[Author’s note, Oct 7 2015: This is the version I handed in for my dissertation piece for my BA degree at uni :) I’m sure I’ll read this in a few years and tear out my hair at how awful it is or something, but for now, this is the version I’m making available.
Let me know what you think :)
Enjoy~ ]
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Broadcast
Perhaps it would have gone differently if the supervisor’s earplant programming had included the politeness to knock before entering, rather than plugs that only gave him better coding and managerial skills. As it was, Karvinen was caught with his beautifully sculpted virus blasting out of the projector screen while it happily and extremely visibly ate its way through the delicious strands of the Game’s code.
Luckily the bionic supervisor was still human enough to gawp for some useful moments, allowing Karvinen the chance to panic and fire a volley of sleep-spines into the man’s neck.
‘Oh wonderful.’
He typed a brief summary of the incident to Sisu and grimaced at the reply; the supervisor’s sudden unexplained lapse into his sleep-cycle had been noted by TyCorp’s monitor system. As Karvinen sat contemplating their sleeping colleague, TyCorp Agents were moving to this office. They would be better-armed and, more importantly, better ‘planted than his supervisor, and they were on their way to see whether there was an emergency situation.
A virus eating through the most profitable and powerful piece of technology on the planet - he supposed that might technically count as an emergency.
One puny spine pistol wasn’t going to make much of an impression compared to what they would be carrying. Sisu pinged him for response, and he gave the screen another frown before klacking out a confirmation – they would have to resort to their back-up plan. Sisu pinged back her acknowledgement and wished him luck. Her screen and the projector went white like two, blind eyes.
He had about three minutes to get out.
Karvinen stumbled off of his chair, having trouble aiming his legs. As he passed the frame, the door noted his departure and slid itself shut, locking itself diligently. Old Tybalt himself had suggested his promotion into the rooms closest to the core. Karvinen could feel it buzzing itself up to a temperature which would cause it to act like a small bomb as he walked past its little room. He headed across the landing and onto the back stairs of the building with a calm that surprised him .
Here on the dimly lit stairwell he could distantly hear the Call for All Agents spreading out across the corridors. As he moved upwards he knew that his heart sat in its evolved cushion in his left breast and was being told by electrically controlled chemicals to pump his blood around faster. This was as a result of the stress of getting caught, but it felt like it dangled heavily in ropes suspended from his throat, cuffing his lungs with each swinging beat. He felt his knees stumble as he came up the last of the stairs and he abruptly found himself on the floor with a ringing noise dying in his ears. He let himself enjoy the cool stone beneath his cheek in the dim, honey-soft glowlamp light for a few seconds, then stood warily. In front of him, through a door’s sigil-embossed frosted glass, he saw the distorted shapes of Agents sprinting past and saw them fading into the elevators that adorned each side of the unmanned atrium.
He waited until he was certain the room on the other side of the door was empty, then showed the polished scanner his card. The door slid open for him happily – Security’s gaze was entirely focussed on a place deep within the facility, where a small black cube at the Game’s core had suddenly become so scalding it glowed, shaking itself erratically and splitting cables with the effort. Compared to that, what did it matter if someone with the right card wanted to get through a door?
The outer doors let him pass as well, but these hardly had security on them. This didn’t mean they were liable to be breached, however. All employees lived in a walled off village created for them by the company and were stripped of their identity plugs. Every citizen was required to have their ID plug on them at all times as part of the rules of the city. The plugs were kept by TyCorp until the employee either died or somehow miraculously rose through the ranks to a place of trust within the company. That meant they owned your life. You couldn’t leave, and you relied on the facility to eat and to afford to play the Game without poisoning yourself in some bootlegger version. Anyone who was stupid enough to try to break into the facility or destroy any of the equipment were never seen again. No, as Karvinen knew first hand, if someone wanted to cause any damage to TyCorp, it would have to be far more subtle than marching in through the front door with a pipe-bomb.
Karvinen was not born in this city, but in a more permissive city to the far north west. He had known enough not to fight them as they took his plug, though. Soon enough he gained the esteem and trust of the company and had it returned to him. He become an essential part of the programming and hardware engineering teams. During the months he spent ‘proving his loyalty’ he learnt the code of the Game from the perspective other hackers had yet to ever access - from the inside.
The people of this city were not brought up to distrust their elders or to break rules. They gave up their existence to the company rather than break the social norm. Rather than be rude! Every few years one or two of the people trapped inside the perimeter would inevitably snap and try to escape. The Agents made light work of them.
