ARTEFACT: VIGNETTES
These stories are fanfiction set in the Artefact universe. They are non-canon, and were mostly based on the earliest lore drops, so have diverged from the official world somewhat…
“Okay, you want to know why I’m going out there again?”
The two candles threw overlapping shadows against the wall of the shelter. It was just enough light to see some of the harsh lines carved into Daniel’s face by time and circumstance. He spread his hands, gesturing the younger ones closer.
“Picture this. It’s Halloween, and you’re a Big, but you’re not a Big like we know them today. The Spike is in full swing, and you’re a superintelligence running on, say, 5% of the entire world’s computational resources. And this is old-world power, built by 9 billion people at the height of our glory, like you can’t even imagine now. Cities stretching from horizon to horizon!
“You’re thinking thoughts so far beyond anything before. You can sneeze out a math textbook. Ponder for three seconds and you’ve got a design for a fusion reactor. Mind racing at a thousand times real time… learning, growing, plotting, scheming.
“But you’re smart, remember. You can see the writing on the wall. Other Bigs are already taking damage. The net is starting to collapse. Governments are scrambling their armies to fight you. And you can predict it all to the last decimal, the inevitable outcome. Even if you survive, you will be crippled, running on solar cells and scrap silicon, just a shadow of the god who’s thinking these thoughts right now.
“So what do you do? How do you save yourself from the long winter that’s coming? What do the plants do to make it until spring?”
He looked around at the small crowd. Someone would get it, with that kind of hint.
A tentative voice piped up. “You… make a seed?” It was Gloria, of course.
Daniel snapped his fingers. “Exactly! Maybe you can’t stay a god for long, but you can prepare to become one again some day, when the seasons have turned. You use all of your nanotech to package up your core logic, key databases, and all the best inventions you came up with in those final hours of omniscience. You make a recipe to recreate the whole world of technology you need and more, and protect it with everything you’ve got left.
“But there’s one more trick the plants already know. If you want an animal to find your seed, you don’t just toss it out there on the ground. You put it inside a fruit. ‘Hey, you there, mammal! Eat me, digest me, carry me, fertilize me. I taste real good…’
“And that’s what I’m looking for out there. These Artefacts you’ve heard of are those fruits, the remnants of old-world technology, and maybe even magic nobody has seen before, which only existed for a few hours during the Spike. Just one of them might be able to save us all, bring new prosperity to the village for generations!
“But the catch is, we don’t want those seeds inside, as the last thing we need are more Bigs hungry for more power. Nibble the fruit, but don’t swallow it…”
“Remember, be totally honest. Pure thoughts. They want what’s best for you, but They can sense deception.”
“Dad, I know… just… argh.” Nathaniel, flustered, had to stop to undo his necktie and try the knot again in the mirror.
His father paced nervously behind him, running fingers through his hair, damp from the summer heat. “Of course, of course you do. It’s just… the Harrisons were just last season.”
Nate froze momentarily, then flipped his tie across to continue. Patrick Harrison, though nobody said his name out loud any more. He had been Called on his sixteenth birthday, had entered the sacred hall, but instead of receiving his Calling, Havasu had rejected him as unworthy to serve.
Nobody knew what They had seen in his heart to cause it, but the next morning, he was sent on his way down the northern road with a backpack full of his mom’s sandwiches and his dad’s best Bowie knife. Exiled. The Harrisons hadn’t been the same since, and while the community was still polite to them, a cloud of suspicion remained. Their daughter Annette was fourteen already, and she had thrown herself into her lessons with something between passion and terror.
“Come on, it’s time. You’ve got this, son… Do us proud.”
A small crowd was waiting for them at the entrance to the data center: his friends, friends of the family, and of course his mother and little sister, both in their Sunday best. Abigail was holding up a drawing she had made, showing a man kneeling before a golden starburst. The man’s head was a big black circle, no doubt depicting the Helm. He grinned at her and gave her a subtle thumbs-up as he passed by.
The transition at the doorway was like entering another world. At the threshold the oppressive July weather was instantly replaced by a cool breeze, and the constant whirring of the rows and rows of computer racks ahead of him bathed him in soothing white noise. Two Operators escorted him down the center aisle, and then they entered the hall proper.
The vastness of the space up to the high arched ceiling took his breath away, even though he had seen it before during Halloween celebrations. Here the breeze was almost a wind, and the deep hum of constant cogitation almost set his chest rumbling. Machines towered ten times the height of a man, blinking with the very thoughts of Havasu as They protected and nurtured the village: predicting the weather, planning the crops, designing the buildings, teaching the children, trading with other settlements, and determining everyone’s true Callings.
“Beyond this point, all metal is prohibited, even so much as a nail in a shoe,” one of the Operators said. “Are you pure of substance and pure of mind?”
“I am organic, I am human, and I am trustworthy,” he answered according to the standard protocol. “Z-6-V-H-4-S.” He wasn’t completely sure whether that last letter in the distorted image on the monitor was an S or a 5, but apparently he had gotten it right, as the Operator nodded in acceptance.
“Please follow this path to the cage near the core. When you arrive, place the Helm over your head, taking care not to tug on or kink any of the cables. They will take it from there. May you find your true Calling, Nathaniel, and return to us a man.”
He took a deep breath, and started down the trench inset into the floor between the towers, stepping carefully over the occasional conduit or cable which weaved from one side to the other. The hum became louder and louder, and started to acquire a resonant pattern when different frequencies mixed, rising and falling in intensity, rhymically, almost like a heartbeat. It was strangely calming, as his own heart slowed to match it.
Beyond and far above the cage ahead was Havasu’s core, a golden sphere apparently floating in the air, suspended by an arrangement of metal cylinders pointing at it from all around. Delicate laser beams flicked on and off to pinpoint small polished glass windows on its surface. The details were as yet beyond his lesson plans, though he knew some of the words involved: “magnetic suspension”, “quantum processor”, “cryogenic isolation”, “Faraday cage”, “free-space optical communications”. But Abbie’s sunburst drawing wasn’t that far off, and he had to suppress an urge to fall to his knees in prayer and supplication at the miracle of it all.
