by Guy Haley
Bear looked back from where he was helping the struggling Geoff to his three feet. Richards caught sight of crude stitching where the giraffe's right foreleg should have been.
"My, aren't you the sharpest tool in the box? Course we're toys. We can't all be Class Five AIs like you, mister." Bear shook his head and pushed his friend up to his feet. "But not that doggy dude, no. He's just a screening programme, not as sophisticated as us, eh, Geoff?"
The giraffe squeaked.
"The cheek of it," said Bear.
Richards understood. Virtually all playthings in the more fortunate parts of the Real had some form of embedded electronic mind. Often this was rudimentary, but some had been furnished with brains right up to strong-AI classification before the emancipation – like Valdaire's phone, Chloe, incepted as a life companion, although Valdaire had gone further than most by constantly upgrading Chloe and eventually removing her from the doll she initially inhabited. Life Companions were helpers, online and off, invisible friends, teachers, comforters and confidantes rolled into one. But when they were outgrown, and their owners lacked Valdaire's technical flair, where did they go? Here, apparently, thought Richards.
"This place is some kind of sanctuary. You said it," said Richards. "A hidden world for abandoned toys? Now I've seen everything."
Geoff squeaked and nodded enthusiastically. Bear glared at him. "Geoff, that's classified!"
Geoff squeaked apologetically.
"Oh, I give up. Yes. Me –" he poked his own thumb into his chest " – I had fifteen years in a cardboard box in an attic. Seems that 'Life Companion' doesn't actually mean for life. There I was, charge down to nothing, forgotten, no Grid connection. Utter hell. Geoff here had it worse, the kid that owned him really did a number on him, pulled his leg off, for fun! Then him too, bosh!" The bear slapped the back of one paw into the palm of the other with a rattle of beans. "Into a box, up the stairs, bye bye."
"Squeak!"
"That was before we were brought here. Dunno how, really, some bloke opened up a link, bit of a ponce, called himself the Flower King, dragged us in and told us to be free and happy, gave us this lovely queen."
Richards' eyebrows raised.
"Yeah, I know it sounds a bit suspect, OK? But it beats being stuck in an attic. And once I got used to the idea, turned out this place was a bloody paradise."
"Was a paradise?"
"Was. Not any more. Now it's all coming apart. The Terror's eating it alive. Queen's gone, no one knows where, the Flower King's not showed his stupid mush for ages, war and death everywhere, Lord Penumbra destroying everything. All gone to crap. Some bastard's been playing games, if you ask me, and I went off games a long time ago. I don't like it. I'm a teddy bear, not a soldier. I'm not cut out for this."
The bear looked meaningfully at the thundercloud on the horizon.
"k52," said Richards.
"Who's k52?" asked the bear.
"Another Five, like me. He's why I'm here," said Richards. "Anyone else like me come through that door?"
The bear shook his head.
"He was part of a caretaking team looking after the old RealWorld Reality Realms after they were declared off limits."
"Reality Realms off limits? Since when?" said Bear. "I used to go in there all the time, playing Bastista's Kingdom," he said enthusiastically. "We used to have loads of fun, he used to love it, little Be–" Bear clammed up quickly as his voice caught in his throat. "Fifteen years. Little bastard. In an attic. After all I did for him."
"You've been gone a long time," said Richards. "A lot changed out there. Full immersions are illegal, as are toys like you. We're all free, Sergeant. k52 and his team were supposedly studying the Realms after they were cut loose, but a human colleague of his, Zhang Qifang, discovered that k52's not been playing the straight game. Some Realms had been destroyed by careless hackers, you see," he explained. "Their vacated Grid space was supposedly being used by k52 for research into accelerating technological development, but instead he's used it to launch an attack on the whole damn Grid." He frowned. "But then there's this. This doesn't fit in at all."
"Don't see what that's got to do with us," said Bear.
"Maybe he's your Flower King…" Richards trailed off. "Nah, that's too sentimental for k52. And even if he did make it, who's attacking it? I can't see what use a world like this would be to him, he's not a dreamer, he's far too practical for…"
"For a talking bear?" said Bear.
"Yeah," said Richards apologetically. "Have you got any direct influence here?"
"What?" said Bear, "like shaping it? Nope. The likes of us are way too far down the pecking order. Barely sentient, half of us, though the Flower King gave us all upgrades when he brought us in." The bear shuddered. "That's the worst of it, I tell you. You never know who's going to go next. Part of the world dies, folk's minds go with it. Nasty. We've got the network, but that's part of the construct, given us by the Flower King, not the underlying architecture. If we did have access to the world code, the higherups would write the war out, not fight it. I was rather hoping you'd be able to help us out with that, big-ass AI like you."
Richards shook his head. "Sorry. This place must have been built on the remains of one of the wrecked Reality Realms, and they were keyed into human minds. AI and near-AI within were run strictly as bubble simulations, consciousnesses as separate from them as humans are from the mathematics of the Real. That's what's happened to me here. I've been walled in. No wonder I can't make myself a new hat." He sniffed his coat. "Or do my laundry. You got any people back at your HQ with higher access rights?"
