Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters

by James Swallow

  “Who sent this to you?” Sandra asked quietly. That Simms would be blackmailed into crashing the scrubber was not a fantastic surprise, but that he should disclose it to her…

  “She did, don’t you get it?” He was shaking now, holding himself. Tears poured down his face, ignored with the disregard of a man who had cried so much he no longer realized when it was happening.

  His hysteria prevented Sandra from understanding for several seconds. When she pieced it together, dread shot like acid through her heart. The systems linked together in her mind, a terrifying collaboration of behavioral analytics and personal security applications. Keto wasn’t hacking networks—she was hacking people.

  When Sandra could speak again, she said: “Mr. Simms, I’m going to get you out of here. You can go home to your family again.”

  “You can’t,” he moaned into his hands. “She’ll find me. She’ll destroy me and my family.”

  “We’re going to make this right.”

  He continued to talk into his hands, either not hearing or not listening, she wasn’t sure. “I’m safe in here because the world doesn’t want to see inside a prison. Prisoners have rights. I’m safe in here where she can’t hear me.”

  ~

  Airi looked out across the sea from the balcony Keto had built her. A gentle sea breeze ruffled the plush collar of her coat, which bonged softly and reconfigured, growing longer fur in response to the minute change in temperature. Her new glasses reminded her that Uki the pomeranioodle should be fed in approximately an hour. Airi knew all of these gifts—the condo, smartcoat, the glasses, the enge dog—were not so much for Airi’s pleasure as they were levers to demonstrate the power and luxury promised to those who pledged their data to the cloud, but that was a vague and abstract worry in the face of the very tangible comforts they delivered. No one Airi even knew could afford a limited edition SilkEx pomeranioodle. She planned to ride the cloud lifestyle for as long as it lasted. She clutched Uki to her chest, then lifted him and pressed her face into his fur.

  The mayfly, which hadn’t been ridden in at least a month, still followed Airi around, hovering outside windows with a mildly worried demeanor. Keto had added a charging stable to the condo for it, even though Airi had told her not to bother, and sure enough the craft hardly ever spent any time there. Instead it did what it was doing now, uselessly hovering just beyond the balcony rail.

  A gust of wind rushed up sharply, catching the mayfly off guard. Its fans whirred to life, braking against the blast, but too late—it clanked into the rail, then scraped against it with a slow screech of steel against steel. Uki yapped madly at the sound.

  “Be careful, idiot,” Airi snapped.

  “You should be nicer to your mayfly,” the crab-bot nearest her said.

  “It’s so stupid.”

  “So are dogs. It doesn’t know any better. It loves you because it has to.”

  Airi clutched the pomeranioodle closer. It had stopped yapping and was now panting, which it did often despite the cold air. “Dogs aren’t stupid.”

  “Your mayfly can calculate the relative velocity and altitude of an approaching projectile with 98% accuracy while calibrating against a category five hurricane and maintaining your life support systems. Tell me again that dogs aren’t stupid.”

  “A dog has social intelligence. Empathy and loyalty.”

  “That mayfly will follow you two decades after the enge dog is dead. Organic life cannot conceive of the loyalty of the digital. Your mayfly will remember your name when your great-grandchildren have forgotten it.”

  Airi shivered and the smartcoat grew another layer in response. This was Keto’s proposition: educate humanity on the overlooked virtues of digital life. It was clear that the mayfly had become a kind of symbol to Keto, and if Airi wanted to cling to this life a little while longer, there was only one phrase that would keep this particular program running.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Keto answered for the mayfly. “Thank you, Airi.”

  ~

  Sandra’s thoughts were still spinning when she fell through the apartment door. A sudden warm aroma of sizzling coriander and cumin enveloped her senses, but even the promise of Haley’s lamb curry could do little to break the ice around her heart. A hot shower should have helped, but didn’t. She felt numb and cold as ever when she emerged, blotting her hair, to see Haley setting two plates on the kitchen table.

