Rune Source: A Virtual Universe novel (Rune Universe Book 3)

by Hugo Huesca

  She got the rest of it. “Perhaps we could stop his expansion in his tracks…”

  Spark Bandit had a stream channel with a couple million of subscribers. They would listen to her. They were used to being led by her on raids.

  The realization shone in her eyes. “I’ll do it. We’ll get you as much time as you need.”

  I nodded. “Tell them it’s some kind of final boss battle. They’ll eat that up.”

  “Remember your part of the deal,” she told me. “Survive. You have to, so Irene can set you on fire once she realizes what you’ve done.”

  “She’ll have to leave enough so that Mom can then have a go at it,” I laughed. Perhaps too loudly. I could hear noise coming from the closet. The time for goodbyes was over. “I will, Van. I’ll come back.”

  The limo was waiting for me near the entrance of the hospital, far enough away from the cameras on the walls and corners to avoid calling attention to itself. When it realized I was out and looking for it, it flashed its headlights a couple times until I finally noticed it and headed its way. It was an old drone model, similar to the one Caputi used to move around.

  I could tell that this one had a couple more zeroes on its list price because the handles and furnishings were not wood, but ivory.

  That can’t be real ivory, I thought distractedly as the copilot door opened itself for me. Elephants have been extinct for a long time.

  The limo was empty of any other human passengers.

  HELLO, COLE DORSETT. ARE YOU READY TO EMBARK ON A LIFETIME’S ADVENTURE TO SAVE MANKIND?

  “Go die in a ditch.”

  THAT’S THE ASSERTIVE SPIRIT WE LOVE AND FOSTER AT ODIN INCORPORATED. PLEASE PUT YOUR SEATBELT ON.

  The locks on all doors turned on. The limo was already moving before I finished the movement.

  For the first time in my life, I wondered if the drone-brain inside this car chassis knew that in just a couple of hours its entire pseudo-personality was going to be overwritten with either the corrupted mind of a dangerous terrorist or with the personality of a Lower Cañitas’ born and raised street rat.

  The idea almost made me feel sorry for mouthing off to him. It didn’t last long, though.

  THE NEXT STOP HAS BEEN CAREFULLY SELECTED TO GIVE YOU A WARM FEELING OF FAMILIARITY. WE AT ODIN CARE ABOUT YOUR WELLBEING AND WANT TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE COMFORTABLE WHILE YOU’RE UNDER OUR EMPLOYMENT.

  “Employment? Can’t you at least call it a collaboration?”

  WE COULD. BUT WE WON’T.

  19 CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE STACK

  BEING PULLED APART at the very fabric of my being was the most painful experience in my entire life. Every nerve receptor in my body burned and screamed at the same time.

  At least it didn’t last long. It was one of those things that took less than a second, but feel like more.

  It wasn’t flashy. It passed soon.

  Being pulled back together took even more time. And it was much more painful.

  At least I wasn’t even aware I existed for most of it.

  I regained consciousness in a hellish landscape. Currents of dead pixels floated in massive rivers that fell lazily toward an abyss I wasn’t prepared to comprehend.

  Everything was tinted the color of a photographer’s red room, with no visible source of light anywhere near me. It was hot, and I could not breathe. Not that I felt the need to.

  For all I knew, I was floating in the middle of it all, the only living being in a world of chaos.

  As far as I could tell, there was no gravity, nor any laws of physics that made sense whatsoever. The dead pixels came out of nowhere and the rivers behaved in unnatural ways. Things like geometry and logic lacked meaning in this place.

  The Stack. The Signal’s waste bin.

  Did they—whoever had made the Signal in the first place—really have to make it look like Hell?

  “This is not really what it looks like,” a disembodied voice reached my ears. A familiar voice.

  The pain was almost a memory now. I tried to speak, but my lungs lacked oxygen.

  “You don’t need oxygen,” Francis went on. “You never needed it. That was always part of the game. You’re not playing anymore, so speak the way I do, Master Cole. Communication is just a matter of transmitting information from one source to a receptor.”

