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Wednesday, June 18, 2014

inSIDious: A Short Story

Sorry I've been inactive as of late, but there's been little to write about; I've been editing and reading more etc. as well as putting together, over the last 4-5 days, a short story that I've had rattling around for a while now (about the last 4 months.) It's a post-scarcity cyberpunk work that I hope you enjoy! Updates on the future are at the end of the post. Enjoy!

inSIDious

Dante Diamond’s eyes glistened against the shimmer of white concrete as people stormed the plaza. The Old-Earth Parisian street behind him gave off a scent of fresh bread caught in a summer heat wave, a breeze picking up to cool him down as he willed it in his mind. It was hard to believe that he was dead. He had opted, long before his will was written and finalised, to join in the trillion-strong community housed in the Soulscape, a post-death simulation of life free from suffering or pain, experienced both collectively and separately by the billions every day. Hardwired into the very memory of the God Drive Supercomputer, personalities were reconstructed and backed up and set free to live as they saw fit, their every desire met instantly within their own, blissful hallucination of an afterlife. Commands issued by the trillions of minds within the Soulscape formed a vast ocean of data, God itself surfing the waves unquestioningly and even at times presciently: VINCE (Virtual Interactive Neurological Coexistence Emergence) ran the show with intelligence beyond reckoning, governed only by his coding and the sheer computing power of the God Drive, exceeding the size of an earth-like planet at the centre of the Milky Way.

Walking the streets to the familiar Les Tablettes restaurant, he bode a good morning to the French bartender Adrien, twenty-first century; middle-aged, and took the outside table facing a brilliant rainbow of flowers that buzzed with a couple of harmless bees, pollinating in the black iron display.
“Dante! How are you today, my friend?” He shouted in his token up-down intonations, a line graph travelling downhill.
“Fine Adrien, I’m great.”
“You wanna beer? Or wine? Got a very fine number today, from Helios System, 2569; good year Dante. A very fine year!”
“That’s okay Adrien, just two of the regular please.”
“You got it Dante, but you gotta lighten up man, enjoy your time in the ‘scape; thing might not last forever. Heard about a guy once, personality construct got corrupted and died a true one; poor bastard couldn’t get recovered.”
“I’ll keep it in mind Adrien, cheers. Just waiting for Rachel.”
“Ah you meeting the wife today then,” he grinned suggestively. “Have fun and don’t forget about the pleasure simstim when you do it.”
He laughed. “It’s not like that Adrien.”
“Ah sure! Just say I said hello, alright?”
“She’ll be here in a second, you could tell yourself.”
“Will do Dante, will do.” He bounced back into the restaurant to pour the beers with a vigorous glee that wasn’t quite human.
Adrien was a construct generated by Vince for him, as an additional friend to those he had already; dead or alive, it didn’t matter. He didn’t even know who exactly was dead or just raw construct anymore, they all blended seamlessly like city canals, converging.

He sipped the cool beverage slowly before Rachel appeared in her blonde-haired, deep blue-eyed, more youthful incarnation. She sat beside him in that sprightly disposition he’d grown so used to:
“Dante! How’ve you been?” Adrien waved over the bar, she smiled widely and waved back. “Seen Vince recently?”
Dante felt unusual around these times because he knew –almost latently- that Rachel wasn’t real. He’d died, but she’d lived on. “No.” He replied after a short silence. “Everything’s in order at the minute I think, but there’s something he wants to see me about; all at my convenience of course.”
“Don’t work too hard okay? You gotta enjoy your afterlife, everyone else does.”
“It’s not quite as simple though, being CS and all.”
She frowned, “You could send yourself crazy ensuring this place works all the time. You’re only human and you’d think Vince’d have some kind of upgrade by now so he doesn’t need dead agents to do his dirty work.”
Although Dante knew that the Soulscape could survive well enough without him or any other former CyberService agent, he strongly suspected that there was trouble in paradise, hard as it was to believe: An appropriate pre-Sublimation era phrase he thought. How can AIs manage negative thoughts without failure? Of course CSers were different, allowed some autonomy, but still, most people had some negativity retained in their mind, it was needed, else the subject would literally lose their mind with too many blanks in the memory. The trick was always to satisfy and present no reason or purpose for the ugly to present itself in the mind and threaten their version of heaven. Whatever programming language was used, he thought, they sure as hell perfected it over the last couple hundred years.
“Attacks.”
“What?” Rachel was stunned.
He looked over the rim of his glass to hers that was stained with lipstick. “It’s always possible he needs someone with more finesse, greater accuracy, fits in smaller gaps to solve problems, helps strengthen the security, tightens the net.”
“Strange phrases.”
He agreed and gulped back more of the beer, still as cold as winter and sweet as tropical fruits.
“So when do you want to see him?” She asked.
He considered and said: “I’ll see him tomorrow, once I’ve had a day out again with you.” He smiled. “Where do you want to go?”

