by Russ Linton
Mars base had been the culmination of nearly a century of work hidden from the world. Space exploration forgotten in the wars, the Collective had returned to it without so much as a text message to their human wards. Following in the treads of fellow robotic pioneers once hurled toward the same planet with orders to work until they died, they’d done what humanity could never have collaborated to do. They’d built a permanent base. From there, they’d set their eyes on a region of space trillions of miles away.
Only the AI would ever see Alpha Centauri. No need for habitation and life support, the self-replicating, immortal presence could be programmed to seek out planets with the necessary resources and construct new colonies in the vacuum of space.
Maybe the Collective were right, thought M@ti. Humans were too fragile, too backward to ever have achieved this. But damn, she’d love to have tried.
M@ti tunneled into the rocket’s onboard cameras. She watched the stars race past and the red planet grow smaller. She shut down her HUD and fixed her eyes on the shimmering point of reddish light peeking through the shutters of her aerie.
The image of the departing rocket kept replaying in her mind. She’d never even see the video from the new colony they’d certainly create next. A flaw in her own programming, she supposed. The rush of the hack and from the history she’d just witnessed, slipped away.
6
Sitting at the back of the cathedral, M@ti found religion. Pounded into her at a blistering tempo, each percussive strike insisted her heart join. She’d set her LifeMinder status to cardio so as not to raise any red flags.
The terracotta floor and limestone columns rebounded each beat with a maddening ricochet. Her pew vibrated with the calamity, sound trapped beneath the unyielding seat. A plaque labeled “Hymns” slipped from a nearby pillar and crashed into the tile.
His kit arranged on the altar, Knuckles flailed away with his drumsticks. Sweat sprayed and his flop of hair whipped. A host of carved saints filled the frieze behind him displaying their horror or casting their eyes to the heavens, imploring intervention. From where she sat, the rows of pious men stacked one atop another looked fragile, like icicles, ready to shatter in the Armageddon of sound.
Two arms working, at times she saw three or four, lip curled in a permanent snarl, Knuckles was a beast from whatever pit these worried old men used to fear. M@ti stood on the pew and closed her eyes. Back arched she hopped up and down and let the unholy cacophony baptize her.
She shook her arms, feeling her blood flow. Her boots trampled the pew. She needed this, to feel alive. To shake off the emptiness she’d been left with after watching last night’s launch. With a wave of her hand she piped in the concert’s full audio from the Nexus.
Guitar and vocals shrieked into existence mid-song. A crowd roared. Not wanting to be distracted by the virtual world, the fake world, the world people hid inside to accomplish empty dreams, she kept her eyes closed.
Of course, deep within the code designed to feed her retinal images, overrides existed. They could force that falsehood on her whether she closed her eyes or not. They weren’t activated, but she’d seen their Judas functions, ready to be called by the Collective. True choice was an illusion, as much as the Nexus. Nobody could truly choose if they were a drummer or a trash collector. They sure as hell couldn’t be astronauts with a ticket off this spent rock.
Harlock’s vocals shredded over the scream of the guitar and the frantic bass. M@ti sang along, defiant, hungry.
She needed reality to pummel her, to acknowledge her with unbridled rage or passion, she didn’t care which. She understood now why she’d tagged the golden boy in full view of a Warden. She’d finally started to not give a fuck.
She’d been given a glimpse beyond Livingstone’s simulations of friendship and attempts at humanity and been reminded of a thing she’d wanted to forget. Any relationship with an AI always boiled down to an abusive imitation of the real. This long buried truth had surfaced, and she’d lashed out at the only being there that day who she could truly hurt.
Knuckles’ drumming dropped into an extended filler beat. Guitar strings in the Nexus audio squealed and fell silent. The bass let loose a confused series of twangs, more retreat than assault. Suddenly M@ti’s voice and the clomp of her boots filled the cathedral.
She opened her eyes.
Knuckles’ full attention rested trance-like in the Nexus. She heard Harlock’s whiskey seared and ragged voice shouting, ”Get the fuck off the stage!” Curious, and ready to beat down whatever heckler had dared derail the concert, M@ti jacked in.
