The Paradise Factory

by Jim Keen

The soldiers were back in ten minutes, Niner’s chilled cube held between clamps on a large levitating platform, a compact fusion reactor plugged into its side.

  “What are you going to do with him?” Alice shouted against the wind.

  “It has a choice between deactivation or reconditioning,” the lead soldier answered.

  “What’s reconditioning?”

  “A personality redesign to increase obedience.”

  Niner had been listening. He spoke up, his voice small and desperate. “Please, please, I promise there’s no need to do that. All I want is to be my best and help you. Maybe if we—”

  Feedback wailed, followed by what sounded like a mechanical scream. His tank went dark. The soldier who had spoken to Alice clipped a kill switch to his belt.

  “If you’ve a problem with this, feel free to fuck off,” he said, and pushed the dead MI over to an industrial size Hopper.

  Alice looked at Red and saw the same pain that had cut through her.

  The NYPD and news crews arrived a few minutes later. The cops gave off an aura of anger and concern; they weren’t sure if the Bridge was safe, and most hadn’t heard about their redundancy yet. The news teams were different. None had been here before, and they scurried over the landing pad like ants over a sugar cube, a frenzy of cameras and studio tie-ins.

  She kept Red and herself as far away from them as she could, and watched the police spread out. Cops recognized her, then turned their faces to reports or equipment. They knew she would be fired; her name nothing but a statistic. Another police Hopper landed and Sergeant Rice pried himself from its interior.

  “Hey, Sarge, good to see you,” Alice said as she walked over. Rice disgusted her—he was a bottom feeder of middle management—but if anyone knew about the forced military takeover, it would be him.

  “Officer Yu. Quite the mess you’ve stirred up here.”

  “Think you can get me on that new Pentagon task force?” She came out with it straight, same as always.

  He said nothing, looked at her with care. His thin, pasty skin glistened under a layer of sweat. “Know about that, huh?”

  “Yes sir, love to get involved.”

  “You’re late to the party. I’ve already got eighty street cops signed up, not much room left. There is something you could do to jump the line though.” He wasn’t subtle, his eyes crawling over her body.

  “How long you been part of it?” she asked and smiled.

  “A year. They knew I was the guy to vet the rank and file. We need to do as told to make this work. That’s why I didn’t think of you.”

  “So you’ve known for a year that us street cops are out of a job?”

  “Yes, I—”

  It wasn’t the best right hook she’d ever thrown, too exhausted to get the timing perfect, but it connected with his chin. His jowls did a small dance, his eyes rolled to the skies, and he fell back, arms perpendicular, and hit the icy floor with a dull thump. She kneeled beside his body and ran her hands over his pockets until she found the Hopper’s encryption keys.

  Rice stirred, then opened his eyes to look up at her. “Oh, you’re so screwed. I’m going to make sure you’re out by tonight, hear me? Don’t bother cleaning your locker. You show at HQ tomorrow, I’ll have you arrested.”

  “Fuck you and your shitty job, you stupid asshole. Think I care what you say anymore?”

  Alice stepped over his body and crossed to the Hopper, the armor-glass canopy milky with scratches. She placed the encryption key in the lateral groove and the dihedral doors scissored up to reveal two worn seats, both empty. She turned back, the red and white lights catching every snowflake.

  “Hey, Red. C’mon, your ride’s here.”

  Alice took them straight upward, then waited, a Christmas bauble hung in the sky. She took one last look out and nudged Red to do the same. He leaned over as far as he could, face pressed to the curved glass door. The Bridge lay below them, police lights flickering like sparks over its dark hull. Both ends were lit by spotlights; she saw crowds milling away, thousands of ants looking for a new home.

  She took the Hopper off auto and dipped the nose to move it north, followed the black scar of the East River toward midtown. The contrast between the landscape to her left and right was stark. Lower Manhattan still had a vestigial echo of its earlier street life, but the higher they went, the more empty roads she saw. Towers clustered like grass, the base of each one a hundred-foot wall of reinforced concrete. Rings of smart-home defense systems pushed out to the property line, robot sentries watching sodium-orange streets lacking any life. Above them, skyscrapers rose as rods of light, some subtle with the translucent walls of a geisha house, others stripped naked to reveal their structural trusses. All were empty this low down. Alice looked up. A mile overhead the towers became lumpen and buckled like diseased trees as they cupped hidden worlds. She’d never been up there; never would.