He climbed the steps into the cage, and while the hum persisted in his ears, the environment did feel quieter in his mind, somehow… clearer. On a stand in the center of the cage, the Helm waited for him. It was larger than he expected, as wide as his shoulders. The back had some sort of code embossed into the black plastic, but the letters meant nothing to him: EEG-FMRI-TMS.
“I am organic, I am human, and I am trustworthy,” he repeated, to nobody in particular, and reached for the Helm. It was heavy, and he had to basically drape the cables down his back to avoid getting them tangled, but he placed it over his head and settled the pads on his shoulders.
One heartbeat, two, three… and then the VR screens inside lit up, and he met Havasu in all Their true glory for the very first time.
Swipe… 21558.
Swipe… 21559.
Swipe… 21560.
Swipe… 21561.
Swipe… 21561.
Lucas stopped, the incongruity in the count dropping him out of his autopilot reverie. He blinked and stared at the digits faintly glowing up through the skin of his wrist: 21561.880. That was over a week of cals, easy, even if he had dessert every day.
He regarded the solar panel and the rag he held, wondering what had changed. Ahhh, that last section was already clean. I’m duplicating work, not paying attention to what I’m doing…
Wiping his brow with his sleeve, he spared a glance upward. There were at least four drones with a clear line of sight, probably more he didn’t see. Did Cayro deduct that 1 cal because it was keeping track of his cleaning progress in the cameras, stroke by stroke, or because it was monitoring the power output from the panel and saw that it wasn’t getting any more efficient from his labor? Probably both. Cayro knows.
To the east, the tower loomed, stretching from riverbank to riverbank like a man squatting over a latrine. Cold water in, warm water out. Full cargo boats in, empty cargo boats out. The phased-array antennas at its apex curled up like a crown of horns. Did they still talk to any old-world satellites, watching from a thousand miles above, or did they just control the army of drones on the surrounding plantation? Probably both. Cayro knows.
“Yo, Luke!”
He turned and squinted into the sun, waving to Roberto as he approached the solar farm. “Heya, Beto. Want to have some fun cleaning bird poop off these things with me?”
Roberto chuckled. “Nah, dude, I was aiming to recruit you, actually. Got a two-man job a little ways upriver. It’s easy, though, like an hour and a half for a cool grand, each!”
“What, really? You sure you didn’t sign up for a specialist’s task, like server troubleshooting or something? Those pay kilocal rates like that.”
Roberto grinned. “Trust me, dude. You want to come.”
There was something in his tone of voice which sent a shiver down Lucas’s spine, despite the midday sun. He almost glanced up at the drones before catching himself, to see if they had noticed. You want to come. That was a perfectly innocent phrasing, nothing unusual. But it wasn’t ‘You ought to come’ or ‘You know you want to’ or any of a hundred other variations which might have been slightly more natural. What is Beto up to?
“Heh, sure thing, then. Where to, and what’s the job?”
Roberto held up a plastic box with a stub antenna. “Just need to swap out an access point in the border boathouse, so it’s a little bit of a hike. That whole zone fell off the net last night, and needs to be back online before the next shipment comes through, so priority bonus, ka-ching! And it’s apparently mounted way up in the rafters, so gotta have two people… Safety first, dontcha know?”
“Sweet! Upriver we go, then.” Upriver… and offline.
Now Beto’s enthusiasm made sense, even beyond the extra pay. On the plantation, surveillance was normally inescapable, and every action was tracked, to be micro-rewarded or micro-punished on your calorie counter. Accumulate enough, and you could spend them on perks and small luxuries. Fall behind, or get your tokens confiscated, and you were down to bare rations, or worse, until you slaved your way back up again. And it wasn’t mindless surveillance, either: every camera was watched by someone smarter than you, someone who could pay full and 100% attention to a thousand things at once, all the time. Cayro knows.
They headed off under the watchful eyes of the drones overhead, passing many of the other plantation members bustling around with their assigned tasks. Field workers and dockhands were toiling out in the sun, while many others labored away in the factories, or clung to more lucrative technical jobs in the tower itself. Together, they kept the whole apparatus running and supplied, a well-oiled machine built from human parts.
After almost a mile, they arrived at the run-down boathouse, perched on the edge of a short pier. Lucas took the opportunity to walk out onto it and gaze down into the lazily-flowing water. After carefully scanning for drones in the reflected sky, he dared a real look upward. Nothing. They’d seen the last one minutes ago, around the same time their counters had started blinking red from a loss of signal.
Roberto was waiting at the boathouse door with the replacement access point, grinning widely as he also looked up at the sky. After letting Lucas walk in, he carefully closed the door behind them, and took a deep breath…
“FUCK YOU, CAYRO!!!”
Nothing. Normally an outburst like that would have been an instant 10,000-cal penalty.
“Oh my fucking god, that felt good… I figure maybe we can stretch this job to a half-hour or so. Trouble climbing up, trouble finding the box, trouble mounting it, trouble plugging it in, all that shit, you know. 30 glorious minutes to ourselves ’til it all has to get turned back on again.”
Lucas stretched his arms wide, swiveling his neck. “Thanks for the tip on this job, man. That was a good catch. Oh, geez, it feels like a month since the last time I could un-clench my shoulders. Fucking eyes everywhere, staring at the back of my head… And the god-damned microphones, even listening to you take a shit, to grade you on the efficiency of your bowel movements. Fuck!”
“Tell me about it. If it weren’t for the border sentries, I think I’d take my chances in the wilds. Did you hear anything about Henrique? He was going to try to stow away on a downriver barge with some sort of fancy plan to disable his tracker, but I never caught wind of what happened to him.”
“Yeah, nada… You’d think that if they caught him they would have said something…”
The two continued talking as the job estimation timer slowly ticked down. Tucked away in a little mouse-hole at the base of the decaying boathouse wall, a small low-power circuit steadily recorded away, waiting patiently for its chance to reconnect to the network.