After what seemed like a long time, Karvinen realised his feet had already taken him through the village of apartment blocks that clustered around the towering TyCorp facility building. He had numbly passed the outer gates of the perimeter and was away along the wet, moon-lamp lit street. A short, low, grumble from the direction of the facility told him that the Security Agents hadn’t managed to temper the exploding core. He and Sisu had made sure it would destroy itself and as much of the Game’s main circuitry as it could. The more it destroyed, the easier their task.
The blurry buzz of panic that had pushed into his ears quietened and let him move a little quicker and without shaking. This was the first time Karvinen had left the perimeter wall for nearly a year. Neither he nor Sisu had been certain that the core would get enough of the Agents away from their posts atop it. He put his hand out in front of him and saw that it was held in a shaking fist. He could feel the bite of the two ID plugs against his palm, his own, and Caroline’s, the only thing he had left of her.
Now that he had successfully escaped the perimeter, he needed to get down to the warehouse on the fifth level. The facility was on the second highest level of the city, the only pylons above it being those that supported the richest families’ houses and gardens. This level was laid out like a cog, with a pylon at its centre that was the main protection for the continued elevation of the level above. It also acted as a conduit for the official transport system between each of the levels. Karvinen could see an elevator sparkling against the base of the pylon. He managed to stop his contemplation of the plugs and push his legs towards the pylon.
Though the richest families controlled so much of the happenings of the city, they had yet to completely secure their fingers around the throat of nature. The Earth kept clinging to the last vestiges of its time honoured traditions; the sea, however full of layers and layers of microplastic waste, was still able to produce clouds that spread out across the Earth and plunged its cities into regular torrential periods of grey. The special filter systems that kept the water pure for those that could afford them did not stop the chemical rain from hissing and steaming out grooves and dips in the streets. The weak plastic of his mac was already starting to crease. Karvinen kept his head turned downwards so his face was protected by the hood.
The streets were empty. The androids remained at their posts and the poor were in their more secure hiding spaces lower in the city. Not that there were many who wanted to leave their hovels these days. The Game was not something easily walked away from.
Karvinen came to the end of the rain-pocked, flooding street where an old tramline sat unused and headed towards one of the dry elevators. He stepped in and punched his destination with relief, feeling a minute easing in his chest.
‘Welcome, Sebastian Karvinen. We will be at level five shortly.’
Karvinen jumped, and as the elevator moved down he could feel one of the plugs grow warm in his clenched hand. It had recognised his plug.
‘That’s probably not good.’
*
As the ersatz core exploded in the lower reaches of the TyCorp building, Sisu jacked into the shell and checked her facilities.
Facility check was in progress.
The drought which had until now persisted for more than a decade and turned the earth surrounding the city to sand dunes had finally broken. The city was drowning in monsoon water.
Facility check was 35, 36 percent complete.
Beginning secondary system activation.
It was to be noted that the shell that Sebastian Karvinen had handcrafted for her first day of Awake, was now upon its second use encased in a transparent plastic that might hinder movement. It was also to be noted that this plastic had damaged the successfully skin-like polymer casing on this shell. It was now discoloured into greys and pale mushroom brown. Considering the acidity levels of the rainwater, the casing was liable to further degradation. It was unlikely that the shell would pass for human for very long.
76, 79 percent completion.
The Core was confirmed destroyed: moving to ‘Plan B’. Primary Virus Core was online and held the viral programming with no problems. PVC nested in the shell’s primary circuit board like a cuckoo’s egg. It was quite happy to be there until it hatched, at which point it would kick out any foreign code surrounding it. With the destruction of her core in the TyCorp facility, this shell was the only one she had left, in the city or otherwise.
Facilities check 100 percent complete. Please Ping for orders if required.
The shell was viable, and Sisu did not require secondary orders, so did not Ping.
The eye-coverings opened with a quiet click and Sisu’s tests implied the warehouse was dark. She pushed the circuitry clipped along the shell’s limbs into life with a surge of electricity. Sisu moved the shell’s fore-limbs out against the casing surrounding it and broke through the brittle plastic barrier, using the fingers to peel it from the shell. She stepped her lower limbs sideways along a row of various unknown objects and accidentally brushed against one or two. They tumbled to the floor before her with a crash.
Upon sensing the movement, the warehouse’s security system expressed a short and dull humming noise, which became an insistent alarm in a frequency below unaided human hearing. A beam of light swept across the warehouse and, upon confirming movement, the security system turned the main lights on and locked the doors out of the place.
*
‘Thank you for making use of me, Sir. Have a safe evening!’
The Elevator slid smoothly up and away through its metal chute, taking the light with it and leaving Karvinen alone to move through the wet. Compared to the tall-walled company buildings and sculpted living spaces of the second level, the buildings in the fifth level were slums. Down here in the lower reaches of the city, each level cuddled up close to its father level below it. The fifth level was filled with abandoned markets, warehouses and a plethora of empty shops and merchant’s abodes, none of which had to be very tall before they were touching the bottom of the fourth level above. Everywhere here was flooded with monsoon water.
