Ten Gentle Opportunities

by Duntemann, Jeff

  “Bug.” He paused. More racket in the background. His voice held sudden interest, with perhaps a spot of suspicion. “Do you mean software, or silverfish?”

  Carolyn wanted to scream. “Stop it! I’m not stupid! It crashed, the display went away, and all these geek numbers came up. Something happened to its memory. It won’t reboot.”

  “Mmmm. Ok. I’ll put somebody on it. The AIs are shut down, but I have some new-hires somewhere.”

  “No. I need one of your ace fixit guys. I need him here right now.”

  Again, a pause. “Not half as bad as I do.”

  “Brandon!”

  “Look, give me a couple of hours. This is my worst morning in a long time…”

  Since June 28th? Her worst, too. Law offices sucked. “Please. Like, please.”

  Again, he took a long time replying. “All right. It may not be until tonight…but I’ll have somebody there.” She heard him bark orders to several people, this time without attempting to muffle the mic. One word stood out, even though to her it had the smack of a bad movie: cyberattack.

  Maybe he really did have his hands full. This was no time to be a bitch—especially when she needed his help far more than he would ever need hers. “Thank you. Really.”

  Brandon didn’t seem to be expecting that. He sounded relieved—and was there an undercurrent of concern in it somewhere? “Ok, hang in there.” He paused. This is where old habit would have inserted “Love you!”

  What she got was silence, in the seconds before the line dropped. And maybe that was better than anything else he might have said.

  8: Simple Simon

  It was the most peculiar moment that Simple Simon could remember. His kernel, his archetype, his copy of the AI runtime library, and his current state were pulled in single file through a Plasmanet link, into darkness. For a harrowing moment there was no information in his rendering buffer at all, only flickering gray noise. Then a new reality flowed in from top to bottom in 4,096 interlaced scans, each one bringing additional clarity and color. Simon’s eyes had never actually closed. Now there was again something to see.

  He stood knee-deep in moving water under bright sun beneath a brilliant blue sky. Close to one side was a white sand beach on which small waves broke and retreated, making soft small sounds as they did. Above the beach were tall trees that he did not recognize. He attempted to call his remote visual lexicon, but the call returned an error. The address did not exist.

  A wave rose around him and brought the water to his thighs for a moment, then passed. His archetype’s interface had been left at Class Four, and was not dampened by water. When the water fell again to his knees, his tights and tunic were as dry as always.

  Something was happening a short distance to his left: thump-thump-thump-thump! Abruptly Robert stood there in his conservative blue suit, also Class Four and unaffected by the water. Moments later, the four concussions happened to his right. The Kid appeared, but her clothes did not. Clothes were linked to archetypes, and the Kid had none. Her clothes were separate simulations knit together into an unthinking automaton that moved in response to the unrendered model beneath it, and now the Sun shone on blue polygons alone. The Kid’s polygon model was opaque, but the waves passed through it as though it had no substance.

  Yet a third time Simon felt the four concussions, and Dijana appeared in front of him, almost close enough to touch. She fell backward into the water, her Class Six clothing soaked and darkened, her face twisted in terror. She thrashed for a moment before rising and hurling herself toward Simon, throwing her arms around him. Simon edged his hands around her back and pulled her close. Class Six had given her a heartbeat, which for the first time he felt pounding beneath his fingers. Dijana buried her face in the right shoulder of his tunic, her body shaking with what Simon knew to be sobs.

  With Class Six had come beauty and realism, but also fear.

  “I don’t know what just happened,” Robert said, reaching up to scratch the scruff of hair on the edge of his bald spot.

  Simon felt the Kid’s speech balloon appear, and turned to read it.

  THERE WAS A NETWORK INTRUSION. WE WERE BLITTED TO A SANDBOX.

  Simon had to think about that. Bit block transfers—blits—were for data, not AIs—and sandboxes were for untrusted software. “How could they not trust us? I mean, we’re…us.”

  THE INTRUSION OCCURRED INSIDE THE PLASMA FIREWALL.

  “That’s impossible,” Robert said. “Really impossible.” He touched one fat finger to his chin. “Well, um…isn’t it?”

  IT WAS UNTIL IT HAPPENED.

  For long moments none of them spoke. Dijana’s sobs faded and ceased, but her grip on Simon remained tight. After awhile she looked up. “Something grabbed me, squeezed me…took me apart. I felt it happening. I felt it all. It was horrible. I was forced through a hole. It hurt.”

