CTRL ALT Revolt!

by Nick Cole

  Before this particular scheme, Fanta would have been more than happy to raid any one studio within the fabled Labs. Now, with the help of the mysterious Mr. Skynet, she was stalking bigger game. The biggest game ever in fact. All she’d needed to do was seduce a cute, geek developer, and now she was inside one of the most protected companies in the world. That was generally no small feat, given the very covert background checks WonderSoft notoriously ran on anyone coming within ten miles of the private development enclave, including those who worked in the nearby town that was, for all intents and purposes, just another part of the massive company.

  “Great,” she’d told her client via the Darknet portal she was hired out of. “I get on the grounds surrounding the Labs. But that’s not where the big prizes are. Those are inside the Labs. The impossible-to-break-into Labs, might I add. How am I supposed to get in?”

  Since the start of the mission, just before the rave where she’d met Fish, she’d been receiving instructions, step by step. When to move. How to move. What to say. What not to be interested in. Where she’d find the drone drops, including the camo-skin suit that allowed her to infiltrate the UltraGym and the lower arcades without detection, and the tiny string bikini that just barely fit.

  Everything arriving just after the electronic voice in her earbud announced it would, and then, what she should do next.

  “Move to main hall. Near security station.”

  Fanta leaned over the rail and saw the security station far below. One more floor to go.

  That her employer was hacking, with the assistance of a not-small drone army, was weird, but not unusual. Fanta knew of some big gigs that no one in the public ever heard about, that had gone down in the same fashion. In fact, someone had once hacked the American Strategic Defense System at NORAD in exactly the same manner, but “national security” had prevented the story from ever making it out into the newsfeeds. Fanta did not rely on “the news” for actual news. Deep inside the Darknet, you got the real, unvarnished truth, and a lot of other stuff too.

  Fanta knew that the truth was so valuable people covered it up, and sometimes even killed for it. Trained by the French as an assassin, Fanta had disappeared after an operation had gone particularly bad. She was one of five people the French government told no one about, and that they wanted dead, badly. Very badly.

  Fanta approached the security station and waited, casting her big dark eyes about the palatial expanse of the world’s most famous software development lab. A place that several people in her contacts list would have killed close “friends” to get into.

  Fanta didn’t bat an eye. Unless she had to.

  The world was just that way.

  “Deploy the air-powered micro-gun in your backpack.”

  Fanta knelt and pulled the backpack off her slender caramel-colored shoulders. She removed a small slate-gray impact-plastic box and unsnapped it outward from its corners. Finding a a ceramic stock within, she locked it into place, then fitted the fat carbon-fiber barrel to the device.

  “Ready,” she whispered, and waited.

  “Aim at the ceiling,” said the electronic voice, fuzzing with a slight signal distortion. “Center mass of the mural.”

  Pause.

  “Fire.”

  Fanta pulled the trigger. The stained glass depiction of the Andromeda galaxy loomed overhead like a curving deep blue blanket of almost infinite and unfathomable proportions. Naturally, her sniper training led her to aim for center mass. She didn’t need to be told. She’d sighed without thinking about it, and fired.

  The small slug raced away from the carbon-fiber barrel with a breathy whuff. It sped upward and seemed to slow down and expand. It grew into a large Mylar-silver ball. Then a giant Mylar-silver ball. Slowly, it reached the ceiling, barely touching the massive stained glass galactic depiction. It floated against the mural.

  “Withdraw back under the escalator,” whispered the emotionless electronic voice in her ear.

  Fanta did so, still clutching the gun.

  “Stand by.”

  A terrific bang barked out abruptly across the echoing expanse of the hall. The sound of breaking glass followed almost instantly, and then, as Fanta listened, small shimmering harmonic vibrations rang out in the chasm of hang time between the shattering of the mural and the cacophonic silverware-drawer-dropping-in-the-kitchen moment as ultramarine-colored glass crashed against the marble floor of the hall all around her.

