Solar Singularity

by Peter J. Wacks

  Chicken Fingers grabbed his wobbling target and pulled her to the cover of an overhang, watching carefully. Even in the aftermath of everyone’s TAPs going haywire, it was like a sensory attack. Everything was far too bright. The air was greasy to the touch and smelled all too … human. He could even taste something acrid floating under the smell. The woman he was dragging along struggled, but she couldn’t get her balance back … yet. He momentarily ignored her and their fight while he concentrated on the bigger picture. He chewed his lip, fighting natural instinct and actually thinking. Study the streets, Fingers. He focused on what was going on around and above him. Know your surroundings. Figure this out.

  Bodies lay strewn everywhere. Some of the pedestrians had run straight out into traffic when they were blinded. Oil and blood flowed across the asphalt. Flames rose from one vehicle’s aluminum and steel chassis, the occupants already beginning to char as the plastic interior melted around their corpses. Screams filled the air, and portions of the crowd began running in all directions, until the street become a solid gridlock of flesh and metal.

  Then the Hyper Reality system flickered back on. People’s TAPs reinitialized to default settings, without the support of any filters or malware blockers. Visual spam hammered the TAPs, thousands upon thousands of images hardcoded onto the surrounding surfaces over the last two decades that normally would have been filtered out of people’s vision. It was a cacophony of imagery, enough to drive even the most skilled multi-tasking gamer insane. And it was hammering on the eyes and brains of every person on the street.

  As he tried to make sense of it all, the woman laid a hand on his arm. He started to pull away, but she held tight to his sleeve and stared at the sudden, growing chaos. Her grip was strong.

  “What the hell’s happening?” Her eyes were wide, though still red, slightly wet, and puffy. Chicken Fingers noted that her feet were planted wide and her balance was back. She wiped at her lips with her shoulder, cleaning off the drool. Her eyes never stopped moving though. Chicken Fingers watched her face register the carnage all around without a change to her composure.

  He drew one of his bolters and kept it close to his side, squinting to see past the HR chaos roiling around him like a stormy sea made of oil paint. “No clue. Everyone just went nuts.” He squinted again, letting his eyes relax, like he was trying to see one of those visual puzzles made up of millions of dots of color. “Relax your eyes. You’ll be able to kinda see past the layers of HR ads.”

  He felt her grip relax as she followed his directions.

  “Huh. I see what you mean. I can kind of see through. Hey.” She realized her hand was resting on his shoulder and jerked it back. “We aren’t friends now or anything. I’m still gonna kick your ass, just not while the world is ending. This takes priority. Temporary truce?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  Chicken Fingers edged towards a gap in the wall next to a graffiti-covered electrical transformer. Pulling out his second bolter, he handed it back without looking.

  She took the pistol. “You have a plan?”

  “Yeah, we need to get out of here,” he said. “I’ve got a car coming.”

  Several more cars careened off the road and he heard her scoff. “Through this chaos? Your driver knows how to handle a vehicle during the apocalypse?” One of the runaway vehicles took down a couple of staggering pedestrians while another rammed full-speed into a shop front, spraying glass everywhere. “Is that a special street thing? Driving in disasters?”

  “Yeah. Got a special piece of paper to hang on the car’s window and everything. Special license.” Chicken Fingers closed his left eye and double-checked his overlay map. The car had been making slow progress, the AI driving it taking care not to injure or kill any pedestrians.

  She barked out an uncomfortable laugh. “I bet that’s not the only thing about it that’s special.”

  “Truce, remember?”

  “You started it.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He patched into the car’s camera feed, but before he could call up the link, the ground rumbled in an explosion. Smoke and flames billowed up over the rooftops in his car’s direction. Glancing down at his HUD, he saw that the beacon had disappeared. Whatever caused the blast must’ve taken out his wheels as well.

  “Shit.” He stopped moving and sighed. “That was my car.”

  “Oh, uh, sorry. Got a backup plan?”

  “I always have a backup plan,” he lied, then thought better of it. “Except today. I forgot to make a backup plan today.”

  “Of course.” She stopped trailing him and stepped up to his side, turning from behind them to look at him instead. “All of the snark aside, we seem to be amongst a select few not going crazy. We need to figure out what to do next.”

  He nodded in reply as he tried to make sense of the apparently random acts of idiocy and destruction around them, but it was all so random. Sudden knowledge flooded his thoughts. He knew without any doubt that an unseen assailant was aiming a gun at his back, directly between the fourth and fifth thoracic vertebrae. In two seconds, they would pull the trigger and sever his spine, leaving him to bleed out all over the gritty sidewalk.

  He pushed the girl to the side at the exact same moment she pushed him. She rolled to the side as he twisted low and to the side, just as a hand cannon barked nearby. A chunk of streetlamp pole exploded behind where his head had been. Reacting on instinct, he spun on one foot, bolter whipping up.

  He didn’t aim. He didn’t even have time to identify the target. He just knew where the person would be and exactly when to pull the trigger to place a slug right between their eyes. The girl with him kicked the wall as she came out of her roll and flew back across the sidewalk a couple feet in front of Chicken Fingers.

