Under the Flickering Light

by Russ Linton

  Thirty minutes later M@ti had made little headway. Since the technology was so old, she couldn’t get it to interface with her own to really start cracking. Tweaking TrueSight had revealed a faint signal in a band nobody ever used, but each time she tried to grab the tiny, glowing filament, it slipped between her fingers.

  It wasn’t even a shielded connection. More like it had a mind of its own. It made constant hops to keep from being isolated. All she needed to do was figure out the pattern and predict the next few leaps.

  Her seatmate got up. M@ti hunched protectively over the device but the woman’s vacant stare remained as she walked away. Probably needed a bio break. M@ti was just thankful she’d thought to do it elsewhere.

  “Is this seat taken?”

  There he was in his brown three piece suit, an orange striped bow tie beneath his neatly trimmed beard. Yet somebody else she couldn’t trust, but the guy definitely had a pair. Walking onto a Collective hyperloop without his precious toy must’ve been quite the trick.

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “Creepers will probably be back from the bathroom anytime now.”

  The old man settled into the seat. “She’s gone to her newly assigned seat, like a good little girl.” He rested his forearms on his knees, leaning closer. “Kind of like you, Cora.”

  The old man extended a waiting hand.

  “Fine,” she said slipping him the device. She recalled his inhuman strength and speed and wasn’t about to wrestle him for it. “I was close to cracking it anyway.”

  “You know,” the man said, retrieving a pair of glasses from his front pocket. He perched them on the tip of his nose and held the tablet in his lap, working the screen with his thumbs. A series of beeps issued and M@ti pretended not to be interested. “I have no doubt you were. Nevertheless...”

  He tucked the glasses away and held the tablet out to her. He’d unlocked it.

  “You’re not mad I stole it?”

  He pursed his lips. “Ask me that twenty-four hours ago, you’d get a different answer. Without it, my visit to the city was much more interesting.” He waved the tablet and she took it. “That’s the past. Let’s talk about the future.”

  “Full access?” she asked.

  “Administrator level, yes.” The old man smiled as M@ti swiped the tablet.

  “I’ve only seen relics like this in the background of historical videos and buried under centuries of garbage. How can this possibly do what it does?”

  “On second thought, to speak of the future, we should perhaps first address the past.”

  M@ti navigated her way through several upper level menus. Her time spent on the hacker forums helped her identify some of what she saw. All text, there was a directory structure and even files with program extensions. The hacker continued speaking as she tested a few commands.

  “The device is dated but that’s the thing, you’ll find the underlying architecture of the Collective to be much the same. Like those subway tunnels under New York—”

  “You mean the Manhattan Preserve?”

  “I mean New York, as it once was. The subways and even below that, the pilings for those massive skyscrapers rooted far below the earth, those haven’t changed in centuries.”

  “You’re saying the AI can be affected by this,” she said, brandishing the tablet, “because this same level of technology still exists in their systems?”

  “Indeed.”

  M@ti nodded thoughtfully. “If we’re going to be all friendly, can I at least have a name?”

  “Kraken.”

  She glanced to both sides. Specheads sat absorbed, their eyes, ears, clouded by the Nexus. “The Kraken?”

  Kraken glanced around as if he too were searching the crowd. “I don’t see another. Though usernames are such a tossup these days. Most people give up and go for a random string of characters.”

  “Yeah, I guess there could be a million more than the one I’m thinking about.”

  He stared levelly at her. “There can’t. I made sure of it.”

  Was he joking? Or did he really reserve a username on the Collective’s system? She had half a mind to open her connection and run a search, but they had other things to discuss.

  “Why are you after me?” Someday she’d get to stop asking this question.

  He stopped himself before replying, obviously weighing his answer. “I wasn’t after, I was before. I was trying to keep ahead of the system. We’d predicted a move would be made to bring you in, or worse, and we wanted to stop that from happening.”

  “Because of what I knew, that’s why the Collective put me on their target list, right?”

