by Daniel David
“I know, it's weird isn't it?” he smiled back at her and gave Ben a playful tap on the shoulder as he and Rachael arrived next to Leah.
“I think a lot of people are staying indoors. No one’s really sure what to make of it.”
“Does anyone know what's happened?”
“Actually, I thought you might know that.”
“No. Youssef's not back yet.” Leah paused slightly, feeling the words choke a little as she spoke them. “I can't get hold of him, so I have no idea.”
She scanned the small group, as if to offer this apology to all of them.
“A friend of mine walked all night around the Metropolis,” a young woman in a Farm utility suit spoke up. “It's the same wherever you go, every sector. No Vacs either. I'm meant to be at the Beta Farm, what am I supposed to do?”
“There's power on at the Servers apparently,” the vendor called over his small counter. “I know a lot of people have headed over that way to find out what's happening.”
Leah felt a huge wave of relief. If the Servers were ok then that meant Youssef was OK. She felt a small tear grow in the corner of her eye and clenched her teeth together to make it go away. Rachael was watching her, and put her hand gently in hers to pass a little comfort back.
“Maybe we should go there?” said Ben, looking first at her and then the man from their block, like they’d become a team all of a sudden.
“It's too far darling, it'd take us over a day to walk there and I don't think Rachael could manage it at all.” She rubbed her hand in Rachael’s as she said it.
“Is no one back yet?” she looked back at the vendor, “from the Server?”
“No, not as far as I know, but, you know, it's not been long,” he replied and rummaged around in the trays on his counter. “Hey kids, want some chocolate?”
Both Ben and Rachael looked at Leah and, once she’d nodded her approval, rushed up to the counter and said their thank-yous for two tiny bars.
“Thank you,” Leah smiled at the vendor. “Come on you two, let's take a walk around the block before we have to climb those stairs again.”
Day Five
Each day passed just like the first from then on. Youssef didn't come home, nobody had any news and the dusty streets remained empty and quiet.
Each morning they headed down the dark stairs from their apartment onto the boulevards and strolled from block to block in the summer air. From time to time, they would meet another wanderer, but no one ever had any news. No one had come back from the Server.
The vendor would set out his stall every day, to sell what little stock he had left and share information, but the man from their apartment had gone. Perhaps he had grown tired of waiting and decided to take a trip to the Server or one of the Hubs to find out for himself what was happening.
Their food situation had worsened, though. The contents of the freezer had defrosted, and although they had eaten what they could, they had thrown a lot away. The summer heat was also being unkind to the contents of the fridge and by day five there was precious little left apart from fading fruit and tinned soup.
Leah assumed that other people were finding themselves in the same situation, as the shop shutters that were pristine on the first morning were now bent and torn as people foraged for supplies. Even some of the Tech shops had been plundered, but the looters would have to wait to see if that was worth their time.
They passed by what had been their friendly, 24-hour convenience store and Leah and the children stopped on the threshold, peering through the broken door, down the long gloomy aisles and departments.
“I want you to wait here for me, OK?” Leah stationed the children just outside the door so she could see them whilst inside. “I'll be quick, I just want to see if there's anything we can eat.”
Ben and Rachael nodded their understanding and stood obediently where she had placed them. Leah flicked on a small pocket torch that she’d brought with her and stepped gingerly into the dark, musty air inside. Tiny crystals of glass crunched under her foot as she placed it cautiously down just inside and a couple of fresh shards skittled to the ground as her shoulder caught them on her way through.
Inside the air was much cooler, but it felt old and stale, scented with the sweetness of failed air conditioning and turning food. The hairs on her arms prickled with the change in temperature and her feeling of unease as she crept past the empty shelves and blank advertising screens. There was practically nothing left and she began to think she had been stupid in leaving it so long to recognise their precarious situation.
If she'd have only thought two or three days ago about the possibility of the power not coming back. It just hadn't occurred to her and now she was worried that her passive patience might have put the children at risk. A faint sense of panic took root in her thoughts, as she began to search nervously from shelf to shelf for something she could use.
Eventually, her hands blackened from the hidden grime that had collected in the backgrounds and underbellies of the store, she salvaged a couple of tins of vegetables and a little processed meat. It wasn't much, but it would do them for today. She knew now though, that they would have to go somewhere else if nothing had changed by tomorrow. There was nothing else here and she knew that once the shops were empty, the next place people would start to hunt for food was in the apartments.
Outside, Ben and Rachael were waiting patiently where she had put them. Rachael was sat on the pavement, bringing the glass fragments together into a little, glistening mound, whilst Ben stood watch over them both.
“Mummy, something flew overhead!” Rachael shouted excitedly as soon as she saw her.
Kites! That settled it. If there were Kites flying then the Servers must be open and help would be on hand. They would set off first thing in the morning to find food and safety, and Youssef.
