by Guy Haley
"Right."
"Yeah, 'right', and you'll do it now or my friends here will play pincushion with your hide, got it?" He waved a sophisticated-looking phone mockingly at Otto. "I wouldn't bother calling that friend of yours if I were you. I've got you jammed, haven't I? Launcey was good, real good. Audio bafflers, Grid suppressors… the lot. Expensive, but I got your supposedly oh-so-uncrackable MT cipher, haven't I?"
"I am honoured you went to so much trouble, but you should have spent something on yourself, bought yourself something pretty."
"Ha! Money well spent, I said that, didn't I? I mean it. All of it from my jobs, all gone. On you." He pointed at Otto, his hand coming up and down with oddly feminine delicacy. It wavered in the air; he was high on something. He smiled, his deformities dragging his mouth into a leer.
"That's a nice smile," said Otto, "it must have been a hit with the ladies back in the slammer, not that they'd get much of a view of your face."
"Shut up!" roared Tufa, his face red. He held out his gun and shot Otto again, close by the first bullet. "Got that?" This time Otto really felt it. He charged his healthtech to deal with it quickly; this was a more serious wound. He almost vomited. He hated vomiting. He gagged, his mouth filling with alkali saliva. Spit and a little blood ran from his mouth. He staggered, but did not fall.
"Loud and clear," said Otto. A wave of nausea passed over him again, his skin prickled. To say his gut hurt was a monumental understatement. The bad cy-jobs grinned at him evilly as they followed him over to the warehouse. One chuckled. Otto made a mental note to pull that one's enhancements out of his skin while he was still conscious. The other went forward and rolled back the door. Grinny came forward and motioned him inside while doorman covered them. Otto stared at them. They laughed at his helplessness; they knew it was still too risky for him to try and take them out. Otto's time was running out, because god alone knew what twisted shit Tufa had inside.
Otto found out.
The concrete floor was crumbly underfoot, the air smelled of tropical damp and rot, but it was otherwise tidy. The warehouse had been cleaned, soundproofed and painted, a stage set for Tufa's revenge. Four cell lamps were set up to illuminate a hollow square defined by three metal tables with a variety of surgical and engineering tools neatly arrayed upon them. They stood round a chair that had been bolted to the floor. The bolts ran through plastic sheeting under and surrounding the chair. The layout was obsessively executed, far too neat. That, rather than the fact that most of the tools weren't there for the good purposes their makers had intended them, made it out to be the work of a sick mind. Otto looked it over and nodded, as if in agreement with it all. He didn't think he could be scared any more, hadn't been since the mentaug. What he felt was weary, and he let some of it show. His shoulder hurt, his guts hurt, his fucking bladder hurt it was so full. He'd done too much hurting the last thirty years. Why not give up? Because I'm not going down to scum like Tufa. He made a mental note to kick himself in the balls after he'd killed the Albanian.
"Huh, you have been thinking about this for five years. Must have taken your mind off all those ass-fuckings," said Otto. His voice was low, strained with effort, but he'd be damned if he'd let a couple of bullets shut him up. He was clutching at straws – angering Tufa might make him lose control, give him an opportunity, but it could make his situation worse. No matter. Otto disliked waiting. "That's if a guy like you with a face like yours can find himself a nice husband in jail." Tufa shoved him. "Asshole," Otto added. The chair bolts, they weren't big enough, nor were they driven far enough into the floor. He looked away from them, he didn't want to draw attention to them, but Tufa was past noticing anything, too drugged, too bent on revenge.
"Don't call me that," Tufa said calmly. "You'll be calling me 'sir' and begging for death before I'll let you die." He stepped away, his face fixed with triumph. He picked a shock baton off one of the tables, weighed it in his hand with mock thoughtfulness. "Boy, am I going to enjoy myself tonight," he said, and jabbed it into Otto's spinal interface port. Pain shot through Otto's body, skittering like lightning through cybernetics and organics alike. His shoulder felt like a scratch and his guts like a love tap by comparison. His machine senses crackled offline, scrambled by the charge; his iHUD danced with crazy patterns. His polymer muscles spasmed with such force they cracked carbon-bonded bones. He jerked madly, fell over and locked into a foetal ball, vomited. A delta of piss spread across his trousers. Tufa laughed and whooped and shocked him again.
Today was turning out to be a shitty day.
Richards was out in the dataflows of the world's information network, deep in the sea of the sum of all human knowledge. The raw Grid was of a different order to the cosy places the AIs constructed for themselves: it was a non-place, sketched by a lunatic over the phantom datapipes and optic cable beams of reality, the trails for dreams, a nonsense land. An endless series of pathways spread fractally for ever, growing ever smaller one way, joining one after another in rapid succession to form the unfathomable trunk of man's accumulated wisdom in the other. Richards was in a thundering world of light and sound and raw, pleading data begging to be read. Along each and every strand strobed the light pulses of retrieval programmes, communications, dataflow of all kinds, some of it, no doubt, the sensing presences of his fellow Fives.
