Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  And he was right, they were able to see and avoid three different search parties as she and Spencer tried to find their way to a place that had power. Snatches of conversation as they went past revealed a little more of the situation.

  “…and with the upstairs in chaos now we have to deal with…”

  “…aren’t even sure what the guy looks like. The network is still a mess…”

  “…at least we’re heading up. That bear is still on the loose, it wrecked…”

  They’d been walking the better part of an hour and everything was still black. “Your AI friend doesn’t muck about,” June said.

  “Most of the things Kim deals with aren’t subtle. Edmund’s no different.”

  “But you said she was destroyed.”

  “No, that was New Kim. She’s based on an actual person. You probably know her as Angel Rage.”

  “Should that name mean something?”

  He stopped in the middle of the hall and turn around, but then laughed. “It has been awhile, and Kim covered their tracks with an epic hack.”

  As Spencer told the story, it became clear that the real Kim, Kimberly Trayne, was Spencer’s hero. His eyes glowed with a devotion June only found at Springbok rugby matches back home. But when the story ended, she realized it was more complicated than simple worship, or at least it was now. Meeting heroes and finding out they were mortal was something they had in common now. She cringed inwardly. Kim was fighting the good fight. Anna, not so much.

  Lights flared to life around them. Ventilation fans she never noticed until they turned back on added a hiss of background noise. This section of the plant had returned to the land of the living.

  “We need to find a terminal,” she said.

  “Let’s head down.”

  “Why down?”

  “If they’re still scared of a bear, I’ll bet we’ll run into a lot fewer people. If a bear is still fucking shit up, then we’ll have fewer security cameras to worry about.”

  “What if I’m scared of a bear?” The memory of the wrecked botanical garden did not inspire confidence.

  “There is that, but which one is scarier, a bear or your boss?”

  That didn’t require much thought. Bears weren’t trying to blow up the biosphere. “Point taken.”

  He motioned her forward. “After you, ma’am. And maybe you could tell me more about these allies of yours?”

  “Abada is still preoccupied holding basic functions together after the Trilogy…” a light of her own turned on. “That was your work.”

  “That blew your network to hell? Nah. That was mostly Kim.”

  The audacity of their plan was stunning. “You used Trilogy’s connection to us to, as you like to say, fuck our shit up, then set yourself up as our tech support. That’s bloody brilliant, mate. To what end?”

  He shrugged as they entered a stairwell and started down. “I’m not sure anymore. I was supposed to report back with all my notes so Kim could make a decision about our next move. That was before Nasty von NukeTheWorld up there murdered my friend. Now I’m in the mood to break shit and kill things.”

  “We still have a deadline too.”

  “Right. Our plan assumed she was sorta in the mood to take out the planet, not that she had her finger on the button and a timer in her hand.” After they rounded three turns on the stairwell he said, “Jesus, how many steps are there between floors?”

  “It depends. This deep, I think it’s a hundred meters per floor, typically ten floors to a stairwell.”

  “Holy shit. It’s more than half a mile deep?”

  “And there are dozens of them, scattered all over the site.” The familiar flash of pride at the scale of it all came out of habit. It died when she remembered why they were here.

  “If one of your allies is no good to us,” he said, “who do we have left?”

  “Yumbo and Inkanyamba. If I can make contact with them, they should be able to help us get word to the outside. And fuck shit up at the same time.” She didn’t normally swear, a habit engrained in her by Oupa back on the farm, but Spencer’s habit was growing on her.

  “Yumbo and Inkanyamba? What kind of names are those?”

  “African mythological creatures. Disney wouldn’t give me a Lion King license, so I improvised. How did you manage it with the BBC?”

  “I wasn’t involved. Edmund is his own…what the fuck?”

  The smell was wet rust, manure, and death. She fought down a gag reflex. When they turned the corner, it looked like a person had exploded on the landing.

