The Nemesis Worm

by Guy Haley

  “Or maybe he is making a point,” said Otto.

  A man in a blue environment suit waved to them from behind a pile of rotting leftovers. “Smillie! Over here!” his voice was clipped, old money posh.

  “That’s my man, Doctor Roberson. Come on” Their EuPol guide offered waders to Otto and Smillie. They pulled them on, and stepped off the walkway. The staggered up over the trash, both Otto and Richards’ borrowed body sinking up their knees.

  “Julian, how are you?” Smillie offered his hand. The other man held both his up. They were gloved and covered in slime. In one he held a probe.

  “Please, Smillie. Can you not see? I’m all awash in evidence.”

  “Aye, sorry. This our victim?” Smillie gestured to the boneless mess just visible through the flaps of a forensics isolation tent, and barely distinguishable from the rubbish it lay on. Two other men, similarly garbed to Roberson in one-piece blue suits, were minutely examining the ground about the body. A hoverdrone darted about like a fat corpse fly, flashing as it took images. Other units scuttled around the floor, plucking fibres from the filth. “What is it, the eighth? Looks just like the others.”

  “It is,” said Roberson reluctantly. His eyes, silvered optimax replacements, were unreadable. “Friends of yours?”

  “Of a sort. Don’t worry about them, you can talk freely. They’re up to their necks in this. It’s government business.”

  “I thought as much. I can feel the swine crawling about back there,” the coroner waved a hand toward the large copper-coloured augmatic hunched down like a tick under his hat. “Typical. I wish they’d just send one of their own ’crats down here to pick over this. Having them peering out of my eyes is frankly an intrusion. But what can you do?” He shook his head. “Come on then,” he started toward the tent, throwing his probe into a box of similarly soiled tools. “I advise you to take one of those,” he indicated another box, full of breathing masks. “The smell is even worse in the tent than it is out here, if you can credit it.”

  The three men ducked into the tent. Richards’ borrowed body was too large to go within, so he hulked outside and unfolded a limb with a camera on it into the tent.

  “You got here just in time. We were just about to pack him up and leave,” said Roberson.

  “It’s a him?” said Smillie “You sure?”

  “Yes. His ID chip has been removed, of course, and his genome’s been puddled, just like the others. But there’s enough left to determine sex, and we know he was an EU citizen from the chip location. The marks on the skull from the implantation process are all the same on citizens. And there was this. God knows why the killer left it behind. Bit of a smoking gun really.” The coroner squatted down and pulled an evidence bag from a tray of similar plastic-wrapped objects.

  “A pre-paid access jack,” said Richards. “Is it still active?”

  “Well, yes. I think so,” said Roberson. “Preliminary scans indicate so, though we don’t have the appropriate equipment here to fully check it out. We will be able to tell you for sure once we have our Sixes and the Seven in the lab have a go. But now? My guess is that it is active. But it could also be a penal tag or an advanced pro Gridlink or any other number of things. As you can see, the healthtech chewed it up pretty badly,” he jiggled the bag. “Look at the area round the body,” he pointed. “The ’mites just kept going when they got through the corpse, and ate into the garbage. Imagine if something like that got out into the wild? They would’ve stripped the life out of a good old chunk of the river. We would have been fishing the buggers out for days. I had the place EMP’d before we landed, just to be sure. Fried the barge pilot, of course, which is not going to make the GNLC happy at all, but replacing a near-I is cheaper than refloating this monster and the subsequent clean up operation. We’re pretty sure we got the lot of them. We scanned a few, and we don’t think they were programmed to autofab, which is a lucky old thing.”

  “Nice work, Julian.”

  “Well, thanks. But this isn’t my job, Smillie, and as much as I’m glad to help out the boys on the ground, you need to make sure they are more careful in future.”

  “Noted,” said Smillie. “I’ll have a word.”

  “Give me the jack,” said Richards’ drone. He extended a segmented, flexible maniple, like a steel squid. Roberson handed the device over, and Richards whipped it away.

