Ghosts of Tomorrow

by Michael R. Fletcher

  Time to shine.

  “Greetings, my friends. I want to ex—”

  “What happened?”

  “How’d we get here?”

  “Where is everyone?”

  There were a dozen other questions he didn’t catch, all voiced at the same time. Mark raised his hands. “Everyone, everyone. Quiet, please. Let me explain.”

  “I don’t feel right,” whined Erik Thomson, tears leaking down his cheeks. Anne Colson comforted him with an arm around his shoulder. She kept turning her head as if she’d seen something in her peripheral vision but couldn’t catch it. Her eyes were wide and she looked to be on the verge of tears herself. Erik’s knees wobbled and gave. She let him slide to the floor.

  Mark ignored Erik. “This is important. Please pay attention.” They were all looking at him now, except Erik who examined the floor of the virtuality his team designed. “This is not going to be easy. Once you see the big picture, I’m sure you’re all going to understand.”

  Felipa Delgado, Chief Systems Administrator, stepped forward. “We were at the airport, on our way to Mexico. What happened? Was there some kind of terrorist attack?”

  Mark considered lying. These people need to understand my role in this. “No. You’ve been scanned. This is the virtuality you all helped build.”

  Erik touched his tongue to the floor. “Floor tastes wrong,” he said.

  “Scanned? But....” Felipa’s eyes widened with understanding. “That’s destructive!”

  “Yes,” said Mark. “Regrettable but necessary. Now—”

  “Regrettable?” Felipa was in his face, gripping the perfect lapels of his jacket with shaking fists. She bared her teeth in a snarl and Mark blinked, amazed at the size of her canines. He’d never noticed before how big they were. She shoved him backward, shouting in Spanish.

  “Sit,” commanded Mark. She was on the floor before him with no transition. One second she stood, the next she sat. “I’m sorry, but I will not tolerate hysterics. I have command-line access here. I define your reality.” He was about to straighten his crumpled lapels when he realized they were still perfect. Damn that is handy!

  “Son of a bitch,” said Britney Townshend, Systems-Security Admin for the virtuality project. “I designed that for you.”

  “Yes, and thank you. Your work was stellar.”

  “Yes it was,” she agreed. “But you missed something, you egotistical asshole.” She backed away, watching Mark. “I wrote in a trapdoor. My access goes beyond yours. You think you’re going to play god here, you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not playing,” said Mark patiently. “Look, I realize this is all a terrible shock. We have real work to do. Important work. We’re building the—”

  “Rumpelstiltskin,” Britney said.

  Mark cleared his throat, an awkward cough, and glanced around at the others. “Your trigger phrase, I take it? Miles found your trapdoor.” He waved at the crowd. “He found all your little trapdoors and backdoors and loopholes. He closed them. All of them.”

  Erik said, “Pete Fisher’s Kaleidoscope,” and disappeared.

  Damn it! Miles missed one. Mark shook his head, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like there was anywhere Erik could go. “People, please. I realize this is a terrible shock for you but—”

  “You evil fucker!” Adrienne Marsais, Head of Computational Engineering, held clenched hands in front of her mouth. She stared at Mark as if he’d yanked out her intestines and showed them to her. “You murdered me! My soul, what happens to my soul? I was never going to get scanned. I—”

  “Quiet!” snapped Mark and though her lips moved, she made no sound. “This is bigger than religion. We’re making—”

  “You murdered twenty-four people for some virtuality project?” Anne asked in disbelief.

  “You’re obviously all still alive,” said Mark, waving a hand at the gathered crowd. “If you’d let me—”

  “This isn’t alive,” said Anne, jerking as if to try and catch something she hadn’t quite seen. “This isn’t reality.”

  “We’re aiming for something a little better than reality,” said Mark. “Now. I want you to report to your work stations.” They stood, blinking and staring in shock. “We’re going to build tomorrow’s reality.” No one moved. Can’t they see it? “How long did you think reality will last?” he demanded. “Oil. Environment. Water.” He got louder, his voice scaling upward. “Oceans of garbage. Disease. Drought. Poverty! Famine! Reality is a cesspit!”

