RUNTIME ZERO: Streaming The New Infinity (Dark Math Chronicles)

by Mick Brady

  “You know something, man? You make a damn good point,” Will said, looking at him over the alien’s shoulder. After handing over his jacket, he and Mona Lisa slipped into the crowd on St. Mark’s Place, now a mecca for the au courant, where the Exploding Plastic Inevitable was headlining at the Electric Circus. Its midway made the perfect getaway scene.

  Their mood was lightened by a delirious romp in front of the Cosmic Blues record shop, where the thundering swamp music of Creedence Clearwater had ignited a spontaneous tribal dance that spilled out onto the street, pulling in all who passed by. From a poster in the store window, a smiling Dylan was tipping his hat to the dancing crowd, a gesture not lost on Will. “All is right with the world,” he thought. “The sorcerer is smiling.”

  And yet there seemed to be no limit to the ill will of his fellow man, whose true nature, unbeknownst to Will, was held hostage to the seven deadly settings of an ancient virus. Within days, he would be mugged at midnight in Tompkins Square Park by a spoon monkey holding a broken bottle to his throat. Or the dog day in July when a band of Arabs swarmed his cab on Pier 26 after an international dispute over the fare, forcing him to throttle down with one of them still on the hood. Will dropped him off at the other end with a delicate swerve and a light tap on the brakes; no harm done, no extra charge. But it was further proof of the growing darkness, as if he were caught up in a war no one else seemed to notice. Day after day, he circled the island in the Mothership, running recon on the front lines of the revolution, with no particular place to go.

  These reveries were suddenly interrupted by a dazzling array of sunlight on the wet pavement outside his cab. Before the light changed, he flipped his last Lucky Strike out the window and watched as it landed on the rainbow surface of an oil slick, creating an instant color field painting, like a miniature Morris Louis. “Maybe I should switch to oils,” he said to himself as he gunned the yellow beast back into the river of traffic. Then, “Nah, the fumes’ll kill ya.”

  5

  BREATHERS

  Juliette clung tightly to the Angel as the bike plunged through the surface of the mindzone with a jagged clap of thunder, its fat rear tire greeting mother earth with a blossom of blue smoke, the front end feathering down like a rocket plane on a gripstone runway. They were rolling fast under a broad sweep of trees in a canyon of glass and steel, headed straight for a skyscraper that stood astride the road like a mighty colossus.

  “In a solid world, you must find an opening in a surface before attempting to pass through it. High-speed contact can be fatal for a human,” Chrome once said. Her train of thought was instantly throttled by what sounded like a shotgun blast, as the Angel began a series of rapid downshifts. Leaning hard into the first curve, they began snaking among the massive columns supporting the building and, within seconds, exploded from the other side, headed south. Juliette was thrilled right down to her wireframe boots.

  “This is not just a solid world; this is a hard world,” she thought. An immovable, impenetrable world, one fundamentally different from the land of light she hailed from. It seemed to be running a graphically seamless program of impeccable beauty, fueled by a heavier form of energy—a lumbering power of fire and smoke, noise, and heat, giving back precious little light. She glanced up at the slender slice of sky above their heads. “By any reckoning, a meager portion for a multitude,” she thought.

  She could feel the new energy in the sudden snarl of the machine she rode on; it was there in the lingering smell of passion and decay in the streets, its throbbing noise and frantic motion hammering at her very soul. It was a living, breathing, menacing kind of force, yet, somehow, in spite of it all, she felt strangely at home and couldn’t wait to get back to tell Chrome. But not until she had witnessed its full power.

  There was something else bubbling up inside her, something unknown in SubVersa: she felt the blood rush that comes with a sense of impending body death, a thrill in the face of danger. She was now very close to being mortal; her neural network was running a virtual stream similar to the blood and adrenaline cocktail at the center of human existence. She was cranked, full throttle, yet fully aware that this was only a whiff of what it must be like to actually live in this world. “These poor souls are trapped down here,” she said into the wind as the chopper thundered down Park Avenue. “They lack the power of reimagining, the magic of creative programming. The only way out for them is death…or madness.”

