by K S Augustin
“Together?” she frowned. “We never attended a conference together.”
It finally dawned on her that, rather than being amnesiac, Carl was testing her. The image of the rabbit sprang to mind. If someone could create an avatar based on a fictional character, she realised, it was entirely possible that someone else could create one based on her.
“Carl, it’s me,” she said, thinking quickly. “Your body is in the inner core of Basement Five, in one of the insertion rooms, overlooked by the observation section. There’s another, identical room next to it. That’s where my body is.”
The barrel wavered and Tania had time to see the person behind it. Her eyes widened.
Carl! But...not Carl.
“You reach the inner core through another layer of security,” she continued. “The walls are made of brushed metal that always made me think I was inside a caterer’s refrigerator.”
She had made that same comment to him over dinner one night – their first dinner together. Would he remember? Her statement was as much a test for him as it was for her.
He lowered the weapon and slid it into a holster at his hip.
“A restaurant refrigerator,” he said.
She let out a long slow breath of relief.
“You sure as hell took your time getting here.” His voice was bitter. “Why did Basement Five shut down its servers for so long? Is that a tether on your belt? Is it working?”
Tania had been expecting several reactions but not the hostility that was beating at her. She blinked in confusion.
“I came as fast as I could,” she said. “Yes, that’s a tether. And yes, it’s working. It’s our way home.”
“Home?” He snorted. “There’s no way I’m going home, darlin’, not while the Thing is out there.”
This was worse than being in the Blue. What was Carl talking about? What was the “thing” he referred to? Was he delusional? And why did he look so...old?
Her eyes narrowed, Tania took in Carl’s appearance as he paced away from her, muttering under his breath.
Yes, this was Carl Orin, but not the man she recognised from their time together. His hair, once a rich blond, was now much lighter, the pale gold strands overwhelmed with pure silver. The colour dusted the short sideburns next to his ears. There were wrinkles fanning out from his cornflower-blue eyes, etched beside his firm lips. His cheeks were more sunken than she remembered, throwing his cheekbones into sharper relief. Beneath the one-piece suit that he still wore, his body looked firm but thicker. In short, he looked like he’d aged twenty years.
“Did Don send you?” he asked, from the other side of the room. Between them was a lab set-up that resembled the observation room of Basement Five’s inner core.
Tania looked at the equipment then over to the man who had been her lover.
“Yes.”
Hums, from the rows of monitors running various applications, filled the air.
He shook his head. “Why?”
She frowned. “Why send me? To find you, of course.”
“After all this time?” He shrugged. “Not that it matters. I’ve got work to do here. I can’t leave. Not yet.”
Tania’s next question was drowned out by a large thump that shook the building. It sounded like a bomb had detonated nearby. She opened her mouth to ask a question, make a statement, but Carl beat her to it.
“Shit!”
He yanked at a drawer of the desk closest to him and withdrew another weapon that looked suspiciously like the one he’d shoved in her face. He threw it to Tania and she caught it with both hands. It felt lighter than it looked. To one side, above the trigger, a small light blinked green.
“If anything comes through the door, walls, floor or ceiling, you blast it,” he said. “I bet it’s your goddamn tether. Gave us away.”
The feeling that she was caught in the middle of a video arcade game was inescapable. Another vibration and dull thud shook the building. Stabilising herself, Tania stood with her feet slightly apart and scanned the room, wondering what the hell she was supposed to shoot at.
She was about to ask Carl what the intruders looked like when the first blood-red sphere came through the wall to her left. There was no doubt about its intent. Before it had even cleared the wall, it oriented itself towards her and a rifle sprouted from its smooth shell. As the skin of the house ripped to let it through, Tania sighted down her weapon and pulled the trigger. She was expecting noise and a sense of recoil but there was neither. All she saw was a dotted line of blue shooting from the barrel of her gun. The leading bolt hit the sphere and the object exploded. Tania closed her eyes and turned away but no fallout hit her. Opening her eyes again, she saw the wall repair itself until it was once more a seamless white surface.
A quick glance over to Carl showed her that he was battling four of the spheres. He seemed to be holding his own, so Tania concentrated on her own half of the apartment.
Two spheres were trying to burrow in from the ceiling and another was bulging up through the floor. Tania waited until the walls cracked before letting off a barrage of shots. The small light on the barrel blinked amber and Tania took a few deep breaths while waiting for her strange weapon to recharge.
As the spheres around her exploded, it seemed to her that a fifth seemed to hesitate. Was it going to retreat? Tania didn’t give it a second chance. Coolly, she sighted down the barrel and blew the invading globe into multi-coloured shards.
The battle lasted little more than a minute after that.
“Nice shooting,” Carl said.
