by David Weber
The Peacekeepers lowered him into a coffin-like indentation in the hulking machine, which then tilted until he was flat on his back. The top dropped down and sealed him in total darkness. Needles pricked his scalp in a dozen places, and then the brief pain turned into a dull numbness.
His heart pounded in his chest, sweat beaded on his skin despite the chill, and his hands quaked even with the spinal interrupt suppressing his actions. He closed his eyes and called up some music to help calm his nerves; a reimagining of Gustav Holst’s The Planets, written and recorded in the twenty-second century, played over his virtual hearing as the Peacekeepers activated the extractor. Screws drilled into his skull to steady his head, and the various transceivers pressed against his scalp.
The melancholy chords of “Pluto” washed over him, and he wept during his last, precious moments before the machine switched on and tore his mind apart.
*
Philo glided along the infostructure trunk to the top of DTI tower. His battle with the monitor had left his connectome scarred, how severely he wasn’t entirely sure, but more extensive repairs would have to wait until he returned to the TTV. He’d already lost too much time recovering from the fight, and he needed to press forward with his newfound advantage.
The monitor had mauled him badly, but for all its brute force, it had lacked cunning, and Philo had slowed it with a viral bomb, then wielded his connectome skinner and gutted it alive before wrapping himself in its outer code layers. He’d stayed cocooned after the fight to sort through his own partially scrambled connectome.
“It’s not a giant horse,” the AC muttered to himself, “but I’m sure the Trojans would approve.”
For all the damage he’d suffered in the attack and for all the Admin’s apparent hatred of artificial intelligences, they really weren’t very good at stopping them. Perhaps this was because they didn’t regularly have to deal with AIs, and therefore they lacked the innovating feedback loop that came from dealing with fierce opposition. Even a basic SysGov infosystem wouldn’t have tolerated half the exploitable features Philo had already spotted, but then, SysGov architecture needed to be better because roughly half the solar system’s population was abstract.
Another monitor passed Philo, heading down the trunk. He stopped and probed its outer layers, just as it probed his. The two danced around each other, and then the monitor moved on.
“Better,” Philo said. “Much better.”
He moved into the tower’s central communication buffer and began to search the DTI’s logs for information on Raibert. In the process of searching, he came across various pieces of information that, while not immediately useful, could help him understand the Admin better, and he stored them for later reference.
He sifted through the incoming and outgoing correspondence, and found Raibert listed in a prisoner transfer to a…server tower? He opened the transfer orders and read through them.
“No,” he uttered as the nature of the orders finally became clear. “Oh, no. No-no-no-no-no! No, this can’t be! They didn’t just send him to prison! They abstracted him!”
He checked the time. The order was already being carried out!
“Raibert!”
Philo identified the destination tower, loaded himself into the communication buffer and executed the send command. He spent several cold seconds being broken into pieces, transmitted through the air, and then reconstituted on the other side. It was reckless and stupid, but he didn’t have a choice. He had to reach Raibert in time or none of this would matter.
The server tower’s communication suite rebuilt his connectome piece by piece, and he dashed into the main infostructure trunk and opened the directory. Where was he? Where was Raibert?
“There! Level 201, extraction room 3. Raibert! I’m coming for you!”
He shot down the trunk and slipped into a branching path that took him to the extraction room. A monitor interrogated his presence, and he shoved the correct signs and passcodes in its face before proceeding in.
He reached extraction room’s camera feeds and opened them.
“No! Damn it, no!”
Two Peacekeeper thugs dumped Raibert’s body down the reclamation chute behind the connectome extractor. He accessed another camera in the chute and watched helplessly as Raibert’s limp corpse bounced and tumbled away, then fell into threshers that ground the body into paste and pumped the leftovers into reclamation sorters for base material separation.
“No…”
Raibert’s body was gone, but where was his connectome?
Philo identified a secure data line that left the extractor. He couldn’t access it directly, but he followed the line to its destination, back to the main trunk and then down toward the bottom of the tower. The secure line left the main trunk within the tower’s basement, and he followed it to what he thought was a small, auxiliary data portal into the prison domain.
And there he stopped.
Four sentry programs guarded the entrance, each a bigger and meaner version of the monitor he’d fought at the DTI. They were arrayed in such a way that they checked each other for abnormalities while also guarding the data portal, and it looked like they had live connections to physical Peacekeepers as backups. He doubted the skinned monitor he wore would have the appropriate clearance, and there was no way he could fight past them without alerting the whole building to his presence.
But that wasn’t nearly the worst part.
Not only was Raibert stuck inside an inaccessible server, but he didn’t have a body anymore! The Kleio was hardcoded to require one physical and one abstract crew member for any time travel except its emergency return-to-home function. And that function would only take them here! Back to the Admin!
Without both Philo and Raibert on board, the chronoton impeller wouldn’t engage even if he somehow found a way to shut down the suppression field. He tried to figure out what to do, anything that could help them out, even as an overpowering sense of despair filled him. He had no way to get to Raibert, no way to save him if he could, nowhere to run even if he did manage to save him, and the Admin was going to start taking the TTV apart tomorrow.
