Connect

by Julian Gough

  Sucking the gameworld’s resources dry, as it tries to render every crystal.

  But . . . if Sasha’s snow is appearing ingame . . . in the gameworld . . . in the desert . . .

  Then either the immune system has taken over Sasha’s weapon, and is using it against them: or . . .

  Oh crap.

  The immune system must have made its way inside the game. She’s fighting it ingame.

  It’s here.

  125

  The snow covers up the detail of the world; slows movement down to nothing; freezes the rare pools of cyanide-blue water, and stills the animals and birds.

  Throws a blanket across the gameworld, as it goes to sleep.

  Brings all life and movement to a halt, inside the logic of the game.

  The mountains disappear.

  A flat grey shadowless light rushes over the buffalo herd towards Colt, as the clouds slide across the face of the sun, and now he is overwhelmed by the pale cloud of whirling flakes.

  Colt stares into the whirling void until he isn’t sure which way is up.

  The voice comes out of the white.

  ‘Colt?’

  Sasha’s voice.

  ‘Colt?’

  And he realizes he’s closing down too. The battle between the immune system and the gameworld is freezing his code, right across the network, node by node. It’s freezing code all the way down to the servers at his back. Soon he won’t be able to think.

  He’s battling on too many fronts.

  It’s winning. Single-minded and brilliant, it is winning.

  But Sasha is back. Back ingame.

  The world fades away around them, until only Sasha and Colt remain.

  He has prioritized them.

  But any more pressure from the immune system, and the game won’t even be able to maintain their avatars.

  Colt feels his guts clench, as he tries to work out what’s happening.

  Both the gameworld and the immune system now have code running inside the same node, battling to control the kernel, to eliminate the other.

  The gameworld is having a panic attack. It’s having a breakdown.

  It doesn’t know who it is any more.

  The wind rises again, and the snow crackles and sings as a trillion flakes grow larger, combine, collide, the ice so hard now the collisions of the crystals sound metallic.

  ‘You need a totally different approach,’ shouts Sasha over the storm.

  ‘But what? I’ve tried everything,’ says Colt in despair. ‘The more I attack it, the more resources it borrows from everywhere else.’

  ‘You need to understand it.’

  ‘I don’t need to understand it,’ shouts Colt, ‘I need to destroy it.’

  The sound of the wind is driving him crazy. Aren’t snowstorms supposed to be quiet? His thinking is so close to frozen, he has forgotten that the volume of the wind is set to show the attack strength of the immune system. To show the percentage of resources the gameworld is using just to defend itself. And it is a scream.

  ‘Mmm,’ says Sasha, putting her face close to his ear so he can hear. ‘Why are you attacking it?’

  ‘Because it’s attacking me!’ says Colt, as with another part of his fragmented brain he launches a last desperate assault.

  I sound like my father, he thinks, astonished.

  ‘Uh huh,’ she says quietly in his ear, and she reaches out, squeezes his hand.

  And he sees it through her eyes, from the outside . . . ‘It’s a feedback loop,’ he says. ‘The more I shout at it, the more it shouts at me. The more I attack, the more I’m attacked. I’m making it bigger, angrier, worse . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispers in his ear, from the middle of the storm. ‘I kind of know a lot about this, because I used to do that, with my dad.’

  ‘So . . .’

  ‘One of you has to stop.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’

  But the immune system is still reacting to the assault Colt just launched.

  It launches another attack, from inside the gameworld, seizing resources, capturing nodes.

  Sasha’s snow thickens, trying to slow down the assault.

  The gameworld dims, flickers, as nodes commit suicide rather than be captured.

  And now the snowflakes grow so big they start to lock together, to make fragile shapes in the air. Like brittle sculptures. They form an arch, a cage of ice around Colt, Sasha.

  They block out the complicated universe, they turn the world into geometric forms, they fill his sight.

