by Russ Linton
They’d called them cellphones for decades after they stopped actually being phones. Strictly pre-wearable communications devices and definitely around long before her own implants. The Collective had credited this piece of technology as the single most important link in the chain which led to their existence. That and the singularity who was Chroma.
M@ti tried to scrape off a layer of funk and only managed to smear the screen. She turned it over in her hand, searching for any sign of life. Several small buttons lined the edge, but the screen remained dead.
Recyclable, for sure, and an artifact she was mandated to turn in for processing. Deeper in the tunnel though, she’d lost her connection to the Collective servers. There’d be no record she’d ever found it, so why bother? It belonged here. Lost. Entombed with the past. She tossed it against the wall.
M@ti turned her attention back to the mound. Getting out would be tricky. Climbing up the now loosened cascade of filth was going to ruin her second pair of coveralls this week. At some point, the Collective might stop replacing them. Then she could maybe wander the streets naked. Like a spechead.
A tiny glint caught her eye. Something smooth and shiny had reflected the faint shimmer on the back of her retina, catching the IR beam at just the right angle. She slogged forward and stuffed her fist inside.
The tips of her gloved fingers brushed a smooth surface. Hard to the touch, the object hadn’t yet started to decompose. Consumer grade plastic, this was thicker than the water bottles by several millimeters and treated to withstand more exposure and handling. Jackpot. Something which might have survived down here reasonably intact. She yanked the object free and it shot loose with a little squelch.
M@ti stared, awestruck. The funk chamber had birthed a tiny man. In her hand was a figurine, not much larger than her palm. The colors had bleached and smeared, but a definite crimson streak shone under the gunk-covered face. His proportions were unlike any genetically bred citizen of the Manhattan Preserve she’d ever seen. More like an avatar in the Nexus, his muscles swelled to outrageous proportions.
“I must demand you return to the entrance!” The gate rattled futilely. “I don’t want to do this, but as your supervisor, I’m going to have to...to...dock your Nexus tokens.”
She barely registered the empty threat. Empty because he’d never make good and because she didn’t give two shits about the Nexus. But the figurine — this was going in her collection for sure.
“Coming!” she shouted as she stuffed the tiny man in her pocket. One last scan and she struggled her way to the top of the trash heap and through the gradually collapsing tunnel.
She made sure her connection was live again as soon as she exited the subway. Back in range, she wanted to let her minders continue to think she was a good little citizen. Not a thief trying to steal a past they’d just as soon leave buried.
2
“We work, you live. That simple.” One of the Collective’s many sayings which had been drilled into M@ti’s brain ever since primary school. It was supposed to soothe you. A life without toil was yours for the taking. Most people didn’t note the double meaning though. To her, it sounded like a threat.
“People are too busy living to pick up their own damn trash,” she muttered.
Her work AR display placed a red halo around a discarded cup. A quick DNA test performed by the Wardens and the perp would be docked some serious tokens. But she let it slide. She wasn’t exactly playing by the rules herself.
The cups pissed her off though. Yes, the latest biodegradable materials should break down in a few weeks, unlike the layered, waxed, and pressed containers she’d often find crushed among the subway tunnel trash. That didn’t mean the newer cups could be blindly tossed on the street. Scraping the sludge off the pavement as they decomposed was only slightly better than dealing with the incredibly too common pile of human feces.
She snatched the cup with her trash grabber and shook it into her bag.
“Excuse me?” Livingstone asked, mostly to be polite. Her robotic supervisor had no doubt heard every word of her complaint about human nature, this time and the hundreds of other times before.
“When you park everybody’s brains in the Nexus, the real world becomes an afterthought,” M@ti replied.
“Give us a few more years and we’ll have solved the problem of unnecessary waste,” Livingstone said, his aging speaker adding a nostalgic patina to his speech.
With humanity’s addiction to caffeine, paper cups were one of the few hold outs. Drone deliveries direct from factories, 3D printers loaded with recyclable materials, and extreme data collection to track consumption habits had almost made good on the Collective’s goal of zero waste. Almost.
But having ninety-eight point three seven percent waste disposal containment in a city of thirty million meant M@ti still had a job. A calling, as she was often reminded during these conversations with her supervisor. A noble fucking pursuit.
“People’ll still squat and shit on the sidewalk and call it immersion,” she said.
Livingstone didn’t respond.
They continued down the barren sidewalk outside Central Park. Once teeming with visitors, an ideal occupancy had been calculated decades ago. Access to the park proper was only granted to citizens of the Manhattan Preserve on a rotating basis.
Contact with real, non-virtual nature improved quality of life by some other perfectly calculated factor. When your outdoor time came, you went, whether you wanted to or not. M@ti, as a trash collector, came and went as the job demanded. A perk.
She couldn’t argue that one. Birds sang. Squirrels chattered. It was almost an escape.
Outside the park’s walls, hovs zipped past on the street riding whispered curtains of air. Buildings towered on either side stuffed with citizens. A constant cloud of drones ensured the people never had to leave their alternate realities, piped into their apartments through the Collective’s other lasting achievement: The Nexus.
