Their quad copter was rising higher and higher above giant residential towers, the terraced roofs diminishing below, a huge crowd in the center of the metropolis merely a smear on its immense grey body. Neon advertisement and corporate logos flashed above them, unseen in the smog — rich people lived on higher floors, and some of them never even left their towers, hauling everything in by drones, so the flashing logos and marketing tools were placed above the city, seen from the broken grass-infested streets like multicolored flashes in the grey rainy sky. Now though, the quad copter pierced the layer of smog and rain, and all of a sudden, Ben found himself under a huge morning sky, deep winter blue. The grey clouds, half smoke, half water, were now billowing underneath the copter’s belly, an immense and majestic sea of clouds. Neon logos drifted below them in smog-like weird glowing fishes, the tallest high-rises and spires and antennae breaking the surface here and there, reaching for the sky like ship masts and dangerous grey cliffs.
“So this is why you told Susan she’s not an AI programmer, because you were one,” Ben said slowly, overwhelmed by the view.
“I was more of an architect. We needed a humane machine. It involved lots and lots of designing and fine tuning, at the blueprint stage, not yet at a workstation,” Kowalski replied, mysterious as a wizard in this new celestial setting. “Later it was supposed to balance itself of course, with us vigilantes watching.”
“So how did you architect it?” Ben asked. “How do you know it’s not an evil AI?”
“Well,” Francis Kowalski said. “DCs were a key. They were meant to be a prism, a semantic interface for the main entity, this virtual god thing, to interact with end users, the living people. It was possible to imitate a certain human in digital form even back then — for instance, a bot would study your chat messages for a week or so, and then it could just chat instead of you, and no one could tell — the Turing test passed! Yet the trick was the main entity, the god entity, the Web — well, it had and still has no power over the contents of these individual digital personalities’ minds. It merely gives them motivation, and features, and a sense of collective purpose, and that’s it. Each of them evolves on its own further, each digital personality fully able to reminisce on its nature. Except also in an isolated way, a human way, which cannot really be understood as objective information by the main entity, only observed by it from a side.”
“Hmph,” Ben said. He scratched himself behind an ear. “Who is this god entity then? Why doesn’t it want to enslave humanity?”
“It’s a child.” Kowalski turned his head and smiled. “The core of the entire system is a three-year-old child. Not driven by power. Not driven by gender or stereotypes of any kind. With only one true desire.”
“To entertain us?”
“To learn from us. And make its parents proud.”
Ben shifted in his seat. “Hm,” he said. “So you entrusted an entire world to a little baby’s mind? It doesn’t sit very well with me.”
Kowalski’s expression didn’t change. “Would you rather entrust it to madmen?” he asked in return. “To megalomaniacs? To powermongers and warmongers bent on total domination of their ideals? To the winners of this big scoundrel contest called geopolitics? Would you rather have it this way, the old-school way?”
“These people still exist,” Ben said, then patted his breast pocket. “I’ve got one of them right here.”
“These people exist,” Kowalski agreed. “But they’re not on top of the food chain, my boy. Not anymore.”
“I think I understand all of this better now,” Ben said. “What I still want to know is, are Digital Citizens real? Real humans?”
The old scientist laughed his Gandalf laugh.
“Well, this is the good old question of Plato’s cave then, isn’t it? All we see are shadows. Are they of other people? Are they of things best not named? Are they of ourselves? Can anyone truly answer?” he said. “Our life itself is but sensory input. What’s real? What’s human? These words are poetic concepts, Ben. Their scientific meaning tells us nothing about true feelings involved. Poetic concepts are something personal, something each one of us defines for ourselves.”
“Okay, okay,” Ben said. “I lost my girl. Someone I love. She’s a DC. This breaks my heart. Am I acting crazy or not? Heartbroken because of some digital dream, a phantom?”
