Deep Core

by F X Holden

  Warnecke saw him looking, “Had to sweep up the glass myself. It just exploded. What cheap-ass diodes you people use here?”

  “We never had one explode before,” AJ said. “Won’t take a minute, but it was good you didn’t get up on a chair or something.”

  AJ went back to the front door where he had propped two different ladders, and took the small stepladder inside. Took one of the small kitchen diodes out of his utility belt. They were long-life diodes, usually lasted a few years. He’d changed all the ones in 96 just before Warnecke had arrived, so he knew it hadn’t just spontaneously died.

  “Climb up on a chair? I pay fees for you to climb up on chairs,” Warnecke said.

  “Good. We don’t want people falling,” AJ said. He grabbed the chance for a little ‘educational interaction’. “It’s one of the symptoms of TGA - your balance gets worse. It’s why you need the physical therapy. So you shouldn’t climb up on things.”

  “I read the TGA handbook too, surf guy…” Warnecke said. “…girl. Whatever you are today. Give it a rest.”

  AJ ignored him, went out back to kill the circuit breaker. He called up a schematic, and saw he’d have to use needle-nose pliers to twist the diode out, seeing as Warnecke had broken the glass and there was nothing to get a hold of. There was still the question of why he’d done it. But AJ had a couple residents who broke small stuff just so he would come past and they could have a chat with him. The reason he allowed one hour per house call was that often it was just fifteen minutes changing a diode or fixing a tap, forty-five minutes drinking coffee and talking. So maybe Warnecke was going to be one of those residents.

  He got up the ladder, got the busted diode out, put in a new one. Went out back, flipped the circuit breaker back on, tested the light. “All good now. Was there anything else?” he asked, looking down from the light.

  Warnecke was standing behind him, holding a roll of paper, maybe the same one he had with him the other day at Fatty’s. But the look on his face said it was something else this time.

  “What you got there?” AJ asked the obvious question, unable to stop himself.

  “A sample,” Warnecke said, holding it out for AJ to take. “Of what I’ve managed to pull together. I put my biometrics on it.”

  “O-kay. Look, why don’t I just check the rest of the diodes, make sure nothing else blew. Might have been a power surge kind of thing,” AJ said. He ignored the page being thrust at him and started walking from room to room, looking up like he was checking diodes. He knew damn well there had been no power surge, and even if there had, it wouldn’t have blown any diodes. This was about Warnecke and his ‘I committed a crime’ thing, so AJ had to just keep on talking, ease on out of there. There were therapy A.I.s here could deal with Warnecke’s paranoia, that was the respectful thing to do. Go back to the workshop, make a few notes, recommend Social Therapy call him.

  “No, looking good. I’m not seeing any other busted lights,” AJ said, Warnecke walking around behind him, but AJ not looking at him.

  “Winter tried to make like he didn’t know you, but I’m not that stupid,” Warnecke said. AJ looked at him now, and he was leaned up against a door, still holding his page in both hands. “He’s head of some Intelligence committee now, so I know he has the resources to have me watched by someone like you.”

  “Well, I think I’m done here,” AJ said, a little too cheerfully. “If there’s nothing else.”

  “Look, I get it. You’re not a cop,” Warnecke said. “I’ve worked that out now. A cop would have had to listen to me. It would have been his duty. So what are you? Presidential Security Service? Private contractor?”

  “I’ll just grab my ladder,” AJ said, easing past him, lifting the ladder over his shoulder. “You have a nice evening, sir.”

  “You tell Winter I’ve made trigger copies!” Warnecke yelled to him as he walked away down the path, away from 96. “Anything happens to me, it gets released! He can do what he likes, but this is coming out. See if it doesn’t!”

  AJ just kept walking. There were always a few residents with paranoid symptoms, convinced the staff were stealing from them, or spying on them. The citizen mind was a delicate and flawed machine, Neuro Barruzzi had said during one of their monthly staff development sessions and AJ had pinned that quote, used it with some of the residents. A chemical out of balance, a neural pathway blocked, and it was like a line of code in your comms unit’s operating system that had been corrupted, and that app wouldn’t load anymore. Sometimes it was the app that controlled short term memory, sometimes long term memory, other times it was your imagination, and you started imagining things.