The sight made her catch her breath.
Saturn loomed on the horizon. Crystalline shards of ice shot across the sky, twinkling as they raced past. Stage, auditorium, they floated freely in space, a black disk sent sailing around the ringed giant.
M@ti felt the room spin. She took a heavy step off the pew in the real world and steadied herself. So this was the surprise Knuckles had mentioned.
The stunning render held plenty of the crowd in awe. She’d been taken in as well. Then she saw the imperfections. The stars weren’t right in relation to Saturn’s current position. Maybe a decade ago...too hard to say exactly when, but not yesterday when she tagged along on a real space flight.
Still, the spechead had gone to some serious trouble and she’d never intended to log in. Without the heckler, she would’ve missed this surprise. M@ti stood on her tiptoes to see above the crowd. Too many avatars in her way. She ghosted the bots, the filler bodies unlinked to real humans, and found a path through the masses.
“I said, get off the stage, motherfucker!” Harlock growled over a sudden whine of feedback. She caught a few glimpses of him onstage brandishing his mic stand like a maul.
They’d never met outside the Nexus. On the inside, the lead singer was an imposing figure. Six five and hairless except for a fan of green which added another vertical foot, Harlock had enough metal piercings he’d never make it past a high powered-magnet alive. Loops and bars skewered his arms, face, lips, and his ears dangled in giant hoops of flesh — a complete retro body mod only legal in the Nexus.
M@ti clipped through the ghosts toward the stage. The remainder of the Weeping Tits held idle, waiting to continue. Whoever was up there refused to leave, and she couldn’t quite see them. Stage lights projecting from a nearby star, the intruder kept to the shadows.
“I will ram this stand through your face,” Harlock taunted.
The crowd had already switched from a steady chorus of boos to an angry roar. A crazed fan shouted, “Do it!” and the chants began.
“Do it! Do it! Do it!”
Ever the showman, Harlock gazed wildly at the audience and unfurled his tongue, more metal glinting in the starlight. Eyes manic and ravenous, he nodded, sweeping the stand in a long arc, anointing the crowd and they roared their approval. Closer, M@ti could barely see the heckler on stage. They looked small compared to Harlock, but they didn’t budge.
Everybody expected violence in the Nexus. You could safely do anything. But each time she visited, she felt too aware of the Collective’s control. As much as humanity wanted to believe this space belonged to them, they were completely wrong. Here, the Collective weren’t just overseers. They were gods.
“There can be only one!” Harlock shouted and he took a well-placed swipe aimed at the heckler’s head.
M@ti watched Harlock’s scripts from Fivefold Bushido kick in, providing a deadly arc to the chrome stand. The whole band had formed a warrior guild in the facsimile of feudal Japan and they knew how to scrap. Whatever the shadowy figure’s problem, she hoped he was ready for time out in the lobby.
But the shiny chrome never cleaved through the shadow. A sharp clang rang out, noticeable only because it fell so awkwardly among Knuckle’s even taps on the drums. M@ti watched the mic stand tumble upward and keep climbing until it struck Saturn’s outer ring and rocketed away.
Harlock sneered. Ready to pounce, the front man checked his forw
ard momentum.
The figure prowled forward from the shadows, pressing a cane ahead of him which looked to be a sliver of night capped by starlight. The long, dark overcoat he wore didn’t disentangle from the shadows until he stood completely within the spotlight.
M@ti thought at first the heckler had chosen some sort of humanoid-bird hybrid as his avatar. But the beak protruding from his face was part of a stitched leather mask which covered his entire head. Over-sized round goggles concealed his eyes and above these he wore a blunted top hat.
“You have been scheduled for inoculation.” He spoke in a dead voice whose words reached every ear in the rowdy crowd. M@ti saw the tip of the cane flash as he flicked it away from Harlock and toward Knuckles. The drummer frowned and had given up doing anything more than keeping count with his foot.
Hairs on the back of her neck stiffened. Something was wrong. She doubled her efforts to reach the stage through a crowd less and less willing to part.
The front man batted the cane aside. “Right. I’ll throw you into fucking orbit then.”
