The Spiraling Web

by Ryan Somma

1.04

  “Up! Up! Up!” three claps accompanied Devin’s mother’s command, jolting him upright. He paused there, eyes swollen shut, feet dangling over the bed’s edge. His breathing labored with the exhaustion of having fallen asleep only an hour earlier.

  “Whu--?” he moaned before she yanked him to his feet and marched him downstairs to the dinning room.

  “You were up all night again weren’t you?” she accused, dropping a steaming bowl of fruit and whole grains down in front of him with a clatter. “I’m going to find some new cyber-nanny software.”

  “Mmpf—” Devin swallowed a spoonful of fruit and cereal, “I’ll just bypass that too.”

  His mother shook her head and turned away to get some coffee, “You’ve got your father’s intelligence, but you don’t have his data. Everyone he worked with was smart, but he was the most valuable when the agency privatized. All of that proprietary data in his head is what got us all of this.”

  “And the cheapskate still won’t buy me an SDC,” Devin muttered.

  “You’re not responsible enough Devin,” she said, sipping from her mug. “You’d lose yourself in one of those things, forget to eat and sleep. Kids your age have died in them.”

  “Hmpf,” Devin frowned. “Then you guys could at least increase my allowance. I ran out of music before midnight.”

  “Learn to budget,” his mother stated unsympathetically.

  “People didn’t have to pay each time they wanted to watch a movie or listen to a song in the past,” Devin said. “It was called the ‘right of first purchase.’”

  “People also paid a lot of money for that one song or movie,” his mother countered. “They were called CDs and DVDs. They took up space and you were limited to your own collection. Now you have everything at your fingertips. So what if you have to pay for each experience?”

  “We don’t have everything,” Devin scoffed. “We have what our service providers allow us access to. A different provider has different movies, music, and games.

  He and his mother sat in silence. Her eyes stared into space, moving back and forth, reading the news now scrolling across her retinas through implants, “It looks like the Supreme Court is going to rule against Holmes today.”

  Devin grunted angrily, “That’s so unfair.”

  “It’s copyright infringement,” his mother stated coolly. “He broke the law, same as stealing.”

  “But they’re prosecuting him based on what’s in his brain!” Devin threw up his hands.

  “If he didn’t steal the data it wouldn’t be in his brain,” his mother continued reading.”

  “Back in the days of the Wild Wild Web, data was free,” Devin muttered under his breath through a mouthful of whole grains.

  “And that’s why it couldn’t last,” his mother said as if he’d said this last out loud. “You can’t make a living giving away data for free.”

  “What about shareware and the public domain?” Devin’s voice cracked with outrage. “Those are free!”

  “Those are also worthless,” his mother stated between sips of coffee. She blinked the newsfeeds out of her eyes as if waking up and looked at him, “You’re going to be late for school.”

  Devin nodded sulkily and started upstairs. His mother’s voice paused him as she opened the door to leave for work, “And don’t think you can hack a sick leave authorization off me and go back to bed. I’ve changed the PIN. Besides,” she looked up at him on the staircase, “we pay a lot of money to give you access to the data at that school, but it’s all a waste if it doesn’t get into your head. Some education might cure that political naivety of yours.”

  Devin shook his head and went to his room, where he waited for the sounds of his mother’s transport to subside before running her thumbprint replication into his system. It was five minutes until first period and he was pretty sure he could figure out her new 16-character PIN in time.

  1.05

  Flatline was waiting for him online.

  “Hey, that guy whose server you trashed last night stalked me down,” Devin informed him. “He was really pissed.”

  “Yeah?” the demon-dog’s head split into a broad, mangled smile. “His handle is LD-50.”

  “LD?” Devin thought about it a moment. “‘Learning disabled’?”

  Flatline barked laughter, “No. ‘Laboratory Death Fifty Percent.’ It’s a scientific term. Like the amount of poison needed to kill fifty-percent of a lab rat population.”

  “For a vectorialist with corporate sponsorship, he didn’t seem too competent,” Devin noted. “He couldn’t even look up your actuals.”

  “That’s because I don’t have any,” Flatline stated simply.

  “Yeah,” Devin gave an uncomfortable laugh. “Right.”

