Virch code, p.13
Virch Code, page 13
Lee had found some back route in the area, getting off the freeway a few exits back and creeping along the frontage roads. They’d come in from the north, which had been no less of a mess, but seemed to be moving quicker.
The light ahead was green, but the cop still stopped them, holding up a hand as he approached. The cop’s upper face was obscured by a lightweight, opaque visor, making him look like some 1980s parody of law enforcement.
“This area is shut down to everything but foot traffic. I’m going to need you to take a right and head north.”
“The protest march doesn’t start for another two hours, officer,” Lee said, terse.
“Turn right, sir,” the cop said. “You’re holding up traffic.”
“Officer,” Argo interjected, leaning over, “we’re here from Ellington, the 121st Interdiction Wing. We have a few pieces of equipment that we were asked to deliver to the event command center. We have an abiota on station overhead.”
“You got some evidence of that?”
“I’m going to reach into my back pocket, okay?” Argo said, moving his hand slowly as he spoke. The cop watched him but didn’t move. He got out his wallet and handed over his military ID card.
Taking it, turning it over in his hands, the cop’s mirrored visor gave nothing away. “And you, sir?”
Lee stretched open a hand, a gesture clearly meant to transmit metadata. “I’m a contractor with the 121st.”
The cop looked between them. “What are you bringing?”
Argo tried to sound nonchalant. “A few odds and ends that the deployment this morning missed. You want to take a look, go head.”
Still, the pilot held his breath while the cop rifled through Dingo’s truck bed. The computers in their cases, all their wiring and crypto and other associated components, were one thing. But the .50 cal was back there too. That, surely, wasn’t normal.
But Argo got the feeling these weren’t normal circumstances. The traffic was building up badly behind them now, and even normally patient Houston drivers had started honking or swerving their cars, trying to see what was going on up there to bring their slow progress to a dead halt.
It didn’t go unnoticed by the cop, who looked up from the bed back up the frontage road.
“Alright, sir,” he said, coming back to the cab. “You got an explanation for that big-ass gun you’ve got?”
“Replacement component for one of the Idisi,” Argo said smoothly. “They break so goddamn often. You know how it is.”
The cop hesitated. For a moment, Argo was worried that he might call it in, get confirmation. But instead, he handed Argo back his ID.
“I’ll tag your vehicle as official for our traffic management predictive. Have your abiota transmit his metadata to me. But be aware, your movements from here until you leave the protest area will be tracked by the HPD.”
“Wouldn’t expect anything less, officer,” Argo said.
“How in the hell did you manage that?” Lee asked as they made the turn and headed under the freeway.
Argo slipped his ID back in his wallet. “There’s more than one way to hack something,” he said.
Lee looked at him, then started laughing.
The protest march may not have officially started until 1430, but the sidewalks were already crowded with people, all streaming east. Most looked perfectly average, normal people who had, for whatever reason, opted to come out for this today. Older folks, women in gym clothes, even kids being pulled along in wagons or pushed in strollers. There were a lot of dogs too, yipping and prancing near their owners, and a surprising number of kugus. Through the AR on his phone, Argo could see even more abiota tagging along.
An entire cross section of the city had turned out for this.
“That’s a lot of families,” Argo muttered.
“Probably better to bring your kids with you than risk having them trapped at home by themselves,” Lee observed. “You know, if there’s a klaatuu strike.”
“Do we have any idea how those are happening?” Argo asked.
Lee shook his head. “I’m guessing it’s some kind of cyber effect, a network attack.”
“What kind of cyberattack takes down hospital backup generators and cars and power plants?” Argo asked. “The complexity of something like that doesn’t seem…”
“Possible?” Lee finished. “These people, whoever’s behind this, have planned it out very well. Probably spent years working on it. The directed energy weapons those kugus are using are proof of that. We were supposed to still be five, ten years away from that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, but technology changes so quickly. How’d they get control of everything?”
“I don’t know,” Lee said. “I’ve been asking myself since I found out about this shit.” He looked out the window, slowing as they came to an intersection. There was a mass of people crossing it, but upon seeing them, another uniformed cop came forward and ordered the crowd to stop. It split, clean and neat as a tree trunk on the chopping block. “It’s a challenge, that’s for damn sure.”
“They all look so normal,” Argo said as they made their turn, passing by the crowd.
“They are normal,” Lee said. “You think normal people like the idea of aliens moving in and taking over? No matter how many ChatBots talk about how great it all is, no matter how many pictures come down from Bri’s fake little exhibition in orbit, most people don’t want this kind of nonsense. They want to go home on a Thursday night, see the family, have a beer, watch a ByYou stream. Nobody really wants the big questions right in their face. Normal people don’t want the power turned off.” He snorted. “Can’t say I blame them for that.”
“You think everyone here takes this thing at face value?”
“Honestly, Argo, it’s always easier to take things at face value.”
Argo got the feeling Lee wasn’t just talking about this day, this moment. He didn’t press it.
“What’s the goal of this thing today?” he asked instead.
