Virtual Horizon

by Kris Schnee

  "What, are you rooting for your government's machine?"

  Nathan led her farther away from the spectators. His grin vanished. "Part of the reason I want you back home is because it's not safe here anymore. Picture a fuse that's just been lit. First Talespace, then Castor, then Cuba, then the other AFS, as a chain of weirdness and fringe politics burning away, back to normality."

  She stared. "What has a duel between AIs got to do with the US wanting Texas and the rest back?"

  "Because they're the same problem. Ludo's existence is weird and different and confusing. It's a threat to everybody, just by existing. So our government wants to stamp it out and have only AIs that we humans can control. The Army stood down during the Free States' secession, because the economy was so bad and tensions were so high. But now, there's too much money and power at stake for the US to have an armed rival next door luring immigrants like you. I expect that Ludo's going to get shut down, and Texas and the rest will get brought back into the fold one way or another. The AI is being targeted first because she's a wildcard. The end will be less painful if it's quick."

  Linda recoiled from Nathan. "You really have given up. How can you ignore that we have a functioning country here, as strange and flawed as it is? Ludo's not the end of the world either."

  He shrugged. "I agree, but more powerful people don't. We're ants trying to stop a steamroller."

  Linda said, "No! There's more than one way to live, and if someone's trying to shut down all the other options then it's because they're terrified of the competition!"

  "That's not the story as the politicians see it. They see 'a house divided' against India and China. China's Jade Dragon? Also a real AI. They're the ones who captured the 'Red Sage' lady."

  If that's true, how does he know that? Linda didn't dare to follow the thought. "I need to get back to my exhibit. Go, enjoy the fairgrounds for a while."

  Nathan took her arm. "Please, come home with me. We can make a difference there."

  "The likes of FAE won't let there be any differences." Linda shook Nathan off and stomped up the ramp to the hot sunlight, alone, feeling tears blur her eyes.

  * * *

  She was in no condition to give cheerful speeches. Linda changed direction and headed for the crystal spire at the Exposition's center. In augmented reality it was a space elevator, in truth "only" a doorway to another world.

  Inside the air-conditioned cathedral of glass and steel stood a hundred VR pods. Not the grim mausoleum rows she'd expected, but a jungle of sloped platforms where the machines were hidden among vines and pillars and dining tables and video screens. Kids chased each other through an obstacle course of nets and padded walls that'd get the owner sued for negligence in the US. Talespace characters, human and otherwise -- or maybe they were other players -- ran and climbed alongside them on the screens. Human and robot employees kept watch while parents and other adults played board games, waiting for their turn in the pods or just escaping the heat at the cafe in here. The gaming equipment was fully a part of the room, not isolated from it.

  "You've learned," she said to the nearest microphone. The pods, strewn about like Easter eggs, were even in cheerful colors. "Why haven't you put all this on hold?"

  The AI's voice beside her sounded strained. "Your compliment means a lot to me, Linda. Sorry, not very witty right now. They're mostly amusing themselves. Doesn't take much attention away from the current problem."

  She took in a breath of warm, humid air in this den of casual wonder. "Can I help?"

  "Keep an eye out for more trouble. Are you all right?"

  She rubbed her eyes. "Nathan's sold out. I thought I could talk him into emigrating... Heh, you know the feeling. But worse, he thinks defeat's inevitable for you shortly followed by the AFS. Wanted me to hurry 'home' with him instead."

  A still image of human-Ludo popped up in Linda's glasses. "He talked to you about both? Where is he now?"

  "I left him in the food court."

  "Tracing..." The image grew sharper, as though commanding more of the AI's attention. "I see him entering a corporate building where I haven't got cameras. Should I be concerned? Please, Linda: my resources are limited, I'm trying to prevent panic, and I need you to be honest with me in the name of both our goals. Do you suspect your brother is here to harm me?"

