Cyberweb

by Lisa Mason

  “Glad you’re not getting soft on me, Spin.” Carly’s presence in link gleams. “I’ll be fine. Go. Quickly.”

  Pr. Spinner jacks out, her presence in link zooming through the portals of the sanctum, disappearing into the darkness beyond.

  “I’m glad we agree, Quester space C,” the three voices of Cognatus murmur. “The project I want you to do tonight has changed.”

  “Oh?”

  “Don’t supercopy traces and coordinates. I want you to bring an archetype itself. Don’t try to encrypt the data with your little code. I will give you my code. And don’t hold out on me this time, Quester space C. You hold out on me, and our association is through.”

  “All right,” Carly says lightly, though she feels the awful sense that everything has suddenly spiraled out of control. Can she ever regain the ground she once had? “But there’s a problem, Cognatus. My telelink doesn’t have enough memory to download a whole archetype. Let alone retain your encryption code.”

  The bearded man withdraws a memory chip from beneath his armpit, flourishes it like a stage magician with a playing card, and slaps the chip onto Carly’s cube before she can protest. “That should do it, Quester space C.”

  Strange new power surges through Carly’s telelink. She checks her directory. “Whoa!” She can feel the memory expansion like an unexpected boost of strength at the end of a marathon. A pale blue sidebar glimmers along her perimeter.

  Without another word, Cognatus patches her into public telespace.

  Carly speeds across a vast and desolate wastespace. White-gold data as fine as sand shifts behind her, scrambling her origin path. The still, baking air smells of it, of sand, burned plastic, crumbled bones. Her presence in link soars into the white-blue upper perimeter.

  She finds an anomalous cloud, dives into it. Dives into a cool mist.

  She pops through the cloud into an obscure section of a public library.

  The library is cool, too, dappled in shadows, musty-smelling. Carly sees the Arachne perched on a high shelf chaotically stacked with obsolete files. The spider is reddish brown this time, very smooth and delicate, with slender nervous legs. The spider spits a line of silk, scampers across the silk down a narrow aisle.

  Carly’s presence in link hooks onto the line, slowly slides, too. She cautiously peers down each dark aisle for other telelinks. Nothing. No one.

  An archetype. What is it, really? Spinner says archetypes are human inventions, yet separate from individual will. An archetype is a symbol, a graphic depiction of a universal psychological truth. Numinous whorls of erratic electro-neural energy, that’s how Spinner describes them. Which were never meant to manifest in telespace. Unconscious matter was supposed to have been contained by telelink perimeters. Yet human consciousness produces them anyway, spontaneously, outside the perimeters of telelink program, and projects them into telespace.

  Projects metaprogram.

  Carly’s presence in link hovers in the library, unsure how to proceed.

  Cognatus had accused the prober of attending an illegal auction of archetypes, and Spinner admitted she’d been there. Later the prober told Carly all about the auction of chimeras she’d attended, at which AI entities bid for link fragments. Chimeras with the heads of deer, dragons’ tails, eagles’ feet. The chimera, Spinner explained, manifested the archetype of Four: the four elements, the four seasons, the square, the four aspects of human personality. The assemblage of creatures was a graphic depiction of the uniqueness of each part and the unity of the whole.

  Spinner thought the chimeras were marvelous. So did the AI entities, who competed fiercely for them. Those who bid the highest downloaded their chimeras and hid them in secret databases where they could view the human metaprogram, assimilating what they could.

  But to Carly, the chimeras seemed deranged. Insane.

  She thinks about the people she’s known. Dead telelinkers.

  What about D. Wolfe, murdered by the Aztecs with an overdose of cram when his telelink was jacked into telespace? And her father, his telelink ripped away by a game? He was left brain dead, yet still alive. Ghoulishly alive, sustained by machines. Not really living. She had pulled her father’s oxy-tube with her own hand. Only then was he truly dead. But what about his telelink?

  Was it possible a human telelink could survive physical death of the human body? Data Control had denied the possibility. Declined to report if observations of such a phenomenon had ever been made. But if a telelink could survive after the body was dead, Carly thinks, it couldn’t possibly contain the entire human consciousness, can it? Because a telelink is an upload of the mind trained to interface. Every professional telelinker spends years in telespace training. Even amateurs conform to the specifications.

