Connect

by Julian Gough

  And he needs the gameworld to help him now.

  *

  Colt sits back in his chair. It’s looking good. He reckons he can even keep the game running, while he does what he’s about to do, if he downgrades the speed and detail a little, across a billion customized gameworlds, and uses that huge, freed capacity for his own purposes.

  Of course, if he’s wrong, and he crashes the gameworld . . . he’ll have several hundred million players really angry with him. Collapsing the entire gameworld for private purposes is about as big a faux pas as an open-source indie game developer can make. He could lose his admin privileges.

  Total social death.

  Which scares him more than the drone cloud hunting him.

  120

  Colt sets the noise-cancellation in the helmet to 90 per cent. That should block minor distractions, but still allow him to hear any major event out in the real world.

  And then he gets down to work on his plan.

  He begins coding, ingame, in the test range, because it’s soothing there.

  He is coding faster and better than he has ever coded before, when a crude clay beaker abruptly appears in his hand. Objects placed in hands have to be mapped. He stares down at it. Oh, Mama must have returned with his water. ‘Thanks . . .’ He doesn’t map her, doesn’t even glance towards where she is in the real room.

  Her distant voice – 10 per cent of her voice – whispers, ‘You’re welcome,’ and she leaves again.

  Ingame, he places the clay beaker on a low boulder as, outgame, he puts the mug on his table.

  He has a wall of servers at his back, overdriven, running hot, doing all the hard work; he just has to see the patterns; rework old code; write new code. Lots of new code. It flows from him like poetry; fluid, flexible, every symbol perfect. He has become a fountain of code.

  And it’s not enough.

  As he starts to see the outline of the problem emerge from the data, he works out how much fresh coding will be required. The answer strikes him like a fist, so that air leaks out of his mouth in a little whoooosh. ‘There isn’t enough time,’ he whispers.

  Time . . .

  He checks the time, frowns.

  Something about it flicks a memory.

  A recent memory, damaged by the rewiring of his brain, cut adrift.

  Oh, crêpes.

  He’s meant to meet Sasha.

  Here, in the test range. Now.

  Oh, Sasha . . .

  He stops writing code.

  Where is she?

  ‘Colt.’

  He turns around.

  And she steps right up to him.

  Sasha. As herself.

  Her avatar that isn’t an avatar.

  Colt feels a tremendous tension in his chest. What the heck is that? He pokes around his interior.

  Some kind of unreleased emotion.

  OK.

  He stares at her face.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for ever,’ she says.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Colt says. Be polite. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Something drifts down, diagonally, between them. It’s small, white.

  Another something.

  Another.

  Sasha puts out her hand, catches one.

  Tiny, crisp and white in the palm of her hand.

  It vanishes.

  ‘I’m sorry I . . . grabbed you. I didn’t understand . . .’

  ‘Uh huh.’ She looks around her. ‘My snow shouldn’t be falling here. The air should be too warm. What’s gone wrong?’

  ‘I’m, ah . . . I’ve been rewriting the mapping algorithms, and it’s a bit messy, sorry . . .’

  ‘Rewriting how? Why?’

  Colt shrugs.

  ‘Tell me what’s happening,’ she says.

  ‘Happening?’

  ‘There’s something wrong,’ she says, waving an arm at the gameworld’s horizon, where the high, thin clouds don’t look quite right, ‘and I can’t help you because I don’t know what it is.’

  Tell her what’s wrong? The pressure in his chest is making it hard to breathe.

  Tell her what’s wrong.

  ‘This is too much,’ he says, as occasional tiny shimmering flecks of snow drift down sideways from the distant, high, thin cloud.

  Sasha nods. ‘Yes, it is. But I can help you,’ she says, looking into his eyes.

  The statement is so absurd he almost laughs, but he doesn’t have the spare capacity. How can she help him? She’s not enhanced. He’s working at full capacity, massively enhanced and backed up by a global network of secure tech, and that’s not enough.

  ‘How?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know, yet,’ she says. ‘First you have to tell me what’s wrong.’

