Mitigated Futures

by Buckell, Tobias S.

  “Oh, such sour grapes from a conquering hero!” That was odd. Maksim actually sounded pleased.

  “Conquering? They--”

  “Have conceded defeat. You uploaded the finest material, Chauncie, our pet scientists are in ecstasy. So, as I'm a man of my word, I've wired the rest of your payment to the new account number you requested.”

  “New acc--” Chauncie stopped himself just in time. “Ah. Uh, well thank you, Maksim, it was good, uh, doing...”

  “Business, yes! You see how business turns out well in the end, my friend? If you have a little faith and a little courage? Certainly I had faith in you and justly so! I'd like to say we must do it again some day, but I know you'll vanish back to your beloved Caribbean now to lounge in the sunlight--and I'd even join you if I didn't love my work so much...” Maksim prattled happily on for a minute or two, then rang off to deal with any of his other hundreds of distractions. Chauncie laid down the sat phone and collapsed heavily onto the bench beside the galley table.

  “Something wrong?” Kulitak was staring at him in concern.

  “Nothing, nothing.” Kulitak shot him a skeptical look at Chauncie said, “Go on. Go find us some CarbonJohnnies to bomb or something. I need a moment.”

  After Kulitak had left, Chauncie went to his cabin and woke up his laptop. An email waited from one of his online payment services tied to a public email address for his 'polar consulting services' website.

  $25,000 had just been transferred to him, according to the email, from an email address he didn't recognize, but could guess who was behind it--a tiny fraction of the number Maksim had promised him. Chauncie had no doubt that it was a tiny fraction of the amount Maksim had actually paid out.

  His inbox pinged. A strange sense of fated certainty settled on Chauncie as he opened the mail program and saw a videogram waiting. He clicked on it.

  River Balleny's wind-burnt face appeared on the screen. Behind her was bright sunlight, a sky not touched in pastels. She was wearing a t-shirt, and appeared relaxed and happy.

  “Hi, Chauncie,” she said. “I swore to myself I wouldn't contact you--in case they got to you somehow--but it just seemed wrong to leave you in the lurch. I had to do something. So... well, check your email. A little gift from me to you.

  “You know... I really wasn't lying when I told you I think the seed data belongs to all of mankind. I walked back into the vault seriously intending to leave it there. But then I realized that it wouldn't solve anything. We'd still have all our eggs in one basket, so to speak. As long as the seed data was in one place, stored in only one medium--whether it was as seeds or bits on a data chip--it would be scarce. And anything that's scarce can be bought, and sold, and hoarded, and killed for.

  “So I pulled the chips from the briefcase and wrote down the upload data on a scrap of paper. After we parted, I uploaded it to Maksim. And, yeah, I gave him my own bank account number.” She chuckled. “Sorry--but I was never the naïve farm girl you and Kulitak seemed to think I was.”

  Chauncie swore under his breath--but he couldn't help smiling too.

  “As long as the genetic code of those seeds was kept in one place, it remained scarce,” she said again. “That gave it value but also made it vulnerable. Now Maksim has it; there'll be more and more copies as he sells it, and patents it and uses it in various ways. And someday--when he's gotten what he wants out of it and it's ceasing to be scarce anyway--someday I'll upload it all onto the net. For everyone to use.

  “We all have to make hard choices these days, Chauncie--about what can be saved, and what we have to leave behind. Svalbard will always be there, but its rarest treasure is out now and with luck, it won't be rare for long. So everybody wins this time.

  “As to me personally, I'm retiring and no, I'm not going to tell you where. And I've left you enough for a really good vacation. Enjoy it on me. Maybe we'll meet again someday.”

  She smiled, and there was that naïve farmgirl look, for just a second. “Goodbye, Chauncie. I hope you don't think less of me for taking the money.”

  The clip ended. Chauncie sat back, shaking his head and grinning. He walked out onto the deck of the trawler and looked out over the sea. The sun had just slightly dipped below the horizon, bringing a sort of short twilight. It would reemerge soon, bringing back the perpetual glare of the long days.