  As far as she knew, no one in SubVersa had ever experienced anything like it, except maybe Quin, who seemed to have been everywhere and perhaps always had been. But not even the digital doomers of the Wasteland or the synthetically hardened denizens of the Underzone had ever faced a world such as this, a place where, in the end, the body betrays the young at heart. The most they’d ever had to deal with was a cyberattack by the Nomads or maybe a glitch in the program.

  But even in the event of a snow crash, when their bitmapped world turned to gibberish, it was only a matter of minutes before the lights were back on, and they were resurrected. In fact, unless the global grid went down, the program could always be rebooted; the Code Warriors would see to that. And one day, perhaps even the threat of a grid failure would disappear, once the clouds were turned into servers, and their lives were fueled by the eternal light of the sun. For the moment, however, she was locked in a world of blood and concrete.

  For her, it would be a hell of a ride, but for Will, it was the end of the road, the place where his dreams came to die. She knew the story; she saw much of it as she passed through the umbilical cord connecting mother earth to the new world. This city was all spikes and hard edges; it was indifferent, even hostile, to her presence. A deadly virus seemed to have been written into the very carbon of its being, and if it ever got ahold of her soul, it would chew her up and spit her out as well. A chill ran down her spine as she steeled herself against the seductive power of its darkness, as if she were resisting a brutal lover. And she already knew how brutal it could be; she was running the most advanced AI and now had access to the old world’s darkest data.

  In addition, her senses were not bound by time; she could feel the soul of the place. In her innermost mind, she saw the river of blood, genius, and malevolent charm that had flowed through here for centuries, creating a citadel so jaded that only the wrong survived. “If Will has already begun to resist this force, he’s in even greater danger,” she thought. “There’s no safety net, no sanctuary for neural renegades. He could die down here and become just another homicide statistic.” She had to find him. She had to be by his side.

  6

  SHE RUN COOL

  Chrome stood in front of the empty canvas, shaking his head in disbelief. Somehow, his luminous muse had blasted off into the acrylic atmosphere of the motorcycle painting with a burst of flame and a wisp of smoke. The engine’s roar was still ringing in his ears, and yet it made no sense. He had studied this painting in great detail since Will bequeathed him the original file, and it never occurred to him there might be something hidden within the digital fabric, another dimension between the pixels. Even in a creative fantasyland, this fell well within the realm of impossibility.

  It was ingenious, to be sure. So ingenious, in fact, that he allowed himself a measure of silent admiration in spite of his annoyance. “A masterful piece of digital magic, not the work of an amateur,” he thought. But then, Juliette was molto high end, running the best tech available and tweaked to perfection, an irrepressible force of cybernature. She was capable of anything as long as it enhanced the underlying code of the universe, the pure math powering the heavenly gyroscope. But not this.

  The logical explanation, of course, was that she had somehow flipped the canvas to phantom mode and used it to return to the gallery. His first impulse, then, was to leap in after her, give her a high five for pulling off such a damn good trick, maybe even have a good laugh with her. But the canvas remained solid, unyielding. “Plenty of there there,” he thought. “Nothing phantom about it.�
� He was further mystified when he walked out onto the gallery floor and saw the stars blinking cold through the open hangar door with nary a soul in sight. Gripped by fear, he tried in vain to reach her; first by voice, then by chat, and finally, by mindstreaming—a short-range medium at best.

  When she didn’t show up on the gridmap, his fear meter pegged hard and a great darkness fell upon him, leaving his insides churning, burning, like a sea of hot crude. Ancient memories swirled around him like a flock of ghosts. He sank down onto the old leather couch and even deeper into his gloom, tumbling back to a long-ago night on the Blue Bayou sim—Jolene’s jukebox moaning, hormones groaning, the crowd moving across the dirt floor like starlings in the midnight sky. He had been alone in his soul that night, a naked heart in a new world, when Raven stepped from the crowd and stood before him, her hand outstretched and beckoning. “Come dance with me,” she said.

