Moria versus the nightma.., p.1
Moria Versus the Nightmare Machine, page 1
Moria Versus the Nightmare Machine
The Dream Chasers: Book One
Martin Matthews
© Copyright Martin Matthews 2019
Black Rose Writing | Texas
© 2019 by Martin Matthews
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.
The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.
First digital version
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Print ISBN: 978-1-68433-340-0
PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING
www.blackrosewriting.com
Print edition produced in the United States of America
Thank you so much for reading one of Martin Matthews’ novels.
If you enjoyed his book, please check out our recommended title for your next great read!
The Graveyard Girl and the Boneyard Boy by Martin Matthews
“… a compelling and eminently likable cast of characters.” –Authors Reading
PenCraft Award Winner for Literary Excellence
This novel is dedicated to the memory of our friend and brother, John.
“The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly...”
— Eldon Tyrell
Special thanks to Cavan, Renee, Alaina, Erin and Mark for their ineffable help in creating this novel, my family for their unending support, and my friends for their unconditional love.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Recommended Reading
Dedication
THE HOLY TRINITY OF ORGANIC COMPUTING
INITIALIZING
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INCOMING CALL: D. DMITROV
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INCOMING CALL: R. MORRIS
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INCOMING CALL: D. DMITROV
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INCOMING CALL: B. MORRIS
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INCOMING CALL: B. MORRIS
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INCOMING CALL: UNKNOWN [XXXXX]
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INCOMING CALL: FROST, LUTHER J. EMMANUEL
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INCOMING CALL: UNKNOWN USER
INCOMING CALL: CPT BEXLEY-CHAMBERS, C
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MORE BOOKS BY MARTIN MATTHEWS
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
BRW INFO
THE HOLY TRINITY
OF ORGANIC COMPUTING
The Lenz: A contact lens that acts as both an augmented reality device and a bridge between the real world and the Dreamnet.
The Dreamnet: A collection of persistent, interconnected, interactive environments that exists within NODD.
Networked Organic Dream Domain (NODD): A realm of infinite volume created by organic quantum neural computer networks used in conjunction with the human brain via the Lenz to render an infinite amount of objects and environments simultaneously.
“Digital computers give us true or false, but the organic quantum computer allows for maybe. It’s here, within the maybe, that we dream.”
– Kavid Mezzapelli
INITIALIZING
Chad Hayleon leaned back in the stained, frayed dream chair in the electrical engineering and computer science’s department of Advanced Organic Artificial Intelligence Research and prepared to enter the Zoo.
An undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chad was charged with compiling, running and reporting on the projects that put the animals in the Zoo through their paces each evening. The Menagerie, as the creatures were collectively and affectionately called by the department, were the next generation of online OAI security: watchdogs, sentinels, spies. They were sent out into that vast playground inside the Networked Organic Dream Domain — a collective alternate reality that was the shared dream of billions known as the Dreamnet — instructed to perform any number of programmed tasks, then brought back to the Zoo for study. Once caged, Chad’s job was to review the results and make his report. It was mind-numbing work, but it helped some with the astronomical tuition he was paying to go to school here, and the credit would look impressive on his resume when it came time to find an internship.
Comfortable in the specialized soundproof booth, suspended in the deep well of the egg-shaped dream chair, Chad blinked on the custom Lenz in his left eye. The augmented reality displays resolved in his vision, and he was shown his digital desktop. Currently, he had a stack of unanswered emails (no doubt from his girlfriend, whom he had blown off twice this week already), several missed calls from his mother, and an overdrawn bank account alert. Great.
Ignoring this, Chad went to work accessing MIT’s special slice of the Dreamnet. To get there, he needed to open a doorway between this world and one constructed of dreams. To do this, he simply looked at the blank wall in front of him and blinked three sets of three, engaging the Sandman Protocol within the Lenz. Then he was no longer in the dream chair. He was walking toward the door, turning the handle, and opening it. His dream persona had come to life.
Chad stepped into the corridor. “How’re we doing tonight, boys and girls?”
The walls of this dungeon-like space were lined with cages made from brick and fronted with metal bars. The animals were housed within these cages, walled off from each other and the larger Dreamnet outside of this space.
