by Russ Linton
A life she’d now ended.
“At the bottom, you’ll find a tunnel which opens into the subway,” The old man hovered over the opening but had yet to put his feet on the rungs. “Go left. Exit at 135th street. There’ll be a boat waiting under the Madison Avenue Bridge. Hurry.”
“Madison who? 135?” Knuckles sounded as though he’d been listening to a foreign language. “I don’t grock your code.”
Odd that the old man appeared confident she knew what he said. M@ti began to wonder how much of her life she’d ever had control over. The old man told her she’d been flagged as a problem years ago. Maybe the map had been planted where she would find it. This could be how the system rooted out the hackers, the rebels.
Though maybe her custom scripts to bypass her retinal imagers were flawed? Or, what if, instead of the Collective, the Cryptoanarchists had hijacked her hardware? Could be this was all some sort of VR nightmare.
A bright wedge from a searchlight sliced across the open hole. With a grimace, the old man wrestled the concrete slab into place. Darkness and a rain of dust engulfed them.
Scaled rust on the metal rungs bit into M@ti’s palms. Sealed off from fresh air, she steeped in the exhalations of moss and damp stone. This was all real. It had to be.
“Down,” she heard Knuckles say.
Knuckles’ shadow crawled against the edge of a circle of dirty light far below. She kept an eye on him to make sure she wasn’t treading on his fingertips. The closer they got to the opening, the smoother the walls became. She saw Knuckles dangle as he found the last rung, then drop.
When her turn came, she hung in the open air with her arms outstretched and feet feeling for the ground. Knuckles seized her by the waist to help lower her. It was deliberate. An obvious disregard for her personal space he knew so well. She held back her complaints.
“You know that grognard?” he asked.
She studied him in the amber glow of a wall-mounted light, the filaments inside the bulb an intricate puzzle. His bony cheeks painted by shadow, he looked gaunt and angry. She shook her head.
“Did he hurt you?” she asked.
Knuckles rubbed his neck and appeared reluctant to answer. “I don’t really know. I grabbed him once you told him to back off. He made a move. Things went dark. You?”
“I’m fine.”
A single tunnel stretched from the chamber strung with an exposed electrical cord and evenly spaced bulbs. Knuckles followed her gaze and wandered that direction. He gripped the opening just barely above his head and leaned forward.
“You ever hear about this place?”
“I’m guessing this leads to the old subway system,” she said as she slipped past. “Most of the subway platforms have been blocked off at the surface.”
Knuckles nodded thoughtfully. “You believe what he said about the Tits?”
The conviction of the mysterious old man and her own gut feeling told her he wasn’t lying. Whatever happened to them was different from being banned. Or maybe this was how they banned people. Permadeath. For real.
But how could an AI kill anybody? They’d need real world agents committing the deed, so why bother with a VR show? She didn’t want to believe it was possible. Then there was the hope in Knuckle’s voice.
She shook her head. “We’ll find out for ourselves. We’ll steal a connection somehow—”
“I got you.”
Knuckles reached into a pocket and pulled out the device she’d seen on the old man. Her eyes bulged, and she snatched it away.
“How?”
“C’mon man, I told you. Level seventy rogue in Dungeon Delvers. Pick Pocket is like my best skill. You can get rich off players.” His eyes glossed over, and she thought for a moment he might be losing consciousness again. He reached for his neck where his specs normally hung. Coming up empty, his eyes cleared, and he snatched the tablet back. “Senile old bastard owed me some tech anyway.”
“Dungeon Delvers is a game,” she said. “How do you figure it taught you to pick pocket?”
“There may have been some research outside the Nexus. What can I say? I’m an overachiever.”
She almost laughed. Of the many words she might choose to describe Knuckles, overachiever wasn’t on the list. But how well did she really know him?
He walked ahead of her, staring down at the device. Maybe he’d surprise her again. With every swipe and prod he made though, she crept closer. Soon she was breathing over his shoulder, trying to see the screen. Desperate, he pressed it directly to his eyes.
