THE SURFACE—WESTEURO
METRO LONDON, IN TRANSIT TO SCOTLAND YARD
How could Luce be off-grid? What did such a thing even mean?
Rubi pondered the question as Anselmo requisitioned transport, as they got into a rolling meeting room and zoomed away from the British Museum, hotly pursued by a cloud of journo bots.
“Where are we going?”
“Scotland Yard,” he said, biting off the words as he laid map coords on the table between them.
“Actual Scotland Yard?” asked Gimlet.
“It’s a transcript-crunching center,” Frankie said, reading the tags. “Too #historic to knock down, so they converted it.”
That made sense. With Cloudsight wielding the big stick of peer pressure against minor social transgressions, and no property crime to speak of, the bulk of policing had fallen to giggers on the bottom end, and crews of specialists clawing for the few jobs at the top.
Frankie’s research shared to the group. The remnants of the Met were one such specialist policing team. They sifted the Haystack for evidence of fraud, system-hacking, hoarding, grubbing, and terrorist conspiracies.
“Why go across town?” Gimlet asked.
“Journo bots are banned there.” And indeed, their swarm of followers had stopped at the invisible edge of the quiet zone, forming up in a humming, airborne wall.
Rubi started posting knowns about Luce, trying to cover what she knew. The problem had far outstripped the beginner AI theory modules she had taken in the past week.
Gimlet leaned close, subbing, “Javier isn’t a coder … that’s why a tech is tasked to the case. We’ll use a sim to search for your man.”
It wouldn’t all be server maps and circuit codes, then. Rubi nodded, grateful that Gimlet had seen the source of her anxiety.
Getting divorced, hmmm? Now that she knew there was trouble at home, Rubi realized she could see it in Gimlet’s face—shadow around the eyes, a clenched jaw. And, of course, the wildly stressed-out child at their side. Still, they had configged their primer for the theater: smooth cream-colored one-piece suit, close-fitting, custom cut by a premium fashion service, with a printed scarf serving as petal.
It made her feel out-and-out shabby. Ragged nails, dust in her hair, and there was even a sticky blast of fake blood, from Macbeth, spattered on her orange glass-sweeping vest. She pulled that off, wadding it up, blood-side-in, for the recycler.
As they arrived at Scotland Yard, they were met by another surprise: the scarred sergeant from the Dover fiasco, Misfortune Wilson.
Rubi sneaked a glance at Anselmo. His face bore a courteous smile, but she was betting he had no interest in networking with Misfortune. The older officer had alienated him back at Dover.
Too bad Scotland Yard’s HR app missed that nuance when it decided to help them friend.
The sergeant took in first Frankie, with her DPA badge, and then her genderqueer parent, with a long, slow blink. “Follow me, everyone.”
They filed through the policing hub and into a sim room, white walls circling a single row of chairs set in a ring. Frankie donned her VR helmet and gloves, running a solemn systems check.
A toon of Malika, the tech, appeared in the middle of the ring. “Hi, everyone. We have a sim we hope will bring everyone up to speed on the search for the Pox entity.”
“Told you,” Gimlet subbed.
“Get on with it,” Anselmo growled.
Henna patterns on the tech’s hands counted down from five to zero, and then icons materialized in midair before them: tree farm, coral reef, zombie’s head, beehive, a windchime vibrating with chords, a toy train system, and finally a starfield.
“Which metaphor shall we use?” Anselmo asked.
“Zombies,” Frankie said immediately.
“Fine—if the sim is family-rated,” Gimlet interrupted.
“Nope.” Malika flicked the monster option away. Parent and child exchanged a glare.
Awkward silence. Rubi asked, “We’ll be seeing a metaphor for what, exactly?”
Malika said, “Sensorium access profiles and server locations.”
“We’re all new to this. Is there a tutorial level?”
“Yes.” Anselmo chose the tree farm.
The walls melted away, leaving them seated in a semicircle on a hovering disk, floating through a vast greenhouse. Orderly rows of coniferous trees stretched to the horizons, protected by a thick glass roof.