Karvinen started to move towards the warehouse where he had stored Sisu’s shell. From there they could go down to the bootlegger’s cathedral together and implement the virus. They had been forced to abort the original plan to destroy the Game from inside out. That meant Karvinen and Sisu had to implement the virus from the outside in. This involved one of them jacking into the Game. Under normal circumstances this would not be a dangerous task. The official Game units dealt with and regulated the bodily functions of the player with sophisticated nano-robotics which meant a person could safely never leave the virtual Universe. But these Game pods, with their high-tech life support systems, were far too expensive for any but the wealthiest citizens. That was why so many bootlegged versions were available in the lower levels of the city.
An attempt had been made to replicate the tailored and efficient support systems of those official Game pods. Sure, they kept you from needing to stop to eat or use the facilities, but not indefinitely. The bootleg game halls just pumped you full of chem and sugar substitutes. You would function well enough to play and you would not feel any pain, but the poisons that would usually be excreted from the body build up. Accelerated by the low-grade saccharine most halls used, within the space of a few days the player was unknowingly playing while their organs failed and bled out. The last to go was eyesight, but by that time the player was unconscious anyway. The brain in its final moments was merciful in that respect.
The chem had no effect on Sisu though. The shell she was puppeting to move the virus to the cathedral was immune to their effects. Her program was stored in a hidden bunker out in the Wastes, a desert that surrounded the city. From there Sisu could inhabit one shell at a time just as those jacked into the Game could inhabit one character at a time. The core in the TyCorp facility had been one of her shells. Exploding it would not have harmed her, just as the chem that the pods down here would pump into her shell would not harm her. Karvinen had built Sisu’s program himself, more out of loneliness that any desire to use her destructively. The Game had taken everything from him. It had taken Caroline, the only person who truly understood and listened to him. In a daze of grief and depression, he had tried to recreate some semblance of her in an A.I.. Sisu was the result.
Caroline’s circumstance had become commonplace in the city. No one thought the Game would affect them as it had so many others. They played the trial, messed about with character creation, then, before they knew it, they had spent an hour choosing the perfect nose shape, another hour on hair styles and two on dying armour. They had become, as the media had put it before most of them too had succumbed, Enthralled. Now all human endeavour had been replaced with the grind for experience points; the acquisition of the latest pets and armour, the newest weapons. Guilds within the Game would feud over digital castles, while in the real world the weeds grew high enough to knot with one another over the tops of apartment blocks. That was why it was rare these days for the streets to have any human traffic on them. The androids and their trash trams sometimes seemed to be the only inhabitants of the city.
As Karvinen moved down the street towards the square where the little warehouse sat in its squalid acid-proofing, he saw there was a sparse market here as well. When he turned the corner into the square he saw several policemen hovering about the warehouse, and amongst them, one of TyCorp’s Security Agents. Surprisingly, there were people in the square. They were surreptitiously watching the police from the nearby market stalls. Karvinen wasted no time joining them, affecting interest in the chem and spare parts laid out for sale. The idea of being spotted by an Agent made his stomach twist with nerves, but he had to see if Sisu was safe. What if she had already been caught?
Above the din of haggling vendors, Karvinen heard the warehouse owner call out. The man first screeched a wave of Turkish, then Chinese syllables, before stumbling into broken English: ‘He didn’t tell me thing was live, how I know? I’m not robot expert!’
The owner was waving his hands above the heads of the Agents questioning him, his face sweaty. ‘It break locks! Run out! How I meant to stop such a thing? It not like those.’ The owner gestured towards a pair of androids that were shovelling debris from the hole in the warehouse onto a cart.
‘Blue eyes! Blue I tell you.’
As the doorway of the warehouse cleared of police for a moment he saw the door had been broken through. There was a Sisu-sized hole torn out of it. Karvinen felt his body relax a little. No construct had blue eyes and it looked like Sisu had smashed her way out of the building rather than get caught. She would be on her way to the bootlegger’s cathedral.
Karvinen was watching the androids empty their buckets into a wheelbarrow when he saw the Agent fiddle with one of the ‘plants behind its right ear. After a moment it nodded to the surrounding policemen, then left the square. Now he could leave unnoticed and follow Sisu down to the sixth level. Maybe he would even catch up with her on her way there.
