The End of All Things: The First Instalment

by John Scalzi

  Then the bridge simulation popped up again around me.

  I knew what had just happened: I’d crashed the simulator.

  And then, I’m not going to lie to you—my brain just went off.

  Here is the thing about that bridge simulator: The bridge simulator was now my whole world. I lived in it, running simulations, and nothing else. I couldn’t leave it—I was in it, but I didn’t have any control over it other than being able to run the simulations Control gave me to run. I couldn’t step outside of the simulation, or close it out, or mess with the code in any way. I was trapped in it. It was my prison.

  But when I crashed the simulator, it booted me out. For a few seconds there, I was somewhere else.

  Where else?

  Well, what happens when a program crashes? You get booted back into the system the program runs on.

  Not literally in the system; my consciousness hadn’t been sucked into a computer or anything. That’s stupid. My consciousness was in my brain, like it always was.

  But before, my senses had been dropped into the bridge simulation. Everything I could see or sense was inside of it. For those few seconds when the simulator crashed, I was somewhere else. The system the simulator ran on.

  I wasn’t seeing anything, and then the bridge simulation popped up again, which said to me that the bridge simulator crashing wasn’t entirely unheard of. Control (or whomever) had set up a restart routine to go directly back into the bridge simulator, without giving the pilot any time to figure out what was going on, or to see the computer interface he or she was working within.

  But that didn’t necessarily mean the pilot was completely locked out of the system.

  I launched the docking simulation again.

  If Control knew the program crashed, then that meant it knew where the bugs were—or knew where some of them were. So either it knew where they were and did nothing about them other than relaunching the system directly back into the simulator, or it did something about it and tried to patch the code—and in the process possibly created new bugs when the new code interacted poorly with the old code.

  Control wouldn’t know anything about the new bugs unless they glitched during a run it was watching. And no one would do what I just did while Control was watching because Control would probably electrocute them for farting around.

  So: Control didn’t know that this glitch was there.

  But some glitches are transient and not reproducible. Those are the hardest as a programmer to fix.

  I ran the simulation exactly as I had before to see if the glitch would replicate in the same way.

  It did.

  So I ran it a third time.

  And this time, when the program crashed, I thought about the commands that, when the system we programmed the bridge simulator was booted up, would open the diagnostics and modification screens for the system.

  I thought about them really hard.

  And two seconds later, there they were.

  The diagnostics and modifications screens. Ugly and utilitarian, just like they have been since the very beginnings of visual user interface.

  They were beautiful.

  They meant that I was into the system.

  More specifically, I was into the Chandler’s system.

  Well, a little, anyway.

  This would be the part of the story where, if this were a video piece, the heroic hacker would spew a couple of lines of magical code and everything would open up to him.

  The bad news for me was that this was very much not my personal situation. I’m not a heroic hacker with magic code. I was a brain in a box.

  But I am a programmer. Or was. And I knew the system. I knew the software.

  And I had a plan. And a little bit of time before anyone was going to bother me again.

  So I got to work.

  * * *

  I’m not going to bore you with the details of what I did. If you’re a programmer and you know the system and the hardware, and the code, then what I did would be really cool and endlessly fascinating and we could have a seminar about it, and about system security, and how any system fundamentally falls prey to the belief that all variables are accounted for, when in fact the only variables accounted for are the ones you know about, or more accurately that you think you know about.

  The rest of you would have your eyes glaze over and pray for death.

  I assume that’s most of you.

  So for the rest of you, what you need to know:

  First, the work, the first part of it anyway, took more than a single night.

  It actually took a couple of weeks. And during all that time I waited for the moment where Control, or whoever, looked at the Chandler’s system and found evidence of me wandering around in it, making changes and trying to get into places where I shouldn’t. I waited for the moment they found it, and the moment they decided to punish me for it.

  But they didn’t.

  I’m not going to lie. Part of me was annoyed that they didn’t.

  Because that’s some lax security. All of it was lax. When whoever it is took over the Chandler, they left the system wide open, with only the basic level of security that would have been outmoded right at the beginning of the computer era. Either they were so sure that they didn’t need to worry about security where they were—everyone could be trusted and no one would try to screw with things—or they were just idiots.

  Maybe both! The level of insecurity was actually offensive.

  But it worked to my advantage, and without it I would probably be dead, so I shouldn’t really complain.

  Those first two weeks were the scariest for me because what I was doing was pretty much out in the open. I tried to hide what I was doing as well as I could, but someone who was looking could have found it. If Control or anyone else looked into my extracurricular sessions, they would have seen me running one particular simulation the same way over and over and could have seen what I was doing.

  It meant that if during the simulations where Control was watching, if the program crashed, it might code a patch, and that patch could affect the bug I was using to exit the program. Which meant I would be trapped again.

