Social Faith

by Damien Boyes

  We used the Service Override on the customer alerts to the unit and opened it up, found organic precursors, scafing supplies, a pallet of Cortexes that traced back to a shipment stolen out of a New Jersey freight yard six weeks ago. We closed it back up and, after reporting to the Inspector and summoning a TAC team, following procedure to the dot, had the clerk notify the contact name on the rental contract to tell them a break-in had taken place, a number of units had been compromised, and they should come check to see if anything was missing.

  Then we set up to wait. The TAC teams in empty units on either side of the hall. Yellowbird in the manager’s office, ready to alert the team when the targets arrived. And me in the cypher’s unit, sitting in the dark, perched on a barrel of microgel.

  I check my weapon again, make sure it’s still engaged, still set to stun. If at all possible I want to take them alive, and before they can set the self-destructs. Not that there’s anything we can do to stop them. Even with their bodies completely frozen by the neuraliser, their Cortexes will keep right on working. We could cut their heads off and they’d still be able to trigger their failsafes.

  Hell, I could hit them with an EMP slug and still—

  My IMP chimes a call through in my head. It’s xYvYx. I consider letting the IMP deal with him, but switch over to Gibson and let him in, voice only.

  “Yo, Gibson,” he starts, his voice already grating. “Where the fuck you been?”

  “Busy,” I say in my head. My voice sounds odd, like a recording, higher pitched than what I hear coming out of my mouth.

  “Fuck that, we had a deal—”

  “Yes we did,” I reply and instruct my IMP to drop the call. I don’t have time for him.

  The IMP comes back, xYvYx again.

  “What?” I say.

  “Whoa, don’t dis me, Ok?” he almost sounds contrite. “I saw your message to Eka. Lots of people did. That shit’s already hit legendary status, you calling him out like that. That was you, wasn’t it?”

  I don’t respond.

  “I knew it,” he says. “Look, man, I can help.”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “Yes, you do. You just don’t know it. Tell me what you know about Eka, and I’ll help you find him. That’s what you want, right? To find Eka?”

  “And what do you get out of it?”

  “I don’t want shit, man. That’s the thing. Not anymore. All I want is to be the guy that finds him. You know what kind of rep that’ll get me?”

  “No chance. Even if I did want to find him, letting you get to him first wouldn’t do me any good, would it?”

  “I tell you what, you got my word, anything I find, I give to you,” he says, his voice sweet with sincerity.

  “Your word?” I don’t trust him, but I’m close to finding Eka, I know it. xY’s been helpful so far. I’ll use him as long as I can, but not without guarantees.

  “Shit, man, what else do you want?”

  “Your word won’t do it,” I think back to him. “I want to know who you are. Who you really are. That way I know where to go if I have a problem.”

  “Uh uh, not going to happen.”

  One of the security feeds in my head shows a car pulling into the small Storage Hutt parking lot. Two cyphers: one with a shaved head under a toque, the other with a pixie cut. They get out and make their way inside.

  Yellowbird patches through, “It’s a go. All teams ready on my mark.”

  “Roger,” I confirm to Yellowbird. The TAC unit signals ready just after. I switch back to xYvYx, “I’ve got to go—”

  “No, wait—fine,” xYvYx responds. A second later a message pops up, linked to a dox for someone named Darien Cole. His address is in Colorado.

  “That’s you?”

  “Yeah,” he responds, quietly.

  I read the dox in the seconds between the cyphers climbing the stairs, and as I do, things snap into place. xYvYx—Darien Cole—knew Amit Johari. Knew Eka before he was Eka. That’s why he was so freaked out back in his virt. They have a history.

  Once upon a time Darien Cole was a prodigy. Won nine-straight Prime Coder Championships and lost devastatingly and convincingly in his senior year to Amit Johari, the kid who entered and in his junior year a posted the first perfect score ever. The kid would go on to become Eka.

  xYvYx’s held a grudge for all these years. Amit took his title away. His legacy as the first ten-time Prime Coder Champion, snatched away by an autistic kid on his first try.

