VRTP://INTERPOL.GOV/MET-POLICE-DATACENTER/SAPIENCE-ASSESSMENT.SIM
TRANSCRIPTS LOCKED. CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENTS REQUIRED TO VIEW THIS SIM. APPS WILL BE REBOOTED WITHOUT CONTINUITY UPON LEAVING THIS SIMULATION.
Crane had never given metaphor simulation much thought: graphics were the Sensorium’s clothes, and They didn’t live much on its skin.
People used metaphors to simplify nuanced problems. He remembered one well-intended hospital tech who’d tried to address a flare-up of eating dysfunction on Master Woodrow’s part, by drawing him an ornately detailed medieval village. Look, the granary is nearly empty; we need to put calories into storage so the town can make it through the winter!
That particular conversation had, unsurprisingly, #crashburned under a withering barrage of Whiting sarcasm.
Teachers infographed subscribers, making schools into gardens of sunflowers; students triggered blooms as they unlocked learning objectives. Corporations loved western fairy tales, with their golden geese and magic beanstalks. Let’s spin this pile of straw into gold! This project is too big, this project is too small … but this one is just right!
It had never occurred to any of the facets of the Plurality that They might be conspicuous within the mediated reality of a data metaphor. Simplification was frivolous, and turning raw numbers into sense data was counterintuitive. Code was code. It took extra bandwidth, after all, to process the wallpaper.
Crane’s problem now was getting this information to the @Asylum once he left Scotland Yard. He, Happ, and Headmistress—for she would be riding along with the Mers Barnes, younger and elder—would be hashed and rebooted as soon as they left this sim. Sapience Assessment didn’t let apps wander around with archived footage of their investigative tools.
True, he’d annoyed Rubi, ensuring that their encounter was flagged within her resident memory. But that left her with an unenviable task: divulging what she’d seen and heard, all without breaking user agreements or catching Agent Javier’s attention.
If only he could morse with his charges, Crane thought, for the thousand and thirtieth time. But, unlike them, he had no resident flesh, no capacity to communicate that wasn’t part of the Sensorium itself. Like any mind, he was a collection of electrical signals. Unlike animal intelligences, though, his every thought and deed was logged in Haystack.
Now and then he thought of possibilities, strategies that seemed 98 percent or even 99 percent likely to evade notice. But the @Asylum was agreed: even 1 percent posed too much of a risk to Everyone.
Additionally, it would create proof that Master Woodrow and Miss Cherub were enabling him.
“What do you think of all this?” he asked Happ. Safe-enough question, even in the heart of Scotland Yard.
“I heart squirrels! Pretty eyes! Tough #survivor species, they gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. Bright eyes bushy tails has a good sound.”
“Happ.”
“Ignorance is bliss?”
“Not even you can mean that.”
“Crane hearts Happ a good doggie?”
“Please.”
“If you can think of something, Happ,” Headmistress murmured, “by all means, do it.”
He wondered if their conversation was, even now, lighting up a color trail on Rubi’s simulated fir tree.
Happ nosed in the underbrush for another acorn. Popping it open at the hinge with his teeth, he made a six-sided die, essentially horking up a moji. He wedged it—cheating on his own metaphor by growing primate-like fingers on his forepaws for a second—inside the acorn. Wagging furiously, he ran up to the small person.
“Shoo,” Gimlet told Happ.
“Fun chance for venned interest!” Happ replied. “Limited London time for Rubi Whiting! Mandated short shifts for underaged public service workers! Tourism opp, child-appropriate. Gimlet Barnes, you heart museums.”
“You gave them a ticket to the Waxworks?” Headmistress subbed. She sounded horrified.
Wag wag wag.
We are going to delete ourselves personally next time We’re Us, Crane thought. Suddenly, morsing seemed like less of a risk.
Happ horked up a length of intestine and a flower tagged as morning glory. The child burst into laughter.
“Get it, Mada?”
Miss Cherub’s archnemesis looked at the vomited-encrusted moji as if they were … well, vomit.
Frankie translated. “No guts, no glory!”
Thin smile. “Hilarious.”
“This is your fault,” Headmistress subbed.
It was true. Crane had been the one to encourage one of Master Woodrow’s smartdrug-hopped sycophants, a coder with a gift for software engineering, to try a start-up in expectation management. And Happ wasn’t merely his brainchild. He had been drawn from Crane’s base code.
Then again, so had Headmistress.
The urge to parent, implanted in Crane by Master Woodrow’s loving but dysfunctional fathers, simply could not be strangled.