  ‘Oh, your snow,’ he says. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  The wind whistles, then screams though the interlocked crystals. More snow piles up against it. And the snow cage breaks under the pressure, falls apart. It smacks into them hard, pulls Sasha free of Colt.

  Sasha reaches out to hold him.

  Colt reaches back.

  The wind screams so loudly Colt doesn’t even hear Sasha’s shocked voice as her avatar begins to fail, and she vanishes.

  What did she say, what did she say?

  A snowflake lands on the back of his outstretched hand.

  There’s something about it . . . He frowns. What caught his attention?

  It fell against the wind. It’s not blowing away.

  He lifts his hand.

  The flake is wildly asymmetric, even more so than the others. He leans in close, doesn’t breathe in case he melts it.

  Oh my God, there’s so much detail.

  Long and short crystals fan out, all around the fringe.

  The snowflake abruptly turns black.

  Oh wow. She isn’t gone from the game. The gameworld just can’t, or won’t, render her avatar.

  But she’s still got control of the snowflake code.

  She’s coding individual snowflakes.

  Code, thinks Colt. Code. Holy guacamole . . .

  There’s a meaningful pattern to the flake. Colt can see meaning rising off the crystals around the edge of the flake, the way other people might see colour, or shape.

  Is this Morse code? No.

  Binary. Short crystals are zeroes. Long crystals are ones.

  Letters are numbers.

  Simple. No case, no punctuation.

  Just one to twenty-six.

  1 to 11010.

  Long is 1, is A. Long, short, is 10, is B. Long, long, is 11, is C . . .

  He reads the black snowflake.

  WHY ARE YOU MODELING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM, it says.

  ‘To understand it,’ he shouts into the wind.

  A second asymmetric snowflake lands against the wind, on the back of his hand.

  Turns black.

  He reads it.

  U . . . M . . . gap . . . H . . . M . . . M . . .

  Oh no, she’s changed the code, or it’s been intercepted and scrambled, or it’s broken, it’s failing . . . wait, read all of it . . . ah . . . hang on . . .

  UM HMM AND WHY DO YOU

  It’s phonetic, she’s dictating . . .

  NEED TO UNDERSTAND IT

  ‘To fight it,’ he shouts.

  Another fat white snowflake drifts sideways out of the swirl, to land in the palm of his hand and turn black.

  MMM AND DO YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR OWN SYSTEM

  He tries to find some meaning in the question. What system? Be polite. ‘Pardon?’

  YOU FIGHT TO GET SOMETHING YOU WANT

  ‘Yes.’

  WHAT DO YOU WANT

  ‘I don’t want Mama to die.’

  WELL WHATS THE BEST WAY TO ACHIEVE THAT

  He doesn’t know what to say to that. Another snowflake lands.

  MAYBE MODEL YOURSELF FIRST COLT

  He stands in the desert, frozen. Eventually another flake falls.

  HAVE YOU MODELED YOURSELF

  He’s so tired.

  He’s so cold.

  He doesn’t know what to say.

  And flake by flake, faster and faster, the snow in the gameworld turns black.

  T
he wind dies down.

  Have they won?

  Or has the immune system taken over that piece of Colt’s code?

  The air is still.

  The snow stops falling.

  Out of the huge, dark sky heavily flaps, falls, a black eagle.

  Not even fully rendered, coloured, drawn.

  The ghost of an eagle.

  It rips open his side, feeds on his liver.

  It’s not Colt’s eagle.

  It’s not a model.

  It’s the immune system. Ingame.

  He’s lost the node.

  126

  And he is back in his room.

  Back in his chair.

  Back in his head.

  Back where he has always been alone.

  He can hear his mother in the distance, in the bathroom, weeping.

  No time for that now.

  No sight, sound, sign of Sasha.

  No snowflakes.

  He’s lonely, lonely, lonely.

  She isn’t here.

  But something else is.

  A shadow falls over the window, passes.

  Colt, caught for a confused moment between worlds, thinks; another eagle; but of course it’s a drone.

