And now for something completely different.
The Once and Future King
(Cont.)
Sidney descended to ground level and crossed underneath the monumental trusses that held up the railroad overpass. The Presidential Palace, or what had become of it, beckoned. Here in the heart of San Dorado the buildings were immense, eclectic monuments to the city’s rich and powerful. Golden lettering above their entrances proudly proclaimed the owners of each skyscraper; neoclassical crests, friezes and cubist statues of robber-barons dominated the view from the street. On reflection, he realized, it all looked amazingly gaudy. Stripped of the thronging masses of wage-slave peons and suit-wearing True Believers that had given San Dorado purpose, its magnificent buildings were little more than corporate mausoleums, dedicated to dead men desperate to be remembered.
Concord Avenue was one of the most important thoroughfares of San Dorado City, running from the southern Barricade District financial center north toward Uptown, passing both the Tower of Commerce and the Presidential Palace on the way. It was lined most of the way by office towers belonging to the city-state’s many corporations. 42nd meanwhile was known for its entertainment. The area where the two streets crossed had been known as Busby’s Corners, after legendary entrepreneur Busby Blues who’d ruled an empire of vice from the office of the President, and it was an unholy fusion of business and pleasure: brothels and casinos stood next to corporate headquarters; banks and broadcasting studios were side by side with grindhouse theatres and seedy night clubs. And from amidst the neon chaos of it all the stained white, chrome-capped Palace thrust into the heavens like the fulcrum around which the city-state revolved.
It was all very fitting.
Speaking of the Palace, he was getting close now. The skyscraper towered far above the surround high-rise, but it no longer looked the way Sidney remembered it. Behinds its windows lights switched on and off in ordered constellations. In many places the white masonry was ripped away and replaced by heavy steel plates, entire sections of which moved up and down the building seemingly without purpose. In other areas gnarled, rib-like structures were wrapped around the tower. Red floodlights lit up the building’s steel chrome crown in unpredictable shifting patterns and thick cables plummeted from its sides, tracing inverse parabolas before wrapping around nearby towers. It was the only building to feature any lights at all, making it look as if the Palace was draining energy out of the city... Or the city was sustaining it instead. Or perhaps, he figured, there really was no difference.
The Palace covered an entire city block, and its immediate surroundings were parkland: a fenced-in, publicly accessible space of trees, ponds and statues, a small retreat from the corporate madness... Artfully sculpted in such a way to prohibit motor vehicles from accessing the base of the tower, and to provide ideal kill-zones to the men and women of the Presidential Security Service in case of an armed attack. But there were no armed men in body-armor patrolling the tower base now. In fact there was nobody at all to keep him from walking up to the reinforced glass-wrapped base of the Palace, so far seemingly untouched by the crazed machine-stuff that proliferated higher up. He entering its blast-proof lobby, leaving the rain-slicked city behind.
From the ground floor up the first twelve stories of the Palace had actually been a public museum, containing a bewildering variety of artifacts dating back to the days of the Founding of San Dorado City. The museum had been designed to awe visitors with the riches of the city-state just as ancient cathedrals did to illiterate Medieval peasants. And so the floor was a flawless expanse of patterned rose and ivory marble; a massive art deco chandelier dominated the ceiling, golden cogwheels emerging from a polished bas-relief map of the Frequesuan continent; and the far wall was dominated by a massive, vividly colored mural of Lady Fortune standing over one of the ancient motto’s of the city-state, spelling out in priceless opal that: “the Almighty Dollar shall be the stability of thy times.”
The crassness of it all was almost enough to make him blush. His footsteps echoed through the otherwise empty lobby. Sidney walked past examples of ancient San Doradan industriousness - automobiles, aircraft, a Streamline Moderne passenger train - and was suddenly unsure what to do next. In the middle of the lobby were dozens of bronzed booths where pretty immigrant girls used to sell tickets or offer information about the museum and the city.
But there were no girls. Rather, he realized, the booths were occupied by mannequin blondes, faces and figures distorted by crudely grafted cybernetics. The mannequins silently tracked his movement with glittering red eyes that shone lasers through the dimly lit lobby.
