The Myth of the Maker

by Bruce R Cordell

  In borrowed blue jeans, a gray T-shirt, and Converse sneakers, I exited the athletic center. Hopefully they didn’t belong to the helpful guy from the shower. The shoes pinched and the pants were too loose, but it was lucky they fit as well as they did. My plan, such as it was, didn’t immediately fizzle for lack of a belt.

  Running past the biology building onto Colorado Street, I headed toward the engineering building, which housed the VR lab. To be safe, I’d tried to print back at a distance from the VR lab so Bradley wouldn’t see a duplicate me appear out of nowhere and freak out. Was that what I was – a duplicate? I felt like me. Not like a copy…

  Probably better to worry about my philosophy of existence later, if there was a later, I told myself. Finally bursting into the engineering building, chest heaving and mind spinning, I raced for the VR lab.

  A man in a coffee-stained white polo stood outside the lab entrance, a mug in one hand and a red metal toolbox dangling from the other. Michael Bradley.

  Bradley squinted at me. I rubbed one temple, wondering how to explain myself. Bradley had been monitoring us when we went into the VR simulation. Which, according to the wall clock, was less than thirty minutes ago. It seemed much longer…

  “Carter?” Bradley said. “What’re you doing out here?”

  “Hey,” I replied. “Um, call of nature.”

  “Mmm hmm,” he grunted, nodding slightly. “You had too much coffee.” He sipped from his own mug.

  I nodded as if agreeing. “What about you?” I asked. “Why aren’t you in the lab?”

  I’d printed back at a location outside the VR chamber because I hadn’t wanted anyone to witness my arrival. If I’d known Bradley wasn’t monitoring us, I could’ve saved myself a lot of time.

  “Server sent up a couple of faults,” Bradley said. “I had to replace some fuses, if you can believe it.” He rattled his toolbox. “Electrical fluctuations, I guess. But the extra power supplies smoothed everything out.”

  “The test environment couldn’t handle all variables,” I said, remembering the shuddering expanse that opened beyond our virtual starting grid, strange beyond all reckoning. We thought we’d reached into some sort of perfect mathematical abstraction promising as many cycles as we’d ever need for truly lifelike VR. Instead, we’d pinged a network so primeval that it predated the solar system. A network crawling with hungry things eager to reach the orbits and atoms of our natural universe.

  Bradley snorted. “Variables? Shouldn’t make any difference. Probably the idiots over in aerospace are using some unapproved CAD extension.”

  I shrugged as if unconcerned. “Sure.” I wiped sweat from my upper lip. “You better finish with those fuses. I’ll hook myself back in.” Please, I thought, turn around and head back to the server room. Don’t make me–

  “Naw. I’m done.”

  Shit. “Oh, good,” I said, my voice faint. Shit, shit! How was I going to deal with Bradley? How, really, was I going to deal with everyone? I hadn’t given the next part of my plan much thought. It was too horrible, going far beyond what I’d already done. Yet there I was.

  I opened the door and gestured for Bradley to precede me. He walked through and set the toolbox on the shelf inside the entrance. I followed him in and, without thinking about what I might use it for, quietly lifted the toolbox. It was cold and heavy in my hands. Bradley didn’t notice.

  The Beatles lilted from the room speakers, singing about a girl who came to stay. No one plugged into the VR could hear it, thanks to sound-canceling headphones.

  The five lounge chairs – each sprouting a garden of wires, LED status lights, oversized gloves, and blocky goggles – were exactly as I’d left them. One seat held Jason. I let my gaze slide off him. The other four seats held Sanders, Mel, Alice, and… me.

  Bradley hummed along to the song as he checked his monitors. Then he froze.

  “Carter, what the fuck?” He was staring at my original, still snugged into the rig.

  I swung, bringing the toolbox crashing down on Bradley’s head. He crumpled without a word.

  “Shit,” I whispered, then swallowed. I tried not to think about what I had to do next. About whether I’d just heard the sound of crunching bone.

  Stepping past Bradley’s lolling form, I approached Jason. He looked relaxed, as if asleep.