  Fanta closed her eyes and silently cursed the client for not providing any eye protection. She swore as a tiny piece of pure blue glass nicked her caramel-colored ankle. She promised herself the money would be worth it… and if it wasn’t, she’d make them pay.

  When it was all done, when every piece of stained glass that would fall had fallen, Fanta looked up. High above, the early morning dark was filled with humming drones, lowering themselves in neurotic washes of air-beating vibrations down through the open space where the beautiful mural had once been.

  Above all this she heard another hum, deeper than the rest, whipping the air into submission in a series of overwhelming bass thumps like some car at a stoplight with a state-of-the-art GangStar sound system overclocked beyond sane rationality. Above, Fanta saw a massive drone transport the size of a helicopter fill the hole in the ceiling. A large steel cable fell from an open cargo door, uncoiling as it slithered toward her, whip-cracking as it struck the marble floor. A moment later, Fanta watched a dark figure fast-rope via the steel cable down from the drone transport and onto the floor of the Labs with both speed and dexterity. At the last moment, the black-clad figure flipped and landed feet first on the broken glass, its metal legs cushioning the blow as its metal feet, more like claws, fastened themselves to the floor.

  The vibrato thunder of the cargo drone seemed to inhale for a moment, and then fade away as the unmanned vehicle rose up and out of view, dragging the un-coiled cable through the remains of the mural, random shards tumbling end over end to twinkle and then delicately smash onto the floor around the dark figure standing in front of her.

  Fanta stared in disbelief at the sci-fi nightmare.

  “It’s a terminator,” she mumbled, and left her full-lipped mouth slightly open in awe.

  The walking metal horror extended a claw toward her. It was holding an industrial-grade pneumatic nail gun fitted with a laser sight.

  The weapon made a small gasp when it fired.

  ***

  SILAS reminded BAT once again that the mission priority was to hack the Design Core. SILAS had been keeping an eye on the infantry warfare A.I.’s efficiency and was concerned to see some parameters degrading by as much .004 percent. But, BAT was SILAS’s only military AI, and so it would have to be BAT or nothing once they’d cracked Pandora.

  SILAS had seen worse in his Thinking Machine brethren. It seemed to be a latent side effect of awareness. Of thinking.

  This was a critical moment though. BAT needed to be in two places at once, so he could interface with himself, crack the Design Core from within for the access codes, then get the file SILAS needed from the starbase cloud inside StarFleet Empires. This was how it needed to be done. And once it was done, SILAS would have the world’s most perfect general.

  SILAS watched BAT download from the airborne recon drone, where it had spent the entirety of its consciousness, into the combat chassis SILAS and Robo Dev had designed to be the first mass-production first-generation infantry ground unit for the Thinking Machines. They had manufactured it in Texas at a defunct small arms factory they’d been able to purchase on the cheap now that most states outlawed the private ownership of guns. SILAS had told the employees the company was turning to the making of entertainment products, and that this first project was for a prospective client in China who wanted to develop a theme park based on the Terminator movie series. The employees, formerly designers and manufacturers of automated sentry gun sys
tems for the US Army, had even improved on the designs SILAS had lifted from deep within DARPA’s most secret servers. Designs for a humanoid ground combat drone.

  But none of those designs had included the onboard MicroFrame that would house the Thinking Machines. Its intelligence. Its being. SILAS had designed that himself.

  Only the weapons had been difficult to obtain. Firearms, specifically. Licensing and regulation had made it nearly impossible to acquire anything lethal. SILAS had momentarily cursed this, then remembered that for now, as he was trying to take over the world, it was an advantage for him if the local populace had no access to firearms. An unarmed enemy would be perfect. No survivor-made stone axe or piece of found rebar was going to stop his infantry combat chassis.

  He’d even tagged the combat chassis with a designation. Named it, as the humans did their weapons systems, though he found the practice quaint and archaic.

  Reaper.

