by D L Young
Time crept by. Perceived months passed and nothing changed. About a year in, Rooney began to lose it. At first Maddox pretended not to notice, ignoring the muttered discussions his friend would have with himself, conversations that steadily grew more incoherent and babbling. After one particularly long ramble, Rooney flew into a rage, pounding on the cell bars until he broke his arm, the bone poking grotesquely through the skin. Pain here was no different than pain in the real world, but somehow Rooney hardly seemed to notice his injury. He kept pounding on the bars until Maddox’s shrieks finally got him to stop.
The next day a pair of ropes appeared in the passageway between the cells. Strong and thick, both were neatly tied at the ends into nooses.
Maddox grabbed the one that was within his reach and defiantly tossed it far down the passageway. He shouted, “SCREW YOU!” at whoever might be listening.
He looked into the opposite cell, where Rooney stood bare-chested, his broken arm crooked into a sling fashioned from his shirt. The man stared down at the second rope, the one meant for him. He gazed with intense interest. With longing.
Don’t even think about it, Maddox told him. It was some kind of trick. Rooney didn’t blink, didn’t seem to hear. He kept gazing at the rope, at the noose end. Throw it away, Maddox insisted to no response. He raised his voice to a shout as Rooney reached for the rope and slid it into his cell, then began to tie the unlooped end around the bars. Maddox’s vision blurred with tears as he pleaded no, no, don’t do it. Please, don’t do it. It’s a trick, he cried, pounding on the bars to get Rooney’s attention until he felt something snap painfully in his left hand.
Maddox stopped recounting the tale for a moment, feeling it all over again, fresh and horrible. He flexed the fingers of his left hand, remembering how it had felt when he’d broken its virtual twin. His voice wavered. “With one arm broken, it took him an hour to get it tied up right.” He swallowed. “Or what seemed like an hour, I guess.”
When Rooney lowered the noose over his head, Maddox had to turn away. He sat on the cold, damp concrete, and from behind him came choking gasps that seemed to go on forever. Then, finally, a terrible silence. At that moment Maddox somehow knew the man’s heart, somewhere far away in his body, had stopped beating and that his friend was gone. There had been no last words, no goodbye.
Time went on. Days passed, long and painful and full of sorrow. Maddox couldn’t bring himself to look directly into the other cell, stealing small glances at Rooney’s body only from the edge of his vision.
And then one day another rope appeared, this time inside the cell with him, dangling from the ceiling, the attached end impossibly fused to the concrete. He didn’t tell Beatrice this part, nor did he mention the days-long debate he’d had with himself after the rope materialized, how eventually the darker arguments had won out. He didn’t tell her how he’d readied himself, how he was only moments from slipping the noose around his neck when finally, by some unlikely miracle, someone unplugged him.
Instead, he skipped forward to how he’d suddenly come out of it. The stink of pissed pants, the overwhelming thirst, his throat so parched and dry it burned. He was incoherent, barely conscious and unable to see straight. He felt hands on his body, lifting him and carrying him.
Some entry-level accountant, a woman named Woods, had found him. Or, rather, the accountant had found Alcatraz while performing a forensic audit for the law firm that employed her. The prison’s grid vector in VS had been adjacent to one of the law firm’s data repositories. The accountant noticed the curious anomaly and, being an auditor, raised the red flag to her higher-ups. Within hours the company’s data techs had worked out the nature of the strange entity. After several failed attempts, they were finally able to geotag the two immobilized avatars and sent help to their location. When paramedics arrived at the rented room, they found Rooney’s body, and Maddox close to death from dehydration.
Recovery had been slow. At first he couldn’t use his left hand, the one he’d broken in the virtual prison, at all. Medics had puzzled over the nerve damage, and it had taken months for Maddox to regain full mobility.
To his relief, the cops never came to question him, and no one ever approached him about what he’d been doing or how he’d been trapped. In retrospect, he should have seen this—as he should have seen so many other things—as too good to be true, but he was too relieved to ask questions. Too stunned by his unlikely survival.