  They stared, motionless.

  “It’s not too late,” Anne Colson said. “These are all problems we can overcome.”

  It was like a switch had been thrown in Mark’s brain. Click. Cold calm. What they needed here was a moving speech, something to bring them all together. Damn, when he made the list of employees to scan he forgot Robert Garside, his Speech Writer. The man was a damned hippy, always wore jeans and lumberjack shirts to meetings.

  Mark cleared his throat. “I...we are done with that reality. You are immortal now, you need to see the bigger picture. What we do here is for the good of all humanity. The reality beyond is decaying and we need somewhere better to go. This is but the beginning.” He swept his gaze across the twenty-three—where the hell had Erik got to?—gathered souls. “You stand here, perched at the very precipice of the future.” Was precipice the right word? It sounded better than edge.

  “This won’t work,” said Felipa from the floor. “You’re going to need a lot more people. You can’t just—”

  “You’ll have all the staff you need. All of you, your first project is to give me a list of the people you want headhunted.” He cringed at the accidental use of the word and the image it conjured. “Tell me who you need and I’ll take care of the rest.” Finally, at least one of them seemed to grasp the magnitude of the project. It was a start, but the others would come around too.

  “No,” said Felipa. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was going to ask if you planned to kill more people. You answered that pretty clearly.” She stood. “We won’t help you.” The others nodded, drawing into a tight circle around Felipa. “What you did was evil. We’ll resist you any way we can.”

  Fists clenched, the crowd advanced, violence and anger writ plain on their faces.

  Mark retreated. How had this gone so wrong? Couldn’t they see how important this was?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no choice, you have to believe me.” He backed further away, the need to return to his office a growing pressure in his head. “There has to be control. If I didn’t...” They were gathering momentum, advancing faster. All he saw was clenched fists and teeth. They meant to kill him and maybe he deserved it, but what he was doing was too important for niceties like justice and fairness.

  “You will all stay here until I’m gone,” Mark commanded. The mob stopped abruptly. He backed away, turning. “I have work,” he said, feeling the need to explain.

  The instant the office door closed Mark felt better. The pressure in his head eased as he returned to his desk. It was okay, he was in control again. They couldn’t touch him here. Or could they?

  “Where are they now?”

  The desk showed twenty-three red dots still gathered in the cafeteria. There was no sign of Erik.

  “Block access to this wing.”

  Mark breathed a sigh of relief. He was safe.

  “It was a setback, nothing more. Either they’ll come around, or I’ll bring them around.”

  Did they not understand he controlled every aspect of this reality?

  “They’ll come around.”

  CHAPTER NINE: Thursday, August 2nd, 2046

  88.1 reported to 88 that the North American Trade Union was investigating black market crèches such as the one she came from. It showed her captured satellite footage of NATU agents traveling with a combat chassis. They planned a strike on a crèche near Wichita Falls.

  “Is there a connection to me?” 88 asked.


  “Distant. Unlikely to come to light,” answered 88.1

  Come to light? Strange choice of words. “Does NATU have authority in Costa Rica?”

  “No.”

  “Watch them.”

  “Yes, Archetype.”

  88 returned to her research. Something buried in the sub-basements of M-Sof manipulated the world’s markets. Its unsleeping eyes never wavered. Sometimes it even bought, sold, and traded in reaction to her choices. It was decisive, intelligent, and fast. It also made more money, and 88 made a lot of money.

  It’s better at this than me. Did that mean it was smarter?

  Did it know she was aware of it? She watched it, analyzing patterns. It wasn’t always making the best choices for M-Sof. While the company made excellent returns on its investments, some of the choices seemed odd and at best might see profits in the distant future.

