The Sword

by J. M. Kaukola

  “Now there is this. A simple inhaler, the source of the powerful new drug sweeping the globe. Mind Blade, they call it. It gets you high, it puts you above the conflict, and in tune with the universe. Tiberius's plan is self sustaining. The drug they use to escape, funds him. His funding produces more terror. More terror results in more crackdown. More crackdown requires more escape. The escape is chemical, and fuels the machine.

  “That is not all. The violence in the cities, the riots, the madmen on buses and planes, much of it can be traced to this little blue vial. The cycle not only drives itself, but it also builds the pressure. Brilliant redundancy, fueled by the systemic weaknesses in the Authority.

  “All of this is groundwork, setting charges and laying traps. His true thrust lies elsewhere, the kick-start to a revolution. I predict it lies in the peace talks along the DMZ.

  “The Authority launched an ambitious negotiation with the Path after they realized their dire predicament, but it has made little progress. My hypothesis is that he will attempt to derail it further, and provoke an outright war. The aggression will be the spark that ignites the powder kegs that are the cities, but there will be a warning.

  “He will wait until the talks are at a critical junction, a potential breakdown that brings all the heavy hitters from both sides into the same room. If this does not occur naturally, he will manufacture this crisis. We will wait for this. When the accords break down, and the tension is high, we will strike, and hope our aim is true.”

  “ I don't like it.” Lauren said. She leaned forward, pressed her hands on the bleacher-top, and looked up and down the field. The stadium was enormous, and empty, and her voice was swallowed by the silent air. The sky above was dull gray, but it rolled with heavy clouds, each tumbling over another as if grappling for the top of the pile, each threatening to give out and release the deluge when it failed. She glanced to the tumult above, perhaps with a hint of nervous anticipation. Firenze had never programmed that tic.

  He stood along the same sideline benches, tucked between abandoned equipment, from games long finished. His toolkits were laid out in chests, sorted and set for any challenge. He still couldn’t keep the humming tension from his thoughts, no matter how many times he checked his gear, or prepped the same checklists. He glanced over at her, and agreed, “I don’t like it, either. There’s no other choice.”

  She held up her fingers to count, and said, “Okay, let's see... do it. That's one choice. Don't do it? Yep, there it is, choice number two.” She wiggled those fingers at him, pointed at them, as if to challenge him to disagree with simple logic.

  “Not an option. Not anymore.” Firenze said. The Agency noose was tightening. He only had a few hours in meat-space before they needed to hop a flitter out of the hub. His code was as set as he could make it. All that was left was this last, desperate, stupid gambit. Time to face the dragon.

  She stood before him. Her eyes were level with his own. They were green eyes, today, and they shone. She offered just the hint of a smile, and admitted, “You're so cute when you're trying to be heroic. You do know I can check your brain patterns and tell you're terrified?”

  “That's cheating.” He said. “Besides, I thought you liked bravado?”

  “Only when it's not going to get you killed!” She snapped. “If you die, I'll get confiscated and disassembled, and then what will you do?”

  “Nothing. I'll be dead. Besides, I built you an escape hatch. If this goes wrong, you can jump into the net. I'm sure some nodes will survive the thrashing NODA gives 'em.” I hope.

  She stared at him, and asked, “You built a hatch? Do you know how many laws that breaks?”

  “No idea, but I don't really care. I mean, I’m breaking into the goddamn EBS. I think a few bigoted control laws are going to slide under the High Treason table. And that's only if Striker doesn't kill me, first.” Firenze said. He raised his arms, and the first toolkit sprung open on the field, constructing into blueprints, wireframe, and then objects. He’d always liked that transition. Real old-school.

  He worked, chose his first crackers, set protections on scramblers. From behind, Lauren murmured, “Thank you.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “I mean it.” She insisted, “Thank you!” She paused, and he could almost hear her smile. “And they say chivalry is dead.” She kissed him on the cheek. “You need to be sure, though: can you trust him?”