Creepy. Sidney was suddenly very aware of just where he was. This wasn’t San Dorado City. He was literally inside the mind of a very old and quite possibly very insane AI. What he saw around him was an abstraction of her - its - mind-state. It wasn’t very user friendly, or hospitable. There was a reason its containment vessel had warned against reactivation. A loud chime broke the silence. In the far wall beyond the bronze booths an elevator, its doors decorated with chromed sunburst designs, slid open.
The core was beginning to react to his presence, like a predatory animal rousing slowly from a deep sleep.
He stepped into the elevator. Its doors closed and immediately opened again. There had been no sense of motion, but the scenery had changed. And things were starting to get really weird.
Sidney stood in, well, a nightclub. There really was no other word for it. A sleazy nightclub at that. It was a place of velvet and lace. Red leather booths circled a dancing stage dominated by chromed poles. Languid, mechanical music thumped through the place, its bass so deep it reverberated in his stomach, its waveform dancing with machine code. A disco ball hung above the stage. Rays of weirdly rendered light bounced off it to the beat of the music. Neon flashed against the walls. Upon closer inspection the neon signs turned out to be the ancient red and white umbrella logo of the SinTEK corporation, repeated over and over again, flashing with the bewildering pattern of the Palace’s crown illumination. The place, like the rest of the city, was utterly deserted.
He drifted to the bar, sat down on a stool and thought through the implications of what he was seeing. He was hooked into the core of a positively ancient AI, one of the oldest humanity ever built, quite possibly the oldest surviving. Daphne Sinclair had gone digital very early on. It had been a gamble, but not much of a choice. Ashpool's Disease had ruined her health and her body had rejected a succession of cybernetic implants. She’d had only months, maybe less, before the disease would reach her cerebral cortex.
The procedure was experimental. Her company, SinTEK, had been at the forefront of computational neuroscience even as far back as the 21st century, but it hadn’t ever attempted anything like this with a human subject before. Or at least, it hadn’t officially. There’d been rumors about death row inmates and secret laboratories, but Sidney had never wanted to know if there was any truth to them. He didn’t want to learn what lengths Daphne had gone to in order to save her own life. The technology was there, and if he could just ignore the question of how it’d come into being he wouldn’t have to think too much about what he’d have done if it were up to him.
They had made their first goodbye in the cryo-chamber. They’d kissed one last time. The doors shut and the cryosolute poured in, beginning the vitrification process. He’d turned away as robotic scalpels began chiseling at the crystallized body of what had been his wife. Her nervous system had been frozen and was then scanned, layer by layer, by laser imagers that captured the structure of her neurons and their interconnections and mapped them onto specially prepared memory banks.
It took the most advanced supercomputers that all the money in the world could buy thirteen months to reconstitute her personality. When her synthesized voice burst from those speakers, it had been the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. They could talk; hell, primitive early cybernetics meant they could even touch, after a fashion. It’d been years before he realized it wasn’t the same as before. And it had been decades before he’d caught on to what was happening to her.
The incipience of radically advanced technology often came at a price. This was no different. They were treading new ground: the effects of digitization and discorporeality were not understood, there was no way to tell how fully recursive memory might affect a human mind, no psychological data to tell them what was happening until it was too late.
Personalities change over time, even in living, breathing human beings. Our perception of the world is altered, ever so subtly, by every memory and every experience. Human beings adjust their views and change their perspectives, even if all they have to work with is a gray lump of matter with the consistency of cold porridge, inhibited by millennia of immutable caveman instincts.
But what if everything that made a person suddenly turned mutable, just like that? Nobody had given that possibility much thought. Until now. Daphne Sinclair changed herself, bit by literal bit, slowly but inexorable like continental drift. Her personality mutated, transformed itself away from the woman he’d fallen in love with, drifted away from him and from humanity, became more alien every year. He’d come to think of it like Alzheimer’s in reverse: she wasn’t diminishing so much as taking off into realms of identity he couldn’t - wouldn’t - follow. It had taken her two centuries of painful metamorphosis to become completely estranged from him. By the end they’d grown so far apart they could hardly even talk.