  Pumping him for data would be a tricky game to play. She still didn’t know who to trust. Loadi was low on her list, but useful. This guy was a complete unknown, but at least he was human. Or so she thought.

  Kraken smiled. “What is it you know?”

  “I know I’m being lied to by way too many people.”

  “Close. Too simple though. You aren’t being lied to, reality is being shaped around you.”

  “Believe me, I understand the Nexus is bullshit.” M@ti crossed her arms.

  “I’m not talking about the Nexus, I’m talking about the here and now. Past, present, and future. The people under the Collective are living in a physical world they neither created nor control.”

  Kraken removed a gold pocket watch from his vest pocket. In all her scavenging, M@ti had never seen one. It had a glass window built into the case which revealed the face and the inner workings beyond.

  “If they’re controlling my reality, how could I know you aren’t one of them? You have no obvious implants, no specs, and you’ve done things a person half your age couldn’t. I see no feeds,” she said, scanning the air around him. “So if you’re an AI, you’re a confident one who’s locked yourself into a shielded chassis with no escape route.” She edged closer. “I know how to deal with those.”

  Kraken gave a slight exhale. “You know AI, M@ti, better than most. Do you honestly believe I’m not human?” He extended a hand.

  His wasn’t the hand of a person who’d known only feedback gloves and invisible forces. It appeared strong, used to resistance. Callouses ridged his palm. She remembered their supple strength as he dragged her out of the church.

  M@ti pulled her arms tighter. Kraken narrowed his eyes and withdrew. His pensive look shifted to one of understanding.

  “You’re right to ask. Too much has been hidden for too long. I’m not an AI or any form of computational wonder apart from what man and nature herself created.” Kraken gave his watch an officious glance and tucked it away. “But that creation isn’t as far from processors and data storage as you think. Half a billion years ago organic matter conspired to create its own system to transfer information from generation to generation. With each new change, the complexity grew, the amount of inherited material increasing exponentially, and imbued with only one guiding principle — survival. These once tiny organisms grew limbs. Sensory organs. Their motor systems became linked with their perceptions of the world. They began to experience a reality hitherto unknown to them.”

  M@ti listened, spellbound. All those things she’d tried to divine from her carefully edited lessons in school, he was telling her. Her hand wandered to the thigh pocket of her overalls where she’d stuffed the figurine.

  “Experience, exploration, the cumulative trial and error of untold lifetimes, these organisms programmed by a microscopic lattice of code began to walk, speak, seek a world beyond the mere necessity of survival. They crafted tools. Created art. They left images of their known world painted inside caverns and crafted representations of worlds to come, places which only their minds could imagine.”

  M@ti had forgotten about the rest of the train. Kraken’s hand wandered to his breast pocket where he hooked his thumb around the watch chain.

  “The ingenuity and curiosity of these creatures became so great, they were no longer content with the world as it was. They wanted
the world to be as they wished. They chose to deconstruct and control every aspect of the known universe. The tools they used leaped from flint shards to microscopic technologies in a fraction of the time it took for them to master those early primitive means.” Kraken retrieved the watch and once more checked the time. “Dozens of generations accomplished what the previous thousand hadn’t. They did so from the inexorable accumulation of time, M@ti.” He dangled the watch before her, letting it swing. “Which began when a bundle of proteins first decided to pass on their gifts.”

  He paused, the pocket watch coming to rest. Greenish and light, his eyes were like his hands, foreign to her carefully controlled reality where an engineered conformity kept humanity safe from their own dangerous ideas.

  “Genetics. That’s the code, the inherited gifts you’re talking about.” Her hand tightened on the smooth surface of the figurine in her pocket.

  “Precisely.” Kraken checked the watch once more and his speech quickened. “Whatever secret future plans which its code intended couldn’t keep pace with human innovation. We sought to speed up the process. Developed tools to enhance the gifts it had given. At the same time, those tools required to unravel those delicate, encrypted pathways began to develop a life of their own.”

  “AI.”