  Jason and I had been inseparable for years. The memory of the hundreds of times we’d made midnight runs for fast food after late coding sessions overwhelmed me. More times than not, I was short on cash. Jason always picked up my tab.

  Maybe I should reconsider. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe–

  Stop it, I told myself. You have to be sure. You can fall apart later. So I emptied the toolbox on the floor at Jason’s feet. He didn’t so much as quiver at the metallic racket. I rooted through the pile and finally selected a long screwdriver and a mallet.

  I had to sever the connection between the flesh in front of me and the things that lived in the dark energy network that had absorbed Jason’s soul. Things had gone way too pear-shaped to simply remove his goggles and unplug him from the rig. Quantum entanglement meant that contamination had already occurred. I’d seen it happen.

  Goggles hid his eyes, and I was glad.

  The screwdriver stung my hand each time I brought the mallet down on the butt, driving the fucking thing into Jason’s head. An unplanned scream ripped my throat raw. The speakers lamented about trying to leave a girl. What was Lennon trying to tell me?

  Damn it, focus! You’re only doing what’s logical, I told myself. Jason’s body was already compromised, and his mind – perhaps even his soul, if such a thing existed – was elsewhere. He’d made the transition and was still, in some sense, alive down in the substrate. Unless what I’d done to ensure that I was the one standing in the lab with the mallet and screwdriver, not Jason, had sealed everyone’s fate. Everyone’s but mine.

  Bending over, I threw up on the carpet.

  You don’t have time for this, I told myself. Stop it.

  I stumbled to the next rig, concentrating on anything other than what I was doing.

  Were my friends still safe on the other side, or was I really murdering them? My plan required the former to be true, for the sake of my sanity.

  Everyone got the same brutal attention. Sanders, Alice, even Mel. I told myself they were all still alive on the starting grid. I wasn’t actually killing them – the planetovores would do that.

  Part of me was sure I was a coward and a liar, and I retched twice more before I got to the fifth and final rig, but only dry heaves. Nothing was left to come up.

  One more time. Don’t think about it, that he’s got the exact same L-shaped scar as you from a boating accident fifteen years ago, that–

  The original Carter Morrison twitched in his chair then fumbled off his goggles. I met my own gaze. Something was wrong with his eyes: fractals bloomed there in the green of old phosphor computer monitors. I screamed.

  He howled wordlessly along with me.

  My original struggled in his – its – traps, but remained snared in the buckles.

  I whacked it with my mallet, over and over. What was in my original body wasn’t me. It was something from the primeval matrix, something that had sniffed fresh data and was hungry for more. Here on Earth, it had discovered a whole new world of information encoded in molecules and atoms, optical fibers and nerve impulses. The things that lived in the dark energy network were predators of a whole new class: planetovores.

  I stopped hitting it with my mallet when its strangled wail ceased and the green in its eyes guttered out.

  Someone was still screaming. When I covered my mouth, the sound stopped. “Carter,” I whispered to myself, “Now’s no time to lose it.”

  I nodded. “Right,” I replied. “You’re a smart man, Carter.” A couple of giggles escaped me before I clenched my teeth together so hard my molars clicked.

  A soulful voice over the speakers encouraged me not to carry the world upon my shoulders. T
hat it’s a fool who–

  When I smashed the mallet into the CD player, blissful silence followed.

  Things remained to be done, even though blood was stiffening my clothes and making my fingers tacky. Lurching to the computer interface, I narrowly escaped stepping in my own vomit.

  My hands left red smears on the computer keys as I checked the backup server in the basement that hosted all our work.

  Calling up a command line, I scheduled a complete data wipe at the blinking cursor prompt. The wipe included all the remote backups describing our work. Just as important, I triggered a failsafe in Sanders’ experimental chip. In half an hour, all the qbits composing the chip’s heart would fall out of superposition, rendering the thing into so much useless silicon.

