Con Code

by Aften Brook Szymanski

  “What do you mean, a year? Did you know about this?” I ask.

  “Keep up.” Juan yanks a large snake from a tree. It snaps, even though its head and neck are too close to Juan’s grip for it to get a toothy purchase. Even if it did, all the snake would accomplish is puncturing fake skin. Juan tosses the snake out to the side. Behind us the group adjusts their trail wide in the opposite direction of the thrown snake.

  “Why would Geo make a program like that?” I ask. It has to be Geo. How else would Juan know about it? “I thought his whole aim was to expand his artificial empire, not cripple it.”

  “Geo didn’t develop countermeasures,” Juan says. He looks over his shoulder. At first, I think he’s looking at me. It’s hard to tell with his ruined face. I look behind me to see Mav watching us as we walk.

  Mav has an intense personality, like his brother. It’s easy to misread his body language. Right now, for instance, he has the facial expression of a man who has his sights on someone he doesn’t trust, someone who maybe poses a threat to the rest of the party. Someone he wouldn’t mind immobilizing—violently, if necessary.

  At Mav’s side, Belen winces, drawing my eyes away from Mav and the visual lock he has on Juan. Belen looks far too distracted with pain to be concerned with programming. Of course, if whatever Juan is talking about exists, it was developed before today. It’s not something Belen would need to worry herself with now. But they wouldn’t put something into effect that would have a negative impact on humans as well.

  Would they?

  I catch up to Juan again. “The humans suffer negative effects too.” I point out. “They were all acting weird like they were sick.” I recall the birds unable to fly. “And animals were affected by it too. Why would the humans send out a signal that would hurt themselves?”

  Juan doesn’t speak right away.

  Not because he has nothing to say, but because before he can’t come up with some version of logic to shatter my point, I add. “They wouldn’t.”

  Juan smooths his fallen facial features into place, then lets his skin drop again. “Who acted sick first?”

  The people got sick first. Animals too. Isn’t he proving me right? They wouldn’t target their own, especially not first. “That’s my point.”

  “Your point is that the humans didn’t initiate first strike?” he asks.

  Something in my gut sinks. Images from the news monitor inside the car flood back to me. The Mord were under fire. Airstrike. “Mord don’t have any defenses here,”

  “Before all your sensors went offline, did you notice a radiation spike?” Juan manages to speak low and soft without changing the tense set of his body. I look behind us anyway, checking to see if anyone behind is paying too close attention to our conversation, suddenly hyper-aware of ‘sides’ involved.

  Mav still has his eyes on us. His neck straightens at my peeking behavior. If he wasn’t paying attention a second ago, he is now thanks to my suspicious glances backward.

  “I didn’t notice.” I think back to the glass building. All I can recall is trying to transmit a signal and causing myself a lot of head pain.

  “I’m not sure what it was exactly. Maybe not radiation.”

  Curse it, Juan. Don’t throw out an accusation like that and not be confident. “But radiation wouldn’t affect us. We were clearly affected.”

  “Not right away.” Juan motions me to keep up better, stop checking over my shoulder. But I swear Mav has gotten closer. He’s not between Gordon and Belen anymore. He’s leading them. “The signal that hurts us was return fire,” Juan says. “I know military procedure better than anyone. We’re at war.”

  “Do you have an AK in there?” I say. Military know-how, strategic posturing. Of course, a GenAK would assume any problems in our system would be an act of war.

  “I’m not a brainless infantryman,” Juan says.

  For one thing, I’m tired of Juan not announcing whoever the heck is speaking in the first place, and I’m not too impressed with how these personalities can’t seem to get along despite the fact they’re trapped together. “Why don’t you drop the tough guy act and admit you’re throwing out conspiracy-level accusations?” I lean in closer. “And scaring the crap out of me for no reason.” I point up to where the cell tower might be in relation to how far we’ve traveled. “You’re full of crap and don’t know anything about what’s going on or how to fix it.”

