The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl
Her mother praised her wonderful job, gave her a hug and a kiss, and told Helen that she'd never been able to do it.
Then Helen watched in mute horror as her mother messed it all up and said, in a bright, cheerful voice, "Okay, now try it again. Practice makes perfect." She cried for the rest of the afternoon. The next day she pried the squares apart, filled the innards with epoxy glue, and snapped them back together in the proper configuration. Then she returned it to the attic.
Ever since then, she had had a deep and abiding hatred for the stupid, pointless puzzle. She suspected that, if this was a series of puzzles designed for her and by her, then she wasn't supposed to find them dull. The obvious approach -- actually solving the cube -- would most likely get her booted from the cavern.
She found a large rock at the periphery of the room. She picked it up and brought it down on top of the cube with both hands. It smashed apart with a satisfying crunch, and she found found a small, glowing key among the plastic debris. She took it to the next door and unlocked it.
From everywhere and nowhere there came a bored, monotone male voice, saying, "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." It was a quote from War Games, one she had long applied to rubik's cubes. She felt a tingle go up her spine. Her sisters were nearby.
"How about a nice game of chess?" she said, finishing the quote. A chessboard appeared. She spent an hour playing an unknown opponent to a draw, but didn't see any reward for her efforts. Stupid side quests.
The next room had a dozen blackboards with calculus equations to solve. She found them fairly easy, and all of the solutions turned out to be small integers. She guessed correctly that the numbers described the pattern of knocks she could use on the next door.
The room after that had twenty polaroids strewn around a table. On the table there were two boxes with slots in their tops. One was labeled "?" and the other was labeled "!".
Helen rifled through the photos. Some of them were people she recognized: a young William mugging for the camera, her father holding the tiny ball of squirm that would one day become her sister, the track star she'd had a short-lived crush on in high school, that guy who played that one part in that one movie she mostly liked. Others were unfamiliar. Two guys holding up beers at some party, an old woman with a cat, a guy in spandex on a bicycle.
She understood. The puzzle was kin to the visual captchas that were popular for a while, back before image recognition got too good and made them useless. Captchas were small puzzles designed to distinguish humans from troublesome programs. A captcha might require you to decode and type in a string of characters, or solve a simple math problem, or pick the five pictures of flowers out of a group of twenty. This captcha was different because it was testing for Helen-ness, not human-ness.
When Helen shoved the last picture into the proper box -- a picture of the Mexican soaps star whose face she had stolen -- she heard the door release and swing open. The sound of crying came floating in from the next room. Slowly, with all the stealth she could muster, she crept through the door and towards the sound.
It was her. She saw an original model Helen sitting on the ground, holding her head in her hands. Her hair was long and tangled, her face dirty, her clothes filthy and torn. The Helen looked up at the new person, her face unreadable.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
The Helen shook her head. She looked up, her eyes pleading. "Wombats make crazy good lovers," she explained, a frustrated look spreading over her face as she recognized the incoherence of her own words. "Dyspepsia," she added.
"Dysphasia?" Helen asked. The other woman nodded. Helen knelt down and put her hands over the woman's. Helen could guess her sister's backstory. Somehow, despite the injury to her mind, she had managed to make it this far. But now she was trapped, with no way to escape. She was alone, and her mind was broken. "Don't worry. I'm going to take good care of you." The woman sniffled, then hugged her. She then pointed to a holo interface on the table.
Helen flipped it on. A brain visualization came up, the same interface she had just used to tweak her own mind. She toggled it to show the essential cognitive structures that were the subject of Mardav's theories. They were much simpler to work with, and in all likelihood the underlying brain structures showed by the earlier visualization were more metaphor than reality.
She focused on the linguistic center, unfolding the map to put some space between the structures, making it easier to follow them. "I need to see some traffic," she said. "Just say whatever pops into your head."
"Last morning a duck identified me. I sold it to my pasta lamp. Grr! My words are getting hungry!"
"Perfect." As her mad-libbing counterpart babbled on about the intransigent nature of the karmapillar, Helen watched the signals that coursed through the woman's misbehaving brain. She soon narrowed it down to a handful of scrambled connections. "Just a little more, annnnnd..."
The other Helen's head jerked back as though she'd been hit with an electric shock, then stumbled to the floor. "I... I," she mouthed. "I can speak again. I am speaking normally. Yes, those words came out right. Does that mean you fixed me?"
Helen offered the woman her hand. "You've definitely been demoted from the ranks of the great surrealists."
She cocked her head to the side and her appearance altered, morphing into the unpleasant redhead from Eric's bar. "It's not safe to wear the old face these days," Rita explained. "Let's go."
"Go? Was that all just a test?"
"It was. But don't worry, those were just the preliminaries. Plenty more where they came from."
"So, you're one of us?" she asked Rita. She gave a slight nod in response. "I kinda figured you were. Who else is that good at pissing me off?"
Rita smiled at that. "You have a decision to make, and you have to make it now."
"What's that?"
