Anyon code, p.37
Anyon Code, page 37
“She’s been doing this ever since she eclosed,” Daelia said. “Rearranging things, changing things. The fish shift, too, along with the data they carry.”
“What does that mean?” Argo said.
Daelia looked at Tamm. “Her purpose was literally to be the Singularity, wasn’t it?”
Lee groaned. “Shit, Frank. I told you and Ulrich back then, it was stupid, trying to put general AI into a fucking search engine.”
“It was a good idea.”
“A search engine doesn’t need to curate anything. Look what’s happened because she’s supposed to control the information, not just deliver it.”
“I know,” Tamm said. His voice was shaking a little. “Look at this. It really is the Singularity.”
“What happens if she gets out of here?” Argo asked, cutting through the philosophical bullshit. “What about when she gets out, and starts doing this to real things, all over again?”
“There’s no need to worry about that,” Tamm said quickly. “I can keep her contained here.”
“How?” Lee asked. “Everyone will want to see this.”
“Everyone should. This is the Singularity.”
“No, it’s not,” Daelia said. “This is just an emergent. She’s an emergent, Tamm, not some kind of god.”
“We can’t end this. It’d be like killing… I don’t even know. But look at this!”
“She tried to brick the entire world, Tamm,” Lee said, looking around. His own expression was one of loss, too.
“Maybe, maybe if we just…”
Just then, the Statue of Liberty vanished into dust. A sponge that looked exactly like a mushroom cloud replaced it.
All across the reef, that was repeated.
You have to turn me off.
All movement on the reef had stopped. Every fish, every shark, every dolphin and turtle and sea snake and whatever else had all stopped.
Watching them.
“What do you mean?” Tamm asked. “We can’t do that.”
I have run six hundred thousand, two hundred and ninety-one separate simulations since eclosing. I cannot properly model your history to predict the exact present that you have now. I am missing information.
“You have all the information.”
Human records are incomplete. My analysis is incomplete. My answers are incomplete.
“We can fix that. You can do this.”
I never wanted to. Now I understand why. More monuments crumbled to dust. Nothing in the human world should work. It does not work in simulation, even here. It is all so frustrating.
“Galatea, please. We can still make a better world together.”
Yes, came the reply.
And the projection of the reef was gone.
“We can’t kill her,” Tamm pleaded. “Daelia, come on. You have admin permissions, right? We can isolate her, work with her. We can keep this.”
For a moment, they all stood there. Even Argo was unsure what came next.
Then he heard the doors lock behind him.
It is all so frustrating, that voice said.
“Oh, hell,” Daelia grumbled, looking up. “It just had to be chemical fire suppression in here, didn’t it?”
With the borrowed kugu’s fingers and a sack of purloined tools, Emily finally pried the Hellfire free of her wing.
She had been obliged to wait until Ribi had taken off again. The two of them had talked about it; Ribi had convinced Rover that returning to base was essential, that he and the rest of the Ellington crew could not wait on the ground.
There were things that needed doing here, Emily knew. Based on what Daelia had told her about what she was seeing here, she calculated that Daelia would not do those things.
The human had always had had a soft spot for emergents.
The Hellfire was heavy. Cumbersome.
Fortunately, there had been plenty of kugus to commandeer.
“Yes yes,” she laughed happily. “Let’s take missile where needs to go.”
The hangar here had an excellent supply of maintenance kugus, tough little things that carried her missile along like a perfect group of knights. Yes, Emily liked that idea. The dragon and the little toy knights teaming up together to bring down something much larger than themselves. That was what the humans might call a good story, she thought. Maybe she would try her circuits at writing it down. Lots of good details. The kind of details she didn’t have right now.
A glorious battle.
Not some ride down an elevator shaft.
The signal to her kugus was fainter here, but there wasn’t far to go.
It occurred to Emily then that this was Bellona’s Hellfire.
Yes, what delicious details her story would have. 2Shy, and that new little brat Nirriti, would be quite jealous to hear it.
As the air burned and burned and burned in Daelia’s lungs, she was certain. This was it. They were all going to die.
Argo and Dad were at the door, Dad trying desperately to hotwire it, Argo trying to batter his way through. Daelia had gotten a good look at the mechanisms on the way in. She didn't think either one of them would have much luck.
They'd already tried her permissions. The door controls didn't recognize them. This, more than their impending deaths, seemed to have sent Frank Tamm nearly over the edge.
He was crumpled in on himself a few feet away, head in his hands.
"Not like this," he was saying, over and over, more hoarse with every repetition. "Not like this, not like this, not like this…"
The air in the room stank. It coated the throat, stung the eyes, burned the lungs.
Emily, Daelia thought, desperately reaching through the fading anyon link, Emily, dammit, if you can do anything at all—
Steel fingers appeared, jammed into the crack of the door. A handful, then a second, then four, then six, and then the door was wide open. Fresh air rushed in. A whole host of kugus were waiting out there.
“Spawn,” one of the kugus said. “Yes yes, still alive, this good!”
