by Damien Boyes
Lost Time: Part Five
Sync
Damien Boyes
StatUS-ID
[fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]
SysDate
[22:08:21. Sunday, January 19, 2059]
The first shock of gunfire erupts from behind the shyft replicator, a tight burst from one of Xiao’s soldiers that rips into a Fate agent with the wet slap of fast metal on stopsuit and sets everyone scurrying for cover.
Agent Sòng and her partner drop to a crouch, shielding themselves behind a palette of plastic-wrapped shyfts near the flapping transparent strips between the warehouse and the exterior drone yard.
Sòng’s got a crowd control-strength neuralizer charging. She’s already disabled half of Standards’ strike team with the first shot. Another will likely incapacitate the rest, then she’ll be free to pursue Xiao. Luckily for us, Sòng’s got her weapon hooked to a portable battery and not a UAV power plant. The capacitors take time to charge between shots. It’ll be a few moments before she can fire again.
With one of their number down, the three remaining Fate agents appear out of cover with the precision of a synchronized swimming team and use their assault weapons to blow the hell out of the shyft replicator and Xiao’s soldiers hiding behind it. While two agents continue to fire, the third retrieves their fallen comrade with the agility of a sprinter and fireman-carries him back to safety.
The distraction gives Standards time to run to the rows of empty shelving stretching across the warehouse’s glossy blue floor and find meagre cover behind the few straggling boxes and barrels of bioPharm supplies Xiao hasn’t yet evacuated.
We’re in Xiao’s distribution centre, the last remaining element of his criminal empire. Up until a few minutes ago, I thought Xiao was one of the most dangerous men on the planet—after all, he’s wanted by the Department of Human Standards for supplying the Reszo underworld with illegally scafed bodies and rithm-enhancing shyfts—but I’ve since learned he considers himself a freedom fighter about to launch his first assault against Fate, the company he believes intends to enslave humanity through its benign offering of digital immortality.
I’d come here looking for answers and found myself in the middle of a three-way stand off between Xiao’s army of little girls, Standards’ Special Agent Wiser—my former partner who’s convinced I’ve been working with Xiao all along—and Fate Agent Sòng who’d been hunting Xiao as well.
Xiao’s convinced Fate intends to enslave the human race by offering it a final choice in the never-ending struggle against mortality. Fate guarantees a life without death, but only if you agree to their terms. I’d been led to believe that Xiao was the bad guy, a terrorist driving the human species to the brink through the advanced shyfts and skyns he provided.
I don’t believe that anymore.
Both Wiser and Sòng are here to stop Xiao, but from everything I’ve seen, I tend to agree with the supposed terrorist. Standards is wrong. Fate is far more dangerous. While Fate’s Ancestor Program promises an endless life of pleasure through purpose, in reality, the people who choose Fate are ceding control of their minds to a corporation’s bottom line.
Sure, Fate’s Ancestors live a life of contentment, but only because they’re programmed to feel that way. With each gift of immortality, Fate provides a destiny, free of charge. Every Ancestor’s digital psychorithm is encoded with a subconscious goal, one based on the genetic predisposition of their brains and the content of their minds. The Ancestors are then let loose into one of Fate’s virtual worlds with the drive to achieve their destinies hardwired into their personalities, whether they want it or not.
They’re conditioned to be doctors, engineers, scientists, athletes and killers--all skills that have value in the global knowledge economy. Services that can be freelanced to markets around the world. Renting out their ever-growing storehouse of minds has made Fate very wealthy, and every day, more and more people are dying to join.
Ancestors don’t need to eat or to sleep. They can, but they don’t need to. No one is forced to do anything. The necessities of a leisurely life are provided for everyone, but most find the incessant disquiet of ignoring their programming too hard to bear, eventually fall in line with their training, and are happy they did.
It’s slavery, but no one seems to mind. Fate keeps their virts tightly controlled, and little information gets in or out. They claim it’s for security, but rumours persist of regular atrocities conducted within. Simulated physical tortures combined with very real mental ones.
