LoneFire

by Stephen Deas

  How long since I had a proper meal?

  Too much metal in Jester to make good pizza anyway.

  I stop outside her door. No sounds, nothing at all except the low hum of Gateway’s power grid. Maybe she’s not there.

  I knock.

  Nothing.

  I stare at the lock. Standard keypad. Simple enough, but I don’t really have the tools with me to do a neat job of breaking and entering. As soon as I try it’ll scream for help and I’ll have security clones falling out of the sky all around me.

  I look at the lock again. Scratches, a crack– someone’s already taken it apart once today. I press the open button and duck behind the wall, well out of sight. The door slides quietly aside.

  Silence.

  Shit. Now I’m really missing Jester with his speed and his armour and his pinpoint accuracy and his indestructible willingness to be the point man and deal with any sort of trouble in a comprehensively full-automatic high-explosive armourpiercing sort of way. But he’s not here. Just me.

  I leap into the doorway, my tiny pathetic pretence of a gun poised and ready…

  Three bodies lie in the room. A man at my feet with two bullet holes in his chest, blood on the floor around him. Looks like someone dragged him inside.

  Another man, sitting at a desk, slumped over a small black box, wires running from it into the wall and into his head. Could just be asleep but his eyes are wide open, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, his whole face rigid. I don’t see him breathing.

  The third body is past him, past the table, lying face up, sprawled on the floor with a bullet hole in her face.

  Melissa.

  Shit.

  Marov, M., Kresak, L.P. et. al. ‘The Method of Dedifferentiation of Human Zygotes using agent P45.’ Nature, 465 (2011-2132) (2320).

  God this one was boring. If you’re ever not nice to me I’ll make you read it.

  Ten – Dead Souls

  I get over being stunned and toy with pissed off for a bit. A quick trip through scared and I settle on feeling uneasy. I check the man by the door. Barcode on his back. Bratstva. Looks like he was running through the door when he got shot. Someone dragged him out of the way later. Pockets are empty, no gun, no ID. He’s still warm. This happened only minutes ago. Shit. I could have walked right into it. Shit, shit, shit.

  Melissa. Fingers frozen around a tiny gun. I pry it loose. Two rounds fired. One for each hole in the body by the door. I keep it. At least I have something that can do real bullets now. I recognise the model, too. Jester gave one of these to Mr Cray once. Thought it was kind of a joke at the time, giving him something small and weedy-looking, but Jester never joked about guns.

  Next, I check the man lying over the desk for a pulse. Nothing. Could be faking it I suppose, but I can’t imagine why. I cut his jacket open and search his pockets. One tattooed barcode, two guns, one shot fired. Clear enough. Two Brothers come in, Melissa shoots one, the second nails her to the far wall, tidies up a bit, then sits down and plugs himself into whatever this box is. And dies in terror.

  Poison on the plug, released into his brain? There’s not a mark on his body, but the plastic of the desk is scored by his fingernails. I pull the plug out of his head, wipe it clean, look at it.

  Perfectly normal.

  Suddenly I’ve got to know what’s in that box, because that box is what this is all about, and Jez promised to pay me if I found out what Melissa stole, but more to the point, if the Bratstva are this hot about it, it’s priceless. Brainweb’s safe. Can’t kill people through the brainweb. That’s what we’re all told. Mr Cray used to say otherwise, and Jezebel stays very quiet when I ask her questions like that. Tells me I don’t need to know but her eyes give it away. Oh yeah, and the fact that I did a guy on Szenchzuen only a dozen hours ago. But this is a Company web with a few extra modifications of my own…

  No question that I’m taking this box with me, wherever it is I end up going. No question I don’t trust anyone else to look inside now that Mr Cray’s gone…

  I stare at the plug. I must be fucking mad.

  Cats have nine lives and I only have one, and no self-respecting cat would shove a plug in its head anyway…

  … I slide the plug home and screw up my eyes and wince, waiting for the excruciating…

  Nothing happens. No connection, no start-up menu, nothing. Like the box is dead.

  I start picking commands:‘Start. Demonstration mode. Guest. Index.’ Stuff like that. Still nothing.

