The next series of photos showed another encounter that had not worked out so well. A glittering mass of nanites lay across the body of an old man; the photo showing the smear with only the top of his head and legs from the knees down showing clearly. In the next image, the Persona was tracking away through the show, and the man now had a hole in his chest, eyes wide in his grizzled face. Others around him in obvious despair. Pacemakers were the bane of many Bios who had escaped all the early dangers, only to be hunted down in the snow and the tech in their bodies ripped out.
Seemingly out of sequence, were several photos that had to be of an early battle with Toughs. The pitch battle had been shot from within the melee. Grant’s photos in this series were mostly blurred and out of focus because he must have been fighting while taking photos. Some images had moments in them of bloody gashes, whites of flashing eyes, snarling red mouths ringed with black teeth. Then an image of the dead scattered across a field of snow, undoubtedly frozen solid not long after the battle. Kristi Beach among the dead.
“Well now. Kristi. Now that is a grim gallery,” Adam said and swallowed. “Why didn’t the Persona go after Grant’s camera.”
“The last one did. It’s totally analogue, all gears, and didn’t rise to priority level until all the other electronics were taken. And, yes. A grim gallery.” Natalie didn’t look away from her work, she spun the photos one way and then back to Kristi. She selecting one of the series of her and dragged it to a folder at the bottom right of the hologram.
“No sign, I take it?”
“Nope.” Flick. Spin.
“Well, if she’s not in The Sim and you haven’t found her …” Adam took long swallow from the glass.
“Yes, I know. She’s almost certainly dead and gone, but there are lots of Bios out there I haven’t been able to talk to yet. My mother could very well be out there alive still or someone will know where her body was left behind.”
“But does she want to be found? You’re the one who discovered Bios killing themselves in pits and caves, so that they wouldn’t be found and resurrected in the Sim. Based on what you told me of her, that’s likely what she did or will do.”
In the first year after The Transition, Natalie found her mother among the Bios north of San Francisco. She ran with a group calling themselves In God’s Image. A cult determined to avoid the corruption of replication. Her mother was not happy to see her daughter, since it was apparent to all that she’d become a Bug Person. “Daughter!” On her knees in the snow. “You’ve given up your God-given body for a lie, for evil! You are fully separated from God!” Natalie tried to talk to her mother through the hysteria, but after several hours of being repeatedly condemned to eternal hell, she had to give up. If now dead, she hoped her mother had frozen quickly, saving enough of her complex matrix to recreate her in The Simulation. These recreations were often heartbreaking, though, since the simulated person usually came alive as a hot mess mentally, behaving like old people on Real Earth who had severe cases of Alzheimer’s. Natalie would try it anyway. Her version of the copying nanites were different from those uploading into The Simulation and were also connected to the AI’s computing system in some way not yet understood. Natalie could shift between Real Earth and The Simulation because the program identified with her ran outside of The Mind Hive. Just where outside of the hive it was was the unclear part.
Adam left Natalie to sink her fear-boardering-on-grief into work, a tactic for sanity that often succeeded even in this new and very bizarre world, just like the booze he made. He walked around the circle of the observation deck to where he could see the microwave energy collector. He paused to fill his glass with thoughts of intoxication. Swirling the liquid, he faced the observation deck’s southwestern window from which he could see the collector. His latest evening ritual. The shadow figures were back. About a dozen shifting but still humanoid creatures took turns at the base of the collector’s towering monolith-like structures leaning into the silver energy river with their faces. Heads? They appeared to suck, lap, sip? out of the river. Several of the creatures dipped appendages, like long-handled spoons, into the plasma stream running from the collector to the black box. They jerkily raised the scooped plasma to their mouths. For the past few nights, starting when the black box appeared, the same night Celestine visited him backed by a simulation of an African village, these roughly human shapes came to drink. They slumped and waited until just after the main force of the microwave energy dissipated and the platform overhead lost line-of-sight, then they shuffled forward to the edge. The energy drained out of the scatter-collectors into the river leading to the black box for several minutes longer, and that’s when the shapes drank. They could be AI Personas, but why would they need to get energy the way these shapes did? The creatures, machines or Bios or some mix of the two, shuffled off into the gloom looking just like zombies. A thrilling association for someone who spent decades reading and watching every story involving the walking dead. Watching from several hundred feet in the air and several city blocks away from the collector, Adam couldn’t make out much detail and yearned to get closer to the source of the plasma flow. He again wondered if he could withstand the heat and intense radiation that must be coming off the stream and the vertical collectors. He had a suspicion about one of the figures, just the way it moved, but he did not allow his brain the time to wonder how it could possibly be true. Perhaps Natalie would go with him as Celestine suggested. After all, she appeared to him to be as powerful as the AI Personas. Otherwise, how did she survive all those encounters with them out in the Bio Lands?
