Viral Spark

by Martin McConnell

  I start on my sandwich, and chew in silence, glancing from the tablet, to Amanda, to Tom. Amanda seems busy enough, wiping things down, and helping customers as they come in, that she fails to notice any look of sadness that I might be wearing. There’s some kind of rush today, and the place is full of customers. Tom is fixated on the tablet and the wall. After he finishes his meal, he stares out at the fake jungle.

  The lights go out, fully out. Some sunlight shines into the main lobby through the entrance, but I can’t see anything in front of me except the device. The chatter in the room gets louder.

  “Tom?”

  “Still here.”

  The device spins, facing away from me, and the glow of the screen illuminates Tom’s face.

  “We have a problem.”

  “What?”

  The tablet spins halfway around, and slides toward me. The equalizer for electric signals is going nuts. Before it was a tiny wave with spikes. Now the wave takes up the entire space, and it looks more like a scratchy mess.

  The walls rumble and shake the air, mimicking a thunderstorm. Violins play in the background as crackles and pops stand out over the fading celestial growling.

  “Bee?”

  A crack rips through the room, and the building flashes with blue light. My heart races.

  “Bee, stop it.”

  The walls strobe with bright flashes. Customers knock tables over with a slow motion affect from the flickering lighting as they scramble toward the exit. Amanda has pinned herself against the back wall of the serving area.

  “Knock it off!” I yell.

  The sound quiets, the lighting returns to normal, and the tablet sings the faint symphony of Spring. Toms eyes are locked in a dry stare.

  SIXTEEN

  Whiskey glass in hand, Dr. Waite stares at the adaptive living room wall as it flickers. Colorful squares flash randomly around the message he’s writing. Buzzing from the apartment interferes with the soft ballad on the playlist. His stomach burns, probably from the pills. A single tear drops from the corner of his eye, cooling his skin as the memory of lost love rolls down his cheek. Each note of the music thumps against his belly, injecting suffering as images of his dead wife flash in his mind.

  He taps at the implant behind his ear, and subconsciously orders the wall to magnify the displayed message. It expands, as does a news report from the corner near a holographic plant. A young man hanged himself from an apartment ceiling.

  Some kid, wanted by security for a non-conformance charge of battery, committed suicide while arresting agents gathered outside his door. The news anchors report strange noises in the kid’s apartment, a recurring theme in the string of recent incidents. The same kind of noise now coming from the walls of this apartment.

  He scans his message again, placing the whiskey glass on the table. A tap of the surface, and the menu appears. He selects a keyboard application. The letters raise slightly, allowing some tactile response. He fingers the keys while reading his own message on the wall across the room.

  “Guys. Something is wrong with the simulation. It’s branched beyond the scope of the environment we created, and it’s infecting the Global Network. I think there’s some connection to the recent glitches, but I can’t be sure. We need to terminate the project and re-evaluate.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he mumbles. He takes another sip of the Aguardiente Oscuro Especial, burning his tongue and torching his throat. The program works, or so the monitoring software says. As negative thoughts pour in from the darkest recesses of his memory, he can’t help but think that it works too well. It’s branched out, and found a way to toy with the human mind through white noise. How many deaths is he now responsible for? How many related lives has he ruined? The guilt forces a wince.

  Even with the success of synthesizing a working mind, there’s no evidence of actual thought in the program. It should be trying to communicate by now. Maybe there is a God, and he’s the only one who can breathe life into a new body, be it biochemical, mechanical, or electrical. The human body is a machine, no different from any other machine, except in complexity. But maybe, just maybe, we are more than the sum of our biological parts. Maybe a mind like ours cannot be synthesized. Maybe another drink will put the worries to rest.

  His eyelids droop, and his head rocks forward. The alcohol does little to ease the aches in his belly; if anything, it intensifies them. His body tingles with the anesthetic effect of the drink, and the drugs. His pain fades. His mind goes quiet, other than a gentle throb as the veins behind his temples struggle desperately to keep oxygen moving to his brain, and subsequently fail.

  ***

  “Tom.”

  “Scott.”

  “Is that the new kid with you?”

  “This is him. I think he might be more valuable than we first thought. He’s able to interact with the virus directly.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know how,” I say. “I just yelled at the tablet, and everything stopped.”

  “You didn’t write the virus by chance, did you? Trying to get some attention to further your career?”

  “What? No?”

  “What, what, what,” chirps the tablet.

  The fiery redhead on the other end of the line looks like someone far too stressed about his job, but his face grows more intimidating with a twist of the eyebrows. “What the hell is that?”

  Tom interrupts. “It’s this analyzer. It’s acting––weird. I’m not sure how, but the invasive code seems to be fixated on it. Have you guys noticed anything like that on your devices?”

  “No, they’re just scanning the spectrum. Listen, Tom. This place just filled up with black suits. The boss in in the conference room talking with them now. I haven’t heard anything yet, but you might want to get your ass back here. I have a feeling things are about to get interesting.”

  “Black suits?” asks Tom.

  “You know what I’m talking about. Don’t act like you don’t.”