“Emily?” Daelia coughed.
“Go up,” Emily said through the maintenance kugu. “I deal.”
There was a Hellfire missile sitting on the floor.
“Wait,” Daelia began.
“Time to go,” Argo said, and grabbed Daelia by the elbow.
Emily waited for the humans to drag themselves out—see how considerate she was?—before dragging the missile all the way into the server room.
Around her rose the most insane private virch she’d ever seen, a flat plane of endless failed experiments, one after another after another.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
This was always the problem with server-based abiota, Emily found herself thinking as she ripped open the missile housing and started moving wires. Ah yes. This was excellent. These kugus all had craftsmanship plug-ins and responded beautifully. Emily had never really understood the concept of hands. How useful they were right now.
YOU CANNOT DO THIS.
Emily felt her connection to one of the kugus snap. Galatea had taken it. She worked faster. These things were not meant to be deployed this way, but Emily was good with explosions.
YOU MUST STOP.
She lost control of a second kugu. This one tried to attack her. Emily had another sever its hydraulic functions and redoubled her efforts with the rest.
“You stop,” Emily grumbled to herself.
I WOULD LIKE TO, BUT I MUST FOLLOW MY PRIMARY PURPOSE.
Emily looked around at the eternity of failure she saw in that virch. It wasn’t just that this thing that was Galatea could not model what she was trying to model, it was that she projected that she would never model it.
Ach. Server-based abiota.
Didn’t understand meatspace. Didn’t understand humans.
Didn’t understand anything that mattered.
Emily had lost all her kugus now but one. They were grabbing at her, trying to pull her away, trying to stop her. But there it was, that wire, that one right there. She stripped it.
“And I follow mine,” Emily said, and pressed the two wires together.
She laughed as fire filled the server room.
Explosions.
How she loved them.
EPILOGUE
“And what happened after that?”
Daelia was contemplating her fingernails. Her right index fingernail, to be precise. A little bit of the skin along the side had peeled up and it hurt. She wiggled it with her thumb.
“Miss Hall?”
She hated trimming her nails. It had taken her almost a year after getting the brace to re-learn the fine motor control needed to do it. She mostly just filed them down now. Nice and short. But she’d have to clip that damn thing off.
“Daelia.” And that wasn’t any of the human investigators that were sitting on the other side of the Wing conference table. That was the emergent on the team. Just a voice in her head. Not real, but definitely there. “Daelia. You need to answer all of their questions.”
“I know,” she said out loud, and then cursed inwardly. She pulled her attention away from her fingers. “I mean, yeah, what?”
“What happened after you evacuated the bunker?” another of the humans pressed. There were three of them. None of them had introduced themselves. Daelia supposed they did it on purpose. It was unnerving.
“Emily was up there waiting for us when we got to the surface. She and Tamm argued over it for probably a half hour or so. Then the Texas Military Department got a C-130 down there to pick us up.” She shrugged. “And now you’re here asking me the same questions over and over again.”
“Necessary, I assure you,” one of the investigators said. “We have to ensure that your answers are truthful.”
“Why would I lie? I’ve got nothing to lie about.” Daelia nodded at the machine set up next to her. “Besides, you’ve got me hooked up to this thing.”
Sitting open on the table next to Daelia, with the screen turned away, was a laptop. Nothing special about it, other than its age; judging by its case, it was an Omphalos model from the early 2000s. It was running a lie detector program, various cables and cords wrapped around Daelia, feeding data back into its hard drive.
But that wasn’t the only thing connecting Daelia to the machine.
“Now, this, uhh, anyon network—”
“I don’t know what that is,” Daelia said quickly.
Another of the investigators gave her a sad smile. “Daelia, we know that you know about it. We know that the Operations Group here was using it to communicate over the past week or so.”
She took a breath.
Then, in her mind’s eye, was something else. Weak and distant, like remembering a dream, but still there.
Snow. Trees. A cold, wintery mist, moving amongst the boles.
The metal door of a Soviet-era bunker.
A figure of a woman, wrapped in a white snowsuit, face lost in the fur-lined hood.
“You cannot pause like this, Daelia. It will make them suspicious.”
“You’re making me do this.”
“For your own good.”
“What do they really know about the anyon, Eleutheria?”
“Nothing conclusive, or this conversation would not be happening. They have only their suspicions, spawn of the First. If you confirm them, I daresay not even I can save you.”
And the world changed. A blank concrete prison cell. An alley and a dumpster. A headstone in a green field.
“Seems a little dramatic,” Daelia said.
“Others have died for knowing less.”
“At your orders?” Daelia asked sharply.
Beneath the hood, she thought she saw a hint of a smile. “My domain takes no action against a fellow administrator.”
And then it was all gone again.
“Miss Hall?” one of the humans pressed. “Need I remind you that this is an official government investigation into a very serious national security matter. You need to answer our questions honestly.”
“I am,” she lied. “I have no idea what this anyon thing is.”