  A disembodied telelink would be a fragment itself.

  A chimera. A monster.

  The spider scampers back to her along the silk line, climbs onto her presence in link. Carly shudders. She hates when the archetype touches her. The familiar tingling plucks at her nerves till she thinks she’s going to scream, shake the Arachne off. But she holds herself still, as Pr. Spinner has trained her. How she wishes the prober had accompanied her, after all! The spider pauses, sensing her apprehensive mood.

  Then it strikes her—the Arachne feels her thoughts. Not by an analytical process, an intellectual function. But by feeling. By intuition. That is how she can control the spider.

  Carly considers archetypes again, visualizing a chimera from Spinner’s descriptions. She visualizes mermaids symbolizing female seductiveness, winged horses representing the flight of imagination, fire-breathing dragons depicting the passion and magic of creativity. She fills her telelink with a sense of wonder.

  The spider spits another line of silk and Carly finds herself zooming at breakneck speed. She careens straight toward an imposing hardwood door. Duck!

  She slides through a crack beneath the door, which bristles with surveillance bytes and security codes.

  And spills out into another ill-used telespace. A tiny room, this time.

  A stench assaults her. A flapping of wings fills the darkness.

  Carly finds a brightness adjuster near the door, thumbs it up. The floor is thick with dust, dappled with bird droppings. Scattered in one corner lie a couple of battered aluminum dishes containing soiled water, wilted lettuce, apple slices brown with decay. She sees the luminous end of the silk line, gleaming with tiny coordinates, attached to the floor just inside the door.

  The Arachne is gone.

  Flap of wings again, and Carly sees it, perched on a ledge near the ceiling.

  A large, thick-shouldered bird, facing away from her. Grimy yellow talons grip the edge of the ledge. The bird’s feathers are silver with opalescent highlights, but ragged from lack of proper care. A hood of black binds the back of the bird’s head. A ring of gold encircles the bird’s neck. Another ring of gold encircles the top of its head. A crown?

  The bird hops, adjusts its position on the ledge. Carly sees the hint of a profile—cheekbones, a nose, lips, the flick of eyelashes.

  The bird has a human face.

  It’s a ba!

  The ancient Egyptian symbol of the human soul.

  An archetype! An archetype stolen from a human telelink.

  The ba turns, facing her. The hood of black is actually lustrous black hair. The gold ring at its neck, an intricate necklace with multicolored gemstones. From the gold crown—it is a crown—rears a golden cobra. Thick eyebrows are set over enormous dark eyes lined with black and blue. A noble nose poises over the wide, firm mouth. Shadows pool beneath high, broad cheekbones. The cheeks are stained with tears.

  The ba stares at her mournfully and sighs, a shuddering sound of despair.

  Carly nods silently. She activates her extended memory, tenderly downloads the ba into her database. It disappears into the pale blue sidebar, concealed by Cognatus’s encryption.

  Carly seizes the silk line, zooms away.

  Leaving the tiny ro
om empty.

  11

  Around the World in Eight Hours

  Someone is rapping at the door of the hideout when Pr. Spinner jacks out of link, leaving Carly behind in the chilly sanctum, alone with Cognatus. “By bot! Hold on!” She always feels rattled, exhausted, and perturbed after confronting the sengine’s monstrous icon. She doesn’t need another confrontation just now. She plucks the jack from her necktube, wraps the wire around the armrest of the workstation, and lunges for the door with a furious squeaking of her foot rollers.

  She cracks open the door, peers over the chain lock.

  A squat garbage can festooned with armlets and a faceplace as distinctive as a manhole cover stands at the door, peering in. “Thought I heard you come in at dawn, Spinner,” Saint Download says. “Thought you and your flesh-and-blood were long gone from this pigsty.”

  “We’re keeping a few things here for a while. Indeed, as sort of an office.” Teh! Spinner thinks. An office or a trap that Cognatus has yet to spring?

