by Stanley Bing
“Good morning, soldier,” said Gene. “We’d like to enter the facility,” he added as an afterthought.
“Right away, sir,” said the head, which then remarked, “You have no idea how good it is to see you, sir. It can get rather boring here.”
“My,” said Gene to the head, “you’re a chatty fellow.”
“Let’s move it along,” said Stevie, staring off in the direction of the approaching whirr and hum.
“Yes, of course,” said the head. “The entry to the facility is beyond this location approximately one hundred and twenty-seven yards and a bit to the right. Head for the yellow markers. Be careful not to fall into the entryway as the ramp opens. It is rather steep.” There was then a rumble, followed by the sound of metal moving against metal, and the ground opened up in the middle of the asphalt plane into a giant hole that once had provided an exit path for a missile on the way to destroy its destination somewhere in the western part of what had been the Soviet Union and was now disputed territory between Russia and Mongolia. On one edge of the chasm was a ramp heading down into an abyss. They walked to the top of the ramp. Then Stevie handed over the two devices, now in one convenient backpack.
“Well,” he or she said, “this is it. Good luck, you guys.”
“What?” said Liv. “Wait a minute.”
“Go on now.”
“Stevie!” said Gene, although it came out more like “Schteevee.”
“Dudes,” said Stevie. “In a few minutes, the cavalry is going to arrive with the express purpose of killing your asses and stopping this whole thing from happening. This has always been my assignment: Get you here. Set you loose. Give you enough time to get the job done. Now get going, or all of this shit will have been for nothing, including the fact that our home was just whacked by these mother-raping cocksuckers.”
“Okay, yeah,” said Gene. He turned down to the top lip of the ramp.
“Stevie,” said Liv, her eyes brimming with tears.
“It’s okay, babe,” said Stevie, producing two handheld weapons that had been in the pocket of his or her jacket and checking them for use. They were small, glowing things and didn’t look that dangerous at all. “I’m looking forward to this next part.”
“Just you against the whole army, huh?”
“Fun while it lasts. I don’t plan to make it, so that gives me a certain je ne sais quoi about the whole situation.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s okay, babe.” Stevie gave Livia a sweet and delicate smile. “Bob’s got me backed up. And this time, I’m gonna get the right body. One that fits my head.” Even in the extremity of the situation, Stevie seemed to find this observation amusing, and for the first time since they had met, he or she indulged in a brief paroxysm of genuine laughter. When it subsided, he or she reached into a jacket pocket.
“Here. Take this.” It was a very small firearm, no bigger than one of those toys children used to have before everything became digital and produced a whirring noise and a few sparks when its trigger was pumped by a tiny finger.
“It’s, uh, stronger than it looks,” said Stevie.
Liv took it. Put it in her pocket. Then they were all sort of frozen for a while. It can be like that when you know it’s the last time you’re going to see somebody.
“We gotta get goin’, Livvy,” said Gene at last, inching his way down the entryway. He extended his hand to Liv. “It’s supposed to happen this way, honey,” he said. “Stevie delays the evil villains for just long enough for us to go on ahead and complete our mission. Right, Stevie?”
“Affirmative,” said Stevie directly to Gene, eye to eye, and not without some iron-gray humor attached. Then Stevie unzipped her combat vest for the first time and took off her old Yankee cap, which she dropped to the ground. A cascade of light-blond hair flowed down her back, almost to her waist, and any doubts as to her biological gender were instantly eradicated.
“Ha,” said Gene.
“Dude!” Liv exclaimed. Then she put her arms around Stevie, who stiffened under her embrace but didn’t shrug it off. “We done now?” Stevie said after a few seconds, adding, not unkindly, “Please get the fuck out of here.”
“Let’s go, Gene,” said Liv. Pushing Stevie away from her in one determined thrust, she grabbed Gene’s hand, and they headed down the ramp into the darkness.
