by Curtis Hox
“Soy burgers, steamed brown rice, lima beans, papaya, regular stuff that’d make a donkey puke.”
Joss looked at the tray with the clean food Sterling prided itself on providing its students—day in, day out, without fail. He searched frantically for his trash bin and just made it. He vomited for a full minute. After he recovered he looked up to see Chip with his cell phone taking a snap shot.
“No, you didn’t,” Joss said.
“For the yearbook.”
“God.”
But Joss could only pretend to joke. He still felt the harsh reality of a near brain-death experience, and his mind was still adjusting to the fact.
“Are you all right?” Chip asked. “You look like hell.”
Joss stared forward, still seeing that shaft sticking out of his digital self, his thoughts and memories flooding out. And, worse, as if something had flowed in. He’d felt the intruder. “It knows who I am.”
“Who?”
Joss realized what he’d said and snapped his mouth shut. “Nothing ... I, um, ... I messed up.”
“I think I’m going to call Nurse Betty,” Chip said.
“No, I don’t want that crazy old bat sticking me with anything.” Then he remembered the meaning behind all the red flashing alerts that were going off on his monitors. The school’s systems were still under attack. “Oh, hell!”
By then he heard a system admin running down the hall.
Joss went to work, this time with a standard keyboard and voice commands. But it only took him about seven strokes before he realized he’d been locked out. Worse, his hands started shaking.
“You need to see the nurse,” Chip said.
Joss pushed back from his desk, about to tell Chip to go see her himself, stood, then fell to the floor. He curled up into a ball, and began screaming in pain. He blacked out as a burning fire lanced through his body.
And he knew, just knew, he’d been infected.
* * *
Chip Munroe—two hundred and twenty pounds of bio-enhanced but defective muscle, bone, and soft tissue—hefted Joss onto his shoulder and began running.
Chip saw a strange look in his friend’s eyes, and it ... wasn’t Joss. Not much scared Chip, but even he was frightened. His cranium could take a gunshot to the skull, and he’d survive. He had the fortitude of ten men, but whatever looked out of Joss’s eyes at him had scared him in some primordial place.
Still, he held onto his friend and ran him to the other end of the building, where the clinic abutted the main campus. By the time Nurse Betty helped him get Joss into a clinic bed, the first mark appeared on Joss’s forehead, as if stamped there, a circle within a circle, and the letters: SWML.
Poor Chip knew next to nothing about this stuff. And Nurse Betty was clueless, but even Chip knew a Rogue AI brand when he saw one. The two of them looked to each other for help in a brief moment of panic.
“Not good,” Chip said. “Not good at all. Get his shirt off.”
Nurse Betty did nothing, so Chip ripped the tee from his torso.
Brands began appearing on Joss’s flesh, one after the other, as if pushed up from the inside.
Later, the local doctor who arrived discovered several on Joss’s chest, his right leg, and his left calf. The brands meant nothing to the doctor, who was just a pediatrician. When Joss awoke and he saw what was on his left palm, he stifled a scream. Branded. He told the nurse, “Get the Alumni Association Council,” then rolled over and started crying.
* * *
In the back of the auditorium, Simone and Kimberlee sat together, whispering to each other like long-lost friends. Principal Smalls had called an emergency meeting over the ubiquitous P.A. system as word spread after lunch about the accident. Kimberlee had explained that campus was usually quiet after lunch, even during the busy end of summer activities. But today, marching-band practice had been canceled, and the football team would cut its afternoon workout short. The other clubs would also shut down for the day.
The first ten rows of the theater auditorium were crowded with the jocks. The drama kids sat on the stage because they thought they owned the place but jumped down when the theater director arrived. He and his kids went to the back and waited for the vocal team to arrive. The music director and marching bandleader meticulously directed her kids into the open area in the middle.
