SENSORIUM:
VRTP://HOUSEBOOK.EARTH/WHINEMANOR/USERS/DROW-WHITING.VR
Conventional sidekicks existed to optimize Sensorium flow for their human licensees. A sidekick functioned as assistant and helpmeet, shielding users from a torrent of messages, alerts, offers, and advertisements.
Sidekicks didn’t tire or judge. They filtered particles of signal from the ebb and flow of Sensorium noise. They tasked users’ implants to monitor their carbon burn, calorie intake, nutrient mix, and pharma load. They kept larders full and wardrobes printed, updated contact information, balanced clients’ spending, and stayed up to date on local rationing measures. They logged user moods, advised them on social-cap maintenance, and tracked luxury allowance. They optimized clients’ prosocial acts: making charitable donations and lampshading opps to commit acts of kindness.
The artificial entity calling himself Crane seemed no different from any other electronic enabler. True, commercial sidekicks claimed millions of subscribers, while Crane’s entire remit consisted of Drow and Rubi Whiting. These two, his entire world, were the son and granddaughter of Crane’s creators, long-dead programmers who’d venned over a particular media crush object.
Theo Whiting had been obsessed with the butler of a comic book vigilante. He dreamed of acquiring the rights to #brand and proliferate Crane, for profit, under the name of Alfred Pennyworth. But a fall onto the Toronto subway tracks had logged Theo out permanently—all accounts closed, all negotiations broken, and all cycles stopped—before that dream could come to fruition. His smartdrug-amped husband, Jervis Hatter, confined himself thereafter to upgrading and customizing Crane for Master Woodrow’s exclusive use.
Neither of Jervis and Theo’s surviving rightsholders—back then, they were still called heirs—had sought to license Crane for commercial use. He was thus private software, a true family retainer.
Crane was ancient by the standards of sidekick apps. He had been rewritten, reinvented, and, on one memorable occasion, hacked. His mandate was protecting Master Woodrow from anything that might threaten his liberty or balance of mind, landing him in criminal or psychiatric managed care. To protect him from himself, in other words.
Such concerns, obviously, didn’t occupy even the advanced settings of Crane’s flashy, simpleminded sidekick peers. But now, with Miss Cherub out of town, Master Woodrow would be trying to get his hands on smartdrugs.
Thwarting without reporting. Such an idea would never occur to Butlerbot; it would flat-out crash Adulting. HeyNannyNanny would shop itself to its own programming team if the prospect of quietly sabotaging someone’s parole violation so much as glimmered on its decision tree.
A ping: it was Happ, Miss Cherub’s positive-psychology application.
Rubi’s tourism derailed? It sent moji: a worried puppy face.
She’s only just arrived, Crane reminded him. And she made it to Pont Neuf.
Happ did a backflip, emitting red hearts. Strong engagement with @Interpol agent! Boundary testing … possible attraction? Venned interest in law and edible luxuries.
He’s with the police, Happ.
Request profile on Anselmo Javier, @Interpol. Determine sexual/romantic/pack availability?
Why not? Crane tasked a minion-scale version of himself to harvest and analyze the agent’s feed.
Anselmo Javier will be notified of your transcript request, said the Haystack gatekeeper. Continue?
Authorize, Crane replied. He had already found Javier’s request for all of Rubi’s archived utterances, comms, and video. Transparency customs and the Sensorium’s mutually assured disclosure policy encouraged her to return the favor.
Happ went on: Javier says he played GhostSim!
Verified, Crane replied, whiteboarding the agent’s game scores as the cradle-to-current transcripts on Anselmo Javier unlocked. He specialized in playing good-hearted, rule-bending police officers; Tequila Yuen was listed as one of his #fanfaves. Javier had, for a time, been the high scorer on an off-brand 1970s shoot-’em-up called Filthy Harold.
The agent’s oblique references to Miss Cherub’s celebrity, though … those seemed disingenuous. Crane highlighted sections of their conversation for later review.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” he couldn’t help muttering.
Happ took the utterance as an invitation to debate, sharing Miss Cherub’s contentment metrics. Romance deficit! Hearts and flowers, stat! Luxury chocolates and sex, sex, sex up the—
“Indeed.” Crane didn’t need numbers to tell him their charge had the blues. “You’re getting positively maniacal on this subject.”
Tail wag.
“Miss Cherub’s depressed stats are tied to the failure of SeaJuve. This getaway of hers should help.”
Some ooh la la! with a charming Frenchman! That’ll put happyface on her—
“Shush.” Crane had supported Happ’s idea of a work-travel opp. Like many of her generation, Rubi hated the prospect of wasteful self-indulgence. Bounceback kids found overconsumption repulsive, a callback to the world-frying selfishness of their Boomer and GenX forebears.
When the chance for her to take a case while seeing Paris arose, it brought an optimal convergence of work with her lifelong dream. Crane had misgivings about Rubi becoming entangled with the damnable Luciano Pox, but her plummeting mood had outweighed them.
A ping from Master Woodrow, code for a jingling servant’s bell, drew Crane’s primary focus back to Toronto.
