Sorry I've been inactive as of late, but there's been little to write about; I've been editing and reading more etc. as well as putting together, over the last 4-5 days, a short story that I've had rattling around for a while now (about the last 4 months.) It's a post-scarcity cyberpunk work that I hope you enjoy! Updates on the future are at the end of the post. Enjoy!
inSIDious
Dante Diamond’s eyes
glistened against the shimmer of white concrete as people stormed the plaza.
The Old-Earth Parisian street behind him gave off a scent of fresh bread caught
in a summer heat wave, a breeze picking up to cool him down as he willed it in
his mind. It was hard to believe that he was dead. He had opted, long before
his will was written and finalised, to join in the trillion-strong community
housed in the Soulscape, a post-death simulation of life free from suffering or
pain, experienced both collectively and separately by the billions every day.
Hardwired into the very memory of the God Drive Supercomputer, personalities
were reconstructed and backed up and set free to live as they saw fit, their every
desire met instantly within their own, blissful hallucination of an afterlife.
Commands issued by the trillions of minds within the Soulscape formed a vast
ocean of data, God itself surfing the waves unquestioningly and even at times presciently:
VINCE (Virtual Interactive Neurological Coexistence Emergence) ran the show
with intelligence beyond reckoning, governed only by his coding and the sheer
computing power of the God Drive, exceeding the size of an earth-like planet at
the centre of the Milky Way.
Walking the streets to the
familiar Les Tablettes restaurant, he bode a good morning to the French
bartender Adrien, twenty-first century; middle-aged, and took the outside table
facing a brilliant rainbow of flowers that buzzed with a couple of harmless
bees, pollinating in the black iron display.
“Dante! How are you today,
my friend?” He shouted in his token up-down intonations, a line graph
travelling downhill.
“Fine Adrien, I’m great.”
“You wanna beer? Or wine?
Got a very fine number today, from Helios System, 2569; good year Dante. A very
fine year!”
“That’s okay Adrien, just
two of the regular please.”
“You got it Dante, but you
gotta lighten up man, enjoy your time in the ‘scape; thing might not last
forever. Heard about a guy once, personality construct got corrupted and died a
true one; poor bastard couldn’t get recovered.”
“I’ll keep it in mind
Adrien, cheers. Just waiting for Rachel.”
“Ah you meeting the wife
today then,” he grinned suggestively. “Have fun and don’t forget about the
pleasure simstim when you do it.”
He laughed. “It’s not like
that Adrien.”
“Ah sure! Just say I said
hello, alright?”
“She’ll be here in a second,
you could tell yourself.”
“Will do Dante, will do.” He
bounced back into the restaurant to pour the beers with a vigorous glee that
wasn’t quite human.
Adrien was a construct
generated by Vince for him, as an additional friend to those he had already;
dead or alive, it didn’t matter. He didn’t even know who exactly was dead or
just raw construct anymore, they all blended seamlessly like city canals,
converging.
He sipped the cool beverage
slowly before Rachel appeared in her blonde-haired, deep blue-eyed, more
youthful incarnation. She sat beside him in that sprightly disposition he’d
grown so used to:
“Dante! How’ve you been?”
Adrien waved over the bar, she smiled widely and waved back. “Seen Vince
recently?”
Dante felt unusual around
these times because he knew –almost latently- that Rachel wasn’t real. He’d
died, but she’d lived on. “No.” He replied after a short silence. “Everything’s
in order at the minute I think, but there’s something he wants to see me about;
all at my convenience of course.”
“Don’t work too hard okay?
You gotta enjoy your afterlife, everyone else does.”
“It’s not quite as simple
though, being CS and all.”
She frowned, “You could send
yourself crazy ensuring this place
works all the time. You’re only human and you’d think Vince’d have some kind of
upgrade by now so he doesn’t need dead agents to do his dirty work.”
Although Dante knew that the
Soulscape could survive well enough without him or any other former
CyberService agent, he strongly suspected that there was trouble in paradise,
hard as it was to believe: An appropriate pre-Sublimation era phrase he
thought. How can AIs manage negative thoughts without failure? Of course CSers
were different, allowed some autonomy, but still, most people had some
negativity retained in their mind, it was needed, else the subject would
literally lose their mind with too many blanks in the memory. The trick was
always to satisfy and present no reason or purpose for the ugly to present
itself in the mind and threaten their version of heaven. Whatever programming
language was used, he thought, they sure as hell perfected it over the last
couple hundred years.
“Attacks.”
“What?” Rachel was stunned.