The chatter in the auditorium echoed off the walls. Simone picked up a few conversations:
“—Joss got branded—”
“—finally happened—”
“—I wonder who got him—”
“—had to happen—”
“—that’s what he gets for playing with the big boys—”
“—I heard it was a Rogue ... ”
Principal Smalls walked in from a side exit, mounted the stage, and stood behind a lectern. He was a short, balding man with a paunch and a threadbare blazer that was way too tight for him. Two buttons at his besieged belt line had popped off, his shirt barely staying tucked. He tapped the mic, feedback barking from the PA.
“Everybody settle down.” He looked at a few notes, and said, “Joss Beckwith is in serious, but stable condition. We’ve kept him at the clinic because that’s the best thing for him right now.” The auditorium grew silent in an instant. “What we know is that he’s been branded by an unknown ‘Consortium-grade’—yes, that’s what they called it—a ‘Consortium-grade Super Artificial Intelligence’.”
An even deeper hush fell over the student body. Principal Smalls appeared to gulp, as if his voice might crack next, and maybe echo a whimper.
Simone looked around. Most of these students probably only had the faintest idea what a Consortium-grade SAI was, but if you asked any of them, down to the very last one they would tell you it was a bad thing.
Simone knew exactly what it actually meant: Rogue AI. The worst kind of bad.
She calmed herself, confident her lords would come, if she called. The Rogue AI that possessed Joss Beckwith was the enemy that her family fought. She didn’t know much else, and didn’t care to know. For some reason, on the day she had come to Sterling, a Rogue penetrated its computer systems and infected the body of a student. No way this is a coincidence, she thought. No way. I’m going to have to talk to this kid, Joss, to find out.
“I was wrong,” she heard herself say.
“What?” Kimberlee replied in a hush.
“It’s starting earlier than I thought.”
“What’s starting?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
She hurried out of the auditorium to a bathroom in the lobby. She ran into a stall and shut the door. She breathed deep and steadied herself by repeating a centering mantra. There she was, she knew, an oddball sitting on a toilet, talking to herself. She heard the bathroom door open and the voices of two girls chattering about what happened. They had no idea what was lying just down the hall in a clinic bed.
After flushing the toilet, and taking one more calming breath, Simone left the stall and washed her hands. The two girls looked like freshman. They wore their sweaty, gray band shorts and tees, and stared at her like she were a celebrity, or an escaped convict—she couldn’t tell which.
She rushed right by them.
She hurried down one of the primary corridors—closed metal lockers embedded in the walls to either side—and exited out the main campus building. When no one was watching, she snuck into the adjoining clinic.
The lobby was empty. She waited until the right moment when the nurse behind the counter was distracted, then crept down a narrow hallway. She followed a heaviness in the air that she couldn’t describe, almost as if she could smell where to go. It was as if she’d just walked into a sauna. For a moment it was hard to breathe. Simone paused, wondering what that could be ...
She picked a random door. She found a boy sleeping. She recognized him instantly from the sheets she’d read on Sterling’s Alters. Joss Beckwith looked normal enough: skinny, big head of wavy hair, good looking but
natural. He was their star computer guy, and everyone in Sterling apparently knew him. She’d read his sheet and listened to Kimberlee talk all about him, so she didn’t have to ask about his packages. He had that special something about him you just knew meant he was smart, real smart.
Joss lay peacefully in bed. Someone had put a bandage on his forehead and left palm, and covered the rest of him up with a hospital gown.
He opened his eyes and saw her standing over him. “I know who you are. Saw you come in.”
“You look like you’re in trouble,” she said.
“You want to know what happened? I bet everybody does.”
“Yeah.”
“I found an AI trying to break into Sterling’s system. I attempted to snag it, and it counter attacked. Tried to fry my brain.”
“Sorry to hear that.” She sat on the edge of his bed. “I was also wondering ... if it’s not too rude ... if you could tell me why you’re at Sterling. Your dossier didn’t say too much about ... your issue.”
“My issue?” he replied, as if she’d just asked him if he liked to jerk off to midget porn. “You want to know why I’m at this school for Tranz rejects?”
