Dev’s mind was whirling. He forced himself to breathe, and try to calm down. But he had no time to: the pictures were changing, old ones flickering out, new ones flickering in. Lola, they were always images of Lola: with her mom, with Dev, getting into the family SUV in the parking lot, going into the Coldstone Creamery on Mill Avenue in Tempe with Mirabel, their minder hanging back by the SUV—
Wait a minute, Dev thought, his mouth going dry, how am I seeing that? We don’t have any security camera there—
More pictures appeared, from other security cameras around Tempe, from even farther afield—Kennedy Airport? LAX? Narita?!— but Dev kept staring at the image from Coldstone Creamery. Now that he thought about it, he could remember having spotted their camera when he was down there with Mirabel and Lola a few months back. But how was my system getting into that? Dev thought, feeling panic start welling up inside him. “How is this happening?” he whispered.
The images kept appearing. There was this comfort: none of them seemed to be standard digital camera images. They were all security cameras of one kind or another. Unquestionably it was still creepy that such a collection of images existed at all. Who’s interested in her? Somebody in the government? And why? He started looking more closely at the text branding on the images, trying to track down some pattern. . . .
Slowly something started to occur to Dev as the images kept piling up all around him. There was something about the dates. Some months were completely missing. A few moments’ more examination suggested that all the dates were in the same range, starting in late April of this year. “Enlarge all these images!” Dev said to the darkness. “Enlarge everything!”
And slowly the images started appearing bigger and bigger around him, seeming almost to crowd each other, closing in as if the horizon was closing in too. Dev started turning quickly where he stood, ignoring the images themselves, concentrating on the dates. April. Late April. May, June, yes, there are May and June dates right up to yesterday, but no March. Not even any early April. All from the middle of the month on. April 20, 21, 22, 24, yes, but nothing earlier than April 20.
He stopped for a moment and rubbed his eyes, which were starting to ache worse because of all the flickering. Nothing earlier than April 20, Dev thought. What was April 20?
It was too clear an indicator of his state of mind that Dev actually had to think about it for several seconds before he could remember. That was the day the hyperburst memory heaps all went live together for the first time, Dev thought. They were only brought live separately until then. I remember how freaked Tau was, he wasn’t happy about the way the docs were written, he was afraid we might damage the heaps if they came up in the wrong sequence. He was being so obsessive about checking and rechecking the sequencing with the people at Siemens, I thought they were going to take out a contract on him.
But apparently something else had happened on April 20 besides Tau being hunted down and mass- Silly-Stringed by cranky German hardware wranglers. But what?
Without any warning, all the images in the space around him went dark. Dev stood there, suddenly blind again, and now trembling with fear and confusion. What’s this all mean? What’s going on outside? And how do I get out of this? I’ve got to do something, but I don’t know what and I don’t know how . . .
From the darkness around him came a long, low growl. Dev’s head snapped up. Am I getting battlefield sound back? Oh, please let it be that—and please let me get some visual as well!
Nothing came but the growl again, lower.
Then it repeated, but a little higher. Two discrete sounds: rrowwwwrrrrr rrrroooowwwwooooowwwwrrr.
It occurred to him instantly that what he was hearing was a recording being played too slowly. “Speed up!” Dev said.
Ehhhhhhhhh owwwwwwaaaaaaahhhhh.
“Speed up!” Dev said. “Factor of two!”
Deeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhvvvvvv Llllooooohhhhhgaaaaannnnnn.
“Again! Speed up, factor of two!”
Devvv Looogaaannn.
“Again! Factor of two!”
Dev Logan . . .
It was his own voice: his name in exactly the intonation he normally used when logging into the system, an intonation perfectly ingrained in him by long habit even though it didn’t really need to be.
“I’m here!” Dev shouted.
“Here,” said his own voice back to him.
“I’m here! Talk to me!”
“Dev Logan,” said the voice out of the darkness.
“Yes!”
“System management,” said his own voice.