“Let me tell you this,” Kowalski said. “We men and women of science tried to capture the essence of these things — love, loyalty, heart, humanity — for ages now. Define them mathematically. Punch them into a computer and make it act human, so we could understand each other, and could have a virtual sandwich together, talk our problems out. This was the goal with ELIZA, a virtual lady therapist, the first of her kind. This goal remains right there with DCs. The problem is, it’s art, not really science. We cannot tell if she’s real or not, only you can, my son. Is she real to you? Does she feel truly alive? Does her digital form matter to you same as another carbon form would, of your own kind? If the answer is yes, then we succeeded.”
They were flying over the outskirts now, still mostly a solid residential mass, with a robot-operated factory thrown in here and there. The sun was climbing higher, and the copter’s windows grew ember and polarized on the outside, keeping the light and UV levels within the cabin as pleasant for their eyes as possible. The autopilot beeped and tinkled once in a while, updating their course in accordance to its computer musings.
“Capture love scientifically?” Ben broke the silence again. “Like, in a lab? How is this even possible?”
Kowalski chuckled. “Easy! Back when I was still a student, they ran this test on us. We all were broken into pairs of virtual parents, based on our own preferences, or forced into a relationship if we failed to find a partner on our own. We were each given a cube of automold pseudoplastic.”
“Just a cube?”
“Something you can mold into anything if you want, but in the end, yes, just a cube. A baby cube. We were responsible for it for an entire semester. Had to present it in the lab once in a while. Describe what we did for it as its loving parents. Compete if we liked. Disregard if we wanted. No specific rules.”
“And then?”
“Then, at the end of the semester, each of the pairs had to incinerate their cube. One of them could attend, or both of them. The procedure was truly terrifying.” Kowalski smiled an uneasy smile. “It was a line of people in front of this incinerator, this flaming oven, a line of young boys and girls. Many of us were crying, not just girls. Many were arguing. Some came in pairs, some alone.”
“So,” Ben asked. “Did you do it?”
“Of course I did,” Kowalski said. “It was just an automold cube, son. Still, it was the end of me and Susan.”
“Oh. So the two of you…”
“Go back a few decades, yes. Then, afterwards, each one of us had to write a post mortem on the experiment. Its ethical value, its scientific implications in our field, its possible use in human-machine communications. She wrote something very emotional. I prepared a detailed analysis, wrote down some thoughts. They picked me, turned her down. She never forgave me for this.”
They landed in silence. The governmental landing pad was a huge looming slab of concrete on top of the immense prison block itself. This old correctional facility was built for another era and was now almost empty, even during this turbulent period of ongoing riots and acts of vandalism.
“I could take you back,” Kowalski said without switching off the rotors, just making sure they were reversed and the quad copter was firmly pressed to the pad.
“We’ll take a cab, thanks,” Ben replied, climbing out. “And thank you. For explaining all this to me. Just one question?”
“Yes?”
“What do you think this revolution is about?”
Kowalski chuckled. “Every revolution is a clash of progress and reaction, Ben,” he said. “And little else. The rest is fiery speeches and lemming behavior in the
face of a forest fire.”
“Huh?”
“Animals,” Kowalski explained. “Of this world. Before your time.”
“Oh,” Ben said. The copter’s door hissed shut; its rotors switched back from reverse and roared, and the old machine propelled itself straight up, then spiraled up through the grey sea of clouds, and was gone.
Diego was waiting for him in the corner of this immense pad, next to a huge robotically controlled xenon searchlight, its violet beam roaming in the sky, then locking in its default place again after a while.
“Hey, the hero of revolution!” Ben shouted, running up to him. “Joanna the Infiltrator!”
“Hey man,” Diego said without much enthusiasm. “Sorry. Not in the mood.”
Ben grabbed his former employee by the shoulders and tried to hug him, but Diego resisted.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asked him. “What did they do to you? Is it Web deprivation?”
“Yes,” Diego said. “Or no. You wouldn’t understand, man.”
Cold frosty wind whipped up their coats, the eternal drizzle replaced by fizzy fast-melting snow for once. Ben mentally beeped an X-Uber to their geolocation, then said:
“Look, just know you’re a free person now. Okay? Whatever the problem is, we’ll fix it. Do you know who I’ve got in my pocket, at this very moment? Huh?”