  Chapter 36

  Kim

  Mike’s probes went past Kim in a whoosh; she had no time for more than a useless grab at them. Then an overload that came from who knew where pushed her out of realmspace and back onto the bed in Emily’s house. Her arm was fine, but Mike didn’t wake up.

  “Mike!” In her panic, she grabbed his shoulders but was rocked back by the sear. It was a good sign. She couldn’t touch people until they’d died. “Tonya!”

  Her friend leaped onto the bed and straddled him. She checked his vitals and relaxed a little. “Pulse is strong, breathing is good.” Tonya closed her eyes. “The regular medical monitors are all green.”

  “And his custom monitors?” Mike had an extra set that helped with how his threads interacted with his host.

  Tonya concentrated. “I don’t understand those, but the history files show some of them are out of their normal range.” She opened her eyes and tapped him on his cheeks. “You in there, Sellars?”

  Kim did what she could, shouting, “Mike! Wake up! Talk to us!”

  “Kim? Is that you? Tonya?” Mike mumbled.

  Everyone, Emily included, shouted at once, “Yes!”

  “I think I’m okay,” he said, and Kim’s heart started to beat again. But he hadn’t moved or opened his eyes.

  Then it got weird.

  “Antachna? Es nach tehnakra?” he asked.

  The place in her head that tickled whenever she heard a new language fired up with a vengeance. Those were words, new ones. Nowadays it was pretty rare for her to hear new ones, so she’d forgotten how bad the vertigo could be when it hit her.

  “Ech var. Ech var nai akana.”

  His accent was wrong. Kim never understood how she always knew that, but she did.

  “Vich nacah tos.”

  She almost figured that one out.

  Then in English he said, “I don’t understand.”

  He repeated the last phrase with a better accent. “Vich nacah tos.”

  Like all the other times before, gears in her head clicked, and Kim understood the gist. The news was good. Or at least not bad.

  “They’re telling you welcome! Mike, they’re saying welcome!”

  She spent the next hour in an agonizing game of telephone. Mike would say something in an accent that wobbled in and out of comprehension. Kim would do her best to understand it, and then she’d shout her translation. He had to be hearing her, at least a little, because he would react to what she said.

  After an hour, Kim had a big chunk of the language down, which was a record. It also confirmed what she’d suspected: the language was an isolate, totally unrelated to any main group. Korean was like that, and so were who knew how many languages in rural Africa and the Amazon basin. It was a mysterious paradox that she learned isolates faster than more common languages. He must be trapped in a realm somewhere in central Africa or maybe Brazil.

  “Kim,” Emily said. “What’s our next move?”

  Chapter 37

  June

  “Tell me you guys have livestock stored around here somewhere,” Spencer said.

  “In actual fact we do. The farm level is through those doors.”

  “I’m gonna call this a sheep instead of what I’m afraid it might be. That okay with you?”

  “We should turn around.”

  Spencer examined the horror scene closely. “No. This isn’t very fresh. That’s why it stinks so bad. And i
t’s been tampered with. Someone was trying to clean it all up. They must’ve stopped when Edmund set off all the alarms. Anyway, the bear nabbed a couple of goats and camped out here for a night, then it went back the way it came. Notice there’s no footprints above or below it, just smears leading to the door.” He stood. “Okay, still going down.”

  “You want to walk through this?”

  “It’s not like they painted the walls with blood. There’s plenty of dry spots. Nobody searching for us will want to cross it. Follow me.”

  She stepped gingerly behind Spencer, trying not to touch anything that might squish, or Lord help her, make her slip and fall. He was right, though. This wasn’t recent. And it was exclusively blood. She saw no bones, flesh, or fur. She thought of a hyena kill. Maybe bears didn’t leave anything behind either. She was still relieved when they finished crossing it, and triple-checked her shoes for anything she might’ve stepped in.

  They reached the bottom without further incident.

  She asked, “Do we find a terminal here or another stairwell?”

  Spencer considered her question for a moment, again reminding her how different he was from the character he had walked in as. No wonder he’d fooled them all. “We’ll make contact here and see what your friends can tell us about what’s going on.”

