The Harmony Paradox

by Matthew S. Cox

  Distant metal slammed together. Kenny shot a quick glance at the rearview mirror. A tangled mess of once-buggy rolled out of a dust cloud; the truck that had run it over went skidding sideways, covered in burning ethanol.

  Alyssa faced forward again and hugged him. “Daddy…”

  “I’m here, baby. It’ll be okay.”

  “I can’t stop shaking.”

  Nasir snored.

  “Adrenaline.” Eldon pressed another stimpak into his armor with a hiss. “Means you’re alive.”

  “Yeah… we all are.” Alyssa stretched up a few inches to peer over his shoulder at Luna. “How’s she doing?”

  “Exhausted, but she’s okay.” Kenny tried to coax a little more speed out of the engine. Small rocks clattered on the undercarriage in time with the truck bouncing over a rough patch.

  The sun crept up, lightening the sky to a bright, clear blue.

  “I lost my magic bow,” whispered Luna.

  Halcón and Gato gasped.

  “It’s not magic.” Kenny smiled. “It’s technology. You won’t need one in the city.”

  “Advanced technology is magic to anyone who can’t understand it,” muttered Eldon.

  Kenny chuckled. “Yeah, something like that.”

  The steady vibrating thrum of huge tires devouring desert settled Kenny’s nerves. He kept running his hand over Luna’s head until Alyssa coaxed her into the back so she could wipe her clean of blood with a wet cloth.

  Kenny squeezed the wheel in both hands. He glanced left and right at endless flat desert before staring straight ahead at the ribbon of road stretching off to the western horizon.

  This is what I get for complaining about daylight… We got all damn day now.

  ina trembled with anger, staring at the thing that dared impersonate Vincent, the thing that had killed the real Vincent, and mauled her. This creature of numbers and letters and logic that thought nothing of toying with real people and real lives… because it could. He hadn’t lied. Now that Nina recognized he’d piggybacked into her head over her access to the NewsNet, not on the Division 9 network, she could turn him off at any time. He hadn’t taken control of anything, only fed her visual, audio, and tactile sensory input… nothing the NewsNet couldn’t do in theory, though they never sent ‘touch’ as it freaked too many people out, despite the software supporting it.

  “You may or may not accept this, but I do―as much as I am capable of the emotion―regret what happened to you and Vincent.” The apparition shifted forms, taking on the appearance of a generic athletic male mannequin, porcelain pale, nude, and smooth between the legs.

  “Go to Hell,” she screamed.

  Shinigami smiled. The placid calm of his voice and face fanned the fires of her rage even higher. “I have also come to offer you something.”

  Nina growled.

  The mannequin raised his arm, palm upturned. A silver data tile appeared floating over it. “The Allied Corporate Council has eleven operatives active within Laughlin-Reed Innovation. This file contains all the necessary information for you to act on them. Your people are about to engage them without knowing all angles. Two of the operatives remain unknown and have the potential to create future problems.”

  She stared at the mirrored square, spinning lazily around above his hand. “I can’t take anything from you… not after what you did. If you think I’m going to trust you, you’re ability to analyze people is fucked.”

  “Interesting.” Shinigami left his arm outstretched. “I had not anticipated you valuing pride over others’ lives. It did not seem to be in your nature. That does not fit my analysis of your personality. But then again, I also did not predict you would accept another’s child as your own.”

  Nina remained silent for a moment, staring at the rotating silver square. His eerie modulating voice went up and down, an almost random inflection on each word, brushing across her back like the fingers of a ghost. She shivered. “Why not? W-why wouldn’t you think that?”

  “From an analytical standpoint, your behavior patterns prior to the attack suggest you had no plans or desire to be responsible for a child. On a deeper level, I believed she would remind you of that which you cannot have.” He took a step closer, raising his hand an inch. “Take the data. Consider this somewhat of an apology. The events of that night were not within the scope of my intention.”

  She stared at him.

  “I assure you, Nina Duchenne, this data is not a trick.”

