Solar Singularity

by Peter J. Wacks

  “Wait, you what?”

  Nova rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t matter. I’m just talking out loud, trying to figure out what’s going down.”

  “All right, then. Why would being disconnected drive everyone crazy, but not us?”

  They kept threading through the streets, which stayed empty. Both of them did their best to avoid looking too closely at the wreckage left in the wake of the militia.

  “I’ve been thinking. What if it’s because the spam filters are down? The way we had to unfocus earlier so we weren’t blinded by the layers of HR was pretty intense.”

  “Hold.” The two ducked behind a car as an armed squad crossed an intersection two blocks behind them. “Looks like there’s more than one set of militia in the area. Okay.”

  The two got moving again, and Chicken Fingers replied to Nova’s earlier thought. “Yeah, okay. The HR was intense. But it’s died down. My filters are working fine.”

  “Are they?” She glanced back. “Mine are offline, but I’m still not getting any overlays and I have no idea why. We’ve passed by several murals that had malicious code in them. Our optics are a straight shot to our TAPs. Our brains should be infected by viruses right now, yet we’re fine. I have no clue why though.”

  “Oh. That’s screwed up. You’re right. My filters aren’t online, but I’m getting nothing too.”

  “Right,” Nova continued, “so what makes us different? If I’m right about why everyone is going haywire …

  Chicken Fingers didn’t have an answer, and the two continued on in silence.

  The hushed night echoed oddly in Chicken Finger’s ears. After suffering through screaming mobs, exploding vehicles, and military bombardment, the eerie noiselessness of the streets didn’t come as a relief. Instead, it lurked through the area, creeping along as if waiting to jump out and ambush them. “Quiet, ain’t it?” He felt that his words were having a problem crawling their way to his ears.

  Nova frowned and glanced up at the empty and blown-out windows of the surrounding towers. “Maybe that was the worst of it. Maybe whatever’s going on is dying down already.”

  Chicken Fingers shook his head. He knew she was being overly hopeful. “Doubt it. Probably just the calm before the storm.”

  She eyed him. “That your instinct talking or you get another future flash?”

  “I dunno. Maybe a bit of both.”

  “Figure out where it’s coming from yet?”

  “Nope …” He shrugged then chewed his lip, thinking, as he played rear guard.

  Just as quiet, and lost in her own thoughts as well, Nova led them forward.

  The two kept sneaking through the dead streets of Chicago, hoping against hope that they would find her little sister alive.

  Chapter Nine

  Anansi

  Anansi tried to work out his options as he strode through the arcology hallway. He did his best to act nonchalant, but every time he turned a corner and spotted an employee, even at a distance, he cringed. His hands reflexively kept trying to snatch his spray-paint cans out of his belt, and he had to forcibly stop them. Hyper Tagging malware into the arcology’s lobby might mess with whoever was messing with him, but CHIMERA would rain hell down upon him at that point. It was more of a last resort thing, even if his instincts screamed otherwise.

  He got mixed reactions from the other people in the vast arcology lobby. A few he passed twitched and muttered as he walked by, acting as if they didn’t even see him. Others marched by, expressions grim, eyes focused straight ahead. Some people were clustered in groups and whispered to one another … fearful of what, he had no clue. They’d glance at him with panicked faces, only appearing relieved once they noted his janitorial uniform. It was really sending mixed signals to Anansi and messing with his calm. Were they after him or not? People were definitely acting like something was going down, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with him.

  The thought was relieving, but also a bit of a blow to his ego. What was more important than smuggling black market DNA out of CHIMERA and selling it on the streets? He stopped the train of thought. He was almost thirty now; it was time to not be an egotistical narcissist, maybe. Teasing himself with those thoughts helped him get a little bit of his calm back.

  He was equally relieved when no one obstructed his progress or asked where he’d left his sani-drone. A couple of security guards and their drone equivalents patrolled by, but none gave him anything more than a suspicious glare and a bio-scan before moving on. Bonus for being on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder. No one figured he’d have any answers or pose any threat. So then … what the hell was the threat? Had the TAP hack in the bathroom hit the entire arcology? Even the mega-collectives of hackers weren’t capable of something like that.