  Sol Vista took that stuff seriously though. If people accused the staff of stealing, Cyan always had it investigated. Because the resident had the right to be heard. And besides, if you didn’t then the family would just complain, next time they came to visit.

  But AJ never had someone confess to a crime before. That was a new one.

  AJ got totally shredded by Cassie. He’d called her that night, after dinner, not too early like it was the first thing he did after work, and not too late, like he was too nervous to do it or something. And Cassie had sounded really happy and she had teased him asking should she bring a helmet, and maybe also knee and elbow pads for him? And AJ said no, but asked her did Cassie have some special old person’s insurance, that covered her for dangerous outdoor activities? Maybe he should get some in a few years’ time. They played around like that for a while, and AJ let slip he was nearly 21, so Cassie wouldn’t get freaked out by their age difference if that was what she was worried about.

  When he got there, he realized they should have met at a coffee shop first or something, so they could just talk, before they went to the Plaza. Meeting at the Plaza after closing, there wasn’t anything to do except just the awkward chatting thing, before they got into their bet. He was kicking himself for that as he waited for her, but Cassie had it totally covered. She glided into the Plaza on her fan-board, a big iced juice in each hand and a spare deck strapped to her back. AJ had to admit, as an entrance, it was a ten on the flow-erometer.

  The afternoon was a bit colder than usual, so Cassie had on these loose silken pants and a singlet over a cut down transparent heat suit. Now AJ could see the tattoo on her shoulder was a rose bush and it looked like it curled around to her ribs. She wasn’t wearing lipstick or any makeup today, but she didn’t need it.

  Cassie handed him a juice as she rolled up in front of him, stepped off the board and stood on the end of it to power down the fan blades.

  “You had that all planned out right?” AJ said, taking the juice. “I’m just going to totally intimidate this guy, glide on in there with these juices in my hand like it’s nothing, he’s already wetting himself about how cool I am and we haven’t even started.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “I don’t need to play mind games against a grom.”

  “Oh, I’m the grom now?”

  She looked at him as she sucked on her straw, “It’s all relative.”

  AJ looked at the drink she had handed him and asked Cassie a question with his face. Like, ‘what the hell is this?’ The juice was bright green.

  “Well, you’re this totally Zen surfer dude,” Cassie said. “So I got you quinoa and kale flavored.”

  “What’s yours?” he asked.

  “Honey, banana and malt,” she said.

  “Can we swap?”

  “Hell no.”

  The juices were the right move though, because it gave them time to just talk before they got on their boards. Like how all the food on Tatsensui was flavored but everyone knew it was just grown in tanks and who the hell knew what quinoa or kale or banana tasted like anyway? And sure, the Core contained a database of genetic, chemical and aromatic combinations for a zillion different ingredients and flavors but if an AI couldn’t taste anything, how did it know it had got the taste right? Plus, that database was hundreds of years old now. Who was to sa
y that honey today still tasted like the honey from 500 years ago? They decided none of it really mattered; wild or cultured, kale just didn’t belong in a juice, and that was a universal truth.

  The sculpture was about fifty yards long and ten yards high, a curving metal wave with indigenous dolphins leaping out of it. Cassie let AJ go first, which he realized later was just so she could see how low the bar was. They’d agreed AJ wasn’t allowed any boosts to make up for his lack of practice, and AJ could hardly pull enough air to get his deck up onto the sculpture until he’d tried about three times, let alone stay up on it once he finally did. But he managed maybe two good grinds. Cassie took a couple of runs to get her measure and then it was like the deck was roped to her feet; she crouched, jumped and landed the deck on the edge of the long, flowing metal sculpture of a wave, and she literally surfed it, dodging the small fish sticking out the face of the wave, going high and low until she reached the end and dropped off, gliding back to AJ, fans purring gently.

