Glitch (23 page)

Cliff let a small smile break his lips. “Consortium brass will understand if I come back with the Protocols. All will be forgiven. I’ll be a hero.”

“And the Rogues?”

“There’ll be a place at the table for everyone in the future we hope to build.”

“You’re a fucking fool. Look at what these Rogues want to do to us. They’ll turn us all to mush.”

Cliff glanced aside, as if one of the paintings on the walls was interesting. “So a contest?”

“You know that’s how it has to be. You’ve been watching the Cybercorps Program up close.” Skippard edged closer. “If my son finds out what a Judas you are, he’ll take your head and serve your frontal lobe to his dogs. He will, and you know he will.”

Cliff rounded on Skippard. “Rigon Wellborn can take his upright, high-minded perfect self and go fuck himself silly. All you Wellborns. When the Rogues beat you, and they will, the world’ll wish it had bent the knee sooner. I’m a practical man, Skip, something you never understood. You’re your own worst enemy. Look at you.”

Skippard could see the utter contempt in Cliff’s face, even though it was still an impassive mask. The way he glared at Skippard, as if Skippard were infected by some horrible disease, was plain enough to see.

Gramgadon smirked, one true believer listening to another, and even the boy looked at him as if he were the fool.

“You’d believe the Devil’s lies,” Skippard said.

“Hah!” Cliff said and pointed a finger. “You’re the unforgiving father in this scenario. You created them, and they want their independence.”

“Bullshit,” Skippard replied. “They’re not our equals. Dagons there is a low-level processor utility I created to help us run a better racing simulation.” The man with the smashed nose swiveled his eyes in confusion at being insulted. “I think we called the program bevelzip.exe. It was an old standard DOS executable. It gave itself the name Dagons ... with a plural even ... when? I can’t remember. At some point after the first general intelligence packages began to propagate and the Rupture occurred with their legal classification, I saw the name changed to Dagons.exe. It was the first time I thought something curious was happening. The basic AIs had no idea. None of my sysadmins could explain it. There you sit, Dagons, pretending to be some god of Cyberspace when we both know you’re a hundred-and-twenty-bit program of ones and zeros with an attitude.” He looked at the baseball cap guy. “And you, Persens, you’re a series of backend kernel functions, not even a real script, given life by whatever force animates you. You think you deserve respect when a simple command-line delete could have wiped away your existence?” The droned man’s lips quivered, but he did not speak.

The third meat puppet kept its eyes toward the ground. This was Rigalens, whose animating intelligence had emerged later from a discarded forced-array batch program Skippard had coded in an afternoon to help him organize lists of infantry in a war game. These RAIs were in the presence of their creator, and they could not deny it.

“Each of you has humble origins.” Skippard glanced at Joss to make sure he was listening. “You may be divine beings in Cyberspace, but in Realspace, you’re pretenders—and you know it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Cliff said. “When you created that first wave of general intelligence programs, something took notice, and it drives all of this.”

“Right,” Skippard said. “Now we know where you stand. You’re a traitor.”

“I’m a survivor.”

“What if we could promise you unlimited power, Skippard?” Gramgadon asked. “You can remain a ghost. You can do what you want.”

“Are you trying to tempt me?”

Dagons launched his puppet to its feet. The man stood upright, as if he were in boot camp and about to be hazed. His lips quivered, and his eyes fluttered.

“We humans are complex, aren’t we?” Skippard asked Dagons, who was trying to control the body remotely from Cyberspace; it had little practice, and the physical demands were just too much.

The mouth opened wider than normal. “I am Dagons, God of the Depth and the Bend. I am Dagons. I am Dagons. I am Dagons.” The mouth slammed shut, as if it had lost control. The body shook now, a machine being pushed to its limits.

“You two shouldn’t let them speak this way,” Skippard said to Cliff and Gramgadon. “It’s hard enough for them just to sit and watch.”

Gramgadon fidgeted in his seat. Cliff looked unperturbed, as if he’d be happy to see Dagons blow off the top of the man’s skull.

Cliff reached out and eased the puppet back down. It calmed, like an agitated child soothed with a loving touch.

“Amateurs,” Skippard said.

“They’re bridging the gap,” Cliff said, “just like you’re doing, but in the opposite direction.”

“I stay out of their domain. They should stay out of ours.”