  Cole’s life fell to pieces afterwards. He transitioned from coding to become the bad boy of the eGaming circuit and lived high there for a while, but flamed out a soon after in a controversial Elympic duping scandal. Other than the odd retrospective piece, he hasn’t been heard from in years.

  He’s motivated to find Eka too, more than simply investigating oddities in the link.

  I can use him.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I say and cut off. He tries calling back and I throw up a temporary blanket on public comms. Let him stew. I’ll deal with him later. More important things are about to happen.

  Outside the unit there’s a quick series of beeps and the interior motor whirrs to life as the door slides up.

  “Now,” Yellowbird signals. “Go, go, go.”

  I step out around the barrel and raise my weapon. Before the light from the hallway has hit my face the cyphers are already retreating, shifting their weight to the balls of their feet, muscles tensing to dash back the way they came. No surprise, just reaction.

  Warning barks echo down the hall as the TAC units swarm into the narrow hallway, blocking the path of retreat. The cyphers swivel to break in the other direction, but so slowly it’s like they’re barely moving at all. I wonder if this is how they see us too?

  I raise my weapon, squeeze the firing stud, lance out twin green beams that squarely strike the cypher nearest me, and fire every muscle in her body. She freezes, loses her balance and starts the long fall to the floor.

  The second cypher manages to get out of the unit doorway but before her companion lands three sharp retorts of automatic gunfire tell me she didn’t get far.

  I turn the stun back on the first cypher and fire again, take a step as my gun charges, then hit her once more. The first muffled burst comes before I’m out of the unit, the sound stretched out by the Revv like a bass line. A cypher’s Cortex detonating. The second comes immediately after.

  Fuck.

  I kneel in the unit’s doorway, grab the stunned cypher by her hair and lift her head. A thin trickle of blood seeps from her ear. Her pupils are massive. This was our one lead, our best chance to get to Xiao. Gone.

  “Fuck,” I yell and slam her head against the concrete floor. It hits with a slick crunch, but that’s not enough. I raise and slam it again, feel the skull flatten, lift it once more, blood streaming from the split scalp, pooling, shiny in the bright hallway.

  The TAC officers are watching me. Judging.

  I’m going to get a reputation. Chaddah will have me off the case.

  I’ve got to keep it together.

  I let the cypher go and her head hits the floor with a wet thud, her blood a Rorschach pattern around her skull. It looks like an accusation.

  I stand and holster my weapon, straighten my jacket, stare down the TAC lead until she looks away.

  “Tell Omondi he’s on,” I say to Yellowbird in my head. “Have him run the sniffers until he finds something.”

  I stalk downstairs, away from the glances, and compose a message to Darien Cole in my head, telling him everything I know about Eka.

  StatUS-ID

  [fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

  SysDate

  [19:54:20. Sunday, January 19, 2059]

  I roll with Ankur along the city streets with the windows blacked-out for a few moments and then descend into the Gardiner tunnel and cruise at highway speeds toward Xiao’s secret location.

  After twenty minutes sitting in silence with the man who destroyed
my life, I finally ask the question we’ve both been avoiding.

  “Do you remember killing us?”

  He looks at me, blinks. Presses his lips together, then nods and says, “Vividly. And like it happened to someone else at the same time.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  He takes a breath, swallows. “It was not my intention.”

  I feel my anger starting to rise once again. The shyft’s still in my pocket. I could still use it. “So you’re telling me it was an accident?”

  “No,” he says with a wan smile. “I am wholly and singly responsible for what happened.”

  Even as he says it, I know it’s true and not at the same time. He’s lost more time than I have. We’re right back in the moments after the accident. As far as I’m concerned I just lost my wife and he only just killed us. We’re both raw.

  “Can you tell me why?” I say, my anger waning.

