“Yet,” Sibeal replied.
Sid put his beer down. “I’ll bet you’re happy SyBCoR got slammed.”
Sibeal frowned. “SyBCoR would make my job a lot easier, if you want to know. The big AIs hide inside corporate structures so even if they kill people, it’s hard to get the shareholders to stand down.”
“Worse than people?”
“At least if they had civil rights and obligations, the playing field would be evened. And it was your friend Killiam who killed it, and I bet it wasn’t on moral grounds.”
The argument wasn’t really anymore whether the machines qualified as “people” philosophically, but more about the economic chaos from granting billions of machines even basic civil rights. The rise of Atopian pssi was, in theory, supposed to buffer this effect by moving economics into virtual consumption.
“Anyway, machine intelligence is different,” added Sibeal. “I don’t know why—”
Sid knew she was about to get into the statistical inference versus biological debate. He cut her off. “Do you understand why you do things?”
Sibeal looked at him defiantly. “Of course.”
“There’s a difference between rationalization and reasoning. You do things because you want to, because a set of reasons put up afterwards always make it fit. Reasoning is just an illusion—”
“You’re going to talk to me about illusions? You’re the master of illusions.”
“Exactly.”
“Kids, kids,” Bunky interjected. “Come on now, we’re here for a nice pint.” He raised his glass and grinned. “And those results are coming in from the materials lab. How about we focus on that?”
Sibeal took a deep breath and looked away from Sid. She opened a virtual workspace and dragged everyone’s subjective into it, and then pulled in the results from the rock sample testing.
Living underground, they were all experts on rocks.
After a few seconds, Sibeal sighed. The results looked typical: mostly metamorphic rock, the mica schist that formed the bedrock under Manhattan. Some flakes of quartz and granite gneiss—the crystalline basement of the crust under the East Coast—and some ground-up glacial till.
“Wait, what’s that?” Sid asked, dragging one of the test results to the top of the workspace.
Bunky and Shaky’s avatars frowned, but Sibeal’s eyes grew wide.
“Quasi-crystals,” she said aloud, pulling up more samples into the center of the test-result world. “Do you see that?”
Shaky’s avatar nodded. “What’s that doing there?”
Sid looked up the definition: A quasiperiodic crystal is a structure that is ordered but not periodic.
“That’s not even an icosahedrite,” Bunky pointed out.
Sid shook his head. “What?”
Sibeal forwarded him some background data, but it was barely intelligible. “Quasi-crystals don’t occur naturally—at least, not on Earth.”
“The only ones in nature are from the Koryak Mountains in Russia,” added Bunky. He was something of a rock historian. “And some in the New Guinea highlands. But all have extraterrestrial origin.” In the pub he took a sip from his stout, leaving him a foamy mustache. He smiled. “What I mean is they’re from meteorites.”
Sibeal spun the model of the crystal structure around in space. “And these look natural, not lab-grown. There’s residue of uranium.” She popped their viewpoints back into normal space at the pub. “Bunky, can you contact underminers in cities where Wally’s proxxi made stops, see if they can find any more of this?”
Bunky nodded.
Sid didn’t quite understand, so he pulled up the tech sheets Sibeal had forwarded him.
A splinter following world events chimed in with a future prediction that had topped the ninety-percentile, “With Atopia joining the Alliance, it is only a matter of time before a kinetic attack is launched against Terra Nova unless it gives in to UN demands for weapons inspection . . .”
Something else was bothering him. The digital organism Sibeal had been complaining about, it shared some of the same digital fingerprints as the virus that infected and nearly destroyed Atopia.
Burrowing into his workspace to investigate, he shrugged off an attempt by someone to grab his primary subjective. Closing his virtual eyes, he sighed, relenting, deciding he’d better apologize to Sibeal for his rant earlier. She was right about that glass being odd. He opened a private space, a small meeting room with beanbags on the floors and walls covered in whiteboards.