  “Berenson?” Firenze asked. “God, I don't know. Maybe? Do I have a choice?”

  She held up two fingers again, staring at them in mock puzzlement. “One, trust him. Two... don't-”

  “I know, I know. Boolean choice.” Firenze cut her off. “I think it's ternary.”

  “Maybe? Unknown? Or irrelevant?” She inquired. Somewhere along the line, she'd added a little blue pom-pom to her battleship gray outfit, an ironic nod to cheer, done up in electric-blue and white.

  “Any. All.” He replied. “The status quo leads to me getting mind raped, and you getting erased every six months, and everyone getting destroyed. The current world is nonfunctional.”

  “The system is headed for collapse.” She agreed. “Too many faults, too many bad sectors, the hardware is broken, and the software is buggy. This will end badly unless we act.”

  “So, I don't really have a choice, do I?”

  “Look at you!” She declared, with a measure of pride. “All grown up and heading to war!” She'd acquired another pom-pom, which she waved about with only the slightest dash of mockery.

  “Yeah.” Firenze said, not quite comfortable with the thought. “Look at me.”

  “You know,” she said, “I was thinking, on what Colonel Halstead told you, back in Kessinwey. Meat-space has so many interesting functions not present in the net. The people you're working with, they are like a roving antivirus and optimization suite. They identify faults, step in, correct them, and then pick up the pieces. Even without central processing, they keep scrubbing the system. I... appreciate that.” She looked puzzled for a moment. “There's no equivalent on the net, did you know that? Nothing like this. You're doing a good thing.”

  “Thanks.” He said, looking up again. “That means a lot. It really does.” The words were an echo, in the silent and empty field.

  She gave him a sudden hug, then stepped back, all business again. She said, “Now, about Berenson. I don't trust him, but I have an option. He sports some pretty interesting wetware, including an honest graybox in his skull. I was thinking, I could load myself into his brain and double check-”

  “Whoa, no way.” Firenze protested. No way in hell.

  She tried to justify the idea. “I know it's icky, but if he's planning on murdering you, I don't intend to just sit here in standby and take it!”

  “Alright, let's disregard the mind rape – which is bad – he's probably got utterly nasty traps up there.”

  “True.” She admitted. “I wouldn't do it, anyway.”

  “Oh?”

  “His logic is circular, at best. He plays bizarre angles. He appears to behave according to highly logical precedents, and then suddenly hooks left. Your life is dependent on him, and I do not like this.”

  Firenze assented, “Thanks, I think.”

  “Just be careful.” She admonished, “You get killed in meat space, and I swear I will drag you through the hard jack into the compiler.”

  “That sounds painful.”

  “Might be. It's never been tried before, but I'm willing to play ball. So don't get killed!”

  “Right, right, I'll work on that. On the plus side, I got Reaper to protect me, and doesn't that fill you with confidence?” Firenze prodded.

  “They trust him with far too much firepower.”

  Firenze burst out laughing. “You have no idea. The other day, he was wearing one of the dial-a-yield devices on his chest, claiming to be 'nuclear man'. Just one crazy-ounce short of a full Berenson.”

  “Those are stable devices. And the firing key was safely in another room.
” She noted.

  “Have to play the devil's advocate, don't you? If I'm confident, you doubt. If I doubt, you reassure. Can't you just agree with me?”

  “Nope.” She picked up one of the cracking programs. “But I think you're underestimating Mister Hill. He modified the Rolling Thunder in under six hours, resetting its parameters for battlefield use. Complex work, and hardly in line with his persona.”

  Firenze nodded. “You're postulating that the whole dumb-ass act is a stress breaker? I’ll buy that.” He stepped back, and conjured a lockbox onto the faded astroturf. “Alright, this is it. I'm going to need you to disconnect from me.”

  She glanced to him as he opened the strongbox. “Like hell.”

  “This is going to get messy, and last time, it nearly burned you up. You remember that, right? Any deeper and you would have been random code.”