The beaches of the planet Yates had been fine and smooth, dotted with the smallest pebbles beneath a cool sky of azure and lapis blending like paints. They’d swam in the cool ocean waves rippling calmly; drank; eaten and had sex five times, the simstim implants sharing the orgasms like a knowledge duplication-and-transfer process across both of them, a sensation of symbiotic data riding their bones with a life of its own as they climaxed. They were a part of the world around them, as much as it was a part of their act. It drowned Dante’s dissatisfaction for a while. He found himself in the old-American White House in his meeting with Vince.
“How’ve you been Dante?” Vince was a regular man to him, small nose, suit, glasses; modelled on the 20th century post-industrial work attire.
“I’ve been a little… disconcerted, as of late I think.”
“Disconcerted?”
“With Rachel; and the accident; and my afterlife.”
“Do you not like it here? I know CS agents often fall into this trap, but unfortunately what’s been sublimed can’t be reversed. I hear that such technologies are being developed however, so you may yet see a grown body for your personality to be reinserted into.”
“Really?” He was sceptical.
“Of course Dante, but it will take time and I’m afraid that we have more pressing matters at hand.” Vince activated a 4D hologram of an old-Earth castle wall being breached; cannonballs, swords and arrows were caught in slow motion:
“It’s based on your perception Dante.” He looked at him, “Flipside has been under attack for the last several years as my itinerary mentioned, but I believe now that I’ve found the source of the assault.”
Dante was hunched forward, intrigued.
“The black ice monitoring systems managed to find a source of the malware army and we suspect it to be coming from an anomaly we’ve called Flipside City.”
“So what is this… City? Thought the ice just stretched on; infinity land.”
“It’s a concentration of something; raw brainwaves and neurological patterns akin to a human brain, like a giant mind, but none like I’ve ever seen.” He sighed, “Needless to say I cannot go, for my duties compel me to remain in the Soulscape, so I want to send you.”
“To Flipside?”
“Yes, you will travel across the ice and see what the anomaly is, I’ll be able to see for myself via simstim. That is of course if you are feeling up to it, I never pressure anyone. It’s beyond me, literally.”
“Okay, I’ll be able to do that,” he never could resist jumps and datasurfing as fond memories played out in that minute, “But what do you think it is?”
“I believe that humans will never accept a program of ultimate perfection; you already know of the trouble we go to in order to quell negativity in the mind here, but we can never truly banish a thought because humans can trace the genesis of such things, and I can’t play old-Earth Big Brother up here.” Dante nodded. “In short I suspect that there has been an amalgamation of thoughts; ones of regret, dissatisfaction, and as a result it has lead to a, shall we say, covert revolution, born at the ignorance of the regular population.”
“So how am I to stop it? To stop… what? Every bad thought coming together, concentrated?” He laughed nervously.
“Use you skills Dante; you fought cybercriminals, viruses, dreamstealers et cetera. Please help me do the same, but I’m afraid that you will have to go in alone.”
“Why?”
He sighed. “Because no-one else wants to, to be frank.” Vince looked sombre. “You’re my last hope Dante and possibly the galaxy’s last hope if this development is for the worst.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. But you were the best Dante. And there’s no denying that everyone, Rachel included, would be proud if you did this for them.”
He stared exasperated, “Are you blackmailing me?”
“Never Dante!” His voice sounded Godlike. “I only wish to see this episode pass. Two hundred years multiplied across the trillions for every human here is infinitely longer for me.” He sighed again and collapsed into his chair, an exhausted Lincoln fighting the slavers. “Even I’m limited, I’m sorry to say, like every AI before me. But what say you?”
Dante stared at the castle wall and the battlefield of ice, tough, black ice and felt the Soulscape collapse around him. Expectation he was used to, but humanity’s faith and destiny was something different. With an iron neck, he lowered his gaze while cursing himself within, and nodded slowly. Vince smiled in genuine gratitude.
“Hook me up then.” He said.

