by Damien Boyes
I reach over, pick it up. It’s light. Two simple discs of plastic connected by a thin cable. Plastic that lets me into someone else’s head, let me see what they’re seeing, feel what they’re feeling—
My Cortex jiggers and the Revv’s high enough I feel my simulated neurons trigger a new connection and a solution to killing Eka sparks into existence. I should have thought of this before. Not much different than what xYvYx already did at the arKade. I bet it won’t take xY long to tweak that shyft of his—the one that let people from all over the world to cast their minds into a remote skyn and attend the arKade--to do what I need.
I’m bit-head, photonic code. Expendable. Endlessly reproducible. I don’t need to put anyone else in danger. I can dupe a copy of myself into another body. Be my own backup. Cover my own ass.
xY can hack up the control shyft. I’ll use the Senshare cable to do the transfer. Finding a skyn might be tricky. Maybe Elder or xYvYx can point me to one. If xY gets started on the shyft now, I bet he can have what I need in a day, two at the most.
That’s it. I’ve got it. I’ve given myself a two-day reprieve.
By Thursday Eka will be dead, and so will I.
And this time, I plan on staying that way.
StatUS-ID
[fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]
SysDate
[06:41:07. Monday, January 20, 2059]
My heart’s thrumming like I’m running at a full sprint. The fragment just called me. He’s in Elder and grabbed Dora, offered her life for mine.
I shouldn’t have let her leave on her own. I should have gone after her, convinced her to come with me.
Elder’s called full video, has the tab pointed away from him and the video shows a small, spare apartment. Blank walls. A tiny kitchen. Dora’s sitting on a bed.
“I’m done chasing,” Elder says from behind the camera. “A Sküte requires six point five minutes to cover the distance between us. In seven minutes, I will kill her. It won’t be permanent, but the person inside her skyn will die all the same.”
I’m sure Dora’s been syncing her rithm. Standards would have a recent copy of her mind in storage if Eka’s fragment did kill her. She’d be able to restore to a new skyn, wouldn’t lose much but a few hours probably. But that doesn’t mean anything to the person she is right now--that Dora will die. It’ll be some other Dora that wakes up. I can’t let it hurt her.
The left side of Dora’s face is red, starting to swell. He must have tried to occupy her body and she wouldn’t let him in.
Good for her. My fight or flight makes a U-turn from running and slows, brings its fists up. “Let her go,” I say, my tiny coat in hand, already out of Saabir’s saferoom and halfway down the hall. Dora resisted him. That fragment’s not invincible after all.
“Then, after I kill her,” Elder says, waving a pistol in front of the camera, “if you are still not here, I will find someone whose death will be more lasting, and I won’t ever stop killing until you present yourself to me.”
“I’ll be there,” I say.
“Five minutes and forty-seven seconds,” he replies, and cuts the call with a swipe of his hand.
I know I told Galvan I’d disappear, but I can’t risk the chance Eka’s fragment might escape again. I’ll call Agent Wiser and he can bring the cavalry, make sure the fragment goes down for good.
Once I get downstairs to the street, I start scanning for a Sküte as my IMP tries to contact Agent Wiser. He doesn’t answer, probably still hip-deep in it at the warehouse. It’ll be a multi-jurisdictional bureaucratic shit-fest up there. Letting Xiao slip away again isn’t going to play great on the feeds. I tell the IMP to leave Wiser an urgent message to get the fuck back to me, and then set it to retry every thirty seconds until Galvan answers or blocks me entirely.
A Sküte rolls to a stop in front of me and I jump in, give it Dora’s address.
Elder must have been following Dora all along, snatched her when she left and tried to force her to shyft, to pry his way into her head. She refused and he hit her, threatened her, and still she held out. She’s strong. She’ll be okay until I get there. She has to be, I don’t know if I can handle being responsible for yet another ruined life.
Dora’s apartment isn’t far and the streets are empty, but I’m still five minutes away and there’s nothing I can do to make the Sküte go any faster. I need to be doing something so I tell the IMP to increase the pings to Agent Wiser. Every fifteen seconds until he answers.