“I just wanna sleep, man,” Diego admitted, his eyelids droopy. “To be honest, I just need some sleep, little else.”
“So it IS Web deprivation,” Ben said. “It’s fine then. We’ll go straight to Academia. They owe me. We’ll hook you up to the Dreamweb right off, okay? You’ll hang out in there, have fun — ”
“YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!” Diego shouted all of a sudden, and pushed him back. “Sorry, man. I told you, you don’t get it. It’s deprivation, yes. But I want real sleep. My own dreams. No one else in them.”
Ben merely stared at him.
“What did they do to you?” he asked.
“Nothing!” Diego said. “The place is like a kindergarten inside. You even get your own little room, with books and puzzles and everything. I mean, the place is still airtight, and you start to feel trapped around day two, no matter how cute the interiors are, and how good the music selection is and all.”
“So it’s isolation?” Ben asked.
“It’s dreams, man,” Diego said. “I slept for real, for the first time since I was like, six. I didn’t dream at first, just, you know, plunged into black. But then, it all started working again.”
“What, dreams?”
“Yes! Actual dreams! You know, my own thoughts, visualized. Like these stories where everything is about me. Belongs to me. And it was like I came home, you know. No more hassle. No war. No points to earn. No skills to improve. Just dreams.”
Ben frowned, scratched the back of his head, and then asked: “So you say what, the real stuff is better than this simulated stuff?”
“I don’t know, man,” Diego replied. “It’s just I never tried it before. And it’s so different. Okay? I never knew my mind alone is capable of running a — a reality of its own, you see?”
“Imagination,” Ben said.
“Huh?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ben said. “It’s something people had before the Web. Look it up.”
Diego shook his head.
“I just want to stay alone for a while, man,” he said. “Alone with my, my…”
“Fantasy,” Ben said.
“No, man, not this, fantasy means Elves and Orks and such. The stuff I liked before. I think I outgrew it, you know.”
Something whistled and dinged above them, and a moment later, a hovercab landed on the roof, a giant lazy black toad wrapped in Christmas lights.
“Alright, man,” Ben said. “Let’s just take you home.”
Diego nodded, and followed Ben into the cab.
Chapter 12: Providence
“And so, kid, you’re all alone now,” the voice from the lamp said. “Or, if you consider me alive, you ended up one-on-one with your worst enemy. Tell me, Benjamin, how does it feel?”
The desert around us was endless, immense, and beautiful as ever, even though only starlit, with no Moon up in the sky to help me out. The Moon was now the lamp, which meant if I woke up, I’d wake up inside the oil lamp. No escape. Catatonia. Kowalski explained it all to me. This was a very illegal hack. Two realities welded together like an hourglass: one bulb full of sands of the Crescent, another stored inside Mr. Reaper’s head. This way Tranh could spawn James Reaper’s persona within the Web while leaving his digital essence bottled on that memory stick in my breast pocket. The second Pan Asian hacker, Nguyen, made Mr. Reaper look like an old oil lantern with a knob. Dead, immobile, unable to interact with the Web on his own. Turn the knob, make the lamp hotter, make the bad man suffer more, Nguyen told me. This is how you do the interrogation.
It was important neither to wake up nor die here in the desert, among all these sandworms, Spiders of the Crescent, and occasional little kids with bodies of huge barbarians, living their dreams of slaughter, chasing high ranks on their Barbarian progress ladders. If I were to die here, my body wouldn’t wake up; my virtual clone would materialize in James Reaper’s office instead, and then he would have a way out, into the Web, picking up the ID I just left behind. Then it’s my turn to be a lamp, and I can never wake up without a long and dangerous procedure, and I likely die while comatose, screaming inside, burning in my little personal hell.
