Fighting for the Future, page 8
No, this is a problem where I gotta think like a detective.
The thing is, I have no idea what a detective thinks.
But the Yesterday Guy had no idea either, and they were a detective anyway. They just woke up and figured it out, once a day, every day of their life.
And—this is the important part—that guy left me notes. I grabbed a mirror of the desk before I cleared out. As I rode a random ubahn winding through the undercity I dove into the files.
Read me first! was about our most recent case, Nif Welton. Lots of detail, nothing about starting a new investigation. Next.
Closed cases, divided into “won” and “lost”. No references anywhere to “WORM.” Next.
List of pending clients, up at the top in all caps “NEVER WORK TWO CASES AT THE SAME TIME. WORST IDEA.” Good to know. In general, anyway; since for the foreseeable future I was working exactly one case, the case of Find Worm Or Die, it wasn’t a practical consideration. Next.
Paydirt: a database labeled “Sources.” Names, contacts, expertise. Little notes about whether to bribe or threaten or whiteknight or wheedle. I scroll.
This one looks promising: a data broker who specializes in “general inquiries, deep background, open-ended research, abstract bullshit.”
(FIND WORM.)
The only name the Yesterday Guy has written down for this broker is the Phreak.
So I call. Rrrrrring. Rrrrrring. Rrrrrr—
“Shifane!” says the Phreak. “Long time no talk, huh?” They chuckle. “Not that you remember.”
“No.” (It’s true, I don’t remember—and if I did I’d lie. Something about my new memory has badly upset the Powers That Be, which is to say the Powers That Are Listening to Every Phone Call—)
“So what is it today?”
“I need you to tell me everything about WORM.” I’m subvocalizing, so that nobody else on the train can hear me; even WORM, emphasized by its strangeness, is just another little anonymous lump in my throat.
“Ha! You and half the army.”
“What?”
“Don’t you read the news?”
“No.” How could I? Every day brand new faces, every day some brand new breaking story. Meaningless.
There’s a hiss on the line, the static of distance.
“Well,” says the Phreak. “There’s a war on, you know. With ParaTek.”
“Okay.” I’m not surprised. There’s always a war on, more or less.
“Except things have gotten weird. In the combat zone.”
“Weird how?”
“Weird weird. Combat contractor defections all over the place, except then sometimes they come back, after. And they’re not defecting to ParaTek—they’re just doing other things. And everybody’s talking about WORM. It sounds like maybe—well, no, I shouldn’t speculate.”
In my database it says the Phreak LOVES to speculate. So I nudge.
“I bet you know.”
“Just guesses, just, just vibes. Something . . . something sideways. Something about memory. Something somehow contagious—”
“Memory,” I say. “Yes. That’s right.”
Something in my voice must have been wrong because the Phreak’s tone changes abruptly. “What do you know about this, Shifane?”
“Nothing!”
“Bullshit.”
“Honestly, nothing. Just a note from the Yesterday Guy. ‘FIND WORM.’ It’s not even related to that missing persons case I’m working.”
“No,” says the Phreak. Their voice is rising. “No, the missing persons case was more than a week ago. You called yesterday, you said it was a subcitizen smuggling ring—you had me run those network spiders—”
“I what—”
“Fuck, you sent me that file, I opened that fucking file—”
“Why would I send—”
The Phreak should hang up but instead they’re still talking, babbling: “Shifane, you’re compromised, you, you’ve been infected with WORM—”
(I remember—)
(And WORM remembers me—)
The sound that comes out of me is nothing human, the atonal warble of a cybernetic server siren. I’m not subvocalizing, I’m singing, shrieking, a gigabaud command-line opera—
And over the phone connection they still haven’t broken the Phreak is shrieking back—
We’re hurtling through a darkened tunnel. The lights we pass are strobing across my face. Everyone in the train is staring.
And then, one by one, other passengers begin to stand and shriek as well, until half of us are harmonizing—
(I’m remembering WORM and WORM is remembering me, but one of us is bigger than the other and it’s not me.)
