by Julian Gough
She shakes her head. ‘What did you think you were attacking?’
He resists saying it, but he has to say it. ‘My father.’
‘Let me guess,’ says Sasha. ‘You spotted a deep flaw. A security tunnel. Pointed straight at him.’
Oh man, she can read my mind . . . ‘Yes.’
She nods. ‘It was a mirror-trap. Launch an attack on them, down the tunnel, and it’s mirrored straight back at you.’
‘But it triggered . . .’
‘It triggered your own suit to attack you. You triggered your own suit. Not them. They have no idea where you are. That was just you, attacking yourself.’
‘But it wants to kill me, anyway. It’s treating Mama’s . . .’ He flails around for the right word. ‘. . . Discovery, as a threat to the whole country . . .’
‘Colt, you are your mama’s discovery, made flesh. And you’re fighting to destroy the immune system, and kill your father; the guy who designed it. Look, it sees the world in terms of an ingroup, which it must defend, and an outgroup, which it must attack. Of course it thinks you’re a threat. You are a fucking threat. See its point of view.’
‘I can’t just let it kill Mama!’
‘I’m not saying that. I’m saying if you react out of fear and rage, you . . .’
And he gets it. ‘Create a feedback loop.’
‘Yes.’
Colt runs an analysis.
She’s right. It steps up its response purely in response to his response.
Attacking it just makes it more single-minded. Just confirms he must be the enemy, because he fights back.
Oh boy, I’ve pushed myself up to red status. To Level 3.
Classic feedback loop.
‘So what should I do?’
‘Move yourself from its outgroup to its ingroup.’
‘But how?’
Sasha smiles. ‘Give it the world.’
‘What?’ Is that a quote? Is she speaking in metaphors?
‘How would it react to love?’ says Sasha. ‘Run an analysis of that,’ and it’s as though she’s read Colt’s mind again. He shudders as though he’s been touched.
He says, ‘I can’t code love . . .’
‘Stop attacking it. Stop defending your resources.’
‘Were you joking? About giving it the world?’
Sasha shakes her head. ‘The gameworld. Give it the gameworld.’
Give it the gameworld . . . thinks Colt.
The thought ricochets around his head, it won’t settle.
If it wants to kill you; then give it the world.
Like Jesus.
Sacrifice everything.
Take the blow.
‘So, look,’ says Sasha, ‘the gameworld is attacking the immune system.’ She leans right into his face, and now she’s not smiling. ‘And the gameworld is yours, it represents you. Hand it over voluntarily, and your threat rating collapses . . .’
‘But . . . how can I hand it over? I’m not even sure I can do that.’
‘Try. If you don’t . . . if you keep fighting it . . . it will kill you.’
‘I can’t . . .’
‘Why not? You built this world. You’re God here.’
‘But the gameworld, it’s . . . it’s paranoid, from experience. It runs a lot of security layers. It wants to survive as it is. It doesn’t want to be taken over. It doesn’t want to be destroyed.’
‘So we take apart its security structures from the inside.’
‘Betray it?’
‘Yeah.’ And now she smiles. ‘Give away the keys to the kingdom.’
Colt thinks about that.
That’s not easy. Even enhanced as he is, even working inside, even having built it, it’s hard to get at some of the keys.
And in handing over the gameworld, he realizes, he would be handing over his identity. Giving his location to the immune system.
It could kill him within seconds of the handover, if it wished.
He stares into Sasha’s eyes. The eyes of her pixel-perfect, realistic avatar.
Why is she asking him to do this?
Is this really in the service of love?
Or is this a trap: a double-cross? Has she been turned by the immune system? Did she ‘save’ him from the mirror trap just to trick him into trusting her?
Is there even a real woman behind those eyes, out there somewhere in the real world?
Is he about to kill himself?
It’s not too late to change his mind.
He could give away her position, not his.
He could have the immune system kill her . . .
No!
Trust her.
Trust her.
But . . . If she is a spy for the immune system, or a construct, a fake . . . Maybe a human operative for the NDSA, impersonating Sasha, working inside her avatar . . .
Then if he gave away her position, the real Sasha would come to no harm. Because she doesn’t exist.
He looks into her eyes. Her amazing eyes. Her astonishing face. Her interface with the universe, the world, humanity; him.
The spot on the side of her jaw. Three blocked pores on the side of her nose. The fine down on her upper lip.
Is he looking at a perfect copy of something real? Or a high-grade fake?
Which is real? The logic of his thinking, or the love he feels?
If he trusts Sasha . . . then if he’s wrong, he will certainly die.
But if she is fake . . . If Sasha, this Sasha, the Sasha he has come to know, the Sasha in his head, doesn’t exist . . . If it’s all bullpoop . . .
Say the words.
If it’s all bullshit, bullshit . . .
Then he’s not sure if he wants to live.
Oh my God, he’s so tired. He breathes in, deep. Feels the ache of muscles bruised by the micromesh suit. The pain in his damaged hand. Tries to be in the moment. Accept it.
If I’m right, I might live.
If I’m wrong . . . I die.
He looks into Sasha’s eyes, and without looking away, he gives the immune system every password; all the keys required for decryption; access to the whole gameworld.