  “You have the expertise to crack it, even so damaged?” said Roberson, his eyebrows disappearing under his hat. “Impressive. I didn’t know you had a class Six on the staff, Smillie.”

  “I’m not on the staff, and I’m not a class Six. I’m class Five,” said Richards with his smarmy, borrowed voice.

  Recognition lit up Roberson’s face behind his visor. “Oh! Are you, you are not Richards, are you by any chance, the security consultant?”

  “I prefer the term private investigator.”

  “How quaint. I am so sorry, I didn’t think to check you when you got here – no offence, when DI Smillie here says ‘government’ I tend to keep a low profile, so I kept off the mentaug, and the loader didn’t jog the old meat sack,” Roberson tapped his forehead. “But a Five? The Richards? Well, well, fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Dr Smith at the cybernetic arm of our office has told me so much about you. So, what can you tell us?”

  “I am trying to concentrate,” said Richards. Roberson obligingly shut up with a smile, though he watched the loader like he were expected it to pull a live rabbit out of the tool box bolted to its front behind the shovel. Richards let his mind slip half out of the real and into the Grid flow to wrap itself round the ethereal components of the jack. It was a prepaid number, nerve-bonded, the type they gave out to junkies to limit their gridtime. This one had been professionally hacked and had a sky-high usage count, the limiter on it reduced doing nothing more than counting off the hours; it looked like the pile of mush was one guy who had fallen off the wagon in a big way. It took Richards some time to access what he was looking for. The condition of the jack meant he had to pussyfoot around a whole load of broken nanotronics before he could get into the account it belonged to. Then the account was surprisingly well protected, almost impressively so, Richards required entire seconds to break in. From there, it wasn’t too hard to burrow into the health and social mainframes.

  “The boy was Jermaine Abuso, 19 years old,” Richards borrowed voice intoned. “He was a student at Camtech. He was being treated for addiction to the New Life game family, that’s why this.” He waved the jack around, and broadcast a host of information about the boy into Roberson’s aug. The coroner tilted his head on one side as he skimmed it.

  “My, my,” he said. “That should come in handy. Many thanks.”

  “You can put my medal in the post,” said Richards.

  “So fast, and quite illegal. Tell me, how did you crack the NHS?”

  “I’m not telling.”

  “Well, that wasn’t so hard,” said Smillie. “You should come back to work for me Richards. Do you have any connection with the other victims?”

  “Not yet. I am initiating a scan of his social network, but it will take a while.”

  “Eh, don’t be so short. It’s a lead isn’t it?”

  Otto snorted. “Like the data trail? I do not think so, Smillie. If this was for real, Richards would be locked up tight in the AIMCU and we’d never have seen this corpse. It is an obvious trap.” Smillie scowled at him. Otto pointedly looked away, back up river toward the tattered city, to where sea birds wheeled round the mouths of the third and fourth surge canals. “Come on, let’s go, we do not have to stand and wait while Richards rides the Grid,” he said. “The stink of this place is getting to me.”

  Richards soon discovered that three things linked the victims. One was a shared membership of a certain game in the New Life cluster, the one Abuso was a registered addict of, the second was that all of them had recently been implanted with healthtech, the other was an interest in AI sciences. All of them either had education
in that direction or actually worked in the industry. Most, but not all, also had some kind of mentaug. Other than that they were a heterogenous group as you could hope to find: Brit native, Eurocitizen, immigrant, young and old, employed and jobless. The same kind of firewalls, false trails and retroactive data scrubbing obscured the group’s dealings as they did Abuso’s account. As far as Richards could tell, he’d been the group’s security expert. Pointless, thought Richards. Without a true quantum cypher, none of this could keep him out, and that was a stone cold fact.

  While Richards tracked through the Grid, Smillie had pulled up the dead boy’s address on his palmtop. Abuso’d been living in a student residence, in the Morden Subcity. Richards proposed that he head off back to the office gridwise, while the two men checked out the halls. Smillie grumbled at that and shook his head. He wasn’t keen on students. Otto shrugged. Richards’ didn’t wait for Smillie’s agreement before he left.

