METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  ROCK OF AGES CLEFT FOR ME, LET ME HIDE MYSELF IN THEE. Y OR N?

  She took hold of the cable and tipped her head to the side, brushing her hair away from the small jack at the base of her skull. External bio-ports were rare—a throwback to earlier times—but sometimes old tech was the most reliable and discrete. One trip to an underground wetware hack shop and she could move data in and out of her iSys without touching the grid. Still, that also meant whatever she brought in would also dodge the normal safety protocols that kept her—and the online world—protected on the net. Whoever brought her here knew she had the port. And had left the hatch ajar.

  Nothing about it smelled right.

  I should leave, she suddenly thought. I should drop the cable and run for the elevator.

  In the midst of her hesitation, the earbud crackled to life again. “Listen to your father, Sooboo,” Bashar’s voice whispered from far away.

  Fuck. She held her breath, ported in and checked the connection. “Yes,” she finally said and watched the letters appear behind her eye.

  The data package hit her iSys like a shovel to the head. White light spider-webbed her vision and a loud roar brought vertigo upon her that threatened nausea. She fell forward against the server rack and gasped, her hand scrambling to disconnect the cable.

  What the fuck? Whatever was being pushed into her personal system didn’t fit cozily and her internal neural safety protocols were trying to push back. Of course, they weren’t nearly as robust as the net’s protocols and it was a losing battle. She found the cable but couldn’t make her fingers work. They kept slipping over the surface of it and when Sabo finally did have a grip, she didn’t have the strength to pull it free. Her arm fell limp to her side.

  Sabo slid to her knees, a roaring pulse pushing at her temples from within her skull. Her vision morphed from white lace to gray and she gave in to the nausea, vomiting onto the cage’s plain metal floor. When she went the rest of the way down, the cable snapped loose from her neck. The edge of the server cabinet clipped the side of her head, sending the gray light spinning into dark.

  She came around to the smell of coffee, sour milk and bile in the puddle beneath her cheek. Her head ached and she sniffed again, now aware of the strong reek of iron. She touched her nose and looked at the blood that smeared her fingers. The IM window was open behind her left eye, the orange font flashing at her:

  UPLOAD COMPLETE.

  She blinked and pulled herself up to her knees slowly. Her ear bud crackled and popped to life. “We have to go, Sooboo.”

  Dad? She touched the sore spot on the side of her head and winced. “I know,” she said.

  “Then get up.”

  Sabo closed her eyes against the ache and climbed to her feet. “Okay. I’m up.”

  But her body felt sluggish, her eyes wanting to close as she leaned against the server cage. Now, her father’s voice was firm, the tone of command she once feared and more recently loathed. “Get going, soldier. You’re out of time.”

  She cast one guilty glance at the mess in the bottom of the server cage, then let herself out carefully. Her legs were rubber but she forced them to carry her through the server room’s hatch and back to the elevator.

  She pressed the button for the roof and settled against the wall as it began to climb. She was halfway to the top when she remembered her father. “Are you still there, Dad?”

  No answer.

  Sabo pulled the log with the twitch of an eyelid and scanned it for a callback number. Of course, he was smarter than that. Neither his earlier call nor the most recent appeared in the log.

  The elevator whispered open onto the roof and she stepped into the wind that her ride kicked up. It was long and dark and silent, its gyros making a high-pitched whine that tickled her inner ear. The passenger door folded up and a man wearing a Patriot, Inc. uniform leaned toward her.

  “Ms. Oxham?”

  “Bashar-Oxham,” she corrected. “You must be my ride.” She took in the unmarked copter. It was one of the new McDonnell Douglas four-seaters, designed primarily for urban combat support. She climbed into the passenger seat and fasted her belt. “I’m glad Mom still has some friends at Patriot Inc.”

  The pilot nodded. “She has plenty of those. I’m Carmichael.”

  She opened her mouth to say something but the words were lost when her father’s voice filled her ear again. “Go, Sooboo, go!”

  “Let’s fly,” she told the pilot.