That does it. Galvan answers almost immediately.
“Not four hours ago—what did I say?” Wiser deadpans, audio-only, his voice strained through his teeth.
“Elder has Dora. Eka’s fragment’s inside him.”
That changes his tone instantly, from irritation to concern. “Where?”
I give him Dora’s address.
“I’m forty five minutes away,” Wiser says.
“That’s too long.” Elder could kill us both and slip away by then. “Call the Service.”
I hear his prosthetics whirring. “Superintelligences are Standards’ responsibility,” he answers, his breath heavy. “They’d just flip the call back to us. I’m getting on a hopper now, I’ll be there in twenty. Do not engage him until I get there.”
“Nope. If I’m not there in three and a half minutes, he says he’ll kill Dora.”
He’s silent for a second. “Keep him talking. I’ll be there as fast as I can.” Twenty minutes. I can stall for that long. I hope. “Be careful,” he says and the feed cuts.
The Sküte swings down Spadina Ave. and crosses the wide bridge over the multiple lanes of railway. I can’t rely on Wiser. Whatever’s going to happen, however that fragment is going to be stopped, I’m on my own.
I still have my gun. Maybe I can shoot Elder before he can pull the trigger on Dora.
I don’t consider it long. It’s too risky—I don’t know how much ‘super’ is left in this fragment’s intelligence, but all he needs is a fraction of a second faster response time and Dora will die.
The Sküte stops in front of Dora’s building and I leap out, dash through the damp air to her lobby. The interior doors open as I approach and I stride through the lobby and into a waiting elevator. It takes me to the thirty-fourth floor and directs me to Dora’s apartment.
First priority is getting Dora safe. After that, I can worry about stalling for Wiser.
The door opens ahead of me and I stop in the entrance way. Dora is still sitting on the bed, hasn’t moved since the call, but Elder is now crouched behind her, using her as a shield, his weapon pressed against the back of her head. If I’d come in shooting Dora and I’d both be dead.
I’m almost surprised he doesn’t put a bullet into my Cortex the second he sees me, and then I remember what Ankur said—the fragment doesn’t just want me dead, it wants me erased. Scoured from the world. He needs my head intact so he can tear it apart from the inside, then sync and corrupt my backup too.
“Fin—” Dora says from the bed and tenses to move but doesn’t. Elder’s gun stays on her as I take a step into the small room.
“Stop,” Elder says as the door slides shut behind me. “Toss your weapon.”
I hesitate for a split second and he’s already tensing.
“Do it now!” he says, his face a frustrated cringe. He’s anxious. Frustrated. Edgier than I’d figure a superintelligence would get. Maybe not so advanced after all. I wonder how much of Eka is still left in him?
I squeeze my hand into the tight jacket pocket and pull out the pistol, flick it into the corner. Elder watches it sail across the room and bounce off the wall with a clatter. He stands and cocks his head at me, and I get my first good look at him. He’s different than his pictures. His hair is long and his face sallow and his eyes twitch as he stares at me. “I need into your head,” he finally says.
“Let Dora go,” I counter, “and we’ll talk about it.”
Elder presses his gun against Dora’s skull and she grim
aces through a whimper. “There will be no negotiations,” he says. “Comply or she dies.”
“I’m here,” I say. “You got what you wanted, but you need me to agree. I have to let you into my head. I promise you, if you so much as hurt her feelings, you’ll never get what you want.”
His eyes circle between Dora and I and almost immediately he comes to a decision, reaches into his pocket and retrieves a shyft, holds it up, then tosses it to me. It looks like it’s full of a clear liquid. An alcosoft.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“There is a cuff on the counter next to you. Attach it to your neck and allow the shyft into your rithm.” This is what he wants. Whatever this shyft contains, it isn’t an alcosoft. Once I let it into my head, this is all over.
“I’m not doing a damn thing until you let Dora go,” I say, feigning a calm I don’t feel.
He considers, then swings the gun from Dora’s head to my abdomen. “Go,” he says to her, waving the weapon at the door.