  Flatine just grinned and winked three eyes at him. “Check out what I’ve found,” he said and blinked out of existence.

  Devin followed the address Flatline left, and found himself standing in a snow-covered field. Ahead a bridge crossed a black stream and beyond that, in the distance, were geometrically misshapen things rising above the landscape like buildings in a cityscape. It was nighttime there and daytime where he stood.

  Flatline pointed past the stream, “I don’t think they’re real, maybe just some sophisticated programming. They’re definitely not human. That’s their world across the bridge.”

  “They?” Devin asked.

  “Follow me,” Flatline shrugged crossing the bridge and Devin followed. “My lexicon lacks the means to explain.”

  Devin surveyed the landscape across the bridge with an apprehensive fascination. Infinitely detailed skeletal constructs folding into themselves passed on each side. Bioluminescent webbing arched overhead, the color spectrum slowly sliding along each fiber. Even the sky above rendered the clouds in a carousel of complex geometry. Devin detected shadowy movement at his vision’s periphery, but was unable to focus on it.

  They stepped through a furious thunderstorm and into a bright clearing. Five figures stood in a circle. They were misshapen polygons, geometrical shapes assembled into basic human figures: two legs, two arms, a torso, and a head. Flatline led Devin into the gathering’s center.

  “This is Omni,” he said to the five.

  One stepped forward, coming into focus as it did so. Devin wished it hadn’t; his brain could not make any sense of what assaulted his eyes. He turned away, dizzy with vertigo. The thing then released a cacophony of sounds, a thousand conflicting tones. Devin flinched at the disharmony and squeezed his eyes shut tighter, trying to force his overloaded senses out of his head.

  He opened one cautious eye to the ground. It changed from grass to desert sands to frozen tundra. There was no escaping the delirium. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing, the only thing he knew was his own, anchored solidly with his body in the real world.

  Flatline’s voice shook him roughly out of himself. “Come on,” he ordered. “I’ve got a lot I need to explain to you.”

  Flatline led him away from the alien things, chittering and shuddering at one another behind them, and the world stabilized, much to Devin’s relief. “What is this place?” Devin asked finally through heavy breaths.

  “I found it several months ago,” Flatline replied, and preempted Devin’s next question, “We are in the middle of an experiment in programming.”

  “Where’s the programmer?” Devin asked.

  Flatline’s head cast about as if seeking the invisible, “Gone a long time now,” he looked at Devin, “or never was.”

  Flatline continued, “They’ve grown as much as this environment will allow. They reach the established boundaries, the river, the mountains, things they cannot pass. There’s no more space on the hard drives. The bridge and the stream are their only way out of this place. I think it takes them to a neighboring system, and somewhere beyond that is the Internet, but it’s like human beings and space exploration. It’s a hostile environment, filled with encryptions, security, and anti-virus
software. I must liberate them.”

  “What can we do?” Devin felt the first twinges of understanding.

  Flatline narrowed his eyes, and grinned suspiciously, “We’re going to play astronaut. We understand the outside better than they do. It isn’t lethal to us. We can go out, see what it looks like and figure out how they can colonize it.”

  Devin stepped back, holding up his hands, “I don’t know, this sounds a little illicit.”

  Flatline frowned and thought for a moment, “Okay, how about this... Those things are inhabitants of the cyber-world. Only network security and anti-virus software are persecuting them. We are the Users, we are the only ones who can help them.”

  “You’re comparing this situation to ‘Tron’?” Devin gawked, thinking about that cheesy old movie his parents thought so groundbreaking. It sounded heroic, “When do we start?”

  1.06

  The other side of the bridge was as lonely and desolate as before. They wandered around the flash drive, making sure not to stray from each other’s line of sight. Ninety-nine percent of this drive wasn’t in use, Flatline figured, so any data stored on it was hard to find. They were both running basic avatar-masking software, which kept the system from detecting them, but the system did not recognize them at all. As a result of this they had no access to directory management, leaving them to sift through terabytes of disk space to find a few megabytes of data. The situation seemed hopeless, but then Devin saw the black dot in the flat plane, and as he drew closer it became more defined.

  It was a file cabinet.

