Reality 36: A Richards & Klein Novel

by Guy Haley

  When he was twenty metres from the factory, Richards launched a dozen limpet mines from Big Daddy's forearms. They flew forward and attached themselves in a neat arc to the wall. High voltage played across them, attempting to disable the bombs' electronics, but there were none, the mines working off clockwork timers of Richards' design. Richards marched on in Big Daddy's body, reaching the wall as the shaped charges imploded, carving a neat hole in the wall just big enough to accommodate the machine. Richards deployed the plasma thrower to melt the remaining foamcrete in the gap, then levelled the launcher again. This time, he loaded it with canisters containing ten thousand short-range ants apiece, and fired them one after the other into the swirling mess of the interior beyond the crude entryway. The canisters blew open in mid air, showering the place with the tiny robots. The pattered into the walls and floors, sprang to their feet and surged away, searching for energy sources. About half of them were picked off by drones, but the rest scuttled into air vents and conduits. With the ants deployed, Richards' job was nearly done.

  Richards stepped forward through a cloud of dust into a world of chaos.

  He was in a large, open loading bay filling the end quarter of the fortress. Eight large pits, big enough for heavy trucks or dirigible gondolas, were set into the foamcrete. Klaxons bellowed and debris rained down from the high ceiling, bouncing across the floor or clattering off Big Daddy's carapace. Anti-intruder smoke casters, fires and dust kept visibility down to a few metres. Infrared wasn't much better, queered by swirling columns of hot air billowing up from the pits in the floor. Fire, too much fire. He hadn't hit it that hard. The building was eating itself. He had minutes at best, but he walked cautiously, fearful of toppling Otto's expensive toy into a loading pit. He brought the plans of the building into mind; he needed to get into the main body of the complex where his ants were congregating. The building worked off a diffuse multi-brain network, blended personality, no main server, multiple redundant systems. He needed to plug into one of those quickly before the whole lot suicided.

  There were the sounds of explosions in the distance. These stopped. His ants were too few to form an effective chain and convey much information back to him through the EM noise, but if the cessation of demo charges going off was anything to go by they'd fulfilled their most important role.

  Or he was walking into a big trap.

  The wall at the end of the hangar was crossed with suspended walkways going in and out of doors cut into the foamcrete. A number of humanoid combat sheaths appeared on these and opened fire with flechette rifles and heavy rail guns. As Big Daddy had eight-centimetre-thick diamondweave armour plate, they might as well have been hurling rotten fruit. Servomotors whined as Richards tilted the big mech's torso upward and gunned them down. Some fell from the walkways and landed in front of him where they struggled to get up. Richards stomped them vindictively to pieces. It did little to improve his mood.

  He approached a large blast door set into the wall at the end of the bay. He raised his fist again, ready to melt the doors to slag, but they slid open before he could fire, to reveal a largecalibre spider cannon squatting in the way.

  "Uh-oh," said Richards. The spider cannon fired a hi-ex shell before he could annihilate it, knocking Big Daddy onto its armoured behind. The mech skidded several metres backwards on its arse and its elbows, drawing a shower of sparks from the floor. Richards sat up. The spider cannon switched to full auto and sprayed him liberally at short range. Warning indicators began to flicker in the mech, but Richards weathered it until the other machine's clip was empty.

  "Nice try," he said, and blew the spider cannon into fragments. He got back up again and walked through the door. Another spider cannon was coming round the corner. He destroyed that before it got a shot off, and lumbered onwards, leaving shattered machine parts in his wake.

  A broad corridor ran the length of the building, to his left the exterior wall, to the right an interior block the height of the building divided into offices and accommodation. On the other side of this block were a series of large workshops and plant rooms, at least according to the plans. There wasn't enough room for Richards to proceed in Big Daddy, and not enough time to blast his way into every room, which wouldn't have been so clever, seeing as he was looking for information, not piles of rubble. He cut Big Daddy's mind loose, took control of his android sheath and clambered out of the front.

  "Stay!" he shouted at the mech, pointing a commanding composite finger.

  "Big Daddy stay!" it agreed enthusiastically. "Big Daddy engage hostiles?"

  "Yeah, yeah, knock yourself out," Richards said. This sheath had no coat or hat. He felt naked. "I'm taking the drones though." Two crow-sized flight drones popped off Big Daddy's back and fell into covering positions. "Right then, let's see what this fucker's been up to," said Richards, and walked off into the warren of rooms. His ants were fighting a hard battle with the building's minds, which were still in the process of trying to kill themselves. He could feel it through the ants; it was a strange one, not like anything he'd encountered before, like Four or Six, but without the self-volition. Neither true AI or near-I. He feared he knew what that meant.

  He walked through a door. Flashing lights and debris made a nonsense of sight. Half the rooms were collapsed in on themselves, demolition charges exploded before the ants could short out the system entirely. He scrambled over rubble, peering into rooms as he went: office furniture coated in plaster and carbon fibres, here bedrooms, there a kitchen whose broken taps pumped a dust-skinned puddle on to the floor. He pushed on. An android leapt out from a wrecked room, gun at the ready. His drones blasted it to pieces with idle efficiency.