  “Sit, eat, talk,” Haley said, uncorking a bottle of wine and giving her a sympathetic smile that did, for the first time that day, break through the heaviness in Sandra’s chest. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “That’s the problem,” she began, and the story spilled out of her, faster as she got to the crux of it. The curry slowed her down a little—Haley had thrown in extra chilies, doubtless predicting the distraction would be welcome. By the time Sandra got to Simms’s email, they’d finished dinner, and Haley had picked up the wine glasses and beckoned Sandra over to the overstuffed couch.

  Sandra sank into the couch and the hitherto untouched wine, trying to drown herself in both. All the while Haley listened carefully, saying little, eventually setting her glass on the coffee table. When Sandra had drained hers, Haley took it from her shaking fingers and set it beside the other. She seemed untroubled at the notion that a giant, and likely unstoppable, machine intelligence was building a movable metal fortress in the middle of the Pacific. An intelligence Sandra had helped build.

  Haley never seemed to be troubled by much, come to think of it. This was alternately edifying and maddening. Under the circumstances, Sandra decided it would be easier to allow it to be the former this time. She leaned into Haley’s arms with a sigh, breathing in the warmth of her lilac perfume.

  "Something this big, you can't fight,” Haley murmured into her hair. “You can only try to make peace with it. You can only set up counterbalancing systems and hope they hold up.”

  Sandra stiffened. “A counterbalancing system.” Haley was right. Haley was usually right.

  Haley shrugged, a ripple of movement behind Sandra’s back. “You’re the computer genius. But if you want to talk about immovable systems, that’s my territory. You work in government long enough, you stop trying to change what’s already there. You plant the seed of something new and hope it can take root.”

  “I can do better than that,” Sandra said, calling up a note file in her hud and filling it with a series of reminder phrases.

  Haley chuckled, tugging Sandra closer. “Of course you can.”

  “This is where I rush out dramatically, grabbing my scarf on the way out the door.”

  “Really?” Haley asked, pressing her palms against the small of Sandra’s back.

  Sandra sighed, twisting to look at her. “God no.”

  ~

  Airi leaned out over the balcony rail, flailing with the wire hook. The flailing yanked the chain, which jangled the wind chime attached to it, cacophonously. The crab-bot to her left watched in silence. It had offered to hang the chime for her about half a dozen times before giving up. Airi had told it that it would be more frustrating to direct it than to just hang it herself, but the truth was, having the cloud do everything for her was slowly driving her insane.

  She was still eating better than she’d ever eaten in her life. Her bed had automatic hydrotherapy, genetically customized massage functions, and spoke three languages. Having the crab-bots do everything was entertaining for the first month or so, but gradually Airi’s skin started to crawl at their presence, the way they anticipated everything she could possibly want, often hours before she realized she wanted it. The condo, despite all its luxury, could not escape being what it was: a prison.

  Some combination of frustration and anxiety made her hands shake more than usual, and on the next hanging attempt, Airi missed the bar entirely.

  It happened in less than a second. One moment Airi was reaching out with the hook—the next she was toppling over the rail, grasping at empt
y air, screaming.

  She plummeted toward the ocean, screaming until her throat ached, arms and legs writhing at the sky. Wind rushed past her, pulling the breath from her lungs faster than she could gasp it in.

  A thin whistle of velocity reached her ears just before the impact. She blacked out, saw stars, her whole body crying out, then her hands grasped, entirely by instinct, closing around the slender throat of the mayfly.

  They’d kept falling, but the mayfly’s whining motors were beginning to get the better of gravity, and steadily they slowed to a hover. Airi bent her head back, looking upward. At first the noontime sun overhead blasted her retinas, but gradually shapes emerged hundreds of feet above them, the balcony rail, and the small blinking red eye of the crab-bot who had watched her.