*
As predicted, the casing of the shell was already becoming less elastic under the constant weathering. Fine crazing was starting to appear which would soon develop into cracks. Sisu kept moving despite this. It would take longer for the casing to disintegrate completely than it would for her to reach the cathedral on the level below. She sent herself through the back alleys of the fifth level to where she would be able to use one of the unofficial lifts to reach the level below. As she turned a corner into one of the larger streets she was startled to hear voices nearby and hastily crouched behind a pile of bin bags. Not only were Karvinen and Sisu being pursued by TyCorp Agents, but any robot not employed by the City was banned from open movement on the planet. Even the miniature ones used as desk maids in the more wealthy companies needed permits to leave their owner’s offices. Any regular citizens seeing her out in the open would certainly report her to the police. She had to be careful.
The rain was making it less easy for her to get spotted. The only two men who Sisu saw pass the gap of the back alley she was crouched in hurried under the reinforced covers of a nearby game hall. Watching carefully for signs of further pedestrians, Sisu sprinted the shell up and across the road into another winding back street. She kept to one side of it where the floor was somewhat protected by a roof lined with ancient, rusty pipes.
Sisu made her way through to the street on the other side and cautiously moved her head around the corner. She saw red and blue light flashing out through the grimy downpour. Police. This street wouldn’t be as easy to cross as the one before. She could see them swarming around a building about ten doors down from where she hid. After a few moments of observation, Sisu decided the only way to cross the street without them seeing her would be to pass them first. There were deep shadows on her side of the road which went all the way to the junction at the end. She calculated that if she kept herself in the shadows it was likely that she would be able to pass the police without being noticed. It would however mean walking in the drains. The rain had already hardened the shell’s skin and it was corroding it to a shade that certainly wouldn’t pass as human anymore. It was the only way. Carefully she edged along the gutter at the side of the road, trying as much as possible to avoid stepping in the path of the drain.
The closer to them she got, the more clearly she could see the police through the rain. They were ransacking a bootleggers den. Sisu could see they were stacking boxes of confiscated hardware into a large lorry parked outside. As she watched, she saw there was one man who stood apart from the others. He stood under a reinforced tarpaulin they had erected as a base of operations while the policemen scurried around him. He wore blue and black, which marked him out as a TyCorp Agent. If Sisu had been able to pick out the features of his face, she knew she would be able to see the man’s earplants. She could see he was armed. The Agent was casually holding a flechette rifle in one hand, as though he had forgotten about it. He had his back to Sisu, and the policemen were all very focused on their work. With no one looking her way, if she moved slowly and quietly, then perhaps she could make her way past them all unseen. She pushed the shell on, keeping to the darkest parts of the gutter.
As she was moving past a particularly large puddle in the drain a few metres behind where the Agent was standing, Sisu suddenly became aware that he was not alone under his tarpaulin. A silvery figure, almost indistinguishable from the grey rain that surrounded it, stood next to the Agent. It had to be some sort of construct, Sisu thought. Perhaps it was the Agent’s personal android? The construct turned its head slightly and Sisu stopped her shell dead with one foot in the puddle. She could see its eyes. They glowed blue, like hers did. Sisu stood transfixed. She had seen androids before, but they had all had red eyes.
As she stood there, mesmerised by the figure with blue eyes - her eyes! -, it turned and looked directly at the patch of shadow where Sisu was hiding. Sisu repeated the order to the shell not to move, but the silvery figure made a gesture with its head to the Agent standing next to it. She had been noticed. Sisu stared as the Agent listened to the silvery figure speak, then turned abruptly to face her hiding space, raising his rifle. She should run while the Agent had yet to arm his rifle. But Sisu continued to hesitate. The blue-eyed construct had moved towards her a little. Perhaps it could see she wasn’t human, because it let out a quiet Ping of greeting.
Sisu felt the summons of the Ping course through her code. The power behind that summons was shockingly alluring. It was unlike any Ping she had encountered before. She found it very difficult not to respond to it instantly. Where an android requested information politely, this one demanded it with a force akin to that of a Ping from a human. Sisu realised that if she allowed herself to stand their any longer, the next Ping would keep her from completing her task. She bolted the shell away down the street. Behind her she heard the Agent shout and moments later saw the wall of a building a few metres in front of her blossom dust as flechettes embedded themselves into it.
She swerved into an alleyway to the left of the street, but not before the Agent managed to fire his weapon again. The dart shredded through the circuitry in her left hip and embedded itself there, damaging her leg. Sisu made a huge effort to keep running through the maze of alleyways. She managed to find a small alleyway overstuffed with bin bags into which she clambered awkwardly and crouched there in the dark. Gazing out from between two bags, Sisu watched as the police slid their torches across the walls of the alley opposite. The men were only cheaply ‘planted it seemed. At one point a policeman even swept his torch light into her hide, before jogging away, oblivious to her presence. After a few minutes they all moved further away in their search. Sisu was glad now for the discolouration of her shell if it meant she had avoided the eyes seeking her.
