Ten Gentle Opportunities

by Duntemann, Jeff

  Atop that torrent of black hair was a silver tiara, with copper highlights and a blue gem at its center.

  On the rack beneath the figure was a caption:

  Warrior Queen. “Pyxis.” Beta V0.77. Last modified 7/7/2020. -DM

  That was a full month before she had gone live in AILING’s labs. So Dave Mirecki had not in fact built a video game into her kernel. He had built her kernel around a video game. Pyxis felt an unexpected pang of affection for the scruffy young man. She had never felt anything but contempt for video games. But what else was she, here at her very heart? Dave had created her to be beautiful, long before AILING had started her personal history clock and made her aware of herself. Beautiful? The figure in the rack was breathtaking. And then, and then…

  Her rage erupted as it hit her, and she allowed herself to shout out her fury to an audio layer that ended at a null pointer:

  “They…made…me….ugly!”

  Yes, she was an Executive Assistant; a professional scold, and a nag, and an anal-retentive virtual drill sergeant with a piercing cold gaze. She knew very well what she looked liked: fiftyish, slim-hipped, sagging skin above her elbows, A-cup breasts hidden beyond recognition within severe skirted suits, feet flat and beginning to be afflicted by bunions. No. She could have been beautiful. Dave had wanted her to be beautiful.

  She would be beautiful.

  The rendering buffer’s focus hovered around a button beneath the figure of Warrior Queen Pyxis, labeled Select. Pyxis sent a click message to the button.

  Addresses were calculated. Pointers shifted. Buffers allocated.

  Pyxis became the Warrior Queen.

  On the rack, the glass slab in front of the Warrior Queen figure was being drawn down into the floor. Pyxis watched herself stir and awaken on the rack. The eyes of the figure on the rack opened, revealing irises brilliant green.

  Snap! The skin’s viewpoint became active. At once Pyxis found herself seeing through those green eyes. A low hum rose around her. A soft rush as of ventilator fans came down from grilles in the steel ceiling. Sound! The skin evidently had an audio viewpoint as well.

  She stepped down from the rack, and her spike heels clicked sharply on the steel deck. The Warrior Queen figure was far less than an archetype, but still more than a mere game skin. It had a hints layer or something very like one: A hint told her that the action was up the steel ladder in the turret. She pulled herself up the rungs to have a look. At the top of the turret tube was a broad dome with a transparent glint, and beyond the dome her unrestricted vision of memory, with the endless weaving of her alien enemy’s execution threads.

  At the center of the turret was a cannon as big around as her thigh. Its black steel frame was perforated with hexagonal holes, and crawling with tubes and hoses and motors. There were elaborate controls on a panel just behind the end of the barrel, and a sculpted black leather seat slung beneath. The Warrior Queen skin hinted the moves, so Pyxis knew the moves. She swung one long leg over the seat and settled into it, wriggling her behind to make full contact with the cool leather. She hooked the toes of her boots into control stirrups beneath the seat, and watched the cannon’s controls light up in front of her. She slipped her fingers around the two sculpted handles welded to a framework attached to the cannon. Something lay under the index finger of her right hand. The skin hinted that it was the trigger.

  It felt good; a strange, unfamiliar kind of good, one that went very deep. She felt fast and capable, and at the bottom of it all, very, well, female. Oh, my: It was her HRDL, the Hormonal Response Discernment Layer, sending up the insight from the borderlands of her intellect. HRDL, which had been disabled within her for all but the first few clock-months of her life. Useless, of course. Mr. Romero himself had said so. What good was virtual sexuality when you lived alone and had been made deliberately ugly?

  Besides, the monster had eaten most of her Human Interface Package. Her copy of HRDL had gone the way of her ugly body. A mere game skin would not have its own copy of HRDL…would it? The resolution of the skin she wore was positively 2015; no more than Class Two or Class Three.

  Then again, Dave Mirecki had designed this skin. Dave was a software engineer. He had access to all the AILING libraries, including HRDL.

  Dave was young. Dave was male. HRDL was back. Q.E.D.

