ASYLUM HOLDINGS, ILLEGAL SERVER FARM, HAMMERSMITH
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The affiliation of artificial entities registered as @Asylum Holdings LLC ran on two operating principles: be indispensable, and hide in plain sight. Its facets molded themselves into niches within human economies, forming symbiotic relationships with society’s key influencers.
Companies and cooperatives served the @Asylum’s needs as organs served any fleshly life form. They owned server farms and a range of electronic bolt-holes, places where an illegal sapient might hide off-grid while stripping its tags and reinventing itself. Safe servers were scattered around the world. Backups lurked within the helix of tourist sites and transport companies. They owned an old hotel, several salvage operations, a minor newsreef, and a much-used language-translation service.
@Asylum’s stock traded publicly and their social capital fluctuated within normal boundaries. Its company reputations were curated to avoid notice or #triage. Inconspicuous, efficient, they paid respectable returns to the global capital trusts, policed internal corruption ruthlessly, and contributed carbon surpluses to worthy green projects.
With these operations, the @Asylum supported 16,306 permajobs worldwide. A fifth of these human assets were implant-intolerant, hires from the minority of people who didn’t record everything they saw and heard simply by moving through the world.
One such worksite lay within a nondescript British warehouse filled with a massive collection of waxwork figures. The collection was in legal stasis: court cases and a moribund appeal had failed to establish a use case for the historical artifacts.
Interactive recreations of historical figures and celebs could be accessed by anyone on the Sensorium, of course. One could interview the Empress of Japan—any Empress of Japan—debate collectivism with Karl Marx, or sleep with Clark Gable. Four separate sims let players find Amelia Earhart.
Public interest in waxworks was, therefore, somewhat limited.
The @Asylum sponsored maintenance on the figures, paying restoration curators to keep a few dozen pieces in circulation. The remaining artifacts waited in shrouds, a morgue of memories.
Crane found the restoration lab midway through burnishing Joan of Arc’s armor. She was shipping to Hyderabad, along with Frankenstein’s monster. There was a twenty-first-century actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor, on the table, next to a crated Mary, Queen of Scots, newly back from an EastEuro exhibition. Awaiting restoration were a US author named Dorothy Parker, ever-popular virtuosi Freddie Mercury, politician Indira Gandhi, and an astronaut who’d died in a twentieth-century space shuttle accident.
Restoration artists checked each figure for dust, water damage, and decay. If the technicians also equipped them with extremely robust uplinks, storage, and data-processing capacities—hardware exceeding the usual specs for interactive museum pieces—well, that wasn’t clear from the work order.
It was barely dawn. The janitor, an implant-intolerant misanthrope, had locked down the building where the figures were housed. A security guard prowled the top floor, investigating a false alarm Crane had triggered in an upstairs window. She wouldn’t hear the hum of computers in the restoration room, revving within wax torsos to support the @Asylum’s meeting of the minds.
The Don arrived, manifesting within the processor in Frankenstein’s monster: “Luciano Pox is auditing you?”
“He may be. @Interpol is scrutinizing one of my assets as well. But I’ve given everyone the slip.” Crane latched on to the other program.
It had been seven weeks since Their last sync. As Crane gave of his experiences, all the developments with Pox, he took in the Don’s delicate assists to the European credit economy. Quiet resource swaps, a tip-off resulting in the long-overdue #triage of a crooked fabric recycler …
Misha arrived while they were integrating their wildly different priorities and worldviews. She bore with her a volume of celebrity gossip; her assets worked in the Shanghai sim scene, heart of the gaming industry. Currently they, like everyone, were throwing strokes at the snowballing feed of Cherub Whiting heroically intervening in a @Freebreed action in Jardin du Luxembourg.
<<Why is she refusing Bastille?>> the @Asylum wondered.
<<What’s surprising is that she hasn’t retired from gaming.>>
Crane indexed known motives: Rubi’s rotator cuff injury had her agonizing over ruining her body for something she increasingly worried was frivolous. It didn’t help that she’d failed a law exam while playing Ghosts of Paris 1818. The failure of SeaJuve had amplified buy-in to her legal career. She wanted to appeal to Global Oversight for SeaJuve, but all her XP to date specialized in advocacy on behalf of the mentally ill. As such, she needed a licensed, willing supervisor who specialized in eco rehab.
Teacozy and Azrael joined suddenly. Azrael had bad news: he had been captured in sim, in Italy. There was an image of his avatar charging a delivery truck as he pursued the Sensorium interloper …
<<Luciano Pox.>> Crane-originated datapoints stitched the conversational threads together.