Shadows contracted. The cloaked figure made a subtle shuffle out of the spotlight and Harlock stumbled. She saw the cane glint as it whipped upward and heard a solid crack as it connected with the bone and metal studs near Harlock’s temple. The giant disappeared.
Music stopped, and the crowd fell silent. She didn’t know why, but M@ti checked the lobby, waiting for Harlock’s name to scroll by.
“Come on, man,” said Tragic, the bassist. “Why you gotta troll us?”
Knuckles stood, scratching his chin with a drumstick. “Guys, this must be expansion material.”
“Fivefold Bushido expansion material at our concert?” asked Harriet, the lead guitarist, perplexed. She wiggled her fingers along the strings as she considered the idea. “I’m down.”
M@ti shook her head as though Knuckles could see her. Harlock still hadn’t dropped into the lobby. The filler bots in the crowd began to fade. Others had lost interest once the music stopped and the violence proved to be swift and underwhelming. A determined few pressed closer to the stage waiting to see how badly things would go. She pushed her way to the stage pit and switched on her custom interface.
A faint outline shone where Harlock had fallen, the signature left by his Avatar had yet to be cleaned up by the routine processes. She sifted through the digital remnants with her hands and plucked out a strand. M@ti grasped the unalterable LifeMinder vitals connection between her fingertips.
The feed had no data.
“Knuckles!” she shouted.
The band members vanished, and the dark figure followed.
M@ti ghosted Knuckles and logged into Fivefold Bushido, dropping into their guild’s protected domain. At the same time, in the real world, she blindly groped the pew, feeling her way to the front of the cathedral.
“Knuckles!”
Knuckles, Harriet, and Tragic faced her at the end of a stone path with their swords drawn. They’d zoned into a garden. An arch shaped like an enormous sword stand rose behind the three samurai. Cherry blossoms trickled through the air.
“Intruder,” said Harriet. “That him?”
Their lead guitarist had traded every ounce of the grungy punk for an ivory skinned face, her lips a stray petal, her eyes perfect black sweeps like sword cuts tinged with blood. She wore a black silk kimono with a golden dragon pattern and an attitude to match.
Knuckles flipped up his demonic mask almost sending his crested Kabuto helmet to the ground. Both he and Tragic wore the full cuirass and greaves of samurai armor.
“Hey! You came, you reality junkie you. Guys, this is M@ti.”
Neither of the bandmates seemed impressed. M@ti looked down and noticed she still wore an ensign’s uniform from Space Nomad. She curtly waved a hand and switched to the concert-goer avatar she’d used once before; a sleeveless T-shirt which billowed around her bare breasts, ripped jeans, and a pair of combat boots which were exact replicas of her real world shoes.
Tragic grinned. “Oh, hey! I remember you!”
“Something isn’t right.” M@ti’s tone erased his smile. “You need to log.”
“This won’t take long,” Knuckles assured her. “Sorry about the concert. Did you like the stage?”
He seemed upset when she ignored his question. “You don’t understand. Harlock, he’s gone.”
“He’ll be back in time to ninja loot this boss, trust me,” Harriet spat.
“No, he won’t.”
The statement seemed to clear up Knuckles’ frustration. He appeared to be on the verge of asking his only hacker friend why when bells rang at the shrine. The melodic tinkling became a discordant clatter as the wind gusted. Fallen petals whipped into a dense cyclone, a blackness at the center. The petals fell away.
The beak-faced avatar from the stage pointed his cane at Knuckles. “You.”
A hacker, for sure. He’d spoofed one of the band members profiles to break into this secure guildhall just like M@ti had. That was the best case scenario. Worst case, they’d pissed off one of the superusers and he was about to smite them with the hand of God.
Knuckles swept his sword in an arc and held it ready above his head. Light glinted along the edge of his blade and more of the drifting petals fluttered to the ground in halves. M@ti couldn’t see his face but the pride and power radiating from him was obvious. He may have been a great drummer, but this was his jam.
Harriet raised one leg beneath her silk kimono and rolled her palms upward as knives crawled from her finger tips. Tragic, the stolid bassist, took two stomping steps and clapped his palms together around the hilt of his sword. He barked a war cry and the weapon expanded to absurd proportions, twice his own height, wider than his shoulders.