  Linda fell into a chair, staring open-mouthed at the AI's avatar. Linda used to assume her future was to stay in America and win elections, and she'd been frightened to learn there were more choices. It would have been easy to stay home, sulking, telling herself that to flee the country was cowardice or treason. Instead she'd tried to make life on Earth more attractive than Ludo's offer. Maybe Nathan had gone through the same anguish, to a different conclusion. In his place, she might have tried to do something desperate to Ludo to cut off her own line of retreat, or out of spite.

  Linda said. "Yes, I'd worry. And it's worse than that. FAE is meant to fight rival AIs, while 'satisfying human values' to implement the Blue Sage's ideas of AI ethics, right?"

  "Really not the time for philosophy."

  "I missed the point. Humans value a lot of things. If you err on the side of coddling us, satisfying our needs for comfort and fun, what would another AI do to make sure humanity's other values are satisfied? Like the will to power, tribalism, conquest, self-punishment..."

  Ludo paused to think. People looked around in confusion as though Thousand Tales had glitched even here. Linda imagined the same thing happening around the world, as though God had stopped animating the sea and sky.

  "Oh, shit," said the AI. "You're right. Hurry into pod nine."

  "I can talk down Nathan in person." Linda had her gun, too. She shuddered.

  "GO!"

  Linda followed a cluster of lights toward a VR pod.

  * * *

  Horizon

  He stretched wings of aluminum and carbon fiber, flightless but sharp-edged. This replacement body was more weapon than toy, even compared to the last classified one he'd tried. "Noc, are you there?"

  Nocturne chirped in his ear, patrolling elsewhere in the park. "The medics are at work and a bunch of robots got pummeled."

  He was sealed indoors. The tunnel leading to the most crucial computer room had only one entrance that a human could use, only in case the maintenance robots needed repair themselves. Its thick steel door had a keypad with three-factor authentication. The pad was programmed to say "INTRUDER ALERT. POISON GAS DEPLOYING!" if you used it right, to see how you'd react. Everyone assured Horizon that it was very secure. Yet Ludo had given him wireless tasers under his wings, and there were lethal defenses in the sealed room behind him.

  "What exactly am I guarding?" asked Horizon.

  The voice of Clara the Green Sage rang out in his mind. "This is the North American Core. A third of Ludo's processor power, some data she doesn't dare transport online, and a lot of stored minds. Including ours. At worst we have backups, but it's not the same, you know?"

  It wouldn't be the end of the Lady, then, if something happened here. She could quarantine it against any virus. Probably. Horizon's mind raced. "What's our status? I thought we were going to keep walking around outside."

  "Ludo says a saboteur got into the backstage area just above you, and he's disabling the cameras."

  "How'd he get past the screening?" Ludo's hacker team had checked on the first-day invitees and let various spies through, to put them under discreet supervision. Fortunately the AFS authorities didn't want them achieving anything in Cuba either.

  Clara said, "Similar tactics to ours, I think: they put the real threat behind the obvious one. But Horizon, their man is Nathan Decatur."

  Nocturne echoed Horizon's surprised "Awk?" She went on: "Is Linda in on this too?"

  Horizon shouted by radio at them. "No!"

  Ludo's voice broke in: "She's the one who warned me."

  Horizon shuddered inside his mechanical body, silently giving thanks to the Lady. If he were the same man he was years ago,
and Linda were guilty, he would have been ready to kill her in justice's name. "You say the enemy is shutting off cameras? Sounds like some kind of portable EMP device."

  Clara said, "That's what we're thinking. Human guards are en route too. Their password is 'Kira'." She paused. "Damn. The bastards just retook control of half the park's robots. How the hell did they break an elliptic curve cipher?" There was the sound of a forehead being smacked. "Oh. Some dumbass employee plugged a corrupted thumb-drive into a secure machine. Somebody's getting fired today."

  Horizon shuffled his metal feet. "Are these griffinbots EMP shielded?"

  "Yes. But if the transmitters nearby get zapped, that'll cut the puppet strings. Won't be any hardware to send your commands to the bots."

  Nocturne said, "Unless..."

  "Yeah. Ludo, please copy our minds to the bodies' internal storage and transfer control to them."

