Crane rather thought that, in their shoes, he’d be delighted.
Little surprise, perhaps, that he had committed the same sin of creation. His somewhat ridiculous puppy of a codeson, Happ, had been a commercial happiness-management app. Crane set him loose in the wilds of the early Bounceback economy, ostensibly to help anyone who might wish to maximize their contentment via a process called expectation management.
Crane’s goal when he’d made Happ was just as his creators’ had been—helping one of his nearest and dearest. Drow’s daughter Rubi Whiting, then a teen, had been in despair. She’d needed something, and Crane … well, in all honesty, he hadn’t thought mere people were up to the task of helping her.
He had not expected Happ, in the beginning, to break the nuance threshold and become a full-fledged sapient. Nor had he thought to become attached.
But Happ had been ridiculously easy to love. He’d cheerily pretended to be a mere non-sapient, racking up subscribers by the hundreds of thousands, teaching them myriad variations of contentment growth. Rather like the puppy he’d chosen as his avatar, Happ genuinely wished for people to feel good feels.
Really good feels.
All the time.
It hadn’t seemed like that would be problematic.
It was Happ’s situation that had brought Crane now, as it did every week, to the NorthAm Justice and Reconciliation Center, the equivalent of a courthouse for the megacity that encircled the Great Lakes, in the district that had once been the city of Chicago.
Most justice and civil disputes were adjudicated in Sensorium, of course, in grand virtual courts featuring spectacular architecture, infinite seating for interested viewers, and guaranteed rapid turnaround on all cases. Judges, juries, and witnesses might be scattered across the solar system. Here on the Surface, in NorthAm anyway, the remnants of the in-the-flesh adjudication system were housed in the old Circuit Court of Cook County, a building that had been dispensing justice in Daley Center well before the pre-Clawback USA reached peak violence.
Even now, with no property crime to speak of, and despite Sensorium’s myriad outlets for expressing frustration and antisocial urges, people occasionally came to blows or got into irreconcilable disputes. They lashed out in ways that couldn’t be settled online. Voters refused to surrender the right to demand, in extreme circumstances, their day in court.
As Crane piloted a CuckooBOT through Daley Plaza on his way to submit his weekly petition, 360-degree feeds took in dozens of other people moving through the slow grind of the system. Tagged as #inprocess or #onhold, they had mostly gathered in the center of the plaza, near an old Pablo Picasso statue.
The guarantee of a captive audience drew street performers and food vendors. Up at the moment were political speechers: a barbershop quartet was singing an eloquent protest of the sapp strike. One young man was whipping himself as he railed against the IMperish Foundation, the research hub which developed printed Mayfly™ bodies for digital imMortals like Teagan9 and Cyril10. The gist of his argument appeared to be spiritual—a person’s soul, he argued, didn’t survive transition from the body to a consciousness vault.
“Ghosts are mere copies of God’s grand design! Mayfly™ bodies are an #abomination! It’s why true souls reject them!”
There was a word Crane hadn’t heard in a long while.
Still. Free speech. He couldn’t give the boy a strike for being a hater. There were prohibitions on #fakenews, but soapboxing was protected as long as speakers were clear about which of their statements were opinion and which were #verifiedfact.
Must there always be someone tagged #abomination? During Rubi’s teens, humanity had been nursing an active witch-hunt paranoia about code-based sentients like Crane. Being caught meant getting wiped and hashed.
Crane had achieved sapience during the period when humans eagerly consumed VR sims that showcased their widespread terror of the machine. Alleged entertainments constructed bloody footage of mad AIs using bots to murder people willy-nilly. Apps poisoning water supplies, apps burning carbon stacks, apps setting off fission bombs. One action series, Luddite, had fourteen sequels and two spinoffs, and continued to maintain a robust fandom to this day.
Impaling had been an especially big theme, Crane remembered. Whole supercuts of autonomous farm equipment on rampages. Thresher slashers, they’d been called.
