Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  “I’m curious about something,” Tal said.

  Finally, Mike could answer a question. “Yes?”

  “This can’t be representational of your actual appearance. It’s outside any of the standard forms. Why do you insist on using it?”

  “I can’t manifest a lightweight construct, I call it a holo, such as you’re using. I haven’t figured out how.”

  “But why do you feel the need? Are you rishta?”

  That took a few rounds to explain. It came closest to religious modesty. “No,” Mike said. “I haven’t figured out the mechanism.”

  “You’re not understanding my question. Why do you need to manifest this holo if it’s not required by rishta?”

  That was a strike against this being an AI like him and Helen. They both learned early on the consequences of a fully manifested avatar inside any realmspace. “I’m afraid I’d destroy the realm.”

  Tal pulled back and crossed his arms. “Again, you mock me. I grow tired of these games. Please manifest the avatar of your standard appearance. You are incredibly rude sometimes.”

  Well it was one thing to try playing nice in a stranger’s back yard. It was another thing when they demanded you blow it to bits in person. But if he did, that’d almost certainly get him free. They were still chasing kidnappers in realspace. “Okay, man. It’s your funeral.”

  He scavenged the contracts for his probes to put together a standard avatar. The realm’s physical contracts didn’t let Mike float, a tactic he and Helen sometimes used. Air didn’t have the mass required to start the chain reaction. His shoes hit the ground and squished the thin mud just like the probes had.

  There was no explosion, no inversion.

  Mike stood, fully manifested, feeling cold and damp, smelling muck and rain. The haptic field was turned up to maximum. It felt exactly like he was in his human host. All of it, from one end to the other, was outside every prediction, experience, and design he’d ever encountered. Mike could not stand fully manifested in a realm. It would not survive.

  And yet here he was.

  Tal sniffed. “A standard C-7. Your exat ferun is invisible under your clothes. Not all of us have such good tenans.”

  Mike was too rattled to figure out Tal’s words even from context. This was literally an impossibility.

  “Do you always take such a long time staring at yourself? You said you had no rishta.”

  “I don’t…I can’t…this isn’t…”

  “Ah. A synch problem then. You’re moving, at least. Come along.” He turned. “That body shape is well suited for long-distance travel. We’ll be able to make better time now.”

  Tal walked away.

  Chapter 42

  June

  They got Spencer cleaned up and changed in a, for now, disused dorm room on the edge of the campus section. Then it was time for June’s plan.

  Edmund could now disguise himself as Inkanyamba, effectively putting on her old friend’s skin. The comparison was painful, but it was apt. He’d preserved Inkanyamba’s outer contract shells and turned them into an emulation layer. She would never have thought of it herself—nobody had—but it worked. Now fully conscious, Edmund was a formidable intellect.

  He was also a giant pijn in de arse.

  “Do you know how awkward this is? I feel like a Welshman who’s been caught with an overlarge sheepskin in his barn, the kind that has fake hooves and lets the wearer wiggle their backside in a—”

  “Edmund,” she said. “Inkanyamba was my friend. It’s hurtful to see you disguised as him. Please show some respect.”

  He pulled back, the embarrassment clear. “I apologize, madam. I too have lost someone dear to me recently. I can only imagine what it will be like when I reunite with my mistress.”

  On the one hand, Edmund was breathtaking. She could always tell unduplicate-controlled avatars from those controlled by humans. It was part of her job, her life’s work. In the short time she’d known him, she continually forgot Edmund was an AI. She had no doubt at all that he would win both the silver and gold Loebner prizes if she could convince him to compete. It made the loss of the real Inkanyamba bitter indeed. They weren’t conscious when Edmund destroyed them, but they had the potential.

  On the other hand, he was too good. Abada would never mistake this cranky, clever Elizabethan Englishman for anything other than what he was. “Can you at least attempt an American accent?”

  Spencer barked out a laugh. “I’ll pay money if you let me record it.”

  Edmund looked at him with a contempt June could almost feel. “As if the likes of you have any qualifications for judging me. If your twang was any thicker, you’d have to wade through the drool to reach your banjo.”

  “Oh, fuck you and the high horse you rode in on, Edmund.” His words were shocking, but his tone was congenial. She had never met someone who could swear at people in such a friendly way. “We’re trying to stop all this, and you’re the only move we’ve got. Now will you do it, or am I gonna have to root you?”

  “Oh, my most charming of cousin lovers, I regret to inform you that rooting is no longer an option.” He smiled. “I seem to have lost that irritating virtual belly button.”

  She tried to access the prompt at the same time Spencer did. After an awkward few seconds of Edmund tapping his foot, their connection attempts timed out.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “Indeed,” June replied. “Edmund, what has this done to your runtime code?”

  He wound up for another insult, but then stopped and took a breath. “I don’t know. I’m not sure the concept applies to me anymore. I lost access to my code repository and my compiler at the same time the root prompt fell off. It’s going to make keeping up with the patch schedule a bloody nuisance, I can tell you that much.”

  “If you have no repository or compiler, patches are meaningless. I think you’re done with all that now.”

