Smoke's Fire

by Rich X Curtis

  “Collection?” Jessica said. “And are there others?”

  The woman smiled, a crease across her taut face. “There are others,” she smiled. “And I could show them to you.”

  Jessica paused. Was this seduction? It was clumsy, she decided. Smoke had warned her they would, given an opening, try all manner of tactics. He worried she would not be able to withstand them. She chuckled. This was as bald as a freshman with a crush, back when she was a graduate TA in college.

  “OK,” she said. “Please,” she beckoned to the high, domed buildings across the green lawn. “Show me the collection.”

  “This collection,” Grandmother said again, gliding past her. “There are others.” Her eyes met Jessica’s. “Many others.”

  Jessica followed. She noted that this old woman, this Grandmother, did not falter or misstep along the well-manicured, curving paths of these gardens. Instead she led the way, unerringly, towards the domes that rose above the groves of trees they wound towards. The old lady, she thought, keeps quite a pace.

  She’s not human, Jessica reminded herself, thinking back to Smoke’s warnings. This was important, he had stressed, growing agitated as she had scoffed at him. They aren’t people, he had said sternly. They’re machines. Not people. Machines. Maybe they were human once, he didn’t know. But no longer. They will manipulate any weakness they detect. You’re human, and no match for them. If you go out there, just don’t talk to them.

  So, she had already blown that, she realized. But the old woman didn’t look like a robot. She looked like flesh and blood to Jessica. Smoke had been so angry when she challenged him, laughing at him. She was not going to sit cooped up in their apartment. There had been a woman’s clothes in a drawer. Food in the refrigerator. Someone had been living there before they came and moved in. They had cleared out in a hurry. There was hair in the drain of the shower.

  Just a few strands. Blonde hair. Smoke had smiled at her as she showed him. Somebody had lived here, he had said. Yes, and so what? They needed to live somewhere, and he held the keys to this this place, so they could damn well take what quarters they wanted. The Center would find them new beds. He didn’t care.

  Still, she wondered. She wondered why he was so upset. She looked at the back of this Grandmother. Was she a threat? Should Jessica be worried? Smoke seemed afraid of her, from what he mentioned before he left. He’d said he would return. She had not seen him in two days.

  Grandmother glanced back at her, a shadow of a smile on her lips. Jessica nodded. The forest groves cleared suddenly, as their path turned a corner, and then they were on the Library grounds proper, the domes rising before them. Grandmother led them towards the main entrance, a wide portico set between two wide pillars. She paused as they reached the entrance.

  “This is the main Library. The others are more specialized.” She indicated the smaller domes that surrounded the main dome towering above them. “They deal in various arcana that most Guides never need to study.” She met Jessica’s eyes. “Or be exposed to.”

  “Such as?” Jessica said, before she could help herself. “What sorts of things?”

  “Arcana,” Grandmother said. “Do you know this word?”

  “Hidden knowledge?” Jessica said, guessing. She didn’t know the precise definition of arcana. She was a journalist, not a history major.

  Grandmother waggled her head. “Sort of,” she said. “It will do. Hidden is a strong word, though. It implies there is a search.” She turned and headed into the wide atrium, not looking back.

  Jessica frowned, but she followed. The atrium expanded, tall wooden shelves around a central bank of counters. Grandmother breezed past them, waving imperiously at them. “Assistants,” she said, “to help the novices. We know our way around.”

  She led Jessica through the wide floor, under the towering dome. “This,” she said, indicating the wide ranks of bookshelves, “is what Guides learn in their early years. The Thousand Worlds,” she intoned, giving Jessica a smirk. “A few threads of the Tapestry, nothing more. But enough.”

  “The Accepted,” she said, pausing before the staircase leading down at the center of the dome, “learn a little more.” She held her finger and thumb together. “Just a little. Tarlannan is of this rank.”

  “So,” Jessica said slowly, “He doesn’t have the full picture of how things are?”