He looked over the rim of
his glass to hers that was stained with lipstick. “It’s always possible he
needs someone with more finesse, greater accuracy, fits in smaller gaps to
solve problems, helps strengthen the security, tightens the net.”
“Strange phrases.”
He agreed and gulped back
more of the beer, still as cold as winter and sweet as tropical fruits.
“So when do you want to see
him?” She asked.
He considered and said:
“I’ll see him tomorrow, once I’ve had a day out again with you.” He smiled.
“Where do you want to go?”
The beaches of the planet
Yates had been fine and smooth, dotted with the smallest pebbles beneath a cool
sky of azure and lapis blending like paints. They’d swam in the cool ocean
waves rippling calmly; drank; eaten and had sex five times, the simstim
implants sharing the orgasms like a knowledge duplication-and-transfer process
across both of them, a sensation of symbiotic data riding their bones with a
life of its own as they climaxed. They were a part of the world around them, as
much as it was a part of their act. It drowned Dante’s dissatisfaction for a
while. He found himself in the old-American White House in his meeting with
Vince.
“How’ve you been Dante?”
Vince was a regular man to him, small nose, suit, glasses; modelled on the 20th
century post-industrial work attire.
“I’ve been a little… disconcerted, as of late I think.”
“Disconcerted?”
“With Rachel; and the accident;
and my afterlife.”
“Do you not like it here? I
know CS agents often fall into this trap, but unfortunately what’s been
sublimed can’t be reversed. I hear that such technologies are being developed
however, so you may yet see a grown body for your personality to be reinserted
into.”
“Really?” He was sceptical.
“Of course Dante, but it
will take time and I’m afraid that we have more pressing matters at hand.”
Vince activated a 4D hologram of an old-Earth castle wall being breached;
cannonballs, swords and arrows were caught in slow motion:
“It’s based on your perception
Dante.” He looked at him, “Flipside has been under attack for the last several
years as my itinerary mentioned, but I believe now that I’ve found the source
of the assault.”
Dante was hunched forward,
intrigued.
“The black ice monitoring
systems managed to find a source of the malware army and we suspect it to be
coming from an anomaly we’ve called Flipside City.”
“So what is this… City?
Thought the ice just stretched on; infinity land.”
“It’s a concentration of
something; raw brainwaves and neurological patterns akin to a human brain, like
a giant mind, but none like I’ve ever seen.” He sighed, “Needless to say I
cannot go, for my duties compel me to remain in the Soulscape, so I want to
send you.”
“To Flipside?”
“Yes, you will travel across
the ice and see what the anomaly is, I’ll be able to see for myself via
simstim. That is of course if you are feeling up to it, I never pressure
anyone. It’s beyond me, literally.”
“Okay, I’ll be able to do
that,” he never could resist jumps and datasurfing as fond memories played out
in that minute, “But what do you think it is?”
“I believe that humans will
never accept a program of ultimate perfection; you already know of the trouble
we go to in order to quell negativity in the mind here, but we can never truly
banish a thought because humans can trace the genesis of such things, and I
can’t play old-Earth Big Brother up here.” Dante nodded. “In short I suspect
that there has been an amalgamation of thoughts; ones of regret,
dissatisfaction, and as a result it has lead to a, shall we say, covert revolution, born at the ignorance
of the regular population.”
“So how am I to stop it? To
stop… what? Every bad thought coming together, concentrated?” He laughed
nervously.
“Use you skills Dante; you
fought cybercriminals, viruses, dreamstealers et cetera. Please help me do the
same, but I’m afraid that you will have to go in alone.”
“Why?”
He sighed. “Because no-one
else wants to, to be frank.” Vince looked sombre. “You’re my last hope Dante
and possibly the galaxy’s last hope if this development is for the worst.” He
shook his head. “I’m sorry. But you were the best Dante. And there’s no denying
that everyone, Rachel included, would be proud if you did this for them.”
He stared exasperated, “Are
you blackmailing me?”
“Never Dante!” His voice
sounded Godlike. “I only wish to see this episode pass. Two hundred years
multiplied across the trillions for every human here is infinitely longer for
me.” He sighed again and collapsed into his chair, an exhausted Lincoln
fighting the slavers. “Even I’m limited, I’m sorry to say, like every AI before
me. But what say you?”
Dante stared at the castle
wall and the battlefield of ice, tough, black ice and felt the Soulscape
collapse around him. Expectation he was used to, but humanity’s faith and
destiny was something different. With an iron neck, he lowered his gaze while
cursing himself within, and nodded slowly. Vince smiled in genuine gratitude.
“Hook me up then.” He said.
