Was she just hanging out there for hours seeing who and who else showed up? Or could she see the future and knew what Now he would pick? Interesting either way.
He set out the dangerous way. He was one of the few with enough experience to perform instant travel without undue risk. He popped up across the street from the palace. Against the fat center pillar leaned a fighting cat from a young adult novel series popular at the time of The Transition. Residents and tourists loved masquerading through the Gothic Quarter’s narrow alleys and streets as much as sword fighting, so Alexandrine’s disguise drew little attention beyond the admiration of a few young tourists. The teen girl, as he suspected, came as Skinny Cat: The fighting cat known for pronounced-yet-lean muscles, long and sharp claws and fangs. She was equally known for the qualities he most admired of his youngest sister the last time he was home in San Francisco. She had read several of the books to him during that visit. Skinny Cat took everything at face value and literally. Whatever Alexandrine’s reasons for meeting him in disguise, even if out of child playfulness, he agreed to play along.
Robert pulled his rumpled reporter’s notebook out of his back pocket, checked his mechanical pencil had lead extended and crossed the street. He handed diagonal to where she stood toward a group of five Sims all masquerading as Picasso in his later, famous years.
“Pardon me,” Robert stepped into their midst. “My name is Robert Henderson and I’m a journalist from America doing a story on Barcelona’s masquerading craze. And of course here you all are … Picasso, I presume.”
The five identical Picassos just looked at him, neither volunteering nor dismissing him, yet.
“So, mind if I ask you, one at a time, why you are in costume?”
They looked at each other, then back at Robert. No rejections, so he picked one. When that Picasso gave her name and started talking the others jumped in. They were all expat Germans who had retired in Costa del Sol near the artist’s birth-town of Málaga before The Transition and all replicated together. Apparently, as they eagerly explained, Germans recognized Picasso’s genius very early on in his career. The Picasso Museum Barcelona sent an invitation to all aficionados, experts, critics and historians to join in efforts to recreate all of the master’s work. The museum encouraged participants to show up as the master himself. Robert took detailed notes. Sounded like a story to him, once he finished with Alexandrine. When the group turned away, he sent a message about the event to the photographer he enjoyed working with.
Then he walked up the promenade to Skinny Cat.
“Pardon me, Skinny Cat,” he said loudly for the benefit of others. “Wonder if I might talk with you about a story I’m writing.”
“Took you long enough!” The cat said in a high-pitched teen-girl voice.
“Uh, sorry? Thought you’d want some discretion since you’re in disguise.” Her tone had surprised him. A kid for sure, but not a child.
“I know. I’m just nervous …”
“Not on my account, I hope.”
She shook her head dismissively. “The Twins have a lot of Sims hunting for Bug People like me. Can we get off the street now.”
That information surprised him and thrilled him a bit. Stories about Bug People were very popular. The only other Bugs he’d known were Natalie and one of the slaves brainwashed by The Twins. A rare and valuable gem, Sims who hung on to a passion for power found Bug People’s ability to gather energy from many Sims, refocus it and transfer that power to another individual highly desirable. Their ability to travel to Real Earth and back, put them high on every scientists’ list of desired assets, including Celestine. Robert and Alexandrine walked around the building to the modern entrance and once inside, Alexandrine morphed into a skinny early teen, just as he had suspected. She wore a fuzzy, rabbit-eared hoodie. He did not underestimate her, however. Even an early teen Bug would be very hard to defend against. In The Simulation, they can be overwhelmed by many Sims if the attackers can remain coordinated; while on the Real Earth, they attracted AI Personas like flies to fly paper. This one had evidently worked with Marsel, and that fact also raised his estimation of the kid. Marsel, in short, did not babysit.
Robert and Alexandrine sat through a video presentation of the history of the Palace and then took the walking tour through the Music Palace, as if on a father-daughter outing. On the top balcony, under a grey cement Pegasus, the two waited until the rest of the tour had moved on then took seats. Three guitarists prattled notes at each other comically on the stage far below.
