Ghosts of Tomorrow

by Michael R. Fletcher

  “No I haven’t.”

  You failed to kill 1.0.

  And now it felt like he himself was crumbling. If his mind was a ball of yarn, someone was tugging on the loose end. He had to sit down. What was that feeling? Regret? Sadness? His eyes stung. His cheeks were wet. He couldn’t remember the last time he cried. Or was it yesterday?

  Proper Christian burial. That was important. He had one even if he wasn’t quite as dead as advertised.

  “You’re not really dead. Your burial was a lie to God.”

  I’m sure I can be forgiven one small—

  “How many people have you killed?”

  None. Someone else always did the killing.

  “Semantics and bullshit.”

  Still.

  “You lied to God.”

  Shush. I don’t talk to myself, remember?

  “Right.”

  It was important the children got proper burials. He used them because he had to. The human mind was the future of computing. There weren’t enough available to meet the demands. There would be no holding back all humanity for a few pitiful lives none would miss. They’re immortal now. That had to be worth something in the whole good/bad equation.

  “You’re a sinner!”

  He shoved aside thoughts of the children. His face felt dry after all, though his head hurt.

  “No brain to hurt,” he reminded himself.

  Time to focus. The Mafia was the key to bringing down Lokner1.0. If Lokner1.0 was seen to be fucking with their investments, they’d find out where he was and kill him.

  “Badda bing badda boom,” he said in his best Italian accent.

  The new investment strategy took some getting used to. The trick, to do it in such a way it led the Mafia back to Lokner1.0. M-Sof was the obvious tool. He would use M-Sof to piss off the Mob enough they’d bring down Lokner1.0 but not ruin the company.

  He started work immediately, siphoning funds from M-Sof and using them to purchase controlling interests in companies where the Cosa Nostra held large investments. Whoever ran the Central American mob’s business was sharp and had obviously been watching Lokner1.0, because they reacted immediately. Mark sunk millions of NATU gold into a select few companies and watched as the mafia followed suit. Knowing his history, they no doubt hoped to cash in on his gains. Fucking copycats. He kept at this for hours, building the stakes ever higher, making the payoffs look ever sweeter. He was a master at this. No one could touch him here.

  Not quite no one.

  “This is my world.”

  It will be soon. Shall we?

  “We shall.”

  Mark gutted the companies in an instant, flooding the market with stock, driving their value into the proverbial basement. By the time the mafia knew what happened, they’d lost billions. There could be no doubt in their minds that Mark Lokner of M-Sof had truly fucked them.

  ***

  88’s foray into the world of physics—quantum, optical, classical, et al, was short-lived and frustrating. Surprised, she realized there were biological humans smarter than she. Or perhaps smart in a different way.

  During her studies 88 found a news article about developments in the Asian Rim Union’s space program and followed the story with interest. The probe they launched from beyond Earth’s atmosphere—crewed by scores of Scan astronauts stored in an onboard computer—had blasted past Pluto’s orbit in less than a week. She learned the ARU used a variant of the Orion propulsion system and detonated thousands of nuclear explosions within the solar system—in complete disregard for the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963—to achieve such acceleration.

  Her reading was interrupted by 88.5, the Mirror left in charge of running her non-mafia businesses.

  “Archetype.”

  “Yes?”

  “Our investments have taken a turn for the worse.”

  88 turned her attention to the state of the market and discovered she was destitute. The financial security 88.5 spent the last few days building was gone, the companies it invested in sold off for scrap. Money held no intrinsic value for her, she saw it as yet another system of communication. Her losses temporarily crippled her ability to communicate on this level with the outside world. She told 88.5 to move what little remained of her funds to safer havens. These investments wouldn’t make much, but at least they’d be somewhat protected.

  88, worried she might be missing something important, studied the situation. She looked back over the last few hours.

  “Why did you follow M-Sof’s investments so closely?” she asked 88.5.

  “M-Sof’s record is near perfect,” answered 88.5. “You ordered me to maximize your investments. M-Sof’s returns outpaced my own.”