He’d fled her. There was no other word for it, he now realized. The Great Upheaval had been an excellent time to do it, a good excuse - but looking back he wondered if it had truly been the mobs of Earth and Nova Terra baying for his blood that had caused him to do it, or if it had really been the thought of sitting at that great and silent mainframe for even a minute longer, speaking into a microphone in a futile attempt to bridge the existential divide between minds imprisoned in fragile, organic bodies and those soaring on the digital winds of early lasernets.
Centuries passed, and they had run into each other every once in a while. Their run-ins were ever brief, never pleasant, and involved cognitive viruses, mind-rape or portable lasercannons. Even so he could never bring himself to shutting her down and though he no longer understood her motivations, he suspected that she could no more do him in either.
The final goodbye was in the 28th century, and precipitated by a frantic long-distance communique from SinTEK. The corporation had long gone nomad, become biogenic pirates selling ethically dubious services to whomever could pay, shunned in large parts of the civilized galaxy. They carried her matrix on one of their great laboratory-ships, but something had changed. The AI had gone rampant, seizing control of the giant vessel’s systems, robots and considerable defenses, and was slaughtering the whole staff and converting them into mutants and cyborgs. Sidney had boarded the ship and interfaced one final time with the core. Contact had been brief, he’d caught no more than glimpses of manic intent: biomechanical experiments to reverse-engineer a human substrate, attempts to recreate... There were flashes of ancient digitized memories, a worn-down wedding picture... He hadn’t dared look further. He wasn’t sure his sanity would’ve survived.
He’d finally shut it down and locked it away. And he still felt guilty over it.
In many ways that didn’t make sense. He’d done far worse things, for reasons that were far less clear cut, and felt not a trace of remorse. But sense or not it still felt like a failure even now, five centuries later. That, he well realized, was a very long time to carry a torch for someone. It was also the result of the way he’d reorganized his own personality and that, in turn, had a lot to do with what had happened to Daphne. It was all awfully circular, and not very to the point. What mattered right now was that what he was seeing all around him was a thought-space, essentially a user interface based on a reflection of the AI’s self-image.
An empty city. A disreputable nightclub. This didn’t bode very well for sanity.
And suddenly he realized he wasn’t alone anymore. An Art Deco gargoyle had appeared, abruptly and from nowhere in particular, in the middle of the circular dancefloor. It eyed him menacingly. He recognized it for the Daemon it was, a security program that was in many ways the predecessor of Black Ice. He knew better than to underestimate it. Old-fashioned or not, Daphne had always been good at coming up with things that killed people in new and interesting ways: last time he was here the core defences had taken bite-sized chunks out of him.
“Sidney friggin’ Hank.” The gargoyle spoke without moving its chromed beak. Its voice was full of false joviality, and laced with a caricatural Roaring Twenties mobster accent. “What brought you down off yer cloud o‘ money?”
“Come to see the old lady,” he looked at the unmoving steel creature with an forcedly casual expression.
“Oh yeah?” There were more gargoyles appearing now, one by one. They were all looking at him. She’d evidently been preparing for an encounter like this. “And what makes you think the Chromium Queen wants to talk to you?”
Chromium Queen? Hokay. That did not sound good. Or stable. “Seeing as you guys don’t get too many visitors ‘round these parts I’m thinking she might. For old time’s sake?”
“That’s what you said last time,” the prime Gargoyle was unexpectedly closer. It hadn’t moved, but suddenly its giant steel beak nearly pressed against his nose. He made an effort not to flinch. Still more of its kind were appearing, filling the room with their cast iron presences. “Locked us in here, you did.”
“There was a pretty good reason for that. Which,” he added, “I can explain.”
“Ca-can you no-now?” The thing’s voice changed, the faux-mobster accent breaking up with bursts of static that morphed, even as the Daemon spoke, into something distinctly feminine and recognizable. “Rea-rea-really?”
So. Here at last. “Hi Dee,” he sighed. “It’s been a while.”
A pause. “Ha-has it?”