“I guess, to the point,” Robert started, “what happened to Marsel and Perran and how do you know?”
“I was juicing Marsel as she tried to get Perran out of The Twins’ dome, but The Twins had enough people focussed to overpower her and then they stuck her and Perran in a construct I can’t find.”
“She a pretty good fighter, but The Twins are …”
“Nasty bitches.”
Robert wondered at the strong language. The Sim was a tough life for kids, he heard his father say a dozen times about his little sister. Those two had been fighting a lot more in The Sim. She wanted to run free with all the other Sim kids, and he meant to remain her parent: I can’t get hurt! Not physically. No, but your mind and your heart can. That’s bullshit! You will not run wild, not then and not now! Why! Because I said so, that’s why! A software engineer, their father invented parental controls that limited his daughter’s range, for a time. She acted out to wear him down. She was tough and determined and fifteen years old, a rough age no matter where it happens; but after Robert’s mother died, a decade before The Transition, his father held onto the family with unwavering determination. A fews days after the collapse, seeing how the future would play out, he brought her into The Simulation
“Yeah, nasty ass bitches, for sure.” Robert was not his father. “I have to go meet a couple friends of mine to show them something, one of whom is like you …” He paused to note her change of expression. “She’s on our side. She’s safe. I bet she can help. I’ll need your help, though.”
The girl slumped and turned her head away, disappointed. Everyone wants something.
“Or I can get her to come here. She spends most of her time in the Real Earth, as I suspect you do. Your decision. Either way, I’m going by the newspaper office first. You should come for that. It’s safe and and I bet interesting.”
Her expression changed from exasperation to curiosity, but she waited as if to draw out his lies. Thirteen and already so harassed, she knew an adult’s words for smoke. Robert recognized the look from his years reporting on the rampant teen homelessness in Real Seattle. He didn’t pressure her. He can get there on his own, but he didn’t want to lose her either. She knew how to get to the The Twins for one and she live on Real Earth somewhere, he felt sure. He could smell a story … So, yes he was using her too … but …
“Fine. Let’s go.”
They stood and prepared to jump.
“Great.” He showed her a hologram of his office (cleared of all furniture and locked from the inside), so she’d make the jump. “You won’t regret it. Natalie, my colleague, is …”
“Natalie Rodriguez?”
“Yeah.” He drew out the vowels.
“Why didn’t you say so! Oh my god, I love her!”
Robert rolled his eyes as they leapt.
XIII
With a gesture at the image projected in front of him, Josh flipped over the last page of the documents he had assembled during The Transition. Marsel’s team had traced the links from Adam’s portal download to the source. The image phased out and his Spartan apartment, in what had been one of three new high-rise complexes in downtown Bellevue, came into focus. He relaxed into his chair, stared at the bare wall that used to be a panel of floor-to-ceiling windows. He had changed the wall, because he felt too much moral dissonance looking out over the once clean, conservative, urban answer to licentious Seattle, which rose ever higher and darker and more gothic on the diapoled shor
e of Lake Washington. The wealthy and conservative elite ran Bellevue and its surrounding neighborhoods like private, gated communities. He liked that. The city did not have a police force, not one constrained by constitutional niceties anyway. Instead, private security firms hired by families or co-ops worked in concert to keep out those who didn’t belong or quieted those who got a little loud. In Real Bellevue, he came home to a city that felt like the Iowa town he’d grown up in, a deep relief from the confusing, mixed morality of the cult life he’d been forced to live undercover while investigating Celestine’s Clans. His undercover work had plodded along, professionally. He gathered and reported intel on the groups’ technology efforts, their showy initiations, their reckless sex lives. The Twins and their religious fervor. And Celestine’s honest, rigorous and heartfelt drive to save the world from a threat that sounded to him like a bad science fiction movie. When his bosses wanted