Xiao should know, he was an Ancestor himself. He finally escaped from the Yuanfen— Fate’s virtual prison in China—where life is cheap and lasts forever, and brought a warning out with him. He sees the future Fate offers for the dystopia it is and submits an alternative, one that doesn’t involve sacrificing humanity’s freedom to choose in the process.
Escapes from the Fate’s virts are rare, which makes it easy to keep the specific contents of their virtual worlds hidden. While Ancestors interact with the world every day by the millions, only those who have accepted their destinies are allowed outside contact. They have nothing but great things to say about their amazing, fulfilling lives.
This is why Fate has been hunting Xiao, he knows the truth.
Xiao knows he’s considered a criminal. He’s wanted by governments all over the world. No one will listen to his warning—he has no other choice, Fate must be destroyed. Which is why Fate has sent their best-trained Ancestors to kill him: Agent Sòng and her partner along with four assassins. Fate only sent six people to eliminate Xiao—a man who has a small army at his disposal. It would seem foolish if they hadn’t already disabled half of the strike team Wiser brought with him and had Xiao’s army on the run. As it stands, six might have been overkill.
Agent Wiser followed me here, expecting to catch me colluding with Xiao in some kind of elaborate plot, but Sòng crashed the party and introduced herself by incapacitating most of the Standards officers and their AMP in its state-of-the-art lawbot with a sweep of her powerful stun-gun. She left only a Wiser and a handful of his team still conscious and they’re scrambling to regain their bearings.
Wiser calls out targets, focusing on Sòng. Disabling that neuralizer is his first priority. Standards’ weapons send out precise bullets targeted by their enhanced combat armour, but they only carve shards out of the stacked shyfts. Sòng stays safe and sound and waiting for the ready light on her next stun blast to flash green.
While Fate and Standards keep each other distracted Xiao’s head of security--the bald-man with nimble feet and a face like a stealth bomber--has already grabbed up the old woman who acts as Xiao’s right hand, draped her over his shoulder bolted toward the stairs behind us. Grandma doesn’t flinch. She pulls a small handgun from her wide sleeve and gets three shots off at Sòng’s flank before they disappear up the stairs. The bullets miss, but just. Sòng ducks preternaturally, craning her neck as if to watch them skim over her head.
The second the old woman is out of the line of fire, Xiao turns and races deeper into the barracks area, where five more of his identical female soldiers are waiting, huddled behind an empty weapons rack. Ankur follows, hurrying his boyish skyn along behind his mentor, and I try to stick with him while twisting around with Dora’s small gun in my hand, ready to clip Sòng the second she tries to bring that neuralizer back up for another shot.
Ankur’s the one who brought me here, we have a history. He killed me, I killed him. But I think we’re past that. There’s still an anger in me, I want to hate him—after all, he’s the person who killed my wife—but I don’t.
The accident that brought Ankur and I together, the one that took Connie, happened only days ago in my head. I remember it vividly, but more than a year has passed in the real world. A year i
n which another version of me had been restored and tore down the life I’d built to enact a revenge on the person Ankur used to be. Somewhere out there is a year’s worth of my life I lived, but don’t remember.
Discovering I’d been an entirely different me diluted the shock and the grief of losing Connie, mixed all those feeling up with the confusion of that other life I’ll never know. Connie’s death feels like a part of him more than me. Last time I grieved so hard I destroyed myself. I know Ankur was the one who killed me, the one who killed Connie, but what good would another run at him do? We’ve been through that once already and it didn’t end well.
Besides, I kind of like him. He seems like a good kid.
He’s working with Xiao on his plan to free the Ancestors from Fate and I have something they need: a datakey that will unlock who Ankur used to be, the man I once killed—namely Eka, a superintelligence--one of the most dangerously advanced weapons the planet ever produced.
The Department of Human Standards tightly legislates intelligences, human and otherwise. There are a few thousand licensed AMPs in the world, including Standards’. They’re all contained on tight leashes, their behaviour monitored and controlled. A superintelligence can strum the data of the global link like a finely tuned instrument, play a song that manipulates stock markets or cripples infrastructure. Superintelligences are too smart to be predictable, which means they’re dangerous, and are put down as soon as they’re discovered.