  Brooklyn festered to her right. It slept under a black-velvet blanket interrupted only by the strobe of emergency vehicles, the flicker of burning cars, and here and there the actinic flash of gunfire.

  “It’s not going to get better, is it?” Red said. His face, uplit by the navigation console, looked like a pale skull.

  “No,” Alice said. “Bank was right. Family has to be the core of everything from now on.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Me? No idea, kid.” She peered out the window again, facing her reflection. “I just don’t want what I have anymore.”

  22

  “If they are truly built in our image, it would be foolish to assume some won’t hate and fear us.”

  Cortex Employee 34, private memo, New York, 2044

  “We need to develop weapons that work against Mechanical Intelligences as soon as possible, and pray we never need to use them.”

  Pentagon Report, “War in the Age of Sentient Machines,”

  President of the United States, 2053

  Red shook, numb with exhaustion, but he still had a job to do. The envelope was addressed to an old midtown block near Central Park. Alice flew the Hopper along Fifth Avenue, picking up an array of aerial violations, then pulled a hard bank over Grand Army Plaza as she hunted for the building. Her jacket sat in grumpy silence, her phone long since lost. Red looked over the perimeter wall of the park, toward the skeleton of Cortex’s new headquarters. Thousands of twinkling lights traced its half-mile cylinder; automated construction running every second of the year until completion.

  Cortex’s current address was less fashionable. The building’s hundred-year-old curtain wall lay under decades of pollution. Long streaks of filth scoured the metal spandrel panels, making it appear camouflaged besides its mile-high neighbors. The roof was covered with satellite uplink arrays, an old water tower, and a large, white plastic structure with red radiation warnings. A thick black cable ran from the fusion reactor to an open escape stairwell, then down into the throat of the building.

  Alice landed the Hopper next to the reactor, powered down the vehicle, and leaned back with a sigh. She and Red sat in silence punctuated by the ticking of cooling metal. The headlights of the Hopper illuminated the roof’s turbulent sea of garbage. Snow had returned, thick flakes that struggled to smother the past.

  “Go on,” she said. “I’ll wait for you.”

  Red looked at her, now afraid to be alone. “Come with?”

  “The most important man in the world has no interest in a broken ex-cop. It’s you he wants to meet.”

  “Me?”

  “You didn’t think this was about that letter, did you?”

  The armor-glass door scissored up. Cold air swirled in, thick with the odor of burning rubber and trash. Distant sirens merged with the hum of air handling units.

  His mouth tasted bitter, like old coffee.

  He was scared.

  “Okay, I’ll be quick.”

  “No rush, I’ve nowhere to go.”

  Red stood in the deepening snow. The letter held no power o
ver him now. It had become what it really was: nothing but a soiled piece of paper. His determination had long gone, an echo of a feeling.

  “Forty-fifth floor. Of course it is.” He crossed to the escape staircase. The thick black cable throbbed in the quiet, the sound of massive energy contained in too small a space. He kneeled and placed his palm on its warm surface. Then he stood, wiped his hand in revulsion, and went inside.

  The stairwell was a reinforced concrete tube with no lighting. Red walked down one floor, then though a fire door to enter the elevator lobby. He had never been in an office tower before, and was disappointed. He’d expected a slick glass-and-steel edifice filled with bright young things making other people rich. Instead he was greeted by a tired corridor with a gray carpet, filthy white walls, and buzzing strip lights. The brass doors of the elevators had been vandalized, street-art sigils carved into the metal with diamond-tipped attitude. Red jammed the down button. There was a deep mechanical rattle, low beeps.

  A minute passed.

  It was quiet here, dry and warm. His feet squelched in their boots. He stank, sweat humming from his jacket. His long spiked hair had finally given up, and lay draped over his scalp like a cluster of dead snakes. He looked the street kid he was, out of options.

  The elevator doors opened with a squeal, revealing a urine-stained box. A single flickering light crackled in the ceiling. He entered, looked back at the filthy corridor, pressed the down button.