But it wasn’t Sibeal.
Vince materialized sitting in a beanbag across from Sid. He smiled. “Miss me?”
25
“BACK!” BROADCAST THE droid across a wide spectrum of audio and radio frequencies, its red and blue lights strobing at the crowd. A second droid was working the other side of the plaza, while a third and fourth rolled in and sprang into action, pushing back the street vendors and hawkers and robotic scavengers.
It wasn’t easy clearing a landing space for a VTOL in the Lagos slums.
Bob stood still in the center of the square while the crowd dispersed, his head bowed. He wore a stained white robe and sandals, his dirty blond hair falling around his shoulders, merging with his beard. Passage through Assembler City was thankfully uneventful, just about the first thing that had gone to plan in this whole adventure. The drone he’d hidden in had passed by one automated transport and microwave array after another, eventually depositing him here in the outskirts of the Lagos mega-city.
A light mist began to fall, and the moisture triggered a phase change in the bio-plastics lining the alleyways and shop stalls. Like blooming flowers, walls and awnings spread against the coming rain.
Over the tops of the tin roofs and neon signs, the Spike—a glass tower a mile high—glittered between scudding clouds in the night sky, dominating the skyline of Lagos beside the greyed-out hundred-story Islamic business feminist complex. A point of light flashed from near the top of the Spike, and Bob watched it arcing through the murky air. The point of light grew into an African Union turbofan transport. A knife-point of light stabbed out from it, illuminating Bob in a cone of white in the middle of the now-cleared plaza.
Stepping back from the center, Bob gave the transport room to land. The blast from its exhaust blew a cloud of dust and scattered debris. Bob closed his eyes, but his mind was already away, his primary subjective jacked into a private Terra Novan communication channel. The moment he made a data connection with Terra Novan representatives, his body was flooded with their own synthetic reality technology.
Observing from a virtual point-of-view in a conference room at the apex of the Spike, Bob watched his body climb up and into the transport far below in the slums.
The relief of reaching a safe harbor was almost overwhelming. Bob felt like he was resurrected, been brought back to life after wandering the underworld. Somehow he managed to navigate his way out, past the tortured souls that remained trapped there. The past week was a blur. He felt different. Most of his external mind wasn’t reconnected yet, and a lot of it might stay lost, but it wasn’t just that.
After making a connection, he was instantly cordoned off, his presence isolated by thick security blankets. He hadn’t spoken to anyone yet, and so Mohesha pinging him, asking if she could come and talk to him, felt like the start of his journey home. He’d done what Patricia asked. He made it to Terra Novan territory, and could tell Mohesha what he knew. Perhaps his part was done.
“We were afraid we had lost you,” Mohesha said as soon as her virtual presence materialized in the room with him. She looked down through the windows at the transport. “We haven’t been introduced, I’m—”
“I know who you are.” Bob turned to face her, a slender, dark-skinned woman with close-cropped black hair and kind eyes. She was an old friend of Patricia Killiam, and was, in fact, a student of Patricia’s more t
han fifty years before. Together they created the foundations for synthetic nervous systems, the foundation for both Atopia and Terra Nova.
Mohesha smiled. “You understand bringing you here is dangerous.”
Given that I’m a hunted terrorist. Bob resisted the urge to defend himself.
The room was cool, their voices echoing through the empty room. It was a conference space designed for international meetings, forty chairs lining each side of a massive table ten feet across. The floor-to-ceiling glass window walls sloped outward. They were alone.
“Patricia told me to come.”
“I know.” Staring through the window, Mohesha’s reflection hung side by side with Bob’s. “Atopia has formally declared war, joined the Alliance with America.”
“I had nothing to do with what happened in New York.”
Mohesha spun mediaworlds into Bob’s sensory frames, announcing the sighting of Robert Baxter in the Lagos slums. “It doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t do anymore. International courts have filed for your extradition, to Atopia of course. They claim you possess stolen information that threatens Alliance security.”
