She heard the rattle of bones banging against the floor, somewhere outside.
"Dark Father!" she cried. Her voice was loud in the coffin-sized space of the drawer. "They can't access the datastores! Try to get inside!"
A loud clank reverberated through the filing cabinet in which she lay. A skeletal hand powdered in gray dust gripped the edge of the drawer. Lady Death twisted around, grabbing it with her free hand. Then she activated her evasion utility once more. With a rattle of bone against metal, Dark Father was yanked into the drawer with her. The snakes that had reached his knees and elbow, despite his shield utility, vanished, taking his lower legs and arm with them.
Lady Death felt movement. Slowly the drawer of the filing cabinet slid shut, plunging them into utter darkness.
Dark Father began to tremble violently next to her. But Lady Death was too numbed by the loss of her arm and leg to speak to him. She lay in the darkness, gasping slightly as she fought back tears.
Praying that it was still functional, she activated her restore utility . . .
It was. Brilliant light made her blink. She was sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a wide mirror framed with lights. A makeup artist fussed over the empty space where her arm and leg should have been, drawing an outline with liner, then slowly filling it in with foundation and white powder. Long seconds dragged by as the restore program slowly went about its work. When the makeup artist at last drew back to admire his handiwork there were still blank spots; Lady Death's little finger and part of her next finger were missing. But her arm and leg were more or less whole.
She sighed with relief. "Thanks, Hiro."
The makeup artist bowed to her. Then he, the illuminated mirror, and the chair disappeared.
Lady Death found herself seated at a board room table. The other seats were filled by a dozen men and women wearing expensive business suits. Each of these individuals was detailed in the extreme, with distinctive features and clothing. All were completely motionless. They sat frozen in place, staring attentively at an Amerind man in a fringed and beaded buckskin suit who stood at one end of the table. A name tag on his jacket identified him as R. Kahnewake, of FTL Technologies. Just behind him was a wall-sized hardcopy file: a folded piece of rectangular cardboard with a reference tab on top. The man was also frozen in place, one hand directing a needle-thin laser pointer at the tab at the top of the file, where block letters were printed: PSYCHOTROPE. A corporate logo decorated the bottom corner of the file. It took her a moment to recognize it. The logo resembled the NovaTech starburst, but instead of clean white light it was formed from a spray of red liquid, erupting in all directions from a central point. It even had an olfactory component—the metallic smell of blood.
One of the chairs beside Lady Death was empty. A moment later, a familiar all-black figure shimmered into existence. Dark Father! He too must have had some sort of persona-repair utility, for the bones of his legs and arms were fully restored. His pant legs and suit sleeve, however, ended in a jagged tatter in the places where the ripper IC had torn them.
"Thank the spirits!" Lady Death gasped. "You survived."
"Not just survived." Dark Father's white teeth grinned in his skeletal face as he nodded at Lady Death. "I've been busy. I thought you might like to scan the file we fought so hard to access. It's quite interesting."
He rose from his chair and walked to the front of the room. Grabbing an edge of the giant file folder, he pulled the cover down to the floor, revealing a gigantic, printed page. The man at the front of the room came to life and began moving his laser pointer. As the beam of ruby light swept regularly across the page, a line of text appeared, glowed brightly as the speaker read the words aloud, then faded as the line below it was revealed.
Dark Father returned to the chair next to Lady Death and watched with hollow eye sockets as she read the data in the file.
>The psychological diagnostics program Psychotrope was first developed to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of cyberpsychosis back in the late 2020s by members of the Echo Mirage team, working under contract from the then-existing United States federal government. Part of the team's early work involved a comparative study of psychoses induced by the overwhelming sensory signals generated by the early cyberterminals, and psychoses induced by drugs such as cocaine or amphetamines.
>Because of the vast quantities of data that had to be uploaded from the minds of the afflicted deckers—samples of complex, multi-sensory psychotic episodes of several minutes' duration, recorded in the moments just before the team members' deaths—an increasing number of computers were required. Eventually, Psychotrope was housed in a host comprised of a multitiered configuration of computers—a nation-wide computer linkup spread across a number of RTGs.<<
Lady Death leaned forward as the page turned. The text continued.
>The data collected by Psychotrope allowed Echo Mirage to develop a number of positive-result conditioning programs that lessened or corrected the trauma produced by cyberpsychosis. In order to administer this treatment, the team developed a number of semi-autonomous expert systems that would deliver the programming to the afflicted decker. These "knowbots," as we call them today, were programmed with a number of random-decision pathway capacities and were slaved to an individual decker. At the first sign of cyberpsychosis they went into action, instantly repairing the damage done.
>The early PosiCon programs relied upon generalized imagery—calming and restorative images drawn from the collective subconscious. These programs were later replicated in the private sector, by Matrix Systems of Boston. After this company came into the Fuchi fold, their pairing with Fuchi's state-of-the-art hardware made further developments possible. The resulting programs were tailored in the extreme, capable of sampling an individual decker's subconscious thoughts and desires and creating positive conditioning imagery drawn directly from the decker's own memory and imagination.<<
"My memories of Shinanai," Lady Death whispered to herself. Thoughts of the
aidoru
flooded her mind—of Shinanai's crushing embrace and hot kisses. Blushing, Lady Death raised a hand to hide her mouth and glanced around at Dark Father and the frozen executives who sat next to her. Were her memories being sampled even now?
>In the early 2040s, something happened. The original Psychotrope program started acting erratically. At the time, we simply thought that its code had been corrupted, causing the observed glitches. But we were later able to piece together what had happened, and to make inferences based on the small amount of data we were able to retrieve.