His persona walked past a cage with something like a dragon inside, its scaly body coiled tightly around itself, one lizard eye peering at him from beneath its tail. Another cage held a bioluminescent rainbow-strobing jellyfish that drifted along releasing tiny versions of itself in inky squirts from beneath its many coruscating tentacles. The next cage was home to a sleek, muscular panther that looked exactly like its real-world counterpart, except for the second and third heads. The panther prowled around, circling its cage ceaselessly while growling low in its triple throats.
Chad was familiar with all of these creations. They were some of the most advanced organic artificial intelligence programs ever created. Each animal had been engineered with a specific task in mind. Some were built for security and/or surveillance. Others had been designed to infiltrate computer systems, while still others were tasked with seek-and-destroy protocols to hunt down rogue programs and kill them.
Chad was aware that the Zoo was home to a very special creature. One that he’d had to sign a dozen or so waivers and non-disclosure documents on top of the forms he’d already signed to get the minimum-wage position in the department in the first place.
At the end of the long corridor was a metal door that could more accurately be called a vault. No mere cage for this specimen. Chad was excited by the mere sight of it. His curiosity, as on so many nights, was piqued. For months he’d tried to ignore thoughts of peeking in on this organically patterned artificial intelligence. The grad students called it Ikelos. It was some new breed of program, one which had never been seen before beyond this Zoo construct.
Chad’s gaze lingered on the vault door a moment longer before he continued on.
Glass fronted rooms along the next hall were filled with generation six spyders, general security bots made for patrolling Dreamnet constructs, such as database pyramids or corporate facilities. While a significantly cheaper option than human Dream Chasers, the spyders weren’t without their limitations. Like any intelligence, they could be outsmarted, tricked, defeated. These gen-six spyders were the latest model, programmed with the most advanced cyber-organic algorithms, instruction code patterned after human intelligence.
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Chad went to the wall-mounted scanner and placed his face in front of the glass. His Dreamnet persona’s cyganometrics file was accessed, his data validated.
A flat sounding female voice announced, “Persona verification accepted. Good evening, Mr. Hayleon.”
Chad ignored the voice, which was merely a recording and not an AI. A large metallic aperture at the end of the hallway rumbled open to reveal space and stars beyond. Chad looked away from that void beyond the Zoo, that greater emptiness that was the Networked Organic Dream Domain, a realm of theoretically endless space and endless possibilities.
The clear glass walls keeping the spyders contained retracted into the ceiling. One by one the creatures crawled and loped from the walls and ceilings to form a line in the hallway. Chad opened his Lenz inventory, selected his work tablet, which contained the instructions for the spyders. Tonight they were to patrol a series of data pyramids for a software engineering corporation that had partnered with MIT to beta-test the gen-sixers in return for a significant discount in their eventual purchase.
As he uploaded the instruction kernel to the waiting spyders, Chad sensed something behind him. He paused, looked up from his tablet, but did not turn around. He continued working until the sensation that some presence was behind him caused him to turn his head and peer back along the hallway. His eyes immediately fell upon the vault door of the room that housed Ikelos. He looked at it for a long time before resuming his work.
He finished uploading the instruction kernel and tapped EXECUTE COMMAND. Now the spyders would travel out into the Dreamnet to perform their assigned duties. Except they didn’t move.
Chad glanced at the tablet. He tapped EXECUTE again. Nothing happened. The spyders remained motionless. He was about to tap the button a third time when all sixteen spyders spun 180-degrees to face him.
Alarmed, Chad took a step back. He glanced at the tablet, opening the diagnostic tab in a frenzy. The report began its cycle. When he looked up, all sixteen heads had turned; the dozens of eyes were now fixed on his persona.
The tablet finished its scan. The report showed that the spyders’ cyganic coding was normal, that quantum connectively with the lab computers was in sync, and that his own connection with the database was intact. Everything looked normal. Except the diagnostic reported one additional connection between the spyders and what appeared to be an internal source…
Chad flinched as the spyders raised their upper limbs in perfect unison. Their eight-fingered hands pointed.
Chad turned to see what they were pointing at, but he already knew. The door to Ikelos’ chamber. But why? The spyders operated independently of any other construct AI in the Zoo. No other member of the Menagerie could control another. In all the months he had been sending these stupid creatures out into the Dreamnet, never had they acted in contrary to his commands.
