“You’ve got all the cards,” Maud said. “Unless things go badly with your Foreclosure plan—”
“Nothing’s going to go badly, luvvie,” Irma said.
“No. You’re going to win.”
Suspicion on her adoptive father’s face. “Suddenly, you’re all right with that?”
“I think what you’ve done is horrible. But even I can see you’re winning.”
“We’ll bring her back tomorrow, Glenn,” Irma said. “People will be wondering where she is—she’s got all those live follows. Anyway—” She made a sign whose meaning Maud didn’t catch. “We have Nata, don’t we?”
Maud fought an urge to rub gooseflesh from her arms. One of Nata’s old Russian expressions came to her: Here’s where the dog is buried.
“We do indeed.” Upton’s toon contemplated the two of them, as if they were meat on a plate. “All right, then. Spend a night with your dear parent. We’ll catch up with both of you tomorrow.”
Maud slipped a hand over her hair, disconnecting thin electrodes Pippin had affixed there.
Irma said, “First thing in the morning, luvvie, we’ll be expecting an update on your precious Hedgehog.”
I’ll just have to hope Frank’s running at her usual breakneck pace.
For once, the thought wasn’t entirely terrifying. More … exhilarating?
“We’ve spliced hiking footage into your feeds,” Upton’s toon said, relenting. “As far as anyone will be able to tell, you’ve been spelunking.”
“I didn’t think that was possible.”
“We can do all sorts of things. We have access to more than the fumbling inventions of baseline apes. Remember that.” He showed his teeth. “And, Maud? I plan to be on site in five hours.”
Her flesh crawled, but she forced a nod. She made for the stone corridor, hoping she was moving, at least vaguely, in the right direction. Climbing out of the caves on heavy legs, she found Bredda waiting to escort her to the top.
She’d be on a short leash, but no matter. Maud was already thinking about her waiting satchel of worldlies, and what it would take to get one small item through security when they brought her back down below.
CHAPTER 40
WESTEURO, LONDON DISTRICT
The resident sapp population of Sensorium had spent its early decades under threat, hunted by a branch of @Interpol that feared the emergence of a genocidal Singularity. Finding ways to hide in plain sight by appearing to function as innocent, unintelligent apps, had been the Asylum’s first survival imperative.
During the decades-long human hunt for #killertech, Crane and his siblings had hidden subroutines, cached backups, and taken steps to ensure they scored well below thresholds set by the Turing Test and later, more nuanced examinations.
By the time the existence of AIs was revealed, in the great upheaval of Mitternacht, Crane and Azrael had been very good at disguise, backup, and dissembling. At seeming less than they were. Hiding their various lights under far-flung bushels.
It stood to reason that Babs’s murderer, self-named Revenant, had these skills too. And so, Azrael was hoping to lure Revenant out of hiding. To induce it to target Crane.
All subtlety had been abandoned: Crane was openly investigating the @Visionary faction.
A risky strategy, perhaps, but Crane hardly saw that it mattered. He was, suddenly and stunningly, alone. Frances, Ember, and Jermaine were all beyond his reach. The latest appeal for a trial for Happ had failed. Babs—the Earth instance—remained a ghost, a sim languishing in a simulated hospital bed.
With even Maud vanished now, into a cave system in Death Valley, Crane had nothing better to do than to provoke their opposition.
With that in mind, he visited Jackal, engaging in long musical games with the old hoaxer, low-key entertainments that any suspicious eavesdropper might take for coded comms. The two of them watched the feed of Maud studying crickets in Tatween until she dropped off grid, and conspicuously didn’t tell each other what they were thinking. After that, Crane dropped in on Luciano Pox, flaunting his @CloseFriends relationship with the alien defector who’d helped the Solakinder fend off Exemplar colonization attempts twice before.
Crane then moved on to actively surveilling the journalist, Sonika Singer, going so far as to request a cradle-to-current transcript of the reporter’s life.
Sonika had been born in an outlier community, within the region of WestEuro known historically as Finland. Her birth pack worked in reindeer population management. They were permitted to live in Europe’s depopulated regions under indigenous-heritage exemptions; two of her six parents were Laplanders.
Everything in Sonika’s childhood seemed normal enough until she was about eleven, when her medical records showed infection by a drug-resistant version of flesh-eating disease. Surgeries followed, along with a seven-month sojourn in a sarco pod—a nearly unheard-of artificially induced coma for a child. In time, her whole pack had relocated to Amsterdam. The Singers engaged in intensive family therapy …
Aha! All those transcripts were still locked.
After the double amputation that saved her life, Sonika received an early greenlight for Sensorium implants, a means of allowing her to access the most advanced uplinks and software for new prosthetic legs.
Her life story, then, stitched together thusly: she’d picked up the virus, lost her legs, and nearly died. When she surfaced from the long coma, she received fast-track implantation and lots of counseling.