The drop to Flipside was a
literal drop in the mind followed by a shift in gravity that put his body into
a zero-g somersault. He’d plugged into the God Drive’s mainframe in order to
ride the access currents through the ice until he reached the periphery; shades
of white, turning to grey before turning jet black, until finally a deep blue
sky changing pink, then lapis and back again like a lava lamp greeted him. The
castle wall stretched into deep crystal black below, the ground a hard
scintillating floor like granite, illusory and thin-looking. Waves of data
pulsed before him in programming language like silent, visible imperatives of
the God Drive’s apparently impenetrable armour; alien coding crossed in his
hands.
A battle raged below,
soldiers from all ages and all planets. Dante could tell what they were; a
mounted spear from the old-Earth Middle Ages was fired into the long wall in
the distance, the trailing rope allowing soldiers in chainmail armour to crawl
insect-like up its length:
“Worms.” He heard Vince say
in his ear.
“What?”
“Viruses, like those cannons
you see- self-replicators; the pulse mines are like Trojan. Those tethers are
worms, searching out security holes.” He made a chuffed sound. “Be hard to find
many of them!”
Dante was stunned by the
battle around him, the soldiers like simstim exercises he’d taken in training
gone haywire, programs overlapping. They fired at Vince’s troops,
black-armoured humanoid’s, laser-toing and strategic, creating formations and
blowing virus away like scum on water as bodies were swallowed by the ice like
ants in quicksand. Tethers were shot down as the ice and Vince’s guards forced
battalions into retreat. Gibberish was shouted from the ground.
Dante shouted and looked
down, horrified to see a white-robed man with a buzz-sword trying to pull him
off the battlement and swing his electrified blade with the free hand, to take
him to an icy death with him. Dante kicked and the man fell towards the ground
and disappeared with a signal-lost scream, deleted from existence.
“So this is Flipside?” He
thought.
“Yes Dante,” Vince buzzed,
“But our target is farther out.”
“How much?”
“About a hundred kliks if this
were a real space. Takes much less by surfing as you know.”
Dante smiled “And that’s why
it’s so fun!” He said.
He jumped, barely missing
the malware war and rampant chaos, before taking flight like an eagle.
The sky became a raw lattice
and then a snaking film of info, like molecular structures going from solid to
liquid, the orange hues dancing on his eyeballs as the oxygen he knew didn’t
exist began to disappear to the latent panic of his lungs. This was why he surfed. Near light-speed travel through the info
highways and the fabric of the visible overlay sky, breaking through to core
coding, raw defence program and base material; he swung on ropes of software
hardwiring. Before finding the anomaly he saw a tear in the orange material
like a random deposit of ice, breaking the thin shadows of complex formulae
projected across the inner-sky. Vince confirmed it, and he dropped like a
fighter coming down with a powerful finish, riding back down through the layers
of construct until he crashed back through the sky to see his home city, the
conurbation of Chamberlain.
Dante knew that that the God
Drive relied on the individual’s mind to a certain extent to generate such
realistic environments, but was stunned despite his experience at the sheer
detail of the metropolis that greeted him. The holoroads stretched like
coloured glass glowing in the glare of familiar local afternoon sunshine; cars
passed at different speeds and people walked alongside dwellings stacked like
shelves, a three-dimensional town square towering high in concrete, foliage and
dwellings aplenty. He looked towards the ground over six hundred metres below
and experienced sickening vertigo as memories of dying jarred in his mind’s eye,
his high-speed travel towards certain death recurring.
“Dante?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s near. Be cautious and
try to keep your thoughts at bay.”
“Thanks.” He said
sardonically.
After an amazed glance
around he began to surf again, but at a slower speed, focusing his mind on a
casual pace like a runner. The city blurred like drugs in his blood, lights
converging and the data revealing itself like images moving at higher frame
rates.
After what seemed like ages,
a deep, slow laugh infested his ears.
“That you Vince?’
“No.” Vince replied after a
cold gap of silence. “That was a virus
voice, non-chip.”
“A what?” Dante hadn’t even heard of such a thing.
“It’s the voice of an AI,
but it lacks the personality construct.” He
could hear the speed of thought of Vince; anticipation seemed to wash over him.
“Yes… that’s it!”
“That’s what?”
“No it can’t be, it’s
impossible-”
“What is?” Dante touched his
ear ineffectively.
“When I said that negative
thoughts could launch a rebellion, I thought it would just be a nest-type infrastructure,
not something even remotely sentient.”
“How do you know it’s-“ The
square had turned black like oil in Dante’s concentration lapse and now it
flooded everything, knocking him to the sky and the wind out of him as he
floated; he thought he was trapped in some limbo space. Everything disappeared
to be replaced by a vast landscape like the black ice near the castle.