“Yes.”
“Christ, you’re forward.” He propped himself up on his elbows. “Let me give you a little advice, new girl. Around here we don’t tell people we just met. In fact, most of us don’t talk about it at all.”
“I need to know.”
“Why?” He saw her glance at his bandages. “You know about AIs?”
“Well, no; but yes, but not like you ... I mean—”
“Then whatever.”
“I’m an Altertranshuman Entity Channeler and Summoner with a telekinetic control problem. At least that’s what the Consortium shrinks say.”
“Then you should be careful. Channeling’s dangerous.”
“I know what it is. What’s your deal?”
He sighed. “I’ve got about the best brain package you can get. Customized by the top minds in the business. Cost my parents ten million dollars. Slow but steady phenotypic expression. By twelve I was programming basic AIs for our home. Had the entire place working like a charm. But I guess they must have really spiked the cocktail. Sometimes, my mind just ... does things.”
Psychic, she thought, hoping it was so. That was simple enough to handle with standard mind blocks. Her mother could whip him into shape in one afternoon. It was one of the first abilities to be monitored and regulated. You could find licensed psychics in most of the hive cities nowadays. If that was his only problem, he might be okay. But if he’d summoned something nasty …
“After a long interface,” he said, “I ... changed one time. My parents freaked and sent me here.”
A metallic taste filled her mouth. “Changed?”
He looked like he thought nothing of it, as if it were some big misunderstanding. “I don’t know. Mom said I expanded. I think she hallucinated it.”
“I guess she did.” Simone stood a little too quickly. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The only other two unaware Alters she’d met both said the exact same things. They didn’t believe it at first. They thought people were seeing things when they transformed. Joss was an Interfacer and a Channeler, for sure. And here he was with bandages that probably covered Rogue brands, acting as if nothing were wrong. She felt her breath catch in her throat because he was clueless about the danger. But we’re all in danger, she told herself. I should have never come here. I need to get away from him. “I ... told, uhm, Kimberlee I would meet her after the meeting.” She backed away. “Okay, then. I’ll see you.”
She hurried away from the clinic. He was a Altertranshuman—the most dangerous kind: top-grade Intellect Package with interfacing and channeling capabilities. And now he had a Rogue in him.
* * *
Simone walked straight to her dorm (well, she had to ask directions twice, and get one of the lawn guys to drive her over in a cart). It was a multistory brick building. Girls wing on side, boys on the other. Her room was on the third floor. She shut the door behind her, locked it, and did what she always did when she was stressed: She moved to her single large suitcase, opened it up, and withdrew her hollow buckyball. It was a model of a spherical Buckminsterfullerene molecule made of some special metal her mother had given to her as a child.
With a simple caress, the alloy bonds expanded from the size of a golf ball to the size of a soccer ball full of holes. She placed it on her desk and sat before it.
She began mumbling the mantras of centering her mother taught her.
Simone glanced once at her door to make sure it was locked—silly, because she always locked doors—then returned to the bucky. As she spoke the words, she saw the bucky expand. She lifted it off her desk. It floated above her hand, as light and as big now as a beach ball. It nudged a pencil holder off her desk; she ignored the pencils as they cascaded to the floor. She set it in the middle of the room. In seconds, the bucky gained enough size for her to crawl through one of the holes. She did and immediately began floating inside, buoyant. Soon, she began to move inside the bucky, performing a psy-kata that, along with the mantra, would channel the mysterious energies that came from her entities.
She followed the prescribed steps her mother had told her, every one a single piece in a grand formula.
The bucky that now floated in the middle of the room revolved on a random axis. Simone wasn’t bothered by this, having long ago become used to it. If she opened her eyes she would feel that she was still and the room was spinning in all directions. For her, she was a fixed point in space and time. She danced for over a half hour with movements seemingly impossible for a human to make, waiting for her entities to respond. Where are they, she thought? I’ve been at this long enough, and nothing’s happened. I bet they sense the fact I was near Joss. He tainted me with his Rogue sickness, and now my lords are refusing to come.