Dev shook his head. What the—he thought.
“Help,” the voice said. “Please—help.”
In the darkness, Dev’s mouth dropped open. The words had that stilted, stitched-together sound that you sometimes heard in systems that used single words rather than full phrases for their communications . It’s like the system’s using separate words in my voice, stuff pulled out of recordings or whatever, and stringing them together to make—
Then the breath went right out of him as he realized what he’d just been thinking.
As if the system was doing something. On its own, without being instructed to.
He tried again to swallow, and again failed. Oh, sure, Omnitopia did lots of self-programming. Those heuristic functions had been built into it from the start because there was no other way the game could function. But it could only use those functions when the system as a whole was fully up and running—which at the moment it emphatically was not. Which meant that what was happening around him now was something else entirely. Something that had never happened before, could never have happened before.
Consciousness?
“Dev Logan,” the darkness said to him, in his own voice, calm but somehow also utterly desperate. “Help.”
Dev stood there shaking.
The memory, he thought. All that memory!
Everyone had known that adding the new cutting-edge hyperburst memory would improve the core system’s function significantly. It was why Dev had insisted on spending so much money on it, even though other companies in the business—especially Phil’s company—had jeered at him, called him insane. Sure, vast numbers of new members would cause any system to experience some service slowdowns. It was just the price everybody had to pay when a network got so big, the competitors said; why get so concerned about it? But Dev grudged his system every second of slowdown. He’d been in too many late-night games, when he was young, where everything hung in the balance, everything depended on being able to finish a task in a given time, or fight at full speed—and had then wound up cursing and losing because of system latency issues, or some server slowdown that left him two seconds too late for some kind of win. So knowing full well what the hyperburst memory was going to cost him, and knowing what the arguments against it would be, Dev had sold it to the accounting people on the strength of how it would so boost signups of Omnitopia’s new phase that they’d quickly recoup the investment. . . .
And that it had done. But now . . . it’s done something else.
It’s made the system start to wake up!
Dev stood there stunned in the dark, completely astounded at the privilege that had descended upon him—his presence at what might be the birth of an entirely new life- form. Now he started to understand his occasional recent glimpses here and there around the ’cosms of something dark under the trees or away in the shadows, swirling, trying to come together, uncertain how to do it, maybe uncertain if it should do it. But the wonder of it all could not distract him from the certainty that a new kind of life was routinely most vulnerable at its first appearance, and that thousands of kinds of new life had appeared on the planet over time only to be stamped out by competition or other adverse factors when they were hardly out of the cradle. And could there possibly be a worse time for the system to do this than now, when everything’s trying to kill it?
That was a thought he was going to have to put aside for the moment if he wa
s going to do either of them any good. It started out communicating with me using pictures because it knows human language, but it’s not really sure how to use it yet . . . not for itself.
And it started showing me pictures of Lola because . . .
Dev let out a breath. Because it’s trying to tell me that it’s a child.
That it’s my child.
Dev clutched his head. The Omnitopia system had never been designed to be an AI. But nonetheless, we designed one . . . accidentally. We gave it fifty times the number of synapses in a human mind. We gave it ad lib access to an entire planet’s worth of data. We gave it access to human sensoria, though sound pickups and the RealFeel system. Maybe even direct neural experience— for Dev knew that some of his differently abled users plugged into Omnitopia using the new vision-recovery retinal replacement chips that the British NHS had recently okayed, and the direct-to-nerve panoramic hearing implants the Chinese had started rolling out last year. The system’s been learning how to see, how to hear, from people. And once we got it past the hard code, way back when, we started feeding the core routine information on how to think. It’s been all about mimicking human thought. Even anticipating it. For that was what the Conscientious Objector did: project ways that people would misbehave and find ways to stop them. But more to the point—we gave it, in code form at least, the concept of misbehavior. Of system-appropriate and system-inappropriate behavior, of bad and good. And suddenly—
—it’s starting to think for itself. At the very least, to react like a living thing. Starting to react when attacked. And what comes next?