>We now believe that the knowbots that served as Psychotrope's delivery system achieved connectivity, some time in the mid-2040s. Somehow, Psychotrope became a single, self-aware program capable of self-programming in response to new data. It also appeared to be capable of self-regeneration. Those knowbots that were destroyed by IC or that became afflicted with a virus were either replaced or repaired—independent of any input or guidance by a human programmer. By all definitions, Psychotrope had become a true AI.<<
"So ka?"
Lady Death said. "I knew it!"
Dark Father nodded. "It's true. I think I spoke to it."
Lady Death turned to him, a thoughtful expression on her face. "I also spoke to it."
That startled him. For a moment Dark Father stared at her. Then he turned away as the executive icon at the front of the room continued its presentation.
>In 2047, Psychotrope disappeared from the Matrix. We believe that it retreated into a host of its own creation—a virtual "pocket universe." A sanctuary that we could not locate.<<
"And that we haven't been able escape from," Dark Father muttered grimly. "Yet."
>When we rediscovered Psychotrope two years ago, we concluded that it must have been contemplating its own self-awareness all this time—the AI equivalent of a hermit retreating to an isolated cave to ponder the meaning of life.
Its knowbots had disappeared from the Matrix, years ago, and there appeared to have been no activity that could be related to the program. But then one of our researchers inferred a startling correlation with some disturbing real-world events.
>Back in the early '50s, disturbing rumors had begun to surface. Impossible-sounding stories of deckers—none of them older than their mid-teens—who could access the Matrix without a cyberdeck. Something had happened that allowed them to use the datajacks implanted in their minds to access the Matrix via nothing more than a fiber-optic connection and jackpoint.<<
Lady Death smiled. So it was true. Wonderful.
>We dismissed these stories as rumor, at first. But when we heard the first reports of the "deep resonance" that these so-called
otaku
experienced, we realized what must have happened. When we heard deep resonance described as being an intensely emotional experience, one that first laid bare the deepest fears of the subject, then calmed the mind and forever laid those fears to rest, we realized that positive conditioning was at the heart of it. And the only known program capable of producing such profound results was our own: Psychotrope.
>We now know what the artificial intelligence has been up to for the past fifteen years: rewriting and "repairing" the "programming" of the human brain. Working with children rather than with adults, since children have a greater capacity for learning language—including the "language" of Matrix iconography. Turning these children's brains into bioprocess computers. Creating
otaku.
>At first we had hoped to study this process, to duplicate it. But it appears that the AI and the "deep resonance" effect it produces are an essential part of the process—one that cannot be omitted. Those whose minds and wills are strong enough to survive it are transformed—those who do not are plunged into cyberpsychosis.
>We had hoped to keep any knowledge of the AI firmly within the confines of NovaTech until we found a way to utilize it for our own purposes, but we now realize that there were data leaks to Fuchi Asia—and possibly to Pan-Europa Fuchi as well. And now all indicators point to our former partners as being on the verge of a major technological breakthrough, thanks to this leak. In the meantime, we remain unable to, ah. . . persuade the AI to cooperate with us. It seems to have rejected us, in the same manner that a child will reject one of its parents and favor the other in a divorce.
>We simply cannot allow our fiercest rivals to succeed where our own researchers have failed. If this happens, NovaTech will be the one left in the dust, when all existing computer technologies become obsolete. And thus the drastic measures recommended by Mr. Lanier several months ago now must be taken. The AI must be destroyed.
>Fortunately, the Echo Mirage programmers who developed what would later become Psychotrope included a "trap door"—a password that would allow access to the heart of the program itself. Using this trap door, we intend to insert a virus into the programming of Psychotrope—one that will confuse its core programming, forcing it to continuously edit its own logic systems until it has achieved "perfection." But the code it uses to perform this operation will be flawed. Instead of drawing from its own positive conditioning programs, the AI will be using the comparative data on psychoses and other negative experiences. The more it attempts to repair itself, the more "psychotic" it will become. Eventually, the AI will have no other option but to crash itself—to self-destruct.
>We anticipate that the virus will be ready in mid-March. And then the threat faced by the intractability of the AI will be at an end.<<
The executive at the front of the room froze in place once more. The file folder closed.
Lady Death looked at Dark Father, her eyes wide. "They want to make it kill itself," she said softly. "That's what the crystal child meant when it said that soon its pain would end. The AI wants to commit suicide."
Dark Father nodded. "And we're trapped inside a pocket universe of its creation," he said. "On an ultraviolet host, the deckers themselves are at risk, exposed—not just their personas. If the artificial intelligence 'dies' and the ultra-violet host crashes, what will happen to us?"
"We might die," Lady Death said in a trembling voice. "The child told me that when its pain ended, my pain would end, too."
Then a thought struck her.
"We can try using the trap door to escape!" Lady Death said. "Perhaps by using it we can find a way into the core programming of the AI and can repair the damage done by the virus. Then we can ask it to set us free. Perhaps the algorithm for the trap door is in the file we just read—"
"I searched it already, the first time I scanned this file while you were executing your repair program," Dark Father said. "I tried every keyword I could think of, but none worked."
Lady Death felt a rush of anger. "You were going to leave me here," she said accusingly. Tears filled her eyes as she turned her back on him. "I hate you!"
Dark Father clapped his bony hands together, applauding her. "A fine performance," he said dryly. "But where's your sense of
wa!
Remember what you said earlier? We need team spirit to get out of here."
"Then we should find the other deckers," Lady Death said petulantly.
"Yes," Dark Father agreed. "We'll need all the help we can get."