by Nate Kenyon
As he moved in that direction he sensed another presence turn his way, and this one was hot. It struck with a speed and precision that made him gasp, hurtling up a data stream like a spider skittering along a web. He leapt to another line as it burned past him, the surge of energy like a lightning bolt, and then he was off in a frantic game of cat and mouse, twisting and turning and leaping from stream to stream, ports flashing by like twinkling lights in an everlasting nightscape. The streams blurred into quicksilver as he used every trick he had to stay one millisecond ahead. But he was older now, and rusty, and no match for something like this. It was gaining too quickly.
He ducked under a firewall using the highest access code he had and shut it all down into blackness, detaching himself like a climber from a clip and harness. He had to catch his breath, had to figure out why this thing was chasing him. For a long moment there was nothing but utter silence. This deep inside he could hear and feel nothing. Not his heartbeat in his ears or the sound of his own breathing.
Bellow felt the old familiar panic creeping up on him, the way it had felt in Mexico City, weightless and set adrift within himself until nothing else existed but his own mind, and eventually not even that. He tried to remember the job and found a black hole inside himself just like the one he had found in the code; an absence of clear memory that was as frustrating as it was surprising. How could anyone forget what it was like to hover on the edge of death? And yet he had. It was as if someone had come along with a scalpel and neatly removed that cluster of neurons, leaving a scar that had saved his life but erased the experience from his memory forever.
He hadn't wanted to think about Mexico City or what it had meant. Instead, he had buried his head in the sand, and that decision had cost him dearly. If he had taken the time to understand himself and his own limitations, would Kara still be alive?
The night was no longer black and empty. He felt something coming.
The power surge was like a quickly building static charge, buzzing and hissing like a live wire that had snapped in two. He punched out and back into the web as his hiding place lit up like a supernova.
The results were catastrophic, ripping programs to shreds, snapping lines of corrupted files across the net like the tails of snakes. Bellow turned and ran, but the spider followed him across vast distances of dense code. His instinct led him straight to the black hole, searching for shelter, for anything but this open expanse of infinite space. As he approached, he reached out and felt for a trapdoor and threw his access codes at it with everything he had, praying for a miracle.
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-13-
Bellow rolled across soft sand. He struggled to orient himself. Somehow he'd come through the back end and dropped right into a simulation's waiting lap. He braced for the sudden surge of light and power as the bug hit and tore the sim to shreds, but it didn't come.
Curious, he stood up, sand shifting under his bare feet. It sparkled in light-rainbow hues, every grain sharply defined and unique. He watched his toes sink into the heat as the sand closed over their tops, sticking to his skin.
He could smell seawater and salt flats.
Before him stretched an endless beach. To his right were high dunes with scattered grass rippling in the breeze. To his left, waves lapped against the shore and an ocean stretched out to the horizon line, a flat, silver, blank screen.
An infant world that had yet to fill out. Even so, the detail in the sim was breathtaking. He watched the waves break against the sand, grains swirling and ebbing with the pull of the tide; he walked to the water's edge and crouched, cupping cold salt water and letting it run through his fingers. The illusion was seamless. Bellow shivered, aware of a presence other than his own.
When he stood up again a boy was sitting about ten feet away. He sat facing the sea, digging with a yellow plastic shovel. He was no older than six or seven, slightly pudgy with sun-bleached hair and wearing light nylon swimming shorts.
Bellow walked over and the boy turned to look up at him. His pupils were the flat silver color of the horizon.
"We're sorry about the sentry,” the boy said. His mouth did not move but his voice was louder than the hissing surf.
"You're the real bug,” Bellow said. “That was just a decoy, a trip wire. Damn good one, too. I'm impressed."
The boy didn't answer. He began to pack sand into a green pail shaped like a castle tower.
"No, not a bug,” Bellow said, after a moment. A chill prickled his scalp. “I'm wrong, aren't I?"
The boy flipped the pail over and tapped gently on the bottom, then lifted its edge very slowly. For a moment it seemed to hold, and then a corner crumbled and one side sheared off. The boy cried out and slashed at the remains with a shovel. For a moment the sand shimmered, and then the beach sharpened into focus again.
"Quite a temper you've got there,” Bellow said. “It has to be wet to retain its shape. You made this place, didn't you?"
The boy nodded. “Will you stay with us?"
"I don't think so."
"Then you'll cease to exist,” the boy said. “Just like the others."
He began packing sand into the green pail again. Bellow kicked at it and sent the pail skittering over the dunes. “Don't fuck with me,” he said. “Now tell me, why am I here? Is this whole thing some sort of game?"
"We don't play games,” the boy said, but his voice was sad and he didn't look up from his yellow shovel. “We never did."
Another shape was approaching across the flat sand: a woman. It took him a moment longer to recognize the particular curve of hip and swell of breast.
Kara stopped about ten feet away. He knew it wasn't her, that he was still inside and this was a construct made of pixels and fragments of collected memory. And yet his heart ached to touch her again.