Rubi ran her hands over her sleeves; Debutante had selected one of her sharper lawyering suits. Gimlet’s outfit, in toon, was almost identical to the one worn by their flesh but for the addition of a short sword. Anselmo was back in rebel cop gear. Here, his shoulder holster was actually permitted a gun.
“This metaphor represents the infosphere,” Anselmo said. “Each tree is a server farm. Each branch is a user account. Needles represent action: data request, comms, graphics.”
“The branches are human users?” asked Gimlet.
“Yes. Green needles on each branch show actions initiated by a live user. App-mediated decisions show colored chlorophyll.” Anselmo zoomed in on a reddened branch. “Typical users automate more processes as they age. As more decisions become automated, the branch moves from green to russet. When they log, it turns brown. Then the records are reconciled and archived.”
“Meaning the user dies and you wind up accounts?”
“You use this to look for the Singularity?” Frankie was wide-eyed. “This. Is. Beyond!”
It was, wasn’t it? Rubi met her eyes, then raised her good arm so Frankie could high-five her.
Anselmo continued the demo. “Certain app choices show as golden chlorophyll. For example—here’s Mer Whiting and her sidekicks.”
Rubi felt a weird sense, almost as if she was naked, as they zoomed in on a spruce branch, needles clustered green at the core but tipped in umber and gold.
“Gold needles represent activity carried out by Mer Whiting’s sidekick.”
“And the red ones?”
Anselmo frowned.
“Come on, you read enough of my transcript.”
“A Happ subscription and a robust game manager.”
“Coach?” Rubi said.
The gold and red were brightening, alarmingly, as she watched.
Do something. “Do they change if I order Crane and Happ to check for software updates? Can you pick that up?”
“Well—” Anselmo began.
“Totally,” Malika said.
“Crane,” Rubi said. “Pause all apps for fifteen seconds.”
The branch greened up immediately.
“That is so interesting,” Rubi enthused.
“Beyond,” Frankie repeated.
Misfortune surprised them all by asking, “How does this track your runaway app?”
“Luce is a polter,” Rubi corrected.
“You think he’s a polter,” Malika countered.
“Luce didn’t run; he got … pounced on. By that thing that hacked the chairs in the theater.”
“Pure speculation.” Anselmo zoomed in on a fresh green branch. “This was the Luce Pox user account.”
“Looks pretty alive to me,” Frankie said.
“Too alive. Nobody makes such a high percentage of their own decisions,” Anselmo said.
“Why didn’t you just grab him, then?”
Malika answered: “The smartchair at the Eldercare facility camouflaged his activity.”
The branch dimmed to a normal palette.
“… and after his Cloudsight rating bottomed out…”
Bugs swarmed it.
“Ads, ads, ads,” murmured Rubi.
“Can you filter out the green user choices globally?” asked Gimlet.
Malika snapped her fingers, and the whole grove became a sparse forest of spindles. Rubi’s branch suddenly showed the red needles—Crane, Happ, Coach, and her PR manager?—on an otherwise bare twig.
“The metaphors help us identify outlier users. We then pull their transcripts to assess whether they merit investigation.”
Rubi heard herself say: “Whenever you search for a suspected AI, you view it through a graphical sim?”
The utterance hadn’t come from her.
Was that Luce?
No. Crane, standing to one side, invisible to the others, was giving her a big, cartoony Look.
Anselmo answered: “Experts—Malika here—can isolate and drill into code directly. But for the rest of it, data filtering—”
Crane. Had just used her voice to ask about the sim.
They began to move through the forest, leaving Rubi’s tree behind.
“All right?” Gimlet subbed.
What had they seen?
“I’m fine.” Rubi scanned the group transcript. Her question was logged as if she truly was the one who’d spoken. Would @Interpol spot the fraud?
Crane handed her a flat crystalline disk, ruby in composition, with the faceted image of a bird within. One of his markers, like the ones he exchanged with Drow.
He was self-aware, had to be. And she’d brought him to the digital heart of Sapience Assessment, where he was cheerily asking the cops how their systems worked.