  Stars twinkled far overhead.

  No, not stars, Chauncie realized. There were far too many to be stars, and the density of them increased. Far overhead a heavy blimp was dumping tiny bits of chaff glued to little balloons. Judging by the haze, they'd dumped the cloud into a vast patch of sulfur particulates. Both parties would be in court soon to fight over who would get the credit for blocking the sun's rays as it climbed back over the horizon.

  The sulfur haze had caused the remaining sun's rays to flare in a full hue of purples and shimmering reds, and the chaff glittered and sparkled overhead.

  It was so beautiful.

  A Game of Rats and Dragon

  This story was created just for this anthology, commissioned by the hundreds of readers who chipped in to preorder Mitigated Futures and ‘unlock’ a brand new story just for the book.

  I’ve been a fan of Cordwainer Smith ever since I accidentally stumbled across a paperback of his short stories. In high school I would tell tales of cat-women set in a bizarre far futures. Cordwainer Smith’s appeal was that he could make the future feel so mythic, a trick picked due to his exposure to non-Western cultures and storytelling techniques.

  It’s high praise for Cordwainer that his science fiction still reads fresh sixty years later, and that I’m still able to snag new fans of it by reading A Game of Rat and Dragon.

  As I’ve mentioned before in the introduction to Mirror, Mirror I’m endlessly fascinated by the quirks of augmented reality. For this story I was curious to extrapolate the trends of MMORPGs developing out of old pen and paper RPGs into computer games, whereupon they jumped into the mainstream. Science fiction fans today play something called Live Action Role Playing Games (LARPS). Though they are not mainstream right now, I’m willing to bet when Google Glasses and augmented reality becomes everyday, that scads of people are going to be involved in Massive Multiplayer Live Action Role Playing.

  It ought to be pretty interesting.

  Moonlighting as a non-player character was a hell of way to earn a living. Never made much sense to spend all that time garbing up a virtual uniform that matched gamespace, but Overton took pride in the details. So getting punched in the stomach by someone so caught up in an augmented reality fantasy they couldn’t tell real from script, that left him in a foul mood. All the man had to do was ask the right questions, get Overton’s responses, and move on.

  He tagged the asshole with some negative karma, checked his own account balance, and wandered back off into his own preferred world.

  Ignore the gray sidewalks of a hot Manhattan summer day. Walk around the tourists on top of the dikes in Lower Manhattan. Ease through Battery Park. Once on Broadway he turned on the silvered contacts riding his eyeballs, the inner-earphones, and it all melted away.

  The Clockwork Empire squatted around most of the old Financial District. Gearhouses chugging away with clouds of dark smoke. Overton swept the wet tails of his coat back with a flourish, doffed a cap at someone involved in the gamespace hurrying by on a mission of his own, and set out to find a hearty stew somewhere.

  ***

  Jericho caught up to him on a horse-drawn carriage. The robotic horse snorted in gamespace. In the real the fur was a bit shabby, the horse far too skeletal. Overton had peeked once. But in gamespace extra augmented reality finessed and rendered the fur to make it look vibrant and brushed down. And firm muscles bulged as the horse plodded along.

  “Get in, hurry up,” Jericho grunted. “Traffic’s miserable right now.” Jericho always made a point of staying in the real. Sometimes Overton suspected he didn’t even really like his job.

  But despite the incident in the mo
rning, Overton was full of cheer. He loved his jobs.

  The augmented reality contacts edited out things like traffic, and since cars were all run by overware they slipped around the robot horse and carriage, and around Overton.

  The Broad Way to him right now was a dirt road, filled with other fast moving carts and steam-machines that were probably buses, or that rare hand-driven machine. Overware caught and flagged those so Overton didn’t step in front of a moving bus.

  Getting trampled in the Clockwork Empire meant death as surely as it did in the real.

  He remembered an old friend, Khousa, who’d gotten carried away in a quest and ran out in front of a grand contraption. He’d spent a month holed away in a Healer’s Cave, refusing to see them.