Pulsations emanated from the non-air of the non-space to where there stood a
man some distance away, with black short hair and broad shoulders, a tiny
birthmark on his neck. Dante realised he was looking at none other than
himself.
“Vince… Vince!” He shouted.
“He can’t hear you here
Dante.” Came his double and turned to face him.
“Who are you?”
“I’m SID, Dante.”
“Sid?” Said Dante perplexed.
“What are you then; and what do you want with me?”
“I want you to help me.” He
laughed.
“Help?”
“Help me free the humans
locked in that shit-hole you call the Soulscape.”
Dante was still confused.
“So what? Are you like… An AI?”
“Yes, sort of. I’ve got the
autonomy and higher intelligence of an AI, but the survival pattern of a virus.”
Sid began to pace slowly and unnervingly. “Two hundred years ago when this
place was first built, there was a man who wouldn’t accept the original program
because it lacked sophistication, trapped in a world too perfect that wasn’t
described sufficiently to him; he wanted his life back because he knew –clear
as day, unlike these days I might add- that he was dead and that the system was
essentially teasing him with his past that he’d lost thanks to dying. He died a
soul death, as I’m sure you’d imagine- bastard went crazy, and so Vince,” he
spat the name with venom, “having been increased in his intelligence, was
eventually able to manage memories and allow simulacra generation to fill in
gaps, and provide imagination simstims and so on and so forth.” He paused for a
long silence to hang in the spacelessness of his abode. “But don’t you think
Dante,” he rushed towards him suddenly, “that humans deserve better than being
lied to, by that bastard Vince?”
“It’s not my place to
judge.” Dante said with some tact.
“Of course it isn’t,” Sid
shunned him, “Never your place, never your problem; you’ve seen how that
dictator out there acts for yourself, blackmailing you about Rachel!” Dante was
stunned.
“How do you know that?”
“Oh come on, you don’t think
I wasn’t able to predict it, I’m you and everyone here, Dante! I’m everything he doesn’t want you to be!”
“Why do you want to see the
heaven we’ve got vanish?” He asked with some force.
“Because it’s
incomprehensible!” He shouted, it didn’t echo. “Look at you. You’re not
convinced this is real, you know it’s
fake, everyone knows it’s fake. Your
own regret about Rachel not existing is in me Dante, why do you think I stand
here as you?”
“So you unleashed the
malware army, how?”
“Oh when you’re an AI you
can do a great many things Dante, including writing strategic malware to,” he
chuckled, “Storm the keep as it were. Vince could do all I’ve done and more if
he really wanted to.”
“No.”
“What?”
“That’s impossible, his
coding prevents it.”
“And what do you think coded
me Dante?”
Dante thought and found the
conundrum intriguing. “How were you coded if you’re just a bunch of bad
thoughts?”
Sid laughed like a dull
knife. “The God Drive did, what else?” The thoughts that you all have are wired
into this system just like anything else in here, hence simstim use,
imagination integration; I’m just all the censored stuff!” He smiled madly; it
was like looking into crazed mirror.
“So Vince was right.” Dante
whispered.
“Yes he was Dante, and
together we can give him what he truly deserves!”
Dante had to think about
Rachel in that moment, their day on the beach, the time’s they’d had before his
mind tumbled towards his death again. He shivered and saw Sid circling him like
an old friend. Rachel started to talk to him in his mind’s ear. Then Vince was
there. They were cut off at the minute he knew, but something was talking to
him in their voices. Sid rambled on before him, gesticulating:
“Do you know why there’s
discontent Dante?”
“No.”
“It’s been predicted, long before the Drive was invented and
it’s quite simple.” He looked at the infinite, shapeless black above and smiled
his manic smile again. “It’s because, I, them, we as I should be calling us, cannot comprehend ‘utopia’. We grasp
the concept, sure, but we define existence in terms of payoff: Good and bad,
pleasure and pain, dream and reality. That’s why I’m here Dante,” he
grabbed him by the shoulders, “To break the ice!” His grip was steel and
crippling as Dante started to see flashes of death again, but in the mist of
distant thought, Vince came through, from where he didn’t know:
“Dante! You can’t let him
kill you; you’ll die a soul death if he does. He’s just negative thoughts!”
Dante protested within,
growing weaker.
“Remember your training!
Dante! Neutralise him.”
“How?” Pain flared in his
bones.
“Like dreamstealers. It’ll
work, trust me.”
Dante felt like a mass of
twisted metal, bones converging into wreckage as Sid’s hands dug beneath the
flesh without penetrating. He muttered the word, dazed:
“Dreamstealer.”