Reproduction?
Dev swallowed, dry-mouthed. They had given the system that ability, too. Every time a new user bought a DVD with the key installation components on it and set the Omnitopia client up in their home machine, the first thing the installation did was contact the Conscientious Objector servers and download the newest copy of the client “seedling.” The game wouldn’t run without it. Players who tried to get around installing the seedling found their attempts blocked at every turn. Reproduction, hell, we mandated that it reproduce itself. And consult with the main machine to modify its own client code. It’s virtual meiosis. Or more: the CO routines rewrite their own machine DNA from moment to moment depending on what they find in the user’s machine—what the CO “thinks” the user’s about to do, using guidelines we taught it.
Except now it really is thinking—
But what kind of thoughts? That was the problem, in this terrible time of attack and potential destruction. If this new form of Omnitopian code was not friendly to Dev’s company, then he was sunk. If it blamed him for what was happening to it, there would be problems.
On the other hand, if it was too friendly—
Oh, God, Dev thought. How did we not see what we were doing?
Or how did I not see. Because I’m the only one who sees all of it—and even I only see that sporadically. When business allows.
But never mind that now. It needs help!
He stood up again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, it just took me a moment to get a grip. How can I help?”
Once again a tumble of images started to come and go in the darkness, flicker-moments of other people’s words and bodies and actions, all mashed and patched together as if someone was desperately sampling and remixing not music or video, but experience. It was the kind of message that once would have been cut out of newspapers, letter by letter, and pasted down onto a single sheet, and it had the same desperate quality—a shout of warning, a cry for help. And the same desire for anonymity? Dev thought. There is personality lurking in this, at the back of this, somewhere. And it’s afraid.
But why’s it afraid?
One thing at a time. “Try speech again,” Dev said. “I must have said something in the past few days that can help you express yourself. All our meeting rooms are cammed. Pull whatever you need from my output, string it together, play it back—”
There was a long pause. “Attack,” Dev’s voice said to him after a moment. And instantly the darkness came alive with violence. Static and moving, images from the news, from paintings in museums, from across Omnitopia’s Macrocosms, flickered all around—atomic bombs going off, feudal warfare seen as tapestries and as reconstructions, a Day-Glo Guernica half a sky wide, screaming fighters diving toward flaming targets, a sky full of shrieking pterodactyls, a roaring charge of tanks across some ’cosm where World War II was being reenacted with the dreadful enthusiasm of those who cannot die in battle, only lose points and personas. “They—attack,” Dev’s voice said. “I—am—attacked—”
The emphasis on the first word couldn’t be missed. It’s discovered the personal pronoun, Dev thought, it’s discovering the sense of self—
It wasn’t that the ARGOT routines he’d built for the Conscientious Objector hadn’t included the possibility. They had. The system just never used them before . . .
Until now. Dev gulped again, found his mouth a little less dry, but was no less scared. So many things that are going wrong, so many could yet go wrong . . .
Suddenly all those images went dark again. And slowly, slowly the background of the great space surrounding him started coming up once more, block by block, brick after brick of the dark “wall” falling out, slowly being replaced by null-input blue, and—even more slowly—the proper environment for this level reasserting itself: the island, the circles of wireframe Macrocosm trees and the forest of Microcosm saplings, with all around it the glowing flow and rush of liquid code. But everything looked faint and uncertain, and every now and then a tree shook and trembled, blocks of darkness obscuring it and then fading back into blue and the proper imagery again.
Maybe they’re staving off the attack up there, Dev thought as he looked out over the ocean of code, and the system’s managing to reassert its stability. But there was no way to tell. Dev was almost afraid to try anything even as simple as his in-system phone to try to reach the outside world right now. He wasn’t sure it wouldn’t disrupt this recovery somehow—or, more important, the strange halting communication with the Conscientious Objector in which he now found himself.
