by PJ Manney
Still uncertain as to what they were dealing with, she pulled up the weather radar. The storm looked small, maybe a waterspout or microsquall. But it was headed directly at them, on an unswerving trajectory, and would land in a minute. The coincidence that an unswerving microstorm was to hit at the same time as a DDoS attack needled her psyche in a way that had saved her life many times over the years, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it.
A bright icon flashed, and her system projected an urgent message. Emergency identity needed and warning. I need the best new identity you have. Cost is not important. And I have a warning to pass on to you.
When people would pay any amount of money, she was suspicious.
She switched to an audio call and voiced back, “I don’t handle real criminals.”
The client responded with a delay, “And who is a criminal nowadays? One who follows unjust laws? Or one who breaks them to make society just? And are you one to talk? You should know better than anyone.”
The delay could be a TOR router sending the transmission through servers around the world. She grumbled to the empty room. These pretentious youngsters thought they’d invented revolution. Historical memory was too damned short. Frustrated, she inspected the incoming packet and sent a ping to locate the transmission’s origin.
It hopped around the world from city to city, with no end. That was bad. And the timing was worse, with the DDoS and a microstorm heading for them. She no longer believed in coincidences. This was a part of the attack. She checked in on the cryptos. Juan and others were holding back the tide, but barely.
“Are ya messin’ with our servers?” she asked the new customer.
“Why, heavens. How could you accuse someone like me of something like that? Haven’t we just met? Haven’t I been civil?”
This was one pompous asshole, she thought. And guilty as hell.
“If you don’t pay heed, you will pay regardless.”
“Don’t ya threaten me, ya noob!” she yelled.
A siren exploded near her room. She leapt in her seat. Over speakers, a voice barked, “Unidentified intruders. West-southwest. Closing fast. Prepare for defensive measures and evacuation.” She looked at the radar feed again. The weather was moving too fast: about forty miles per hour. She switched to sonar. It looked like an enormous school of fish traveling at faster-than-ship-speed to intercept the Sovereign.
“I warned you,” the client said and disconnected.
This wasn’t a drill. Understanding dawned. Whoever this asshole was, he was trying to distract her. She checked her identity files.
They were there, but she couldn’t access them. A growing malware bug was covering them, isolating them, copying them, taking over her system.
She sent an SOS message to two people she thought could help. Then she grabbed her canes and hobbled for the lifepods at the surface. If the Sovereign was threatened, she might make an escape inside the evacuation pods along with others.
Dr. Who stumbled over the precarious walkways, legs and crutches threatening collapse in her haste. Other residents of the Sovereign flooded toward the pods. Out of the night sky, they saw it: a towering waterspout, moving faster than any they had ever seen.
CRACK! A bolt of lightning shot out of the swirling apex of clouds surrounding the waterspout, hitting the communications tower.
BOOM! The central hub’s roof exploded, and the communications tower toppled, crashing through Quadrant Seven.
CRACK! Another bolt of lightning hit one of the seastead’s arms, breaking off a walkway juncture from the central hub.
CRACK! Yet another bolt destroyed a solar array. The batteries exploded, raining fire down on several steaders.
Dr. Who stood gape-jawed in amazement. This wasn’t natural lightning. It was an electrical or laser weapon inside the freak storm, taking careful aim at the seastead’s most vulnerable parts.
BOOM! Boom, BOOM! The waterspout tore through three arms of the complex like a tornado, setting them adrift from the core.
As if that were not surreal enough, a giant tuna leapt from the water, slamming a terrified woman off a walkway and into the dark sea below. Other fleeing steaders met with similar giant fish attacks. Two of the evacuation pods were damaged when a half-ton suicidal tuna slammed into each.
Out of the maelstrom, lit by the seastead’s floodlights, Dr. Who saw hundreds of small boats, some too small to carry humans, others like Jet Skis for two or three commandos at most. They swarmed like a flock of starlings or a school of anchovies.