  “I remember. Without me there, you'd be a vegetable.”

  “I've got it, this time. I learned.”

  “You are not going alone.” Whereas Firenze pleaded, she simply declared.

  “I need to.”

  “I will disconnect you from the net and eject you into meat-space.”

  “You wouldn't.”

  “Sure would. We go, or no one goes.” She stood with her arms crossed, unblinking. When the hell did she put on the grease paint?

  “I'm not winning this one, am I?” Firenze asked.

  “Nope.”

  He sighed. “Alright. I assume they've got medical standing by on my body?”

  “Yep, a full trauma kit is prepared.”

  “Then let's do this.”

  With a thought, he donned his armor, equipped his weapons. The screens slid into place, one by one, active defenses toggled in sequence, until he stood clad in full Reactive Combat Armor, just like on the Airship, prepped and ready for whatever awaited.

  Lauren stepped behind him, grabbed his wrists, placed her feet next to his. He'd never paid attention to how his mind rendered this, how he could feel her “breath” on his neck. It was almost comforting, and that comfort didn't worry him as much as it should.

  For a moment, she was behind him, beside him, guiding his movements as he synced fully. She stepped into him, and they were one. He could feel in numbers, think in raw, pure math. He was lying on the floor. He was in a server, somewhere in the South Hub. He was on a boat in the mid Atlantic. He was on a plane over the Indian subcontinent.

  He was playing a game, racing against players from all over the globe. He was computing astronomical charts. He was counting to pass the time. He was watching his own heart rate climb. He was in a thousand places at once, and he could see everything. He could understand, for a brief, perfect moment, a totality that crashed through him with thunderous wonder, the pulse of the world, until his head began to burn, and the nauseating overload fled.

  He was one again. He was standing in a stadium that was not a stadium, getting ready to play the game of his life, and all the sensation and thought of a thousand distributed processors hummed inside him. His virus was working. He was smarter, he was more. He intended, and entire networks lent a tiny portion of their crunching power to him. The trickles became an ocean.

  He didn't code, not this time. He pointed. He intended. The ocean surged around him, like some ancient prophet commanding the sea to part. He pointed, and a greater power moved through him, dwarfing him, humbling him, exalting him.

  I've never felt like this.

  I've never run like this. The second thought echoed the first. Which was his?

  There were classes that talked about the risk of mask blending, about the dangers of allowing rogue code into wetware. They'd never truly conceived of a full AI occupying that space. They'd never conceived that someone would do so willingly. If they had, they would have recoiled in horror. But they didn't know the glory of those microseconds.

  Firenze, not just Firenze, but the gestalt, reached into the lockbox, and the ICE spilled forth, blossoming into the roiling, rolling sphere of acid that was the EBS security. They could see it now, clearer than before, the tiny gunboats that patrolled the seas, the sharks and submarines in the depths, and the pulsing star at the center.

  They reached into the waters, and the sphere churned and expanded, until it filled the stadium. The gunboats dwarfed them, the sharks turned to hunt. The silver threads that Firenze-the-singular hadn't seen on his first attempt drifted towards them, to track them, to drown them in silver, like they had, so long ago. The gestalt pushed them aside, and grew.

  The gestalt filled the ocean as it expanded. They were bigger than they had ever been. They could see the stars. They were on an orbiter. They were on Luna. They reached through the black, to Phobos and Deimos, and the belts beyond. They were.

  In Siberia, at an Authority Cybersecurity Station, one of the techs noted a spike in network traffic. He turned to notify his superior, and the computers went black. The lights failed, the doors locked, and all eyes went to the empty screens in the control center. For all it appeared, this was not an attack. These computers were simply needed to feed more processing cycles to the expanding ocean and the titanic gestalt inside.

  The gunboats were smaller now, and the fibers burning clear away. The acid of the burner virus barely tingled on their skin. They reached out, swept the ocean clear, brushing the detritus away, tossed the waste into the nether beyond.