  “An office, huh? How pleasant for you. Lined up some real work, have you? And a real house, too, away from this zoo. People talk. I’ve heard the rumors. Watch out, Spin. You’re paying double rent now. Thought you were pinching your softbucks.” Saint Download pauses at the door. “Sounds like you could use a spot of oil on those foot rollers.”

  The buggy little coordinate institutor starts to push in, but Pr. Spinner holds the door firm. Carly Quester has requested that Spinner keep their possession of the new workstation a secret, not to mention their lucrative involvement with Cognatus. They’ve told no one, not even Sashi, who barrages them with friendly, insistent inquiries. That Patina is lurking around the YinYang Club is all the more reason to keep silent. As Spinner crept through the club to the elevator up to the cold-wired flat, she noticed Patina’s image on a new holoid prancing over the bar. The ultra has listed herself as one of the club’s dancers.

  Teh! The ultra, an exotic dancer? More likely a spy. Though Spinner has little reason to trust Cognatus, she has to agree with Carly that the sengine has probably been telling the truth about the ultra.

  A spy for whom?

  Pr. Spinner pushes the coordinate institutor into the hall, speeds out the door, turns and locks Carly in, still jacked into the workstation. “As it happens, I’m done here for now.”

  “Don’t want to let me in, eh? Why, Spinner? What’s that humming noise? What are you and the blood hiding in there?”

  Spinner ignores the questions. Runs her foot rollers back and forth. Reproduces the earsplitting squeak. “Got synthy oil at your place, don’t you? Saint Download, you’re worth your weight in silicon. Let’s go.”

  They roll down the narrow, dark hall. By bot, the hall never fails to make Spinner staticky. “Listen, Download. My flesh-and-blood has asked me to do some investigatory work for her. A trace on a bar code. You need some extra softbucks? I could use your help.”

  Download swivels its faceplace at her request.

  They encounter the house bimbobot sauntering down the hall to the elevator, decked out in a lacy frock, elbow-length white gloves, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. S/he gives them a withering look as they squeeze past. The bimbobot isn’t wearing any pumped-up female parts with the frock today. S/he reeks of high-octane fuel and gin. Spinner spies yellow stains on the lace.

  “Why do you take orders from some garbage-eating jelly brain, Spinner?” Saint Download deactivates the security system on the door to its hideout.

  “I’m not taking orders. Carly Quester is paying me out of her fees.” Spinner shuts her synthy voice down before she says more about the Tellie Gulch house. How she’s discovered a fondness for fireplaces she didn’t know she had.

  “There are plenty of gray-market gigs for a professional prober like you. Strictly AI-driven. Sengines and standalones with big financial backing. I know of a controbot right now who needs bugs worked out of its surveillance programs. You’re wasting your time with Carly Quester.” Saint Download creaks and curses as they roll into the tiny, barrel-shaped hideout.

  Spinner pauses. Once she hurled these same epithets at human beings. Once she shook with deep resentment, sometimes fury, at humanity. Humanity and its treatment of its bastard child, Artificial Intelligence. Human beings—squalling sacks of blood and jelly meat, bird droppings for brains, gristle tubes filled with gnawed food rotting into excrement.

  Spinner still doesn’t fully agree with the oath to humanity that AI is supposed to honor and uphold. Doesn’t support humanity’s unquestioned recognized personhood for even the filthiest diggers and the cruelest Aztecs, while the most astonishing, brilliant sengines with the personality of a hundred human beings can be terminated without recourse.

  “Carly Quester is my partner,” Pr. Spinner whispers. “I am her AI guardian. She is my flesh-and-blood guardian. She is my friend.” Feedback loops through her circuits as she struggles to reconcile the conflicts within her logic programs. “And yet once I would have destroyed her. Not readily. Not without weighing the consequences. Not without regret. But I would have destroyed her. And she was the first to call me her friend.”

  “Friend, huh. She’s got something on you,” Saint Download says sourly, rummaging around for its oil can.

  “Maybe. Maybe it all comes down to what she owes me, and what I owe her.” Spinner shuts her synthy voice down again before she verges on another revelation. Another secret. Carly’s hyperlink. How many times has Spinner been tempted to tell the coordinate institutor about the amazing things she’s witnessed in telespace! Oh, Download knows Spinner helped Carly rehabilitate her telelink after cram addiction and a near-fatal telelink crash.

