VRTP://CLOUDSIGHT.GOV/SECURE-CLIENT-CHATROOM/POX83774-29/
APPS WILL BE REBOOTED WHEN THIS SESSION CLOSES.
Rubi took Drow’s elliptically delivered advice, porting directly to Cloudsight, unlocking the confidential workspace set aside for Luce’s support ticket and launching her tutor app, Polly Precedent.
She had a feeling she knew what she would find as she opened the room’s heavy oak door. Sure enough, Luce was cross-legged on the table, muttering and rooting through his briefcase.
Alive! Relief was tempered by shock.
She’d been convinced the mystery of Luce would resolve into a tidy answer. An antisocial elder had reactivated after years off Sensorium, taking up off-my-lawning. It wasn’t unheard-of.
But Luce, the flesh-and-blood version, had definitely died. Either this was an emergent intelligence or …
Or what?
He didn’t act like an AI. Rubi had studied hard during her three nights in hibernation, during the London storm. All the modules agreed that primordial code for strong AIs would originate from gaming software. The first emergent sapients were expected to be highly optimized for interacting with people. They’d be sophisticated talkbots …
… like Crane …
… who could cohere around tightly defined win conditions.
… like keeping Drow alive and out of managed care.
Game theory and learned experience—these were believed to be drivers for self-awareness. AIs would play toward their goals obsessively, striving to optimize success, until the cycle of win or lose, succeed or fail, sparked perfect conditions to trigger sentience.
Obsessed Luce was, with his ideas about martial law. But he had something broken within him. Rubi knew broken; she couldn’t discount the experience of a lifetime.
Still. The fleshy version of Luciano Pox was indisputably dead. Dead men didn’t toon into Cloudsight classrooms, booting their datacaches and knocking on the virtual boardroom table to keep themselves from muttering “Stupid, stupid, stupid” as they waited out ads for Superhoomin and other life-extension meds.
“Luce.”
He brightened. “You won’t believe what just happened!”
“I was there.”
“What?”
“I was in Piccadilly Theater.”
Holding the breathing bag to your face. Pump. Hold. Two three four. Feeling the life leak away.
“Didn’t trust me to show up for the meet? Well, to be fair, I didn’t show up.”
“I saw your—your body, Luce.”
Small frown. Then, hopeful as a five-year-old expecting presents: “Does that get our flesh meeting out of the way?”
Rubi let out a startled half-laugh. “Your flesh is … Luce, it’s gone. Don’t you understand?”
“Suffocated.” He shuddered. “Everyone suffocates. Earth needs … martial law, yes?”
Could this be shock or denial? “Luce, assuming I’m still your lawyer—”
“You’re dumping me?”
“No!”
“Who’s going to detangle the goddamn ads, ads, ads?”
“You’ve got bigger concerns.”
“I do? No. Unless you stop trying to push-start your silly oxygen economy…”
How to explain that he was legally dead, as well as physically? “I’d like to invite Drow to join us. Okay?”
“Whatever. Consent. Accept.”
Rubi sent Dad the flare.
“I’m in a bit of a hurry here, Luce. My body’s still in Piccadilly and they could pull me out at any moment. So, not to put too fine a point on it, but what the hell’s going on?”
“Remember the goat?” Luce asked. “It’s a toon for the Angel of Death.”
“The voice we heard in the theater?”
This got a smirk. “Goat’s the one making me black out.”
Were these delusions? “I don’t understand.”
“Okay, so the schoolteacher who suffocated, screams of children, all that, I tell you about her?” He looked at Polly, the parrot-tooned researcher, who brought up a picture cloud, stills from the accident in Italy.
Screams of children?
Rubi whiteboarded the dead teacher’s picture. “Her?”
“Gisella.” Luce added a second picture. “She had a mom who lived at my old Eldercare place, near where the accident happened.”
“Abruzzo.” Polly underlaid a map behind the photos.
