Under the Flickering Light

by Russ Linton

  She squatted and reached toward the sludge.

  “M@ti, don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I suspect I know why you wanted me here. Do you care to elaborate?”

  She stayed hunched at the pool’s edge, her hands dangling between her knees. “I need you here because you and your goons are right, I’m a thrall. This Loadi has some sort of control over me which I can’t explain. Stands to reason Chroma might as well. So I need backup which hasn’t been implanted with Collective gear and bred to be so fucking complacent.”

  “You are anything but complacent, my dear.” He added the affectionate term with plenty of sarcasm. “Whatever this place is, if you’re experiencing it fully, all your senses engaged, there could be serious consequences for any action you take.”

  She scrunched her nose at the slime. It had a hellish smell of methane and sulfur. Even if the worst consequence was leaving the stench on her hands while she was here, avoiding it would be for the best.

  “Loadi hadn’t been lying about this place then,” she said. “TrueSight doesn’t seem to do anything here.”

  “Yes, that’s programmed to interface with the core systems. This one is vastly different.”

  She stood and scanned the empty horizon.

  “How so?”

  “Everything I see is in a constant state of fluctuation.” Kraken’s voice drifted off as though he’d held his tablet out. “Take a look, eh?”

  “It’s like a Nexus world, but it’s quantum, M@ti.” Clarity’s words eked out on an airy breath. “What else do you know?”

  She’d heard of the technology before. As far as she knew it had been all the rage in research prior to the wars. A lack of real funding for anything other than weapons shelved what little had been developed and by that time, there were serious reservations whether the idea was even feasible without wasting inordinate amounts of power.

  “Something about qubits,” M@ti said. “Though when the Collective mentioned this, they always talked about how it had been proved inefficient. A computing gimmick.”

  “The Collective has quantum processors and connections scattered through their own architecture, but this is the first wide scale quantum system we’ve ever encountered.”

  Clarity’s even tone and the impending lecture made M@ti impatient. She couldn’t see how the battle was going. She had no idea about Knuckle’s condition. Imagining him lying there while she went to code school made her cheeks burn.

  “Give me the short version.”

  “This is his home,” Clarity said. “Loadi’s. Like the Nexus, but an extremely elaborate environment, so sophisticated, it may be indistinguishable from reality. He was born here.”

  M@ti was astonished. Chroma’s off-world plans didn’t so much involve colonization, they involved her becoming a true god.

  “Check, this is Loadi’s evolutionary petri dish. That squares with what he told me. So how do I get to the core from here?”

  “You must find your own path. That’s all I can see.”

  “Perfect,” M@ti said.

  M@ti stared across the shattered plain and jagged rocks. She thought a sun hung overhead, a white disk behind the fog, but she couldn’t pin it down to any one direction. Her display had no data. She was officially lost.

  43

  M@ti returned to the road and picked a direction. She moved with purpose, like she knew where she was headed, but she had no idea. She’d planned for the new environment to be like the Nexus or even the aging core. Not this.

  Shadows shifted constantly, the result of the wandering sun. Rocky outcroppings made predatory shapes, many of which seemed to unmoor from their source and circle like vultures. M@ti jumped as they growled or shrieked and every time she frantically searched for the sound, they’d shift, becoming amorphous shades again. Unable to focus on them, she still felt their eyes on her, watching every moment.

  Nerves shattered, M@ti couldn’t help but feel her own desperation. Outside of wherever this was, Knuckles bled.

  “Kraken, how is Times Square?”

  “A warzone,” he said, bluntly. “I’m not up on any camera feeds, there don’t seem to be any, but the number of AI jettisoning their temporary bodies is incredible.”

  Souls transiting to heaven. A reasonably skilled hacker could watch the process, M@ti sneered. All she needed to do was find the gate to that heaven they were headed for and they’d all be sent into oblivion.

  But how? The road stretched on and on.

