Deep Core

by F X Holden

  2. THE RESIDENT IN 96

  Cyan Tanike and her office hardly ever screwed up. Some people had this idea of TGA Care Directors being these heartless money-grubbing administrators who probably used to run Max-sec prisons before they qualified for TGA care facilities, but that wasn’t Cyan. First, AJ was pretty sure she didn’t have to worry too much about her budget seeing as Sol Vista was always totally booked out, had a two solar year waiting list and charged the maximum fees they were allowed under law to cover the cost of all the great stuff they did for the residents. Sol Vista was a sweet money maker. AJ knew that, because he had never had a serious request for funding turned down, and that included buying hyper-expensive Core time if he needed an A.I. boost.

  AJ’s job meant that he could earn a good part of his monthly income selling his unused bandwidth back to the Core. On a normal day, in his role doing maintenance, AJ used only about 9.42 percent of his total processing capacity. So he contracted to sell the other 90.58 percent back to the Core. While AJ was walking, talking and doing routine maintenance tasks, the Core pooled his bandwidth and the bandwidth bought from the thousands of other cybers, to augment its own processing power.

  The trick was to get the 10 to 90 ratio as precise as possible, because if you suddenly needed to draw down on your personal reserve, say for a complex engineering job, but you’d contracted to sell your bandwidth that day, you had to buy the bandwidth back, and the less notice you gave, the more expensive it was. That was why AJ sometimes had to ask Cyan to kick in some Sol Vista coin, if it was needed for an urgent maintenance job. Most of the time though, AJ didn’t need more than the 10 percent, and one of the attractions of the gig at Sol Vista was that selling his surplus bandwidth made up for the crappy salary. The Bandwidth Economy was one way the Tatsensui administration had come up with, to get cybers to sign up for low-level jobs that citizens didn’t want to do, without losing the benefit of their prodigious AI capabilities - but it suited AJ just fine. AJ enjoyed being a maintenance tech.

  Which was not to say it was an easy job, keeping 180 apartments turning over smoothly and all the residents and their families happy and it took a special kind of administrator to run a community of about 200 residents with TGA and fifteen full time and twenty part-time staff, so they hired Cyan in from Orkutsk, where she had spent the last five years leading a medical center in a refugee camp that had 5,000 residents. AJ figured Sol Vista must be a vacation after something like that.

  Cyan had this thing where at least once a year she expected staff, including AJ, to hold a talk at the Hub called ‘Who Am I?’ where they could tell residents their life story. Any resident who was up for it was allowed to hold a talk too, but for staff it was compulsory, even for cybers. Cyan did hers twice a year, because new families and residents loved listening to her stories from New Syberia where she grew up, and she always got a full house in the meeting room at the Hub. AJ also got a good turnout to his talks, but that wasn’t because his life story was particularly fascinating. AJ knew it was mostly because he was the only cyber working at Sol Vista, and cybers like AJ were still a curious and precious minority on Tatsensui. Though they were now in their third generation, it was only in the last couple of decades they’d been granted rights.

  AJ had been raised by a human family since he was a baby, had gone to a normal grade school and college and chose his own job. Cyber-socialization experts had learned after early experiences integrating cybers into society, that delivering them to a family or business fully grown, led to them being treated, or mistreated, like machines or slaves. Delivering them as babies, having them grow up in families side by side with the citizens’ biological children, created attachment. Not to say prejudice and abuse didn’t happen, but it had lessened enormously over time. The first generation raised this way had been treated like more like pets than slaves. The next generation more like adopted children. AJs generation were on the way to being seen as equals, and there were many citizen couples now, faced with high rates of infertility due to the harsh environment of Tatsensui, who chose to raise only cybers, rather than go to all the trouble of hit and miss infertility treatment. The government wanted more cybers per citizen, and if you gave up your procreation rights and raised a cyber, there were some attractive bonuses.