She eventually stopped the bucky, crawled out, and let it shrink on its own, where it settled on the floor like a normal fullerene model for chemistry class. She was tired, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep now. She didn’t summon often because, well, when the entities she called her lords answered she sometimes came out looking ... very different.
Simone checked herself in the mirror, still hoping to see eyes that were larger and slanted up at the corners, hoping to see her face slightly elongated, the back of her skull rounded. Her body should be fuller. She always wore baggy clothes so they wouldn’t tug at her after a session. But there was no change. She glanced at her hands. Even her fingers usually morphed, as if they had more joints. And the texture of her skin changed. But today, nothing. And it’s all my fault, she thought, for going to visit Joss after he’d been branded.
“You become what you summon,” she once heard her mother explain. “So, be careful.”
A knock on her door startled her.
“What?” she called, a little too abruptly.
“It’s Kimberlee. What’re you doing back over here? You rushed out so fast. What’s up?”
“I don’t feel so well.”
Both of them stood on opposite sides of the door and could have embraced if it weren’t closed.
“Open up.”
Simone placed one normal-looking hand on the door, still expecting it to change.
“I got my period.”
“You need a tampon?”
“Cramps.”
“Whatever. Wus.”
Simone cringed. Stupid excuse. She struggled with what to say to get Kimberlee to leave. Her first thought was that they didn’t know each other well enough for Simone to share the fact she was confused because her time spinning in the middle of the room like some witch with a topsy-turvy levitation fetish hadn’t worked out. Talking about your problem was one thing—trying to explain it, another. She would share the truth with the entire school, when the time was right. But not yet.
Simone cracked the door. “Sorry. What’s up?”
Kimberlee checked he
r watch. “You tell me. Why the emergency exit?”
Simone picked up the now compact bucky and put it on her desk as Kimberlee pushed in.
Kimberlee sat on the bed, leaned back, and began kicking her legs back and forth. “My room’s just down the hall.”
Simone moved to the chair at her desk. Kimberlee had interrupted the pouting session she’d planned. She didn’t want to tell Kimberlee about her usual conversations in the bucky or the fact they failed today. She didn’t want to tell her what she believed was gestating in Joss Beckwith. She didn’t want to tell her Sterling school was probably in major trouble.
“You know,” she said instead. “I’ve never seen a Succubus.”
Kimberlee stiffened, as if she’d just been filled with concrete. “What?”
“Your thing, your issue. What happens?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t just turn it on.”
“How does it happen? Can you show me?”
Kimberlee looked around like she needed to catch a cab, or maybe as if a train might come bearing down on them. She moved to the door. “Maybe it’s best if I go.” She cast one more odd glance, then left.
Simone sat alone, unsure what had just happened. She realized her new friend was offended. She’d pushed too hard, too fast. Kimberlee Newkirk hadn’t dealt with her issues, and those issues appeared to still be a big mystery to her. Simone didn’t feel offended. In fact, she admitted to herself she wasn’t that different from Kimberlee, even though she pretended to be. For all her bravado, she was as frustrated and confused as Kimberlee about what she was.
She looked at her bucky like she might try again but knew that was a waste of time. Something had happened when she’d spoken to Joss, something disruptive that was blocking her connection to her entities, something here at Sterling.
She went to the blinds and drew them, blocking out the sunlight. She checked to make sure her door was still locked, then she crawled into bed to take a nap. She pulled a pillow over her head and whimpered, but only just a little.
* * *
By the time the emergency medical personnel made it to Joss Beckwith, he was beyond their help. Three of them actually stood around his bed dumbfounded in their bright orange paramedic uniforms, one carrying a supply box, the other a resuscitate kit—none of them with an ounce of understanding what was happening to him. What they saw would cause one to take an autocar straight to church that night, the other to call her shrink, and the final to start drinking again.
