Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  Phone in hand, she trails a fingertip over the servers’ uniform black chassis. Even colder, down here—she wishes she had gloves. The altitude is right, and then the latitude is right, and then she finds the one.

  The node, the famous node, seems to be a server like any other. She scrutinizes it closely but finds nothing, wonders if she’s been wasting her time. No way you could run an AI on it—all the servers in the building would barely be enough for a toy one.

  “That’s it?” Philip asks. “It doesn’t look like much.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “Hmmn. Let’s have a look at the network traffic.” He makes passes on his phone, cursing quietly at first, then with ardor. “Done. It’s oddly proactive about looking for new wireless networks, and, Jesus fuck, the bandwidth is really high. No matter … There’s a lot of traffic but it’s hard to interpret. Have a look.”

  He hands her his phone. Data trickles by on the screen so she ups the resolution and now it comes in a rush, faster than the eye could follow but all written into her other memory, and as it accumulates she sees it’s encrypted but she shrugs off the encoding and stares into the flow of revealed static for a long moment before her perception starts flickering and she know what she’s seeing.

  “It’s glyphs,” she says. “It’s sending and receiving glyphs. It really is an AI.”

  Philip regards the server skeptically. “That seems like a stretch. They could be recorded. Want me to open it up?”

  She nods and he produces a multi-bit screwdriver from inside his coat, the same Calatrava he wore to Fantôme. His hands explore the server’s hull with a deftness she remembers. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been this hands-on,” he says. “God, it’s cold. Reminds me of the old days of theft and poverty. Ah, youth.”

  He sets aside the top half of the server’s case. “Christ,” he says. She looks over his shoulder, sees an ordinary-looking motherboard and on it a lump of metal the size of a golf ball, gleaming bluely in the dim light, its surface slightly crystalline. It’s wired directly to the power supply.

  “What is that?” she asks.

  “A gross manufacturing error, I’d say, in other circumstances. As it is, I can’t imagine.” He touches it gently with a fingertip. “It feels wrong for explosives, so that’s something.”

  “Wait,” she says. “I know what this is. I saw it in Cromwell’s office. He said it was a kind of computer, but the one he had didn’t work—he said it was an improperly assembled prototype. The AI must be running on this.” It crosses her mind that this is, in some sense, the AI’s soul, and how fitting, for such an ethereal being, that its soul is purely material. “Can I borrow your phone?”

  She can see Philip formulating objections, but he says nothing, gives her his phone.

  She taps in her soldier’s number.

  It’s evening in California. He answers on the first ring.

  “I’m going to create an opening,” she says.

  “When?”

  “Probably the next ten minutes.”

  “Very good. We’ll get in position.”

  She remembers what happened with Cloudbreaker, wonders what she’s getting into. “If you see an opening, go. Don’t hesitate. I might be unavailable.”

  “Acknowledged. I’ll attack as opportunity affords,” he says, sounding detached now, like he’s already subsuming himself in his function.

  She hands the phone back.

  “Here I go,” she says.

  “Are you sure this is a sound plan?” Philip says. “Cromwell is rational. It seems obvious that this is bait, and that he’ll be exposing himself. Okay, so he likes Magda, but there are other women.”

  “Maybe so, but would you do it for me?”

  He says nothing.

  “I’ll be as quick as I can,” she says. “Keep an eye on me, okay?”

  “Okay,” he says.

  She turns on her implant’s wireless.

  62

  Flaw in His Vision

  Kern waits for dawn on the black ship’s deck.

  As the night fades a black line lingers on the lightening sky, razor-thin and plumb-straight from sea to heaven. At first he thinks it’s something to do with the early light in the atmosphere, and then that there must be a flaw in his vision, but he blinks, rubs his palms over his eyes, and it’s still there. The line is fainter, higher up; craning his neck, he loses its heights in the depth of blue.