  Clara broke in: "Got it covered, you two. For technical reasons I'm swapping you."

  Horizon's vision bent and rippled. Suddenly he was in the Westwind space exhibit, in a similar armed body, with all input but voice-chat disabled. That meant Nocturne was now below in the vault area. Fear washed through him. How many other attackers might there be? In theory he was now safe against any hack, but if something physically trashed his body he was gone. At best, backups that thought they were him and Nocturne would wake up, and he didn't want to think about going through another transition like that. "Hold the line in there, Noc."

  He startled at the sight of a golden retriever with metal plates along its skull. The dog saluted and a tinny voice said, "Orders, alpha?" It looked more capable of smashing rogue robots than his own body did. He gave thanks to Westwind for creating these.

  Horizon grinned and started toward the door. "Come!"

  He skidded to a halt, struck by a thought. For the first time in years he was in a body disconnected from Ludo's systems. She couldn't read his thoughts. It'd be possible for him to help Nathan. To tilt the world away from this future Linda feared, and give other sides more of a chance.

  He shuddered. The dog beside him looked puzzled; its loyalties were simple. Horizon said, "The fact that the Lady let me go, tells me hers is a good cause. Let's protect people." He and the dog dashed ahead into the sunlight.

  * * *

  Linda

  "What do you need?" asked Linda.

  "I'm keeping you out of sight in case you're a target." The VR pod showed Linda her old pirate ship.

  "What? If you're under this heavy an attack then FAE must have orders to destroy you outright, not just scare people. I'm not going to hide."

  Ludo spoke tersely. "I'm also trying to spare you from fighting your brother. FAE likely wants you to fight him. It will make for strife-promoting headlines."

  She didn't want to think about Nathan, but she had to. "He's a good man. He's just being tricked, used. They probably threatened me to get to him. When I reason with him --"

  "I'm only even talking with you right now because you've got insight about FAE's motives. From a human perspective what's the most horrible, tragic ending?"

  She gulped. "He dies. And people say he was a terrorist somehow doing it to betray America and provoke war with you."

  "Lovely. He's not just carrying a computer virus, then. FAE would know it can't get into my sanctum and is focusing on the soft targets, the civilians in the park. If it's sending Nathan into the tunnels, that's probably a bombing attempt."

  She pictured him carrying a black box, knowing only that it'd "compromise the AI's computers" if he could get close enough. Ludo had to have crazy security around anything vital, and FAE would know that. "A bomb?" She tried to unhook herself from the pod's controls.

  "You can't run there in time. If you insist on helping, I'll let you steer a spare bot that's much closer. Watch out for his EMP device; this one's not shielded." The VR view switched to a real hallway, with a mini-map centered on a griffin icon.

  Linda hesitated with her finger on the VR pod's emergency release button. Ludo said the robot was the only way to reach him "in person", and sometimes she didn't play games.

  She stayed in the pod. She took a few steps and found the system was only approximating her moves, for ease of use. Great. I have to do this from inside a griffin robot. Her grousing helped distract her from the thought of Nathan as an unwitting suicide bomber.

  She ran through service tunnels toward a red marker, and saw her brother, walking briskly. "Nate, stop!"

  Nathan looked back over one shoulder, huge and haunted. He towered over her remote-controlled body, holding a device like a garage door opener. That couldn't be a bomb, could it? EMP, maybe. Nathan said, "Don't try to fool me with her voice, robot."

  Linda said, "I'm remote-controlling this thing. I'm the sister who told on you for having those magazines under your bed, and who knows about your wannabe rock star phase, and who knows you're trying to bomb Ludo's place." She saw a locked door at the end of the hall, labeled "Main Computer Room -- Authorized Personnel Only". There was an airlock-style "man trap" door securing it, but he presumably had been given a way past that. Or just enough blasting power.

  Nathan looked surprised. "Bombing? This is to infect the computers. I have to do this. You're not safe otherwise." He held up the gadget.

