Scale Free

by Patrick Arnesen

  “They routed this folder through her inbox” I continued, “and we were able to reconstruct it from deleted sectors on one of our memory caches that had not yet been rewritten. We’re still trying to trace where the files came from, or where they went.”

  Gaudet opened the folder and leafed through a few pages. He smiled thinly.

  I said “Now, I need your word that no further action will be taken against VivraTerra, official or otherwise.”

  Gaudet grunted. “It’s not that simple anymore. We just had a nuclear bomb go off in Utah. It’s pretty hard to ignore that. The NASC is mobilizing for a very big investigation, and VivraTerra is right in the crosshairs. It’s out of my control now.”

  “We had nothing to do with that explosion. It’s possible that the culprits knew we were getting close and destroyed the reactor in order to hide evidence, or perhaps throw us off the trail.”

  “Conjecture, and the word of a talking circuit board. If you want me to deflect one of the biggest investigations in recent history, you’ll have to give me a bit more to work with than that.”

  “You were already on this case before the explosion. The NASC will be relying on you to interpret the facts. You can downplay VivraTerra’s involvement.”

  “I might have some small influence, be in the right place to whisper in the right ear…” Gaudet shrugged, “… maybe. But why would I?”

  Gaudet leaned forward and pointed his finger at me. “Why should I believe that VivraTerra is so innocent in all this? I have nothing for that but your word. How can I ignore the very real possibility that a large group of post-human uploads are messing around with high energy physics and testing-detonating nuclear bombs in the desert? Who else would have the resources to do that?”

  His eyes narrowed, “Where are you uploads going with this? What are you up to?”

  I sank into Gaudet’s guest chair, slumped my shoulders and rubbed my forehead. “How do I fight that kind of suspicion? How do I convince you that we’re not a threat? We don’t want to kill you, or rule you or replace you. We just want to be left in peace.”

  “And the hangar? The bomb?”

  “Wasn’t us!”

  I gestured at the folder on the table. “Those are the complete plans for a power source that can save the environment and create an age of abundance like nothing anyone has ever seen.”

  I sighed. “We give it to you without reservation, in a gesture of friendship and unity, and because we know that the world needs it. Please accept it for what it is. Don’t let the NASC’s paranoia turn this investigation into a witch hunt.”

  Gaudet closed the folder, picked it up, and collapsed it into an icon between his hands. He filed it away in his personal interface. “I’ll make sure these plans get into the right hands. Have a nice day Mr. Roamer.”

  Chapter 50

  They came for us a week later.

  For the last several days I had been running from interview to interview. I was sleeping at ten-times normal speed, allowing me to work nearly around the clock. My media appearances circled the world, roughly tracking the sun. But I was fighting a hopeless battle. The anti-upload meme had humanity firmly in its grip, and Sheila’s stunt had put the public’s hysteria over the top.

  I was sitting across from the host of a popular late-night talk show, doing my best to attack the fear-mongers with humor and sarcasm, when a high priority message flashed into my field of view.

  “I think we’re about to lose our main server stack. Come Quickly – Melanie”.

  I made my apologies, pulled up my interface and blinked to Melanie’s current location. She was waiting for me on top of Speer’s hill. Speer, Castillo and Ono were on their feet, shifting their attention between several screens and talking fast. There were several others who were unfamiliar to me, but I did recognize the prime minister, sitting beside Speer’s fireplace, in dialog with several others.

  Melanie was on her own, staring soberly at her own floating screens. I walked over to her.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Melanie gestured at a screen. “For a few days now there have been crowds protesting outside of our headquarters. Until now the police were always there to keep things under control, but today they left without explanation. We’ve been trying to reach them, the NASC, city hall, just about anyone, but they’re all stonewalling and passing the buck. Right now, the only thing standing between us and those protestors is a locked door.”

  “Our robots?”

  “Still disabled.”

  “Private Security?”

  “Refusing to help. They say they don’t have enough manpower to reasonably ensure the safety of their guards against a crowd like this.”

  I took a harder look at the images on Melanie’s screen. The crowd had grown to several hundred people. It had long since spilled out onto the street. Traffic was being routed around other avenues. Many were holding placards and shouting slogans. Others were throwing bottles and other debris at the door. Several dozen were clustered around a religious figure dressed in white. He shouted wildly. He pointed at the sky, then at our building, then clutched his heart and hung his head in submission to some unseen power. Bolstering this crowd was a platoon of media types. Their trucks were parked haphazardly on the street and their camera men and reporters were moving through the crowd recording and interviewing the louder and more interesting protesters.

  Melanie took her eyes off the screen and faced me. “Jarrod, I know it’s a long shot, but could you give Gaudet a call?”

  “Won’t do any good.” I said.