“Hey, Natalie?”
“Yes dear?”
“You should take a break. Clear your head.” Adam walked back to where she sat flipping though rows of images. Natalie dropped her hand and looked over at him. “Come with me down there.” Adam pointed outside. “Those towers should be cooled down a bit by now. What do you say we see how close we can get.”
“Need someone to hold your hand?”
“If that’s how you want to look at it.”
“Well, fine. I do need a break. No matter how magical the technology, people still have only so much attention to spend and these photos are pretty grim reminder of what people in The Simulation seem desperate to forget.”
Adam stepped up to her side and flicked through a row of photos. “What if …”
“Yeeessss …” She cocked her head and look up at him with practiced impatience leaking out of her eyes.
“What if you …”
“Yeeessss …” Smiling.
“Goddamn it. Just listen for a second.” Hands on hips. Enjoyment clouded his serious face.
“Okay. One thousand and one. Look, I know how this is supposed to go and I’ll get down to twenty or so photos.”
“You are such a pain in the ass!” Adam laughed. “Just publish them all …”
“What!” Hands to head. “You arguing for giving up our editor role? Shocking!”
He reached up and flipped through the line of photos Natalie had rejected. “Yeah, well, the world has certainly changed. See. Here. You can see the faces of most of the dead in this photo. What if you published them all more as a public service than an act of journalism. Just like you scoured all the hundreds of photos looking for evidence of your mother, others in The Simulation might also want to see if they know any of the Bios. Dead or alive.”
Natalie swiped all the photos out of the air. “That’s not a bad idea. But maybe I’ll do it both ways.” She stood out of the chair. “I’ll do a gallery of the best photos, the most telling, the most gripping … that sort of thing and also make all the photos available as well.”
“Suit yourself.”
Natalie stepped over to the window. “What’s down there that has you so curious?”
“You’ve seen them haven’t you?” He joined Natalie at the window. “Those shapes, I’m calling them zombies. They come to the microwave collector?”
“Seems like there’s something n
ew out there every other day.”
The two stared out into the dark. Natalie has tried to teach Adam how to use the capabilities of his body, but he’s been too stubborn to listen or try anything besides watching old zombie movies and making alcohol. She pointed her listening ability at the place where Adam had seen the zombies. If they were still down there, they were silent. She guessed they would be dormant, saving energy until the next moment they could approach the plasma stream.
“I can’t hear anything, but that doesn’t mean they are not down there. I suspect they either can’t absorb energy the way you and I do, just from the ambient charge in everything the AI has made. Or, they leak it out and have to replace it in bulk to stay charged. Either way, it makes sense that they would be dormant between charges.”
“Have you run into anything like them out there?”
“No. I’ve seen a lot of creeping and crawling things out there. Some of them have quite the sting, too.”
“Can those zombies hurt us?”
“I don’t think so. Not if they can’t keep up their energy stores.”
“Let’s go see, then.” Adam nudged her with his elbow and turned to the center of the observation area. “I’ll take the stairs. I hate watching you land on your head.”
Natalie floated in his chair.
“Okay. What are you, the Jetsons now?”
She went higher and over the edge of the observation barrier. From the other side she yelled, “Everything is made of bugs now. The air around you is full of them. Just concentrate on what you want to do and it will happen.” She floated down and out of sight.
“Nope.” Adam made another drink, adding a lid with a straw poking up, and walked to the stairwell.
VIII
Deplaning onto the tarmac at the Shanghai Pudong International Airport, Josh Fines looked back at the bizarre apparitions that airplanes had become and marveled at the tiny propellor attached to the rear of the blimp-sized airplane he’d just arrived on. Who knew aerospace engineers were such cards? They had figured out that in The Simulation, the issue wasn’t whether you could fly but whether you wanted to fly. If you did, you could; damn the engineering. There was no aerodynamics in The Sim. Nevertheless, most Sims traveled in conceptually conventional means since flying unaided was cold, abrasive and difficult. You really had to concentrate to stay airborne and running into things still hurt like hell. Some people tried to just appear places, but you have to know a lot about the place you want to get to and reappearing inside another person or wall or moving vehicle was painful and very confusing until The Simulation program got you all sorted out. So, Josh still enjoyed flying in a plane, such as they were.