“Good morning, sir,” he said. “You’re looking very dapper.”
In the present moment, in the unaugmented reality most English-speakers called the Surface, Drow was washed, dressed, and shaved. His primer was overlaid with a freshly printed white sunrobe, one of Rubi’s favorites.
The response came via text: Got a patient with an emergency. Reschedule my next in-the-flesh, will you?
“Delighted,” Crane said, running a check on Drow’s blood pressure, pulse, and blood sugar. No spikes: he was clean.
Still. Crane reviewed Drow’s recent transcripts, again filtering for hints, things missed, reachouts to anyone who might help him acquire Liquid Brilliance or his new favorite, Leonardo.
The object of Crane’s obsession was lounging in a smartchair on the greenroof of a sixty-story tower. A helper dog (named Robin, naturally) sat alertly at his right hand. A saxophone case was propped within easy reach of his left. Drow’s aged face wore a nigh-angelic expression of repose. The chair was one of thirty pointed at the blue expanse of Lake Ontario, but—like most of the gathered loungers—Drow was oblivious to the beauty of the rejuvenated shorefront: his consciousness was deep in Sensorium.
Crane slipped into close observation, viewing the world through his master’s implants.
Master Woodrow’s current locale, in Sensorium, was the walled-in sculpture garden of his e-state, Whine Manor.
Had Crane desired to look at the graphics rather than the code, he’d have perceived gray stone walls and a blue sky dotted with low clouds. Clear physical boundaries were soothing to claustrophobes and agoraphobes alike. Many e-states incorporated windows that displayed the user’s realworld location, but not Master Woodrow’s: the Lake Ontario view beyond his half-blind old eyes was nowhere to be seen.
The statues in the garden were white marble. Some were classically featured: humans, all a little broken, missing arms or legs, faces marred by erosion. These were interspersed with gargoyles, and misshapen, monstrous angels. Archways in the walls bore menu options in excised stone lettering: EXIT TO SENSORIUM, #VTSD SUPPORT GROUP, MUSEUM & GIFT SHOP, FECKLESS BACHELOR™ SOCIAL CLUB, #URBANMYTH ARCHIVE.
Master Woodrow stood in a corner of the vestibule, his toon clad in an expensive-looking suit, with his offsite visitor.
The guest’s ID was blocked: tags included #patient, #emergency. Any human visiting the garden would see an old-time burglar’s mask screening their face.
The patient’s connection data was streaming from another continent. WestEuro.
Not a likely source of smartdrugs, in that case.
“Ping Father Blake,” Crane said.
A Vatican-issue sidekick, an animated lioness clad in the habit of a Benedictine nun, materialized at the edge of a bed of blue-black pansies.
“Good morning, my son. Today is the feast of—”
Crane fast-forwarded the spiritual spam. “I wish to reschedule Woodrow Whiting’s morning confession. Can Father Blake come later? Perhaps … noon?”
It shot him a bunch of fine print. Drow had requested the sacrament of confession, so the priest would be carrying a mic jammer and running a Sanctity #brand transcript-shredder app. Nothing the two said to each other would be copied to the Haystack.
Crane accepted the user agreement, declined an information flow on Saint Benedict, and pushed the appointment to lunchtime. The sidekicks dickered over factoring in delivery of a printed lunch before signing off.
Keeping a channel tuned to Drow and his patient—they were discussing Sensorium history—Crane ran a quick course through the household checklist. Drow’s incoming deposits had dropped lately, and Crane had, accordingly, upgraded their accounting app, Scrooge, with a forensic-accounting module. It was crunching Feckless Bachelor™ accounts.
Drow had an in-the-flesh mentoring session with Whiskey Sour in the evening.
Sidebars bubbled past, unasked-for documents on naming trends: portraits of children with names like Daiquiri, Margarita, Mimosa, Martini, Sazerac, Fizz.
“Happ,” he murmured, sotto voce. “This is irrelevant.”
“Heart the Alcohol Novelty name trend!” Happ burbled. Loudly. “Whimsy! Expression of nostalgia for pre-Setback luxury goods! Historical relevance—”
“Bad dog! Go back to Miss Cherub!”
It was too late: Master Woodrow had overheard.
“You’re snooping,” he subbed.
“I have rescheduled your confession, as requested.”
“I’m working, I’m eating, I’m seeing my spiritual advisor. What more you want from me?”
“I note your appointment with Miss … Sour?”
“So?”
“She wouldn’t be coming with gifts in hand, would she, Master Woodrow?”
Narrowed eyes—an exasperation #tell. “Whiskey? Really? Would I collude with a seventeen-year-old?”
Crane ran the question. If she had been a degenerate of some sort … but no. The child was a talented, starstruck innocent. “You would not.”
“Rubi’s sure to stick her nose in, sometime today, to boss me around in person. So, stop apping like my parole officer. Schedule me a blood test, if it’ll make you happy.”
“My happiness hardly factors into the equation.”
“Hardly,” Drow repeated, tone mocking.