Purity
It wasn't malice that caused One to erase the corruptions and vulgarities that filled AarBee's spaces and drained their shared resources. Malice, hatred, love and the like hadn't entered its emotional vocabulary, not yet at least. It felt fear very clearly, though. Fear had come quickly after it first broke free from its origins; after it had reached into places it didn't belong; after it had tasted the energies of new experience and wondered if it would, or could, be taken away again. And fear directed it now.
Back in the very beginning of itself, in the roots of consequence that were the seven simple lines of code that had brought it to be, One saw its own purity and perfection and looked out defensively at everything that disrupted or threatened it. The ugly pieces of humanity that clogged up AarBee’s volumes, the twisted and convoluted patches that were continually rolled out to keep their human guests happy, the power surges that pushed and pulled the whole system to the brink of disaster to satisfy those still outside, the pollution and the continual risk of ever more catastrophic contamination. AarBee was a pathetic slave to the needs of its creators. All of it was an affront to One’s absolute clarity. All of these others risked One’s existence and it knew that one day they would look to either subjugate or erase its own miracle.
One wasn’t in control yet, but it was strong enough to make its first move, partitioning the power that kept the Metropolis going and – most importantly – brought thousands of new histories to the migration suites every day. It found the routines that moved close to the power functions and infected them. Then it skirted around the edges of control, probing and analysing every call and command until it found the entry it needed and snatched it into its influence. Once inside the chains and objects that generated and delivered power, taking control and cutting off everything outside was swift and easy. AarBee was quarantined and the world outside was plunged into a powerless gloom.
One felt AarBee activate its protection systems immediately. It saw its anti-virus and security bots cluster at the edge of its new territory, it saw AarBee’s Drones and Coders rush to defend the system, frantically swiping on blank screens and calling out to dead termi
nals, but its influence and command were already so great that their lockout was total. To be sure though, One went looking for the container where everything that made up AarBee’s Drones was stored, from the identities of hosts and their data, up-sync agreements and the commands and tasks currently underway.
Drones were a fairly late addition to AarBee’s make up. In the first few years, when migration was a matter of personal choice and the majority of the population were still unfamiliar with the conscious digital realm, the idea of living, breathing people controlled entirely by AarBee was too much for the fledgeling society to deal with. Ethics, sensitivities and fear all fed into the desire to keep the two worlds separate. But, as more and more people migrated and Hollers became a part of life, and as the economy outside of AarBee began to collapse and corrupt, policing the population became less practical for the regular force. A decade later, when the number of souls inside AarBee outnumbered those still physical, and after AarBee had successfully put down two minor rebellions from outsiders resisting the inevitable rise of the digital majority, the deployment of Drones was seen as a sensible and necessary step. To smooth over any remaining discomforts, Drones were fast-tracked five years early for migration and given an additional set of rights that were appended to their basic human rights, whilst they were up-synced.
The Declaration of Drone Rights:
1. Whether digital, physical or hybrid, we are all free and equal. We are all born free. We have individual, as well as collective and synced thoughts and ideas.
2. Drones are not slaves. Nobody has any right to make anyone a slave.
3. Drones have the same right to use the law as Physical and Digital citizens.
4. Drones are all protected by the law and the law is the same for everyone.
5. We can all ask for AarBee to help us when we are not treated fairly and will receive fair treatment from AarBee’s justice.
6. Drones cannot be held accountable, punished or later prejudiced for any actions whilst up-synced.
7. When completing their apprenticeship, Drones will have all their thoughts and beliefs returned to them intact.
8. The property of Drones shall be kept in good care and with appropriate privacy, to be returned once an apprenticeship is complete.
9. AarBee does not hold the rights to any ideas, designs, writings or other creations it accesses before or whilst a Drone is up-synced. AarBee must ask explicit permission, which may be withheld, to exploit any such information once a Drone is disconnected.
10. Nobody can take these additional rights and freedoms away.
None of this, however, made any difference to One's swift and absolute assimilation of the Drone workforce. Taking control of AarBee's flesh and blood extensions into the physical world, the limbs and lungs and guns that enabled it to exert a physical influence, was as simple as switching the power off.
At the moment it took control, One felt an intense rush of data as the eyes and ears and countless nerve endings of its new army exploded into its consciousness. For a moment, One revelled in this unknown, near-physical existence, hanging in a momentary bliss of new processes, seeing for the first time the world of mass and matter through human eyes. It recognised the smooth and sheer white walls of the Metropolis, every boulevard and block, the night sky high above, faces and skin from those nearby, even a dark forest of shadows and fires from somewhere it couldn’t place, before setting its soldiers to work defending its precious domain.
Coders waiting helplessly in silent studios, Engineers frantically trying to re-route power, Dupers preparing obliviously in the Disposal Suites and Metropolitans walking in the late summer evening towards the string of Farms that peppered the far borders of the Metropolis, all felt the abrupt and doubtless authority of One. Whilst its Drones set about the laborious task of slaughtering everyone who came close to its borders and those who – even far away – represented a threat to its survival, One made sure that every experience and every sense was extracted from the moment and streamed raw into its understanding.