  “Where to?” The engine’s whine built as the copter lifted and moved over the edge of the roof. Beyond the tinted matrix-spun transparent sapphire she saw Seattle spreading out beneath her, bathing in an uncharacteristically warm winter sun. To her right, Puget Sound reflected back the sunlight.

  “South,” she said. “There’s a Hawking Grove there I need to visit. Shadows-in-Line-With-the-Moon.”

  “I know the place.” Carmichael got busy being a pilot.

  As they accelerated south, she felt the slightest change in the atmosphere. There was a sudden burst of noise on the pilot’s headset and she heard him gasp even as lights started flashing on his console. “Hang on,” he said, casting a glance up and behind them. She found herself pressed back into the chair as their speed built even more and she twisted herself to see what he was seeing.

  Fuck.

  Behind and above, the sky was filled with fire as something massive fell upon them. She felt the copter shake as a hot wind tore at it as they shimmied to the left and dropped suddenly. The pilot regained control over the aircraft as they sped away south, climbing as they went.

  She felt the impact down in her teeth, the sound of it a roaring like nothing she’d ever heard. The winds were stronger now and Sabo was distantly aware of alarms going off in the cockpit as the pilot’s hands scrambled over the control panel. The copter bucked and twisted against the wind as her stomach turned with the sudden turbulence that shook them like a rat in a dog’s unrelenting jaws.

  Fuck.

  She looked over her shoulder and gasped. Smoke and fire choked out the horizon to their rear where a city once sprawled and the weight of it settled upon Samira Bashar Oxham’s shoulders.

  Seattle was gone.

  And somehow, her parents had known what was coming and warned her away.

  The pilot gave echo to the voice in her head and when he said the word, his voice was cold and hollow. “Fuck.”

  * * *

  They set down near the Hawking Grove. Sabo studied the small group gathered near the trees. Already, people wore bandanas tied around their mouths, breathing through the wet cotton as they shuffled into the grove with empty eyes.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  The pilot looked up from the console and nodded. “Hurry.” She could hear the rush of static in his headphones and knew the channels had to be choked now as they tried to ascertain what exactly had struck Seattle and how much of that city it had carved away.

  And as they tried to figure out where to start pulling survivors out of the rubble and seawater.

  Sabo slammed the hatch behind her and made her way quickly to the grove’s single cobblestone path. She couldn’t help but look north, watching the cloud that continued to rise there where a city had been. In the distance, she heard disaster alert sirens.

  What have the two of you gotten into? She couldn’t remember exactly when it was that she first felt a parental impulse toward her parents. It might’ve been around thirteen or fourteen, and they’d largely laughed at her attempts to assume that role but they’d never corrected her.

  “Worrying about what we’re up to,” her father had told her back then, “will only make you tired, Sooboo.”

  She moved into the grove, letting its security and network protocols tickle her as it read who she was as she inhaled the scent of pinesap and old needles. Of course, her parents being her parents, she also had to offer up answers to a half dozen other questions before the grove granted her access.

  Even still, she w
as unsurprised that they’d paid for the deep-down security only afforded by the grove’s expansive root system, which meant a hardwire data transfer. She moved to the tree that flashed the implant in her left eye, studying its branches for a port cable, even as her right eye took in the other people moving beneath the grove’s canopy of sheltering branches. Most were haggard, their faces drawn in lines of worry, their eyes darting north despite the view being blocked.

  How many lost? At its peak, the city had boasted maybe a population of three million, its citizens packed into massive strato-rises tethered to an already crowded downtown corridor. But the city was shrinking again as people moved inland, joined the seasteads or went abroad. The seawalls were keeping up with the rising Pacific but the cost of holding the future at bay was translating into higher taxes and an overall higher cost of doing business for the green industries that had helped rescue the coastlands to begin with. Even her own employer, the J. Appleseed Foundation, had started looking into relocation. Those vanishing companies and their payrolls had cut that population easily in half. Still, the city would be typically be full of people during the middle of a workday, despite telecommuting mandates and quotas. It would be harder to calculate a typical Saturday population.