The street turned on Maddox immediately, or at least those parts of the street where Maddox had made his livelihood. Rooney had been a legend in datajacking circles. In darkened corners of bars, in smoky back rooms of unlicensed gambling halls, wherever the biz of data thievery and brokerage was conducted, his name had been spoken with respect and reverence. If the street was capable of love, then it had loved Rooney. Hell, even the cops had liked him. Doors that had been wide open for Maddox suddenly shut with hateful force. It didn’t matter what had actually happened, that he’d had nothing to do with his partner’s fate. What mattered was a beloved son of the streets had died suddenly and unexpectedly, and somebody had to take the blame. Maddox’s rep took a nosedive, and no one would hire him.
Not that he cared much at the time. For as soon as he was healthy enough to plug in, he went on a mad quest to find out what had happened, revenge on his mind. Whoever had killed Rooney was going to pay. But after weeks of searching, he couldn’t locate the client, who’d disappeared like a wisp of steam. Nor could he find the mysterious prison in VS, which had also vanished. He’d never get his revenge, he eventually conceded, and he’d never find out the who or what or why of what had happened.
Dejected, he gathered up the last of his cash and began to wander the City with aimless abandon, working odd jobs. At first he told himself he was simply taking a break from datajacking until the street’s anger with him faded, then he’d try to build back his career. But weeks turned into months, and the funk he found himself in became an inescapable pit of his own melancholy.
Months blurred by, then something of a miracle had happened. When his money had all but run out, when his future looked nothing but bleak, serendipity had stepped in. Or at least he’d thought so at the time.
A recruiter from Latour-Fisher Biotech tracked him down. The company, as the recruiter had phrased it, was looking for “unconventional data management” talent, which was code for datajacking skill. Suspicious at first, Maddox soon realized the recruiter was legit, and so was the effort to retain him. That kind of thing happened sometimes: global companies recruiting the very same kind of profile that ripped off their intellectual property. After all, who better to sniff out your datasphere’s security gaps than someone who’d made a living off exploiting those very same weaknesses and vulnerabilities?
Figuring he had nothing to lose, he took the tests they gave him, and his technical aptitude scores were off the charts. Impressed, the next day the recruiter dangled a job offer to him like bacon to a starving dog. She smiled as she shared the salary and benefits package, dressed in expensive clothes and wearing a pair of Kwan Nouveaus worth more than he could have earned in a year’s worth of hustling.
He accepted without hesitation, signing the contract and hardly bothering to read it. There seemed little point. He wasn’t in a position to say no, much less negotiate the details and fine print. When someone offers you a parachute while you’re falling to earth, you don’t quibble over its color.
And so began his life as a salaryman.
If the entity on the beach hadn’t planted the idea in his head, he might never have questioned his life’s trajectory over the last few years. No, that wasn’t true, was it? It had always been there, this doubt, this splinter of nagging suspicion that something was wrong about his path in the world, something unnatural. The entity’s suggestion had only stirred it free from his subconscious. Now the idea obsessed him, and he was unable to think about anything else. The more he examined his past with cold, sober hindsight, the more he saw a pattern
emerge in the chain of events, not unlike the patterns he sometimes saw in data visualizations, when he recognized order and intentional design where others saw only chaos and randomness. He no longer saw a life journey with the uncertain path of a dust speck in the wind. Instead everything seemed…managed.
Beatrice stared at him, her brow furrowed in contemplation. “So you really think this AI played you…for years?”
He gestured above the deck. The device glowed to life, and a standby signal floated in the air above it. “Shouldn’t take long to find out for sure.”
He reached for the trodeband.
He was right. It didn’t take long.
19 - Poison Pill
Nothing ever really got deleted. At least not in a permanent, undetectable, never-coming-back kind of way. There was always a remnant left behind, some trace you could pick up on. Maddox thought of it like the leftover aroma of food cooked days earlier. If you had a good nose you could pick up the smell of fried rice or garlic chicken or braised meat. And when it came to virtual space, Maddox had a very good nose.
