by Russ Linton
Her implant still showed no signal. The little handheld device though had a meter which indicated that it didn’t either. The old man had used it to cloak her until she’d fallen out of close range. Was it still able to do that?
M@ti kept her thoughts from slowing her down. Knuckles had been right about getting out of the tunnels. Even she was starting to feel claustrophobic.
They reached another intersection and she led them east. Once they crossed under the East River, they could head overland to Brooklyn. If their cloaking device worked. And if the tunnels weren’t flooded.
A thin skin of liquid already covered the tunnel floor. They were on a downward slope again. Water sloshed higher against her boots.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” Knuckles asked.
M@ti thought for a second. “Midtown. That branch we just took would’ve been off Broadway. We’re under Times Square.”
“Broadway? Where that Shakespeare guy wrote plays?”
“Sounds right,” she said. Ancient history wasn’t her thing. Her map had labeled this as a “theatre” district, and she knew the entire street had been fully recreated in the Nexus. “But this is the real Broadway.” She tried to think of a landmark he might recognize. Then she realized her mistake.
“The Warden’s District?” asked Knuckles.
Proud, decadent, this area had once been the apex of civilization. With its bright lights and massive screens, Times Square and Broadway’s glowing marquees had consumed enormous amounts of electricity. When the Collective first tried to shut them down, there’d been mass protests.
“Protests,” Mr. Grumley, her teacher, had said dismissively. “Can you imagine? The world dying because of such wasteful energy practices and people protested.”
That was in a time before everyone had been seduced by their screens. When offered a Times Square replica in the Nexus, people slowly stopped caring about the real one. The Wardens then turned it into a special district which became the entry point for AI tourists. Those magical lights stayed on, but humans weren’t allowed.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Knuckles asked.
“We’ll be fine. Wardens don’t use these tunnels.”
M@ti tried to sound confident, but she couldn’t be certain. She’d never even so much as picked up trash in the Warden’s District. Her duties ended blocks away. Entry was quietly regulated through control of the hov routes and a strange dead zone she’d never had the courage to penetrate.
As they got closer to Times Square, the subway tunnels began to change. The conduits nearer the ceiling were thicker, the ground, cleaner and dry. Rounding a corner, they spotted a tunnel branch M@ti didn’t recognize. She briefly worried she’d led them the wrong way. Those worries disappeared as they both gawked at a line of lit bulbs trailing toward a fully illuminated platform.
M@ti knew this wasn’t the way they needed to go. Shrouded in darkness for hours though, she found it difficult to argue with the warm lights and her curiosity. Knuckles seemed as relieved as she was and said nothing as she changed course.
They’d definitely passed other platforms in the gloom, knowingly or not. Livingstone had let her explore one once when they happened on a broken gate. She’d found it depressingly empty and ruined. No interesting finds for her collection littered the floor, just filth and mildew coating the concrete and holding together disintegrating white tile.
By contrast, this platform was clean. Sparkling white, the wall tiles were grouted and sealed. A colorful band of purple ran near the ceiling. The only color she’d ever seen in the tunnels had been from biological processes or the occasional faded tag. Quick eye contact with Knuckles signaled he was more than ready to climb out of the rail pit with her.
Further down, a sign hung on the iron girder columns: “Escalator to Upper Platform and Street.” Not until M@ti read the sign did she notice the mechanical whir. Escalators had all but been done away with by the Collective. People energy not wasted resources, or so CalBurner said.
As useless as moving steps might be, M@ti still wanted to see them run. Knuckles tried to pull her back. This time, his touch triggered her. She whirled, sneering, and he backed off.
M@ti crept forward to where she could see the stairs feed into the floor. Simple, but effective, she didn’t quite understand how the energy demand mattered. With thousands across the city, she supposed the waste would be meaningful.
There was something hypnotic about the way each step appeared out of nowhere. She caught herself trying to find an imperfection on a step, so she could track the cycle of one all the way through. There. One was just now descending into view. The step had a deformity on top. Black rubber melded into brown leather.
A sandy colored pant leg and suit were almost fully in view by the time M@ti pressed herself against the iron girder. Several rows down, Knuckles stood in the open. She swatted the air frantically to get him to hide.
The tunnel filled with a scream of steel and the crashing heartbeat of wheels on rail. A subway car! An actual running train! She couldn’t decide between excitement or terror. The device in her hand helped choose.
Quaking in her palm, a fiery red message flashed on the screen: “Autonomous AI signatures detected. Multiple instances inbound.”
14
The train roared into the station. Each skip on the track resonated in M@ti’s chest. She couldn’t tell which caused her body to shudder more, her heart or the train. Subway cars slowed to a stop and she pressed closer to the pillar.
Knuckles had vanished. No telling what kind of spechead game he was playing in his head. What they were witnessing though was strange enough M@ti wouldn’t blame him if he thought he was logged on.
Maybe the cars were slowing to pass. Maybe they’d keep going. Their speed continued to drop. Blurred glimpses through the windows let her imagine they were empty. As the speed continued to plummet, she saw faces.
Full stop.