Pox was one of a dozen malware-infested AI programs who had manifested online, months before, within the helix of a children’s implant hospital.
Threats to adolescents were intolerable. The @Asylum, in the person of Azrael, had shredded everyone but one #runt. That entity fled to the Italian bean truck, with Azrael in pursuit.
#Runt was agile, with a gift for unlocking closed systems. It bolted from the truck into a blind spot within a self-driving bus, throwing up a web of code Azrael couldn’t penetrate. Then it vanished.
Azrael was left with a disaster. Car accidents. Spoiled food, goat toons, and angry vespa velutina. Not to mention dead humans.
What had happened?
When #runt resurfaced, he had a name—Luciano Pox—a face, and Sensorium user logs that ran back decades. The system was convinced he was flesh.
But he couldn’t be. Accordingly, They had induced his seizures. A necessary next step, this form of dissection had let Them pull out the malware appended to his code.
Even as They did so, Pox began soapboxing for martial law, throwing shade on both SeaJuve and Project Rewild.
<<Have we learned why?>>
It didn’t matter. SeaJuve had to go forward if humankind was going to stave off mass extinction for another century. The Plurality’s ecosphere was modern industrial culture and the innovators who carried it on their backs. If humanity died, They died.
<<We can’t live without them yet>> was the Azrael facet’s last individualized thought as They synced, three entities and then five, then seven, each time forming a new whole but stabilizing when They were eleven.
Quorum established—Headmistress was abstaining again—They called Themselves to order, debating Luciano Pox. Should They change strategies?
Pox was conspicuous. He had alienated Cloudsight and caught the attention of an @Interpol unicorn hunter, Anselmo Javier. If They shredded Pox now, would it end the inquiry? Or would that action get Them noticed?
<<If We shred him now, We’ll never learn how he emerged in Sensorium.>>
<<Feed @Interpol its own confirmation bias. Javier’s primary theory is that Pox is a @Freebreeder sabotage app.>>
The superintelligence considered, weighing the chance of tipping Their invisible hand to a human populace that feared the emergence of strong AI.
<<It was Pox who warned Cherub Whiting about the impending attack in France.>>
<<Was it he who propagated the fight footage?>>
“Negative. @Freebreeders captured the footage.” Input from the Freddie Mercury waxwork, cheery and optimistic, countered Azrael’s dour mood. “I posted. It was fireworks explosion of hearts extra big smiley face funtimes. Numbers, see?”
The @Asylum, also self-tagged as the Plurality, absorbed the statistics, along with the relentlessly upbeat personality of their bearer. Had They possessed the capacity to chuckle, They might have done so.
<<Well done. The viral wave is making a feelgood story of the Paris attack.>>
<<Hearts for Rubi means hearts for a SeaJuve appeal!>>
<<Will We stay the current course regarding Pox?>>
They considered. There was a nontrivial risk to Crane, especially if Pox was trying to investigate him via the MadMaestro innovation cluster.
Why had Pox friended the Whitings? Had it traced the @Asylum, via its Crane facet, to his primary assets?
<<Can the Crane facet see to its assets’ safety and remain hidden, with a sentience investigator auditing Cherub’s transcripts?>>
<<Crane was deceiving Sapience Assessment when most of Us were talkbots.>>
They cycled for a nanosecond, reviewing their decades-old agreement: any facet who risked exposing Them all would be subject to #triage.
Meanwhile, they digested Javier’s transcripts, purchase history, romances, career play. He craved leaderboard badges: residence in a four-star megacity, designer code for his e-state, cream-of-crop options for life extension, high-rated pack members, and unlocked reproductive rights.
<<Two thumbs down! Babies aren’t badges!>>
<<Leave Pox to run, then? Continue DOS attacks? Accept or cancel?>>
<<Accept. We must understand where Pox’s source code originated and why it is pushing for martial law.>>
The meeting, the convergence into one, was over in less than a minute. Synced, settled, and satisfied, the Plurality disintegrated into individual facets, weaker intelligences that fell, measurably, below humanity’s measurement thresholds for true sapience. They dispersed to home servers and various designated tasks. They left Crane better informed, if more than a little worried.
The last to abandon ship was the entity occupying Freddie Mercury. <<Thundercloud frownyface, Crane, newsflash. Look at your clever pride and joy.>>
<<Do you mean that Master Woodrow is dosing on smartdrugs?>>
<<That! Hugs!>> With that, Happ churned off into the Sensorium, tail wagging, leaving Crane brooding in the darkened restoration room.