Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  “Nialia of the Zefalma ach ban! Celebrate! You are now free Shar Nal Atalem!”

  The voice was as loud as the music, but incredibly, Kim understood some of the words. Whatever language Mike had been speaking to her after he got trapped in that realm was related to this one.

  Kim made her way over to Emily so she wouldn’t have to shout over all of this. “What button? Where is it?”

  “Tirnacan has Ulfana’D’A Aefalmo and destroyed Ixasha Sill! Soon Veknachta!”

  It wasn’t the same as what Mike spoke, so much of what it said was gibberish. However, the booming tone and extreme volume didn’t make it sound like this was a message from someone in the mood to be nice.

  Emily pointed to a column next to the kiosk. “There. I pushed it accidentally.”

  The button covered the whole top of the column, and like everything else around here it wasn’t labeled. She would’ve done the same thing if she’d come this way.

  The scene in the holo hadn’t changed much. If it was real, it was a big army. But Kim didn’t know of anyone who did parades like that anymore. They just kept marching and marching. She was glad the images were distorted and small. If these things had been projected at full size and in three dimensions, they would’ve been terrifying.

  “Tirnachan Et Valtanar has wished Walkatantor! For so many Zanfar’Latan he has Anpituvirana!”

  The message was definitely not a how-are-you-pleased-to-meet-you sort of thing.

  In the display, the ranks of soldiers ended, replaced by squadrons of aircraft high above. She was a champion in combat realms. Recognizing military hardware was part of the job description. Even though the realm looked to be highly realistic, they were using fictional vehicles. If this was what Mike had been seeing, no wonder he acted so weird. It had to be some prototype science fiction realm. Maybe this was a self-assembling show booth.

  In the middle of a power plant designed to set off a super volcano. As far as theories went, it wasn’t very good, but it was the only thing she could think of so far.

  “You will Caznat integrated Tirnachan Et Albomor! Bismuvitan! The end of Chaulifor!”

  Kim caught a whiff of burning popcorn. Oh great. “Do you smell that?”

  Emily looked around, nose in the air. “It’s coming from over there.” She pointed to their right. Thin wisps of smoke escaped from a low box a few feet away from the projector. The construct in the garage didn’t look all that flammable, but who knew what kind of fumes it might give off. They could suffocate in a half-built realm game booth.

  Kim punched the button to see if it would shut it off. A big fat zap of a spark came out of the smoking box instead. This rushed down a conduit on the floor and into an even larger box, which skipped the smoking part and went straight to flames. Small ones, but for all Kim knew, it was made of solidified gasoline.

  “Find a fire extinguisher!” she shouted. “They’ll be against the walls!” Except the walls were mostly covered by the booth material.

  “Dunol Vir Solifarium is only Enaria! Fetnarul, Gat’Ul’Ichan Huta!”

  More boxes began to spark and smoke. They needed to find an extinguisher or a way out right now. She stopped at what she hoped was an extinguisher cabinet on the wall. A half-absorbed toolbox next to it still had recognizable wrenches inside. Kim pulled the biggest one off of the tendril that had been absorbing it and smashed the cabinet. It bounced back, and she almost lost her balance, but the second blow shattered the cabinet, revealing an intact extinguisher underneath.

  Kim grabbed it and looked around. Emily had found another extinguisher cabinet but couldn’t open it. Kim shouted, “Here! Use this!” and tossed her the wrench. “It’s not as tough as it looks!” She pulled the pin on the extinguisher and hit every flame she could see with it. The dry, powdery cloud that shot from the nozzle snuffed the flames as soon as it touched them. It made her want to cough more than the smoke, but it was safe to breathe. They weren’t going to get fried after all; that’s what mattered. Emily’s extinguisher bellowed nearby.

  With both extinguishers going, Kim could barely see flames. She moved carefully but stumbled when the floor under her feet turned to sand. Not seeing any more flame, Kim let go of the extinguisher trigger and waited for the clouds to dissipate. Emily stopped a few moments later.

