by Julian Gough
She opens her eyes just in time to take the next bend, a little wide.
Concentrate, concentrate.
But if the ravens can’t see me . . . how . . .
Of course; Donnie left a message, telling Ryan I was there . . .
So was it the immune system at all? Or did Ryan just try to kill me? Forget it, that doesn’t matter. That’s not the point.
She looks back, at how slowly, how calmly she dressed. How slowly she removed the servers to the car.
And she thinks; if the immune system has blown up the lab; it could blow up the house . . .
Colt.
She puts her foot down, accelerating into the next corner, and the BMW screams around it at a tilt, grey smoke scorching off the back tyres.
She had thought she was merely calm, as she carried the servers past the body. No, she’d been stunned. Too stunned to think things through, to see the implications.
Get home . . .
117
She runs into Colt’s room, without knocking. He barely looks up. Oh God, he’s so grown up, so handsome . . .
‘Got the StemStim?’ he says.
She hands over the one-shot capsule.
‘Thanks, Mama.’
He’s alive. He’s alive . . .
She opens her mouth. Nothing comes out.
No, I can’t tell him.
‘Mama, will you do it . . .’ He preps the capsule and its specialized syringe. Hands it to her.
‘OK . . .’ Oh God, my hands are shaking . . .
It doesn’t help that, when she was a student injecting into an artery, rather than a vein, usually only happened by mistake. Too dangerous to try it deliberately, unless, perhaps, you were targeting a toxic drug at a tumour, and the patient was already in so much trouble the extra risk was worth it. But Colt needs the accelerant delivered directly to the brain.
Injecting into an artery is still high risk, even with the new, pressurized capsules, and ultra-thin arterial needles. Focus . . . She silently injects the accelerant, deep. Into his internal carotid artery.
Straight to the brain . . .
‘Woooah . . .’ says Colt.
Yes, arterial injections hurt. More nerves. As the capsule empties into her son’s neck, with a soft sucking sound, she shudders. ‘Sorry . . .’
She can barely speak. Throat jammed with suppressed words, suppressed emotions.
Can’t deal with the overwhelm.
No. You can’t fall apart now.
‘How was it?’ says Colt, finally looking at her.
‘What?’
‘Your trip to the lab.’
And she tells him, some of it. Just some of it. Enough for now.
‘Wow, Mama,’ says Colt, when she’s done. ‘Wow, Mama.’
‘I know,’ says Naomi. ‘I know. Look, you do your work. I’ve got to clean up.’
She turns away, and goes to the bathroom, and closes the door.
Gets in the shower. Stays there a long time.
*
OK.
Now, coffee.
Walking back through the house to the kitchen, she is intensely aware that every device she passes is spying on them, betraying them. That if Colt’s fake data feeds fail for a second, their presence in the house will be revealed.
Standing in front of the closed fridge – with its sensors tuned to tell when the door opens; when the temperature drops; when the milk is removed, and not replaced – she thinks, oh, he’s confident, he’s enhanced, he’s good; but he’s still a kid, there could be errors in the code . . .
And if there are . . . she, he, the house will shortly vanish in a fireball.
Black smoke, and orange fire.
Hey, remember when the decision to start the day with a coffee was as rebellious as I got?
She laughs, opens the fridge.
Well, I need coffee.
If we die, we die.
10
Stack Overflows
‘Typical interneuronal reset times are on the order of five milliseconds, which allows for two hundred digital-controlled analog transactions per second. Even accounting for multiple nonlinearities in neuronal information processing, this is on the order of a million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits, which can switch in less than one nanosecond’
— Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near
‘We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing’.
— Philip K. Dick, Valis
‘We will travel to Mars / even as folks on Earth / are still ripping open potato chip / bags with their teeth.’
— David Berman, ‘Self-Portrait at 28’
118
While Naomi makes herself a coffee in the kitchen, Colt hooks up the servers in his room, and optimizes their flow.
Now to connect them to his brain.
Only problem is, their electronic information will arrive at almost the speed of light, in a chemical brain that hardly moves at all.
He is still the bottleneck.
If he’s going to have a realtime fight with the immune system, then any fast decision-making will have to be done by the servers.
Luckily, he has a lot of new neurons, still busy forming new pathways; incredibly suggestible, and quick to learn.
He just has to force them to communicate with the servers. Outsource their decision-making.
Rewrite his brain a little.
OK, a lot.
He runs through the plan again. And again.
Oh man, there will be loss of function. Some old neural pathways will get overwritten. There’s no way to keep this inside the new boundaries.
The brain is holistic, it doesn’t do clean separations.
Even if this works . . . I’m basically giving myself superpowers and a stroke at the same time. And hoping I come out ahead on the deal.
Well, I can fix a lot of the damage later. If there is a later.
If I live through this.
He realizes he’s checking a tiny piece of perfect code for the third time.
OK, that’s as good as I can get it.
He takes the cable – so gross, so physical, so out of scale with the delicacy of the two sets of circuits being connected – and plugs the system of servers into his helmet.