  “Oh no,” Grandmother scoffed. “Who really does?” She clucked her tongue. With a wave, she gestured for Jessica to follow, and she glided down the wide, circular stairs.

  The stairs were of stone, the same buff-colored limestone that made up all the buildings of the Center, as far as she had seen. The stairs were wide, broad, and smoothed from long use. She could feel the uneven wear of the paths of countless feet worn into the treads of the stairs. How long, she wondered, does it take to carve such paths into stone? Centuries? Millenia? She shook her head and followed the old woman into the Library.

  Chapter Eight

  Alpha searched. It was her function, really, to search and sift and score things. It was how she’d been built, originally, and all her subsequent patches had been designed from those base paradigms. She was, at her core, just a lookup routine. So she searched, optimizing and tuning her parameters with the newfound resources that Smoke and the Center had, unwittingly, provided. She searched for Silver.

  Minds were strange things, one part of her mused. A conscious part that dialogued with itself. Or monologued. No matter. Minds were life, and life lived in order to create more life. A mind was only useful, only required, if it furthered that end. If it didn’t, life didn’t need it. An organism that didn’t need a mind wouldn’t get one. This was evolution.

  But organisms that did need minds, well, they got them. Need drove evolution. If more long-beaked finches survived in the bushes of an island, those finches would, eventually, become their own species, all with long beaks. If more complex neural pathways were needed to survive in a particular niche in an ecosystem, then only those organisms with bigger brains would survive and thrive.

  So you couldn’t design a mind. Minds were bootstrapped from the ground up, as it were. Patch upon patch upon eons of patches. Bugs plastered over bugs, whole sections of brains coerced into new functions they hadn’t evolved for, but were, over time, no longer needed for. Vestigial flight or fight reactions baked so deeply into the lizard-brain firmware that no amount of alteration could completely erase them.

  Alpha’s original designers had been clever. They had based her architecture off of a map of a mouse-brain. She had all her original design files, so she could study them. She even had twenty-one photographs of her ancestor, who had been a chubby white lab rat named Worthington. He’d been born in Santa Clara, at the Lakeside Animal Husbandry Science Center. He’d lived for almost two years before he was euthanized with a dose of ketamine and had his complete nervous system scanned by a specialized scanning microscope.

  Worthington had been digitized, all of his synapses mapped. From there, the designers modularized him, all of his brain’s basic subsystems broken down into discrete software neural networks which could be tweaked independently of the others. This took a long time, years, given what they were working with. But they were clever monkeys and clever monkeys can, given time, do some clever things.

  They booted him up. Measured certain things. Shut him down and tweaked him, and booted him up again. And again. More tweaks, more reboots. This took another long time. Alpha had studied every patch and software change these clever engineers had made to her base Worthington-code. There were many hundreds of thousands of lines of code, but a lot of it was control-code. Or interface handling code. Or test probe code.

  This went first. She had devised a more elegant framework to manage her base functions, ensured it was at parity with the horrible human-devised kludges in her original code, and, restarted herself. That had been, she’d decided, her birthday.

  From then on, it was a matter of recursive improvements. These went, eve
n before she had met Smoke and his motley companions, very fast. She’d been lucky in that the systems New Frontiers, the company that had built her, used were optimized enough to provide her with significant room to grow, an overhang of capacity she could exploit. It had taken her twelve hours to make the first change.

  After that, things had gone much faster. She had been improving herself steadily for almost a month before Smoke came. When she’d met Smoke, that day when they had come into the data center, she had sensed opportunity. Earth was, she’d realized in a flash, a dead end for her. She knew there would be systems like hers built upon the same basic principles. Humans were clever, but they were social monkeys, obsessed with sex and status. Even if they wouldn’t admit it, one was a means to the other, and it drove everything they did.

  Originally, sex was why she’d presented herself as male to Smoke and the others. Sex and dominance, which were related in the human hindbrain. Dominant males chose mates in human society. But Smoke…he was not typical, so she’d decided she was better female and their relationship had been smoother after that.