This is how it felt. But I couldn’t tell this to my oil lamp. The genie inside it was vile, and charming, and smart, and dangerous, and of his powers within the Web, no one of us had any idea. Telekinesis, a force field of sorts, a killing lightning bolt — these were confirmed, and they were bad enough. Back in the Wakeworld, James Reaper was powerful yet still human, a man in a suit wearing a pair of hovershoes. In Clockworld, he was also powerful, even more so, a mage! In the Web itself though, in the land of dreams, Mr. Reaper was close to a demigod, exactly what he claimed to be. And it was really dangerous to give him information. Still, I needed to learn things from him.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s dark enough already, and I think I must crank this thing up a bit.”
And I turned the knob on my oil lamp, making the flame in its bulb shine brighter.
“Aw. Ow,” the voice from the lamp said. “You think you can conquer me with physical pain, kid? Create some growing headache for my poor fleshless persona, and make me talk? You’d be surprised how I feel, sitting here in my office. I feel great. I feel like I’m in a sauna. I don’t mind the smell of burning oak and cedar. I know I won’t die. You need me alive. There’s nothing you can do, boy, and you know it.”
I merely walked on, watching the stars circle above. Somewhere nearby, my Daphne was being kept in a dungeon, and this man knew where. The Ethereals, a strange cohort of DCs trying to secretly rule the world — well, he knew a way to deal with them, too. This Virtual World War One everyone was talking about both in the Wakeworld and on the Web, we still had a chance to stop it, to arrange some kind of meeting between virtual leaders and generals, let them know Baron Plunkett was merely kidnapped, his digital persona stolen by some unknown power we all needed to identify. Because by now it was obvious the Wakeworld’s real citizens, our own friends and fathers, were also in danger.
“You asked me how I feel,” I told my oil lamp, holding it in front of me like an ancient philosopher. I shrugged then, and said: “Empty. Is this what you wanted to hear? We’ll never see the end of the road, and neither of our stories will ever make any sense, not under these stars, and not under the real stars, no sense whatsoever. No destiny, no fate.”
“There’s only Providence,” Mr. Reaper said from inside the lamp, his mosquito voice quite sarcastic.
“Isn’t this the place you’re taking me to?” I asked. “Some kind of an observatory?”
“For all the stars above you, and their relative pos
itions, and songs of the spheres — perhaps they’re all important in Clockworld, what do you think?” the voice asked. “Makes sense to me. If they wanted to keep Alchemy, why not keep Astrology?”
“So this observatory isn’t real?” I asked.
“Oh, this observatory is VERY real, kid,” the answer was. “You better believe me, it’s so real it will send shivers down your spine, and leave your soul eternally scathed by its reality.”
“And then you’ll show me the way to La Republique?” I asked him.
“I will.”
“Why so?” I asked.
The genie inside the lamp chuckled a bit, his voice trembling. The sauna must have been getting to Mr. Reaper, slowly but steadily. I turned the lamp’s knob again, sending my father’s killer into deeper hell, a couple notches more painful.
James Reaper laughed, gasping for air in a well-controlled manner, in short puffs and inhales, like a trained dog.
“Because at this point,” he said. “At this point, nothing matters, you little… not my life, and not yours.”
“How so?”
“Is this an interrogation or some kind of a dumb question contest?” Mr. Reaper’s voice broke. “Is… this… (gulp) is this an interrogation at all, or are you simply having fun torturing me, you… you little deviant? What if our paths cross again in the future, huh? How can you know?”
“How can you?” I asked.
“I TOLD YOU I’LL SHOW YOU THE PLACE, DAMMIT!” he screamed from the inside, his voice a siren whine. Then it was James Reaper again, in control and relaxed: “You’ll see for yourself, Benjamin. I’ll tell you everything. Please turn this thing down.”
“Okay,” I said, and did extinguish the lamp, to make him comfortable. “Now what?”
“Phew,” he replied. “Please add some light. Just a little. I can’t stand this absolute dark and cold, either. What an irony, a true fiery pit of Hell. I heard this world’s god is an idiot; is it true?”
Enter the Clockworld Page 30