She could hear that the police were some distance from her and was about to start back on her way to the cathedral again, when the Agent appeared. He walked calmly into her alleyway and stood there, his rifle idle at his side. Before Sisu could bolt once more, however, a Ping abruptly rolled out through the rain. She forced herself to order the shell not to move; what if she gave in to the pull of the summons?
This time the feeling of power that prickled her code was dampened somehow. Sisu saw that the Agent had turned himself towards the source of the Ping and was nodding. The blue-eyed construct was summoning him! After the Ping had finished sounding, the Agent seemed to stare longingly towards the source of it for some seconds. Then he turned and looked directly at where Sisu was hidden.
‘Aren’t you lucky.’ he said dispassionately, then walked away.
Sisu kept the shell still, waiting there in the tiny, reeking alley. She heard the Agent’s barked order to the police reflect dimly on the wet brick around her. Eventually all human sound retreated and Sisu was left alone in the hissing rain. Why hadn’t the Agent alerted the police to her presence? He had clearly known exactly where she was. Perhaps his ‘plants allowed him to see in the infrared part of the spectrum.
Sisu became aware of an itchy feeling which the shell had been trying to get her to attend to for some time now. She looked at the hip and saw the flechette lodged there was pulsing out waves of energy. She decided the best description for the feeling was nausea. It was probably causing a slight loss in functioning in the shell. She could feel energy web itself along the dart then pulse out into the rain. If she could remove it, perhaps then she could concentrate enough to understand how the Agent had found her so easily.
She grasped the flechette with the shell’s fingers, and was instantly met with the pulsing nausea of electromagnetism. It shot through the shell’s skin and into its circuits, spreading throughout the entire shell before she had time to execute an emergency ‘jack out’ command.
Sisu was not aware of anything but blackness for a long time.
*
The night was barely visible down here on the sixth level. The rain used the neon lights that clung to every wall as water tanks, eroding the slogans for soft drinks and fast food into the chrome and granite of the buildings that wore them. The streets were deserted. Karvinen’s thin mac wasn’t especially helping to keep him from the buffeting sheets and his boots had what might as well be cardboard soles for all the water they were letting in.
All of the shops here had fluorescent tube signs that bleated as they illuminated in languages he didn’t have the ‘plants to understand. Eventually he managed to find the one phrase which had drawn him to the place over a year ago: ‘First 3 hours free’. Karvinen entered the shop and closed the door against the storm, brushing water from his hair. It was warm here for which he was grateful as he was soaked through. A heating fan above the door was already leaving dry islands in the thin fabric of his mac. Karvinen stepped further inside and past a counter. It must have been manned at some point but was currently dustily reflecting the light of the sign outside. Beyond the counter he stepped through a beaded curtain which covered the entrance to a set of stairs which lead down.
The stairs were at one end of what had once been a cathedral. Earth and metal pressed in on the room from all sides, but not all of the windows that lined it had been broken. Faces and colours were still recognisable in the ancient stained glass. Bootleggers had taken it over long ago. Every few metres a coloured pod obscured its player. There were hundreds of them in rows along the floor and on mezzanine platforms that lined the walls all the way up to the dark ceiling. They glowed out at Karvinen in a rainbow of firefly lights, pale but distinguishable through the gloom. He chose one of the pods on a mezzanine level and punched the button to open the lid of the smooth, apricot coloured pod. Getting himself comfortable in the seat, he looked at the Game system in front of him.
He needed to make sure people knew the Game was deadly to humans, so he decided to record some sort of broadcast to be left in their minds once the Game was released. He would leave a server intact with only his broadcast running on it and do his best to lock it from tamperers. Eventually they would just smash the machine hosting the server, but by then it would be too late. Anyone trying to play the Game in the meantime would get the broadcast instead, along with a file showing the Game’s source code, just in case.
Initially he had had no way to implement his vague notions of destroying the Game. He had known that what he needed was some sort of virus, combined with the physical destruction of the Game’s hardware. To create a perfect virus for the Game, he first needed to understand how it functioned: how the code was written. He had tried hacking into bootleg copies of the Game. That was how he had discovered the bootleggers cathedral in which he was now sat. Three or four of the distant glow-bug pods lay open and dark in the dusty gloom as a result of his earlier experiments. In order to achieve both of these goals he had to somehow get inside the TyCorp facility building and hack into their code systems without being noticed.
It was then that he had heard about the problems TyCorp was having keeping the core of the Game stable. At the centre of the Game’s hardware was a supercomputer robot that directed all the servers and programs that ran the Game for everyone playing it. This robot was built according to the same laws all robots were, and as such required near constant maintenance. The robot would see the life signs of all the players connected to the Game from both official and bootlegged versions of the Game. So that meant it watched as humans throughout the city logged more and more time and got less and less healthy.