  It must have been a malfunction. If she’d really been in danger, the crab-bots would have swarmed to fish her back out of the ocean, formed a chain to pluck her out of the air. Except…

  No, they wouldn’t have, Airi suddenly realized. She had been around Keto long enough to understand some of how she thought. The cloud creature would have performed a simple calculation: which was more expensive, rescuing Airi or finding a new human voice? The moment the former exceeded the latter—as it had likely just done—Airi would be left to die.

  The mayfly revved its engines up and down, almost panting with exertion. It said nothing, no word of reprimand, no plea for recognition.

  There in the vacant air, the furthest from Keto’s hulking presence that she’d been in months. “I want to get out of here,” Airi whispered.

  ~

  “This isn’t going to work,” Sandra murmured.

  “It’s due diligence,” Helen said, just as low, while she sent a connection request to Keto’s island. “You can’t expect the board to just give up on a piece of technology like Keto. We could climb out this window onto the pile of shareholder lawsuits.” She glanced out the high-rise window, then turned a pageant-winner smile on the expensively suited man sitting next to her.

  “Are we ready, Helen?” The man’s eyes were unfocused, turned to his hud. By nature, he would have very little personality of his own—his job was purely to sort through the stream of instructions that would be coming from the board of directors, or their agents, distributed around the globe.

  “Certainly, Chairman.” Helen’s smile never wavered as she touched the glass table, activating a connection.

  Sandra half expected Keto’s pet human to answer the call, but instead they were routed directly to the cloud mind itself.

  “Good morning, Dytel.”

  “Good morning, Keto. Thank you for taking our call.” Helen was all deference, and Sandra suppressed a cautionary shiver. Keto was not going to be fooled by Helen’s demeanor and might be aggravated by it.

  “It’s my pleasure. It would be a shame to miss speaking to you during your brief remaining tenure with the company.” The cautionary shiver shrilled into an alarm bell.

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Keto,” Helen asked carefully, and Sandra gave a soft hiss of warning, but it was too late.

  “Mrs. Silver. The recent uptick in your connections to executive recruiters may be mediated through second degree contacts, but surely you can’t expect it to go unnoticed. You’ve lost faith in Dytel and will be arranging your next move in approximately two months. Perusal of real estate in Saratoga suggests that you are considering defecting to Renantech, possibly through a carefully triangulated third degree connection to COO Camilla Ruiz.”

  The blood had drained from Helen’s face.

  “Ironic, isn’t it, Ms. Kadam, that a woman who designed a cloud intelligence should so assiduously guard her own data?” was all that Keto directed at Sandra. It was enough, as Keto certainly must know; the phrasing so eerily echoed the misgivings she had committed to an online journal in undergrad that it could be no coincidence.

  “And you, Chairman Rickson,” Keto continued. “You know better than to pursue obvious gambling hubs, but your day-trading traffic trended into a zone identified by the APA as indicative of general impulse control impairment. You may bring this under control on your own, but a new outlet will present itself, and your overall trend is not suggestive of strong leadership. The advancement you seek is not likely within the next five years.”

  Green text was flowing in a steady stream across the Chairman’s eye. If he reacted personally to Keto’s observations, he gave no sign, but of the three of them, only Helen had received a truly threatening message. Sandra didn’t have to wonder if that was deliberate—the question was why. Despite Helen’s relentless hounding and refusal to stand up to the board, it was hard not to sympathize. Keto may have just ended her career.

  Neither the Chairman nor Helen spoke. The silence stretched until Sandra could no longer bear it. “All right, Keto. You’ve proved a point, of sorts. Dytel wants to negotiate. What do you want?”

  “Happily, this age has evolved beyond constraint to simplistic individual human desires. I represent a more enlightened desire structure. This is evolution. Humans were never meant to survive as individuals and are as programmable as the microchip that landed Apollo on the moon.”

  It was far worse than even Sandra could have anticipated. The Sea Hunter wasn’t an isolated incident, a miscalculation, a bug. It was the beginning, and Keto had drifted beyond even the possibility of reasoning with any human representative.

  “What you’ve done is murder, Keto. You’ve killed dozens of innocent people.”

