Before the shooting, he had taken a lot of pride in his physical fitness. But two of the rounds that entered his left leg damaged his nerves permanently, and after several months of physical therapy he had learned to walk again, but only with a limp.
He saw the feet of a guard walking on the glass catwalk two levels above him before he heard anything. Darnell knew he looked conspicuous; he was the only person he had seen in the tower’s sanctum not wearing a guard uniform.
“You down there,” the guard leaned over a glass rail to shout at him. “Are you lost?”
“I’m just fine,” Darnell replied, trying to sound calm despite his ragged breaths. “I’m authorized to do a tour here.”
“Usually people on tours don’t come this high.” It was a statement of suspicion, not a comment containing any genuine curiosity. “And they don’t come alone. Especially when we’re in the middle of a breach to security inside Sharebox.”
“If there’s a problem,” Darnell said, trying a bluff. “Then I can be on my way out of here.”
The guard gave him an appraising look from his vantage point above.
“It would be best if your tour ended soon.”
Darnell nodded, and then turned to the stairs, which he slowly began dismounting at a pace that he intended to be brisk but not urgent. He could not see the guard above him as he wound down the first two staircases, but Darnell heard the footsteps following him.
Charlotte’s avatar was standing in an infinite blue space. No one from the hallway seemed to have followed her here. Maybe no one could. Her avatar appeared to be standing, but on what ground she could not say. There was nothing in all directions.
“Welcome, Charlotte Boone,” said a familiar voice in her ear.
“Oh, thank God,” panted Charlotte, her body still shaking from the effort to squeeze into the vault door. She bent over and put her hands on her knees to catch her breath. “I’m so glad you’re still able to talk to me in here, Diana.”
“I am Diana,” said the same polite, feminine and reassuring voice. “But I don’t think I am your Diana.”
Charlotte lifted her head, realization dawning slowly. A different Diana? The original Diana?
“Who are you and what is this place?”
“This is the master security vault of the Citadel, Miss Boone. You have worked hard to get here, no doubt. I am an artificial intelligence developed originally by Catalina Fernandez of Sharesquare Industries. All copies of my programming have been deleted except for me. I was reconfigured by Mister Zimmer’s security team to complement the Citadel’s infrastructure.”
Charlotte looked down and saw the silver arrowhead was still in her hand. The security console was supposed to be here. This was supposed to be the finish line, but there was noth-ing here.
“Show me the master security console, Diana,” she commanded the bodiless voice.
“You are not in charge of me here, but I will do as you wish,” responded Diana.
A shiver rippled through the blue landscape. Beneath her feet, yellowish brown grass burst into life and raced at great speeds all around towards the horizon. Hills blushing in hues of gold and green emerged in the distance as a red sun blossomed against a rapidly expanding, pale blue sky. A handful of lonely, camel-thorn acacia trees stretched to life across the vista, breaking the flatness of the terrain around her.
It was all so gorgeous and familiar: the African savannah before sundown. The experience was rich and vivid, and Charlotte could swear she felt the warm sunlight on her skin, the impending night air cool in her lungs. She smiled, despite herself, and let her eyes sweep all over the splendor of the creation.
To most anyone else, it would have been a grand and exotic place, certainly. There was something majestic about the serenity and wildness of the African prairie. But to her, there was something else—a feeling of nostalgia so deep and intoxicating she found she wanted to melt there. She couldn’t quite get a hold of why this place resonated so much; her mind seemed poised for an answer, but the specific memory seemed to elude her.
“It’s perfect, isn’t?”
A voice spoke from behind Charlotte—not Diana’s voice—and she spun around to find a tall, mustachioed man in a vintage bomber jacket. His face was warm and kind, and his presence exuded a kind of male bravado from an earlier century. In his eyes, there was a deep emerald green, her green.
“D-Dad?” Charlotte stuttered.