  “Do you know you met my parents once?” he says, sees me about to call him out for changing the subject but raises finger before I can. “When I was three I was diagnosed as autistic and lived that way for twenty-four years, knowing I was different, but not unhappy. I was non-verbal, but I had friends—in my head. Numbers were living things to me. Each had its own distinct appearance and personality. I could close my eyes and step into a wholly realized world, a world as real as this one. My own internal headspace.” His lower lip twitches. “When I reached neural maturity, after agonizing about it for years, my parents put me through the restoration process, with an added step designed to cure me. To reset the parts of my brain that made me different. It was a success, it loosened a tightness in my head I’d never known existed, but in the process it destroyed my friends. Cut me off from them forever. It killed the person I was and made me into someone I didn’t know.”

  “Into Eka?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, with a shake of his head. “Not at first. The restoration process sterilized the living world in my head, but left my skill with the language of computers intact. It did not take long until I turned that skill inward, and began to experiment with the nascent tools of the Rithmist culture. To find a way to make me the way I was.”

  “Did you ever succeed?”

  “I did not,” he answers. “I had a friend, his name was Woodrow. He was helping me. I progressed quickly in a very short time. My rithm was growing exponentially. I thought we had perfected a shyft to bring my rithm back in line with the person I once was.”

  “But you were wrong.”

  “I killed him moments after I injected it into my Cortex.”

  Listening to him talk, sitting side-by-side like this, makes me feel like a priest taking confession. “Why’d you do that?”

  “I didn’t know I was. My head was in rebellion, my rithm in flux. The numbers that had once been my friends rose up against me as horrors. I was terrified, convinced Woodrow was their agent sent to erase me.” His breath catches and his jaw tightens. “I encountered you shortly after, purely by accident, as I attempted to flee the terrors crowding my head.”

  Ankur isn’t a monster. Even Eka, as powerful as he became—I don’t know if he was one either. He was traumatised, attempted to heal himself in the only way he knew how. He played with his mind and it turned him into something he couldn’t have foreseen.

  Shit. He’s making me empathize with him. “You remember all this?”

  He looks away, nods. “This incarnation of myself stems from a sync only days afterwards. After I abandoned the van. After I cleansed my actions from the link. I am all too aware of the lives I destroyed. I am often overwhelmed by the knowledge, as I’m sure Eka was. While I can’t condone his actions—walling off his rithm to numb the pain—I understand them all too well. I wrote the shyft I gave you because more than once I’ve wanted my pain to end.” He rubs his hands along his legs, gently, takes a breath and turns back toward me. “I’ve progressed past the point of wanting to end my life, but I still leave the final decision up to you. All I can do now is attempt to make amends, and to do as much as I can to offset the evil I caused.”

  He sounds sincere. Like someone who got caught up in something noble that went out of control. Something that consumed him. Turned him into someone he didn’t recognize.

  Sounds familiar.

  “That’s why you’re helping Xiao?”

  “Yes,” he says. “With Xiao. And with the Eka pattern, we will liberate the minds of millions.”

  StatUS-ID

  [a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]

  SysDate

  [07:01:03. Friday, May 3, 2058]

  “If you’d all quiet down,” Omondi says to the already quiet room, “we can get started.”

  Omondi’s at the front of the briefing room, taller than everyone else, rimless spekz low on his nose, tab pulled to a point. There’s a long black weapons case on the floor next to him.

  He’s found something on one of the cyphers.

  Most of the Reszo Squad is present. The Inspector, the on-duty detectives and techs, a few of the more senior constables, TAC, Yellowbird. Chaddah’s already been filled in, watches from the front row.

  Standards still hasn’t sent any replacement agents.

  Omondi waits another moment, then begins. “We’ve finished examining the Cortexes recovered from the Storage Hutt. Like the cyphers at the drone yard, the internal fail-safes caused significant damage—not to mention the additional destruction immediately afterward—” looks sideways at me, continues. “One of the Cortexes was a write-off, same as before. But the other one—we got lucky. Detective Gage’s repeated and wholly unnecessary use of the neuraliser interfered with the detonator, and some of that Cortex survived. Left a lot of juicy pieces intact. Enough we could read them.”

  A murmur runs through the room. I sit up a little higher. No one’s ever seen inside an Ancestor’s head before. No one knows what goes on inside the Yuanfen.