Right beside her, doors hissed opened and passengers spilled out. M@ti tried to cautiously slide to the other side of the pillar, and remembered the ones coming down the escalator.
Head down she tried not to make eye contact. The departing passengers’ outfits only added to the argument she was actually in the Nexus. On the street, wardens wore dresses made from some sort of material which flowed like liquid. For comfort or to inspire awe, she knew which mattered more to them. These AI’s outfits had been plucked from a lost era. Pants and jackets of wool and silk, leather belts and shoes, all richly colored and immaculately tailored. They reminded her of the suit the old man wore but less dingy.
Eyes low, M@ti noticed some in the crowd stop moving past her. Several of the AI had gathered to stare.
“A human?” asked a man. He wore a felt hat and an impassive expression. His slate suit showed a lost attention to detail no assembly line could ever replicate.
“What is it doing here?” The woman beside him wore sharply pointed heels and a brown trench coat. The hem of a deep sapphire dress peeked out from the opening.
Running hadn’t ever been an option. Flee on the tracks and she would’ve been crushed by the train. Up the escalator, she’d have run into more. So, she looked the woman in the eye.
“Superuser. I heard there were signal issues here.”
The woman regarded her sternly. “This is the subway. Connectivity issues are a common occurrence, though I detect none at present.”
Two more had stopped while the rest of the station emptied. They were all dressed in the same elegantly styled clothes and glittering jewelry. Nearly human on the outside, but M@ti knew what lay under their polymer skin.
“Understood,” M@ti said, her confidence slipping. “I’ll just finish my sweep and be gone.”
She braved a few steps. Calm. Casual. The reply over her shoulder stopped her cold.
“You’re out of uniform. How can you pursue your tasks without the proper equipment?”
“I’m new,” she said, turning with a smile. “Th
ey haven’t issued a uniform yet. And they haven’t gotten my credentials in the system.”
Okay, so maybe she’d pushed her luck too far. She knew that would be their next question though. She could practically see them searching for her user data behind their dead eyes.
The woman strode forward. “Without the proper permissions, you surely wouldn’t have been assigned here.”
The woman tugged at a pair of silk gloves, cinching them tight around her fingers. M@ti did the same with her work gloves when she needed to perform a particularly nasty clean up. The AI wasn’t going to let this go. Now others waiting at the platform were looking their way.
“Maybe I read my schedule wrong.” M@ti took a step backward, toward where Knuckles hid.
“Facial recognition databases have provided her designation as M@ti.” The man spoke this time, his eyes focused past her. “She is correct. She’s no longer in the system. For a reason.”
The group advanced. M@ti fell further back. She jumped at the hiss as the train doors slid shut.
Subway cars clacked along the tracks, each revolution growing faster. M@ti continued to back away, searching for Knuckles behind each pillar she passed. Nowhere to hide, it was up to her to get them out of this. Banned, exiled, maybe marked for deletion, since when did she need permission?
“Screw it,” she said.
TrueSight fired up on her display with a wave of activity. The subway cars glowed with a solid vein of data, much like a hov. These relics ran, but obviously they’d had their own upgrades. Mind racing, M@ti considered hijacking the train to escape.
No, the AI were too close. She could see right into their codes and processes. That time when the warden almost busted her had been the first time she’d ever fired up the hacking interface with a tourist in range. Livingstone and his dated hardware didn’t really count. For the next gen chassis and their sentient pilots, the space around them swam with activity.
These weren’t the solid, predictable lines of the hovs or the controlled feed of the Nexus into a pair of specs. Constant input trickled across the surface of the tourist shells. Eyes, noses, mouths, all had a prismatic sheen like a disturbed oil slick. In the center of their chests, these auras formed a single pulsating core where a deep red pulse flailed. A moth trapped in a jar, the red line rebounded off walls and crawled up pillars until each found their way up the open escalator passage.
As mesmerizing as the sight was, it didn’t leave her helpless. It told her exactly what to do.
Autonomous AI, sure, but from the traffic data, she could divine a single purpose. They were walking sensors. A presence manifested in the physical world meant to gather data and feed the Collective. Probes sent into an alien world.
“Come with us.” The man in the suit lunged for her.
Train cars continued to churn past. She hadn’t found Knuckles yet. She prepped a shot of adrenaline and fired. A momentary packet loss registered, enough to make the larger man stumble. The gathered AI’s faces fell into pure shock.
Mimicked shock, she reminded herself.
The rest of the AI dispatched signals upstream, an alert burning brightly on M@ti’s display. Their systems opened an emergency port which TrueSight eagerly tagged. Their oily sheen turned blood red. Internal connections coalesced in their foreheads, meeting in a single, glowing override function.
That vein of energy sculpted into a mask. Rimmed goggles perched above a beak-like snout glared at her from a dozen faces. The AI rushed forward as one.
Knuckles charged out from near the far wall. “Stop!” he shouted. “We’re innocent!”
With enhanced speed and superhuman shells, she had no doubt which would reach her first. And what would Knuckles do? Drum them into submission? Pick their fucking pockets? M@ti reacted.
A simple sweep of her hand and she entangled the AI’s control functions with that of the departing train.