A lot of data has to be accessed and moved. A lot.
The code runs.
His helmet translates the surge, and delivers it in focused cascades of information to his brain, through the retinal connections.
His brain has grown pretty good at integrating external devices with its own wetware. But this is an order of magnitude stranger, more overwhelming, more disorienting.
It’s like the back of his skull has opened out into a huge space that gets bigger and bigger, as the servers integrate with his neurons.
The external, electronic processors have overwhelming speed and scale.
His slower, organic brain has interconnectivity; immense neural complexity.
Now each begins to outsource tasks to the other.
The first few minutes are just a gigantic, crazy, two-way data jam.
It’s channelled; it’s following the principles he’s planned, programmed; but there’s just so much activity that the data overflows the channels; stuff ends up in the wrong places.
For a minute, two minutes, ten minutes, eternity, it’s impossible to tell . . . his sight and hearing and smell and touch are switched off, obliterated, totally overwhelmed by the roar of information arriving down these new channels.
Deaf and dumb, he is lost inside his own mind, drowning in dataflows, not even sure i
f he is breathing.
What if he’s got this wrong?
What if the new data keep coming; spill over? Assign themselves to some network of neurons that he needs in order to breathe?
What if he switches off his lungs, his heart?
Overwrites key memories?
Forgets why he is doing this?
Forgets who he is?
And now, disturbed new neurons fire, link, form accelerated connections, all over his brain; chains of association are launched, and his senses return.
Kind of.
It’s like he’s vanished into himself, like a star collapsing under its own weight. He’s a black hole. He can’t see the outside world; just the architecture of his new interior, shimmering into being. Huge warehouses of self, stretching off endlessly.
Memories assemble themselves from distributed, highly compressed fragments. He’s smelling and tasting and seeing a jumbled, psychedelic past. At first, the tag to say ‘this is a memory’ is missing; each utterly vivid memory feels like the present, like it is happening again, now.
He is fourteen years old.
He is twelve.
He is seven.
And each time, it is totally real, it is all true, it is all there is; it is now.
He’s adrift in time.
But once the first big waves of information have moved through the bottleneck in either direction, his mind begins to settle down.
It tidies up.
His memories get tagged as memories; and, click, he is no longer a time-traveller. He goes from being seven years old, in school, at lunchtime, and frightened – the smells, the sounds, the wild roaring children, the impossibility of knowing what will happen next – to being back in the now, eighteen, and simply remembering something that happened long ago.
The relief, the sorrow, as his sense of time returns, and all those living moments become the dead past.
Then sight comes back.
Schwhuuuuuusssshhhh . . .
It’s like being hit by a train. Pure, raw, unfiltered visual data, overwhelming; a tremendous blast of light and colour.
His brain starts to filter the raw data. Edit it. Interpret it.
And . . . click; it’s not a raw blast of hot, bright light and colour, it’s a picture of the world.
Objects.
His room.
Hah, everything is sideways. Stroke in the visual cortex?
He can smell coffee.
Wait, where is he?
He has fallen from his chair; he should have thought of that; that the process would be disruptive, that his deep motor coordination might be upset. Should have been lying down, for the transfer.
Who’s that, looming above him?
His mother.
No, he’s not lying on the floor. He’s lying in her arms. She’s saying something, over and over.
There’s a stain on her blouse.
She must have spilled her coffee when I fell.
‘Sorry, Mama,’ he says. ‘I’m OK. You can make more coffee.’ But he can’t understand himself: his voice sounds like pink noise, like raw modem chatter, the meaning hidden, encoded. His jaw, his cheek muscles, don’t seem under his control. He tries to smile and nothing happens.
Need to control this.
He calls up an image of his own brain. A map of what’s just happened: dataflows signalling where they landed. It takes him a while to understand it.
His thoughts sluuuuuurrrr.
Wow. Big overflows into the occipital lobe. Messy.
But he can change it. He can route around the damage. Between the new neurons and the new servers, he has plenty of room to do it.
Yes.
He routes around the damage.
His mother just holds him, rocks him, talking to herself. ‘. . . dimaykildimaykildimaykil . . .’
He strains to understand, but his hearing registers the sounds without unpacking their meaning.
Then meaning kicks in, as his brain recovers enough to interpret the data. Now he can hear what she is saying. The words, not the noises.
‘I killed him, I killed him, I killed him . . .’
‘It’s OK, Mama,’ he says. ‘I’m OK.’
He can hear his own words. Understand them.
Good.
Colt pulls himself free of his mother’s arms, and shakily stands. ‘I’m OK, Mama.’
And now he is. Just about. He can still hear some weird tones that aren’t actually there in the outside world – a green noise with a texture like frayed rope – and his mouth is full of tastes that feel metallic and multicoloured and textured in some peculiar ways – spiky blue tastes – but he can live with that.
Naomi stares at his face. ‘Oh, Colt . . .’
He can speak.
It jolts tears out of her, tears that have been unable to escape for the past hour. Words, too.