  “I thought that would get your attention,” he pauses for effect. “While most of what we recovered were, sadly, neural processing routines—one from ventral temporal cortex relating to determining face-selection, another in the lateral intraparietal region, instructions for the oculomotor system controlling and monitoring eye—”

  The Inspector clears her throat.

  “Right,” he says, looking at her and then back out to his captive audience. “Those weren’t much use, but the others…well—I made you a highlight reel.”

  He waves his tab. The room lights dim and the livewall behind him resolves into a fuzzy, low-angle, first-person view of a woman’s backside as she presses through a seemingly endless field of thick, leafy stalks topped by a spray of yellow-orange flowers—some kind of biofuel crop. She’s wearing a loose green one-piece and sandals, with a woven basket strapped to her back, and every so often she stops, cuts free a flower, reaches around and drops it in the basket.

  Ahead of her, barely visible above the flowers, the yellowed tips of turbine blades hum slowly in the thick brown sky. Mountains are hazy smudges in the distance. The air is still. A low persistent drone the only noise, other than the woman’s shuffled footsteps, and the intermittent snip of her shears.

  Suddenly the view skews, dips sharply to show young hands dropping a kid-sized shovel in the soft, wet dirt.

  The woman half turns, flashes a smile at the person following, opens her mouth to say something—and then it’s over.

  The AMP’s voice fills the briefing room. “We found this memory associated with pleasant smells of the dirt and the woman. Feelings of comfort and safety with a sharp overlay of nostalgia. I’ve set on sourcing the location and trying to identify the woman. I regret we've had no results yet.”

  Omondi flicks his tab again. A new memory jerks to life, but this time the vision is distorted, blue and jagged at the edges as though through a migraine. A grey-shrouded figure stands ahead, but the floor is curved upward, like inside a huge cylinder, enough to see more shrouds ahead of that one. Ten, maybe more, curving up i
n a line toward a large rectangular mirror.

  On each side, extended to the limits of the memory’s resolution, more lines of indistinct, grey forms wait for their turn in front of their mirrors. They all stand patiently, like cowed wraiths.

  The view swings around to take in the room. It’s eternal, stretching off endlessly in each direction like the inside of a giant straw. A checkerboard floor curves up to an absence of walls or ceiling. Light comes from everywhere and nowhere.

  Behind us, a constant trickle of new arrivals appear through wisps of red velvet curtain that dissipate as they enter, take in the room, and join a line.

  The room is silent, save for the rhythmic echo of names as they’re called out in Chinese, one by one.

  I twitch as a dilute sense of dread catches me off-guard.

  The names are announced in a precise beat, a roll-call of the dead. The figures step to the mirrors in a constant flow, answering the call to judgement like water drops marking time, and face their fates.

  I don’t know what the mirrors show them. Figures fall to their knees and weep—some in sadness, some in joy. Most move up and confront their fate with dignity, or at least resignation, and when their judgement is complete walk into the mirror and vanish.

  Those who refuse rage against invisible bonds until the mirror sprouts reflective tendrils and drags them in, screaming.

  The vision lasts only a few moments, and then cuts hard to black.

  “Emotional tags here trend overwhelmingly anxious,” projects the AMP. No shit. “No associated smells. Only pervasive, acute anxiety.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Omondi says, beaming from the front of the room. “As far as I know, you are the first to ever witnesses to the inside of the Yuanfen. Well, second,” Omondi says, his grin wide. “I saw it earlier.”

  “Samuel,” Chaddah says. “Explain what are we seeing.”

  “Exact details are scarce, believe me, but in the Yuanfen, as with all of Fate’s virtual immortality retirement programs, the Ancestors live in a digital world. Like ours, but heightened. A game, basically. Where Fate trains their minds to be rented out.” He leans over on the podium, casual. “As far as I can figure out, when they first join there’s a kind of mental examination. Each rithm is analysed, its pros and cons charted—if it’s good at sports or math or sucking up. If it should be a neurosurgeon or an engineer or a plumber or a nanny, and a personalised campaign created. A customized life, filled with events designed to nudge each and every Ancestor toward their greatest usefulness, whatever that might happen to be, whether they want it or not.”