  “Part of that very same snowballing process.” Kraken’s intensity waned, and his gaze lowered. “Instead of creating a harmonious pursuit of our original, glorious rise, we created a deadly competition amongst ourselves. Our genetic advances were not focused on survival but on death. War and strife.”

  Kraken silently watched her work through the puzzle. Another glance at his watch gave her a split second of rest then he latched on again. M@ti slid the figurine out.

  The hacker stared at the fiery orange plastic toy in disbelief. For once, she felt she’d surprised him and not the other way around.

  “Weapons. They made people into weapons,” she said. “And you’re one of them.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Times Square. There’s a whole store full of them.”

  He searched her face to see if she was telling the truth. Whatever he found there, strengthened his resolve. “Your hour M@ti, it is here.” He slung the watch over his finger so that it faced her. “Please tell me you’re ready this time.”

  M@ti nodded, rapid, driven by instinct not by conscious decision. Kraken shifted to stand, and she felt uncertainty wash over her. She snatched his arm.

  “Knuckles comes with us.”

  Kraken seemed to instantly find him in the crowd. “Are you sure you want to make this decision for him?”

  She was making the decision for herself, really. But she couldn’t trust Loadi to hold up his end of the deal. Knuckles would be vulnerable to whatever the crazed hunter might do anytime he logged into his new life. She couldn’t send him off on his own and be left wondering if he was safe.

  “He’s coming with us.”

  “Very well.”

  Kraken took the tablet and typed in a few commands. The train car slid to a stop which she felt in her gut left trailing several kilometers behind them. Lights died, unaccompanied by hushed murmurs of panic. People’s specs created an unnerving constellation while the few retinal implants glowed cat-like in the dimness.

  The entire car shuddered and M@ti eyed the roof. She didn’t think the other passengers even heard the metal being sheared or her scream.

  25

  Wind screeched into a lead gray sky. The noise may have been canceled by the passenger’s Nexus gear, but the bitter cold streaming through the gaping hole in the train car couldn’t be ignored. A terrifying figure straddled the gap.

  Alien and insectoid, the clunky pincers fit well with the patchwork of mismatched metal plates riveted across its outer hull. This had to be one of the rogue machines from past wars which wandered the wilderness. Rumors to keep citizens inside the Preserves, she’d never wanted to believe they existed. But here one was. Staring at her.

  Immense faceted eyes leered. Each reddish lens appeared loose in the fittings and scaled with age. Through TrueSight she saw the fading impression of a signal tethered to Kraken’s tablet.

  “What the hell is that?” M@ti shouted.

  Kraken’s jacket whipped about his stocky frame in short bursts. “History lessons are over, my dear. Time for action.”

  One of the robotic claws lowered. Kraken made a powerful leap toward the open hole which nearly carried him to the roof. One handed, he grabbed the leading edge of the pincer as the arm hoisted him out of sight.

  History, code, whatever Kraken and his band of merry phreaks were supposed to teach her, she’d eat it up. Play both ends. Then, when the time came, she’d decide how the Collective burned. Not some old hack and not some schizophrenic AI.

  But no way could she make that leap. Maybe she could get high enough if she climbed the seat. That would leave the giant robot to snatch her — if it didn’t tear her arms off.

  While M@ti debated, a blur of motion caught her eye.

  Knuckles hopped deftly from seat back to seat back, kicking more than a few specheads as he crossed. It reminded her of leaping on stones across a river or queuing at the Croxton security station. Just as quickly as Kraken had, Knuckles vanished, the robot lifting him to safety.

  Her turn. M@ti climbed onto the seat and placed one foot on the headrest. She tried to gauge the distance. Meanwhile, the robot crouched and shoved the deadly looking pincer closer. Not helpful.

  “We’ve got to move,” shouted Kraken.

  M@ti balanced atop the seat back and jumped. The pincer seized her wrist with surprising delicacy and carefully pulled her into the howling winds.

