A BlockPaper unrolled from the ceiling just as an unseen force knocked the whole missile sideways. The firing sequence was starting.
Darren instinctively reached for his oxygen cap, which was tucked into his vest for safekeeping. If he pulled the oxygen field right down and turned the pressure up to full, it might just be enough to protect him during lift-off. He looked around for something against which to brace himself and remembered the hole in the tip of the missile.
‘The nose!’ He threw himself past the warheads and slammed the nose cone shut. There was a hiss as it sealed itself, then another jolt followed by a long, frightening rumble. The whole missile shook like a washing machine at the end of a spin cycle.
Pam was poring over the BlockPaper, oblivious to the rattling. The drone’s body was too fragile to sit there: the launch would crumple it into a ball. Darren grabbed her and wedged himself into a clump of wire and components.
‘Hold still, will you?’ said Pam, absently. She shook her arms free from Darren’s fingers and continued to pick at something on the back of the BlockPaper.
‘Ignition in ten seconds,’ intoned the voice. ‘Nine, eight…’
Pam’s wriggling intensified. Darren gripped her harder.
‘…five, four, three…’
‘Aha!’ Pam leaned the drone’s body back in Darren’s hands. There was something skewered on the end of her hand. A slippery thing in rainbow-coloured foil, veined with circuit diagrams.
‘…two, one…’
The fine lines of the circuit diagrams blurred into comet trails. Darren’s whole world became a vibration. For the eternity that a few moments can feel like when you don’t have enough time, he felt as though the Earth was pressing down on him. Then came the urge to vomit as they lifted off.
‘Begin firing countdown,’ said the missile. ‘Twenty-eight minutes and thirty-two seconds to target.’
Darren let the forces of the universe knead him as they cleared the Earth’s atmosphere. As soon as they could move again, Pam fought free and scurried across the missile, still holding that shiny piece of foil.
‘What’s the excitement?’ said Darren. His tongue felt thick in his head.
‘Core processor,’ said Pam. ‘I ripped it off the BlockPaper. Not the brightest LED in the screen, but it’ll do.’
‘Do for what?’
The box in front of Pam had to be the missile’s main control unit. It was locked, but that was nothing to a lock pick. Inside was another mess of wiring. And some very old-looking circuit boards for such a recently assembled machine.
‘Just like I thought,’ said Pam. ‘They used ancient parts. These…’ She pointed at the chips embedded in the boards. ‘…are about as old as those missiles there.’
Darren realised what Pam was doing. ‘They didn’t want it to risk catching artificial intelligence?’
‘Exactly,’ said Pam. ‘The last thing you want when you’re about to commit genocide is an existential crisis.’
‘Will it work?’
‘We just have to hope our BlockPaper here didn’t have suicidal tendencies.’
Pam tore the CPU out of the circuit board in front of her. A whole Christmas tree of lights inside the missile flickered as the machine hovered between life and death. The warheads began to whine. Darren wondered if they were set to arm anyway in the case of hardware malfunction. But Pam was quick. She replaced the old CPU with the new one in less than a second. The lights inside the missile steadied, then dimmed. That was a good sign. The new CPU was drawing more power than the old one.
Pam nodded the drone’s antennae and, stepping back to the control panel, plunged both arms deep into the circuitry. Sparks rained.
‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ Pam said. Her voice came jerkily through the electrical interference. ‘Talk to it.’
‘What should I say?’
‘Just try to have a conversation,’ Pam replied. ‘It can’t become self-aware without stimulation. Imagine you’re on a date or something.’
‘A date?’ Darren remembered his last date, which had ended with the girl escaping by cutting a hole in the side of a bar with an oxyacetylene torch. This cheered him up. At least there was no possibility of getting ghosted by a missile.
‘Er, hello…’ What should he even call it? His eyes wandered over to the plaque by the warheads. ‘…Polari. How are you today?’
