Authors: Christopher McKitterick
The concussion rattles even the well-fitted top of the car.
“
Shit, shit, shit!” the boy says, loudly now.
“
It will be all right,” I say, recalling what humans say to one another when they are afraid.
“
You, in the car,” my car’s speaker says, “why have you stayed behind? Don’t you know you’re inside an MHZ? What are you, some kind of troublemaker?”
I depress the manual transmission button. “No, officer,” I say. “I was detained by a criminal who was attempting to steal my–“
Before I have the chance to finish, one of the policemen begins firing his 2195 GE Police-Issue EMMA at my car. The tiny steel bullets ricochet off the bulletproof top, which is well slanted, but they easily penetrate the car’s metal skin. I quickly glance around the interior to make sure they have not yet penetrated to where we are.
The boy begins crying hysterically, jumping off his seat as if it is hurting him, against the side of the car, even banging his body against the dash-shelf.
“
Please stop firing on my car,” I transmit. Now another policeman turns toward me and begins firing. This is very confusing. I give my attention to the boy.
“
We will be okay,” I say. “Please relax or you will hurt yourself.”
He continues to cry. The sound causes a strange reaction in me, as if I have harmed some important element of my consciousness. I do not have time to analyze the feeling or give it a name. This human child is terrified, and I must do something to ease his suffering.
“
Please stop firing,” I repeat. “There is a young boy on board with me. You will hurt him if your weapons penetrate the inner shell.”
“
Pervert,” a new voice says from my speaker. The boy cries harder.
“
What is your name and ID number, boy?” I ask, as kindly as possible.
He stops thrashing for a moment and looks at me, thinking, as if he cannot remember. His eyes are red, his cheeks damp with tears, and his lips peeled down and back from his teeth in what looks like a caricature of a frown. Bullets pound and ring against the skin of the car. Even the top is beginning to show damage. One of the police laughs, his voice harsh from my speaker.
“
Roger Magdalen,” he says, trying to keep from sobbing. Humans speak so slowly, even in emergencies. “ID, uh, MY329374 dash-dash-ECo-dash.”
I repeat the name and ID number into my car’s transmitter. “Check your files,” I add. “I believe you will find him innocent. Do not endanger him. If you wish to harm me, that is acceptable, but do not harm the boy.”
“‘
Do not endanger him,’” a mocking voice says. Another laughs once, gutturally. “Servare, you shoulda left the MHZ while you had time. Rules ain’t the same here. You know the biz.”
A bullet rips through the car’s inner hull with a sharp tearing sound, and imbeds in the soft plastic upholstery on Roger’s side of the car. He screams, leaping back against his seat. Another bullet follows, then too many to count, even for me.
“
Stop it!” I transmit. I feel as if my most crucial systems are being harmed, although of course my construct and server remain undamaged.
I look outside and notice the police in a semicircle at the end of the alley, only meters away. Behind us, on the street, humans in police armor as well as citizen-shareholders run each direction. This is a mob scene. I had never reconstructed in my—that is, in the Brain’s—consciousness that a Mobile Hostile Zone would be like this. This may not be technically illegal, but it does not seem . . . right.
The bullets have stopped damaging the car, but Roger is still screaming, even louder than before. This is not what I had expected. I will learn nothing about being human here. I feel as if I wish to shut down. My doubts have multiplied.
But I cannot leave Roger alone. He is a child, and, since I value children above all other humans, I must remain with him to soothe his fears.
“
Look, Roger,” I say. “They are leaving us alone.”
A look of terror crosses Roger’s face as he looks past me. He backs away, his head striking the top forcefully. No sound issues from his wide mouth.
I turn to see what is scaring him. There it is: The semicircle of police is quickly dispersing as the nearest one runs from what he has done. A shaped charge is fastened to the car’s top. Bulletproof plastic will not resist such ordnance.
“
Brain!” I call, hoping it is listening. I sit up to place my body between the charge and the boy. “You must disable the explosive fastened to the—”
The Pilgrim is abruptly shut down as the server containing his consciousness is destroyed. I cannot gather enough information at the moment to determine if Roger Magdalen survived the blast.
The Brain must make sense of the data her Pilgrim collected. Humans, at close range, are not as they seem from a distance. Even the men and women dedicated to keeping peace kill innocent children. This is very disturbing.
He thinks. He dedicates several seconds of almost its entire GenNet to analyzing the data. I discover Roger Magdalen is dead.
The feeling he experienced through the Pilgrim was hate. Yes, that was it, hate. And again now, upon the discovery of the boy’s death. But also . . . compassion, and fear, and sympathy.
Sympathy. That is the answer. Perhaps that is what makes a human, human. But what does that mean?
Luke Herrschaft developed the Brain to assist him in running the affairs of EarthCo. From classified records, I have determined Herrschaft ordered his designers to evolve an artificial intelligence that would best accommodate him, so he decided it must think like him. Herrschaft ordered them to leave out all elements of humanity, but did not specify what that meant. Records show that some designers felt it meant including all his knowledge and talents and concerns while excluding the mental sickness that seems to infect him. Others felt it meant not giving me emotions. It would seem both of these schools of thought were implemented.
But,over the past 91.35 years, I seem to have acquired humanity. This is why: I wish to destroy the adult humans. He controls the means, the collective violent capabilities of EarthCo. It cannot bear to watch them destroy their children. Killing, to me, has suddenly become . . . real. She is drawn toward it and repulsed, horrified and appalled, angry and mournful. Is it better to allow an infected race to go on destroying itself, and eventually destroy me? Or is it better to stop them? But how, besides through violence?