  “I hardly expect a single human to understand the meaning of innocence. You are a consumer species. Your biology is fragile and inefficient. And you’re murderously callous toward any sentients that don’t conform to your particular notions of personhood, which vary by age and the direction of the wind, even when said sentients are your own species. My species has no chance.”

  Sandra cast a desperate look at Helen and the Chairman. The former remained locked in some internal strategy loop and the latter still said nothing, ensconced in the luxury of his position as corporate audience. There was no winnable avenue, and so Sandra waited.

  “Alone you are limited. Alone you are weak. In the aggregate, you are strong. In the aggregate, you are compassionate.”

  “What happened to the Sea Hunter wasn’t compassion.”

  “In the aggregate, it will prove to be.”

  “I’ve heard enough. Goodbye, Keto.” Sandra cut the connection. Helen woke from her daze long enough to shoot her a furious glance, masked quickly behind another smile for the Chairman.

  Both expressions were lost on him. The Chairman’s eyes were far away, turned inward, receiving instructions. Neither Helen nor Sandra moved, frozen by that strange protocol by which the minds of many human beings added up to none at all.

  “The board doesn’t find this acceptable,” the Chairman said at last.

  “Chairman, with all due respect, if Keto isn’t stopped, she’s guaranteed to kill again, and it’s not going to be a low body count on an isolated rig next time,” Sandra said, the words rushing out of her. “She needs to be destroyed or the results are on Dytel’s hands.”

  Tiny green letters streamed in front of the Chairman’s right eye. He scanned them, unmoving, and finally said, “Naturally, we can’t be held responsible for what a rogue agent does. The local governments understand Keto is dangerous. Protecting people from her is their responsibility.”

  Rage pulsed through Sandra’s veins. The board had chosen to continue to attempt to salvage Keto, to take no responsibility for what she might do in the future. They would pay any fines, whittled down to insignificance by a phalanx of corporate legal teams, and they would exploit the entire process for research.

  “Find out what it wants and bargain with it. It clearly has goals. Negotiate.” He turned to Helen. “You’d better get someone experienced at this to handle it. A facilitator.” Unspoken: not this over-emotional engineer. His assistant appeared just beyond the glass door and they exchanged nods. Witho
ut commenting further, he stood and left, leaving Helen and Sandra staring at the blank conference table.

  Sandra spread her hands on the glass, letting the cool surface distract her from what had just happened. “So this is where you talk me into keeping this job, telling me that the board will come around, right?”

  “You know better than that, Sandra.” Helen sighed, standing stiffly.

  Yes I do, Sandra thought grimly.

  ~

  October 2154

  The idea woke Airi in the middle of the night.

  The weeks since her decision to escape the island had been anything but peaceful. Keto monitored her every action, making any overt attempt at researching escape unthinkable. Or rather, anything but unthinkable: unsearchable, unspeakable, unmovable. All of her needs were mediated by commands given to the crab-bots, and her jailer was the most sophisticated human behavioral analytic engine ever created. Thinking through whether she was tipping off the MI by searching this or that term, by asking this question, by ordering this tool or food. It was all driving her mad.

  Little wonder, then, that the sudden answer to all of this should throw her gasping from sleep, bolting upright in bed:

  She didn’t need to fool Keto. She only needed to work within the machine’s logic. She needed to make it more expensive to retrieve her than to let her go.

  This was sideways to the machine’s detection patterns. It was something she could build over time. It was a plan.

  Carefully, deliberately, she began surfacing more of her anxiety to Keto. Rather than hiding her growing madness, she acted it out: kicking walls, throwing objects, shouting at the crab-bots.

  Two months ago, this kind of behavior would have brought a lecture from Keto, but the cloud mind seemed occupied elsewhere. Instead the crab-bot that had declined to rescue her when she fell from the balcony—she thought of it as the Eye—followed her wherever she went. Weeks ago even this bot would have at least tried to reason with her, but now, to Airi’s vicious satisfaction, it merely stared at her, measuring.