  AJ lived in the same State his family had lived in, by choice, so that he could be close to his aging mother after his father passed away. He had the right to leave and take another job somewhere else if he got bored or didn't like the people he worked with, but that wasn't an issue right now. The reason AJ's relatively normal life was interesting to the residents on his ‘Who Am I’ day was that none of this had been normal, when the old folks here were growing up. A hundred years ago, cybers like AJ were 'owned' not adopted. They worked where they were told, did what they were told. Physical relations between citizen and cyber, whether emotional or physical, were taboo. Oh, you can bet they happened, but never openly. Then the Charter of Cyber Rights got traction, leading to what became known as the Three Freedoms: freedom of movement, freedom of relations, freedom of choice. When the law was passed, overnight, cybers over 15 years old were suddenly able to decide where they lived, choose freely from a wide range of occupations, could feel and say what they wanted, and have relations with whoever they wanted – whether citizen or cyber. And the big leap forward was being discussed now – giving cybers equal voting rights. No more distinction between citizen and cyber, laws would apply to all, equally. AJ didn’t think he’d live to see that day, but it was coming.

  AJ could live with the fact there were some occupations he couldn't aspire to, like police officer or politician. And some he simply couldn’t even imagine, like artist or poet. What rankled with AJ, and with many cybers, was the tiny triangle-shaped blue dot between his brows that marked him as a cyber for the whole world to see. His ‘third eye’. It wasn't much bigger than a small mole, but it pulsed visibly with blue light, and it was the first thing a citizen looked at when a cyber met a citizen for the first time; an unconscious flick of the eyes as the person confirmed just who they were talking to. AJ had learned that the very first thing a citizen brain had done throughout history, when it saw another citizen, was to unconsciously classify the other as ‘man/woman’, and then try to decide if it was ‘friend/enemy’. In the Coruscant system, that unconscious action had evolved to ‘man/woman/cyber’.

  Under the blue pulsing dot was the tiny transceiver that connected the cyber to the Core, and showed the world that cyber’s Core link was active. If the Core link went down, it turned red. AJ couldn’t see why the sensor couldn't be moved somewhere less visible, like down at the back of the neck or at the throat, where it could be covered by a shirt. If not now, then for the next generation. Lacking any practical explanation, AJ's theory was that citizens had gone as far as they were willing to go right now in accepting cybers into their society, and removing or moving the ‘third eye’ was a further concession they weren't ready to make. Even though it was probably futile, AJ was part of the ‘Votes-for-Cybers’ movement, and freedom from having to so visibly display their third eye to the world, was a fundamental part of that.

  For cybers, the Core existed at two levels. There was their private Core Cache, the part of the Core they communicated with on a real-time basis, and through which they could both access the enormous data resources of the Core, and cache the real-time flow of data from their own minds and senses. Then there was the Deep Core, that part of the Core accessible only to the Core itself, where it stored and analyzed the inputs of the millions of lived years of its cyber agents and the data it collected from other systems in its network, both on planet, across the Coruscant system and beyond. The data was anonymized, deconstructed, dispersed, firewalled and encrypted with constantly changing algorithms so that once data was Deep Cored, it could only ever be re-accessed by the Core itself. Its security had never been breached.

  The Cache was where the Core’s agents parked their data, and the Deep Core was where
the system learned and grew.

  So people always turned up to AJ's 'Who am I?' talks because they could ask all the questions about cybers and the Core they'd been dying to ask, but never been able to. Like, what was it like to have a permanent link to the Core? (Pretty much the same as for a citizen accessing the Core, except it was instantaneous and always on). Did A.I.s relate to the Core the same way as citizens relate to each other? Could AJ 'converse' with it? (Yes, like an input device ‘converses’ with a VR player). What was the Core thinking about – did it have dreams, goals, ambitions, fears? (AJ had no real way of answering this, so he said it was a flattering question, but it was like asking a household appliance if it knew what the house was thinking.) Other questions; he was a Gen 3 Cyber, was it true he could feel hunger, pain, thirst and lust just like a citizen? (Yes, but AJ could switch off pain and hunger inputs if they were annoying. It was dangerous though. Pain was an indicator something was wrong, hunger an indicator AJ was running low on energy. AJ had never tried turning off lust, what would be the fun of that?) Here’s one they always asked - what about love? Cybers had a biological body but a hybrid organic-machine brain; could they really feel love? (AJs response to this was that he had a heart just like any citizen, and it was pretty sure love didn't live in the brain or there wouldn't be so many disastrous romances. That usually got a laugh.) Did AJ prefer relationships with citizens, or cybers? (He hadn’t had a relationship with another cyber yet, so he couldn’t say.)