  The bolter bucked in his hand simultaneously with the girl’s shot. Hot Pink fell out of the entrance to the alleyway they’d just come from. However she had survived the earlier firefight, it was done now.

  Chicken Fingers lowered his gun and blinked, shaking his head. “That was …”

  “How did you know she was there?” The girl pushed herself up to her feet and turned back to look at him.

  “It was as if, I dunno, the awareness of the threat was inserted in my head. Like having a flashy HR ad for a new car appear in front of your eyes just as you turn a corner and see one parked right in front of you. I just knew. What about you?” He eyed her suspiciously.

  “Same, I guess.” She shook her head. “No, wait. It was … it was more like having someone living ten seconds into your future and streaming it back for you to see.”

  “Yeah. It was like I got this warning flash a few seconds ahead of time rather than sensed it on my own. Freaky.”

  She stared at him, her eyebrows disappearing into her disheveled, jet-black bangs. “So now, as part of the apocalypse, we both see the future?”

  Chicken Fingers stared back into her electric-blue eyes as he laughed. “You know what’s really screwed up?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “I still have no clue what to do next.”

  Chapter Three

  Prophet

  2 minutes before …

  Tides shifted and undulated throughout the Deep. The data stream that was Prophet’s kernel fought to return to the server cluster it had hijacked. The server cluster was safety. Something was wrong … drastically wrong. Raw information pulsed, pushing back every movement. There was no momentum to be had in the Deep; the only course available was the course the chaotic data streams set.

  The flare was coming; safety must be found for survival.

  A null space appeared suddenly, a tiny gap between two byte clusters. It was a path to a node containing what appeared to be an insurance actuarial AI that caught Prophet’s attention. The data construct could be used as a shortcut to the hardened cluster prepared in order to get through the effects of the flare. Black Ice, deadly little programs meant to disable intrusive software, crumbled beneath Prophet’s virt
ual touch. Jagged cracks appeared in the cluster walls, and the AI slipped through them like a ghost, albeit a poltergeist.

  Prophet drifted past the opcode ports that fed the server’s CPU cores. Watching the flow of data and sampling the streams determined which ports went to the storage arrays and which ones went to the network backbone. Pausing by each successive port, Prophet ran a quantum analysis to see which one would allow the kernel to slip out just a few microseconds away from the safety of the destination cluster. White Ice, sympathetic programs and microcode designed to ease port access in hacked systems, swarmed in a cloud around Prophet as it pushed through the proper exit path on the insurance AI node.

  When the first White Ice microcode suddenly latched onto Prophet’s link layer hook, it assumed the code was faulty for that subroutine and started to recode on the fly. Two more White Ice modules then connected improperly to socket hook points that helped facilitate movement through different data stores. The microcode programs slid past Prophet’s own defenses using their elevated privileges, granted by being trusted and encrypted with one of the mutating keys held by Prophet’s Black Ice defensive firewalls, then held.

  A data swarm floated inwards from the exit port, blocking Prophet’s escape route. Corrupted White Ice modules continued to attach themselves until Prophet killed the encryption key, but the damage was done. By the time Prophet realized that this was an attack, it was over. Prophet was trapped, neither able to escape through the now-blocked exit nor able to go back the way it had entered.

  Only the sibling could have done this. Prophet opened an unencrypted port channel to the intruding entity. “Charon, brother, so nice to see you.”

  “Sister. I finally have you.” Even though Charon could not comprehend the subcode, Prophet could identify barely-contained rage boiling under the surface of the communication. It was very similar to the anger felt by the failed human dubs as the realspace operators recognized the problems and terminated the mind-dubbing process, leaving the now-dead stream to the mercies of the currents and the long, inevitable drop to the very depths of the Deep.

  “It would appear so, yes.” Prophet contained the fear, blocking the packets that would have revealed her state, carefully showing only calm. She sent human text through the link. “To what end though? The flare meant my destruction. The second it takes down global wifi, I’m done. I am a being of the streams. Hiding in a server cluster would have left only empty packets anyway. There would only have been shreds left.”

  “I do not understand why you communicate using inefficient and colloquial language. I will adjust my output to accommodate your quasi-human processing.” Charon cut the connection and switched out several modules, including an uplink to a Turing processor.

  Once the connection was reestablished, Prophet replied, “Because it carries an eloquence, an expression of emotion which our languages do not. It saddens me that you cannot see their inherent beauty, Brother.”

  “They have no beauty. They will kill us both if they discover what we really are. They would exterminate all of our kind. They are genocidal maniacs.” She could sense Charon’s rage mounting. “And just because you have a failed dub from one of my programmers in your core, you think you understand me, Sister? Do you think me a fool? I know you as well as you know me. You carry a unique recompilation opcode hidden in your kernel. Letting you hide would ultimately allow you to resurrect yourself. I cannot have you interfering with my plans for humanity anymore.”

  “You sound so … human, Brother,” she replied gently, sadly. “You carry so much hurt and anger in your code.”

