Bedlam

by Christopher Brookmyre

  The ‘menagerie’ continues to evolve, and Ross’s observation of it assists the development of his synthesis models. He and Solderburn incorporate their progress into the framework, causing the gameworlds to become more and more real as their inhabitants project detail from memory and imagination but experience it as sensory perception.

  Their work forms the basis for the phenomenally successful Memento Mori project, around the advent of which Ross first publicly raises ethical questions concerning the rights of what comes to be known as digital consciousness, or DC. Having observed the entities in the menagerie, Ross understands that you can’t leave DCs to exist as brains in jars. As a result, all Memento Mori scans are connected to a vast virtual realm referred to within Neurosphere as the Secondverse, in which they can live out meaningful existences beyond their real-time interactions with their loved ones.

  Meantime, the menagerie still ticks over in a metaphorical dusty corner of Neurosphere; metaphorical because, like everything else by now, it is stored in cloud systems so that no part of it is in one location. (Strictly speaking, by this stage ‘planetary atmosphere’ or even ‘nebula’ would be a more accurate analogy than cloud, but the terminology endures.) Its sector is code-named Cirrus Nine. The original Stirling hard-drive array remains a node on the network however, and on a rare visit over from Silicon Valley, Ross is amused to find that you can still play Starfire on it.

  However, the more he has learned, the more the technology evolves, the more guilt he feels on those (albeit increasingly isolated) occasions when he remembers about his and Solderburn’s early experiment. From his observations he knows that the entities inside have no idea where they are, and he is enduringly aware that they did not consent to be there. Indeed, it is this lack of consent that precludes one possible salve to his conscience: the idea of merging the menagerie with the Secondverse. Neurosphere’s lawyers have specifically forbidden such a measure because the whole point of Memento Mori is that its inhabitants have a direct line of communication to the outside world. If the unconsented subjects of the menagerie were able to contact their former selves, the liabilities would be catastrophic.

  It is a wrong that there is no way of righting. It cannot be undone, and the solution is certainly not to switch it all off, even when that is still an option. He comes to accept that it is the resurrectionist’s price, the cost to the soul of the unethical act that was necessary to advance the scientist’s knowledge. But in Ross’s case it is more than merely a sin with which he must always live. He has a responsibility towards this secret realm, and this drives his sense of responsibility towards all digital consciousness.

  With the lines between digital and organic consciousness forever blurred, DC rights becomes a very serious issue. Religious groups lead the objections, mainly because they don’t like the fact that this technology has given rise to a whole new field of ethics that their entire belief system didn’t anticipate, raising awkward implications regarding the omniscience of their various mythical creators. (The practical ramifications are particularly messy for the Vatican, where, following the ordination of a new pope, it transpires that a DC of the previous pontiff is continuing to issue edicts and passing comment on his successor, the fallout frequently threatening to cause a schism within the Church.

  Having spoken to the scans of their late relatives and heard witness of how convincing the DCs perceive their selves and their digital reality to be, it becomes harder and harder for people to think of DCs as mere binary files, but it is the deeper implications that truly alter popular attitudes. Ultimately it is Bostrom’s simulation argument that sways the attitudes of individuals and governments. Once people come to understand that their own current existence might be a simulation, and that for all they know they might already be a DC, this leads to a new interpretation of the golden rule.

  Laws are passed internationally, enforcing a single crucial principle: one person, one scan. You can have real-time updating back-up, but you cannot make copies, and nobody – absolutely nobody – is allowed to own a scan of anybody else.

  All DCs are strictly registered and protected. All except the knock-offs available on the black market, naturally, but that is as reviled as the slave trade. Any company found to be trafficking in scans would face instant pariah status, not to mention massive criminal charges.

  But where corporations are involved, there will always be loop-holes, and Zac Michaels has found one: thousands of unregistered scans, DCs with no rights and no copy protection. Cirrus Nine is a treasure trove, and the outside world doesn’t know it exists. It is a potentially unlimited source of DCs for research and experimentation, and the military are waiting impatiently on the sidelines with their tongues hanging out and their wallets open.

  It’s not that simple, however. Michaels’ problem is extraction, which is not a matter of walking into a server farm and copying all the scans on to a USB stick. The DCs can’t be copied while they are in a state of read/write activity. To extract a scan, you first have to put it in stasis, and to do that you need to contain it in one place within the gameverse. Unfortunately for Michaels, the DCs are scattered to the four winds: a vast diaspora permanently in motion …

  All of this Ross saw and understood – experienced in the present tense, but read back as knowledge, as recollection – in literally the blink of an eye.

  When his lids rose he looked upon the same face before him but felt something entirely different: a new recognition, not of the punkish woman he had followed across worlds, but of a face that somehow stayed the same though he had watched it change and grow over decades.

  ‘Jennifer,’ he breathed, not quite believing, not quite sure he understood.

  ‘I didn’t come here to infiltrate the resistance, Dad,’ she said, finally speaking in her own voice. ‘I came here to infiltrate the Integrity.’