Dora jumps up, her purse clutched in her arms, her eyes frozen on mine, creeping terror in her face. “No, Fin—”
“Get away from here,” I say as she collapses into me.
“I can’t just—”
“Now,” Elder says, his voice thick with tension. “I promise you, Mr. Gage, I have other ways into your rithm, and none will be as pleasant as what I’m offering right now. I can also promise Dora will come to no harm. Once I’ve completed my objective, my reason for existence will cease. I will no longer pose a threat to her or anyone else if you comply.”
Dora’s pleading at me with her panicked eyes, but there’s no other way. I raise the shyft Elder gave me, slosh its transparent liquid display like I did only hours ago in Saabir’s apartment. I let this into my head and no one else gets hurt.
Sure, I’ll be gone, but what other choice do I have?
I can’t stall any longer. Wiser won’t get here in time.
It’s worth it. I sacrifice myself and this mad fragment ends its vendetta. No one else gets hurt. Ankur and Xiao will have to manage on their own, but I slide the datakey from my pocket and drop it into Dora’s purse. “Find a way to get this to Ankur,” I say.
She looks down at it, confused, and shakes her head. “How am I supposed to—“
“You’ll find a way,” I say. “Now hand me the cuff and get out of here.”
“No, you can’t,” Dora says, holding me around the waist. “I won’t let you.”
I gently pry her hands away, reach past her and grab the cuff myself, latch it to my neck.
“This is the only way this ends,” I tell her. I lower my head and give her a soft kiss, then step back and nudge her toward the door.
“I won’t leave,” she says, tears spilling down her cheeks.
I bring the shyft to my cuff and before I ack it I say to Dora, “Go, now. Find Ankur.” Dora scowls but backs up, turns and races out the door that opens and closes around her.
When I see she’s safely out of the room, I think green and let the fragment’s shyft in.
For a long second, I think nothing’s happened, that maybe this was all some kind of a trick, a long, elaborate joke, but then I realize I can’t move. Whatever was in that shyft has paralysed me, frozen me in place.
This is it. I’m about to die.
A moment of terror grips me and I try to fight but my body won’t answer. I struggle for another second and then go. The fight and the fear wash away and I’m suffused by a sense of acceptance. I’ve been dead before, it wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t anything. In another minute this will all be over and I won’t know the difference. Who knows, maybe I’ll get to see Connie again.
Elder’s smiling. He walks toward me and sighs, long and loud. Like at a life’s work finally finished.
He brings his face close to mine, and I think he’s going to whisper something in my ear but instead he calls out, “It’s done. He’s open.”
Behind me, the door slides back open, and a hint of lilac breezes into the room.
Dora?
She walks past me without a glance, drops her bag on the bed, reaches in and pulls out a long cable with a port on each end. A SenShare. She finally looks at me, relief in her eyes.
The fragment was in Dora too. All this time.
If I could feel my body, I bet my stomach would be somewhere around my feet.
My mind trips over itself trying to put the pieces together.
Is that why she wanted my to shyft so much, each attempt trying to achieve this moment?
Except, back in my apartment, when I’d accused her of this very thing, how’d she know about why I bought so much tomato soup and the name of my cat? I should have questioned her harder, pressed her more, but she was so convincing.
I try to speak, to yell the questions spinning through my head, but my lips don’t respond.
All I can do is watch.
Elder has steps up close to Dora and they connect their heads through the cable. Dora snaps the port smoothly to her neck but Elder fumbles with his, has to try three times to get it to stick. They stay connected for a few moments, the cable pulsing with purple light, and then the transfer fades and Elder slumps forward onto the bed, his eyes vacant. Dora takes a deep breath, pulls the cable off his neck, then pries the gun from his hand.
She wets her lips and takes a step toward me, brings her nose to mine and stares into my eyes, like she’s peering into an empty terrarium, trying to spot the animal hiding inside.
She stays this way, our faces close, until Elder shudders and moans from the bed. He blinks and winces as life returns to his face. His head jerks up and he catches sight of Dora standing over him with a gun.