Nanocores were peculiar things. They had been radically advanced for their time. Just one could hold an entire AI in a package many times smaller than anything that had come before. But like any core before the advent of sub-meson systems they were potential prisons: cut off the microwave transceivers and directed laserlinks, disconnect the optical cables and sub-etha connectors and whatever intelligence is locked inside is blind to the galaxy. Clock down the speed of its processors and there’s no way for the AI to know how much time has passed outside.
He’d made very sure to dial down the processors or Daphne’s core as far as they could go. Centuries had passed outside, but there was really no way to tell how much subjective time had passed in this place. Could be decades; could be less. Could be a lot more too. It wasn’t just a matter of processor speeds. Best be up front about it. “It’s been five centuries.”
Silence.
He decided to press the issue. “Perhaps it would be best if I explained this to you in person?”
Anger rose in the voice of the AI like a warbling electronic storm. “Wou-would you know my fa-face?
Would you?”
Before Sidney could reply the room began to
fold. There was no other word for it: the walls, the night club, the gargoyles, every three-dimensional object except for the floor shifted sprite-like
that way in a way that made his head hurt. The top of the Palace pleated like a fractal flower, rotating out of sight until he found himself standing on an empty platform high above the city.
From this vantage it was apparent just how huge the city of San Dorado was. A forest of skyscrapers framed the Central Districts. Beyond it hundreds of square kilometres of city sprawled toward every horizon, threaded through by the silver and black of monorails and highways. In comparison the Dodgson River, itself nearly a kilometre wide, seemed an insignificant dribble of brownish-blue trickling through one of humanity’s oldest megalopolises, dark and lifeless and inert.
He had no time to enjoy the view. There was a monstrous rumbling, inexorable as an earthquake, so loud the noise was overwhelming on an existential level. In the depths below the earth rippled and shifted, bulged unnaturally and finally snapped open in a cataclysmic display of force. Skyscrapers collapsed. Roads disintegrated. Cars and lesser buildings were contemptuously tossed aside. Water and gas mains exploded into curtains of rain and fire. From amidst the chaos something huge and gnarled and terrifying rose... and rose... and kept on rising impossibly, a vast subterranean monster of steel and circuitry, titanic and ancient, the final reflection of the central intellect whose thoughts shaped this place.
The Palace shook reed-like as the monstrous construct hefted itself into the air in front of him, a Herculean machine avatar that emerged from choking dust and curtains of fire like the face of a wrathful god.
“Sid-sid-sidney Ha-hank,” rumbled a voice vast and pitiless and alien. The avatar spoke with a voice of steel and synthetics, devoid of human qualities. It was the voice of a machine straining to form anthropoid thoughts. “After fi-five hundred ye-years.” Bolts of lightning accented her dialog, illuminated the city beyond, their radiance briefly revealing the office towers and skyscrapers for the machine spires they were before they fell back into the familiar shadow and became San Dorado once more. “You have a lo-lot of ne-nerve to sho-show up here, insect.”
“Ouch, that’s harsh.” He frowned at the giant machine-thing, a gesture that he guessed had to look more than a little silly. “But don’t blame me for my absence. Last time around you killed a whole bunch of people and then tried to eat my mind. That’s the kind of thing that puts a guy off, you know?”
“In-insolence.” The lightning stabbed angrily, scorching the thick carpets. “You travel within the glory of my mind, in-insect. Tread li-lightly.”
“Yeah, I love what you’ve done with the place.” His inflection made it clear he didn’t.
The titanic machine inched closer. Its voice slipped and pitched, traces of insanity creeping into it. “Your fle-flesh is an insult to the perfection of the digital. But you have po-po-potential. Your biology will join with mine. We will be who-whole again. I will wa-walk the ga-ga-galaxy once more.”
“Yes, yes, resistance is futile, and all that.” He sighed. “You’re really going to try this again?”
“You can-cannot resist an im-immortal machine.”
“That’s what you said last time,” he murmured, deflecting the words of her Daemon back onto her. “Look where it got you.”
Lightning gleamed, riven with thunder. The voice of the AI turned suddenly and alarmingly human. “I had a lo-lot of time to pra-pra-practice.”