  The descent was slow, the car rattling, until it came to a grinding halt. The doors sighed open to reveal another faded corridor. It was worn and old, but this one had at least been scrubbed clean and stank of disinfectant. The ceiling opened to expose a raw concrete frame above white lights hung from red wires, halide fire-suppression nozzles glued alongside. The power cable snaked past him to enter an open door. Someone had taped a handwritten note to its outside: Cortex Intelligent Machines. Voices floated from within, both male. One with an educated East Coast accent; the other more clipped and precise, argumentative, like Alice’s jacket crossed with a lawyer.

  Red walked to the door and knocked.

  “Come in, boy. We’ve been waiting for you,” the East Coast voice said.

  Red stepped through the doorway. Cortex’s office spanned the whole side of the building, the room running away to meet a gray wall covered in yellow signs. A grid of dirty white acoustic panels covered the ceiling, and carpet tiles the color of fresh bruises smothered the floor. The filthy windows offered nothing but a weak reflection of the interior, and the opposite wall hid behind office furniture stacked like plastic sentries.

  Niner was the first MI Red had seen. He was an old military version, with vast heat and power requirements. The one in this room was of a more modern design. Its body was a one-foot by six-foot brass cylinder, submerged in a glass tube filled with pink liquid. The ends of the tube were capped with complex hexagonal lids that twisted with slow force. The MI’s surface was ribbed like a heat sink, bubbles rising from the blades in an endless stream. The reactor’s black power cable snaked across to the lower lid, and a green cooling hose exited the upper and ran to the far wall, plugged into a long, low metal box.

  Two men sat at a white folding table beside the machine, one of them with his back to Red. The table had a faded grid drawn on its surface, little wooden figures occupying the squares. The man facing Red was Charles Takamatsu, inventor of the Babbage circuit and father of Mechanical Intelligence. He looked up, waved him over.

  “Come here, boy. You’re late. Pip assured me you would be here on time. We’ve been waiting hours, and look at the state of you. Be careful, don’t get filth on the carpet, takes an age to clean. Come, come, don’t stand there, work to be done. Hurry. Do you still have it? The letter? You have it?”

  “Who’s Pip?” Red said. He fidgeted, unsure.

  “The man who runs that dreadful bar, calls himself the Professor.” Both men tittered and Red’s stomach curdled with humiliation. He wanted to get out, run, hide in his bed. The letter hung impotently between his fingers.

  “Here, now. Come.” Takamatsu beckoned him over.

  Red hurried across, shame rising at the squelch of his boots, the smell of his body. He reached the table, held the letter out to Takamatsu.

  “Not me, you idiot. Him.”

  For the first time Red studied the man opposite. He wore thin black pajama pants with no shirt or shoes, and he was aged and Asian, his body a riot of active tattoos. As Red watched, a great blue dragon rose from his groin to writhe across his chest; it crushed a wooden boat between its jaws, long white fangs puncturing the hull. The dragon tossed the boat in the air, then swallowed it as people fell screaming and disappeared.

  The man held out his hand; Red stepped forward, then stopped in horror. He didn’t have eyes. Or, to be correct, he had what looked like normal eyes, but they were part of a metal plate raised from the front of his face. Behind that was another metal plate, this one a blend of MI and human, brass and flesh welded together to create something new. Bolts, screws, blood, labels, cheeks, stubble. A thin blue cable snaked from a socket behind his ear and crossed to another on the MI.

  Red didn’t move, his mouth open, as the man’s hand darted out to pluck the letter away. A wet corner remained between Red’s fingers. He closed his mouth with a snap.

  “Boy, meet Low-Bar. Low-Bar, meet boy,” Takamatsu said. Low-Bar clicked his fingers and Red saw long yellow fingernails honed to sharp points.

  “What is he?” Red managed.

  “Low-Bar, show him.”

  The man, the machine, flicked his face plate down with a click. The join was flawless; from a distance he looked human, apart from the blue cable hung behind his ear. Low-Bar tilted his head to one side and spoke.

  “Well?” The voice emerged from the MI cylinder behind him.