  He found the first fibre cluster thanks to his ants, who stood to attention on the back three of their five legs as he walked in. "Cheers, lads," he said, and had them go off to sniff out more vital systems to cripple. The cluster spilled out of a data conduit in the wall like a tangle of filthy spaghetti. He couldn't link wirelessly with the building mind, the shields it had on the broadcast network were too good and the ants had not yet brought it down, so he had to hunt for a direct link for a good minute through optic cables all rendered the same by a coating of dust. He eventually found what he was looking for, a coupling for a fibre that connected all the components of the building physically together. He popped open a panel in his chest and connected himself into the network, then it didn't matter what fancy crap Karlsson had on the network because he was in and ready and no building mind was going to stand up to Richards, AI.

  Richards expected an assault that never came. It was over.

  Richards began to interrogate the building's minds. He got that same sense of detachment he had had through the ants, more immediate to him now he was in. The machines within the network dumped their information into Richards, offering up their treasures without complaint, and he suspiciously sifted it for logic bombs and viruses. Once he'd done that, there wasn't much left.

  There was no personality left to the building, but as he interrogated the composite brain, gradually, horrifyingly, Richards realised that it had had one once.

  It had been lobotomised.

  Richards became furious. He put the mind out of its misery as quickly as he could, and took control of the building. He shut off all the remaining drones and what was left of the selfdestruct mechanisms, activated the halon fire-suppression systems and began running through the crippled AI's memory. Much of it had been wiped. Richards anger grew as he realised that there had once been twenty sentient linked AIs in the building. All had been similarly stripped. Karlsson has gone mad, he thought.

  And then he located Karlsson. He unclipped the fibre optic from his chest and ran down the corridor, his access panel left hanging open.

  Karlsson lay slumped in a pool of his own blood, covered with plaster, his head caved in by a falling piece of masonry, laying bare a mess of tangled monofilament wire, nano wires and grey matter studded with hair and bone. Richards felt his pulse. Nothing. He was
emaciated, naked. His own waste lay thick and stinking about the chair he'd been sat in.

  Meat puppet, has to be. Someone had wiped the AIs here, and infiltrated Karlsson's mind via his mentaug, imprisoning him in his own body.

  "Who would do that?" he whispered. He wished he had his coat, to cover the dead man's face. Pieces of grit sat on the sclera of Karlsson's eyes. Somehow, that bothered Richards the most. He closed them gently with his machine fingers.

  He stood up and looked at the man for a moment. "Time to find out what the fuck exactly has been going on here," he said.

  The workshops were extensive. In one empty of all equipment he found the bodies of twenty men and women, members of Karlsson's clade of anti-singularity paranoiacs. They were long dead, their corpses bloated and slimy. Some of them Richards recognised from their DNA profiles, a mix of fugitive brilliance and talented amateurs, some real genius here. He estimated that they'd been dead about two weeks. Each had a shot to the head – executed. Richards shook his head. Such a waste, every shattered skull a universe gone.

  The next room was a burnt-out mess, old damage, not from today. He made enough of it to separate gene-looms from surgical tanks, carbon-weavers from base units. Data he scraped from the charred components of the machines told him that this was where both the fake Qifangs and the fake heiress had originated. Data wrestled from the wreck told him so: the heiress duplicated several days after Qifang, their bodies speedgrown in pieces on the looms, and welded together.

  He thought of the drones, of the meat-puppeted Karlsson, of the stripped AI minds.

  AI. These were AI crimes.

  And then he found it.

  Behind a smashed protein scaffold tank of a gene-loom sat the heat-slagged remains of a base unit. Not that of an AI, but one of those used to accrue and store pimsim data for living meat persons before the moment of death, and from which the simulated personality of the recently deceased could be released into the heaven levels or operate out in the Grid and the Real.

  It was amongst the most damaged pieces of machinery in the room. "Someone's gone to extra trouble with this," said Richards. He pulled it apart, hunting for chips. Most were scragged beyond redemption, but there were just enough left to reassemble a moment in time: a conversation with a fat man at a gala dinner. Richards data-matched the face: Harold Kamer, a senator from one of the hayseed Midwest states that had refused the rewilding. In his eyes, Richards could make out the reflection of his interlocutor, the man whose memcord this was.

  The distorted reflection was the face of Professor Zhang Qifang.

  But Qifang had no implants, no mentaug. He had no registered pimsim. He didn't believe in either.

  "Curiouser and curiouser," said Richards. He hunted about; he knew what he was looking for, but it was hard to tell the junked machines apart. Finally, he found it, a direct neural imager. That's how they'd copied Qifang's mind.