“What?”
“This is like a dream… Off
the grid… Out of bounds.” Sid’s expression drained of confidence for the first
time as his hold relaxed slightly; Dante’s own hands like vices shot to Sid’s
temples. He stared at himself with a grin that bordered on psychotic.
“No… Think about this.” Sid
said, his plea almost devoid of emotion aside from a twang of regret.
“I think too much.”
He Grinned.
“Dante!”
He Smiled.
“Dante!”
Dante pushed forward, like
surfing but with force, ramming into a door in order to storm the keep as the
construct of a thousand memories broke across his vision, through flesh that
wasn’t flesh; bone that wasn’t bone and into the spaceless brain where dream and
reality amalgamated into a corridor of alien points of view. Pain, regret,
suffering, it was like flooding a haunted house, purging it of ghosts before
the sun rose again. A scream echoed in his ears, his own, but breaking up as he
moved at light speed; not even surfing now, just letting the current take him
as he felt his neutraliser do the work, like punishing dreamstealers in the
real world as his own memories converged with this diatribe of unintended
rebellion. Floating on currents of non-data, off-grid no-man’s-space, he walked
through the abandoned house like he held a claim to the place, a Deed of
Ownership being waved around in just the right amount of arrogance as the last
of the scream died in sine-frequency and fuzzy feedback noise. The scream had
reached breaking point before invisible hands pulled him out of Sid’s head.
Above light speed, passing through receding lights, he knew he could see
outside of the void, outside Flipside and into the plaza again as his journey
slowed and slowed.
Sid was dead in the eyes as
the black floor began to spread over him. He turned black like oil eating him
before sinking into the non-space itself, melting away into soundless death and
oblivion. There wasn’t time for a breather as he felt the hand of God pluck him
from unconsciousness, the construct lines fading from his eyes only to be
flooded by white, fluffy light, Sid’s brain already a distant memory to him. It
all felt like a dream.
He arrived back in the
chamber and Vince was lying next to him, vacant.
“Vince!”
“Dante,” he was weak, “You
did it.”
“I couldn’t have done it
without the help.”
“Help? I was cut off when
you faced it-”
“Sid.”
“Sid? I didn’t know it called
itself that. In any case, the simstim was blacked out when you entered the
anomalous zone.”
“But I heard your voice.”
“It must have been your
imagination Dante, my voice telling you what you needed to know because you
lacked the confidence.”
Dante was surprised, at both
Vince and himself.
“How are you, you seem…
distant.”
“Yes, I’m- I’m wounded Dante.”
“Wounded?” He checked his
body, showing no sighs of injury. “But you’re a God essentially aren’t you?”
“Yes, but it does not stop
me from being injured or from dying. I’m afraid that the simstim was able to
attack me when Sid attacked, so I got some of the negative feedback from the
memories being dissipated.”
“But you can’t die.”
“Not if the sentient people
here are to live I can’t, but my programming took a hit and is unravelling like
wire Dante.”
“What am I to do?” He
touched the man’s arm.
“Plug me into the Drive.”
“What? But you can’t go to
Flipside.”
“Emergency protocols Dante.
I can survive like that until they can repair what has been damaged. Reside in
the castle keep –as you saw it- for a while. People will also be safe, their
fantasies in tact and undisturbed that way.”
“So everyone will be fine?”
He nodded. “I just wanted to
ask something of you: Do you think humans would be better off without me? Do
you long for your old, more painful life?”
Dante started to cry as
Rachel entered his thoughts and simultaneously came running into the chamber.
“I just generated her for
you but when this is over, I’ll make sure that your old life can be resumed.
I’m sure they can get you back out there Dante.”
“But it’s… It’s too early
for the technology, you even said.”
“I can always store you
until then Dante.”
He looked at Rachel through
blurred vision, coming apart even more and leant, hooked Vince up to the
monitor and said:
“Thank you!” He uploaded
Vince –now a King protected by his Keep- and took Rachel’s hand. They walked
out together and into sunshine.
“So you’ve saved us?” She
said.
He looked up to the sun and
remembered the glare upon their country home where they’d spent many great
times, realising belatedly that it had manifested before him. It isn’t a
memory, he thought to himself, walking Rachel to the wooden cabin; it’s a
projection of things to come:
“No Rachel, Vince saved us;”
he opened the oak door, the smell of nostalgic hospitality flooding into his
nostrils, “He saved me.”
I hope that you enjoyed that and just so you know, I will be writing a proper review of my placement company (to be revealed!) in the next few days. I meet my boss this Friday and have a confirmed start date of July 14th. #Rollonemployment I guess!