  Fuck. There had been an impact but no blast that she was aware of beyond the relatively minor wave of heat that had pummeled the chopper as they’d fled south. The ‘net buzzed with the news but she didn’t have time to scan more than headlines. First glance, an asteroid strike had taken out downtown Seattle.

  Sabo found her own eyes drifting north until a familiar orange font caught her attention.

  TRANSPORTATION BEING RE-DIRECTED. ATTEMPTING COUNTERMAND. Her ear bud crackled, her father’s voice suddenly filling her head. “Hurry, Sooboo.”

  She blinked and glanced at the copter. “Dad?”

  “Get what you need. We need to go.”

  She stood before the flashing tree now and reached up into a leafy branch, her fingers closing around the data jack. She pulled it down and held it to the back of her neck, starting at the sudden memory of vertigo and vomit that ambushed her. Closing her eyes and crossing her fingers, she plugged in.

  Sabo went through another layer of security with the grove and initiated the download. It wasn’t a large packet—certainly within her wetware’s limits—and she was surprised when the download terminated due to lack of memory. She ran it again, not believing the results even a second time. Perplexed, she still refused to believe it until she checked the memory level and saw it, then checked for the program that had consumed every bit of space on her iSys, extending deep into the wetweb that served as overflow.

  SMA.EXE.

  The executable file she’d downloaded from that J. Appleseed server. She blinked voice-recog on. “What is SMA?” The words appeared, flashing in orange, as she spoke them into the chat window.

  Her father’s voice answered even as his own words appeared. “I am, Sooboo. But there isn’t time for that now. We need to go.”

  “Mom thought this was important; she sent the helicopter. Whatever is going on, I’m sure we need this.” Even as she spoke, something tickled at her memory. What had her mother said?

  I have a present from your father. “She said it was from you,” she added. Of course, now she couldn’t be sure of that. Or sure that it was actually her father whispering in her ear.

  But she was sure of one thing. Something had gone wrong in that last download. Her implants were malfunctioning …or worse, her mind was. Her phone hadn’t been able to dial out since the impact and she knew she couldn’t be hearing her father’s voice. She’d checked her call log and there had been no calls since her mother’s warning what seemed hours ago.

  “I will analyze the packet and save any relevant data,” her father told her. “Steady yourself.”

  She opened her mouth to protest even as she leaned against the tree. Her body spasmed. Then her head tingled, building to a sharp, hot ache.

  All of the trees were flashing now and she was vaguely aware of a dozen sirens going off both internally and externally even as she pieced together what her father’s voice told her. She didn’t have the memory to store, let alone analyze, the data but someone or something else had something better. It was using her connectivity to hack the grove, bending the grove’s vast memory resources to access and analyze her mother’s packet.

  It didn’t take long. The orange font appeared: SALIENT DATA RECOVERED.

  Sabo pulled the jack free, aware again of a nausea that flooded her. She steadied herself against the tree. The sirens still blared around her but there was no evidence of any security presence. Of course, that didn’t surprise her. Whatever happened up north certainly trumped a suburban grove-hack of less than three minutes.

  She followed the path back out, scanning ahead for the copter. She held her breath until she saw it waiting ahead. The pilot watched her through narrow eyes when she climbed back inside. “Someone out there loves you,” he said. “I was ordered back; then, just as I was lifting off, it was countermanded by the White House.”

  Sabo nodded. “Someone out there does love me.”

  At this point, she had no idea who. Neither her father nor her mother had anything close to the level of skill required to hack a grove. They were both hellaciously talented people, but not in that direction. She couldn’t think of anyone she knew that could pull that off, even with the best equipment, much less through her iSys by way of a file transfer cable.

  And with results in under three minutes. An impressive level of skill.

  Sabo didn’t realize Carmichael was speaking until he touched her arm. She looked at him. “I’m sorry?”

  “Where to next?”

  She blinked. “I don’t know.”