“Raibert, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to do!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Department of Incarceration prison domain
2979 CE
Raibert flashed into existence, naked and shivering atop a square platform with shallow steps leading down in all four directions. The damp stone chilled his bare feet, and he crouched down and hugged both knees against his chest. A light drizzle fell from a gray overcast sky, and rolling grasslands stretched to the horizon in all directions. Four statues stood sentry at each corner of the stone platform. They towered over him, twice as tall with bodies hewn to look like plate armor.
“I want to go home,” he whimpered, resting his chin atop his knees. Tears mingled with the rain falling down his cheeks, and he sucked in a shuddering breath.
A slender woman in Peacekeeper blues materialized before him with short black hair and bangs that angled across the front of her face, almost occluding the vision of one eye. Raibert might not have known who she was, but he saw familiar traits in the shade of her dark skin, the lines of her high cheekbones, and the shape of her eyes.
“Greetings new arrival, and welcome to prisoner orientation. I am Warden Ixchel Shigeki, and this is my prison domain.”
“Thought so.”
Another Shigeki. He shook his head. This is not a good sign.
“Your connectome resides within DOI prison domain number one-two-seven, a minimum-supervision, maximum-security domain for those sentenced to life without parole. Have you been briefed on the nature of your debt to society?”
The warden froze in place as rain fell through her image. A prerecording then, perhaps with nonsentient interactive options. He wasn’t talking to a real person.
Raibert wiped the tears and drizzle from his face.
“Not really,” he sniffed.
The woman’s i
mage jumped to a slightly different stance.
“You have been sentenced to life in abstraction without the possibility of parole. You may, if you so choose, voluntarily end your sentence at any time by petitioning for and receiving the right of self-deletion. Regardless of your decisions, automatic deletion will occur when your age exceeds the current average lifespan of an Admin citizen or you have served a minimum ten-year sentence, whichever is longer. Self-deletion is a painless and humane process and is a perfectly acceptable way for you to pay your debt to society.”
“I bet it is,” Raibert said. “Wait one second. You’re not speaking Old English. How can I understand you?”
Another awkward jump.
“All prisoner connectomes are fitted with a standardized linguistics package so that they may communicate freely.” Jump. “Since this domain is under minimal supervision, prisoners are free to interact with each other and the environment in any manner they choose, within certain limits. The temporary killing of another prisoner is not allowed and other disruptive behaviors are subject to review and punishments up to and including one-way abstraction for the worst offenders. Be warned that malicious actions will not be tolerated in my prison.”
“The judge mentioned one-way domains at my sentencing,” Raibert said. “She said I should be thankful I didn’t get sentenced to one, but I don’t understand why. You’ve already abstracted me. What more could you do?”
“When criminals are banished into one-way abstractions, they enter a domain where it is physically impossible for data to come back out. This means no Peacekeepers monitor prisoner behavior and no deletion is possible, either voluntarily or at the hands of another prisoner.”
“Okay, that does sound worse.”
“Would you like to view a sample of what could await you within a one-way domain?”
“Sure, why not?” he said, then thought for a moment. “Wait, hold on. You just said data can’t come back out? How do you know what’s inside one of those things?”
“A single one-way abstraction was once cracked open by Lunar terrorists. This required physical access to the server as well as modifications to the runtime hardware. They failed to rescue their coconspirators, but they were able to retrieve domain states that were then exposed to the public, creating quite a scandal.” This amused the warden for some reason, and she smiled. “I have retained copies of these domain states for use during prisoner orientation. Would you like to view one?”
“Sure, fine, let’s see it. I mean, how bad could it be?”
A patch of grassland behind Ixchel turned to hot sands, and the sky parted to blaze upon a group of dark figures around medieval contraptions. Raibert craned his neck to look past the warden’s simulation.
Four men in hooded black robes turned a crank that drove two wheels, each taller than they were and arranged vertically. A man bound to the top wheel screamed and shook against his bonds as the wheels crushed his feet, then his legs and groin and abdomen and ribcage. Bones cracked, blood gushed, and entrails squirted out. The wheel ground on, and finally his head popped like a zit.
But he didn’t die. His body reformed on the other side, and he let out a desperate wail as the hooded figures brought him around for another pass.
Next to them, more hooded figures added wood to a pyre around a naked man impaled on a thick metal pole that had broken through his teeth from the inside out and muffled his wailing. His blackened skin crisped, dropped off, and reformed while he writhed, eternally unable to die.
A naked woman hung upside down from her ankles, and two hooded figures sawed her in half from groin to neck. Her broken body reformed, and they fitted the saw between her legs again and started over.
Raibert dropped to his hands and knees and dry heaved.
“This is the world the prisoners created for themselves,” the warden’s simulation said as the horrible images faded away. “They became fixated with their inability to die, with some even speculating there was an upper limit to the number of deaths an abstracted prisoner could suffer. They were wrong, but that didn’t stop them from trying.”