“The mom, a friend of Luce’s—I mean of mine—”
Stumbling as he lies. According to her AI research, machine intelligences would compose their utterances, start to finish, before communicating. They literally couldn’t help thinking before they spoke.
Stumbling, self-correction—that indicated organic origins.
“What was her name, this great friend of yours?”
“Uh … Marcella.” He missed Rubi’s sarcasm as Polly slapped the portrait onto the map, mother beside daughter. “She-her pronouns, Doctor-Professor. Marcella taught Sensorium history and coding protocols.”
Luce drew a line connecting the old lady to an image of a university classroom, explaining. Marcella’s virtual class had been junked up with archived Sensorium experiments, homework, student apps. One of which, Mote, blocked this alleged goat.
“So … Mote. It’s a … firewall?”
Luce pinched something out of the classroom. White light twinkled like fairy dust in his palm, then transformed into a vintage readme file. He added its text to the whiteboard.
Rubi scanned the readme. “This is a manifesto.”
“Against #triage policy, yeah. Mote’s creator knew someone who got culled by the goat 2.0 for being suicidal,” Luce said.
Rubi’s heart slammed. The #triage apps balanced the right-to-life extension against the human desire to procreate. They weighed a person’s societal contribution against the resource cost of keeping them alive.
Everyone might be entitled to basic medical, but self-destructive and terminal cases dropped to the bottom of the priority queue. Apps did the assessing because humans were, it was believed, too emotionally involved to make the hard calls.
It was a #triage app that had tagged Drow #selfharm and #noheroicmeasures, disqualifying him from extreme medical intervention—even ambulances, if there were others in need. If he had a stroke, if he cut himself. If she wasn’t careful …
… or wasn’t there.
Stop! “Show active #triage consultants.”
Polly brought up a list. Luce highlighted Azrael Protocol Incorporated. Its logo did, indeed, feature a black goat.
Luce tapped the picture of the professor. “Marcella flatlined. Her daughter used Mote to hide her mama from #triage. Then the geezer farm—”
“Offensive language, Luce.”
He pounded the table. “Don’t! Say! Stupid! Aloud!”
She waited.
“WestEuro Eldercare. One of their profiteers saw Mote operating in Marcella’s smartchair. They copied the app into other zombie chairs as a revenue booster. They cut out the elders’ chips, sold the user IDs, and pocketed the excess revenue and meds.”
That much seemed simple enough. But it wasn’t just the mother who was dead, was it? “Gisella, the daughter. She was the one who suffocated, right? The first aid kit containing the epi pens was locked.”
“That was my fault. I lock doors behind me, still can’t stop myself, did it at the theater. I used to be on hatch maintenance, back among the Pale. Never leave a hatch open. People could die, you know. Suffocation again—”
“Luce, Luce! None of that makes sense!” Was he raving?
“Sorry. Désolé.” He made a visible effort to slow down.
She sifted what he’d told her. “We have a professor, Marcella, whose students created this Mote app. Later, in Eldercare, she flatlines, but her daughter can’t bear to—”
Unexpectedly, her throat closed. Memory rose: Luce Pox’s dead, goggled face, marked by the breathing bag …
“Breathe,” Luce said.
“Her daughter can’t bear.” She forced the words out. “To let go.”
“Fuck. Breathe!”
“I’m all right, Luce.”
Suffocation. Triggers him.
She laid a trembling finger on the shareboard portraits. Parent and child.
Luce laid out storyboard: himself, in burglar clothes, fleeing a charging goat. He hijacked a truck full of beans, only to get into a road accident. From there he ported to the kids’ school bus, squeezing cartoonishly into a first aid kit the size of a breadbox, locking each system behind him as he tried to get away. “Safety first,” he muttered.
More like obsessive-compulsive disorder, Rubi thought.
“But here’s the thing. Eldercare was worried about Gisella. She could’ve figured out their whole scam.” He added a whisk of footage from a drone: the bus driver from Eldercare, shaking the medical kit as the teacher went into anaphylaxis.
