But in the real, other people were swearing and walking around.
It was time to step out of the game and into the real to see what was going on. When Overton did so, the wooden tavern signs and other Clockwork paraphernalia faded to be replaced with chrome and glass and reality.
The restaurant was on the one hundredth floor of a scraper. He glanced at the New York skyline, bright in the sunshine.
“Overton. Help!” Alcimus called.
Overton turned around. The dragon no longer sat on the back of his chair. “Alcimus, where are you?”
“Corridor…” the dragon gasped. “O partner. Man of the real. Save me from the rat.”
Overton leapt up and ran. He forced the doors open.
Something dragged Alcimus down the corridor. A wounded shadow, vomiting malformed code snippets. It roared unicode at Overton, but he didn’t have Alcimus to translate for him.
“Let Alcimus go!” Overton shouted.
The shadow briefly formed into a familiar wyrm-shape. Red eyes glared at Overton. “I still exist,” it hissed at Overton. Then it dragged Alciumus through the wall and pulled itself up toward the ceiling.
“Alcimus!” Overton screamed as the dragon’s tail was sucked up through a light fixture.
***
“They’re getting smarter,” Easterly said. “We’ve been exhibiting heavy Darwinian pressures on them. Culling the stupid ones, leaving only the really smart pieces of code to run away and hide, reproduce.”
Overton threw himself at the doors again. His ribs hurt. And he hadn’t budged them in the slightest.
“It wanted revenge,” she continued. “Revenge against what the code inside tells it it should model as an attempted murder.”
Overton slumped against the doors. “I can’t get to him.”
“Look, we’re trapped in here in the real for a while. But police and firemen are on the way. They’ll bash through and get us out. The air conditioning is still on. Everything’s okay.”
With tears in his eyes Overton stood up. “The rat will kill Alcimus.”
“So get another,” Easterly snapped.
“There is no other Alcimus. He’s been with me since I was a child, helping me learn to read. Helping me with everything.”
“It’s just a nanny program you turned into a daemon and a weaponized bug hunter. Get over it.”
“No!” Overton shouted. “He’s as real as anything else. He just lives somewhere else.”
Why was she being so hard on him? This was a disaster.
He wanted to argue with her further, but Sunstuff put a hand on his shoulder. Sunstuff understood. His hound was based a scan he had made of an old and very faithful Doberman Pincer that he’d loved.
“There’s another way,” Sunstuff said. “A second route.”
***
Sunstuff’s hound, Baskerville, sniffed at the elevator doors. With some effort he pushed his nose into the control panel. After a painfully long moment, the doors opened to reveal the chasm. The elevator car was stuck halfway down. “Baskerville can get it up a floor for you, to chase the rat.”
“If it turns back on now you’ll get cut in half trying to crawl in,” Easterly said.
But it was for Alcimus. Who’d read him stories in that first crude sounding voice when he’d been sick as a child. The one who helped him master code. His teacher, his companion, his… friend. The one who accompanied him on his first game quest.
“Give me a boost,” Overton said.
He scrambled madly up into the car, wincing and expecting it to shift and cut him in half.
But nothing happened.
“Okay,” Overton said through the crack he’d just crawled through. “Next floor.”
“Wait,” said Sunstuff. “I’m coming with you.”
He and the hound crawled in after Overton.
The elevator jerked into motion. It fought its way up to the next floor, groaning against some sort of attack going on deep in its programming.
The rat.
They jerked to a stop at the next floor, levered the doors open, and Overton ran out. “Alcimus!”
In the corner of an office building the shadow squatted over the dragon, smothering it with darkness. The iridescent Alcimus struggled to free himself.
Baskerville shot through, tearing through a wall then coming back through and wrapping his fangs around the middle of the blob of darkness.
Overton had a few pinlights in his pocket, and he hit the rat with them. The distraction of getting tagged, the pricks of having its code regions defined, annoyed the rat enough to get it to stand and bellow at Overton. And that was all it took for Alcimus to break free.
The two creatures savaged the rat, ripping it apart, throwing pieces of damaged code to splatter against the walls.
But it wasn’t done yet. It had another trick up its sleeve. Tendrils of ragged arms reached out for Overton and Sunstuff. The inner-earphones screamed, a pulse of energy so loud Overton felt his brains vibrate.
Light flashed, a sequence of hallucinatory explosions so intense he felt himself lose control and fall to the floor.
He was having a seizure.
The moment dragged out for a minor eternity as he spasmed on the floor. Every shake and shudder.
Sunstuff staggered over and grabbed him. “Baskerville! Alcimus, we need to get out of here!” Sunstuff shouted.
“Elevator,” Overton groaned.
The two of them lurched in each other’s arms back to the car.
“NO!” Alcimus shouted, and whipped past them into the darkness ahead.
The rat swept at them, the keening in Overton’s ears drilled through his temple. There was blood on his lips.
We have to jump, he thought. Jump and skip out.
And he did.
Only there was no elevator in there to meet him. Sunstuff and he pitched into an empty abyss. The rat had tricked them, Overton realized as his stomach lifted and they plunged through the dark.