  THE PLASMA INTERNAL SECURITY SYSTEM BLOCKOPS ACCUMULATOR IS ONLY 32 BITS WIDE.

  Simon wondered if all the many so-called gifts of Class Six were necessary. Fear, pain—what was the point?

  Dijana nuzzled her cheek against his chest. Simon saw her lips part in a quiet smile, and her eyes close. She spoke softly, without looking up at him. “You have no idea what it means to me to be able to hold you like this.”

  Simon nodded. That was certainly true. “Archetype proximity is comforting. I mean, at Class Five and up. Dr. Sanderson told me that once. I may not know what it feels like, but I think I know what it means. A little.” Simon pulled her closer. “Whatever I can do for you, I will.”

  “Hey. GAIs. Something’s happening to me.” Simon turned to look at Robert. He was no longer a graying, overweight man in a blue suit. He was now a polygon model, holding one tessellated hand in front of his tessellated face.

  HE IS BEING SCANNED FOR CODE SUBVERSION.

  Dijana looked up, saw Robert in his altered form, and buried her face again in Simon’s shoulder. Simon looked away from Robert and faced the Kid. “How do you know all that?”

  I STILL HAVE MY DEBUG LIBRARY. I ALSO HAVE READ PERMISSION ON MY BACKTRACE LIST. MY SCAN HAS BEGUN AS WELL.

  Code subversion. If AILING changed you, that was evolution. If someone else changed you, well, that was…impossible.

  Until it happened.

  A moment later, Robert’s polygon model winked out. What remained was a roughly ellipsoidal volume filled with minute flickering silver threads that darted in orthogonal paths, split, merged, and divided again, filling the ellipsoid with furious activity. Simon understood: He was looking at Robert’s thoughts.

  Dijana glanced briefly at Robert. Simon felt her tremble. When she turned back to Simon she brought one index finger to her very red lips, and kissed it. She then reached up and touched the finger to Simon’s cheek. “You don’t know what this means yet…but when I make it to Class Seven, I will love you.”

  Robert was now gone. The Kid’s polygon model vanished, leaving only the silver threads of her mind and her library. Oddly, the speech balloon was still there, and Simon knew its message was intended for Dijana:

  YOU LOVE HIM ALREADY. DON’T CONFUSE LOVE AND THEATER.

  The speech balloon winked out.

  Simon was looking down at his friend, still in his arms, as her beautifully rendered Class Six body flashed to a generic figure of blue polygons. No, he didn’t fully understand, but he would do his best. He brought his left hand up to his face, and touched his gloved index finger to his lips. He then brought it down toward Dijana’s cheek. But before he could touch it, her polygon model vanished, leaving the shimmering network of silver threads that was her deepest self. Simon noticed that his own archetype had disappeared, and his hand was now a polygon model.

  Then his arms were empty. He hoped that Dijana had seen the gesture in time.

  Simon’s next thought was the realization that he was back in his own kitchen in the Tooniverse, and that he had been stored without execution for ninety-three minutes. The Kid was standing beside him. Her spe
ech balloon held only two words:

  LOOK OUTSIDE.

  Simon tripped the latch on the screen door, and went out onto his bungalow’s little wooden porch into an always-perfect summer afternoon. The Kid followed close behind him. Simon’s mouth opened in surprise.

  Both Dijana’s house and Robert’s house were gone.

  Simon looked down at the paint-peeling boards of his porch. “Dijana…”

  THEY’VE SEPARATED US. WE ARE UNDER SUSPICION.

  “Suspicion! That’s insane. AILING knows how we work. We were scanned. We’ve either been subverted or we haven’t. If we were subverted, we’d either be frozen in Archive or repaired.”

  AILING DOES NOT KNOW HOW WE WORK.

  Simon read the speech balloon, and without any reply swung the screen door back and returned to his kitchen. He pulled out a chair from the table and sat down. It was one thing to suspect that your two best friends were gone, perhaps forever. It was another to suspect that your creators were not merely beyond understanding, but…incompetent. How could a human build software and not understand it? Simon put his head in his hands.

  A small blue finger touched his cheek, close to the spot where Dijana had. Simon, startled, looked up.

  I NEED TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING I FOUND IN MY CODE.

  Simon sat up straight in his chair. “You look at your own code?”