Stepping away from the tarmac, he joined a group of people heading for a literal wall of Personal Transportation Crafts created by municipal transportation geeks. The craft assigned to him identified him, popped out of the wall hundreds of feet above and swooped down to a loading zone. The top opened and he slid in next to Marsel Martin. The PTC lifted off, just fast enough to give him a sinking feeling, and carried them higher than the highest skyscraper. Marsel told the craft the name of a restaurant in real Cantonese, to show cultural respect to the AI Persona running the craft, and the PTC veered right and drew them over the city.
“Hope you like sushi,” she said.
“Knowing you, a sushi restaurant in Shanghai is going to be the least of it.”
Even in Real Seattle, Marsel and Perran were having second thoughts about how much of the blame Celestine deserved for the AI running the Mind Hive. Once they entered The Simulation, their suspicions and fears for what might come next caused them to contact Josh. He and several other spies had created a secret club of spies that collected information on Celestine, her projects and what they learned about the AI and its plans. Marsel and Perran offered to inform on their friends in Celestine’s inner circle. Perran subsequently disappeared into a splinter group run by The Twins, some sort of pseudo-religious consciousness cult. Marsel stayed with Celestine and this evening had invited Josh out for dinner to talk about her latest discoveries.
The PTC began descending between very narrow, very tall buildings that looked like massive light panels that cycled between vibrant versions of the basic color wheel. The building’s color generators filled the wet, night air with soothing blues, greens, yellows. The craft stopped and hovered at a ledge halfway up one of the light-panel buildings. The glass front of the PTC’s passenger bubble slid over the top, and Marsel led Josh toward a rectangular black hole in the misty color panel.
Just inside the door, a very large room opened up, blocked by a stern maître d'hôtel. She held them up to wait for an open seat or two at a bar top. He couldn’t tell just how big the room was or how far it went back, because it was also crowded by a very tall bamboo forest. Instead of dining tables, people stood at sushi bars. He figured they didn’t want people hanging around forever so they didn’t have or allow seating. He could just see through the lower bamboo leaves, that young naked men and women, completely hairless, walked back and forth on the bar tops. They passed each other on the narrow boards with grace and occasionally squatted …
“Right this way, please,” said a woman in a red kimono. He figured her for Chinese but had not spent that much time in the Orient. “Here you are.” She waved her hand at a spot between two people. They’d have to squeeze in. “Tell our master chefs,” she lifted her hand to signal the naked man and woman standing above them, “what you would like.” She spun away.
Josh looked up at a penis-and-balls set and over at a vagina and then at Marsel. “Uh …”
“You haven’t seen anything yet.” She tucked her head and laughed. Looking up, she said, “I’ll have a hot sake, a dragon roll and an assortment of sashimi. Josh?”
“No menu?”
The two stared down at him placidly.
“No. Just think of some sushi you’ve had before and I guarantee you it will be the best you’ve tasted.”
Just then the naked woman stepped to her left, squatted and peed steaming brown liquid into a tea cup. She stood and stepped right and continued staring down at Josh, without expectation or any sense of acknowledging his sentience. The man next to Marsel sipped at the cup.
“The fuck?” She’s got a hell of a good aim, though, Josh considered.
“Just order already! I’m starving.”
“Uh, okay. A California roll, sashimi and uh well don’t supposed you have a chilled sake?”
The man let loose a stream of liquid out of his penis into a wine glass, knelt and set it down. Meanwhile, the woman knelt and filled a sake decanter with steaming fluid. Then the man and woman squatted and …
“This is too much. I can’t eat that.” Josh’s laugh carried and several other customers laughed and pointed chopsticks at him. “You’ve gone too far.”
The man stood and waited.
“Oh stop it.” Marsel picked up a sashimi pad and put it in her mouth. “You’re just not going to believe it.” She chewed and mmmm’ed.
“You do have the weirdest taste in dining experiences.” He fingered a segment of California roll and popped it into his mouth. The flavor exploded. His eyes watered from the perfect amount of and most amazing wasabi he’d ever eaten. “Yeah, wow. Okay.”
They ate and drank like starving people, paying the service no mind. At one point, Josh blushed after he noticed his own loud moaning.
Recovering from their first round of gastronomic ecstasy, Josh returned to his debrief: “Does she know if the AI captured it or inherited it?”
"She didn’t say. All she said was that it had one and was struggling to keep it open while sending information in the form of photons with up-or-down, either-or spin. That’s at least one of the theories for why it shuts us down. The last one, timed by her sources outside The Simulation, lasted eight hours.”
Mind Hive Page 28