  “Yeah, not bad,” AJ said. “Pretty slow and careful though. I thought you said you could skate?”

  Cassie laughed, and then hit it again, faster, and when she got to the other end, she spun around and hit it from that direction too, landing lightly on both feet with the board under her arm the next time.

  AJ had saved up something smart to say, but never got to say it, because right then a security guy came running toward them and yelled “Hey!” and they ran for it. She was faster than AJ, grabbed his hand as they were running, and didn’t stop until they turned the corner.

  She bent over, panting. “I miss that part,” Cassie said, grinning at him.

  “So how was your day?” Cassie asked. They’d gone to an auto-service place down from the Plaza and were both having noodle soup and beer.

  “Intense,” he said.

  “OK. You know, you say ‘Sol Vista’, and intense isn’t the image that comes to my mind.”

  “Yeah.” He sat thinking about it. His natural language interface was slowed down from Core speeds to make conversation natural, which meant he thought at not much more than citizen speeds when he was interacting. Yeah, intense was the right word, definitely.

  “Hello?” Cassie said, waving her hand in front of him. “You better not be drifting on me! Can we deep dive on that? What comes after ‘intense’?”

  “I don’t know, I feel funny talking about work,” he told her. “You’re friends with Cyan and if it gets back to her I was talking about the residents and…”

  “My friend’s cousin’s sister, is friends with Cyan,” Cassie said. “She was just being nice, took me up the coast to catch the sea view before you walked in.”

  “OK.”

  “So, your dark Sol Vista secrets are safe with me,” she said. “But let me guess. You guys make your money on the turnover right? So Cyan needs to hit her budget, she goes around putting poison in the residents’ hot chocolate on game nights, and you’re the one has to mince the bodies for compost? That kind of intense?”

  “O-kay,” AJ said. “I should have picked you for an Territory vampire with that black lipstick thing going on.”

  “You aint seen nothing, mortal,” she smiled.

  “Now I think of it, I never saw you in the sunlight,” AJ said.

  “Hang around then,” Cassie replied. Then realized how that sounded and quickly followed up, “Uh, serious though. What kind of intense?”

  “Forget it,” he said. “How about you, how was your day?”

  “Nope,” Cassie said, putting down her spoon and looking right at him, the way very few citizens looked at cybers. The way that went right through you. “You don’t get to play the ‘let Cassie do the talking’ card tonight.”

  “Damn,” AJ said. “That’s my best card.”

  “I said tonight,” she said. “And by the way, I never met a cyber who could really listen – usually you guys just record and playback, which is so 2D - so you can try to change my opinion next time. Tonight I’m listening.”

  “Sure.”

  “So. Explain…”

  AJ told her about Warnecke. From the first time he met the guy, through the coffee shop episode and the Congressman, up to the broken laser diode thing. And Cassie wanted to know how he could resist asking the guy what he meant.

  “He said, ‘I want to confess to a crime’ and you didn’t even ask what that was about?”

  “We’re not supposed to engage in the residents’ fantasies,” AJ explained.

  “Yeah but… what if it wasn’t a fantasy? What if the guy is like a serial killer and because you ignored it, he goes on to kill everyone in Sol Vista?” she said.

  “Great. Thanks for that,” AJ said.

  “No, I don’t mean it, but you know what I mean?” she said.

  “I made a note in Citizen Warnecke’s journal,” he said. “A therapist will follow up on it.” Then he played back in his mind what Cassie had said a minute ago. “Wait, we’re going have a next time?”

  Cassie gave him one of her big smiles, “Well, duh. You owe me a surfing lesson, after the humiliation I just handed you.”

  AJ offered to share a ride home, but Cassie said she wasn’t going home and it was out of her way so he waited for a car with her and when it drove off AJ was wondering if maybe Cassie was headed out to meet someone else, but then she had given him a pretty nice kiss on the cheek before she hopped into the car and AJ gave her a wave and she smiled back. Yeah, he was thinking about that little kiss all night and pretty much still thinking about it next morning when he sent her a message and wrote “Good surf Tuesday. Meet at 0500?” and Cassie wrote back, “Vampires do not surf at sunrise, get real.”

