by Julian Gough
Back when he faked his age, and hung out with the older guys, trying to learn how to live among others. Back before he gave up, and created his own desert to live in.
He takes a deep breath, reaches out, and grabs her between the legs.
The game lets him do it; but she’s not there, she has written some code to protect her from those kinds of move, and so her avatar doesn’t react at all. His hand passes through her.
‘I’ve got the no pussy blues . . .’
The game tries to reset mapping, and the disconnect jolts them back into their starting positions.
Standing, looking each other in the eye.
‘Why do you think you have the right to do that?’ she says.
This is not what is meant to happen at all.
‘You wanted to . . .’ Colt can’t find the words. ‘To kiss me . . . touch me . . . when we . . .’
He’s vaguely aware of the long war over codes of behaviour for avatars, but he’s always kept out of those debates, the passions frightened him.
I walked away, he thinks.
‘Look,’ says Sasha, ‘you came to me in the game, that time, and you’re confident, and, fuck, I love your work, I’m flattered; and we talk, and it’s nice. It’s lovely. And I enjoyed making out with you ingame, and so we got carried away and triggered the censors. I mean, fuck, I didn’t know you had parental controls on.’
‘I’ve turned them off, I . . .’
She shakes her head. ‘That’s not the problem.’
‘What is the problem?’
‘When I go to you in the real world, you blank me, you withdraw all your emotions. You stonewall me.’
‘Oh . . .’ But Colt doesn’t know what to say, how to respond. He starts ticcing, his hands tapping his thighs in a rhythm, but it doesn’t help, and Sasha keeps talking.
‘. . . And then, when you change your mind, now, you just use your admin privileges to find me, and you appear inside my mission without permission, and then you . . .’
Colt thinks of something. ‘—But you didn’t ask permission when you called to my house—’
‘I took a real risk, in the real world!’ Sasha leans forward, and her eyes, her face, are so astonishing that Colt steps backwards. ‘I didn’t have admin privileges! Do you think it was easy, going to see you? I was crapping myself.’
She was scared? She was scared? This information is completely unexpected.
‘You could have turned me down, fine,’ she says, ‘but you could have been nice about it. You could have cared how I felt . . .’
‘How did you feel?’
‘I felt fucking terrible, I was crying so hard I nearly crashed the bike going home. And now you want to rewind, and play the scene again, except this time with you in charge, and in the safety of the game, risking nothing, nothing.’
And now they’re both nearly crying, out in the test range, and Colt remembers he’s on a bus, that his mother is a few seats away.
He starts to shut down; but no, he can’t, he can’t walk away again, he’s got to keep going, get through this, and so he blinks and blinks and looks at Sasha’s face, her amazing face, her interface with the world, so alive and angry and he says, ‘Why are you so angry?’
‘Because I like you. Because I don’t even think you’re a shit, you’re just totally thoughtless.’
‘Explain it to me,’ he says, helpless.
‘Explain what?’
‘Women.’ He thinks, no, the problem is bigger than that. ‘Men.’ Even bigger than that. Yes. ‘Everything.’ But that’s not the right word, he’s overshot the target. A better word comes to him. ‘Love.’
As he says the word, a shadow falls over both of them.
Colt glances up, at the clouds gathering far above Sasha’s head, and behind her. Clouds that are coming out of nowhere; clouds that are forming faster than they could ever form in nature.
Sasha turns, looks back over her shoulder, to see what he’s staring at. ‘Whoa, that’s crazy,’ she says.
Is it relief he’s feeling at the distraction? Yeah, it’s relief.
‘Yeah,’ he says.
‘Bug?’ she says. ‘Hardware glitch?’
‘No.’ Colt pauses, trying to read the clouds. Decode them. ‘It’s real.’
‘Can’t be. The NDSA has never made that much weather.’