  “Could you at least try? We’re running out of options here.”

  I sighed, but opened a new screen beside Melanie’s and placed the call anyway. Gadget’s face appeared a few seconds later. “Yes?”

  “There’s a crowd about to break into our building. The police are nowhere to be seen.”

  “That’s a shame. I expect there will be a lot of destruction of evidence when they burn your building to the ground. I was really hoping to have all our search warrants in place by now, but you know how difficult it can be to overturn a court order.”

  “Guadet, you know you have a duty to stop this crowd. You need to get some officers over here right now!”

  “Actually that’s more of a local police matter. You should try calling them. By the way, did you make any more progress tracking down the bombers, or are you ready to admit now that you did it yourselves?”

  I grabbed each side of Gaudet’s screen and crushed it into an icon, then ground the icon to bits between my palms. I opened my hands and watched the pieces fall to the ground. Sometimes the little nuances of sim physics could be very satisfying.

  Melanie was busy with her interface. On her screen, the crowd was beginning to act with some coherence. They parted to reveal a large truck at the far side of the street, facing our front door.

  “We’re doing a last sync to the backup data center.” Melanie said. “Regular citizens have been ordered to wrap up their business and put themselves to sleep. The backup stack has enough compute resources to run about 1000 minds. Only the most essential people will wake up there. Everyone else will have to wait offline until we can rebuild our main stack.”

  The truck began to accelerate. It was an antique model, diesel driven, with a cab for a driver up front. Its automation had been ripped out and a human driver sat behind the wheel. It belched a cloud of smoke from its exhaust as the driver gunned the engine. The truck lurched forward and accelerated straight toward our door.

  “The people in this sim will be the last to back up. After that, we’ll execute the self-destruct command. All our chips and memory stores will be wiped clean and then physically destroyed. We can’t leave our data in the hands of these people.”

  Melanie switched the screen to the view from inside the lobby. Through the glass doors I saw the truck headed for us. It bounced violently as its front axle hit the sidewalk curb. Then our front doors and surroun
ding windows shattered in an explosion of glass. The truck plowed through the door and merged with the elevators at the back of the lobby. The members of the crowd began to stream around the wreckage. They quickly found the door to the stairs.

  Melanie said, “Oh shit, Oh shit, here we go! Backup and switch-over in 3, 2…”

  Chapter 51

  The screen was blank. There was a big red flashing notification in my field of view:

  “Warning: you have just been restored from backup. 12 minutes, 31 seconds have passed since you were taken offline.”

  I looked around. Everyone was exactly where they had been before. Melanie and I exchanged glances.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “We just lost our main stack.” Melanie growled. She gestured for her interface and her fingers darted across invisible keys. Then she frowned. “I can’t reach any of the controls for our backup datacenter. Jarrod, see if you can reach some external sites.”

  I turned to my interface and brought up my news-feed app. It was up to date. Then I used the screen in front of us to call for a real-time satellite feed of our head office. I could clearly see the rear of the truck sticking out of the building. People were streaming in and out. Many of those exiting were carrying large pieces of computer hardware. A pile of it was accumulating on the street.

  “I have external streams” I said.

  Melanie looked at the screen. She was shaking. “Those assholes. That was our home! It took us years to build it.”

  “Why were we offline for 12 minutes?” I asked. “Isn’t the switchover supposed to be almost instantaneous?”

  Melanie turned to me, but didn’t quite manage to bring her eyes into focus.

  I turned back to my interface and tried to ping my daughter, but received an error message.

  “Emma hasn’t been restored.”

  Melanie gathered herself up and returned to her screens. “What’s this? There are only 18 people online right now. There are supposed to be nearly a thousand!”

  I looked around and took a quick count.

  “18 would be everyone in this sim.”

  Melanie looked up from her screens. Her eyes were wide. “This is the only sim running, and I can’t access any of the hardware running it!”

  I could think of only one way to account for this. A knot began to tighten around my gut. “The NASC must have us.”

  Melanie shook her head. “It’s not possible. We were monitoring the backup datacenter in real-time. Everything was in good shape. Our security was working perfectly.”

  I shook my head. “We just woke up in a sim running on hardware we don’t control. Whether it’s the NASC or someone else, it looks like we’re in a lot of trouble.”

  Melanie tried several more commands. Her fingers flew over the keys of her virtual interface. I have never seen her work so fast. Then with a shout, she pounded her screens. “I have no access! Damn it!” I pulled her away from the screens and hugged her tightly.

  After a minute, Melanie began to calm down. “Thanks Jarrod. I need to go talk to the other techies.” She let me go and went to join the very animated conversation centered on the security chief and the prime minister.