Bob retreated from the window. “Not stolen, it was given to me.” He sat down in one of the conference table chairs.
“By Patricia? This is Patricia’s proxxi data?”
Bob nodded. He was holding the data cube Patricia gave him in the center of his systems, protecting it like an egg. It seemed another world and time when she gave it to him. It was a burden he’d be glad to be rid of.
“And you have it with you?”
Bob nodded. Leaning his elbows onto the table, he pressed his hands together and steepled his fingers. The data cube might be a burden, but he hesitated to just give it up. “I have it encrypted in the bio-electronics in my body.”
“Good.” Mohesha watched the transport arcing through the sky on its return, cradling within it the precious cargo of Bob’s body. “One more thing.”
Bob looked at her. “What?”
“Did you find Willy’s body yet?”
26
“THIS PROVES IT!” screamed a newsworld anchor, his face apoplectic. “Robert Baxter is a Terra Novan spy, flying home to roost.” In the background hung a three-dimensional image, the viewpoint flying around from all angles, of Bob climbing into the transport in the Lagos slums from the night before. “The Allies need to launch an immediate attack on Terra Nova before we get a repeat—”
Sid controlled the primary feed, and he switched to another newsworld.
“—with Atopia joining the Alliance, an era of peace stretches forward for humanity. In countries where their synthetic reality system has been successful, we’re seeing the highest happiness indices that have ever—”
Sid switched worlds again.
“—they are trying to destabilize Atopian technology for their own gain.” This time a square-jawed synthetic anchor, in a suit and tie with his hair neatly parted and his voice steady. “Granting asylum to Robert Baxter, while refusing UN weapons inspectors entry to their space power grid installation is not—”
Vince swiped away the mediaworlds with a phantom. “Enough. At least we know Bob is safe. Did you send out a message?”
Nodding, Sid sent a copy of his inquiries to the external Terra Novan offices. There was no response. “I still can’t believe he made it.” He must have one hell of a story to tell.
He was with Sibeal and Zoraster in the White Horse. It was their meeting place. On the other side of a fused augmented reality were Vince and Connors in the barn in the Louisiana bayou, sitting on peeling wooden chairs. Now that he knew where Bob ended up, Sid was able to retrace his path through parts of the accessible wikiworld. Sid bought bits and pieces of the data path that weren’t publicly available. He’d already contacted the paramilitaries that had taken him up the Yoba River.
Connors stared at Sibeal through the augmented reality display. “Explain to me again these crystals you found?”
After some haggling, Vince had convinced Sid to allow her into the meeting. Understandably, Sid wasn’t comfortable including in their discussions a member of the same police forces that were trying to hunt him down. He only allowed it on the condition that her memories of the discussion would be externally stored, where they could be wiped if needed.
The shared meeting space blossomed into a visualization of atomic orbitals, shared valence bonds, and crystalline structuring graphs. “Quasi-crystals don’t occur naturally on Earth. The only ones found outside a lab were discovered in the Koryak Mountains and Indus Valley.”
The viewpoint zoomed to sub-atomic detail, zeroing in on the wave pattern of a single electron. “At each point that Willy’s proxxi stopped in the undergrounds of cities, we found traces of these same formations.”
“Meaning either it was looking for them, or it implanted them there,” Connors said.
Nodding, Sibeal dove into technical details about the resonance of spin between quarks in the crystals’ sub-atomics and power dissipation curves from a surrounding matrix of uranium.
Sid had been researching the quasi-crystals for hours already. Deciding to take a break, he opened a private world to chat with Vince. They morphed away from their physical bodies to sit down at another table in the White Horse, their conversation protected by a glittering security blanket. “So you’re telling me you were possessed by a voodoo spirit?”
“I don’t know, it all happened pretty fast. It felt the same as sharing sensory channels in a synthetic world.” Vince smiled. “But, you know, some of us just can’t help having fun no matter what we’re doing.”
