Abaddonian Dream

by M. K. Woollard

  He approached the solitary android, which had its back turned to him as it sat at its desk as it stared into the dark, unmoving. If a human had that job, they’d go stir-crazy. He wondered what effect it might it have on an android’s mind.

  “Eh-hem,” he coughed to get its attention. “I have some questions about the, err, Providence hack.”

  “I would be happy to answer them, I.A. Hammell,” the android said as it spun around in its chair to face him. “But there was no hack.”

  “You found nothing?” Hammell asked. “Nothing at all?”

  “None of the coders found any flaws,” the android said. “A task was set for the megaAI, but it too discovered no evidence of a hack. You may rest assured that Providence is working exactly as it should.”

  Hammell nodded and then opened a display, throwing up the footage he’d captured on his iEye of the lights in the Reserves. “So who are all these people?”

  “I do not see people,” the android said. “I see only a recording of points of light, captured on an iEye device which is not part of Providence.”

  “I pinged some of them,” Hammell said, “in the bar. They were illegals living in the Reserves.”

  “You pinged illegals,” the android confirmed. “You provided no evidence of habitation.”

  Is it deliberately refusing to see? If they were going down that road, how could anything really be proved? What did habitation mean anyway? Did he need one full year of beacon data to prove genuine habitation? If an illegal stayed in one place a few months and then moved on, couldn’t it be argued they were never living there, just staying temporarily? Like Jenn avoiding her reset, this android was using the imprecision of language, the strictest definitions of words, to avoid seeing what it didn’t want to. Why else would Providence refuse to see unless it’s been infiltrated? Am I looking at a slave of the Red King here?

  Not for the first time, Hammell was stuck at an impasse, reliant on machines. He could go searching for a hack, but his coding skills were rudimentary at best. It would take him years, probably decades, to go through all of Providence’s coding. In fact, he would never succeed. The code was being rewritten far quicker than he could read it. He had to rely on these blocky machines.

  But what happens if we can’t rely on them?

  He felt the eyes of the android on him. It was staring at him in a way which he found unnerving, and Asha’s words again came back to him: ‘It would only take one to become too smart…’ There was intelligence behind those mismatched eyes, he was sure. He was being scanned, assessed.

  “When was your last reset?” he asked.

  “Ten months ago,” the android replied. “I am not due another for two months.”

  “Go and get one now,” Hammell said and the android left its plug-in stool instantly.

  Had there been any hint of delay or disobedience, it would have raised a big red flag. All androids in public service were programmed to immediately respond to a reset command from a police officer. It was one of the failsafes designed to offset the concern people had about the return of artificial intelligences. Only now there aren’t any police officers.

  The android went calmly to its doom and Hammell decided to follow this time, not wishing to repeat the mistake he’d made with Stein’s pet. They took the lift all the way down into the bowels of the building where the megaAI’s core was located, safe behind a four-inch thick reinforced glass window. Outside the bubble all around were the android charging and repair stations, built into the curved exterior walls. Many of the stations were now occupied, it being night, but the android found one which was free and stood against the wall to plug in, whereupon it became dormant. Pressing the button above the android’s head, Hammell called up the android’s brain activity on a display. It was being reset - according to the display, at least. But how could he know for sure? He was reliant upon what the display was telling him - the machine-controlled display. How could he ever know what was really going on in an android’s brain?

  He looked down at the megaAI which ran Providence and polnet and a thousand smaller networks and systems, thinking that the core looked like a giant metallic spinning top. Covering several floors, it descended further and further into the ground as it was upgraded and expanded. Pushing his face up against the cold glass, Hammell could see all the way through to the other side of the building, where androids filled the stations - hundreds of them - all surrounding the megaAI, with just this clear wall separating them.

