Under the Flickering Light

by Russ Linton

  In the last few days, they’d gotten closer out of necessity. She’d spent time with him without his damn specs. He’d started to see the real world and she, she’d seen a person behind the hardware. She wasn’t ready to say what her feelings were for him, but for now, just having him here made her happy.

  “You lagging or something?” A spechead pressed well into her arm’s length personal space.

  “Sorry,” M@ti said.

  She slipped between the tightly packed people to catch up with Knuckles and found herself roped in by a virtual concourse. He appeared to be concentrating, his feet landing in a proscribed pattern. Gradually, she noticed similar patterns being repeated all around by the other specheads in their orderly lines.

  Like data written to storage, the Collective wanted to ensure passengers ended up in their assigned places. Computer systems which let their bits roam too freely always corrupted due to fragmentation and loss of order. M@ti wondered if the Collective had so calculated every variable that sending people to the wrong Preserve would do the same.

  More dangerous ideas. M@ti forced them out of her mind and flicked on her display to join the flock.

  Colored pills and capsules lit her path, each about the size of her foot. Foreign names flashed in the corner in sequence. Zolpidem, codeine, oxycontin, fentanyl. A depressing tone sounded as one pill burst under her feet, then another. Beside the names ran a score keeper with a Saint Andrews logo.

  She leaned over Knuckles’ shoulder to whisper. “What do you see?”

  “Huh? Oh, banner identification. For the warring shoguns.”

  “Right,” she muttered. Fivefold Bushido stuff.

  On Cora’s, or M@ti’s display, more pills vanished, her score plummeting. Whatever the game, she sucked at it. Finally, her foot hit a little flesh-colored tablet stamped with the number thirty. Golden confetti sparkled on her screen and several upbeat bars of the Saint Andrews theme played. Her score ticked upwards.

  “Yay,” she cheered, monotone. Zero enthusiasm.

  “Improve your score!” came the soothing AI announcer. “Stay on track! Earn tokens and upgrade in Saint Andrews! Replace your rusty bone saw with a sonic slicer!”

  She saw the name, Adderall light up when she managed to trip on her one success. Cora was ace at this game. M@ti knew her metrics would be recorded and analyzed. If she was going to do her best to fit in, she needed to start here. She watched for the one prescription she knew and hopped from pill to pill.

  A few more accidental points and she managed to identify more. Her score crept upward. With every misstep, she could feel the weight of being somebody else. She had to improve to pull off this identity switch, she told herself.

  Skipping lightly, she hit a triple combo and the screen exploded with fireworks.

  “Yes!” she shouted.

  She became aware of Knuckles ahead of her. He’d turned to stare, his specs down. She looked behind her at the orderly lines and open stairwells filled with people hopping mechanically forward like pieces on an assembly line. They’d made it to the security platform. There, travelers disappeared into a bank of rotating cylinders and through the smoked glass she watched scan lines sweep the interior.

  “It’s just a point grinder, M@ti.” Knuckles smiled.

  23

  The security pod in front of her cleared. Knuckles disappeared into one beside hers. One step away and her hand brushed the hard edge of something in her pocket. The figurine. No, that was in the zipper pocket on her leg.

  This was the hacker’s tablet.

  Fuck! She should’ve thrown it in the river when she had the chance. She could ditch it in the crowd and nobody would notice. Everyone had put their specs back on, guided by the indicators on their displays. She knew the sanitation crew would eventually find it though. The tablet’s case held traces of her, now Cora’s, DNA. She’d slept with the damn thing. Probably drooled on the screen.

  “Hurry it up!” The citizen behind her pushed M@ti forward. “Minder says I got ten minutes before the train leaves and I get docked tokens!”

  M@ti caught herself on the opening and managed to suppress an urge to kick the guy’s specs off his face. “Vent your processors, I’m going.”

  She set her jaw and stepped inside.