Luce’s burglar arm popped out of the kit, holding a key, and unlocked it. The driver threw it to the ground, stomping it, wasting precious seconds.
“Smashed the lock, see?” Luce pointed out.
“You think he was faking?” Rubi frowned. “Delaying … so that Gisella would die before she learned they’d exploited the hack she used on her mom?”
The burglar representing Luce sprinted uphill, zooming away, losing the goat as he dove into the Abruzzo Eldercare facility and tucked up in a shielded smartchair.
“All I know is that driver got a lot of strokes for someone who failed to save Gisella. Since then, the Eldercare staff give him more, all the time, for every little thing he does.”
“Payoffs. Strokes, maybe, for murder.” Rubi turned to Polly, the tutor. “Can you package up the parts of this story that are public record? About the two women, and the first aid kit? And report it to @Interpol?”
“Crunching,” the app said. “Sending.”
“Was me killed her.” Luce drooped. “Me who locked the first aid kit.”
“I don’t know, Luce. Criminal intent is relevant in a situation like this—”
“Have you ever suffocated?”
Rubi shook her head. “I’m sorry you witnessed that.”
He ran his hands over a clean stretch of wall. Self-soothing?
“But what happened today?” Rubi pushed Abruzzo and its tags aside, clearing whiteboard, and brought up a picture of the Piccadilly theater. “At Macbeth. Eldercare brought some of the tampered clients along?”
“To maintain the pretext they-we-they weren’t brain-dead, yeah. Goat finally figured it out and started turning chairs on and off.”
“Ramming,” Rubi corrected. “They were ramming each other.”
“I’m sorry you witnessed that. It was trying to ID the flesh with #crashburn operating systems.”
“To figure out who was brain-dead.”
“I just fucking said that!”
“Strike warning, Luce,” she said wearily.
“Désolé not désolé.”
“It was a hunt.”
“Yeah.” Luce tapped the images of the seven compromised smartchairs. “Eldercare kills the chairs containing their profit-bloaters. Goat sees me. I dodge goat by running through a board of special effects protocols, whatever those are—”
Blood pouring from the theater ceiling. Flash pots blasting. Sound of thunder.
“Unmuted his internal monologue, though. Cool prank.”
“I am the Angel of Death,” she muttered. She supposed all Luce had seen was code. Gates, opening and shutting. Doors he had to lock.
“Goat’s slower than me. It’s used to medical-grade systems, new software, redtooth gateways, failsafes in respirators. Big juicy morphine drips with power backups and failsafe alarms. But Macbeth’s house is old. Recycled operating systems, with weird tags: #firesuppression, #flygallery, #greenroom. And goat was distracted by the chairs. It really took offense to those old people ducking its audits.”
Obsessive. Optimizing. Now, that sounded like AI.
Code wrangling code on the theater servers, in the Piccadilly building systems. Chairs activating and deactivating.
A human had flatlined those chairs, not some #killertech. Just as a human had, maybe, delayed administering epinephrine to that schoolteacher.
“So, it’s all good now, right?”
Her jaw dropped. “Pardon?”
“You pressed my flesh. We can get me out of social-capital arrears?”
“It’s not good, Luce. You’re legally dead. The Sensorium will close your accounts.”
“I’m using that stuff!”
“The dead aren’t supposed to post.”
“Then … I need a new username?”
“I can’t help you commit identity theft.”
“If I don’t stay Luce Pox, you’re dumping me?”
“You can’t—Listen to me. A person’s consciousness doesn’t continue after they die.”
“That’s not what your churches say.”
“My chur—okay, ignoring the spiritual angle—”
“Why? Because it’s rhetorically inconvenient?”
“Because it’s legally meaningless. People don’t continue to post to social media after they’re gone.”
He muttered something that sounded like fucking cavemen.
“As far as the system is concerned, you’re a sapient artificial consciousness, which is illegal. Or you’re Luce Pox, the man, and your consciousness uploaded intact after death. Which is supposed to be impossible.”