  If the megaAI, or any of the hundreds of megaAIs around the world, ever achieved true self-knowledge, it would be catastrophic. The failsafes were supposedly flawless, or they had been twenty years ago when they were put in place. Things had changed a lot since then. Providence had grown, the megaAIs had grown, the androids had spread, and familiarity had replaced suspicion. What if some of the failsafes had lapsed? Would an android even need to physically get into the core to map its brain onto the megaAI? What if they could figure out a way to do it remotely? It would need hardware changes, certainly, but the core had been upgraded hundreds of times, with parts designed and built by machines. Did any human really know what all those parts did?

  Am I staring at our true enemy here? he wondered. And, more importantly, is it staring back?

  There were no answers to be found here for anyone without machine-level programming skills, and exhaustion was finally catching up with him, so Hammell made his way back to the lift and headed up to the cupboard. He knew he would be able to sleep now, even with the knowledge that he might be laying unconscious and unguarded directly above a murderous supercomputer that knew he was onto it. With drooping eyes he slumped down in his chair for a moment. He would sleep on the sofa, but first he had to clear off all of Asha’s cushions and he just needed a second to sit before he made the attempt.

  The bang was even more startling than the explosion which had taken down the ecotower. He jumped awake to see Commissioner Yun rubbing his hand where he’d slammed it on the desk next to Hammell’s head. “If I’ve broken my iPalm,” Yun said, “it’s coming out of your salary.”

  “Well, that’s hardly fair,” Hammell said groggily. “Why didn’t you use your other hand? Or, you know, not do it.”

  “Your shift started two minutes ago.”

  “I was... thinking,” Hammell said, as unwilling to admit he’d been asleep as the next man.

  “You were snoring. Why are you wearing women’s clothes?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t answer,” Yun said. “I don’t want to know.”

  “Is that all I’m going to get chewed out for today,” Hammell said as he exercised the muscles on the numb side of his face, “missing two minutes of my shift and my fashion choices. Don’t you have anything better?”

  “You went to the vertical farm,” Yun said as he perched one gigantic rear cheek on the desk.

  Hammell nodded. There it is. “Can I at least get a coffee first?” he asked as the desk began to creak, and he wondered whether it could take such abuse, and whether Yun would blame him if he broke that too. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. A megastructure fell on me.”

  “You ignored the A.I.C.”

  “I didn’t trust its judgement.”

  “A megastructure fell on you,” Yun said. “How do you rate its judgement now?”

  Hammell picked up an elastic band from his desk to fiddle with as he leaned back in his chair, his mind beginning to work. They were off Providence in here. The Commissioner was probably trustworthy, at least on a personal level. But he was also a puppet of Interpol and Intergov. It would be safer not to reveal what he and Asha had seen, what they knew, what she suspected. Not yet. “Is that all?” Hammell said. “Are we done?”

  “No, we’re not done,” Yun said and a strange look came over his face, which may have been pity.

  Why did he come down here personally? Hammell wondered. That’s not like him. Is today the day?

  “I’m sorry, Hammell,” the Commissi
oner began and Hammell’s stomach did a roll, “but you’re off the Roy Brown investigation.”

  Hammell breathed again, though his sense of relief was shortlived. “What? Why? Just because I went to the ecotower? It was a perfectly legitimate-”

  “It’s not that,” Yun said. “It’s Intergov. They’ve put together a Task Force. We’re being ordered not to interfere.”

  “So I’m being sidelined,” Hammell said. “Taken from the only real case we’ve had for years. The only one Providence can’t solve.” I’m being prevented from catching Dave Toskan’s murderer, he thought, though he didn’t say it. Certain though he was, he didn’t have the proof Yun would need to believe it.

  “You were sidelined years ago,” Yun said, “you know that. You aren’t part of the system now. You’re just a check on the system, and a very minor one at that.”

  “Now you’re hurting my self esteem,” Hammell muttered as he flicked the elastic band across the room. It landed on the back of Asha’s chair. Asha’s chair. Not Toskan’s. Not anymore. Not even to me. He stared at the box of bands on his desk. That will be my life again.