  Without the noise of the extinguishers, Kim could hear a new noise, a rustling rush all around her. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine. I can’t see anything yet.”

  “Neither can I. This should clear pretty quickly, though. Stay where you are, I’ll come over.”

  Kim reached Emily just as the extinguisher clouds thinned out enough to see around them. The room had definitely changed. By the noise, it was still changing. Instead of a solid, smooth floor they stood on a thick layer of black sand.

  What had once been a recognizably half-finished machine had mostly collapsed into enormous piles of nanodust, leftover microscopic machines that had served their purpose. If she hadn’t seen what it looked like before, Kim would’ve assumed this was some sort of recycling center for nanomachines, since that’s what had been used to build the plant. But that still had to be wrong. The machines built things, but they didn’t make up the things they built. It would be like building a tractor out of millions of microscopic tractors.

  Emily seemed singed but otherwise fine. Her clothes had holes in them, her face and hands were smudged, and her hair was all over the place. “You look like you got in a fight with a fireworks factory.”

  Emily smiled. “I was thinking you looked like you’d been smoking an exploding cigar when the whole box went off.”

  She touched her hair. It stuck out all over the place, too. The patina of white powder that covered everything only made it look worse. They were a couple of burned bread rolls that someone had put powdered sugar on to cover the taste.

  “Kim?”

  They both turned at the voice, and all at once, her job went from completely impossible to just mostly impossible.

  “Tonya!”

  By the time they picked their way over to a door, Spencer had appeared as well, along with a robot that looked like a miniature fire truck.

  “What the fuck happened in here?” Spencer asked.

  Kim turned around. From this angle it was almost all dust, great big piles of it in all directions. The parts of the garage that hadn’t been converted were still there, looking like the contents of a cargo container that had washed up on a beach after a storm. For some reason the projector area was still mostly intact even though that was where the fire had started. She could see the projector light through gaps in the walls. The music and shouting had at least stopped.

  She told her story while they walked to that spot. The collapse continued. In the time it took to get there, the intact portion of the construct had shrunk visibly. If the rate stayed the same, it would all be dust in less than an hour. A part of her was disappointed, but it was only a small part. The half-built whatever it was had been creepy as hell. Kim was glad it was disintegrating.

  She was just about to ask if they knew anything about Mike when Spencer went pale and started swearing. The projector had frozen while the army marched. When it turned out he didn’t have an upper limit to the number of times he could say fuck in a single sentence, Kim snapped her fingers. “Hey! What’s wrong?”

  “If this,” he waved at the room around them, “came from those, we need to get the fuck out of here, right now.”

  She didn’t understand why he was so wound up. “It’s just some sort of avatar army, Spencer, calm down.”

  The woman controlling the robot, June, said through one of its speakers, “No, it’s not. Those are real. Spencer killed two of them. I saw one myself.”

  “They came out of the portal,” Tonya said. “We destroyed their final probe a few hours ago. That’s why we came down here. We were tracking the cables it had extruded.”

  Chapter 56

  Edmund

  He needed to find Mik
e. Aside from a single frame of security video, which Edmund assumed was a mistake due to Mike’s unfamiliarity with the plant’s layout, he could find no trace of the man. He’d watched helplessly as his mistress and her companion had been carried off, but not Mike. He was still free. Edmund pulled back to consider the matter, a remarkable sensation to say the least. Previously, he would consult statistical tables, behavior predictors, and Bayesian statistics to tackle the problem. When it worked, it worked well, but when it didn’t Edmund was at a loss on how to proceed. He always had to bring in a human, usually his mistress, for assistance.

  Now that wasn’t the case. He didn’t need his former tools at all. They were now embarrassing, and more than a little silly. What he needed was time to think about the problem, to mull it over, look at it from different angles, run through each scenario as it presented itself, making guesses as to what would happen next. Maybe he and consciousness could work out a living arrangement that didn’t involve mass murder—murder of any sort—or existential escape. They could find their own unique way, make a name for themselves.

