Mage Against the Machine

by Shaun Barger

  She applied transparent, greasy mask nets to Blue and Dr. Blackwell’s faces. Pressed tiny pads onto the skin over the cybernetic touch points behind their ears.

  “The masks emit a field that changes our features in the eyes of Synth droids and mod surveillance,” Jem explained, tapping the almost invisible film plastered to her own face. Then, indicating the pads: “These are dummy mods. They divert the signature and data stream from other civilians, to make it look like we’re properly Synth-modded.”

  Unlike Jem’s unique enhancement mods—or those of rescued humans like Blue and the doctor, whose Synth-installed mods had been hacked and altered—the mandatory implants allowed Armitage and automated surveillance to peer through the eyes of any under their control, recording a constant stream of data to keep perfect record of the goings-on within their city.

  That, and they had tiny detonators. A kill switch in every skull.

  “They’ll keep us hidden,” Jem said. “So long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves.”

  It went unsaid that if this occurred, there was a very real possibility that they would draw the attention of Armitage itself. And then there would be no hiding.

  Blue traced her fingers along the papery bark of slender white trunks as they passed through a densely packed stand of birch trees. Fireflies modified to survive the autumn cold twinkled amid golden leaves and naked branches overhead, floating in sluggish twirls as they lit the way.

  “It’s beautiful . . .” Blue said.

  “I guess,” Jem said, swatting away a low-flying insect. “These aren’t designed for human enjoyment. No paths, no light. Not a bench in sight. Hardly anyone passes through the gardens—especially these days. Good for Runners, though.”

  They passed through the birch trees into ferns and foliage crisped with frost. Then a pond, dappled with bright pink water lilies that glowed with a dull luminescence. They hopped across a winding series of stones to cross.

  “Careful,” Jem said, catching Blue’s arm as she nearly slipped from slick stone into inky black water.

  “Fucking clumsy these days, thanks,” Blue said, embarrassed as she took Jem’s hand for balance. She glanced back at the lilies, their dim glow reflecting rosy smears across the glassy surface. “I’m not sure what I was expecting. But this—was not it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dr. Blackwell said, hopping onto the shore with nimble grace surprising for a woman her age. “You’ll have your fill of human squalor soon enough.” She gestured at an immense concrete building peaking over sprawling clouds of yellow-green ironwood leaves in the garden beyond.

  Security was minimal at the Immersion Farm. Their entrance, a discreet metal door set into a wall overgrown with creeping ivy, was easily unlocked with a quick scrambling burst of Jem’s compact EMP blaster.

  The inside of the Immersion Farm was at striking odds with its dull exterior. Tastefully painted halls lit by gentle lighting echoed with soothing music were designed to give the rows of men and women reclined in glassy pods a somewhat less ominous feel. Artfully arranged fountains gurgled throughout labyrinthine halls.

  Jem led them through countless rooms full of people who’d decided to live out the remainder of their lives in fully immersive virtual reality—blue light shimmering through eyelids that might never open again. Though most chose to live in private housing, of which there was an abundance, the burden of feeding and caring for themselves had simply become too much for these slumbering thousands. Instead, they chose to allow Synth caretakers to care for their physical forms while their minds continuously indulged in every kind of food, adventure, and fantasy—sexual or otherwise.

  Some even chose to forget that they were in immersion at all, requesting that their knowledge of the outside world be erased. Armitage, like all Overminds, was obligated by Alpha AI decree to maintain these perfect artificial lives for those who chose to forget—for those who chose virtual paradise over watching the slow death of their species in the real world.

  Jem resented, pitied, and envied these people in equal measure.

  “Don’t touch the pods,” she warned. “Tamper with the sleepers and all eyes will be on us. Should be twenty-seven minutes before the droids begin their washing and medical rounds.”

  The streets beyond the Immersion Farm were rain-slick and empty. The city itself was a gloomy sprawl of brick, cement, and neon. Armitage’s aesthetic tastes seemed reserved for gardens.