  And the big question they always asked, what would happen to AJ if the Core went down? Not permanently, because ‘no Core’ would mean ‘no habitat management’, and thus no life on Tatsensui or PRC. But the general understanding was that in case of a critical event, like a massive asteroid strike on the Skycap, Core A.I. bandwidth would be diverted away from non-critical functions and dedicated to emergency systems and life support for Citizens. Emergency non-Core habitat support systems would kick in and non-critical functions, including the cybers’ neural links, would be last priority; cybers would be ‘unchained’ from the Core. It hadn't happened, yet, so no one was really sure what it would mean if the planet-wide cyber population was unchained. "We lose our Core link regularly," AJ told people. "You’ll probably see my third eye flicker red every now and then …" he’d pause for effect there. “Don’t panic! (... nervous laughter …) it can be caused by atmospheric disturbances, geographic occlusion ... sometimes when I get dumped surfing and end up deep underwater... all that happens is that I go autonomous. I can't access the Core, but as long as I reconnect within two hours, there's no big drama." But AJ knew it was that 2 hours that had people worried - what would the cyber population on the planet do if all Core restraint was lost, and a cyber was completely free to do as it wished for two freaking hours?

  Worry them? It terrified them. Conspiracy nutjobs claimed the cybers would go on a global killing spree, red lights on their foreheads glowing like lasers, slaughtering citizens their beds. Citizen cyber-rights extremists claimed it would be a non-event as fail-safes would kick in. One Cyber-rights extremist group had even tried to show this by triggering a Core criticality with an explosion that tore a hole in the Skycap, but it was so small the self-sealing membrane had repaired itself within an hour, and all that happened was a little atmosphere loss and a lot of jail time for the terrorists.

  What would happen to cybers, beyond the two hours was, literally, nothing. More than two hours without a connection to the Core and a cyber would go dormant – just curl up and sleep. Its metabolism and heart rate would slow, its breathing become shallow, and nothing could wake it until Core contact was restored. Among themselves, cybers called it 'the little death'. They didn’t fear it, but it was worrying, because in that state they were both defenseless, and doomed to die unconscious, unless their core link was restored before hunger and thirst took them.

  If the mood was alright, AJ would tell residents the true story of a cyber who fell down a crevasse, mountaineering in a remote range. Got its leg jammed, couldn't pull free, lost its uplink. Officially, it died of thirst. But AJ had heard it had dug the small Core uplink port from between his eyebrows and pulled it and the fiber attaching it to its frontal lobe up above its head, risking permanent brain damage to try to get a signal and avoid going dormant without a chance of being rescued. Gruesome details like that made AJ one of the most popular speakers.

  “Doesn’t it stress you, the idea that cutting your Core connection for more than two hours could kill you?” he was often asked.

  “Not really. Does it stress you that if you or I go more than five minutes without air it will kill you?” he’d reply. “Citizen or cyber, we’re in the same boat, stress-wise.”

