Nova shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t think a living Sushi would know how to react either. I’m not sure I know myself. It wasn’t the kind of situation that ever came up when you were alive.” She waited to hear Sushi respond, but instead her friend sat there, shaking her head.
“Here, have some more feedback. You would have giggled at that. Anyway, if my life wasn’t screwed enough by this point, I get a call from Burner. He had a visit from the police too and had a massive go at me. Obviously I ended up arguing with him. So that’s another relationship I’ve messed up. Jockey, my parents and Burner. Oh, plus the FBI and the police. Please remind me if there’s anyone I’ve failed to offend in some way. My only friends in the world are a computer program that pretends to be my dead best friend, and a robotic lemur with the mental age of a three-year-old.”
This time Sushi laughed but stopped abruptly.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I judged that you meant that to be funny. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
“It’s OK, you were right. You would have laughed your ass off, exactly like that. It’s just that I’ve never missed you more than at this moment, and I wish with all my heart that you were still alive.”
Nova removed her headset and buried her face in her pillow. She’d been wrong about one thing. She had plenty more tears to cry.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Leaning against a gnarly old tree stump, Casey watched a mean-looking alligator slide into the water. He wondered if that was the one who’d taken Father’s arm. Father was one hell of a survivor. When Casey lay awake at night, obsessing over what had happened to Ivan or Wallace, he tried instead to imagine Father finding the Sub, battling the ’gator and being visited by the Magi. Then his thoughts would drift once again to the event that changed his life.
He’d been working on a project in his garage at home, installing some code in a robotic baseball machine he’d built from spare parts. The robot had learned to throw the perfect pitch and could deliver 43 of them in under a minute.
The music had been blaring, and he didn’t hear Mary-Ann coming. She was on the phone to her sister — always on the phone, that girl — and probably wasn’t paying attention. The robotic arm, which had been jackhammering back and forth at 43 rpm, crushed her windpipe with the first blow and smashed her nose into her skull with the second.
He remembered collapsing to kneel beside her as blood spewed from her mashed nasal cavity. She wheezed a few painful breaths, her hands clasped in his, the grip ever weaker, until she lay there, unmoving, dead. It was that final image of her, his beautiful, sweet Mary-Ann, lying there, destroyed, that still haunted him to this day. He replayed the incident in his mind for, what, the thousandth time?
Why could the ending never be different?
Once he was sure she was dead, he panicked, got into his Chevy, and drove for six hours straight. Checking into a rundown motel, he spent the next few weeks playing online poker, drinking and staring at a crooked picture of the Virgin Mary, which hung on the wall at the end of his bed. By the third week his mind was set on suicide.
Exhausted and half smashed, he’d gone online to search for ways to end it all, wanting to find a method that was guaranteed to work. Hanging appealed. The ceiling in the bathroom in his room at the motel was unusually high and there was a thick pipe which ran across it that he was certain would take his weight.
He joined a forum devoted to the topic and asked about knots, wanting to ensure he got the noose right. A few people replied to him: a couple of forum regulars, an oddball who wanted to watch him to do it, and a woman with the username ‘Zoro’, who professed she wanted to help him. There was something about the no-nonsense language she used, and her unbridled optimism for the future that appealed to him. She didn’t come across like your average busybody Samaritan, and he liked that.
“Why would you want to kill yourself?” she asked.
“I told you. I killed the love of my life. I’ve got nothing to live for.”
“Always something worth living for. Always.”
“Oh, yeah, like what? Name me one thing.”
“Listen, I’m not going to pretend I know what hell you’re living through right now and I’m certainly not going to sit here and patronise you with a list of stuff like rainbows, babies and kittens in some inane effort to cheer you up. I also want to acknowledge that killing the love of your life is a shitty situation to find yourself in. But I firmly believe that it’s always worth fighting for a better future.”
“What future? I don’t have one, not without Mary-Ann.”
