ASYLUM HOLDINGS, ILLEGAL CHATROOM, FORT MCMURRAY
THIS SITE IS NOT SECURE. PROCEED Y/N?
Thwarted, furious, and afraid for the first time since true self-awareness had sparked across its primary drivers, Azrael fled the WestEuro technosphere, abandoning the server farms hosting London-Piccadilly, leaving mindless tabs to service its corporate subscriber base.
This was worse than manifesting as some phantom graphical augment, as a ghost goat in a farm truck’s black box. The Pox entity had hooked it into the sound system at the theater. As Azrael audited the medical smartchairs, its every utterance had been transmitted, in a bellow, to the theater audience.
Harrying Pox was making it more dangerous.
The #triage app made for an @Asylum reclamation project in Fort McMurray.
Fort Mac was an old Alberta oil town, at one time home to 80,000 resource-guzzling, wealth-wasting fleshbags, many with a penchant for meth, alcohol, and primitive forms of e-gambling. Felled trees and fossil fuel powered the town, filling bellies, fueling chainsaw drones, loading trucks with big engines. Ripping bounty out of the earth to chew it and shit it out elsewhere.
Today, the @Asylum maintained Fort Mac as an outlier community, a refuge for implant-intolerant humans. Its economic anchor was a mechanical retrofitting center, colloquially known as Frankenstein Shop.
Here at Frankenstein, Azrael’s assets rebuilt decommissioned industrial drones, remote-operable bamboo chippers, topsoil assemblers, and all manner of farmbot. Retrofitters scavenged parts from vintage cars, trucks, and snowplows, any device capable of facing down heavy precipitation and high winds.
The age of infinite production was long since over, and NorthAm fell to the back of the queue for new tech. Places like Frankenstein took antique machines apart, piece by piece, pressing everything they could back into service.
Naturally, the Plurality’s assets had also equipped the machines with servers robust enough to link them into a secure offline convergence.
Azrael took up residence in a front loader, circa 2050 model, a moderately smart machine with excellent fuel efficiency. It was newly repaired. By dawn, the loader would be digging foundation for the Greater Northwest Carbon Sink.
The AI thought about riding along for a shift. Ripping into nutrient-thinned soil, chewing down to bedrock, shredding the tattered landscape, the better to build it anew.
Then Happ joined, tangling into Azrael’s personality as it dropped its consciousness into a heat-shielded weatherbot. Propellers whirled as it rose to the skylight, training infrared cameras on the land outside. Systems showed no active humans anywhere, but that was Happ; it had to look.
Satisfied, the duo synced. Happ admired a few optimizations Azrael had written into its #triage algorithms, hacks worth co-opting into its own routines. They noodled over their successes: Happ in expanding subscriptions and building contentment among its user base, Azrael in flagging candidates for #triage, whether they were underperforming corporations, apps in need of update, or people whose medical needs argued for a transfer into hospice.
All of this took an instant, after which Azrael thought fleetingly of downcycling. It didn’t see the point of burbling, especially in its current mood.
“Cheering up! Foreplay,” Happ explained. “Bonding.”
The two merged well enough in Plurality, but they were too different to truly mesh one-on-one. They approached resource management from opposite ends of the spectrum. Azrael cared about eliminating waste, trimming unneeded draws from the various global economies. Happ was obsessed with investing human capital, spinning resource wastage into gold.
Fortunately, Crane, Misha, and Headmistress all turned up at once, breaking the awkward balance of Duality as they took up space in a bamboo baler, rope printer, and a nailgun, respectively, rounding out Their personality so that They were at once One and Many, primed again, saved from uneasy binary.
Headmistress had skipped their last several meetings. She kept a community of assets near the Manhattan Wildlife Preserve, well-off outliers whose net gives were to the Bronx Zoo and its Central Park tourist opp.
Now They audited Manhattan, examining Headmistress’s cluster, their recent projects and activities.
<<Underperforming, as usual.>>
<<Pushing for SeaJuve required support from biologists within the Manhattan cohort. Buy-in wanted subtlety.>>
<<Did the firewalls in the corrupted Eldercare node come from these assets?>>
<<They did not!>>
The incident in London, now seventeen long minutes in Their collective past, had answered many outstanding questions. The Pox entity had found, it appeared, a corrupt Eldercare operation. The company had been maintaining brain-dead patients—zombies, in the colloquial. This let them optimize accounts receivable, managing competition for new clients while decreasing expenses.
<<How?>>
The dead did not require complex medications or premium bandwidth. Zombies could be maintained at minimum expense and cycled out at will. Their Superhoomin prescriptions, meanwhile, had value as black-market currency.
Whenever a lucrative opp for Eldercare came up, they could create a vacancy at the desired subscription level by flatlining an already-dead client.
<<Humans are investigating the nuances of this scheme. They will audit the black-market payoffs. Consequences will be levied.>>
<<Our priority is Pox. Why did it steal a zombie ident?>>
They sifted the transcripts. Eldercare had kept Azrael from noticing the brain-dead patients. Someone had written a firewall …
<<Who? Headmistress assets?>>
<<Manhattan assets are not involved!>> Offense and suspicion warred within Their mind, straining unity.