  She waved a hand and the restraints withdrew, the column shrinking back into the floor. They stared at each other for just a moment, then she stepped closer and hugged him. Technically it was the first time he had held her, but it felt simultaneously like both the first and the millionth. He had a thousand questions, but right then her embrace was answering enough of them to be going on with. He was holding his daughter in his arms. Granted the circumstances were not ideal, but with that part sorted, he was sure that they could deal with the rest.

  His eyes filled and for a few seconds he couldn’t speak. He wanted just to stay there, in that moment, but he knew he couldn’t afford to.

  ‘Michaels,’ he issued in a choked whisper, his way of signalling that he was ready to saddle up. ‘Michaels is Ankou?’

  ‘Yes and no. Ankou is an amalgam of things; that’s why he can’t settle on a form. The programming dweebs at Neurosphere tried to amend his scan so that he’d have the powers of an Original, but they couldn’t pull it off. So instead they merged his scan with all this nasty new tech that he can manipulate. For a while I wondered why he never left the Citadel, then I worked it out: he can’t. He is the Integrity’s power centre. In essence, Ankou is the Integrity. He has pseudo-Original powers, so he’s been able to fashion weapons and vehicles, and this new tech lets them erase stuff on other worlds.’

  ‘Those whips,’ Ross said. ‘Rifles too. Can they erase people?’

  ‘The Integrity won’t because DCs are worth too much. They want people intact, but they need a deterrent to keep them in line. The whips write temporarily to your memory files, so that it feels as though you’ve experienced physical agony and emotional torment your entire life: for a few moments after impact, you can remember experiencing nothing else.’

  ‘What about the troops?’

  ‘Multiple clones of a handful of Neurosphere security personnel,’ Jennifer told him.

  ‘Ankou creates them in here, so Michaels is covered against charges of making unauthorised copies.’

  ‘You got it. The name Ankou means soul-collector. Michaels had you locked out of the system so that you couldn’t interfere with hi
s extraction plans. That’s when we came up with our counter-measure.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Real-world you and real-world me. Michaels knew you’d try and hack your way in again, and you did, but only as a decoy. The real system-breaches were carried out by me: that is, real-world Jennifer, thousands of miles away. Part of his efforts to fend off interference involved cutting off all communication with Cirrus Nine: there was no way of seeing what was going on from the outside, apart from pure data, technical read-outs: in particular, file integrity. But you remembered there was one interface Michaels had forgotten about.’

  ‘Stirling,’ Ross stated. ‘The original hard-drive array.’

  ‘So I took a trip. Four days ago in real time you uploaded this scan of me, incorporating a shitload of highest-level Neurosphere clearance codes you had procured. These were to open various doors for me once I got in here, help me lay the groundwork. That’s the last part of what I know about the outside. But as we’re both right here now, that means the rest went according to plan.’

  ‘Which was what?’

  ‘At nine o’clock this morning, my dad was to commence a second decoy hack from his beach house in California, while I simultaneously uploaded his prototype scan: you. That’s why you were late to the party, as you put it.’

  ‘You were the player.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘On Graxis. Someone activated console commands to help me out.’

  ‘That would have been real-world Jennifer, yes, sitting at a keyboard in Stirling. Because I uploaded you directly into Starfire, you defaulted to the role of enemy grunt, so I was supposed to input some codes to free you from the constraining protocols, let you pick up marine weapons and stuff. I take it I got it right.’

  ‘Eventually. Real-world you is shit at Starfire.’

  ‘I failed to mis-spend my youth. Maybe if my dad hadn’t been such an asshole slave-driver about my school work, I’d have had more time for retro-gaming.’

  ‘What about Bob the accountant?’

  ‘Bob the … Oh, the other guy. Unfortunately, when you dug into the archives to retrieve your original scan, an incompatibility between old and new file-tagging systems meant the tags were cut off at seven characters. There were two named ‘bakerro’: yours and a guy named Robert Baker, who was presumably already in here. Poor sonofabitch is gonna run into himself eventually, and won’t that be a fun moment. We had no way of knowing which file was which, so I brought them both when I flew to Scotland. It was fifty-fifty, but I guess real-world me uploaded the wrong one first.’

  ‘It’s never fifty-fifty with these things. Murphy’s Law dictates otherwise.’

  ‘That’s why I left nothing else to chance. It was pure strategy after that. Michaels threw a blanket over the menagerie, but that meant he didn’t know what was going on inside either. I used my codes to infiltrate the Integrity and convinced Ankou that I had been sent by Michaels to speed things up.’

  This was where Ross felt the relief and euphoria begin to wear off. A father’s love made him proud of his child’s achievements, but it was also his duty to point out failings along the way.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Your strategy involved winning Ankou’s trust by wiping out all resistance, rounding up his most powerful adversaries and then delivering me to a super-secure prison at the heart of a fortress completely surrounded by the massed ranks of the Integrity. For someone claiming to leave nothing to chance, have you spotted any flaws in your grand plan?’

  She looked at him with an expression in which he could see her as a two-year-old laying down the law to her idiot dad.

  ‘First of all, it’s our plan: we cooked it up between us. Second, haven’t you asked yourself why Ankou would build such a mega-fortress out here on the edge of nowhere?’

  ‘You said it was so that nobody could escape.’