  So much for that. Maybe something else killed him then…

  … And then I freeze, because something else is in my head with me, as though a ghostly hand has reached through my skull and wrapped itself around my brain. I can’t move. I’m not in control any more.

  ‘Who are you?’

  I’ve no idea how this question gets inside me, who asks it, anything except that it comes from Melissa’s box somehow and it’s nothing like a commlink, nothing at all. I feel the emotions with it, a deep, deep fear, an anger, a despair. Whatever it is, it shouldn’t be able to do this. So much for the Company brainweb.

  ‘Patr… Constantine.’ It takes every effort of my will to stop myself, to not blurt out my real name.

  ‘From Szenchzuen?’ Disbelief.

  I know who this is now. Melissa. She can have her disbelief right back at her. You don’t just download people into boxes.

  The presence grips me tighter.‘Why did you follow me? You’re not with them, are you…?’

  Anger overrides the fear.‘Why did I follow you? To snap your fucking neck, that’s why!’

  I’m talking to nothing. The Brainweb has finally sensed something amiss and shut down. I disconnect myself from the box, let my heart rate settle, and then plug in the phone I liberated from Mr Dal, as safe a way as I can figure to talk to Melissa’s ghost. Or simulation, or replica or whatever it is. Probably a troupe of monkeys made to seem like her, but we’ll find out soon enough. Pseudo-AIs still can’t hold a decent conversation, and true ones don’t fit into boxes this small, and last I heard there’s only a couple of them out there. Gemini and his Cestus bastard offspring.

  ‘Hello?’ It’s one weird fucked-up feeling, talking to a dead person. Her corpse is right here.

  No answer.

  ‘Look, whatever you are, I’m pretty sure you can hear me. I’ve plugged you into a link so you can’t mess with my head. You want to talk, then talk. Otherwise I’m unplugging this box and taking it with me, and I’m pretty sure I can sell it. Maybe to the Bratstva, just by way of picking a random example.’

  ‘I’m not your Melissa. My name’s Ortov.’

  ‘Uh huh. What are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. A recording, I think.’

  I snort. Bound to be more Brothers on their way and I don’t want to be here when they arrive. I say so.

  ‘Take me somewhere safe and I’ll tell you how to make the Brotherhood fawn at your feet!’ The voice has urgency in it.‘I can make you obscenely rich. Anything you want, just don’t let them have me back.’

  Yeah, right. Everything you think I want to hear. Oldest trick in the book. I don’t even need the code in my head to play that one.‘Fuck’s sake, who do you think I am? Some kid still with his milk teeth? I haven’t the first idea who or what you are. Some sort of AI? I really don’t get on with AIs. And why the fuck should you care about the Bratstva? Come to that, why the fuck should I except that they want me dead. Maybe I should let them have you. Maybe that would get them off my back.’

  A pause. When the presence speaks again, its voice is icy.‘If you leave this room then I’ll set off every alarm in Gateway. Did you see all the soldiers when you came aboard?’

  ‘What of it?’ Soldiers on Gateway was kinda unexpected. I figured the Rim must have called up in advance to say they were about to dump a load of human refuse they didn’t want.

  ‘Cestus commissions it’s Sunscreen system today. They’re touchy about security at the moment.’

  Sunsc
reen again. What the fuck is this thing?

  ‘A weapon that collects solar radiation and converts it into a focussed particle beam with enough energy to vaporize a near-light-speed planetoid. Both the Rim and the Old Worlds began building them after the Stars did what they did to Earth. It’s the most powerful, most expensive and most ridiculous weapon ever built. If someone hacked it they could kill all life on Cestus in a matter of hours. So do as I say or I’ll try to take it down and I’ll be pointing the finger right at you.’

  I shrug. It’s kinda troubling how this Melissa-Ortov entity knows stuff like that and I don’t, but right now I don’t want it thinking I give a shit.‘Right. You don’t even know me.’

  The voice seems to shrug back.‘Don’t I? You leave me for the Bratstva and I’ll tell them everything there is to know about you. I’ll tell everyone. Everything Melissa knew. She’s here with me now. All of her, and all of what she knew.’