In no time at all, the sounds of their footsteps faded. It was quiet in the woods surrounding the tarmac. A light rain began to fall, and the wind picked up. Stevie lowered herself to the ground and assumed the lotus position, a weapon in each hand, and tilted back her head to feel the wind and rain on her face. Somewhere in the depths of the woods, a crow called to its companion, which gave an answering caw. “They always travel in pairs,” she said quietly. “But the hawk flies alone.” She checked her handguns to make sure they were set on their absolute maximum power. And then she waited.
A quarter mile below the surface of the earth, Gene and Livia proceeded with all deliberate speed down long corridors lined with steel doors shut against them. They had been told to ignore them. “Offices,” Tim had informed them in one of his deathbed lectures, before he was mysteriously reenergized. “Head for the core, which is surrounded by miles of drive bays.”
“What’s on those?” Gene had asked.
“The wisdom of the ages, Gene,” Tim had replied sagely. “I suppose the smart ones have it all backed up in local facilities. But after the denial-of-service outage hits, and the core is destroyed, it will take decades, maybe more, for them to put it all back together in one place, if they choose to indulge in that stupidity again. They probably will. But it’s nearly impossible to claim ownership of a property that’s spread out over continents and run by local managers that are closer to it. The Roman Empire learned that lesson the hard way.”
Gene had no idea what Tim was talking about at the time. Apparently it was not a subject at which Bob had excelled at the university. Arthur, on the other hand, had recognized the peril of global decentralization the moment it had been presented to him by the board. World domination was too good for business.
Down the long, long corridor they ran in the semidarkness. Gene found that he was gaining rather than losing physical strength as he went. The liquor was wearing off, and all he had left was a small store of airline bottles that had been provided to him back at the Kingdom. His head was clearing. He wanted to reach for his backpack, which held his remedy alongside the EMP devices, but Liv was already ahead of him and calling for him to catch up. And as he lurched forward, Gene heard, to his horror, another voice rise within him like vomit in the back of his throat. “I’m gonna fucking kill you, you little fucking creeps,” is what came belching out from the bottom of his gut.
“Shut up, Arthur, you sonuvabitch!” he screamed, his feet pounding down the slick gray quartzite of the floor that stretched for what seemed like a mile before him.
“Gene! Fuck him! Keep going!” Liv didn’t have to turn around to know what was happening.
“Fuck me? Fuck you!” The ugly rasp of Arthur’s pent-up rage echoed down the hall.
“Liv! Honey! I’m losing it!” Gene kept going, the way a dead chicken will continue to race across a farmyard long after its head has been cut off.
“No! You’re not!” Liv was at full throttle. “You’re stronger than he is! You’re better than he is! You can beat him! But you gotta try! You gotta try! I see light ahead! There’s space ahead, Gene! Hold on, baby! Hold on!”
“Hold on, baby! Hold on!” It was Arthur’s voice, mocking, sneering. “He hasn’t got the guts! He isn’t properly hydrated! He hasn’t had his meds! Ha ha ha ha ha!”
Gene could not respond. He was busy running. And crying. Deep sobs wracked his body as he went, shaking his head like a dog who had taken a load of something toxic up its nose, his hands trembling. But his legs and his feet kept on, driven by all that was left in him that was still himself. And so they ran on, the incline heading downward now, and, yes
, not too far away now, they spied an open archway where the light was different, and a hum grew louder: the hum of hundreds of thousands of optical drives speaking to the world as one.
29
The Cloud Must Die
The rain was falling more heavily as the armed platoon of corporate soldiers entered the asphalt clearing in the middle of nowhere. The mannequin sentry still tilted on silent duty. But where before there had been nothing but empty macadam stretching for miles into the distance, there was now a gaping hole in the earth, one that led down to the beating heart of the Singularity that ran the human race, stored its memories, its music and baby pictures, its instant and permanent messages going back several generations, the social security numbers, sexual and entertainment preferences, political points of view of all citizens touched by the giant tentacled organism that reached into every home, every mind, their voting records and noxious utterances made over the dark Web as well as the more civilized one, all the books ever written, all the thoughts ever expressed that could have been captured since some forgotten politician named Gore, back in the last half of the twentieth century, had assisted in the transformation of the US Defense Department’s intranet into the World Wide Web.
