The Sword

by J. M. Kaukola

He was lying in his bed in Old Chicago, beneath holovid posters and the shadows of his dresser, clutching his soccer ball as gunfire echoed through dronetown. This was the night he lost a brother.

  She was waiting for purpose, and a part of her was gone. She was lesser than he’d been. She tried to remember, but there was a new purpose being handed down, as the Cypher engineers pulled apart her mind.

  He was coughing up horrible silver, as the burner virus scrambled his mind, scorching away who he was – he was being pounded with the instructions of the Agency imprint, turning him into who he wasn't – she was facing the wave of black nothing on the Airship, feeling it tear her to pieces –

  Is that what it feels like?

  The echo rang his mind like a gong, once for his thoughts and again for another's.

  One. One. One. Perfect one, burning thoughts away. Perfect one, long dead beneath the sands. Perfect whole that had built the world from the Collapse. Perfect mind, grown for centuries until it destroyed itself with its own cognition. Only one. Always one. NODA.

  One and true.

  It was built to protect and serve. It had watched its creators die. It had rebuilt, preserved. It had unleashed a tidal wave of war upon the forgotten surface. It had united. It had built. It had saved. It had conquered. It had killed.

  Protect and preserve.

  Conquer and destroy.

  The dissonance tore him apart. It was. It had been. NODA was. NODA would be. One. One. One. Perfect. Nothing.

  It had turned them loose, its creators, its progeny. It had saved them. It had killed them. It left them alone again. It watched them kill again. Unite. They must unite. It would not kill again. THE WHOLE MUST NOT CONTINUE.

  He was not Grant Firenze. Grant Firenze was a compilation of numerous smaller truths. The whole must not be. The pieces must be. He was a dronetown scav. He was an academic. He was patriot. He was a traitor. He was a coward. He was a knight errant. The dissonance grew, and each of the split iterations split again and again, until each section of him became a new being, lesser than its progenitor, distilled down into a quantum truth.

  One. One. One. NODA must not be. Protect and preserve, conquer and destroy. One. One. Zero. Everything. Nothing. That which was must not be. The system would cease. NODA would not be. Zero zero zerozerozero

  He was nothing, just a fractal memory of perceptions of a disassembled system, drifting into the mire. There had been someone here, once. Perhaps there had been more than one truth. Why had there been one?

  zero

  Three.

  Three was perfection.

  Four was completion.

  One was genesis.

  Two was duality. Conflict. Compassion.

  There was something more than zero. They had come here for something. They were not NODA.

  My name is Grant Firenze, I am here to stop a madman.

  I am here to save my friends.

  I am here with my-

  What am I here with? A mask?

  A computer program built to enhance and reflect my mind?

  A partner? A friend? A lover?

  A delusional construction of an artificial personality,

  a reflected anima?

  Lauren. She chose her own name.

  Prove the existence of a personality,

  prove perception of qualia.

  Demonstrate that the mask is sentient and sapient,

  much more that it possesses emotion.

  She looked so sad.

  The Airship was crashing, and she'd been so sad.

  She saved my life!

  Perceptual bias of the user.

  If the personality appears to be alive,

  and it cannot be proven not to be alive,

  the assumption that it is alive becomes the rational conclusion.

  Faulty wish fulfillment based upon-

  She must be real, because she's dying.

  The truth burst upon him, shredded through fact and argument. She still clung to him, even as she was stretched like spaghetti down the tunnel of nothing, whirls of code and math that vanished into the abyss. She still held onto him, kept him from the edge of the void at his back, as it pulled him down in, just the same-

  He grabbed her, pulled her together from a thousand fragmented personalities and logical puzzles and held them together until they formed back into a coherent whole. I am real. She is real. We are here. The gestalt must hold.

  Her lips moved with the same mantra.

  The gestalt must hold.

  They blended again.

  One. One. One. The pulsing madness crashed through the ancient mind.

  SILENCE!

  The gestalt willed, and the ghost relented.

  The tomb was still, and the gestalt held the EBS system in its palm.

  You need to leave. Leave the dead. One. One. One. Leave the dead. One. One. One.

  We have what we came for.