“Here,” he said, offering the tablet like a dead fish. “Look, Harlock is local. I can find his place without a connection, I just need a hov...” his words trailed off.
Hovs. Meals off their CalBurner tokens. Access to their enclaves. New clothing. Shoes to replace the ones they currently waded through patches of ankle deep water in. All that was no longer part of their life. That realization was still sinking in for Knuckles. She wanted to comfort him, but the device felt too important. A key to this mystery which had interrupted their world.
They approached a solid steel door at the end of the tunnel. Hinges rusted, a heavy lever held it closed. It took both of them to get the stubborn joint to budge, and another team effort to force the rusted hinges to move. The grating squeal alarmed them both, and they stopped with the door barely open, listening. After their ears were cold and their fingers numb, they pushed the door open just wide enough to squeeze out.
The phosphorus wedge of light cut into a larger space on the other side. Far overhead, the sloped ceiling of the subway tunnel dissolved into darkness. A raised walkway lined the side they were on and tracks ran down the deep middle channel.
Gates, barriers, floods, and collapsed portions had always prevented her from exploring too deep. Those and a nanny of a boss. Recalling her old map, she figured they were somewhere beyond those barricades where nobody had been for centuries. Pulling the tablet into her lap she slid down the wall.
“What are you doing?” asked Knuckles. “Let’s go.” He waved down the left tunnel.
She examined the screen and swiped past a few upper level menus. “This isn’t one of your quests in the Nexus. The freakishly strong old guy isn’t an NPC. I’m not going anywhere until I know what the hell he wants.”
Knuckles slumped beside her and let out a long, slow breath. “What the fuck am I doing here? No specs. No connections. I can’t even get to Harlock’s house to check, you know? Guy’s like my brother and I don’t know what happened. You got anyone who can help? Maybe explain to the Collective we weren’t with that weirdo?”
So he’d finally just gotten to the rationalization stage she’d long since left behind. M@ti didn’t want to face that with him and she tried to lose herself in figuring out the tablet. It looked ancient. For a member of the Fel-0-Sh!p, she’d expected maybe some version of TrueSight. This screen simply had a blinking square.
“I don’t know anybody,” she muttered. “My parents maybe.”
“You know your parents?”
She hadn’t meant to say it. Between the stress and her focus on the strange device, the words just slipped out.
Citizens didn’t have parents. If her history lessons were right, little tablets like the one she held had once been used to keep their kids entertained and educated. Turned out, this had been parenthood beta testing for the technological wonders to come. Not long after, those few people left who actually chose to be parents handed the majority of childcare over to lower generation AI. At the turn of the last century, the Collective had fully optimized child rearing to eradicate abuse, neglect, and worse.
There’d always been a slow, inexorable slide toward the world she knew today.
Most everybody said it had worked out for the best. Parenthood 2.0 meant children were well-nourished and never grew up to be burdens on a society which could seamlessly provide for billions. Of course, this also meant people were born in labs. Raised to an AI’s specifications. They had human conta
ct though until they could be trusted to remember to feed themselves and login to the Nexus.
Her life had been different. M@ti had gotten Parenthood 3.0 it seemed. An alpha test for a never fully released end product. She’d been raised with no human contact. There’d been bugs.
“It’s a long story,” she said as a way of not answering Knuckles’ question.
“Not like I gotta be anywhere,” Knuckles said, indicating the empty tunnel. When she didn’t respond, he pressed her. “I’m mean that’s bizarre, knowing your bios. Did you use your hacking skills to find them or something?”
M@ti closed her eyes and let the tablet sink into her lap. Hacking. She didn’t want to talk about that either. She had so much she never told anybody, even her only two friends who consisted of a spechead drummer and a robot.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Whatever.” Knuckles bit his lip and stared through her for a while, nodding his head. He seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. “You know, at least you’ve always got your connection.”