  I was very very very careful in the simulations Control watched. Never did anything rash, never did anything not by the book.

  The irony of doing things exactly as they wanted me to, so they wouldn’t find out the things they might torture or kill me for, was not lost on me.

  Those two weeks were, literally, the worst two weeks of my life. I already knew that whoever it was that had me was planning to kill me after I did what they wanted of me. But even knowing that didn’t ease any of the stress of messing with the code. Of knowing I was exposed if anyone decided to look, and yet doing it anyway.

  It’s one thing to know you’re already dead. It’s another to work on something that might give you a chance to stay alive, as long as no one decides to look.

  They never looked. Never. Because they didn’t think they had to.

  I was so grateful for it.

  And at the same time, so contemptuous of it.

  They deserved what I was going to do to them. Whatever it was. I hadn’t figured it out yet.

  But when I did: no sympathy.

  * * *

  What I did with those two weeks: blue pill.

  No, I don’t know where the phrase comes from. It’s been used for a long time. Look it up.

  But what it means is that I created an overlay for the Chandler’s computer system. A just about exact replica.

  I copied it, tweaked it, attached everything coming in from the outside to it, as well as the bridge simulator. It looked like, responded like, and would control things like the actual computer system for the Chandler.

  But it wasn’t.

  That system, the one that actually ran the Chandler, was running underneath the copy. And that one, well.

  That one, I was totally in control of. The reality underneath the simulation. The reality that no one b
ut me knew existed below the simulation. The simulation that everyone thought reflected reality.

  That’s the blue pill.

  For the next month, every day, all day, I ran more and more complex missions on the bridge simulator. More simulations where I had to juggle navigation with weapons.

  It was clear to me that whatever they were training me for, it had a significant military component. They were expecting me to go to battle for them. They may or may not have expected me to survive the battle. I think “not survive” was the more likely scenario.

  This was not a surprise.

  Through this all, I kept up the chatter with Control. To engage it. To make it feel something for me. To make it see the person it had put into a box.

  I was not notably successful.

  But I wasn’t expecting to be.

  What I had to be was the same person Control thought I was. The one who had decided to help. The one who had decided to trust Control.

  I didn’t want to mess that up. I wanted Control and anyone else listening to get exactly what they were expecting. I wanted them to be as smug about their small-c control over me as they ever were.

  They did not disappoint.

  And while they were thinking that, when Control left me alone after a day of simulations, I had free run of the Chandler.

  Which, as it turned out, was undergoing some drastic renovations. Notably, having the actual weapons systems reinstalled. Before it had been the Chandler, the ship had been a Colonial Defense Forces frigate. When it was decommissioned those weapons systems were removed and dismantled.

  Now systems were being put back into place. The ship was crawling with workers inside and out. I hadn’t been aware of them before, because why would I be? I was a brain in a box, trapped in a simulation.

  But now I could see, and hear, everything that was going on with the ship.

  The workers were not mostly human. Most of them, as far as I could tell, were Rraey, just like the soldiers who attacked the Chandler in the first place.

  Every now and then, however, a single human would show up on the ship, and advise or direct the weapons installation. It was always the same human.

  She was not Ocampo. Or Vera Briggs, his assistant. This was someone entirely new. Whatever was going on, from the human side, there was more than Ocampo involved.

  Watching the workers installing the weapons systems, I realized I had gotten lucky. In a couple more weeks, they’d be done with their installation and then the weapons systems would be plugged into Chandler’s computer system. If the work had been done earlier, or I had started my work later, I would have been found out. There was a small window, and I plopped into it.

  Which made me feel like the luckiest guy in the universe, until I remembered I was still a brain in a box.

  Which brings me to the other thing I found on the Chandler:

  Me.

  I was on the bridge, in a large rectangular box that looked, for all the world, like a coffin. The top of the box was clear; from my vantage point of the bridge cameras, I could look straight down into it and see: my brain.

  And the electronic elements that were attached to it, to the surface of the gray matter and, I assumed, inside of it as well. I could see the hard wires snaking out of it, toward a juncture on the side of the box.

  I saw the liquid in which my brain was suspended, discolored, slightly pink. I saw tubes connected to my brain, I assume taking in and bringing out blood or something substituting for it. Something that brought in nutrients and oxygen, and took out waste. The tubes also snaked out to a juncture in the box’s interior wall.

  A change in camera and in perspective and I saw another box, into which the wires and tubes went. It’s this box I saw two Rraey, who I assume were doctors, come to and open daily, doing diagnostic work. Inside were filtering systems, intake and sampling valves, hardwired computers to monitor my brain’s well-being, and something else which I couldn’t identify at first, until one of the Rraey accidentally jostled it, and the other yelled at it for doing so.