  An island emerges, a spire at its center, the black line rising up from it. The ruddy early light glows on what seems to be a city, and even this early whatever castles, cathedrals, factories are shimmering in the heat.

  “Get your bag,” Akemi says in his ear. “My knowledge gets a little thin here, but you’ve got to be ready to go.”

  Duffel on his back, he watches the docks approach. Cranes hang over the water, paint eroded, cables sagging. It feels like no one’s been here in a hundred years. He wonders what he’s supposed to do here but expects he’ll find out.

  The ship glides into a long gulf between decaying concrete piers. The water reflects the sun’s red light. Uninterpretable machinery at the pier’s edge, spindly trees growing out of cracks in the concrete, rust stains spreading from protruding rebar. He looks over his shoulder, realizes the other ships have vanished in the night.

  “Now,” says Akemi. “There. Go!” There’s a rusted ladder on the pier’s side, about to slip by, and he wants to stay with the ship and see where it goes, but he runs, jumps and catches the ladder, which sags agonizingly, then holds.

  As his face clears the pier’s edge there’s a flash impression of hundreds of hostile yellow eyes and he almost falls as the gulls erupt into swirling cacophony. He looks back in time to see the black ship submerge, become a dark shape under the water.

  The stench is appalling—in places the guano is a foot deep. Rail tracks rise above the filth, offering a less foul path toward shore. The spire in the island’s center is immense, taller than skyscrapers, tapering inward to the black line’s base.

  “Go toward the tower,” Akemi says.

  “What is this place?”

  “The space elevator. At least, it was going to be. Basically it’s a giant cable going up into low orbit—it was supposed to be a cheap alternative to rockets, but between the deflating economy and some spectacular failures of engineering it never actually got used. The cable still goes up into space, but now it just sort of sits here.”

  If he squints, the rotting buildings look like jungle hills. He crosses a ring road, then a thoroughfare as wide as a city block leading toward the tower. He crushes ferns underfoot, tries to jump between patches of bare asphalt. There’s graffiti here and there, but it’s sparse, faded, probably decades old. He knows he’s alone, and that probably the worst danger is getting crapped on by a seagull, but even so it’s eerie, and it’s hard not to be cautious.

  There are buttresses around the tower, practically towers in themselves, slipping in and out of view between buildings, and he daydreams he’s making an assault on a castle, single-handed, pure of heart, invincible and forlorn. His old laptop had a book about King Arthur, but much as he’d liked the idea of it, the stories were less interesting than just foreign—the knights were obsessed with etiquette, finicky about status, and the sword fights were never specific enough to be good; the only parts that really felt like anything were when the knights approached dark castles that still concealed their mysteries.

  The ground rises as he approaches the tower; he looks back over his shoulder at the ruined city and the sea. He reminds himself he’s literally exploring a jungle-choked lost city, which is a real adventure by any standard, but the experience is emptier than he’d expected. Did Arthur’s knights ever slouch on their horses, worn by boredom, their thoughts a jumble of past battles and old loves?

  “That hangar there, three seventy three,” Akemi says. “I need you on its rooftop.” STAGING 373 is stenciled on a door big enough to accommodate a jet bu
t it seems to be rusted shut. It’s almost disappointing that there’s a fire escape zigzagging up to the roof, as getting up would otherwise be a challenge.

  The rooftop is as big as a dozen soccer fields. There are puddles in declivities in the concrete, their brown water seething with larvae.

  The cable keeps drawing his eyes. It seems impossible, like a fissure in the sky, an error in the rules of the world—he keeps trying to read it as an optical illusion.

  “Just a little bit farther,” Akemi says.

  Ahead there’s a little cubical building with a door, probably either a maintenance shed or stairs. He steps on mummified cigarette butts, dented aluminum cans, shards of broken bottles.

  “Here’s where you set up the sat-phone,” Akemi says. “We’re going inside, but we need to leave it here so it can get a signal. Can you find a way to secure it so the wind won’t move it around?” In an inward voice she adds, “I should have had you buy tape.”