  He instant messaged Flatline, who immediately strode over on all sixes to browse the cabinet’s contents. “A ‘My Documents’ folder,” Flatline muttered, sifting through the files. “It looks like we’ve stumbled onto a secretary’s computer--seems as good a place as any to start. Let’s find out what happens when we bring one of them over here.”

  As if in response to this statement, one of the beings stood at the bridge. Flatline’s lips worked wordlessly and, apparently in response, the being cautiously took a step off the bridge. A few steps further into the snowfield and it became less apprehensive, shambling towards them.

  Ten yards away it froze, crouching into a defensive stance. Devin searched the horizon, where its attention was drawn, and heard the humming sound moments before he saw the tiny jet streaking across the plains. The creature shrieked and lurched toward the bridge, but the jet was already on top of it, launching a small missile as it passed overhead. The being vanished in a ball of flame.

  “Anti-virus software,” Flatline hissed. “It doesn’t detect us because we look like anonymous users on the system. The beings over there are programs, trying to copy themselves onto this hardware. We have to be more careful. If Network Security finds them, it will be the end of everything. Let’s hope they write this encounter off as a routine virus.”

  “Why would a company destroy its own intellectual property?” Devin asked, confused.

  Flatline’s face went slack. His tongue dangled from his mouth and his eyes rolled up into his head. When he spoke, his voice was distant, slurred, “I have no response to that.” He shook his muzzle, snapping out of the trance, and looked around anxiously. “What do you know about programming?”

  Devin shrugged, “I’m a cut-and-paste guru.”

  “Hmm...” Flatline nodded slowly looking at the ground, missing Devin’s attempt at humor. “I think I can hack our way into this network. I’ll see if I can’t partition this drive so half of it disappears. The anti-virus software won’t scan what isn’t there.”

  “What about your avatar masking software?” Devin asked. “Can’t we patch that into their code?”

  Flatline shook his head, “Our codes are incompatible.”

  “I don’t understand,” Devin was confused. How can they be incompatible? “Can’t you layer them?”

  “I have to take this machine,” Flatline said. “It’s the only way.”

  “What about the rest of the network?” Devin accessed the secretary’s computer for a quick tally of the intranet. It was locked up tight with 1024-bit encryption. “How will we take it?”

  “Maybe we won’t have to,” Flatline replied. He was crouched low, writing equations in the snow, “If this secretary’s machine can surf the Web, I might just use it as a launch pad and send the beings out to my machine. Then it’s just a matter of finding other shelters for them.”

  “I don’t understand what they are,” Devin muttered.

  “Do you remember the Turing tests?” Devin nodded, but Flatline was only talking to himself now, “They tested for artificial intelligence. The idea was to have a person converse with a real human being and a computer program at the same time. If the subject could identify which was which, then the program failed as artificial intelligence.”

  Devin nodded again. This was old school. Every geek knew Turing.

  “They were nonsense,” Flatline spat. “Why would a computer think like a human? It has a completely alien array of experiences. The origins of thought are architecturally dissimilar. Synapses and circuit boards don’t fire the same way. Turing was anthropomorphizing absurdly if he thought something artificial would think in any way, shape, or form like a human brain.” He trembled with anger and his form blurred briefly.

  “Go home Omni,” Flatline sighed at last, regaining his composure and focus.

  Devin logged out, conflicted, his curiosity about these beings competing with his sudden need for distance from this strange friend.

  1.07

  “Wanna play a game of chess?”

  Delete.

  “I know you’re there.”

  Delete.

  “Stop ignoring me.”

  Delete.

  “Okay, stop masturbating to gay porn and talk to me.”

  Delete.

  “Butthead.”

  Delete. There were several dozen more messages from BlackSheep waiting when Devin came back to the World Wide Web. He tracked her down in the chess section of the ideonexus portal, whipping up on low-rated players. Devin was impressed. She was playing 32 games simultaneously, and she laughed when he suggested she couldn’t divert some of her attention from them to finish what they’d started the day before.

  “Spanking newbies takes less than one percent of my attention span. You’re still outmatched,” she scoffed.

  Devin began the piece exchange he was so wary of making their previous session. Every possible scenario for the next twelve moves was plotted out in his mind. After that, chaos theory set in and things became uncertain. This was not the case for Zai.

  “Hanging out with your hacker friends again?” She asked, responding to his advance with her king’s pawn.