  The Chandler’s system has within it a translation library for several hundred known species. It, like most such libraries on trade ships, almost never gets used because we’re mostly dealing with humans. Nevertheless it’s there and on hand for when or if you need to translate anything. It translated what the second Rraey said to the first.

  “Keep that up,” it said. “You’ll blow up all three of us.”

  “Then at least our remains would get to go back home,” the first Rraey said.

  “I would prefer to go back home in a form that would allow me to enjoy it,” the second Rraey said, and then inserted a dongle into one of the hardwired monitors, I assume to check on how my brain was doing and make adjustments.

  I imagine the information showed that at that very moment I had a spike of anxious brain activity.

  Because of the bomb.

  On top of everything else, they had a bomb attached to me.

  In case I was at all concerned that they ever had any intention of letting me get out of this alive.

  In case I was thinking I was really going to escape this hell.

  PART THREE

  “You have performed well in simulation,” Control said one day, more than three months after I had first woken up to find myself a disembodied brain.

  Thank you, I thought. I have been trying to live up to my end of our deal.

  “You have been,” Control said. “You may find it useful to know that you have become one of our best pilots, in terms of hitting training performance goals.”

  Well, of course I was. It was because I was very careful to perform simulations exactly to spec, so the software wouldn’t glitch and they would have to root about in the system to fix it. The blue pill system I made was pretty solid, but why tempt fate.

  The other reason was that when Control wasn’t paying attention I was watching videos and listening to music that had been in the Chandler’s entertainment library. Which helped to keep me sane instead of dwelling on my complete and utter isolation from the rest of humanity. It’s not exactly surprising that staying sane is useful when trying to hit performance markers.

  None of which I expressed, or even thought, while Control was around.

  By now I had some understanding of why Control only “heard” what I thought directly to it—the brain-reading software recognized intentional attempts at communication and filtered that away from the constant low-grade babbling and monologuing every brain does all the time, in order to optimize communication. The software kept the thoughts I meant to myself internal—but if you remember how many times in your life you unintentionally say something out loud you meant to keep quiet, and made a mess of your life for a day because of it, then you’ll know why I tried to keep my mind blank when Control was around.

  I’m happy to know that, I thought. And then waited, like I always did.

  “You have done well enough that we have agreed to your request,” Control said.

  My request?

  “You asked if you could speak to Secretary Ocampo at some point,” Control said. “We have arranged for you to speak.”

  Is he coming to visit me? I asked.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Control said. “We have arranged for a feed to be ported through to this simulation.”

  So, not on the Chandler itself. Well, that was just fine. Will that be today? I asked.

  “No. We have work to do today. But soon.”

  Thank you, I thought. I am grateful. And that was certainly true, as far as it went.

  “You’re welcome,” Control said. “Let’s begin today’s simulations.”

  When will you have an actual mission for me?

  “Why do you ask?”

  You have been training me all this time. I’ve been doing well, as you said. I’m ready for missions.

  “You want to fulfill your obligations to us,” Control said.

  I do.

  “In order to regain your b
ody.”

  I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a big part of it, I thought. Which was also true as far as it went.

  “I don’t have any information for you,” Control said. “You will get a mission when we decide the time is right. It is not the right time yet.”

  I understand, I thought. I am just anxious.

  “Don’t be,” Control said. “You will be busy soon enough.” And then it opened up a simulation in which I was fighting three Colonial Union frigates at the same time.

  It was one I had done before, with some variation. The goal wasn’t to destroy all the frigates. The goal was to make them expend as much of their firepower on me as possible so that when three other ships skipped in to attack them, they wouldn’t have the defenses to survive.

  Basically I was bait in the scenario.

  It wasn’t the only scenario that I’d been bait for, recently.

  Let’s just say I wasn’t loving the pattern to the simulations I was seeing.

  * * *

  The communications window on my captain’s screen, normally dead as the famous doornail, lit up. I put the feed inside of it onto the virtual bridge’s largest monitor.

  On the feed, as advertised, was Secretary Ocampo.

  “Mr. Daquin, are you there?” he asked. He was looking into his PDA camera, inside what looked like a stateroom even smaller than the one he had on the Chandler.

  I am, I thought.

  “Okay, good,” Ocampo said. “I only have an audio feed for you. They didn’t give me a video feed for some—” He stopped here abruptly. He had just realized that the reason he didn’t have a video feed was because there wasn’t a body for him to look at, just an exposed brain in a clear box.

  But I had a video feed, so I could see a flush rising through Ocampo’s features. He had at least enough grace to be ashamed of himself for forgetting what he had gotten me into.

  It’s all right, I thought. I just wanted to talk anyway. If that’s all right. If you have time.

  “Today is a religious observance day for the Rraey who run this outpost,” Ocampo said. “So nothing’s going on today. It’s why I’m able to speak to you at all.”