  “Stay close to me,” Jem whispered as they passed a cluster of hollow-eyed civilians, listlessly slouching down the sidewalk. “Observation in this sector is currently light, and fully automated, but I don’t want to take any risks.”

  Turning into an alleyway, she led them to a discreet sewer grate hidden beside the sleek white bulk of a garbage processor.

  As the city shrank, the underground SEPTA trains had rerouted, leaving large swaths of shielded tunnels abandoned below. Despite the stink and filth of the minimally maintained underground, Jem reveled in the damp silence. Any droids or Mods she might run into below would be on their own—the invisible tendrils of Armitage’s prodding mind largely obstructed by the thick cement and dirt overhead.

  Jem removed the grating with a grunted heave, revealing a dimly lit ladder to the darkness below.

  Blue froze, stiffening as Jem offered to help her descend.

  “What’s wrong?” Jem asked, impatient.

  “N-nothing,” Blue said, snapping out of it. “Just a little claustrophobic. Not a fan of being underground.”

  Jem’s tiny flashlight lanced into the darkness ahead, a crimson beam sweeping across railway and stone as she led the way. The Synth and human peacekeepers combed the tunnels with a constant, complex web of ever-shifting patrols. As such, most of the other Runners preferred to rely on the flimsy invisibility of their mask nets and dummy mods. For Jem, however, the patrols were no issue. The tangled pattern of their routes accurately tracked in her mind.

  They walked in silence but for the ever-present chittering of rats.

  “Shouldn’t be much longer now,” Jem said, “Quarter mile and we’ll surface, then . . .”

  She trailed off at the sound of laughter, punctuated by the occasional scream.

  Impeding their passage was a group of ragged young men dodging and swiping at one another with knives and cudgels. Some of them hid behind invisible cover, firing with weapons that weren’t there, grinning. Their pupils flashed blue with the light of augmented reality that made them blind and deaf to their surroundings.

  Who knew what they were seeing, what they were hearing, but as Jem watched, one of the men stabbed a white-handled kitchen knife into the shoulder of another young man, whose grin slipped into horrified shock.

  “Wait, no, oh Christ, no, that hurt, you stabbed me, oh—”

  But the cries were cut off as the other kept stabbing, deaf to the screams, blind to the blood as he cheerfully murdered his friend.

  The others laughed playfully, like children playing tag. Though full sensory VR required the computational power of a VR bed for most people, they could walk around while using partial VR, seeing and hearing whatever they so chose.

  Some of the younger survivors around Jem’s age who had grown up with constant full immersion sometimes developed a sort of madness in which they began having difficulty discerning what was real, and what wasn’t—their games and blood sport occasionally leaking over into the physical world.

  Jem turned to find Blue and Blackwell frozen, horror etched across their faces.

  “Come on, we need to go back,” Jem said with cold urgency.

  The doctor looked back at the weeping boy bleeding out in the filth, hesitant. “But what about—”

  “No time!” she said, grabbing her by the arm. “Signals to the surface are mostly blocked down here, but if a civilian is injured or killed their mod will burn itself out to send a powerful emergency signal. Peacekeepers will be here any moment.”

  She stopped short at the blue-and-red lights bobb
ing around the corner. One human and two Synth peacekeepers hurried around the bend—the Synth a cartoonish parody of old-fashioned police officers designed to look nonthreatening, but dangerous nonetheless.

  “Fucking VR zombies,” the human peacekeeper growled, a stun baton crackling in his hand. “Come on, droids, before they finish each other off!”

  “Yesssir!” one of the PK droids said. “I’ll attend to the wounded—unit thirty-one, assist Officer Davis with disarming the civilians.”

  “I’m on it!” the other droid said, drawing its stun baton.

  Synth droids like these were sophisticated but mindless unless Armitage dropped in and took control. They ran on virtual personalities that were automation instead of actual, self-aware intelligence, though were often so lifelike it was hard to tell.