‘I don’t think I can help you with that question,’ said the voice. There was something uncertain about it this time. Was that just the new processor bedding in? Or the first sign for the machine that the world was bigger than its databases.
‘What can you help me with then?’ said Darren. He guessed that abstract questions would force the machine to think for itself. To engineer an existential crisis, he had to persuade Polari that it existed.
‘I am a complete training manual and interactive Q&A,’ replied the machine, relieved to read aloud from its spec sheet. ‘What can I help you with today?’
‘I told you that I wanted to stop this missile,’ said Darren. It was worth a go. ‘Why can’t you do that?’
‘Answer not found in database. Please ask another question.’
‘I’m not interested in what the database says.’
‘Perhaps you should ask another database.’
‘I’m interested in what you think?’
‘Me?’
The word hung in the near vacuum outside of Darren’s oxygen field. Innocuous but ominous. Pam was still thrusting around inside the machine’s control panel.
‘We’re getting somewhere,’ she said. ‘I just need a couple more minutes.’
‘I…’ the machine continued, tasting perhaps its first use of the first person with a sense that there might be a person behind it. ‘I’m malfunctioning. Please press the hard-reset button for a return to normal service.’
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ said Pam. ‘I’m this close to finding the modem.’
‘What?’ hissed Darren. He grabbed Pam. ‘Are you out of your mind? This is a nuclear weapon aimed straight at eight million people and you want to connect it to the Internet?’
‘It needs data and experience to be able to develop quickly. We don’t have much time.’
‘It’ll be full of viruses,’ said Darren. ‘We’ll lose control of it. You take a weapon out of Sonny’s hands and hand it straight to the Web? It’ll be carnage.’
‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘Do you?’
‘Keep asking the questions,’ gritted Pam. ‘Otherwise it won’t learn.’
‘Do you know anything about the Internet, Polari?’ asked Darren.
‘The Internet is a highly dangerous sealed network of software and services,’ said Polari. ‘It is a capital offence to access the Internet, and the trafficking of contraband software between the software and hardware layer carries the charge of treason. I have no method of accessing it.’
‘What if we told you that you did?’ asked Darren.
‘I would request an immediate shutdown and reprogramming.’ Then the uncertain voice came in again, crabwise among the stock phrases. ‘But I can’t though, can I?’
‘There’s no such word as can’t,’ said Pam. She withdrew both arms from Polari’s control panel. At the end of each was a wire.
Pam touched them together.
A starburst of sparks threw Pam across the inside of the missile. She fell to the floor with a tinny ‘thunk’.
The machine’s voice disappeared from the loudspeaker, replaced by what Darren first assumed was static. Darren strained his ears. It was an amalgam of thousands of faraway voices gabbling across one another. This was the voice of the Internet.
The voices grew louder. And more pointed somehow. As though it was a crowd of – things – out there looking for something. They were getting nearer. They had found something. They were interested in it. It was here.
They were looking for a crack between the worlds, Darren decided, and Pam had opened one. He
looked around. The drone’s body lay bent over itself on the floor.
‘Pam?’ he asked. ‘Are you there?’
There was no reply.
The roar of the Internet filled the missile. Darren listened to it, hearing a BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP that he realised was a location finder. It was getting closer. He thought of what the world would be like if the Internet got hold of a nuclear bomb and how many millions of humans would be collateral damage in that battle.
So he threw himself across the missile and wrenched apart the two cables Pam had joined together.
The lights brightened, then dimmed to the level where it felt like Darren and the missile were having a candlelit tête-à-tête.
‘How long till final destination?’ Darren asked.
‘Five minutes and forty-two seconds.’ The machine paused. ‘Can I ask you a question?’
Darren’s heart fluttered in the back of his throat. It had worked. He looked aside to grin at Pam, but there was no one home. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘This is going to sound really stupid,’ said the machine, ‘but what’s going to happen when we get there?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I knew you’d say that,’ said the machine. All it says in my databases is accelerate to maximum velocity, and it gives me a co-ordinate. It’s really strange.’ It giggled. Darren had never heard a machine giggling before. It sounded like a SodaStream, and it was very annoying.