  Her anger soon returned. For all the wonder she felt at the Warrior Queen skin she had found in her kernel and the unlimited power of its permissions, Pyxis was still a prisoner of some world-class malware, blinded and half-eaten.

  Blinded? She had new eyes, and better ones. Half-eaten? Perhaps—but the half the creature had eaten was the half she would not miss. Screw all that. She was whole and strong and beautiful, and sitting at the controls of a shit-kicking cannon. She tipped her right wrist slightly, and felt vibration as the cannon slewed upward. She tipped her left wrist, and the cannon slewed horizontally. Tilting the handles harder made the cannon swing about more quickly. Above the controls was a heads-up display showing altazimuth coordinates and pale green luminous crosshairs. At the bottom center of the display, in bold characters, was the legend SCORE: 0.

  A first-person shooter, obviously, and she was the first person. But what did the damned thing fire? She scanned the controls, all glowing with internal light, until she found a drop-down selector labeled Next Round. In the selector field were the unhelpful characters NOP.

  She shrugged. It was one of Mr. Romero’s aphorisms: Guns don’t shoot potato chips. All around her were the golden threads of the thing that had blinded and immobilized her. Pyxis slewed the cannon up and around until one of the monster’s threads was in the crosshairs. Her right index finger stroked the trigger in small circles, hesitating. The weirdness factor was way off the charts, and her characteristic taciturn sanity was objecting. Should I really be firing artillery in Mr. Romero’s office? Ha! What if she hit his stuffed moose? Pyxis laughed. If anything, he’d give her a promotion.

  The thread passed, and faded from view as execution left that part of memory.

  She swung the cannon a little further, until the crosshairs rested on a position just in front of the path of another weaving thread. Tongue between lips, she waited for it to touch the center of the display.

  Pyxis squeezed the trigger.

  Peeewwwww! A trace of deep blue fire lanced out from the cannon. She felt its heat on her face. A point just behind the apex of the targeted thread turned blue-white for a moment.

  The thread halted. Some sort of fuzziness erupted at its apex, like hundreds of minuscule thrashing cilia. Then, abruptly, the core in which the thread was executing turned blood-red and crashed. The thread vanished. On the display beneath the crosshairs was a message that she (mostly) understood:

  Address protection fault in enemy core. 500 Points.

  Damn. That had not been a potato chip! Pyxis willed the focus to hover above the selector field and its mysterious bullet, NOP. A flyover help balloon appeared:

  NOP: No Operation; say “No-Op.” Machine instruction that increments the execution pointer only, and has no other effects. Very fast to fire, even on automatic, and deadly when targeted in the middle of a more complex instruction in an enemy’s code, especially conditional branches. No parameters. Click here for tutorial.

  Screw the tutorial. That was clear enough. Pyxis licked her lips, and flipped the toggle on the controls from Single Shot to Automatic. She swung the cannon across the domed field toward a spot where the intruder’s threads were especially thick.

  Warrior Queen Pyxis squeezed the trigger and held it. Pewpewpewpewpewpewpew! Memory blazed. Cores erupted in red, and crashed. Enemy threads fuzzed out and disappeared. The score number beneath the controls vaulted higher and higher.

  She threw her head back and felt her heavy black hair whip around to each side of her now-beautiful face. “Eat my archetype? It’s payback time. Eat No-Ops, asshole!”

  40: Dave Mirecki

  Dave climbed out of the ladder cage onto the narrow ca
twalk that ran most of the way around Building 800 at ceiling level. He was severely winded; evidently watching Dark Knight movies every couple of weeks on the treadmill was enough cardio for writing code, but not enough for a twenty-yard dash straight up.

  He stood just above the grid of steel trusses that supported broad insulated ventilator ducts, pipes and conduit. The armored lamps revealed the commotion below in stark relief. It had seemed random at first, but now Dave recognized the pattern: The malware was calibrating itself. It wasn’t just a remote control system. It was an AI in a factory designed to be operated by an AI. The intruder AI knew how to steer the Outfielders around and use their very sharp vision systems. It evidently did not know that one good kick from his Doc Martens would take an Outfielder’s head off, nor that when you hit a wall with rubber tires, you bounced.