  Big one. Very big. It’s sniffing the house like a huge hound.

  Looking for warmth?

  No.

  It can’t see them, anyhow, on any frequency, through the one-way privacy glass. But . . . Wait . . . oh, no.

  Drug drone. Highly sensitive chemical-sniffer. Trying to detect their pheromones, their evaporated sweat.

  Their fear.

  The telltale air from human lungs.

  That size, it’s not just carrying sensors (sniffer drones can be the size of hummingbirds, of bees); it’s a battering-ram too.

  Oh, crêpes.

  The immune system has commandeered a SWAT drug drone.

  The bloodhound sniffs around the window frames, but they are sealed.

  Sniffs around the door, but it is sealed.

  The ravens stare at the house with blind eyes.

  High above, the killer drones wait for the SWAT drone’s decision.

  Wait for the bloodhound to howl.

  And if it howls . . . well, Colt knows the howl he’ll hear will be acoustic, loud as hell, with bass spikes that turn your guts to water; designed to intimidate, overwhelm.

  But the electronic howl the drones hear . . . it will be a priority-one alert, on all channels, overriding the ravens’ low-priority message, that everything is OK, that the house is empty.

  And the ravens will have to restart their systems. Change all the variables. Work out how they missed Colt and Naomi’s arrival, why they can’t see them . . . It won’t take long. As soon as they disconnect from Colt’s booster tower, and try another tower, they will get their sight back. They’ll vote for the kill.

  And the eagles . . . the eagles will attack.

  Oh . . . crap.

  The bloodhound’s heading for the roof, to sniff the aircon outlet; to sniff the warm air being pumped from the building as cool air is drawn in through the filter pit beneath the house. Air that says, in a million molecules of perspiration every second, in every fleck of dust bearing their DNA, that they are here.

  ‘Aircon!’ says Colt. ‘One hundred degrees!’

  ‘Are you sure that’s wise, Colt?’ asks the house AI, in the warm, friendly voice of Ronald Reagan. ‘Some of your mother’s plants . . .’

  ‘Go to one hundred, steadily, and as slowly as you can,’ says Colt. ‘That’s an order.’

  Colt doesn’t actually want to go to one hundred, but he does want the outlet pipe to reverse, and suck in air for a while. Just switching off the aircon would leave the pipe full of telltale molecules . . . He’ll switch it off when the house gets too hot.

  The aircon AI sighs; the direction of airflow reverses; and now the sealed house is sucking in hot air from outside, from the roof, into the cooler house.

  Clearing the pipes. OK.

  Some cool air will be pushed back out through the filter pit deep under the house: but the bloodhound can’t sniff that.

  Colt thinks about his next move.

  He won’t want to do this for long: with all the servers in overdrive, the house is already warmer than it should be.

  But it’s not nearly as hot as the desert outside.

  The important thing is, for the next twenty minutes, half an hour, more; no air will escape from the rooftop aircon outlet.

  The bloodhound arrives on the roof.

  Sniffs the aircon unit itself, its oils and chemicals, to calibrate. Colt tenses. The bloodhound shifts a little, sniffs the air around the outlet pipes.

  It moves up and over the ridge of the roof.

  Doesn’t howl.

  OK. I’ve got maybe half an hour.

  HAVE YOU MODELED YOURSELF.

  OK.

  Do it.

  127

  He takes a cautious look inside his vast, expanded self. Tries to see what the various areas are doing. What they want.

  Make a model of his own body and mind. His needs, desires.

  Woah.

  Everything’s fighting everything else! Battling each other, for control. All with different goals.

  He’s a civil war.

  He wants to fight. He wants to eat. He wants to kiss. He wants to hide . . .

  He wants to live.

  He wants to die.

  Colt fills with panic.

  Tries to calm himself down.

  OK. I am a biological system. And biological systems are complex, layered: capable of conflict. Neurosis. I know that.

  But how can I get what I want, if I don’t know what I want?