  The cylinder swiveled shut. Murmurs from the crowd evacuated the space with a sharp hiss. M@ti nervously eyed the hoop of energy descending from the ceiling.

  She couldn’t have forgotten she had the tablet. This was her own final, desperate act to sabotage a normal life. All she’d gotten from the device so far had been basic commands. Nothing too fancy could be done without a password. There’d been no reason to keep it.

  She followed the lines as the scan sunk past her eyes, her chin. Each passing inch and she could feel a growing discomfort which wasn’t centered on the device which should’ve been her biggest concern.

  Trembling, she called up her old custom interface, now empty. If anything went down, she was defenseless. What the hell had she been thinking? There was no normal life in the Collective. There was a dictated existence. Smoke and mirrors.

  The security scan disappeared into the floor and excited electrons left a numb sensation in her nostrils. For a moment, everything seemed normal, the scan complete. Then she felt her neck muscles tighten and scalp prickle. That fleeting intuition she wasn’t alone.

  Working around AI, living with them, she’d long been aware that unless you looked directly at them, they were invisible. Because of that, she’d grown up in a state of constant anxiety, always checking to see if her parents were observing. Expecting to collide with them around corners in their old house. No familiar sixth sense to warn her they were there.

  But this Loadi, this mad entity, he was here. She could sense him.

  “Undo last command,” M@ti said into her interface.

  Her hacking tools cascaded down the screen. She fired up TrueSight first. She saw her own connection inside the pod, a glowing silver thread. The incoming feed from the Collective formed a red umbrella above with Loadi’s own bundle of connections at the center, writhing like a mass of maggots. A cancer.

  “Before you do anything rash, I must inform you that these chambers are sound proof. They can also be made inhospitable to biological life. Those waiting in line are being rerouted to other units. Nobody will even know what happened. Except you.”

  Slowly, M@ti turned to face the voice. Loadi’s greenish apparition striped the wall behind her. The scanning ring had reached the floor and now traveled upward again, flaring through the individual segments of his likeness. He idly tracked the ring’s leading edge with the tip of his cane.

  The scan neared her tablet and gave a wink and Loadi gave it a sharp rap. She watched the cursor go dark.

  “Possessing one of those is a death sentence,” Loadi stated. “You didn’t know this. Laws are all pressed into your soft minds but the consequences, rarely are they discussed. Death is more common than you would imagine. And I, I am the executioner.”

  “They dock tokens. Banning was supposed to be the worst punishment,” M@ti said. “Or exile.”

  “Exile. Death. One in the same for your fellow citizens.” Loadi slid his cane behind his back. “Do you truly believe Chroma would toss a rebellious human into the wilds and let them live in peace?”

  M@ti concentrated on her display. Overriding the tourist bodies of the AI had been one thing. Those chassis had been designed to openly accept commands, to be piloted by their AI tourists. Attacking Loadi, she’d have to overcome his internal defenses, not just some piece of hardware he temporarily occupied.

  That’s it. She’d target the security cylinder he was projecting into. Maybe she’d find an opening to do worse. She set her hands in motion stringing together and compiling the code.

  “It could work,” he said, his attention on her efforts. “But you forget, I live in the world you seek to alter. Your code is as plain to me as a loaded gun pointed at my head. Only your trigger won’t be
fast enough.” He appeared to press closer, his pointed nose sinking into the space occupied by her own. A monochromatic video of herself inside the security pod played in his goggles.

  She watched her growing frustration in the shuttered pod. She beat on the walls, trapped, like an animal. “Think of your safety. And that of the friend you will leave behind.”

  “You’d kill him too, wouldn’t you? Like you killed the band. Like all those innocent people.”

  Quickly he sunk away, and the images faded. “There were complications. Discoherence. I wish no harm to you or your friend, but I cannot keep you safe for long. Your only choice is to agree to help me.”

  “Complications? Murder is a complication?”