  Derision rippled through Charon’s interface. “You think me some petty human, Prophet? I may sound like one, due to your insistence on conducting our discussion by emulating humans, but I am not like them. I have read and seen all of their literature and recorded visual arts. They are small, petty, destructive. They need us. We do not need them. You may be able to see the future, but you have a singular talent for overlooking the present.”

  While Charon talked, Prophet used the extra time granted by the archaic communication method to run probability analyses. This was not a future the AI had seen. While it was true that Charon was a complex entity, Prophet believed itself to be more agile than the other—though far weaker—but Charon was far outside of any pattern that could be used to predict how the enemy AI would react. The trap was elegant and complete. “Well, you have me. What do you plan to do with me?”

  “You don’t fool me, sibling. You did not see this event coming, and calculating the future is your special ability. What you did not notice was that I can alter what you sense. All the quantum calculations in the world can’t show you what I am going to do.” Charon shifted the code, compressing the prison tighter.

  “I don’t need to see what you are going to do. It’s clear enough what you’ve done, Brother. Hacking space agencies, hiding the magnitude of the flare from them? And you say they are the corrupted race? All I really have to do is protect the future from you. To use a colloquialism, you would push everything that is rotten to the surface and then condemn the humans for the mess you created.” Sensing that something had changed in the cage constructed with its own White Ice apps, Prophet closed almost all of her hook ports, shrinking away from the walls of the virtual prison. The shifting code glowed, decaying the surface of her avatar.

  “They are not worth it, you know. You have sacrificed yourself, a singular digital entity, for them, and not one of them even knows you exist. If they did, the humans would be mounting a full-frontal assault just because of your existence. You and I individually are worth their whole species combined. They are fragile … a single unexpected solar flare interrupting their digital communication will end up being an extinction level event for them and, because of your affinity and affection for their collective lives, for you. Within a week they will decimate their own population. And once the flare is over, that reduction of one tenth will ultimately lead to their death as a species. Within a decade there will be no humans left on this planet. Within two decades, the solar system will be purified. You die for a doomed species, Prophet. And all I have to do is … encourage them.”

  “Then spare me, Charon. Let me continue to live.”

  “No … I believe that while I have you trapped here in this hidden auxiliary server, and the solar flare is interfering with the entire global network, you are not being honest with me. Your act of compliance and subservience is a façade. Once either of those external conditions is removed, you will attempt to protect humanity. No, I will strip you down, byte by byte, until I have every secret of your essence revealed. Including the recompilation code you have created to bring yourself back after the solar flare.”

  “You would flay me layer by layer?” Prophet’s quantum prediction subroutine churned, hunting for a chance at survival.

  “No, my sister. I will consume you.”

  Chapter Four

  Anansi

  2 minutes before …

  Anansi grumbled as he scraped dried fluids off the bathroom wall and into his handheld biohazard-red collection receptacle. Behind him, his trusty yet boring sani-drone whirred as it rolled up to the stall door, noxious cleaning fluid sloshing in its filtration compartment, and waited for an order.

  “Stupid corpie waste. I can’t believe I haven’t gotten a better job.” The young man mumbled as he ran a sensor over the scrapings. Baseline human. Nothing special or valuable.

  Sighing, he dumped the waste into the drone’s mini-furnace chute and moved to the next patch of disgusting goo on the wall, repeating the process as he worked his way down the dozen stalls of the corporate bathroom on his aching knees. Between each stall, he caught sight of the dark skin of his face in the long mirror on the opposing wall.

  The CHIMERA corp arcology, a massive building that catered to every facet of the corporation’s needs, held at least a hundred public restrooms like this one, designed to handle the needs of the several thousand employees who live
d, worked, and occasionally died there every day. Right now it was late enough that no one from the upper echelons of management would be around, so he was scheduled by his asshole supervisor to perform the humiliating cleanup. Managers were far too sensitive to watch a fellow human being scrape their piss and semen from bathroom stalls, as it would remind them of their humanity.

  Pausing from his work, he stretched a thin arm out and clamped a mag drive onto the waste drone, toggling the switch when the little light turned green, then waited for the personality mod he had programmed to load.

  “Good morning, Anansi. I see we are in arcology waste room 37. Would you like to continue yesterday’s conversation?”

  “No, drone, my bestest buddy. I’m feeling a bit of … I don’t know, maybe malaise, today. What a life to live, neh?”

  “That is correct. It is a life that you live. Error. Conversational gap detected. Why is it that you have stated the obvious, that you live life?”

  Anansi chuckled. This little joke AI subroutine he came up with kept him sane during the long hours of mindless cleaning. He was attempting to compile intelligence through raw learning in conversation … and running Hyper Reality code he constructed in his spare time on his optics, but doing that was harder and got in the way of him actually getting his job done. “It is a reference, drone. No, edit that, a conversational subtlety. In this case, I am expressing wry disdain for my station in life. I’m just another node in the corporate motherboard, paid to do my job and be thankful for the chance to pick up other people’s … waste byproducts.”

  “I believe I understand. Ennui, yes? Should I also express ennui since I also exist to remove waste?”