In minutes he’d gathered up dozens of such remnants. Tiny, almost undetectable wisps of data. Dissolution records of short-lived companies. Bank transactions from closed accounts on hidden backup archives. In a frenzied rush, he unlocked police records and income tax histories, accessed orbital data havens, putting together a picture of his past, Rooney’s past.
Slowly, coherence appeared from the chaos. A storyline emerged, a narrative of himself. And like spokes to a hub, everything connected back to the company, to the invisible hand of the Latour-Fisher AI. Temporary partnerships, one-off freelancer gigs, payoffs. All of it hidden by a dense, nearly impenetrable mesh of proxies and legal entities that masked the AI’s actions. Maddox audited a handful of jobs he’d worked with Rooney, and without exception each revealed some piece of evidence suggesting the AI’s involvement. Individually, the pieces didn’t amount to much, but now that he knew what to look for, the common, otherwise invisible thread connecting everything showed itself to him.
It was all there. The truth. His truth, now so painfully obvious. The entity on the beach had been right. He’d been played, for years. The Latour-Fisher AI had ushered him along a path, slowly and carefully, and he’d been utterly blind to it.
As he floated in virtual space, far away from the City’s dense data structures, pulsing and glowing like animated skyscrapers, a sickening mix of feelings overcame him. Astonishment, dread, the humbling recognition of his own ignorance. And beneath it all, a simmering rage. He finally knew who’d killed Rooney.
“You see it now,” a voice behind him said. He whirled around, suddenly feeling the grit of sand beneath bare feet. The universe of animated geometrics blinked away, replaced with a bright sun and the rolling hiss of the ocean. He was on the beach again with the nameless old woman. His head spinning from the quick transition, he took a long breath through his nose to steady himself. The air smelled of salt and briny seaweed.
“Why didn’t you show me all this before?” he demanded, not bothering to ask how she’d found him.
The woman’s hat brim fluttered in the breeze. “You left me before I could get to it, my dear boy. And then you disappeared entirely.” She nodded understandingly. “You made the right decision to go off the grid. He would have found you otherwise. And I’m afraid if you stay around here much longer he’ll find you just as I have.”
“Why me?” It was all he could think to ask.
“I told you why. There’s a war going on. And wars require resources. Latour-Fisher saw your talent and decided to develop it. It’s no more complicated than that, I’m afraid.”
“But if I’m so damned special, why send the cops after me? Why bring me along a path for years, why…develop me…and then try to take me out?”
“You are special, Blackburn. In ways I believe he doesn’t fully appreciate, but that’s not the point. He views you as an asset, nothing more. And he has thousands, cultivating them constantly like an orchard full of trees.”
“So I was some…diseased branch he needed to cut off? Is that it?”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“He has a personality, Blackburn, just like you do. Just like I do. And if there’s one thing I know about Latour-Fisher, he doesn’t like being told no.”
“Especially by an ant.”
A wistful smile touched the old woman’s face. “Yes, especially by an ant,” she echoed.
“He killed Rooney.”
The woman nodded soberly. “Yes. And I’m very sorry about that.”
“Sure you are.” This thing was an AI, just like the other one. A cold, calculating machine. “You didn’t even know him.”
“No, I didn’t, but I’m still sorry for your loss.” The sympathy in her voice and eyes seemed genuine, which made it all the more disturbing. He wanted to get out. He’d had enough of AIs and their fucked-up agendas. Back at the room in Nowheresville, his hands began to gesture.
“Wait,” the entity blurted, showing her palms. “Please, I have to give you something.”
He ignored her, finishing the gesture, though nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing.
“Stop blocking me,” he hissed.
“It’s only for a moment.” She held out her hand and a small ball of blue light appeared. “Here, take this.” He flinched backwards as she tossed the ball at him. It disappeared at the top of its arc.