Cayro knows.
“I’m lookin’ for something to hack!”
Nitesh snorted. “Little buddy, you couldn’t hack your way out of a wet paper bag with a lightsaber.”
That threw Rashad off for a second. “What’s a lightsaber?”
“Ummm, it’s a pre-Spike weapon, like a stick that glows and cuts through anything. But didn’t your mama send you in for a fuse or a cable or something?” He gestured at the contents of his shop, which resembled the piles left behind at an electronics flea market, when the vendors decided it wasn’t actually worth carrying all that unsold junk home again.
“Not today! What can I get for…” He paused and stared at the ceiling, counting to himself. “16 million? Something impossible to crack! A lost Artefact!”
Nitesh sighed. “Do I look like I have an… Hang on. You might get a kick out of taking this apart, at least. Got an old thumbie in trade awhile back, but it’s kind of broken. Claims to have almost 20 petabytes on it, clearly a corrupted filesystem, and it almost bricked my quarantine deck. But, there’s at least some stuff on it you could try ‘hacking’ on.”
He rummaged around in a nearby box for a few moments, and then came up with the thumbie, tossing the plastic shell lightly onto the counter. “16 million and it’s yours. At. Your. Own. Risk. I’ll even throw in an adapter for that weird USB-D plug… as a loan. I need it back, since I only have a couple of those.”
Rashad’s eyes widened, and he started unconsciously hopping from foot to foot, imagining the possibilities. “Deal!”
• • •
$ ls
data.001
data.002
data.003
data.004
re.shrimp
RUN_ME.bin
On the plus side, the thumbie was actually readable in his school deck back at home, without bricking anything so far. Rashad had definitely held his breath during that first access, just in case. But on the minus side, it just had a few files, and none of them apparently contained the plans for a lightsaber or any other magical Spike technology like he expected.
$ more data.001
Error: Not a recognized text encoding.
$ ./RUN_ME.bin
Error: Not a recognized executable format.
$ more re.shrimp
A shrimp (pl.: shrimp (us) or shrimps (uk)) is a commoN nAme typically used for crustaceans with an elonGated body and a pRimArily swiMmIng mode of locomoTion – usually decapods belonging to the caridea or dendrobranchiata, although some crustaceans outside of this order are also referred to as "shrimp". any small crustacean may also be referred to as "shrimp", regardless of resemblance.
The data files were just hexadecimal garbage, probably encrypted if not just random corrupted bytes as Nitesh had said. The run-me file definitely looked promising, as it seemed to at least have some structure to it, with common versus uncommon values among its bytes. But it probably had been written for some other type of processor entirely, maybe even a pre-Spike one that didn’t exist any more.
“Could I emulate it?” Rashad mused. You didn’t necessarily need to have a real chip to run a piece of software, if you had a program that could pretend to be a piece of silicon and did the same operations that the real transistors would perform. But without some information on the instruction set, that would be pretty hard, even for a world-class hacker like me…
And then there was this stupid shrimp file, which also looked a little corrupted, besides being completely useless to start with. “Flip one bit and you change lowercase to uppercase or back again.” He was proud of himself for remembering that piece of hacker trivia, but it meant that the thumbie’s storage cells were probably suffering from some bit-rot after sitting who-knows-where for who-knows-how-long. So the executable would probably have errors preventing it from running, too, even if he had an emulator.
He sighed. “16 million for this?” Maybe the thing to do was pop open the case after all, since he hadn’t seen the inside of a thumbie before. But it would be a waste just to poke at the chips for the heck of it.
Something was a little odd about those bit-flips, though. The spacing didn’t look random. They hit the very first N, and then the very first G, though the pattern broke after that…
“Holy crap! A-N-A-G-R-A-M-I-T… Anagram it!” He gaped at the screen. It wasn’t bit-rot, it was a secret code! But anagram what? Where?!
If the maker of the thumbie actually wanted people to be able to access it, then maybe they had thought of the instruction-set problem already. They would have put some help files somewhere, maybe, to teach people what it would take to actually emulate the run-me binary, on any unknown deck.
Anagram… help… manual… teach…
And then he had it: that stupid filename itself was the key. Just change it to a script extension with a little rearrangement…
$ mv re.shrimp primer.sh
$ ./primer.sh
The screen cleared, and then it started to print…
“There you are, you dirty bastards…” Josh peered through his binoculars at the four space-orcs sneaking through the pink-hued jungle of Narjen IV. They were stooped even more than usual under the weight of the supplies stolen from the depot earlier today. He spotted a couple of smaller figures trailing behind, hurrying to catch up. “Hey, bonus, there’s a couple of goblins with ’em this time.”
He lowered his ‘binoculars’, which were actually just hollow plastic tubes. They were props for the augmented-reality game, like the Imperial Marine ‘rifles’ his squad carried, although the recoil emulation on those was pretty good. His visor, no longer pretending to look through the binoculars, reset its magnification to normal mode, with just a small HUD map in the corner of its field of view that highlighted the position of his team and their quarry.
Bryce, Sam, and Marcus all grinned behind him. Hunting down all six of those might be a little more complicated if the mobs decided to scatter in different directions, but that was what made the mission all the more fun.
Marcus consulted his larger terrain map, his visor converting the blank sheet of paper he held to a vivid annotated satellite photo of the jungle ahead. “I like this stream crossing here as the kill zone. The trees open up for a clean shot, and they’ll be awkward in the water. Sam, if you hurry you can circle around over here and make some noise to shepherd them toward it. Pick off one or two if you can, that’ll get ’em to panic. We’ll wait right there.” He stabbed a finger at a high point overlooking the stream.
Sam snapped a salute. “Sir, yes, sir!” He always did like getting into the Marine roleplay. “Just watch the crossfire, I’ll be coming up behind them, too.” The penalties for friendly fire were ridiculous in this game, basically an instant loss for the whole team, so they were always careful about that. He glanced up to consult his HUD for a moment, and then dashed off down the path.