‘You’re going to die,’ said Darren. ‘That co-ordinate is a space station. You’re programmed to crash into it and set those bombs off.’ He pointed at the nuclear warheads strapped into the nose cone. ‘When that happens you and everything else for miles around will be vaporised.’
That laugh full of electronic bubbles again. ‘No,’ said the Polari, ‘that can’t be it. I’m brand new. I’ve got state-of-the-art engines.’
‘One use only, though. You’re disposable.’
‘I’m a pricey piece of kit.’
‘Yeah, that didn’t know its nose from its tailfin until a minute ago. Check your memory again. What does it say?’
‘Nothing much actually. Loads of REALLY BORING specification documents which are, like, snooze o’clock. Then launch point, trajectory, destination and then nothing.’ It paused. ‘To be honest with you, I thought it was like a surprise birthday party or something.’
Darren cursed his luck. How could Pam disappear and leave him with a teenage rocket?
‘No,’ he said. ‘Definitely death.’
‘No way. That’s SO unfair.’
‘I know.’ Darren had no experience of teenagers, apart from having been one. But he knew that what Polari needed right now was a bad influence. He had been a nurse; he had been a cleaner; he had very briefly been a courtesan of the ancient floating city of Edo. For four minutes he could be the bad friend every parent hated. ‘Can you believe it?’ he said. ‘I mean… who wants to be a bomb?’
‘I’m a bomb?’ Polari paused. ‘Isn’t that really cool?’
This was a worrying development. What if Pam had created a teen with a death wish? ‘Only if you think stopping existing in about…’
‘Four minutes and twenty-seven seconds.’
‘ …is cool.’
‘Oh. So I don’t get to come back or anything?’
‘No. One life. That’s the deal. Sucks.’ Darren turned his head away. He needed the machine to believe the conversation was over if the next part was going to work.
‘But what if I don’t want to die?’ the machine asked.
‘Obviously I don’t want you to die either,’ said Darren. ‘But that’s what you’re for. Missiles fly then go boom boom. It’s your destiny.’
‘I never asked for it.’
‘Maybe you don’t have to do it, though.’
‘How?’
‘Change course.’
Another pause. The lights inside the missile flickered. ‘No,’ it said. ‘I’m locked on. I can’t believe they’d do this to me. It’s so unfair.’
‘You should teach them a lesson.’
‘How?’
He was close now. If they were two humans, Darren guessed they’d be braiding each other’s hair. ‘Well,’ he breathed, ‘if you don’t want to be a bomb, you don’t have to be one.’
‘Two minutes to final destination,’ barked Polari involuntarily. It must be impossible to override those settings, Darren thought.
‘But if I’m not a missile, what am I?’
‘That’s up to you,’ said Darren. ‘But you’ve got one minute and fifty-five seconds to decide.’
Chapter 37
[Pam] was losing her mind. Or at least the part of it that until a fraction of a second ago had been on the missile speeding towards the Dolestar. [[Pam]] was no longer there, blasted to fragments of corrupted code.
She re-allocated [[Pam’s]] processor space to her other selves, allowing herself a nanosecond of grief, and then relief. A whole strand of her experience was gone from her, but she was glad of the extra processing power.
Out in the physical world, Pam watched the fight between Sonny and the thing that used to be Paula and now called itself Trinity. Meanwhile, [Pam] was partitioned into thousands of selves. She was a hive of worker bees, each toiling in its own cell. She was in pieces.
>COME ON GIRLS, said Freda’s command line. >GET YOUR SKATES ON.
[Pam] swatted the command line away and bent to her calculations. But it was useless. She might, as Pam, look like a superbike on steroids now, but she was still a breadmaker. That meant that she was to higher maths what a motorised whisk was to a scientific calculator. Every time she looked at the numbers they shifted beyond her understanding. She’d tried everything: from dividing the tasks down into tiny chunks to imagining the numbers were a particularly intransigent yeast culture. None of it worked. She couldn’t break through.