  He had his truck drive round and popped all his probes out of it and Big Daddy for a quick data sweep. It wouldn't be long before the authorities showed up. Even Richards couldn't kick off a small-scale military action and saunter off. He'd be able to clear it with the Sams, even if he had to get Hughie involved, but whatever happened, his equipment was going to be impounded, it would take some time to get it out, and the local cops would want a long, tedious chat about letting off heavy artillery within the city limits. He could do without that.

  "Big Daddy!"

  "Yes," came the machine's stentorian reply.

  "There are going to be some men here soon. Do not shoot them, got that?"

  "Yes. Do not shoot." Richards thought it sounded disappointed. It wasn't possible, Big Daddy was the one machine whose personality he wouldn't dare upgrade.

  "Walk out the back, get into the truck and deactivate yourself, got that too?"

  "Yes. Big Daddy go sleep in truck."

  "That's right. Stay put until I come and get you." And get you cleaned up, thought Richards. For all of his sordid enjoyment of war, Otto hated it when his equipment got dirty. He ordered his probes to retreat to the truck, and the truck, once it had the appropriate clearance from the authorities, to return to the New York garage, clearance he petitioned for now.

  That done, he left the laboratory to walk outside and explain himself to the cops. Then he'd get back to Hughie. Something much bigger than they previously suspected was underway. Well, much bigger than he'd previously expected. Hughie might well have been exploiting his good nature again and…

  His sheath collapsed, his consciousness gone.

  He found himself as he truly was, huge and powerful on the Grid, emergency overrides dissolving his fantasy self to show him the monster beneath.

  "Eh? What the fuck now?"

  Failsafes on his base unit had cranked his operating speed up to inhuman levels. His racing mind filled with alarms. Datafeeds reported the beginnings of a substantial explosion close by in the Real. He was thinking far faster than a human mind ever could; sensations from the Real filtered in through the treacly slowness of temporal dislocation. Subroutines compensated, allowing the full spectral range he ordinarily enjoyed, adding meaning to the Real's distorted sounds, slowed to slothful, guttural roars. He felt the arco vibrate as a shockwave strolled through its structure, and his attentions switched to a human emulant on the arcade outside – nothing special about it, the kind worn by geriatrics or tourists remotely holidaying, only this one was engaged in the final stages of fiery disintegration as a low-yield atomic ignited within.

  He wound back the outside camera footage, to see more clearly.

  He guessed he'd see the face of Professor Zhang Qifang looking back at him.

  He watched as balls of flame unpacked themselves from the elderly professor, sprouting into expanding bubbles of destruction, announcing the birth of a short-lived star, right on his doorstep. Pretty, he thought, but inconvenient.

  The shockwave ran ahead of the explosion, ripping the floor into splinters, pushing out and down, smashing metal and carbons, a sphere of violence that spared nothing. The office windows blew out, the pieces simultaneously melting; the door was slammed off its hinges, into the waiting room and through the wall on the other side, where it disintegrated into burning embers, then evaporated. The electromagnetic pulse that preceded the blast wrought havoc on the arco's systems, shutting much of the city building down, but Richards' heavily fortified base unit held, and he continued to watch with morbid fascination. He was helpless. Pedestrians outside on the gallery half a kilometre away were flung into the wall or hurled to their deaths in the park below; others caught fire and twisted like dervishes; those nearer exploded into their constituent pieces as if a helpful holofeed were describing the anatomy of man, their skin flayed away, then their flesh, then their bones. Those nearer still simply turned to steam.

  It rarely paid an AI that interfaced with the human world to run so quickly. In such a state they could think so fast a day would pass as a month, and although they would process much in that time, they could do nothing useful in the world of the Real; the material universe became as unyielding as rock.

  "Balls," said Richards, and sent Otto another message. He sent one to Chloe too, cramming as much information into them as he possibly could. "You're on your own now, big fella."

  Time, no matter how slowly it ran, could never be stopped. Richards initiated thousands of simulations, trying to figure a way out. There were none. He had no time to upload himself in his entirety elsewhere, and where could he go anyway? He could send out a sensing presence back to his sheath in Chicago or to any one of the fifty-plus he had elsewhere, but his very core was about to be consumed by fire, leaving any remote projection a broken facade, dribbling nonsense. What would be the point? He sank into unfamiliar lassitude.

  Richards watched the world he had built blasted to pieces. A wash of nuclear heat scoured the offices of Richards & Klein clean. The air ignited, and the resultant vacuum sucked the exterior windows in. Flames roared out of the arco
as a great part of the building burst outwards, four floors up and four floors down from the detonation's epicentre. He was only glad that Genie's base unit was at her parent's house.

  The young star devoured the last of Richards' external sensors, and he lost all connection with the Real, then the Grid.

  Alone in the dark for what seemed an aeon, Richards felt his processes flicker and die one by one. I'm dead, he thought. After all his years of fretting about extinction he felt disappointingly ambivalent, now it finally came down to it.

  The flow of Richards' subjective time ran on slow as geology and the fires burned and spun like ravenous whirligigs trapped in glass, until his life was snatched away with a terrible abruptness.