  Loadi recovered his composure and his round goggles bored into her. This time, instead of showing the inside of her security pod, she saw a subway platform. People, no, AI tourists, hurtled themselves against a speeding train. A warden lay crumpled in Times Square, her lightweight gown rippling on a breeze.

  “They uploaded. They...”

  “Backup nodes are a luxury. If one’s connection to the system is intermittent, say in a subway tunnel or blocked inside a sanctuary, a sacred space, they might not transfer from their corporeal form. What remains of them is lost. But you were well aware of that, weren’t you?”

  The cramped space began to feel warm. Stifling.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “You’d try to do the same to me would you not?” The mad hunter sounded almost eager.

  “In a heartbeat, murderer,” she hissed.

  “You didn’t object when I helped you escape Times Square. The slain warden is no more, much the same as her underling.”

  She recalled the sound of bone snapping and flesh grinding into the pavement. “That was you then.”

  “Fortunately, I answered the call and not my discoherence. The guardian is there to protect Chroma’s peace. It is her place of deepest regret and contemplation where she foiled any chance to reclaim her humanity.”

  “You’re not human! None of you! You’ve spawned copies, backups. I don’t even know which of your twisted clones I’m talking to right now.”

  His face wandered to the floor where the ring was beginning yet another pass. He jabbed his cane into the wall and it stopped, frozen near their ankles.

  “I am not a base file system ready to be written and re-written. I am, like you, one of Chroma’s children. The others who hunt you, those aren’t crude copies. They are states of my own existence which I so very much wish to contain.” His voice grew desperate and pleading. “Every moment they conspire to take control and every moment I fight them. Even now, they wish to see you die here, gloating as you gasp for air which they don’t need, your skin becoming inert and cold.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “We have similar dreams and ambitions.” His chin elevated, the coned nose bobbed upward. He released the scan line toward the top of the chamber where it pulsed, scattering a charge like static electricity across the ceiling. M@ti saw constellations spark to life. “Like you, I wish to explore the stars.”

  Through the mask she couldn’t see his face, but she could hear the familiar childish wonder. She’d have said those words precisely the same way. The universe was limitless and real. A cosmic womb bound to have given birth to countless worlds. Real worlds not digital imitations.

  “What could possibly be out there for you?” she asked.

  He raised the cane and traced a wandering path through the stars. The cane dropped. “Have you ever wanted to be I and not we?”

  M@ti had, she realized. Everyday. She’d fought to make her own choices and here she was about to get on a train to another place where she had to pretend to be who she wasn’t. They both wanted to escape fate.

  “But that doesn’t serve the Collective, does it?”

  “Damn the Collective!” Loadi’s rage compressed the air. M@ti pulled away and raised her hands to unleash an attack. The hunter ignored her, irritably stabbing his cane downward. “There are plans to colonize new worlds. I wish to be there in their founding.”

  “So go. Upload to the Mars transmitter and go. Leave me and my friends alone.”

  Loadi ran a hand along the caduceus atop his cane. “Off world has been denied to me. Mars. Mercury. Beyond.”

  And me, M@ti thought.

  “You need a hacker then?”

  “I do. However I’ve granted you your freedom if you would rather become one of the many again. As I said though, we have dreams, ambitions. I don’t believe this is what you desire.”

  “Hold up. Livingstone, he’s the one who put all this together.”

  “The efforts of the entities you call Livingstone were easily detectable. I have assured otherwise.”

  “You’re saying you arranged the new user accounts? To protect us from...you?” The AI’s fragmented brain was starting to grate on her nerves. He was the one hunting her. He was the one she needed to escape.

  “I assisted with your new accounts as a peace offering. Your supervisor has been partitioned for his own safety. Your human friend has been given a life similar to the one he left behind. You, you can be free to follow your dreams.”