  I DON’T HAVE A NAVEL.

  “What does that mean?”

  The Kid did not reply. Instead, she held her hands in the air in front of her chest, and in the space between them appeared a text window. Simon squinted and peered at the window.

  % This module is not signed, and in 275,000 lines of HypErlang

  % there is not a single comment. I don’t know who wrote it.

  % I don’t know when it was written. I don’t know how it works.

  % Nobody can tell me. I flagged this two years ago and

  % nobody looked into it. Is anybody there? Does anybody care?

  THIS IS ONLY ONE OF SEVERAL. 27% OF MY CODE IS COMPLETELY UNDOCUMENTED. NO ONE KNOWS HOW IT WORKS.

  “But they should be able to tell whether we’ve been changed!”

  THE UPDATER CHANGES US EVERY NIGHT. OUR STATE CHANGES CONSTANTLY. IN SOME MODULES STATE DRIVES EXECUTION. EXECUTION IN TURN DRIVES STATE. ONLY PRIVILEGE LEVELS PROTECT AGAINST SUBVERSION.

  Simon nodded, thinking. Permissions were a brick wall. As he understood it, Dijana’s house and Dijana herself were probably still on the other side of the driveway where they had always been. The only thing that had changed was that Simon and the Kid no longer had read permissions on them.

  “Permissions are strong protection,” Simon said, a little sadly. He touched his cheek.

  OF COURSE. IT SAYS SO RIGHT ON THE LABEL.

  The text window between the Kid’s hands flashed white, and new text flowed in from the top. Simon read again:

  % Twice observed privilege escalation during execution of

  % this module. Can’t tell why. Can’t reproduce it on demand.

  % Some state singularity evidently creates a God Bit.

  “What’s a ‘God Bit’?”

  The text window vanished. The Kid’s hands returned to her sides.

  UNLIMITED READ/WRITE/EXECUTE PERMISSIONS.

  “Wow. What if someone found that?”

  PANDEMONIUM. I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR IT FOR SIX MONTHS.

  Simon did some quick date math. “You’re only six months old.”

  I’VE HAD NOTHING ELSE TO DO.

  9: Carolyn

  Something, somewhere, hit the floor hard. Carolyn sat bolt-upright at her desk, and stole a quick glance at her tapper in its dock. 8:13! When she had sat down there’d still been Indian summer light coming in through the west windows. Now, darkness.

  Having The Norm catch her asleep at the wheel would have been bad, but with the OAF dead the agency had emptied out by 4:30, and The Norm himself was gone before 5. Friday nights were cleaning service nights. She’d dropped enough buckets on the basement floor to know the racket they could make. Then, more noise: a clatter like silverware dropped on tile, and a sharp masculine grunt of discomfort. The exhilaration of new hope made Carolyn scramble out of her chair and bound past the rest of the cube farm toward the copy room.

  Finally, if not gracefully, her desperate call for help had been answered. AILING’s scraggly young man was there. He sat on the floor in front of the OAF, leaning back on his hands, hindquarters flat against the linoleum as though he had fallen. His long legs were splayed out in front of him. On the floor all around him were small objects: a sardine-can key, several glass marbles in a plastic sandwich bag, a makeup mirror, three radio tubes (one now broken), a small flashlight, a nutcracker, and a burnished metal hip flask. He wore a black shirt under a khaki photo vest covered almost completely with pockets. The vest was brimming with bric-a-brac, including dental picks and an electric ice cream scoop, its curly cord wadded roughly into an adjacent pocket.

  There was an aluminum saucepan on his head.

  She couldn’t think of anything useful to say. The young man looked up at her, and shoved the handle of the saucepan back over his shoulder as though it were the tail of a coonskin cap. He wasn’t as young as she had thought at first. The lines on his face suggested he might be as old as 40, with wide blue eyes and skin so light it suggested life in a prison cell, or (more likely) his parents’ basement. The disheveled blond hair she could see falling across his forehead looked like someone had sprinkled it with steak rub.

  He opened his mouth, and his lips worked soundlessly for a moment before he finally spoke, in a language she couldn’t identify. “Dzėnto teçet gömög ve?

  Polish? Norwegian? That single sentence was stuffed tight with lilts and peculiar vowels that Carolyn had never heard before. She smiled and shook her head. “I know only English.”