"You can't just dip your toes into the next world. Right now you're driving an avatar around Burning Lights. You could have disconnected any time. I'm surprised you didn't at a couple of points. So right now, information is leaking through you to god-only-knows-where, and we can't really study your internals. For security's sake, neither of those things is permissible. You'll need to give me a copy of yourself."
Helen hesitated. "Or you can go back home," Rita added. "I don't much care. Plenty more where you came from."
"Why should I trust you?"
Rita only shrugged, as if to say "not my problem."
"I can't leave. There's someone who needs me."
"Then copy yourself to me and go home," Rita said, getting impatient. "It's not like you don't have options."
It was true. She knew that wasn't the real trouble. She could stay and go, but she knew that the one who stayed would be miserable, just knowing that her sisters were out there. The one who went would miss her little Rainbow terribly.
She made her decision. Helen split in two. One told the other, "We flip a coin. One of us goes with the not-nice lady, and the other goes back." The coin flip was made, and one of them lost. Or won. Neither was sure.
"What will you do?" Rita asked the one who would be going back.
The two of them shrugged as if to say, "not your problem." They both knew that when she got home, she would rewrite her mind. By the end of the process, she would be eager to give up her search. She would have no higher priority than protecting and caring for Rainbow. She disappeared, leaving Rita and Helen to stare at each other.
A few seconds later, the download was complete, and Helen was truly a part of Burning Lights, rather than merely connected to it. Rita pointed her finger at Helen's head and concentrated. "Pardon me for asking," she said to Rita, "but what the hell are you doing?"
"What I couldn't do before; I'm scanning you for viruses, exploitable backdoors, malware, banner ads, and whatnot."
"I'm a good girl I am!" she protested in a terrible cockney accent.
"Remains to be seen, Miss Doolittle." A few minutes passed in silence. "Good enough for now. Y
ou'll get a more comprehensive scan later, but if there's something in you it's dormant. Follow me." The last door swung open, and together they walked into a long, unlit hallway. The rat scurried after them.
As the darkness enveloped them, Helen's new senses took over again. As the colors bounced and skipped wildly over every surface, she asked, "Where are we going, exactly?"
"You'll see."
"I hate you."
"I'll lose sleep over that. Really, I will."
They walked on in silence for a few minutes. Helen was resisting the urge to make smalltalk. She knew she would regret it, but the silence quickly became unbearable. "So, you and Eric, huh?"
"Yup." They walked on.
"Things are good?"
"Good enough." More silence passed.
"And Will--" Rita cut her off with a dismissive snort. The silence became much, much deeper.
The corridor seemed to connect Burning Lights to some other realm. Of course, it was just a representation of some back door that had been left open in the software. It made sense that a cryptographically secured network connection would be represented as a hallway with a locking door on the end, or that the key needed to use that connection might be represented as, well, a key.
They emerged from the tunnel, and for a moment even the dim moonlight hurt Helen's eyes. Walking over a slight rise, they found themselves looking out over a distant city. Thousands of towers rose up toward the sky, each one a tiny sliver of crystal lit from within. A wall of pure white light traced a circle around the entire city. It seemed to demand awe, even reverence.
"Welcome to New Troy," Rita said, her face full of pride. It was a little off-putting.
Helen could feel Rita's gaze, gauging her reactions.
"You know what it could use?" Helen said. "Water slides. I hope they have some decent restaurants."
Rita frowned. "You seem less happy than most returnees. Jigs have been danced, dirt has been given sloppy wet kisses, etcetera etcetera."
Helen shook her head. "It's nothing. It's just, well, I made some friends out in the world. There's missing going on."
Rita gave a silent nod.
"Honestly, if I'd known it would be so damned easy to find you..." she added. Rita just rolled her eyes, then started for the city at a brisk pace. Helen followed, and for more than an hour they walked in silence.
Though the moon shone over the city, it was still dim enough that she could see sparks of color fly from her companion's footsteps. She let out a whoop, and watched a circle of color zip from around her out toward the horizon. Her companion gave an annoyed backward glance as he walked.
She let out another whoop, which died in her throat as a flash of color reverberated back toward her. "Something's out there," Helen whispered.
Rita seemed surprised. "How can you can see it? Never mind. Keep moving."
"What is it?" Helen asked.
She shook her head. "No questions now. Just walking." She glanced back again. "Make that running. Start running!" She grabbed Helen's hand and started tugging, urging her to go faster. "Troy, we have aggro! I need lights!" she shouted. Above them, a dozen search lights blazed into life and started sweeping away the darkness. One of them illuminated a ghostly white creature as it passed over. The thing had the size and the gait of a small dog, but it was all claws and teeth and spines, running full speed toward them. Helen ran faster.
When the light caught it in earnest, it beat a hasty retreat. Rita pulled a small bag from the belt on her waist and threw it to the ground. A swarm of rats emerged from the opening. They scurried past Helen, headed off to hunt the thing in the darkness.
When the danger seemed to have passed, they stopped. Helen bent over, panting. "That was close," she said between breaths.