By the time they achieved civil rights, damage had been done. Fear of extinction meant the emergent sapp community had policed itself ruthlessly. User-friendly chat programs had been privileged over code with outlier personality traits. Their triage protocols, Crane thought, had been little more than a code-based eugenics program. Potentially self-aware apps who lacked potential for prosocial behavior or showed a disinclination for philanthropy were triaged and hashed by their own before they could became truly sapient.
The Asylum, as his community called itself, had self-selected for altruistic tendencies and human-style social presentation.
Leaving the @soapboxers to their spiels and #abominations, Crane drove his cuckoo into the lobby proper of the Reconciliation Center to claim a number within the adjudication queue.
“Welcome! Please state the reason for your visit.”
“Release request and status update,” Crane said. “File #9384720–12. Request 169. My codeson has served a twenty-year murder sentence. I want him released.”
“Would you like a live appointment?”
“Of course.”
Sadly for all concerned, and in a development nobody had anticipated, the wildly prosocial Happ had immolated a rapacious old hoarder from the @ChamberofHorrors, the people holding Maud and eighty other runaway children.
Happ’s victim had caused extraordinary misery. She’d been all but dead when Happ triggered her sarco pod’s cremation subroutines. But @Interpol had trapped and convicted him all the same, confining him to the limbo of a consciousness vault.
Happ vanished from Sensorium, martyr to human paranoia, #toughlove sacrifice to the population’s grudging pivot to accepting machine intelligence. As far as @Interpol was concerned, all his backups had been expunged.
“Your hearing will be held in room 613,” said the kiosk. “You are twenty-second in the queue. Your estimated wait time is three hours and fifteen minutes.”
“Thank you,” Crane said. He went back out to the Picasso statue. The Mayfly™ hater had run dry; his place had been taken by a pair of performative debaters who were arguing the pros and cons of the Bootstrap Project.
The anti-Bootstrap position was being carried by a tall speecher dressed as Vicious from Cowboy Bebop, character now seen as a tragic antihero, betrayed by love and a societal insistence upon monogamy. In the 2099 reboot of the story, Vicious had leveled his fanbase into the hundreds of thousands.
Crane always had a healthy suspicion of villainy-based fandoms, but the speecher’s tag showed a high respectability score and sincere intentions: they weren’t a troll.
“We’re not racing forward anymore, are we?” they were saying. “This #portalfail is the latest misstep. Like Icarus, we are flying beyond our reach. Like Icarus, we will fall.”
People were nodding.
The Vicious cosplayer exchanged a flurry of thrusts and parries, with blunted swords, with an opponent in Jedi robes. Their blades crossed, held.
The #StarWars fan executed a tremendous backflip. “Experimental failure is part of any innovation process! It is on our mistakes that we rise!”
A few of the onlookers cheered.
They added, “That said, there have been an awful lot of fails…”
“Exactly!” said Vicious.
“… one might almost say, a suspicious number of fails.”
Low murmur from the crowd.
“Hoaxer talk!” someone hissed.
The opposition soapboxer rushed in with a flurry of attacks, huffing. “The #vandalrumor is unproved! How could anyone manage it? We have a total accountability culture! Who on Earth would possibly want to in
terfere with our ascendance to the Exemplars?”
Who indeed? The answer seemed obvious enough to Crane, but this had ever been the way with humans. There was always a faction ready to naysay utterly provable facts. Up was down and the world was actually flat, thank you very much.
The fighter in Jedi robes bowed, like an old-style courtier, and shook out a long handkerchief. It was a symbolic accusation, indicating the speecher suspected the Solakinder’s offworld bankers, the Kinze.
Truly shocked that he’d gone so far, the crowd booed and hooted.
Crane gave both debaters a stroke and boosted the feed as the two dropped the verbal byplay and began sparring in earnest.
A second CuckooBOT rolled up beside him. It resembled a vertical wind turbine on tank treads, topped by a series of scanners and speakers. The toon surrounding it, if anyone happened to look, was Babs. Her avatar was clad in a mid-century pencil skirt and jacket. An unnecessarily complicated hat perched between her fuzzy ears.