to know how they could grab some of the Clan members who went through initiation, he remembered a group of eight members who were touring the country to gather experiences. He proudly told his bosses about the group and where they might be found. He finally had specific intel to feed up the chain for direct action! A promotion would follow. He’d move to D.C.! Then Clan members dug up the bodies of the Missing 8. Then came the order to use the private security firm hired by the agency to get himself and his people out of the Clan tunnels and gather in Seattle. Then came the end of the world. He motioned away the wall and looked out over the gleaming, square city skyline whose few remaining inhabitants lacked or refused to exercise imagination to make into something interesting. He put the wall back. Shame deepened within him. He drank the remaining few inches of red wine in the bottle by his elbow. He knew that leadership in D.C. would know more than they said, would have agendas they would not tell him. He had, even so, critically underestimated their mendacity. They lied and framed and corrupted. But they had not figured on a poor black graduate student finding her way through their lies to the heart of their agenda and upending it. The memorandums, emails and recorded conversations proved without a doubt that the oligarchy, for that was the correct term for the superrich and the politicians and military men who served them, had created the AI through Mannerheim for the purpose of saving themselves. What caused them to react so suddenly was mounting, incontrovertible proof that the Greenland Ice Sheet would slide into the sea within decades not centuries. Coastlines would be inundated, flooding a billion people in a matter of months instead of years and destroying low-lying farms that supported another couple billion or more. Chaos would ensue and while they expected to remain safe in well-defended enclaves, they would much rather not be around to watch it play out. Then, Celestine discovered the AI, had an interaction with it and taken some of the micro-machines it created. Instead of having him spy on her, why not arrest her for theft of government intellectual and real property? Unless … now he saw it. They also knew the AI was acting on its own. Mannerheim had started the program, but they’d taken in from him. He didn’t know how far it had grown, but they did. Those top government and business leaders assumed it was building a spaceship or something in the old Superconducting Super Collider facility in Texas, but they could not be sure and evidence was piling up that they did not understand what the AI was up to. Then came intel from the SCC that the AI had spent its time capturing a wormhole instead of building a spaceship. Worse, it appeared to be sending and receiving information through it. The final page of the documents he had stolen was a transcript of the end of a conversation between the National Security Advisor and the President:
“So you’re telling me that there are aliens coming after us?”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s exactly what I’m telling you. At the very least, it’s a good bet they know we’re here. We just don’t know what that means for us, if anything. I mean, we have no idea where they are. They are almost certainly not in our neck of the woods or SETI or NASA or ESA would have spotted them. So, either they have no idea that the other end of the AI’s wormhole is among them or they are so far away that we will never encounter them because they are beyond our cosmological horizon, too far for light to ever beat the expansion of the universe and get to us … but it is the safe-bet to assume they know as much as we do technologically, which includes sending code through a wormhole like the AI might be doing. The point is that it’s not a sure thing, but we should assume they are coming.”
“Maybe they’re coming to save us from climate disaster.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, alright, let’s go. Initialize Project Harvest.”
They had let loose an AI under all the wrong assumptions. Someday he will ask Marsel’s team to locate many more classified documents in order to write the definitive history of the creation of the AI, the reaction its capturing a wormhole had triggered and its subsequent takeover.
Right now, though, he knew enough to know it exonerated Celestine. First thing he decided to do was tell her.