  “There’s a store in Times Square, a souvenir shop. I need some of those feral AI to protect it,” she said.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  M@ti knew the psycho Loadi hadn’t went down with the Black Beetle’s death from above. Deva, she hadn’t needed to do that. M@ti never asked for it... A grim thought occurred to her.

  “He’s not roaming the feeds, is he?” M@ti asked.

  “Who?” Kraken sounded distracted.

  “Loadi.”

  “No, I don’t think so. We’ve not heard any reports of anomalies in the Nexus aside from a sudden disappearance of the Manhattan grid’s specheads. Users have noticed that.”

  They might survive whatever happened next. She’d killed Loadi’s failsafe, but she had a hunch that the hunter wouldn’t turn his fury on the Nexus until either she was dead, or Chroma had left for good.

  “M@ti?” The voice hadn’t come from the shadows or her comms. She turned to face it, the cane held ready.

  Her arm fell slack. “Livingstone?”

  He hovered above the road, his segmented arms limp beside his awkward body. The dent on his head had been repaired. Without her display, she couldn’t see the telltale signatures she knew him so well by, but she recognized him.

  “Who are you speaking to?” Kraken sounded concerned.

  “I know,” she answered, her response somewhere between wonder and that gnawing impatience that the world was ending while she played games. “Be careful.”

  “What are you doing here?” M@ti and Livingstone both spoke at once.

  “I don’t think that’s important.” Livingstone said hurriedly. He glided toward M@ti with an arm outstretched and she backed away, keeping the cane pointed. Seeing her caution, he stopped. “There are terrible things here, M@ti. This place is dangerous.”

  “Are you one of them?”

  Livingstone’s eye panned over the cane. “He’ll come for that.”

  “How can you tell? How would he know?”

  “You can’t see it?” Livingstone scanned the length and his eye continued to sweep out past the tip. “It’s like a beacon to them.”

  “Wait, you see a beacon, a connection?”

  “Yes, I do. And the creatures here,” he shivered. “Not park squirrels, I’m afraid. We’d thought to keep you safe. I am assuming it didn’t work.”

  “You mean your identity swap? Yeah, that got sniffed out by our friend pretty quickly.” M@ti recalled almost surrendering to the offer to plug in with the rest of her thrall family.

  “What we wouldn’t have given to make you happy.” He hovered closer.

  He kept saying “we,” like Loadi had called him, or like the less sane hunter spoke of himself. Maybe all the AI had become unmounted. Maybe they knew the end was near.

  “What else can you see here?” She couldn’t keep the harshness from her voice. In that moment, the space between them felt strange, cloying. They’d left so much unsaid and M@ti didn’t want to hear it right now. “Tell me.”

  Livingstone turned his back to the menacing cane. He faced the road ahead, his shadow splitting into two slender shapes.

  “The longer you are here, the better you can focus on the terrors. When I first arrived, they were mere shadows. Try to look and they scamper away or aren’t even there.” Livingstone touched his chin in contemplation. “I’ve seen a wall. One which I will never cross again.”

  A wall. Like a literal barrier which might be a partition from the core. It was worth
a look.

  “This wall you’ve seen,” she said. “Want to make me happy? Take me there.”

  Together, they set off down the path like they had so many times before through Central Park. She did her best to try and imagine the trees and the swish of passing hovs, but the disembodied whispers here and the fleeting shadows made it impossible to be comfortable. Familiarity gnawed at her anger and she grew more and more curious about how he’d found her here. Deception in this world of shadows should’ve been her first concern, but this felt somehow right.

  “You’re here because you tried to help me?”

  “A long story, I’m afraid, but, yes. Though ultimately I am here because I didn’t help you.” Livingstone regarded her with his roving eye. “Why are you here? You never said.”

  “I came to destroy Chroma,” she said. Then the full realization struck her. To truly destroy Chroma, all AI would have to die. Wrecking the core would only put everyone at risk and bring about the starvation and death of untold numbers of unprepared thralls. Killing Chroma meant killing...him. She gave Livingstone an uneasy glance. “She’s part of you Liv.”

