Finally. Adam found himself engaged and interested and that felt like a relief, a respite from the judge-penitent role he got drawn into with her. “Okay. So, here we are. Done deal,” he conceded. “What now?”
“We know the AI has more plans for us than keeping us locked up in a simulation. We are working to reveal those plans as well.”
“Let’s go back.” Adam turned his chair into barcalounger. “Where did the AI come from? Mannerheim and the feds? I remember your explanation taped by Natalie. Sounded pretty fantastical to me.”
“And so it is, to some degree. I am myself only slowly understanding what happened. I did hijack its nanites but it allowed me too. Why? I experienced its magic show, but was I intended to? The only way I can find out how the AI came about is to go back in time and or find Mannerheim, reconstitute him and see if his memories can be revived. If I can find out how the AI came into existence, I might be able to discover a weakness, a way to infiltrate the programming, find out its true agenda.”
“Noble. But you need me?”
“Let’s say the future of humanity does.”
“So my assignment, should I accept it …”
“Pursue the answer with me—or access to the answer. To do that, we need to break out of this simulation into the Real World, the level of reality the AI operates in.”
"What are the barriers to finding that out?”
“Energy is the barrier. With enough energy, which we experience as focus, mental focus. We can break out, punch a hole right through the AI’s firewall. Everyone around me is concentrating on bringing us together. So it must be possible to do even more. The energy requirements, however, are large. There’s more than ten thousand people behind this current projection. You only see a small percentage.”
Adam leaned to peer around her. The Africans spread out behind her over a wide, dusty plane.
“Since everything that happens in programing gets represented in The Simulation as an event,” Celestine continued once Adam settle back in his seat, “we can think of the firewall shielding us from the core programing of the AI as the cosmic microwave background of our worldview. Get through that, and we can get through to the core of the program and hack it.”
“Or break it.”
“Which would be a disaster. So, we’ll have to attempt to change it without crashing it.”
“And so you look for Mannerheim?”
“Yes. We have no reports of him among the Bios, but we have signals of his DNA here and there in the system.”
“I’m sure he was in that building when they brought it down."
“Quite possibly, but I’ve been seeing bio-patterns in the material scavenged from the city that could be him.”
“He was flashing out a stream of Morris Code there at the end, in the middle of the night. But, hell, I don’t read Morris Code.”
“That’s good information, Adam!” Her voice raised an octave there, but she did not change her posture or demeanor. “We’re hunting video of his building’s last days right now. Could be very interesting to learn what he was trying to say. By the way, why do you think they left you and your Space Needle?”
“Well, as you and the AI are keen to point out, I’m not sure or even know how I can be sure they have. They, the dissemblers, the AI or AI Personas, whoever is running shit here, could have replaced it all just as they replaced me with this machine or whatever I am."
“You could actually be ten inches tall and the Needle a couple of yards high, right? Or, why any height at all? Perhaps this is your own private simulation. Your own private purgatory. Just what you’ve always wanted.”
“Indeed. Well, I better get to typing up my notes …” He started lifting himself out of the chair …
“One more thing,” she interrupted. She shifted in her chair, bringing shoulders forward, eyes closer to his.
“Do we now arrive at the reason you’re here?”
“You can see the effort it takes to have this intimate conversation. So, you can also see we cannot investigate that black box down there.”
“What can I do? It has to be hotter than the hubs of hell down there with all that electricity pouring in.”
“Perhaps you can get help.”
“Oh, I see. This has all been to get Natalie to join forces with you.”
“Just remind everyone that the key to our independence within the Mind Hive could lie with Mannerheim or in that box down there. If we can get some core genetic information, a bit of his brain, we might be able to recreate him and learn a lot more about the choices he made when creating the AI or at least be able to narrow down what his original algorithm looked like.”
“Interesting. What about those in hibernation? Is that how they are stored? Like a compressed file with the details of their lives to be filled in upon waking? It’s only been rumor but you’ve confirmed that many want to be shelved until the AI gets this world figured out and so they are stored? … and suicide isn’t an option?”
“As you well know.”
