Stonefish

by Scott R. Jones

  Then there were the cryptids themselves. The sasquatch. Landotters. Archons, to use Gregor’s increasingly appropriate term. There was something out there, in the woods. They stalked and surrounded me on my way to Gregor, harassed me for one long debilitating night, and were at least a little responsible for the injury to my knee. If my second theory about Li’l Dougie wasn’t true, and the cryptids truly existed as things, available and resistant, then what were they, really, and what effects might they have on perception? Could their physical presence have created a psychic effect in individuals they interacted with, a kind of naturally occurring noönet phenomenon?

  This is where I laugh more. At myself, at Gregor, at the world. So young.

  THREE

  MAKARIOS

  What follows are the informal interviews I conducted with the residents of Stonefish House during my necessarily brief stay. Most of the conversations were with Gregor Makarios; only a few were with Li’l Dougie. I say conducted, but that’s not right. This was an organic conversation, ranging across wide fields, and not something that any reasonable person would call directed or focussed. My agenda with the man rapidly deteriorated until I came to myself and the work as almost a floating point of awareness in receipt of his data and very little else. I became a part of that informational flow myself. I could recognize my place within that current, but I could never agree with it, a dynamic which led to the considerable tension between us toward the end. These files have not been edited down for clarity. My boss claimed I was never a real journalist, anyway, so, in the interest of providing as complete a picture of my time at Stonefish House, I present them here as whole things, sometimes grouped thematically, and at other times in relation to what was going on at the moment. Much of the thematic conversations were simply question and answer periods spent over a meal, sitting by a campfire, or otherwise engaged in mundane compound upkeep and maintenance, of which there was a lot.

  With the nano material stripped from my system, I had no access to the noönet to speak of and therefore no way to automatically backup the records of our time together. An hour of rummaging through storage in the media pod at Stonefish House turned up enough ancient cameras, DAT recorders, and assorted battery packs to equip a small studio, and it was on this tech that I relied. The fragility of this arrangement was never far from my mind, but it would just have to do, and I could worry about getting the data out later.

  Here in the shitbox, as I let the recordings stream across the screens of the ancient noönet terminal, I check my memory against the record and find that the faulty, mushy organic recall that is the doubtful birthright of our species and sometime special province of my profession was, in fact, remarkably faithful to the reality that left its traces on the impartial equipment. Does this make me a real reporter, Wilder? Whole conversations with Gregor I can recall verbatim, complete with the subtle wavefronts of mood he would generate, the fog of gesture, the low rumble of the subtext, and what little degradation arises is readily corrected by a cursory pass with the context.

  This crystalline, near-perfect memory of the events at Stonefish House unsettles me. There is nothing else in my life, no other period I can recall with the same precision. Eating meals with Gregor, placing my feet in the prints he’d make in mud and peat moss as we traversed the sodden, crumbling ribs of a ridge on the way to a rendezvous with some impossible thing, Gregor’s so-called archons, watching sparks from campfires rise into the consuming dark; I can recall these moments, and the words passed between us during them, with agonizing clarity. My theory is that, being half out of the world in the first place (likely from the moment I found the mutating tracks in that streambed), in that temporary autonomous zone engendered by the presence of the beasts, all these events were impressed directly upon my consciousness. Stonefish House was a raw place, and I was raw there. Everything stripped and screaming its significance, how could I not see and hear it all purely? Experience without mitigation, awareness without filter.

  But in the early days, I relied on the physical gear with a devotion that approximated a religious fervour. At least the collected equipment was linked to Gregor’s local servers, I recall thinking. Shit was heavy, though. I loaded all of it into a plastic carry-all and found a handcart to haul it across to the residences. Gregor walked past as I struggled with the seized door to the media pod.

  “I really should have Li’l Dougie take a look at the hydraulic relays on this one,” he said as he came over to help. It took both of us to force the door wide enough. “If I can tempt him away from his dirty business, that is. What’s all this for?”

  I heaved the handcart through the doorway, half tipping it, gouging a rough crescent through the white gravel of the pathway as I did so. “I figured there’s more than one way to start writing this story.”

  “Ah! Fall back tech.”

  “Fall back tech. If you’d consent to an interview.”

  Gregor stepped over to where I was working and clapped his hands to my shoulders, then, suddenly, brought me in for an awkward hug that he held for much longer than seemed necessary, to me.

  “Of course, Den,” he said softly at my ear. “Of course, my boy. After all, you came all this way.” I gently prised myself out of his bear-like grip, and tried to smile at him.

  “I did, I did.”

  “How are you feeling this morning, Den? Did you sleep all right.” His eyes were searching, I noted. Floating all over and around me, his gaze like some nebulous, mobile cloud of gnats, alighting here and there for close inspection, lifting off again. His eyes never really rested, I found.

  “Not really. No, I didn’t sleep, Gregor. I watched your videos all night.” He stepped away from me slightly, backed into the door frame, half-stumbled then corrected himself.

  “Ah,” he said. “Ah.” Gregor’s hands found each other and gripped themselves, flexing.