Stevie sat at the top of the ramp, legs crossed one on top of the other in the classic yogini position of repose. In each hand, she held a somewhat larger version of the weapon that she had shared with Liv and Gene. She was wet all the way through now, her hair a glowing helmet that ran like a ribbon of gold down her back.
“Hold!” said Arthur, although to the untutored eye, the speaker was anything but the imposing chief executive who was oh so close to world domination via sole ownership of the machine that fed, entertained, and indoctrinated all linked-in human life on the planet. What Stevie saw standing before her, contrariwise, was a little green lizard thing with shiny iridescent skin; short, segmented legs with stubby claws for fingers; and scary, malevolent eyes, perched on top of a ridiculous Segway that moved it forward in fits and starts. She recognized the top of the thing. It was the pet that the enemy’s wife had held when they had rescued Gene from Nobu. The bottom was the idiot robot constable that had fucked things up so badly at that engagement, except that its head had been removed and replaced by whatever was residing in the green synth. Something in Stevie relaxed then, at least provisionally. She was certainly toast, at least this particular iteration of herself. But if this gargoyle was the entity that was going to defeat them, their cause was a pretty sorry excuse for a revolution.
By this weird creature’s side, she saw, was Mortimer, the shit stain that ran security for the Corporation. Stevie had studied up on him and had come to the conclusion that the engine that ran this guy was his stupidity, and it was both his greatest asset and his most critical liability.
“Stop right there, cocksuckers,” she barked.
There was a silence then as the two sides regarded each other with loathing. Neither immediately leapt into action, for a number of reasons. For her part, Stevie thought, it was her moment of greatest power. It was she who would determine what would happen next. It was a feeling of sweet empowerment, complicated by the knowledge that it would end in her death. For Arthur, it was simpler, since the idea of his own defeat, or even the possibility of his personal nonexistence, had never really occurred to him. This delusion imparted to him the kind of strength reserved for certain egomaniacs whose narcissism suffuses their reality with the hot testosterone of madness. He just wanted to savor the moment.
The silence didn’t last very long. “Kill . . . er . . . her?” he said. And in that one pause, the beat during which Arthur wrestled with the correct gender pronoun to employ, Stevie raised both of her weapons and shot him in the heart. The sound of a synthetic lizard screaming as it hurtled through the air was drowned out by the electronic blare of returning fire from a thousand different twenty-first-century ordnance of all magnitudes. So great was the conflagration that it very nearly destroyed not only its target, which, of course, was at first Stevie, and then the remains of Stevie, and, finally, the area once occupied by the physical presence of Stevie, but also it almost vaporized Mortimer, whose shrieks of “Hold your fire!” mingled with the screeching of Arthur’s lizard host.
Somewhere in the maelstrom, the disembodied head of the sentry flew out of the top of the booth and described a high parabola in the sky, emitting a high “Noooooo!” all the way, and then hit the pavement and smashed into a thousand pieces, leaving nothing but a blinking eyeball in its wake.
When the lightning flares and creeping bolts of plasma finally subsided, there was nothing at all left of Stevie, the friend who had conveyed Gene and Liv to their destination, just a blob or two of organic material slipping and bubbling this way and that on the tarmac. Not far away, Lucy lay on her back, her stumpy feet wiggling in the air. Mort was crouched on his haunches, his hands on top of his head and his legs tucked so far beneath him, all that was visible were two knees and the toes of his boots.
“Mort! Mort, you cringing sack of shit! Get up! I’m on my back here! Turn me over! Pick me up!”
“Arthur?”
“Well, who the fuck do you think I am?” yelled the chairman. Stevie had made the mistake of blasting away the wrong part of her adversary. The last bits of O’Brien were gone, to be sure. But the consciousness that was Arthur still lived, and it was mighty pissed off. “Get. Me. Up!” it bellowed, in a voice not particularly constructed for bellowing. What emerged sounded very much like a six-year-old child whining for its mommy. As far as his vassal was concerned, however, it served its purpose.