“A malicious rumor.”
“Yeah, right. Anyway, as far as we know the AI employs a tactic for dealing with the fact that energy cannot be created only converted. We can’t experience directly because of its affect, but even basic computing systems use Statistical Time Division Multiplexing, where it diverts energy not being used to other programs in a complex system. That’s has to be how it can run so many simulations. Running us all at the same time, would overwhelm even its vast resources. Energy inside The Simulation is bounded by the totality of energy available in the region, eventually in the galaxy. So far, most of that energy is too far away to use and some of it is in exotic forms and cannot be converted or released and captured here.”
“So we sleep.”
“Right, but we suspect it is more like being deeply sedated than what we experienced as sleep in our biological form. And, so there may be another way to figure out the AI’s plan for our future. And that’s to break out of The Simulation and see the original code of the AI.”
“Created by Mannerheim.”
“Or,” a new voice broke in, “our universe isn’t the first one to have a simulation and Mannerheim means nothing.”
“I wish you would knock.” Adam twisted his seat around.
“I saw you had a visitor and were likely to be dressed. And the great Celestine nonetheless!”
“Well, not that I don’t enjoy your attempts at killing me, but now if you will excuse me, there have been some exciting developments in the lab. Speaking of developments, however. Natalie, why don’t you use your superpowers to go down there and see what’s going on with that black box?”
“If I do, you’ll be among the millions to read about it first.” Since Celestine had tricked Natalie into replication, Natalie has held onto a bit of a grudge, though really she had barely tried to kill Celestine and just that one time.
After Celestine snorted, the image of her siting in the middle of an African village flickered out.
“You’re such a big help.” Adam stood and mixed himself a drink.
“I found Grant. He’s embedded with the Bios. He is a Bio.” She walked to a table and unloaded an absurd number of items out of her pockets.
“Is that good news?”
“Unclear. He’s shot a lot of film that I need to get developed."
“You can’t just absorb it? Or, see what’s inside the case with your x-ray vision?”
“It’s analogue, not digital. The film has to be developed the old fashioned way. I can make the chemicals. I just need a space to set up a darkroom.”
“And here I have the last building standing on the West Coast?”
“The nearest. There are others. I can range pretty far, but for now, it is much more convenient to work here.”
“Well, what have you got?"
“I don’t want to talk about it. I need to write it first.”
“Normally, I’d call bullshit on that.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“I understand that some stories are more art than news, so go for it. You can work out of the restaurant floor. You get the entire wing!"
V
The Twins, an appellation accepted and adopted by them, walked blond and naked side-by-side into a bright white concept of a bio-tech clean room lit by smoking neon lights, electric colors dripping down the white walls in reds, blues and greens. In barefoot strides, hips swaying, they smiled at their target who was reclined in an armless leather chair: Perran Martin. The hum of the neon ballasts grew louder as The Twins approached Perran from either side. Mirror-identical thin noses, thick pink lips, they came at him with pornographic intent written clearly in their eyes. The Twins licked teeth in unison. Perran squirmed against padded restraints clamped to his ankles and wrists. He had had as many and as varied sexual experiences as he had time for and The Twins had been at the top of his wish list since he’d heard of their cult-like sexual activity. Perran understood the price would be downtime in The Simulation, but what was a little clock time of hijacked attention when … The Twins kneeled before him, skin slick with perspiration and oil and took him into their hands, caressing … when he will experience his own pleasure, echoing though his experience of their individual pleasure and shared … the chair adjusted to push his head up and his heart thumped at the drama unfolding before him. They opened his mind into the one they shared. He entered. In the bio-feedback loop of their Ménage à Trois, they attained a growing climax state what would last and increase to an empty sate of pure lust until they let him go. After all he had experimented with, after all the male and female body forms he’d explored, The Twins offered one extra, one glimmer he could not get anywhere else, an experience of sexual oneness with multiple people, a whole-mind oneness, oblivion in a field of ecstasy. The neon lights burst. His transcendence of self complete.