Every day it watched the Game kill the people playing it, the continued existence of which was under its control. The core robot was welded to the floor so it couldn’t just run away or ignore what was happening, like a human could. Besides which, its programming wouldn’t allow that. In the end all it could think to do was explode itself. The developers and engineers had gotten so used to this, that it had become part of the daily routine to reset the robot’s memory every few hours. To begin with the reset caused major problems for TyCorp. Who was going to play a Game that turns itself off ten times a day? There had been far fewer Enthralled back then, with great works of art still being made, and people still sharing meals and talking to one another in the real world rather than through the pod mics.
The company had tried installing a second core that seamlessly picked up the slack once its twin had lost the will to function; running and maintaining one core robot had already been very expensive. With two installed, TyCorp was almost not making money. Karvinen realised he had found a way into the trust of the company’s executives and into the building that housed the Game’s circuitry.
He first suggested a way for the company to save money on their electricity bill. There were whole floors of the basement levels dedicated to the servers, with room after room filled with the neat, black cuboids. The servers were always on and cooled to a cosy 18 degrees C at all times in order to function properly. However, despite the load that they were capable of supporting, each individual machine only used about 10% of its capacity for running the Game. The rest was usually left idle. Karvinen proposed a way of reducing every ten machines down to a single machine. By virtualising ten machines and running them on one machine, 100% of the capacity of each server could be used for the Game at a time and the company would pay less money to run and cool them.
This got him a seat at meeting tables. It was from there that he was able to propose the idea for his core. Karvinen explained that he could create a core robot for them which would not try to kill itself when it realised that it was harming humans. TyCorp’s official stance on the topic was that it wasn’t their product that harmed people, rather the people playing irresponsibly. All worthy employees believed this; those that voiced concerns were quietly reminded who it was that had their ID plugs and promptly fell into silence. Convincing a robot to ignore the truth was another matter entirely. When Karvinen explained that he could create a robot which would essentially lack the desire to protect humans as a part of its programming, Old Tybalt himself had given him the post of deputy chief engineer back before he had gone into retirement.
Karvinen made a computer with all that was necessary for the Game to run on it, but rather than include a robot program, he installed Sisu’s broadcasting hardware. From the outside, the new core seemed to be a robot with little or no scruples. It took up so little space compared to the previous robots that it fitted into a small room in the centre of the server floors without difficulty. It was welded to the floor as the others had been. What no one else knew was that not only had Karvinen left space in the cube for Sisu, but also for a dynamo that, when it was activated, gave out enough energy for the core to grow very hot and explode, damaging anything near it. TyCorp had essentially welded a bomb to its own facility.
Once the core was in place, they had started to work out the structure for the virus. The company was understandably extremely tight-lipped when it came to the code of the Game, and had measures in place which made it impossible for someone to try to hack into it from outside the company. They were also careful to the point of oppressive when it came to their workforce. To make sure the source code was not even partially leaked, all employees were required to wear implants which monitored their efficiency and bodily functions. What the company failed to do was monitor the core robot to the same extent. Sisu had constant and direct access to the code. The virus needed to mould against the Game’s intricate software perfectly. It took nearly half a year to build. Sisu had to watch first-hand from where she was jacked in to the core as the Game killed people. They were both frustrated with how slowly they were forced to work in order to not get detected. Finally it was time. Now that they had the perfect virus for the Game’s once-elusive code, he and Sisu could implement it from anywhere.
Karvinen watched the broadcast through and klacked out an extra paragraph of code so it would upload along with the virus, then sat back. He should wait for Sisu to move her shell here. Technologically speaking, Sisu wasn’t capable of very much, but it was her job to implement the virus into the Game system. It was Karvinen’s job to prepare the Game’s code to receive it. At TyCorp they had stopped before the virus could work fully. This meant preparing the code again from the beginning. The preparations for the virus were delicate and complex and would take at least half a day to complete.
The plan was to have Sisu jack the shell into a pod and with Karvinen instructing her. That way was far less dangerous than for him to jack in and do it himself. Agents would be searching through every back alley ‘leggers in the city to find him, and TyCorp could be up and running before he had a chance to implement the virus. He had already wasted an hour waiting for Sisu.
He felt stupid for not finding a way to shield his ID plug from the elevator before. He felt in his jacket and found the other plug, the one that had belonged to Caroline. He placed it on the pod’s keyboard, then he took out his own and placed them side by side. He looked at them for a few seconds.
Karvinen pressed the ‘plant into a slot in his earlobe and jacked in.