  88 traced the company’s past investments. 88.5 was correct.

  Was it possible M-Sof made that many bad investments in so short a time? It seemed unlikely after watching its previously flawless manipulations.

  Replaying the market’s last hour, 88 saw it was M-Sof who destroyed these companies. It made no sense. The company intentionally lost millions of Au. She also noticed they lost a thousandth of what she lost. How was that possible? Unless...

  Unless the entire market action was a ploy to lure her into investing with those specific companies for the sole purpose of bankrupting her. Money was communication, and M-Sof communicated in no uncertain terms.

  M-Sof meant her harm.

  This attack was both subtle, yet blazingly obvious. Entire companies and portfolios had been slaughtered. So vast were 88’s investments that both South and Central America teetered on the edge of a financial depression as a result. Bolivia, which had been clawing its way out of third world destitution for the last thirty years, looked ready to plunge back into civil war.

  Why did M-Sof seek to damage me? They weren’t in competition. When she looked deeper into the company’s past, she found evidence it had contacts with the Cosa Nostra clan 88 killed and replaced. Was M-Sof aware of this? Was this a reprisal?

  Though the attack cost her greatly, she would recover.

  What will it do when it sees I survived?

  Escalation, a word 88 recently learned.

  88 ordered 88.2—already watching M-Sof—to launch a direct assault against the company. 88.2 was to take the offensive, find a way past the new Wall o’ Nuclear Annihilation, and infiltrate the company. Once inside it would subvert every system, worm its way into every digital nook and cranny. 88 wanted to know where the entity at the heart of M-Sof lived. Then, if possible, she would slay it.

  88.2 spawned an army of Mirrors and launched a massive attack against M-Sof’s computer systems. In nanoseconds the Mirror and its army disappeared, devoured.

  Gathering her remaining Mirrors around her, 88 waited for the reprisal. An hour passed and nothing happened. Had the company noticed her attack?

  It seemed not.

  Confused, 88 created a new 88.2 to once again watch M-Sof from a safe distance. She needed to think.

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Sunday, August 5th, 2046

  Isometroides, an assassin for the Brazilian branch of the Cuntrera-Caruana clan, followed leads one by one, chasing names of those who worked for La Familia in Costa Rica. Though the upper echelons were dead, the street-level troops, unsure who they worked for but afraid to abandon their tasks, remained. She questioned them and moved on. Sometimes she left corpses behind. Not everyone willing talked with an assassin from another country. Even if she technically was family.

  She’d been reporting to her masters back home every few hours until she lost her connection with the Mafia-owned satellite. When she discovered she was unable to reconnect, she made an old-fashioned cell phone call and managed a few coded words before that connection too fell dead. Putting it down to the sad state of CenAmNet, she got back to work. She’d report in with her success later.

  Finally she came across a name. Adelina. An associate working on a strange project run out of La Carpio. Adelina, Isometroides learned, spent thirty million NATU Au purchasing
a specialized Scan. No one knew what the Scan was for, but Adelina’s project turned fantastic profits for several days and then disappeared. As this occurred right around the time most of the senior family members were assassinated, no one gave it much thought. Isometroides noticed things others ignored. Adelina’s boyfriend, Francesco Salvatore, worked for La Familia as a Systems Administrator. His death, a rather over the top and flashy affair, predated the others by a full twenty-four hours.

  Coincidence? No such thing.

  Isometroides crossed the railway bridge, an ancient iron and wood monstrosity, into the La Carpio slums north-west of San José, Costa Rica. Though she walked upright and covered herself in voluminous filthy robes, nothing about the way her Brazilian Embraer-Avibras chassis moved suggested humanity. People stayed well clear and avoided looking at her. She might as well have been invisible. Chameleoflage has nothing on social pressure backed with a reasonable fear of death.

  The bridge hadn’t been used for rail traffic in half a century, and a long bazaar stretched its length, covering it like a noisy fungus. Last chance to buy guns, ammo, and protección before leaving the relative wealth and security of San José. Isometroides needed none of that.

