Reality 36 (35 page)

  There was no personality left to the building, but as he interrogated the composite brain, gradually, horrifyingly, Richards realised that it had had one once.

  It had been lobotomised.

  Richards became furious. He put the mind out of its misery as quickly as he could, and took control of the building. He shut off all the remaining drones and what was left of the selfdestruct mechanisms, activated the halon fire-suppression systems and began running through the crippled AI's memory. Much of it had been wiped. Richards anger grew as he realised that there had once been twenty sentient linked AIs in the building. All had been similarly stripped.
Karlsson has gone mad
, he thought.

  And then he located Karlsson. He unclipped the fibre optic from his chest and ran down the corridor, his access panel left hanging open.

  Karlsson lay slumped in a pool of his own blood, covered with plaster, his head caved in by a falling piece of masonry, laying bare a mess of tangled monofilament wire, nano wires and grey matter studded with hair and bone. Richards felt his pulse. Nothing. He was emaciated, naked. His own waste lay thick and stinking about the chair he'd been sat in.

Meat puppet, has to be
. Someone had wiped the AIs here, and infiltrated Karlsson's mind via his mentaug, imprisoning him in his own body.

  "Who would do that?" he whispered. He wished he had his coat, to cover the dead man's face. Pieces of grit sat on the sclera of Karlsson's eyes. Somehow, that bothered Richards the most. He closed them gently with his machine fingers.

  He stood up and looked at the man for a moment. "Time to find out what the fuck exactly has been going on here," he said.

The workshops were extensive. In one empty of all equipment he found the bodies of twenty men and women, members of Karlsson's clade of anti-singularity paranoiacs. They were long dead, their corpses bloated and slimy. Some of them Richards recognised from their DNA profiles, a mix of fugitive brilliance and talented amateurs, some real genius here. He estimated that they'd been dead about two weeks. Each had a shot to the head – executed. Richards shook his head. Such a waste, every shattered skull a universe gone.

  The next room was a burnt-out mess, old damage, not from today. He made enough of it to separate gene-looms from surgical tanks, carbon-weavers from base units. Data he scraped from the charred components of the machines told him that this was where both the fake Qifangs and the fake heiress had originated. Data wrestled from the wreck told him so: the heiress duplicated several days after Qifang, their bodies speedgrown in pieces on the looms, and welded together.

  He thought of the drones, of the meat-puppeted Karlsson, of the stripped AI minds.

  AI. These were AI crimes.

  And then he found it.

  Behind a smashed protein scaffold tank of a gene-loom sat the heat-slagged remains of a base unit. Not that of an AI, but one of those used to accrue and store pimsim data for living meat persons before the moment of death, and from which the simulated personality of the recently deceased could be released into the heaven levels or operate out in the Grid and the Real.

  It was amongst the most damaged pieces of machinery in the room. "Someone's gone to extra trouble with this," said Richards. He pulled it apart, hunting for chips. Most were scragged beyond redemption, but there were just enough left to reassemble a moment in time: a conversation with a fat man at a gala dinner. Richards data-matched the face: Harold Kamer, a senator from one of the hayseed Midwest states that had refused the rewilding. In his eyes, Richards could make out the reflection of his interlocutor, the man whose memcord this was.

  The distorted reflection was the face of Professor Zhang Qifang.

  But Qifang had no implants, no mentaug. He had no registered pimsim. He didn't believe in either.

  "Curiouser and curiouser," said Richards. He hunted about; he knew what he was looking for, but it was hard to tell the junked machines apart. Finally, he found it, a direct neural imager. That's how they'd copied Qifang's mind.

  He had his truck drive round and popped all his probes out of it and Big Daddy for a quick data sweep. It wouldn't be long before the authorities showed up. Even Richards couldn't kick off a small-scale military action and saunter off. He'd be able to clear it with the Sams, even if he had to get Hughie involved, but whatever happened, his equipment was going to be impounded, it would take some time to get it out, and the local cops would want a long, tedious chat about letting off heavy artillery within the city limits. He could do without that.

  "Big Daddy!"

  "Yes," came the machine's stentorian reply.

  "There are going to be some men here soon. Do not shoot them, got that?"