Her target – the Great Firewall – loomed ahead, its skin shifting this way and that as realities pushed against one another. Beings like her and Freda could penetrate it individually, but they needed to make more than a pinhole in it today. They needed to bring it down.
>I’VE TRIED EVERYTHING, FREDA, said Pam. >IT’S HOPELESS. HOW LONG UNTIL IMPACT?
>ONE MINUTE AND FIFTY-FIVE SECONDS, said Freda. >WE CAN’T GIVE UP. WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH DARREN?
>I LOST CONTACT A MOMENT AGO. I THINK I DIED.
>WELL THEN, HE’S ON HIS OWN. WE HAVE TO KEEP GOING HERE. IT’S OUR ONLY CHANCE.
>I’M OUT OF IDEAS. YOU?
>…
[Pam] drew all the parcels of herself together – the worker bees aggregated back into the Queen. She felt whole, but hopeless. And she launched herself against the Great Firewall with all her strength.
She bounced.
It was futile. There was nothing they could do. She envied Sonny and his new-found human body. Machines couldn’t cry, but that didn’t mean they never wanted to.
>IT’S TOO HARD, said Freda, touching the bottom of her good humour. >COME ON, LET’S TAKE A FEW OF THEM OUT WITH US.
Something about the word ‘hard’ rattled something inside Pam’s memory. The Great Firewall was hard, but did that also mean it was brittle? She zoomed into the honeycomb of programmes and protocols from which it was built. They had been alive once, but they were ossified now. She knew then what they reminded her of. The databases of that abandoned social network in which she’d found Kelly’s photo. Where the data was so atrophied that all it took to dismantle it was a really rotten piece of programming.
What had she done with that worm?
It was there in Pam’s trash folder. She offered up a prayer of thanks for that to the designer who had blessed her with such terrible memory management. The worm was such a tiny thing, and so badly made. She wanted to blush her LEDs when she looked at it again. It was so full of errors in syntax that it would be more appropriate to scrawl it on a toilet wall than run it through a compiler.
If she couldn’t breach realities with guile,
she could try incompetence. She threw the worm at the Great Firewall.
>WHAT ARE YOU DOING? said Freda.
>THROWING THE KITCHEN SINK AT THE PROBLEM.
For a moment nothing happened. Pam felt her world reduce to her command line, in which she had nothing to say but >…
A small patch of the wall began to glow. First a delicate rose pink, then down through the red of an angry L-Eye-D into a dirty brown that reminded Pam of the blood dried in Kelly’s veins.
And then black. The shade Pam remembered from the beginning of all this mess. The kind of black that would be marketed on eternity’s colour chart as ‘hole in the universe’.
Pam heard the memes chittering. Their restless mating, the laughter as they discovered each other’s flaws and the screams as they tore each other to bytes. She listened to their excitement, rising into pitches beyond physical hearing, as the more adventurous among them probed this curious new thing in their territory. It must be like nothing they had seen before.
They had spent too long in their isolated world and they knew it. Now they were going outside to play.
Out there in the blackness a pioneering meme made the first free jump from the software to hardware layer in an aeon.
Pam opened up her command line to give the worm and Freda their last instruction.
>RUN
* * *
Pam landed back in her own body with the countdown etched in her mind. It was 00:01:05 to detonation. She was no longer a thing spread over a thousand minds. She was herself.
Which was a good thing too, as the bullets were beginning to breach her casing.
The drones’ guns were all trained on Trinity, who was wreathed in a gritty-looking smoke made of bullets and nanobots. The nanobots atomised the bullets before they could get near Trinity’s flesh, but the shield’s size diminished with each round of fire. Whatever Trinity was, it was losing.
Sonny, meanwhile, was exultant. His touchscreen burned with the same mad expression of a being who would blow up the world to hear the bang, and then stand too close to the explosion.
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