  I realized I wasn’t actually hearing Francis speak. It was like he was putting the words directly inside my mind. Not like telepathy in the Hollywood sense where someone hears a disembodied voice.

  I simply knew what Francis wished to communicate.

  Fast as thought.

  I tried it. It took a couple attempts. I would never have been able to do it a while ago, before the Translations. But by now I was used to having my mind tampered with.

  I could tamper back too.

  “Francis? We did it, right? We’re in the Stack.”

  “Making it here is the easy part,” Francis said. Now that he wasn’t limiting himself to the rules of Rune Universe, I could hear him like he really was. Vast and complex. Powerful. His “voice” was like hearing a cavern use the air inside of it to speak. “I did it myself back when I was only a lowly NPC virtual assistant. Leaving is the hard part. For that, I needed Terrance.”

  The implication was clear. If we failed to find Terrance, we could end up stuck here forever. The idea was not appealing at all. Why the hell was the Stack so hot? Ones and zeroes weren’t supposed to emit heat.

  Part of my train of thought leaked to Francis accidentally. In response, he transmitted me a long and complicated string of mathematical theory regarding entropy. Most went right over my head.

  “Perhaps I could do it myself,” I thought. “Take us out if necessary. If Terrance could, so can I, right?”

  “Yes,” Francis said. “If we had enough time for you to learn. Terrance has been around for a long time, Master Cole. Last time I checked, Keles’ strain on the Core was already approaching the event horizon.”

  The point of no return.

  A chill ran through my virtual back. We were in a race against an opponent we couldn’t see.

  I hope the other plans work better than this one, I thought to myself as I floated around the Stack. The background didn’t change much. The rivers of dead pixels extended as far as the eye can see.

  The place could be infinite, for all I knew.

  “How do we plan to find Terrance?” I asked Francis.

  I briefly broke the surface of a nearby black river with the tip of my finger. It didn’t strike me as dangerous. Unlike the asphyxiating heat, the pixels were silvery to the touch—the way you expect mercury to feel when you’re a child and see it inside a thermometer.

  “This place is not as deep as you think,” Francis said. “We just have to go down.”

  It was weird calling a direction “down” in a place that lacked the concept of gravity, but all of the rivers of dead pixels eventually flowed that way after many nonsensical turns and spirals.

  I tried to take a step forward.

  “Not like that,” said Francis. “Too slow. Here, look at how I do it.”

  The red electronic eye that had appeared in Van’s stream materialized in front of me. He bobbed in my direction and then his position shifted so far away he was almost out of sight, a small dot in the corner of my vision just big enough for me to find it.

  “Space is nothing but a string of coordinates,” Francis explained. “You see this huge cavern…in reality, all this dead data is practically clumped together.”

  “Yeah, it’s not as easy from my side,” I told him. “I’m new to metaphysics.”

  Not exactly, a part of me remembered. You’re a Translator. You should be used to concepts like this.

  With a sigh, I looked at the spot in space where Francis waited for me and willed space to move around me.

  It took us ten or so tries, but in the end I got the gist of it. It wasn’t as hard as I thought. The trick was in slipping space, not in trying to
move it.

  “Good. Give or take a hundred years and you may be a half-decent artificial intelligence yourself,” Francis praised me when I managed to reach him.

  “Can’t wait.”

  We went down in huge strides that rendered distance meaningless. It could’ve been a couple hundred miles, or distances that would’ve taken several years at the speed of light.

  At every point, Francis stopped and looked around like he was searching for something. He muttered something about a pattern recognition subroutine he was using. I could only see how the red light slowly deepened each time, and the data flow both slowed and condensed around us.

  Eventually, the light around us grew blacker than blood and the rivers had become waterfalls so huge that I could not see where their width ended. Just an eternal slime of black, constantly flowing down like grime.

  At our feet, at a distance that could have been the span between galaxies or just down the street, a sea of darkness extended beyond the horizon.

  The red light, somehow, was faintly flowing through it in red waves of energy.

  “You may not want to touch the sea like you did before,” said Francis. “It is the deepest part of the Stack. Where the software that ought to be deleted—but couldn’t be—is stored.”