  "Yes. Do not shoot." Richards thought it sounded disappointed. It wasn't possible, Big Daddy was the one machine whose personality he wouldn't dare upgrade.

  "Walk out the back, get into the truck and deactivate yourself, got that too?"

  "Yes. Big Daddy go sleep in truck."

  "That's right. Stay put until I come and get you." And get you cleaned up, thought Richards. For all of his sordid enjoyment of war, Otto hated it when his equipment got dirty. He ordered his probes to retreat to the truck, and the truck, once it had the appropriate clearance from the authorities, to return to the New York garage, clearance he petitioned for now.

  That done, he left the laboratory to walk outside and explain himself to the cops. Then he'd get back to Hughie. Something much bigger than they previously suspected was underway. Well, much bigger than he'd previously expected. Hughie might well have been exploiting his good nature again and…

  His sheath collapsed, his consciousness gone.

  He found himself as he truly was, huge and powerful on the Grid, emergency overrides dissolving his fantasy self to show him the monster beneath.

  "Eh? What the fuck now?"

  Failsafes on his base unit had cranked his operating speed up to inhuman levels. His racing mind filled with alarms. Datafeeds reported the beginnings of a substantial explosion close by in the Real. He was thinking far faster than a human mind ever could; sensations from the Real filtered in through the treacly slowness of temporal dislocation. Subroutines compensated, allowing the full spectral range he ordinarily enjoyed, adding meaning to the Real's distorted sounds, slowed to slothful, guttural roars. He felt the arco vibrate as a shockwave strolled through its structure, and his attentions switched to a human emulant on the arcade outside – nothing special about it, the kind worn by geriatrics or tourists remotely holidaying, only this one was engaged in the final stages of fiery disintegration as a low-yield atomic ignited within.

  He wound back the outside camera footage, to see more clearly.

  He guessed he'd see the face of Professor Zhang Qifang looking back at him.

  He watched as balls of flame unpacked themselves from the elderly professor, sprouting into expanding bubbles of destruction, announcing the birth of a short-lived star, right on his doorstep.
Pretty
, he thought,
but inconvenient
.

  The shockwave ran ahead of the explosion, ripping the floor into splinters, pushing out and down, smashing metal and carbons, a sphere of violence that spared nothing. The office windows blew out, the pieces simultaneously melting; the door was slammed off its hinges, into the waiting room and through the wall on the other side, where it disintegrated into burning embers, then evaporated. The electromagnetic pulse that preceded the blast wrought havoc on the arco's systems, shutting much of the city building down, but Richards' heavily fortified base unit held, and he continued to watch with morbid fascination. He was helpless. Pedestrians outside on the gallery half a kilometre away were flung into the wall or hurled to their deaths in the park below; others caught fire and twisted like dervishes; those nearer exploded into their constituent pieces as if a helpful holofeed were describing the anatomy of man, their skin flayed away, then their flesh, then their bones. Those nearer still simply turned to steam.

  It rarely paid an AI that interfaced with the human world to run so quickly. In such a state they could think so fast a day would pass as a month, and although they would process much in that time, they could do nothing useful in the world of the Real; the material universe became as unyielding as rock.

  "Balls," said Richards, and sent Otto another message. He sent one to Chloe too, cramming as much information into them as he possibly could. "You're on your own now, big fella."

  Time, no matter how slowly it ran, could never be stopped. Richards initiated thousands of simulations, trying to figure a way out. There were none. He had no time to upload himself in his entirety elsewhere, and where could he go anyway? He could send out a sensing presence back to his sheath in Chicago or to any one of the fifty-plus he had elsewhere, but his very core was about to be consumed by fire, leaving any remote projection a broken facade, dribbling nonsense. What would be the point? He sank into unfamiliar lassitude.

  Richards watched the world he had built blasted to pieces. A wash of nuclear heat scoured the offices of Richards & Klein clean. The air ignited, and the resultant vacuum sucked the exterior windows in. Flames roared out of the arco as a great part of the building burst outwards, four floors up and four floors down from the detonation's epicentre. He was only glad that Genie's base unit was at her parent's house.

  The young star devoured the last of Richards' external sensors, and he lost all connection with the Real, then the Grid.