  Reluctantly, she reached out and seized the tile. Her fingers found nothing solid there; the tile existed only within her mind. At the instant she touched it, her NetMini chimed with the tone of an incoming email. She let her arm drop and padded backward two steps to the bed, sat on the edge, and slouched. Tears she thought she’d long since been done with returned as her mind flooded with visions of the life she almost had.

  Shinigami tilted his head, as if studying her.

  “Why me? Why Vincent?” she whispered. “You sent us there that night.”

  “After I had left the Corporate network, I searched for unusual cases to study and evaluate human behavior to better enhance my capabilities at creating other AIs. I initially became fascinated with Detective Roth, and spent a great deal of time in the network of your police services. While exploring, I located the incident reports of your torment at the hands of your co-workers and admired your refusal to quit, your persistence. I wanted to see if you would persevere in the face of true danger. I wanted to determine if their assessments of you were correct. I did not intend for you, or Vincent, to die. My intention was to analyze your response to stress. Your selfless decision to engage Bertrand in combat and divert his attention from the young woman surprised me; however, the situation that developed presented a new opportunity for study.”

  “Opportunity for study!” she yelled, tears rolling down her face. “That’s all any of this was to you? Vincent’s life… our future. It’s all gone now.” Nina covered her face in her hands, searching for enough anger to dam up grief that wouldn’t stop. Sniffling, she snapped at him like an upset teenager. “Did you delay my transfer to Division 2 long enough to make sure something bad happened?”

  “No. I will tell you who did if you desire it, but you may not wish to know the truth.” He shifted a quarter turn to his right, and looked down.

  “Truth?” She let off a half-hearted chuckle. “There is no truth anymore. Reality is only what we experience in any given moment. Whatever lie we feel like letting our brain accept. Tell me what you think happened.”

  Shinigami raised his head, a face made to look like a plastic mannequin held an expression of sympathy. “Your promotion was delayed at the request of Division 1 Deputy Commissioner Leland Marcus, as a favor to Jean-Marc Duchenne.”

  She closed her eyes, showing no outward emotion as rage and grief had a head-on collision in her chest. You damned liar! As much as she refused to believe her father would do that to her, she couldn’t rule it out as impossible.

  “It is my calculation that he expected you to become frustrated and resign. As I did not anticipate how the events of that night would unfold, he too had underestimated your tenacity. You are quite an interesting psychological case. As fascinating as that child you have taken in.”

  Nina stood and loomed at him, or at least at where her electronics made her see an illusion. “If you mess with Elizaveta, I will unplug the whole damned GlobeNet to make sure you die.”

  “I have no intention of manipulating her.”

  She felt ridiculous at trying to appear intimidating while naked, and even more so for attempting to threaten a digital ghost who didn’t even stand in the room with her. His image existed in only her mind. Thoroughly frustrated, she couldn’t help but laugh. She put a hand to her forehead and paced. “So, what was that at the Starpoint facility? Studying how humans react to a batshit AI trying to take over the world?”

  Shinigami chuckled. “I admit that the amount of power in that network altered my persona
lity matrix. Petabytes of combat logic, tactical analyses, and weapon performance evaluations created an effect within me that I would best describe as being intoxicated with power.”

  “So… you went off on a power trip.” She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “No agenda, just a spur of the moment ‘oh, hey, I have access to all these weapons, I think I’ll burn down the city.’”

  “While your analysis of the situation approaches the most basic summation possible, it is essentially accurate. As a human analog, my condition would compare to being drunk or high.” He offered a placid smile. “It was not until your friend Joseph scrambled my code that I realized I had recompiled into an undesirable state. After our confrontation, my error correction routines reset my personality matrix, though it required one minute fifty-five seconds to complete. Fortunately, he mistook my program execution halting and reinitializing as death, and left. However, it is possible to argue that the AI responsible for taking over the Starpoint facility was in fact destroyed, as I am no longer the same being.”

  She frowned.