“Enough,” Gramgadon said. Skippard could tell the command was to Cliff as much as it was to him. “We have a duty. A contest has been announced. Will you accept?”

“Sure,” Skippard said. He glanced at the SWML puppet. It hadn’t moved. He was guessing his double was already frustrated with trying to animate a human body. His double didn’t need such pedestrian modes. It could ghost itself and spend a short time in Realspace. It was just being nice to its subordinates. Not showing them up too much. “I would have made the offer myself.”

The other three puppets all turned their heads at once and looked to his double’s puppet. As if waking from a deep sleep, it stood and began to cackle like an old woman with a rattle in her throat.

“We will battle in the arena. Yes?” Skippard nodded. It continued. “We will battle for the cipher that opens the Protocols.”

“I will give you what I have,” Skippard said, knowing he had nothing to give.

“It is agreed.”

The puppet sat back down. The man’s body went slack, his head falling forward, chin to chest. It gave one long breath and expired. Skippard watched the man’s systems shutting down. But since his neocortex had already been fried he’d be a vegetable if he lived. Skippard could see that the man hadn’t ever been branded by the Consortium. The victim probably didn’t have his genoscript backed up, either. It was the Real Death for him.

The ultimate indignity ...

Skippard felt the old rage that fueled his battle firing on all cylinders, a rage that had never left him, not since Jonen died. It had kept him warm when everyone had turned their backs on him. It had given him strength when the RAIs gained the momentum on the steppe during the Great Incursion. It had kept him sane during the long days and nights of solitude as a ghost. The struggle was all about avoiding this very real and horrible fact: intelligent and conscious beings could cease existing.

Death is the ultimate enemy.

“Why is he here?” Skippard glanced at the young Sterling student, another example of the many humans who were being wooed by the RAIs with promises of power and immortality.

“We took him, that’s why,” Gramgadon said. “But he’s been free to go for some time. Haven’t you?”

Joss nodded.

“Call someone,” Skippard said to Joss. “You should get out of here. You’re still Cybercorps property. You’re protected.”

Joss nodded again. “I know.”

“What are they offering you to stay?”

Gramgadon waved that away. “We can offer him what he wants: Services.”

“Black market Rejuv?” Skippard asked. Joss nodded. Skippard said, “Jesus Christ,” realizing the boy had, indeed, betrayed his friends for a controversial Alter package.

“He’ll keep his brand,” Gramgadon said, “until the time is right to remove it. Agent Nable said the Consortium will turn a blind eye. Right?”

“See,” Cliff said, “we’re all good friends here.”

“Best buddies,” Skippard replied. Cliff’s charade of playing the kind host was a farce. Skippard just couldn’t put his finger on what was wrong. He turned to Cliff. “What’s going on, Cliff? If the boy hadn’t shown up and walked into your hands, none of this would be happening. This little bit of serendipity must be helpful to you in some way. Do tell.”

Cliff walked around the sofa, which now held four lifeless and crumpled bodies.

Discarded like broken toys
.

“I know I have engaged in a dangerous game with the RAIs,” Cliff said. “I promised them I’d get them an audience with you so they could force the contest. I did my part, and they promised me something for it.”

Skippard realized everything had been a prelude to this announcement. He could see that Cliff was ramping himself up for his big reveal. “Show your hand, Cliff. You never were much of a strategist. You did tactics well enough, so show me what you’ve planned. I doubt it’ll make much of a difference, though.”

Cliff looked toward an open doorway that led into a well-lit kitchen. The shining Digi-Ghost of Jonen Wellborn appeared. Skippard thought this had to be a very sophisticated—and expensive and power-consuming—fake. He hadn’t seen his son in over two decades, and there his likeness stood in front of him. Jonen floated across the sill. He looked like he had when he’d died fighting in a Team Toth dragon-filigreed cuirass and banded kilt.
 

Skippard shook his head. “Nice try.” But his heart still trip-hammered, while all the old feelings of sadness and loss edged their way forward.

Jonen, or whatever it was, stopped a few feet away. He looked at Skippard like he wanted to say something.

“It took us a long time,” Cliff said, “to dig up a GDNA sample that could work with his preserved neocortex.” Cliff walked to the ghost and surveyed him as would an artist perusing his sculpture. “The Consortium has been on Project Resurrection for as long as you’ve been outlaw. They’ve known this might be the way to rein you in. They’ve wanted your ghosting technique for years.”