The thought of other worlds reminded M@ti she had plans tonight, light years from this oddly crowded and lonely place. This particular off-world event had been planned in absolute secrecy for decades, and she’d be in the VIP section if everything went according to her plan.
“Speaking of regrettable human habits...is that excrement?” Livingstone asked. His single eye telescoped and spun in the direction of an unmoving lump splayed on the park retaining wall even as his cylindrical body reeled on its cushion of super-heated air in mock disgust.
“Nope. Just a dead rat,” she said, her trash app outlining the limp form in virulent purple.
Stuffed in a first-generation chassis, it didn’t matter that M@ti’s supervisor was a proto-sentient splinter of the Collective. His dated sensors and image recognition subroutines dulled his perception. Hers? Her implants were state of the art. The situation provided an odd parity between them which humans didn’t experience when sentient AI were around. The gap was even enough to make her comfortable despite her own troubling personal experience.
The sentients who walked the streets in their uncannily human bodies were a different species though. Perfect skin temperatures. Dampened, glistening eyes without the hint of a soul. M@ti shivered at the memories.
“Weren’t you due an upgrade?” M@ti asked, trying to bring herself back to the present.
She knew Livingstone’s answer but asked anyway. This was their routine. An even trade for his listening to her bitch about trash and specheads.
“I’ve grown fond of this form,” Livingstone replied.
That was the thing with a proto-sentient splinter versus a weak AI — they could lie.
Livingstone glided over and plucked the rat from the limestone wall with his spindly arm. He pinched the corpse by the tail and shuddered as it dropped into a drawer on his torso which snapped closed. Grinders deep in his gut activated and his innards gave a crackling pulse followed by an abrupt hum.
The biological and electronic waste he consumed provided both energy for his r
eactor and created a chemical slurry of hazardous and useful materials. Those he’d later neatly deposit at the recycling hub.
Not on the sidewalk like a fucking human.
Of course, M@ti’s robot supervisor was far from perfect. She loaded her custom HUD and a new menu entwined with flowers sprouted from the default display. She shut down the trash collection app and opened a diagnostic program, another of her little hacks. A heat map showed the temperatures inside Livingstone’s internal chambers spiking to tens of thousands of degrees.
Livingstone’s wireframe on her display jittered. His single eye rapidly extended and contracted.
While M@ti didn’t understand all the internal processes which fed her supervisor’s body, she did know his code was flawed. Sometimes, as he digested, he’d slip into a momentary seizure. When he did, his internal signatures would flare and garble the interface of her own wetware.
M@ti checked up and down the concourse. Hovs zipped past, their occupants lost in digital worlds. No obvious surveillance drones.
Sure, humans were never allowed to alter themselves. But the cardinal sin was altering an AI’s programming. Report the error and wait with the damaged unit, that was another routine saying drilled into every citizen since birth.
M@ti had been a terrible student.
Besides, technically, she never completely altered his programming. If she had, it would’ve been fixed for good. Instead, she flashed his hardware with a temporary override. A shot of adrenaline, she called it. Enough to get him over the hiccup.
“I’ve grown fond of this form,” Livingstone repeated.
“So have I,” she said. “I don’t know how you’d do your job in an updated chassis anyway. Do you really want to feel a dead rat’s tail between your fingers?”
Livingstone’s eye retracted thoughtfully and they continued down the broad sidewalk in silence.
“I suppose I’d likely be reassigned too.” If he meant he’d no longer collect garbage, M@ti wasn’t sure what the problem was. “Besides, I’m no mere tourist,” he said, using her own name for the AI who visited the real world in their shiny human bodies. “I have a calling, much like you. We should be happy. Aren’t we happy?”
Ahead, acorns littered the brick path. She’d switched back to her trash collection app and her display overflowed with highlighted recommendations. Each one winked out as the effort of collection outweighed the efficiency. She crunched through the shells and imagined stomping out the task alerts.
“Better things to life than trash,” she said.
“Without your efforts, we would be overwhelmed! Humans used to fill barges full of waste and dump them into the sea,” Livingstone said. He absently plucked an acorn off the sidewalk and consumed it. “Their waste formed islands larger even than the entire Manhattan Preserve.”
“Spare me the lecture.” She’d heard the story many times over. Garbage, death, war, famine — even in times of plenty, people had persisted along the same self-destructive paths. “But didn’t we manufacture and program robots once?”
It was Livingstone’s turn to look nervously around. “That is both an historical and philosophical question. Humanity created weaker AI and mindless automatons, true, but Chroma created herself. There has been no other like her.”
“I just sometimes wish I’d been given more options.”
They passed a magnificent turreted building opposite Central Park West. As little as she cared for History during school, she knew the story behind this place. Her AI educator had gleefully told them how human doctors once considered cancer a disease which hid in the corners of rooms. So, naturally, they’d made this cancer ward into a building with rounded walls. No corners. No cancer.
Of course, when the Collective assumed responsibility for humanity’s health, they’d cured it. Not the idiocy. Just the cancer.