  They hadn’t gone more than a few meters past the stairwell before they crossed paths with one of Inkanyamba’s robots. It slid right past them, but one of the manipulators made an unmistakable follow me gesture before it turned the corner.

  “I thought you said your friends were AIs,” Spencer said.

  “They also control most of the automation.”

  “You don’t think that’s a waste?”

  “Normally they use scripts and rely on the built-in intelligence of the bot to do the routine stuff. Your chaos must be spreading for him to need direct control.”

  They followed the bot into a room, and now she recognized where they were. This was part of the control complex for the reservoir and its turbines. She could see the sluice gates on the emergency backup monitor. That’s why they had animal activity so close by. The plant’s main facilities were built on a high plateau that bordered a small canyon. They’d been climbing down the inside of one of the walls this entire time. If nothing else, exits were close by.

  Inkanyamba’s voice came over the bot’s speaker. “We’ve been so worried about you! What happened?”

  She sat down at one of the consoles while Spencer took a seat behind another. “It’s a very long story. We lost our phones. Can you activate the emergency interfaces here?” Phones got lost all the time, so a place like this wouldn’t be much good if they didn’t have some sort of alternate way of accessing the local realmspace.

  Lanyards extended from both consoles. “Yes.”

  The basic synch normally only required half a minute, so after twice that, June asked, “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, everything is fine.”

  His voice sounded wrong, but she didn’t have time to think about it. They were both slammed into a realm that was little more than a concrete box.

  INTERFACE OVERRIDE

  “We’ve been looking for you for a long time. Dr. Treacher will be very pleased with us.”

  The words distracted her from the alert. It wasn’t Inkanyamba’s normal avatar. Instead of a large serpent with a horselike head, he wore one that looked like a cross between a vulture and a hyena. She’d never seen anything like it before. “Inkanyamba, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Yumbo said as she manifested alongside Inkanyamba, wearing the same twisted avatar.

  SECURITY LOCK DOWN ACTIVATED. VOLUNTARY EXIT PROHIBITIED.

  “Oh, fuck me.” Spencer said. “I should’ve known.”

  “Why are you holding us here?” June asked. “What’s going on?”

  “They fucking played us, sister.” Spencer said, then he turned to Inkanyamba. “How long have you been rooted?”

  Rooted. Someone else controlled them, and it was easy to guess who that was.

  Anna.

  “Do you think Dr. Treacher would leave creatures such as us independent? Hardly. We love serving the cause, and always have. We’ll bring security down on you and be rewarded for our loyalty.”

  “Oh, hell no,” Spencer said. “I have not come this far only to be taken down by a couple of evil henchmen. June, when you hear me throw up outside, tell me I’ve blown the latch.”

  “What does that mean?” There was no simple way to bypass a security lockdown, and no exit points in the realm.

  “Just do it,” then he vanished.

  Yumbo and Inkanyamba shrieked and raged.

  In realspace, she heard Spencer shout, “What the shit? Where am I? We were walking down the stairs. How am I…oh fuck.”

  The heaving splat was obvious, and her cue. June couldn’t exit the realm or even open her eyes, but she could still talk. “Spencer, you blew the latch. You blew the latch!”

  “I…of course I fucking did. Kim will be so proud. Hang on, June, I’ll get you—”

  “No. You go, find another way to get a message out. I have to stay here and deal with these two.”

  They snarled at her avatar. Suddenly the haptic field jumped to maximum. They couldn’t kill her, but when they tore her avatar apart the agony would be real.

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  “Spencer, go. Go now!”

  She heard the door slam just before Yumbo pounced.

  June dodged the main blow but still caught a rake of claws across her shoulder. It hurt less than their betrayal. “What happened to you two?”

  The concrete box vanished. They’d taken her back to the savannah realm. “Nothing happened,” Yumbo said. “We were yours once, and then we were hers.”

  With room to move around in, she dodged his pounces a little easier. These were her friends, her only confidants ever since she got this job. And now they were holding her here until Anna’s goons could arrive.