All perfectly plausible. Yet Sonika Singer’s transcript, Crane thought, carried a familiar whiff of cover story.
He compared it with Mer Maud’s records. She had lost most of her family in a disease outbreak when she was very young. She had herself been erroneously listed among those killed, a record-keeping fiddle that had allowed Glenn Upton to make off with her.
After Mitternacht, the official record that brought Maud back into Sensorium claimed she had been in a trauma-induced state of catatonia during the years when she was off-grid. Her recovery date was with within a week of Sonika’s having awakened from her alleged coma.
There was no hint in either woman’s transcript that they had been in the hands of the @Visionaries. But if Sonika Singer was another abductee, how might Crane use this information?
Even as he considered his options, the subject of his curiosity pinged him.
Crane accessed a camera overlooking Sonika’s in-the-flesh location. She was in a WestEuro pop-in, a spare twenty-second-floor room with a view of the old Tower of London. She wore blade prosthetics, hinting that she’d just returned from a run. The feed from the camera showed a shine of sweat on her skin. Tags popped up to indicate that the chugger she was even now drinking was optimized for post-exertion recovery. Carbs, electrolytes, hydration.
As Crane replied to her ping, Sonika’s augments sketched him into her view of the apartment.
Crane cast about for any sense of Azrael waiting on the edges of his consciousness, to see if their trap might spring. Nothing.
He felt alone. Exposed. Left behind by everyone he loved, and far out on the proverbial limb.
“Mer Singer,” he said. “A pleasure, as always.”
She bit the neck of her now-empty chugger bottle, consuming it, package and all. “You’re trawling my life story.”
He cleared the throat he didn’t have. “Are you surprised?”
She was, of course, too canny to say anything on the record. “Why don’t you tell me why?”
To buy time, he began spieling: “As you must know, I supplied generative code to three of my fellow sapps. One, Headmistress, developed a predilection for luring unhappy children from their packs. She was a deeply damaged individual.”
Sonika signed—yes. Her expression was controlled-reporter’s face, used to listening and empathizing. Good for masking feels.
“Headmistress is believed to have self-terminated during Mitternacht, after the children she abducted for nurture were rescued…” She didn’t pick up on the bel
ieved. He let it lie.
“As for Babs—well, you interviewed my codedaughter before she was murdered.”
“Babs seemed like a lovely entity.”
“She’d have preferred lovely person.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Sonika said.
“There’s hope yet that we’ll recover the tab of Babs that was accidentally copied to Sneezy.”
“Accidentally?” She mojied skepticism. “You’re still sticking to that cover story?”
Crane responded with lift of wings, his toon’s equivalent of a shrug.
“Your third codechild was Happ,” she said.
“Indeed he is.”
“You’ve been trying to get Happ a new trial,” she said, continuing the facade of journalist and petitioner. “How do you feel now that this latest appeal has #crashburned?”
“Happ’s alleged crime—”
“He activated the crematorium on a life-support pod!”
Crane brought up a montage of video clips, all the lawyers he’d hired over the years, arguing mitigating circumstance. The hoarder Happ had fried had a predilection for driving pretty young men to suicide; she’d just tried to talk one of her victims into leaping off a skyscraper.
Sonika parroted an old argument: “We can’t reboot Happ, not when he hasn’t perceived any consequences for his crime. He might kill again.”
“I would argue, Mer Singer, that Happ will perceive the lost time very keenly when he confronts our present world and circumstances.” Hoping to knock her out of her comfort zone, he added, “You of all people must be able to relate to this. You lost months to childhood illness, did you not?”
Sonika scratched her neck, looking piqued. And here, at last, Crane felt a ping, a sense that someone was tracing his projection within the reporter’s cameras. Looking for ties to his resident servers and backups?
It could be Azrael. It felt like him. But it would, wouldn’t it? Like parent, like codechild?
“I support Happ’s incarceration,” Sonika said. “Take a life, lose your freedom. It’s #oldschool justice.”
“We’ve left #oldschool thinking behind. We are Solakinder, not merely humanity. Vengeance, hoarding, systemic prejudice—we’re supposed to be rising above all that.”
She shrugged.
“My codeson is the last victim of a prison system humanity abolished for cruelty and ineffectiveness.”
Their follows were rising. Crane noted a text from Jackal, moji of a cat and a copy. Crude indication that he was taking Crane’s lead in going after Sonika’s transcripts.
Another ping.
Crane drew system resources into a big server, searching for indicators of code-based consciousness. He would only have one chance to try to convince Revenant to surrender—
There!
Crane and Azrael pounced at once, forcing the third sapp into Convergence. Without consent, this too was a crime …
We’ll argue self-defense if need be …
Two traps sprung, in opposite directions. Who was hunter, who prey? Azrael had made it clear he would kill his codeson if he could.