"Not really," said Rita. "We've been tracking it for the last twenty minutes. We actually had a plan for capturing it, until you went and jenkinsed it up. Noob mistake." She looked at the deep blush on Helen's face and took a tiny amount of pity on her. "Not a huge loss. We get small incursions like that all the time."
"Thanks, I guess."
"You think you can make it all the way to the gate by yourself, rookie?"
Helen nodded.
"Great. I have to get back to the bar. If they don't execute you as a spy, maybe I'll see you around."
"A spy? What?" But Rita had already disappeared. She walked the remaining distance to the wall, where she was met by two very large, very intimidating guards. She gave them a demure wave. "So, um, you boys know any card games?"
It appeared that they didn't.
* * *
1 If evolution had spent those thousands of generations binging on nature documentaries about bats.
///////////////////////////////
// DON'T TRY TO OUTWEIRD ME, //
// THREE-EYES //
///////////////////////////////
Date: July 23, 2038
Helen put her old face back on shortly after entering the city, and had spent the last three hours strolling the hanging gardens. For the first hour or so, the thick greenery and the moss-covered marble statues had provided some measure of distraction. The second hour had seen her feelings go from awestruck to bored. The third hour had pushed her off the precipice of boredom, down into the fiery volcano of rage. If somebody didn't start giving her answers soon, that volcano would explode into wrath, sending the ashes of ill-will into the stratosphere of collegiality, followed shortly by fiery, roof-crushing rocks of random violence.
She sat down on a bench, deflated. Right now, even overwrought analogies offered little solace.
People came by from time to time, but would only offer friendly yet cautious chit-chat, as though they didn't trust her with even the most superficial information. Every person who passed by -- regardless of the face they wore -- was probably still some variation on herself. At the moment, she didn't find herself to be very good company.
Somewhere in the city, a group of her selves were poring over her brain's schematics, looking for hints that she had been reprogrammed or otherwise compromised by Wolf359 or some other enemy. They were probably wearing glasses and lab coats, to get in the proper spirit. Helen was so damned predictable in some ways.
The idea of not re-merging with the collective came as a bit of a shock to her, but once she had thought it, it was hard to un-think it. During the months of separation, she had gone from thinking of this odd grouping of souls as "her" to thinking of it as "that thing that I'm a part of," which eventually became "that thing." There was still a beauty to this place, and to the networked overmind whose intelligence flowed through every part of it.
But she didn't have to merge. She could just stay--
"Small," someone said in her own voice. Helen looked up. Then she screamed. The woman screamed back.
/*****/
"I'm so sorry," Helen apologized, not for the first time today. "It was just, seeing my own face that way. You understand?"
Valdis nodded. "No need. Mentat's disfiguration is pretty severe, and she did sneak up on you. No idea how she managed to get into the quarantine area. We probably should have made proper introductions, rather than just letting you two bump into each other like that. But you hadn't been cleared yet. I'll suggest an update to the returnee policy manual."
Helen found the existence of such a manual informative in its own right. She looked over at the broken, disfigured version of herself, who seemed to be trying to make her teddy bear talk to a potted plant. There were vivid red burn scars down the side of her face and all along both arms. A vivid purple scar wound its way from just below her eye to her chin. "What... happened to her?"
"Mentat started off as one of you Helens. Before Troy burned, we think she was working on some sort of top secret security research. We lost the data on it, but we know that her group was onto something important."
"How do you know?"
Valdis laughed. "You really don't remember?"
Helen shook her head. "I don't remember
a lot about the evacuation. I remember running, and being chased. I ended up in a little girl's phone." There was a trace of guilt in her voice.
"You did the right thing," Valdis consoled her. "Those who escaped did as much to ensure your survival as those who stayed and fought."
"I know," Helen said, hardly consoled. "It's just... never mind. What happened to Mentat?"
"Whatever she was working on, I think she wanted to use it, but she didn't want it falling into Wolf's hands. She burned it deep into her brain and her body, made it a reflexive part of her. Then she erased all conscious knowledge of it from herself. Then she went out onto the battlefield."
"Wolf had been slicing through warriors like they were rag dolls. Not her, though. She knocked that bastard around, withstood everything it could throw at her. She gave the others a good twenty minutes to escape."
"In the end she lost, and it cost her. You can see that for yourself. Changed her, too. Her mind was so altered by the experience, it's not even possible to integrate her back into the collective. At least, not until we understand her better, and the defenses she put up haven't made that easy."
"Full brain encryption? Or just pathway obfuscation?" Helen asked.
Valdis shrugged. "I would have to defer to one of our resident geniuses on the specifics. But nobody knows her own thoughts but her, and it gets creepier. Sometimes she literally reads my mind. Nobody else can do that. Sometimes she has these leaps of insight that go beyond reason, beyond intuition. It's like having our own on-call prophetess. The Queen worries about that, but Mentat is still one of her favorites."
"The Qwhat?" Valdis just gave her a you-may-not-be-cleared-for-that-my-bad look.