GodsRealm- Betrayal

by Luke Isaacs

  “A mole?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Ok, I can give you around 6-8 hours, but if I get tired, you’re on your own.”

  The cloaking needed to keep the logging anonymous required continuous work from the technician/coder on the other side to keep it under the radar.

  “I owe you one Chen,” Dahlia said as she pulled the big helmet over her head and started to jog on the treadmill under her feet.

  “No, you owe me 2400 DCs friend.”

  He jacked her in as he sat to the hub of computing units and monitors typing and cursing to facilitate her 6-8 hours of VNet time.

  31

  Rick had to work overtime two days in a row to get himself around six hours of VNet time to research the data vault of Jamal Yu. Dana again used her doubling trick and Rania had to finish a paper early to get the day off. Mario used a UN-sponsored site to log in and get the extra time he needed anonymously. Extra time was not a problem to Edward since he didn’t suffer from the restrictions his father applied to his friends. He had to do one last thing before joining though, something that was a crucial part of the plan.

  A Stasis Can is a vicious tool created by slum hackers in order to take over accounts of other people. Basically, it could trap you in your suit for 36 hours. Once the safety protocol of VNet identifies the glitch, it automatically suspends the account for 24 hours until the origin of the virus is found.

  This was Edward’s job; he had to inject the virus into their home network, and only his suit would have the anti-freeze tool, something that the team gambled that Jamal Yu wouldn’t have since the virus was ancient in VNet terms – it was almost a decade old and even in prank form was not interesting enough for people to use it.

  The plan was simple and brilliant; the VNet itself would contact the security company, who, in turn, would lock access to Jamal Yu’s data vault while he was trapped in the Stasis Can, also allowing Edward instant access to the vault and its content.

  Edward, still paralyzed from the neck down, meant the job easier said than done because somebody had to smuggle the code cube to his rig in real life. Since the only people allowed access to him were his nurse, doctor and orderly to clean the room and lift or move the injured boy when required, one of the members of the team had to pose as one of those to deliver the cube.

  Mario was the perfect age to be any of those, but they decided against it since he had records just like Dana with the UN and VNRS. Rania, even though she had no record, was too slight to be an orderly, and perhaps a little too out there with her blue streaked hair and nose ring to be a nurse or doctor.

  This left Rick, who had no records anywhere. He would be acceptable as an entry level orderly and with his strong but not overly muscled body, he looked the part.

  They arranged for a small bonus and a lottery win for the resident orderly, which removed him from the picture and prompted the house AI to make the order for a replacement, and this is where Rick came in.

  The risk of spending his life in servitude was substantial, especially knowing the vindictive nature of Jamal Yu, but Rick considered that Edward was taking a similar risk and perhaps being alienated completely by his father and ending up in the street as a homeless, penniless cripple.

  Rania met Rick to do some makeup touches to help him avoid being identified unless closely inspected and again kissed him before sending him on his way to the Yu’s palace.

  The journey was long, and thoughts of the consequences overrode his pleasure at having been kissed by Rania again. He played the plan over and over in his mind until he reached Edward’s home – it was very impressive.

  He was led from the door to his dressing station by holo AIs that were on every single wall of the immense palace. They read him a list of his duties, and he was then allowed to enter Edward’s room.

  Edward and Rick greeted each other politely as strangers. After niceties had been exchanged, Edward commanded the new orderly to clean the data receiving slot on his computing unit joined to his bed.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rick slipped the cube from his pocket and joined it for the few seconds it needed to download its contents. Edward activated the anti-freeze code on his suit immediately, leaving it alone of all the connected entry points, safe from the Stasis Can virus.

  Rick continued working in the house for the next hour, expecting any minute to hear sirens, the sound of the police or UN coming to take him into a lifetime of servitude. They never did come and after he said goodbye to Edward and left for home, he began to dream that their plan might work.

  32

  Jones reached the spot where the attack happened and immediately released the tracers and sensors. Within seconds they identified nine people on the scene, six of whom suited off on the spot and three that ran off.

  As much as she was sad to discover that the UN was penetrated, she was thrilled to finally find her prey after three weeks of nothing to come home with.

  The trail ended soon enough for one, an unregistered and camouflaged suit whose data she saved for further investigation, but the other two continued almost till the end of the road from the simulation base of the UN before they winked out.

  As she was retrieving the data of these two suits, also unregistered to anybody, she glimpsed the girl, Rania’s avatar, slinking out of the bit market. On a hunch, she decided to trail her, since she still had some good hours left in the hacking time allotted to pursue the assailants, and she surmised that this is what Rania was doing herself.

  Before the girl uploaded to a different spot, she released one of her remaining tracers to stick to the girl’s suit.

  As the girl uploaded somewhere else, so did she.

  *

  The Valhalla Greatest team stood on the threshold of Jamal Yu’s data vault when Jones suddenly appeared in their midst.

  “Odin’s Grey Beard!” Rania jumped.

  “Don’t be alarmed girl,” Jones said and signaled them to calm down. “I’m here for the same purpose you are here.”