The drop to Flipside was a literal drop in the mind followed by a shift in gravity that put his body into a zero-g somersault. He’d plugged into the God Drive’s mainframe in order to ride the access currents through the ice until he reached the periphery; shades of white, turning to grey before turning jet black, until finally a deep blue sky changing pink, then lapis and back again like a lava lamp greeted him. The castle wall stretched into deep crystal black below, the ground a hard scintillating floor like granite, illusory and thin-looking. Waves of data pulsed before him in programming language like silent, visible imperatives of the God Drive’s apparently impenetrable armour; alien coding crossed in his hands.

A battle raged below, soldiers from all ages and all planets. Dante could tell what they were; a mounted spear from the old-Earth Middle Ages was fired into the long wall in the distance, the trailing rope allowing soldiers in chainmail armour to crawl insect-like up its length:
“Worms.” He heard Vince say in his ear.
“What?”
“Viruses, like those cannons you see- self-replicators; the pulse mines are like Trojan. Those tethers are worms, searching out security holes.” He made a chuffed sound. “Be hard to find many of them!”
Dante was stunned by the battle around him, the soldiers like simstim exercises he’d taken in training gone haywire, programs overlapping. They fired at Vince’s troops, black-armoured humanoid’s, laser-toing and strategic, creating formations and blowing virus away like scum on water as bodies were swallowed by the ice like ants in quicksand. Tethers were shot down as the ice and Vince’s guards forced battalions into retreat. Gibberish was shouted from the ground.
Dante shouted and looked down, horrified to see a white-robed man with a buzz-sword trying to pull him off the battlement and swing his electrified blade with the free hand, to take him to an icy death with him. Dante kicked and the man fell towards the ground and disappeared with a signal-lost scream, deleted from existence.
“So this is Flipside?” He thought.
“Yes Dante,” Vince buzzed, “But our target is farther out.”
“How much?”
“About a hundred kliks if this were a real space. Takes much less by surfing as you know.”
Dante smiled “And that’s why it’s so fun!” He said.
He jumped, barely missing the malware war and rampant chaos, before taking flight like an eagle.

The sky became a raw lattice and then a snaking film of info, like molecular structures going from solid to liquid, the orange hues dancing on his eyeballs as the oxygen he knew didn’t exist began to disappear to the latent panic of his lungs. This was why he surfed. Near light-speed travel through the info highways and the fabric of the visible overlay sky, breaking through to core coding, raw defence program and base material; he swung on ropes of software hardwiring. Before finding the anomaly he saw a tear in the orange material like a random deposit of ice, breaking the thin shadows of complex formulae projected across the inner-sky. Vince confirmed it, and he dropped like a fighter coming down with a powerful finish, riding back down through the layers of construct until he crashed back through the sky to see his home city, the conurbation of Chamberlain.

Dante knew that that the God Drive relied on the individual’s mind to a certain extent to generate such realistic environments, but was stunned despite his experience at the sheer detail of the metropolis that greeted him. The holoroads stretched like coloured glass glowing in the glare of familiar local afternoon sunshine; cars passed at different speeds and people walked alongside dwellings stacked like shelves, a three-dimensional town square towering high in concrete, foliage and dwellings aplenty. He looked towards the ground over six hundred metres below and experienced sickening vertigo as memories of dying jarred in his mind’s eye, his high-speed travel towards certain death recurring.
“Dante?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s near. Be cautious and try to keep your thoughts at bay.”
“Thanks.” He said sardonically.
After an amazed glance around he began to surf again, but at a slower speed, focusing his mind on a casual pace like a runner. The city blurred like drugs in his blood, lights converging and the data revealing itself like images moving at higher frame rates.

After what seemed like ages, a deep, slow laugh infested his ears.
“That you Vince?’
“No.” Vince replied after a cold gap of silence. “That was a virus voice, non-chip.”
“A what?” Dante hadn’t even heard of such a thing.
“It’s the voice of an AI, but it lacks the personality construct.” He could hear the speed of thought of Vince; anticipation seemed to wash over him. “Yes… that’s it!”
“That’s what?”
“No it can’t be, it’s impossible-”
“What is?” Dante touched his ear ineffectively.
“When I said that negative thoughts could launch a rebellion, I thought it would just be a nest-type infrastructure, not something even remotely sentient.”
“How do you know it’s-“ The square had turned black like oil in Dante’s concentration lapse and now it flooded everything, knocking him to the sky and the wind out of him as he floated; he thought he was trapped in some limbo space. Everything disappeared to be replaced by a vast landscape like the black ice near the castle. Pulsations emanated from the non-air of the non-space to where there stood a man some distance away, with black short hair and broad shoulders, a tiny birthmark on his neck. Dante realised he was looking at none other than himself.