“Is that all you care about? Logging in?” she said sharply. “This far down there isn’t a signal. And if I did, I wouldn’t want to connect anyway.”
“Don’t get out of range!” Knuckles said, his voice reverberating in the tunnel. “We have to log in. I need to straighten this out, get some gear, and check on the band.”
M@ti peered fearfully into the dark on both sides. “You don’t get it!” He was still playing catch up with their situation. She needed to set him straight. “You’re not ever going back. It’s my fault.”
13
Knuckles shielded his eyes, making it hard for M@ti to see his reaction. His mouth was set in a thin grimace. Even though he was seated flat on the ground, his foot kept a blistering beat. He could hate her, she decided, but they couldn’t separate. The spechead would get himself killed without her.
Passing hovs on the streets became whispered murmurs in the concrete tunnel. She kept expecting the sound to be Knuckles’ reply and she leaned closer. She’d told him, very plainly, this was her fault. Was he going into shock again? Some kind of Nexus withdrawal? When she thought his silence would drive her mad, he spoke.
“I knew what you were doing was wrong. That’s on me. But they wouldn’t ban us for sharing tokens, right? And the band, they weren’t mixed up in this. Did you share your account with them too?”
She shook her head and stared between her knees. “Could be they just got in the way. The guy in the Nexus, I’m not sure what he was. Human? AI? He seemed to be on some kind of anti-virus mission.” Knuckles’ squint deepened at her explanation. More about the technology which ruled his life that he didn’t understand. “Old system programs which quarantined problem files and removed them. Not much use nowadays aside from fending off the Fel-0-Sh!p.”
“I heard the old dude mention that guild,” Knuckles said. “Is that how you know all this account switching stuff?”
M@ti made sure to look him squarely in the eye. “I’m not a terrorist.” Then she remembered TrueSight. “But...sort of. I learned most of it growing up. Some kids went to school and paid attention. I tried to find the limits of whatever chips and tech they’d put inside my head.”
“Look where it got us.”
“I don’t know how to apologize for this, Knuck. Think of it this way, it freed us! No more living with the damn LifeMinder in your ear. No more senseless grinding for gear.”
“You’re right.” Knuckles clambered to his feet and she did the same. “You can’t apologize for this,” he muttered. “Let’s go.”
He’d come around. What she’d done wasn’t really so different from his bringing Nexus skills to life in the real like teaching himself how to wail on the drums and pick people’s pockets. How hard could picking a spechead’s pocket be anyway? He wanted to live in the real world like her. He had to. He had no choice.
M@ti kept her thoughts to herself and started off down the right tunnel.
Her feet scuffled as Knuckles turned left.
“Where are you going?” they said in unison.
“That way,” Knuckles protested. “Toward the light and whatever this boat was the old man mentioned.”
She could see a faint glow far off in the distance. It made sense. To the right was an empty maw.
“Doesn’t matter what he said. We don’t know who or what that old man was. You saw his strength. Could be he’s a next gen tourist suit for the AI.”
Knuckles scrunched his face. “How does that make any sense? A freaking warden busted into the cathedral and he told us to run.”
“Did you ever see a warden?” she demanded. “Look, I can’t trust anybody except you. And I need to somehow prove I’m not crazy. We make decisions for ourselves from now on.”
“I’m not a fucking newb,” Knuckles spat. Running a hand down his face, he restrained saying something worse. “What if I choose to go left?”
M@ti couldn’t imagine them going separate ways. Not here. “Didn’t you say Harlock lived in Brooklyn?” Knuckles’ gaze grew intense and he nodded. “Brooklyn is this way.”
He took in one last glimpse of the faraway light. “You better be right.”
They set off, taking a flight of steps to the tunnel floor when the narrow platform ended. Conduits ran along the wall, a stretched reflection on their metal surface the only memory of the lit passageway. M@ti wondered if she should return and close the door but she didn’t want to plunge them into total darkness sooner than absolutely necessary.