  “You also came to investigate my father!?” Edward said in shock.

  Jones recovered from this tidbit of information quickly.

  “Yes, of course,” she adlibbed, taking an intimidating stance. “I am investigating his connection to your coma.”

  It was the best response she could come up with because she couldn’t imagine another reason this very group would be investigating Jamal Yu.

  “Dahlia Jones, you have always been a bad liar!” Dana spat the words at her. “You came here tracking one of us by sheer accident.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Jones asserted her authority. “The fact is, I’m here to see whatever you lot are doing through to the end.”

  Edward hesitated, but Mario said, “For better or for worse, she’s in for the ride.” He patted the younger man’s shoulder. “Open the vault Edward, before your father’s employees discover that he is trapped in a Stasis Can. We don’t have much time.”

  Edward looked at him and nodded, then to the rest of the group who gave him the thumbs up.

  Edward entered the biometrics scanner of the vault and after a few seconds that felt like hours, the big door finally opened, and they all stepped in.

  Almost instantaneously there was a rushing sound and the walls melted away as they were whisked out and uploaded to a different location. Valhalla Greatest and Officer Jones found themselves in a huge virtual holding cell.

  “You never fail to disappoint me, Edward.” Jamal Yu stood in front of the electric bars of the cell, shaking his head. “You never worked out who invented the original Stasis Can, did you?”

  PART FIVE – THE HOODED MAN

  33

  Anybody that knows anything about coding knows about the law of redundancy; it is the only way to work with a living program, like Artificial Intelligence. A miscalculated margin of error can cause an AI to grow sentient, like the incident of 2022 when a sophisticated creative AI became sentient and subsequently suicidal.

 
To safeguard against sentience of AIs, the law of coding redundancy was created. In simple terms, it is a series of repetitive code to safeguard against one of the main intelligence codes of the AI failing and leading to the erratic side effect of emotion and feeling – the real building block of sentience and self-awareness.

  Since the VNet was created after the financial disaster of 2024 and the demise of that famous Suicide AI from 2022, it was stacked with redundancy codes, to the extent that as it grew, parts of VNet became inaccessible to the original programmers.

  These inaccessible areas are the center of many conspiracy theories and urban legends, some of them concern augmented AI persons and rumors that they maintain a network on these areas for their own communication.

  Others maintain that the renegade AI, the one who swore vengeance on its creators, made this part of VNet its domain and that it’s better not to try to find the wormhole and backdoors in VNet because if you ended up in its domain, the renegade AI would take over your mind. The creepier version of this legend said that it augments you with parts of its mind or self-created AIs to recruit you to its purpose.

  For a small group of conspiracy theorists, both of these threads are true and if you are a nobody you end up as part of it as your body enters a deep coma, but if you are a figure of authority or wield any sort of power, it augments you with parts of its acquired brain to recruit you.

  Aside from the far-fetched and exceptionally crazy, one conspiracy theory had taken hold of the VNet society; this one dictated that these inaccessible parts are accessible through very complicated coding to reach the backdoors of these areas. And that in it, the more powerful crime lords, dark coders, and even some powerful business figures have their hidden bases where they can conduct themselves outside of the law.

  This theory is completely true, and the Valhalla Greatest along with Dahlia Jones (who had become the unwanted 6th member of the Valhalla Greatest) was held in a very advanced and modified Stasis Can in a part of these inaccessible areas. The one owned and run by Jamal Yu.

  “You never fail to disappoint me, Edward.” Jamal Yu stood in front of the electric bars of the cell shaking his head. “You never worked out who invented the original Stasis Can, did you?”

  “No, but I know now,” Edward challenged his father’s avatar, which was just the same as his real life appearance. “I will do better next time when I want to know your secrets that involve me.”

  “What are you talking about, you insulant wretch?” Jamal Yu.

  “I am talking about betting 1 million DC against us.” Edward began to channel his dark glow as he talked to his father. “I am talking about your own role in sending us into a coma and crippling me!” he shouted and everybody in the cell with him cowered in terror.

  It affected everyone except Jamal Yu, who looked at Edward as if he was an angry puppy yapping for supper.

  “Interesting, very interesting,” Jamal Yu reached out and touched the avatar face of his son. The crackle of energy on contact was loud. “I was planning to release you after some hours of incarceration,” he moved away from the cell as he talked, “now I plan to study you and your colleagues to find the source of this strange augmentation.”

  He winked out. Edward cooled down after his father left and the others let out a collective sigh of relief.

  “How come your father was not phased by your terror thing?” Rania slumped in the corner as she spoke to Edward. He still stood holding the bars of the cell.

  “How would I know?” Edward answered in frustration. “The man always was more machine than human!”

  “Machine!” Dana jumped from her place next to Rania. “When I tried to read his mind, it was like reading code of an AI!”

  “That can’t be,” Jones shook her head, “Jamal Yu was an immigrant, and the augmentation program was only done here.”

  “What if he did it after arriving here?” Dana asked her. “Couldn’t that be the case?”