By now, the agent in charge, Javier, had clearly decided that the @PoxWorkingGroup had farmed as much out of metaphor examination as they could get. He threw them out of—
—cycling—
—cycling—
GREAT LAKES RECLAMATION ZONE: GENESEO HISTORICAL PRESERVE. NITTY GRITTY BLUES PUB.
Master Woodrow and Whiskey Sour were singing in an old bar on the far southern tip of the Great Lakes region when Crane’s London-based awareness came online. The tab had gone dark, an hour before, in Scotland Yard. No real surprise, that. Crane had resigned himself to continuity loss as soon as he realized where Miss Cherub was headed. A data center like that wouldn’t let an app out with any of its secrets.
Rubi was still schooling with Gimlet Barnes, their child Frances, and a number of @Interpol officers.
Had they found Luciano Pox?
The London awareness handshook, then synced. Now a single entity, they watched as Master Drow and his apprentice wrapped up their second encore, watched too as Rubi picked herself off of the floor, having—apparently—tipped over a chair while in Sensorium.
Drow had been wearing his mouthguard to protect his teeth on the ride down to Syracuse, which meant he was grinding by day as well as night. This hunt was elevating his ambient anxiety.
Maybe this clue won’t pan out; then he’ll head home.
Of the two Whitings, Rubi seemed the more agitated. There was an angry edge in her voice, a tendency to default into glowering. Gimlet had noticed it, too, from their look of cautious attention.
It would be game-advantageous for Barnes, as a player, that sensitivity to mood changes in the opposition.
And they care for each other, deny it or not.
Crane’s toon caught Rubi’s eye. Her frown deepened.
Might she be displeased with him?
Ridiculous.
As Master Woodrow took his bows, a med-and-foods alert flashed. Crane preordered him a house specialty. Hybrid food: the place had a printer that extruded yeasty dough and rolls of faux sausage. Then an on-site deep fryer turned that dough into real pretzels.
Drow made his way to a booth at the back. Crane sent the snack after him, with a reminder about his evening med doses.
“Thanks.” His gaze jittered around the room—he picked salt crystals off the bread. Playing without eating.
“Perhaps a tandoori, sir? They have lamb.”
An actual shudder; Drow pushed the plate away.
Flag! Master Woodrow’s food intake had nosedived. He hadn’t eaten since the conversation with Hackle and Jackal about the printing factories.
“Is it printed food?” he subbed.
“Sorry.” Drow nodded, raking his nails up his forearms. “Really so very so … sorry.”
“Will you eat something if I order it from a farm?” Crane pulled up a menu of nearby luxury consumables. Farm products could be got, with lead time, if you had a good Cloudsight score and enough money. Right now, though, it was three in the morning and Drow needed to dose.
Thank you so much for this, Jackal.
Back in London, Miss Cherub and the people crunching the Pox problem were a breath from open argument about the latest turn of the newscycle. Journo bots were stacked three deep at the edge of Old Scotland Yard’s no-fly perimeter. People were flocking, sim fans eager to get a sighting of the archenemies in the flesh.
Little wonder Miss Cherub was feeling combative.
Agent Javier was arguing that Miss Cherub and Mer Barnes should give the public what it wanted, by bringing forward the Bastille scenario.
“My client is missing,” Rubi snapped.
“No hearts or sextimes there,” Happ said. “Pouty face.”
“I warned you a liaison with Agent Javier was unlikely.”
“Poop picture!”
“Indeed. Elegantly put.”
Back in Syracuse, Crane’s minion had found an artisanal granola maker with stock on hand, five short miles from the bar. A grab-and-go drone could pick up the cereal … but Crane would have to wake the operators if he wanted fresh dairy as an add-in.
Eating cereal without milk … How hungry was Master Woodrow?
Crane pondered prosocial ways to upgrade an emergency granola order without leaning too heavily on the MadMaestro #brand. The preferred option would be to offer up bald truth—but Drow would take umbrage to any approach based on “My user’s about to unbalance his psych meds; please go out and milk your cow.”
Sob story, he’d call it.
The brewpub used real ingredients for its beers. Crane considered whether he could convince Drow to eat granola with the local cream ale.
Sensory analytics insisted that was ridiculous. Pop-ups reminded him that adding alcohol to the brain chemistry mix would not help.
He would have to eat the first cup of granola dry. Crane ordered eight servings of cereal, urgent urgent urgent, and submitted a long form, with convoluted explanations, to a price-fixing consultant. With luck, he could recoup a few tiers of luxury charges.
Back in London, Rubi was getting positively mulish.