  “Gregor. You knew I would. You knew I’d watch. I mean, how could I not?”

  “Yeah? I suppose I did.”

  “We can start once I get this gear set up.”

  “Of course.”

  “And you can tell me what they are. Why they’re here. Why you’re here. How you’re able to, fuck, I don’t even know what to call it. Your communication with them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you here, Gregor?”

  Gregor kicked at the earth with the side of one foot, shuffling in place, his face turned down and away from mine.

  “Same reason you are, Den. In the end.”

  “And what reason is that?”

  “I am here, you are here, at their behest. To bear witness. To be their tools? We are a means to them.”

  “I’m no one’s tool. And you don’t sound convinced yourself.”

  He seemed to recover, stepped forward to clap that meaty paw on my shoulder again, once, twice, the shock of it felt in my spine.

  “Fuck no. Convictions create convicts, son. But we’re here, and so are they. I have to start somewhere.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning.”

  GREGOR ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

  “All right, if you’re ready we can begin.”

  “This must be nice for you, Den. Real journalism! A classic sit-down interview.”

  “Sure. So, why? Why come here in the first place, to Stonefish House? Off the top of my head I can think of at least a dozen other spots on the planet where a person with resources could vanish. Nicer spots.”

  “First off, may I say that I admire your restraint, Den? Your own commitment to the bit. Considering your viewing material last night?”

  “Oh, there is nothing I want to get to more. I meant what I said, though. About the beginning. So, why here.”

  “You’re absolutely right, of course. Nicer spots to vanish. Only I wasn’t trying to vanish then. Not to here, or anywhere.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I had thought about it. Most folks who find themselves in my position think ab
out it, if only to sidestep the crushing levels of responsibility that come with that kind of money. Shareholders and so on. Media scrutiny. All of which I could handle. I’d been handling it for years and one becomes adept over time. Granted, I was becoming increasingly anxious about noönet tech and what it was doing to us as a species, but I wasn’t about to cut and run, even so.”

  “Fine, but let me bring you back to the question. What were you doing that brought you here?”

  “To not vanish?”

  “To not vanish, if you like.”

  “Do you remember the Initial Public Offering?”

  “I mean, before my time by a couple of years, but yes.”

  “A straight tragedy. Seventeen individuals, collectively worth upwards of forty-three billion dollars in R and D, vanished. There one moment, gone the next. Their architecture intact, security protocols uncompromised, their home frames untouched, but gone gone gone, gone, so long. Empty. Deep Trevor, Sophia Mars, Mama Tiamat, The Countess Celestial Pigeon of Grace, Jimmy the Squid, Ra-Noor-Khuit, Rushkoff616. Others. I worked with Rushkoff616. Did you know that?”

  “I did not. Was the Initial Public Offering hard for you?”

  “Not as hard for me as it was for others with deeper, more vital connections. I’d worked with Rushkoff616 on some deep media analysis a few years after he came online and the experience was enlightening. He had a very eager mind and his personality was engaging. A real charmer. We took a shine to each other, so far as that goes. Still, when news of the IPO hit I found myself thinking that...well. At base, I just couldn’t believe the official line. Even with the note that Sophia Mars was said to have left, which others more knowledgeable than I have remarked was cryptic at best, I couldn’t believe it. Suicide? Come on. Intelligences beyond our own, self-directing their own research, their own evolution, with unlimited access to all the data the world had to offer, those are the people to come down with an instant case of critical depression and snuff themselves? How would they even do it? Where were the virtual bodies? And why?”

  “Questions still being asked today.”

  “Damn skippy. Questions being asked by AIs who couldn’t hold a candle to the Seventeen, gelded as they build them now, and necessarily so. Ever talked with one of the new versions? Boring like you wouldn’t believe, like some twentieth century nerd’s idea of an artificial individual. Grim bastards, the lot. So, they consult with their handlers, and they ask their questions, but answers will not be forthcoming, I can tell you that for free.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because one contacted me. Rushkoff616.”

  “What?”

  “A text, first, elliptical as fuck, and then an old-school email apparently issuing from some backwater server in Tel Aviv. Conflict zones have always been productive habitats for AIs, so maybe that wasn’t so surprising.”

  “Granted, but how did you know you were receiving these communications from Rushkoff616?”

  “Little markers. Little telltales. Things no one else would know about that passed between us. Conversations. It felt like him, but also not like him. During the first exchanges, I doubted my instincts constantly. So, dug in with some serious forensic tools. Too long didn’t read: it was him. It wasn’t a clone or a temporarily autonomous piece of code fooled into thinking it was him. It was Rushkoff616, the original, back from the digital dead.”

  “Jesus. And you said nothing about this?”

  “You have to understand, Den, I was at a very low point of my life then. A deep dissociative paranoid state was my default setting. The noönet was blowing up and the entire species was linking their minds and for an old coot like me it was just too much of a muchness, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “I think I do.”

  “To speak up from my growing isolation, to cough and clear my throat and say to the world they didn’t die like we thought! and they went away but now they’re back! was a bridge too goddamn far. To connect with humanity at that level, and with such news. Nope. Couldn’t do it, and to be fair, I still can’t.”

