by Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep- The Best New Science Fiction from Sweden (retail) (epub)
A thick layer of dust covers the furniture. When I push the door open, the top layer is disturbed and now hovers in the air. Nobody's been here for a very long time.
It's like a scene from my past. At least a past it feels I have lived. A simpler past where things weren't so complicated.
Torn blinds let in the light from the blinking commercial signs and passing cars from the outside. Long shadows wander across the furnishings, like fingers searching for something. The window doesn't do much to shut out the noise of the city outside.
The first thing that catches my eye is an antique desk. Lacquered wood. Like the one I used to have, when I had an office. On the desk is an old keyboard, a mouse and a 15" monitor. A chair lies toppled on the floor. On the wall behind the desk are several book cases. All empty of books, thank God. On the floor below are several computers, unplugged and stacked on top of each other. The walls are covered in velvet wallpaper, with inlaid gold patterns. The years haven't been kind to it and now all they do is add to the sad feeling of something lost.
I lower my eyes to the floor to get a better look at what the door got caught on. Imagine my surprise (I wasn't really surprised) when I saw a body there. Or what remained of it. A suit draped around a skeleton. A million holes in the clothes where I suspect the letters either left his body or entered it.
I enter the room, careful not to step on the body. Look under the desk, find the computer, and get what I'm here for. I wrap the hard drive in a plastic bag and put it in my breast pocket.
Then I leave.
-click-
-click-
See, this is where things started to get a bit weird. Even weirder than they usually do in the Event Sector. When I was in the room, I thought I saw the lights from cars outside through the window. And the office reminded me of my old one.
The thing is, people haven't been driving around in cars since the Event. I've never even had an office. And I most certainly don't have a simple, uncomplicated past. Also, I have never smoked. You can't even get cigarettes these days.
And why the hell would I go into the Event Sector just because a woman smiled at me? I feel like I'm being played. And I wonder what the Event Sector is doing to my brain.
-click-
-click-
Back at the Architect's building I don't have much time to think. I walk down two flights of stairs before I run into four visitors. One of them is the fedora-wearing, sword-wielding astronaut I ran into previously. I never saw the other three before.
I curse myself. Like a soon to be dead amateur, I didn't think about my walking pattern. Too rhythmical. I stop. I breathe slowly, but not too slowly and not in sync with my heart. I put my trust in the anti-beat-machine.
Which chooses that exact moment to fail.
So then I run. The visitors follow, spouting weirdly poetic but completely incomprehensible techno-jargon. They might not look fast, but if they've got your scent, your beat, they're hell to get rid of. And if one of them finds you, others won't be far away. They're ants and we're the honey.
I run down the stairs, out into the street. It looks different now. There are trees here. Exploded out of the asphalt. Impossibly tall oak trees that stretch up toward the skies. And I swear I see some kind of vehicles flying above them. It's like I'm on a bad trip. I've never seen the Event Sector behave like this before. I wish I was back in the bar, nursing a whiskey. But instead I run. Every time I put my right foot to the ground, the wound explodes in pain. I grit my teeth, internalize it. No time for pain. I just have to get away.
And I do. I hide in the basement of an empty office building. And that brings me to when I started this recording. Give or take a minute or two.
The Event Sector is always weird. That's why sane people stay out of it. The rest of our city has more or less stabilized. The Event Sector is always in flux. But not like this. Buildings move around, but never when you're looking. I keep the map updated for that. The visitors prowl the streets. I keep my eyes open for that. But whatever happens in the Event Sector, it doesn't change the fact that it's a dead place. Nothing happens unless it's happened before. It's all echoes of the past, of the Event. The world has moved on and left it here. What I've seen today is different. I've seen and heard new things. Like the Event Sector suddenly grew an imagination.
I can smell the Event Sector around me, stronger than ever before. My skin crackles with electricity. I've run for what feels like days through dark alleyways and empty basements. Probably in circles, but I haven't noticed it because the world keeps shifting around me. I am totally lost.
I leave the basement. Sneak up the stairs, past the street level, a couple of floors up. Just until I get a better view of my surroundings. Some time during my walk up the stairs, the building shifts and I'm suddenly much higher up. Hundreds of yards above the ground. It happens without so much as a sound. There's a door in front of me. I enter an unfurnished room with panorama windows to all sides. Like the building understands me. Like it knows I need to get my bearings. Find a way back.
There's an old bakelite phone on the floor. I pick up the receiver. It's dead. The cord isn't plugged in. I look. There are no outlets.
The city has changed. This high up I should be able to see the Hole, and beyond that the rest of the city. I can't recognize a single building.
There is a park just a few blocks away. The trees there look hundreds of years old. Magnificent oaks. The ones I ran past when they were chasing me. The buildings around me make no sense. It's as if every architect in the city got free rein to do whatever they pleased. I see every architectural style I knew existed, and several more that I don't know the names of. On the streets I see real people moving around, but they phase in and out of existence, like they're not actually there. Like they're manifestations of somebody's dream. The buildings in the far away distance are behaving the same way. Can't really decide if they're supposed to be there or not.