  The situational evidence didn’t seem to match what was going on around him.

  He kept his manual TAP filters on high and managed to shift through the confusing mélange of HR imagery that continued to beam nonstop from the arcology walls. Even being an HR tricker, he’d never given much thought to how pervasive the Deep and its illusory projections had become. They were part of existence basically from birth and manifested in every aspect of life.

  TAPs could be hacked and subverted. They could be burnt out and infected. As of today, he even believed they could be hacked en masse. That’s why people had firewalls and filters and antivirus apps, not to mention security sprites and backup brain engrams. Nobody had ever considered what might happen if those parameters ever dissolved. His brain worked at the puzzle, shifting the pieces around and analyzing what he was witnessing and experiencing from different angles.

  Guess we’re going to find out now.

  Anansi watched as three managers stumbled out of a conference room. One crawled on all fours, yipping like a dog, while the other two started acting like boxers in a cage match, ducking, weaving, and punching even though they stood five feet from each other. If it wasn’t so terrifying to see the chaos in person, he would be laughing hysterically and, most likely, be livestreaming it to the Deep. But up close and personal, and nearly taken out by the TAP hack himself, it was … scary. These were normal people with normal lives, driven crazy by some invisible hand.

  Another security guard appeared, an augmented woman with a black visor strip where her eyes used to be. She watched the men for a few moments and then tapped the side of her throat, no doubt subvocalizing a situation appraisal to her supervisors. Interesting. She was acting normal. Either she hadn’t been hit, or she had upgraded filters, just like Anansi did.

  Anansi waved at her, trying to appear harmless as he slipped past. Why the hell are you calling attention to yourself, you idiot? He kept the thoughts internal. Please don’t notice. Please don’t notice. Please don’t notice, he prayed.

  She barely turned her face towards him, no doubt doing another bio-scan, before she turned and headed for the managers, hand on her electric prod. He picked up his pace, not wanting to hear what happened next.

  Why were certain people being affected by the GENIE breakdown, while others were going around like business as usual? What distinguished one user group from the other? When he put malware or a virus into a spray-painted mural, there was no advanced selective targeting. Either it got past a user’s filters, or it didn’t. So why were some people here seemingly unaffected?

  Not all of them could be HR wizzes like Anansi, accidentally primed to defend himself in such a situation. That meant another factor worked in their favor, one he couldn’t detect yet. Some invisible hand protected them. Maybe there was a subnet in the arcology walls protecting them?

  At last, he turned a corner and the hall broadened into the exterior corporate lobby he had seen from the glass elevator annex back by the bathroom, all marble and glass with the CHIMERA logo—a tri-helix spiral—emblazoned on the floor and chiseled into the walls. Numerous halls, elevators, and internal shuttle stations led off to other portions of the building, but he only had eyes for the main entrance a
nd the security checkpoint on either side of the sealed, hardened-glass doors.

  He balked for a second. The normal guards had been replaced by figures in bulky power armor, railguns strapped to their backs and machine guns in gauntleted fists. Enhanced bioscanners formed the door thresholds, ensuring everyone’s DNA matched the genetic record on profile. Something way bigger than him was definitely going down.

  The whole time Anansi watched, not a single person entered or left the building. What if they won’t let anyone leave? What the hell am I supposed to do if they stop me? Janitors weren’t allowed to carry anything resembling a weapon while on shift, unless you counted a manual mop for use on biohazardous spills. And his mop-fu wasn’t up to powered armor-clad guards. Not that he would risk his job anyway by making a scene, at least not if they weren’t on to him. If only he knew what was going down.

