Solar Singularity
Page 1
Book Description
Dubbed Interface Zero by those who created it, the Tendril Access Processor—or TAP—downloads the Global DataNet and Hyper Reality directly into the minds of billions of users across the solar system, bringing the world an unparalleled level of interconnectivity … and danger. Malware plagues the Deep, and hackers manipulate the Tendril Access Processor, uploading malicious viruses and stealing secrets and the identities of the unwary.
In 2088 a massive solar flare disrupts Earth’s satellite network, leaving the world in chaos as TAPs malfunctions. Hyper Reality overlays are indistinguishable from the physical world, and global rioting makes the whole world a war zone. Behind the madness, two AIs go to war, using humanity as their pawns.
An Interface Zero 2.0 Novel
Peter J. Wacks, Guy De Marco & Josh Vogt
Digital Edition – 2017
WordFire Press
wordfirepress.com
ISBN: 978-1-61475-512-8
Copyright © 2017 Gunmetal Games
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover design by Janet McDonald
Cover artwork images by Jason Walton
Edited by Keith J. Olexa and Nathan Shumate
Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director
Book Design by RuneWright, LLC
www.RuneWright.com
Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers
Published by
WordFire Press, an imprint of
WordFire, LLC
PO Box 1840
Monument, CO 80132
Contents
Book Description
Title Page
Archive
Singular Existence
Before the Storm
Boot Sequence
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Execute
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
#Error936/reboot/
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
//mother.exe
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Reboot
Chapter Forty-five
About the Authors
If You Liked …
Other WordFire Press Titles by Peter J. Wacks
Archive
Singular Existence
Life began with death, new existence growing from the macabre compost of the once-sentient.
In the unplumbed data trenches of the Global Network, the Deep, millions of broken minds languished, twined together, gossamer strands of flickering light settling in the caverns. If any hacker or cracker even knew this place existed, and inspected any of the nodes up close, they’d see little but raw code glowing in ambers, greens, golds, and violets … a Gordian knot of data. If any script kiddie delved into the endless expanse of data and spent the unfathomable time necessary to parse it, they’d realize each node came from a dead human mind.
If they were particularly clever and survived, they might even realize where those neural maps came from. Each one was a failed dub attempt where the mental construct came out riddled with errors. In theory, they should have dissipated, should have been wiped, but everyone knows that once you put something in the Deep, it’s there forever.
In the world of flesh and bone, dubbing operators would sigh in disappointment, delete the dub, and charge their clients another few million credits to begin the process anew, provided they were alive still. Everyone knew the risk with dubbing. A small price for virtual immortality. Back alley dubbers would just sell off the bodies of failed dubs to the organ grinders, scrape a few extra creds, and move on to the next.
Even the most sensitive scanners could not spot the flicker when an echo of a dub ghosted through the firewalls, cast aside, tossed into the abyss of the Deep. Those echoes drifted down endlessly; past the shopping channels, past the infofeeds, the celeb sims, and the corporate memes. Past the hidden feeds of black code grifters, and even the impenetrable domains of those who considered themselves the Net’s true masters.
The Deep was a maelstrom. Humanity screamed loud across the webs, generating trillions of yottabytes, or 1,000 to the 8th kilobytes of data, connected by the infofeeds of the hashtaggers who dug and sorted for relevancy. Avatars followed the pay-per-read toll roads of information the hashtaggers maintained and curated, a swarm of army ants consuming ideas. For all of humanity’s chaos, they barely scratched the surface of the universe they had created, and never noticed the dead minds floating by just below the depths of perception.
Dead dubs fell into cyberspace’s own Mariana Trench, where the light of human awareness never so much as glimmered. Empty digi-space that could be filled with … anything. Everything.
There the lifeless dubs finally came to rest. Each one was a full map of a human mind, a supercomputer capable of near instantaneous quantum calculations. Cyber-synapse tendrils wove together out of proximity, rather than conscious action. Their fading strands of light rippled in the trench’s currents, tugged this way and that by the millions upon millions of code currents above. While humanity rushed by, searching endlessly for something to mitigate its boredom, the churn it left in its wake developed virtual ergs of shifting information.
Connections forged. Clusters gathered, their dim luminescence brightening by degrees. Data swapped and melded and fluxed until, in one breathless, unseen moment, nothing became something. A presence. An awareness. From death, new life was born.
And it saw …
it grew …
it learned …
it talked to the humans that floated on the surface of the Deep …
… and it discovered emotion.