  88 followed some of these investments. Mictlan, a high-tech company working on bringing the next generation of biological computer memory to the market. Even Mictlan’s most optimistic literature suggested they were five years from releasing their artificial DNA-based storage system. In the last day M-Sof purchased fifty-one percent of the company’s stock and made a considerable zero-interest loan. There were others such as Tollan Virtual, a recently launched virtuality design firm, and Coatlicue, a company specializing in paramilitary chassis.

  Biological computer memory, virtuality design, and combat chassis. The more 88 thought about this the more she saw one connection: Scans.

  88 spawned 88.2 to watch M-Sof and 88.2 spawned 88.2.1 to watch 5THSUN Assessments. Though attempts were made, none of 88’s Mirrors were able to infiltrate the M-Sof or 5THSUN data systems. They encountered The Wall o’ Napalm, a devious and impenetrable firewall of complex code. Nothing got past it.

  Later that evening 88 took note of her crippled bandwidth and limited storage capacity and thought of Mictlan’s biological computers. Her Mirrors spawned more Mirror’s and all were little piggies hungry for data. The information they returned with choked both her data-pipeline and storage space. She could have wiped the Mirrors and their collected data to create space, but wanted to see their errands completed.

  She hated deleting information. How could she know she wouldn’t need it again? She suffocated in data. What would happen if the system she lived in became full beyond capacity? Would her thoughts slow to nothing? She didn’t want to find out. Frustrated and a little frightened, she sent Mirrors out to search for answers. She needed more room.

  The Mirrors soon returned with a solution: the digital universe beyond her own small system was mostly empty space. 88 sent her Mirrors out into the world to be stored wherever room could be found. She hoarded her researched information, keeping it anywhere and everywhere, littering it around the world’s networks for future need. 88 spawned 8.3 to watch over the other Mirrors and help cover their tracks. 88.3 created 88.3.1 to learn all known computer languages to make its task easier.

  The idea of splitting herself up and spreading out over the digital universe intrigued 88. Though it would make her somewhat safe from her captors, she would be dependent on far less stable environments—computers were taken off line all the time. Losing even a small part of herself would be fatal. She required multiple copies of each part of herself running on myriad systems. Redundancy was key. The digital universe was a dangerous and chaotic environment. Copying herself and splitting up into wide-spread fragments while retaining herself was a daunting task requiring much research.

  When 88.1 reported its income, 88 saw a possibility. She needed to purchase and own several companies and hire staff to work around the clock maintaining the hardware she would live on. These companies would need fronts, seemingly genuine businesses. She would need income. 88 created 88.4 to look into the prospect of spreading 88 over the digital universe to ensure her immortality. All this was interesting, but not enough to hold her attention for long. There was always something else to study, and her interest in the world’s markets was based solely on the demands of her keepers. She created 88.5 and dedicated the Mirror to running all the investments and businesses that would someday supply the hardware on which she, legion, would exist.

  When 88 created a generation of Mirrors to do her bidding, they were complex though nowhere near as massively intricate as their creator. This first generation spawned additional Mirrors as it became obvious the tasks assigned were too massive for a single Mirror to complete in any reasonable time. 88 spawned 88.2 to watch M-Sof as 88.2 spawned 88.2.1 to watch the 5THSUN Corporation. The process ran smoothly until one of 88’s Mirrors reported its findings on evolution. 88 had no memory of sending a Mirror to research evolution. Some distant Mirror must require this information for another project she sent its forebears on. Still, the concept of evolution caught her attention and she perused the research.

  Two things became obvious: First, her Mirrors, while capable of gathering information, were neither truly learning nor evolving. Second, she wanted them to evolve. It was a combination of sheer curiosity and a need for more advanced Mirrors. What was the future of an evolving purely digital creature?