  I laugh.‘Yeah, right. You don’t know me and neither did she. You’ll have to do better than that.’

  ‘You used to work for an Old Worlds intelligence agency. Would you like to be reminded which one? And you still do, except you’re also a traitor, a double-agent working for Gemini. That do for starters or shall we go on? Do as I say or all that information about you flies in a hundred tiny packets all across the galaxy.’

  Fuck.‘Where’d you get this shit?’ I feel how suddenly small the room is. Sterile. Nowhere to hide and three dead bodies. A part of me is edgy now but another part is thrilled. An oldfashioned stand-off, hardly any time to trust each other, and everyone loses if we don’t. Takes me back to when the Company paid me a salary. And I still don’t even know what I’m talking to. I was made for this shit.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m dead, Mr Constantine. I’m totally fucking dead. I don’t know what I want. I want to live again but that isn’t going to happen. Or maybe it is. I want to find out. I barely even know what century I’m in. What I don’t want is to go back to the Brotherhood, sit in their data banks, watch them fawn over me and feel so fucking impotent that I want to end it all there and then. I want some time and some space and a place to hide. I want what all dead people want: I want to come back. For now I’ll settle for access to the hypernet.’

  Shit. This is way over my head.‘Sure. I’m no expert. Maybe they can resurrect you, maybe not.’ Not that I have the first idea what you is here.‘But you’ll need money, that’s for sure, and I can’t help you with that. A place to hide? Yeah, maybe I can do that.’ Yeah, and maybe when Jez finally gets around to showing her face I can trade you in to the Company for a big fat pay-cheque, because I sure as shit don’t have any better ideas right now.

  ‘And what do you ask in return?’

  ‘Oh, you mean apart from the fact that you’ve got my testicles in a vice? You can tell me what the fuck happened on Szenchzuen for a start. And you can tell me who you are and why the barcodes are so keen on you. And, if you like, you can talk some more about this making me rich, even if it’s just some crap you made up to get my attention. I can have my fantasies, right? But we’ll start with what you really are.’ I shrug, which is a bit pointless but it’s habit. ‘That or I hand you over to whoever pays best.’

  ‘Melissa is right, you are an arrogant man.’

  ‘Fuck with me all you want, bitch, you’re still just a box with a voice and I don’t see you running off to hide anywhere soon before some more barcodes come along. So sure, set off the alarms and turn yourself in. Good luck with that. Or we both take our chances.’ I’m talking to a box. I have to keep reminding myself of that. It’s a just a construct, a complex amalgamation of algorithms. You can’t put a whole human personality into box like this. They don’t fit, and anyway, no one really knows how to record them, not properly.

  Damned if it doesn’t feel real, though. Something about the way it talks. I find I want to believe there’s the relic of a real human somewhere here, not a troupe of monkeys or some cheesy fake AI-based thing. A real person and with some real power too. Once.

  Bannerman, J. & Vishmir, V. ‘Features of AI Personality’. AI News, 53, 423-453 (2315).

  This, by two giants in the field, is a study of about a dozen AIs, the aim being to try and identify whether they have any common personality features and where they come from. Being a sort of AI myself, it gives me a weird feeling to read this stuff: They came to the conclusion that an AI’s personality is made up from a few basic building blocks. It’s not less complicated than humans, just more structured. I can feel these building blocks inside me, Constantine. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a simulation, not a recording. How could I tell?

  Eleven – Second Coming

  Mr Cray’s safehouse isn’t the best place in the universe to hide out. Pretty crap actually, given what happened to Mr Cray, but it’s that or a cardboard box, and Mr Cray was helpfully paranoid. Hard to trace anything back here. Power’s wired in through a tap-off from some automated fab-unit and routed through a series of massive capacitor and battery banks so it looks like a low steady drain and never spikes enough to set off an alarm. He’s got instant and anonymous credit enough to keep me alive for a year or two. I get to find out the truth about his fridge, which is worse than I thought. And as for the way he’s hooked into the hypernet… I don’t know how he fixed it to be this way but every time I do something bad, some guy on a world thirty-seven light-years away has a really shitty day. Cray said he had an algorithm for it. Always guys with the same names. Cotton, I think, or maybe it was Leather, chosen because Cray had the shits for some small-dicked word-wanker who dissed him once. His words, minus most of the fucks.