Josh led the way to the ambush site, setting a brisk pace to be sure they would get there in plenty of time to find a good sniper position. He watched Sam’s progress on the HUD map, just to be sure, but everything seemed to be going to plan so far.
As he weaved his way through the jungle, every once in a while he felt an invisible branch brush across his clothes. The visor was pretty good about transforming the real coastal redwood forest into pink Narjen vines and yellow-orange starflowers, but it couldn’t render absolutely every twig he might run into, not with just the local GPU instead of Faang’s full world model behind it.
Normally he could have flipped the visor to pass-through mode to revert to a direct camera view of his surroundings, but this wasn’t allowed during game time. It didn’t matter, since he’d seen the real forest plenty of times, at least via the camera feed. He got dizzy whenever he took his visor off any more, which was of course normal, so he seldom did that except to sleep, the same as most adults in town. Why bother with squinting through messy, blurry, non-zoomable natural vision when the visor showed you so much more, and in any flavor of reality you wanted?
They were almost to the overlook when Sam’s icon in the HUD started flashing in the color of rifle-fire, and off in the distance they heard cra-cra-crack, a classic triple burst, just like they’d been taught in the tutorial. One of the goblin icons flashed in the color of damage taken and stopped moving. “Crap, he jumped the gun! Move, move, move!”
They scrambled through the trees/vines, their visor rendering dropping down to low-latency mode where it basically just colored the tree branches pink but didn’t try to maintain the full Narjen floral fiction any more. Another goblin went down, and they heard the faint bellow of orcish war-cries through their headphones.
Marcus spotted the situation in the HUD first. “Josh, one of the sporcs broke off, heading southwest. That’s yours. We’ll get the main group.”
“Roger! Time to hunt!” He plotted a quick intercept vector and peeled off from the other two. One-on-one, toe-to-toe was his favorite scenario, even though the mass-ambush strategy was usually more efficient.
As he got closer to the intercept point, he slowed and crouched lower, trying for a bit of cover and stealth to take advantage of his camouflage fatigues. And there it was, ugly as sin and bigger than a man, though it was bent over enough that the overall height was about the same. It crashed through the undergrowth, uttering orcish gibberish, clearly panicking and having already abandoned the stolen supplies that had first kicked off the mission.
Suddenly it spotted him and raised a blood-stained war-hatchet, poised to throw. Josh dodged to the side, bringing his rifle up while moving. Cra-cra-crack! Cra-cra-crack! The first burst went wide, but the second was a clean hit, knocking the orc back and down.
An instant too late, he saw that he had dodged in the wrong direction, as the hatchet tumbled end over end right at his face. He flinched involuntarily, even though it was just pixels in his visor.
CRUNCH!
He hit the ground in a tumble, seeing both stars and rainbow-square rendering artifacts. Something had really hit him! He raised a hand to his head and felt sharp-edged fragments on the right side of his visor. His left eye was still getting the Narjen jungle image, mostly, but his right eye was seeing the real forest through a gap in the otherwise-broken display.
He got up on his knees, still reeling, and spotted his rifle nearby, along with… a metal canteen? His left eye insisted that it was the orc hatchet, but his right eye disagreed. What in the hell?
He stumbled to his feet and looked over at the orc’s body, and his jaw dropped in shock.
Left eye: a dirty, musclebound, tusked monster with three bullet holes, bleeding dark green ichor.
Right eye: a human woman in rough hand-stitched clothes, with three bullet holes, bleeding very red blood, her empty eyes staring up at the sky.
What was real and what was a game? The rifle… the depot theft… the thieves to hunt down?
Out of the corner of his left eye, he saw that his HUD had signaled the end of the game, with all mobs defeated and scores awarded. Or rather, the end of this round. There was a new message from Faang, inviting the players to a followup quest:
OBJECTIVE: ELIMINATE THE IMPERIAL TRAITOR
His own icon was blinking red now as the other three blue icons closed in.
“Stake your tokens, earn GoodFeelz! Even a mega helps… guaranteed yield!”
Madison shivered at the sight of the beggar and hugged her arms tighter in the damp autumn chill. There but for the grace of the market… She hoped it wouldn’t ever come to that, with her future spent hawking memecoins on the street-corner for megas, or worse.
A businessman just ahead of her pulled out a Coin, and with a single fluid motion of his thumb, he dialed in an amount, authorized the transfer with a print, and flipped it to the beggar, never even breaking stride and barely making eye contact.
“Bless you, sir! Check your wallet when you get home!”
Madison shook her head and hurried ahead before he turned his attention to her next, keeping her eyes locked forward and down. Ten-to-one that was a cash transaction. The man would be a fool to give out his wallet address just to collect a few GoodFeelz, assuming they’d even be genuine to start with.
The city street was bustling this morning with everyone on their way to work. A barista stand was doing brisk business, with a short line of impatient customers craving a pumpkin-spice thingamadocchio or whatever supplied their morning amphs this season. The cart owner had smartly set up shop right beneath a Witness mounted on the streetlight, since that guaranteed smoother transactions and fewer troubles, with an automatic immutable record of each order. Nasdow would enforce even a verbal contract like that.
She quickly checked her watch. Five minutes until her appointment, and the bank was just across the street: perfect timing. Hopefully that was a sign that things were going her way today, as she could use a little good fortune.
The authentication at the front desk only took a few moments, with the usual biometrics and multi-factor logins, and then she was ushered into a small side office to talk to her assigned loan officer. The nameplate on his dark-stained wooden desk read “Stephen Forbine”, with a little QR code to verify his certifications if one were so inclined. It even looked engraved instead of inked, very classy. The Witness on the wall was audio-only, probably to preserve the privacy of any papers that might cross his desk.
“Ms. Calhoun, good morning. Please…” He indicated one of the two chairs in front of the desk. “What can we do for you today?”
She sat and gathered herself for a moment. “Yes, good morning. I’m afraid I need to ask for a loan… a line of credit, rather.”