  She reaches out slowly, with both hands, and holds his face. Her micromesh gloves transmit the pressure of her fingers through the reactive plastic of his helmet, and only then does he realize his whole body has been trembling.

  She’s looking into his eyes. ‘I can help you. You’re not alone,’ she says, and lets go his face. Steps back. ‘Now, tell me what’s wrong.’

  Tell her what’s wrong. He stares at her avatar’s face, her amazing face, and the emotions he’s been holding inside expand till he has to gasp in air.

  His ribs are pushed out by the surge, until his chest feels like it’s going to burst.

  Not alone.

  Not alone in the universe.

  Not alone . . .

  ‘I’m afraid,’ says Colt, rapidly, before he can think about it, analyse it, overrule himself, ‘when I’m talking to you, that I’ll say something wrong.’

  ‘Wrong? How—’

  ‘—Or, you know, misunderstand what you mean. Look at what happened when we . . . when I . . . When I thought you wanted me, to, to . . .’ He waves his hands at her, at him; this is beyond the territory he has words for. ‘I’m not good with people. I get things wrong.’

  ‘Me too, Colt.’ She sighs again. ‘Me too.’

  ‘You? You seem pretty good with people to me.’

  Sasha shakes her head. ‘I fake it. I study them. Watch a lot of video. I’m able to act appropriate most of the time. But I’m guessing, I don’t know, like a neurotypical would.’

  ‘Me too!’ says Colt. ‘Me too . . . I’m guessing, and when I guess wrong it hurts.’

  ‘So we are both running scripts,’ says Sasha.

  ‘I guess. Yes.’

  ‘So what would happen if neither of us ran scripts?’ Silence.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Colt.

  ‘What would happen if we just said what we felt, and didn’t try to second-guess the other person’s answer? If we didn’t try to protect ourselves from a bad response?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Colt.

  ‘Let’s try it. And whatever happens, we won’t give the other person a hard time.’

  ‘OK,’ says Colt.

  ‘Shall we take turns?’

  ‘OK,’ says Colt.

  Silence.

  ‘You go first,’ says Sasha.

  ‘OK . . . I like you,’ Colt says.

  ‘OK.’

  Silence.

  ‘I like you too,’ says Sasha.

  ‘You’re not just saying that, to mirror me? As a script?’

  ‘No. I like you. I’m saying what I feel.’

  ‘OK.’ Colt looks inside himself, for something to say. Something true. There are so many things that he feels a spasm of despair.

  Where to begin?

  ‘I’m just going to say the most important things in my head,’ he says. ‘The biggest things. They might not be relevant.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘Sometimes I feel too much and it hurts and I want to stop feeling and so I kind of make myself stop feeling, but the feelings don’t go away, they just get moved somewhere I can’t get at them. But they are still there.’ He pauses. No, that’s enough. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘OK.’ There is a pause while she thinks. ‘Sometimes I feel too much too
. . .’

  ‘You’re mirroring me—’

  ‘No! Let me finish . . . We just have, I think we have, a lot in common. My dad . . . oh, both my parents . . . I thought they loved me, that they were just busy or careless or something, but now, I don’t think they ever loved me, and that makes me feel . . . terrible.’ She twists her mouth into a shape that makes Colt feel sad. ‘I sometimes just do stupid stuff, not to feel that. Drink too much. Drive too fast. Other stuff . . .’

  Colt nods, to show that he has heard, has understood. Sasha smiles back at him, and Colt feels incredible.

  ‘I love looking at your face,’ he says rapidly. ‘In the real world. It looks right. It is my favourite thing I’ve ever looked at. Not because it is beautiful, like in movies. Because it is your face.’

  ‘My face? Colt, that’s—’

  ‘—Your face makes me feel like I’m filling up with light and heat and . . . energy,’ he says. ‘I want to be with you, but I’ve got all this work to do, because my dad is trying to kill me and Mama. And I don’t think I can do it because there isn’t enough time.’

  ‘Wait—’

  ‘—But you look like you glow. You don’t look like other objects in the universe, to me—’

  ‘—Wait, wait, who’s trying to kill you and your mother? Your father?’