He spat out the taste of bile and curled up with his knees against his chest.
“Fortunately, you have nothing to fear as long as you respect your fellow prisoners and follow all instructions given by the sentries. One-way abstraction was originally reserved for violators of the Yanluo Restrictions—”
He shuddered, and not just from the chill.
“—because of the dangerous nature of the knowledge they possess and the need to segregate that knowledge from the general public. However, the punishment has since been expanded to include other crimes such as terrorism, treason, mass murder, and connectome hacking. Your crimes, while severe, include none of these, and you have nothing to fear as long as you behave.”
Raibert hugged his knees tighter and rocked back and forth on his heels.
“There are currently three prisoner settlements,” the simulation said. “Follow the signs and roads to whichever one you prefer. Are there any questions?”
“Can I have a coat, please?”
“All prisoners are encouraged to work together to provide for their basic needs. Are there any more questions?”
Raibert shivered and said nothing.
“This concludes prisoner orientation.” The woman vanished.
He shifted across the platform and cowered between the legs of a rock giant, but then he heard a sound like the grinding of a mill stone. All four turned their heads and watched him with the dark pits of their hollowed-out eyes.
“I guess you want me to leave, don’t you?”
“That’s right, prisoner.” A young man’s voice reverberated from within one of the statues. “I’ve got another three connectomes to port in after you. Now get moving.”
“Right…” He stood up and surveyed his surroundings. Three sides of the platform led to worn dirt paths made damp by the trickling rain. He picked the one to his left, found a triangle of marble imbedded in the path, and read the bronze plaque nailed to it.
“The Colosseum? Whatever. Probably nothing like the original.” He moved on to the next side, looked around for another plaque, but couldn’t find one until he noticed words drawn in the mud. Rain half filled the letters, but he could still make out the name and the vague impressions of an arrow.
“The Forgotten? Well, that doesn’t sound promising at all. Next.”
He moved to the next facing and found a whitewashed wooden sign with blooming flowers underneath.
“The Temple of Ixchel?” he asked. “As in the warden?”
A statue creaked to life and took one heavy step toward him.
“I said get moving, prisoner.”
“Give me a moment, would you?” he protested. “This is a really big decision. You could at least give me a rating system to work with or some peer reviews to read.”
Two more statues began to stir.
“Okay, fine!” Raibert scampered down the steps. “I’m going! I’m going!” He cupped his genitals and hustled down the path to the temple, mud squelching between his toes.
*
The rain let up, and the sun came out, banishing some of the chill as he trudged down the muddy road, his body shivering and stomach grumbling. He knew none of this was real, not in the physical sense, but that didn’t make it feel any less genuine. After all, what was reality to a bodiless connectome? He knew only what his sensory inputs told him, and they made it very clear he was cold and hungry.
But was it really that different from his physical body? The human body’s senses were just electrical impulses interpreted by a lump of mush inside the skull. Was his abstract connectome any different? Not really. Just a difference set of inputs and output and hardware. Quantum processors instead of neurons. That’s all.
Right?
He decided he should probably not dwell on it too heavily.
Survival, such as it was. That’s what he needed to stay focused on. Survival.
&nbs
p; He wasn’t dead yet. Not really.
And in that case, he’d best get started plotting his escape.
“Step one, find the locals,” he muttered to himself. “Step two, make first contact. Step three, integrate into their society.”
Now that he considered it, this was very similar to an Observation mission. Except that he didn’t have a TTV or Philo or even Kleio to back him up, he was stuck in this hellhole without a body to return to, and he had no idea what kind of messed up prison culture he was walking into.
But other than that, this was exactly the same.
“Positive thinking,” he told himself. “That’s the key.”
His shoulders and back dried as the sun rose to its zenith and its warm rays beat down on him, but the chill never fully left him. He marched along the sloppy road, then up rolling hills and past sparse trees until he finally came to a flattened plain of tilled earth.
“Farmland. Getting close.”
Fields of wheat and corn lined the road, and he heard what sounded like a woman singing. He left the road and pushed through stalks of wheat taller than he was.
“Find locals, make contact, integrate,” he recited. “And then…and then…”
What could he do for step four? He was bodiless and powerless in a virtual realm.
“Step four, survive,” he decided.
That was all he could do. Survive.
And wait.
And be ready, because a glimmer of hope still remained in the back of his mind. No one from the Admin had mentioned Philo yet, and he had to believe his companion was still safely hidden in the TTV.
A bolt of fear shot through his mind, and he wondered if the prison domain could monitor his thoughts. It was technically possible, at least in SysGov, but he doubted it. Interacting with the periphery of a connectome, where the senses and outputs like muscle commands resided, was a far simpler task than diving into the tangled web of connections that made up someone’s consciousness. If they really wanted to sift through his mind for hidden pieces of information, then he doubted his connectome would have been placed in a live run-state.