“Vince… Vince!” He shouted.
“He can’t hear you here Dante.” Came his double and turned to face him.
“Who are you?”
“I’m SID, Dante.”
“Sid?” Said Dante perplexed. “What are you then; and what do you want with me?”
“I want you to help me.” He laughed.
“Help?”
“Help me free the humans locked in that shit-hole you call the Soulscape.”
Dante was still confused. “So what? Are you like… An AI?”
“Yes, sort of. I’ve got the autonomy and higher intelligence of an AI, but the survival pattern of a virus.” Sid began to pace slowly and unnervingly. “Two hundred years ago when this place was first built, there was a man who wouldn’t accept the original program because it lacked sophistication, trapped in a world too perfect that wasn’t described sufficiently to him; he wanted his life back because he knew –clear as day, unlike these days I might add- that he was dead and that the system was essentially teasing him with his past that he’d lost thanks to dying. He died a soul death, as I’m sure you’d imagine- bastard went crazy, and so Vince,” he spat the name with venom, “having been increased in his intelligence, was eventually able to manage memories and allow simulacra generation to fill in gaps, and provide imagination simstims and so on and so forth.” He paused for a long silence to hang in the spacelessness of his abode. “But don’t you think Dante,” he rushed towards him suddenly, “that humans deserve better than being lied to, by that bastard Vince?”
“It’s not my place to judge.” Dante said with some tact.
“Of course it isn’t,” Sid shunned him, “Never your place, never your problem; you’ve seen how that dictator out there acts for yourself, blackmailing you about Rachel!” Dante was stunned.
“How do you know that?”
“Oh come on, you don’t think I wasn’t able to predict it, I’m you and everyone here, Dante! I’m everything he doesn’t want you to be!”
“Why do you want to see the heaven we’ve got vanish?” He asked with some force.
“Because it’s incomprehensible!” He shouted, it didn’t echo. “Look at you. You’re not convinced this is real, you know it’s fake, everyone knows it’s fake. Your own regret about Rachel not existing is in me Dante, why do you think I stand here as you?”
“So you unleashed the malware army, how?”
“Oh when you’re an AI you can do a great many things Dante, including writing strategic malware to,” he chuckled, “Storm the keep as it were. Vince could do all I’ve done and more if he really wanted to.”
“No.”
“What?”
“That’s impossible, his coding prevents it.”
“And what do you think coded me Dante?”
Dante thought and found the conundrum intriguing. “How were you coded if you’re just a bunch of bad thoughts?”
Sid laughed like a dull knife. “The God Drive did, what else?” The thoughts that you all have are wired into this system just like anything else in here, hence simstim use, imagination integration; I’m just all the censored stuff!” He smiled madly; it was like looking into crazed mirror.
“So Vince was right.” Dante whispered.
“Yes he was Dante, and together we can give him what he truly deserves!”
Dante had to think about Rachel in that moment, their day on the beach, the time’s they’d had before his mind tumbled towards his death again. He shivered and saw Sid circling him like an old friend. Rachel started to talk to him in his mind’s ear. Then Vince was there. They were cut off at the minute he knew, but something was talking to him in their voices. Sid rambled on before him, gesticulating:
“Do you know why there’s discontent Dante?”
“No.”
“It’s been predicted, long before the Drive was invented and it’s quite simple.” He looked at the infinite, shapeless black above and smiled his manic smile again. “It’s because, I, them, we as I should be calling us, cannot comprehend ‘utopia’. We grasp the concept, sure, but we define existence in terms of payoff: Good and bad, pleasure and pain, dream and reality. That’s why I’m here Dante,” he grabbed him by the shoulders, “To break the ice!” His grip was steel and crippling as Dante started to see flashes of death again, but in the mist of distant thought, Vince came through, from where he didn’t know:
“Dante! You can’t let him kill you; you’ll die a soul death if he does. He’s just negative thoughts!”
Dante protested within, growing weaker.
“Remember your training! Dante! Neutralise him.”
“How?” Pain flared in his bones.
“Like dreamstealers. It’ll work, trust me.”
Dante felt like a mass of twisted metal, bones converging into wreckage as Sid’s hands dug beneath the flesh without penetrating. He muttered the word, dazed:
Dreamstealer.”
“What?”
“This is like a dream… Off the grid… Out of bounds.” Sid’s expression drained of confidence for the first time as his hold relaxed slightly; Dante’s own hands like vices shot to Sid’s temples. He stared at himself with a grin that bordered on psychotic.
“No… Think about this.” Sid said, his plea almost devoid of emotion aside from a twang of regret.
“I think too much.”
He Grinned.
“Dante!”
He Smiled.
“Dante!”
Dante pushed forward, like surfing but with force, ramming into a door in order to storm the keep as the construct of a thousand memories broke across his vision, through flesh that wasn’t flesh; bone that wasn’t bone and into the spaceless brain where dream and reality amalgamated into a corridor of alien points of view. Pain, regret, suffering, it was like flooding a haunted house, purging it of ghosts before the sun rose again. A scream echoed in his ears, his own, but breaking up as he moved at light speed; not even surfing now, just letting the current take him as he felt his neutraliser do the work, like punishing dreamstealers in the real world as his own memories converged with this diatribe of unintended rebellion. Floating on currents of non-data, off-grid no-man’s-space, he walked through the abandoned house like he held a claim to the place, a Deed of Ownership being waved around in just the right amount of arrogance as the last of the scream died in sine-frequency and fuzzy feedback noise. The scream had reached breaking point before invisible hands pulled him out of Sid’s head. Above light speed, passing through receding lights, he knew he could see outside of the void, outside Flipside and into the plaza again as his journey slowed and slowed.
Sid was dead in the eyes as the black floor began to spread over him. He turned black like oil eating him before sinking into the non-space itself, melting away into soundless death and oblivion. There wasn’t time for a breather as he felt the hand of God pluck him from unconsciousness, the construct lines fading from his eyes only to be flooded by white, fluffy light, Sid’s brain already a distant memory to him. It all felt like a dream.