Typical human specheads lost in the Nexus passed places like this unimpressed. M@ti, however, couldn’t help but think dangerous thoughts. The smooth walls, flowing arches, and ornamental windows didn’t look like the work of idiots. Plenty of virtual architecture surpassed this. Still, humans had built cities which withstood the elements and the ravages of a once dying planet for centuries.
“Let’s cross here,” Livingstone said.
They stepped into oncoming traffic. Hovs shot past or came to complete stops from their blistering speeds until her and Livingstone had crossed. She knew exactly where her supervisor was taking them. Two blocks down, they came to a row of metal grates sunken into the sidewalk.
“More proactive waste collections today?” Livingstone asked.
Livingstone could sense her sour mood. Biometric readings or visual cues he’d picked up on despite those obsolete optics; whatever calculation he’d performed to determine whether his employee was operating under optimum parameters. A trip into the sewers, delving into wreckage, was usually enough to cheer her up.
She’d found more than a few keepers to decorate the walls of the little rooftop sanctuary. The little figurine had been a good one. Livingstone never asked what she did with her discoveries or made her surrender them.
Normally, she found these attempts to make her feel better, sweet. Their own little secret.
Livingstone playfully raised the grate, his eye whirring in anticipation. Teasing. Toying with her.
His special treat for his good little human. Suddenly, she felt angry.
“I need a break,” she said, walking away.
She could feel Livingstone’s concerned gaze and hear the telescoping of his eye. “Of course,” he responded quietly. The grate settled with a tentative wobble. “Your hydration levels are low. Might I suggest water?”
His synthesized, empathetic tone only pissed her off more. She closed her eyes and continued walking, trying to regain control over her vitals. Anger was normal, to a point. Push too far and LifeMinder could mark you for medical intervention, therapy, or you’d get your Nexus hours audited. She didn’t need that level of feedback. Especially not today.
She wasn’t sure how she felt. Agitated. Annoyed. She must just be anxious for tonight’s event. The Collective would make history without their dim-witted wards even knowing. She looked up toward the sky and squinted into the sun.
A recommendation to turn on her Hydrate! rewards flashed. Had Livingstone initiated it? Was he monitoring her health apps now?
M@ti suddenly wanted to be free from the incessant buzz of hovs on the street and drones in the sky. Away from the towering buildings crammed with a sedate, unaware humanity and away from the streams of data entangling her, shooting through her. She tuned them all out and tried to imagine a star field in deep space. A new, unspoiled world she could explore.
Lost in thought, her collision alert registered too late. Another step, and she was on the ground.
Like a spechead she’d walked right into someone. Sunlight flooded the space between rooftops showing only a stately, back-lit shadow.
“Sorry,” she said.
No surprise. No angry outbursts about how many tokens she’d just cost them. Not even a hand offered to help. They just peered down at her.
“Is this common? Are they that helpless?”
The woman’s detached tone drove M@ti’s anger into full retreat. From the collision, she recalled the perfect smoothness of the skin and the unyielding rigidness of the simulated bone. She’d collided with an AI tourist...or worse.
“Often, yes,” responded a man.
M@ti could see two shapes now. The man reached down and dragged her to her feet. Flesh on flesh, there was a give in his joints and a tepid, clamminess which she knew was human. The realization didn’t comfort her. She cringed at his touch and shook him off. Instantly, she knew it was the wrong thing to do.
No longer staring into the sun, she could see the man wore the uniform of a Superuser. His golden jumpsuit was ribbed with buried sensors and wires. He’d have every wetware upgrade imaginable tucked beneath his skin too. Any trip to the Nexus was a full-on i
mmersion experience for him — an experience much like his companion was undergoing right now.
No, not a companion. His supervisor. A Superuser escorting an AI meant one thing: she’d blundered into a Warden.
The Warden’s chassis was statuesque. She could’ve been a goddess or an alien from a world of genetically superior beings bred to rule over the small and bumbling humans. Bright eyes gave their dead stare as her examination of M@ti continued.
“Its vitals are out of specification,” said the Warden. M@ti fought an urge to initiate a losing battle over securing her feed against the AI.
“No specs, you must have retinal implants. Are you jacked in?” asked the Superuser. M@ti shook her head. “Maybe you should be then.”
“My apologies!” Livingstone came gliding up behind her. His knobby hand found M@ti’s shoulder. “I’d asked her to hurry with her break.”
The Warden looked at the first-generation chassis in much the same way she’d examined M@ti. Her eyes drifted to Livingstone’s hand and M@ti felt it retract.
“Is this your employee?” asked the Superuser.
“Yes.” Livingstone hesitated, his head swiveling between the two. “We’re Sanitation Engineers.”
The Warden raised her palm and her gaze shifted to the city, reading a hidden web of data feeds before settling again on Livingstone. “Sanitation engineers. You sound proud of this designation.”
M@ti could detect the stutter in Livingstone’s recessed voice box. “Of course. It is my function for the Collective. Our function,” he added with a nod toward M@ti.
“Your ward has an obligation to the continuance of her species,” said the Warden, her voice a distracted whisper and her eyes fixed on a point in space above the park. “She should be thankful to have been assigned such a highly compensated task.” Her gaze settled on Livingstone. “Only you have a function.”