M@ti didn’t have a chance to speak before the stranger was on them.
7
M@ti watched Harriet engage the stranger first. Fantasy, for sure, because nobody could move like that in a kimono. She danced atop the petals mid-air, her blades a wall of steel. The stranger withdrew, unconcerned as he countered the spinning knives with his cane. Each strike issued a skin-crawling screech which made M@ti want to tweak the volume of her gear.
Their adversary planted his feet and held his cane vertical as if he could hide behind the narrow strip. No longer swiping through the air, M@ti caught the symbol at the top — a winged staff entwined by two serpents. She recognized the ancient medical symbol from her books. It had fallen out of use after the Collective took over humanity’s health needs. What significance it had for this spechead, this troll, she couldn’t say.
If the move had been meant to block Harriet’s assault, the man had failed. Knives diced the cane before coming after him. Practice and grace in each step, Harriet spun through the air, her thin blades shredding the man’s overcoat. When she sensed the opening, fire lit her blood-red eyes.
A deep voice rumbled through the garden, “Excellent combo! Finish him!”
“With pleasure.” Harriet’s devious grin caught M@ti off-guard as pointed fangs appeared between her lips.
The beaked mask tilted down to watch Harriet plunge slender, bladed fingers into his chest. His curious head tilt reminded M@ti exactly of a bird. He watched with mild interest as Harriet tore her hands outward in a swimmer’s stroke.
Bloodless, without a scream, or whining about cheats, the body crumpled in a tattered heap.
“You were saying?” Harriet sneered at M@ti.
“Damn,” said Knuckles, nudging the corpse with his foot. “No loot? You get any tokens for that at least?”
Harriet’s avatar stared into the distance and glitched. “No. Nothing.”
“What the fuck?” Knuckles poked the fading corpse with his sword.
M@ti came closer, studying the remains. In the real world, she was almost at the altar, and had no clue if Knuckles himself had moved. Maybe they’d been right. Maybe the guy was just some hacker troll. TrueSight could verify that, but if this was a superuser toying with them,
she’d get them all in trouble.
“This isn’t an avatar,” she said, investigating as much as her passive custom apps would allow. “There’s no open connection. A bot maybe? But really damn complicated. Who’d you guys piss off?”
“Why the hell would somebody risk a hack just to mess up our gig?” Knuckles asked.
M@ti didn’t have an answer. She felt the ground where the man had fallen, seeing past the illusion. Every bump on the stone path had an assigned geometric equation. Petals continued to fall trailed by the formula of their trajectory. In the sky, she saw the variables for the wind. Nothing showed any trace of having been forcibly altered.
“Whoever did this, they’re good.” She looked up. “Anybody actually heard from Harlock yet? They’ve completely blocked his connection somehow.”
“Probably rage quit and broke his specs. With his tokens he’ll be back on pretty soon,” said Tragic.
“Huh,” M@ti muttered thoughtfully.
Wind tickled her ear. The formulas ghosting the petals spiked in intensity and took a sudden horizontal path. At the shrine, bells sounded.
The group exchanged glances. Beyond the stone arch, the door to the little shrine opened. The bells hanging from the porch continued to clatter. The man Harriet had left diced on the ground emerged and straightened his overcoat.
“We need to speak,” he said in a muffled, inescapable whisper. The same dead voice they’d all heard at the concert, but he sounded like he was struggling to get out the words.
“Not you again,” Knuckles said. “Hacking? You’re gonna risk a perma-ban to fuck with us? Seriously?”
M@ti stayed low, her mind racing while the others moved into position. The same knotted tension she’d had at the concert crept into her gut and she raised her eyes, slowly, cautiously.
The doors through which the man had emerged were tiny. The shrine had been made for offerings, not as a building for people. Seamlessly, he’d stepped through, and as he did, warped every environmental variable surrounding him. The avatar or bot wasn’t simply getting bigger as he moved toward them, the entire world, the servers which simulated it, were flexing to accommodate him. And at the nucleus, the man’s avatar remained a blank void.