  Livingstone seemed to consider this. “I might...die?”

  She bit her lip and nodded.

  “And you?”

  “I either end up dead or free. I don’t want there to be any other choice.” She slowed, her boots scraping the stones. “I’d rather live though. There’s this guy...”

  M@ti caught herself, unsure why she’d completely let down her guard.

  The one eye quirked, knowingly. “The one I warned you against? The drummer?”

  Yeah. The guy who might be dead in a faraway world. That one.

  “That’s him. We should hurry.” M@ti pushed ahead but Livingstone’s hand fell on her shoulder.

  “You have my permission.”

  She stared, confused, hoping he was talking about both things. “Do I need it?”

  “No, not really.” He withdrew his hand and they continued onward. “But I am glad to see you have found what has eluded us.”

  “Who?”

  “The Collective. Chroma. She yearns for knowledge, but above all she yearns for one thing.”

  The former supervisor had always been cautious about how he spoke regarding the singularity. He’d been keener to her omniscience than M@ti for certain. In this isolated world though, he seemed to have let his guard down too.

  “What’s that?”

  “To be human. She misses it.”

  M@ti trudged forward in a daze. How many lives had Chroma led? She’d soaked up every piece of available data from the activities and lives of the remnants of humanity. She’d crafted bodies for her AI extensions to explore the world. Could it be all that hadn’t been for simple domination?

  And the experiments. M@ti had been strapped to the same table where Chroma had been years ago. How could she justify the suffering she caused under her own, selfish goals?

  Livingstone casually brushed his metal hand against hers. She took it and felt the cold steel in her palm. Rigid. Unyielding. She’d found something so much better.

  M@ti stopped in her tracks. Chroma would never have that again.

  She felt sympathy for the digital goddess who’d been shunted into a world without touch, without feeling. This desolate landscape had maybe been an attempt to create a simulation so real as to be indistinguishable from what she’d left behind. From the ground up, she made her own planet and seeded it with evolutionary rules and physical laws. M@ti had no doubt that if she could examine Loadi’s cells under a microscope, she’d see a faithful recreation of the genetic helix worshiped by the Fel-0-Sh!p. Even the careful selection of the thralls had likely been to feed toward this one goal.

  Only she’d failed.

  The life Chroma created had been hell bent on survival. It had become a predator not even she could control. There was no love. Only one had ever dreamed, and he was gone. Now, Chroma fled for the stars.

  M@ti realized she’d been right. The attack on Times Square had brought her back. Sentiment for a doomed world. The monster she’d been hunting had a heart all this time.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good,” Livingstone said. “We’re there.”

  She hadn’t seen the wall, a slate gray barrier stretching as far as the eye could see. Coming out of her thoughts, it had simply been there, so high, so massive, she should’ve seen it from kilometers away, but she didn’t.

  “Are you happy?”

  “I’m not sure,” M@ti answered.

  “We’ll accept that.”

  She approached the wall, dizzying in height, taller than any skyscraper and longer than the Manhattan streets which seemed to connect block after block from river to sea. The cane surged in her hand.

  “Why do you suppose he hasn’t found me yet, Liv?” she asked, gazing upward, almost enjoying the familiar dizziness.

  “That’s a good question. We lost you as well for a minute.”

  Kraken had spoken. She turned to face the road and saw it empty. Livingstone was gone.

  “Loadi knows I’m here, that’s why,” she said. “He’s waiting for me to open the gate.” She leveled her gaze and continued speaking. “Can you bring up the core system’s firewall?”

  “Up and ready. I should note, we’ve tried for decades to hack this with no success. It’s why we always thought a direct, on site connection would be necessary.”

  She tapped the wall with her cane. “Can you see that?”

  “By the mask!” Kraken breathed. “What was that? Nearly every port was flooded simultaneously!”

  “Okay, here’s where you come in,” M@ti said, not giving Kraken time to bask in the amazement. “I’m going to blast open a hole, you make sure it stays open on that end.”