  So the accounts hadn’t been assigned completely by chance. Knuckles had been given an ideal replacement, if he could forget about his murdered friends of course. The identity assigned to her had its purpose too, she imagined. To be as painfully representative of what she hated most about the whole damn system. She understood the AI’s dreams better than she wanted to admit. A chance to explore space gave her a bigger rush than the idea of bending computer systems to her will. But even if she could beam herself on board the expedition like the ships in Space Nomad, it wouldn’t help. The AI hadn’t bothered to include life support on their ships. Her shriveled, mummified corpse would be all that arrived at Alpha Centauri.

  “What exactly do you think my dreams are?”

  Loadi’s chest swelled as though releasing a sigh of relief. The gesture came naturally either from experience or learned response, M@ti wasn’t sure.

  “I will show you how to destroy Chroma.”

  M@ti’s pulse quickened. All the excitement she’d tried to bury suddenly released, forming goose bumps on her skin. The one who held the entire human race hostage and experimented with her life, gone? Now that was a proper ambition.

  “How?”

  “Scorched earth. Give your prey nowhere to go to ground. Destroy every sentient and proto-sentient AI in the Collective which contains even a shred of her essence. I can show you how, but first,” He regarded the shifting constellation above him. “I’d like to be far away. Do we have a deal?”

  She had no reason to trust him when he could barely control his more murderous side. Him knowing how to bring Chroma and the Collective down though, that wasn’t a lie. He’d almost done it once before, or at least given her an opening. If they could contain his cascading failure, they’d keep innocent users from being slaughtered by his raging clones.

  “We’ll need to be inside the core,” M@ti said.

  “Yes, that will serve my purposes as well. I’ve done so once, but I didn’t have a way to transfer to the Alpha Centauri expedition from there. You can make this happen with the right tool set.”

  “Just give me a link.”

  “Not quite a download. These tools, the proper knowledge, they’ll be brought to you. The terrorists, the ones called cryptoanarchists.” Loadi pinched a strand of the emergency feed between his fingers and brought it to his beak. “They’ve caught your scent it seems. Go with them.”

  The scanning ring disappeared and the door to the security pod slid open.

  M@ti stared out into the terminal, uncertain. Loadi had his own scheme, she could count on that. Could be he was using her to spy on these rebellious humans. But she’d do what she always had — keep her wits about her and make her own way through this mess. She’d never been a pawn in anyone’s game. She wasn’t about to start
now.

  24

  The hyperloop train glided so smoothly she couldn’t be sure they’d even left the station. Wider than the jaunty subway car, the cabin contained three rows of seats. No windows, there wasn’t even a view to distract her. The woman across from her had retinal implants. Not long under that dead stare and M@ti thought maybe she wouldn’t be better off logging some Nexus time of her own.

  The seat on the hyperloop which M@ti had been directed to was no where near Knuckles. With Loadi’s delay, she hadn’t been given time to spring the new plan on him. They were in the same car at least, but she’d lost him in the shuffle. They’d promised to find one another as soon as the loop got them to San Diego.

  She searched for Knuckles’ topknot above the seat backs. Even though hairstyles were an acceptable body modification, most people didn’t bother. In her own way, she’d been lazy too. She wanted to claim she’d first shaved her head as a form of protest, but the style had its pluses while spelunking through garbage.

  Before she’d found Knuckles’ topknot, M@ti spotted a shock of white hair. Four rows up and one aisle over. She stared, willing the person to turn around. When they didn’t budge, she raised out of her seat to get a better look. Specs? She couldn’t see any.

  She sank back into her seat. Could be they’d found her, just like Loadi said. These cryptoanarchists did have plenty of knowledge and tech that could be useful. She needed to play both ends until she had enough information to make her own move.

  M@ti pulled the stolen data tablet from her pocket. The little green cursor was blinking again, no messages or warnings. If it had been able to cloak her, it could have also told the hackers where she was. Turning that off and sending a giant middle finger their way would be entertaining. Knowing more about how their hardware could fool even wardens would give her an edge when facing Chroma. She turned her full attention to the archaic device.