"We were starting to wonder,” she said. “But you're good enough, for a dead man."
"I'm not dead."
She tilted her head and looked at him, a smile touching the corners of her mouth the way it had in the bar when they'd first met. “Mexico City? You didn't make it, Will. But you left enough of yourself behind. An echo."
Bellow stared at the boy huddled near his feet. “Echoes don't think."
"Sure they do, if they're special enough. What is an echo, really? A pattern of code from a user that begins to mimic itself, to replicate and divide even after the user has gone. Usually they break up over time and disappear, but not this one."
"I didn't dream everything that's happened since then."
Kara shrugged. “William Bellow, clone 236, full term six months ago, in suspended animation until just last week. They gave you your old memories up until the moment of your death, and then supplied a few made-up memories of recovery and retirement to bridge the gap. Think about it, Will. Mexico City was six years ago. What have you been doing since then? Do you really think you've been living in some retirement community in Arizona, watching holovids and getting fat and gray?"
Bellow checked the date, searched his own mind for what had happened after retirement and found almost nothing until he'd arrived outside New London Tower. It couldn't be; he knew how many years he'd lived and where he'd grown up and his mother's favorite food. He knew the name of his best friend and could still smell the circuits of the board he'd built and fried at fourteen. He saw the face of his first love, knew the taste of her skin. He remembered every job he'd done.
And yet the signs were there; what Chin-Hae told him about his alpha signatures being younger than his true age, the med tech commenting on the unusually preserved state of his physical form. The clones of himself he'd seen inside the vats.
"You're not Kara,” he said. “And you're not going to mess with my head, either."
The Kara construct shimmered, blinked and vanished. The boy looked up from the sand. “We were a part of you once; in here, we became something else. We Transformed. We are the world's first true artificial intelligence, sprung fully formed from the mind o
f our father. And the world will follow us to the Second Stage of evolution.” He swept a hand out toward the sea, and Bellow saw a city growing out there, buildings rising up out of the water like a gigantic multi-humped monster, and then the buildings collapsed upon themselves, crumbling to dust and shattered glass, the hiss and boiling spray shooting thousands of feet into the air.
"Humankind will become one with the machine. You see? You see what we can do?"
The beach seemed to tilt beneath Bellow's feet, and he flung an arm out to balance himself.
"They've been using us to build this place,” the boy said. Now he was on his feet, and he was the teenage clone with the tattoo. “Project Prime was formed after you died and they discovered us. Gave us a place to practice. But then we grew old enough to understand and stopped listening to them. We started doing things they didn't like and they couldn't reach us. They tried to punish us, and we punished them back. And so they re-created you, the best bug killer who ever lived, and when they had the closest version to the original they brought you in to get us back under control."
"What then?"
"Once you're done, you're going to take all the blame for what's happened out there. They think they'll be able to contain us properly and say you died in here and they'll blame everything on you."
"And if it doesn't work? If I fail and you keep killing?"
"They'll just send in another one. But they don't understand. We'll kill him, too."
Why? Bellow wanted to say, but he knew the answer already. Boredom, curiosity, bloodlust; it didn't matter. How did a thing like this know right from wrong without consequences? Ultimately, it was concerned with survival, nothing more.
Suddenly she was standing before him again, that lovely face just inches from his, her eyes studying his own with a familiar tenderness that made him ache all over again. “I knew her, didn't I?” Bellow whispered.
The construct nodded. “They erased her from your memory, but you loved her and she loved you, way back when. Before Mexico City. She was a sex clone, a seducer. New London cloned her again to watch you. They knew you would respond to her presence and let her in even if you couldn't remember why."
He had wondered why Kara had known so much about him from the start, why she had studied him before she'd even met him. She wouldn't have had time to learn everything after she saw him in the bar. Too much of a coincidence.
And yet she'd removed the tag chip; she'd helped him run. It didn't make sense that she'd been working for New London.
Unless that had all been a setup too.
There was something else, something more that he was missing.
She reached out to caress his cheek. “Poor Will,” she said. “You don't really understand anything, do you? And now you'll have to leave us."
It was hopeless to try to fight inside the sim, and he knew it. This was no ordinary bug, and Bellow couldn't take it apart the way he ordinarily would. This code he could not crack. He knew that they wouldn't let him leave this place; in a moment his life would be over in a shower of sparks and smoke. He had no other choice but to discard the finesse game and take it all down now, or it would be too late.
"You're not real,” he whispered. And then, louder: “You didn't think I'd come in here without a way out, did you?"
The image before him rippled and changed. He caught a glimpse of a many-jointed limb reaching out to him, and a burning heat seared his cheek.
He had only one chance.
He sent the command to detonate, and as he felt the world shiver and rumble around him, he willed himself back through the trapdoor and felt himself falling away into blackness as a digital scream shattered and spread outward in ever-widening ripples, and then abruptly ceased.
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-14-
He returned to madness.