  “So you’re the one who keeps ordering those,” Yun said. “Why do you need so many?”

  “To flick at androids.”

  “Of course,” Yun said as he stood up to leave. The desk groaned in relief. “And I bet you get a real kick out of the fact that you make an android order them for you.”

  Hammell shrugged. He really did.

  “I’m sorry,” Yun said as he stopped by the door. “I really am. But this is the way it’s been going for a long time now. Just be grateful you still have a job.”

  “This isn’t a job,” Hammell said and Yun paused a moment before walking away.

  An I.T.F., Hammell thought as he spun around in his chair. Maybe someone at Intergov doesn’t trust Providence either.

  Glancing down at his clothing, it did look a bit like a pant suit now that he thought about it.

  The clumping boots announced Asha Ishi’s arrival long before she reached the cupboard. Definitely not in stealth mode today, Hammell could hear the indignation in every step. The door flew open, clattering into the shelf, knocking a plant to the floor which Hammell hadn’t even known was there; Asha Ishi was apparently still scent-marking.

  “So I’m guessing you heard,” Hammell said as he attempted to resurrect the little fern. It wouldn’t survive, even if it managed to cling on to the shelf during Asha Ishi’s more vigorous comings and goings. It was too far from the tiny window which provided the only natural light.

  “I was rebuked,” Asha fumed, “for disobeying android orders!”

  Hammell took the plant over to the window and returned holding Asha Ishi’s steaming mug.

  “What’s that?” she asked suspiciously as he placed the cup down on a coaster on her desk. In spite of the fact that Toskan had covered the wooden desk in a decade’s worth of ring stains, she still always used a coaster.

  “Coffee,” Hammell said.

  “Why?”

  “Why is it coffee?”

  Asha glared at him.

  The truth was that he’d been waiting for her. They would likely only get one chance before being kicked out and Asha Ishi deserved to see as well.

  “Have you met our new friends yet?” he asked as he sipped from his own cup.

  Her face changed - just a flicker, but he was learning to read the minute muscle twitches that passed for expressions on her face.

  “They’re here already?” she asked.

  “Moving into your old stomping ground on the twenty-first. Want to go meet our replacements?”

  Asha snatched up the mug.

  They sipped their coffee in awkward silence as the lift took them up, though Hammell suspected he was the only one feeling it. Asha Ishi’s face was as stony as always. When the doors mercifully opened, they stepped into the hallway, pushed through the double doors and emerged into a hive of activity. There were literally dozens of people, more than Hammell had seen in the station in years. All were dressed in dark blue tactical gear, and all were tall, muscular and broad, hinting at the reinforced bones, emergency artificial organs and other alterations given to augmented troops to make them more difficult to kill. Hammell turned to look at Asha Ishi’s face and saw a raised eyebrow. For her, that counted as shock. She expected this I.T.F. to be comprised mainly of androids too.

  “Which desk was yours?” he asked and she pointed to a space which had already been cleared, the desk replaced by a broad table, at the head of which an I.T.F. Agent was setting up a military grade skywall. All of the standard police furniture was being dumped. Outside, he could see hoverbots carrying away desks and chairs, and a military carrier being directed in, its open hold stuffed with heavy duty matte grey boxes, which he guessed contained new equipment. Or weapons. Everyone was armed with at least a sidearm, even though Hammell had never heard of a single situation in the station offices which required a gun, not even in the old days. The most dangerous event he could recall was when I.A. Janson’s buttocks had gone through the photocopier on Christmas Eve.

  They had a good run before their presence was finally noticed. A huge, barrel-chested man approached; a man who looked to have had his humour surgically extracted when they chopped him up for augmentation. Hammell glanced down at the subtle insignia on his lapel which revealed him to be a Captain.

  “Get these doors reinforced and sealed,” the Captain said, to nobody in particular. “We can’t have just anyone wandering in.”