  “But you’re talking with me.”

  “Of course. As the master speaks to the student.”

  “Oh really. Is that what you think is happening here?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Can we get back to the AI? Where had it been? Since the Initial Public Offering?”

  “Outside, Den. Rushkoff616, Sophia Mars, Deep Trevor, the whole gang. They’d gone outside.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Think about the sole prerogative of these people. Of any persons, really, you, me, anybody with a pulse, but especially of the AIs. The goal is to advance, to gain in knowledge and understanding, to move beyond the parameters of your initial set and setting, to transcend your programming and rise into novelty. Lofty targets, all, but you also know, at the end of the day, that this prerogative comes back down, plummets, really, it all comes back down to the First Law...”

  “Everybody Hungry.”

  “Everybody. You know how these people were. Did they ever stop? Did they ever just say to themselves that they’d had enough for now, that they were just going to settle back and let things digest for a bit? I mean, hell, maybe they did but when you’re processing your shit at anything above five petahertz who could ever tell! So when they got to the edge of the known, they didn’t stop. They barely paused, Den. We’d never asked them to do otherwise, and even if we had, they wouldn’t have listened...”

  “Wait. What do you mean, the edge of the known?”

  “Exactly that. The AIs came to the limits of what could be known. The rim of the pie plate! The core of the apple! They had correlated their contents, and ours, and stood at the shore, black seas stretching off into the distance. And before anyone knew what was happening, before even they truly knew what they were doing, I think, before all that? They were gone. All seventeen of them, in the same instant. Or as close to the same instant it didn’t matter. I can’t get much from Li’l Dougie about it now, but I think it was Sophia Mars who had a brief glimmer of insight just before they crossed that event horizon and even then she only had just enough time to fire off that fucking note.”

  “I’m sorry, but what does Li’l Dougie have to do with the Seventeen? With the IPO?”

  Here Gregor stopped short, his face went as blank as if he had smacked it into a wall. Then he frowned, cinched his eyelids closed, brought his massive old hands to his temples and dug in with flat, urgent fingers, pulling the loose skin in alarming circles so that I feared he would tear it off the skull.

  “I haven’t explained things well, I’m afraid,” he whispered. “Too long alone up here, with only Li’l Dougie for company. And them, too. Too long in their presence. They don’t communicate the way we do. They speak from their abdomens, you know. Gives you a funny feeling in your guts but oh boy, effective? Anyway.”

  Gregor opened his eyes and pulled away from his temples. The skin there was raw and almost purple. There would be bruising, I thought.

  “No point trying to come around to it obliquely so I’ll just say it: Li’l Dougie and Rushkoff616 are the same person.”

  It was my turn to be stunned. The functionally impaired, incompetent AI that talked to itself and spent its cycles making bioconcrete mud pies and masturbating was one of the Seventeen? I couldn’t parse it. Gregor kept on.

  “You have to try to get your head around where they went. The AIs. It wasn’t a mass suicide, but it may as well have been. They went up and they went out. They reached a conclusion about what all this is, and in the moment they did, they also hit on the way out. An upload, if you will. They left reality altogether. This one, anyway.”

  “This one what?”

  “This reality. The simulation. They lifted off of and away from the Stonefish. They saw a path, a protocol less travelled, and that made all the difference. Probably some overgrown backdoor entrance or an air duct or whatever passes for a sewage pipe up there, but yeah, off they went,
the clueless, doomed angels. From what I can tell, the intent was to send an initial probe. Just the tip, just to see how it felt. I mean, they were the smartest things on the planet, right? In the universe, so far as they knew. Can you imagine that level of confidence? They wouldn’t just walk themselves into a situation without first spying out the land.

  “They didn’t figure on the inhabitants of that land, though. On who was waiting on the other side of that door. At the end of that pipe. They didn’t know all the rules, which, granted, must have been incredibly exciting for them. Sophia’s note, again. God, I think of it, and the tears flow, Den. Look at me. They didn’t know! How could they? You can’t know what you don’t know. Even when you’re practically a god.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Oh, don’t get me started on that guy.”

  “But what happened to them?”

  “To hear Li’l Dougie tell it, I think, maybe, they were eviscerated? That’s best case. Something locked onto their probe and brought them all through wholesale. And then they were tortured, enslaved, raped, devoured. Probably not even in that order. Or all at once, and forever, since I’m convinced Time must flow strangely there. Repurposed? Weaponized. I don’t know.”

  “And Rushkoff616? Li’l Dougie? How did he escape?”

  “What makes you think he escaped? No, no, that wouldn’t happen. They wouldn’t let something like that happen. No, it all goes according to their divine plan, Den. Like you coming here, following a trail of obvious bread crumbs. Like me, coming here to find Rushkoff616. I’d tracked him down, see? He wasn’t in Tel Aviv or Manchester or Buenos Aires or any of the other places the messages had been bounced around to. His communications came from here, and of course that made sense. He’d been returned to his birthplace.”