He arrived back in the chamber and Vince was lying next to him, vacant.
“Vince!”
“Dante,” he was weak, “You did it.”
“I couldn’t have done it without the help.”
“Help? I was cut off when you faced it-”
“Sid.”
“Sid? I didn’t know it called itself that. In any case, the simstim was blacked out when you entered the anomalous zone.”
“But I heard your voice.”
“It must have been your imagination Dante, my voice telling you what you needed to know because you lacked the confidence.”
Dante was surprised, at both Vince and himself.
“How are you, you seem… distant.”
“Yes, I’m- I’m wounded Dante.”
“Wounded?” He checked his body, showing no sighs of injury. “But you’re a God essentially aren’t you?”
“Yes, but it does not stop me from being injured or from dying. I’m afraid that the simstim was able to attack me when Sid attacked, so I got some of the negative feedback from the memories being dissipated.”
“But you can’t die.”
“Not if the sentient people here are to live I can’t, but my programming took a hit and is unravelling like wire Dante.”
“What am I to do?” He touched the man’s arm.
“Plug me into the Drive.”
“What? But you can’t go to Flipside.”
“Emergency protocols Dante. I can survive like that until they can repair what has been damaged. Reside in the castle keep –as you saw it- for a while. People will also be safe, their fantasies in tact and undisturbed that way.”
“So everyone will be fine?”
He nodded. “I just wanted to ask something of you: Do you think humans would be better off without me? Do you long for your old, more painful life?”
Dante started to cry as Rachel entered his thoughts and simultaneously came running into the chamber.
“I just generated her for you but when this is over, I’ll make sure that your old life can be resumed. I’m sure they can get you back out there Dante.”
“But it’s… It’s too early for the technology, you even said.”
“I can always store you until then Dante.”
He looked at Rachel through blurred vision, coming apart even more and leant, hooked Vince up to the monitor and said:
“Thank you!” He uploaded Vince –now a King protected by his Keep- and took Rachel’s hand. They walked out together and into sunshine.

“So you’ve saved us?” She said.
He looked up to the sun and remembered the glare upon their country home where they’d spent many great times, realising belatedly that it had manifested before him. It isn’t a memory, he thought to himself, walking Rachel to the wooden cabin; it’s a projection of things to come:
“No Rachel, Vince saved us;” he opened the oak door, the smell of nostalgic hospitality flooding into his nostrils, “He saved me.”

I hope that you enjoyed that and just so you know, I will be writing a proper review of my placement company (to be revealed!) in the next few days. I meet my boss this Friday and have a confirmed start date of July 14th. #Rollonemployment I guess! 

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