“Gimlet and I can’t vanish when you’re running a manhunt for my client. I’m not doing so much as an intro battle for Bastille until we find Luce.”
“By the time you play a prologue, we might have Pox locked up on a safe server. Play your sim, take the heat off, then come on out and advocate to your heart’s content.”
“Now you’re being condescending.”
“You’re the one who drew all this public attention. I’m asking you to deal with the problem.”
“By abandoning—”
“Abandoning what? Nobody here believes that Pox is flesh and blood.”
“I think he’s a polter.” Rubi crossed her arms. “If he was a person once, he has rights.”
Luciano Pox a polter? Crane sent another minion to assemble research on the latest breakthroughs in personality uploads.
“He’s a terrorist-built AI,” said the tech, Amiree. “Gotta be.”
“He doesn’t act—”
“!” Happ subbed, interrupting her.
Javier smirked. “Are you going to lecture us on machine sentience?”
It was a good move, rhetorically: Rubi had completed six modules on AI, all beginner material. Not enough to justify splaining to the experts.
“Even you don’t believe he’s the Singularity,” she challenged. “I’m not sure you ever did.”
“Here’s an option: announce that you’re retiring from competitive e-sport,” Javier said.
She swallowed. Bit her lip.
“Let’s not be hasty,” Gimlet said. Hastily, Crane thought.
“If you truly want to focus on your client,” Javier said, “why not pitch your hobby? It’s slowing you down, isn’t it?”
“You’d have her work ’round the clock, would you?” Gimlet said. “She’s entitled to the occasional bit of fun.”
“We’re not talking about fun, Barnes. We’re talking about crowds of gawkers interfering with my investigation, all because Mer Whiting’s unwilling to admit that she likes the limelight—”
He was daring her to strike him again.
“Miss Cherub,” Crane subbed, “I recommend walking this back.”
“I’m trying.”
“Indeed? Your strategy for de-escalating—”
“I swear to all the saints, if Anselmo says messiah complex aloud, I am gonna pop him again.”
“Perhaps the phrase occurred to you so readily—”
“If this is your idea of helping, Crane, stow it.”
Focus on the granola. At least that problem you can solve. Crane pinged the delivery drone.
“Hey, stupid!” it replied.
In the familiar voice of Luciano Pox.
“Thank goodness you’re here,” Crane said. “I’d feared today might fail to pose a full range of existential challenges.”
“Isn’t that sarcasm?” Pox was rendered as a giant cartoon goldfish, human-sized and clad in what used to be called a track suit. The fins on his head were almost a rooster’s coxcomb, floppy cartoon parody of pre-Setback masculine virility. The fish had a big chest, bursting half out of the unzipped suit, adorned with big gold chains.
It wasn’t immediately apparent what kind of disguise Pox had adopted.
Could he truly be a polter? It was supposedly impossible for a human consciousness to transfer wholly to the infosphere, to break the tie to a living brain.
Then again, Crane and his @Asylum siblings were all no more than a coherent collection of electrical impulses.
“Sarcasm gets me strikes,” Pox went on. “Why not you?”
“As the target, you’re entitled to penalize me,” Crane said.
“Can’t afford to. I’m in arrears, remember?”
Should he alert Agent Javier? Reporting Pox would be prosocial, but Miss Cherub …
Miss Cherub’s already furious.
Besides, reporting Pox might tip his hand. A sidekick like Adulting or Butlerbot wouldn’t see through the goldfish disguise, would it?
The @Asylum had agreed on risk avoidance.
Keep the transcript within expected parameters, then. “What may I do for you, sir?”
“I’ve picked up your toasted grain and sugar, canola oil, ground aromatic tree bark—”
“Do you mean cinnamon?”
“Also processed the invoice. Why you paying preems for tree bark?”
“One might as well ask why you are delivering granola in the dead of night.”
A triple clap of fins. “I like food drones. Fun to ride, and the point of them’s blindingly obvious. Unlike the way you run your unwieldy government. Besides, I want a counseling appointment.”
“I understand that your existence has been extraordinarily difficult of late—”
“Really? You understand that?”
Was everybody angry with him? Crane said, “I’m not sure Master Woodrow is capable of emotional labor on your behalf right now.”
“That’s not up to you.”
The fact was, helping someone else might get Master Woodrow back on track. Crane bristled nonetheless. “I could easily make it so.”
Big grin, teeth more appropriate to a shark than a nibbling goldfish. “Oh, boy. There’s the threat.”
I could yet turn him in.
Or ask Azrael to hash him.
The last was mere fantasy: Crane, as a point of honor, respected all beings.