He could never explain what this was like to Otto. Words failed him, pictures failed him. It was a billion electronic trees branching one off the other, it was an ocean of emotion, it was a soup of idea and being, it was an infinity of honeyed fact, a stack of candied universes composed of sweet, sweet numbers his machine mind longed to consume, to parse, to possess. It was none of those things.
Humans could not get the raw Grid.
For all it was ostensibly Richards' natural environment, on the Grid he felt clumsy and unsure. His true form was alien to him, monstrous and multi-dimensional. The raw Grid was at odds with sense. It was logic forced into illogic.
He was being hunted through it.
The meanest-looking shoal of eel phages he'd ever seen was speeding single-mindedly after him, weaving through the Grid's teeming packs of knowledge, the programmes within arrow-swift and intent. Phage-eels were guard dogs, the kind of thing that governments had patrolling the spaces where their dirtiest secrets hid, the kind of thing Richards had himself installed to guard the entrance to his base unit. They were massively infectious, anathema to the existence of data, the killers of the unliving. This pack was loose, roaming free on the currents of the web, no owner's mark to identify them. A standard-model shoal would not and could not do that. These must have been heavily tampered with. Richards locked into the shoal, tried to shut it down, to talk its stupid group brain into inaction, but it had been mercilessly butchered, wired up to identify him as a rogue AI fragment no matter how hard he pinged his identifying information at them. When they smelled Richards, they smelled a target.
At every turn his attempts to contact the authorities were stymied, each line he threw out intercepted and bounced back at him. Richards ducked down paths, trying to make his choices as random as possible, but he could not shake the shoal. The eels were ugly, ribbons of nothing undulating through the blaze and fury of the web. They ate every counter-measure Richards could fling at them without slowing. If they caught him the whole thing would need unravelling or he'd be consumed. He could just go and sit it out in his base unit, wait for his own security programmes to shred the shoal, but he was out of time. Richards could not fight the eels and help Otto.
He rather suspected that was the point.
He ran, the eels behind him, black streamers of killing code trailing death through the Grid's clatter of light, derailing spears of information, dissolving others to incoherent number strings.
Nodes and exits flashed by as Richards sped down branch after branch of the Grid's structure, the information depending from them become more and more rarefied. He was moving erratically to throw the eels, but his route took him ever closer
to the old food distribution centre's online shadow. His only choice was to see if he could get out, get into something and help his friend, link up with his base unit through a secure pipe and shut the Grid and the eels out. What he would do with the eels when he got there and this proved impossible he had no idea.
He had no choice. Not if he wanted to see Otto alive again.
He passed through a little-used link into the UN mainframe, sliding past its security as a wisp of electron smoke. The eels were not so subtle, wriggling, boneless fingers forcing wide a doorway. They were immediately accosted by a hundred nearI hunter/killer security 'bots. Some of the eels fragmented under their assault, more burst through, chunks of their dead comrades frittering to nothing behind them. Part of the shoal's power was spent. Not enough. Richards fled on, diving up on to the broad highways of the United Nations, the eels following him, half the UN's security protocols following the eels, their train scattering information retrieval requests like leaves before the wind. A phalanx of security 'bots blocked the way ahead, Richards ducked into the first side-pipe he found, treading roads bare of fact.
Richards jinked and dived, flashing across info-paths as wide as tomorrow and as narrow as yesterday. He went further and further into the UN mainframe, the no-dimensional space he traversed becoming increasingly fragmented. Superhighways turned to highways, highways to roads, roads to byways, byways to paths, then to threads, then to archives. Richards was deep in, only a few queries popping up here and there as digicologists combed the halls for some piece of half-remembered information or other.
The address for the online counterpart to the food distribution warehouses in Morden opened up before him. He dived inside, hurriedly throwing up a load of scales into a security gate across the entrance. He checked for other points of ingress, and found none. Good and bad. He was at the end of the line.
The eels crashed against his gate, thrashing hard, their idea of teeth worrying the code of Richards' barrier. He felt them as needle stabs across his back, his face, his hands. Not the kind of pain he could shut off. Almost immediately the shoal was attacked from all sides by semi-static antibodies native to the archive, the pursuing hunter-killers piling in from behind. They tore chunks from it, but the shoal was robust and violent; UN 'bots burst as they fought. Some eels died, others repaired themselves as quickly as they were damaged. Richards staggered on. The gate wouldn't hold for long.
The warehouse site dated back seventy years to the migration. Once a busy hub, it had been unceremoniously shunted into storage, paths snipped off, left only because nothing was ever really deleted from the Grid. Outside in the Real, the warehouses remained UN property, swept for squatters every now and then, in case the physical site was needed again. But though both the warehouses and their online infrastructure stood in the Real and on the Grid respectively, the electronics that had once allowed the two to interface were gone; looted, recycled or both. There was no way in from one to the other that Richards could see, no security drones, no stocktaking near-Is, no terminals, none of the usual machines you'd find in even the most rundown complex, which was precisely why Launcey had chosen it, Richards guessed. He'd probably stripped it himself.
Outside, the eels shrieked. The attentions of some of the UN's higher AIs were being drawn to the place by the commotion. He better be quick, and not just for Otto's sake. He shot out a myriad tendrils, feeling queasy as he spread himself thin.