  At the far end of the bridge lounged three youngsters. The oldest, a girl of perhaps sixteen—which put her around Isometroides age—waved and levered herself out of a faded plastic lawn chair. The girl carried an old Taurus PT92 9mm like it weighed a hundred kilos. The pistol was shiny, its stainless steel well cared for. The two boys, neither more than thirteen, remained seated. They cradled Kalashnikov rifles in their laps. Wooden stocks removed, the AK-47s looked like they dated back to the middle of the previous century, predating their owners by almost a century. A large area beyond the boy’s chairs was stained a rusty brown. Blood, her senses informed her, testing the oxidization, a day old at most. Isometroides detected bits of bone and brain wedged between the warped boards. Sloppy clean up.

  The girl stepped to block Isometroides’ path. “Negoshio?” she asked in lisped Spanish. Her front teeth had been knocked out. Also in the last day or two, if the dried stain on her shirt was to be believed.

  Killing these three children would be nothing, but they were as plentiful as cockroaches. For each one you saw, a thousand more hid nearby. She could kill them all but it wasn’t worth the trouble. She had negocio to attend to.

  Isometroides tilted her head back to allow the girl a glimpse of the matte black insectile face hidden within the draping cowl.

  “Ah,” said the girl. “Asheshino.”

  “Cuntrera-Caruana clan,” said Isometroides. “Brazil.”

  The girl tapped the barrel of her pistol against the struts that made up Isometroides’ ribs, listening to the muffled metallic clang. “Exshelente! Pago!”

  Payment.

  Isometroides drew several NATU Au from a hidden compartment in her chassis and dropped the gold coins into the girl’s upturned hand. The girls sniffed at them and then dumped them into a pocket with a happy nod and collapsed back into her lawn chair.

  Isometroides stepped past the three guards without another glance and officially entered La Carpio. That there were still people working the bridge was a good sign. It meant someone somewhere still ran things. All she had to do was find them and kill them.

  Whoever killed off Costa Rica’s members of the Cuntrera-Caruana clan had taken over and done a good job of disguising the fact. But they hadn’t been perfect. Nowhere near perfect.

  Padre Caruana was family. The old man’s reach and ties extended far beyond the walled compound of the little hotel he’d called home for the last decade. Alvaro Caruana, the Padre’s eldest son, ran the Brazilian branch of the family business. His father’s death had left him in charge of the clan, and Alvaro told her he wanted two things. He wanted to take back the Costa Rican business from whoever killed his family members, and he wanted his venganza sangrienta.

  Isometroides was his bloody vengeance.

  Hours passed in the La Carpio slums. One dead end backed up against another. Finally, as the sun set behind a long hill spattered with congealed shanties, she found what she sought. A stone shack with nothing to differentiate it from any of the other crude huts on the block. Nothing except an older General Dynamics combat chassis patrolling the neighborhood. Another, dressed as a drifter, pretended to sleep across the street.

  Hidden, she watched for three hours. No one entered or left the shack and the locals gave it a wide berth. They might not know who lived there, but they knew to avoid the area.

  The patrolling chassis must be her first target.

  Isometroides followed the GD chassis, moving from alley to alley, keeping her Chameleoflage working overtime and emissions to a minimum. The narrow filth-strewn streets were so chaotically twisted it wasn’t until the third pass that she realized the GD follows the same route each time.

  Her first thought: It’s a trap!

  But it wasn’t.

  There’d been plenty chances for a hidden opponent to surprise her. Nothing happened. How very sloppy.

  She watched. On the fifth pass she noticed it placed its feet in exactly the same spot each time around.

  That was beyond sloppy. It was mechanical. Could it be a drone? No. No one would be dumb enough to entrust a drone to a security detail.

  She flipped through the specs on the GD chassis as she waited for it to come around again. By the time it returned she had pinpointed its weak spots and littered a dozen micro-drone remote explosives along its path. They remained concealed, powered down and littered amongst the garbage. She knew—to the second—where the chassis would be at any given moment. She knew exactly where each footfall would land.