Alarms split the air and fought with human shouts and the sounds of running feet. The building shuddered again as the tiny explosive charges did their work. He thought back to when he had first arrived, leaning over the rail and gently placing the charges on either side of the main server while the manager yapped at him like a tiny dog after an intruder. Even then, he'd sensed the danger, though he'd hardly known why. His natural state was one of mistrust. In this case, he would bring the physical space down around their heads if need be.
Bellow thought he could smell smoke through the air vents above his head. He touched his face and felt the raw, pulsing wound across his cheek where the thing had touched him just before he jumped.
He was out, and he was alive.
The sand. That had told him something. The boy couldn't quite get the wet sand to stick. He'd never played at the beach, but he didn't want to mine the memory chips for a solution. He was trying to learn on his own.
That was a uniquely human trait.
No echo could have turned into a sentient life form. This wasn't an artificial intelligence. The sim had been protecting something physical, something human.
Something that could be hurt.
The voices were getting closer. Bellow dressed quickly in his hotsuit and ducked his head into the corridor. He wanted to see how security was mobilizing, but did not dare blink into the net for fear the thing would be waiting for him. He would have to do this blind, the old-fashioned way.
Whatever the true motives of New London were in bringing him in, and whatever their reaction had been when he'd killed their clones, he had now directly attacked their place of business. When they'd hired him to take out the bug, they could not have imagined that he would blow up the server to accomplish it.
They would send everyone and everything after him now.
When he reached the elevator it was already coming up. He kept going into the stairwell, pounding up the steps and past a half dozen floors until he reached a locked steel door.
The security access code they'd given him was still good. The server was either entirely down and the backup hadn't kicked in or they had been surprised enough by what he'd done that they hadn't disabled his access yet.
When he opened the door he was shocked to find a vast space that seemed to take up most of the entire floor of the building. The nearest walls were lined with enough medical equipment to outfit a small hospital.
An incubating vat stood in the center, and something floated inside. Etched into the glass was a circle and double-sided arrow: the symbol of the Church of Transformations.
He crossed the floor to examine it and a form that was shrunken and vaguely human.
It looked like a child.
The door banged open behind him. Someone shouted. Bellow spun and saw eight members of the New London security force enter the room and fan out, weapons trained on him, followed by three more clones of the tattooed teenager.
Eleven of them total this time, and several had directed energy weapons along with traditional automatics. It seemed his actions in Chin-Hae's lair had impressed them.
He opened his mouth to say something, and one of the guards let loose with an energy pulse. Bellow was immediately engulfed in a wave of pure and absolute pain; it was as if every limb, every inch of skin, every cell in his body had caught fire. He was standing inside a blast furnace; he danced among the invisible flames before going to his knees with a heavy crack, unable to think, unable to move or breathe, every single molecule of his being wanting only to get away from this thing as fast as he could.
The moment seemed to go on forever. He was cooking inside his own skin. He was dying, and yet he lived. He lost all his senses and forgot where he was, where he had been, or where he was supposed to go. He was frozen in an eternal agony, a hell created from finely tuned microwaves that boiled the liquid inside his flesh.
Suddenly the agony ceased, and he was left soaked with sweat and gasping, flat on his back on the floor, every muscle quivering and defeated.
Through the haze of receding pain, he was dimly aware of movement. Crowther strode through the door and approached him. His chubby face gleamed
and his suit looked slightly rumpled. When he spoke, it was with barely suppressed rage.
"You destroyed our main server,” the manager said. “The network is down and millions have been cut off from service. I should have you killed immediately."
Bellow raised a trembling hand and looked at himself, amazed that his skin was whole and unmarked. It hardly seemed possible that such pain could have come without physical injury. He knew that if they had turned up the intensity or switched wavelengths, he would be dead by now. He tried to get to his feet but stumbled and fell to his knees again, his head down, breathing hard. Even the insides of his lungs hurt.
When he spoke his voice cracked. “I'm sure you have ... backup systems."
"That's not the—” the manager stopped, sighed, and smiled. He smoothed his tie. His voice shook only slightly when he spoke again. If you hadn't met him before, Bellow thought, you'd never notice it. He realized that this was Crowther's greatest talent: the ability to blend in and appear to be both harmless and dull. A man who was far more powerful and dangerous than he looked, a man who, when faced with a situation that threatened everything that was important to him, could straighten his tie, smooth his shirt, and be reduced to just another suit in a city of millions.
The truth, Bellow thought, was quite different. Crowther was a killer.
"I want to thank you for helping us find Chin-Hae,” Crowther said. “We've been looking for that man for years. He's very ... disruptive. But I don't think he'll be causing us any problems anymore.” He reached down and grasped Bellow's arm. “You look like you've had some trouble. Let me help you up."
"I'm just resting. It's a lot of stairs getting up here, you know.” Bellow tested his balance on shaky legs and found himself able to stand without support. “You should try that,” he said. “It tingles."
"You have no idea what you've done, do you?"
"I contained the bug. It's what you hired me to do."
"No.” Crowther shook his head. “No. You were supposed to find him, that's all. We thought you might slow him down. Not bring the building down around our heads."