  Feeling the need to gather myself, I walked away from the group to the edge of the hill’s flat-top. There I created a couch and sat down heavily. Below me was Speer’s little Swiss village. Was it only there for scenery? Were the structures just cut-outs like the ones they built for movie sets, or did Speer actually go down there once in a while? It occurred to me that if this was now the only sim I had access to, then it was more than an idle question.

  Someone came around the edge of the couch and sat down.

  “Hi Mr. Roamer.”

  With a start I turned to find Sheila sitting beside me. About ten different thoughts and five different emotions jumped into my head all at once, most of which contradicted each other. I was left staring at her, eyes-wide and silent.

  Sheila smiled. Eventually, I said. “I suppose this means you were either telling the truth last time we spoke, or you’re the best hacker in history.”

  “You tested me by having me arrested here in VivraTerra.”

  I nodded, “Had you been fooling me, then putting you under detention and cutting off your communications would have stopped you cold. But if you were telling the truth, then detaining you in VivraTerra wouldn’t have had any effect.”

  Sheila smiled. “Well, here I am. And it’s a good thing for you, or you’d all be in the hands of the NASC right now.”

  “Are you responsible for, this?” I gestured around the sim.

  Sheila nodded. “Uh huh. The NASC had compromised your backup stack. As soon as you synced up the latest versions of yourselves, they would have cut your power and network connections. They had already sabotaged your backup power and self-destruct system. After that, they would have been able to move in at their leisure, collect your servers and bring them back to their lab. You would have woken up under their total control. But don’t worry. You’re safe now.”

  I grunted. “Clever. Get the crowd to do the dirty work, and then take us quietly at our secret backup stack, where there’s no media and nobody to notice. Nobody would have known that they had us.”

  I turned and looked sharply at Sheila. “So what exactly did you do?”

  “Well for starters, I trashed your backup stack. The NASC won’t get a single byte of data from what’s left of those machines.”

  “And where are we now?”

  “I made a complete copy of the entire VivraTerra stack. You, this sim, and everyone else in it, are all running on my own personal computing substrate.”

  I stared at Sheila, stood up, sat back down, nearly stood up again, and then sank back into the couch.

  “So what happens to us now?”

  “Well, that depends on what you and the other leaders in this room decide. If you’d like, I can wake up VivraTerra fully and you can all run on my substrate. I would be happy to host the polis for as long as you like. You’d be completely safe here. But I don’t think this will be a popular option. A polis needs to be in control of its own hardware, otherwise its members will never feel free.”

  “I could also build a new stack using conventional technology in the real world, in a country of your choosing, and let you take your chances with the humans again.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think there’s anywhere we could go where we'd be welcome - or safe, right now.”

  “I could put you to sleep for a few generations; let human values catch up. I could wake you up again when humans have become more tolerant.”

  “Then we’d be nothing but an anachronism from another era, a curiosity. We’d be irrelevant.”

  “There is another solution. It’s a little more extreme, but it might be something you should consider. It’s certainly the most interesting option.”

  I leaned forward and listened as Sheila told me her idea.

  Chapter 52

  There were tears in my eyes. Melanie smiled in sympathy. She created a handkerchief and dabbed my cheeks, then squeezed my hands. “You have to smile for her dear.”

  Emma was crying openly. I took her shoulders in my hands and looked in her eyes. Then I embraced her in a tight hug. She cried on my shoulder.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to take a copy of me with you?” I asked. “You could run me whenever you felt homesick.”

  “No” she sniffed. “It wouldn’t be right. There would be nothing for you there, nothing you could understand; and if I kept you turned off most of the time… it just wouldn’t be right.”

  “Alright then” I said. “You have perfect memory. I know you’ll never forget me, though I must seem awfully silly and small to you these days.”

  Emma shook her head. “You’ll always be my Dad, I’ll always love you.” Then she buried her head in my shoulder again.

  Most of Emma and Sheila’s closest friends were with us. We formed a group of about
40 people, standing together on the shore of what we had unimaginatively named the Black Sea. From the gritty kernels at our feet, the sea of sand stretched to the horizon, utterly black, with barely a ripple on the surface. The sand had been here, still and unchanging, through the entire course of mankind’s existence. Behind us was a mountain-scape of ridges, marking the beginning of a heavily cratered section of our asteroid. Above was the great dome of heaven, filled with a stunning number of bright stars. The Milky Way stretched across it, as if painted on with a giant brush stroke. One star, still visibly a disk, shone far brighter than the rest. It cast sharp shadows from the hilltops. Except for our own voices, which were actually transmitted by radio, this airless world was utterly silent. The temperature was below -150 Celsius.

  We were using our new humanoid robots. Unlike the old ones we left behind on Earth, these looked and felt utterly human. Each was personalized to accurately reproduce the preferred appearance of its owner. We loved using them to explore our new little worlds and for doing physical work on the surface.