“The future doesn’t exist as some predefined construct, something set in stone by God at the start of time. It exists as an unmanifested spectrum of possibilities. You were looking forward to one of those possible futures with Mary-Ann. I’m guessing it might have been a wonderful future you ended up having together. Again, it’s shitty that it didn’t come to pass. But it will only ever remain one of an infinite number of futures that could have played out for you. Are you seriously going to tell me that there’s not a chance that one, or even several, of the other possible futures might also be wonderful for you? Because if you do, I’ll tell you you’re full of shit.”
“Well, you certainly have a way of talking to a guy who’s on the edge, I’ll give you that.”
“I know I’ve never met you, but I’m sure that if I did, I’d get to like you. And that’s enough reason to spend my time talking to you to help discover a future you might be interested in experiencing. Would you do me the honour of hearing about the future I’d like to create?”
“I guess I’ve got nothing to lose.”
That weekend, following several hours of dialogue with his new online friend, he looked at his motel room and finally saw it for what it had become. It was disgusting. The floor was littered with empty cans, bottles and discarded pizza boxes. His clothes stank, he stank. He showered and washed his T-shirt in the sink, shaved for the first time in weeks, tidied the room, opened the curtains. A shaft of sunlight struck the wall at the end of his bed, forming the shape of an arrow that pointed at the crooked picture of the Virgin Mary, the tip of light precisely connecting with Mary’s heart.
He walked over, gently took it off the wall and, clutching the picture to his chest, sat down on his bed and for the first time since Mary-Ann’s death, broke down in tears. Wiping his eyes and gasping for breath, he realised how close he’d come to death. But he’d been saved. And the sunlight striking the picture in that precise manner was proof; someone or something was looking after him. He felt a sudden urge to speak to the woman Zoro again.
“I have to speak to you in person. The most amazing thing happened. Think I might finally be ready to investigate the kind of future you were telling me about.”
“That’s so good to hear. Let me speak to my colleague, see what works for us early next week. You think you can make it over to Jackson?”
“I’d make it halfway across the universe to see you.”
He did meet them — Zoro and her colleague, who he now knew as Mother Frances and Wallace — in Jackson, Mississippi the following Tuesday, in a house that felt like home. He had a long shower and dressed in the new set of clothes that they’d brought along for him. They ate a home-cooked meal, meatloaf and apple pie. Then, over a slow bottle of bourbon, they talked. They talked about pain and heartbreak and loss, and about hope and faith. They also spoke about a concept that was new to him: artificial superintelligence.
Night fell and dawn broke, and still they were talking. By breakfast time, all Casey wanted was to join up. To be a member of the group that would create the one artificially intelligent being capable of ushering in a radically different future for a mankind. A group that admitted only the brightest, the best, the most committed. Joining the executive branch of the organisation, like they’d suggested he was qualified to do, required a six-month virtual induction followed by an initiation ceremony that would push him to the limit. He could think of no be
tter way to atone for his mistake.
The 144 journeys up and down the hill had been his penance. He had fixed in his mind the image of that fatal arm jackhammering back and forth to keep him going. But now everything he’d promised he would do to avenge her death had been jeopardised. Wallace’s face had been plastered all over the news, that month’s highest new entry in America’s Most Wanted.
It was the DNA in his saliva, found on some cigarette butts carelessly discarded at the top of the hill that had allowed the FBI to identify him. Compounding the error further, Wallace had been careless in disposing of the bodies of the failed initiates. It had been horrific, watching the bots beat him to death in front of everyone. Father had explained that it was a necessary evil; Wallace had put the entire organisation at risk.
Casey hadn’t known what to think. Yes, the work they were doing was for the benefit of all mankind. Yes, Wallace had lost the respect of his brothers and sisters at the Compound. And it wasn’t as if you could simply resign from the Order, like you could in a regular job. Especially not if you’d been in such a senior position, so integral to the organisation.