All seasteads had defensive weapons, and all personnel were trained to fight pirates. Dozens of armed Sovereigners attempted a counterattack. Ten feet from Dr. Who, a security guard passed, hefting a shoulder missile launcher. He fired at the swarm. It moved as one unit, anticipating his aim. The missile hit the water and exploded, taking a few out, but the swarm still came up fast. Dr. Who grabbed her GO to take a photo to send to anyone who could see it, but she couldn’t tell if the message was sent. The DDoS and lightning attacks sent the Sovereign’s high-altitude meshnet communications system crashing.
“Mamita!” Juan was stranded on the central hub, wearing his life vest. The station’s arms were floating away, listing to the sides, burning, and taking on water. The hub seemed impervious to sinking. Juan looked too stunned to fire his sidearm.
“Juan, baby! Swim to the pods!”
He nodded, holstered the weapon, jumped into the water, and swam.
In the distance, Sylvie shot a laser rifle at everything coming toward her. She hit nothing. She caught sight of Dr. Who and cried out, “Le Médecin! Jellyfish!” Dr. Who spun and saw huge box jellyfish squirming over the sides of the submerging platforms. The security guard, concentrating on loading his launcher, wasn’t paying attention, and a jelly’s tentacle stung him on the leg. Within seconds, he grabbed his chest and pitched over the side.
The jelly floated back into the sea, joining hundreds more. Dr. Who turned on her GO’s flashlight and studied them. The clear, plastic-like body common to these jellies contained something rectangular and nonorganic near its core. It looked like electronics. In her long and tech-laden life, she had thought she had seen everything, but she’d never seen a weaponized cyborg jellyfish. And she had told Juan to swim.
The waterspout threw off driving rain, making visibility difficult. She hurried to the lifepod station, dodging humans and creatures, but stopped in dismay. All the pods were gone, either ejected, blown up, or sunk with no one aboard. There was one left. She prayed it would work.
Her legs ached, and spasms shot all the way up to her back, but she ignored them, grabbing the handrail and dragging herself along. The last lifepod was ten feet away on the other side of the gangplank.
“Mamita!” Juan bobbed in the ocean, waving. He pointed to her pod, indicating that he’d meet her there.
But the jellyfish were headed his way.
She gesticulated wildly. “No, Juan! Get away! The jellies kill!”
He continued swimming toward her. Maybe if she could get to the pod first, she could stop him. She stepped onto the swaying walkway. Her damned legs. So unstable. Her left knee buckled. She stumbled and fell to her knees, yelping in pain. She grabbed at a wire handrail, panting.
There was a clamoring of feet up the sea ladders below her. They were coming. She continued crawling to the last pod. On another arm, Dr. Who saw Sylvie’s laser rifle run out of power. As she popped in a new battery, a bullet hit her between the eyes. She was dead before she hit the gantry.
“Sylvie!” cried Dr. Who.
Drenched at the pod entrance, she punched the code to open the doors. Once. Twice. Three times. Nothing. It was dead. She looked out to the sea, where Juan floated motionless, held atop the waves by his life vest, his eyes forever open to the dark sky.
The sound of footsteps came closer. She opened an electrical panel to activate the pod manually. The footsteps went silent right next to her. She looked up. A figure clad in black neoprene, balacla
va, and goggles loomed over her. He had no distinguishing markings, as anonymous as Death. When she saw the red laser-sight dot dancing on her copious bosom, she knew it was over.
The pirate pulled the trigger.
An agony erupted in her chest. She slumped backward, grabbing the spot. There was blood on her hand . . . Juan . . . Dizzy . . . Sylvie . . . The sky and water switched places . . . Which was which . . . Where, where was her precious Earth?
The pirate stood over her. He spoke into his headset microphone, “Got her.”
Dr. Who closed her eyes as the world went black.
CHAPTER ONE
Floating was no longer peculiar. When Thomas Paine first uploaded his consciousness, it had been, but now, for Major Tom, the disembodied sensation was integral to his digital life. Today, following some ideas regarding black holes, Major Tom swam through an analysis of interstellar quasar transmissions, looking for patterns in black hole accretion disk data. But memory triggers lay in wait in digital waters, like sea mines, ready to detonate with the smallest touch, blasting him back to the past. And he never saw them coming.