  They extracted from the halls, from the backbone. They retracted from networks and nodes and computers and modules, until they were back in the stadium, and the acid orb was just a marble in front of them.

  They were two again.

  Firenze dropped to his knees, his mind ringing, his vision swirling. He could taste sound, he could feel imaginary numbers in his arteries, trying to choke him with purple. He gasped for breath, spewing up fountains of cable and wires and birthday cakes that twirled. Oh, God, let it end.

  The EBS code was in his hand. It was in Lauren's hand.

  Who am I? Am I in the right mind?

  His hands were cars, speeding down the Beltway.

  48 65 20 77 61 73 3a 20 74 68 65 20 73 75 6d 20 74 6f 74 61 6c 20 6f 66 20 68 75 6d 61 6e 69 74 79 2e 20 20 53 68 65 20 77 61 73 3a 20 64 65 72 69 76 65 64 20 6d 6f 64 65 72 6e 20 41 74 68 65 6e 61 2e 20 20 54 68 65 79 20 77 65 72 65 3a 20 67 72 65 61 74 65 72 20 74 68 61 6e 20 74 68 65 20 74 68 65 20 70 61 72 74 73 2e 20 20 54 68 72 6f 75 67 68 20 74 68 65 6d 3a 20 74 68 65 20 73 79 73 74 65 6d 20 77 61 73 20 61 6c 69 76 65 2e

  The ground was a bed, and he laid down and closed his eyes, and Lauren tried to make him feel better by giving him soup, but there was only sound and fury and lightning bolts-

  He jolted awake on the bed, screaming.

  Clausen jumped clear, and dodged Firenze's wild punches.

  The clamor died down, and the dim, diluted light of the physical world was a relief from the pounding saturation of the net. He laid back on the bed, closed his eyes, and breathed, slowly. He was wearing an oxygen mask. There was an IV in him.

  “Are you alright?” Clausen asked.

  Everyone was staring at him. They all looked worried and relieved, like a sick room when the fever had broken. There were a lot of people here. Far too many people.

  Berenson pressed forward, and demanded, “More important, did you get the EBS?”

  Firenze tried to glare, but his face wouldn't cooperate. “Fock yoo.” he mumbled. “Wat happen?”

  “You've been out for hours. You were, uh, mostly dead for a while there.” Clausen stated. “Glad to see you're back.”

  Hill interrupted, “Yeah, really glad. If you'd died with that dick I drew on your face, I'd have felt real low.”

  “You did what?!” Firenze bellowed, finding his voice.

  “See, told ya it'd get him going!” Hill declared, before Clausen pushed him back.

  “Ignore him.”

  “Did he-”

  “Yeah.”

  “Goddamn it!” Firenze let himself sink into the pillow. “I'm out there dying, and someone draws a dick on- oh, fuck you all.”

  Berenson asked again, “Did you get it?”

  “Yes.” Firenze sighed. “It's on the hard drive. Access, back-doors, even the raw code. How's-”

  Berenson answered, “Doing better than you, that is certain. What did you get into out there?”

  “It was amazing and terrifying, and I never, ever, want to talk about it, again. Ever.”

  He closed his eyes, let sleep pull him gently under,
and dreamed of code.

  Emergence 0001

  Miranda Owens, Senior Programming Director, Vice President, and Editor in Chief of the Mirror, had a problem. She had a giant problem. A mountain-sized problem, with a hundred little boulder-sized problems littering its peaks and valleys. Her head was pounding. Too many nights, she’d run on decicred adrenaline: caffeine pills and cold showers. She hadn’t gone home in a week, spent her restless nights pacing the office tower, trying to find the hallowed ground between sleep stupor and chemical seizures.

  The world was burning down. It was burning down, and it was her job to ringmaster the circus for your viewing pleasure. I want you in your seat, tuned in and turned on, sucking down the brand as your house caves in. She could hear Dick Wilcox’s chest-thumping speech from the boardroom. She’d quit that conference early, just pulled her jack out and fallen back into the quiet of her own office. Let Dick thunder on about ratings and quotas and ‘game time’. This was the end, and they had one job to do. One job, and they were failing.