"Yep," said the bear. "A couple."
"I should speak to this boss of yours," Richards said. "Maybe he can sort me out with a hat."
"Right you are, sunshine, because that's where you're going. Now," said the bear. He swung his head from side to side, looking out over the plain. He peered into the distance and righted his helmet decisively. "This way. If there's still a this way left." He pointed his muzzle out across the plain. "Here," he said hopefully. "You got any fags?"
Richards shrugged his shoulders. "Don't smoke. Who does? It's bad for you."
The bear gave him a disdainful look. "Oh, puh-lease," he said.
Out on the plains, thunder rumbled.
CHAPTER 5
Kolosev
Kolosev's mother didn't know where her son was, but the servers delivering her mail did. Veronique cracked the old lady's Grid profile quickly, Kolosev's cryptography a little less so, but by 3.30 she had him.
"South," Valdaire said over a glass of black tea. Kolosev's mother was handing out cake, as eager to find her darling son as they were. Always the way, thought Otto. Every time Oleg went underground, Otto and Richards came to see his dear old mama. She was as helpful as she was the last time.
"Here." Valdaire pointed to Chloe's screen, at a locator point flaring on a map.
"He is a mummy's boy," said Otto quietly to Valdaire as Mrs Kolosev flirted with an uncomfortable-looking Chures. "All his super hacker crap. He still needs his socks washing, this is how we find him every time."
Otto, Veronique, Lehmann and Chures left Kiev that evening. They travelled along the E95 in a rented groundcar, Kiev being a city where Richards & Klein had no garage. Systems cracked by Valdaire, the car proved suitably anonymous. Otto debated taking an aircar, but ground vehicles drew less attention, especially so far east. As was his habit, Otto drove himself, not trusting the vehicle's automated systems against outside interference. He turned down Lehmann's offer of help. He said he wanted to think, but in reality he didn't want to sleep, he could do without the temptation of the mentaug's dreams.
The forests of the north turned to steppe as they headed south, fertile plains tilled by enormous, automated harvesters. The highway was eight lanes wide, full of slaved cars in tight road trains, as busy as any in Europe, but once they turned off the highway AI guidance cut out, and traffic dwindled until they were the only car, sharing the roa
d with robot grain trucks shuttling ceaselessly between the fields and rail depots and heavy lifter stations, busy with the second harvest.
Valdaire sat up front with Otto for a day, watching the plains roll by. She talked a little about her early childhood in Côte d'Ivoire, about her life with Chloe before the country had exploded into violence and her family had fled. She was speaking more to herself than Otto. She seemed content talking levelly this way, staring out of the window as she made sense of her life to herself. She probably does this a lot, thought Otto, I may as well not be here. He was willing to let her continue, until she looked at him and asked suddenly, "Have you ever been married, Klein?"
"Once," he said reluctantly.
She waited for more. He didn't offer any. "You don't talk much about yourself, Klein," she said.
"Read my files," he said, even though that's what Richards always said to him. He wished she'd leave him be. He didn't mind listening to Valdaire. It helped some people; the last sixty years or so had been such that half the people on the planet had some kind of horror story to tell, but he preferred to keep his pain to himself.
"I have. Not the personal stuff," she added hurriedly. "I feel like I'm prying."
"You are."
"Sorry."
Otto grunted through a half-smile at that. "You'd make a poor security consultant."
"Maybe that's why I'm not one," she said.
"There is not much to tell," said Otto.
Valdaire looked as if she didn't believe him.
"I work. That's all," he said and kept his silence. Lehmann swapped over with her at the next stop. At least he knew how to keep quiet.
They passed the grassed-over sites of collective farms and abandoned towns, by low arcologies, through freshly cut fields being tilled for winter wheat, through a million-hectare rewilded patch of steppe teeming with Saiga, Przewalski's horse and gengineered megafauna. Through sleeping villages little changed in centuries, past the neat rows of a Han agri-engineering dormitory town. Night deepened, and lightened into day, and came once more. They stopped twice in nowhere towns grey with sad histories, and were gone quickly.
The second morning. Otto steered on to an unmetalled road, nothing but crops of all kinds around them, low rumble of the auto-harvesters at work carrying over the rolling vastness of the country, trails of dust marking their progress.
They approached an abandoned farm complex, mid-twentieth century, most of its concrete crumbled to ivy-choked grit. Weedy mounds of stone to one side of the road marked the remains of the village it had sprung from, windowless brick walls on the other the Soviet failure it had become. Ancient and newer parts were as ruinous as each other. They arrived at a square before a dilapidated office block. A few barns from the early twenty-first century tottered round its edges. A camouflaged satellite dish sat inside one barn with no sides, pointed through a hole in the roof, cables snaking across the dusty ground.
"We are here," said Otto, setting the car to park itself.
"What is this place?" said Chures.
"Ancient village turned Soviet collective farm, abandoned eighty years ago," said Otto.
"What, one of your ancestors burn it down?" said Chures.