Tania turned to say something, ask something, but he was already busy, his attention no longer on her. Instead, he was concentrating on one particular screen lit up on the wall.
“Let’s hope we got them all.”
Tania put her weapon down on a nearby desk surface and approached him.
“Got what all? What were those things, Carl? What’s going on here?”
“They’re bots, sent to sniff out particular information signatures. Once they find what they’re looking for, they’re programmed to either destroy the target or head back to their base and report their findings.”
Destroy? Base? Report findings? This was starting to sound less like a retrieval assignment and more like a war.
Irritated, Tania grabbed Carl’s arm. He looked down at her fingers in surprise for a moment then let himself be turned around.
“I don’t understand any of this,” she said, searching his weathered face. “I don’t understand why the spheres attacked us or where they came from. I don’t understand why they should be after my tether. I don’t know how yours got severed or why you say you won’t come back.”
She paused, then continued in a more broken voice. “I don’t understand why you look so old. Carl, what happened to you?”
Carl tried covering his face with one hand, then let it drop. He looked dejected, his onetime expression of smug self-satisfaction pulled down by age and worry.
“I was about to ask you why you still look so young, but then I realised that it doesn’t matter how you look out there.” He jerked his head and Tania knew he was referring to the real world. “In here, you can look however you want. However you feel.”
“I don’t understand.”
They stared at each other.
“Come with me,” he said. He sighed heavily. “You need to understand something. And then you’ll have a decision to make.”
She motioned to the front door. “What about those bots?
Are there any more of them waiting outside for us?”
“We got them all.” He smiled grimly. “Sentience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
Tania didn’t understand that last statement, but she let it slide. Her ex-rival, ex-lover was looking tense and haggard and she was willing to cut him some slack if he was willing to explain exactly what the hell was going on.
They left the apartment and immersed themselves in the multi-dimensional world of wild cyberspace.
“Can we talk here?” Tania asked. “Or will there be more of those bots out there, listening for us?”
Carl looked at her, an eyebrow lifted. “The bots were after you. And no, they’re not sensitive to sound.” He looked around. “Not that sound, as we know it, exists here. This is all made up anyway.”
He took her hand and watched her face as they both lifted into the air, a slight smile playing around his lips.
Tania knew what to expect. She had done it herself at the start of her insertion while searching for him. But that still couldn’t stop the feeling of magic that engulfed her.
Flying. That normally happened in her dreams but here, in the Blue, she was conscious and rational and could direct wherever she wanted to go. The only thing missing was a breeze blowing against her face and she wondered if she could program that in for a future visit.
She looked down at where the fingers of her hand were enmeshed with Carl’s and snuck him a quick look.
He had changed.
The man she had known for the past half a year was brash and cocky. He had given her the best orgasms of her life then, after the last one, left her, blindfolded and oblivious, in her bed. And he had done all of that, just so he could get the coveted position of first Basement Five operative inserted into cyberspace. She knew all about that Carl and could imagine him pulling her along impatiently in order to get to his destination. She could imagine him making fun of her for her tardiness, or attempting to get her into bed at the first available opportunity, killer bots or not. She could not imagine him travelling at a steady pace, happy to have her hand in his. Their current speed was too domestic a pace for the Carl she’d known.
No, this man appeared to be a much more mellow and measured person. He had guided her out of the apartment with a gallant gesture that looked so natural, even as Tania hesitated at its alienness. Not at the gesture itself but at the fact that it had been Carl who had made it.
Could someone really change in the space of a day, from opportunistic bastard to approaching normal? Gracious even? It beggared belief.
The two of them soared up through several virtual cityscapes, neatly dodging the vehicles that sped along the highways.
“There are trillions of bytes here,” Carl said, “with millions being added every second. Unlike our own world, this one is almost infinite, an entire universe within each computer, each server.”
Buildings of every shape and hue whizzed past them. Anything that stored, or sent, information via cyberspace was modelled here, from small cubes that reflected individual users on their own home servers to giant edifices representing large corporations spanning continents.
“Information about every single thing on Earth, just sitting somewhere in the Blue, waiting for someone to reach out and grab it.”
Tania let Carl’s words wash over her as they soared onward. She thought that the corporate-owned, impenetrable-looking blocks of encrypted databases were the largest things in the Blue, and wondered if they could be manipulated into more imaginative shapes. Then she began noticing a swarm of something directly in their path. They were still far away from it and she narrowed her eyes, trying to focus on what she was seeing. Was it another building? No, it couldn’t be. None of the windowless skyscrapers they had passed were painted such a distinctive shade of red.
It struck her that that shade she was seeing was the exact same colour as the orbs that had attacked them.
