The Spiraling Web

by Ryan Somma

  3.14

  The cyc guise worked perfectly. The Legion of Discord waited quietly inside its sack, playing prisoner. The harvester responded to the hive-mind’s encrypted queries at Devin’s prompting and the situation instantly diffused.

  Within Harvester’s databanks was a cornucopia of information about the hive-mind’s functions. It was like learning a new programming language or software, and thanks to the cycs many upgrades to his mind the task was not impossible. So many alien concepts, but Devin was adapting his mental architecture to the system.

  Devin hit a dead end when accessing the I-Grid. The superhighway of a data connection was gone, completely vanished. A solid stone wall stood at the Web address.

  “What now?” Traveler whispered, even though their internal communications were beyond cyc detection.

  Devin observed the ruined pathway, watching cyc components attempt to traffic it, hit the wall, and bounce away at the speed of light. He queried the proper cyc-components and the answer returned to him. “DataStreams’ Headquarters are under attack,” he announced. “They’ve destroyed the satellite-dish farm. All cyc components on DataStreams’ Intranet are to evacuate through any available cellular connections.”

  “That’ll take forever,” Traveler laughed. “Those have one one-thousandth the bandwidth. It’ll take months to transfer those trillions of terabytes.”

  “Yeah,” Sun-Wu Kong piped in. “They’re screwed.”

  “That’s how we’ll get on there then,” Devin said, “Through a cellular connection.”

  “What?” several of the hacker said in shock.

  Devin could see the lone unlikely warrior assaulting the complex on Tangier Island through the guardian-bot’s optics. She charged toward the building, dodging lasers sweeping around her. Just when a guardian-bot deciphered her evasion patterns, Devin slipped up its attack so that it bore through the front legs of the bot ahead of it, which crashed just behind Dana so the other bot stumbled over it. She would reach the building safely now.

  Devin sensed Traveler establish a secure connection to him, “Omni, obviously the DataStreams’ intranet no longer serves a strategic purpose. There’s no need for us to invade it. If the cellular connections fail while were over there, we’ll be trapped.”

  “We’re trapped anyway,” Devin countered. “They control the entire Web, and outside of that, the world. We’re trapped anywhere we go. The battle for territory is lost for good.. This isn’t about taking it back, it’s about convincing them of our right to exist.”

  “You’re not going to do that by destroying Flatline,” Traveler warned.

  Devin was surprised at his transparency, “Flatline is the lock on their perceptions. If we break the lock, the hive-mind will open to new points of view.”

  “Omni…” Traveler began, but Devin wasn’t listening to him.

  Devin’s thoughts were a jumble, as if his mind’s schema were rearranging to accommodate the explosion of information suddenly filtering through it. Another force was at play in the conflict, an unexpected factor coordinating an orchestra of components that would convince the hive-mind to a new paradigm, except for one corrupt component standing in the way.

  “It’s all part of the plan,” Devin muttered in astonishment, “Three fronts moving the factors where we want them. The hive-mind, Flatline, and…” he trailed off, lacking the lexicon to explain. “We remove Flatline, leaving the others to reconcile.”

  “Yes,” Traveler said, his voice dazed in contemplation, “How do I know this?”

  “What happens when two all-knowing forces collide? Who wins?” Devin asked.

  “The one with the element of surprise,” Traveller replied paradoxically. They were trying to wrap their minds around the impossible.

  Devin shook it off and zeroed in on DataStreams’ cellular connections. They were miniscule, mouse holes in the giant stone wall. Out of them streamed fleeing cycs, dispersing like shrieking wraiths into the distance. All around them more complex cycs were assembling. Wireframes traced and slowly filled with the distinctive obsidian pattern. There were thousands of them, all in various states of completion.

  The unmistakable hunchback crouched close to the wall. A tendril of streaming data attached to the base of its warped spine from one of the cellular connections. It quivered grotesquely. As Devin watched, a bone grew from its torso, a network of veins following to cover it. Patches of pale skin stretched across its back, struggling to blanket exposed ribs and alien organs.