  But telling her is making the tightness in his chest loosen, and so he ploughs on; he can’t stop now; it’s started coming out, so it all has to come out. Words he recognizes as true only as he speaks them; words he hadn’t known he was going to speak. ‘—When you were in my room and I looked at you, it was like your skin glowed—’

  ‘—Colt—’

  ‘—To my senses, it glowed. Something happened in my brain, and I think about you a lot, and when I think about you, it’s like I feel something is missing, some part of me is missing.’

  ‘—Please, Colt—’

  ‘—I’ve always felt alone, but I didn’t notice, because I thought it was normal, I mean, I feel alone when I’m alone, of course, but I feel alone, too, when I’m with anyone else but you. But, with you, I don’t feel alone. I don’t feel alone. And I didn’t know you could feel not alone. I didn’t know.’ He pauses, and she’s about to speak, but there’s something else, something else he has to say, that he doesn’t want to say but he has to say, and he says, ‘And it was too much and I ran away. And I should have said yes.’

  When she’s sure he’s done, she sighs and says, ‘Oh, Colt, you schmuck. Why didn’t you say this before?’

  ‘I didn’t know this before.’ Colt stares at Sasha’s amazing face. It doesn’t look happy and it doesn’t look sad, but her face is doing something. He tries to decode her expression, but he can’t, and that makes him afraid. ‘I just had this . . . big feeling. And I was scared.’

  Sasha nods. ‘I get that.’

  ‘Your turn,’ says Colt.

  Sasha hesitates. ‘That’s a lot of stuff, Colt. I’m going to have to think about it.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘But I’m glad you told me.’

  ‘OK.’ They stare into each other’s eyes until Colt feels like he’s going to explode.

  She rubs her face, left to right, hard, with the palm of her right hand. ‘Seriously, Colt, that’s a lot to process. I can’t . . . That was . . . more than I expected.’

  ‘Are you angry I said that? Do you . . . is it . . .’

  ‘—That’s a lot to process. Let me process it. I’ll get back to you.’

  ‘OK,’ says Colt. ‘OK.’

  ‘OK,’ says Sasha, looking away. ‘So how is your dad trying to kill you?’

  And Colt tells her about his mother’s work. His upgrade. His father’s base. The immune system. The destruction of the lab.

  ‘Uh huh,’ says Sasha, and glances at the strange clouds coming closer. ‘So what’s your plan?’

  ‘Well, I’m pretty good at noticing patterns,’ says Colt. ‘Especially now, after the . . . upgrade? Good enough that I can sometimes project them into the future. Like, not just guess a probability. Actually predict the future, pretty much.’

  Sasha blinks at that, but she says, ‘OK. So?’

  ‘I need to model the immune system, and see if I can predict what it will do. See if I can work out a way to . . .’ He trails off.

  Destroy it?

  Escape it?

  Well, he won’t know till he’s run some simulations . . .

  ‘Switch it off ?’ says Sasha into the silence.

  Colt shakes his head. ‘That’s designed to be impossible. But if I could get it to attack another target . . . Or if it faced a bigger threat, maybe we’d stop being a priority . . . Or if I could get it to attack itself, somehow . . .’

  ‘Or convince it you’re dead . . .’

  ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of possibilities.’ He rubs the back of his neck. Tight muscles. He squeezes them, tries to loosen them, relax them. Don’t think about how you feel. ‘But if I try those possibilities in the real world . . . I can only choose one, and I only get one chance. And, if I get it wrong, I die. I don’t have infinite ammo. I don’t have unlimited lives.’

  ‘OK,’ says Sasha. ‘I get that. How about—’

  But Colt’s not really listening, he’s too anxious, he’s still chasing his own thoughts. ‘—But if I can map the immune network accurately, in here, ingame, if I can see it,’ he says, ‘understand it as a model . . . then I can run some simulations, see how it will act. I can try things without getting Mama, me and Mama, killed . . .’