‘Not just the NDSA any more.’ Jeeez, they’re forming super cells so fast you can see it happening. Tornados coming . . . ‘The security agencies,’ he says. ‘All of them. They’ve been mobilized. Coordinated.’ The immune system, he thought. It’s been expanding, while we’ve been talking. Taking them over. Using their resources.
Those drones that have been looking for us aren’t all Dad’s.
Sasha reluctantly looks away from the clouds.
Looks Colt in the eye.
‘What are they doing?’
‘The agencies? . . . Searching.’
‘Searching for what?’
He pauses. ‘Me.’
She laughs. She thinks he’s joking.
He wants to tell her everything. But if he tells her everything, she’s involved. She’s at risk.
She’s already at risk. She’s talking to him. They must be trying to monitor this, en route. Crack it.
Yes, it’s hard to remember to be paranoid enough.
Wait, she’s wearing a helmet, and micromesh. A full suit. He should warn her about the hardware backdoors. She’s going to need to modify them physically.
But how can he tell her, without telling her how he knows about all that? Without telling her everything? And does she have the time, the tools, to do the modification? It’s not trivial.
Also . . . if he tells her everything . . . he might have to tell her everything. How he feels. Crack himself open. Decrypt himself. No.
Just leave her. Keep her safe. Keep her out of it.
‘I have to go,’ he says.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ she says. ‘We were almost getting somewhere.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s an emergency.’
‘All right. But we need to finish this conversation. Meet me.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We do. Where. When.’
‘Here, later. Test range. Five hours. I’m off shift.’
Five hours. Well, he will either be dead, or alive. He doesn’t have to think about it now.
If it’s safe, he’ll turn up.
‘OK.’
100
And then he is back on the bus, between worlds.
Everything is blurred and his eyes can’t focus.
He wipes his eyes. Looks out the window.
Three hours. He just has to stay alive till then.
‘Where were you?’ says his mother, right beside him.
Oh man, she’s moved over to his seat while he was ingame.
Was he mumbling? What did she hear?
Colt doesn’t know what to say.
Naomi glances up at the drones. ‘Will they kill us?’ His mother’s voice is like a little girl’s. She’s looking at him like . . . like . . . like he usually looks at her. This is scary.
Say something. Say something to make her happy. ‘It’s OK, Mama.’ Is it? Why didn’t the drones just kill them? Why did the system let them get on the bus? ‘Totally different rules of engagement at home.’ As he is saying this, he’s searching frantically to see is it still true. Legal sites, rumour sites . . . So many of the rules of engagement have gone dark. ‘. . . Domestic, it’s much harder to kill people. There are laws . . .’ He hopes. But this is a totally new security system, specifically designed to work around the constitutional and legal problem of tracking and killing people domestically.
And he has no idea how much Ryan has been able to reprogram it before launching . . .
Colt keeps talking to his mother, while he tries to think his way through what an immune system for America would mean.
OK. His father must have set the terms of engagement. So, second-guess his father and maybe he
can second-guess the drones . . .
Then that big emotion wells up again, washing all his thoughts away, and he hears himself mumble, ‘Oh, Sasha, I’m sorry . . .’
No, first deal with the drones. You can talk to Sasha later, try to mend the things you’ve broken. But you need to stay alive in the meantime.
Save Mama.
Stay alive . . .
OK. The immune system. Go.
Colt’s getting a headache. The avalanche of data is never-ending.
He wants to close his eyes, sleep.
He’s dehydrated.
His hand hurts.
Keep looking, keep looking.
There . . .
‘I’ve found a position paper,’ he says.
‘On what?’ says Naomi, distracted, scanning the desert out the windows of the bus.
Oh, Mama . . .
We spend every day together; but she has no idea what’s in my mind.
The thought fills him with one of those bad, sad feelings that he hates. It mingles with the big emotion, reactivates it, so that it starts to swell up again.
He taps a pattern on the seat’s red, balding fabric until the feelings go away.