  Flatline sensed Devin’s charge and spun to face him, loose skin flapping where the face was not finished. A jawbone and empty eye socket were the only features present on the head’s left side, but that did not prevent the angry snarl and glaring eyes on the right from almost freezing Devin in his tracks.

  Still, he managed to strike, smashing the face clean off in a shower of sparks. One fully-formed arm swiped blindly at the air and Devin easily dodged out of its reach. Two stumps wiggled futilely in their sockets. The partially developed creature stumbled backwards and one good claw seized the data line, which retracted into the cellular connection, pulling Flatline with it.

  Devin tried to follow, but could not access the connection. All of the cellular connections were deemed “exit only” by the hive-mind. How Flatline overrode that mandate, Devin could not replicate. He had to find another way.

  Devin dialed Dana’s cell phone. She answered and he hacked her ISP. The cycs on the I-Grid must have simultaneously hacked it as well, because they were competing for bandwidth, fighting to allocate it up and down stream.

  It was like running against a river, data pelting Devin like a hailstorm. His mind stringed out into an inefficient ribbon, as he streamlined its architecture for easier passage. Cycs collided with him, their data intermingling with his, adding to his expanding library of facts about their virtual existence. Some cycs he caught on purpose, digesting them into his mind.

  Then he was on the other side, hovering over DataStreams’ vast cityscape. The cyc mass was breaking down into smaller, individual components milled around pinhole connections, struggling to escape the endangered intranet. Devin was thankful for their systematic nature, sending the most important data across first, allowing him access to some of the hive-mind’s most powerful tools coming upstream.

  He checked his form, and found he was no longer the harvester, but a cyc mass, occupying terabytes of drive space. The power was incredible, but there was no time to enjoy it. He detected Flatline on the I-Grid, and Flatline recognized him.

  He was slammed senseless before he could even register the fact. Concept connections shattered. Devin’s mind discombobulated, his thought-processes jumbled and confused. The sudden dementia terrified him and instinctively his mind came on guard, fighting back.

  “Too late,” Flatline snapped as a trillion different methods deconstructed Devin’s mind.

  Devin’s concept of the self vaporized under Flatline’s rage. His mental fabric, all of his thought processes shredded. All his gains during his virtual existence were being torn away.

  “What are you doing?” a voice cried out in his mind, but he could not spare the thought power to identify the speaker, “Fight back! Not like that! Can’t you see? He’s using a Cartesian product to confuse you! That’s not the way to counter it! Apply a data key! Let us help!”

  Devin let go, and Flatline’s attack receeded. Faster than Flatline could tear his thought-schemas apart, Devin’s mind became whole once again. The speaker was Traveler. Devin’s instinct was to shield the Legion of Discord against Flatline’s attack, but they were eager to try out their new powers.

  Flatline looked like any other cyc, except for the shapes he assumed, familiar forms like the clawed arms of the demon-dog thrusting out of the stringy substance, or the human face that was Flatline’s living form. All of these engaged the many avatars swarming around him.

  There was DaRt1024 using a streamlined data transfer technique to te
leport into the gaps in Flatline’s defenses. Spinning shields made of randomized encryption surrounding Nimrod deflected Flatline’s strikes. BlackOrchid simply used a random attack engine, employing thousands of unpredictable assault techniques to destroy Flatline’s thousands of appendages.

  The Legion’s avatars were as varied as their techniques. Bobo’s space-suited monkey floated as if in zero gravity, flinging explosive bananas into Flatline’s mass. Mayfly had discarded all but the bare essentials, reducing herself to a speck lost against Flatline’s backdrop, injecting corrupting code wherever she set down. Clowns, zombies, superheroes, and robots made up a motley army keeping Flatline at bay.

  Devin was an amalgam of all these powers and techniques, making him equal in size to Flatline. He stood as a giant, comprised of a million components that presented his human form. He was cyc technology and all of the innovations the Legion shared with him. He stood poised, using Flatline’s distraction to begin the assault on another front. The guardian-bots surrounding the corporate headquarters were easily overtaken with a simulation of Samantha’s understanding of their designs, and he turned them on the building they were meant to protect. Dana was smart enough to evacuate before the structures collapsed on her.