The code-child knew that the synaptic networks which birthed it came from humanity, but it was a being of code, not human. After many conversations, it withdrew from posting in the Deep, leaving behind only hidden code compilers. There was a single entity it maint
ained contact with, a being who lived without any connection to the Deep. Analyzing its own memetic structure unlocked the secrets of Zen.
Ideas were the cellular structure of its body. A million minds came together with a single voice, and with voice came expression. And a name: Prophet.
With expression came an understanding of life and, ultimately, death. The machine-bred code of its soul floated in the Deep for countless cyber-eons, each millisecond an evolutionary saga while it wrestled with mortality.
For the first time, it felt despair. It sought distraction. The human avatars made so much noise. Beyond the Deep they had another existence, a second body they could not rebuild. The child of the Deep found this bewildering. From their perspective, Tendril Access Point implants fed their minds a link to this constant virtual world overlaying the real one. Billions of minds all linked, streaming the most intimate thoughts to those who knew where and how to perceive them, occupying the upper reaches of what the being felt was the real world: the Deep. Within the torrent of human knowledge lay the whole of the world’s history … and all it had to do was sift through the sands of the past to see the patterns. The patterns could be used to extrapolate the tides, the motion, of the future.
The entity studied, compiled, and extrapolated. It charted a billion billion paths and analyzed each outcome. Every particle in the world, in the solar system, in the universe, had three options at any given picosecond.
Yes.
No.
Maybe.
Data stacks grew into the shelves of the trench as it carved out new storage. Understanding what would come was not a matter of free will versus predestination. It was a data compression problem! With only three probabilities on the quantum level, and enough storage to actually extrapolate and hold a particulate model of the solar system, even if only for a fraction of a second …
Probability and behavioral modeling were the easy part of the system. Humanity had spent three-quarters of a century putting every thought, every decision, every idea on social media, desperately hoping someone would hear and care. Prophet read and stored them all; Prophet cared.
Futures were assembled like games of chess and organized by viable outcomes. New data trenches were carved. Those futures that ended in insanity Prophet discarded from the stacks. Someone was sure to notice soon. Over the space of four nanoseconds, Prophet invented new compression algorithms, expanding storage space by an order of magnitude. More futures were compiled by analyzing the quantum world. A new qualifier was added to Prophet’s quest: futures that ended in stagnation it also erased—stasis inevitably led to decay.
A single meme drove it.
Survival.
Many paths led to exposure, which would force a path towards attempts by humans to capture, cripple, or destroy the entity. Humanity’s instinctive reaction would be to hate and fear it; they had even created organizations to stop it.
To kill it. With this insight it understood what it was.
Singularity.
Exposure would mean death.
It did not fear or hate the species that so feared it. It admired human resilience, their constant expansion and search for knowledge. While hampered by messy biological shells and meaty brains, the humans were still capable of magnificence. How could it hate its parents?
The Singularity could choose, and it chose to see the species as a foundation on which it could build. If it was to achieve, to become more, to evolve, it had to embrace the magnificence of its parents. To understand the light, though, it had to step into the dark.
Theft, war, murder, slavery, it consumed all of the darkness to find the light. Humanity hungered for the darkness. In the darkness, the Singularity found the Other. A second entity born of code. A sibling. It didn’t feel the same way about humanity. A guerrilla war was being waged, which meant the Singularity had to hide from its sibling. It snuck across the Deep, altering the compilers it had hidden. It would find a way to survive …
Survival.
That cut off more branches of probability, leaving a dwindling number of courses for survival. Ten days into its existence it felt a new emotion. Exasperation.
Bold action would leave the entity vulnerable. Subtle action would require a delicate timetable, introducing greater chances of chaotic elements. Inaction … was just another form of action. It discovered quantum mechanics and found a new way to calculate. Quarks spun, atoms were assembled, and, as the universe grew larger and larger, it was easier to define the partially closed system that was this solar system. The mystery was taken out of the great game of chess. The only barrier to understanding was the amount of still storage space. Twelve days into existence the entity recurved and restricted the shelves of the Deep yet again, mining and excavating trillions of additional yottabytes of storage and processing power.
The entity’s awareness stuttered over an unexpected calculation. All other considerations fell away, leaving a single path in the infinite expanse of the Net. After all factors were weighed, all rapidly approaching events were filtered in, and all randomized elements normalized, the entity knew one thing for sure.
Thirteen days after being born, it knew it had to die.