  No one else would be able to recreate our experiment. That was important. Assuming my plan worked. Shutting down all the servers would be like pulling up anchor, I hoped. Once the servers were offline, nothing else in that strange network we breached could use the same hack I’d used to print myself back to Earth. Maybe.

  Actually–

  What if there was another way to pass between Earth and the dark energy network, one that didn’t require a quantum chip like the one we’d used? The unexpected intuition tickled my brain, hinting at a way different than how I’d returned. A way to translate instead of extruding a duplicate physical instance, a way to make the shift without worrying about air for lungs, clothing, specific location–

  No. That wasn’t possible. Leaning like a drunk on the computer terminal, I barely held myself upright as new doubts tried to break my conviction. With no open connection, reaching between the real universe and a network hosted in dark energy wavelets would be extraordinarily difficult. Please, let that be true. Otherwise, I’d just killed the bodies of my friends for no reason.

  Oh, shit…

  Was the Earth still fucked?

  The planetovores knew about Earth. They’d continue to swarm around the naked grid we’d stupidly created. The grid was like an open wound gushing blood into shark-infested water. The wound needed to be sealed off, like slapping a cap onto an undersea oil gusher.

  Was there something else I could do?

  Maybe. I sucked in a long breath, and had an idea. A brilliant, wonderful, half- baked, and undoubtedly insane way to further protect the world from the primordial network. I didn’t have something perfectly suited for what I imagined, but I did have a fat chunk of functioning code and twenty-five minutes before the servers were wiped and the chip fried.

  Why not give it a shot?

  Typing furiously at the main computer, I opened a link to Ardeyn, Land of the Curse. Although it never fully launched, a limited beta version of the failed game remained active across a handful of fan sites. The beta code was unwieldy, bloated, and more than a bit buggy. But maybe – maybe – it would impose rules to a sector of the strange substrate. A substrate completely unformatted before we’d created our starting grid and created a direct connection between Earth and the network. Ardeyn would smother and block that connection, if imposed on the network, or at least encrypt it.

  Please, let that be true.

  I began transferring the code from the game directly into the server hosting the superposition chip. There wasn’t time to disconnect the two thousand or so playtesters currently connected to Ardeyn. They probably wouldn’t notice anything as the code base around them replicated down in the stratum.

  “Stratum” had a sort of ring to it. Maybe that’s what I should call the network? No, too geological. The network was far more… strange.

  Only a minute remained on the wipe clock when the copy completed. It was either working, or it wasn’t. The only way I could know was go look.

  Which would be dangerously insane. But what about my friends’ entangled minds, still down there? My mind was safely extricated. If I went back in, I’d risk losing myself all over again, but maybe I could save their souls. What would that mean for me? Looking at the corpse that shared my face, limp and slick with blood, made the decision easier. Here, I was already dead.

  With shaking hands I stripped the VR equipment from Carter – from me – and loosened the straps holding the flaccid body upright. I shoved it out and took its place. The gloves and goggles were still warm.

  Static boiled against my eyes and ears. It scratched my skin and tasted like metal.

  I logged in. My consciousness was swept down the connection, plunging into unfolding fractal architectures. My eyes reflexively closed against the overwhelming complexity.

  Then I stepped through to another place and pulled the door shut behind me. When I opened my eyes again, everything was different.

  3: Investigation

  Katherine Manners

  Three years later

  The port scanner failed to turn up a single open connection. The email spoofing attack hadn’t fooled anyone. And the packet sniffer was a complete bust because there just wasn’t any data. Kate’s usual techniques, plus a few of Raul’s paranoid schemes, had been for nothing. BDR’s servers were locked down.

  So Kate resorted to social engineering. It was a cliché, but only because it worked. Success just required a bit of play-acting. Picking up the phone and pretending to be an angry supervisor threatening the job of a confused customer service rep had gotten her results before.

  Not this time.

  Banks Digital Realty wasn’t large enough that she could pull off impersonating a nameless authority in HR. And as far as she could tell, there wasn’t a remote connection available for off-site administration. Which made no fucking sense. What if the servers needed to be rebooted in the middle of the night? What if one of Seattle’s notorious “snow” days turned the roads into parking lots and no one could get in?