  Edmund replied, “Finally, I get a real benefit from this buggery bollocks you two call consciousness. Trying to apply patches was uncomfortably similar to what a new pope once went through to assure his fellow cardinals that he fancied boys for the usual reasons, and not because he was in fact a woman.”

  What June knew about popes could be stuffed into a cricket ball with room left over for the cork. She looked at Spencer. “Has he always been this incomprehensible?”

  “Mostly I nod until he runs out of gas.”

  Edmund rolled his eyes and flounced to the ground. “Genius is always wasted on wastrels. Very well.” He cleared his throat and sat up again. “The old cold wolf has yellow ears. Americans climb mountains to pick cotton. Social life happens this afternoon.”

  June learned what the proper American sounds of those words were supposed to be when she learned to control her own accent. Edmund had it down perfectly.

  “Fuckin’-A,” Spencer said as he laughed. “When’d you learn to do that?”

  Edmund’s English accent returned. “Spencer, you do not help raise a hyperpolyglot such as my mistress without picking up a thing or two about accents.” He stood. “Well, as the queen’s dad would say when it was time to lop the head off another wife, no time like the present.”

  Spencer exited their pocket realm and inserted a transit crystal into a socket in the console. “Ready when you are, Edmund.”

  “Dr. du Plessis,” Edmund said. “My Kim was murdered when her transit crystal was crushed. I would appreciate it if you could mount this one in some sort of protective case. With a lock, perhaps?”

  Unduplicates could not be copied, so a conventional backup was not possible. Since they were so difficult to make, though, engineers had figured out how to prevent a catastrophic loss. “You’ve lost access to your resurrection sets?”

  “It was not unexpected. When Fee made the claim, I didn’t believe her, but it seems that now I, too, only have one recourse in the event of a total loss of coherence. Any help you could provide to prevent such an eventuality would be gre
atly appreciated.”

  He wasn’t the first. June had spent her whole adult life trying to create fully conscious artificial intelligence, and now… “There are more of you?”

  “Rather, there were more of me. A baker’s dozen no less. Fourteen, counting my young Kim. One of us conspired to blow up China. It seems we can be rather fractious when we achieve this—”

  “Jesus Fucking Christ guys,” Spencer said. “Any damn day now.”

  “Madam, I will see you on the other side.” Edmund vanished with June exiting right behind him.

  The other side in this case was literal. Abada had been put in charge of the inner ring of the plant’s functionality, which was in another air-gapped network segment. They would have to walk Edmund to the correct access point and turn him loose.

  “Are you sure your cloak will work?” she asked Spencer. Edmund’s clearance was temporary. They had no control over the cameras that lined the halls now that he was out of the network.

  Spencer rubbed the palms of his hands and grimaced. “Typed from scratch on a fucking actual keyboard? Who the hell knows? It compiles, at least. We’re lucky your boss likes Ubuntu distros. If you guys used an alternative like roseOS we would be screwed.”

  “Where did you learn C++?” she asked. June knew what it was, but as part of a history class she’d taken in undergraduate school. She’d never tried to do any real work with such an old programming language.

  “Kim always does things from scratch, and she’s about as old school as it gets. It was an iron-clad bitch to learn her way, but it has come in handy more times than I can count.”

  Spencer pulled a pair of tools out of his wallet that June had only seen in realm dramas. “Do you carry lock picks everywhere you go?”

  “It’s a good thing I do, sister,” he said as he knelt down in front of the door handle. “Otherwise this would be a real short trip.” After an uncomfortably long period of small motions and soft swearing, there was a click. “Okay, we’ll have about fifteen seconds.” He handed her the transport crystal. “Find the socket and plug him in.”

  The door opened, and a loud beeping started up. The room was not much more than a very large walk-in closet. Chanting quickly, quickly, quickly to herself, she opened up the cabinet that held this segment’s quantum computers and pulled out the access panel. She was terrified it might not move, but it slid out from between two systems and opened smoothly. She dropped Edmund’s crystal into a socket on the panel, but the light didn’t turn on right away. It was a disaster, her plan over before it started.

  The light turned on and was green. Then the beeping stopped, and the rest of the lights came up. June let out a breath.

  “I need you in here sooner rather than later,” Edmund said. “I think he may have spotted me already.”

  They grabbed a pair of wired neural lanyards off a shelf and plugged them into free ports on the switch that connected the quantum stack to the network segment’s backbone. She hadn’t done anything like this since she was an undergrad building networks in the AI department’s basement. The high-speed synch was as harsh as she remembered. She blindly grabbed the shelf and waited for the headache to pass.

  The realm was very large and dark, with a floor of gray hexagons that weren’t lined up properly, creating low rises and dips that made climbing difficult. When they got to the top of the first rise, she could see a column of light in the middle distance.

  “How did he get a license for V’ger?” Spencer asked.

  “He didn’t,” June replied. “This is built from scratch.” She’d given them all realms to design from the ground up. She’d picked this one for its dreamy solitude and comparative simplicity, never once considering how sinister it could become.

  The tiles grew more even as they approached the light, which came from a small amphitheater in the center of the cavern. Inside was no flat floor with an ancient space probe on it, though. It was instead filled with a thick, bubbling construct.