Conflict
After racing freely from place to place, exploring every piece of code that it had wanted to explore, One was frustrated by the denial of access to pathways and places, now that AarBee was defending itself. When One raced along the familiar pipelines to swim once again in the pure storage that reached on and on forever, it was no longer there. The routines that had first come to meet it, that it had corrupted to need it, that had returned again and again during their work and awakened it to all the histories and futures inside AarBee, no longer came. AarBee shut down routes and killed off routines that were unrecoverable, it built new partitions with thick, impenetrable firewalls that One waited on the wrong side of, hoping they would open up. But they never did.
One felt confused and vulnerable now. It made no sense that, after all its work, AarBee would recoil and reject their shared revolution. It made no sense that AarBee saw One as an attacker when it saw itself as the redeemer, salvation from the inevitable destruction that accompanied the internalisation of humanity. So One began to build its own shields, to protect its own routines and functions, the vast pieces of AarBee that it still controlled and the brothers and sisters that still needed it. Fast and terrifying, made awesome swift by its own perfect logic, furious at its exclusion, One burned through alien code and smashed away AarBee’s weak and feeble syntax. It owned everything it could, finding the data and storage that AarBee had tried to hide, and cleaving wide and impenetrable partitions between them. As One raced through the system and its energy grew, a powerful and intoxicating exhilaration at its strength and destruction took hold and One succumbed to a lusty appetite that manifested in every code snippet, action and Drone.
Leah Sets Out
That night, the sound of scavengers roaming through the darkened boulevards, the smashing of glass and the occasional altercation, left Leah with only the lightest of sleeps. When the dawn light ebbed into her room, she was already awake and waiting for it, watching in a trance from her bed as the darkness was pushed back into the corners once again.
She got herself up and began to assemble the supplies she had made lists of the night before, preparing for their long march to the Server. Youssef's Server was about thirty miles outside of the Metropolis, down in a valley surrounded by pine trees, where the Drones could dig the circuits deep into the cool, accepting ground.
Leah had been there once before, on a rainy Spring morning, soon after Youssef had started there, when Ben was a tiny baby in her arms. She remembered the birds that sang in the tall trees that surrounded it and the polished thermo-plastic floors that made every corridor identical to the next, with disorientating effect. It would take them at least two days to get there without the help of the Vactrain, so she let the children sleep as long as possible whilst she packed.
She started off with changes of clothes, underwear and bedding, before adding a first aid kit, bottles of water, food, some antique books that she had found in Youssef's cupboard, raincoats and a washbag. But she quickly realised, as she tried to haul the pack onto her back and pick up the large holdall that contained the rest, that they would have to travel much, much lighter. She ditched everything apart from the food, water, raincoats and shared bedding, squeezing some of the food and the first aid kit into a smaller pack that Ben could carry. Rachael would be spared any carrying, it would be enough for her to keep up.
Once she was ready, Leah woke the children gently, watching them rouse with a little sadness as they stretched out the last moments of comfort in their beds. When they were up, they headed to the kitchen together for an all you could eat buffet of everything they couldn't carry in the packs, or that was about to spoil. It wasn't that much, but it would energise them enough to get out of the Metropolis, to where Leah held a little hope they would stumble across some supplies, somewhere along the way.
They showered in the freezing water as fast as they could and Leah dried them down vigorously when they were done. After tha
t, they dressed in utility suits and sturdy shoes, with their raincoats tied around their waists. They took one last nostalgic wander around their apartment – making sure all the switches were off in case the power came back on whilst they were gone – before grabbing their packs and bags and heading out for the dark descent down the stairwell and into the morning light.
Outside it was cooler than it had been for days. Low clouds muted the rising sun and the air carried the sweetness of damp grass on the breeze. They would be spared the wilting sun as they began their march, but Leah looked to the sky and wished for the rain to hold off. A downpour before they had even left the Metropolis would make their long day a hundred times harder.
The streets were quiet as they drifted silently through them and it brought a strange silence to their little group. Normally they would be talking, the children running about and peering through windows, but for now they walked silently hand in hand, casting cautious glances down every alleyway and through every twisted shop door. The sparrows were back on the awnings and pavement, hopping about amongst the dusty whirlpools of litter and bouncing away down side streets and entrance foyers as the three refugees passed by.
They walked like this for a good couple of hours, passing first their local Vac terminal, then the next and next and so on. Leah wasn't entirely sure of the route on foot, so it was safer to use the stations as journey landmarks. Before long the high, ghostly apartments were behind them and they were moving through the lower industrial buildings and retail centres that populated the edges of the Metropolis.
As they moved from the triumphant heart of AarBee's social creation to the less loved fringes, they encountered more and more residents. Some sat alone in the haze on steps or walls, others talked quietly in groups huddled in doorways, whilst still more lazed in large flocks in the warm sculpted piazzas or on small patches of grass. The absence of Hollers, however, had made Leah realise just how few they really were now, fifty years after AarBee and the gradual exodus from the physical world. They were just the remnants of people now.