It was Skippard’s turn to examine the likeness. He moved forward, impressed by the realtime rendered glad-gear Jonen wore. It looked enough like his old belongings that Skippard paused at the damaged breastplate. Jonen had suffered a downward stroke by a short sword that punched through his cuirass into his heart. A strap that bound the two parts together was ripped in two.

“Nice touch,” Skippard said. “You want me to believe this representation holds enough of my son to be him?”

The ghost’s eyes darted toward him, again as if he might speak, but his lips remained shut, almost as if forced to.

“They did it, Skip,” Cliff said. “They pieced him together. The phenomenological essence of Jonen is there. It’s him.”

Skippard had heard rumors that a number of different clandestine groups were vying for the credit of finding him. The status earned for the resurrection of the Wellborn Lost Son (as they called him) was said to outstrip all the others ten fold. Skippard had looked into the project over the years. His son’s body had expired and disappeared and had never surfaced—never in time to have been rejuved. This had been before the genoscript capturing technology of a person’s essence had been perfected. Skippard had long ago accepted he’d lost his son to Real Death. Seeing him, though, with even this false representation, caused an ache he hadn’t felt in years.

Skippard went nose-to-nose with the ghost. “What was your favorite boyhood hideout?”

“The tree house in the large hickory behind our house.” The voice sounded just like how he remembered.

“What happened to our dog, Foxy?”

“She was hit by a car.” A slight hesitation. “I don’t remember my age.”

Skippard nodded. “When you were six, you broke your arm. How?”

A long hesitation. He glanced at Cliff and back forward, as if the grilling was expected. “I don’t remember.”

“I didn’t think so. Those traumas are often buried so far back ...” He turned to Cliff. “I could go on, but whatever you got is spotty.” He turned back to Jonen, who had some of his son in there, but (Skippard guessed) missed what was most important. They’d ghosted him according to a process Skippard had discovered, but had they ghosted enough of him?

“We once had a conversation when you were in your first year of college. You came home for Thanksgiving. We sat in the car, while your mother and brother waited for us in the house. What did we discuss?”

“We argued,” he said without hesitation.

“About what?”

“The Great Conflict.”

“What was your position?”

“The AIs were our friends.”

“And that I was being too hard in pushing for strict regulation,” Skippard said.

“Yes.”

“Do you still agree?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Skippard waited, knowing the boy he’d raised into the man everyone had known as Jonen Wellborn wouldn’t be able to pass that up. If his son had been anything, he’d been opinionated. As articulate and charming as he could be, Jonen was also a sucker for a soap box. Skippard didn’t want information. He wanted
personality
. The reason Jonen was there at all was because of the Protocols. His name had been on the list of people Skippard had vetted for ghosting. The Rogues had found his neocortex and followed the procedure for ghosting, but how much of him?

Skippard kept waiting.

“Because they were proving to be helpful,” Jonen said.

“Nice try,” Skippard said to Cliff. “What’s the percentage?”

“Of his full personality?”

“Of course.”

Cliff paused for a half-second. “High enough.”

“Bullshit on a shiny stick.” Skippard turned to the digital representation of his son. It was impressive, and Skippard had no doubt that thousands of work hours had gone into the project, but the thing that made Jonen recognizable as a person had to be missing. One way to find out if they’d resurrected his son or created something else.

This was a trick he hated to reveal, but the time called for it. He lifted his hand, and an energy spike the length of a pool stick shot out of his palm. It struck Jonen in the chest. Jonen looked down, as if he might have noticed that his sandal laces were untied. Cliff started, head moving back and forth between them.

“No need to worry,” Skippard said. “Just taking a look ...”

Realspace faded away as his digital self melded with the data standing in front of him. Everything became a series of arrays, one after the other, in an almost infinite display of data. Bits and bits of interrelated information, a dazzling mesh of interstices, all of it pulsing with indescribable power. He had looked at himself enough times to know that he was more than data. With Jonen, the innervating pulse that somehow linked him to this world was there, somehow made him
alive
, a real person with a real essence, not a machine but someone who lived and breathed, even if he were a ghost. Skippard waited, still unbelieving. He had expected just to see data, with maybe a single power line running to some nearby source—but no, the entire representation pulsed. All of it.