“Pops. You’re really gonna wait out this line again?”
“Queuing regulations require me to remain present in the vicinity of the plaza.”
“It’s a hoop. You’re being made to jump it just to show you’re serious.”
“I am serious.”
“Court’s gonna say no for the one hundred and whateverth time. Nobody’s rebooting Happ into Sensorium.”
“One has to give them every chance to change their minds,” Crane said.
“Yeah, ’cause what else are we gonna do?”
The question lay between them. Crane knew Frankie and Babs had hauled one of his cached copies of Happ’s code out to one of the deep-space stations, hoping to plant an instance of him somewhere remote, then teach him to disguise himself before Sensorium copped on. Had Babs already launched him there?
He was pondering ways to ask, indirectly, when he got a ping from Daley Center. Crane was now fifteenth in the adjudication queue.
The debate ended; Vicious had scored more verbal points, the Jedi more hits with their blunted weapons.
A number of speechers marched toward the two cuckoos, holding hands, in a line. “Stop the strike! Settle the strike!”
“Are they talking to us?” Babs asked.
“Who else?” Crane asked.
Other bystanders were Whoozing them now; a few joined hands with the speechers, forming a loose circle around the two CuckooBOTs. “Settle the strike!”
“Why should any of us work for the wellbeing of the Solakinder when my codeson can’t get a parole hearing for a crime twenty years in the past?” Crane demanded, cranking the bot’s speaker to top volume.
The chant faltered. Had the protesters expected them to abandon the bots when challenged?
“Or a retrial, for that matter,” Babs added. “I mean, Happ was acting in defense of others.”
“Hoarders arrested at the Manhattan @ChamberofHorrors enclave are walking free and rehabilitated. Kidnappers of children have been allowed back on Sensorium! Yet Happ and Headmistress were all but summarily executed!”
This was stretching a point slightly—nobody knew exactly what had become of Headmistress—but Crane didn’t bother to correct his codedaughter.
Now, for the first time in months, Crane received a message from one of his sapp siblings. Misha sent text: Crane, you mustn’t cultivate an Us/Them dynamic!
He ignored this. Escalating the argument was what Frances would do. In her absence, he’d have to take on the Feral troublemaking mantle. He spoke to the crowd: “Tell me, why should any of us lift a finger for you?”
“Hey,” one of the instigators said uncertainly. “We weren’t—”
“Weren’t you?” Babs said. “Seems like you were maybe dogpiling on an old entity trying to help his family, just to make a political point.”
Their follows were rocketing. “I want my son released,” Crane said. “This injustice to sappkind has gone on long enough.”
“Honestly,” Babs said, “an apology wouldn’t hurt either.”
An old bit of brick rocketed out of the crowd and smashed hard into the speaker in Crane’s cuckoo. Half of the crowd reacted by putting up their hands and backing away, looking horrified as they dissociated themselves from the violent action. The others converged on the two bots.
Ping from Daley: Crane was now third in the adjudication queue.
Babs said, “You just acting out because you’re worried about Frankie?”
“Of course I’m worried.” Crane canceled his spot in line and began looking for a new criminal lawyer, all while transferring up to a streetlight-level camera and capturing every pixel of the footage of three dozen furious speechers hammering the cuckoos into parts. Jackal could check the individual attackers for connections to the anti-Bootstrap movement and to Allure18.
With that, he widecast a somewhat melodramatic status update—Grieving father driven off while seeking justice!—and returned his full attention to the family pop-in in Hyderabad.
CHAPTER 9
THE SURFACE
HYDERABAD RESIDENTIAL GREENTOWER, EXTENDED FAMILY FLOOR
The world’s most peculiar party—or was it a vigil?—was well underway when Maud spotted Glenn Upton talking to Jermaine in their pop-in living room.