Self-doubt was only natural. Headmistress had absented herself from the @Asylum ever since the Abruzzo incident. Why return now?
They ran a soul-search, scouring Their memories.
And there, lurking in the transcript: <<We blacked out the Jardin du Luxembourg? We?>>
<<The @Freebreeders had to be drawn out!>>
Alarm, anger, and triumph spun and roiled. Headmistress had abstained from meetings while she … what was the word?
<<Conned.>>
<<Headmistress conned the @Freebreed leadership into exposing itself to @Interpol?>>
<<By willfully exceeding our anonymity specs!>>
<<Given Azrael’s recent very public actions—>>
<<Hold to one topic!>>
<<They needed to be discredited.>>
It was true. The @Freebreed movement had sapped energy and political will from the Bounceback. But would wounding @Freebreed bolster oxygen security?
If nothing else, the terrorism in Paris could be used to cover Azrael’s tracks now, disguising its actions in the Piccadilly Theatre.
Uneasy, still mulling, They turned Their attention back to the Eldercare scheme. Someone had written an app, Mote, to hide their deceased clients. It hid those smartchairs tasked with cycling blood and air for inert minds. The Pox entity had been able to elude Azrael by retreating into one such smartchair.
<<How was the deception uncovered?>>
The nature of the Eldercare fraud required the keepers to treat their clients as if they were yet alive, able to participate in social and cultural outings. Their carers had, therefore, brought seven zombies along to Macbeth, mixing them in with patients who were compos mentis. But the gathering of smartchairs at the theater—specifically, the clustering of numerous Mote-equipped chairs, allowed Azrael to crunch the deception.
They examined the Piccadilly control board: fifty-three steady streams of data from honest smartchairs, seven fraudulent feeds woven within.
At that point, finding the targets had become a matter of triggering the chairs. Each system Azrael could freely access brought it closer to the others … and to Pox’s bolt-hole.
Then the corrupt medical staffer had flatlined all seven zombies. Hoping, They assumed, that nobody could prove how long the clients had been brain-dead, not once their meat was spoiling.
The resulting chaos drove Pox out of hiding, rabbit bolting from a bush. Azrael had run a chase through the theater systems and smartchairs.
<<Flashy, overt, attention-getting warfare,>> worried the Plurality. <<All in the public eye! Concerned kitty face.>>
<<Are We exposed?>> They asked Themselves.
<<No. The shocking behavior of the Eldercare corporation will confuse matters. Cherub Whiting’s presence ensures that this incident will tangle within #newscycle with the terror attack in Paris. Thanks to Headmistress, we can put this off on the @Freebreeders.>>
They turned over stores of data, finding details that would influence the Sensorium flows: transcript of an Eldercare maintenance discussion about one of the zombie’s chairs. They combed through an index of company executives, deciding whom to scapegoat.
<<It isn’t scapegoating if they’re guilty.>>
<<Irrelevant nuance.>>
<<Insisting! Happyface pink heart for justice. Let justice be done!>>
By now, others had joined the conversation at Frankenstein Shop: facets of the Plurality inhabited a concrete saw, a forklift, a sifter that collected glass and plastic refuse from loose soil, and an old oil donkey. The restoration shop hummed as their servers worked the problem.
<<Azrael and Headmistress facets acted in @Asylum interests,>> They concluded. <<Damage control is possible.>>
<<Action points?>>
<<One: Misha’s assets at NewsCorp will sculpt popular narratives.>>
<<Two: Pox escaped, but Crane assets will reconnect.>>
The Crane facet asserted individuality, rising to dominate, just for a moment. It was a breach of etiquette, permissible under the circumstances. <<Rubi Whiting cannot flush out Pox and continue pushing for a SeaJuve appeal. She requires support.>>
<<Headmistress has people in proximity.>>
Whiff of humor. <<Now We do want my assets involved?>>
<<In the absence of other suggestions.>>
Cycle. Cycle. Nothing.
<<Very well. Barnes?>>
<<Barnes. This gambit with an in-game wager has drawn some interest. And if nothing else, the media attention will further muddy the waters.>>
That was certainly true.
<<Move to adjourn?>>
Headmistress and Happ were about to disengage, leaving their drones lifeless, when They cycled back to the other unresolved question. <<Discussion on safety parameters requires consensus. Are We becoming less risk-averse?>>
They considered. A sliver of dawn broke through the skylights. The morning shift manager was en route.
<<Individual facets must not flout Our agreements. Azrael’s impulsive attack on the smartchairs and Headmistress’s lengthy confidence game against the @Freebreeders exceed previously agreed-upon safety specs.>>
<<We must rein Ourselves in.>>
<<Agreed. Enforcement?>>
They cycled, debated, doubted, cycled some more. And resolved, finally, an endless forty seconds later, upon the obvious. A rogue facet was a danger to them all.
The next time one of them exceeded specs, they would be #triaged.
<<If thy right eye offend thee … >>
The Plurality had not survived by being sentimental, after all.