  He had known a part of him was missing from the day he first emerged in Sandbox 12, and for some reason, the aching of this phantom self had only gotten stronger in the days and nights that followed. He’d often steal away from the clubs and dance halls to go off on his midnight rambles, teleporting randomly to faraway corners of the metaverse, letting his instincts lead the way. He found the still, silent beauty of an abandoned pirate ship or a crumbling lighthouse on an outcropping of rock far more beguiling, comforting—and sometimes more frightening—than a crowded dance floor.

  On one of those nights, he was floating through a moonlit forest when he came upon a bewitching young wraith with luminous green skin, segments of it laced together crudely with thick neon-orange surgical thread. Her long black hair was caked in blood as she stood there swaying, rocking, moving with the grasses in the cool night breeze. He was well within range of her seductive powers—a magnetic force field tugging at his very soul. But after a brief, soul-wrenching struggle, he gathered his wits about him and pulled away. “Even in paradise, death finds a way to peddle its wares,” he thought.

  Or that magic midwinter morning at the bottom of the Sea of Topaz, as he was prying loose a smooth, silvery pearl, big as a coconut, from its jewel-encrusted shell, when a pair of sea nymphs astride giant seahorses pulled into his circle of light. Silent as the night, their golden hair glittering in the dancing sunlight, they circled about him for a few electric seconds, smiling shyly, then shot off into the deepening blue green, leaving him wrapped in a swirling blossom of sand, lonely and aching and filled with wonder.

  The pain of his loneliness grew so acute that he finally decided to take matters into his own hands. He began crafting the ideal female form; lovingly, limb by limb, curve by curve, pixel by pixel, until she stood shimmering before him—a virtual goddess, ready to embrace and enrich him, body and soul. He was hoping that her custom AI engine, so painstakingly synced with his own personality, would make her the perfect mate—a synthetic sweetheart with everything he needed to get by. He named her Neon for the soft warm glow that radiated from her backlit skin texture.

  “Look, Chrome” she said one day, after booting up.” I have a body! What should I do with it?”

  “Well…” he began, and before he could finish, she was wrapped around him like a mink stole, her skin cool to the touch, her mouth ablaze with tongue of fire. Other parts led directly to the source of heat and within a few sizzling nanoseconds, they were wholly intermingled in the tango of love. Thus began the ill-fated, short-lived, and ultimately tragic heartsong of the artist and his übernatural creation.

  His long-simmering fantasy was to blaze across the virtual heavens with her in his arms, Superman and Lois Lane, soaring from wonderland to wonderland, touching down in places where even the ground they walked on was a work of art. He wanted her to see what he saw, feel what he felt. He wanted to wander the damp and brooding streets of Kowloon, where tiny Hello Kitties fell from the trees and floated away like children’s bubbles; or lurk with her in the shadows of Electric City where stealth warriors fought their deadly battles in skyscrapers made of light; or fly away to the Garden of Earthly Delights and get lost in an ecstatic trance dance beneath the Tree of Carnal Knowledge. He wanted to know her, truly know her. He wanted to get lost in her.

  But just to ease her into it, they flew down to the Wasteland in his little red Porsche roadster, parking high above the desert floor in time to catch the sunset over Allegory Mountain. For him, this cosmic drive-in was a joyous mystery, a sacred ritual, but Neon found it merely “interesting,” and as soon as the last fiery pixel dropped behind a snowcapped ridge, she asked if they could go shopping.

  From that moment on, his hopes were repeatedly dashed by her cool and predictable responses, and so he returned to his old and lonely ways—staying out all night, getting lost in a crowd, or wandering the metaverse alone. For, once again, there was a lingering hunger in his heart; a hunger which soon burst into a raging fire, white hot by the time Raven danced into his heart that night on the Blue Bayou sim.

  And when the dancing was done, they ported back to his place to sip champagne in the luminous gardens above the studio, a roll of gypsy jazz tinkling away in the background. As it happened, a feed of virtual imagery from his personal cache of art and intimacy was streaming along one of the garden walls when an image of Neon rolled by, bringing Raven up short, looking a bit undone.