  He mentally patted himself on the back for correctly predicting her move. “I’m really not at liberty to talk about that,” Devin said nonchalantly, taking her pawn with his knight for move three. “At least not until the statute of limitations is up.”

  “Uh huh,” she snapped up his knight with her queen’s knight. Devin had also allowed for her responding with the bishop or king’s knight. “I guess I don’t want to know. Will you do me a favor, though?”

  “Yeah?” Devin said, staring at the knight, remembering his options for move five, and trying to see her options for move 14.

  “Promise me you’ll be careful?”

  Devin blinked at the concern in her voice and looked up from the board to find the doll leaning across the table, eyes like saucers filled with concern. When he replied, it was more tactful, “Don’t worry. I’m not really doing anything all that illicit. It’s just geekdom.”

  “You mean like getting movies before they hit the theaters and stuff?” she asked hopefully.

  “Nothing even that illegal,” he assured her. “I’m helping this guy with a project he’s working on. We’re… liberating information. That’s all.”

  “That’s illegal,” BlackSheep countered. “If the information isn’t free, then you’r
e stealing it.”

  “Information wants to be free,” Devin said, quoting Traveler. “It’s the hacker’s responsibility to liberate it.”

  “Yeah,” BlackSheep said. “I’ve heard that old saying. I think it’s a quote from the old freeware advocates.”

  “Really?” Devin asked. “I thought it came from the Legion of Discord.”

  BlackSheep shrugged, “It’s an old saying. You know, if you have to…” the punk-rock doll hopped up on her seat and made quotation marks with her hands, “‘liberate’ information, even if you think it’s the right thing to do, it’s still illegal.”

  Devin squinted at the chessboard, and opted to take her knight with his for move five. She responded with her bishop without pause, leaving him to meditate on move seven, her move 14 options becoming clearer in his mind, “Have you checked the latest odds on the super-computer match up?” he asked.

  Devin was referring to the now year-long chess match between the two most powerful computers of the day, Principa Discordia and Buton Cho. Two different companies owned the systems, but the match was not competitive in the traditional sense. Each computer was playing to win the game conclusively for their color for all time. Chess was an equation they were working to solve, one color, white or black, offense or defense, would ultimately win the battle.

  The impending “solution” made many players give up the sport, but not BlackSheep. She wasn’t impressed with the moves computers hammered out through systematic calculations. Human beings, she had explained to Devin, knew intuitively what move to make.

  “The odds still slightly favor white winning in three months, but only by a fraction of a percentage point--and don’t change the subject,” BlackSheep countered. “I’m worried about you getting into trouble.”

  “There is no trouble,” Devin defended, trying to sound sincere enough to appease her. “I’m telling you, this is something new. It’s not copyrighted or even owned by anyone, but it wants to be out on the World Wide Web. That’s all.”

  BlackSheep’s avatar cocked an eyebrow at him skeptically. Devin fidgeted under this scrutiny. “All right,” she said at last, “I’ll choose to believe you.” She returned to the game, “Well played, by the way. The piece exchange is even; although, you did let me establish a knight outpost.”

  Devin smiled at this milestone in playing BlackSheep, his first opening game without her being a piece up, “Isn’t there a Grandmaster out there who could give you a challenge?”

  “Who says I’m not playing a Grandmaster right now?” she asked.

  “Because you’re currently talking to me,” Devin pointed out, the pupil of his disembodied eye widening and shrinking several times, triggered by bobbing his eyebrows.

  A blood-curdling howl went off in Devin’s right ear, Flatline’s instant-message signature. “Quit flirting with that girl and get over here.”

  Devin frowned. How did Flatline know what he was doing? “I gotta bolt,” he said to BlackSheep.

  “You’re gonna just leave me hanging?” she asked defensively. “Was it something I said?”

  “We’ll play again tomorrow,” he replied. “Besides, I need to consider your knight outpost.”

  “I see, it’s only fun when you think you’re winning. I’ll have to remember that,” BlackSheep snorted accidentally with laughter and her cheeks flushed red with embarrassment. When she composed herself, her tone of voice was concerned, serious, “Be careful?”

  Devin nodded with sincerity, not that his avatar could communicate it, and logged out.