“Figures you would be inhabited by . . . who was it? Papa Ougan, the voodoo spirit of boozing and womanizing?”
Vince laughed. “Yeah, that’s what they say.”
“And I see you’re going all Stockholm syndrome.” Sid motioned at the image of Connors, already up to her elbows in schematics with Sibeal. “The woman kidnaps you, loses you”—Sid checked the latest mediaworlds on the Phuture News meltdown—“about a trillion dollars, threatens you with jail, and you want to make her a part of our gang?”
“What can I say?” Vince laughed again. “I’ll get it all back, and it wasn’t personal. She’s just doing her job. I respect that.”
Sid shook his head in wonderment. “You’re one special kind of guy.”
Vince’s smile faded. “Seriously, though. She’s a straight shooter, wants to do the right thing, and more than anything, she wants to make her mark, prove herself. I think she could be a big asset.”
“If you say so.” Sid switched topics. “So you want details on where we tracked Willy’s body?”
Vince nodded.
“It stopped at each of these cities in the continental United States”—the room faded into a view of the entire Earth, with New York, Chicago, and Washington highlighted—“and then moved on to Europe and the Middle East.”
“Where did it end up?”
Sid spun the globe. “We think we saw traces in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, but that’s where the trail ends.”
“Anything else?”
There wasn’t much else to go on. Something tweaked in the back of Sid’s mind. “There was one other thing that didn’t make sense, or at least, I couldn’t fit it in.”
Vince nudged him. “What?”
“This might seem ridiculous, but I was reading some of the religious texts you sent me—the ones Willy’s proxxi was reading in the Commune in Montana.”
“Been reading a lot of those myself. So what is it?”
“There was one phrase that I couldn’t find any other reference to, something scrawled into the notes you sent me: The beginning of man, where time stops in a thousand tongues.”
“That sounds like pretty standard Gnostic nonsense,” Vince said after a pause. He frowned. “Wait a second. Where time stops . . .”
Sid looked at him. “What?”
“I met with that gangster Patricia told us to find.”
“Sintil8?”
“Yeah, that’s his stage name. Real name Mikhail Butorin. He gave me a copy of some Gnostic texts that he dug up in the Egyptian deserts a hundred years ago, the Book of Pobeptoc. There was a passage in there that popped out at me.” He shared it with Sid. “Wal lie body is where the flesh eaters live.”
“That’s just a translation coincidence,” Sid said. “Or maybe Butorin is having a bit of fun with you. Doesn’t he encourage his followers to eat their own flesh? That’s one sick—”
“Where did you say the trail ended, Jakarta?”
Sid nodded.
“Where time stops,” Vince whispered. He laughed, and then collapsed their private meeting space and grabbed everyone’s attention from the lecture on quantum computing Sibeal was giving.
“Did you say some of those quasi-crystals were found in the wild up in the New Guinea highlands?”
Everyone stared at Vince.
Sibeal nodded. “Yeah, New Guinea. Why?”
SUNLIGHT STREAMED DOWN through the jungle canopy, and a lime-green parrot fluttered overhead. Pushing back the last of the foliage before the village, Vince peered in. Smoke rose from cooking fires between thatched huts, and children chased each other, squealing, while their mothers prepared sweet potatoes in stone-lined pits.
Vince was projecting himself into the village through the base station repeater that he dropped here months ago, just about the time Willy’s body disappeared. It was when the future death threats were peaking, hunting him down, forcing him on a goose chase around the world to try to protect himself. This part of the world was still remote and wild; there were no networks, no wikiworld feeds, barely any technology beyond what humans had a thousand years ago. The perfect place to hide, it was still in a primal state . . . the beginning of man.
It was here that Vince had met the Yupno witch doctor, Nicky Nixons. The Yupno didn’t perceive time in the same way the rest of the world did. They didn’t just see it as going forward, but also as going backward, sideways and in circles . . . where time stops.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 19