He hunted around in the Real for anything that would hold a sensing presence, a forgotten camera, a smart coffee dispenser, anything, but he only found outports that went into nothing, long-dead addresses and pages of irrelevant notices that clung to existence like mosses hanging deep in a cave, out of sight of the thundering churn of the Grid proper.
Richards was about to give up hope when one of his tendrils tripped over the slow pulse of a slumbering mind. It was a flicker, not even coming through a Gridpipe, but via an outmoded update daemon. If he hadn't been looking so hard he'd never have found it.
The daemon was attached to a Class One AI, archaic and abandoned, sitting on standby for God knew how long, probably left where it was because it might come in handy and, technically, because it was an autonomous being. Ones didn't enjoy the rights the law gave them, precisely because they lacked the capacity to enjoy anything. They were as dumb as bricks; their weak consciousnesses did not require full base units, being small enough to fit wholly into larger devices, like the near-Is. They were slaves to habit and to man. This one would have been shown a whole new shiny world when the AI emancipation laws came in. It probably insisted on staying put in case anyone needed a cup of tea.
When Launcey had cleared out the site, he had missed it too, probably because it was not a Grid-slaved device. If it hadn't made a peep, it might not have shown up. Maybe. He'd barely found it himself, after all. He wasn't too fussed about the niceties of it right now; it was a way out of this mess.
Richards gave it a prod. A stream of non-linguistic data tumbled abruptly out of it, meaning roughly: "AI online. Ready for instruction."
Richards did not waste words on it. AI Ones had little to say; they were not, strictly speaking, truly intelligent. That they were considered strong AI at all was an accident of history. It didn't have the opportunity to formulate ">Query?<" before Richards shouldered it out of the way and shut it up in a corner of itself, a plaintive burble its strongest response.
Richards was in some kind of vehicle. He allowed himself a sigh of relief as his mind filled it and came across a wireless set. Quickly he set up a secure pipe between his base unit and the machine, and sealed the on-Grid entryway from the UN site. The sounds of the battle between the eels and UN security vanished as the door slammed shut. He dispersed his scales and the pain stopped. He relaxed. The only way the shoal could get to him now would be through his base unit. Part of him really wanted to see it try.
His relief was shortlived. Warning icons flashed in his mind as he interfaced with the vehicle. He was in possession of an ancient loader. Corroded fuel cells, said the icons, flat tyres, metal stress in loading fork two… on and on, blinking red and angry. He looked out of the thing's eyes. Only three of seven were working. Two showed an undifferentiated grey, probably a tarpaulin, the third a corrugated, photodegraded plastic wall. It was dim. He guessed he was inside an open-fronted shed. Microphones hissed as he tried out the loader's ears. He picked up only distant city sounds; the garage or shed or wherever the hell he was was at least empty. Further exploration revealed the loader to have a rotating cab, complete with a seat for a human operator – this more than anything else marking it out as an antique. A pigeon had made its nest there, leaving behind a dusty heap of guano and twigs on the chair. It made Richards feel dirty. He did his best to ignore it.
Only one of the loader's two arms was functional; the other squealed and jammed when he tried to lift it, and yet more icons yammered for attention. One arm was better than none, Richards figured. He didn't like fighting. His bravado felt ludicrous.
"Here goes nothing," he muttered.
His voice boomed out of the front of the machine.
"Shit!" went the lifter at a similarly ear-splitting volume, before Richards realised he should shut right up, right away. No choice now, he had to act fast. He turned the engine over. He winced as a clanging like a cement mixer full of spanners filled the shed, getting faster and faster until it sounded almost like an electric motor, and not an accident waiting to happen. Further warning icons blinked in Richards' mind. He had a bare four minutes of fuel cell, if the engine didn't fall out of the bottom of the loader first.
He pulled forward, the grey in the machine's eyes replaced by the interior of the shed as the tarpaulin slid free. Outside, the evening was darkening into night. Richards pushed the loader out onto the concrete apron of the distribution centre, wobbling on uneven wheels. He was right down the far end of the complex, a good half mile from the warehouse he'd had Otto watching. He had to get a move on. He gunned the motor
. It stalled. Richards swore.
• • • •
Otto leant on the ropes, undid the glove geckro with his teeth and watched the men watching him. He let the gloves fall to the ring canvas as they approached.
"Otto Klein?" asked one, the taller of the two: thin, aesthetic, a bureaucrat.
"I must be," Otto replied. He ripped the tape from his left hand with his teeth and tossed it into a bucket on the gym floor outside the ring. He used the freed fingers to grab a towel off the ropes and wipe the sweat from his face. "If you're in here, asking. Everyone knows me here. What do you want?" He tugged his other glove off, sat on a stool in the corner and swigged water from his bottle. He caught his trainer's eye, and she looked away.
The men stayed outside the ring. Otto looked down at them; sitting inside he remained well above their eye-level. Neither had introduced himself.
"You are due to take your national service soon," said the bureaucrat. The second remained silent. He was bulky, military-looking. Although he wore no uniform, Otto recognised the type.
"Next June. I've been offered a stay of execution so I can take part in the games," said Otto. More public information.