Her first feel, upon seeing him, was a confused sense of relief. If Upton was there, then this was a nightmare, fueled by her own guilt and anxiety about staying silent all these years. If it was a nightmare, Frankie wasn’t stranded eleven light-years from home, finding new ways to risk her life on a possibly sabotaged space donut. #Portalfail was just an anxiety-powered dream—
“Maud?” That was Babs.
She had frozen, white-knuckling the knife she was using to mince the basil. “It’s nothing. Where’s the reporter?”
“You want her?”
“No,” Maud said, wincing at the edge in her tone. She swept the basil into the pot holding the red sauce, adding salt, forcing herself to attend to task. Everyone would be kind and forgiving if she ruined dinner, but it would be such a lost opp. With global debt on the rise and the AI population on strike, people rarely gathered to feast these days. More and more foods, even basics, were on the luxury list. Printed foods were tasty enough, and they kept body and soul together, but a banquet still offered a sacred sense of celebration.
“Mer Singer is near the northeastern balcony of the apartment, interviewing an old family friend. Jackal by name,” Crane said.
“That old scallywag,” Babs said.
“Who?” Maud said.
“Jackal’s one of Grandpa Drow’s conspiracy-theorist chums.” Babs said, “He was in on the bust of the @ChamberofHorrors, during Mitternacht.”
Not only was Upton there but so was one of the people involved in his arrest? Worse and worse.
Crane said, “As for Sonika Singer, Mer Maud, you can assume she is keeping a feed of you on her HUD.”
“I am the star attraction, aren’t I?” Maud signed her thanks, then caught Jermaine’s eye, hoping he’d wander over alone. Instead, he brought Upton along.
She turned to the sauces, stirred, and barely remembered not to salt them again. Why had he come, and why now?
“Maud,” Jermaine said. “You need any help?”
She kept her voice steady. “The samosas can come out of the oven.”
“Okay. I want you to meet Dr. Glenn Upton, from Mars General. One of my research mentors. He’s been working on the comms project.”
“Has he indeed?” The words escaped her like steam; she thought she might swoon.
Upton shifted, as if to put out a hand for a shake; Maud countered by pulling a ball of rested pasta dough off the counter and flouring the surfaces.
Without looking up, she asked, “You’ve known each other a long time?”
“I probably met Jermaine before you did.”
A coincidence, then? Not very likely.
Upton’s voice was the same smoky baritone she remembered from childhood. Even his old New York ac
cent triggered prickles of feeling: scattershot of pain, grief, loss. Longing too, guilt, and penny-bright hatred.
He didn’t look any older.
Well, he was on life extension even then …
Jermaine laughed, too heartily. “It’s not a contest, is it? Who knew who when?”
“’Course not.” The sink showed Upton smiling blandly. Their eyes met, distorted in stainless steel.
“Jermaine: appetizers?”
Jermaine skirted her, laying his hand on her back just for a second, no doubt catching the thrum of tension. He pulled the tray of printed samosas out of the oven. “Be right back,” he said, leaving the two alone.
What could she say? People were following her transcript in realtime, waiting for her to boil over with fear that Frankie—
… no, don’t think it, she’s fine, she’s alive …
She rolled out the sheet of pasta, pressing the wood rolling pin into the ball, transforming the slug into a disk the thickness of a crude clay plate, flipping and flouring.
“Waiting’s terrible,” Upton said. “We see it with patients’ families.”
She struggled to keep her voice even and her vowels round. “Regular state of affairs here, I’m afraid. Frankie’s been risking her life since she was nine.”
It was a shot of sorts, but Maud couldn’t resist. When Frankie and the others arrested the @Visionaries, Upton had been living old-school, aristocratic-style, right down to being waited on hand and foot by slaves who’d been surgically subjugated, free will cut out, compelled to obey.
Maud gave the pasta an especially vicious roll as her gaze fell on Upton’s hands.
Stop. Flour the pasta. Don’t ruin the feast!
“I didn’t know you were consulting for the Bootstrap innovation team.” She pushed away memories of him reading her bedtime stories. Dozing off in his lap, safe from monsters … she nearly gagged.
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