  The transmission ends. Lights in the maintenance room flicker, and the walls begin chirping like the tablet.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” he turns to me. “That we have to go. You ready?”

  “How long will we be gone?”

  “I don’t know anymore. This is way above my pay grade. Are you ready to go?”

  Paul emerges from his cave. “You taking my best employee?”

  Tom grins. “Your only employee?”

  “The same. Go ahead, all of the bots just died. Guess there isn’t much to do today but cleanup. I can handle it.”

  I snap to attention as I turn to face him. My blood runs cold. “What do you mean, died? What happened?”

  “I was looking at the camera. Then they all stopped moving. They’ve been shut down for over a minute.”

  “Your bee stings again,” says Tom. “You ready to go?”

  “Can I grab some things from my apartment?”

  “Like what?” He stares at me blankly. “Alright, be fast, and meet me by the main entrance.”

  I rush out of the double doors and shuffle toward the lift, dodging silent, lifeless bots that speckle the path. The main level is still flickering, and as I reach the elevator, my mind wanders.

  I daydream of code. A tiny scrap appears on a wall before me, standing out against the rest of the program loop. It’s a function called neuron, and the formatting is surprisingly simple. It contains a primary variable which stores something the program calls potential. There are several included subroutines that affect the variable, either adding to it, or distributing its value to neighboring neurons. The program loop monitors a matrix of them in real time. It gives them the ability to divide and spread, with each new bit of code developing its own program and control. I turn, in my dream, and see an old man in a lab coat, slumped in a chair, like he’s sleeping. His head is tilted forward, with the chin resting on his chest.

  I snap out of it as the doors open. I hop inside, and ride the li
ft to the second level.

  Once inside my apartment, I scramble to grab the infusers, and stuff them into my smock pocket. I shake the cold steel can, and from the shifting of contents, I judge that it’s almost empty. Enough to last a few more days. Don is on the roof working, and I don’t have time to tell him goodbye, but suspect that I can return later and chat with him. I don’t want to leave without at least telling Amanda where I’m going, face to face.

  I rush out into the hallway and toward the lift, but I’m stopped in my tracks by another image that flashes in my mind. It’s Amanda, with a bruise across her cheek. She’s on the ground crying.

  I shake it off, and the door of the lift slides open. Down the hall I hear someone shout. “Cheating bitch!”

  “Mike!” shouts another voice. A female voice. Amanda’s voice.

  The hallway flickers, and my blood starts to heat. Bee’s synthetic voice repeats the comment like a parrot, “Mike, mike, mike, mike.”

  My first steps toward the sound, toward Amanda’s apartment, happen in slow motion, either from the intensity of focus, or the strobing affect that floods the hallway.

  Bee sounds off again. “What, what. Mike, Mike.”

  The corner approaches in flashes, and as I turn it, I see him standing there, with Amanda cowering near his feet, holding her cheek.

  I can’t stop myself from speaking up, as if someone else is in my brain, controlling me like a robot. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “This is all your fault, runt. I told you to leave her alone!”

  My body floats toward him under its own power. Fear freezes into shards of ice that course through my veins, pounding against the walls of my heart and cutting their way through my veins. When they reach my face, they turn to fire, and the flame spreads through my limbs.

  Mike’s hands tighten into fists, and he steps toward me, tripping on Amanda’s outstretched leg, and stumbling. I close the distance as he spins around, growing. “You stupid––”

  Anger vents from his lungs as his arm draws back. His body races toward her, until I hook his elbow. He tows me around, and I collide with the wall near Amanda.

  The hit knocks me off balance, and I drop to the ground. The hallway goes black, and the walls blare a terrible siren of thunder mixed with lighting cracks. Somewhere in the darkness, a violent scream erupts. I can’t tell if it came from the walls, or somewhere else.

  Somewhere. Someone. Mike.

  SEVENTEEN

  When the lights come back, Amanda is wrapped in my arms. My shoulder jams against the wall, holding us upright, and Mike is gone. The hall lights flicker.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  The can of tea lays on the ground by my feet, tipped but not spilled. “We can’t stay here.”

  Amanda pushes away, and we climb to our feet. I scoop the canister off the ground as I stand up.

  “What’s that?”

  “This?” I asked, holding the can out to the side. “This is my tea. I’m leaving today. I was headed to the café to say goodbye, and then I heard you guys fighting. Three seconds later and I would have been in the lift.”

  “Thanks for stopping. He’s changed.”

  Considering my history with Mike, he is still the same jerk. I nod agreeably, but in my head he’s just a bully who offered her a pass while they were dating. He was always a jerk, and deserves whatever the virus did to him.

  “We have to tell the police what happened. Or he’ll do it again.”

  Some of her hair has worked itself free from the ponytail, and a few strands cling to her cheeks. Her normal glow of confidence is gone, and her eyes are covered in glaze. Her lips appear short, and thinner then before.

  I take her arm, as gently as possible, and guide her down the hallway toward the lift. When the door slides open, we are greeted by two blue uniforms. I tense up. Even if I did nothing wrong, they still make me nervous.

  The words trickle out of my mouth. “She was attacked.”