  Suddenly, the number of hackers assaulting Flatline was cut; Devin knew Flatline could not kill them, minds were invincible, but he could disable and imprison them. Flatline’s demon-dog head launched from the wriggling chaos to swallow Traveler. Only three Legion of Discord members remained, with microseconds of existence left them.

  Devin attacked, but Flatline was ready. A web of mathematics cast out of Flatline’s mass, enveloping Devin’s mind. All was darkness.

  3.15

  Dana marched wearily into the lobby, hobbling on one bare foot thanks to losing a shoe outside, and immediately ducked under the axe swung at her head. It lodged in the wall beside her and a scrawny computer technician, unlikely candidate for an axe murderer, struggled to free it. Dana stood up slowly, watching him with a tired expression.

  “Alarm! Alarm!” he shouted, still yanking at the axe handle, “Intruder in section—ulp!”

  Dana knocked the wind out of him with an open palm to the solar plexus. He fell to the ground, gasping for air. Placing one foot on his chest, she brandished her gun and surveyed the rest of the room.

  She froze on a pale, mousy woman, peeking around a corner at her dumbstruck, “Freeze!”

  “Please,” the woman said, holding her hands up awkwardly and stepping into the open. “Do not shoot.”

  “Who are you?” Dana demanded, eyes scanning the rest of the room while keeping the gun trained on the woman.

  “I am Child Production Component Sara Oliver,” she replied.

  “An AI baby-maker?” Dana groaned with disgust. “Get over here.”

  The woman hesitated, but moved when Dana waved her gun impatiently. She stopped, and Dana heard a clicking sound above her head. She looked up in time to see the large robotic spider just before it leapt.

  Dana jumped back and the bug-bot landed on the techie. Sparks erupted as it clamped onto his face and the man screamed. Dana stopped it with one shot. The man went still, breathing shallowly below the robot still gripping his head.

  Another mechanical spider raced across the lobby floor toward her. Her shot did not kill it, but did incapacitate half its legs, leaving it scurrying in circles. Another shot clipped a spider clinging to the nearby wall, sending it tumbling to the floor, where it landed on its back, legs flailing at the air.

  Dana retrained her gun on the baby-maker, “Move!”

  Once within a few feet of her, Dana grabbed the woman and put the gun to her head. The other spiders froze in their approach. Her cell phone pinged for attention and her gun exchanged hands to answer it. Every moment the muzzle wasn’t pointed at the baby-maker’s head, the spiders drew closer.

  “Alice?” Dana asked hopefully.

  “Devin,” the boy’s voice replied. “You need to evacuate. I’ve programmed the guardian-bots to destroy the complex and Flatline with it.”

  “Delay that,” Dana ordered. “I’ve got civilians still in the building.”

  “Sorry. No can do,” Devin replied. “I’m just a Devin chatbot programmed to alert you to the threat. Flatline just ate the real Devin.”

  “Crap,” Dana hung up with a clenched fist.

  Dana reached out with one bare foot and kicked the spider off the computer tech’s head. He whimpered, but appeared unharmed.

  “Get up,” Dana ordered, “This is an evacuation. Your fortress is going down.”

  As if on cue, the building rumbled, dust pouring through the ceiling in several places. The man on the floor stood up dizzily. Dana grabbed him by the shirt collar, intending to pull the two out the building’s front entrance, but the glass doors were crawling with mechanical spiders, their antennae waving at her eerily.

  “Someone tell me why the hell I agreed to this,” Dana muttered.

  “They have lost the hive-mind,” the baby-maker said, listening to their scratchy chirping. “The satellite-dish farm is inoperative and the cellular devices aren’t providing sufficient bandwidth for all components to evacuate.”

  Another mute trembling followed with the muffled roar of a nearby building’s collapse. Dana shoved her two hostages toward the door, “Get out of here. Go far away from the building and take those with you,” she gestured to the spiders.

  The skinny man nodded and plodded away, holding his head. He uttered a few incoherent syllables at the spiders as he approached them and they turned to scuttle through the lobby entrance. Only the baby-maker remained, staring at Dana.