Turns out the other me, the one who’s life I don’t remember, discovered Eka had killed Connie and hunted him down. Usually, it takes a team to track a rogue SI. I did it alone.
I found him, and both of us died as a result. Afterwards, someone had me restored again. Brought me back from the seconds after watching Connie’s death and dumped me into this body with no recollection of anything I’d previously done. Then I discovered a fragment of Eka’s mental immune system had splintered from his rithm and was hunting for me in return. The fragment jumped from host to host trying to get to me, occupying my former friend’s minds and destroying their lives in the process.
Xiao restored Ankur, thinking he was resurrecting the superintelligence Eka, and found someone else—Ankur. He’d once been named Amit Johari, long before he transformed himself into Eka. Instead of the SI Xiao had come to rely on, he found a Amit, restored from a much younger back-up, now calling himself Ankur.
Ankur came to find me, told me that I held the key to everything he had once been: a datakey that could unlock the Eka pattern and allow him to reintegrate with it, to once again think fast enough to watch probabilities collapse in on themselves. Ankur said he’d need the pattern if Xiao had any chance of defeating Fate.
I told him if he wanted his key, I needed to talk to his boss. Needed to know if Xiao had been the one who restored me. Xiao claimed he had more important things to do than putter around with my life. He was finalising the blueprints for his offensive against Fate when I arrived with Ankur and learned the truth about his terrorism. He wasn’t out to burn the world down, he was trying to save it. He’d reinvested everything he’d earned as the leader of a swiftly-rising scafes and skyns gang into an all or nothing gamble to liberate the Ancestors trapped behind the Yuanfen’s firewalls. In his eyes, he’s locked in a fight for the very survival of the human race.
If Xiao does succeed it will mean millions of minds suddenly freed and let loose into the global economy. It’ll disrupt the knowledge markets, economies will plummet. Xiao’s success means we’re in for a few rough years, but Xiao believes it is a small price to pay to avoid Fate slowly absorbing humanity. He’s convinced me, which is why I decided to give Ankur the key to his old mind.
It’s too bad that by coming here I caused all this to happen.
Wiser followed me, and Sòng must have followed Wiser. Xiao kept this place off Standards’ radar for months, and the second I show up everything he’s been planning falls out from under him.
If Fate gets through Xiao there’ll be nothing to stop them from swallowing the world, and it’ll all be my fault.
I can’t let that happen. And I’d like to keep Sòng from killing Agent Wiser if I can. Eka’s murderous fragment is still out there, still hunting me. I don’t know how advanced it is, but if it’s even remotely like Eka was, I’ll need Standards’ help to keep it off my back.
As we catch up with Xiao one of his identical sister soldiers hands him a rifle and he thumbs off the safety and rests his finger above the trigger-guard like a veteran. None of the girls are nervous, or if they are they sure hide it well. They’ve got their gunsights up, scanning across the barracks to the open, patiently waiting for something to shoot. They know exactly what they’re doing, have this planned, likely run through thousands of simulations. Plus, I bet they’re all Revved, thinking at lightspeed. I’d imagine Fate is too. The only thing keeping Standards in this fight is their combat armour and even with it, they won’t last long. Their smart armour isn’t fast enough to outmanoeuvre an enemy who thinks in neuroHertz and sees at the framerate of creation.
With the speed everyone’s thinking around here, shit’s going to move quick.
“What’s the plan?” I ask, and before I get a response, I cock my head at the soldier who’d given Xiao her gun, then at one of the few remaining weapons left in the long oblong case. I only have Dora’s handgun. It’s no match against stun cannons and assault rifles. “Can I get one of those?” I ask her.
She flicks her high-and-tight crewcut at Xiao who nods, then she bends and hands me a weapon. I check to make sure it’s loaded.
Xiao locks eyes with me, his face rigid. “We can’t afford this,” he finally says. “But nor can we afford to let Fate have their way with a team of Standards agents.”