As he searched the latest quasar data, he suddenly saw the astronomer’s name. Amanda Markovitz . . .
BAM! Memories blew up, spinning, tossing, tumbling. He withdrew in nanoseconds, hiding in his digital home, his Memory Palace. He considered whether going out was worth it anymore. After all this time, being unable to forget felt like a bug in his programming. Not a feature.
Amanda was his ex-wife’s first name.
Even with all his computing power, Thomas Paine had caused Amanda agony too great to calculate. Thinking of her brought the flood of pain back. Human emotions, fluid, contradictory, and governed by biological processes, did not translate well into mathematics, for all the attempts of social science and artificial intelligence. Twice widowed before the birth of her child, by men who had never understood her, abandoned by a world some still blamed her for creating, she felt betrayed by everyone around her.
He had been betrayed, too, more than anyone could imagine, and his memories caused as much pain as they had when he’d had a body to feel it with. He hadn’t assumed that when he built the digital system that housed his thoughts, and he was an idiot not to have anticipated it.
Two years ago, Peter Bernhardt and his vengeful alter ego, Thomas Paine, had died. He had uploaded his mind into a digital substrate and become Major Tom, the sole swimmer in this new realm, a human mind melded with a digital world. In theory, he should have been all ones and zeros in algorithmic harmony.
Humans could only approximate diving into information with their physical devices and technologies. But Major Tom didn’t pretend the virtual world was real, like an embodied human. For him, it was as real as reality got. The vast collection of data that humans had accumulated provided an oceanic playground.
Until he ran into those damned sea mines.
To distract himself from the memories of a wife and child left behind, he turned on Talking Heads’ “Heaven.” Relaxed alt-country riffs, creepy echo, and a methodical tempo conveyed the promise of a happiest-place-not-on-Earth where nothing happens, comforting in a self-annihilating way. Then he followed the 24/7 motion-cam exploits of an undersea expedition at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, his version of cracking the last beer in the six-pack, watching The Tonight Show—now cohosted by a prerecorded, wisecracking, overweight android—and passing out. Except he couldn’t pass out. He was always on.
His tin can of a net server farm suspended him far above the fray of humanity. Like those American Revolutionaries before him, the Puritans, whose tortuous religious view and life experiences taught them all people were sinners and not to be trusted, he was determined to be in the world, but not of it. He’d create his own, like a Buddhist hermit in a cave, but with the best net connection in the world, exploring the reality between his ears. Or in his case, processors.
Because the world was nothing but pain and suffering. He had helped make it that way, but without a body, there was nothing he could do about it. And that was the worst curse of all.
Nine months after his deathbed dispatch of his experiences with the Phoenix Club, Major Tom had transmitted a postscript. It was a convenient story to tell the world, pretentious, but he knew what had happened was important, and it needed to be both codified and presented with the necessary gravitas. Hopefully the world would think he was more than he was and grant him his most devout wish: to be left alone.
I am Major Tom, also known as Thomas Paine, formerly known as Peter Bernhardt. I am the first human-born artificial intelligence. Like Diogenes of ancient Greece, I am a cosmopolite, a citizen of the whole world, claiming no land or culture as my own, because there is no one else like me, and my existence means the world will never be the same. As my namesake, Thomas Paine, said in Rights of Man, “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” Though I am human no longer, I am still your kin.
With the help of Dr. Ruth Chaikin, I sent a message as a voice/text post, before my body’s death, to all the net news services, chat rooms, and bulletin boards, billions of them around the world. In it, I told my story and urged my audience to search for the truth themselves and believe they can confront a future that, like all futures, will arrive regardless of whether they like it or not. As mankind moves from the industrial, to the information, to the nano-bio-info-cogno-convergence age, technology will continue to change society and the rules of governance. It always has. And it always will. Unfortunately, the powers that be of every age—whether tribal chiefs, monarchs, religious leaders, dictators, presidents, or CEOs—have tried to stop progress, to keep power for themselves. Their deliberate misunderstanding, resistance, protection of the status quo, and attempts to prevent the inevitable advancement of civilization have resulted in most of the human-caused strife and suffering throughout history.