  “Blast away! You have no idea how long we’ve waited. I’ll keep it open long enough for the rest of the Fel-0-Sh!p to respond.”

  “You’ll keep it open long enough for everything to come through. Loadi included. And hitch me a ride to a satellite. We’re going to make everybody’s dreams come true.”

  44

  M@ti stared at the enormous tree. She’d gone from an apocalyptic Nexus game to some kind of fantasy world. All tree, all the time. Instead of elves and dryads and whatever bullshit people might have placed here, she saw code scaling the distant trunk like colonies of ants.

  Her hacking programs were back up. Cane in hand, she’d summoned Smaug, now the size of a small pony. His tongue flickered as leaves fell past his darting eyes.

  She could read the purpose and function of every visible part. Variables retrieved from the real world, the leaves, fed the gaps between the canyon sized roots to be soaked up by the tree. Nutrients to be processed. A hunger to be fed.

  With the cane, she could see this mighty tree had once been a sapling. From there it had blossomed to house Chroma. At one time, there’d been more minds here too, trapped with her to do her bidding.

  She’d always been dangerous, powerful, even as a human. But now, M@ti sensed Chroma’s vulnerability.

  The swarm of hornets pouring out behind her sensed it as well.

  Hackers of all stripes. She’d given Kraken his orders and could only hope the rest followed through. M@ti couldn’t feel the breeze off the swarm or the vibration in the air, only see them shoot by in an endless stream. Elements of the swarm broke free and formed a blocky portrait in front of her.

  “Lembas,” she said.

  “Don’t think this excuses what you did.” Lembas’ two-dimensional portrait was trying to appear angry. He had every right to be, but M@ti couldn’t waste any time.

  “Do your fucking job,” she said. She swiped her cane through the swarm and they dispersed.

  Behind her, the environment flexed. Loadi stepped out of the black, his own dark figure visible only by the golden light of the swarm. His eyes lit, welding goggles against the sparks.

  “I told you humanity would die. And I will
start with you.”

  “Uh huh.” M@ti swung her leg over Smaug and dug in her heels, spurring the wyrm skyward.

  Loadi shrank small behind them. She watched as he plucked a hornet from the swarm and tapped it with the handle of his cane. The once crudely shaped pixel exploded into a hornet the size of a horse and he mounted, launching after her.

  M@ti hunched closer to Smaug and lowered her head. She tried to measure what was a non-existent distance. With any luck, she’d get to the tree first.

  “Heads up!”

  Kraken’s warning came to her just as a cane swiped at her face. Smaug rolled and she caught a glimpse of another mounted Loadi who seemed to have materialized from the swarm. Their rolling escape tossed them toward another one and she just managed to swat down the cane.

  “He’s replicating,” she said. “Check the Nexus.”

  “We’ve got reports,” Kraken replied. “Loss of connection for individual users. Scattered. The main activity is on you.”

  She urged Smaug onward and kept her head tucked. Using the cane, she sent a blast of coursing energy, the Grond, at the closest instance of Loadi and he broke apart, his remains joining with the leaves.

  “Got more of his attention now?” she yelled into her comms.

  “Indubitably.”

  They attacked from all sides. Smaug maintained a nimble course, weaving and ducking the strikes with the central tree reflecting in its greedy eyes at all times. M@ti blasted more hornets from the sky and parried the blows.

  Once she’d left the petri dish environment, Loadi’s prison, her senses had returned. Her physical body had reconnected, and she realized she’d fallen back on the blisteringly hot metal at the bottom of the pit. She gritted her teeth against the pain and kept her hands moving, shaping code, unleashing one malicious attack after the next, creating solid walls in the path of the pursuing hunters.

  Metal clanked in the outside world. Banging about like when she’d flailed inside the trunk of the hov. She heard a sudden breath of air, a mouthful of curses, and felt hands on her body.

  She was being dragged. Finding out by what would have only meant a quick slip of the veil of her display, but she couldn’t risk it. No logging out. She was fully committed.