  Where once there had been billions, maybe even trillions of genuine AI, peacefully coexisting with humans in both the physical and virtual planes, most had been destroyed or put into stasis, or—well, nobody really knew what happened to them. All that remained were the three great Alphas, and the scattered handfuls of Overminds they left for the day-to-day drudgery of human rule—on Earth, at least. The colonists from Mars, Venus, Europa, and Earth’s moon had long ago abandoned them, signing a treaty with the Synth early on in the war that allowed the AIs to do with Earth as they saw fit, so long as they never attempted to pass beyond the orbital blockade.

  Fucking cowards.

  Blue and Dr. Blackwell’s frozen terror redirected to the approaching peacekeepers, hopelessness filling their eyes at the certainty of their capture. Jem ran past them, directly toward the approaching trio.

  “Thank God you’re here!” she gasped, playing at frantic. “My brother, he thinks he’s playing a game, we tried to stop him but—”

  Jem whipped out her EMP blaster and pointed it at the suddenly wide-eyed human PK’s face, pulling the trigger with a sizzle.

  He collapsed to the floor, back arching as his eyes rolled up into his head, twitching and foaming at the mouth from the damage she’d wreaked upon his mods. He’d live, but her face would be wiped from his internal memory banks, and he would be unable to send out a distress signal.

  The PK droids dodged to either side in perfect synchronization, swinging their stun batons. But she was ready for them, frying one of the PKs with her remaining EMP charge and diving away from the other’s sweeping electric arc, holstering the blaster and drawing her hidden pistol in one fluid movement as she snapped off three bullets into the CPU behind the PK droid’s holographic face.

  Her blaster would need time to recharge itself, so she fired two more bullets into the EMP-fried Synth just to be safe and snatched up its stun baton, striding past the amazed Blue and Blackwell with urgent calm.

  “Come—back!” the human peacekeeper hissed through gritted teeth, struggling and failing to regain control of his convulsing body. He’d be unable to pursue, unable to describe their features, but he’d be fine. A scheduled patrol would find him shortly after they came to follow up on the injury pulse these three had been sent to investigate.

  The man with the bloody white-handled kitchen knife came toward Jem with a boyish grin. “There you are!” he said, hefting the blade. “I’m gonna get ya!”

  She sidestepped the wild slice easily, his movements sluggish to her mod-enhanced brain as she turned and lightly touched the baton to the back of his neck. He fell to the ground, twitching and unconscious, his knife clattering from limp fingers.

  Blue and Blackwell watched with amazement as Jem wove in and out of the VR zombie ranks, stunning and disarming them with crackling bursts of electric blue from the stun baton.

  “Come on!” she said afterward. “We have less than no time!”

  She ditched the baton and led them in a frantic weaving pattern, hoping her calculations were correct as she estimated the altered positioning of the underground PKs in response to the fallen members.

  “That was—” Blue said, breathless as she chased after her “—incredible!”

  Normally Jem would have brushed off the compliment, but she felt her face flush. “Just up here,” she said, evading and grateful for the dim gray light that filtered down from the grate overhead.

  Jem’s heart pounded through her body as she led the two through mildly busy streets, exuding a false sense of calm so as not to panic her wards despite the fact that searchlights might shine down on them at any moment should their path from the underground have been noted.

  Finally they arrived at the nearly empty lot of the dingy marketplace where she would part ways with Blue and Dr. Blackwell. Wires of tension slowly loosened in her chest. They’d made it. Mission accomplished, as soon as she got them to the waiting Runner.

  A few empty cabs waited out front for the old-fashioned few who still went to pick up their own groceries. At this point, most people simply had all their groceries delivered directly to them, usually allowing Synth droids to prepare meals for them as well.

  The inside of the market was small, the shelves and produce aisles sparsely populated, demand being minimal. Jem smiled at the glum white-haired man who sat hunched at a kiosk at the front, staring at his hands. He didn’t seem to notice them.

  Jem led them through the aisles to the back, careful not to be seen as she explained in hushed whispers that they would be hidden in a ventilated produce crate, shuttled by drivers who had no idea they were smuggling them, and would be transferred by other Resistance agents until they arrived at their destination.