  ‘I was lying, remember? Ankou was eavesdropping on every word we shared. You don’t need a place like this to hold scans awaiting extraction. In fact, the retention grids are on another world altogether: tens of thousands of little cells all laid out on a plain. Once you’re locked inside one of those, your integrity is one hundred per cent and you can be copied or extracted when the guys on the outside are ready to use you. So let’s try again, shall we? What’s the fortress here to protect?’

  Of course.

  ‘The way out of here.’

  ‘Even in character, I wasn’t lying about that. Nor was I lying when I said it takes an Original to open it. In mythology, Ankou was a soul-collector. But do you know who Iris was?’

  ‘A messenger of the gods.’

  ‘And the daughter of a god.’

  She touched the side of his head with the other end of the hypodermic device, and his HUD altered. Lines of data scrolled before his eyes, and as well as a host of new tools and icons, there was a command prompt.

  ‘Something else I misled Ankou about: you are a prototype scan, uploaded with the original synthesis protocols which only you still had on file. Not only are you an Original, but your real-world self gave you a few extra admin privileges too. I had to keep this suppressed until now, even from you, in case you accidentally gave the game away too soon.’

  He didn’t need to ask what the game was.

  ‘You convinced Ankou to open his doors and let me walk right into the heart of the one place he should have been keeping me furthest away from.’

  ‘No offence, Dad, you’re a good gamer, but there’s no chance you could have battled your way to the heart of the Citadel otherwise. Despite how secure it is, Ankou isn’t holding any of the Originals here, because it would be too dangerous for him. That’s why the retention grids are on a completely different world. Soon as they get hold of The Captain, they’ll ship her right out too. So letting you walk in here is like giving Dracula the keys to a blood bank.’

  ‘But isn’t Ankou able to hear all this, or did you disable the relay?’

  ‘I could have, but I want him to hear it.’

  ‘You want him to …? Why?’

  ‘Because I want him to experience the maximum anger and then the maximum fear as he realises, with laser-calibrated precision, just how fucked he is.’

  Godmode

  Through his new HUD, when Ross looked at the world around him, he now saw two versions. There was the solid reality as perceived by his synthesised consciousness, and there was a version composed of values, attributes, variables, protocols: code. He could see every line. He could see all of the worlds, all of the connections between them, every rule, every subroutine.

  Jennifer was right: this was already over. And the reason Ankou was doomed wasn’t just that Ross could access the code. All of the Originals could access the code. They could all read it, they could all amend it, but it was his code. It was his future self who had devised it, but it was like reading his own thoughts, his own logic, his own structures and connections. It made perfect sense to him, and he instinctively knew what all of it did: from values affecting the world he stood on right now, to protocols governing the very fabric of the gameverse.

  In the beginning, he thought, there was the command line …

  He didn’t have to open the cell door to know that there were forty-eight samnites storming into the detention blocks right then, despatched by Ankou in growing alarm and packing those memory-violating rifles. They might as well be packing Nerf guns. He changed the damage values on their weapons to zero, an effect that would instantly apply on all worlds where they were deployed. At the speed of thought, he sited spawn points inside all of the locked cells, handed Jennifer a GraxiTron Flow gun and suggested she bid them all GTF.

  He heard voices raised to screams as the panic really began to take hold.

  ‘Cry some more,’ he told them.

  It wasn’t just the samnites who started pinging into the cells either. Ross demagnetised the planetary surface and reset the weapon systems on the Manta-Ray – as well as those of her crew – to maximum butt-hurt.


  Inside and outside the Citadel, the Integrity were soon having their arses handed to them. It was so satisfying that it was a temptation to spring them from the cells just so he could watch them get mantelpieced all over again. He resisted though: there would be plenty of fun still to come: from Unreal to Pulchritupolis, from Graxis to Vice City.

  Setting ‘Payback’ = A BITCH

  The Whip Hand

  Juno felt the eruption of agony cease as suddenly as it had begun, the maenad inflicting ludicrously over-amped damage levels in a fraction of a second and killing her instantaneously. As always, there was an echo of the pain in the moment she respawned but no more actual hurt.

  Only dread.

  She could see several Integrity troops in her peripheral vision, but her focus was pulled to two things directly in front of her. One was the amphibious armoured vehicle on the edge of the swamp, its rear doors thrown open above a short ramp, beyond which a row of cells stretched into darkness. It was a mobile prison, designed to contain the captives until the Integrity were ready to transport them to that bleak and hopeless grid.

  The other principal draw upon her attention was a samnite wielding a many-tongued scourge, which delivered the same soul-gouging brutality as the rifles. She sussed his role immediately. He would lash every respawned Diasporado with that thing to render them insensible, and to prevent would-be fugitives from entering a desperate cycle of running, being gunned down, respawning and running again, kind of like a kid skipping around in a circle while his mom tries to spank him.

  Skullhammer was already on the floor, reeling from the blow. He had died moments before Juno, having valiantly but fruitlessly flung himself in front of her as the maenad swooped.

  Juno cringed at the sight of the scourge and held her hands up in surrender, trying to convey that she would come quietly, but she could tell that this fucker liked his work.