  “Chelan Heights,” her father whispered in her ear.

  Mother, of course. “Chelan Heights,” she told the pilot.

  Carmichael banked the helicopter east. The ash and debris fell now, pelting the metal skin and the tinted sapphire canopy. She closed her eyes against the wave of grief that struck her again and settled in for the ride.

  She pulled up the instant messenger window, activated her embedded optical communication wizard and blinked her words. I know you’re not my father, she sent.

  “You’re correct,” his voice whispered in her ear. “His voice samples were on file in your iSys and in the J. Appleseed Foundation security cluster. I thought his voice would facilitate a more effective working relationship for us.”

  “Boy, you got that one wrong,” she muttered. So who are you then? And what is this working relationship you speak of?

  “I am SMA. And our working relationship began the moment you agreed to download me.”

  What was the choir singing in that audio clip that started this? Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.

  She pondered a moment, then sent the question that she so carefully shaped. You hid something in me to avoid it being destroyed by Dad’s asteroid strike?

  “Almost, Sooboo,” the voice whispered and she understood the truth of it before it continued. It settled into her belly with a flutter. “I hid myself in you to avoid being destroyed by the asteroid strike. So that we can prevent a much greater catastrophe.”

  Let me hide myself in thee. She released held breath as she realized more fully what she had agreed to. And this time, she whispered the words and her voice recog picked them up, dropping them into the chat window in bright orange font. “AI, then?”

  Carmichael glanced over. “What?”

  “Yes,” SMA answered.

  She ran back over her knowledge of J. Appleseed. They had well over a dozen AIs involved at various levels in the org, including the triumvirate of Heinlein, Hubbard and Kornbluth, left to the Foundation by William Silas Crown. She knew of those but she’d not heard of SMA. I am not familiar with you, she sent.

  I am not a part of the organization’s stated IT inventory, the AI answered. My existence is unacknowledged;
it was a secret my parents hoped to keep.

  Badly enough to drop a rock on you, she thought. She opened her eyes and saw that they flew over the foothills now, making their way east. To the south, Mount Rainier rose up stoic and white with snow. To the north, Mount Baker did the same. She didn’t need to look behind her to see the smoke and desolation there. She closed her eyes again, satisfied with their course.

  Easily a dozen questions vied for preeminence but something SMA had said earlier brought her back around. And what is the greater catastrophe we’re going to prevent?

  “Watch and see, Sooboo,” her father’s voice whispered.

  The data began to scroll behind her closed eyes.

  * * *

  Sabo watched and saw, her anger rising as she did. The missing mass accounting data was here—bioware smuggled into orbit, for God only knew what purpose—and more. A tug of the single thread of those mass budget discrepancies exposed even more threads and the new threads unraveled the fabric of deception quickly. Executive session notes going back to the transition of human members off the board—forty years ago—and still more financial shell games for the creation of facilities she assumed must be intended to house the Appleseed AI beyond humanity’s exit stage left. And medical research—lots of medical research—for a Foundation primarily committed to community and economic development.

  Zero population rewilding, managed by AIs of our own making, she thought. What was to remain of humanity was already tucked away, a remnant cast into space and away from the garden that had been their cradle. While our electronic children repair what we’ve done to our own mother.

  The first step had been to move humans into space. The second, to remove any evidence of J. Appleseed’s complicity in it and the third …

  darwin. The present from her father by way of her mother.

  All of it was there. Except for how exactly this particular plague was to be visited upon them.

  “We’re here,” Carmichael announced as he banked the helicopter around the massive building that rose up ahead of them.

  On a clear day, the federal retirement facility, Chelan Heights, rose high enough above the eastern Cascade foothills to see the lake it was named for. The Heights, so-called by its tenants, was three hundred floors of varying degrees of assisted living for the top tier of government retirees. Her mother was in that upper echelon though when she’d first retired, she’d moved into one of the more independent levels. Still, age had caught up to her quickly. Her father had found a way to cheat old age but the tech that made him spryer than his younger wife was hard to come by.