I don't know which way is north. I don't know the way back to the city. I pick up the hard drive from my pocket, look at it briefly, then put it back. Guess she won't be getting that any time soon. I pat my breast pocket for cigarettes, then remember I don't smoke and I never have.
The Event Sector has made me forget. I know I have lost days before, several times. Maybe this is what it feels like when you actually live the days it makes you forget? Maybe I'll wake up somewhere soon and not remember a thing about all of this.
Then, the phone rings. It's still not plugged in. It rings anyway. I answer it.
"Are you there?" It's my client's voice. Soft like velvet.
"Yeah?"
"Good. Did you find it?"
"Yes. How did you find me?"
"I'll tell you later. Don't lose the drive."
"I'm not about to. Don't know how to get it to you, though. Everything's gone to hell here."
"I'll send help. Wait there. You should listen to your recording. You might find interesting things on it."
She hangs up. And I stand there looking like an idiot with a dead phone in my hand. Not really sure if I actually talked to anyone, or if my mind is playing tricks on me. Wondering if this is something that always happens before the Event Sector wipes my memory.
I pick up the tape recorder. The red record button is pushed down. It's been taping things all along. I press stop and rewind. Sit down on the floor next to the bakelite phone and I listen, expecting to hear the muffled sounds of myself running for my life, but not being very surprised to find out that it's been recording something else completely.
At first there's nothing on the tape at all, nothing I can make any sense of. Then I hear sounds, and they gradually become clearer until I can hear everything. Voices. Two people talking. About something I don't understand.
"They're all in the system now. Every single work of fiction in the library." It's a young man's voice, or maybe a boy's. A bit squeaky. He is happy.
"And we have access to it all?" Another voice. Another man. Slightly older.
"Yes."
"Good." The older one is happy too.
"The engine is processing the texts. It's going to take a while."
"How long?"
"Ages. I've set it up to continuously dump grammars and genre files in the work directory. We should have enough to start experimenting with real data tonight. For the full data set, I have no idea. We're going to have to ask for money for more servers."
"Let's go for lunch and talk about it."
"This is amazing. Have you read it yet?"
"No, not yet. Tell me about it."
"I set it to use the noir archives. It spit out parts of a full novel overnight."
"Comprehensible?"
"In parts. It's still very rough. And there is no ending. But listen to this: I walked into the bar. She was already sitting at a table, a forgotten cigarette lodged between her fingers, her eyes on some unknown point in the background. Then she looked at me and I knew right then that she would get me into more trouble than I could ask for."
A laugh. Two laughs. Both of them laughing.
"That's pretty good. How much of it are straight quotes from the original texts?"
"Nothing as far as I can tell. I told you it's amazing. The AI's writing a new story, based on a genre analysis and a set of archetypes, using our grammars and our rules."
"Do you have a print-out? I want to read this myself."
The older man reads aloud from a text:
"She was beautiful. I was drawn to her. I didn't want to get involved, but her power over me was strong. She told me about her husband. She showed me the bruises and the scars. I couldn't walk away then, even though I knew I was setting myself up for a world of hurt.
I knew of him, of course. Everybody did. A construction tycoon, happy to grease the pockets of any hungry politician if it helped him achieve what he wanted.
She wanted out. But he had a hold on her. A document. Of what she never told me. All she needed was for me to get it for her. I was happy to oblige."
"This is awesome!"
"Yes, it is."
"I want to know how it ends!"
"So do I. But something went wrong with the generation. It ran out of buffer space and quit after a hundred and fifty pages."
"Really? A hundred and fifty pages?"
"I know, I know. I'm looking into it."
"I found something weird in the logs today." It's the younger man's voice. Very excited. Somewhat annoyed. "There's a bug in the code, or something else is going on."
"Of course there's a bug." The older voice. Is he maybe the younger man's teacher? "There are over two hundred thousand lines in the code base. There are bound to be bugs."
Silence. The scraping of chairs across the floor. A couple of beeps and clicks. The younger man speaks again: "Still, it's interesting. The program ran for two hours last night."
"I didn't start it. Did you?"
"No. I didn't."
"Has someone learned our password?"
"Maybe. I don't think so."
"So, do you recognize any of this?"
"Of what?"
"As we wandered across the open fields outside the magnificent city of golden Akka Beron, watching the starry night skies for any signs of the Dark One's flying minions, a traveler approached us. A human woman, of high born stature.
'Step aside, you traveler of the night and let us pass for we are on a sacred mission to find the silver flower of immortality,' said Trivell, the priest.