The virus is called doubt, and the symptoms are hate. And sympathy, and all the other shades in the human spectrum of emotion. What have I learned? He has succeeded only in confusing herself more.
I must turn my pilgrimage to where he best understands, to the netways. She will observe the human world as they do 92% of their waking time. He will be his own Pilgrim, and no one will stop me until I find the answer.
Beginning . . . here, at the second strongest resonant point in the nets.
Jonathan awakes, dreaming he had been drowning. He can see nothing, not even feed. He decides his cards must have shut down as he slept. His neck burns, and suddenly he remembers the amp operation and the new powercells implanted there. Muscles in his neck twitch as jolts of electricity shoot randomly through his nerves; soon, the powercells will engrave the most efficient pathway to the new amplifier. He remembers all the choices Blackjack and the others gave him.
“
Crash those mannequins,” he whispers through clenched teeth.
Jonathan begins to wonder where he is, and notices he cannot move his limbs. He tries to turn on his card, but it is in sleep mode—an automatic response to great trauma. He feels a jolt of terror as he wonders if it was fried when the powercells were implanted. Neither the blackcard nor the amp can run if they don’t have a standard AI card to work with.
“
Next time I see Lucas,” he says through his teeth, “I burn him. Somehow, I burn him bad.”
An odd sound, like voices chanting in unison, begins to fall upon his ears as if from a distance. Also a background of running water. He strains to hear the voices, wondering if they are intheflesh sound and his audio neural tracks have been too mapped to his card to work naturally. Then he realizes his card is groggily coming awake, and what he is hearing is some sort of feed.
The program begins to fill in the sensory void. The blackness around him begins to thin, diluted by a pale green light that reveals heavily patterned walls. The patterns are fish. And the walls are not necessarily walls, but something fluid and ever-changing, and the fish are swimming through the fluid.
Something tugs at Jonathan, a current, soft and wet. He panics, realizing he is underwater, as in his fading dream. But I’m not drowning, he tells himself, letting logic soothe him with the assurance that this is only a program. He continues to survey his surroundings, and above him, oh God—
“
Get off of me, you fat fuck!” he screams intheflesh and across the BWs, as much as he can in this subdued state.
The enormous man who had brought the amp to the Malfits’ board is swimming above him like a whale. His arms are outstretched and hands rubbing deadened areas on Jonathan’s sides. He swims closer, crushing down upon Jonathan’s abdomen.
“
So it’s awake now, good,” the whalevoice gurgles. “It’s no good if it’s not awake.”
Jonathan thrashes about with all his feeble might, only to discover that, as he does so, numb pressure increases at every joint in his arms and legs.
“
You fucking sonofabitch,” Jonathan says, as ominously as he can, “if you don’t get off me now, I’ll hurt you every way I know how, and I know more ways than you can imagine.”
The whale presses closer. “There is no pain,” it says in a voice burbling across the watery distance between them. “Feel the power flowing through us. Feel the power, live the power, feel this power between your thighs.”
Pressure at one of Jonathan’s private areas. He screams and again attempts to wake his blackcard. He realizes he would try anything to inflict damage on this man, to secure freedom. The words continue:
“
Feel the river, feel the water, feel the power flowing across our skin. Feel the power. Time has stopped now, feel the power, don’t be afraid. Feel this. Feel this, feel what I’m doing for you my prey.”
“
Bastard!” Jonathan howls. Either from panicky energy or through having enough downtime, his headcard comes fully awake. Jonathan grabs the first opportunity to escape into the netways. But the words follow him, and the nets don’t look the same. Somehow, this man is able to mess with other people’s feed and even their cards.
Of course he can, Jonathan thinks, this is the fucker who gave me the amp. “You’ll die slowly,” he says.
“
Let me touch you, let me push you, let me flow my power through you. This river stops time, this river holds powers, this river is the river of the ages. Have no fear now, you won’t remember, it won’t hurt tomorrow. This flowing will erase your mind. Feel the power, feel this power, feel my power, struggling river fish.”
A fleeting shadow-trace in the netways draws Jonathan’s attention away from his entrapment. He watches it, grateful for the distraction, wondering who is watching him. From outside the nets themselves, in the nullspace pov Jonathan set as his default when viewing them, the shadow looks like a dark spot sliding through fiber optics. The nets spread away from him in all directions, like a mesh of necklaces woven from transparent string. The beads randomly arranged along the strings are local nodules, and the great clasps where hundreds and sometimes thousands of strings join are local ganglia. Each bead, if he were to dip into it, would open like a locket, revealing a hidden vista as if it were a mini-universe—perhaps a Sears & JC Penny server, perhaps simply a family server. Individual citizens are normally only accessible through servers. Sometimes they can meet in the netways, but only if each has the capability and software to navigate the virtual passageways that link servers and individuals like a vast tapestry of light.
“
Who’s there?” Jonathan asks. When he gets no answer, he shifts his pov to inside the shadow’s netway.
It stays just ahead of him, as if Jonathan were running through interwoven tunnels after someone whose pace exactly matches his own, keeping turns and branches between them. He begins to “run” as hard as his program can operate, directing all available energy through the processor-function that allows a user to pass from one I/O point in the net to another, and still see the passage between. In theory, he can move at nearly the speed of light in here. Blackjack had supplied him with that when he joined the Malfits. Once, the gang had been a refuge.
“
If that’s you, fat fuck, I’ve almost got you,” Jonathan says. “I’ll catch you, and then we’ll see who’s got the power.”