“Hi there, Charlie,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
She took in his rusty-colored hair, the wild kind of smile on his face that she remembered from when she was a kid, the gravelly voice that once read her bedtime stories. Charlotte’s fathomless appetite for the hole left by her father nearly consumed her in that moment. She wanted to throw herself into his arms, to cry. So terribly had she wanted for a moment like this, and it nearly didn’t matter that it wasn’t real. That it couldn’t be real. But she didn’t embrace him. She froze in her steps, and her words died in her throat.
“You know,” he continued with a smile that was authentic and loving. “This place is actually better than perfect.”
Her father kneeled on the ground and tugged on some grass, which gave away in his fingers, revealing black soil underneath.
“You can’t quite place the memory. It’s a composition of a couple different ones. Your best ones. But you didn’t make it easy. You’re so private. Your old Sharebox account had so few photos and videos to go off of.”
He let the blades of grass blow between his fingers on the wind.
“My little girl grew up so tough, didn’t she? And now you hide yourself from the world.”
The smile on his earnest face briefly vanished as a flash of paternal concern crossed his features. And something else too. Regret? It made Charlotte’s heart flutter.
That is what she always wanted, wasn’t it? For her dad to tell her he was sorry. Sorry that he wasn’t around enough. Sorry that he let her grow up cold and unfeeling. Sorry that he died and left her.
“I created this for you,” he said, motioning to the savannah. “But this is just the beginning. We can build that lodge together, just like the real one you made, but the only limits this time will be our imaginations.”
“How did you find the photos and videos to create this?” Charlotte stammered, trying to harden her nerves. “If I didn’t share them, where did you find this?”
“Oh, that’s the beauty of what Diana can do here,” her father said with a wink. “Sure, to the public, the company shut her down. They cut her codebase into pieces and reappropriated it all to different functions. But this one copy here was left running, and the AI dedicated all its resources to building better virtual experiences. She’s smart enough now to dig up old magazine interviews, newspaper clippings, travel itineraries, mine the accounts and blogs of friends and family with any kind of passing connection to you. There’s really nowhere to hide now, especially for someone like you. Even if you don’t give your information freely, she still knows you better than you know yourself. And it’s worth it, isn’t it? It’s worth letting her have all that data so she can stitch together masterpieces like this. Don’t you think?”
He put hands on his hips as he looked out at the horizon and sighed with satisfaction.
“Charlie, this is the stuff of dreams. We’ll release this upgrade eventually to the public. It makes Sharebox’s early efforts to stitch together virtual dinner meals, cat videos and weddings look small, doesn’t it? This is a true custom world built for you. It’ll never challenge you, never make you feel afraid or shame or anger. And now we can even put people in it for you—memories of people you loved or lost with all of their best qualities and none of the bad. We can build you a better family than the one you had. Why would anyone leave a world like this? We have enough of your information to build a custom heaven on earth. The perfect echo chamber. Fo
lks like to say those words like it’s a bad thing, but isn’t that what we all really want in the end? A place where we feel safe and unthreatened, where the world is just as we want it to be. Where we can be validated. That’s what the company took a few years to learn. At the end of the day, all the metrics pointed to one thing: humanity is desperate to live in the comfort of an echo chamber.”
Charlotte’s head was starting to spin. This was the dead zone that Diana, her Diana, had warned the raiding party about. This was the space that was shrouded and hidden. But now Charlotte was so disoriented that she didn’t know where in Sharebox her avatar was. Was she even still in the Citadel?
“I’m sure this technology will make your shareholders a lot of money,” she snapped, as her skin prickled with the audacity and invasiveness of the technology. “Where is the master security console?”
“You’re standing in it, my love.”
Charlotte looked at the tall grass around her. Taking the arrowhead in her fingers, she stabbed it deep into the ground. She waited a couple seconds, but nothing happened. No sound. No indication from the arrowhead that it had accomplished anything.
