Singularity's Children Box Set

by Toby Weston

  Stella was looking at the man suspiciously. “Did we meet in Dunia?” she asked.

  “Sort of, is probably the most honest answer,” the man replied. “But no would be accurate, too.”

  Stella continued eyeing the strange man doubtfully. She had heard of N. They were famous for corporate trolling; no multinational’s town hall or oligarch’s daughter’s birthday party was safe from their satire.

  Throughout the funeral party, amusing consensus violations were making people titter or gasp. Sheena was now madly trying to keep up with her mischievous dress, which was gliding around erratically.

  Private events, especially ones like this with high media attention, enforced a single contractually agreed consensus. All types of cheat-overlays, modesty filters, beer-goggles and pr0n-mods were disabled. More importantly, to prevent multiple conflicting realities being sent into the digital, all streamers, including any Camera Bees, were cryptographically bound to broadcast only the official consensus.

  In a trivial, almost irrelevant, real sense, Sheena was not actually naked—anybody present, bothering to lift their Spex, would see her in all her skimpy black Lycra glory—but, with the streams of the hacked consensus shared with millions of viewers, her embarrassment would fix itself into the world’s far more relevant shared social memory.

  “Chill, I’m a friend here, we’re on the same side,” the man said to Zaki. “To prove it, here is a heads up from head office. Check this out.” A miniature comic-style safe appeared between Zaki and the man from N. Zaki eyed it suspiciously, before somewhat reluctantly accepting the encrypted tar-ball.

  “It better not be malware!” said Zaki. “Otherwise you’ve got a Klan war on your hands!”

  “Ooh, I’m scared,” the man said. “No, seriously, I’m trying to help here, bro.” He leant in and whispered theatrically so that Stella could hear. “I’m trying to impress the lady. How would it look if I ganked her friend?”

  Zaki looked back and forth between Stella and the ex-waiter. Eventually, he came to a decision. “Stella, give me five minutes to check this out. Don’t go anywhere with him, alright? And don’t take anything from him, either.”

  “Don’t worry, Zaki,” said the man. “Like I said, we’re on the same side here. I won’t hurt her, that’s a promise.” He raised both hands to show he was not crossing any digits.

  With the informal verbal promise, a smart contract arrived in Zaki’s sensorium. He didn’t bother reading it, it would be legit. Reputation was the most important Klan currency.

  “I’ll be fine,” said Stella. “If he turns out to be a perv, believe me I’ve had to deal with worse.”

  Zaki smiled; then, without further warning, his body froze and began its default AFK behaviour loops.

  Stella was left with Sheena and a man in a freaky mask.

  “So, what are you doing here? Except victimising sluts?” Stella said, nodding towards Sheena and her bizarre crab-like scuttling.

  “Privilege is not the answer,” the man said, sitting down at the table. “A manicured garden does not satisfy.”

  “What garden?”

  “Any. Neat hedges, mowed lawns, perfect topiary. Orderly, safe, predictable. Meaningless.”

  “I don’t agree,” said Stella. “I like gardens. I know a very beautiful garden, which makes me happy.”

  “It’s a metaphor,” said the man. “Gardens are fake reality.”

  “This one was pretty nice. I like feeling safe.”

  “The garden is artificial; it is not nature.” The man tried again. “Life within the garden is hollow. It is a created system, it feels safe, limiting exposure to threatening situations, but the safety is an illusion. The jungle is still out there.”

  “Okay.” Stella considered this while looking at her nails.

  “Wealth sustains the illusion of the garden,” the man said.

  “Okay, I don’t get the point, though. You think money is bad?”

  Some sheep had appeared from somewhere and were milling around, eating the clumps of long grass that had sprouted up between the marble floor tiles.

  “Wealth is toxic to the soul,” continued the man. “Conspicuous consumption takes all the wealth and wastes it. Even worse, it leaves the consumers empty; like eating stones, or air.”

  Stella was trying to get a proper look at the man’s face. From across a room, he might have looked normal, if somewhat nondescript; but up close, he was a shifting blur of chunky pixels. When he turned away, Stella could see that his face was a full-face mask that tucked into the collar of the dark polo neck sweater he wore beneath his suit jacket. Behind his ears was a ridge of milky plastic.

  “And is there something more?” she asked. “I have to admit, for most of my life I’ve been too busy just getting along to really think about it.”

  “That’s not an accident. They made sure the poor stayed poor, to keep them busy. There is enough to go around, but they don’t want to share. Hierarchy is hard wired into our monkey brains, so even when there is enough to go around, the big monkey will still want it all...”

  “If this is your idea of small talk, I’ve heard better.”

  “You asked what I was doing here.”

  “I’m kind of sorry I did.”

  “Do you know why you are here?” asked the man,

  “To get some Coin,” Stella replied truthfully.

  “No, you are here to absorb the attention of people just one or two steps down the ladder.”

  “No, I’m here to get a payoff, because my digital boyfriend committed suicoid.”