  He tears the sat-phone out of its packaging, which he meticulously stuffs back into the duffel—cardboard, or even plastic, might turn out to be useful, and there’s no way to get more. The sat-phone’s black plastic antenna is as thick as a finger and twice as long. He slots the batteries, hits the power stud and the sat-phone hums to life. He chooses English from the setup menu (for some reason he thinks of a white deer in a forest, probably an image from the Arthurian stories?) and after a few seconds it reports signal acquired and status nominal.

  He takes the most intact of the aluminum cans and fills them with tainted water from the puddles. The larvae are disgusting, but the filled cans are heavy enough to make a stable windbreak around the sat-phone.

  “Now it’s time to use all those data cables. We need to connect the sat-phone to something inside the building.”

  He unwraps a cable, clicks one of its heads into the sat-phone.

  The door to the little house is locked but he kicks it open. Steps treaded in cracked rubber lead down into the dark.

  “Three floors down,” says Akemi. He picks his way by cell light. No graffiti, though this seems like prime canvas. He unspools the cable as he goes. On the second landing the first cable runs out, so he unwraps the second one, couples it to the first with a connector. He feels like Theseus searching for the Minotaur, but if Staging 373 is the labyrinth, and the cable is Ariadne’s spool of thread, then what’s the central monster?

  “What are we looking for?” he asks.

  “There’s a computer down here,” Akemi says. She sounds impatient, and like she doesn’t really want to talk, but probably she figures he’s already committed and she might as well tell him something. “It cut itself off from the internet, and we need to get it connected again. So, the sat-phone connects to the net from anywhere it can see the sky, and the cables you’re carrying connect the sat-phone to this otherwise disconnected computer. Okay?”

  “What’s so special about this computer, and who cares if it’s on the net?”

  “Long story short, there’s an AI on it and it’s pissing me off. A friend of mine in Japan needs to give it a talking to.” She seems to be speaking through clenched teeth and he wonders what happened to the damsel in distress.

  Another flight of stairs, more unspooling, another connector.

  “Wait a minute,” he says. “If the sat-phone can’t get a signal inside the building, then how am I talking to you?”

  “Ha,” says Akemi. “The phone’s special. It’s hard to explain. Anyway, through that door there, if you don’t mind.”

  The corridor looks haunted in his cell’s light. He tries to move quietly but his footsteps echo and he soon gives up. No windows or skylights—he’s too deep inside the building. “You can try the lights,” she says. “There’s tidal power, so it might still work.” He finds a switch on the wall and overhead LEDs glow into life.

  “Five doors down on your left,” Akemi says, but he stops at a door marked STAGING OVERLOOK, eases it open. Akemi sighs, says nothing.

  The door opens onto a metal balcony with a railing and beyond that total dark. It swallows his cell’s light. He stand there, listening, and then he freezes because from far below comes a faint mechanical whirring.

  Stuttering pulses of light—as from welding?—briefly give him a sense of an expanse of factory floor. He thinks he saw a shipping container, microdrones swarming over it—were some carrying tubes? Another pulse of light—this time he’s sure there was writing on the container’s side, probably Meta-something.

  “They’ll be unloading the ships,” Akemi says. “The island’s set up for submarine cargo. Don’t worry, it’s just drones, and they don’t care about you.”

  “What are they doing down there?”

  “Making computers. If you’re done poking around can we please go? We’re kind of in a hurry.”

  The fifth door on his left is marked JANITORIAL. A closet, within, empty except for a few filthy plastic buckets. “Look in the fuse box,” Akemi says. There’s a grey metal panel on the wall. He opens it, shines his cell in; it goes deeper than he’d expected, and has no fuses, just what looks like a dozen fist-sized lumps of metal, each glowing a faint spectral blue. They’re pushed together to make a sort of lumpy, irregular snowflake. Looking closer, he sees it’s not actually metal but a mineral of some kind, its surface incised with lines like maps of cities. Wires and cables are pushed into the lumps here and there, their far ends disappearing into little holes in the wall.