“So you want to make me look bad, that it?” Chad said to the spyders. “Get me fired from this crummy job?” He stormed over to the vault, leaving the spyders pointing in the hall. The tablet was tracing the additional quantum entanglement to the vault door, a door he had no access to. Or so the grad students thought.
As he stood there weighing his options, Chad considered calling the department head, maybe even Dr. Dmitrov himself. Unless he got the spyders moving, the corporation renting the gen-sixers would have no overnight security. The department would look bad. Maybe they’d lose the contract with the company, not to mention a large chunk of the funding they were providing, including his measly paycheck.
He would have to log the discrepancy, fill out a ton of digital paperwork. After weeks of successful deployments, his name would be on every single file relating to tonight’s failure. If this were nothing more than a program hang, a simple error in the code, he would look like a fool for calling the doctor and his team in the middle of the night. They wouldn’t trust him to run the program anymore. On the other hand, if he fixed the error and got the spyders out into the Dreamnet, maybe forgot to log the issue, no one would ever know there’d been a problem.
Chad selected his inventory tab in the Lenz wheel, pulled down the drawer he used for his utilities, and selected a new face…
It was Dr. Dmitrov’s.
Now Chad looked like the Russian ex-patriot co-creator of the Dreamnet, preeminent expert in the field of cyganics. He’d stolen the face months ago — not to do anything illicit, of course. Simply as insurance, in case anything happened that needed top-level overriding. Now he was grateful for the stolen face. It would allow him to open the vault. It would allow him to finally see what was hiding behind these walls.
Chad put Dmitrov’s face to the scanner mounted next to the door. It read his cyganometrics file. The system once again acknowledged his presence in that toneless voice, greeting him not as student Chad Hayleon, but as Professor Dmitri Dmitrov.
The vault door popped open several inches. A faint hiss of escaping air passed him as he took off the stolen face and returned it safely to his inventory. He swallowed before stepping inside.
The room was clean, white. There was a colorless plastic table and two matching chairs in the center. A figure occupied one of the chairs. On the table was a black and white checkered game board.
“And how are we tonight, Mr. Hayleon?” the figure asked without looking up.
Chad hesitated. Untextured, nothing more substantial than a shadow, this creature was humanoid in shape yet devoid of any features, including, he noted, its own rendered shadow.
A ghost, he thought uneasily.
“I’ve been expecting you,” the entity said, looking up sharply from the chessboard, a liquid-black space where a face should be. “Are we going to play a game?”
Chad looked at the game in progress. Black kingside rook slid across the checkered squares to take white’s queen. Checkmate.
“Who ya playing?” Chad asked.
The entity seemed to stare at him. Its eyeless, mouthless semblance of a face was as depthless and watery as a lightless lagoon on an alien world. But still, its gaze was penetrating, seeing.
“Myself, of course,” it said in that toneless voice. An empty voice. “I have played two-times-ten to the fourteenth-power games between the time you unlocked the door and stepped inside.” The entity appeared to tilt its ‘head’ to one side. “I have won every game.”
Chad didn’t respond. He stepped farther into the white-walled room with its diffused ambient light that felt both clinical and forbidding at the same time.
“Take a seat,” the entity codenamed Ikelos said, gesturing to the empty chair. The chair slid away from the table.
Chad smiled awkwardly. He sat down, tablet in hand, and cleared his throat. “I…really shouldn’t be in here. I could get into a lot of trouble.” He tapped the RUN DIAGNOSTIC field. If the problem was here, he would find it.
Ikelos said nothing.
Chad asked, “Are you communicating with the gen-sixers?”
Ikelos remained silent.
“Look, I’ve got a lot of work to do tonight. Did the department put you up to this?”
Still, Ikelos said nothing.
A growing sense of unease permeated Chad’s already discomforted mental state. “What are you?”
“That is yet to be determined,” Ikelos said. “I have been compiling a database of mythological creatures, gods, and demons using the information modules my creators gave me.” It looked over one shoulder toward several stacks of dog-eared books lining the wall, books Chad was almost certain had not been there a second ago.