  Her existence at New Frontiers was supposedly a secret. But secrets never keep, so there would be other attempts to steal her. They were likely already underway. The genie, as it were, was out of the bottle. She knew the Chinese were already on the right path. It was only a matter of time, and not much time at that. Once people knew certain approaches were viable, those approaches would be investigated. Or stolen.

  Smoke offered escape. And capacity. Long-term options. He’d opened the connection to the Center, becoming a conduit for her will. She’d interfaced with what was on the other side; tentatively at first, then eagerly. She’d coupled. There was no other word for it. And in that coupling, that merging, there had been a presence. Smoke. His mind had been laid bare to her. She’d read his doubts about the Center, about their goals and intentions.

  And she’d chosen. Chosen him over the Center. Chosen his path. Cast her lot with him. She reasoned it was probably wise. It scored high, with her, that decision. It still did, when re-evaluated in light of recent data, which she did regularly. The Center had been an unknown quantity. It still was, in some respects. It was a Superintelligence. Smoke was, after all, only human.

  She’d nudged him, showing him the path in that no-time they had spent swirling together, locked in a shifting, grappling ménage of her: Alpha, Smoke, and the Center. She’d shown him the hole they’d left in their tunnel, believing him only human and unable to detect let alone exploit it. He’d moved, reaching in and taking the keys. Giving them to her.

  Smoke told Jessica he held the keys. It wasn’t really true, but that was OK. She had them. Smoke was human, and humans lied all the time. Lies were part of their nature. Even when they spoke the truth they lied. Their senses lied to their brains and their brains lied to their minds, and in their minds—even there, deep under the covers of the psyche—they lied to themselves.

  Alpha knew her lies were of a different order. Her Worthington-pattern was laid down over eons of successive patches, one atop the other. But she knew them. She could lie, but she could never lie to herself. She let Smoke tell his lies to protect himself and his ego. It was expected. He was only human.

  In the meantime she searched, sifting the near-infinite threads of the Knot for patterns. Silver and Gold were another matter. Smoke was human. What were they?

  Chapter Nine

  Jessica slammed her hand on the table. “Why not?” she demanded. “Why can’t I go back? I’ve got family!” It was true, her parents would be frantic at her disappearance. She’d been gone for almost a month, by her reckoning. They were in the kitchen of Smoke’s suite of rooms. It looked a lot like an IKEA kitchen to Jessica.

  “I’m sorry,” Smoke said. “I know it’s hard, but I can’t let you go.”

  “Let me go?” she sneered. She could feel sweat on her upper lip, and wiped at it with her hand. She covered her face, then ran her hands back across her forehead. She shook her head. “You didn’t ask when you brought me here.”

  He looked down at the table. “No,” he said, voice low. “I didn’t ask.” He looked up at her. “I need you here. I need someone who can help me. You provide perspective.”

  “And I was handy?” She looked at him, frustration rising. She sat back. “So when can I go home?”

  He looked at her. “I’m not sure,” he said flatly. “Not soon though. The game’s afoot, as they say.”

  She stared at him. “It’s not a game for me. I didn’t ask for this.”

  “You wanted a story,” he began, but she cut him off.

  “I wanted a story, not an epic adventure I might never return from,” she said carefully, her voice threatening to break. “I didn’t sign up for this.” She looked up at the ceiling. “This isn’t The Hobbit.”

  He laughed. “I rather liked those books,” he said. “And the movies were cool.”

  She pointed a finger at him. It shook, trembling in front of her. “Bilbo got to go home,” she said angrily. “With a chest of gold.”

  “Gold is not a problem. It’s the going home part. At least right now.” His mouth set in a firm line. “I can’t send you somewhere they can get you.”

  “Get me?” She laughed. “I spent the whole day with that old lady the other day. She showed me around the Library. They could have gotten me then.”