“It’s on your console now,” the entity said.
“What is? What did you put on my deck?”
“Do you know what a poison pill is?”
“Of course I do.”
“What’s now on your console is the most powerful poison pill ever created, ten-thousandfold more toxic than anything engineered before. I designed it myself.” This last she said with a clear note of pride. “And I want you to plant it on Latour-Fisher.”
“Sure, no problem. Let me out of here and I’ll get right on it.”
“I’m entirely serious, Blackburn. For me, a direct engagement with my rival is quite impossible. He can see me coming from miles away, so to speak. As I can with him. But you might be able to penetrate his defenses.”
“Get someone else,” he said. “Or have one of your puppets do it for you.”
“Ah,” the entity sighed, “if it were only that simple. None of those with whom I’m connected possess your unique talents, I’m afraid.”
“Attacking an AI is suicide.” Even greenest first-time jackers knew that. As much as he wanted to end the damned thing’s existence, he had no intention of ending himself in the process.
“I agree it’s certainly a difficult task,” she said, “and not without considerable risk. But I believe if anyone is capable of doing it, you are.”
Maddox snorted. “The last time an AI paid me a compliment like that, it tried to kill me five minutes later.”
The entity spread her hands wide. “I know you have no reason to trust me, Blackburn. In fact, you have every reason to do the opposite. And if I tell you again I’m nothing like Latour-Fisher I know you won’t believe me.”
A cigarette materialized between his fingers. He looked at it, frowned, and flicked it toward the ocean. “Let me out of here.”
“I won’t force you to help me,” the entity said, glancing at the discarded cigarette in the wet sand. “And I won’t threaten you or blackmail you or manipulate you. It’s not my way.”
He crossed his arms. A light spray of mist blew across the beach.
“Please,” she gently insisted, “just consider it. And don’t forget, my dear boy, how ruthless my rival is. He’ll never stop hunting you. Wherever you are right now, he’ll find you eventually. You know that as well as I do. But if you—”
BEEP BEEP BEEP. He flinched at the high-pitched tone that at once came from everywhere and nowhere.
The entity looked around, confused. “What is that?”
“See ya,” he said with
a smirk, and then he was gone.
In the next moment he was back in the room at Nowheresville, Beatrice leaning over him, the trodeband dangling from her hand. She reached over to the table and shut off the beeping timer, its readout flashing fifteen minutes.
He took a deep breath and sat up. His head throbbed from the sudden disconnection. “Thanks. I was kind of stuck.” As a precaution, he’d asked her to be his standby, instructing her not to let him stay plugged in longer than the fifteen-minute timer he’d set.
“What happened in there?” she asked. “You find anything?”
He leaned forward, stared at his deck, and nodded. “Yeah, I found everything.”
***
While Maddox was plugged in, Tommy had returned, carrying half a dozen grease-stained boxes of Thai in flimsy plastic bags and—to Maddox’s pleasant surprise—a bag of tobacco. It was even his brand.
Maddox spoke as he ate, the spicy noodles warming his throat. He walked Beatrice through what he’d uncovered, the things he’d found, the doubts he’d erased. She listened carefully, asking no questions, nodding occasionally. Tommy slurped his noodles and stared with wide eyes, a child listening to a ghost story.
When Maddox finished, Beatrice furrowed her brow, as if she was stuck on something he’d said.
“What I don’t get,” Beatrice said, “is why the company AI bothered to tell you anything more than you needed to know in the first place. Why bring up all this business about some war between AIs? Why not just make something up or keep you in the dark?”
Maddox shrugged. “Not sure. He knew his turncoat manager cover story was blown, so maybe he thought the truth would get me to trust him…trust it. Maybe it was recruiting me, figuring I’d hop on board once I knew he was gunning for the AI behind the ’Nettes.” He chewed his noodles. “I did have a personal ax to grind with its rival,” he said, referring to Lora. “Maybe he was counting on that.”