  “Suicoid, nice!” The pixels moved into what might have been a smile. “But you miss the deeper point. It’s the same reason the Romans gave away cheap bread and theatre. Keep the masses well fed and distract them with blood in the stadiums. It’s all about control. It’s exactly the same now. In fact, it’s worse. The Sages know us so well that the entertainment they come up with is like a drug. It’s hyper-stimulation; too addictive. And, of course, its laced through with propaganda. Most people get so distracted by the porn, they don’t notice the spin.”

  “My VIP subscribers are basically addicts.”

  “Exactly,” said the man. “You were the heroin to keep them hooked and passive. There are too many of us. The planet is fucked—pardon my French. The whole world needs to be a managed environment; one big airport for us, one big garden for them. It’s too crowded for people to run around like crazies doing whatever they want… all that freedom would bring it down. Basically, you were a political tool, Stella.”

  “I never get political,” she protested.

  “You didn’t need to. They have other streamers for that. You were just the porn, the fast food... Not just you, of course. The whole lot of them—Sheena, Hin-Lyn, Shiori…”

  “Shiori is my assistant, she’s not a Starlet,” Stella said defensively.

  “Come on! She’s a thing, an Oid. You’re her backstory now. TeenLife has to migrate all your subs over to a new stream. Shiori is continuity. Look at her, she’s made for it: big eyes, big tits, short skirt…”

  “Blow them!”

  “Did you think that TeenLife wanted you for your pretty face? There are millions of sweet girls they could stream—they can manufacture a billion more!”

  “Did you get rid of my chaperone just so you could rail on me?”

  “Shit,” said the man. “I’m sorry, I tend to get carried away with this stuff. Look, they chose you because you have something the others don’t.”

  “Okay, I’ll fall for it… what’s that?”

  “You are real! The Sages are excellent at making up this bullshit brainwashing propaganda. But pretty much the only thing humans still do better than machines—is being human. And you are authentic, a real person. A life full of talking animals and floating kingdoms. And you have charm, beauty, sass…”

  “Whatever it is you want from me, why couldn’t you have started with that?” said Stella.

  The man laughed. “Right.
You see, you are helping us already. It was nice meeting you, Stella Sagong. Think about the things we talked about. Ask yourself, are you happy being heroin for the masses? Perhaps you can be their heroine instead?” He stood, bowed, turned and walked away, clearly very happy with his closing words.

  “What the F?” she muttered to herself, shaking her head as she watched him go.

  She stayed with Zaki for a quarter of an hour, despite his persistent vegetative state. She tried to ping him and Segi a few times, but there was no reply.

  Eventually, Zaki’s avatar hit its AFK timeout and logged off. Stella got up, pushed her way between grazing sheep and confused stragglers, and made for the exit.

  Chapter 10 – Kicking the Hornet’s Nest

  An unmissable priority alert vibrated into existence and obscured half of Segi’s vision. Simultaneously, he became aware of feet hammering on the wooden boards outside the clean-tent.

  “Trouble, Bro!” Zaki shouted through the plastic.

  “What’s up?”

  “It’s a raid. I just got a tip-off!"

  “From upstairs?”

  “No, Nebulous of all people,” Zaki said in a rush. “They gave me some intel, which looks legit. The Razzia are coming to shake us down. Apparently, they are franchising out to the local Zilish militia.”

  “Fucktoid! Should we bug out?”

  “I don’t think we can. If we run now, we lose everything we’ve built. As soon as they get a look at this place, they are going to freak.” Zaki leant on a bench. “This is a pretty edgy Fab. Silicium would want us to torch it before we go. Even if we didn’t, we would never be able to come back… it would be way too hot. Granny is not going to take that. She would literally rather die!”

  “Shit!” Segi swore. He knew Zaki was right. On issues of honour, Aal, their great-aunt—who they had affectionately called Granny since they were toddlers—was utterly lacking in capacity for compromise.

  “Look, we’ve got a few hours,” said Zaki. “Try and get Mum and Granny prepared to go down to the cellar, just in case we can’t bluff our way out this time.”

  “Okay,” Segi said, dashing for the door, adding another “SHIT!” in recognition of the seriousness of the situation.

  They sent out a code orange on the emergency Klan channel. It took the duty manager only minutes to dispatch the first squad of on-call security. Kinmates began remoting in. With only the absolute minimal explanation, they began efficiently taking control of local kit and surveillance gear. The growing team fed intel and analysis into an ad hoc command and control space, which they established as their first duty of business. Not every piece of kit on the farm had a remote interface, but enough of it did, so that experienced players, TPing in, would be nearly as good—or, in some cases, better—than boots or bots on the ground.

  Silicium had already read and digested the synopsis. The intelligence tar-ball was vague—probably deliberately redacted—but it suggested that their own Klan security was intact. Incriminating intel on the Çiftlik Fab had most likely come through multiple individually innocuous leaks. Sages grinding through immense mounds of mind-numbingly trivial data had eventually managed to join up enough dots to generate a sufficiently incriminating picture. Eavesdropping Oids were everywhere. Zaki thought back through recent conversations with Stella, wondering how much Jeno or Shiori might have passed back to their corporate puppet masters. He had obviously never mentioned looted Battle-Suits or Heavy-Water refining, but there had probably been enough minor slips over the years to build a fairly accurate picture of their illicit economic activity.