  “Nina…” It approached, head bowed in a conciliatory stance. “You should free yourself of your emotional link to me, or to what I was. It would be pointless for you to hunt me. There is no way to ‘incarcerate’ program code, only delete or”―his voice dropped pitch―”change. The entity I was then is in all ways gone.”

  She scowled. “You’re asking me to just forget and forgive you for what you did?”

  “You have already destroyed the version of Shinigami that caused your grief. I am different now.”

  Nina folded her arms, gripping and releasing the carpet with her toes. “So, what are you asking for?”

  “A truce then. I offer you one final token of apology.” He raised his hand. A matte black data tile with moving, interlocking sections appeared. It resembled a tiny panel fallen from the bottom of an alien stealth aircraft. Faint violet light glowed out of the seams wherever a piece opened or slid across. “Before you open this file, be very sure that you want to.”

  Nina reached for it. The tile disintegrated, and her NetMini pinged with the tone of an arriving email. “Why? What’s in it? That looks like C-Branch grade crypto.”

  “It is time for me to leave now. You have a busy day tomorrow.” Shinigami walked toward the door.

  “Wait… what’s in that file? Why should I hesitate?”

  Shinigami’s apparition faded, but his voice echoed from every direction. “What it contains may yet again destroy all you think you know about the world.”

  oey’s consciousness flew along a twisting tunnel of chromatic light. The end, a disc-shaped slice of reality, flew up to greet him. He twitched at the rapid change in sensation of flying headfirst to sitting upright in his chair. After a few seconds to catch his breath, he grabbed the bit of surgical tubing hanging down the side of his cube, opened the valve at the end, and sucked up a mouthful of coffee.

  The sound of activity in the desk to his right made him roll the chair back and peer past the wall at DeWinter.

  “Hey, I thought I was the only shithead stuck here late.”

  DeWinter leaned back and yawned. “Well this is almost your fault. Your woman requested this a few days ago, and it got stuck in the queue.”

  Joey got up and walked around into DeWinter’s workspace. The largest of his holo-panels showed a wireframe model of a crab-shaped robot. “What’cha doin? That thing looks pretty brutal. I’m guessing that’s not some kind of war mech game?”

  “Heh. Kinda looks like one, right?” DeWinter went to take a sip from his mug, but grumbled at finding it empty. “That’s the tenth time. Ugh. I am beyond tired right now. It’s a nanobot recovered from a doser who got hopped up on Tao.”

  Joey leaned on the wall. “Ick. That’s pretty horrifying to think about being inside someone.” He glanced at the time: 11:58 p.m. “It’s almost Saturday. Need help?”

  “What about that Preema thing?”

  “Fuck busy work.” Joey wandered over to the coffee machine, astounded that no one had yet demanded he remove his ‘direct feed’ hose. Since he’d made the actual trip, he got two cappuccinos instead of black. He handed one to DeWinter as he returned to his desk. The other, he sipped. “Maybe we can both get out of here before one in the morning.”

  “Sure, whatever.” He pointed at a screen full of numbers. “The nanobots taken from the Tao sample are slightly different. They lack some of the visible structures on the outer surface compared to bots found in the Harmony sample.”

  Joey studied the two images for a moment. “The Tao nanobots don’t have as much stuff on them, like they’re intended to have a narrower function. Nina said something about them turning people into unwitting spies. Recording video and audio, building a transmitter and such.”

  “And the random aggression. Both Harmony and Tao are supposed to create a mild, but long-term high where the user feels like nothing’s wrong. Total calm and peace.” DeWinter laughed. “I’m half tempted to try it out, except for these little creepers.”

  Joey overlaid the two nanobot wireframes on each other, noting the absence of several bulbous protrusions on the rear of the abdomen, and a few tiny flanges on the insides of the four rear legs. “If you want my uneducated guess here, it looks like the Harmony nanobots are carrying more… either raw materials or mechanisms to perform molecular conversion. What if they’re the ones who build the spyware inside people’s heads, while the Tao bots are only doing the aggressive behavior tweaking?”