  “I’d prefer if you called me Commander,” Juan says. “And I’ve never made a false accusation in my life.”

  If I had blood, which I don’t, it’d be cold right now. Whatever runs through my cords and wires, lubricants or transmission fluids, whatever, it’s all gone cold.

  Juan is the Commander.

  The Commander is Juan.

  Except the Commander isn’t an official donor. Geo admitted that it was a program designed to prevent Ace from winning. Something to be one step ahead of Ace at every hack, cheat, and backdoor. Admittedly, the deterrent became wildly out of hand.

  Then again, Ace created me within the game and I’m the only player who exited the game the way the game was meant to be exited. Or some version acceptable enough, not changed so much that those welcoming me to this world had been alerted to my wrongness.

  But the Commander is here. Two of us that don’t belong here, are here. The Mord. The Mord are here too. There’s more of us on this side of the game that were never supposed to exist at all. “That’s a failed program.” I want to stop following, but also don’t want to alert anyone to trouble.

  “Depends on who you ask,” Juan responds. He ventures a swivel to keep tabs on Mav, only to find Mav right behind me. “Hey, Mav.” When Juan says ‘Mav’ I can hear it now. It’s not brotherly venom. The Commander is mocking him, mocking both of them. Ace for taking on his brother’s appearance. And Mav for being only half as brilliant as Ace is. I see it now too. Mav is a joke or would have been inside the game.

  “How do you intend to disable the towers?” Mav nods behind us, to where we’ve departed from. It comes across as a challenge, but I’m not sure if it’s meant to be or if I’m on high alert now.

  Knowing the Commander is ‘base version’ Juan changes so much in my ability to cope. The Commander went crazy inside the game—being trapped inside the cage he was supposed to keep locked from other players, only to be a prisoner as well.

  “I don’t,” Juan says.

  For reasons I’m incapable of processing in my current state of ‘freaking out’ Mav’s rigid frame relaxes just a little at Juan’s response.

  “Belen told me about a sanctuary ahead. No signals ever manage to get through.” Juan’s tone lifts as though he’s delivering redemptive news. “Dead zone, they call it.” But his words are anything but encouraging.

  “Cathedral Ipiales,” Belen speaks. I haven’t realized how close she is to me. “No signal here.” She confirms Juan’s claim that our destination is signal free.

  “It’s supposed to be a safe zone to guard against machines like us,” Juan says. “But we need it now.”

  “This bush is so thick,” Gordon complains from where he’s left with the bent branches thwapping back at him. “How do we know we’re still headed in the right direction?”

  “Follow the ravine,” Juan speaks in smooth accented words, convincing me of his rightness by how confidently he lays his words down, like a brick layer of ideas I can’t push over. “The church is built on a bridge that spans it.” The ‘Commander’ edge vanishes when he’s not talking about war. I can’t determine if it’s a trick he’s mastered during the time he’s been out of the game, or if he has always been this way and I’ve never seen him in a non-war setting before now.

  We walk in silence a good distance. The humans have to stop for water from moving streams. They have rules to follow about where they can drink from—clear fast-moving groundwater that they can trace where it came out of the earth. I guess the ground is a natural filter system and despite the advances the Interco
ntinents have made over the years in gaining control of resources and distribution of goods, they still struggle with water sanitation.

  Too bad there aren’t hard and fast rules regarding what AI to trust. Their world is currently contaminated with every aspect of AI they intended to filter out. The Mord was their first indication they were drinking in contaminated technology as a society. As far as I can tell, the humans developed so many advanced precautionary measures, they ensured only the most devious of cheat codes would ever find a way through.

  “Nazrete, I’m curious,” I ask. Juan lowers his eyebrows at me, most likely uncomfortable with me addressing one of his personalities directly. Uneasy what it is I might possibly be curious about. “Isn’t there still a lot of desert in the Arabic regions of the Intercontinents?”

  “Get to the point,” Juan says. Nazrete has a way of being short-tempered and lacking patience as well as tact, so it’s difficult to know if she answers or someone else who doesn’t want to forfeit a conversation to the only female inhabiting their human armor.