  In East Africa, one third of the power grid failed. Engineers would later report catastrophic overload on multiple redundant distribution centers, and remark on how lucky everyone had been that no vital services had been lost. They would call it providential, but still push for a distributed power grid. But that was later. For now, there was panic.

  The gestalt swam down as they grew, as the ocean grew with them. The sharks and submarines and algae and clouds vanished, leaving the waters clear. The acid no longer burned, so large was the gestalt. What would have killed Firenze, what would have erased Lauren, instead shut down terminals in banks and offices and schools.

  In North America, an elementary computer lab purged itself. After the weekend, the IT department would determine that it was a restricted burner virus, but could not discover how a grade school student could have set it off. Nevertheless, they would call a student assembly to warn the children about cybercrime.

  They reached the heart of the ocean, the pulsing crystal star, and they grabbed it, enveloped it, absorbed it.

  In the darkest depths of the Pacific, at a parasite station latched onto the spine of NODA itself, the main boards came alive. In an instant, the channels erupted into noise, the banks roared as data search procedures burned out the seeker heads of drives, and rogue code spidered through the net. There, in the control room, as the wall of monitors blazed in apocalyptic fury, amid the sudden startled rush, and the armed guards glancing to the door-that-must-not-be-opened, Julian Forscythe stood, with a serene grin, and whispered, “Spooky.”

  Then the ocean was gone.

  Deep in Persephone, the power stabilized, and the data spikes were no more. The sudden seek was done, the crisis vanished, the alarm bells silent. Marines clutched their rifles, while technicians scrambled the decks, trying to pin down the impossible that had just occurred. For a few moments, the networks had run at full capacity. In seconds, the vast archives of the station had filled with junk data, and the radiators in the trenches outside glowed white hot, threatening to boil even these frozen depths. To Forscythe's eyes, though, there was something far more interesting – which surely translated as horrifying to any sane man. The net was completing itself. Partial networks healed, new connections forged. Two media conglomerates, operating separate servers, suddenly found their data aggregated through a virtual network constructed between their sealed archives. Mobile devices and wireless networks were broadcasting, satellites transmitting, all forming, breaking, and reforming into new links with every millisecond. It was as if every piece of technology on the net were suddenly animate and screaming. NODA was si
lent, the wrenching tidal wave of data gone, but the aftershocks sent waves of their own, bouncing from point to point, without reason, rhyme, or end.

  And then there was silence.

  The entire network went dormant. Forscythe called up the logs, but they were gone. He called up the records, but they were garbled. It was as if the storm had never existed. From the wings, the Watch Officer waited for the analysts report, but Forscythe only repeated, “Spooky.”

  Inside the otherworld, the gestalt grew smaller, now simply user and mask, still entwined, but disparate.

  They landed in a metal warren. Abandoned hallways and passages wormed for miles through the deep dark, lit only by the flickering dim glowpanels. The air reeked of ionization and grease and dust, somewhere between the pharaoh's tomb and a space station. The only sound was a slight wind, and the distant murmur of fans. They stood alone in the silent road, and the echoes of some lost purpose.

  It was the South Beltway that Firenze knew. It was spinning abstract geometry and electrical currents the Lauren remembered. It was a dark and dry corridor under the sands of the Californian desert, that neither knew, but both now understood.

  The thrum of the fans was a heartbeat. Pulsing, pounding, it filled them, drowned them, buried them, until they fell down to the deck-plates and writhed, thoughts crushed under the deluge of static thrumming. The pounding drove the gestalt apart, split user from mask, intent from execution. Firenze reached out, grabbed Lauren. She pulled back at him, but the pounding – the pounding!

  They spun, the corridors rolling past as light filled the room. It lives. It lives. It lives. Thud. Thud. Thud. One. One. One. The numbers, the always complete scale of nothing to everything, filled to the brim, pounded away everything lesser, everything other.