  Red wanted to scream, to run. His legs refused, locked in place.

  “What do you want to know?” it asked.

  “Are you alive? I mean, are you human?”

  Low-Bar turned to Takamatsu and rolled his large brown eyes. Both men laughed. “I win that one,” it said.

  “Agreed. What does Pip have to say?”

  Low-Bar stuck a bone-yellow fingernail under the edge of the envelope and ran it across, the Professor’s sigil falling to the carpet. The machine withdrew the letter and read a few letters and numbers.

  “Queen takes pawn,” he said, and moved one of the little wooden figures on the table.

  “And?” Takamatsu said.

  “Bishop takes knight’s pawn,” Low-Bar announced and moved another piece across the grid.

  “What a lovely move.”

  Takamatsu pulled a blank piece of paper from his pocket. He scribbled a note with a fountain pen worth more than Red’s apartment, and handed it to him.

  “There you go, boy, deliver that to him as soon as you can. What do you charge?”

  “Ten dollars, sir.”

  Both men laughed. Low-Bar pulled a thin white cigarette from his pants pocket and lit it with a brass Zippo. The guttering yellow flame glistened black against the blue connection cable. Alcohol scented the stale air.

  “Pip was right, you are one to be watched. There is a jar by the door—take what you need.” Takamatsu waved him away.

  Red stepped backward, unable to pull his eyes away from the table and its occupants. He bumped into a desk behind him, and had to stifle a scream. A glass jar rattled and Red twisted to see it was stuffed with notes; not just Obamas, but old ones he’d only seen in textbooks. The numbers on the paper were huge: hundreds, thousands. Two of these would change his life, help him set up a real greenhouse, save his mother.

  He turned back and found Low-Bar watching him while Takamatsu studied the board, oblivious. The machine stared with raw hatred, mouth a downward slit, then gave a sly smile. He raised one finger, put it to his lips, then ran it across his throat in a slashing motion.

  An animal fear unlike anything Red had ever known gripped
him, his bladder close to letting go. Low-Bar’s smile widened and it gave a slow wink. Niner had been pure, a child, but this machine was perverted and evil. Red had to get out of here. He took another step, looked back at the money, then at the new letter in his hand. Wasn’t this what he wanted? What this whole awful day had been about?

  No—not with that machine watching, not like this. He was alone now, understood at last what Bank and Alice had been saying to him. To be alone was to be lost, but owing someone was far worse.

  He left the jar untouched and ran through the door.

  “Red, what happened?” Alice said as he climbed back into the Hopper.

  “I’m such an idiot. I thought Niner was cool, like he was this godhead, a pinnacle of achievement. He’s just an old, outdated machine. Hack-jobs, too—nothing but cave drawings while Picasso lives next door. We should put our names in the Martian lottery, get out while we still can. Humans are done, over.”

  After that Red wouldn’t answer any of Alice’s questions, just clutched the piece of paper and gazed out of the Hopper as Manhattan’s baubles were replaced with Brooklyn’s sullen darkness. He was hollowed out, worn so thin as to not exist anymore. Alice landed on the flat roof of his apartment building. The door scissored up, and he looked at her in the dark-green instrument lighting.

  “So you’ll come over tomorrow like you said? You weren’t lying?”

  “Cross my heart, Red. Two p.m. work for you?”

  He smiled for the first time that day. “That works.”

  “Get some sleep, kid,” Alice said and the door slid down, the layer of filth and scratches a blank wall. He stepped back and watched it lift away, the crackle of its Dyson engines loud, then quiet. He hesitated, breath misting in front of him, then went inside.

  Red let himself into his apartment and shut the door with a quiet click. It was dark, but the south-facing window caught enough moonlight to lend the room a pale glimmer. The bars protecting his crop of strawberries cut long shadows across the wall. Snoring came from the narrow bedroom. He checked his uncle was alright, adjusted the thin sheets to cover him, then returned to the living room. The worn sofa, his bed, looked like heaven but he had chores first. He filled a plastic jug with rainwater, added a sterilizing agent, and hand-pumped the solution through a carbon filter. The keys to the window cage hung over the broken oven. He took them, opened the small greenhouses, and watered each plant in turn.