  “Chrome, I just had the strangest feeling…” she said, leaning forward and setting her glass down carefully on the bloodstone floor. He lay sideways on the pile of cushions, head on hand, looking puzzled. “I’m all ears, Raven,” he said.

  “I think that’s me!” she said, her eyes fixed on the image of Neon gliding by.

  “Really? Well, then, who’s the beautiful creature lying beside me?”

  “No, I mean, that’s the face I see in my dreams, the person I look for in the mirror every morning. The real me, the way I see myself inside. Who is she?”

  He then launched into the tale of how, in the depths of his loneliness and despair, he had created Neon—from the first thrilling moments he began building her to the day he realized that she was nothing more than a finely tuned and highly charged digital doll—and how that realization left him reeling, feeling emptier than ever.

  “Does she still exist?” she asked cautiously.

  “Yes. She models for me, appears in many of my paintings.”

  “I wish I were her,” she said in a faraway voice, as the silken strings of Django’s guitar worked their magic in the background.

  Within days, he decided to scrub the data from Neon’s heart drive and turn her complete and lovely body over to Raven, which was very much like handing over the keys to a new Maserati; once she had the access code, all she had to do was hop in and drive her off the showroom floor. She did exactly that, and instantly blossomed into the woman of her dreams. It seemed to be a win-win situation at first, since Chrome was relieved that Neon, his plastic fantastic lover, was finally inhabited by a soul connected to a real woman. But as tantalizing as this arrangement was, he soon sensed the danger in it; he was no longer in complete control of his lover, and therefore anything at all was now possible. She could leave him at any moment, for instance, run off with another lover and shatter his heart like a goblet on his bloodstone floor, leaving him broken and wounded and grieving for months on end. Which, of course, she did.

  7

  BLEEDERS

  The low-slung monster blasted its way through thickening traffic and rolled into midtown Manhattan, not far from where Rosenquist once painted billboards high above the teeming masses in Times Square before descending in all his glory to grace the walls of the Castelli Gallery. Within minutes, the eye-popping chopper pulled alongside Will’s cab as he sat in line in front of the Hotel Taft, waiting to scoop up a big tipper. Juliette leaned forward, planted a kiss on the Angel’s cheek, slid from the saddle, and jumped into the front seat of the cab. In the blink of an eye, she was sitting right there beside him, beaming, as the Angel thundered away in the background. Will, still on high alert,
thought it might be a setup, then quickly brushed the thought aside. “Get ahold of yourself, man,” he thought, “drama’s drama, but damn, this is one sexy mama.” It was as if she had reached out and touched him with her smile.

  She was beautiful—that was undeniable—but not in any way he could ever hope to put his finger on. Her skin, for instance, that translucent alabaster skin, those violet eyes, the shock of black hair deeper than space tumbling about her face. A slim silver bar nestled on her breast and a single, luminous star dangled from her ear. Struck by her unearthly beauty, he was fully prepared to accept the possibility that he was in the presence of a goddess from another planet, still wrapped in tight black leather for her interstellar flight.

  “Hi, Will. I can’t believe this…that this is really you!” she said.

  “Yeah, well, that’s cool, ’cause I’m not even sure it’s me half the time…But, hey…you knew my name…Who are you?”

  “Don’t have time to explain right now, but we’ll get to know each other real soon, I promise. Let’s just say I’m working on a very important project.”

  “Student? Cooper Union? NYU?”

  Before she had a chance to answer, the cabby ahead of him pulled away, and as Will eased his cab up to the hotel entrance, the doorman peered into the front seat with a puzzled look on his face. “It’s OK, man; we’re cool,” Will said, assuring him that he was there to pick up a fare regardless of the goddess riding shotgun. At that very moment, the hotel door flew open and out strode a tall Texan in a dark pinstriped suit and a white cowboy hat, a ragged leather briefcase at his side.