  “What do you manufacture if all you have is desert?” I push rich green leaves out of my face, letting them slap back toward Mav, who catches the branch without consequence. Once Mav lets go, Gordon grunts, branch-slapped. “The band is about the distribution of resources, right?”

  “But what resources do you have?” Mav asks.

  “The land doesn’t have to be green to have something to offer,” Juan/Nazrete says. “You have a misconception of value based on what you’ve been told has worth.”

  I don’t agree with that sentiment, but this isn’t the time to argue about what has worth and what doesn’t. “What do they manufacture?” I ask. I put my hands up to defuse any misunderstanding since I know Nazrete is prone to those. “I mean, oil… I know there’s oil. Is that it?” To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m intentionally goading the Commander. I probably am.

  “Even sand is a commodity if you know how to package it,” Juan responds, leaving little room for more discussion.

  We endure another span of slow progress peppered with human complaints regarding physical ailments and lack of energy. Their constant moaning about needing food increases. To make the experience worse, I need a charging station soon. “How much farther?”

  “Follow the ravine,” Juan responds.

  “But…” I don’t want to fight, but I do want to know what to expect, and when to expect it. If Juan doesn’t have the answers, I’d appreciate it if he’d admit that. “Will there be access to a charging port?”

  “No hay esignal,” Belen pipes up from behind me. It annoys me that she’s eavesdropping steady enough to pipe in like that at any time. My questions aren’t directed at her.

  I turn around, facing Belen and point to my mouth as I articulate with full lip expression. “Charge…charging.” I swoop my hand to circle around my mouth for added emphasis. “Power? To plug in? Charging.”

  “There is no esignal,” Belen says.

  I throw my arms out and let them fall to my sides, grateful my shoulder is holding without complication, and turn around so I no longer face Belen.

  “Are we planning to walk through the night?” Gordon asks. “Belen isn’t doing too well with her rib. She needs to rest.”

  We all turn to glare at Gordon. He’s not wrong about Belen, but out of the five of us, he groans the most. Granted, he’s had the most tree limbs whack him in the face.

  “We need to keep moving,” Mav says, earning him a glimmer of approval from Juan, which I think Mav appreciates based on the twitch of joy that graces his unsmiling face. That’s the thing about approval from the Commander, it’s desirable and addictive.

  “We haven’t seen evidence of anyone following us,” Gordon explains.

  “They’re going to close all borders. If we don’t get out of Ecuador before that happens…” Juan doesn’t say what.

  “Listen,” Belen directs. We pause like she’s telling us there’s a buzz on the wind we need to watch out for. Gordon swats the air over his ear. “If we run, they will think we are enemies.”

  Gordon chokes trying to stifle a laugh. “…enemies…like we’re playing jungle war.” He laughs again.

  We communally ignore Gordon and continue to wait for Belen to clarify more.

  “If we don’t get away from the Mord epicenter.” Juan raises his eyebrows as if he’s talking to a petulant child, reminding Belen that she played a major role in the fact that there is now a ‘Mord epicenter.’ “We’ll be bombed, incapacitated with signal overload, and if you don’t recall, we’re being accused of terrorism.” Juan points to the west, the direction the sun is setting. We came from the east—Quito. Probably not the time to point out his error. I keep it to myself but allow for a little satisfaction that at least I know ordinate directions even without working sensors.

  “What’s that?” Gordon diverts the attention of the group to a spot in the distance. Blue-gray stonework breaks up the green landscape ahead. A bridge.

  “We made it,” Mav says with confidence while under Juan’s observation, then turns back to Belen and rephrases to allow for error. “Did we make it?”

  I quickly swivel my perspective to catch Juan narrowing his eyes at Mav. It’s the look of distrust, how I imagine grace slips away from the holy. Spending time in a high-stress situation with anyone is taxing on relationships. We happen to be stuck with people that tax each other’s interpersonal skills to the max.