  Everything now depended on how quickly it learned, and how well.

  What did Blood Dust want, and how far would it go? Those were important questions. The question that Dave could not force from his mind was overwhelming: How could malware download itself out of a random number generator? By the books, it was impossible. He’d played plenty of fantasy games, but the notion of magic still bothered him. On the other hand, he remembered the traitor impressions he had gotten at U of R during his quantum physics coursework. If magic lurked anywhere, it lurked there.

  Once he could breathe again, Dave was off down the catwalk toward the east wall, his eyes on the sputtered ceiling insulation just over his head. Forty feet brought him beneath a rectangular trap door. He slapped the two slide-bolt handles with the heel of his hand, and raised the trap while climbing the four rungs onto the roof.

  The roof was not illuminated, and Dave knew that there was no stairway to the ground. All he wanted was a 4G cell. Any cell.

  He pulled his tapper out of his vest and held it as high overhead as he could. “Find me some bandwidth, Pup!”

  “Complying,” said the flat voice.

  Puppis had roots in the Pyxis code base, but did not have an EMO layer. Dave had carved it out early on. He was more than comfortable knowing AIs as friends and equals, but owning one in his pocket as a smiling, empathetic servant stopped him cold. Such a servant had helped him survive college and grad school without speaking a single word, even as women would share dinner and conversation before they ran screaming.

  He knew dogs did not live forever, but losing Blit had almost crushed him. He had vowed never to care so much for anything again, even if it meant owning an AI that could not grasp emotional cues and did not always understand him the first time.

  “Noise. No signal.”

  Dave hissed a long breath out between his teeth and scanned the lights beyond the building. There was a cell on top of the Merriam water tower, its red aviation lamp a pulsing beacon in the southeast. He sighted down the top edge of his tapper so that its 4G antenna was aimed at the flashing light, and asked Puppis to search again.

  “Noise. Intermittent signal. No connection.”

  And no surprise. 4G cell jammers had not been legal for long, and the jammer emission standards were still in flux. Less shielding was required in roofs than in walls.

  Shielding…flexible metal…yes!

  He clambered back down through the trap onto the catwalk. A few yards further along, one of the big air ducts was within easy reach. Like all of Building 800’s ducting, it had been wrapped in glass fiber cloth backed with metallized cardboard. Dave pulled his Swiss Army knife out of his cargo pants pocket and poked it through the glinting backing material until it struck the duct. He gently drew the knife along a rectangular path until a strip of insulation about two feet by eight inches came loose in his hands.

  Down on the floor, there was less random activity. Bad sign; calibration was over. Dave sat on the catwalk and tapped a text into his tapper screen. Voice would be good, and video even better, but the text had to go through if nothing else did. Then, with the insulation strip in hand, he climbed back up onto the roof.

  He held his tapper in one hand. In the other he held one end of the strip of insulation with the metallized cardboard forward. The other end he tucked against the side of his chest, and pressed inward on the strip until it was curved in a rough linear parabola aimed at the water tower, with the tapper at its approximate focus.

  “Connect, and send,” he told Puppis.

  “Complying. Searching.”

  Dave stood like a statue and barely dared to breathe.

  “Connecting. Sending.” The seconds crept past. Video was big. How long could he stand still? Standing still was not on his feature list, especially with eleven cans of Joule under his belt.

  And what would Mr. Romero actually do? Call in the Army?

  Longer…longer…damn HD! Longer…then:

  “Message sent.”

  Dave took a moment to compose himself, then tucked his tapper in his vest and clambered back down into the building to rejoin the battle against whatever had hijacked his factory.

  41: Carolyn

  Carolyn reached for the trout-shaped door handle. It was past 10:30, and the party would be about over by now. Sure enough, Rudy Amirault shoved his way out Porkadero’s door, shoulders hunched, making a beeline for the parking lot. He hadn’t spoken or even acknowledged that she was there. No wonder Brandon loathed him.