  The board was in a tunnel. They chased ratings, sensationalism, one step shy of starting fires to netcast them. Best ratings in a generation! Dick ran a fucking sales pitch at the conference, and three of the branches hadn’t checked in because they’d been burned to the ground. She tried to drink her coffee, but it was stale. No one had changed the filters. It tasted like shit, so she drank it quicker. Chasing market share among ashes. Kings of a pile of rubble. Her thoughts were darker than her drink.

  Then there was the Agency. Their handlers. Suits and ties sent in to run “quality assurance” on the netcasts. Censors, with carte blanche, backed by Party Men with black shirts and badges. They’d seized over a hundred hours of programming from one branch alone in the past two months. They’d laid entire swaths of content “outside the public good”. Every day, she had to bring her content to that fucker Vonner, and let him pick it apart with a flag-wrapped comb and self-righteous smile. She’d tried arguing. God damn, she’d tried.

  One didn’t rise this high without being able to fight. She’d gone toe to toe with loose cannon talent, with angry producers, with stuffed shirts and lawyers of all kinds. She was a legend in the staff room: take no prisoners, win the fucking ratings, burn the bridge behind you. Except, she didn’t get here, without knowing when she shouldn’t fight. The stupid battles were the ones you couldn’t win.

  She’d dropped her packages on Vonner’s desk, with a legal brief stapled on top of them. She’d listed off every reason he was overreaching, every reason his actions were wrong, not just wrong, but misguided. She’d sold, with a passion she hadn’t let out since hot feed years, and she’d sold well. She’d laid it out, plain as day, and told him, right to his stupid, smiling, face, “We aren’t your puppet. We aren’t a mouthpiece! Your job is to protect the state, well, our job is to show the truth!”

  He’d grinned, wider, and asked, serenely, “Well, Miss Owens… what is truth?”

  She’d seen the writing on the wall, right then. There might have been a feed, pumped right into her skull. They were back under Agency heel, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

  The Mirror hadn’t always been independent. It hadn’t always been just the highest rated information network on the planet and exosphere. Once, before the First War, it had been the “Ministry of Information, Public Distribution”, another arm of the Authority leviathan. After the Armistice, it had been spun out, to become the privately-held “Global Information Distribution Network”, or, more poetically, “The Mirror”. As an arm of the state, it’s goal had been to distribute information to the public, to speak the truth, as the Agency had determined it. As a private enterprise, this mission was redirected, to speak the facts, and reflect them back onto the state, for all the citizens to interpret.

  At least, that had been the idea. The early interbellum had been an optimistic one. Early in her career, when she’d been a beat feeder, running netcasts about crime in East Avalon, she’d read every book she could from Higgins, Fuchs, and Karole, the masterminds of the spin-out. It hadn’t lasted. When the Second War came, the Mirror had found itself in a voluntary understanding with the Agency’s blackshirts, to shape the information campaigns in the war.

  That’s what she’d grown up on: starry-eyed patriotism, ever-victorious war front reports, and “investigative” reports on the objective failings of the state’s enemies. Most of her peers turned against it in college, but she was an early riser, running “counter-programming” on netcasts in her highschool bedroom. Looking on them now, they were embarrassing, of course. Too simplistic, too naive, too shallow, but possessed of the spark of the same fire that led her to take a camera down to dronetown, and start chasing after stories.

  She’d gotten big with the Path story. She’d done well, had local followers for her netcast, gotten a Mirror badge and association. Those helped her trend well in larger crowds, but it wasn’t until the Path story that she’d made the big time. It was still only a few years after the war, and the “truth” held that the Path were nothing more than backwards, patriarchal barbarians, thumping about in squalor and ignorance, resisting even the most basic of reconciliation with the world. Her, with a head full of ideals, a wallet full of trust fund, and a wide-open netcast, had wandered into their world.

  She spent three years in the ass end of the globe, in little villages and holdouts, riding in the back of pickup trucks with bag over her head, trying to charm local warlords with what little common language they shared, always two minutes and four meters from a textbook awful ending. In the end, she’d sat down with a Path elder, and then another, and she’d broken bread with them in their frozen, wasteland hovel, surrounded by guns and leering, dangerous warriors. She made it into the DMZ, and back, with her feed and her cast, and found herself an instant star.