  “No way, all immigrants receive a data implant to track their movement over their first five years here,” Jones explained. “And unless he did it later, which is also impossible since the guy has been in the headlights since day one, we would have found out.”

  “Well, I still think it is strange to read a man to find AI coding in his head,” Dana said before returning to her corner.

  “When did he start to act more like a machine than man?” Mario asked Edward.

  “Since my mother died, I guess,” Edward slumped to the floor by the bars. “Four years ago, or something like that.”

  “Did it coincide with any other event?” Mario pressed him further.

  “I am not sure what you mean really,” Edward answered.

  “Any other unusual event that happened at the same time,” Mario elaborated. “Like anything business related maybe?”

  “Well, yes,” Edward answered. “That was about the time he created ROBAGUARD, the now standard AI in VNet and real-life security.”

  “I might be a little rusty on new security measures,” Mario turned to Jones, “care to explain its functionality to us?”

  “You must be away from security, not just rusty,” Rania commented. “ROBAGUARD is the most difficult to hack AI, and by difficult, I mean impossible.”

  “Exactly, what Rania said is the simplest way of saying how sophisticated this AI is,” Jones said. “While not really sentient because it would be illegal, it’s the single most advanced AI created since the Johnson breakthrough in 2026.”

  “I see,” Mario said thoughtfully. “And would you say it compares to any of his previous work, I mean to Mr. Yu’s work, that is.”

  “Not really,” Rick was the one who answered. “Mr. Yu was known for his game coding, in fact, I think ROBAGUARD is his first ever non-game coding work,” he notices the eyes of the group settle on him and he shrugged. “He was an idol of mine for a long time; he is the most celebrated game coder ever… as you all know.”

  “If we didn’t,” Rania teased him, “now we know.”

  “Anyway, this is a unique event then,” Mario continued. “I have one last question, emotionally, did he change after the death of your mother?”

  “Yeah, of course, he did,” Edward said in an exasperated tone. “He had just lost his wife, of course, he changed.”

  “I understand,” Mario said. “Yet my question wasn’t about grief or isolation because of that. What I meant was quantitative, not qualitative, meaning would you say that he began showing his emotions less than before?”

  “In a way,” Edward sighed. “Yes, I would say that he became more repressed, a lot more repressed in expressing his emotions.”

  “Look, guys,” Rania waved her arms in frustration. “I enjoy hypothetical discussions as much as the next person, but shouldn’t we be discussing how to get out of this damn Stasis Can?”

  “Did you try?” Dana asked her.

  “What do you think I was doing during Mario’s therapy session?” she said in desperation. “Nothing, I can’t even dent the thing.”

  “I’ll try,” Edward announced. “And maybe Rick can lend me some much-needed muscle to bend the code over itself.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Rick said, approaching him. They started to talk in whispers as the rest of the group stood watching silently.

  After around 10 minutes, the two stopped, apparently exhausted.

  “This is going to take some time,” Edward said. “We’ll rest for a while and continue. It’s actually depleting our energy as we work on it – I feel a little dizzy right now.”

  “Well, we have nothing better to do for the moment. Take your time,” Dana announced.

  “Maybe I can help lend some energy then,” Jones offered.

  “I will help too,” said Rania, joining them.

  34

  Mehemet and Yee were sitting in a place that was different from the place of their first meeting in every single way. Where the other place had been green, lush and lighted, this one was all metal, drab bric
kwork, bare walls and basic seating. It was awash with shadows from inadequate lighting and yet it was the most secure place on Earth either in real-life or in VNet, since it was another chunk of redundant space like the one that Jamal Yu used for his own purposes.

  “Our mutual friend developed this space exclusively for this meeting,” Yee announced to his coconspirator. “It will dissolve into raw data the moment we leave it.”

  “So, his methodology of recruitment for you was the same as for me I take it,” Mehemet said, nodding at the spartan surroundings.

  “I guess people like him usually maintain the simple approaches simply because they are the least time consuming and the most effective,” Yee said. “The man is, after all, a practice in effectiveness.”

  “That he is,” Mehemet, as usual, had his narcotic tea in front of him. Their host knew almost everything about their VNet habits, and he was always accommodating to his associates. “Do you know why we were called today? And why both of us together?”

  “I can’t answer your first question, all will be clear upon his arrival I guess,” Yee shrugged as he drew slowly on his vape. “But as far as I know from other parties familiar with him, this is a first. Him meeting two people at the same time is unheard of.”

  “‘It’? You make it sound as if he is not human,” Mehemet said.

  “Who knows who he is,” Yee shrugged again. “Or if he’s a he, a her, an it or a they.”

  “Well, I don’t care personally,” Mehemet said. “His partnership with me gave me the edge that made me a crime lord, in fact, more than once he gave me the drop on one of my more industrious and resilient enemies. In a way, I owe him whatever he asks of me.”

  “I can say the same, if not more,” Yee said. “But I was never comfortable of knowing only parts of the grand plan. He never allowed me to know any more than my part, that is, until I started working with you of course.”