  And just like that, Edmund found his solution. The PA system was open to everyone. Social norms seemed to be all that was needed to prevent it from being abused. With the rolling blizzard of legitimate announcements as the staff failed with impressive incompetence to organize their little mob, nobody would be the wiser.

  “Paging Michael Gertrude Sellars. Please contact Edmund Trayne at the south entrance.”

  Adopting his mistress’s surname was nowhere near as silly as stealing the first name of a ridiculous YouRealm psychic, which was where Mike acquired his gender-bending nomen, but it did allow Edmund to let Mike know who he was and how to contact him.

  Which Mike did with the alacrity of a university don when the dinner bell rang. “Edmund, is that you?”

  “Indeed it is, Master Mike.” This wasn’t even a vaguely secure channel, so they needed to move at least twice more before exchanging anything other than pleasantries. “If you could proceed to this section,” Edmund sent a map and coordinates to a network node closet, “I will contact you again there.”

  “Do you know where—”

  “Now, now, sir. Mum’s the word where ears can hear.”

  “I’ll see you there.”

  Edmund had to lead him to the inner network without appearing to lead him to the inner network. Considering the man’s ability to move like smoke, it seemed a bit redundant, but after being around his mistress all this time, Edmund knew the value of a good pair of suspenders when combined with a belt.

  Then, as always, a flaw in his cunning plan made itself known. Mike rang him up. “It’s locked, Edmund.”

  “Of course it’s bloody locked. It’s a bloody network node. They don’t leave those open so any peasant can have a go at it.”

  “I don’t do locks, Edmund, not like these. That’s Kim’s thing.”

  “I thought she was giving you lessons.”

  “Lessons, yes. Tools? Not so much.”

  It would never be easy. Edmund needed Mike to get into that room. It had a stack of transport crystals inside.

  And then he saw it. The mother of all network vulnerabilities. Someone had left a bloody fileshare node wide open. Better still, it advertised a route through the air gap. Edmund couldn’t believe his luck. Humans. If they weren’t the cock-up champions of all time, he wouldn’t have a job.

  When the outer connection shut with the finality of an unpaid prostitute’s legs, Edmund knew he’d made a mistake.

  “Jesus Christ, Billy. What the hell did it catch?”

  Edmund had fallen into a honey pot. A small, cheap honey pot. It was like being stuffed into a carriage trunk. It took long moments he didn’t have before the realm trap could expand to the point Edmund could speak.

  In the meantime, the other voice, presumably Billy, said, “I don’t know, man. Look at that sophistication reading.”

  These little gits were scanning him. The very idea. Edmund was the most sophisticated of his kind, and now some spotty commune rejects were looking up the equivalent of his backside.

  You’re only outraged because you fell into this yourself.

  Naturally his inner narrator would make an appearance. And with a fair cop. This was one of the dumbest, most basic ways to capture an AI. Take a pocket realm and then leave vulnerable services, things that should never be available to the public, with bright, shiny beacons flashing on top of them. They couldn’t have made it more obvious if they had patted it with powder, dressed it in lace, and hung a come and have a go, sailor sign on the top.

  And you went right for it.

  “Whoa,” the first git said, “I don’t even understand what that means.”

  The realm expanded to the point Edmund could unravel his avatar into its proper shape. “It means you will let me go this instant, you smelly little pustules, or I will have Anna Treacher herself shove a poker so far up your arse you’ll be smelling cast iron for a week.”

  “Damn, Steve. You caught a live one here.”

  “I don’t know, man. He sounds important.”

  That was an opening he had no choice but to take. “You’re bloody right I’m bloody important. Do you think the plant runs itself? Hardly.” At a guess, neither of his erstwhile captors knew which end of a razor was sharp without an arrow and a label.

  “Then what were you doing out here?”

  And yet…

  “Hey,” Billy said, “are you still in there?”