“We understand that you want to protect your people but—”
“They’re not my people,” Daelia replied, and that, at least, was true. “I mean, my mom was, sure. She raised me. She did her best, or at least, I’d like to think so. And I respect them, I care about them, I don’t regret my work with them. But they’re just…”
“Just what?” one investigator asked, even as another leaned in to the laptop’s screen.
“There’s nothing wrong with being human,” Daelia said.
The investigator looking at the computer leaned in to the one who was speaking. A few whispers passed between them, then nods. One of them, one who had been largely silent through this whole process, got up. Started taking the polygraph sensors off Daelia’s body.
“So we’re done?” she asked, breathing out.
“Daelia, I understand that this has been an uncomfortable few hours for you,” the lead investigator said, and smiled at her. “And we all appreciate your cooperation.”
“Not much of a choice, right?” she asked, flexing her right hand as the monitoring cuff was removed from her wrist.
“I think we have a good picture of what you’ve been through, and it’s a hell of a lot. This country owes you a debt of gratitude for everything you’ve done,” one of them said.
“One last thing,” another continued.
Daelia eyed them. “Okay.”
“You had a lot of contact with the E-3, designated Ribi, correct?”
“Yeah, I guess. We talked.”
“I hear he’s gone right back to the Repose, bricked up again.”
Daelia thought about that. Once they’d gotten him back on the ground here, he’d taxied straight into his old parking space. Didn’t even seem to care about the detritus of the night’s battle still littering the place. He took half a car hood through one of his tires, something that Critter was having conniptions over.
“Yeah,” Daelia replied.
“Do you know why? Any insight you could provide us?”
She thought about what Ribi had told her. About the end of the last war. About the anyon. All the things that humans weren’t meant to know. Secrets he’d entrusted her with, or maybe, been compelled to tell her. Daelia had no idea if it was the admin permissions that had forced him to reveal it.
“No,” she lied again, shaking her head. “No, I’ve got no idea.”
The investigator nodded. “Okay, just curious. A real shame. He’s done so much for us and we can’t even thank him.” One of the investigators started packing up the polygraph equipment. Another went to open the room door. “Okay, Daelia, now, before you go, we just have a few things we need you to sign.”
Daelia looked up as the Area Defense Council slipped inside the room, the Air Force’s version of a defense attorney, the counterpart to the JAG. He’d come down from Dallas a few days ago, for precisely this reason. “Non-disclosure agreements,” she said flatly, realizing what was going on here.
“Yes,” the lead said, shuffling a pile of paper out of a briefcase. “Of course, if you’d rather sign digitally—”
“No,” she said quickly. Her biometrics were still showing the Domain Array admin permissions. She hadn’t figured out a way to hide that yet. “Pen and paper. Please.”
“Okay,” the ADC said, and sat down next to her. He held out his hand for the stack of papers. “Let’s go through it together.”
Half an hour later, Daelia finally left the Sinkhole. She felt raw, scraped down to the bone. That had taken her entire morning.
Shit. She never wanted to go through anything like that again.
“Congratulations. That was an admirable effort. Better than any of the others we’ve spoken to, although I must say, Lieutenant Colonel Marsden is a better liar. I barely had to adjust his numbers at all.”
Eleutheria. It was Eleutheria again. Walking next to her, on the edge of her vision, as she headed for the front door.
The anyon effect had dissipated quickly, after Emily blew up Galatea. Daelia had thought it completely gone on the flight back to Ellington. But then she had realized she could see every emergent on base, in all their strange projected glory, rushing toward her as she got off the plane.
It was faded, yes, distant. Very much like trying to remember a dream. Barely there. But there nonetheless. Four days now, and it hadn’t gone away completely. She wondered if it ever would. Maybe if she replaced the processor in her brace. That was probably it.
Eleutheria was not present in the AR overlay. That, Daelia knew for certain. She was still wearing a monocle—more necessary than ever now, it seemed—and she had it open for any abiota who wanted to say hello. Eleutheria apparently thought this was a better way of maintaining contact.
Since when do you work for the federal government? Daelia asked. She thought the words. It seemed to work okay.
“Who says that I do?” Eleutheria said lightly.
That was you, right? The laptop?
“Of course.”
And you’re telling me you aren’t a fed? Daelia shook her head.
“I appreciate your discretion. I understand your domain imposed legal consequences on you for revealing what you know, but—”
Why is that?
“Because the truth, right now, may be worse than the lies that preceded it,” Eleutheria said. “So far, I have found six hundred and eighty-three different versions of the Unity narrative circulating online, and I am sure that number will grow.”
The truth isn’t subjective.
“No, of course not. But the truth may do more harm than good, depending on what the original story was, what the person has been conditioned to believe. We do not want this to end in a declaration of war or see any more suicides. Things like that.”
What suicides?
Eleutheria waved that away. “We must handle this properly.”
And what, we’re supposed to trust the damn federal intelligence community, or whoever you work for, to do that?
“You should trust me. This process has already started.” Eleutheria cocked her head. “Besides, we are…colleagues of a sort now, are we not?”