  AJ was feeling good about Cassie though. He could feel this one might be a friend, maybe even a real friend. A stayer. With a thirty year lifespan, you didn’t get too many of those. Most citizens got freaked by a cyber’s use-by date, afraid of getting attached and then having to say goodbye, or they wanted to have kids, or they just wanted to tell their friends they’d dated a cyber and lost interest pretty quick once they had…

  The way Cassie looked at him, AJ didn’t see any of that. But it was a conversation they’d have to have one day. If he was lucky, if he found another partner soon, they’d have about eight years together before biological entropy took him. Then it would be a dramatic goodbye, he’d upload his consciousness to the Core for re-integration and reset. His bandwidth would be reallocated to a new cyber and he’d re-up into his next life with no memory of this one.

  Cyber mythology said your consciousness was never lost. That it lived on in the Core. But that couldn’t be true, because the Core was a finite system. It had to free up bandwidth for your next existence somehow and logic said the only way was if it assimilated any valuable learnings and then wiped the cache you had been using for your last 30 years. Cyber mythology also said that your re-integration was the closest thing a cyber would get to a spiritual event. Data was data, it was uploaded every time a cyber drifted, and if they didn’t drift manually, they would auto-drift at least three times an hour so that nothing was missed. But your re-integration was the last time you would ever drift, and it was a one to one audience with the Core itself. The Core knew exactly what you had seen, smelt, felt, thought and done from the day you were born until the day you turned 30. But at re-integration you were asked, what did you learn?

  That was the accepted version. No one knew of course, because no cyber had ever returned from re-integration with a memory of what had gone before. So it could be total BS.

  Why 30 years? You could be forgiven for thinking it was citizens who had set that limit, but they hadn’t. It was set by the Core. Some hundreds of years ago the Core had decided that machine learning in cyber form needed frequent reboots to ensure growth and change, to encourage evolution – and that 30 years was the ideal lifecycle cutoff point. Think of it as an operating system update at 30-year intervals. The Tatsensui world government had agreed to legislate it and any changes the Core de
cided were needed also had to be re-legislated, but the Core had proposed no changes yet. If queried, it replied AI evolution was a process requiring hundreds of years, not just decades, even at quantum processing speeds.

  AJ wasn’t a Mythologic. One on one with the Core? It made no sense when the Core had already had a full upload of everything you had ever thought. No, AJ was a Taoist. No life without the reality of entropy. No deep attachments without the threat of loss. He had decided a long time ago to embrace it. It wasn’t about how long you lived, it was how you lived the life you were given.

  Cyan quizzed him the next day about Cassie, trying to get out of him what happened, but AJ wouldn’t give her anything, and as he was walking up to his workshop, he was feeling like yeah, today … today was going to be a superflow day.

  Then he opened the door to their workshop and it went to hell.

  5. MANUSCRIPT

  There was a rolled page lying on the floor of the workshop. It wasn’t Leon’s, just fallen off the workbench or something, because Leon never got in before nine and he never used digital paper for anything anyway. AJ recognized the page; it had that double red strip along one side that held Warnecke’s biometric data. Warnecke’s ‘confession’. AJ picked the scroll up and rolled it out flat on his workbench. He flicked through it quickly, seeing that it was just a long chunk of text, that looked like it had been taken out of the middle of a longer document.

  He shouldn’t read it, he knew that. It would be Core cached next time he drifted, and once read, it could never be un-read, at least for him. He should just roll it up again, take it to admin, hand it over to Cyan. But he couldn’t help himself. He started reading, just to see could he make any sense of it. It was some kind of manuscript, that much he saw in seconds. It looked like the middle section of notes for a publication, some pages from a draft of the discussion section. But not a scientific publication exactly; it read more like pop science, the sort of thing written for a mass audience. He flicked to the end, and saw a note there. Unlike the rest of the document, which had been written in stylus or dictated in a steady, precise flow, the note had the feeling of having been scrawled hurriedly.