He dressed and flew himself into Seattle, on the back of a skycycle he’d invented, to the house where he discovered Natalie the night she first encountered the Clans. Inside, he went downstairs where they held membership meetings. In the dark at the bottom of the steps, he spun left to the dugout wall where a portal to Celestine’s compound had been coded into the rubble. He did not know her hideout’s actual location. Few did, since The Twins had turned hostile. He stepped through the rubble-portal into a foyer painted in muted neutral colors lit by candle chandeliers, burning. Exposed-frame herbariums scuttled across the walls on mechanical legs in no pattern his brain intuited. He walked through a scanning vail, his identification being validated down to the code-replication of the microscopic. He came through into a hallway about twenty-yards long. At the end of it hung a deep purple, heavy felt curtain. He pulled the middle apart. Beyond was a room within giant clockwork gears, all of which moved. Sims dressed as if from every corner of the globe circa 1930 talked in closed circles or pairs, tucked into nooks, lounging in leather chairs and sofas with boots and bare feet kicked up on steamer trunks. Amid the slowly turning clockwork accompanied by riffs of hard rock hung 3-D sepia-toned maps, world and topographical, drawn in the 19th Century. Giant, copper-rimmed magnifying glasses sat on black-iron, narrow console tables. At the extreme of the room, loomed a massive floor-to-ceiling, stainless-steel-plated, roaring fireplace. The fierce Navajo white fire gave off no heat. He turned around and faced the room, scanning for Celestine. What he had to tell her would make up for the rudeness of showing up unannounced.
After a few minutes, two Celestines walked into the room side-by-side, arms interlocked, towers of hair touching, dressed in yellow checkered polyester pantsuits. The two took several steps into the room then split. One made eye contact with Josh and headed his way. The other one stepped into a chat circle.
“Josh the Spy.” Her voice smooth and unconcerned though not uninterested. She laced her fingers together as she stoped in front of him. They saw eye-to-eye, her hair towering over them both.
“Celestine the Innocent.”
“Really.” Her face relaxed into a pleasantly surprised smile. “And here I thought you’d come to harass me about a video The Twins shot.”
“I’m not familiar with any videos.” He scrunched his eyes in curiosity at her. “What’s on it?”
“I guess you’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Okay. Not why I’m here anyway.”
He noticed human voices bleeding out of the soundscape, the hum and clack of machinery.
“You’re here to proclaim my innocence?”
“Yes.”
“Hate to look a gift horse in the mouth.” A broad smile. “But what exactly am I innocent of?”
Josh explained that he discovered for certain that Mannerheim had help building the AI, and that it wasn’t Celestine. Mannerheim programmed an agenda for the AI that had been set by layers of officials in the myriad agencies paying for the project and then they took it from him and let it loos
e. Knowing those administrators of the oligarchy as he did, no amount of public shame or threatened hearings would derail them. He understood there was nothing she could have done. If she tried, then someone would have killed her and covered it up. And even though the project wasn’t a total secret—tens of thousands of companies and scientists pursued better, faster and more dangerous AI projects every day—what was a secret was how far along they’d gotten and that they’d lifted the barrier between the young AI and the StreamNet.
“Lucky for us,” Celestine said.
Josh then loosed in the room fluttering copies of documents he said proved fears of imminent climate disaster and a surmised impending alien attack drove most of the direction and speed of the AI research.
“Why aliens?” he asked rhetorically.
“Because of the wormhole.” Celestine used a familiar calm, smooth voice. She turned to her guests in the open room. “And, that strange data I’d found in my research in the old Internet. Mannerheim said it was just noise, a failure of my research protocol. But it wasn’t. The source of the anomaly wasn’t in the system of the StreamNet. It came from outside the StreamNet. I could never crack it other than it appeared to be some sort of pattern emitted by an intelligence, like listening to dolphins. We know they are making sense but cannot translate what they are saying. I suspect that was the main reason they left me in an office next to its original site and then left me to die when it infected me.”
Josh added for the benefit of the audience, happy Celestine let him back into the fold, “They were also freaked out by the AI’s nanite tactic and that the nanites were everywhere and had already replicated members of a certain tech cult in Seattle.” He didn’t wait for the self-acknowledging laughter to clear. “Not to mention that all three leaders of the The Clans had connections with Mannerheim and the Trinity Supercomputer used to model nuclear weapons’ explosion-feasibility at the Los Alamos National Lab; two of them also had coveted internships at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on a Mannerheim project and under the guidance of you-know-who. Those powers over Mannerheim used Trinity to augment the computing power of his private system.
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