And then he hit the roof of an elevator and stopped thinking at all for a while.
***
Overton woke in a hospital room with bright lights and concerned nurses, very much still alive to his surprise. He couldn’t see anything but the real. His contacts were out. But someone had thoughtfully left a pair of glasses near his bed. Overton slipped them on.
Alcimus stirred from his post at the end of his bed. “Grateful,” the dragon purred. Overton reached out and flicked the dragon some karma, and leaned back in bed and wiped the corner of his eye.
“You two idiots,” Easterly said. She’d been sitting on a chair in the small room. Overton looked around the Cave of Healing. “You jumped into an elevator shaft. The rat had sent the elevator car down, but Baskerville managed to hack it back into operation and get it high enough back you didn’t fall too far.”
Overton smiled wanly. “See, they’re every bit as incredible as we say they are.”
Alcimus stirred and settled into the crook of one his knees. Overton couldn’t feel anything. But seeing Alcimus there, that meant everything was okay.
“You wouldn’t have had to jump if you didn’t rush up there in the first place.” Easterly stood up and pulled on a leather jacket. “Here’s the thing: you guys are all over the news. The rat managed to hack into realspace building controls. People are scared. Hostile artificial game intelligence fragments are about to become mankind’s worst enemy. Thanks to you douche-tards.”
“Where are you going?” Overton asked.
“Out,” Easterly said. “With all this publicity, my rates just skyhighed. And its time to cash in on knowing you by granting a couple interviews. Whole city’s buzzing.”
Overton watched her leave.
Sunstuff lay in a bed next to him. Encased in magical mud oozing with potions and unguents.
“She doesn’t like me, but she’s friendly,” Overton said. “I don’t understand her.”
Sunstuff smiled. “She didn’t tell you about her father?”
/>
“No.”
“He left Easterly’s mother for a sex doll.”
Overton made a face. “So?” That sort of thing happened all the time. “Easterly doesn’t like men because her dad did that?”
Sunstuff sighed. “Come on, Overton. She doesn’t like us because we’d rather spend time with Baskerville or Alcimus. Because you’d jump into an elevator tunnel for them. Because we just walked out on Easterly and left her alone on that floor.”
Oh.
And she was right, Overton thought. But it didn’t matter, did it? How long had people been spending most of their day with things instead of other people? Generations now.
He liked the MMARGs, liked getting out to see people.
But Alcimus was the closest thing he had to a soulmate. A near constant companion.
And what could compare to that lifelong bond?
He wasn’t antisocial, he thought. He just preferred that other world.
Overton took off the glasses and looked at the hospital. A patient slowly pushed passed his room with a walker. Nurses efficiently bustled by. Doctor drones whipped to and fro, and surgery machines ambled to their next appointment.
It was all too real.
He slid his glasses back on and looked around the Healing Cave. Then curled up with Alcimus for a nap.
When he woke up, it would be time to hunt rats again. And this time he was going to need to invest in some heavier armament. It was time to upgrade Alcimus, he thought. The overcompany that ran these sorts of games would be looking to hire lots of rat hunters, and maybe even raising the incentives after this unfortunate incident.
Time to take on more work as an NPC to raise the cash to level them both up, Overton thought happily as he drifted off to sleep, his dragon nestled on his hospital bed with him.
Resistance
I read somewhere that search engines online keep track of you and slowly begin to adjust the search results to be ones that they think you might like. This creates a bit of a cognitive bubble that you begin to live inside.
While I admire the ability of our machines to become additional external brains, I wonder a great deal about how much they’ll miss. And living inside of a cognitive bubble of your own creation is a possibly dangerous thing.
When John Joseph Adams asked for a short story for an anthology he was creating called Seeds of Change, timed to come out just before a major US election, I decided I really wanted to toy around with the idea of machine-created cognitive bubbles and the importance of voting. Yourself.
Four days after the coup Stanuel was ordered to fake an airlock pass. The next day he waited inside a cramped equipment locker large enough to hold two people while an armed rover the size and shape of a helmet wafted around the room, twisting and counter-rotating pieces of itself as it scanned the room briefly. Stanuel held his breath and willed himself not to move or make a sound. He just floated in place, thankful for the lack of gravity that might have betrayed him had he needed to depend on locked, nervous muscles.
The rover gave up and returned to the corridor, the airlock door closing behind it. Stanuel slipped back out. The rover had missed him because he'd been fully suited up for vacuum. No heat signature.
Behind the rover's lenses had been the eyes of Pan. And since the coup, anyone knew better than to get noticed by Pan. Even the airlock pass cut it too close. He would disappear when Pan's distributed networks noticed what he'd done.
By then, Pan would not be a problem.
Stanuel checked his suit over again, then cycled the airlock out. The outer door split in two and pulled apart.
But where was the man Stanuel was supposed to bring in?
He realized there was a inky blackness in the space just outside the ring of the lock. A blotch that grew larger, and then tumbled in. The suit flickered, and turned a dull grey to match the general interior color of the airlock.
The person stood up, and Stanuel repressurized the airlock.