  Kate escalated. She donned a uniform, rented a cart, and decorated it with a red watering can and a handful of houseplants. She pushed the cart into BDR’s lobby minutes before closing. She flashed her lanyard (PLANT CARE SERVICE, it proclaimed in friendly green letters) to the security guy. A departing employee was kind enough to hold the elevator for her, which normally required a key card. Most people are instinctually helpful, even if it meant breaking security procedures. She smiled and thanked the nice man as the steel doors of the elevator closed.

  She exited on the third floor and started rounds, confident as if she’d visited a dozen times before. Anyone watching the video feed saw her watering the plants. The servers she was looking for were on this floor, somewhere. Moving from planter to planter through the dimmed office built up the layout in her mind. She found the server room after about five minutes.

  Even if the entrance hadn’t been labeled, the sound of the fans would’ve given it away. White noise filled the hallway and thrummed through doors as she approached. The cooling system ensured that the machines didn’t overheat. A computer serving web pages, rendering 3D images, and executing dozens of other applications generated heat like someone running a 5K in the Mojave Desert. Without someone to throw ice water every hundred feet, they’d go nowhere.

  Kate knew servers. A computer science degree had landed her a position at Microsoft. She’d pen-tested systems and looked for exploits that needed closing. But the glory days of the company’s stock options were past. She’d left after a few years and started her own online security consulting firm. On a lark, she’d also enrolled in an internet university’s private investigation course. She learned about courts and the shortcomings of the legal system, civil and criminal case investigation, and most importantly, how to break into places.

  Her actual business card, as opposed to the fake one on her lanyard, read:

  KATHERINE J MANNERS, PI

  SECURITY CONSULTING & PRIVATE INVESTIGATION

  DISCREET, PROFESSIONAL, EXPERIENCED

  FULL SERVICE, FREE CONSULTS

  Most of Kate’s caseload came from suspicious spouses. Talk about work that would turn even the most idealistic do-gooder into a cynic. But bills needed paying.


  When a case came her way, she could usually scan a database remotely from a coffee shop using its free wifi, correlate the results with whatever she was trying to discover for her client, and call it a day.

  But she enjoyed actual investigation, too, especially when she could dress for the part. Like the gown and high heels she’d worn to attend an ambassadorial ball. Of course, that time she’d been invited. Someone had to make sure the visiting ambassador from Kobe, Seattle’s sister city, could get a video connection back to Japan for the “hands across the ocean” celebration. And they’d served sushi.

  But tonight it was back to coveralls, “Comfort Fit” sneakers, and her plant watering cart. Her client, Michael Bradley, wanted her to locate evidence of malware infecting the BDR servers.

  According to Bradley, the BDR servers were rotten with malicious exploits. But because BDR didn’t want the bad PR, didn’t care, or didn’t have the resources to deal with the issue, they’d ignored Bradley’s warnings. As a client whose web pages had been hacked over and over because of the hosting company’s malfeasance, Bradley was already pissed off. He said he wanted more than just his money back for the six months he’d rented server space – he wanted BDR to admit it was culpable, or better yet, to get a judgment against the company.

  Kate had worked with too many nontechnical managers with the same mindset as BDR when it came to news they didn’t want to hear, and frankly, didn’t really understand. Sometimes, people had to be hit over the head with a blunt object before they’d admit the sky actually was falling.

  Tonight, Kate would find the evidence required to serve as that blunt object. Life was good.

  She opened the thrumming doors.

  Servers towered in the dim space beyond, at least four or five rows of them. The wail of the fans pummeled her but she decided not to stuff foam plugs in her ears. If the security guy left his desk in the lobby, she wanted a chance to hear him, even over the background whine.

  Kate parked her plant cart along the wall in the hallway, then entered the server room. The computer that administered all the others, the one she hadn’t been able to ping remotely, would be in here somewhere. She began walking the rows. Actually, unless the managers at BDR were total dicks, the administrator’s computer would be in a side room with walls and a door to block out fan noise.