VI
In the stolen video, hovering hologram-like in midair in a white space of indeterminate size, Celestine sat in a high-back red chair positioned on top of a circular floor constructed from a round, glass-like, two-dimensional slab of crystal. The audience stood reedlike on rows of platforms, arranged concert style above her. Also around Celestine and her customary tower of black hair was a grid of copper wire. On the platforms around her stood a chorus of the simulated who were dressed in tribal regalia and kept their focused on Celestine.
“The stage-craft mechanism,” reported a voice straight from old television, “allows Celestine to collect the energy and use it to project herself, with sharp plasma-sparks, into the vague space of a visual hole in The Simulation skin. A mirror team stabilizes the hole. Their efforts are revealed in lightening strikes racing around the rim. The location of the anomaly in the space-time structure of the simulated universe, a small, empty artifact of the AI’s preparations to pause The Simulation, are hard to predict. Celestine’s team have missed by simulated miles every time they’ve attempted to capture one of these artifacts. But this time they are able to plot the matrix of occurrences of these normally short-lived artifacts of Mind Hive shutdown. Using the data to construct a more-and-more narrowly probable location, Celestine’s capture team had been able to pinpoint the location in time and space of the next hole in The Simulation. Celestine and her team of scientists had theorized that the hole interfaced directly with the Mind Hive construct running The Simulation.”
In the video, during part of the narration, Celestine projected a slimmed-down program into the artifact. The Mind Hive represented her penetrating program as a spear hurled through a square black window. The electrically charged coils of her “Tower of Power” snapped and glittered and then melted down into a charged solid plate under her chair and feet. Celestine’s black hair shot out from her head into a perfect black disk haloing her face as she turned in place.
In the video of the event being shown to Robert by The Twins, Celestine’s face pixelated, darkened and then vanished into a black zone at the center of the halo. Only the flicker of tiny but bright lights, star-like against the vast emptiness of information-less space, remained. The sprites twinkled and then all went black. The video cut to the skin of the simulation where the black hole had been. It had healed over. Celestine’s face emerged in a blurry transition to that of a human. A smile, broad and toothy-bright spread across her face.
“The Mind Hive,” she said in a booming voice as those encircling her began to reanimate, “has captured a primordial wormhole! That explains the increase in outages. According to the teams reporting back from Real Earth—Bug People in China, Brazil, Canada and Egypt—this latest outage lasted nearly eight RE hours. According to the data sent back to us just as we shut down, it appears the AI is also shooting information through the wormhole. We just don’t know where it is.”
The exhausted Donators around her yelled and whistled in celebration of the discovery.
“I don’t know if the AI is communicating with other beings and if so, where in the universe the other end of the wormhole opens. Maybe it’s sending information out as a beacon. Maybe, like the program we shot though the Black Hole, the AI is attempting to build a machine on the other end of the wormhole that can determine where it is in our galaxy, if it is in our galaxy. Perhaps it will be the key to spreading intelligence, which is still the AI’s objective.” Celestine boomed excitedly, “This is the most complete information we’ve ever gleaned from the AI’s ac …”
The image of Celestine, mouth open in mid word, froze and flickered as did all those encircling her. The airborne image of the scene reduced from Robert’s entire perspective into a rectangle and snapped out.
“Will you publish the video?” one of The Twins asked Robert as she approached his reclined body in the rudimentary, sub-simulated space they had drawn him into without his permission.
Robert, having been down this road with The Twins before, felt a thrill ripple up his spine. He knew, however, that while he would enjoy his time with them, he would need weeks to recover. So, he said, “No. Publish it yourselves.”
The Twin on his left caressed his leg, moving up his inner thigh. He brushed her hand away.
“We’re tainted goods, of course,” she said, a look of disappointment pouting her eyes and mouth.
“Let me take the footage with me. Show me the way out of here, and I’ll look into it.”
The old song “Momma Told Me Not to Come” kicked in and filled the room.
“We really should talk this through,” said The Twin on his right. She placed a hand on his shoulder and moved it up his neck.
He brushed her hand aside, too.
“You bitches let me out of here, and, like I said, I’ll look into it.”