  ‘Jesus, Colt, that’s a lot of coding . . .’ Sasha looks around. ‘But I guess the gameworld already contains a model of the world . . .’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But . . .’ He trails off.

  The problem is too big.

  He had never really thought before about what they’ve built here. To him, the gameworld was the world; it contained all he ever needed, all he ever wanted. A world where he could be himself. Be alone, and free. He thought it contained everything important.

  But of course the gameworld’s America is an old, pre-electric America, radically simplified. A libertarian, anarchic dream of a continent where heroes and cowards make their own destiny. Create, destroy, mine, harvest; you make it, you take it, with your own hands, and the tools you craft. A place, a no-place, where it is just you, and the rocks, and the wind. It is the skeleton of America, the ghost, with every level of government – federal, state, local, tribal – surgically removed. All the social structures stripped away. All the technological structures, cultural structures. A minimal sketch.

  A technological dream of a world before technology.

  Only now does he really notice all that they’ve left out.

  The problem is too big.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ says Sasha, and the repeat of the word he’s just thought shakes him, it’s as though she saw into his mind. His muscles clench in response, in fear, rocking him back on his heels. ‘The map of the natural world here is amazing,’ she says, ‘you’ve done a fantastic job. It’s complex, interdependent; a fully modelled ecosystem . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ says Colt. ‘Sure. We nailed nature. But the human world here is a . . .’ He looks for a word for it. Hmeep. Hmeep. ‘. . . Cartoon.’

  ‘Well, the gameworld is a modelling system,’ says Sasha. ‘Modelling a complex world is what it does. So you can just . . . model it, map it . . .’

  ‘But how, how can it map a drone cloud; self-driving vehicles; missiles; total surveillance?’ Colt is nearly crying. ‘I can’t do it, I don’t have time to create a suite of drones, self-driving vehicles . . . There are no models of drones to be rendered. The gameworld doesn’t have the graphics for them, the physics, it’ll take too long to make an entire new class of objects . . . there are no models of human society to embed them in . . .’

  Sasha reaches out again, holds his shaking face steady, looks him in the eyes, says, ‘Drones fly. They hover. They observe. They kill.’

  ‘Yes! It�
��s too much . . .’

  ‘So you need to model eagles . . .’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘. . . But you have real eagles, Colt. Real hawks, and doves. Real ravens, and vultures, and sparrows, ingame. You have lightning. You have buffalo. You have mountain lions. You have wolves. Coyotes. Bears. Sheep. Cattle. Snakes.’

  And Colt gets it. ‘Build it . . . in metaphors?’

  Sasha nods. ‘The gameworld is an ecosystem. And so is the surveillance world. Similar rules. Predators and prey . . .’

  ‘Yes! They map . . .’

  ‘. . . You wouldn’t have to change much at all,’ she says. ‘They already exist, they have killer instincts, they track, they fly; call to each other, hover, kill. Just change their speeds and heights, some variables. Minimal, minimal recoding.’

  He’s already begun.

  Colt assigns a bird, an animal, to each drone, each self-driving vehicle in the real-world immune system.

  A spirit animal, he thinks.

  Just give each machine a spirit animal . . .

  The absurd thought makes him happy.

  Code pours into being.

  He sends bots out into the tangled electronic jungle of the real world to search for clues, for metadata – spoor, he thinks, tracks, scat – for anything that might betray what the immune system is doing.

  Then Colt looks for the patterns in the data.

  Maps it onto the gameworld.

  Let a raven be a raven . . .

  The drones pop into existence in the blue sky.

  Two blind ravens stare at him. An eagle soars high, high above.

  Another eagle.

  So that’s where they are. The killers.

  ‘While you’re running the simulations, ingame,’ says Sasha, ‘how are you going to keep an eye on the gameworld resources?’

  ‘On the network?’

  ‘Yes. What happens if the immune system attacks?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ says Colt, and he links the attack strength of the immune system to the sound of the wind.

  Listens.

  The wind whispers. The strange clouds are closer, but they’re not moving fast. A single snow crystal drifts by; slow, calm; hits the desert floor and evaporates.

  No attacks yet. Good.