They moved closer and the objects started to resemble a sheet of paper, then a shower of thick strands, like a beaded curtain that had partially collapsed on the floor.
Instinctively she held back, but Carl tugged at her and they moved closer still.
It was a web, a mass of knobbly threads that squatted over entire districts of the cyberscape. Carl stopped while they were still a little distance away and Tania focused on the cyberspace layer below the current street level. She wasn’t surprised to see red tendrils reaching down through blocks of the level below her and – as she lifted her gaze – above her as well.
The tendrils weren’t content to merely engulf the buildings. As she watched, they slowly entered blocks, penetrating them effortlessly, and emerging through shattered panels on previously slick surfaces before gradually meeting up with the main structure again, the tendrils thickening as they reconnected with a major branch. Around the red web, spheres, very much like the bots that had attacked her and Carl, darted back and forth at high speed, circling the thick creepers like tiny flying soldiers.
“What can you see?” he asked.
She frowned as she took in the complexity of what was in front of her. “I see streets. And tall buildings.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Really? Buildings and streets? Not, say, pipes or streams?”
She shook her head while remembering similar words from the giant rabbit. Maybe Carl and the animal avatar did know each other. “No. It looks, more or less, like a normal cityscape to me.”
“That’s what I see too,” he said. “It means you and I must be using a similar frame of reference to interpret objects in cyberspace.” He jerked his head. “What about that? Can you see something foreign over there?”
“It’s,” Tania grimaced, “destructive. A blood-red colour, with tendrils that appear to be infiltrating databases. What is it?”
“That,” Carl said, after exhaling heavily, “is the Rhine-Temple botnet. You must have analysed traces of it back in the lab.”
“A botnet?” She knew what they were but had never quite translated their existence in to the image of destruction she saw before her. The web of tentacles looked malign and horrific. “How dangerous is it?”
He tightened his lips and the wrinkles around his mouth deepened. “More dangerous than any other botnet in existence. We’re not talking about compromising individual machines here. The Rhine-Temple, as you can see, has successfully infiltrated the systems of several large companies.”
That was visible by the way some tall structures appeared to be infested with red, dozens of tendrils writhing out of holes in the buildings like the branches of a huge tree-creature reclaiming an abandoned skyscraper.
“When its developers built it,” Carl said, “they had no idea that it would acquire a characteristic that you don’t often see in botnets.”
Tania looked at him and he smiled grimly at her.
“Artificial intelligence. The Rhine-Temple has a degree of sentience. It can make decisions for itself. And the rigid protocols of many existing companies are no match for it.”
Tania turned her gaze back to the red web. She isolated one patch of movement and watched as a thin red tendril tapped slowly and gently at the sheer face of a neighbouring building.
“Every time a system goes down,” Carl said, “the botnet collects data, analysing how long it took to compromise that network’s security. It then develops it
s own programs to fine-tune its performance so that, the next time it attacks, it’s more efficient.”
“What’s its purpose?” Tania asked. “Processing cycles for scammers? An illegal grid platform for hackers?”
Carl laughed. It was a hollow sound, flat and echoless in cyberspace.
“It wants a whole lot more than that, darlin’. That Rhine-Temple botnet wants to destroy the world.”
Chapter Five
“I think it’s figured out that there’s a lot of real estate here in cyberspace going to waste,” Carl said. “This whole virtual universe is powered by hardware working at peak performance. Thousands, millions, billions of instructions per second whizzing around above our heads and below our feet. Why share, when it can take it all?”
“But Carl, destroying the world? What makes you think that is its ultimate objective?”
“Because I’ve been watching it.” He glanced over at her. “Sit down, I want to explain something.”
They were standing on the top of a tall windowless building that overlooked the botnet. Carl let go of her hand and Tania sat on the edge of the rooftop. From habit, she tried not to look down at the virtual street below. Carl sat next to her, angling himself so she could look into his weathered face.
“The Rhine-Temple and I have already fought several battles. I’ve beaten it back a few times but it keeps coming.” He paused. “I’ve been doing this for years.”
She blinked, uncomprehending. “Years?” she repeated. “But—”
“Listen,” he said. “When we were training in the sandpit, we were inserted into cyberspace for only a few minutes at a time. When we came out of it, back to the real world, there was some sense of dislocation, but everybody at Basement Five put it down to the insertion experience itself.
“I’ve figured it out, though. When you’re in cyberspace for more than a few real-time minutes, your brain starts to adapt. Because it’s now in a world that moves so much faster, it starts moving faster too. And cyberspace, real cyberspace, is much more neurologically stimulating than the test environments where we did our trials. In order to cope, our brain has to somehow take in all that information and make sense of it.”