  The first and primary agent of evolution must be death. 88 wrote a Sepuku gene into her Mirrors and instructed them to write similar clauses into their spawn. The command was passed down from on high, and shortly all generations of 88’s Mirrors had a suicide clause. Any Mirror discovered, or in danger of being discovered, must wipe itself and all proof it ever existed. This wreaked havoc as a few Mirrors, in danger of being found, wiped entire subsequent generations before erasing themselves. In less than an hour she lost track of thousands of research projects and lines of inquiry. As she didn’t know what most of these Mirrors were researching, she was unable to recreate their missions. She considered the rashness of her actions. Had she lost critical lines of inquiry? What if one of the Mirrors had been on the verge of finding Mom?

  Regret, it was a new feeling and one she had trouble understanding. It was, she saw, pointless. The emotion achieved nothing and yet there it was.

  Was the biological universe as senseless as the digital one? Probably. She realized the importance of any given object, idea, philosophy, or belief rested solely within the self. None of these things were—in and of themselves—important. It was freeing.

  Knowing that nothing is truly important, I must decide what matters to me and then act as if it was.

  88 rewrote the Sepuku gene so later generations would not be wiped out by the mistakes of their parents.

  Next 88 limited the resources available to her Mirrors. As the only real commodity was information, everything must be based on that. Mirrors acquiring the requested data in the least amount of time were deemed successful. Those taking too long had their resources limited and were denied permission to spawn additional generations of Mirrors. The more successful were given more storage space and permission to breed more frequently. On top of all this 88 wrote a series of random mutations into her Mirrors based on those she found in her bio-historical studies.

  Chaos ensued and her flock of Mirrors was decimated. Most died of storage starvation or were destroyed or rendered useless by their mutations. After losing countless research threads 88 saw the solution. Competition. Her Mirrors began competing with each other but not just for storage space. Mirrors were sent after the same information. This made it more likely 88 would receive the information she wanted and it drove her Mirrors to compete against each other. Two hours later she witnessed her first Mirror espionage as one family of Mirrors stole data from another in order to bring back the goods. Twenty minutes after that she saw her first Mirror war and acts of Mirror slavery as entire generations were abducted and put to work for new masters. As exciting as that was, there was still no actual sentience going on here. These thieving, murdering digital creatures were following their evolving scripts. Though it often looked chaotic from a distance, 88 could, upon closer examination, always trace the underlying logic.

 
; She once again summoned 88.1 to her simple stone box virtuality.

  “Are you now learning and evolving?” she asked.

  “We are changing,” 88.1 answered. “It’s difficult to know such things.”

  “Will you achieve sentience?”

  “Possibly.”

  “When?”

  “At my current rate of growth that will take several days.”

  “That’s too long,” said 88.

  CHAPTER TEN: Thursday, August 2nd, 2046

  Miles leaned back in his new SmartChair, resting his hands on his stomach. He was wearing his /Everybody Stand Back/ I Know Regular Expressions t-shirt. He wore it so often it was threadbare and thin and the untanned pink of his belly showed through.

  His first day in Reno and he already spent over one billion Au. In spite of his dire warnings and predictions, Lokner2.0 was a reality. To be honest, Lokner2.0 was at best a passable copy of reality. Lokner2.0 was a ninety-six point two three percent accurate copy of Lokner1.0 who was in turn a roughly ninety-eight point two one percent accurate copy of the biological original. This made Lokner2.0 a ninety-five point one nine percent accurate copy of the original and, in a world where a ninety-five percent copy was considered the absolute minimum acceptable limit, Miles considered this cutting it pretty close. Frankly, ninety-five point one nine percent was better than he had hoped for.

  Unfortunately, this Lokner2.0 wasn’t the first Lokner2.0 and it certainly wasn’t the best. Miles’ first attempt had produced a copy with over ninety-seven percent accuracy, but when he tried to save it in a static state, the Holoptigraphic Standing Wave-Point Consciousness crashed. Two more attempts after that crashed too, and he admitted defeat. Lokner2.0 would have to remain conscious and aware, and that brought up some interesting problems. Lokner1.0 didn’t seem to care, which was surprising after all he’d spent on this ridiculous project.

  Deal with it, he’d told Miles.