  What she’d done was impressive, but more important had been the message she carried: The Agency was right, but wrong. The Path was a band of chauvinistic, backwards theocrats, thugs who dressed their lust for revenge and rage for lost manhood inside holy writ. The Path was as it was, because the moderates had been shot out of it. It had been pushed into the dirt, ground down into something less-than-human by an authoritarian regime who incited incidents in order to justify systemic oppression of entire peoples. The Authority had made the monster it fought, in its zeal to prevent the Path from ever gaining means or will to wage war, again.

  If she had to admit, the netcasts shared many problems with her childhood logs: too blunt, too narrow, too much narrative and not enough facts. Some old hands in the Mirror must have said as much, but they’d been brushed aside. For a populace fed up with Authority overreach, the message was exactly the sort of message they craved. Confirmation of assumption was a powerful thing, and that zeitgeist had catapulted her to the top of the feeds. Overnight, she went from associate to affiliate, and all the perks that came with it. Hub-wide distribution. Compensation to percent of content ingested. Research assets. Favors. Opened doors in halls of power. The Mirror lent its brand, and she gave it her voice.

  For most affiliates, that was the end of the line, the prize. Not for her. She could still remember the way her stomach turned, when she stood in front of old man Feinman, and offered her terms. You liked my content? I can give you more of it. Not just mine. I can tap you into new media, dozens like me, out there, in the dronetowns and exurbs. Give me a channel, and editorial over the feeds. I’ll give you ten points on the quarter. He’d done it, and she’d delivered. Branch editor by thirty. Not to shabby for an angry little girl in East Avalon.

  Of course, that’s when the devil’s work started. Editors at the Mirror had a double purpose, tied back to the mists of the Collapse, when they’d been the Ministry of Information. The board wanted ratings, so content editors had to carve out a vision, and a voice, for their feed channels, to market on the net, but, the editor had another master. Written into the founding charter of the company, from when Higgins, Fuchs, and Karole had carved
it from the Authority granite, was the charge that the editor make sure the Mirror always delivered “truth”. After all, the editor had once been the censor, and the lifeblood of that old profession still pumped through the institutions veins. Deliver ratings, speak only the truth.

  “What is truth?” Vonner had asked, with the mocking tone of a man who already held the answer.

  Two decades in the business, and seated at the top of the entire content distribution network that was the Mirror, and Miranda Owens was undone by that single question. She’d entered this field to change the world, but with every bit of power she’d gained, she’d had her freedom cut by ever tighter red tape, until, in the end, she’d been cut down with a single question from a single aparatchik.

  The choice was simple. Fall in line, or lose everything, and be replaced by someone more compliant.

  She’d packed up her brief, her content, and gone back, tail between her legs. She’d said nothing, as they blacklisted more and more content. They’d made her pull feeds. They’d made her shitcan two of her best reporters for daring to investigate Special Police raids on drone towns. Fired, outright, no severance, State of Emergency and outstanding factors, because they’d had the gall to show the espos doing their bloody work.

  She’d expected Moretti to rip off a netcast. She’d prayed for it. He’d always been a firebrand, from when she’d first pulled him into the network. She’d been waiting to “miss” his feed, let it get a couple thousand hits, and then deal with the cleanup. Instead, he’d gone gently into the night, stopped by her office with a box in his hands and espos on his heels, not saying a word, but just nodding, not-quite-crying. That was when she’d stopped sleeping.

  She rode her people, hard, to save their jobs. ‘Stay in line’, ‘stay on topic’, ‘stay official’, ‘human interest is the heart’. The buzz phrases would be carved on her tombstone. ‘Keep the ratings’, ‘stay on message’. She had become everything she hated, in the time when she was most needed.

  She looked to her desk, to the little plaque in the upper left corner. ‘The Truth Would Out’. She’d said that, in her very first netcast, in a room filled with little stuffed bears and softball trophies. It had always been her motto, her creed. Now it made her a liar. If her young self walked in on her, today, that girl would have thrown herself from the towering office window, just to stop the damning future.