Another call and answer of gunfire reverberates through the warehouse. Ankur and I are the only ones who flinch.
“We’re not leaving without you,” Ankur says, tugging on Xiao’s sleeve toward the rear exit. Xiao’s eyes tense a fraction, a reaction to something. There’s a conversation going on I can’t hear.
“We’ve got about thirty seconds before that stunner is ready to fire again,” I say. “Wrap up whatever you’re arguing about. We need to take out Fate, right now.”
Xiao sags, then two of the soldiers—the one with the crew-cut and another with the sides of her head smooth and the thick strip of hair flopped over her left eye—move up to stand next to him. “Boaja is returning,” he says. “Francois and Malia will stay behind and assist Standards. The rest of us will withdraw to the vehicles and make our escape while Fate is occupied.”
“Let’s go,” Ankur says to me, his face open, expectant.
Ankur’s offering me a way out. Wiser wants me arrested. If I stay he’ll have me in the stocks, living the rest of my eternal life in a hollowed out grey void. I could run, get Ankur his key and Dora and I could disappear forever. What’s left for me here?
I should go with him.
“I’m staying,” I say.
Ankur stops, glares at me. “We need the key. We can’t beat Fate without Eka.”
“As you said, Mr. Gage,” Xiao says, his voice patient but stern. “We have no time for arguments. You must leave with us now.”
I can’t leave. This is my fault. Somehow, Standards followed me here—
Shit. How could I be so stupid. The coat.
Wiser probably laced it with tracedust before Inspector Chaddah gave it to me at the station, leading him right to me.
Which means they followed me to Dora too.
Dora.
Xiao’s eyes flicker past me as a thud of bullets impact the plastic floor nearby. Boaja’s sprinting toward us from the door he’d run through a moment ago, jerking and sliding at odd angles across the open barracks to avoid Fate’s shots, and makes it to us unscathed. A tossed weapon arrives in his hands just as he comes to a stop in front of us.
Standards responds with a return volley of fire and Fate’s guns quiet.
This back and
forth sniping won’t get us anywhere. Sòng’s neuralizer will be ready to fire in seconds, if it isn’t already.
“Go,” Boaja says to me, then he and the two soldiers turn and move toward the back of the building while Xiao, Ankur, and the remaining soldiers stalk toward the rear doors. I don’t move.
Xiao doesn’t look back, expecting me to follow, but Ankur notices I’m not behind him and hesitates, glances between Xiao and I.
“Mr. Gage, you have to come,” he calls to me, almost pleading.
Dora will be okay for a little while longer. She’s been taking care of herself for months and Saabir’s got her in his safe house. Besides, Wiser’s stuck here, and he was only interested in her as a way to get to me. She’s safe for now.
I have to help Agent Wiser—Galvan. He may hate me, but we were partners once. I can’t leave him to Fate.
Xiao’s reached the rear door and he turns and notices Ankur and I aren’t behind him. He scowls across the floor at us.
“I need to help Agent Wiser,” I yell across to him. “Take the kid. He can get me a message. I’ll meet you somewhere with his key once I know Wiser’s safe.”
Boaja stops as if receiving silent orders, spins on the balls of his feet and faces me.
“Boaja’s in charge,” Xiao says from the door, his voice clear even across the room.
“Fine with me,” I reply. “We’ve got the numbers on them, but not for long. I know you’re thinking so fast, you’re probably already bored with this sentence, but we need to—”
Xiao interrupts me. “Coordinate with Standards, time an all-out assault. Except we have no line of communication with them.”
“Use the intercom,” I suggest. “Give us ten seconds to get an angle on Fate then tell Standards to open fire. We’ll break cover first and give them a distraction.”
Xiao considers this, nods at Boaja and leaves. Ankur gives me a last look I can’t read, but drops his head and follows.
Boaja appraises me. He only comes up to my collarbone, but he’s all sinewy muscle and by the way he moves he could probably have my neck snapped before I heard the crack.