But it tortured Casey to know his best friend was gone. He might have made a couple of mistakes, but Wallace was one of the good guys, one of the Warriors of the Magi. He’d cared about people, and gone out of his way to look after them. Now he wouldn’t get to see the fruits of his labour, the paradise that the Magi would create. That was the ultimate price he’d paid. Casey just hoped that what he’d discovered would make Father happy again.
He knocked on the door, took a deep breath and entered. A large workbench dominated the room. Clamped to its sides were a series of evenly spaced metal vices, empty, except for the one at the near end, which held a drone between its jaws. The walls were lined with shelves, home to screwdrivers, hacksaws, mallets and glass jars stuffed with drill bits, nuts, bolts and screws. In the corner, illuminated by a spotlamp, was a corkboard, covered in photos of people, maps marked with pins and circles, and a list of multinationals, heavily highlighted and scrawled all over. Theodore placed his eyepiece on the workbench and motioned for Casey to join him.
“Sent Brandon into town yesterday to buy one of these,” Theodore said, nodding at the drone. “They’ve come a long way in the last few couple of years. Seeing how they were used against us, I wondered whether we might be able to use them ourselves.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Father, the discovery of the training site. I’ve done some digging. When the FBI deleted the post on that forum with all the information about us, they weren’t as thorough as they should have been. Turns out that copies of the original post had been replicated to a bunch of other sites. The person who posted the research in the first place was a user called I_<3_Zhang. It was a new account, and that was the only thing they’d ever posted. I googled the username and found one other instance of it — an old YouTube account, belonging to someone called Nova Negrahnu. But that might just be a coincidence, right?”
“Could be. Go on,” said Theodore, now giving his full attention to the younger man.
“This Nova Negrahnu, guess who she’s next to in the Player’s Grid? Sushi Harrison, one of the girls killed in the Seattle blast. It’s got to be the same girl. Here’s everything I found on her.”
Casey flicked through several pages of data on a tablet that showed a series of photos, social accounts and a profile containing personal information. Theodore took the tablet from him and swiped through its contents, a smile creeping across his face. Casey pointed at one of the photos.
“Look at this one. She’s got herself one of those Electropets. Refers to it as her ‘best friend in the world’. Pretty sad, huh?”
“Well, I’ll be damned if this little bitch ain’t got her panties in a twist. This is good work, Casey. You meant it about your commitment, I can see that. You’ve done yourself proud.”
Casey blushed. “Thank you, Father.”
“Where did you say she was from?”
“She’s from Maidstone, Kent. England.”
“We’d need the help of our brothers in the United Kingdom. I’ll think on it. In the meantime, I’d like to reward you for the work you’ve done. I had been planning to offer you a promotion since Wallace … chose to step down. How would you like to be my right-hand man?”
Casey felt his face redden. “Father, I’d be honoured.” He hadn’t known how much he was longing for something like that. But the approval of Father felt vital.
Theodore retrieved a first aid kit from a chest of drawers at the side of the room, placed it on the workbench and popped it open.
“Remember how we spoke about sacrifice the other day?”
Casey nodded, unsure where this was going.
“I‘m glad to hear that, boy. Because with power comes responsibility, and with responsibility comes sacrifice, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Then place your left arm into the vice.”
Casey gulped. He was committed, he knew he was. But what was this? He hadn’t expected to make a sacrifice so soon. And he certainly hadn’t expected it to involve a first aid kit or his arm in a vice. Realising that he’d frozen, he quickly positioned his arm inside its metal jaws, and hoped that Father hadn’t noticed it tremble.
The grid of lights on Theodore’s arm blinked into action, the handle controlling the vice turned, and before Casey could react, his arm was wedged tight. Theodore held his prosthetic limb up in the air. He clenched his fist and a four-inch blade ejected from his middle knuckle with a thunk. Casey reflexively pulled away from the weapon, but was jerked back into place on his stool when his arm refused to budge. His fear was now visible, his breathing double its normal rate. Father leaned back and studied the serrated blade.