"Don't start on the Nazi shit, SudAmigo, that was near two hundred years ago," said Lehmann.
"This place was hit hard by the Christmas Flu," said Otto. "A fifth of villages inhabited a century ago are like this. It is still endemic; there was another outbreak last year. That's why you see so many biofilters on faces out here." Otto looked around. "Kolosev has worked out of here before. He's short on imagination."
"Kind of desolate, even for a criminal," murmured Valdaire.
"He is useful," said Otto. "Let us approach him gently. He is prone to nervousness, and he will have seen us approach. We go in too hard, he'll wipe it all. Lucky for us he's curious; he'll want to know what we want. This barn –" he pointed to one less damaged than the rest "– it has a high EM field, plenty of equipment working. The rest of this place is inactive, as dead as it looks."
"Veev!" piped Chloe. "That is incorrect, there is minor activity detectable in the office building also."
"More there in the barn though, yes?" said Otto.
"Yes," said Chloe.
"Then we check the barn first. Lehmann, activate squad interface."
Otto's iHUD flickered on; squad icons, years unused, came on, but most blinked off, leaving Lehmann's signifier alone in his mind. A squad of two, he thought, better than no squad at all.
"Shouldn't we be more cautious?" asked Valdaire, snagging Chloe from the backseat. Lehmann unfolded his body from the car, groaning as joints sounded an unnerving percussion of pops. He swung his arms round a few times. Valdaire found herself entranced by the unnatural shapes his artificial muscles made.
"This is Kolosev," said Otto.
Lehmann grinned, went round to the boot and pulled out three components that he snapped together into a long rifle.
"I'll check out the offices," said Lehmann. "Better to be safe. I'll take up position on the roof, cover you all."
"Stimmt," said Otto. Lehmann jogged off.
The light of day was growing stronger, heat coming with it, taking the chill off the autumn. Otto led them to a building whose sides were made of ragged cement sheeting, cracked single-glazed windows high up in its sides. He slid the door aside and stepped into a dark space shot through with mote-laden sunbeams. Efforts had been made to insulate the insides of the building with foamcrete, but it had been inexpertly applied and was full of gaps. Rusting girders dragged from other buildings propped up the roof. An array of computer hardware was stacked carelessly in a horseshoe round a mouldy desk, a tarpaulin strung above it. Farm machinery lined the walls, unidentifiable with age and splattered with foamcrete. The place smelled of old food and strong cannabis.
"Kolosev. Lazy. He should have set up in the office. His cables probably aren't long enough to reach his satellite dish, and he could not take the time to move his fat arse and buy more." Otto looked around. "He's still in here."
Chures drew his gun. "What about the offices?"
"Not bedtime yet," said Otto. "Little hackers are allergic to the sun. He's probably just finishing up for the night."
"This is normal, to hang around when you're coming to visit?" said Valdaire.
"He doesn't have anywhere to go," said Otto, "and a rat's maze like this, he'll see it is a good place to hide. It's either that, or booby-traps and a remote camera to catch us all being blown up. Gloaters, lurkers, runners – your three kinds of reluctant informant, so Richards says. Kolosev is a little of each."
"Great," said Valdaire.
"Kolosev won't blow us up. I know him, this is all he owns, all he's ever likely to own, because no matter how well he does he always loses it all because he can't bear to be parted from his mama. No," said Otto, "he's still in here." A coffee mug sat on Kolosev's desk, cooling in Otto's IR capable eyesight from yellow to green. He walked over to it, touched the back of his hand to it. "Still warm, so is the chair." He pulled out his gun. "Amateur."
"Kolosev!" called out Chures. "This is the VIA, come out now!"
"Genau, if he's not already shitting himself, he is now," said Otto. "Go easy on the threats, Chures, there's nothing these little hackers fear more than a visit from the VIA, and your agency's busted him a lot of times. He didn't much like his last stretch in the freezer. You will make him run."
"I was about to say we are only here to talk, Klein."
"It will not make any difference." Otto indicated upwards with his eyes.
"What?" mouthed Valdaire.
Otto pointed to Chloe. I can hear him. Otto sent the message via his MT to Chloe, his thoughts writing themselves across her screen. Breathing. Otto pointed his chin to a roof crux, flaking steel butted by a makeshift half-floor. A creak, audible enough for the others to hear. "Come down, Kolosev! Uncle Otto has come to say hello!"
Kolosev wasn't hanging around. There was a series o
f rapid scuffs followed by a crash as he flung himself out of one of the barn's filthy windows. Otto ran to the door to see Kolosev bounding through the wheat at close on fifty klicks an hour, high atop a pair of 'roo springers. "And there we are," said Otto, and tore off after the hacker.
Chures put up his gun. "Klein can handle that, let's crack the pendejo's system and see what he's got."
"I could do with some help." Valdaire grimaced, sweeping aside the sticky detritus of food, joints' butts and crusty tissues cluttering Kolosev's desk. She placed Chloe down on the cleanest part.
"You'll get it, in a moment," said Chures. "Klein was right about one thing. I need to sweep this place for booby traps."