“Sorry, Arthur! Sorry, man. I thought we had bought the ranch there, sorry.” Mort rose very shakily to his feet and hurried over to Arthur, picked him up, and set him back on the ground carefully.
“Idiot! Fool! Schmuck!”
“I’m sorry, Arthur, sorry, sorry,” said Mort, who was really very sorry. Also, he was pretty sure that if he had been looking for a big job in the future organization once things had been properly sorted out here, it was possible that he had well and truly screwed the pooch.
“Tell your fucking moron troops to hold the fort here and kill anything that emerges from this ramp that is not me.” Arthur’s head was cleared now, and he knew what needed to be done. “And for the love of Christ, pick me up.”
Mort picked up his boss and barked as loud and crisp as a commander of such impressive forces must know how to do. “Hold your positions! Eliminate any living thing, real or artificial, that comes up this ramp if Arthur is not in command of that party!” At this, he held Lucy in the air and waggled her back and forth to the assembled corps. Then: “Lieutenant!”
“Yes, sir!” What had once been a human being and was now an augmented unit implanted with a variety of hardware and wetware stepped forward on his two artificial legs, his remote third eye unit at maximum extension.
“Until our return, you are in command!”
“Yes, sir!” The thing turned to the cohort. “You heard the man!” he snarled. “At ease! But stay frosty!”
“Now let’s get the fuck going,” said the lizard-thing, “and you’d better fucking hope that we’re not too late, Mort, or I’m going to order you to execute your fucking self if it’s the last fucking thing I do.”
“You don’t have to be abusive to me, Arthur,” said Mort softly. “I’m on your side.” He put Arthur under his arm and humped it down the ramp.
“Easy, man, you’re crushing my tail here,” was the last thing that could be heard as they disappeared into the darkness.
A mile or so below now, Gene and Livia stood in an endless vista of segmented towers that stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see. There were aisles six feet wide between the banks of towers, each made up of dozens and dozens of other towers, adding up to a galaxy of articulated towers composed of other towers, the entirety of which held the knowledge, if not the wisdom, of the entire human race for the full span of its existence on the planet. They sto
od at the edge of the infinite data farm.
“What we want is at the center,” said Liv.
“This device on my back,” said Gene. “It can’t possibly make a dent in this whole enormous—”
“We don’t need to take it all out. We just want to get inside to the neural core that connects the various portions of this brain to one another.” Liv and Gene looked at each other. “As I understand it,” she added.
“Fuck you, you fuck,” said Gene in his completely different voice, and he leapt at Livia’s throat. She immediately punched him in the nose as hard as she could.
“Get off me!” Liv yelled. “Gene! For God’s sake, pull yourself together!”
“Ow! Ow!” Gene grabbed his nose and danced around on one foot. “You didn’t have to hit me so hard!”
“Obviously, I did.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out six airline-sized bottles of Stoli vodka and handed Gene one. “Here,” she said grimly. “This is the last of them. I have no idea what we’re going to do when they’re gone.”
Gene opened the first miniature bottle and prepared to down it. “You’re gonna suck my dick, that’s what,” he muttered under his breath.
“Shut up, Arthur,” said Liv.
“Yeah, you sick fuck,” said Gene. Then he downed them all greedily, one by one, each in a gulp, down to the last drop. A ripple went through him as he fully returned to himself, possibly for the final time. “That’s a lot better than Popov,” he said gratefully.
“Come on.” Liv grabbed him by the hand and led them both down the ramp until they reached the center of the great mandala of hard drives that made up the concentric circles of the grid. There they stopped. It was very silent except for the living sound of the Cloud, its murmurs, clicks, and whirrs humming lightly around them. Gene kneeled down and emptied the contents of his backpack. He regarded the cigar-shaped mechanism at their feet with fear and confusion. It was now their job to arm the thing.