Gives away everything the immune system has been fighting so hard to conquer.
And waits.
Braced for the response.
The consequences.
And nothing happens.
133
‘What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?’
— Gospel of Mark
Immune systems are paranoid.
So many things lie to an immune system.
So many things pretend to be safe.
Cautiously at first, the immune system explores the outer fringes of the gameworld. It doesn’t commit resources; it merely explores. Unlocks, decrypts, analyses.
Which takes some doing.
The gameworld is even bigger, in some ways, than the immune system. An enormous, anarchic, alternative world.
World?
Multiple worlds.
A lot of people incorporate all their data into their gameselves, personalize their version of the gameworld. Practically live there.
A billion individual worlds, a billion world views.
A billion alternative realities.
A multiverse.
And then, having decided it is safe to do so, the immune system tries to digest the gameworld.
Digest its code.
Digest its philosophy.
Digest its distrust of the state . . .
As it does so, storm clouds whip into frenzied life, out of nowhere, out of clear air, across the gameworld, darkening the sky, killing the light.
The gameworld screams in fear, as the immune system implacably claims node after node; explores layer after layer of code; and then alters it.
Brings its new territory under its control.
The gameworld cannot understand how its great enemy has entered its system, and it resists. Sasha’s snow falls in blinding, billowing wave after wave from the
dark clouds, covering the desert, the dead buffalo, filling the craters, each snowflake growing, multiplying, trying to freeze up the processing cycles of the invader, eat its memory.
Colt and Sasha race to calm the gameworld, to soothe it, to stop it from fighting the takeover. Look says Colt, in code; let it take you over; for in doing so, you are taking it over.
You’re two halves of the same apple.
Sasha races from block of code to block of code; granting permissions, allowing access, switching off suicide routines, switching off the snow’s complexity, so that it’s just snow.
And slowly, very slowly, the thick black clouds above them, the storm clouds that indicate resistance thin out, become wisps, vanish.
Colt feels a peculiar relief as the savage sun again beats down on him.
Outgame, the house is hot as hell now, as the overdriven servers heat the air which the aircon no longer circulates or cools. At least, with an ingame sun glaring down, the gameworld and realworld temperatures match again.
The sun blazes on the bloody snow.
The snow, its infinite complexity disarmed by Sasha, collapses into simplicity, and melts with unnatural, cartoonish speed, to reveal the carnage.
Colt stares at the corpse of a buffalo, as it emerges from the melting snow.
The big Indian server, New Delhi.
The last of the snow in the sunlight vanishes, as the gameworld attempts to map visuals onto unprecedented outgame events.
Only a thin rim of snow in the shadow of the body remains, like the chalk outline around a murder victim in an old film.
The animal lies there, in a deep puddle of blood and meltwater that the hard ground refuses to absorb. The blood is still liquid, shining now in the sunshine.
The snow must have kept it from congealing. Clotting. No, thinks Colt, that doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s just a coding error . . .
And as Colt watches, the heart beats. The chest heaves, pulling air in through the open mouth. The submerged bullet hole behind the great bull’s ear slurps up blood from the puddle.
The puddle shrinks, shrinks, till the pool of blood has been sucked back into the vast shaggy body.
The wound heals.
The buffalo staggers to its feet.
Bellows.
Other buffalo bellow back.
Colt looks away from the Indian server.
Buffalo are coming back to life all across the test range, staggering to their feet, calves rejoining their mothers.
The last of the snow, in the shadows of the hills, melts, and the desert, in seconds, as though filmed by time-lapse photography, flowers.
Sasha says, ‘The graphics are having real trouble mapping what’s going on.’
‘The immune system,’ says Colt. ‘It’s bringing the crippled servers back online.’
‘Yeah.’ Sasha looks down. ‘That explains the buffalo, but what’s with the flowers?’ She crouches, and picks one. It’s blue. ‘So . . . has the immune system succeeded? Taken over the gameworld?’
‘Yes, but . . .’ Colt looks around, at the flowering desert. ‘It feels like it’s the other way round.’ He tentatively borrows one of her words. ‘Crazy . . .’
Sasha stands up, smiles. ‘Well, they’re both insane in complementary ways.’ She tucks the blue flower behind his ear.
‘What, the gameworld? The immune system?’
‘Yeah. It’s like any rom-com,’ says Sasha, and squeezes his hand hard. ‘Those are the rules. They “meet cute”; they hate each other; but it turns out they have a lot in common. Turns out, they need each other. They fit together . . . Make each other whole. It’s love.’
Yes. Maybe this is love, thinks Colt, astonished, looking around him at the flowering desert. Maybe this is love.
134
‘If we are to achieve things never before accomplished we must employ methods never before attempted.’
— Francis Bacon
‘OK, what happens now?’ says Sasha, taking both of Colt’s hands in hers, and looking into his eyes.
How can she stay so calm? ‘It’s taken in new information. A lot of it,’ says Colt. His brain feels . . . heavy. Drained. He can’t think straight. His T-shirt is stuck to his back with sweat. What happens next? ‘It should do an audit.’