  Nothing to do but try and hope. Pulse jittering, Anansi headed for the entrance and fought to keep his breathing steady. The scanners would pick up on unusual biorhythms as well, searching for signs of undue stress, fear, anger, or other negative emotions that might require closer inspection. Though, with how weird everyone was acting, he was pretty sure there was extra tolerance right now for stress and other unusual activities.

  One looming guard blocked his way and held out a hand. A voice clicked on through the helmet’s speaker. “Employee identification, please, sir.”

  Anansi hesitated. The scanners should’ve picked up his TAP ID automatically. He recited his staff number and name, as well as title and department, as he pointed to the ident card pinned to his uniform. The guard tapped it all into a control panel in his forearm and scanned the barcode below Anansi’s name on his ID.

  “Something wrong with the system?” Anansi dared to ask, trying to emanate a nonchalant vibe. Sure, he didn’t want to be noticed, but he really wanted to know what the hell was going on.

  “Nothing unanticipated, sir. Don’t worry, we have everything under control here in the arcology.” The guard scanned the readout. “Says here you’re scheduled for another two hours on shift. Any reason you’re heading out early, sir? Early shift departure isn’t recommended.”

  Anansi rubbed his shoulder and looked back at the lobby. He decided for complete honesty, at least for a given value of honesty. “Uhh … the weirdness … the situation. I’ll make up the two hours before the end of the week, wouldn’t want to risk losing my job.”

  The guard’s glossy faceplate fixed on him for a long moment. At last, the guard nodded. “Of course, sir.” Anansi could tell the guard wasn’t happy with this. People left early all the time though. It was part of working. “It is recommended that all employees remain on arcology grounds for the duration of the event, or at least until it’s safe to go outside. We’re still going through containment procedures. It’s not pretty out there.”

  Containment? A disease or cyber-virus then? What was happening outside the arcology walls? Anansi needed to know, and to hell with the assumed danger. He had been dead wrong about them targeting him … so whatever was happening was big enough that it had pierced corporate headquarters and taken him down as just splash damage. So … he could stick around and let the corp take care of things, but he knew he’d go crazy being cooped up, even in such a massive complex, filled with unstable people, uncertain of what was going on in the world. He needed to be out there, free to choose his destiny. He didn’t for a second believe the arcology offered any sort of guaranteed safety, and he’d rather die on his own terms, rather than as a wage slave.

  “Is staying here an order?” he asked.

  “Certainly not, sir. All employees are able to leave if they so wish. We just have orders that once you’re outside, you aren’t allowed back in until the situation is cleared. So long as you agree to this, we will provide you and any others an armed escort to the perimeter.”

  Others? Escort? “I understand, but I’d rather go home.”

  “Very well. Follow me.”

  They processed him through the doors after he signed off on a couple digital forms absolving CHIMERA of any responsibility for his safety. Drones and droids patrolled the main courtyard, and emergency lighting swathed the walkways and small parks in red and yellow. A fifty-foot wall surrounded the arcology, mounted with auto-turrets, laser cannons, and guard towers. Anansi had always scoffed at the arcology’s defense measures, but today he didn’t find them so ridiculous or overblown. The nearest gate to the facility remained shut, manned by another security squad. Once out in the court, they took him off to the side and deposited him with a pair of armed guards. Four other employees, a manager and three administrators, waited there as well, none meeting Anansi’s eyes as he arrived and instead talking quietly amongst themselves.

  Checking his internal clock, Anansi noted that dawn still sat a couple hours off. At least something TAP-related still worked properly. On a normal schedule, he’d have finished sanitizing the bathroom and headed home right as the sun rose. Then he’d catch a few hours of sleep before rising to meet up with the band and fine-tune his HR layering, synchronize with their set list, or any of a dozen things they were always behind on. They’d be at their garage studio all day, practicing for the next gig.

  “Stay here, we will escort you out momentarily.”

  Anansi nodded, and as the guard walked away, Anansi sidled up to the other four people here. Though he wasn’t a fan of corpie culture, people were people and they might be more in the know than he was. “Hey, all. Uh. I’m Anansi.”