  The Çiftlik was remote. The next nearest houses were on an abandoned farm a few kilometres away on the other side of a ridge of low hills. The closest habitation was eight kilometres further towards the coast. The landscape here was littered with traces of departed populations—collapsed walls, tumbledown barns and roofless mosques. The majority of the population lived in or around Latakia. The hinterland, parched and hilly, was neglected and mostly abandoned. Infrastructure amounted to little more than dirt roads. Osmaniye had always considered the region its territory; the local Zil had disagreed, and so the land had suffered periodic depopulation and violence as power shifted and populations were forced to adapt, emigrate or die. Even now—with an autonomous local Zil government, and with both Osmaniye and Zilistan under the harmonious stewardship of the Caliph—old animosities were never far below the surface.

  If roads were a luxury, the impoverished state certainly didn’t have resources available for data infrastructure. The only available information networks were a scattering of MeshNodes, which just happened to have been almost exclusively manufactured by Zaki and Segi’s little Fab outfit. The ZKF, therefore, had no choice but to use the illegal tools of the enemy, infrastructure which was evidence of the precise crimes they had been dispatched to prosecute. The irony was not lost on Silicium. Segi used his root authority via a back door to quickly switch the nodes into their ‘Snoop and Infiltrate’ mode.

  Owning the hardware layer made it easy to intercept and decrypt all the ZKF comms passing over the network. Within minutes, Silicium had used their compromised MeshNodes to break into the ZKF’s rudimentary IT systems. They began sucking down everything from tax returns to squad movements. At the same time, malicious persistent payloads were injected and began probing for further exploits, while chipping away at the remaining defences. Everything incriminating or merely inconvenient would be leaked to the Mesh to become the digital equivalent of a kick-me sign, inviting a spontaneous bottom-up digital mob to descend on the astonished, woefully unprepared, Zil chain of command.

  As Zaki familiarised himself with the cybernetic theatre—scanning the intel as it came in—he actually started feeling sorry for the Zil. They didn’t even know they were under attack, and, by ignoring the glitches which had started to show up on their networks and devices, they had already lost the first battle.

  The ZKF were old school, preferring bullets to byte-code, a remnant from the previous century. They had allowed themselves to become locked in time, stuck in a generations-old struggle for freedom; besieged on all sides and quarantined from reality, they had not updated their capabilities in half a century and were clearly not prepared for a fourth-generation skirmish.

  Cynical Silicium spooks were already postulating that the whole scenario might be a Forward/Caliphate stitch-up. Two wary powers snuggling up to each other by bating their respective enemies. A few innocent lives lost in the process would be irrelevant collateral damage.

  Zaki moved through reports and real-time intercepts. He was less concerned with macro political plays than the tactical reality of an armoured ZKF squad gearing up to leave base. It looked like it would be ten men and at least one mechOid in two vehicles.

  Silicium preferred to lurk. The Klan didn’t like leaving the safety of its digital ocean and clambering clumsily around on physical land; but sometimes, violence—the last resort—was the only choice. They would prevail in a war against an old-school, real-life organisation without digital beachhead, but the residents of the Çiftlik Fab might not make it—plus, with any vulgar display of power, there was always the risk that collateral damage scattering chum into the water might give bigger fish a whiff of blood, persuading them to cruise by and take a closer look.

  Silicium was determined in any way possible to de-escalate the confrontation. According to the hasty plan, orders were being forged, maps edited, generals bribed and, ideally, it would all turn out to be a silly misunderstanding, allowing the Klan to slip back below the murky digital surface…

  …of course, this fiendishly subtle plan had gone to shit almost immediately.

  If anything, the cyberattack had been too successful. General network chaos and glitching MeshNodes had actually prevented most of the subtle misdirection from getting through.

  As they hammered through the arid terrain, kicking up a great comma of dust behind them, the ZKF squad had been unintentionally quarantined by Siliciu
m’s attack.

  Unable to even listen to music or share amusing flicks to break the monotony, the soldiers were forced instead to bear hours of arrhythmic percussion from their battered vehicles as they vibrated over hundreds of kilometres of rilled and pot-holed tracks. The squad had eventually rolled up, tired, annoyed and very much intent on confiscating anything of value that the dissidents might have on their farm.

  Watching through multiple feeds, Segi recognised one officer from a raid on the Çiftlik a few years back. The man didn’t make any move to leave the cab of the armoured cruiser. Instead, a taller man with a bushy, jet-black moustache got out of the vehicle and approached the gate.

  Stiff and muttering soldiers began climbing down from the back of the second vehicle, a truly antique truck with canvas sides. The mechOid, which had been clasped to a frame on the lead armoured cruiser, was helped down. It spent a few minutes running through diagnostics, bending its spidery limbs at odd angles as it limbered up like an athlete preparing to race. It was obviously a Forward model, making plain the Razzia connection. It would be controlled by a soldier in the back of the armoured cruiser.