Naomi waits patiently. Well, fairly patiently. Considering.
‘It’s an early NSA discussion document,’ he says, ‘on a possible immune-response system for the US. Leaked years ago, so it’s out of date. But it probably reflects the rough parameters of what the NDSA actually built later.’
‘Go on.’
Colt takes a deep breath. ‘There are three levels of threat. I think we’re on Level 1.’
Naomi looks out the window again. They’re passing a small unmanned plant nursery; a vivid, striped acre of desert flowers.
A gardener drone drifts along the rows towards them, pollinating. Just as they drive past, its sensors spot an infestation of beetles on a bush. The drone’s spiked tongue lashes out, sparkling bright and metallic in the sunshine; retracts with a whipcrack she can hear clearly inside the bus; and they are all gone.
She looks away.
‘Is Level 1 good, or bad?’ she says.
‘Good. It goes from yellow to orange to red, and Level 1 is yellow. But we could be on Level 2, if they only sighted us when we flagged down the bus.’
‘But what does it mean, Level 1, Level 2?’
‘I think we’ve been identified, but not isolated . . . The system wants to kill us, but we’re surrounded by too many people to hit now.’
‘So we’re safe in crowds.’
‘It’s not a static system,’ says Colt. ‘And response levels depend on the threat level we’ve been assigned. With a significant threat, if the immune system doesn’t get a result, it will ramp up its response.’
‘Level 3? Red?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m guessing that’s not a good thing.’
Sarcasm, thinks Colt. Or irony. He nods. ‘If we were already at Level 3, this bus would be a crater.’
‘What moves it up to Level 3?’
‘Failure at Level 2. We need to fool it into thinking it’s got us.’
Colt blinks rapidly. Something . . . something’s making him uneasy. What is it? There . . . At the front of the bus . . .
The driver glances up, at the mirror above his head. Stares down at the back of the bus. Colt realizes the driver’s been doing this every minute or so, since they got on.
Not good.
‘Maybe we’re just a low-level threat,’ says Naomi, trying to be optimistic. ‘Maybe it’s just monitoring us.’
‘Yeah . . .’ But Colt sounds doubtful.
Naomi squints up into the sky. ‘How do we find out?’
‘Well, we could get off the bus, and walk back out into the desert. And if it kills us, we weren’t a low-level threat.’
Naomi looks at Colt, studies his face. Is he developing a sense of humour? Now that would be a transformation. She smiles.
He doesn’t smile back.
Oh.
‘So how do we turn it off?’ she says.
‘We can’t turn it off, that’s the whole point.’
‘But Ryan switched it on, he can switch it off. So we should be able to . . .’
‘No, that’s the point.’ Colt’s right foot begins to tap very fast on the sticky, grey, plastic floor. ‘If the good guys can turn it off, then the bad guys can turn it off. A weak president could turn it off. Terrorists could turn it off. The Chinese could turn it off . . .’ He realizes he’s quoting his father, and he stops.
‘But that’s . . . paranoid,’ says Naomi.
‘Immune systems are paranoid. If they’re switched on, by definition the body they protect has been compromised. So they don’t trust signals that say, hey, you can switch off now. They stay switched on till the threat is dead.’
‘Then how do we make it less aggressive?’
‘We can’t make it less aggressive . . . But we can make it more aggressive.’
Naomi laughs.
Colt doesn’t even smile. ‘What happens when an immune system is too aggressive, Mama?’
‘If an immune system is too aggressive . . . it will attack healthy cells,’ she says. She doesn’t notice her right hand moving to cover her throat.
But Colt notices.
He wouldn’t have before the transformation. But he does now.
‘It will kill itself,’ she says, and she doesn’t notice her right hand slide away from her thyroid now, and down her body, till protective fingers cover the blue veins in the warm crook of her elbow.
But Colt notices.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We might be able to make it kill itself.’ He turns in his seat, and stares up at the dark blue dots in the bright blue sky. ‘With the right equipment . . . I should be able to communicate with those drones.’