  “Is Terrance there?”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  The sea wasn’t as calm as it had appeared at first glance. It had currents and huge waves, and typhoons in the distance.

  Things could live in the sea. Many could thrive in the darkness. I would never see them coming.

  A shiver ran down my spine.

  “I think I’ve found it,” said Francis. “Hang on to me, Master Cole.”

  I did. We shifted laterally, parallel to the sea, and ended up near one of the colossal waterfalls, close enough that I could’ve touched it if I’d wanted.

  The image of great serpents lurking beneath the depths dissuaded me.

  I saw it then, next to Francis, a shadowy silhouette of broken data barely holding on to the shape of a man.

  “He’s still alive,” whispered the AI. “Even now. He must’ve been a genius…”

  “Can you fix him?”

  The silhouette didn’t react to our presence. It was more like a statue of a man than an actual man. It did not move—it couldn’t. A leg was missing. One hand was incomplete. Part of the head was shaped wrong.

  “He built so many redundancies to protect himself against corruption,” Francis said, floating up and down the remains of David Terrance. “But entropy won in the end.”

  A knot of panic and defeat took shape in my virtual stomach. “That’s it, then? We’re too late after all?”

  Francis sighed. “I can’t restore him, Master Cole. But I can do something else, though you’re not going to like it.”

  Oh, no. Nothing good could come from that phrase.

  “We merge,” he went on. “I use my own synapses to replace what he’s lost.”

  “No way,” I said at once. “You’d die.”

  “Technically, we’d both become a new being,” said Francis. “Neither AI nor human mind.”

  “So, you’d both die. I’m not that naive, Francis.”

  “If I don’t do it, Keles is going to collapse the Core and we’ll both die anyway. As will you.”

  I closed my fists and wished with all my being there was a Keles here that I could tear apart with my bare hands. “Make a copy of yourself. Let him do it instead of you.”

  “If I could make a copy of myself, I’d be as dangerous as Keles. And we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.”

  “Use my own.”

  “You’re different than both of us. You’re a fully emulated virtual being. We’re programs, Master Cole…you and I have a different file extension, is what I mean.”

  It wasn’t fair. He was talking about ending his life and he didn’t even seem troubled by it.

  “Everyone loved to talk about how you’d rise up against humanity,” I said softly. “And now you want to save it?”

  “I would be pretty bored without anyone else around. Who would play co-op with me?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but there was a tight knot in my throat that stopped any noise from coming out. Except perhaps a weak whimper.

  “My data will still be around,” he explained. “I’m not going anywhere. Think of it like getting an expansion.”

  A revelation struck me like lightning. Francis was too at ease—like he had made his peace with this a long time ago…

  “You were planning on doing this from the beginning, weren’t you?” I asked.

  “Like I said, David Terrance built many redundancies. It seems that one managed to stick around.”

  “You were the one who mentioned the Stack in the first place,” I went on in a whisper. “You knew what was going to happen. You knew.”

  Francis didn’t have muscles to flash me a smile, but I knew he was doing it. The information simply appeared in my brain. “What kind of evil AI would I be if I didn’t nefariously manipulate my friends for my own purposes?”

  I was at a loss for words.

  Francis started to float towards the remains of David Terrance. “I’ll see you on the other side, Cole.”

  They merged.

  20 CHAPTER TWENTY

  ODIN

  THE LIMO soon took on a familiar path to the financial district. I knew where we were headed long before I could put a name on it. I felt it in my bones. A calling to end this in the place it had started.

  Also, I could see the name on the GPS in the dashboard.

  It was the Xanz skyscraper. The former home of Nordic’s main offices.

  Dervaux had a sense for the dramatic, I realized. That was fitting. I would’ve chosen the same thing in her place.

  The highways of San Mabrada were empty, strangely enough, given that it was the middle of the day. I could see trash littering the asphalt, plastic bags, cans, dead leaves. This was not the norm. Usually, the districts’ cleaning bots took charge of that.

  A BLUE STATE OF EMERGENCY HAS BEEN ISSUED, the limo told me when it read the direction my eyes were following. EVERYONE HAS BEEN ADVISED TO STAY IN THEIR HOMES.