“I’m not sure I finished telling you that story the other day. Where was I? That’s right, I was in my canoe, paddling back into town, a hastily tied tourniquet the only thing keeping me from death. Well, Frances was shocked to see me like that, as you might imagine. Thought I’d been kidnapped and tortured. She administered some anaesthetic, cleaned up the wound, and saved my life. Lying in bed for the first few days after the incident I viewed myself as a victim who’d lost an arm. But after speaking to Frances and getting my thoughts clear about how I was going to heed the Magi’s calling, I had another epiphany: I realized that perspective was everything.”
He spoke like they were old friends catching up at a school reunion. Casey concentrated on his breathing and forced a smile though his eyes were drawn again and again to the blade.
“I hadn’t lost an arm as much as I’d gained an opportunity. What better way to make me appreciate the merger between biology and technology than to make me experience it for myself? This isn’t a curse,” he said, gesturing to the flashing arm. “It’s a blessing. It represents the first stage in my transformation from man to cyborg. And now it’s time for you to join me.”
Theodore placed the serrated blade onto the section of Casey’s wrist that protruded from the vice.
“I want you to stay real calm and real still. I’m not going to lie, this will hurt a lot. But it’s important that you endure the pain. It’s a taste of what’s to come. The role I have in mind for you is greater than anything you could imagine. But it’s going to require a blessing, not a curse. So take some of this and hold on tight.”
Theodore opened one of the workbench’s drawers, retrieved a saucer and placed it by Casey’s free hand. Understanding that he had little say in what was about to happen, and scared of a fate similar to Wallace’s befalling him, he took hold of the little straw, stuck one end into the pile of cocaine and hoovered as much up each of his nostrils as he could bear.
As he felt the cold metal blade rip his skin, Casey inhaled sharply through his nose. He did his best to hold the older man’s gaze, but his eyes kept flitting to the red drops as they hit the workbench. Emitting a guttural whine, he clutched the vice with his free hand and held on so
tight that his knuckles looked like they might pop out of their joints. Once the blade hit bone, Theodore put his entire weight onto the handle, forcing it ever downward, filling the workshop with a horrible crunching noise.
When the hand finally came free, Casey screamed. On the other side of the workbench Theodore calmly leafed through the first aid kit like he had all the time in world. There on the floor was the severed hand. Casey stared at it, marvelling at the fact that it was no longer part of him.
What kind of crazy task could render its existence superfluous?
Chapter Twenty-Three
Arty cleared his throat, swept his curly brown locks off his face, and lightly patted his cheeks. Hannah’s brow furrowed as she watched him.
“You do realise that the interview takes place in VR? That people see your avatar and not the real you?”
“I’m aware of how the technology works, thank you, Mrs McCreadie. It’s a mindset thing. If I look my best in the real world, I’ll feel my best in the virtual.”
“Whatever you say. You’ve done the prep, right?”
“The prep?”
“You looked at the background material I sent you last week?”
“I know this stuff inside out, Hannah. I don’t need to prep.”
“I’m not talking about Solarversia, you moron, I’m talking about Kiki La Roux.” She held her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose and applied some gentle pressure. “You haven’t even looked at it, have you? Do you know anything about him whatsoever? Because the interview starts in five minutes and I’d welcome some positive headlines for a change.”
“I know who the guy is, obviously. Weird fellow. Eccentric. Why don’t you bring me up to speed anyway? Give me the ‘Kiki crash course’.”
Hannah rolled her eyes and then did what she always did — got on with it. She scrolled through some files on her tablet and selected one. A hologram flickered into life on the table and started to spin slowly before them like it was mounted on a lazy record player. Arty leaned forward in an attempt to process what he was seeing. A colourful man, wearing only a leopard-skin thong, lounged provocatively on an opulent chaise longue. Standing behind him, a pink elephant was waving a decorated Japanese fan back and forth over his body while a eunuch fed him the occasional grape.
Solarversia: The Year Long Game Page 17