“You used to be so much fun,” The Twin said.
“And you used to be a lot less scary. What’s with kidnapping people and the twin blowup-doll routine?”
“You tell us. This apparition is apparently what you want to see.” The Twin on his left pushed her hands up his leg.
“That’s ass …” His apartment reintegrated around him. “…ault!” he finished exclaiming. But not like you can call anyone to complain. The culture of shaming was his only recourse, but it’s hard to shame the shameless. In his hand he felt a rectangular device. He opened his palm and there was a thumb drive. He held it up and examined it. Just like USB thumb drives of old. He’d have to find someone to make a computer replica to read the drive, and he knew just the person to hunt down.
VII
He’d never had children and yet Adam observed with very little surprise as Natalie took over what felt like every nook and cranny of his personal space: Artifacts she’d gathered from Bio encampments thrown over there (wood carvings, bone stamps, leather pages of diaries written with faint berry stains); papers and magazines from before The Transition tossed over here … basically, her shit everywhere. And, she wasn’t much for respecting personal space! Natalie, apparently, couldn’t think without walking around. But, again, he was not surprised, given his experience training young j
ournalists over the past thirty years. He did admit that it was good having another person in this bizarre, solitary environment, however. Adam was a loner at heart, for sure, but it had been years, mostly alone atop the Space Needle, since he’d had a normal interaction with a person. He did have the occasional holographic intrusion, like the surprise visit from Celestine. But mostly just himself and his, uh, writing.
Natalie reclined in the old leather chair created by the AI Persona who had visited Adam here. Many other versions of the Persona had given many other interviews across the globe since then, both on Real Earth (in the early days) and recently in The Simulation. Nevertheless, Adam had kept the chair, even though he could now make his own stuff, including the alcohol he stirred into an iced drink as he scowled at Natalie for sitting in his seat when she could just as easily make her own. He spun himself a barstool and watched her flipping through Grants photos arranged in the air in front of her. The images were developed the old-fashioned way and enlarged into prints. Then she scanned them into digital formats and had begun the task of editing the nearly two thousand images down to a few dozen for an immersive story into the lives of Bios on Real Earth.
Her editing job was painful because the photos were nearly all quite good. As she switched the images across her field of focus, she moved the most obviously great and revealing photos into a collection of sure bets. So far, he’d watched her move photos of a group of Bios, standing like mounds of raggedy blankets with spears poking out, in front of a heap of people frozen into a pile. The survivors of a raid by a roaming band of Toughs were looking to identify half eaten family and friends among the dead. The photo series that captured the aftermath of the raid had to be from late in the first decade after The Transition. The band of Toughs had been tracked down and all killed (except for the young men and women captured as slaves) by a posse of Bios who could still at that time organize a response. By the middle of the second decade, the bands of Toughs had been decimated. By then starvation had become the greater threat to life. Another series of photos showed scattered holes in the snow and ice down to the ground level filled up with dead adults and children. Later, Natalie spun through photos of the lines of people rushing out of the urban areas of Seattle in long lines heading into the suburbs until those areas too became infested with disassembling nanites. There were also lots of engaging photos from camp life that showed human resilience in the face of what would have been considered unbearable living conditions just a decade earlier. Another constant source of menace were the AI Personas sent out to gather stray tech. In one series of photos, Grant shot the ghost-like figure of a human-looking Persona from within a circle of dark mounds that were the actual people standing under blankets, sometimes two and three under one blanket. They had no defenses against the Persona, though several of the dark mounds had spears sticking outward toward the glittering apparition, which changed shapes from female to male, child to adult. While clearly there was no sound to the photos, Adam had heard from Natalie the kinds of cries and images a Persona will cycle through attempting to lure individuals out of defensive groups. In a later image, a young man had stepped out from under a blanket with a small, obviously defunct video game player held out before him. In a followup image, another man had the game in one hand, stretched back to throw the device. Another image, zoomed into the Persona, the device lay at its base, which had switch back to tractor mode. The Persona absorbed the device, and the last image in the series was of the Persona racing away, kicking up a cloud of snow crystals.
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