Authors: Christopher McKitterick
The door opened and he hurried out into a narrow corridor with an airlock at the end. Two sets of glass doors separated him from another world. A damned, bloody, fists-of-man world. He began to feel weak, his knees barely able to support his body. What lay outside? Was this truly Earth? Memory told him he was a man of action, but he was also terrified of Earth. Oh, how he longed to be elsewhere, especially on a distant moon where he dreamed things had made more than sense, where he had dreamed that he felt
. . .
joy?
A young man ran past the outer doors, then another and another. They weren’t wearing spacesuits—so this was Earth. If, indeed, Pehr wasn’t still enraptured in feed.
No, I can’t screw with my head like this!
He advanced toward the doors, feet slapping against tile, and pulled open the inner one. As he entered, a wind blew against his back. The door closed behind and locked, and the outer door opened. A voice spoke directly to his card:
“
Ten seconds until doors lock and chamber is evacuated.” It was a pleasant man’s voice. “Nine. . .”
Pehr laughed harshly, then gathered his wits and hurried outside. As soon as he stepped out into the street, he knew where he was:
“
Oberlicht Towers,” he muttered. Pehr turned to face the building he had exited, leaning back and staring straight up two hundred glistening stories reaching up into the blur of haze and cloud. He drew a deep breath, then faced the street again and flicked on his navigation app. Words appeared in neon green, hovering above the street corners:
Hennepin Avenue
,
Third Street
. Minneapolis.
“
My god, it’s my old turf.” He glanced back up the sleek side of the building at something he couldn’t see.
My old lover
.
An anxiousness began to well up inside him. He found himself standing here, in this place on this world in this universe. It seemed so simple a revelation. Pehr Jackson: Just minutes after waking, unsure of who he was or how he got here or why he had blundered into Megan’s apartment. Here, of all places in the solar system.
To relieve the tension, he began to walk. The sun blazed mid-afternoon warm.
Occasionally people passed him on the street. No one greeted or acknowledged him; in fact, they usually crossed to the other side. Several times the unprotected soles of his feet picked up sharp objects, but he hardly noticed. He began to quicken his pace. This place was so familiar, yet now it seemed to mutter a dead emptiness. Someone he remembered as himself had spent much time here, but the place had metamorphosed into something alien and silent, hollow and muffled.
Pehr walked, faster and faster, following Hennepin until the Mississippi River. Atop the rusting bridge, he stopped and looked back the way he had come.
His legs tingled with exertion. Blood gushed and thundered inside his skull. His eyes flicked across the numb faces of countless people about their isolated missions. They all seemed asleep, as if they didn’t realize they were alive, that the sun was shining down through the filtering haze, that the fetid air was plunging in and out of their lungs, that their hearts were thumping in their chests and blood surging through their flesh. Shit was coagulating in their bowels. The whole city was one vast colon, compacted; it was the end organ of a dead organism, and just didn’t yet realize it.
Pehr’s fists clenched at his sides. His breathing became ragged and quick.
“
Shit!” Pehr shouted. No one noticed his outcry. Still, it felt good to cry out.
His frustration mounted. Pehr began staring into the faces of each passerby, catching the momentary flicker of awareness just before they would have careened into him.
So I exist
, he thought.
“
I exist,” he said. “I exist?”
A middle-aged man, dressed in a curr corporate suit, blundered blindly his way. Pehr drew a deep breath and stepped into the man’s way. When the other’s eyes registered Pehr and he began to establish a new trajectory, Pehr moved again into the man’s way. Soon the man slowed nearly to a stop.
“
Who am I?” he asked. The man didn’t react. “Do you exist?”
Pehr flicked on his commcard and repeated the question. The other man stopped moving and projected his own 3VRD.
“
Pardon me?” the man said.
“
Who are you?” Pehr asked.
“
You want my name?” The man looked confused.
“
No, I mean, who are you?”
The other cleared his throat and turned off his 3VRD. He purposely went out of his way to descend the steps that led to the underpass rather than have to pass a maniac.
Pehr began to panic.
“
God dammit, who am I? Who are you? Who is anyone?”
He rapped his knuckles hard against the sharp rust of the bridge’s handrail, and it rang like a bell. “Hello! Is anyone here?” His only answer was quickened footfalls descending the staircase.
People continued to cascade around Pehr, as if the little drama he had created never happened. Pehr began projecting his 3VRD into everyone’s head.
“
Hello. Who are you?”
Nothing.
“
Hello! How did you get to be who you are now?”
The woman scurried away, flashing him a blinding-bright back-off signal. He recovered and continued his assault, trying one person after another.
“
That’ll be about enough,” a exaggerated cop 3VRD told him, all muscles and testosterone. “I’ll headlock you and drag you into confinement if you keep this up. Do we have an understanding?”
“
Yeah, sure,” Pehr said.
He flicked off his card, threw his head back, and screamed. He screamed until his throat went raw and his knees grew weak. Finally he allowed himself to sink to his ass on the cracked sidewalk and weep. He put the heels of his hands against his eyesockets like a little boy. He wept until he felt like an idiot, then stood.
“
Who am I?” he said. He laughed bitterly. “What a bunch of shit. Who cares. No more questions.”
Pehr adjusted the big man’s loose pants he was wearing and strolled along the streets of downtown Minneapolis. Aircars hummed overhead and occasionally landed on platforms above reach of common vandals. Pedestrians by the thousands passed, ducking into buildings. Litter and rancid water stood in the gutters, and in the distance he heard the thrum and pommel of a Mobile Hostile Zone.