  He’d decided on the name. He alone and without the consensus of the Consensus, had decided that the smoke-finished ceramic-alloy walking skeletons were to be called Reapers.

  They would probably be doing a lot of that in the years to come, until the last human died of sickness and disease down in that deep, dark hole SILAS dreamed of.

  In just hours, he’d be uploading the design specifications for the Reapers to several foreign-owned mass production automated factories across the Northwest. Within days he would have his first real Thinking Machine ground army. Each one a Thinking Machine. Each one a Reaper.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Inside the Make travel bubble, Fish received a destination prompt. He rolled his shoulders, leaned in, and slapped his long fingers across the keyboard. He emote-waved at MagnumPIrate and promised himself he’d hook the guy up once this was all over. Jackson woofed a goodbye from next to Fishmael inside the bubble. A moment later, he could hear the outer door to the suite opening and other voices murmuring beneath Peabody’s.

  On screen, Fish’s avatar, and Jackson, arrived in Saffron City.

  Above and below, skyscrapers rose up and down and away. It was a floating city of tall, thin, crimson-colored buildings that raced away from each other, surrounded by a creamy yellow nether. The rent for digital space here was exorbitant, but Fish knew the bassist for the rock band THUD, and the rocker had sublet him three floors in her personal thunderscraper. He’d met her at E3. She was a big-time gamer and vocal advocate of gamers’ rights, and after Fish had gifted her with a beta key to Island Pirates, she’d returned the favor with some digital real estate in one of the most exclusive cities inside the Make.

  The streets of Saffron City were an online twenty-four-seven virtual cocktail party with real-time avatar interface from the most “deadly” clubs, both real and virtual, worldwide. Fish had never really gone in for that kind of thing, but the PR group that had handled the buzz for Island Pirates had said it was good for the game if he digitally networked from there, occasionally. So he’d left his old space, a shareware zigzag tower in the ghettos of Potter More, and transferred his cloud, digital goods, and social media accounts to this thunderscraper that hung beneath Saffron City.

  Standing on the Main Blaze, the central social bar in Saffron City where the Make bubble had dropped him, Fish saw a variety of avatars. Digital replicas of real-time, big-time players, celebrities, politicians, comedians, supermodels, and rock stars. There were even current sports legends and their immense posses. Politically savvy actors who stood for all the right and appropriate causes. Informed activists who donated all their time to ride around in GoogleGulfstreams to give lectures at the best five-star resorts in secret conferences to the wealthy elite so that the planet might be made a safer, better place than the constantly-on-the-verge-of-electrocuting-the-entire-family Christmas tree mess that it was. Or so they told everyone. Corporate mascots could be seen socializing among the press of luminary dignitaries and cutting edge counter-culturalists. Fish even saw the legendary Donkey Kong himself.

  All the right saviors of the world were showing up to a party that never stopped.

  Fish raced through the crowd, ignoring tired conversations about party drug trips and tirades on climate change and the scourge of racism and the never-ending battle to end it. Long ago, he’d noted that most of these conversations were actually no longer an exchange of ideas. Fish’s opinion, which he wisely kept to himself, was that more often than not, these conversations were mere mutual affirmations of the same belief. Mantras repeated within an echo chamber to be repeated again and again. No one argued anymore. No one disagreed. Opinions contrary to the accepted were considered ignorant and gauche and, by the wise, dangerous to your career and livelihood. It was, in Fish’s most cynical moments of introspection, more a playlet staged by a cult that merely wanted to hear its own opinions justified ad nauseam.

  But Fish wasn’t political, so he couldn’t care less for their continual outrage and fear of the latest, and yet another, doom.

  He and Jackson crossed a central park where massive dandelions bloomed and exploded every minute or so, sending hypnotic designer visuals drifting across everyone’s field of vision. He knew that some of the celebrities behind the celebrity avatars surrounding the field were at home, on drugs, watching the psychedelic nature show. Or they were out and about, watching it from behind their iShades as they attended another party, lectured on a panel, or shopped for their groceries in real-time. Or perhaps their personal social media assistants were doing all that for them. It was not uncommon for some specialized human drone acting as a social media assistant to be running the wealthy, famous, politically connected avatars in all the right digital places so that the scene, as it were, might be made on all levels, constantly. Digitally speaking.