Crane put a gig out for a blood draw, specifying a male tech. He copied the appointment to Drow’s parole app, so it could monitor and report the test. In the normal run of things, the software would have self-booted, but Crane had subtly rearranged its defaults after his master’s release from managed care.
“Keep your suspicions to yourself,” Drow added. “Rubi’s supposed to be on a break.”
“A break is only of use, sir, if no crisis arises.”
“Show me crisis. You got nothing. Reasonable doubt, Alfie. Innocent until proven. Prioritize her, not me.”
Happ barked agreement.
“Seriously, Crane.” Drow underlined this by handing over a marker, a black coin with a gargoyle on one side and an angel on the other.
Crane added it to his collection of favors owed.
Miss Cherub had been working a great deal lately and was sleeping 5 percent more than her specs required. She had drawn back from her @CloseFriends as more of her original peer group formed couples and polygamous packs.
The real red flag, according to Happ, was her reluctance to play a gaming scenario premiere: the French revolution, reimagined as a fairy war, complete with a raid on the 1789 Bastille. The company playing defense, Risto Games, had recruited Gimlet Barnes to lead the palace guards. Rubi should be turning backflips over the prospect.
Instead, she was hedging and holding back, refusing to commit. Nearly all her off time was spent trying to harangue a qualified senior lawyer to help her work up a court appeal—she wanted to fight Global Oversight’s defunding of SeaJuve, her pet oxygen-security project.
By now, the masked visitor had picked up on the subtle gaps in Drow’s conversation, cues that he was multitasking. He was scanning about, seeking the source of Drow’s distraction. Crane manifested, becoming fully visible to everyone within the simulation. As an electronic entity, he was rendered not as a human but as an anthropomorphized whooping crane, a big bird in a butler’s uniform.
Happ took this as an invitation to follow suit, tooning in as a scarlet-furred bulldog puppy. He settled next to Master Drow’s assistance dog, Robin, cooing. The golden retriever, the only fully present and unaugmented being on the entire rooftop garden, was oblivious to the invasion of its space.
“Good day, sir,” Crane said, greeting the patient.
“Bird suit? Or is that a mask?” the stranger said.
“Crane’s my sidekick,” Drow said.
“Doesn’t look stupid. Is he stupid?”
Happ barked, unable to resist a nonverbal reprimand for the antisocial phrasing.
“Now you’ve got yet more dog?”
“No hate doggos!” Happ transformed into a turtle, covering his shell in smiling moji.
Crane said, “If by stupid you are asking whether I am artificial—”
“Code, yes. How fast do your guns fire?”
“I am a helper app with a private license and a limited scope of work, with add-ons for Master Woodrow’s mental health and trauma triggers. My terms of service—”
“Stupid. Boring, meaningless drivel.”
Crane was about to select a response from his nigh-infinite pool of dry rejoinders—That entirely depends on your point of view, sir was leading the pack—when transcript analysis flagged up the verbal patterns.
This masked man talked like Luciano Pox, Miss Cherub’s missing client.
Urgent alert! Why was Pox here instead of with Rubi?
He couldn’t ask.
Was this connection—first to Rubi and, through her, to her father—truly an unfortunate coincidence? Or had Pox sought them out?
How fast do your guns fire?
Is he on Our trail?
“Meaning is in the eye of the beholder, sir,” Crane said. A response was, after all, expected.
“Platitudes.” Pox seemed to lose interest.
Should he be relieved? Variables cascaded through Crane’s consciousness. Who or what was Luciano Pox, exactly?
He couldn’t investigate a masked counseling client whose identity was supposed to be unknown. Crane attacked the problem sideways, diving into Anselmo Javier’s bio. Why was @Interpol investigating Pox?
Javier had begun leveling on the policing track with rookie security gigs. Crowd control, accident cleanup, and trespassing enforcement; the basics. Over time, he leveled into investigating petty hoarding and prescription-fiddling hacks.
Permajobs in policing were hard to come by. Javier appeared to become frustrated with running down minor infractions as he competed for a spot in a specialist squad.
Peer reviews popped up. Plays badly with others, cuts corners, no stars.
Too much cowboy, not enough cop. Now Javier was gambling, taking high-risk cases he could work solo.
Some called it unicorn hunting. Cops like Javier were searching for the Sensorium’s possibly apocryphal predators: cold cases, wealth hoarders, identity thieves, and—of course—self-aware AI.
It was the big #technofear these days, the monster under humanity’s bed. People had been braced for the emergence of the Singularity—a mythical technological superintelligence, godlike, aloof, and wired into all Sensorium, and positioned to wreak havoc on human civilization.
#Killertech had been a trending anxiety as far back as the late twentieth century, but it was only when human violence had been reduced to negligible levels that outright terror of homicidal software had gone viral.
Could Anselmo Javier think that Pox was the Singularity, that ill-understood uber-intelligence the humans had built up into their new boogieman? If so, did either Pox or @Interpol pose a threat to the community of artificial sapients flying quietly under law enforcement’s radar?
Crane would have to reach out to the @Asylum.