‘Colt, seriously, they will have thought of that . . .’
‘No. You can’t perfect the security until after you’ve finished the system. And it’s not a mature system yet, it will still have flaws. Security vulnerabilities. I can hack it, I’m pretty sure of it. I can hack the drones.’
‘Colt, this isn’t a game. These are, what, billions of dollars’ worth of military technology, you can’t just hack it . . .’
‘No, Mama. These big systems, they’re good once they’ve been broken in, tested. But this system was launched prematurely . . .’ The bus is slowing down, and it’s distracting Colt. ‘It hasn’t learned from experience yet. It’s a baby. We can fool it . . .’ Something’s up. He smells smoke. ‘I probably can’t switch them off. But I might be able to get them to kill themselves.’
But he’s saying this mostly to stop his mother frowning. He has no idea yet how he can pull this off.
It’s less a plan, and more an aspiration.
The devil is in the details.
He definitely smells smoke.
And now the bus stops, the driver staring in the rear-view mirror.
Something isn’t right.
Colt looks around; nobody has flagged the bus down.
There is no bus stop, no building, no shelter at all.
The driver walks back towards them. The muscles in his jaw clench, unclench, clench.
How does he know . . . Colt tenses; stands; but the driver pushes past him, keeps on going, to the back of the bus.
The small Vietnamese man is crushing a cigarette under his heel. Turning the heel fast. As he looks up from his task at the looming driver, a last trickle of smoke leaks from the corner of his mouth.
‘I told you must be twenty times,’ says the driver. ‘That’s it. That’s it. Out.’
The Vietnamese man speaks too fast and low for Colt to catch the words.
‘I don’t care, I don’t care,’ says the driver, waving him silent. ‘You should have thought of that before. Look at you, grinding your dirt into my floor.’
The small Vietnamese man speaks back, sharper this time. Something about a job, money.
‘No,’ says the driver. ‘You’re of
f this bus, and take it up with Brian if you think you can get back on tomorrow. Take it up with Brian, I’m not talking to you no more.’ The driver herds the small Vietnamese man to the rear door of the bus, like a man shooing a chicken. The passenger steps down into the stairwell, and looks back up at the driver from far below, like a startled child. The driver pops the door open with the emergency handle. ‘Out.’ He watches the passenger step down onto the side of the road.
Colt strains to hear a last plea from the passenger.
The driver shrugs. ‘Hitch. Flag down some fool who doesn’t mind you blackening his lungs. Phone a friend. Whatever.’
He strides back to his seat. The bus starts off again.
Colt watches the drones circle the Vietnamese man.
Making sure he’s not me . . .
The man doesn’t even notice them.
No one ever looks up, thinks Colt.
The man sits on a rock at the edge of the road.
The drones move on, after the bus. A couple of them break away, drift sideways.
They’re darker against the sky now. Camo paint against a bright sky . . . it takes a lot of energy.
The smaller ones must be getting low on power . . .
Colt looks out the other side of the bus. Sees power lines, from one of the big solar plants, sweeping across the desert towards Las Vegas.
Oh, poop.
Colt glances along the power lines.
Yes. There they go.
The drones spread out, along the high-tension wires.
A civilian postal drone, on its way back from a delivery to one of the small desert communities, outranked by the newcomers, vacates the top of one pylon, and moves clear.
And then, as one, every drone drifts carefully down, all along the wire, till each is sitting on top of a pylon charging station, like a stork nesting on a chimney.
Oh, man. You can’t tire them out, and they don’t sleep.
They feed fast; a battlefield recharge. They’re hungry.
Full power.
They take off straight up; and vanish.
Oh, poopscoops!
They’ve fine-tuned their chameleon paint. Fully charged, they’re using more power to make the paint glow, to match the pale sky; and they’re flying at a better angle to the sun; no backlighting.