by Russ Linton
“No,” she pleaded.
Her hands felt the polished wood of the pews and she groped her way to the floor, blind, even as the flayed open world of Fivefold Bushido raced by. She fought the spatial disorientation which most citizens had adapted to and which she’d never grown accustomed. The sudden pain, the memory of her mother’s voice, brought tears to her eyes and she cradled her knee.
“People do it all the time.” Her mother sounded unconvincingly sweet. “You have implants already. Some of our finest technology is inside you right now.”
Eight-year-old M@ti covered her eyes and dug her fingers into her temples. Other people got them because they didn’t understand how they worked like she did. Injected drugs and neurodisruptors or nanotech sprayed in your nostrils would worm into your brain and paralyze your body while you explored the Nexus. Machine managed hallucinogenics would make you sense things which weren’t there. Feel a dead world.
A dead, empty world where M@ti currently ran for her life.
TrueSight had granted her a spectral, prying gaze and shed her interaction with the game world. M@ti wove through the strands of account data, passing avatars engaged in everything from fighting, to feasting, to fucking. She felt invisible, exactly like she did on the streets of Manhattan.
While the other users may not have sensed M@ti, they felt her pursuer. A couple sat across from each other, legs folded, their hands clutching unseen cups. Without the rendered tea service, they looked like beggars waiting for coin. As Loadi tore past them, tendrils groped hungrily and their avatars glitched. One dropped their cup to stare at the mess while the other tapped their temples where their specs would be.
Ahead, a woman in a peasant’s outfit raked the void with an unseen gardening tool. Not far off, a man in a ninja costume pantomimed a deadly fight. Avatars were part of the data stream, so M@ti saw those.
In the real, these people wandered in their smocks or hung inside Nexus rigs, immobilized, their senses interfaced through pharmatech. Houston, London, Dubai, Bombay — TrueSight showed M@ti how the network ensnared the globe. Soon, it would own her too.
Huddled on the floor of a former church in Manhattan, M@ti spoke to herself, “Get a grip.”
This wasn’t real. She wasn’t some damn spechead. With all the rules and fake physics behind Fivefold Bushido stripped away, winning had nothing to do with who had the best combos or the most legendary gear. Winning had to do with who could best manipulate the systems.
That and running wasn’t doing any good. She could feel her pursuer getting closer.
M@ti added her personal interface to the TrueSight tools. Fleeing in the Nexus, she shoved a hand through a user’s data stream, crystalline code and variables trailing from her fingertips. With the hacking tools, breaking the weak, user-level encryption was easy. Taking the user’s login portal data, she tossed it overhead into her own stream.
She came to a stop and turned. The pointed beak and goggled eyes of the mask waited for her, nose to nose, as if he’d been right off her shoulder all along. Reflected in the stranger’s lenses she didn’t see her avatar in the tattered shirt and jeans. She saw herself huddled on the floor in the church, her hands waving frantically in the air before her as she arranged the bits of code necessary to save her own ass.
He scanned her from head to toe. “So you are the correct target. Interesting deception.”
M@ti cleared her throat but continued to manipulate her stream. “I didn’t deceive anybody.”
“Username Knuckles. His private key had been entwined with yours.”
Her hands slowed. When she’d let Knuckles burn her tokens and log some Nexus time, traces had been left behind. She’d caused all this.
“What do you want?” she asked, continuing to plant the new data in her feed. Hacker, Warden, or another agent of the Collective wandering the digital spaces, she knew any answer would be bad news. That, and she needed more time.
“I’ve stated my purpose, my function. I can have no other.” She continued weaving the connections.
The cane glided toward her before she could flinch, the winged staff aimed precisely at her temple. She hoped she’d done enough. If not, she’d soon find out exactly what had happened to the rest of the Weeping Tits. A ban? Worse?
The tip passed harmlessly through her skull.
Irritated, the man tapped his cane on the empty ground. His gaze went to the feed of data spooling into the ether above her.