They waited as Stanuel snapped seals and took his own helmet off. He hung the suit up in the locker he'd just hidden in. "We have to hurry, we only have about ten minutes before the next rover patrol."
Behind him, Stanuel heard crinkling and crunching. When he turned around the spacesuit had disappeared. He now faced a tall man with dark skin and long dreadlocks past his shoulders, and eyes as grey as the bench behind him. The spacesuit had turned into a long, black trench-coat. "Rovers?" The man asked.
Stanuel held his hand up and glyphed a three-d picture in the air above his palm. The man looked at the rover spin and twist and shoot. “Originally they were station maintenance bots. Semi-autonomous remote operated vehicles. Now they're armed.”
“I see.” The man pulled a large backpack off his shoulders and unzipped it.
“So... what now?” Stanuel asked.
The grey eyes flicked up from the pack. “You don't know?”
“I'm part of a cell. But we run distributed tasks, only checking it with people who assign them. It keeps us insulated. I was only told to open this airlock and let you in. You would know what next. Is the attack tonight? Should I get armed? Are you helping the attack?”
The man opened the pack all the way to reveal a small arsenal of guns, grenades, explosives, and oddly: knives. Very large knives. He looked up at Stanuel. “I am the attack. I've been asked to shut Pan down.”
“But you're not a programmer...”
“I can do all things through explosives, who destroy for me.” The man began moving the contents of the pack inside the pockets and straps of the trenchcoat, clipped more to his belt and thigh, as well as to holsters under each arm, and then added pieces to his ankles.
He was now a walking arsenal.
But only half the pack had been emptied. The mysterious mercenary tossed that at Stanuel. “Besides, you're going to help.”
Stanuel coughed. “Me?”
“According to the resistance message, you are a maintenance manager, recently promoted. You still know all the sewer lines, access ducts, and holes required to get me to the tower. How long do you guess we have before it notices your unauthorized use of an airlock?”
“An hour,” Stanuel said. The last time he'd accidentally gone somewhere Pan didn't like, rovers had been in his office within an hour.
“And can we get to the tower within an hour, Stanuel, without being noticed?”
Stanuel nodded.
The large, well-armed man pointed at the airlock door into the corridor. “Well, let's not dally.”
“Can I ask you something?” Stanuel asked.
“Yes.”
“Your name? You know mine. I don't know yours.”
“Pepper,” said the mercenary. “Now do we get to leave?”
***
A single tiny sound ended the secrecy of their venture: the buzz of wings. Pepper's head snapped in the direction of the sound, locks spinning out from his head.
He slapped his palm against the side of the wall, crushing a butterfly-like machine perfectly flat.
“A bug,” Stanuel said.
Pepper launched down the corridor, bouncing off the walls until he hit the bulkhead at the far end. He glanced around the corner. “Clear.”
“Pan knows you're in Haven know.” Stanuel felt fear bloom, an instant explosion of paralysis that left him hanging in the air. “It will mobilize.”
“Then get me into the tower, quick. Let's go, Stanuel, we're not engaged in something that rewards the slow.”
But Stanuel remained in place. “They chose me because I had no family,” he said. “I had less to lose. I would help them against Pan. But...”
Pepper folded his arms. “It's already seen you. You're already dead.”
That sunk in. Stanuel had handled emergencies. Breaches, where vacuum flooded in, sucking the air out. He'd survived explosions, dumb mistakes, and even being speared by a piece of rebar. All by keeping cool and doing what needed done.
He hadn't expected, when told that he'd need to le
t in an assassin, that'd he get this involved. But what did he expect? That he could be part of the resistance and not ever risk his life? He'd risked it the moment one of his co-workers had started whispering him to him, talking about overthrowing Pan, and he'd only stood there and listened.
Stanuel took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. I'm sorry.”
The space station Haven was a classic wheel, rotating slowly to provide some degree of gravity for its inhabitants so that they did not have to lose bone mass and muscle, the price of living in no gravity.
At Haven's center lay the hub. Here lay an atrium, the extraordinary no-gravity gardens and play areas for Haven's citizens. Auditoriums and pools and labs and tourist areas and fields, the heart of the community. Dripping down from the hub, docking ports, airlocks, antennae, and spare mass from the original asteroid Haven had taken its metals. This was where they floated now.
But on the other side of the hub hung a long and spindly structure that had once housed the central command for the station. A bridge, of sorts, with a view of all of Haven, sat at the very tip of the tower. The bridge was duplicated just below in the form of an observation deck and restaurant for visitors and proud citizens and school trips.
All things the tower existed for in that more innocent time before.
Now Pan sat in the bridge, looking out at all of them, both through the large portal-like windows up there, and through the network of rovers and insect cams scattered throughout Haven.
One of which Pepper had just flattened.
Stanuel knew they no longer had an hour now.
***
Pepper squatted in front of the hatch. “It's good I'm not claustrophobic.”
“This runs all the way to the restaurant at the tower. It's the fastest way there.”
“If we don't choke on fumes and grease first.” Pepper scraped grease off the inside.
Stanuel handed him a mask with filters from the tiny utility closet underneath the pipe. He also found a set of headlamps. “Get in, I'll follow, we need to hurry.”
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