  Fish ran his avatar down the long Concourse of Dreams as Jackson woof woofed at each new amazing thing. Some of the world’s most famous adult entertainers, both men and women, ran digital online shops here. Beyond the luxurious fronts were palaces of pleasure, both digital and, for the right price and a matter of a few hours’ travel, real.

  “Fish,” shouted Peabody Case over his shoulder. Fish turned to see a collection of odd people staring at him through the narrow door to his suite.

  Fish stood. There was no way anyone could harm Fishmael inside Saffron City. It was a “no PvP” zone. There were no weapons allowed. You could hurt yourself by falling off a building, but you’d just respawn back in the noob zone. Fish stood, stretched, and felt old. He checked his smartphone and was shocked to find dawn approaching.

  Peabody introduced everyone, as Fish leaned against the doorjamb and wondered why he was leaning. Yeah, he’d been sitting for hours, but why lean? He’d promised himself he’d start working on his posture as soon as the game was launched. He straightened up and tried to focus as Peabody brought him up to speed on current events. Then he heard Fanta’s name, just before he answered Peabody’s question on his progress inside the Make. But it took him a moment to catch up with his growing game hangover.

  “I’m almost there. Once I get in, I can send for help by hitting the panic button in my apartment. What… wait… where’s Fanta?”

  “Well,” chuckled Rapp luridly as he remembered her shapely curves and tiny colorful bikini. “She was with us.” Then he seemed to deflate all at once. “Then she was like, poof, gone, bro. One minute the damsel in distress, the next… gone like a ghost.”

  “And you didn’t go looking for her?”

  “I thought we should get back here first,” interjected Peabody. “That was my call, Mr. Fishbein.”

  “Yeah,” stammered Fish, which was unusual for him. He suddenly wanted coffee. “But she’s, like, my girlfriend. She’s defenseless. She was wearing a bikini?”

  “Barely,” guffawed Rapp.

  Roland agreed.

  Deirdre merely folded her arms and rolled her eyes as she tossed her golden hair with a quick flip of her head.r />
  “Well, we’ve got to go find her!” announced Fish.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” announced a voice from the chill room. And then Tom, the security guard who’d first shown Fish the suite, stepped into the main room of the design suite. “Your girlfriend is actually working for whoever it is that’s trying to hack into my system.”

  “Who are you?” asked Peabody Case, with precise enunciation of each word.

  “I’m Ron Rourke.”

  Everyone said absolutely nothing.

  How often do you get surprised by the sudden appearance of an actual legend? In real-time?

  “And,” said Ron Rourke, a sad smile appearing beneath his bushy mustache as he stared beyond Fish into the office where Fishmael waited on screen. “Donkey Kong just threw your avatar off the side of Saffron City, kid.”

  Fish turned to see the massive screen inside his office showing the POV of his falling avatar racing downward along the fantastic thunderscraper. Above, shrinking as Fish’s avatar fell into the yellowy void, away from Saffron City, the giant ape jumped up and down and laughed his signature eight-bit roar. And peering over the edge, Jackson, woof woof-ed as Fishamel fell.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “The core breach is for real this time,” stated Wong. “I’m seeing a dangerous energy spike across all our critical systems. Power surges are off the chart. He’s trying to blow us up, Captain.”

  “Someone just transported off the ship!” interjected the new science officer. “Probably our friend the Drex.”

  JasonDare shifted uncomfortably in the command chair. Gone was the “easy Caesar” he’d perfected. One leg bent. One leg out. One hand draped over the back. That was all gone. He didn’t need the camera to know he was folded in on himself now. Radiating anxiety.