  “We know.” They step out of the lift, forcing us away from the door. “Ma’am, would you mind telling me what he did?”

  “Him?” She points toward me. “He rescued me. Well, sort of. My ex hit me, then Scott showed up, and the lights went out.”

  The agent taps the wall of the hallway, and a screen appears with the same kind of static that has been showing up all over the building. The image stabilizes for a moment, a hall camera showing Amanda on the floor, and Mike and myself standing over her. That image freezes for an instant, and static returns.

  “Where is your friend?” one of them asks me. Even if they are only trying to be professional, the blue helmets and dark masks over their eyes show no empathy, no emotion whatsoever. They look like robots.

  “He’s not any friend of mine.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I got there, and he turned to punch me, and then the lights went out. When they came back on, I was on the ground, that’s all I remember.”

  The agent snatches my forearm, and I struggle instinctively, not thinking. His other hand raises, brandishing the shock stick. Sparkles of blue crackle around the tip. I comply immediately, and my body goes limp. A streak of red catches my eye. My knuckles are covered in blood.

  The other agent runs a white stick across the mark, and inserts it into a black tube. He touches a couple of buttons on the wall display, and it changes. The screen splits into a list of tiny phrases on the left, and a white square on the right. Inside the square, small black dashes appear at the top. They drop almost randomly, filling the square with horizontal lines of differing brightness. The text on the left scrolls quickly, stops suddenly, and one line is highlighted.

  A name explodes into view. Mike’s name.

  “I don’t remember hitting him.”

  “Alright kid,” says the agent holding me. “Let’s go over here for a minute and talk, okay?”

  A gentle pressure on my arm, and the fear of electronically-forced compliance, is enough to get me walking. He leads me down the hallway. I glance over my shoulder as the other agent questions Amanda.

  “I swear. I don’t remember hitting him. I don’t even remember touching him. He stomped toward me, tripped, and the lights went dark. That’s all I remember.”

  “Relax kid. Just standard procedure.” We round the corner and stop. He releases my arm, and I get a good look at his gloves. From a distance, I assumed they were skin tight, like the rest of the outfit, but the gauntlet is padded with bulky squares, each attached to the next by perfectly straight wires. They buzz slightly as his fingers move, a quieter version of the servos on my bots.

  The lights flicker faster. I close my eyes. Please Bee. Please don’t.

  “What was that?”

  My eyes open. “What?”

  “Your lips were moving.”

  “I’m sorry. The lights were flickering like that before Mike disappeared. I’m a little nervous.”

  He grunts in acknowledgement.

  “Let me see your hand.”

  “What?”

  “Your hand, let me see it.”

  I hold it out, and the blood runs across it in streaks, about the width of a finger. His weapon returns to the holster, and he grabs my fingers, holding them up for a closer look. Then his helmet turns up, as if he’s looking at nothing at all for a moment.

  “Okay.” He drops my hand. “You’re free to go. Have a nice day.”

  Have a nice day? Maybe the guy is a robot. This is why nobody likes agents. They have become more systematic, and they never tell you anything. What they’re thinking, or if they are thinking at all, is so obscure that you never know if they are about turn you loose, or drag you into a holding cell.

  I turn the corner, and the agent races past to catch up to the one interrogating Amanda. She stands alone in the hallway, while the two of them line up in front of another door. It opens, and they rush inside, just ahead of me.

&n
bsp; Glancing in the doorway as I pass, I see Mike, hanging from the ceiling in the middle of his apartment, with the walls around him flashing white. The tether looks like printed sheets, bundled into a type of rope that wraps his neck. Tears dry slowly on his blue face. I collide with Amanda.

  “What are they doing in there?” she asks as the door closes.

  “Mike. He’s––” I shake my head.

  My implant chirps. I turn to a bare wall and grunt, “What?”

  Tom’s image appears. “I’m waiting downstairs. We don’t have a lot of time. How long are you going to be?”

  I look at Amanda, and her eyes stare up at me. “You gotta go?”

  “Yeah.” The question burning in my mind can’t wait. “What were you doing up here? Why aren’t you at work?”

  “I can cook. I usually come home for lunch. Mike was waiting for me.”

  “Mr. Graham,” interrupts Tom.

  “In a second.”

  “Okay. I’ll be waiting. Hurry up.” The image disappears.

  “I’ll walk you down,” she says.

  Keeping my balance isn’t easy. I feel like I’m floating down the hall, rather than walking. The doors of the lift open ahead of us, and a medic rushes out, and down the corridor. She’s dressed in white from head to toe, carrying a shiny case with a large red plus sign marked on the side.

  As we step in, Amanda asks, “What did you do to him?”

  “I really don’t remember anything. I thought he ran off because of the noise. How long were you on the ground before I fell beside you?”

  “I don’t remember,” she says. Her body shivers and she shakes her head quickly in response. “The lights went out, and when they came back, you were there. And he was gone.”

  The doors open, and Tom is standing a few paces away, burly arms crossed. The scars on his upper arm peek out from under the gray sleeves of his tunic. His head turns our way as we exit. I look deeply into Amanda’s eyes, and watch for her response as I ask, “Are you going to be okay?”