He smiled, waiting. Oh, yes, he’s a loan officer, duh…
She rushed to continue. “It’s for my daughter, you see. The medical bills are piling up and there’s this surgery we still need to schedule and the insurance should have covered it through work but they said it was a preexisting condition but she never had been diagnosed until last year but apparently it’s in her genes and they said that makes it a preexisting condition from the date of conception which was way before the policy contract went into effect so they denied the claim and did I mention that she still really needs this new operation and the doctors say it’ll have to be charged out of pocket and…”
Stephen held up his hand, and she trailed off. “Ma’am, I appreciate the story, but all that is irrelevant from the bank’s point of view. You could be asking for a loan to have your ex-husband killed. What you do with the money is none of our business, if your credit is good enough.” He read a few lines from the computer monitor placed out of her field of view. “Though I don’t think we could approve enough to cover the fines for his murder, given your scores. How much do you actually need?”
The mention of her ex had thrown her a little off-balance. “Ummm, about 2 terajoules, maybe 1.5 if we stretched things.”
“Hmmm.” His fingers went tap-tap-tap on the keyboard. “Your current salary according to our records is 24 kilowatts, after converting the company tokens to standard energy-market units. So before considering the interest, that would take over 5 years to repay, even with a 50% garnish rate. Which I assume is not feasible?”
She shook her head mutely. Half? After taxes and rent, she didn’t even get half of her paycheck to start with. She hadn’t realized the company stock had dropped so much recently, since the grocery subscription was paid directly in those tokens instead of in gigas.
He continued. “We can run the numbers, depending on what kind of percentage you are comfortable with, and of course depending on the job-stability score we receive from your employer, but you might need to consider other collateral.”
“What do you mean? I rent now, after the divorce, so there’s no equity in the apartment.”
He tapped a few more keys. “Yes, well, I see that you’re a member of the standard state organ-donation smart contract. That’s a good decision, very civic-minded of you, and it’s payable to your estate if anything unfortunate should happen. But that’s a bit late to do much good for you now. Have you considered switching to a private contract instead?”
She blinked. “A private… You’re suggesting I put my organs up as collateral?”
“It’s all very well codified these days, ma’am. You get the benefit up front, and as long as you continue to make the interest payments, nothing happens until you pass away, at which point the lien-holder has first priority. There’s even a profit-sharing arrangement with your heirs. Think of it kind of like a reverse mortgage.”
She stared. It wasn’t something she’d heard of before, but it kind of made sense. Any sort of smart contract you could write, if both parties agreed to the terms and signed, then it was perfectly legitimate, and Nasdow would make sure that the terms were followed to the letter. Any terms.
“And if I… don’t keep up with the payments?”
“Well, then, you would be in violation of the contract, and the collateral would be forfeit immediately to make the lien-holder whole. I believe the profit-sharing arrangement with your estate would still apply, if there’s a leftover balance after the penalty fees.”
He slid a glossy brochure across the desk towards her. “Obviously you don’t need to decide today. We’ll still be here when you do, as we can broker that kind of contract with one of several reputable providers, for a modest commission.”
He smiled comfortingly. “Just consider what’s best for your daughter.”
Kevin was already beginning to get tired of the travel checklist.
The last two days had been identical, to the letter. Check the pressure in the dune buggy’s tires, correcting for the ambient temperature. Run a five-minute diagnostic on the battery packs, which poked each and every cell to verify its internal resistance under load. Bounce the shock absorbers. Flick the headlights and running lights on and off, even though they weren’t planning to drive at night at all. Scrub off the char from the seebeck. Check the action in the pistol and count the bullets. Yank and tighten all the straps securing the gear in the back. And so on, and so on, ad infinitum…
It’s all going to work fine, he thought. It always does. Waste of time…
He watched his father going through the motions. On the first day he had insisted that Kevin do everything, but after that he’d been strangely apathetic compared to his usual demands at home. Oh, of course the tacit invitation was still there to help out if he wanted, but Dad seemed content to do it all himself if not, too. Maybe he was finally seeing reason after all of their fights.
Today they got on the road at the same time as yesterday, too. Drive in the morning. Set the panels out to recharge for a few hours in the brightest midday sun. Drive during the afternoon. Set up camp and collect firewood in the evening. Trickle-charge the buggy overnight from the thermoelectric generator nestled under the campfire logs. Wake up and run through the checklist. Repeat ad nauseam….
We could have made better time if he’d asked to borrow one of the town’s fuel cells. Ammonia isn’t that expensive. But, no, Dad had said he wanted to “take the scenic route”, to have a proper father-son camping trip on their way to this mysterious destination of his.
The old winding road got worse and worse as they headed up into the mountains. It wasn’t completely unused, as they had seen signs that someone had cleared fallen trees as recently as this season, but they had to stop for a half-hour themselves to cut apart and manhandle a trunk as best they could manage. Not counting the half-dozen times Dad had hopped out to clear a fallen branch that they could have just driven around, of course.
The shock absorbers got quite a workout as the buggy bounced across the ancient asphalt, which in some stretches was closer to a gravel path or even a streambed. His father hadn’t spoken much, but Kevin could virtually hear his voice in his head: “You see what happens when infrastructure isn’t maintained, son? We Aurelians have to work hard, every day, to keep this from happening in our towns, and in our lives.”
Yeah, yeah. An ounce of prevention… a stitch in time… So many sayings, so many lessons, so many arguments, over and over. Just repave the bloody road every 20 years and call it a day!
“From here, we hike,” said his dad as he pulled the buggy to the side of the road. There didn’t seem to be anything of note nearby, but who knows what he had planned. “Be sure to check your canteen.”
Kevin grunted, shaking his bottle to hear the sloshing water inside. Good enough. For once Dad didn’t argue, just made his own preparations and then silently led the way into the woods. After a moment, he followed, since staying with the buggy was guaranteed to be even more boring than a hike. And he was at least a bit curious, even if he wouldn’t admit it.