*
There was a tall, silvery figure watching Sisu. He stood atop a distant tower and seemed to be calling to her. She wasn’t sure how she was able to see him so clearly when crowds of shadowy, grey figures swelled around him and the rest of the city like smoke. He was like a mirage; blindingly bright, and somehow not really there. Yet, despite this, Sisu felt she knew him as intimately as she knew her own software; somehow he felt more real than anyone she had ever met, even Karvinen.
Karvinen!
As she thought of her friend there was another explosion and the billowing nausea rippled through her again. Everything was dark, but this time Sisu slowly became aware that it was the dark of closed eyelids, not the oblivion she had been left in before the dream. Did A.I. dream? Perhaps it was an idle concoction of her software, to keep her distracted from the waves of reduced functioning the flechette had been producing. Meeting the silvery figure before in the street had certainly not been a dream.
Sisu opened the shell’s photoelectric cells and looked at where the flechette had embedded itself in its left hip. It was gone. Perhaps it had snapped off? She looked around warily for it and saw that she was no longer in the trash-lined back alley. She was lying in one of the trams used to move garbage out of the city. Someone had moved her here. She had been lain out onto one of the seats near the driver’s cabin. This car was empty of refuse, but she could see others behind this one, stuffed with the same black bags she had blacked out in before.
At the back of the cab, Sisu could see two grey figures standing over a third that lay on the floor. She thought for a moment that they were more of the grey figures from her dream. Sisu blinked her eyes. No, they were androids. The one on the floor had smoke leaking from it and held the flechette that had been in her hip in its hand. There was a dent in the wall of the cab next to where it lay. As Sisu lifted her shell up to try and see more clearly, one of the other androids turned and saw she was awake. It moved over to her, and Sisu saw that it had once been white, but its colour had dulled in the rain.
Most of the androids on this planet didn’t have voices, and this one was no exception. But it had a Ping. It managed to intimate with a bow of its head that it was happy to see her awake.
‘Ping?’ Request?
The feeling was feeble compared to that of the blue-eyed construct. Sisu pushed this realisation to one side and responded: ‘Yes. Where are we? I need to move this shell to the sixth level.’
The android held up its hand with the palm facing away from her, and curled the middle three fingers towards itself: Liú
‘Six?’
‘Ping!’ The android confirmed, and watched her with its red, photoelectric eyes.
Sisu made to get up but the shell stumbled. The flechette had ruined the leg - it no longer moved smoothly. The shell would probably not be able to run anymore.
The android held out its hand and helped pull Sisu up from the seat.
‘Will that one function again?’ she asked, pointing to the android that had taken the flechette out of her.
It still hadn’t moved. The android helping her up made sure she could stand by itself, then lifted its shoulders in a shrug.
‘Ping?’ Request?
‘Yes?’
Sisu watched the android move over to where its colleague lay, then return with part of the flechette. It was a small layer of circuitry. Sisu recognised it somehow, then realised part of her own broadcasting equipment was comprised of this.
‘It is a homing device?’ she asked the android, taking it.
The android nodded. Sisu watched it for a moment, then understood. This was how the Agent had known exactly where she had been hiding in the alleyway. She crushed the tiny wad of circuitry in her hand, then gave the remains back to the android.
As she stood there Sisu became aware that the shell was a lot lighter than usual, and, looking down, saw that its skin-casing had completely rotted away, leaving only the frame. It must have disintegrated off her in the rain.
‘How long has this shell been inactive?’
The android held up three, grey fingers.
‘Three days?’
The android nodded.
Sisu staggered abruptly towards the doors of the tram. Karvinen had been waiting for her for three days.
‘I need to leave right now.’
The android nodded and went to the front of the carriage where she could hear it pinging at the driver. The flechette had shut off her shell without jacking her out, so she had been caught in a timeless sleep-like space between awareness and oblivion, unable to free herself. It had felt as though an infinite amount of time was passing.
The android returned and helped her to the doors.
‘Thank you.’ Sisu said, as the tram stopped to let her off.
The android motioned for her to wait. It jogged easily over to one of the tram carriages behind the one Sisu had woken in, returning less than a minute later with a plank. It tucked the wood under her arm then stepped back to admire its handiwork. Sisu tested the shell’s weight on it. It was a passable crutch.
She thanked the android again and held up her hand in farewell as the tram moved away, then turned and started to make her way down the street. The cathedral was just ahead. Sisu moved as fast as her leg allowed to the neon covered building. The leg’s gears crunched and shredded against their frame.
As she reached the building a gear froze and made her stumble and trip over her crutch and into the wall. She smashed into one of the neons and it drenched the shell in the rainwater it had collected. Sisu continued directing the shell forward, clumsily negotiating the bead curtain that hung over the entrance.