She didn’t know if she was more afraid of being arrested for harboring #malware or of him getting permashredded.
The forest blurred as they flew, resolving into the metaphorical edge of the tree farm. Conifers in precisely ordered rows gave way to specimens with frost-white needles. Clean servers, Rubi guessed. Thorn hedges, rising sky high, formed an impenetrable wall beyond.
The group ghosted, passing through the hedge. Beyond it were fenced-in fields of seedlings, small trees in pots, sending pollen out in clouds. Bees traveled from the young plants and into the hedge, transmitting …
… Rubi thought back to the education modules. “The bees are carriers for information packets?”
“These are adolescent accounts,” Anselmo said. “Young users and intolerants require extra security filters. This cohort of users is in Amsterdam Implantation Hospital, awaiting permanent connection.”
As they watched, a toon of a squirrel scaled a potted tree—metaphor for an adolescent user—shoving one of its acorns into its mouth. Dropping to the ground, it plunged into the hedge, thrashing past barbs, letting the bristles comb at its fur, passing through brambles to the other side.
It then ran up the nearest albino tree and perched at the base of one radiating branch, where it set to eating the acorn. Thin green color bled into the branch around it, spreading from around the squirrel’s perch as the animal shrank to nothing.
“New majority-aged user, comprenez-vous?” Anselmo said, speaking to Frankie.
“What’s this got to do with Luce?” Rubi asked.
“Amsterdam is where this all began.” Malika pointed upward, at the glass roof. “Six months ago, this happened.”
The greenhouse shivered. They all saw a tree, fallen from the featureless blue sky, its crown protruding through the glass. Breaks spiderwebbed out from the point of penetration.
“Something bludgeoned its way through the implantation hospital firewalls,” Anselmo explained.
“You’re implying it came from outside the infosphere,” Gimlet said.
“That doesn’t make Luce an AI,” Rubi said.
“Outside,” Gimlet repeated. “How is that possible?”
“I have experts untangling the satellite records,” he said.
“Zooming in on the moment of impact.” Malika ran back the views until the greenhouse looked normal. Then forward: the big tree fell through the glass on the nursery roof, slow-mo, dropping acorns everywhere. One of the squirrels—user-implantation apps, presumably—chose an invading acorn, tucked it into a cheek, and made for the hedge.
“Does this freeze?” Frankie said. The bushy tailed rodent froze in mid-bounce. “Did it damage any kids’ accounts? Their data?”
This seemed beside the point as far as Rubi was concerned. From his expression, Anselmo agreed. But that was the point of the DPA, wasn’t it? To force adults to center the concerns of future stakeholders.
“Surgeries were postponed until everything passed inspection. Everyone’s fine.”
“Agent Amiree, can you show me?” Frankie said.
Rubi walked to the edge of their flying platform and put a tentative toe into the air. A staircase unfurled before her. Grabbing its corners, she stretched it up to access the tree embedded in the greenhouse roof.
The tree had fallen between two panes of greenhouse glass, forcing an opening. “So, Luce rode into the hospital systems via … satellite transmission?”
“So say the logs,” Malika said.
“And then hitched a ride into Sensorium via someone’s implant procedure?”
“Oui,” Anselmo answered.
Think, she told herself. Everything in a metaphor meant something. “This tree dropped more than one acorn.”
“The rest didn’t make it through the hedge. Security protocols #triaged them.”
#Triaged. Attacked?
Rubi imagined Luce’s burglar toon running through the hedge. Running inside from out … where? Reaching up, she plucked a green acorn from the tree. Its cap popped open, as if hinged, revealing an empty space as deep as the top joint of her thumb.
“A shell,” Anselmo translated the metaphor. “Protective camouflage for #malware—”
“Or a poltered human consciousness,” Rubi countered. “If they were alive, in some sense, did the #triage software murder them?”
“No!” Malika’s jaw dropped. Her henna portraits burst into tears, clear indication that she was shocked and horrified at the suggestion. “It’s gotta be @Freebreeders. There’s a cluster of coders in Tampico—”
“Tampico?” Rubi said.