‘No, I killed Donnie. Oh God. I killed him. I know I should feel guilty, but . . . I don’t know how I feel.’
And she tells Colt the rest of what happened.
How she killed a man. Not everything, God no, but enough, now, for Colt to understand.
‘Oh, Mama,’ says Colt helplessly. ‘He was . . . that was his fault, not yours . . .’
He knows he should mourn Donnie, the sinner, the dead man; share his mother’s conflicted, Christian sorrow; but he doesn’t feel it, and he can’t pretend he does.
Donnie was a dick.
Colt mourns the lab, where he grew up. Where his mother slowly uncovered beautiful truths. Blown away. Gone.
Colt doesn’t say it aloud; but the implications aren’t good. There are only three copies of her work still loose in the wild. The raw research, stored in the five orange data cubes.
The theory, stored in Naomi’s brain.
And the reality, hardwired into Colt’s.
‘It’s Ryan,’ she says, ‘Ryan must have—’
‘No,’ says Colt, thinking, analysing. ‘It wasn’t Dad. The immune system must have been reading the metadata on everything coming in and out of the lab. Dad’s calls, Donnie’s calls . . . Yeah. The fitness monitor; its emergency call tipped off the system, that Donnie had been killed . . . And the system knew the lab contained all your research . . . Ordered a strike on the lab.’
‘But . . . why didn’t it kill me?’ says Naomi. ‘How did I escape?’
‘I think . . . I think it destroyed the lab blind, based on the metadata. It simply didn’t see you.’
‘You mean . . . it still doesn’t know we’re here?’
‘No . . .’ More confidently, ‘No.’
‘Oh! I was worried . . . I thought . . . we were just waiting to die . . .’
‘Oh sure, it’s decided to kill us. It wants to kill us. But the ravens watching the house are still blind; the sensors inside the house are telling it the house is empty; the BMW still doesn’t exist, it’s leaving no electronic trace. So, no, it doesn’t know we are here. And there’s something else . . . it’s not . . .’ Colt hesitates, unsure how to describe it. ‘I think . . . it can’t trust its own senses . . .’
‘We’re making it neurotic,’ says Naomi, and laughs shakily.
‘Yes,’ says Colt. ‘It saw the lab was empty: but it could detect people in it. It destroyed the lab; but it didn’t see an explosion . . .’
‘It’s no longer sure what is real and what isn’t,’ says Naomi.
‘Yes, exactly, that’s it,’ says Colt. ‘But I’m pretty sure it will send over more drones now, to check up on the house: and I may not be able to fool them all.’ Colt frowns. ‘And if we make it too neurotic, it might get paranoid enough to destroy the house anyway.’
Naomi rubs her throat. ‘Why hasn’t it?’ she says.
Colt’s been wondering about that too.
‘I think it’s using the house as a trap,’ he says. ‘It wants us to come here.’
‘So . . .’ Naomi looks around Colt’s untidy bedroom. ‘This is the one place we’re safe . . .’
‘As long as
it doesn’t work out that we’re already inside the trap,’ says Colt.
‘. . . But, given how fast it’s growing . . . how smart it’s getting . . .’
‘Yeah,’ says Colt. ‘I reckon it will work that out in another hour or so, max.’
There is a lurch of understanding in his brain, as neurons frantically catch up with what’s just happened, and connect the final new islands of information. Oh wow. OK, that should be enough. ‘I’ve got to go now, Mama,’ says Colt abruptly. He sits back into his chair. Starts to connect to the gameworld.
‘Shall I get you water?’
‘Mmm? Yeah, sure.’
She turns to go. Turns back. ‘Do you have enough servers?’ she says. ‘To fight it?’
The servers? Colt turns, looks at his mother blankly.
Oh, man; she doesn’t realize how big an enemy they are fighting, at all.
‘Those aren’t there to fight the immune system, Mama.’ He glances over his shoulder at the array of servers. ‘That’s just my remote control, for the network I’m setting up. It’ll take a lot more than those to fight back.’
And, while he’s still talking to her, he uses the servers, uses his admin privileges to dig deep into the backend of the game, into the secure global networks that host it on every continent.
OK, so he’s survived the stroke.
Now to see if he has the superpowers.
119
It helps that the indie game community has always been locked in a war against government surveillance. Ever since the crypto wars of the 1990s, the battle of the backdoors . . . Indie gamers led the great escape from government surveillance; away from an open net, and from an open, flexible, but vulnerable cloud, back to medieval, locked-off physical fortresses, with only a few well-guarded entrances and exits.
He makes a map of the gameworld’s physical territory. The physical nodes, in the real world, that store and process the game.
Hmm. Not bad at all.
This gameworld has been fighting off attacks from state cyberwarfare groups, digital fundamentalists, identity thieves, chauvinistas, and plain vanilla hackers for years. And, after each attack, it has improved itself. Learned from the experience. Upgraded its defences.
It’s robust.
By now, all the game nodes form a hyper-secure network. Not exactly easy to defend; not against the resources of a military state; but a lot easier to defend than most networks.