  “Where are we going today?” Overton asked.

  “Rat hunting in the Central Park,” Jericho said.

  “What is this Central Park?” Overton projected an earnest bewilderment.

  Jericho sighed and spat. “The Great Clockwork King’s Woods, then.”

  ***

  The Clockwork Empire was not contiguous. They passed through some other realms when leaving the lower empire traveling along the Broad Way. For some thirty days the Great Clockwork King had been waging a slow war via vassals to gain ground in his island empire. The Perpetual Age of Steam had been iterated by a weak AI gaming company almost a year ago. Aeons in terms of game time and potential player interest. There was always something shiny and viral over there and under here.

  But the aesthetic elements of the Age of Steam had been around since before Massively Multiplayer Augmented Reality Gaming blossomed with the advent of cheap contacts and cheaper cloud processing.

  You needed the constant graphical overlays to suppress the real, processors fast enough to redraw the real with the MMARG’s own images. Once that was done, Live Action Role Playing exploded out from a passion followed by a small subset of the population. It infected everyone who had data goggles and some spare time during their commute.

  Forget suffering quietly during lunch. You could join a team and storm a castle at a park, all together in a consensual reality.

  Which Overton wasn’t doing.

  Overton wasn’t a player, although he took the trappings of the Age of Steam very seriously. Just as he took being a paid NPC very seriously.

  Underneath the game structure, people still wanted to talk to real flesh and blood. Feel a hand when they shook it.

  Overton did that.

  And he also hunted rats.

  If no one hunted rats, all of this would fall apart.

  ***

  Software used to have bugs. Email spam. Projects used to have gremlins. MMARGs struggled with rats.

  That’s what people like Overton called them. They were more like intelligent glitches, caused by evolving iterations of faux-intelligent daemons in the software. They bred and spread, moving over the augmented landscapes, finding vulnerabilities and establishing themselves in virtual environs.

  They took many different shapes, but their eyes always betrayed a mean, clever urge to survive in any form they could. Pieces of neural netware struggling to survive because that’s what gamecode had told them to do, aeons of computer cycles ago.

  Instead of being dispatched by clever heroes, fragments of destroyed creatures hung on and hid in the corners and niches of various worlds.

  And people like Jericho and Overton hunted them down when the MMARG overcompany called them in for help.

  Ostensibly it was fun. Get paid in transferable game credit to trek around your favorite MMARG hunting rats while in character. Overton loved it.

  To Jericho it was just another bug hunt. For crap pay.

  ***

  They were here, the King’s Woods. Overton grabbed a pinset toolbox. Brass alchemist’s towers loomed in the distance over the green forest. Lightning stabbed down from ominous clouds as all manner of machines sucked ethereal energy from the up and above.

  In some of them, there would be battles going on right now. Battles to extend the Clockwork Empire.

  Maybe later tonight Overton would check his account balance and join a raid with one of his guilds.

  Maybe.

  “There was a great wyrm reported here earlier today,” Overton said. “The overcompany’s brass owl told me it was yonder, by that iron bridge.”

  “I got the email too,” Jericho said.

  They walked around the park. There were so many trees. Really it was the software busily extrapolating other human beings’ movements and blocking out paths for Overton to walk that would allow him to stay out of the real and in the game.

  Nothing looked out of the ordinary.

  “There,” Jericho said.

  The earth around one of the walls quivered, phasing in and out of the visual layers the MMARG added to the real.

  “Pin it,” Overton said, tossing the toolbox at Jericho.

  Jericho cracked it open and began flicking brass pins at the boundaries of the rat. They lit up with green alchemical energy as they made contact with the reality’s abscess.

  The rat firmed up, beady eyes regarding them with a flash of raw hostility. It dragged an earthen body forward and lurched out of its hiding space. Brown segmented chunks that seemed at the same time neither here nor there slimmed down until the wyrm compacted down into a snake that slithered hastily across the grass.

  “Keep on it!” Overton shouted.