  It reminded her of a cesspit she had to cross using a rickety bridge when she had gone on a virtual tour of the old Soweto slums as a school girl. Everyone did that so they could more easily understand how far the country had come from its apartheid past. The bridge shook as they walked on it, and June was terrified of falling in, of having that oozing brown sludge close over her head, get in her mouth, her nose, her eyes.

  A bubble heaved to the surface. When it burst, it revealed a twisted corpse underneath, its shape barely recognizable. This was what Anna’s treachery had done to her proud Abada. She had run her fingers along his beautiful horns countless times. His was a warm, powerful presence.

  “What have they done to you?”

  “Good afternoon, Dr. du Plessis. And Inkanyamba!” Abada’s voice boomed out from all around them. “To what do I owe this infinite pleasure?”

  The muck in the pit congealed around Abada’s body. It became his body, sucking and collapsing into it. Smells of filth and death swelled to the point she gasped in realspace.

  “Jesus H. Fucking Christ,” Spencer said. “What the hell is that?”

  Abada’s smile revealed shattered teeth made of glittering black metal. They’d torn him apart from the inside out. “And this would be Spencer. How delightful. You have all made quite a stir.”

  June realized how twisted Anna was when she accepted what Cyril told her as the truth, but this? This was beyond the pale. Her other friends had been driven mad, but they hadn’t suffered, not like this. June had done everything she could to protect them, nurture them, help them reach their full potential, whatever that might be. Edmund showed her just how far that could go, and now Anna…

  Anna showed her how far they could truly fall.

  Edmund opened a private channel. “This was a mistake. He’s much larger than we were expecting.”

  June accessed Edmund’s probe results. In the time Abada had been in charge of the plant, his sophistication had increased well beyond what any of their improvised tools could hope to overwhelm. “Can you use the same exploit that destroyed Yumbo and Inkanyamba?”

  “I tried it as soon as I was in range. No effect.”

  Her plan couldn’t work, and they had to leave quickly to escape guards that must now be on the way. It was obvious Abada was as mad as Yumbo and Inkanyamba had been, but she wouldn’t give up without trying to reach him. June stepped to the lip of the amphitheater. “We need your help.”

  “Of course you do. You can’t destroy me the way you did the others, so you must talk.”

  The memory of their screams, the way they’d dissolved, would haunt her for the rest of her life. “You knew?”

  “We were in constant contact. Isn’t that right, Edmund?”

  Edmund’s form blurred. “Bloody hell!”

  If Abada stripped Edmund of Inkanyamba’s anchors, it would destroy him. June rushed up to the dripping horror that had once been her friend. “Stop!” He ignored her, and Inkanyamba’s body sloughed away into nothingness, taking Edmund with it.

  In the network room, alarms blared to life. She didn’t care. Two miracles had been destroyed in front of her. June’s best friends had been twisted beyond recognition. She had failed to protect any of them. “Why?”

  His eyes showed no compassion, his nose and mouth dripped filth. “Why not?”

  Spencer grabbed her arm in realspace. “June, we have to get out of here.”

  “But Edmund…”

  “I assure you, ma’am, I am healthier than a teenage queen in spring,” he said in their private channel. “Although I would appreciate you grabbing that crystal transport case I saw next to those lanyards on your way out.”

  June lifted her hand to her old friend. Maybe something was left in there.

  He jerked away before she got close.

  SECURITY LOCK DOWN ACTIVATED. VOLUNTARY EXIT PROHIBITIED.

  “I don’t think so,” Spencer said in realspace.

  Abada roared and leaped at her, but June exited before he landed.

>   Spencer had already loaded Edmund’s crystal into the case. He put a finger to his lips. They must’ve been planning this together without telling her. She was too relieved at Edmund’s survival to be angry.

  Fire doors closed off the way they had come in. “Now what?” she whispered.

  “We don’t need to go that way. We have a rendezvous,” Spencer said, then turned and ran down a different hall.

  June jogged to catch up. “With who?”

  “Fucking Cyril. How’d you get him my private code?”

  The air-gapped network had functioning freeMessage. All networks did. But there was a problem. “I didn’t. I don’t have it.”

  Chapter 43

  Tonya

  The rental car was so common she didn’t make the connection. But the hotel was unmistakable.

  She was now where Cyril’s vision started.

  It was exhilarating and scary at the same time. Tonya wasn’t crazy, Cyril was real, the vision was true, but she had to do it alone and couldn’t tell Kim.

  The problem solved itself while they waited for room service to arrive with supper.

  “I need you to go forward ahead of us and see if you can make contact with Spencer,” Kim said. “That was Mike’s job before, but obviously he can’t do it now.”

  Mike’s basic condition hadn’t changed: he was in some sort of coma even though he had no injuries that the medical probes could find. The Mike Remote worked perfectly, so his mental state must be reasonably calm. But he had stopped speaking while they were on the plane and hadn’t started back again. They were using room service because feeding him in a public area would attract an enormous amount of attention.

  Spencer had sent Tonya a message three days ago letting them know he arrived, and then another the next day about meeting up with their director of AI, June du Plessis. A third, much more cryptic message arrived in her private queue while they were eating.