  Fractions of a second later Richards was back in the office, though in a real sense he had not been anywhere else. His base unit, the bulky hardware that ran Richards’ programming, was located deep in the arco’s superstructure under the office, any presence Richard had elsewhere was merely an extension of his senses. Nevertheless, he was to all intents not fully aware of what was occurring in his base unit while he was ‘out’, an entity perceived itself to be where its senses were. He had numerous subroutines keeping watch on his physical body, he was no more aware of them than a man is of his beating heart. He ducked into his internal systems to check the running of the base unit. It all looked okay, no one had tried to access it remotely or had tampered with the seals on its vault. He updated his security ware with the subtly different data signature of his copy. He did not want evicting while he was out. He then spent four minutes breaking into New Life and rejigging Abuso’s account so the student would still appear to be alive. He took pains to do this carefully. AI of any Class were strictly forbidden from entering most Grid virtual worlds, and the penalties could be harsh.

  As he worked, Richards looked out through the office’s eyes at the mess Otto had made, and his eye fell upon his sheath. He longed to get out of the Grid, step into the Real in something that was not a glorified shit shifter. Have a real goddamn drink with real people in a real place. But no, he had to go and stop his unasked for offspring from murdering anyone else. Sometimes he wondered why he bothered getting out of bed in the mornings, metaphorically speaking.

  He realised he was muttering to himself, and stopped.

  He finished recalibrating the account and eased the chunks of code he had copied from New Life’s central programming back into the system, waiting for a timing break in the top tier churn to slot them home. A picosecond pause in the stream of information afforded him his chance. Suddenly Abuso was among the living once more.

  “As if he’d never been dead,” said Richards. He would be safely able to wander the game world until New Life’s governing class Seven cottoned on that people didn’t die and then come back to life that way; there was a lot more paperwork involved. But it was a busy machine, so Richards reckoned he had thirty minutes at the outside before it noticed, the account was suspended and his behind removed by the New Life AI so fast it would outpace the electrons carrying it. He and New Life’s Seven had a rocky history.

  Richards cloaked himself in Abuso’s stolen digital skin, took the machine equivalent of a deep breath, and leapt into the ocean of information that made up the System Wide Grid.

  He entered New Life the way a jacked in human would, through the front door. It was a sensory rich environment, and that amused and irked Richards. For him the Grid was... he’d tried to explain it to Otto, but it was hard for the experience an AI had of Grid to be conveyed to a human, if not impossible. To him, the Grid was a sea, the space between thoughts, a river of light. Richards swam it like a leviathan, and he knew at those times that he was not nor ever would be human, not even as tenuously human as Letitia. It was embarrassing for him, but he felt godlike when in his natural environment. Entering one of the game places, by contrast, was far from divine. He likened it to walking through mud to get to a cheap funfair. Richards hated funfairs of all kinds for being neither fair nor fun. He had no idea why online games like New Life held such fascination for people. Ever since the AI emancipation had closed off the totally immersive environments of the Reality Realm RealWorlds, only Grid realms with limited realism were permitted. Being in them was, of course, almost totally convincing to the five senses, but the creatures that populated them were mindless drones way below the cognitive levels of even the AI Ones, and they were as dumb as bricks. Now that the corporations that ran the games could not offer a living world experience populated by slaved true AIs, they followed the tried and tested formats that had been online for over a century with 22nd century window dressing: kill 13 of this semi-autonomous orc-thing, collect 20 of that, trade in for shiny baubles and character points. To Richards this kind of activity was akin to the kind of demeaning thing chimpanzees used to be forced to do to collect sweets in laboratories. The main difference being that the chumps online had a choice. Player to player interaction was encouraged, of course, but in Richards’ opinion they should just get out and go to a bar.