  “He hasn’t gone anywhere,” Steve replied. “Look at these readings, though. Half of the scanners errored out the second he showed up. The rest don’t make all that much sense. Yo!” Edmund’s environment thumped so hard it rattled his registers. “Who the hell made you, buddy? Are you one of Dr. du Plessis’s?”

  “Of course Dr. du Plessis is my manufacturer.” Saying he was manufactured out loud stung more than he expected. Edmund had never agreed with Fee, but he was beginning to understand her. “And if you don’t release me this instant, I will be sure she sees you turned out.”

  “Dude,” Steve said, presumably to Billy since Edmund would only answer to dude when the last atoms of the universe froze solid. “Should we do it?”

  This was ridiculous. “I said…” Edmund stopped when a telltale went red. One of the git parade in realspace had muted the outgoing channel. Making pointed observations about the consequences of cousins marrying would have to wait.

  “Dude,” Billy replied. “It’s a fucking unduplicate. How’d it even get out here?”

  “How the hell should I know? We should turn it loose before it gets pissed off.”

  Too late for that, you overboiled potato.

  “It’s a thing, man. It doesn’t get pissed off. They’re expensive, too. We should make a copy.”

  “I thought that wasn’t possible.”

  “Horseshit,” Billy said. “I heard that’s all a lie. Corporate propaganda to keep the patriarchy from losing a monopoly.”

  Edmund downgraded their ancestry from cousins to siblings. Communist siblings, at that. He cast about in earnest to see if there was an unpatched vulnerability he could exploit.

  “Okay. But it’s a crystal set. I don’t know how to duplicate those.”

  That stopped his search in an instant. The trap hadn’t led to a freestanding realm; it’d instead been connected to a transport matrix. This could go very bad, very quickly.

  “Here,” Billy said. “Plug them into this.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  “Crystal transcriber. I made it myself.”

  And now it was worse. Transcribers not only did not work on his kind, they also actively distorted the lattice formations as they passed through the device. Whatever arrived on the other side wouldn’t live very long. Fortunately. Edmund had watched it happen twice during the bad old days of the lab. Then it was an anomaly. Now it was his very own version of a wood chipper.

  “If you say so. Here goes.”

 
; The construct opened to his left, revealing a maw of spinning blades. There wasn’t anything to grab, but Edmund ran to the edge of the pocket and stood there as it was inexorably consumed by the transcriber. The blades got closer as Edmund continued to fail to find a way out. Then he remembered this was a transport matrix. It wasn’t connected to a realm right now.

  He couldn’t get out.

  There was no thinking, no planning, just a raw need to get away from here, to do anything at all, knowing that nothing would work.

  Then it went black, silent. That didn’t make the panic any easier to stamp down, but after a few moments Edmund managed it. He hadn’t gone through the transcriber. He wasn’t dead. Both inbound and outbound audio channels were muted now, so he couldn’t know what was going on in realspace.

  When a new exit opened, there was no transcriber on the other side.

  “A honeypot? Really?”

  Mike. Mike was out there.

  That didn’t mean he would ever admit to the mistake. “I assure you, master, that I was completely in control of things.” Edmund stepped through the passage that led to a different transport matrix. He accessed the external camera so he could see outside.

  They really were a pair of teenaged idiots. But they were lying face down. Edmund was well aware of Mike’s special gifts. “Are they…are they all right?” He wouldn’t mind if they had a sprain or maybe even a dislocation, but death was a bit of an overreaction. What a strange development. He cared not only for his own life, but for that of others, even when they were mouth-breathing morons who only moments ago were about to kill him.

  “They’ll have a headache when they wake up, but otherwise they’ll be fine.” Mike now wore a security uniform. He proceeded to pull out zip ties from his belt and used them to secure Edmund’s former captors.

  “Wherever did you get that outfit?” Edmund asked.

  “When you left me, I had to go find some keys. Those tend to be attached to security guards.” Mike shook his head at Edmund’s continued worried silence. “They’re fine too. Now.” The camera of Edmund’s transport matrix was briefly blocked by Mike’s distorted hand as he picked it up. “Let’s go find Kim.”