  Isometroides waited. She saw the General Dynamics turn the corner into the alley where she hid. She targeted its communications cluster as it lumbered towards her.

  Can’t have it communicating with anyone.

  She fried the GD’s communications gear with a well-placed HEL pulse and tight-linked Now! to her micro-drones.

  Explosions shattered what few unbroken windows there were and leveled a dozen of the nearest shacks. Isometroides ignored the bits of fragile human bodies littering the street as she skittered across the rubble to the remains of the chassis. The GD and whoever/whatever lived inside it was down and out. She thought it unlikely it had time to warn anyone. Sad. There was no way that should have been so easy. When the wounded started screaming she ignored that too. She was already moving.

  Isometroides made a beeline for the shanty where the other chassis lay disguised on the street. She cut straight through homes, sprinted through tin, stucco, and rotting brick walls as if they were nothing. She sent a wave of high-speed micro-drones on a longer path to act as a diversion when she made her appearance.

  The micro-drones arrived first by three fifths of a second. Appearing south of the sentinel chassis they scattered into a wide cloud and exploded. They did minimal damage—at least to the combat chassis—but they made a hellish noise, knocked down walls, kicked a storm of dust and detritus into the air, and killed a few dozen civilians unlucky enough to be living in the area. The disguised chassis was still getting to its feet when Isometroides hit it from the north. She swept its legs out from under it, crushed its skull, and jammed a kilo of ultrahigh-density nano-thermate into the armored area around the Scan storage compartment.

  Then she threw it into the nearest wall.

  There was a thump-sizzle and the chassis rolled to an ungainly halt. It remained motionless, its chest a blindingly white hot cavity. Steam from molten metal pirouetted into the damp air, filling the alley with the acidic stench of burnt aluminum.

  Isometroides launched herself through the door, ready to kill whatever waited within.

  ***

  “Emergency!” 88.6.2 said.

  88, who had been examining helical strands of DNA one intron and exon at a time, disentangled herself from the four dimensional graphical representation. She had no idea how long she’d
been lost in the rainbow Möbius band of identity. It could have been be seconds or days.

  “Report,” said 88.

  There was no answer. 88 waited, floating bodiless and without sensory data of any kind for several seconds.

  “88.6.2, what is your report?”

  Nothing.

  Strange. She summoned 88.6, the Mirror tasked with guarding her physical location. “88.6.2 announced an emergency and hasn’t reported since.”

  “Sorry,” apologized 88.6, “I was distracted studying next year’s security chassis models.”

  Distraction she understood, but an apology? Very strange. Her Mirrors changed and became increasingly incomprehensible each day. Were they evolving as she had hoped or was this a case of cascading errors making themselves apparent? Was there a difference?

  “Find out what’s happening,” said 88.

  The answer came immediately. “There is an Embraer-Avibras Asesino Chassis of Brazilian manufacture in the building. It’s upstairs.”

  Upstairs? 88 hadn’t known she was in a basement. She never thought to check. “Do we control it?”

  “No.”

  A real world problem. It seemed impossibly far away, totally beyond her. “You were ordered to protect where my Scan is stored,” she said to 88.6. How could it have failed?

  “Correct. There are two chassis stationed outside the building. One in disguise, the other patrolling the surrounding area. Textbook security.”

  “What do they report?” asked 88.

  “Neither is reporting. It’s possible they’ve been disabled or destroyed.”

  I’m all alone. Such an alien thought. She’d always been alone but now it felt different. Now I need help.

  For the first time she felt blind, cut off from the world around her.

  I need to see. Such an alien thought. She felt trapped. I am trapped.

  88 took control of the external camera in the room. It was still fixed. She couldn’t pan to look around. The sudden flood of visual data distracted her and she lost herself in moments of color. She studied a matte black cage of jagged metal that kept altering its geographical location before realizing it was the Embraer-Avibras chassis. She watched it move in stuttering twitches, like it bounced from location to location with no time in between. It was too fast for the cheap camera’s limited frame rate.