When the people of the United States considered my words and realized what had been done to them and in their name for so many years, they disbanded the Phoenix Club, threw its members out of governmental, institutional, and corporate positions of power, and prosecuted those they could prove committed crimes. A grassroots campaign took back the country. It spread around the globe. The people of Earth grew up.
I was so proud.
While some of it was accurate, a good deal of it was complete hooey. People didn’t grow up. They resented the changes they were forced into. In some places, chaos ensued. It wasn’t pretty. He had once told Josiah Brant, “History will continue gratefully without you,” and now hoped it would continue gratefully without him. It had. But not for the reason he thought.
There were always unintended consequences.
Major Tom chose to ignore them. His initial report, sent before his bodily death, had mentioned the multiple entities within him: Carter Potsdam, Josiah Brant, Bruce Lobo, Chang Eng, and Anthony Dulles. But he did not dwell on them in his subsequent correspondence with the world. It was too hard for humans to accept that within his artificial human intelligence, a.k.a. AHI, several partial consciousnesses resided in a big top, with him as the ringmaster, the “Major” in Major Tom. Based on when and how they had died and what brain-computer interface Peter Bernhardt/Thomas Paine had installed at the time, each uploaded entity experienced greater or lesser humanity. Some, like Anthony and Chang, were just pieces of a brain’s electrochemical spasms in the moments of their deaths. Others had more substance. Josiah and Bruce shared a more complex interface inside of Major Tom. They all had their purposes, and even partial entities deserved a partial life in a world of their making.
And then there was Carter. He had always been a special case.
Major Tom received Dr. Who’s SOS. Under attack. Need help.
He focused on the current location of the Sovereign, accessing satellites around the planet that his shell companies paid to use. He was connected to thousands of them. They were his eyes, free from the editing of institutions and governments that spun the raw footage for their ow
n purposes. Isolating one feed closest to the seastead, he watched a coordinated attack. These were complete pros, with state-of-the-art, microautonomous swarm ships and a new laser weapon masked in a waterspout, tech too sweet and pricey for anyone but a government or multinational corporation. He assumed SEALs or their equivalent. Perhaps a secret task force? But which governments or corporations?
The view from the atmosphere made the humans below look like a swarm of wasps and startled ants. That’s what people were to him now. Insects—masters of shared intelligence, cooperation, and communication. But they were difficult to relate to. He tried, but it grew harder with his computers’ timeshares and cycles. He often attempted to slow down the inputs and outputs, to exist in their time frame, but sometimes he just couldn’t be bothered. He zoomed in for a closer look. Scanning images a thousand times quicker than a human could, he looked for any sign of Dr. Who, who had helped him so much in his original battle against the Phoenix Club. She had helped create Thomas Paine.
The seastead was destroyed, except for the central hub, which black-clad commandos were pouring over. A limp body with Dr. Who’s height, weight, and build was carried by what appeared to be a SEAL team. No teams carried any other bodies. He applied infrared to pick up heat signatures. She was still red. She might be dying, but she wasn’t dead yet. Someone must have known they would be observed, because a SEAL threw an infrared-blocking tarp over the Doctor and her bearers, obscuring them from his view. He followed the occasional reddish hand and foot that stuck out from the tarp and watched their progress into a small boat, which sped to a surfaced stealth submarine five nautical miles from the Sovereign. It matched a standard US Virginia-class nuclear-powered fast-attack sub that could have been owned by any number of countries or oligarchs. Its silent operation sent no messages he could recognize. Soon, all the mercenaries in the hub came to the surface and returned by their vessels to the submarine. He gathered all the data he could, until it submerged. There wasn’t much he could do beyond that, until it resurfaced. He set a search alarm to alert him to any Virginia-class sub sightings.