Knuckles tackled her protectively ahead of a rush of silicone and titanium which abruptly changed course. Cheek pressed against the cold concrete, M@ti watched as the AI disappeared between the platform and the moving train, their expressions frozen in shock, the train cars shuddering with the repeated impacts.
When the train had passed, she and Knuckles lay there watching a severed hand twitch on the edge of the platform. Fingers worming, it clawed closer and Knuckles let M@ti go. She stared at the painted nails, red and glossy against flesh still warm and synthetically alive. Knuckles scrambled forward on his heels and palms, then kicked the severed limb into the rail pit.
“What the actual fuck.” He crept to the platform edge and slowly scanned the length of the trail of robotic carnage. Feeble sounds of failed servos and intermittent crackling rose from the railway. “Did they go mental? Did...” he turned slowly. “What did you do?”
“We need to leave,” she said, getting to her feet and avoiding him.
“Did you kill them?”
“They aren’t alive!” M@ti stalked to the edge and pointed at the twitching remains. Rubbery skin curled and burnt as blue flashes of electricity arced along the rails where the bodies had landed. Gray skeletons oozed fluid too dark and thick to be blood. “They probably downloaded before...before...”
No. She’d hijacked their main feed. They had no way out.
“Before what? Before you made them hop in front of a train? Damn. Damn,” he whispered as he began to franticly pace. “There are laws. Decades old laws. I mean hacking is one thing... This?”
Just another thing hammered into them during school. The so-called fight for AI rights had been real and short-lived. Times when humans and AI had both made decisions for the greater good were never debated much less discussed.
“They’re programs,” she said, softly. M@ti picked up a loose eyeball. Tiny cracks webbed a shimmering hazel iris eerily like her own. Feeling her outrage return, she waved the eyeball in Knuckles’ face. “They can get run over by runaway hovs or trains and do it again tomorrow. We can’t! We need to go, now!”
She shook the gruesome trophy again and tried hard to see it for what it was. Junk. Trash left on the sidewalk. Hard shelled, not like a real eye or even a biotech attempt to grow one, a thin wire ran from the back. She recalled her own retinal procedure and winced.
This was a sensor. A camera. Nothing more. Maybe she could even use it.
Knuckles looked like he might be sick as she pocketed the eyeball. “Where do we go?”
The platform empty, brakes squealed in the direction of the departed train. The tunnels no longer seemed like an option.
“Come on,” she said, grabbing Knuckles’ hand.
They raced up the escalator and into the Warden’s District proper.
15
M@ti had seen pictures and even video of the once famous midtown streets. Her teacher had spoken dismissively of people pressed shoulder to shoulder sharing viruses and diseases while inhaling the burnt fuel from gasoline powered cars which barely crawled their way through the city. Accidents in those mindless steel cars, violent crime, and the price of good health all helped people die decades sooner. A massive tragedy, she’d been told.
But right here in downtown Manhattan, the AI had reproduced that gritty existence entirely. Right down to the near collisions as bright yellow taxis ignored signals.
M@ti huddled beside Knuckles in a darkened corner of the 42nd Street bus terminal while the replica world spun outside like some undying animatronic show. A multi-story screen blared electric images of long dead and forgotten icons against the night sky. Signs fringed with stars beckoned to them. Knuckles watched, transfixed.
One thing the Collective hadn’t completely recreated were the sheer numbers of people. Cars rumbled by empty. Pedestrians wandering the street were all AI tourists and she counted no more than twenty. TrueSight kept close tabs on every last one of them as they went about their business.
On the platform, none of the AI had so much as blinked when she turned on the hacking tool. She’d quietly thanked the o
ld man’s cloaking device. That eye she’d recovered had hardware so similar to her own, it had given her a dangerous idea.
Just like the Nexus fed her own retinas fake images, modifying the data collected by this eye should be possible. Because of her wetware, she understood the code generating each pixel in the most intimate manner. Intercept the signals to a tourist’s core processor, clone a nearby patch of cityscape — it could work.
“Don’t freak out,” she told Knuckles. She fished around in her ear with the wire from the severed eyeball. Knuckles watched both horrified and amazed. “Maintenance port for my retinal implants.”
“That’s ten levels of messed up, M@ti” Knuckles said.
“Manual software upgrades and system tweaks are handled through there. Beats having your eyes scooped out again. Trust me.”
The vision in her left eye blurred then went dark. A glitch and her vision returned. Suddenly she was seeing the bus terminal as if somebody had pasted the world together unevenly.
She hadn’t expected the device to completely override her own sight. With her implants, she controlled the input, namely from the Nexus and through her augmented reality displays. The eyeball’s hardware didn’t allow for that.
“Do I even want to ask why?” Knuckles asked.
“Shut up a minute.” The sudden disorientation wasn’t something she’d planned on dealing with. “I needed to interface with the hardware. Hopefully I haven’t blinded myself.”
M@ti perched the eye on her shoulder and faced it backward so she was now seeing in front and behind her simultaneously. As useful as an eye in the back of her head might be, the rising nausea wouldn’t allow for it. Quickly, she dissected the competing signals and re-engaged her own retinal input.
“Got a chain? A string?”