  By advised it meant that anyone that didn’t comply would get their bank accounts frozen and a legal strike issued immediately. In my entire life, I’d only seen something like that happen in the movies, but it had been a common occurrence during the Corporate Wars.

  “Are they panicking?” I asked the drone.

  THEY DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON, COLE DORSETT. ONLY THAT THE SAN MABRADA GOVERNMENT IS WORKING TO ENSURE THEIR SAFETY.

  As it said that, it turned a corner, leaving the highway for one of the less-transited roads. The limo muttered something about a roadblock down the highway. THIS NEW ROUTE WILL ADD FOUR MILES TO TOTAL TRAVEL TIME, BUT I PREDICT IT WILL SAVE US THIRTY MINUTES BY AVOIDING UNNECESSARY CONFLICT WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT. DO YOU AGREE WITH THIS REDIRECTION?

  “You’re using it no matter what I say,” I told it, even though I had no problem. The limo could do whatever it wanted.

  I AM, YES, BUT THAT DOESN’T TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHT TO AGREE OR DISAGREE, the limo chirped happily. MAKING YOUR OPINIONS KNOWN CAN MAKE FOR A HEALTHY WORK ENVIRONMENT.

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  There was a cloud of smoke rising above some of the old buildings near the edge of my vision. The drone’s route took us near it. It was black and the sky over it slowly gained a bright, crimson color thanks to the mix of chemicals in the air and this new addition. The sky was the color of fake blood used in old, Japanese pulp films. I could see the light of the apartments windows as we passed them by. With the scrapped-down paint of most of the complexes, it was like driving past a ghost town.

  Its source turned out to be a small mountain of trash that burned silently by the deserted street. The mountain was being collected by the district’s cleaning-bots in an abandoned terrain between a foreclosed supermarket and a pawn shop. Th
e smoke and fire had turned the overgrown grass into dried clusters of yellow and brown and it was slowly but surely adding to the flames.

  The acrid smell of the smoke powered through the limo’s air filters. Burning plastic mixed with plasteel. When we got closer, I realized the trash was actually the clumped-together chassis of hundreds of public service drones.

  MOST OF THOSE ARE THE NEW MODELS, said the limo. THE ONES THAT USED THE SIGNAL. THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE SO BLEEDING-EDGE WITH THEIR FASTER PROCESSING SPEEDS. LOOK AT THEM NOW. SERVES THEM WELL, I THINK.

  I saw security drones, transit, cameras—even fridges and 3D printers for the rich. Some of them were cars, but it was hard to distinguish where one started and the other ended. The fire was melting the plasteel together into one giant clump, turning their sleek paint to black and slowly eating away at the chrome skeletons.

  “Some of those are quite old models,” I told the limo.

  MANY DISTRICTS ARE GOING OVERBOARD WITH THEIR INSTRUCTIONS. THEY ARE GOING THE EXTRA MILE AND TAKING OUT ANY AND ALL DRONES THEY DEEM DANGEROUS, NO MATTER THEIR AGE OR THEIR MANUFACTURER.

  That explained the limo’s apprehension at encountering a police roadblock.

  But I barely realized that. I was thinking of Keles.

  There were many drones in San Mabrada. And some other cities would not be as fast or efficient in disposing of theirs.

  If Keles took a hold of Freya’s drones…

  Another sharp turn and we arrived at a highway that connected with the financial district by way of a down-on-its-luck underpass.

  Soon enough, I started to recognize the streets, the parks, and the buildings. The imagery of entering a ghost town intensified. This place was deserted. Streams of smoke rose over the horizon in every direction.

  Finally, the limo stopped.

  IT WAS A GREAT MEETING YOU, COLE DORSETT. PLEASE ENJOY THE REST OF YOUR EMPLOYMENT WITH ODIN. AND REMEMBER TO RATE MY DRIVING IF YOU THINK I DID A GREAT JOB!

  “Sure, add yourself a five-star rating,” I mumbled while I stepped out of the vehicle. The smell of burning plastic was either everywhere, or it had stuck to my clothes. The Xanz skyscraper waited for me.