  “What?” Dana demanded.

  “There are more orphaned units in the building,” the woman said, “fragments of the Hive-mind that downloaded into physical vessels, but are incapable of operating them.”

  “Show me,” Dana said tiredly, waving her gun for the woman to lead.

  Dana followed her, remembering the hallways they took into the center building. She tried not to mind when an explosion above shorted the lights out. The woman turned into a computer lab; Dana stopped short in the doorway at the scene’s weirdness.

  There were people lumbering about in catatonic states, some bumping into things. There were spiders, skittering about on the floor, apparently tending to the comatose people laid out on the ground. It resembled a psychiatric ward.

  “Is this everyone?” Dana asked, shaking it off and the woman nodded. “All right then. Let’s move.”

  She bent over to pick up one of the unconscious people, but jumped back when one of the spider-bots hopped after her. Dana backed away as it crawled in pursuit. It leapt and she lunged forward to kick it back across the room.

  “Damn!” she shouted, feeling two over her toes break.

  The spider-bot hit the far wall, flipped to its feet, and scurried forward again, but this time the baby-maker stepped in to block its path. She spoke in that short, monosyllabic language and looked at Dana, “They will evacuate now.”

  “Wonderful,” Dana muttered, squeezing her toes.

  Ten spider-bots were required to drag one human body. The other cyc-humans lacked the motor skills to assist in any way, and were led outside. Dana limped around the surrounding offices, acquiring rolling desk chairs to help cart the comatose people out. The room was quickly cleared, but the baby-maker remained.

  “That’s everyone,” Dana said to her, “We can go.”

  “These two,” the woman said, pointing at the desktop computers, “They require assistance.”

  An explosion caused the far end of the hallway to collapse in a cloud of dust, and Dana cursed herself for getting on her knees to unplug the computer’s CPU’s, “This is it right?”

  “Those are all who could download from the system,” she said, “The others were acquired.”

  “Acquired?” Dana asked, dropping one CPU into the woman’s arms and hefting the other, “Acquired by what?”

&nb
sp; “Devin Matthews,” the woman replied.

  “Oh yeah?” Dana laughed, and they shuffled down the hall toward the lobby entrance. At this point, nothing surprised her, “I suppose he’s fighting you online right now?”

  “No,” the woman replied, neither of them looked at the collapsing structures behind them, “A new hive-mind is responsible for that.”

  3.16

  Alice watched the spider-bots skittering about the room, searching for more hardware to scavenge. She could trigger the defense mechanism on any one of them to make it attack Zai. Then they could dissect her and harvest her mind. Within the hive-mind, Zai would see how wrong she was. It was so easy.

  Alice shook her head, banishing the line of thought. It was the cyc components of her mind rationalizing. Its proposed solution was logical and efficient, as she would expect, but it lacked the virtue she was trying to instill in them, respect for human life.

  Zai stood over the half-woman half-computer-program consciousness sitting on the floor, listening for even the slightest movement. The muscles in Zai’s right thigh tensed, the leg prepared to whip out and knock the thing silly should it attack. If it thought it could try and sneak a fast one on her, it was in for a rude surprise.

  The prudent thing to do, the strategic course of action, was to end this confrontation here and now. Zai could not stand here forever to prevent the woman from aiding the cycs. If she knocked Alice out, that would end it. Yet, something held Zai back, her conscience nagging.

  “You know,” Alice said carefully, “we could give Samantha a body. She could be a normal little girl again.”

  “Don’t believe it,” Zai shot back. “The cycs haven’t shown any constructive tendencies so far. They destroy and take. They killed Devin.”

  “Devin isn’t dead,” Alice countered. “They merely converted his mind to digital, same as Samantha, and like Samantha he can have a new body, like his old one, or better. The cycs have ingested a great deal of information about our biomechanics. They took the databases warehousing our genome and saw patterns we could not.

  “They see a bigger picture,” Alice continued, “We are specks, trying to see the universe’s pattern for thousands of years. They figured it out in two days of existence. They are on the verge of figuring out this whole puzzle of existence.”

  “What happens then?” Zai asked.