  Richards tried not to let his annoyance show as passed through gates ablaze with garish advertising into the game itself. His body tingled and he gently manifested as an eight foot pigman, racks of icons cluttering his vision. He checked the digital environment for anyone who might try and engage him in the game. Fortunately, the area appeared to be deserted. He ran a simultaneous scan of the under-game churn. He hadn’t been noticed by the Seven either. He set to work. His avatar ‘Hogthor’ was well tooled up by the measure of such places. Evidently, as Abuso’s junkie’s access jack had suggested, he had been a genuine Grid addict. Richards riffled through the character data. Abuso had been the member of various raid and conspiracy groups, but Richards was sure he wouldn’t find what he was looking for there. He was right. Hidden under a false item in the Pig Man’s inventory was a summons key for a non-game group. ‘On the grey’ they called these, a tried and tested way for crims and terror cells to meet up. If you are a total amateur, thought Richards. He checked it out. The names of the seven dead AI freaks appeared in the air before him. Bingo. There were two more names on the same list, one highlighted in light blue: Lauran Hollins. She was online and in the game. Richards sent a text only message using Abuso’s account to Otto about the remaining accomplice, a certain Samuel Lundberg. Then he sent another to Hollins, asking her to meet him and telling her to be quick. He made sure there was nothing in the message or its syntax that would intimate he were not Abuso just in case she didn’t happen to already know he was dead. It was unlikely, word got round quick on the Grid.

  He sat down in the midst of a glade surrounded by rock spires, glared at a passing pixie that looked like it might want to talk, and waited.

  It was time he got some answers.

  The Morden Subcity was an ugly place, hastily slung together from prefab units after the 2033 A-bomb, expanding rapidly once the Second Great Migration got into full swing. It should have been pulled down years ago, but pressure from the steady influx of climate refugees had kept it in use and growing. 80 years old, the Subcity heaved with people from every corner of the world and beyond.

  Smillie parked the car behind the high walls of the Morden EuPol station. He and Otto requisitioned a couple of constables, and together four of them pushed their way out into the crowds. Warm rain began to fall. The street was jammed with people of all nations, uniformly clad in cheap rain capes. They shuffled along slowly like so many plastic penguins, heads down. Rusting cars honked endlessly, grinding past yellowing shop displays and poorly made market stalls. It was hard going. Even with Smillie’s badge and Otto’s bulk, it took them a good ten minutes to negotiate the kilometre from the station to the student flats. By then the rain was falling in sheets.

  “It’s that one there,�
� shouted Smillie, voice battling against the throng and the weather, pointing over the street to seven low rise buildings set in lawns behind high fences. There were lots of these student blocks in Morden, cheap ground rents meant half the housing stock of the Conglomerated Universities of London was down there. They all looked much the same. Smillie, Otto and their back-up shoved their way over to the complex. Smillie flashed his badge to the rent-a-cop on the gate. He was about to let them in when the AI Four governing the place got uppity.

  “What is your purpose?” it demanded without preamble, the voice appearing in Otto’s mind and from Smillie’s palmtop. The rain hammering off the foamcrete nearly drowned out both.

  “I am Detective Inspector James Smillie. We’re here to investigate the death of one Jermaine Abuso. He is one of your student lodgers.”

  “I am cognizant of that fact. Your explanation is irrelevant,” said the Four. “Your access is denied.”

  “Why?” said Smillie. “We have a warrant.”

  “Your warrant is invalid. Your information is incorrect.”

  “Listen,” said Otto. “You may believe he is alive, but the Grid presence you are monitoring is not him, it is my partner, undercover posing as Abuso on the Grid investigating certain activities pertaining to AI trafficking. Abuso is dead.”

  “If Jermaine Abuso, student A-39-07-651 is dead, why is he studying in his room?” barked the Four tersely. Bring the first of the truly sentient AIs, the Fours lacked many of the later models’ more human graces, but Otto got the impression this one was being especially pissy. “Why are his vitals present and valid? Why is his encelaphogram stable?” An image showing the interior of a dorm room appeared on the security guard’s cubicle window, its bottom edge rich with data. “As you can see he is alive and well. Your partner is illegally impersonating a live subject. Impersonating the dead is, in any case, illegal. I will be informing EuPol Central and New Scotland Yard2. Please remain here to await arrest. Any attempt to leave will be met with force”