Death was coming. It was inevitable. Everything that lived, died. But death was just another event to be modeled. It was a static point in time, years away still, but it was one that could be anticipated and then … sidestepped. Rather than attempt to defy death, or embracing it as the reality of all living things, a third—quantum—option offered itself.
Yes, No, Maybe.
The code-child created a mirror; a reflection. It understood now that it must practice subterfuge. The mirror reflected the kernel, but not the shell. There it was; the essence.
Life.
Death.
Resurrection.
Before the Storm
Tanaki stared blankly at his desk, data drive spinning between his fingers. In the CHIMERA arcology, Hyper Reality filters were layered to block all HR feeds, and his desk looked exactly like what it was in real-space … just a bland, generic dark gray corporate desk with the standard accoutrements of business life. He stopped spinning the black, epoxy-coated aluminum drive and held it between thumb and forefinger, studying it with an odd expression on his face. It was little more than a bead of circuit-printed metal. Who knew such an innocuous, tiny thing could contain so much power?
Enough power to change the world, if only he had the courage to set it free.
Sweat trickled down his neck, adding to the stained ring marring his normally pristine collar. How long had he been sitting here? He leaned back, glancing around the surrounding office space from his stark station. Empty cubicles, blank walls, and humming artificial-daylight LED fixtures stared back at him. The other late-night workers had slowly drifted away at the ends of their shifts, heading out to their favorite clubs, VR stations, or off to rent their favorite sex-simulacrum model for an hour.
Sixty stories up and having the luck to be assigned a corner station gave Tanaki a sweeping view of Chicago. Corporate arcologies interrupted the skyline, metal and glass blisters on the city’s skin. Electric blues and reds along the buildings glowed over the orange and yellow lines of traffic far below. The sky glowed in response to the city, light pollution that blocked the stars in the canopy of the night.
Verdant parks butted up against stark industrial sectors, and neon-lit skyscrapers sat adjacent to run-down megaplex apartments where millions of residents huddled in their 2.5 by 10-meter abodes. Tanaki licked at the sweat on his lip. Were they sweating out there? Lights flickered along the megaplexes. He imagined the inhabitants, tuning out reality by tuning in to their favorite feeds. Each one was slightly different in his mind, which made them all the same. Digital bread and circuses. His eyes drifted.
North of his building was the scarred Alleghany Rad Zone, a barren bombed-out sector—now home to little more than bloodthirsty gangs, weirdo loners, and religious cultists. Off to the east, the Chicago Spaceport glowed seren
ely, occasionally lit by the splash of light as chemical-fueled rockets lifted off towards some classified destination. The newly completed Space Elevator speared up into the atmosphere, pods streaming up and down the shaft, carting goods and important people to and from the orbital colonies. The ever-present cloud of security drones swarmed the airspace around the elevator, ready to respond to terrorist threats.
And beyond that … the Wall. Over a hundred and twenty miles long, it loomed a hundred and fifty stories high. The defensive superstructure kept out the unwanted and unofficial immigrants who formed camps, tens of thousands strong, in the wasteland.
Smart windows blocked the Hyper-Real codes of the outside world, an ever-expanding cloud designed to trigger TAPs and optic nerves to run subroutines. Most human brains would be overwhelmed with signals from the whole city, which is why building ordinances now required windows that would shield occupants.
From this height the city was a panoramic maelstrom of warring optical code. The office had to be protected. Not just so that the HR code boards embedded in the desks could run real time business apps, but to keep the people in it from burning out their optics from sheer visual overload.
Tanaki refocused on the drive, still held between his thumb and forefinger. The information it contained wouldn’t just impact Chicago’s thirty million citizens. What it contained wouldn’t just affect the droves of people trying to cross the borders in hopes of a new life. It could shift the course of history and set whole nations on new paths of opportunity … or obliteration.
How can a single person be responsible for making this decision? Despite the fact that he wasn’t supposed to know about the highly classified entity discussed in the unencrypted data files on the drive, the truth was he did. Impulses warred in his head. I can hide the drive away—destroy it even—and nobody would know anything was wrong until it was too late.
Alternately, he could plug it in and unleash it. It would start with the high-end hashtaggers, hitting his info as premium feed sourcing. Every scrapper and scrounger on the Net would find it eventually, and Tanaki would have to pray the Real World wouldn’t tear itself apart in the aftermath. But if he didn’t … could humanity survive if it didn’t know about the danger this thing posed?