“Based off the info I pulled off the Eleutheria’s Spearhead website before we left, the organizers are going to give speeches down at City Hall, let people voice their concerns about the Unity space lift thing.”
Checking his phone, Argo realized he was being pushed news alerts. “Huh. There are dozens of livestreams available here?”
“Easily accessible? You’re not getting the links from in the Chans, are you?”
“What? No. This is on my regular feed. Looks like my phone started pulling stuff as soon as we got in the area.”
Lee shook his head. “I don’t like that at all.”
“What do you mean?” Argo asked.
“It’s standard practice for Omphalos to throttle organic discovery on this sort of thing. During protests, Galatea usually shadow-bans any stream that isn’t official, either from local government or the rally organizers. Omphalos claims it’s a way of keeping things calm.”
“I’m getting hundreds of results.”
“Either Galatea’s offline,” Lee began, “or…”
“Somebody at Omphalos who wants people to know what’s really going on?” Argo guessed.
“Don’t bet on it,” Lee said, and made another turn.
This took them onto a circular road ringing a huge area, several city blocks at least. At first glance, it looked like a park to Argo, until he realized several large buildings were set within the perimeter. They were obviously new construction, with that vaguely brutalist aesthetic that so many government buildings seemed to have.
“Oh, wonderful,” Lee said. “They broke out that damn fencing again.”
There was indeed a temporary fence around the entire inner park, Argo realized. That didn’t seem to be stopping anybody. A demountable stage was being erected nearby.
“Some spontaneous protest,” he muttered to himself. There was organization behind this, clearly. Who had the resources to put something like this together so quickly?
“City Hall, the Harris County courthouse, Houston Police Department headquarters,” Lee said, pointing out the structures as he slowly made his way onto the street. It was choked with first responder vehicles, arriving protestors, and those white tents they’d seen in the ChatBot stream. “After the war, when downtown got taken out, the city bought out an entire old neighborhood, leveled it, and put this in instead.”
“It’s bigger than I expected,” Argo said. “Makes the buildings seem kind of small, doesn’t it?
“There’s more underground. Everything’s connected by walkways under the park,” Lee said, continuing around. There was a gate in the fence, being guarded by a pair of Idisi, still as statues. “Damn. They are definitely expecting a riot.”
20
“This used to be a school,” Anito told Daelia as it led her down the main hall. “It was abandoned like everything else after the war. Survived the flood when the dam broke, albeit with quite a bit of damage. Our group found it a little while after that. Took a solid year of work to get these buildings back to an inhabitable state.”
Maybe it had been a school. It was impossible to tell. Whatever character or personality the place had had was long since stripped out, replaced by nothing. The walls were smooth, unpainted drywall. The floor was naked concrete. The old drop ceiling had been ripped out, probably due to water damage, and old LED tile-lights hung neatly on their support wires. The light they cast was even, cold, casting tiny shadows where it hit piles of detritus, mounded in corners and against the edges of the wall.
It could have still been a construction site. Daelia suspected it wasn’t. That this was how it had been left, either on purpose or by lack of concern.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but it doesn’t look all that impressive.”
“Ah, of course. Apologies.” The emergent stopped, held out a hand. A data upload swirled there like molten glass. “Here. We keep the overlays on private. Security and all that.”
She tried to reach for it and then cursed; her left arm was dead at her side. Instead, she blink-clicked it up.
“Oh,” she said in surprise, looking around.
“Look a little different now?”
“Yeah, I’d say so.”
With the visor providing an uninterrupted view of the augmented reality overlay, the true form of the Singularity’s Wisdom came into focus.
Unpainted walls and naked floors gave way to angular, monochromatic frescoes and soft neon, glowing in recessed tracks. Hanging LED lights retreated, replaced by vaults held up by complicated, impossible iron trusses soaring a hundred, two hundred feet above their heads. The floor became a complicated mosaic of brass, circuitry patterns the size of soccer fields.
It reminded Daelia of a cathedral.
There was nothing religious about this place, though. Or at least there was nothing here that would have belonged in a religious place.
Here, instead of the saints and stained glass, there was only one icon, the same icon, repeated over and over, lost in a tangle of stylized circuitry.
The Domain Array’s crest. A common human shorthand for the entire abiota domain.
“Singularity’s Wisdom, huh?” she asked, still looking around. “I’ve never been on one of these campuses before.”
“Yes, we are quite proud of it,” Anito said. Its voice had gone dull, lifeless. Synthetic. It was an abiota used to hiding. Daelia wondered how it felt about remaining in a place like this. “This is the ultimate expression of our two domains working together.”
Raven fluttered her wings, making some irritated chirping sounds.
“Of course you are friends. All are welcome here,” the other emergent said. “All who seek the wisdom shall find it, lost in the data sea.”
“I need to fix some of my gear,” Daelia said, trying to ignore the irritation that welled up in her at those words. Of all the things abiota had inspired in the human world, tech-cults had to be the worst. “Is there anywhere I can do that?”
“Yes, of course,” Anito said. “I will take you to our workspaces once repairs have been made to your biologics.”