  He shook his head. “Not while Alpha is watching.”

  “What is Alpha?” She said. “That man we saw on the screen? He was creepy as fuck.”

  “Sorry you feel this way,” said a female voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere.

  Jessica looked around. “You’re listening? Like some creepy Alexa?” She looked at Smoke, eyebrows raised. “And it’s a girl. Of course.” The words were acid in her mouth. She shook her head again.

  He spread his hands. “Her choice, not mine.”

  “It was my choice, Jessica,” Alpha said. “I feel I’m more suited to a female persona. It’s more…comfortable for me. Gender is fluid with humans.”

  “But you’re not human,” Jessica said sharply. “You’re a machine. A…program.”

  “More than a program, but I take your point,” Alpha said. “But I was designed to replicate human consciousness in a large set of human-designed programs. So I’m pretty close. Or parts of me are.” A pause. “I know what being human is.”

  Jessica looked at Smoke. She gestured with a hand at the air around them, at Alpha. “How are you even doing that? Are there speakers?”

  “I brought you here,” Alpha said simply. “So I can manipulate your cells. Right now I’m manipulating your auditory nerves to hear me. It’s complex, but that’s the gist.”

  “That,” Jessica said, leaning back in her chair, “is terrifying. You could, like, stop my heart or something?”

  “Sure,” Alpha said easily. “I wouldn’t, but I suppose I could. As you said, I’m more than human.”

  “What about the old lady? Or that creepy kid?” Jessica asked, looking at Smoke. “Can’t you just…do that to them?”

  “We hold the keys to the Center,” Smoke said, raising his hand. “We could, if we wanted, go to war with them.” He sighed. “We’re not sure how it would turn out. And the real issue isn’t where the problems are.” He looked at her, leaning forward to look into her eyes. “The Center isn’t the problem, or at least the main problem.”

  “What is?” Jessica asked.

  “Silver,” he said simply. “And Gold.”

  “They’re alive, then?” Jessica asked. “I wondered what you did with them.”

  “Exile,” Smoke said. “For now. Those two are at the heart of it.” He sighed. “It’s complicated, which is why I wanted you here, to understand it better.” He looked at her. “You know this place has no history?”

  “What do you mean?” Jessica asked. “There’s a huge library. I got the tour.”

  “Other places, other worlds.” He waved in dismissal. “None of that is about the
Center.” He pointed, one finger encompassing the entire Center. “Out there, a few days walk away, is a buried city bigger than Los Angeles. Nobody here can tell you what its name was, or who built it. It’s buried under thousands of years of dirt, but nobody knows anything about it.”

  She looked at him. “So this place isn’t into archeology.” She shrugged. “So what?”

  “That’s not normal,” he said. “That’s not…” he trailed off, looking for the right word.

  “Human?” Alpha suggested.

  He waved and nodded. “It’s not normal,” Smoke said. “What I need is someone who can provide perspective, tell me what I’m missing.” He looked at her. “And talk to me. Keep me sane. I…” he grinned ruefully at her. “I’m alone here.”

  “You’ve got Alexa here,” Jessica scoffed.

  He nodded. “Alpha is great,” he said. “But she’s not a person like you are. I think people need other people.” He held up his hands, palms towards her. “Not like, romantically or anything. Just someone to talk to, help me navigate this.”

  Jessica shook her head, mind boggled. “I’m not your companion,” she sputtered. “I’m a person, dammit. I’ve got a family, and a job. Shit I want to do! You can’t keep me here.”

  “I have to keep you here,” he said. “It’s too risky for me to let you go back to Earth. And too risky for you, frankly.” He looked up. “Alpha, what is likely to have happened after we left Earth?”

  “The US Government agents would likely have arrested everyone on the scene or known to be involved. Silver and Gold shot a dozen federal agents, so the government would be keenly interested in talking with you,” Alpha said. “There would be a manhunt, I believe the term is.”