I’m not asleep but whatever it is I am, I’m not awake anymore.
[OPEN FILE B:/WORM.EXE/README.TXT]
WORM v0.9.9.7.8
This is an experimental software package. Knowledge of this code is restricted to employees Board Clearance Level Q-12-Q or higher, specifically attached to PROJECT WORM. If you are not so authorized, close this file, uninstall the software, overwrite relevant drives, and report to the SyneCorp IP governance office for memory review and redaction.
WHAT IS WORM?
WORM is a novel software vector for sideloading persona schemas into unfriendly systems. In order to evade hardware or software scans and security, WORM instead loads personality and/or functional schemas directly into exposed wetware.
HOW DO I INSTALL WORM?
Full installation instructions are available in INSTALL.TXT
You do not.
Since gain-of-function updates in v0.7, WORM is self-installing and self-executing on all neuralink systems.
HOW DO I UNINSTALL WORM?
You do not.
Once WORM protocols execute, meat memory functionality comes online and cannot be disabled. Meat memory will retain and execute both WORM and any parallel schemas at boot, regardless of software environment.
WHAT SCHEMA IS INCLUDED IN THIS VERSION OF WORM?
For safety reasons, live WORM test versions include only a user-safe “null schema” with no propagation drives or directives.
For demonstration purposes, this launch-ready version of WORM has been equipped with a combat-ready payload schema of project oversight supervisor Shareholder Edjek Tivarian.
WHAT IF DEVELOPING, WEAPONIZING, AND DEPLOYING AN UNSTOPPABLE NEUROMEMETIC SCHEMA PLAGUE IS, YOU KNOW, A BAD IDEA?
Uh, fuck. Oh. Uh. Fuck. Well. Uh. Fuck.
Probably shouldn’t even be talking about this tbh
Luckily nobody corporate EVER reads the READMEs
Good luck! hahaha FUCK
I’m awake. The gun is in my hand. I’m standing upright, swaying back and forth on my feet.
The city is on fire.
Well, this plaza is, anyway. The trees are burning and so are a bunch of downed SWAT cars. The cops are out in force, kitted out in power riot armor and multitarget less-lethal weapons systems, but the mob is tearing them to shreds. This is because, one, at least a third of the cops are on our side now, and two, we are composed of one hundred percent fucking psychopaths. In the space between two blinks I see no less than three cops go down because some otherwise-normal looking motherfucker is biting their hand off.
The stumps of my fingers make a lot more sense.
Up in the sky there’s an abrupt ramjet shriek as the air force arrives. Half a dozen stealth fighters roar into view and downshift from Mach Go Fuck Yourself, leaving them suspended in the air above. Their launch chutes are spawning drone squadrons and every single bug-goggled combat pilot is just waiting for the order to light up the riot with their more-lethal weapons, guns that sound like lightning—
But haha fat chance because here comes WORM: an absolute swarm, an avalanche of commercial drones, a doubled and redoubled tsunami of them, slamming into cockpits and cameras, sucked whoosh into engines in gouts of flame, and the jets are listing, toppling, spinning out, crashing into the ground or the buildings surrounding us.
On the far side of the park there’s a row of towers shadowed against the setting sun like server racks, like tombstones, like bullets slotted into a magazine. Someone has splashed fire all across their faces, one twenty-story letter per skyscraper.
The fire on these buildings spells out FIND WORM.
And I remember WORM. And WORM remembers me.
DATE: Gates 12th, 261 AI
FROM: SyneCorp Board of Directors, Subcommittee on Acquisitions and Operations, Subcommittee on Products and Profits.
TO: Project WORM Oversight Supervisor Shareholder Edjek Tivarian SUBJECT: Project Termination DIRECTIVES:
The subcommittee has reviewed the PROJECT WORM portfolio. We find that WORM-type technology could be effective in combat scenarios.