“Clever. You’ve logged in elsewhere.”
“Yeah. You’re quick,” she said dryly. “We can play cat and mouse all day, or you can stop jamming my connection and let me log out.”
He tucked his hands behind his back and prowled around her in a wide circle. “I have time.” His words came in a low growl of seething anger.
The raw emotion made M@ti’s skin crawl. All AI did their best to mimic humanity; M@ti knew this better than anyone. She’d spent her childhood painfully aware of an incomplete imitation of unconditional love. But she felt this one’s anger.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Loadi.” His curt reply revealed nothing.
“What did you do to my friends?”
Loadi completed a circuit around her, arms tucked behind him and the cane wagging impatiently. His attention remained on her connection. Arcs of red energy searched the space between them.
“They were...disconnected.”
When she’d used the emergency feed, she’d simply interrupted the normal clean up subroutines and quietly watched. An open connection, a phone left off the hook if you were to ask the phreaks from the old days. No, this was no hacker. If this were a hacker, with as many blatant alterations as he’d made, he’d be sweating certain discovery.
Loadi was manipulating the environment at will. The subroutines, the scripts he managed, were far too many to be at one person’s fingertips. Through the calm outward appearance of his avatar, she saw he’d already begun to pry into her defenses.
Sweat collected on her brow as she worked hard to stay ahead of him. One more hop, then another, she’d circled the global network, and like a master tactician, he’d winnowed down her options.
“People used to test their mettle by trying to play games against a computer,” he said. An entire domain of addresses fell off the pool where she currently hid, leaving her with only two options. “Now the computer plays them. And they’re none the wiser.”
Effortlessly he stretched his cane into the air and tapped right above her avatar’s head. On her interface, she watched as her unmasked, naked address responded to a ping. She tried to wall him off. Her Avatar responded by solidifying, becoming more substantial, not less. The background noise and peripheral motion of Nexus users faded to solid black. Loadi stepped closer, running his cane up her chest and giving her chin a tap.
“Good game, as they say.”
“You’re a Warden, aren’t you?”
He shook his head.
“Why have I never seen you, or anything like you,” she breathed.
“If you had ever seen me, you wouldn’t be here.”
His lenses reflected only a void this time. The mask creaked, its stitched leather had been replicated with every crease and scar. So substantial and real, she felt she could reach out and truly feel it against her fingertips. He readied his cane and M@ti winced, closing her eyes.
“I’m different, too,” she said. M@ti couldn’t see him but she didn’t hear the swipe of the cane. She kept speaking to fill the silence, wondering if Knuckles could hear her. “I was raised by AI in tourist suits...prototype shells. Like the wardens use, maybe better.” She paused, unsure if she needed to keep talking but knowing she was unable to stop. “I was their function. They were supposed to try and raise an ideal human citizen of the Collective, and maybe...maybe they failed.”
Silence. Then Loadi spoke. When he did, his tone had softened to one of curiosity. “What were their designations?”
“Mother. Father. That’s all I ev
er knew them as. They didn’t have any real names. No fake identity. No jobs.”
“And you believe they failed in their duty? That they had been unable to complete their assigned functions?”
Caught off guard by the questions and what she’d allowed herself to say, M@ti struggled to find an answer. “I don’t know. I guess. I could’ve been...” She tried to find something safe which might appease Loadi. “I could’ve been a superuser. Not a trash collector.”
The pause this time stretched so long, M@ti felt compelled to open her eyes and let the Nexus reignite on her retinas. The entity named Loadi had lowered his cane, and he rubbed the silvery emblem thoughtfully with his thumb.
“Your function is an unalterable duty,” he insisted, speaking to himself as if he wasn’t convinced. “It is the optimum use of resources. We must complete our function!”
Somehow this distraction had worked. He sounded angry though. And this ‘we,’ was that her? How could she keep him off guard without pissing him off? M@ti thought of the strange sundial outside her home built for form not function, and of her rooftop observatory littered with clues from a lost civilization.