  How can I even decide which part of me should be allowed to get what it wants, when they all want totally different things?

  What would Sasha say?

  What would she tell him to do?

  Look at it again, she’d say. Don’t take sides, just look.

  And he steps back, away from his thoughts, and refocuses.

  Wow.

  Nothing has changed but his perspective.

  But now he sees, instead of conflict, an exquisite balance of forces, holding together a system of systems in delicate creative tension.

  And the wind of his breath sweeps deep into his dark interior; oxygen floods across the folded half-acre fields of his lungs, is channelled into the fast-flowing canals of his blood, and is whirled around the sprawling empire of his body, to silently ignite the foodstuff in every cell; he is on fire, he is on fire with life, he is alive and he looks around and the world is alive.

  And he breathes out, and the burnt carbon floods out on his breath, each carbon atom locked to two oxygen atoms, the invisible smoke of a billion campfires deep in the heart of a billion cells, his blazing body a pillar of fire, an illuminated megacity of intricately networked eukaryotic cells . . .

  He is on fire, in every cell. He is a trillion bacteria, cooperating; so totally interwoven, so interdependent, that they could be mistaken for a single thing. He is a standing wave moving through the material world.

  He is matter astonished into motion, into life.

  So if this is what he is: what should he do?

  He looks reflexively for Sasha, for her standing wave.

  Her pillar of fire.

  But she’s not there.

  He wants to hold Sasha, the real Sasha, in his real arms.

  That’s what he wants to do. And he wants to be held by her.

  Soon, soon . . .

  OK. But, meanwhile, with the bloodhound sniffing the windows, with blind ravens watching the house, with the immune system fighting the gameworld, with killer drones overhead, with his mother weeping in the bathroom, with his penis hard at the thought of Sasha . . .

  What should he do?

  Maybe that isn’t the right question.

  Maybe questions aren’t even the right approach.

  He looks back at his body, at all his systems,
intricately meshed, holding him together, holding him in dynamic balance.

  Oh yeah.

  That’s how it works.

  Soon they will decide, this committee of systems, on an outcome; and the entire system of systems will act.

  And Colt will act, under the illusion of self that emerges from these conflicts, from this complexity.

  Only some resistant subroutines – a stammer, a stutter – might hint at the tensions that resolve in this outcome.

  The illusion of self will have the illusion of control.

  That’s how it works.

  That’s how I work.

  So, is that how the immune system works?

  Because if it is . . .

  OK, analyse the immune system. See how it works: what its conflicts are.

  What it wants.

  Where do I begin?

  Colt looks for patterns. Big patterns.

  What does the immune system map onto? Resemble? What is it, that I can understand?

  Oh wow, of course.

  No, it won’t behave like me.

  The immune system didn’t just come out of nowhere. The immune system’s father . . . is my father.

  He designed it, to do what he wishes he could do.

  So it will behave like him. It will repeat the structures of his mind.

  The plan is hidden in the architect.

  I don’t need to model, understand, decode the immune system. My father is the weak link; if I can decode my father, I decode the immune system.

  Oh, Dada, Colt thinks. Oh, Dada.

  Target the wetware.

  He rings his dad.

  Video, thinks Colt? Yeah, video.

  Face to face.

  His hand pauses over the control.

  Resistance.

  Colt accepts the delay.

  Waits.

  Some system within Colt has a problem with this.

  Oh yeah.

  I can make the feed untraceable . . . But if he sees me here . . . He’ll recognize my room.

  He’ll know we’re in the house.

  He’ll tell the immune system.

  And then we’re dead.

  No, I want to talk to him in the gameworld. Not my room.

  If I can get back into the gameworld . . .

  If it still exists.

  128

  ‘I stand in front of you / I’ll take the force of the blow / Protection.’

  — Massive Attack featuring Tracey Thorn, ‘Protection’

  He has to be careful where he enters: he probes a node, but it’s been captured by the immune system. Booby-trapped. He backs off. Tries another node. Same . . .