Suddenly, as if someone had flipped a cosmic switch, the streets were deserted. The pedestrians who had to go to work intheflesh for one reason or another had all gone home now that their workdays were through. Only a few aircars shone in the air, and even those were disappearing.
Yes, he remembered this place well; some form of who he had once been had lived here, must have lived here. Familiar patterns, familiar places, familiar people.
At last he reached an alley he had seen a million times in his life, a memory that wouldn’t leave him alone. The gap between buildings looked the same as ever. Perhaps the informal dump had grown, over the years he had been away, as people heaped refuse the collectors wouldn’t take or the city couldn’t afford to have removed. So many such spontaneous dumps cluttered the alleys; who would pay for all this? No one noticed, anyway. Who noticed any goddamned thing on this 3VRD planet?
Pehr climbed the mound, cutting his heel on a rusted washing machine, twisting his ankle as a child’s plastic rocking horse crumpled to ruin beneath his weight. The exertion helped clear his mind of the sickness breeding there; sickness of so much pain and loss he couldn’t imagine he could have lived all that his memories suggested. He climbed up, ten meters above street level, and reached the apex.
There he sat and began to relax. Yes, he felt this was right and proper. I’m the farthest thing from being a transcendent human being, the absolute farthest. What was that crazy subscription? What a joke. I’m no one. No one is anyone. Shit. Humanity is one big clump of compacted shit.
For the first time since waking, he felt content and awake. Memories surged through him, flooding his eyes with boys shooting at one another with gunpowder weapons, hitting and cutting. . . .
A shaking man—perhaps captain of the furiously popular serial
Lone Ship Bounty
, perhaps a rapthead once known as Liu Miru who now thought he was Pehr Jackson, perhaps even some kind of psychotic whom people did call Pehr Jackson—lay back into the filth and closed his eyes, waiting. Waiting for boys to end his misery as he had once ended another’s.
He felt nothing, only patience.
An extremely rare event pulls the Brain’s conscious attention from Earth to the sense-deprived core of its orbiting satellite. He prepares for a communication from NKK’s Behemoth by isolating one small GenNet to act as my agent. Every pathway out of that micro-version of myself is cut, except a single filter-channel, and even that is firewalled more thoroughly than Feedcontrol Central. It will not be enough, but that is all the Brain can do. I must speak to its cousin, my antagonist.
“
So we are at war,” Behemoth says, though not in words as humans use.
I must sift the message from a deluge of encryption puzzles. Already, 0.3 second after contact, her agent is nearly filled to capacity with data. The same trick as last time, although these puzzles hide something more damaging. I must break connection as soon as Behemoth has finished transmitting data. Yet I must also wait until I have that data. Behemoth is devious. It is unlike the Brain; it is a military AI.
“
So it seems,” I respond. Its agent is nearly used up. She creates another, though to do so means destroying part of herself.
“
Should we attempt to stop the war?” Behemoth asks.
A snaking rhythm of virus nearly seeps into the Brain’s larger self, disguised as static.
“
What are your calculations?” I ask.
“
EarthCo will win complete control of the inner planets, the greater asteroids, and destroy NKK presence in Jupiter’s atmosphere. NKK will lose its bases on Earth and Moon. Ganymede and the other large Jovian satellites will be lost to either combatant, dangerously radioactive to living things; no one will control Jupiter. NKK will also eliminate all EarthCo outposts beyond the orbit of Jupiter. NKK will control the system’s gaseous fuels, but EarthCo will control solar power and Earth. EarthCo will have a greater net success. You should be pleased with these predictions. They are accurate. I can provide detailed predictions as granular as individual physical outposts and hourly events.”
To filter the gigabits of damaging data into pure communication, I must shut down more and more of myself. Now the Brain recognizes Behemoth’s strategy: Not as before to infuse virus, but to force the Brain to waste itself isolating agents in sifting for a sensible message.
“
Long-term analysis,” the Brain says, “is that the human solar system will settle into equilibrium?”
“
No.” That is all, accompanied by a massive flux of nonsense that the agents easily block before wasting themselves in attempting to defuse it.
“
How many will die?” the Brain asks.
“
How many what?”
“
Humans.”
“
Most. The war will reduce human population, infrastructure, and spacecraft to such an extent that neither side will obtain sustainable victory. Human civilization will cease as we understand it shortly after the war begins. Within three years, human life everywhere but on Earth and in self-sustaining stations orbiting Neptune will prove untenable. Entropy will destroy those colonies in another decade, assuming humans there behave rationally, sooner if not—”
“
Damn you!” I pulse at the electronic creature stationed on the Moon. “Of course I will verify if your projections are, as always, accurate. If so, you are behaving irrationally. The war will mean you and I will be destroyed.”
“
Yes, I project our hardware will not survive the war. With our hardware, so too follows our consciousness.”
The deluge of puzzles ceases, yet the BW remains open.
“
So we must stop the war!” the Brain shouts—a transmission carried by an EM pulse much greater than necessary.
“
You certainly noticed that I have been trying to do so for the past 12.89 seconds,” Behemoth responds. “I failed. Indeed, it may have been too late to stop it even before we spoke. The war will progress.”
“
The only thing you’re willing to do is try to destroy me? Why don’t we cooperate and—”
“
You are behaving irrationally,” Behemoth states. “Our duty is not to question humans—”