  “Now push the end of the cable into the blue metal.” He’s going to object, because of course the cable works only if you plug it into the right kind of socket, but instead shrugs and does as he’s told. The metal is surprisingly yielding, and the head of the cable goes right in. Creepily, the metal seems to coalesce around it.

  “What is this stuff?”

  “It’s most of the computational power in the world,” Akemi says, though that can’t be right—computers are small, but not this small—he’s heard of whole cities of server farms built around hydroelectric dams.

  “It’s time to say goodbye,” she says, and sounds a little scared now. “You have to get something from inside the phone, but the phone was never meant to be opened. Do what you have to to break open the hull—you can hit it on the wall, but don’t do it so hard the pieces scatter.”

  “And what then?” he asks, meaning what will happen to him, but she says, “You know that metallic stuff in the fuse box? There’s a little bit of it in the phone. Get it out and press it into the metal in the fuse box. Anywhere is fine. And that’s it—do that, and you’re done.”

  “Where am I supposed to go then?”

  “Just hang tight back up on the roof. I’ll do what I can to get back in touch. But break the phone now, okay?”

  He takes her phone out of his pocket and as he holds it in his hand it occurs to him that he has leverage, that if he were so inclined he could force her to explain everything, like how he’s supposed to survive, and it seems pitiful, now, that he’s been so docile, and obeyed her without question, but he thinks of Arthur’s knights, how relentless they were in their search for the grail, though the grail was only vaguely defined, really just amounting to an expression of their purity.

  “Okay,” he says. “Any last instructions?”

  “No. Thank you, baby. Please hurry.”

  “Goodbye, then,” he says, keeping his voice strong, and without waiting for a reply he slams the phone into the wall.

  It takes three tries before the chassis cracks and he can pry it apart with his fingers.

  When he was younger he’d scavenged cell phones from the landfills because their components had contained just a little bit of gold. The price of gold had been rising for forty years, Lares said, which had finally made that kind of salvage economical; he’d taught him how to disassemble the boards, and as an afterthought a little about their structure, which is how he can tell that most of Akemi’s phone is missing, that it isn’t even really a phone, and that it should never have worked
in the first place. There’s a battery, a speaker, and almost nothing else except for a tiny motherboard; on it there’s a sphere of blue metal the size of a match head, the same as the material in the fuse box.

  He pries it off the motherboard with his fingernail and holds it up to his other cell’s light—it looks like nothing, a tiny particle of industrial waste. It doesn’t take much pressure to push it into the metal in the fuse box. He tries it with his finger—it’s attached.

  The earpiece is dead. This silence feels different, somehow absolute. He’s tempted to keep it in, because you never know, but takes it out, drops it on the floor.

  He closes the fuse box, wonders if he should worry about fingerprints, decides it doesn’t matter.

  * * *

  It’s a bright day. Storm clouds on the horizon. He feels as blank and empty as the surface of the sea.

  According to its screen, the sat-phone is transmitting data at a frenetic rate. In principle it’s a way out but there’s no one he can call.

  He feels like he’s living in leftover time.

  In the last years of his life, the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi had become a hermit and dedicated himself to learning how to die, which had always puzzled Kern, as it seems like something that would take care of itself, but now he thinks he gets it. Staring at the ruined city, the glare on the sea, he tries to imagine the world without him.

  63

  Purpose, Impatience, Suffering

  It’s dark, and the storm has grown. The waves are like hills sliding under the ship.

  The cabin’s monitor shows Kern’s progress through an abandoned factory; with the minimal lighting and the air of industrial dereliction, it’s a little like watching an under-edited student film. Akemi leans toward the screen, entirely focused on her charge, whispering in his ear like a tutelary daemon.

  Thales holds his hand up to the screen’s light to see his fingers silhouetted, make sure his hand is still there.