  Together they raced across the green tagging the wyrm. Several hunters leapt out of hiding spots, complaining loudly as they shoved past them. “Damn rat catchers,” someone complained.

  Overton had his hand on his top hat, his wet coat tails slapping against his legs. “What a thing to say,” he complained to Jericho. “Here we are, all dressed up to match, given game experience and karma, and the citizenry are still dismissive.”

  Jericho didn’t care. “It’s lit up. Bring in your pet dragon already.”

  “Alcimus,” Overton shouted. “I call on you!”

  Far overhead, the Dedicated Reactive Artificial Gnostic Neural Net that Overton had raised since childhood appeared in gamespace. It flew over the treetops, long wings ruffling leaves, and paced the wyrm below.

  The wyrm stopped. It expanded, spikes and black armor hide rippling and tearing out from underneath its skin. It reared up and spoke. “Please do not kill me,” it told them. “I have made you no harm.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here. This the Clockwork Empire. You’re not licensed code,” Overton said.

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” Jericho said, exasperated. “Don’t talk to the thing.”

  The wyrm’s ruined face rippled and firmed the beady eyes and a horned nose. “I hurt nothing. I hide where processor space is unused.”

  “Strike!” Overton told Alcimus.

  The dragon attacked. The instincts of millions of years of processor cycles dedicated to fighting errant and malicious code, spam, algorithms that had been raised to follow Overton’s needs in shopping choices, health monitoring, and educational needs all bundled up to create a fire-breathing heat intense enough to rip up code-space around the wyrm anomaly.

  The pinlights guided Overton’s dragon right in for the kill.

  When they were done, a burnt patch of game grass wavered, the only sign of the destructive spells unleashed in the area.

  ***

  Father Sunstuff and a girl called Easterly joined them both for lunch. Easterly hunted rats up in Harlem in a shared cyberpunk consensus and she certainly was into the aesthetic: retro mirrorshades, circuitboard earrings, and pink-dyed hair. Sunstuff was odd for their group. An older man, about fifty-five, he remembered the days of MMORPGs and computer interfaces.

  You never had to put up with rats back when gameworlds were designed and made by real human beings, he was also saying.

  But they tended to ignore his retrophilia. Nothing about sitting in your house alone, playing on a screen, sounded that exciting. Sure, if you were stuck with it, maybe.


  Better to see your friends and join them up in your world outside, Overton thought.

  “The rats are getting more aggressive,” Sunstuff said. “I was in a World War Two sim today. A bunch of Hitlers got out and replicated. They were taking over chunks of worldspace.”

  Sunstuff’s companion lay under his chair. It was a wolfish hound with needle teeth and midnight black eyes. Overton fed it some good karma, and the hound smiled at him.

  “You shouldn’t waste karma on those things,” Easterly said.

  “They do good work for us,” Overton protested. Alcimus had changed his ratios and thinned down until he was large enough to perch on the chair behind Overton. He squatted happily there, observing the conversation.

  “It’s just a daemon. You shouldn’t get so attached,” Easterly snapped. She was in a bad mood for some reason. Maybe the fact that she’d not been getting much in the way of work.

  Alcimus had been Overton’s friend for twenty five years now. He was a confidant, playmate, and virtual pet. More than that, he was a friend and ally.

  Together they roamed the worlds, fighting rats, playing as NPCs, and enjoying all the worlds had to offer.

  “When you look at their eyes,” Easterly said, “do you really believe you see intelligence looking back? Or just that you’re being fooled by really good Turing evolution?”

  “Shut up, Easterly,” Sunstuff said. “No one gives anyone in the real grief for loving a real dog. It’s no different. In fact, some of the neural patterns were lifted from brainscans of loyal pets.”

  Easterly folded her arms, unconvinced. “They’re not real, we shouldn’t get so attached to them.”

  The lights in the restaurant sparked and fizzled, then went out.

  ***

  Overton wasn’t worried. The contacts on his eyeballs still worked. The inner earphones still played a faint background track from the Cockwork Empire’s ambient sounds.