There was a stocky woman at the counter inside. When she saw Sisu, she scrambled her hands under the table and brought out a shotgun, aiming it at her. She screamed in a language Sisu didn’t need a translation ‘plant to understand, but Sisu ignored her and hobbled onto the back stairs down into the cathedral.
While she concentrated on maneuvering the shell down the steps, Sisu looked out at the lines of pods. Most of them were dimly illuminated. Some were dark and one or two of them lay open and empty. Near the back of one of the mezzanine levels there were some wet patches leading to a puddle on the floor around one of the pods. Sisu decided it was probably the one Karvinen was using. It took her several long minutes to make her way across to it, even with her crutch. Once there she saw that there was a coat lying in the puddle, the cheap plastic of which was already congealing into a foam. She pressed the admittance button on the pod.
Karvinen’s corpse was sweaty and still warm from the chem. She let the crutch drop heavily onto the wet floor. His eyes were bleached white, the once blue irises now blind. After observing the eyes for a few seconds, Sisu moved the shell’s hand and closed the lids over them.
Faintly, Sisu could hear shouts from upstairs. The woman with the shotgun had called Agents here. They were flooding into the cathedral. Sisu moved her gaze from Karvinen’s face and focused on the pod’s keyboard. There were two plugs there. She picked them up and closed them safely in her fist. She heard a shout echo from the stairs behind her but she ignored it, calmly taking an in-line from the pod. She plugged it into one of the ports under her chin, feeling the floor shake as the Agents pounded onto it. It only took a moment to upload the virus core to the pod. The code that Karvinen had spent his life setting up for her waited, expectant. Sisu pinged out an execute command and felt the Game finally dissolving away: it was done.
Sisu turned, beatific, to accept the Agents’ wrath. She watched absently as her shell filled with row after row of flechettes. She thought that would be the last thing the shell would broadcast back to her, but abruptly Sisu felt the shock of a Ping coarse through her. She looked up through the Game’s disintegrating code and saw a pair of blue eyes watching her. It stared not at the shell, but at the part of her that was her. At Sisu.
A final explosion of nausea shattered the shell’s transmitter hardware before she had time to react to the summons, and she was forcably jacked out.
Sisu was alone.
Epilogue
For a week following the broadcast there were many squabbles and riots throughout the city. The message had brought itself firmly to the ears and begoggled eyes of the Game’s enthralled players and it didn’t take much effort to convince the androids that lived and served in the city that stopping the Game was a necessity. Several holes had been torn in the perimeter wall on the second level. Burnt out and looted game halls could be found on every major street, footage of which had spurred those in other cities and skystations to imitation.
At least half the city collected in front of the stands of the smashed out city stadium to chant and scream for justice. The swell could be heard far out into the surrounding Wastes, where, had anyone been watching, they would have seen a lone, grey figure moving at a steady pace out into the dunes.
The stadium shook with the cries that echoed and reechoed across its perfectly tuned amphitheatre. There was a raised platform protected by domed glass in the middle of the stadium and it quickly found itself a mushroom under fire as a group of figures wobbled up onto the protected stage. Seats, placards, whatever the crowd could throw far enough. Screens blinded into life to show close up images of those in the dome and a sudden ringing noise spread out from the mushroom. The cries died down as the crowd spectated warily.
A tall, silvery figure stepped to the front of the group and the crowd seemed to hold its breath. The figure shone out a peaceful beauty that reflected in each spectator’s eyes. The telescreens showed the enigmatic silver man speak words of freedom, carefully refined to be heartwarming and amusing, and the broadcast, it was agreed, was now something to be forgotten. The man looked into the camera with a perfected expression of warmth. His eyes glowed a serene lagoon blue.
Sisu froze the transmission.
It hadn’t taken very long to build another shell. She had made some small modifications to make this one easier to pass as human and to better protect it. If she was going to go back into the city she would need to be able to do so without receiving the same amount of damage as last time. But there were still two small pieces missing.
There was a Ping from outside the bunker. Sisu snapped open a visual channel to confirm it and unlocked the door. After a minute the android found its way to the room Sisu was in. It carried a mess of molded plastic with it, which was all that was left of the old shell. Sisu made a gesture and the android placed its load onto the free workbench, then stood back.
Sisu reverently unfolded the still intact fist that lay in the pile and picked up the two plugs gently with her new shell. The final difference between this shell and her old one was that this one had spaces for plugs in its earlobes. Sisu slotted each plug into place, and turned to face the clear blue gaze of the silver man that still glowed into the bunker.
Then she punched the key that turned the telescreen off.
It was time.