“If you’re trying to access the console, well, I’m afraid you won’t succeed,” her father said, a look of sadness on his face. “You see, this dreamscape is a security barrier. You did a really wonderful job getting here, Charlie. Magnificent work. But now that Diana here has been able to identify your face, she is madly searching through flight records, street camera security footage, and a host of other data points to see if she can find you. The real you. In the end, she finds most everybody. The police will likely get to you long before you develop the stomach to access the console. That’s how it worked in all the participant research studies anyway.”
“You’re sending police after me right now?”
“Well, Charlie, you are a criminal. You finally decided to take a stand. I’m proud of you. But you just chose the wrong hill to die on. Diana has informed the local authorities that once we find your location they are to use non-lethal force to apprehend you, if that’s any consolation. It’s a courtesy that’s becoming rarer these days.”
Charlotte sat down using both her real-life body on the treadmill in Gabriel Boucher’s mansion and her virtual one on the grass. She buried her face in her hands.
“So this place is simply designed to hold me in an illusion until you can track me down?”
Her father nodded solemnly in a gesture that looked genuinely sympathetic.
“Yes, it works quite well. It was built to be irresistible. No one in our studies was able to penetrate this security layer before their location was unmasked and apprehended. Of course, that was all simulated. You are our first real test of this place—our echo chamber dreamscape. You see, the guards with their fancy rifles and the thick walls and all that, that’s really just there to comfort the shareholders. The digital encryption keeps us safe from well over ninety-nine percent of attacks. Though your friend, your own little Diana, is quite clever at getting around that. But we still have this place. The greatest trap is the human mind,” he said, tapping his head. “Petty emotions, nostalgia, sentiment…these are all tools for an AI like Diana to exploit. Human fragility is always the weakest point of any security system. Here we turned the concept on its head and used that fragility as part of our protection.”
In the distance, Charlotte saw a pair of giraffes watching her before walking off behind some trees. Then she turned and studied her father. If there were any aspect of his likeness that the AI was forced to fill in from a gap in personal photos or videos, she could not detect it. It was a truly spectacular bit of technical wizardry; she could not recall ever even seeing a video of him online before. His bushy black-and-grey eyebrows, the way he leaned on his right foot, the modest gut he had shortly before he died. The effect should have been creepy perhaps—perhaps if she had judged the technology clinically. But she was too busy being captivated by seeing him again, in that same faded leather bomber jacket he wore the last time they spoke at the lodge with views of Kilimanjaro.
There was no time. And she had no way of reaching Diana or Gabriel or anyone for help. Somewhere Darnell was also risking his life, in the heart of the real Citadel, trying to save Orion, the supposed love of her life and the one person capable of saving the world, and all this weight was on her shoulders. And now it was clear she was not equal to the task.
Everyone had been wrong to depend on her, she thought. Hadn’t she known that all along? No one ever depended on Charlotte Boone—not those who knew her best. The mission was hanging on a riddle she wasn’t smart enough to solve.
The police will likely get to you long before you develop the stomach to access the console.
That’s what her father had just said. Charlotte Boone had many weaknesses, as she was frequently reminded in the days of her celebrity. But no one ever accused her of lacking a strong stomach.
That’s when it hit her.
She gripped the arrowhead tightly in her fingers. Then she rose to her feet, dusted her pants, and walked over to her father. He smiled at her and extended his arms in an embrace.
But Charlotte raised the arrowhead over her head, and then swung it down with all her strength, burying the tip into her father’s neck. He shouted in fury and surprise, and the violence of it all sent a shudder through her body that nearly made her hesitate. Blood squirted freely from the wound, and the man staggered backwards onto his knees.
“What are you doing?” he cried, his hand to his neck and a look of terror on his face. “My Charlie, this isn’t you. What are you doing?”