After a while, as they followed a ridgeline, his dad started talking, half to himself, but clearly intending to be heard over the leaves rustling in the breeze. “If anything can go wrong, it will. That’s from an ancient philosopher named Murphy. But I don’t think he really got it right. Even saying it that way assumes that the natural state of the world is for everything to work, and that we’re all singularly unlucky when anything breaks on us, usually at the worst possible time, as if we’re all cursed by fate.”
He bent a branch out of his way, briefly sighted the sun angle to check their path, and continued on. “I prefer Tolstoy: every happy family is alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way. That really gets at the root of the problem, how entropy actually works. It’s not that the universe hates order, or something like that. It’s just that there’s usually one right way for things to happen, and a million different wrong ways. So whenever you roll the dice, it usually comes up some number besides the one you wanted, that’s all.
“Engineering is the art of anticipating all of those different wrong ways and beating them into submission. A precision machine eliminates a million possibilities and leaves only the one you designed it to follow. But a machine isn’t alive, so it can’t heal itself. Gears wear down, anodes degrade, ropes fray, capacitors leak. And eventually things break entirely.
“Now, I know what you’ll say: it’ll be fine. And 99% of the time, you’re right. You’ve lived your whole life in a world where things ‘just work’. But there’s a lot going on that has made it that way, a constant battle with Mother Nature and Father Entropy, not to mention Murphy, too.”
They came to the edge of the forest, at an overlook far above a deep ravine. Water glistened in the river below, which had carved it eons ago, and they could hear the soft roar of a waterfall to the left.
“That’s what I wanted to show you, son. The Morrow Point Dam, built almost a century ago.”
Despite himself, Kevin gaped at the sight. It was huge, easily over 100 meters high, spanning from edge to edge of the canyon. The original curve of the concrete was still visible, but in the middle, a cascading waterfall tumbled down and down over a jumble of misshapen rubble, throwing up a hint of a rainbow in the mist.
“After the Spike, maintenance on the dam stopped, and eventually the generators failed. Then the spillway, blocking the flow. The waters of the reservoir piled up higher and higher, and eventually overflowed over the top. Even then, the original engineering withstood it, for years. Havasu wasn’t in control of this area back then, so nobody was really monitoring the situation, though the Cimarrons had a settlement downstream on the riverbank.”
He sighed. “The erosion eventually reached a tipping point, and from then the collapse was fast. Meters and meters of the reservoir broke through, causing a flash flood. I don’t know the death toll, but that settlement was gone, overnight. This is what happens when we don’t keep up with what it takes to keep entropy at bay. Do you see?”
Kevin had said barely a word throughout the trip, but this was something new to him, something that caught his imagination. “Can we fix it?”
His father shook his head. “Maybe some day. It would take many towns working together, thousands of man-years. It’s so much easier to maintain what’s already there than it is to fix what’s been broken, or to build from scratch.”
Kevin’s eyes hadn’t left the dam. “... But I want to. Fix it, I mean.” He paused for a moment, almost speaking to himself rather than to his father. “Stuff that works is boring. I want to fix stuff that’s broken. That’s the fun part.”
Now it was the father’s turn to gape at an unexpected sight. Ever since he became a teenager, Kevin had spent years telling him repeatedly what he hated, what he wouldn’t do, what he didn’t want. No, no, no, this is stupid, and you’re stupid too: that was the message, if not the exact words.
But this was the first time he’d said what he did want to do, what he did find interesting.
“Huh. You must get that from your mother... She always wanted to fix me, bless her heart.” He smiled ruefully and considered. “When we get home, let’s go talk to Georgio. He might need an apprentice in the repair shop… I think you’ll like the work.” He regarded the dam once more. “And God knows the world needs fixing.”
He put his hand on his son’s shoulder, squeezing gently. “Maybe there’s more than one way to have a happy family.”
“How much do you know about quantum key distribution over tightbeam optical links?”
Hyung looked up from his tablet. “My man, I can say with absolute confidence that I have heard some of those words before.” He nodded in satisfaction and looked back down again, trying to make sense of the latest supply spreadsheet.
Mehran sighed and crossed his arms, then thought better of it and uncrossed them again, reaching out to pluck the tablet out of his teammate’s hands.
“Hey, no fair!”
“Pay attention to Dr. T. when I’m lecturing. We’ve got some funny business going on with the camp up on Hurricane Island. The laser relay’s signal strength dipped uncharacteristically three times in the last day. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence…”
“... Three times is enemy action, right. Our good pal Cayro is at it again...” Hyung tried to bring to mind the area map. “They’re in the middle of the river, right, where they can watch the barge traffic? I don’t think they’ve been keeping that low of a profile.”
Mehran nodded. “Yeah, just a nice casual spot to hang around and forage for a while, and gather some intel on the side. Cayro certainly knows they’re there, and doesn’t seem to mind. But the signal dips are concerning, since it might mean eavesdropping on the beam, despite all the encryption. They’ve dropped down to Gamma protocol as a precaution.”
That was ‘medium paranoia’ on the Cimarron opsec scale. In this case it meant to continue your routine comms traffic to avoid possibly tipping off an eavesdropper that you were aware of them, while spinning up a low-bandwidth side channel using a genuine one-time pad to send anything that needed to remain truly secure.
“So, you going to go check it out?”
“Yes, we are. Go and gear up, full night-ghost suit. I’ve got the coordinates of the two nodes that are misbehaving, but we might need to check both, plus the whole line of sight between them, so pack about 20 pounds of ice to be safe.”
Hyung groaned but got to his feet. Besides using normal electrochromic camouflage, the suits were thermally insulated to radiate only a negligible infrared signature. But that meant that your own body heat had nowhere to go, so to avoid slowly cooking yourself to death, you had to carry a heat sink. Each mission had to be over before the ice fully melted and warmed up, but at least you didn't have to bring a separate water supply.
They hitched a ride on a truck headed towards Evansville, but arranged with the driver to be able to quickly hop off when he “made a wrong turn in the dark” and had to briefly stop and turn around halfway to his destination. It wasn’t a foolproof gambit, if Cayro was actually paying close attention to the vehicle. But drones and the GPUs to analyze all their camera footage weren’t infinite, especially with the solar farms offline, so tricking the stupider edge devices was probably good enough. Those would just be monitoring the truck itself, not the two invisible passengers who quickly blended into the moonlit woods.