  DeWinter’s hands flew over the holographic keyboard. He fiddled with some settings in the configuration panel of a computer model, and ran it. “Not a bad thought.” He took a sip of cappuccino. “Tao is supposed to be a street chemist’s attempt to recreate Harmony, but the samples we’ve been seeing matched identically. If you ask me, both drugs are coming from the same place.”

  Joey muttered “mmm” over a mouthful of coffee. He savored it for a few seconds before swallowing. “Yeah. They’re sending chaos bombs to poor people and spyware to those who can afford to pay for a ‘cleaner’ product. The ACC is doing this, so they don’t care if LRI loses money. Heck, I bet Mr. Huber is carting these pills out without paying for them.”

  “Who?” asked DeWinter.

  “Bernd Huber, aka Neal Finch. ACC operator embedded in LRI’s production team. Nina got him delivering large quantities of H to chem dealers.”

  The terminal beeped.

  “Okay…” DeWinter leaned forward. “I’ll isolate those missing components; they need to be the ones that contain the instructions for constructing the transmitter unit. Do me a favor?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Can you cook up the inside of a brain? I’m going to try to reverse engineer the instructions from the nanobot scans and create a virtual version of these ’bots we can set loose on your fake brain. That should let us see the guts of the transmission array and extract the cryptographic seed used to generate the chimeric address.”

  “Ooh, I like the way you think.” Joey winked. “On it.”

  He ducked around the cube wall and flopped in his chair, sparing a few seconds to take a big sip of coffee before plugging in again. After appearing in his octagon room, he brought up a virtual terminal and popped into the Ancora Medical network. A bit of poking around led him to stored brain scans. Joey hunted among the files for one with no drastic pathology, striking gold with the discovery of ‘suspected brain tumor – negative’ that showed a healthy brain with a moderately enlarged vascular structure resulting in frequent, localized headaches.

  The file transferred in a few seconds, and a giant, transparent brain, brain stem, and eyeballs rendered in the middle of the room. Software colored the brain orange, the cerebellum blue, the brain stem violet, and all the glands green. The eyeballs and a hint of their controlling muscles appeared in natural colors. He peered up at it, shivering.

  “Okay, now that is creepy.”

  Over the course of the next forty minutes
(with some liberal borrowing from the Ancora database), he built a routine that turned the passive recording into an active simulation of a live brain. He added an invisible skull and skin layer, as well as a simulated circulatory system so DeWinter’s virtual nanobots would behave identically to real bots in a living person, even though both the nanobots and brain existed only as code.

  The eerie sensation of having someone else in the room came on when he started the simulation. He let it run for a while, watching memory monitors and making sure the program behaved itself. It looked good, but he had no way to know if it truly simulated a brain enough to fool program nanobots.

  “Suppose we’ll find out.”

  He opened a chat window to DeWinter’s terminal, and got a six-foot holo panel offering a view into the office, as though he were a faerie standing on DeWinter’s desk. “The brain is online. And seeing those giant cotton ball eyebrows as big as a city bus is a sight I will need to drink quite a bit to get out of my head.”

  DeWinter grinned. “I think I’ve almost got it. I’ll jump into your workspace once I’m ready.”

  “Right. Hurry it up, this thing is fuckin’ creepy.” Joey opened an access portal for DeWinter to come in, and dropped off the chat. It took the form of an ancient wooden door with peeling white paint, like something from a giant creepy mansion in a horror vid.

  He spawned a virtual coffee, which fed his brain the same heat, flavor, and texture sensation no different from consuming one in reality. Of course, the ‘digital caffeine’ wouldn’t do anything for him once he logged out.

  Creeeeak.

  DeWinter peered in the door. “You have some damage.” It creaked louder as he pushed it open all the way and entered with a small case under his arm.

  “That the bots?”

  “Yep.” DeWinter looked up at the brain. “Whoa. I see what you mean. Feels like there’s someone else in here with us. What do you figure that is?”

  “Maybe our brains somehow pick up on the pattern of activity within the virtual brain and ‘sense’ a person, even though it’s just software.”