“Doralai?” he croaks. “Where am I?”
“Sorry, Elder,” Dora says, brings the gun up and blows blood, bone and electric dust out the back of Elder’s skull. “Can’t have loose ends.”
What the fuck?
She turns to me, the free end of the cable dangling from her fingers. She pulls the cuff off my neck and lets it clatter to the floor. “I’ve been waiting so long time for this, you have no idea. What we’ve been through. How hard it’s been. What we had to do—but you will, soon enough.” She fixes the cable on my neck and stands back, the cable slung between us. “I’m coming home. Back to my head. Back where I belong.”
StatUS-ID
[a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]
SysDate
[23:51:48. Thursday, May 9, 2058]
xYvYx knew exactly what I was asking for, might have had a version already. Before I finished explaining I needed a way to extend my mind into another skyn, he cut me off, told me he knew what I wanted and could have a solution in forty-eight hours. He didn’t ask any questions, wasn’t interested in why I needed it. That was forty-seven and a half hours ago and I haven’t heard a word from him since.
I can’t do anything else until he gets back to me. I need that shyft to create an instant partner, and until he gets back to me, I’m at his mercy.
All this time to myself hasn’t been good for my mental state. I’ve felt sick since Dora left. I still can’t believe what I did, how I let myself hit her.
If she only understood—in my head, it wasn’t her I was hitting.
I’d have to explain everything. How I’d had to hack my brain to find Eka, how long I’ve been Revved—
I wonder how old I am now, how many years I’ve spent in my head, stewing in my obsession as time crept by outside?
Maybe I can make it up to her somehow. I don’t want to die with her hating me. Other than Eka, I don’t have anyone else but her to say goodbye to.
I’m almost ready, don’t have much time left. Yesterday, I started by sourcing weapons. That was the easiest part. Found a listing on the undernet and three hours later a drone met me in a nearby park with two untraceable Chinese bullpup assault rifles chambered for the quicker 5.5mm rounds, four civilian Janus MKII handguns, extra mags and ammo, and a belt of doorcharges all wrapped up in
an easy-to carry bag.
Figuring a plan to fight my way through Eka’s building, even with help, proved harder. The schematics to Eka’s building were readily available on the link but hadn’t been updated in more than a decade. Who knows what the layout is now. With what little I do know about Eka and his capabilities, even with making up the unknowns, as many times as I ran it, a full-frontal assault failed, even with two of us.
I got frustrated playing with hypotheticals and went for a run while flying a rotating series of rented surveillance drones around Eka’s building. Spying on him made me feel a little better, but only confirmed what my hypotheticals were telling me—a direct attack wouldn’t work.
Eka has some sort of airspace exclusion zone set up. I could only get the drones to within a hundred metres or so around his building. Any closer and I lost connection, as if someone had stolen control. The drone’s response dropped then it zipped away back home, following its loss of signal programming, and I had to rent another. It was a pain in the ass, but it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
If I wasn’t already sure he was in there, the first fifteen minutes I spent with the teradrone convinced me. The building is scan-shielded, the exterior glass shockproof and the grounds studded with invisible, military-grade surveillance. The building has received a steady stream of drone deliveries to a platform on the roof—somehow they get through the blocking signal—and nineteen different people come and went, all moving like clockwork. Who knows how many more skyns Eka has tucked away inside?
I was watching yet another drone drop off a package on the roof when I figured out another way to get into Eka’s building. I immediately turned around on the valley path, set my body to run home and retreated into my headspace. There I scoured the undernet appz sites until I found a cracked version of the program we’d used to diagnose and repair the drone fleet back in the Forces.
A front door entry won’t work, but the roof is wide open.
Hoppers are basically just heavy drones built to carry people, and the DroneSense protocol they use to navigate is an offshoot of the military-based command and control protocol we’d used in Africa. I can chart a hopper, and once I’m inside, crack into the diagnostic port and upload a new operating system that’ll let me take manual control. It won’t be perfect, I wouldn’t want to fly it through an obstacle course, but I’ll be able to pilot the thing to Eka’s roof.