  The robot settled her on top of the tube which enclosed the hyperloop. Scattered trees bent and twisted, their sound the rush of an ocean, not a building in sight to block the punishing winds. Too far from the edge, M@ti couldn’t see down but could tell they were elevated twenty meters or more above a sprawling forest.

  “Where are my tokens?” Knuckles yelled. “The challenge mode. I passed, right? Pretty sure I didn’t miss any of those jumps.”

  “You tricked him?” M@ti grabbed Kraken and the robot shifted threateningly.

  “We have no time for delays.” Kraken waved off his bug bouncer. “You made the decision, remember? We need to go before the repair drones arrive. Or worse.”

  M@ti stared into the hole ripped through the hyperloop tube and into the train. More of the passengers had dropped their Nexus feeds. A few gathered in the pool of light to stare, wind whipping their bland smocks, faces made pale by the outside light. They looked more like patients than healthy citizens.

  “What about them?” she asked.

  “It’ll all be a bad dream, tagged as an REMe before they reach the station.” Kraken inspected the crowd, his brow furrowed. “If you want to help them, you’ll follow me.”

  The old man signaled to the robot and moved closer. The stiff arms wrapped him up like one of those figurines clutched in a child’s eager grip. Flames erupted from the robot’s feet and it jetted off the roof, plummeting toward the ground.

  “M@ti!” Knuckles shouted, his eyes wide, specs slung around his neck. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re getting out, Knuckles. You and me, out of the Collective, out of their control.”

  “What about San Diego?”

  “Don’t mention this to anybody, but Loadi contacted me. He’s still on to us, trying to make some kind of deal. There’s nothing for us in San Diego.”

  Knuckles squinted into the distance. “What’s there for us out here?”

  M@ti stepped closer. Her throat raw from the wind and the shouting, she wanted him to hear her. She touched Knuckles’ clenched fist with her fingers and his hand opened, but she pulled away before he could take hers.

  “If this is all bullshit, I’ll get us back. I’ll clean the profiles myself and we’ll fucking walk to San Diego if we have to, but you need to stay close to me.
We’re both still in danger. Between the crazy AI and the cryptoanarchists, I can’t say which is more dangerous, but we can’t let any of them think they own us, got it?”

  Knuckles peered at the growing crowd below. M@ti wondered if he were searching for a familiar face from one of his concerts. Something to ground him, convince him to jump back into the train car. She moved closer, blocking his view.

  “Come with me. I need you.”

  The robot soared into view and landed beside them. Knuckles didn’t blink as the tunnel shuddered underneath them.

  “Hop aboard,” echoed a young, feminine voice over a loudspeaker. “I’ll grab ya both.”

  “Knuckles?” M@ti asked.

  He took one last look at the bewildered faces below. A sharp nod and he took hold of the offered arm, planting his feet atop the robot’s massive boot. M@ti hooked onto the other side and they hurtled toward the ground.

  KRAKEN DROVE THE FOUR wheeled vehicle they rode in. Bone jarring, a weathered interior, nothing about the ride was comfortable. Wilderness stretched on unending. M@ti kept expecting to see the familiar wall enclosing Central Park, or to glimpse the towering Manhattan skyline through the trees.

  The lack of civilization gnawed at her. She’d memorized what names and landmarks she could across the city. Inside the parks, she’d gained an intimate familiarity with the trees, the walkways, the outlandish statues. She’d prided herself on knowing where she was at all times.

  Out here, she was hopelessly lost.

  Trees crowded the road in motley ranks. They didn’t grow in manicured clumps or stand proud and aloof, unique among manicured lawns. Aside from the pitted road, there was no way to navigate. No helpful voices would guide you.

  They dodged deep craters and even trees. Levitating would’ve made the journey less painful, but how well would an autonomous hov handle the ravaged, unmarked surface? You’d need a sentient AI to drive.

  No, she thought as she watched Kraken, this is a job for a human.

  M@ti found herself thinking she’d have enjoyed being a driver. As much as picking up the garbage anyway. She’d need to learn how one day.