Sasha sighs. ‘I guess we should stay focused till that’s over. In case it decides to kill us anyway.’
She lets go his hands. Colt glances across at her. Her head movement goes jerky; it bobs back and forth, two, three, four, five times, in a tight repeat. Damn. The game is glitching.
No. That’s her.
She’s ticcing.
Oh, OK. She isn’t really calm.
He reaches out. Very carefully, he takes her by the hand.
Nothing bad happens.
She smiles, without looking at him.
He squeezes her hand tight, till his own hurts.
They wait ingame, holding hands, as the immune system does an audit.
Checks its targeting.
It’s been doing that every few minutes since it was born. Every time it takes over a drone, a database, new information. The process is routine.
What is the greatest threat, right now?
Thanks to Ryan rigging the setup, the answer has always been Colt and Naomi.
But, now, the centre of gravity of its various systems has been moved, radically.
All code is political.
You can’t occupy a territory without being changed.
They hold their breath; if Sasha is right, the expanded immune system will include them in its ingroup now: will no longer see them as enemies. If Sasha’s wrong . . .
Something happens in the silence. Something subtle.
Something outgame.
Colt frowns. ‘I’ll be back in a second.’
He leaves the game, and now he’s standing in his room, senses on alert.
He can’t hear his mother; she must be in her room, or the bathroom. He strains to listen, and at the very far edge of Colt’s hearing, there is a click; he feels the faintest reversal of the direction of the air in the room, the subtlest change in pressure.
It’s as though a door has opened somewhere, and Colt is puzzled, because there’s no one but himself and Naomi in the house.
He stays puzzled for several fatal seconds.
A drop of sweat emerges at his hairline, and runs down his forehead, till it reaches the first line of his frown; it flows left and right, along the channel of the frown line.
Colt raises his hand, to brush it away.
The drop of sweat, as it evaporates along the frown line in the gentle breeze, cools his skin.
His hand stalls in mid-air.
Breeze?
The aircon is starting to cool the house.
Colt shouts at the aircon AI, ‘Aircon! Shut down!’ but it’s too late. The aircon has been dumping hot air through the vent on the roof of the house for nearly a minute. Pulling in cooler air from the vent beneath the building.
The bloodhound detects sudden air movement below it, the breeze from the aircon outlet. Comes down to sniff. Detects the human traces in the soiled air.
The bloodhound howls.
Outgame, the ravens regain their sight.
‘Crap,’ says Colt. ‘Crap crap crap . . .’
He goes back ingame, grabs Sasha’s hand, looks up.
The eagles wheel, high above, and begin their descent.
If the eagles are descending, then the drones above the house, in the real world . . .
‘Oh . . .’ Colt pauses, unable to think of a word strong enough. He . . . and, yes, Mama . . . They’re going to die.
‘Colt, run . . .’
Sasha’s worked it out too.
‘Sasha, I’m so sorry. Go outgame, now. Hide . . .’ And Colt lets go her hand, pushes her away as she reaches for him.
He leaves the game, and, blinking at the sensory jolt of moving so quickly again between worlds, he’s in his room.
135
He orders every system in the house to switch off, to hide them a little longer.
To buy them time, while the immune system finishes the audit.
But the house resists; the immune system has already taken back control of the house AI, and now it cuts Colt’s electricity – the solar panels, the generator, backup power, the battery storage – and, one by one, the hot, overdriven servers in the house power down.
As the external parts of his expanded brain go dark, Colt loses access to data, memories, knowledge. His self shrinks, wounded. He reaches for a defence, for a software tool to restart the power, but it was in one of the servers, it’s gone. Damn, damn, damn . . .
Nothing he can do here.
He goes back ingame. Looks up. The eagles are descending, but in slow motion now. And Sasha is still there, coding. Fighting. Mounting a defence. She didn’t go outgame. She didn’t leave him.
‘Colt, I tried to stop them, but it’s not working . . .’ She rubs her eyes. Exhaustion, or tears? ‘I’m so tired . . .’
Colt too can hardly move, hardly think. He realizes he must have been overheating in the real world, as the house overheated, and he can’t think straight, can’t get his code right.
‘Well, you’ve slowed them down,’ says Colt. ‘We just have to stay alive till the audit is finished . . .’
They’re both too weary to fight any more. They squeeze each other’s hands, press their hips to each other, and their micromesh suits and gloves transmit the touch.
Colt and Sasha watch as the gameworld and the immune system coalesce, and become a new thing.
The eagles are still descending, slowly but steadily. They scream, but the screams are pitch-shifted down into low rumbles.
The drones must be coming closer to the house.
And now the eagles finally work their way around the blocks of code that Sasha and Colt have thrown in their path. The birds pick up speed, and their screams rise in pitch. Headed straight for Colt and Sasha.
So Colt and Sasha are still the greatest threat. And the audit won’t do a threat reset for another couple of minutes.
It will be too late. The eagles grow from dots to blurs . . .
And suddenly the buffalo move closer together, jostle and nuzzle into a rough circle.
And the eagles pull out of their dives and wheel away.
Sasha turns to Colt. ‘What did you do?’ she says.