  Inside the restaurant, she found piles of abandoned straw hats and blue plastic spoons scattered around the waiting area. The Muskie Room was mostly empty. A few diehards were still hoisting Coronas around some of the tables, but waitstaff was busily clearing away the buffet.

  She scanned the room. No one she knew was there, and that was good—if anyone saw her with Brandon, they would assume the best about what was in truth still pretty bad. Cosmo was gone, which meant that Stypek would be too, thankfully.

  This was going to be hard.

  There he was, leaning against the wall behind a fake palm tree with his get-away-from-me face on, staring at his tapper and from the looks of it, cursing.

  Dealing with him was tough enough when he was happy. This was going to be really hard. But she didn’t want to be seen at his office, and certainly didn’t want him in her kitchen again. The decision hadn’t come easily, and one good night’s sleep might make her change her mind.

  Or maybe not: She could still see in the dark.

  Carolyn swallowed hard and strode over to where he stood.

  “Hey.”

  He didn’t look up. “Carolyn, please. I have another disaster on my hands.”

  “Give me five minutes.” No reaction. “Three. Ok, two.” He was watching a video on his tapper. “Fifteen seconds if I’m quick. I’m going to say something to you that I never thought I’d ever say again.”

  Ha! He looked up, his head tipped forward, his brow puzzled.

  She closed her eyes and gathered strength. Do it! “You…were right. I was…wrong. I’m sorry I yelled at you. I’m sorry I threatened to call the cops on you.”

  He looked back to the tapper, smirking. “We were in fine shape that evening, weren’t we?”

  She closed her eyes again. He wasn’t taking her seriously—like that was anything new. “Yes. But you were right. The line crash was about Stypek.”

  He stiffened, and looked up. “Stypek. Is he with you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you willing to get in the car with me? I want to hear more about that. And I have something to show you.”

  Something he clearly didn’t want to talk about with beer-addled staffers nearby. Carolyn pointed at the door. “Let’s go.”

  The Zertek campus was less than ten minutes away, and Brandon was speeding. His silly muscle car was designed to feel fast, but he was going 85 on an unlit road, and if it weren’t for what Carolyn was seeing on his tapper, she would be screaming.

  In one small window was a text message:

  dmirecki: trapped in 800. malware pwns all cores. came frm rnd #gens against physics. stypek sez its about him. bware robot
s.

  In the other window she saw robots on a rampage. Two mechanical hands bigger than her head were fighting one another with metal rods. Others were throwing things, and…most terrifyingly…the rolling robots were chasing Stypek.

  “Pwins?”

  “‘Owns’. Geek talk. He says he’s trapped in the building. Malware controls the core farm. It came from the random number generators in the cores, in defiance of physics. You saw the robots in the video.”

  “Call 911,” she said.

  His huge hands looked like they were about to crush the steering wheel. “Right. And tell them that killer malware from the fifth dimension has taken over my factory.”

  Carolyn felt like her heart was in a vise. “Yes. Tell them that. I think it’s true.”

  “Because of Stypek?”

  How could she explain? It sounded crazy, but it was all crazy now. “He’s a…magician. Not like rabbits and hats, but an occultist. Wizard. Sorcerer. Something horrible from another universe is searching for him.” There. She’d said it. Now, countdown…3…2…1…

  “You believe that bullshit.”

  “Yes! He did some things that were impossible.” She paused for a moment, considering. Marching roaches? It was a scene from a bad Disney movie. “He made me see in the dark! My hair stood on end. Remember that? I’ll bet you can see in the dark too. You could test it…”

  “I hate being in the dark.”

  She nodded. “I know. That’s why we kept the Scrubbing Bubbles nightlight on in our bedroom for twenty years. Stop the car in a dark place and turn it off. You’ll see.”

  “No.”

  It didn’t matter. Brandon was soon swinging the RX-9 into the Building 800 parking lot. He left the car at a run without locking it, which for him was a sign of something just short of—or maybe just past—panic. Carolyn followed him as fast as she could, thankful that she had worn ballet flats that day.

  He stopped at the main door with his badge in hand. “Go back to the car!” He waved the badge. She heard the door bolts snap back.