  Never appreciated the guy while he was alive, but I sure love him now he’s dead. Melissa-Ortov stays hooked to the net. Every hour she-he hops up to Gateway and reminds the sleeper he claims she left in their net not to tell the world everything it knows about me. Every hour, I decide not to pull the plug. I kinda figure maybe the sleeper thing is all a big pile of made-up shit, but I’m deep enough in the stuff as it is. Our first days are tense. Claustrophobic. Outside I imagine Bratstva everywhere; inside, Ortov and I pose and posture, trying to figure each other out. Eventually we call it a draw. Eventually I even begin to believe his story.

  Which is…

  It goes back to some time a few decades after the start of the new millennium, back when there was an Earth that you could actually live on and that was that, and it was filled with way too many people making a right shit of the place– not that that ever stopped, we just piss on lots of planets now instead of just one. Piss and move on, that’s us– but back then there’s just Earth, one simmering powder-keg getting tighter and tighter, and in the middle of it some guy called Leonard Ortov accidentally starts a religion in a Russian labour camp. Wasn’t really a religion at first, more a way to survive, a way to turn inside to ignore the shit of everyday life. Ortov tells me that the average camp inmate back then lasted about three years before he croaked. No one got out. Story goes that there were one or two made it all the way through their ten year terms and got to leave the camp, but it turned out later that the guards simply drove them two miles down the road and shot them. It sucked to be a Russian back then.

  The millennium revolutions didn’t last long– twenty years, give or take before yet another coup threw a load of democratic liberals in charge for a while. That didn’t last either, but it lasted long enough to take down the camps and get Ortov and his followers out into the real world. Russia was in deep shit all over back then and it wasn’t alone. I guess, times like that, people need something to believe in, and prophet or a charlatan hardly matters– even the Ortov in the box is pretty vague about which he was. Then again he also says he has gaps in his memory, whole decades in places. Maybe he has or maybe he’s full of it. How the hell do I know?

  So whatever he is, young Ortov staggers out of his death-camp, not dead after all, and sees a country gagging for something to believe in. He starts printing pam
phlets, claims to know the secrets of eternal life, of self-fulfilment, of destiny itself. He sells these secrets, one by one, dribs and drabs to anyone who can pay for them, and over time these people become the Brotherhood, a people machine, Ortov their CPU. It’s hard to relate the Ortov in the box to the Ortov of history. The Ortov in the box speaks calmly, sober yet frightened, fearful of its future and questioning of its nature. The Ortov of history is a fire-breather and a madman.

  Skipping ahead now to the other end of his life. A hundred and fifty years old. By now the average Russian has forgotten that Leonard Ortov exists becausehe’s moved to richer pastures to sell his salvation. When he started, you could buy enlightenment for a dollar. By the end it’s a million. It’s total bullshit from start to finish, but people are so retchingly stupid sometimes. Or desperate.

  His body is failing, every medical technique of the time used up to keep him alive, and that’s when Leonard Ortov finds the secret he’s looking for. Eternal life. A way to record his memory, even his soul, into binary. Or so he thinks. Nothing special about that now, of course. Old Worlds are full of hidden sites where state of the art computers store the minds of the rich and the vain and the desperate, held in limbo, waiting for resurrection in a better time. But Ortov was one of the very first.

  They record him. He dies. Fifty years pass. A lot happens in that time. The spinwarp for a start. When the Brotherhood turn Ortov back on they’re in space, part of the loose federation of travelling communities that will eventually grow into the United Stars. What happens next? The Bratstva aren’t saying and Ortov-in-the-box says he doesn’t know. Popular myth has it that the Bratstva turned him on and he turned himself right off again, trying to kill himself. God knows what it must be like to float around in memory with nothing to do, no one to talk to, only your own thoughts for company. Ortov-in-the-box isn’t saying. I get the feeling it’s bad.