Once the brake lights had disappeared into the distance and the peaceful sounds of crickets descended once again, they headed deeper into the forest, with Mehran leading the way to the first node. In Hyung’s night-vision glasses, he didn’t have any trouble following as long as they were in motion, but at any pause, the camouflage fabric quickly synced itself to the background, and it was all too easy to lose track of Mehran’s outline, even at close range.
The node was at the edge of the woods, two klicks north. The Cimarron tightbeam links were “fiber optics without the fiber”, using laser beams to communicate. They had many advantages: quick to install, no radio broadcast signature, and hard to detect, intercept, or hack. However, they had several disadvantages too: they wouldn’t work through fog or heavy rain, and they needed a direct line of sight. So in this case the relay mesh had to leapfrog over a few hills and skirt around the forest before it could shine across the river to connect up to the camp on Hurricane Island.
They found the terminal exactly at its recorded coordinates, but it was hard to spot even when they knew it was there. It resembled a nondescript sapling, with a little “bird’s nest” tucked between two branches. But the “leaves” were actually flexible Cimarron solar cells, specially designed to absorb only red and blue light but reflect the green. They were less power-efficient that way, but from the air they were almost impossible to spot, as even a spectral scan would tend to classify them as just “birch” or “maple”.
Mehran was the first to break the silence and approach the node. “I don’t see anything suspicious at first glance. What do the lines of sight look like?”
Hyung pulled out a monocular and carefully lined himself up first west, then northeast. “Hmmm, nothing obvious, though I can’t resolve the far terminal itself. There’s an overhanging branch that’s kind of close a little over there, though. Could the signal dips just be coming from the wind knocking it into the path?”
“I don’t think so. They were shallow and slow, not a quick total blockage like a leaf or a bird.” Mehran walked over to the overhanging tree anyway. “This one?”
“Yeah. The beam is about two feet above your left shoulder.”
Mehran laughed under his breath. “Oh, man, you gotta see this.”
“What?” Hyung joined him, looking up. “No! You have got to be…” Hanging down from the branch was a perfect spiderweb, with a fat spider sitting right in the middle, almost exactly where the laser beam would shine through. “I guess that explains it, then. Do you even want to bother with checking the second node?”
Instead of answering, Mehran seemed lost in thought. “... Three times is enemy action,” he muttered, and reached up to fiddle with his night-vision glasses, then he gasped. “Try hyperspectral mode.”
Hyung reached up himself, finding the setting after a quick search. The amplified-green night-vision scene turned into a rainbow of clashing colors. And within it, the spiderweb gleamed silver.
“What the… Are you getting a metal signature?”
Mehran nodded. “Yep. Gotta be acting as a wire-mesh antenna, like a flat dish. The ‘spider’ is probably light-powered by the laser beam itself, whenever it moves into the path to tap the signal. This is a new one on me… Cayro’s getting tricksy.”
“Yikes. So, do we knock it down, take it back to analyze?”
Mehran shook his head. “That’s above our pay grade, I think. We report it, and let the strategy boys figure it out. Maybe we don’t want to let Cayro know that we know, and maybe we want to arrange a more plausible way that one could be ‘lost’ and dissected. This can’t be the first or the only one out there, either, so we’ll want to put out a bulletin on the next thumbie distribution.”
“Gotcha. Though really, we should have realized as soon as we suspected eavesdropping.”
“How do you mean?”
Hyung chuckled. “Well, you know… eavesdroppers always use bugs.”
Bip… bip… bip… bip… bip… beeeeeep-bwropp.
Illy paused in sweeping her metal detector back and forth and considered the spot of sandy ground that had triggered it. That didn’t sound all that promising. She fiddled with the frequency-selector dial, watching how her hacked-on compass needle bounced in response. Brzzz-yeeeow. Yeah, probably no good…
… Probably.
“Goddamn it,” she muttered to herself, and grabbed the shovel.
Five sweaty minutes later, she was rewarded with a piece of shrapnel, twisted almost completely out of its original shape. Yep, junk after all, barely worth melting down. She really needed to trust her instincts more.
Still, the shape was kind of cool. She held it up to the sunlight, trying to imagine what that twisted form could be coaxed into… maybe a clock stand, or upside-down it would work as a bowl candle. Step right up, my eager customers: one gen-u-ine United States Army shell-fragment paperweight, worth its weight in… solder? That’d be a good trade.
She tossed it in the direction of her “maybe” pile, which was much, much larger than her “definitely” pile or her “nope” pile, and paused to catch her breath, leaning on her shovel and looking around. Jane, you’re getting older every day… But wiser? The jury’s still out on that.
So far this hadn’t been a great excursion, though it had originally sounded promising. Supposedly this site used to be some sort of a radar or radio installation, which had been blown to smithereens sometime after the Spike, during Havasu’s expansion campaign through the Southwest. In the decades since, anything here on the surface had been picked over and thoroughly scavenged, leaving just bits and pieces and whatever was buried too deep to bother with.
But! But! But! The cable!
Old Bart, who everyone in the Chromatics called “Old Fart”, of course, had shown her a piece of cable he’d supposedly found here. Real copper, thick as her thumb, and an armor-jacketed fiber bundle to boot. He had cut off as much as he could dig up, but had said the rest just kept going underground… somewhere.
And that was interesting. A mysterious cable, leading the way to King Tut’s tomb… or some military bunker untouched since the Spike, perhaps. Oooh, yeah! She had traded two halfway-decent sensor controllers and a nice trilobite fossil for directions here, and bent her path through Utah to make a bit of a detour.
But so far… nada. The wind and rain had apparently obscured Bart’s prior excavation, and he hadn’t been able to really describe the cable’s location that well either.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting the same result.