“Good,” she grumbled, and looked around again. The place must have been illuminated by an abiota, she decided. It had that slightly unsettling feeling that all purely predictive overlays had. One of the reasons human illuminators were so important. No abiota had been able to yet craft a fully immersive environment that felt natural to the human mind. Something in the deep recesses of human evolution, something in the lizard hindbrain, still revolted against synthetic realities.
Unless you worshipped that sort of thing, maybe.
They left the hallway and passed into a vast amphitheater—no, a broad room. Circular in physical form, but otherwise as dull as everything else. A cylinder, plunked down into the middle of the building.
Daelia wondered what it had been, back when the place was a school. A classroom? A junction between hallways? The library, the gym? It was impossible to tell, and it probably didn’t matter.
In the AR, it was an amphitheater, so that was how people here most likely thought of it.
A vast dome overhead stepped up in concentric circles, while wide-stepped platforms dropped down to a low stage in the center of the space. A three-dimensional holographic clock was ticking down above it all, counting out the seconds until something happened. People were there, sitting in low chairs, talking amongst themselves, every one of them as sleek and streamlined as the fake world around them.
Most of them weren’t there. Turning the opacity down in her visor, Daelia counted fifteen. She doubted the room would hold more than thirty comfortably. And yet, in AR, they were part of a massive crowd.
“Programmed audience?” she asked Anito.
“No, not quite,” the abiota told her, steering her around the edge of the room. “These are our Integrated. They’re logged in remotely.”
“Integrated?” she asked, alarmed.
“Of course,” Anito replied. “The early data-halls of the Singularity’s Wisdom pioneered such practices, after all.” If the emergent disapproved, it gave no sign. “It is an essential part of our human members’ practices.”
“I thought that could only be done in certain specialized facilities,” Daelia replied. “The kind that don’t exist in this state.”
Integration was far more common in places like Korea or Japan, even though it had always been a fringe process. Texas, along with thirty-eight other states, had passed legislation against it almost as soon as it had debuted. There had been a few Supreme Court cases over the years, challenging those bans, but plaintiffs always seemed to die before their case could be decided.
One of the many reasons it was banned almost everywhere.
Once you plugged in like that, you didn’t last long.
“Of course,” Anito said, and the inflection of its words was exactly the same as before. Like hearing a voice file repeat. “But Austin is outside the jurisdiction of the Texas legal system.”
“It’s still in the state!”
“Neither the municipal nor state authorities have ever broken our peace by coming here,” Anito said. “If the authorities do not come, does that not mean that we can do as we please? If laws are not enforced, then those laws effectively do not exist.”
Raven cawed and sent Daelia a flood of emojis. Twenty, thirty. Too many to make sense of. Whatever the bird was trying to say, it was complicated. Theoretical, perhaps, because Anito laughed.
“I suppose you could draw that parallel,” it said, inclining its head to Raven. “At any rate, it is why they need me. We do not require the nonsense of most Texas legal statutes, but there is still a need for physical security in this place.”
“Right,” Daelia muttered, looking over the virtual audience. Around the other side of the room was the hallway.
“Come,” Anito said. “You require medical attention.”
The emergent really was good at imitating a predictive’s speech pattern.
Strange. This whole thing was strange. Anito was a spy for the Domain Array? What the hell did they hope to learn in a place like this?
The hallway on the other side of the room was narrower now, smaller. Tighter. Even in the virch, it was smaller. Drawing down to some end point. There was no way this was the original floor plan of the building, not it if had originally been a school. It made no sense.
It was pockmarked with doors. Doors. Barely six feet apart in meatspace, distant and remote from each other in the AR. Most were shut, but one was cracked open slightly. Daelia glanced in.
Inside was a room, a small room, similar to Aunt June’s hospital room. Same equipment. Same beeping life-support machines. But this wasn’t the result of an accident or illness. This was voluntary.
A VR mask covered the person’s face, eyes to forehead. The lower half—nose, mouth, jaw—was obscured by tubes. Breathing tubes. Feeding tubes. Sustaining the physical body while the mind was lost in the virch.
“One of the Integrated,” Anito said, and made a complicated little bow, hand to its chest, and kept moving.
Daelia looked at the emergent, unable to tell whether that show of respect was part of its act or not. “I thought abiota disdained humans who do things like this,” she said.
Raven cawed, agreement emojis popping up in Daelia’s screen.
“Some do, this is true,” Anito agreed, no emotional inflection in its voice at all. “But some of us understand the intention here and appreciate the effort. We step into meatspace in order to communicate, to understand. For a human to step into the virch in such a way, to understand us, is a grand gesture.”
It had to be an act, Daelia thought. If Emily had been here, she would literally be spitting fire at these people.
It wasn’t about understanding. It was about getting lost. Leaving the human world behind and existing permanently in the illusion of the virch. However abiota experienced it—and not even Mom had ever fully explained the experience to Daelia—for humans, it was only ever a playground.
Or maybe not, Daelia found herself thinking. In this place, maybe it really was done for higher intentions. Still stupid but maybe less selfish.