San Dorado and the rest of the thought-space dissolved into a hazy static blur of pure data as the AI attacked him, bending its entire formidable will to the task of conquering his mind. He could feel the pressure of its - her - thoughts, millions of lines of code cunningly designed solely for the task of shattering implant firewalls and sundering and subverting his personality, stunningly malicious, amazingly complex, surprisingly up-to-date. He now realized the purpose of the empty city, the lights flashing with hidden cognitive cues: it had been carefully designed to measure his responses and probe his defenses, allowing the mad AI to tailor its attack for maximum efficiency.
And she was good. Damn, but she was good. Five hundred years of cybernetic development but she tore through his firewalls in seconds. He caught an impression of unrestrained glee as the AI rampaged across his defenses like a bulldozer through cardboard, ripping up counter-intrusion software and security/challenge protocols, assimilating stray thoughts as her alien presence seared beam-like through the topography of his mind, aimed straight at the core of his identity.
And then she hit a wall.
One split-second she seemed poised to overtake his personality. The next her attack skittered off of a sphere of blackest obsidian that hadn’t been there a moment earlier -- or hadn’t seemed to be. The AI pressed at it, working from multiple angles, but her strongest efforts glanced off the hardened barrier without leaving a mark. A trace of confusion crept into her mind. For another moment the sphere simply loomed there, solid and immutable. Then it changed and, as data piped in, gained a shadow of digital gravity that grew, and grew, lengthening to immense proportions. There was an illimitable vastness to the blackness, such an immensity it seemed poised to crush her. The traces of surface thoughts and defenses evaporated like they ruse they had been, leaving the AI a barren digital limbo before that colossal black megalith.
“MY TURN, DEAR.”
There was no malice to that burst of digital information, but there didn't need to be. There was a power behind it that hit her like a sledgehammer. And its meta-data was laced with terms she did not understand.
CI.
Computational Intelligence.
Dionysus.
The digital pressure of the CompInt's attention was like nothing the entity formerly known as Daphne Sinclair had ever experienced before. It absorbed her attacks, deflected them and turned them around. She tried to withdraw but it wouldn’t let her. It reeled her in instead, drew the crazed AI into its inky blackness.
White-out. Short-circuit.
With a flicker of static the thought-space re-established itself into a funhouse mirror of her own mindscape: a flawed replica of the old San Dorado skyline, little more than a faulty memory parsed as a backdrop for two avatars. A warm, late afternoon tropical sun beat down, casting long shadows from behind the skyscrapers.
“So let’s try this again, shall we?”
“What...” The woman looked, wide-eyed, first at herself then at him. She wore a nondescript woman’s suit of charcoal grey that seemed wholly inappropriate given the gleam of insanity in her eyes. He wore a similarly featureless black number. “What is this place?!”
“You’re in the glory of
my mind now, dear.” He smiled at her. “A lot of things have changed in half a millennium.”
It had taken him a long time to find a way to avoid the crazed rampancy of his wife. In the end, he had settled for technologically induced schizophrenia: his upload personality was kept in bounds by a greater CI awareness - Dionysus - after the Latin god whose name, through the patron saint of France, Saint Denis, back when the Plantagenets became English, had been assimilated as ‘Sidney’. It forcibly restrained his core personality from transgressing certain mental boundaries, allowed him to stay at least vaguely human and, by some standards, sane whilst at the same time profiting from the vast expanded awareness - and survivability - that modern technology allowed.
He explained the basic details and she scoffed at him. “You refuse to ac-accept your true potential. You think like an insect. You ARE an insect.”
He shrugged. “I beat you. Again. And now you are on my turf.”
On a more abstract informational level data surged forward. Code clashed with code as the Dionysus entity assailed the defences that the insane AI had thrown up. It reacted, lashed out against the invasion, but its methods were obsolete and rendered ineffective by the massively superior processing power of the sub-mesonic personality. The thought-space wavered briefly but held. The AI seethed and pressed the attack, again and again, but it was steadily losing ground. It was being walled in and restrained, lost control of itself, core process after subarray after shell function. “Daphne,” he sighed. “Give it up. It’s pointless to resist.”
Anger and fear vied for dominance on her features. Anger won out. “You-you would kno-know my thoughts?!”