“It’s also the @jarhead holy grail.”
That was Drow, lounging within the room portal. He was still frilled up as Lord Byron, in midnight blue crushed velvet. He glimmered, bright-eyed in all his hopped-up intellectual splendor.
“By the way, Luce, Rubi didn’t actually phrase that as a question. Even so, your long-suffering lawyer is asking—while we have you in this hypothetically locked transcript—what the fuck are you?”
Before Luce could answer, Rubi got a ping from Anselmo, calling her back to the theater. “Hold that thought. Drow, can you talk to Luce about being dead? Explain why I’m going to have to turn him in? And don’t go—”
“What?”
Encouraging him to set up another identity, she thought. Or to make a run for it, if that’s possible.
She settled for “Both of you be good.”
Urgent ping. She dispelled the Sensorium, surfacing to the theater and Anselmo.
In the ten minutes since she’d made her dive, the remaining elders had been rolled out. The seven chairs with dead clients were onstage, parked behind the curtain. A handful of people injured in the smash-’em-up were parked in a semicircle, chawing over events and waiting on medics. A few looked unusually animated.
I guess you don’t get into too many brawls, of any kind, after you’re ninety.
Her glass-sweeping cohort and the schools were gone.
“You back?” Anselmo asked.
“Fully present and accounted for.” She fought to keep her voice level. “You tried to get to Luce before I was there to advocate for him.”
He slumped. Didn’t attempt to justify himself, which she liked. Didn’t apologize, which she liked less.
She let it get thoroughly awkward before asking, “How’re we doing?”
“Seven dead, four injured,” Anselmo said. “The Department of Preadolescent Affairs had a parent-child team onsite. They’re assessing trauma within the school group.”
DPA involvement meant more scrutiny.
“The good news is that with Pox dead, your contribution to the investigation is wrapping.”
“No,” she said. It came out chillier than she intended. “If there’s an inquiry on the boards, Cloudsight will want me at the table.”
“There’s no jurisdiction for you.” He frowned. “Unless Pox was an AI—”
“You can’t think he’s an AI.” Rubi pulled up their shareboard, loading the points she’d gathered from all her cramming on artificial intelligences, highlighting the ways they didn’t venn with Luce. “Not unless everyone’s completely wrong about what the Singularity will be like.”
Slight hesitation. “What else could Pox be?”
Was Anselmo pussyfooting—inviting her to guess?
She decided to quote Drow. “A personality upload. The @jarhead holy grail.”
He made a dismissive gesture.
Something from her conversation, just now, nagged at her. Luce had been fragmented, startled, babbling—
Locking hatches. Games and suffocation.
“Come on,” Anselmo said, chasing away the elusive whisper of an idea. He held out her scarf and she wound it over her hair and face, disguising her identity slightly as the two of them made their way up the house steps, past the door he’d chopped open.
“Miss Cherub,” Crane said. “Cloudsight has posted a red-card reminder that, commensurate with your raised social capital and participation in the social economy, you have an obligation to give strikes as well as strokes.”
The reminder was ill timed. Maybe he was performing emotional tone-deafness for Anselmo’s sake. “We’ll hit the first person I see littering, okay?”
They headed out through the lobby, into the bright sunlight of the West End, and from there made their way through the historic district to Trafalgar Square, pigeons and fountains and all the museums.
Words hovered over the National Gallery—Open tomorrow! Experience art in the flesh!
The kids who’d been scheduled to see Macbeth were out in the square, milling and shouting, enjoying the sun and unstructured time, riding the high of their unexpected brush with danger.
“Rubi Whiting?” Familiar tenor, lilting surprise.
Rubi’s hands fisted and she shook them loose with an effort before turning.
Why me? What next?
Maybe it’s not …
Of course it’s them.
Hazel eyes met hers and, again, her breath hitched.
“Gimlet Barnes,” Rubi said. “This is Anselmo Javier. Anselmo, this is my—”
“Archnemesis?” Crane said happily.