  Belen stares at the stones ahead. The structure has medieval spires lifting out of the canyon high above where we trudge on the uneven and narrow valley floor. It’s a castle and a bridge and a church all combined into one glorious and overwhelming structure. Sets of three repeats in the design of the building, three spires reaching to heaven, three arches in each window setting, and three peaks. I lose my footing and almost slip toward the river water—the river no one would drink from because we haven’t yet tracked all and every tributary.

  “I’m guessing no power outlets.” Where are Juan and I going to recharge?

  “Do you not have solar chargers?” Juan asks. “I’ve been charging all afternoon.” Juan shows me a discrete panel on the underside of his west-facing arm where codes used to be planted. He has a flip top panel to absorb battery power from the sun’s rays. First of all, he could have mentioned that earlier, so I could turn mine on if I have such a thing.

  I didn’t have such a thing in Mexico. I touch my left arm—the ripped one with extra parts and pieces shoved up there for an emergency, but no flipping panel. “They didn’t finish,” I say as if I’m apologizing for being less well made than Juan.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I’m sure they were going to add that next.”

  We share a look. A look that says, once again, I’m missing a major part of my left arm and it’s not just where my skin is torn, it’s what’s supposed to go with it.

  “Maybe there’s a car.” Gordon catches up to where the rest of us mill about gawking at the structure ahead. “You can charge from the battery or something.”

  “Good old-fashioned jumping.” Mav rubs his hands together. I wonder at the meaning of ‘jumping’. If, maybe, there is more than one use of the word by how Mav seems impressed with his language choice but I choose not to ask. I’ll find out soon enough.

  The bridge is even more impressive the closer we get to it. The river grows in this section, making it more treacherous to navigate the ravine floor safely. The manmade structure promises a footpath ahead. I hope that offers an ascent option other than climbing since Gordon and Belen might not be capable of climbing back out of the canyon without help.

  “Las Lajas.” Belen marvels. She has the tone of being in the presence of something sacred. I might be more impressed if I didn’t know the term lajas means slab or fine rope. I’m assuming in this instance it means slab. Rock slab. Slab is a lot less otherworldly sounding than laja.

  “Cars.” Gordon points out that the sanctuary is, in fact, teeming with cars. “Batt
eries.” He doesn’t mention that all the cars are all the same style and have a military appearance to them. I notice. I’m pretty sure Juan notices.

  Above us is a tram of some sort—a suspended mode of transportation from one side of the ravine to the other. We all glare at it with distrust.

  “What do we do?” Mav asks. “It’s obviously being watched.”

  “Huh?” Gordon reevaluates the bridge. This time he sees the armored aspect to the vehicles, the eerie absence of visible people for the number of vehicles. “Oh, shnike. Do we turn back?”

  “No.” Belen protests.

  To be fair, none of us wants to trudge through the jungle crack any longer, even those of us immune to venom and hunger.

  “Commander?” I ask without thinking about what I’m saying. We need a military mind crazy enough to figure out a solution in a winless setting. We actually need the Commander.

  Juan half-smiles, then turns to evaluate the bridge sanctuary. I have full confidence he’ll find a backdoor, literally or figuratively. It’s what he does.

  “Who?” Mav and Gordon ask together. Neither of them seems particularly alerted, just curious regarding the title I’m throwing out there. Their curiosity lacking alertness puts all my internal alarms into siren mode.

  “Inside joke,” I say, noticing how the set in Juan’s shoulders dips for a moment and his eyes shift as if chewing on the thought of whether I’m mocking him or not. He observes Mav and Gordon for longer like their reaction determines the degree of his. “It’s what we say when we need to solve an impossible puzzle inside the game.” I continue to backpedal.

  Juan shifts his evaluative gaze to me. I don’t want to connect with him necessarily, at least not in the way we connected last game. Maybe humanly-united is a different scenario. We’re different people here with unique goals, not mortally opposed to one another by design. Given the option to not be pitted against each other, perhaps the Commander is worth getting to know.