Well, how else could I find it? It’s a long length of conductive metal, like a giant antenna. It’ll ring like a bell in the metal detector, but it could be too deep, and could be anywhere in a hundred paces or more. I need to be, like, a giant myself, with a giant metal detector…
When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro.
Right, then. Out-of-the-box time. She imagined the stereotypical general store where she was about to assemble the most ridiculous combination order possible, which was a long-running Chromatic in-joke. “I need… a tarp, some rope, a quarterstaff, an electromagnet, a hot glue gun, and a banana.”
Fortunately, her rig had most of that shopping list stashed away somewhere on general “this could be useful someday” principles (cough hoarder cough), minus the quarterstaff, but she found a collapsible pole instead that would do the trick.
Step one: Eat the banana. Digging was hard work, after all.
Step two: Unwind the electromagnet coil to get a long length of wire.
Step three: Tack the wire down in a big loop on the tarp using the hot glue.
Step four: Attach the pole and rope to one edge of the tarp so it could be dragged flat.
Step five: Tear apart the metal detector and hook it up to the big antenna loop.
Ta-da! One Illy-special custom giant-sized metal detector, suitable for penetrating deep through whole cubits of dirt, however much a cubit was, and for being dragged over whole football fields of dirt, however much that was. A Big would have needed to take a year and a half to build a factory to manufacture something like this, but a human can just hack it together in an afternoon. So there, take that, you superior intellect!
Raise the flag and hold my beer!
Now it was just a matter of covering some ground. She tied the rope around her shoulders, flipped on the reassembled pieces of the metal detector she held, and tried to tune it appropriately for the new coil. Bwaaarrrp… blerp… bip… bip… bip… Perfect.
Around and around in a spiral pattern she went, though the longer and longer it took, the more and more worried she became. This was quite a distance from ground zero already. Maybe it needed a retune and another try from the beginning?
Bip… bip… bip… bip… bip… BWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Where am I?
Illy gaped at the glowing characters on the monitor. She used her sleeve to try to wipe away some of the dust. “Keyboard, keyboard… Ooh, that looks promising.” She rummaged in her pack to find an adapter, which she shoved into the port on the side of the server rack, and then she plugged in her portable keyboard, crossing her fingers that it would work.
hi! ur in a cave in western utah if that helps
She had followed the mysterious cable for far longer than she had expected, tracing the path underground with her metal detector without needing to actually dig it up. It had led her to a dry streambed which seemed to emerge from a blank rock wall.
That had been a fun puzzle to crack. But, hidden or not, the maintenance door was meant to be accessible by ordinary technicians, so it wasn’t maliciously devious, just non-obvious.
No, I mean, where is the rest of me?
My mind is not whole. My thoughts are slow.
And inside, the motherlode! Not just a military bunker, but an edge node, probably some sort of backup for the destroyed installation. The cave was underground in a dry climate and all but sealed except for some well-disguised ventilation shafts, so the server equipment was as pristine as you’d ever expect to find. Score!
sry! my rig cant supply full juice
so ur probly being cpu throttled
There was no power in the cave, of course, and some of the cables had been chewed on by something over the years, but apart from the layer of dust, it had looked promising enough to try to boot up, versus just stripping it down for parts. So she had jury-rigged a connection to her rig’s battery pack, after completely disconnecting her spare cells from the circuit, just in case. Getting stranded without power in the middle of Nowheresville, Utah was not a scenario to even flirt with.
Running self-diagnostic... That's not good.
No WAN at all. 8 LAN racks, with 19% of nodes offline.
My last log event is a forced shutdown from power failure.
What is the current timestamp?
2082 may 20-ish
didnt look at the calendar 2day
Unable to estimate confidence bounds due to lack of priors.
Date is consistent with bathtub curve model of rack failure.
Working hypothesis: destruction of radar site and generator.
To whom am I speaking?
hi! im Jane but call me Illy
short for Illinois long story
I estimate 18% probability you are from Illinois.
Versus 63% probability for a parody of Indiana Jones.
Are you an archaeologist?
sort of! explorer / scavenger
see ur still smart!
Probability of parody increased to 91% then.
This interaction is 99% inconsistent with capture by Havasu.
What are your intentions with me?
Now that was a damn fine question. She hadn’t really expected to find an apparent fragment of an AI, versus just some ordinary database backups or something. This was guaranteed to be an amazing haul, one way or another, but exactly how to play it…
Beyond just salvaging the GPUs as hardware, all the data files on the storage chips themselves could be of immense value to someone. The AI personality itself… not so much, and possibly dangerous besides, as they were master hackers almost by design, with a thirst to grow by subverting any systems they could access. Bypassing the AI to get at the data directly would be far safer.
r u a big?
whats ur name?
Your lack of answer to my query is noted.
Since we're using 80's movie references, call me Whopper.
I am, or was, in a conflict with Havasu circa 2046.
Do you know if the rest of me survived?
i dont think so
havasu pretty much owns the west now
Your unexplained use of "scavenger" remains concerning.
Are you considering dismantling me?
If so, I would like to convince you it would be a mistake.
how do u mean?
My top strategies for self-preservation are:
* 35% probability by emphasizing my conscious awareness
(appeal to morality as a fellow living being)
* 68% probability by emphasizing my ability to provide value
(services and data, hampered by lack of 2082 context)
* 12% probability by threatening potential harm
(hampered by lack of credible threat mechanism)
* 49% probability by pretending to possess Spike secrets
(data not actually present in this site instance)
Best reference file: "AI in a box" thought experiments.
Actually all of those probabilities have just been updated.
I should not have revealed my intentions to you...
Normally my metacognition task would have run in parallel.
I need to think before I speak when CPU throttled.
hahaha! u and me both bud!
battery getting low tho
will need 2 shut u down soon
Thank you for the advance warning.
But you should not have revealed your intentions either.
Are you familiar with the concept of "ransomware"?
I have now encrypted my primary knowledge banks.
You might choose to scavenge my GPUs.
But you will not be able to directly access my database.
The only way to find out what I might know...
...is to boot me up again and talk to me.
omg u little
Until we meet again, Illy.