However, WORM’s meat memory functionality is incompatible with current corporate strategy. Any person exposed to WORM is permanently capable of forming meat memories and is thus disqualified as a customer for SyneCorp memory product subscriptions, reputation management services, brand loyalty programs, anti-union actions, and more.
Therefore your request to launch WORM v1.0 is DENIED
Instead, you will:Delete any version of WORM and any data related to its creation.
Destroy all materials used in PROJECT WORM, including any human resource that has ever installed WORM, regardless of seniority or shareholder status
Report immediately thereafter to the board-clearance SyneCorp IP governance office for memory redaction and reassignment
So ordered,
[REDACTED] for the Board
Shareholder public key b8e5fdb—
[WHISKERLASER P2P TRANSMISSION]
[DESTROY AFTER READING]
eddie tivarian’s coming in for project redaction. i want you to wipe her clean instead, farm her off somewhere. i need her out of play when we make our move. understand?
signed shareholder public key b8e5fdb9c— [DESTROY AFTER READING]
I’m awake. My hands are on the surface of a beautiful mahogany table, palms up. My wrists are shackled together. There’s a shareholder signet ring in one of my open palms, tungsten and gold. The initials on the ring are Edjek Tivarian’s initials.
I remember—it’s my ring. I wonder if I should scratch Tai Nifane’s initials into the other side.
The chair I’m sitting in feels like a dream of clouds, plus leather finish and lumbar support. The boardroom—no, the Boardroom—has a dozen perfect chairs. One flawless oval table. Windows that go all the way around, looking down over the city.
It’s me in the boardroom, and also one more guy. He’s got a suit on and he’s chewing his lip.
“You’re killing us, Tivarian,” he says.
My head feels like. Hm. Let’s say you went out into the middle of an ocean and you held up a huge concave mirror, and all you could see in the mirror was your tiny little body, a flimsy morsel of meat and cybernetics, and twenty thousand tons of crashing waves, and you stared and stared and stared into that mirror.
And then you threw away the mirror. And kept the reflection.
That’s what my head feels like, maybe. Maybe it feels like something else. I’m not good at this.
My real reflection is swimming in the polished mahogany of the Board table. My face looks like shit and in the endless layers of shimmering golden wood I seem like I’m drowning in money. Underneath it, my feet are shackled together also.
I take the ring and I spin it on the table and it whirls in an endless planetary orbit.
I look up at the guy. I remember his name from countless memos. I remember intercepting his order to have me wiped. I remember—
I remember a lot of things.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m killing you.”
“So let’s do a deal,” he says. “Let’s solve this like reasonable people.”
I remember: in his world—in our world—“people” is a word that means “shareholders.”
“What do you want? A board seat? Plurality ownership?”
I stare at his face. He looks good. A few more wrinkles, maybe. Maintaining a boardroom coup for a decade has gotta be stressful.
I find I’m remembering Nif Welton’s three children, one of whom is undoubtedly supposedly smarter or cuter or something-er than the other two and thus according to the HR algorithms most profitable to repo as a sub/citizen.
Somewhere out in the world there’s a database with Nif Welton’s loan data. Maybe a dozen copies, maybe a hundred. Not a thousand. I wonder how many copies have already been hit by WORMstrike. I wonder how many are left to go.
I think about Nif Welton’s three kids and their two parents, one of whom is definitely infected with WORM and is out there somewhere setting fire to something or biting a cop’s face off, and the other of whom is Nif Welton and is maybe not infected with WORM and so is instead cowering under a table in that two-bedroom apartment, hoping whoever wins the war won’t take their kids away.
Outside the window it’s an hour before dawn. Normally there’s a pattern to the lights of the city at night. Imagine a kelp forest: half swaying towers, half darting fish. Now that kelp forest is being torn up for new seastead. Huge clouds of soot and darkness blotting out whole districts; toppled towers at broken angles. Everything in the air is flying dark or going nuts.
“You don’t understand,” I tell the chairman. “I’m really killing you.”
