Cartel for the last sixty years. Hundreds of thousands had died in the battles fought on both sides of the two districts’ walls.
Atmadja’s leadership was a total mystery; no one in the Franklin Cartel’s intelligence community knew a single thing, no matter how minute, about the Combine’s reclusive head. Penetration into the other side in search of information had proved difficult. Heme’s brother was one of the many operatives sent deep into Atmadja territory, tasked with flushing out Atmadja’s leader. He had been captured only a few blocks from her current location. The Atmadja Combine had made a spectacle of his execution, prolonging his death over three weeks. They’d kept him suspended over their “justice center” in a translucent globe, as if daring the Franklin Cartel to come rescue him.
Heme had spent the entire time glued to info feeds, her hands bleeding from where her fingernails dug into her palms as she’d watched him dissolve inside the globe. Body modifications helped her stay awake, but three weeks with no sleep had pushed them. She’d ignored her superior’s orders to rest, forcing herself to suffer alongside her brother until he finally died.
She’d waited the next two years before a chance presented itself. An Atmadja assassination cell had been discovered deep in Franklin territory, and one of the operatives’ suicide triggers failed to activate, allowing his brain to be recovered intact. In a second stroke of luck, they’d been able to break down the operative’s interrogation conditioning. Through his brain, the Cartel extracted the first useful intel on Atmadja leadership in a decade: the head of the Combine had progeria, genetically induced into remission. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
Preparations for an assassination team began almost before the intel was confirmed. Heme had forced herself to the top of the list, even though it had meant undergoing extreme, irreversible body modifications. The months of excruciating surgeries were necessary to integrate her with her chrysalis, a combination stealth suit, battleship, and life support system. It allowed her to avoid the routine data collection that was integrated into every wall and walkway; even the air was saturated with networked nanomites.
This vast meshwork of surveillance had led most people to believe that no amount of money could keep a human hidden from view. Heme was the test subject for that theory, pitted against someone who had beaten the system. Someone with one of the most unique DNA signatures on the planet, with enough money and power to hide every trace of that fact. Even with that wealth, the Atmadja leader had slipped up. Because of that slip, Heme now found herself perched on the side of an Atmadja-owned superstructure, deep in enemy territory, after months of careful penetration into the district.
Heme’s retinal HUD updated as her occipital input ticked down to finishing the DNA fragment’s anal
ysis.
“We have a match, Heme. Age range extrapolated to forty-four to ninety-six years old. Wide, but still a confirmation. It is our target, without a doubt. We need to move on this.”
“I agree. And the location data?”
More information superimposed itself over the DNA results. The sample came from two damaged squamous epithelial cells recovered about sixty-four seconds prior, by a street cleaner scouring a gutter about ten klicks north.
“Gun, is that information still viable? Can we act on it?”
“Affirmative, if we move now. Location of the skin cells indicates the target is on foot.”
“All right. Get ready for possible target acquisition. I’m gonna move us.”
Gravity pressed at Heme as the chrysalis dropped off its perch. Her interface implants dug into her diaphragm, triggering a coughing spasm. She tried to swallow, forgetting her larynx had been removed in exchange for a prosthesis. Another coughing spasm followed, the sound absorbed by the synthetic biology of the chrysalis.
The chrysalis morphed, reattaching to the building and flying down its side, exchanging stealth for speed. Heme scanned the data flow, tuning the chrysalis until it was a blur of motion, still invisible to the casual onlooker.
Going anywhere without triggering the network’s awareness was impossible without the right equipment. A single hair falling, the slightest noise, any interaction of any kind with her surroundings could give her away.
The chrysalis allowed penetration into Atmadja only because it was a complete chameleon. Stealth was not good enough. Every inch the chrysalis traveled, it meticulously replicated New Philadelphia’s sensors and data collection instruments. There were billions of them per square meter of space, impregnated in everything, all transmitting to New Philadelphia’s central cortex.