Mud caked the ground, a mix of dust dampened by water seeping through the unmaintained tunnel and putrid liquids dripping down. Rats scurried on the edges. Knuckles didn’t seem to notice or care. She’d come across plenty of the furry little critters while picking through trash. Closed subway stations gave them a natural habitat and access to the city. This far from any opening though, it sank in that she was in their world and not the other way around.
The fetid layer of air they’d pierced on the climb down from the Blockhouse returned. She started to breathe through her mouth to keep from choking. Behind her, Knuckles kept clearing his throat.
“Can’t see,” he choked. “Somebody needs to raise the gamma.”
Gamma. A great irony of the Nexus, you never had to be left in the dark. Lighting conditions in most of the online spaces were at your fingertips. A few realms devoted to terror and horror locked your image controls, but she never bothered with those. Plenty did. People used them to feel alive. It made no sense.
Not many people gave their brain-dead society any thought. The Fel-0-Sh!p was a rare exception, and that’s why she’d first been drawn to their forums. Most people found their ideas to be paranoid rantings. And why not? When lives were so comfortable, why care about how it all came together?
M@ti’d known the Collective’s deceptions firsthand. That’s why she had sympathies for those hackers. Yet she never tried to join their revolution either. She glanced at Knuckles over her shoulder and found only a patch of greater shadow. Would he be able to stick it out if their path led them into some kind of rebellion?
One hand trailing the slimy wall and her other holding the strange device, she rotated the screen to try and light their way. They both concentrated on the flare like the exhaust of an engine in deep space. M@ti adjusted her own LUX app, but the underground darkness remained impenetrable.
Rats scurried and shrieked in the depths. Her hand slipped through patches of sludge, but she didn’t dare move it from the wall. After kicking at her heels several times too many, Knuckles grabbed hold of her shoulder.
“Sorry, I got to.”
“S’okay.”
Really, it wasn’t. She’d let him earlier when he hoisted her down from the ladder. That time though had been swift. Now his hand would perch there, on her shoulder, until they surfaced.
Slime and filth on her palm, rats nibbling at her boots, she’d not given those a second thought. But his hand, the touch, always made her
relive the uncertainty. Her childhood intuition that something had been wrong with the hands that raised her. Always wrong.
She fought not to squirm or shrug him off. She willed herself to accept this as a way to atone for the damage she’d done. If she had to, she’d walk him all the way under the Hudson like this.
By luck, another runged ladder ascended into the darkness ahead. M@ti saw the shadowy outline of it first and she thankfully slipped from Knuckles’ grasp, so she could use the glowing tablet screen to guide him toward it.
“Brooklyn?” he asked.
She didn’t want to tell him how much farther far they had to go. “Pretty sure this is just the lower west side of the park. Another tunnel runs above us.”
The tunnel above had fresh air which seeped in through partially blocked vents along sidewalks. Places where M@ti might have gone in search of additions to her collection. Even more creatures skittered in the shadows. She’d never had a night shift, so she’d never experienced these upper tunnels at their worst.
Some areas had a constant drip, storm or possibly sewer water. Traffic noise here was deafening, careening off the sloped walls. Cockroaches nearly the size of their rat predators ran along the eye level conduits. She lowered the light to shine on the floor.
“Maybe we should go back and continue in the other tunnel,” Knuckles said after his third involuntary groan.
“That’s the wrong way,” was all she said.
She kept an eye on the floor and pretended she was here on another scavenger hunt. Being closer to the street, there was definitely more trash, all of which she would have picked up and handed to Livingstone for analysis and recycling. Those quick DNA scans and token penalties always made her feel justified.
With Knuckles’ band erased, how far had the Collective gone in punishing people? Littering violated the core of their extreme efficiency. If they could kill you through the Nexus for just being near a hacker, what would they do for repeat offenders? How many death sentences has she been responsible for? All just a blink away.