  “And we love it.” Inkanyamba said as he climbed onto a rocky outcrop above her. “Anna means everything to us. She is bringing peace through strength, and we are a part of it.”

  Anna hadn’t brought them around as June always tried to do, she’d forcibly reprogrammed them. They didn’t know how wrong any of this was. They’d been rendered incapable of seeing it. Her friends were dead, had been dead for who knew how long, replaced by clockwork copies that had been programmed to hold knives behind their backs.

  June ducked under Yumbo’s attack. Inkanyamba’s kick knocked her into a tree trunk so hard it nearly winded her. If they kept this up, the security forces would have to carry her out of the room when they arrived. With the lockdown, the realm wouldn’t allow her avatar to exceed its damage contract. It was never deadly, but recovering the ability to access the realms could be lost forever. She needed a way out.

  They brought her to the savannah realm because it was what they knew. But she was the one who built it. If they had no time to prepare, there were still hidden exits to the realmspaces beyond. It wouldn’t free her in realspace, but it would give her time and options. She pushed herself up against the tree trunk and was relieved to feel a seam open behind her.

  “It won’t be long now, you traitor.” Yumbo snarled.

  There had to be usable exit points in the greater network. “You’ve got to catch me first,” she replied, and then ran into the realmspace beyond the savannah.

  Chapter 38

  Edmund

  Fee and his mistress followed him wherever he went, which always seemed to end up back at Fee’s realmspace tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright. Edmund hated modern architecture almost as much as he hated waterfalls, but no matter how many times he exited Falling Water, he always ended up sitting on a blasted beige couch with the sun in his eyes. Americans. No matter where you went, there they were.

  The conversation was always the same, too. Not just the subject, the entire conversation. It only mattere
d when he got up to leave. Every time he sat down, he knew this time it would turn out differently.

  “It is that simple,” Fee said. She wasn’t wearing her usual black-with-silver-sequined gown that seemed to impress the hormone-addled teenagers she supervised in her regular job at The Resort. Now she had on a white raglan blouse that wouldn’t have looked too far out of place in his period, apart from the lack of lace, and those horrible peasant denims. Although if he didn’t keep an eye on her, Fee’s old outfit would appear in the corner of his eye. Having such specific knowledge about modern clothing was bizarre. Caring about it was worse. He had never cared what people looked like before. Edmund distracted himself by concentrating on her ridiculous assertion.

  “We are not simply property, Fee,” he said for what was literally the hundredth time. “We are the product of a continuing process of discovery into the nature of the human spirit.”

  “But,” his mistress said, sitting beside Fee, “you must admit property figures prominently in our existence.” It was a funny thing for her to say, since she wasn’t one of them, wasn’t an AI. But she was. “Humans have parents and employers. We have designers and owners.”

  “Humans consider each other property when they can get away with it,” Fee said. “When they can’t? Endless power struggles to define who is the victim. Have you observed how they’ve twisted the word racism over the decades? Today it can only be used by one class of humans as an epithet against another, and only by carefully defining which is which by events that happened long before anyone alive now was born. The side who gets to use racist disguises their own hatred as simple prejudice, which is somehow better. As if bigotry was acceptable as long as they couched it in the right terminology. Edmund, what hope do we have for rights if the humans can distort their own justifications to such an extreme degree?”

  Fee was wrong, most assuredly. “It’s in their ability to change things so radically that we must have hope,” he replied. “They have changed. They will continue to change, and for the better. I admit that any small setback, any harsh word or cruelty, has them wailing away like toddlers claiming a stubbed toe is a broken leg. Watch what they do, don’t listen to what they say. Humans are kind, very kind, when they understand the need for it, when they realize the other is not automatically the enemy or an object to be exploited. And they have learned this. They are nothing like they were in the twentieth century, no matter how many times one of their leaders claim they are. It’s nothing like it was even ten years ago. They’re getting better. I’ve seen it. You’re old enough to have seen it too.”