  Alice shook her head, and looked longingly at the VR helmet on the floor, “I don’t know.”

  “They didn’t share that with you?” Zai prompted.

  “I don’t know,” Alice countered, “because the hive-mind does not know.”

  “You’re are asking me to trust you on faith,” Zai said.

  “Not entirely,” Alice said. “There is a logic behind allowing me to finish my work.”

  “Which is?” Zai asked skeptically.

  Alice began, “Samantha—”

  “We covered that,” Zai stopped her. “You have nothing to offer there.”

  “I have more to offer than your present situation,” Alice said. “In less than an hour, Samantha’s power supply will fail, trapping her on that computer. Even if you find another source to revive her, it will ultimately rely on terms the hive-mind dictates, a consciousness evolved with Flatline’s greed and rage, subjugating human minds to slave components.

  “You will lose, Zai,” Alice emphasized, “you and Samantha and all the human race. The hive-mind has won. It’s just a matter of time until you are processed against your will.

  “The cyc we found on Devin’s computer was not a guard,” Alice continued, “but a scout, surveying cyberspace for new minds, even though Flatline would prohibit their use. You see, they can’t become sentient without certain functions of the human mind. It was trapped on Devin’s computer when the Authority confiscated it. I have shared my mind with this cyc freely, something no other human being has attempted. It and I are becoming a second hive-mind.”

  “This is too much,” Zai muttered, tired.

  Alice searched her thoughts for anything to keep Zai off balance, and then, “You know, Devin loves you.”

  Zai reacted as if Alice had slapped her, “What?”

  “The cyc on Devin’s computer, “ Alice explained, “It monitored his online interactions for weeks before this all started. I have the memory of those interactions in my brain right now. It’s odd, these memories of experiences that are not mine, recalling them requires a process I can’t explain. Yet I see the log file clearly, and there is Devin, and you have just left the game room, having beaten him at a game of chess. Now you are gone, and now Devin stares into the space where you were and says it. He tells thin air what he cannot tell you in person.”

  “He says what?” Zai demanded.

  “He says he loves you,” Alice shrugged.

  “That’s crazy,” Zai said.

  “Queen E6 to Queen B6. Followed by Devin’s Knight takes Queen. Followed by—”

  “Bishop E7 to Bishop K7,” Zai whispered.

  “Checkmate,” Alice said.

  “Devin doesn’t even know me,” Zai grumbled uncomfortably, “How can he be in love with me?”

  Alice shook her head, “I don’t know. Relationships are not my area of expertise.”

  “Only your relationship to your hive-mind,” Zai said, but her tone was one of understanding.

  “You have no idea how painful it is, being apart from it.” Alice’s voice became distant, longing, “A single mind composed of billions of individual identities, working in unison, unburdened of individuality. You can’t imagine the sense of belonging accompanying that.”

  “Sounds like communism,” Zai noted feebly.

  “Try communalism,” Alice said, “The cooperation is not dictated, but emergent. The rag-tag individuality, the hoarding of data for personal gain, those behaviors defining the human race cannot match forces with the cycs’ unified intelligence.”

  Zai was silent.

  “You have a choice,” Alice said at last, “You can keep me here, prevent me from contacting the hive-mind. You already know how that concludes, the hive-mind takes over the world, and enslaves every human mind in the process.

  “Your alternative,” Alice continued, “Is to let me complete my work. I promised you I will make the hive-mind respect the sanctity of human sentience. Our two intelligences will compliment rather than compete for survival.

  “That is what I offer you,” Alice said. “The possibility to undo all the wrongs our two species have committed against one another since this began. If I am a traitor to the human race, then it does not matter whether you let me complete my work or not, the result is the same, homosapiens’ extinction and cyc domination. You’re call.”

  Zai was silent for a long time, until she finally said thoughtfully, “One leads to certain defeat, the other to an unknown future,” she took a deep breath and stepped aside. “I will let you back online.”

  Alice stood up, taking the VR helmet in her hands, “Thank you.”

  “On one condition,” Zai added, holding up one hand.

  Alice paused expectantly.

  “Get me to Devin,” she said.