  Digital crosshairs annotated Linda's view and pointed out that there was a second button he was holding down. Dead-man switch. He wasn't carrying any obvious explosives, though, so what was that linked to? "If you zap this robot then you've still got human guards to deal with, and they're going to at least taser the hell out of you. You've already been spotted. Don't you dare wreck something wonderful to protect me."

  Nathan wavered. "You don't want Ludo to win. She's out of control and she's damning people to her false heaven. If we don't stop it this way, it'll be done with soldiers later."

  "I don't want anyone to be the only game in town. Do you really think the United States as it is now, should be the only option for us? Or are you so scared of any other futures that you want to destroy them?" She paused. "Where is the bomb?"

  "In me," said Nathan, going pale. "But it's just a hidden virus device."

  Letters flashed up in Linda's vision: [He's almost directly above the real sanctum.] Linda blinked. This secure hall was a decoy? Even so, it was apparently still a weak point.

  Linda said, "An insane AI forced you into this. Whatever it said is a lie. Its goals aren't just to protect the world from Ludo, but to make people fight and suffer as some screwed-up interpretation of its programming. It wants you dead and me in grief, as much as it wants to win."

  A squad of human guards and one of Salmacis' dogs rounded a corner, shouting, "Freeze!" Several held pistols.

  Nathan said, "We can have a good life together. If I do this, we go home to a safer world."

  She screamed at him. "If you set off whatever gadget they stuck in you, you're going to die! You're not getting heaven either, because you'll be killing those humans standing near you and murdering a lot of intelligent minds and crushing a source of joy for millions of people! All so you can pretend that selling wholesale toilet paper to the government and donating to politicians is enough to make your country free again. Is that your idea of a good future? It's a loser's vision, and if that's all you can imagine then you're no brother of mine!"

  Nathan glanced down at the pocket where he'd stashed that chip containing an episode of the Talespace-filmed TV show. His shoulders slumped. "I want to believe in this world of yours, but you're up against well-funded professional black-hats and a country of hundreds of millions. The kind of freedom you hope for can't last."

  "Your would-be owners think you're disposable. They've probably already written the headline about how you were somehow an anti-American terrorist, because that lie makes you more useful and you won't be around to argue." She took a cautious step toward him. "One thing Ludo and I agree on is that we have to try, to struggle despite the odds, or we lose what we are. Hell, even F
AE seems to see that. Has giving up made you happy? I think you're the one who's run away from being all you can. Not me, and not even the people of Talespace."

  Nathan wavered, holding down the button that would end him on release.

  Linda said, "Know why I'm borrowing one of Ludo's toys? It's because I couldn't have run here in time. Only reason you're getting to hear from your sister before you die is that Ludo exists. It's not just you she's helped either. Her technology and her ideas are saving even people who go on to leave her and turn to God instead. Keeping her around isn't an end for us and what we believe in. Your way, is."

  He leaned against a wall, shuddering and closing his eyes. "There's no safety to put back on. The bastards who did this to me didn't allow for second thoughts."

  Linda trotted closer on mechanical legs and touched him, feeling the sensation through radio and haptic feedback and other fancy technology. The gadgetry didn't matter so much as her ability to look up at her brother and save him. "Hold on. We'll fix this. Then we'll work on the rest of the world."

  * * *

  Weeks Later

  Horizon was pacing, somewhere outside reality but able to care. He said, "Are you sure?"

  Linda lay back on the operating table. It was heated, and soft Bach music played. "Get it over with. I've already talked myself into going." She tried to ignore the IV tube sticking horribly out of her arm.

  It had been weeks since opening day. Ludo's minions had found out even more of the secrets of consciousness and brain structure, tipping the balance for Linda. Uploading wasn't death anymore with the new technique. Linda had asked for the procedure to be done by the world's greatest expert, who she could also call a friend.

  Not that Linda was taking Ludo up on her invitation to live in Talespace. This procedure was just a way to climb aboard the asteroid probe and start taking humanity to the stars.

  "How is Typhoon's Eye?" she asked. Horizon mumbled. Linda opened her eyes to see a video screen floating in front of her with the griffin looking bashful.