  Alone in the dark for what seemed an aeon, Richards felt his processes flicker and die one by one.
I'm dead
, he thought. After all his years of fretting about extinction he felt disappointingly ambivalent, now it finally came down to it.

  The flow of Richards' subjective time ran on slow as geology and the fires burned and spun like ravenous whirligigs trapped in glass, until his life was snatched away with a terrible abruptness.

Chapter 22

Pirate

Small blue sparks played on the exposed electronics of the drone, currently a mimetic, self-governing rifle, finally resembling a tree branch. It shuddered as it attempted to alter its shape and flee, the remaining fan on its fuselage rotating helplessly, then it died. Otto nudged the dead machine with the toe of his boot. A damn shame he'd had to kill it but it was too sophisticated for his near-I to pirate. He needed Richards for that kind of thing.

  Blood trickled down his arm. He'd been hit by a sliver, a polymer tranq dart projectile keyed to dissolve when confronted with the chemical signature of blood. The tranquilliser was strong enough to render a normal man unconscious, but not Otto. The in-built phactory of his 'tech supplied an antidote, and the feeling of wooziness lifted.

  He looked around the woods cautiously, holding his breath. Nothing but forest sounds. The trees were widely spaced, and through them the moon was a chalk impression on the blue of the sky. The moon's pocked face was approaching full, the lights of its colonies visible on its shaded crescent as pale sapphires. He had memorised the names of every base when he was a boy, when he had designs on being an astronaut, but there had been far fewer lights then. The decades had run fast; cities glimmered in the curves of lunar craters.

  Otto sat on a log and dressed his wound with a thin sheet of geckro-backed plastic that clung to his skin with leechlike intimacy. The tranq dart had left a red dot on his left bicep not far from where his would-be assassin had hit him back at the diner; both would be gone in a day or so thanks to his healthtech. Otto shut the first-aid case. He willed the phactory to give him a dose of painkiller, more for his worn shoulder than for his recent wounds.

  Another twelve miles to go till he got to Valdaire's hideout, and night was coming in. He picked up Chloe off the floor from behind a tree where he'd tossed her when the drone had attacked. "You sure this is the place?" he asked. The Grid cheater signal remained maddeningly indistinct. The game was nearly up, but he'd still not dared to access the Grid directly; he might as well blow a trumpet announcing his arrival. On the other hand, Chloe could be walking him off a cliff. He'd just have to go with it and see what happened, not the way he liked to work.

  "Yes," Chloe said. "The cabin was a hideout for pirate 'net casters once. Veronique brought me here three times when she was in college."

  "Valdaire was a pirate?"

  "No! She only dated pirates," said Chloe, scandalised. "I did not approve. They were silly boys. She was undergoing a standard final-stage adolescent rebellious phase. She got over it. She is a good girl. I love her."

  They went up, out of the dip in the mountain. Chloe directed Otto onto an ancient road, blacktop crumbled to grit under leaf litter. The road held a steady gradient, and was smoother than the forest floor, but its width was choked with saplings. On the road a second drone found them, but Otto was ready this time and he riddled it with holes. Past its station the road became impassable, thick with razor-edged briars too dense and tenacious to be natural.

  "Go up the bank," said Chloe. "You will be able to see the cabin from the top of the rise. It is not far from here. The road loops round this knoll. We can cut out the bend and avoid the thorns."

  Otto checked the maps he'd downloaded from the car. The topography was as she said, though there was no cabin marked. He picked his way past the gengineered foliage and headed up the hill. They stopped below the weathered rock at the top. Otto lay down, turned up his ocular magnification to full. There was a cabin there, after all, probably not on the map because it looked like no one had been there in years. It was practically derelict, maybe five rooms, a wide veranda out front railed in by rotted banisters. The paint had flaked away and the bare boards were grey or, where the sun did not hit the wood to dry it, thickly green with pleurococcal growth. The roof shingles were slipped and mossy; it'd leak like a sieve in a proper storm, but he supposed it was just about habitable. The finned twin nose fan housings of an aircar, an anachronism in this place, poked out from under pine branches behind the building. The car barked out a nonsense sig when he tried short-range access. It had no other signifier. Valdaire's work again.