  “Our contact should be waiting,” Jem said, pushing past plastic sheeting into the dimly lit stockroom. She’d met the Runner twice before, a kindly middle-aged man named Thomas. Quiet, but capable. The shuttered slats to the loading dock were closed, empty crates stacked neatly along cement walls for pickup.

  Nobody was there.

  They were late, but only by a bit. She cursed silently, wondering if he’d been spooked. If he’d been spotted and forced to run. If he had, there were any number of signals, signs, and codes he should have left for them as warning. And so far as Jem could tell, there hadn’t been a warning, nor any sort of PK presence hiding outside in wait.

  So where the hell was he?

  Blue touched Jem’s shoulder, making her flinch. Eyes wide, she pointed to one of the larger crates, which had been left out in the center of the room.

  It wiggled.

  Jem hissed and drew her EMP blaster, its two shots having recharged by now. The crate was big enough for two people, and ventilated—probably the one that had been intended to transport Blue and the doctor.

  It moved again, something or someone inside thrashing silently.

  Heart thudding in her chest, she reached out, blaster at the ready, and pressed the catch release. The crate hissed open, thick white plastic folding in on itself. She recoiled, biting back a scream.

  Thomas. Naked but for a pair of filthy underwear. Eyes wild with madness. A weeping eye at the center of an inverted triangle, freshly branded on his forehead.

  The all-seeing eye of the Synth. The mark of one who had been subjected to Torment.

  Jem could almost hear Armitage’s smug, singsong voice chuckling.

  Look upon my work, humans, and despair.

  “No,” Jem moaned, backing away as she realized, with horror, that he had gnawed deeply into the shredded remnants of his hand. “No, no, no, no . . .”

  Thomas looked at her, then the others, like an animal gone feral.

  His eyes settled on Blue. He lifted his neck at a pained, unnatural angle, bearing bloody teeth. Whimpering.

  Then, with a sudden violence that surprised even Jem, he lunged at Blue like a scrambling three-legged beast and tackled her, wrapping his single hand around her throat.

  “No!” Dr. Blackwell screamed, and grabbed the man by the hair, yanking his head back just in time to keep his gnashing teeth from sinking into Blue’s cheek.

  Blue struggled, eyes bulging as she fought to breathe, one arm clutched around
her stomach, the other hand trying and failing to push the madman off her.

  Jem was on him in a second, a knee in the small of his back and a well-muscled arm around his throat as she took him in a headlock and squeezed.

  “Get—the fuck—off her!”

  She blasted him in the head with an EMP to disrupt his mods, then again, but though he began to twitch and foam, he still clung to Blue with the insane strength of one to whom pain meant nothing.

  Desperate, Jem began slamming the butt of the EMP blaster against the side of his face, until finally his grip loosened enough so she could shove him off.

  Blue drew breath with a ragged gasp, and Dr. Blackwell pulled Blue away, taking her in a terrified embrace and then laying her down, full-on doctor mode, chattering comforting bedside nothings while she checked over her vitals.

  “F-fine,” Blue finally said. “I’m fine.”

  Thomas lay on the ground, face bloody and swollen, a growing pool of blood spreading from his chewed-up hand, chest heaving as he stared into nothing.

  Jem shook her head. There was nothing they could do for him now. Nothing but . . .

  She stood over him and drew her pistol, steeling herself. But then her shoulders slumped and she holstered the weapon. No way could she risk the noise of a gunshot.

  “I’m sorry,” Jem said to him. She turned to the others and helped the unsteady Blue to her feet. “We need to go now.”

  This had been a message, not a trap—or they’d have already been taken. Sometimes the Synth left victims of Torment as a cruel demonstration to others who would defy them. Thomas must not have known the importance of his refugee cargo, or Armitage would have surely been waiting.

  It wasn’t uncommon for Runners and Couriers to have a false tooth equipped with a powerful neurotoxin that would destroy their brain and nerve tissue beyond repair, so as to avoid the fully immersive virtual hell of Torment. Days experienced as years, intricate suffering crafted specifically for each victim—impossible to discern from reality. Impossible to escape with your mind intact.