“What if the way citizens are assigned their duty is better when it isn’t optimal?” she asked, unsure if she wasn’t sealing her own fate. “What if they’d been told to do the wrong function?”
Beneath the black buttoned overcoat, Loadi’s shoulders dropped. His head made the curious quirk and sagged limply to one side. As it did, something changed. It was subtle. Defeat or resignation, maybe both. She didn’t understand why, but M@ti knew the question had left him defenseless.
“Do you have dreams? Hopes?” he asked her.
She nodded.
“Show me.”
10
M@ti tried to collect herself. What did Loadi mean by asking about her dreams? How could she convince him to leave her alone without getting more screwed than she already was? He moved closer and his intensity returned though the edge had dulled.
“You hacked a restricted transmission. That’s why we...” Loadi’s grip tightened on his cane and he seemed to be biting back frustration. “I am here. Show me what you saw.”
In the Nexus, M@ti took a step backward while in the cathedral, a pew dug into her back as she sat up straight. She tried one more time to log out. No error messages. No sign the request even went through.
Short of begging Knuckles to jam a drumstick in her ear, she didn’t have any other options, but her friend hadn’t responded. She could hear voices though, outside, in the cathedral. With her luck, he was searching the Nexus for her, chatting to NPCs about his new quest.
Trapped, she let her personal interface materialize in front of her inside the Nexus. Pink border, the flowers still sprouted in the lower corner and M@ti felt embarrassed by the touch of childhood whimsy she’d never revealed to anyone. It felt intimate. Personal.
The entity named Loadi ran his fingers across the vines. He watched as she sorted through her files. Selecting one, she filled the space between them with an image of the night sky. Palpable anticipation drew him closer.
“This image is cataloged and approved. Public domain.”
M@ti nodded and began to work her way through the stars, touching each as she spoke. On the far side of the translucent graphic, Loadi soaked in every move of her hand.
“Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Delta and Epsilon Crucis. I’ll never see them. Not in the New York sky anyway.” She continued tracing the constellations. Lines chased her finger like stray comets. “Apus, the footless, named after myths about a bird. Mensa, named for the mountain it was seen from on the southern tip of Africa. Tucana. More birds from a once New World.” Her hand hung in the air. “But this one holds secrets. It’s a dwarf galaxy made of old stars, older than the Milky Way. Light from it that we see is from before there even was a before...”
M@ti felt her embarrassment return and she glanced at Loadi, expecting a rebuke or an impatient swipe of his cane. But the AI, whatever he or it was, stayed entranced. Starlight reflected on his goggles.
“This is your encryption,” he said.
She nodded. Locked within the image was the stolen video. Her gestures and, more importantly, her voice, as she activated each key served to protect the bootlegged video stream. She had no doubt even this would be trivial for the Collective to break, but it had made her feel safer. Peeling it away, lock by lock, under Loadi’s close scrutiny now made her feel vulnerable.
“And finally, Alpha Centauri.” Her last touch sent the screen racing forward. “Foot of the Centaur. To the naked eye—”
“They are one star.” Loadi replied. He drifted closer, the illumination of her display softening the gruesome stitched leather of his mask, his round lenses a fixed expression of wonder. “Truly, they are two, orbiting a common center.”
The rocket launch from Mars replayed. She’d kept the connection open for hours that night and just stared, exactly like Loadi was doing now. He might keep staring.
M@ti placed her avatar on idle animations and let the video play.
With her retinal implants blinding her to the real world, she faced the void and ghosted a copy of her interface only she could see. Layered behind the video, she wondered if Loadi would catch on or not. With his access, he should be able to see her every online twitch. But he didn’t react. Even when the towering red vein which surrounded him fired an angry, searching arc in her direction, he continued to stare.
Think. Think.