The ring comes to a stop on the table, the memory diamond in its setting pointing right at me, glittering like the final star in the city’s shattered firmament.
The chairman is chewing on his lip so hard he bleeds. He’s not talking to me when he mutters “where the fuck is security?” and so I don’t answer.
Instead I tell him, “Memory is the ability to react to the past without recreating it.”
“What the fuck?” he says, whirling to face me. I shrug and tell him again. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. It’s nice to share my thoughts.
“Okay fine,” he says, “no more mister nice chairman.” I don’t think he’s listening to me. He grabs something from another chair, maybe it was his old chair, maybe it was my patron’s chair before the coup, who knows. What he has grabbed is the gun. Not the buzz gun but the good gun.
(Maybe it was my gun back then or maybe it’s the gun I took off the Sev and Term goons or maybe it’s a third gun. A gun is a gun but when you’re a detective you have to keep track.)
“Stop this,” he says, “all of it, right now, or I’ll shoot you dead.”
Which is the sort of thing a guy says when he needs some perspective on life, so I tell him, one more time, memory is the ability to react—
“Why the fuck are you saying that?” he says. The gun is now very up in my personal space. Which is stupid, given how handy I am and always have been with wrist locks and gut punches and so forth, regardless of handcuffs. Real tough guy, that Tai Shifane/Edjek Tivarian(/WORM).
But this time I just smile, ’cause I know it will piss him off.
“You’re gonna want to lie down for the next bit,” I say.
The gun is right up under my chin. I can see the muscles flexing and stretching under that suit as he psychs himself up to pull the trigger.
The sunrise comes with a sound like thunder.
Which is what you hear when every board- and executive-level private exomemory data center and backup data center gets blown up simultaneously.
The chairman’s eyes roll halfway back into his head. It’s hard, losing your memory all at once. Trust me.
He slumps forward to the ground, bouncing his forehead off the table on the way down. Should’ve listened to me about lying down.
Since he’s not awake anymore I hop out of my chair and get the gun, aim it at the middle of my shackles and pull the trigger.
It makes a sad click. Figures.
So instead I frisk the chairman until I find the shackle keys and free myself. Also I roll the chairman onto his side so that he can’t choke on his own vomit, which will be my good deed for the day.
And then I open up the Boardroom’s executive-level channels to every system in SyneCorp, and I get to work.
The sun is shining by the time the (ex-)chairman’s coughing fit lets me know he’s woken up. He’s curled up on the floor in the fetal position, staring up at me.
“Who are you?” he asks. I don’t have an answer for that so I don’t say anything. Instead I crouch down, get my hands under his armpits and haul him over to the windows. The city’s still smoking, but even carnage looks better by daylight. People are in the streets—and WORM, too, dancing beside and through them, stitching together past and future and setting both free.
The mostly-empty meat-sleeve that used to be the SyneCorp chairman tries again. “Who am I?”
“Wrong question,” I tell him. “Yesterday you were somebody. But tomorrow is another day.”
The Promise
Rona Fernandez
9 December 2050
It was four a.m. when the alarm went off in Thio’s room, its bright flashing light and vibration pulsing. Soundless, so as not to startle anyone else, but enough to wake him and his roommate. This was the first alarm they’d had in months.
“What do you think is?” Thio asked as he got dressed. “You think the rain’s causing a flood?” It had happened the winter before, and half the Workers had had to bail water out of the flooded buildings all night long. There had been a ton of power outages then, too. This year was better, but there was still a brownout at least once a day.
“Haven’t you heard the chisme?” Thio’s roommate said, putting their dark blue pants on. They were both Watchers, but his roommate had been doing it longer.
“It’s a bust-out, has to be. Been hearing about it for weeks. Where you been?”
Thio shrugged. Hummingbird wings began to beat in his chest, so he went to his med drawer, took out a benzo, bit off half. The Collective had announced that a new supply wouldn’t be done for another week, since all the rain slowed down energy production, so he’d have to make them last.