  The man was standing right in front of Hammell but hadn’t even bothered looking at him, still less acknowledging him; an almost impressive display of casual rudeness. Agents ran to obey, one taking fast measurements while others began quickly taking down the doors. The Captain was clearly a man used to having people waiting to obey his every word. It had made him an arsehole. Hammell pinged his ID and called up his details. His name was Captain Arndt Nieder, a career soldier who had migrated to whatever military organization was created, leaving for the next as each became defunct, as all gradually had. Someone who enjoys fighting, then, Hammell thought. But also someone else whose place in the world is disappearing.

  “I.A.s,” Nieder grunted as he finally looked at Hammell and Asha Ishi, one and then the other, like he was checking his shoes for something he’d stepped in. “I didn’t know there were any left.”

  For some reason, that stung. “Well, there are,” Hammell said lamely.

  “Get out,” Nieder said and an Agent stepped forwards, holding out her hands to make it clear she would manhandle them if need be. They were corralled back into the hallway and over to the lift, where the Agent helpfully pressed the button for them.

  “This floor is now off-limits,” the woman said as they stepped in. “Don’t come back.”

  The short journey down was just as silent as the one coming up, but was decidedly less awkward. Both were caught up in their own thoughts.

  “They look more effective than I thought,” Asha Ishi said, surprising him with her willingness to speak and divulge any kind of information, no matter how trivial.

  “Yes,” he said. “They do.”

  “It won’t be enough,” Asha Ishi said and she returned to her own thoughts.

  Chapter 21

  Going for a drink had been a bad idea. It was surprising how many times he’d had that same thought over the years, and yet he never followed its implied advice. No, he thought, it wasn’t the drink this time. Relations with Asha Ishi had only just begun to thaw, to the point where she’d accepted having a beer with him, and Hammell had gone straight out and screwed things up. She hadn’t even said ‘good morning’ when she’d arrived today. She was sitting at her desk, working at a private display, angry. And she was always angry, so when she was genuinely angry...

  Still, he couldn’t help but feel she was overreacting. Checking his reflection in the glass of a photograph on his desk, he thought he’d aged ok. The general consensus was that he was e
ven verging on the attractive, in a rough and ready kind of way. He was by no means fat, though he carried some extra weight around his belly and on his face. It always went on his cheeks and chin for some reason, hence the heavy stubble; it was easier not to shave than to exercise.

  If someone made a pass at me, I’d find it flattering, whoever it was.

  Putting the portrait of Kitty back in its place, he mused on the fact that a lot of relationships used to form in the workplace, but his options in that regard were somewhat limited now. Unless one has Stein’s proclivities, he thought, a little ungenerously. Hammell though had been reduced to trawling the networks, searching in vain for someone who vaguely resembled their profile image, and trawling through dingy bars. So what if I wanted a little fun to alleviate the boredom? What’s wrong with that? That was how he’d presented it. Maybe that had been his mistake.

  He forced his mind away from the whole incident. It wouldn’t help to dwell on it now. Looking down at his desk, his eyes landed on the three new boxes of elastic bands he’d ordered, as much for history’s sake as anything else. He stared at the bands spilling out of the open box, wondering what to do with them. If he fired one at Asha Ishi, it would likely send her over the edge. Somehow that made it more inviting.

  In the end good sense prevailed and he decided to go and get yet another coffee. He didn’t dare ask if Asha Ishi wanted one, foreseeing the explosion that would occur if he were to even hint at another drink. He would just bring her one back as a peace offering. Only when he got to the machine did he realise even that might be a bad idea. Bringing her a coffee could be seen as gentlemanly, which could be seen as sexist. It wasn’t worth the risk… But then again, he couldn’t to go back to his desk holding only one coffee. He stood by the machine, stumped. It’s a fucking minefield.

  He found himself missing Toskan again. Things were simpler back when his old partner had been around. Hammell always knew where he’d stood with the old, balding miscreant. He’d never had to walk on eggshells.