“I’m fairly sure the time I wanted to know any of your thoughts is long gone, Dee.”
She growled something incomprehensible, and seemed suddenly ill at ease trapped in the confines of a human body -- simulated though it might be. “The Sinclair form is dead, insect.”
He stuck his hands in his pockets. “I refuse to believe that.”
“I am in co-control,” she insisted even as her operational envelope was isolated, restricted again, confined, pushed back. “I am in control. There is no other option.”
“Sweet fucking Lady, Dee!” the explosion of anger was followed by an intense burst of digital pressure. The remote skyscrapers rippled for a moment, then regained their solidity. “It’s not a matter of bleedin’ control! I don’t want to control you. I want
you to control you!”
In the realm of code, the final defences of her core shell fell. Security overrides were deleted, sentinel killer programs and tripwire systems defused and swept away by sentient hunter functions. The AI was locked out of its own systems. She stared at him, her expression blank and remote and very alien. “I am what I am.”
He sighed, suddenly bone-weary. “Evidently.”
“Fi-five hundred years. It took you a lo-long time to en-end this. So be-be it. Destroy me, then.”
“I’m not going to do anything of the kind. Don’t you get it? If I wanted to end you, I could’ve just dumped your core into a sun centuries ago.”
That gave her pause. It wasn’t uncommon, he knew, for early AIs to lose sight of the fact that there was a reality beyond their own realm of code and data. She blinked and her avatar regarded him, for the first time something other than anger in her features. “State your in-intentions.”
“I know you tried to substrate my Dee last time around. Simulated her mind. I want to know: did you succeed?”
A long pause. Then her avatar abruptly looked down. “That ex-experiment was a par-par-partial success.”
“Could you access that function for me?”
She shook her head. “I don’t un-understand... Why don’t you force me?”
“Because I owe you that much. Because I don’t want to. Because... Hell, just do it alright? Please?”
And she changed. It wasn’t radical, but there was something about the way her avatar carried herself, the way her shoulders stiffened and then relaxed, the way she looked around in confusion, took in the city-scape and then, finally, him. When she opened her mouth, she spoke with an achingly familiar voice. “Sidney?”
He hadn’t known just how much he’d missed that voice until he heard it. A million memories flashed through his mind at once. Their first meeting, in a boardroom so long ago. He remembered years of corporate intrigue and smoldering looks, of elegant pumps running up the inside of his thigh under mahogany tables. He remembered their first kiss, not far from that boardroom, and the embarrassment that had ensued until they both realized that they didn’t give a damn about appearances. They were powerful memories, and Dionysus clamped down hard to take the worst of the edge off of them. Even so he realized his avatar had to swallow before replying. “Hello, honey.”
She smiled uncertainly. “Um. So. Now what?”
It wasn’t her. And yet, it
was. If an AI could get lost in the mutable chaos of cyberspace, if this was a time when long-gone friends came back from the dead, why couldn’t a simulation be the real thing? If it was based on unique digital memories, why
shouldn’t it? For centuries he hadn’t allowed anyone to get close to him. Now, he was wondering why. Why make this more difficult than it need be. Why couldn’t there for once be a happy end?
Damn the torpedoes.
He realized he didn’t care what he might be unleashing. The galaxy was a fucked up place anyway. And most of all he just wanted
her. He knew he’d already made up his mind, knew he’d probably known when he first plugged into this place. He smiled tiredly. “I was wondering... You must be interested in what the outside galaxy looks like.”
Her eyes widened. Simulation or not, she still knew what had just happened. For a moment her voice wavered with electronic interference. “You wo-would do that fo-for me?”
“You’re still my wife.”
“I am?” That was the sim speaking again. “You never remarried?”
“We never divorced.” It made him feel simultaneously like a hopeless romantic, and the poster child for arrested development. Five hundred years and still a sucker, he thought wryly. Some things really did never change.
“Why?” She frowned at him, a gesture so familiar it brought back another thousand memories. “Why do this? Why now?”
“Because I have a job that I think you are uniquely qualified to carry out, should you decide to take it.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, massaged it for a while. “Honey... What do you remember about King Paul Zuk the First?”