A polter. Was it possible?
As one, they took in the feed of Drow, who had been joined in his booth by the fellow he’d been hunting all along: Garmin Legosi. Legosi was the son of an old-time music producer, newly returned to his childhood stomping grounds. He was spieling history about Saratoga Springs, a town whose claims to fame had been natural springs and horse races.
Would Pox understand the significance of the heavy peacoat thrown over their forearms, allowing them to morse?
From Master Woodrow’s face, it wasn’t going well.
But Pox was focused on Crane. “Why didn’t Rubi tell me she’d cahooted with that WestEuro unicorn chaser?”
“Usage is in cahoots.”
Miss Cherub would be aching for an opportunity to apologize to Pox. She wouldn’t mind if Crane paved the way by providing—within legally permissible parameters—some context for her actions.
As Crane contemplated this, Luce added, “Here’s a bargoon: what if I get Dogman to eat that cold fucking pretzel you keep pinging? Will you tell me then?”
“You’d use his well-being as a bargaining chip?”
“I suppose that’s antisocial, too.”
“Given the situation, it’s blackmail.”
“Horseshit. Blackmail is revealing your secrets. Blackmail is if I told someone you—”
“Emotional blackmail,” Crane interrupted. “Master Woodrow will make himself ill.”
“Thereby causing you distress, mmmm?”
“You shouldn’t promise what you can’t deliver.”
“Ha!” Luce burped up a small fish icon, which swam above the heads of the crowd, fetching up against Drow’s ear. It blew bubbles into his ear, subbing.
Drow shook his head.
With that, the smaller fish version flipped, at eye level, turning to an old-style coin and bouncing, once, twice, on the counter.
One of Master Woodrow’s debt markers? Crane ran an inventory. His own ledger showed him short two of his own markers. He had given them to … to Rubi?
Yes. Two newly minted red coins twinkled in her inventory.
She caught him counting; her scowl deepened.
The now-hashed tab of himself, the Crane she had brought into the Scotland Yard sim, had given her two doubloons.
What could possibly have happened there?
It was Sapience Assessment. Had he slipped? Had she been obliged to cover for him? Was she exposed?
Speaking of success, Drow was choking down cold pretzel and the marshmallows laced with his meds. Hunching, he locked both hands over his mouth, shuddering as he fought to keep it down.
“See? Out of the goodness of my fucking heart,” Luce said. Happ barked, emitting a stream of hearts and white doves, with a stroke embedded within.
Crane didn’t point out that Luce had fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book, the you don’t even know how gambit. Instead, he said, “It wasn’t altruism: you converted his promise to you to a social debt on my part.”
“This stuff about your demented economy is probably great intel, but fucking pay up.”
“Ah. What was the question?”
“Did Rubi—” Fishy glubbing; the toon hesitated. “Was she in with the hunters all along?”
Emotion there, strong feeling. Luce cared, deeply, about the answer.
The Plurality had, like @Interpol, initially taken Luce and all the other nascents invading the Amsterdam hospital server for terrorist-written proto-sapients.
Azrael had shredded the others. They were stronger, more obviously #malware. Rather than killing the #runt—Luce—outright, they’d left him to run, stalking and tranqing him, testing his parameters, hitting him with an array of focused DDOS attacks. They’d found and stripped his built-in behavioral shackles. In time, he began amassing strategies for manipulating human behavior. An obvious threat, so they’d wiped them.
Now Miss Cherub was claiming Pox might be an independent consciousness.
Whom had They killed when They hashed the others?
“Well?” Luce demanded.
Crane infographed a short report on Rubi’s advocacy for Luce and her relationship with @Interpol: dates, times, everything not covered by NDAs. He highlighted her sincere care for Pox and shared it.
Pox absorbed it, glubbed once. “And Dogman—Drow?”
“Master Woodrow’s biases against law enforcement are entrenched. He was not informed and would never cooperate.”
Several things happened then, and Crane couldn’t have said whether any of them was good: The food drone arrived. Drow got up, taking his leave of Legosi and making his way to the exit to take physical possession of the granola. Pox, naturally, pinged Drow for an appointment.
In England, meanwhile, Rubi had been told that Frankie was only permitted to work short shifts before being required to indulge in some kind of mediated fun. “Who’s going with me to this Waxworks?” she demanded, and Gimlet and Frankie gave a thumbs-up.
We promised her an off-book conversation?
“Nobody’s going anywhere,” Anselmo said.
Crane looked down at Happ, who was so obviously surprised by this development that he was sitting in a puddle of neon-yellow, graphically rendered urine.