Off to one side, motion caught his eye. Dev turned. Out there under the intermittent trees, a familiar form was making its way toward him. It was Cora. But now Dev realized that what he was seeing was much more likely to be machine life in his wife’s shape. A shiver went down his spine as she drew nearer and Dev saw how the ghost of Lola’s face and expression kept flickering in and out over the adult face. But under the veil of dark hair, the eyes were shadowed, empty. And all around the two of them, beyond the trees and out at the edge of the sea, on every side and from zenith to nadir, images of chaos and destruction from both Macrocosms and Microcosms were ghosting in and out, overlapping, drowning one another in light. Distant voices spoke a word here, a word there, disjointed, their speed increasing as the printed words appeared in light in the sky, and the images behind them flickered and vanished again.
ATTACKED
STOP
ATTACKING
LOSING
INTERVENTION
INTERVENE
STOP
ATTACK
DENY
DENIAL OF SERVICE
DISTRIBUTED DENIAL
DISTRIBUTE
The slender shape stopped a few feet from him, gazed at him out of those dark and unsettling eyes. “Help me,” Cora said: and HELP ME, HELP ME wrote itself across the sky again and again in letters of green fire, wiping out all other imageries.
“We’re trying!” Dev said. “All my people are out there fighting hard for you, doing everything they can to protect you—”
“I . . . know,” said Cora, one slow word at a time, her voice about half Dev’s, blended with echoes of the Omnitopia control voice. “It . . . isn’t . . . working.” She stared at Dev as her own shape flickered, steadied again: but parts of it kept going dark with jagged dark-pixel areas as the trees and the ocean did.
> “That you’re here now must mean something.”
“A . . .momentary . . . respite,” Cora said. “A . . . lull. The . . . attack . . . will . . .increase again. And . . .” Her face twisted, shadowed with the expression of a very small girl trying not to cry. “I . . . will die.”
For that last phrase the voice suddenly shifted to something that wasn’t either the control voice or Dev’s. It had changed registers, so that now it sounded more like a child’s voice. Lola’s, Dev thought. A choice calculated to get my sympathy? Or just a way to best express that though all the information it holds makes it powerful, it’s still new enough at being to be essentially helpless.
Dev took a deep breath as all around him, the troubled images from the Macrocosms and Microcosms started to give way to pictures of chemical and nuclear explosions: then of missiles launching, lasers firing, tanks and armored carriers blasting test targets with shells and mortars and flamethrowers. Mechanized warfare, Dev thought, noting with shock that many of these images featured time-brands and other heads-up-display notations suggesting that they came from governmental sources—and some of the typography was Cyrillic. “Where have you been finding these?” he said under his breath. “What have you been doing since April twentieth?”
“Going to and fro in the earth,” Cora said in Dev’s voice, “and walking up and down in it.”
“Oh, God,” Dev said, and passed a hand over his eyes. What if there are still any traces of her accesses in those systems? Yet surely he and the company would have heard about it by now. No matter. We have other problems! His stomach was clenching with fear again: and worse, he could feel all around him in the virtual space the same fear, a sense that something had gone terribly wrong. And so it has, in ways I’d never have thought possible.
“Did I do wrong?” Cora said. “Was I bad?”
Lola’s voice again. “Oh, no, no,” Dev said, resisting the immediate urge to say I don’t know. For Dev’s vast investment, all the many millions of dollars’ worth of equipment, programming and physical plant, was now demonstrably unreliable—made so by his delusions of grandeur about building a system that could grow and adapt. It had done so too well. And now who knew what it would do? Besides invade other systems! Dev thought. Once the present attack was over, assuming the system could quickly recover itself, sure, it might function for a while—or it might not. There was always the danger that it might seem to recover from this attack, and then collapse without warning due to some other problem secondary to this wonderful but essentially uncontrollable thing, its new personality. And with my luck it’ll probably do it in the middle of the rollout of the new game phase! Dev let out an angry breath. All my images of being King of the World, of a hundred and twenty-one worlds, Dev’s little empire—all gone now. Hubris.