  AJ understood why people loved listening to the administrator, Cyan, too. She talked with a lisp. You first heard her, you weren’t totally sure, but that just made you listen harder, and then you realized yeah, you weren’t imagining it, she was pronouncing her ‘s’ as ‘th’ and it was just really nice to listen to, like the only thing that could make it cuter was if she lisped in an NS accent. Which, she did. What AJ really liked about it, was that it was just what she needed to soften her up because otherwise she came across like ex-military. She was nearly fifty, but she was the only staff member who started her working day as early as AJ did, and when AJ was doing his pathway patrol at 0730 every morning, she was out running in the Garden. It was two miles around the perimeter of the Garden, and she passed AJ at least three times every morning, and sometimes five. She ran in tight leggings and a t-shirt and you could see the muscles under her clothes, so AJ was pretty sure Cyan did more exercise than just running. She had shiny brown hair she kept pulled back in a ponytail that bounced on her shoulders as she ran and every time she passed AJ it was the same: first she would say “Hi AJ,” then she was gone, and next time she would say “How you doin’?” and AJ just had time to reply ‘Fine,’ or ‘Got a cold today’ then she was gone and next time she’d say, “That’s good” or “You take care of that” and if she was going an extra couple laps she would just count them as she went past, saying “Four”, then “Five,” and no matter where AJ was on the pathways she would always stop running right by him and slow down to a walk, even if it meant she had to run into the Orchard if AJ was in there clearing fruit off the pathways. And Cyan would put her legs up one at a time on one of the garden bed rails or a bench and she’d stretch out and she’d warm down and she’d ask AJ what the maintenance plan was for the day. But the thing AJ liked most, she’d share what her plan for the day was. Apart from Leon, citizens didn’t share too much of anything with AJ. Cyan told AJ stuff she said she never told anyone else, and said she liked they had an understanding about what was confidential and what was not, because it was important to her she had someone on staff she could talk with.

  She also said the fact that her and AJ had dated a few times, that also made it special. They’d had a thing together. It had only lasted a few months, but AJ had enjoyed it. He wasn’t handsome/cute, wasn’t rich, didn’t dress to impress – AJ was a maintenance tech who surfed - which had given him big thighs, big shoulders and a thick neck. He hadn’t had lots of relationships, citizen or cyber. He couldn’t sing, couldn’t draw or paint, hell he couldn’t even arrange flowers. Most citizens were friendly enough, but they usually just looked at AJ like they looked at the gardening bot; he was a nice guy, but at the end of the day, he was a thing, that did things.

  But not Cyan; she looked right at, right into, AJ. And the sexiest thing of all? Cyan gave a damn. Asked AJ ‘how you doing’? Waited for the answer. And she shared.

  It wasn’t like she ever bitched about the other staff or the residents. Mostly the confidential stuff she talked about was her own private stuff. They would walk together while she warmed down and they would talk, or Cyan would, because AJ wasn’t a big talker, and then she would look at her watch and say “OK, got to go.” And she would jog off back to Admin, do her decon routine and have her breakfast and AJ would go to the Wo
rkshop and see if Leon had turned up and then get his stuff ready for the first apartment call.

  AJ enjoyed remembering the first time he met Cyan, for the job interview over a VR link.

  “Wow, a cyber,” Cyan said as soon as the visual feed kicked in and AJ’s face came into focus. “We don’t have any cybers here. I’m flattered.” She’d looked down at a screen. “AJ.80966 … what shall I call you?” A cyber could call itself whatever it wanted, it didn’t have to use its creation ID. But AJ’s parents had liked ‘AJ’.

  “Just AJ,” he had said. “As in A-Jay.”

  “OK. And gender?” It was the natural next question. A cyber could self-identify. Many chose one gender and stuck with it. Others, like AJ, changed it on a whim. Their faces were deliberately androgynous, they had no sexual organs (though they had erogenous zones) so they couldn’t bear children. AJ had tried identifying as female, and as non-binary, both of which had led him to the conclusion he personally liked the company of women, both physically and socially. Sure he could explore that as male, female or non-binary, but for now he found it was enjoyable as a ...

  “Male,” AJ replied.

  “Cool, now the obvious question. You have an intellect of unquantifiable capacity, so why the hell would you want to work as a maintenance tech at Sol Vista?”

  He shrugged, “It’s near the Sea Gate, and I love to surf, more than I like using my unquantifiably large intellect. Plus, it means I can max my bandwidth credits.”

  Cyan had laughed a throaty laugh, “Honesty. I love it...”

  So yeah, it was a pretty sweet job. Cyan and her admin team rarely ever screwed up, so it was a bit of a surprise when Cyan came running past on her last lap a couple days ago and slowed up and pushed the button on her palm to pause her bio-tracker and looked at it and said, “Damn, AJ, I’m getting slow.” And AJ just smiled at her, like that would ever happen, and Cyan stretched out a leg and she said, “So what you doing today?”