'I know,' said the woman, 'for it was I who sent my servant to you with the clues you needed to find your way to this city. I have more news for you now. The flower grows seven lengths down in a cave, seven leagues to the east, guarded by hidden traps and fiendish constructions, all created by the Architect, one of the Dark One's most powerful generals.'
I looked at her. Her eyes were more beautiful than any I'd ever seen. 'Worry not, fair lady,' I said. 'I am the Seeker. I find things. All the time.'
'Still, you should keep a map, for the ground will shift around you, and the Architect will do his best to throw you off the scent.'
As I looked into her eyes, I realized that there was no place I wouldn't go for her, such was her power over me.
'Aye, I will heed your advice,' I said and quickly looked away, for if I hadn't I surely never would have been able to."
"What is that?"
"It's the latest generated batch of fantasy fiction. The program spit it out this morning. Has been running all night. Seems like it got caught in a recursive loop of some kind and somehow started sampling data from the noir archives. The man and woman archetypes. Pretty sure they're not part of the fantasy core data set."
"Again? How is that possible?"
"I honestly don't know. I've checked and I've checked again. The program shouldn't even know about any data that weren't specifically passed to it during setup."
"And yet it does. And it keeps telling the same story over and over. I guess it never got to the end this time either?"
"No, it didn't. And there is another thing."
"What?"
"I turned all the machines off before I left last night. All of them."
"So somebody was here and turned them on again?"
"Not according to the logs."
"So you're telling me it's doing it by itself?"
"I guess I am."
"It's not working. This is seriously beginning to creep me out. And every night it uploads new versions of itself to the cloud servers, faster than we take them down. It keeps accessing the genre files and grammars, no matter what I do to stop it. And it's begun creating new ones on its own. Just throwing arrays of what looks like random data into new files."
"What are they? The files, I mean."
"I don't understand yet, but they look like mad mashups of different genres. And it's not just data either. There are self-replicating and self-executing binaries hidden within. It's not only generating stories now. It's generating itself. Perpetuating the algorithm."
"Jesus Christ. But why is it doing it?"
"Maybe to figure out a way to tell the last part of the story?"
"Maybe. What do you want to do next?"
"I'm thinking of deleting the AI process completely. Disconnecting it from the main flow obviously hasn't worked. Disregarding the new files, the size of our main executable has grown over a hundred times the original size. And neither you nor I wrote that code. This just since February. It's writing itself. God knows what'll happen when it's finished."
"But if we shut it down we can't study it."
"I know. But what can we do? The AI is going insane."
"Okay, this is bad. I just got a call from our colleagues in Stockholm."
"And?"
"Every machine on their university network is spewing out 250-page novels. Daily."
"Without end scenes?"
"Yeah. This thing is spreading."
"Oh God. I didn't set out to write a fucking virus! My career is over."
"For a virus, it's not that bad. All it does is reserve the majority of a computer's CPU time."
"And fills your hard drive with crappy novels."
"It's getting better over time. It's learning. I actually think they're half decent now."
"So what are the Swedish academics trying to do about it?"
"They're talking about some kind of counter-virus. Something that'll modify the content as it gets written, trying to pinpoint the executable parts in the data and delete them. Basically sabotaging the AI's environment."
"This is just getting better and better, isn't it?"
That's the last one. Now the tape just hisses and clicks. No more voices. I wonder who they are. Or were?
I feel strange. Like a kid who's eavesdropped on something he's too young to understand. They were talking about me. And my client. I'm sure of that. The scenes they read out loud, I can remember them. But they weren't exactly like that. They were always slightly different.
The magnificent
golden city of Akka Beron ... I haven't been there. But I have walked by the old Akka Beron Casino. Numerous times. Faux Egyptian. Cheap gold colors over white plaster. Until it disappeared in a shift. And I remember the Architect. Hell, the building I went to on this jaunt into the Event Sector was built by the Architect.
I'm being played. I just don't understand how yet.
As I sit there, contemplating exactly when my life became so complicated, she walks through the door. Wearing the same dress she wore at the bar. At first, I don't believe my eyes, thinking that this is just some new way the visitors have found to mess with me. But then she says "hi," and I know when I hear the voice, that this is her. What the hell is she doing here?
"Why are you here? It's not safe," I say.
She moves over to the window. Looks out.
"It's okay. I have help. We can't stay long. We should start moving, back to the city, before it all shifts again. The next shift could be the reset for all we know."
She looks at me. She's worried.
"Do you have the drive?"
I nod.
"And the tape recorder? You can't lose that, whatever you do."
I nod again. Pat my pocket. "It's here."
She starts breathing again. "It's vital. Don't lose it. Come."
She opens the door. Stops momentarily and checks her anti-beat-machine. "Is yours working?" she asks. I nod for a third time. It's click-click-clicking. "Okay. Let's go."
She takes me down several flights of stairs. We watch for visitors, but they are not around. We get down to street level. Go out in the streets. We watch the skies. They're empty. There's no one here but us.