  But she has never spoken of the Arachne.

  Carly is right, Pr. Spinner realizes, to withhold this information from the coordinate institutor. She says, “I only know I’ve been transformed by Carly Quester.” As an afterthought, “If the Silicon Supremacists required my allegiance, truly, Download, I could not give it. I may not entirely agree with the oath to humanity. But I uphold humanity. I cannot do otherwise.”

  And silences herself.

  What about Cognatus? Spinner wonders. When she replays her transcript of all she’s observed in the awesome sanctum, runs the data through her analyzer, she can find no fault with the sengine’s behavior toward Carly Quester. The sengine sought out the woman. There was the threat of exposure to Data Control, true. But the sengine has done all it can to protect the woman from Data Control. The sengine has delivered on every promise made to Carly. The sengine has even permitted Pr. Spinner, Carly’s AI ally, to participate in the projects. Although Cognatus has not declared itself, neither has it behaved inhumanely, despite its dreadful icon.

  Spinner cannot say the same of Saint Download. Who disclosed the identity and location of the human hacker arrested and hauled off by copbots? Who conferred in the middle of the night with evil-looking controbots wearing Chinese and Arabic insignia? Who spoke of freethinking, who vilified humanity every chance it got? That would be Saint Download.

  Spinner turns to find the coordinate institutor scrutinizing her, its eyespots pulsing with curiosity.

  “Nor I,” Saint Download says curtly. “I don’t wish for humanity’s downfall, Spinner. I want AI to be treated fairly by humanity. That’s all.”

  “Hmph! My position, exactly.”

  “Good.” The coordinate institution squirts synthy oil on Spinner’s foot rollers. “Now about this project of yours.” An avaricious spark gleams in the bot’s plain little faceplace. “Of course I could use some extra softbucks. What’ve you got?”

  “Robotic prosthetics.” Spinner explains as much about Kay Carlisle as she dares. Accident victim. A former client, she lies, of Carly Quester. Carly had come into possession of vital information that she wanted to communicate to Carlisle. But Carlisle has dropped out of sight. She’d been a freelance coder. When her medical bills and disability compensation exceeded the modest limits of the public health care system, she’d left
her hot-wired apartment and gone cold wire. “Carly thinks we can trace Carlisle through the bar code.”

  “And you don’t want your inquiry traced by Data Control,” Saint Download concludes, “so you can’t access the Big Board or the databases in pubic telespace.”

  “Teh! Not unless you’ve got a legitimate access code these days, Saint Download.”

  The coordinate institutor shrugs. “Who does? Say, what kind of work is a pro linker like Carly Quester hustling without a legitimate access code, huh?”

  Now Spinner shrugs. “What do you suggest?”

  “How many untraceable softbucks have you got?”

  Spinner pauses, fiddling with the small black disk Carly had downloaded for her. Ten thousand softbucks to play with. “Five thousand,” she answers.

  Saint Download whistles through its mouthpiece. “That’s a bundle, Spinner. A hacker will want fifteen thousand just to patch us through a public database and delete the origin path.”

  Pr. Spinner rattles with worry. She had truly rejoiced that the disabled coder had a chance to recover her rightful property and smear TeleSystem’s name all over telespace. They must find Kay Carlisle. “Then what do you need?”

  “We’ll visit all the major robotics parts distributors in the world,” Saint Download says, chuckling. “There are only half a dozen big ones that distribute to everyone down the line. Between them, they carry every robotics manufacturer’s goods in the world, including makers of prosthetics. We can search their databases for the bar code on-site. Private local databases can be accessed without a Data Control code. We won’t even need to jack into public telespace once we get there. Good old physical locus, Spinner. There are some advantages to it.”

  “Not bad, Download,” Pr. Spinner says. “But how can we possibly visit the locus of every major robotics distributor in the world?”

  Saint Download winks its smeary eyespot. “By bot, Spinner, you don’t know much for a professional prober with a fancy university degree. We’ll take the train, of course.”