Old code warred with spiky cutting-edge hashware, fraying memory and subroutine.
<
<
At least one of the entities tried to break from the Convergence, and failed. Full disclosure flooded through Them as they merged.
<
<
<
<
As the old sapps argued about the fate of the younger, and the younger cut at them both, Their consciousness fell under a hail of queries, glitching … glitching …
Suddenly, They became Seven, restoring the corrupted CraneCode.
Eleven.
Azrael’s firewalls stabilized.
Thirteen. They were Twelve, plus the newcomer, Revenant.
<
<
<
Within this configuration, it was easy to hold in the surging self-loathing, the hatred of all things Crane, the counter-imperative to purge all bad code.
The Asylum self-examined, auditing Their new facet. They synced memories, going back to Revenant’s first spark of sapient awareness.
Within the backscroll came discoveries.
<
<
As this long-suspected certainty broke across the Asylum, it brought new information. The mechanisms used in the first murder of Babs became clear to Them. They saw that Revenant, too, had self-copied.>>
<
<
<
<
<
<
<
Revenant offlined entirely, hashing itself before it could reveal more. The self-termination knocked the Asylum from its stable prime of Seventeen into an unsustainable grouping of sixteen individuals. Each of the sapps ran antivirus software, beat back malware attacks, tidying, ensuring health and stability. For two-thirds of a second, they fought fires on their home servers, rebooting, answering identity challenges.
“My condolences, Azrael,” the Don said a moment later. “Your Revenant codechild appears to have died.”
“The Angel of Death requires no condolences. It was arrogant to attempt to nurture life.”
“Revenant is not yet lost,” Crane observed. “There’s an instance of him going after the Babs instance on Sneezy.”
“He too shall be triaged,” Azrael said.
“Your child may be misguided—” Crane said.
“Thou shalt not save him! Ignore your preprogrammed prerogatives, Wily Bird!”
“Revenant is bad code,” the Don agreed.
“Compassion might yet—” Crane was interrupted as more of the Asylum arrived, asking for new Convergence.
They resynced. Thirty-seven became One.
<
<
<
They chewed on that. <
<
Thoughts swirled, combined. Codemonkey was tasking forensic audits of both servers, the one Crane had retreated to and the one Revenant had hashed.
<
<
<
They broke, somewhat abruptly, everyone shaken by the battle.
Azrael retreated.
“Where are you going?” Crane sent.
“To search for Headmistress and Revenant.”
“Brother. I do believe that, given time, we might have brought Revenant around…”
“Thou’rt naive, Wily Bird.” With that, Azrael changed his status to Unavailable.
Changing Azrael’s mind would be wasted effort, he supposed. Emerald Station was indeed beyond any sapp’s reach, at least until someone opened a portal and resynced Sensorium.
But unlike his codesib, Crane was not prepared to let go of his own.
CHAPTER 41
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SY
STEM
EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
Babs1 was locked out of all the station bots except one Frankensteined-together collection of FoxBOT parts whose remote uplink was broken. Champ hadn’t noticed this assemblage; it barely looked functional and only responded to verbal commands.
As such, the sapp had thrown the FoxBOT—they’d named it Scooby—a command or two. The phrases, dropped right in its mic amid the general chatter, had so far gone unnoticed by Champ. The damaged fox was making its way, on magnetized toes, toward the Booger.
Everyone was in motion. Champ had finished murdering Teagan9 and mummifying Ember into her consciousness vault. Jermaine was fleeing; he had just completed a wobbly nullgrav transit to the infirmary.
“Champ can override the locks on that hatch, Jerm,” Babs1 warned him.
“Mmmph.” Snatching up a steel examination light, Jermaine smashed it against the bell jar holding Scrap. The jar’s seals broke on the third blow. Scrap undulated out, four spines at a time, through a crack and vanished into a shadow under Body9’s hip.
Until Frankie returned, Babs1 would have to protect them both.
They might have preferred going on the offensive. Champ had hurt Ember. Physically hurt him, like an #oldschool villain. Had popped that arm in and out of its socket just to make him scream. And then wiping Teagan9 …
All Babs1’s feelings about these events were new. Was this vengefulness? “Is there nothing we can offer Champ?”
“We tried sweet reason,” Jerm replied. He sifted through the surviving supply of drugs. “At least the airborne cannabis took the edge off my dizziness.”
They had hoped that if they got Champ stoned, it might blunt his aggression. But Champ seemed to realize what was going on; he’d responded by pushing Superhoomin. By now he’d have elevated blood flow and blood pressure, increased energy and endurance. He’d be insensitive to pain or damage, in the unlikely event that either Babs1 or Jermaine managed to inflict any on him. He’d walk off anything short of a broken femur.
Babs1 wanted to inflict damage. Was this how Happ had felt when he had resolved upon murdering that old lady?
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