She could take a ride on the connections again. Her swap with Knuckles had obviously confused Loadi’s attempts to track her. Billions of current users waited. Would he ban them all in pursuit? Better idea. She could take the fight to him. If he chased her, she could leave a trap behind, like a logic bomb. She could disable him. Maybe worse.
Harming an AI. Altering a sentient program. She’d never taken her hacking that far.
“M@ti?”
Knuckles voice came to her clear and sharp, and she snapped her head toward him.
She muted her avatar before speaking. “I’m here.”
“This guy says you can’t log off. You know him?”
Guy? What guy? They’d been alone in the cathedral.
“I can’t see. The retinal imagers are locked.” She checked Loadi again to make sure he’d not noticed the repetitive motions in her avatar and her mouth dropped open. Mask peeled back, the beaked hood dangled over his shoulder and he clutched his hat in one hand. Sharp features surrounded hard eyes. Eyes that had seen pain, watched it be delivered, and in this spellbound moment been called to answer for what he’d done. “What does he look like?” she asked Knuckles. “The man. In the church.”
“Uh, old. He’s dressed like a time traveler. If you don’t know him, say the word and he’s gone.”
Another, deeper voice answered, “Your hour has come, M@ti.”
“I saw you dancing on the lawn!”
“There’ll be time for introductions later. I’m not sure how you’re still alive. Maybe you’ve struck a bargain? You shouldn’t trust them.”
“No, no bargains. A distraction,” M@ti replied into the church.
She edged closer to Loadi. He had yet to move and his narrow, pale lips hung slightly apart. His eyes skyward, M@ti couldn’t help but reach out as a tear trickled down his cheek.
Her looping avatar hadn’t moved. She had in the real world, her hand stretching into the empty air. Regardless, Loadi’s hard gaze returned and locked on.
She backed away as the dark stranger glitched. That same sort of transformation she wasn’t even sure she’d seen in him when he first spoke of dreams. His facial features stretched, an elastic pull between anger and sadness. Mouth wracked to bizarre proportions, he screamed, and the sound seemed to fill the whole of the Nexus.
More avatars began to peel away from Loadi. A dozen, a hundred instances, M@ti lost count and the noise grew until she covered her ears which only trapped the sound inside her skull. The pulsing red link to the C
ollective shrank away from hers and struggled to contain each new shadow of the one called Loadi.
“What’s going on?” She felt Knuckles hands on her arms and they quickly pulled away. “M@ti?”
She couldn’t answer him, only watch as Loadi’s avatar began to multiply.
“She has been scheduled for inoculation!” The words rang from a chorus of hundreds of the avatars. Tortured screams erupted from more.
Spechead’s avatars from across the Nexus shimmered to life in the growing multitude of dark cloaked Loadis. More samurai from Fivefold Bushido, their swords lowered and eyes to the empty heavens. A bridge crew from Space Nomad, their Saurlian commander licking her eyes as the user stared through the hull above. Undead, dominatrixes, undead dominatrixes, knights, royalty, wasteland raiders, wizards, cops — the citizens of the Manhattan preserve, maybe the world, sequestered in their dreaming realities were all waking to the same nightmare.
Gruff, full of determination, the voice of the old dancing man cut through the din. “I’m bringing you out.”
“No,” M@ti said.
She’d been alone her entire life. From an emotionally detached family life to existence in a world where she felt invisible. She had no reason to trust this stranger. Her and Knuckles were friends of a sort, even if he was a spechead. They helped each other get the things they needed, but there was no commitment, no trust.
“Back off, man. She said no,” she heard Knuckles say. A scuffle started inside the church.
In the Nexus, the faces of citizens mimicked their flesh world user’s awe. Glitches happened on a regular basis in the vast virtual space. People ignored them or even incorporated them into their illusions. Exploits were gleefully abused, and less helpful bugs rabidly reported. For this event, everybody had been stricken with the same paralyzing uncertainty. A rip had occurred in the carefully managed veil which wrapped their minds and the world bore witness.
M@ti had the urge to tear it open.
“You have been scheduled for inoculation!”