  “A janitor? Please.” One of the administrators, a young man with the thinnest beard Anansi had ever seen, turned away in disgust.

  Another of the administrators, a younger woman, maybe early twenties, thrust a pudgy hand forward and broke into an earnest smile. “I go by Shard. The rude guy next to me is my friend Tom. He doesn’t believe in street names.”

  The manager amongst the group, obvious for her slick suit—even though she had the jacket off and the sleeves rolled up—was an older Middle Eastern woman whose hair was going silver.

  “Tash. Nice to meet you.” Surprising Anansi, she also held out her hand. Her grip was firm, quick, and businesslike.

  The fourth and final person waiting to go out was a surprisingly subtle gene-spliced cat hybrid. Anansi hadn’t spotted it as he walked up. Faint traces of fur covered his face around the whiskers, as well as blended into his hairline, and it looked natural, rather than just sewn on the way the cosmetic surgery hybrids looked to Anansi.

  “Hello. I’m Tailcatcher.”

  He fought down his discomfort to shake hands with the cat as well. “Nice to meet you guys. Any clue what’s going on out there?”

  “We were just talking about that,” Tash replied, “and sadly we are unsure. I know there is widespread rioting covering almost a third of the city. GENIE is unresponsive, so both ground and air traffics are risky. The more upscale neighborhoods are safe, but each have guards keeping the insanity out. Unfortunately, with the location of this arcology and the surrounding neighborhoods …”

  “Yeah, it’s gonna be dangerous to get home,” Shard interjected.

  Anansi nodded. “So, um, when I was cleaning before my TAP went haywire …”

  “It happened to all of us.” Tailcatcher stroked his whiskers. “We are all from the ad coding department. We are confident we can control our filtering to make it home.”

  Anansi nodded. That made sense. Ad coders had notoriously sophisticated filters embedded in their TAPs and their optics.

  After fifteen minutes of mind-numbing quiet conversation while the guards ignored them, one of the guards returned to the small group.

  “CHIMERA regrets to inform you that this is your final opportunity to remain within the safety of the compound walls.” He sounded like he was reading off a prompter. “CHIMERA would prefer the ability to protect you, as it is contractually bound to do so long as you are within these walls, and as you are all valuable resources to CHIMERA, but you have the right to waiv
e this arrangement. Video feeds are currently down, but we have some stills taken from the walls. CHIMERA would like you to see these pictures before you choose to depart. This is in no way an attempt to psychologically harm you or intimidate you. This is only to make sure you give a fully-informed waiving of rights when you release CHIMERA from any legal responsibilities.”

  The guard held up a tablet that scrolled images of carnage across its surface. Cars were burnt out shells, people were fighting, partying, screwing, and all sorts of other things in the streets. It looked like the gods had gone crazy and inflicted the punishments of ancient Greece in the middle of Chicago’s streets. It was … biblical.

  And it still wasn’t enough to convince Anansi.

  “Once the arcology gates open, you risk being infected with whatever has affected these people. CHIMERA will not allow you to endanger the security of the building. Last chance.”

  Everyone shuffled in place, but no one volunteered to go back inside. Anansi shrugged. They were apparently as committed to getting the hell out of here as he was. “Thanks but no thanks. I’m going home.”

  Once a couple seconds had lapsed and no one else replied, the guard gestured them forward with his rifle muzzle. “Follow our orders exactly. Any non-compliance at this point will be met with lethal force.”

  Anansi blinked at the shifting of gears. From protected, to meat that needed to be disposed of, that fast? He couldn’t wait to be out, past those barricade walls.

  The group reached the gate after a short march. Alarms blared and gunmen ran into position along the top of the wall. Anansi boggled. He knew most corporations did their utmost to protect their investments, both in property and personnel, but they often tried to keep their defensive installations hidden as much as possible to avoid spooking employees and to keep other corps guessing when it came to defensive positions. If this emergency response was what he could see, how many other layers of invisible security must there be? Just how badass was an arcology?