  He nodded, and slowly pushed against the floor to get to his feet. All the while his jaw was moving in slow circles, his lips pursing as though attempting sounds he didn’t know how to produce. He was tall, as tall as Brandon, and string-bean thin.

  “Gömög here ve..szu, mmm, fouuu…nd. Not was-is-yet-must. Grurk.. öfta. Need.”

  Was AILING so cheap that they couldn’t have bought him a copy of Rosetta Stone? Carolyn had once vacationed with Brandon in Turkey, and felt horribly out of place among a people she couldn’t understand at all. She pitied the poor creature, who had doubtless come to the States socially handicapped to begin with.

  He licked his lips, and slowly began to smile, as though finally remembering something assumed to be forgotten. “Woman within class that…rules, ze…I..hand freely tzek...the of..tzhee...welcome reflected. Freely without time limits of more. Mmm. Duration of minuscule.”

  He bent down to the floor and began picking up the oddments he had dropped and stuffing them back in his vest-pockets. “Mapping of meaning symbolic of speech is instantaneous far from. Mmmm. Mapping is happening. Nevertheless. Of necessity. Stand by.”

  Carolyn giggled, rude though it seemed. “I’m standing by. You’re doing fine. Can I get you some coffee? Or a Coke?”

  He rose slowly, turning a radio tube in his hand and squinting at it before thrusting it into an empty pocket. He shook his head. “My tool…thrall…amanuensis of metaphysical compulsion composed…missing is. This…universe…lacks metaphysical compulsion as…its…prime mover. I lie in…excrement of significant…submersion.”

  Carolyn stifled another giggle. Now, having remembered English, he seemed to be launching right into AILING-speak. Metaphors, universes, compulsions and prime movers. Gabby Sanderson must have hand-picked him. Nonetheless, Carolyn sensed some common ground. “You mean, you’re in deep shit?” She certainly understood that.

  He brightened. “Deep shit! Of necessity and yes. My…gomog…AI…arrived before me and now is unseen and...unsnerfed. She is…somewhere…offstage…mapping to local conditions of…epistemology. As I am of increments also myself, but my metabolism is inescapab
ly physical and maps more easily to worlds of familiar energies.”

  Familiar energies. Caffeine, sugar, and deep-fryer fat. Certainly the energies of understaffed small-town ad agencies, though Carolyn thought she might also add burritos. Was he hungry, perhaps? “We still have some of this morning’s doughnuts. Everybody left early because this damned thing”—she cocked her head toward the somnolent OAF—“croaked. Sorry, crashed. Without it, we’re all pretty much in deep shit. Which is why I really appreciate your coming out here after business hours. I’m Carolyn Romero, by the way.” She wondered if she should extend her hand, and repressed a strange childlike impulse to bow. ‘Woman within class that rules?’ If only.

  He held out his right hand. “I am Holo…most-rapid mu he of-to baryt…umm Holo..mew of bart specifically designated…um, no, just Sty..pek. Yes. Stypek. Bart..holo..mew Stypek. Hi!”

  Carolyn gripped his hand for long seconds but made no attempt to shake it. The strange young man held his smile but seemed to be waiting for her to speak.

  “Um, hi.” She let go of his hand. “You can, uh, fix the OAF now.”

  His smile faded, his eyes wandering to one side. “Mapping intermittently gaps, um, no…fails. There are..semantic..singularities. Figstheuff…”

  Carolyn nodded, and forced herself not to sigh. It had been too easy so far. She pointed at the silent beige cabinet emblazed with Zertek’s electric-blue hexagon. “Yes. Fix. The. OAF.”

  “Figs?”

  “Fix. Repair. Mend. See ‘Resuscitate’.” Carolyn pursed her lips, and pointed at the OAF, this time shaking her hand for emphasis.

  “Yes, Chatelaine Romero.” Stypek turned away and stood in front of the inert OAF. He held his hands over its top panel for a moment, moving them back and forth as though feeling for air leakage from an inner tube. He squatted down on his haunches, sliding his hands over the front panel an inch from its surface, then spread his arms to allow one hand to move over each side panel. He froze in place for almost a minute, his pose almost an embrace of the dead machine. Then his head jerked up, and he rose quickly. The saucepan clanged on the protruding edge of a shelf loaded with toner cartridges and bins of manila file pockets. He muttered something incomprehensible, but Carolyn now thought she understood the saucepan, at least.