Anselmo shrugged. “There’s been a second breach, in the implantation center in Tampico.”
Malika glazed, probably reviewing notes. “The tech out there’s even more vintage; they can’t even run the latest security updates. Polters or AIs, if they can sneak them into Sensorium there … Javier, you have to run out for a real look.”
“I do, do I?”
Rubi stepped down from the staircase, walking among the seedlings representing newly implanted users. She had been so excited when she got implanted. The time in hospital, away from Drow, had been a novelty. She remembered Crane counting down as she descended into the anesthesia. Waking with an ache in her skull. The absent weight of her VR helmet felt like the itch of a healing scab.
Meeting the others in her transition class, dealing with the usually depressing phenom of people treating her like an oddity, a zoo exhibit—Spawn of the MadMaestro!—hadn’t seemed as bad as usual.
She had half-enjoyed the medical scrutiny, all the checks in case she rejected the neural linkages or popped allergies to buy-in drugs.
Then, finally: her first taste of full immersion, of diving on Conviction and making a glorious unhelmeted run through a gym.
Fencing lessons. The graduation walkthrough—pick a city, any city. Pick a year, any year. Manitoule, from school, had taken her to 1920s Montmartre. They’d run through one of their favorite archived Rabble courses and capped off the experience with full-immersion sex.
After three heady weeks of freedom, Rubi had come into the promise of full citizenship and unlimited participation in Sensorium life.
And got so high on it, I tried to step away from Drow, only to have him spiral when I was in Guelph …
And now she was half a world away from her father.
There was a hint of shadow on her fingernail. An arrow? Crane was trying to tell her something.
If someone combed her transcript, really combed it, they’d find that.
Even so. She stepped farther into the nursery, felt a gust of cool on her face, and turned. There was a sudden sensation of sunshine and warmth. Old kiddie game, getting warmer. He was, subtly, urging her toward the hedge between the seedlings and the Sensorium server farm metaphor.
Another ruby coin ghosted across her palm.
Gritting her teeth, she nonetheless went. Her perception of the hedge changed: it grew until it dwarfed her. Thorns big enough to impale a buffalo curved off of every stem.
She pushed her way into the break in the hedge. There was a smell of vegetation and sharp hint of fruit. Rosehips?
The thorn walls were dense, and bristly as they ran over her skin, almost scratching but not quite causing pain. They tugged and poked at her dreadlocks without holding her back. Her left hand, the one holding the decoy acorn, got the most attention. Pink blossoms tumbled over her fist; pistils dripped grains of pollen over it. Ants in an array of colors and sizes explored the spaces between her fingers.
“Far enough,” Anselmo called. But there was warmth ahead: Crane, asking her to go farther.
She took another step.
The metaphorical hedge closed behind her. Winks of faraway sunlight filtered in. Anselmo gave her a strike for ignoring him.
Red eyes, inches from hers.
Rubi recoiled. A massive, horned, blood-smeared goat’s head plowed through the brambles, snapping its teeth shut over her hand. The acorn burned to ash.
“Hey!” Rubi objected, pulling free.
The goat butted her square in the chest, sending Rubi flying backward. She flew up and out, landing on her butt in the nursery.
“Are you all right?” said Gimlet and Anselmo simultaneously.
“Goats,” she said. “Luce had goat problems.”
“We’ve been beefing up the #triage programs,” Malika said.
The goat face filled the hole Rubi had left in the greenwall, munching contemplatively. Then thorns sprouted before its face, filling the gap in the foliage.
Monster in the hedge. Minotaur in the maze.
I hope you got what you wanted out of that, Rubi thought—but didn’t say—to Crane.
Instead, to distract everyone, she asked, “Did someone say we had to go to Tampico?”
“Not if I can help it.” Anselmo wiped the metaphor all at once, returning them to a bare room. They were flesh again, circled up, and all of them looking down at Rubi, turtled on her back, where she had tumbled backward on her wobbly, government-issue chair.