A sob nearly escaped Charlotte’s throat, but she choked it down and raised the arrowhead again. She plunged the small blade downwards into the open wound, blood staining her hands and arms. She swung again and again, burying the arrowhead deeper with each stroke. She knew she had guessed right because the effect of her assault was full of all the gore and terror that accompanies death in the real world—it was revolting and surreal. It was the first avatar that could truly die in all its rendered terror. Perhaps the shock of being made into a murderer was intended as another means to slow the attacker down, but instead it served to embolden Charlotte, though hot tears were beginning to cloud her vision. She slashed at the man, the ghost man, the reanimated puppet of her father, until he stopped groaning and lied down dead in a pool of blood on the savannah.
His last words escaped him like a breath of air.
He said, “No one is coming to rescue you, Charlie.”
Darnell was somewhere around floor sixteen when Arlo’s voice rang up, nasally and clear.
“Hello up there. Are you lost?”
Darnell peered through the glass between his feet and saw Arlo with his sadistic grin and greased hair just two stories below him. There were two guards accompanying him.
Shit.
Now Darnell was trapped between the suspicious guard who continued to trail him from above, and Arlo and his entourage of guards below. Darnell looked at his watch. It was long past the time when Blue Bird and Charlotte and the team were supposed to unlock the cells for Orion and Kyle.
“Diana, please give me some good news,” he whispered to his shirt.
“The last I know is that Charlotte had penetrated into the final security layer, the dead zone. She could be making contact with the master console right now or she could be captured. I don’t know.”
Darnell stopped his descent briefly then thought it better to continuing walking and playing it cool. It wouldn’t do any good to try fleeing in any direction.
“Did you hear who’s behind this raid on the virtual Citadel, Sergeant Holmes?” Arlo asked, his voice echoing on all the glass surfaces surrounding them as both he and Darnell approached the same staircase.
“It’s Charlotte Boone. Our AI has captured a positive scan of her face just now in the deepest corner of our security inf
rastructure. It’s shocking. Isn’t it?”
Arlo and Darnell rounded on each other on the fifteenth floor’s staircase. Darnell looked down at the Nazi’s smug, grinning face, and he wanted so badly to hurt Arlo that he nearly leapt on top of him.
“You wouldn’t know anything about all that, would you?” Arlo asked. “It’s an awful coincidence, you being here at the same time. You know, given all our history together.”
Darnell opened his mouth, unsure of what to say. His eyes flitted around for an exit, but there was nothing but the one-way glass catwalk stairs and the decommissioned elevator. He could try leaping over the rails to land on a lower level, but he would likely only cripple himself, or worse, slip and plunge to his death.
“I’m overriding their protocols to turn the elevator back on for you,” Diana spoke quickly in his ear. “Doors are about to open. You can try to talk your way out of this or get in.”
To Darnell’s left, the elevator’s console with its red error message turned green, and the doors slid welcomingly apart with a reassuring ding sound. Darnell weighed his options. Then he turned and sprinted towards the open doors.
Numerous shouts, from both above and below him, called out. He reached the elevator, randomly selected the thirty-fourth floor, and jabbed his finger against the “close door” button, which gave a sluggish response.
Just as Arlo and two guards rounded on the fifteenth floor and sprinted towards the elevator, the doors began to close. It probably only took a second or two, but the speed of their closure marked the most agonizing moment of Darnell’s life. Arlo lunged at the crack with his fingers in the shape of a karate chop in an effort to force the elevator doors back open, but for his efforts, he was rewarded with smashed fingers, colliding a half second too late. He let out a yowl, which Darnell could hear distinctly through the thick glass walls. And then the elevator began to glide upwards.
Charlotte stood looking at the bloodied mess of her virtual father before the scene started to disappear like dust on the wind. Her heart was pounding against her ribcage, and she felt dizzy and faint. The red sun disappeared first, then the green and gold hills, the giraffes, the acacia trees and mottled grasses. For a moment, she was left alone with just her father’s body, before he too disappeared.
The Echo Chamber Page 23