“You all right, mate?” Bunky asked, noticing Sid on the mediaworlds again. The inky blackness of an access tunnel stretched out ahead. Sid was riding shotgun in Bunky’s mechanoid.
Retreating a chunk of himself into the physical world, Sid looked at Bunky in the dim red light. “I guess.” he replied. Since the attack on New Orleans, it was anybody’s guess what would happen next. The phrackers were busy modifying future timelines as best they could to try to deflect the attention from Sid, but their efforts were starting to be noticed. It was just adding to the incriminating evidence.
A flashing door appeared in the rock wall ahead. They were on their way to a materials testing lab with the rocks they collected at the spots where Willy’s proxxi stopped in the underground. They didn’t find any machines, didn’t see anything unusual, so they dug out some samples from the surrounding rock to test.
Bunky smiled at Sid with his broken, toothy grin. “Mate, we’ve got your back. Don’t worry.”
The access door opened ahead of them, and Bunky’s mechs began unloading the samples.
Sid smiled and retreated to his inner worlds, monitoring the stream of data from his splinter network. “Was the police action in New Orleans a step too far?” echoed one newsworld. He spun through some splinters monitoring the physical world: “A winter hurricane? Depression in the Caribbean looks like it will build into category four and hit the east coast in January…” He moved his attention into a different newsworld. “Central Africa reports a huge locust swarm that swept through the desert and into Chad…” This last newsworld story was so unusual that it pricked his attentional matrices. When was the last time a spontaneous locust swarm moved through the Sahara? He filed the thread for closer inspection.
“The Synthetic Beings Charter of Rights has been derailed by Nancy Killiam, the heir of the founder of the SyBCoR movement itself, the late Patricia Killiam…” another story began, which flowed into, “…glitches in the Atopian synthetic reality system, or ghosts in the machine? We talk now to…” which streamed into, “…tens of thousands more disappearances reported by independent sources…”
Sid smiled. Like a frog sitting in water heated to a boil, the public was barely noticing. At first the disappearances had been explained away as system problems, then psychological ones, but what Sid suspected was Jimmy’s excesses were getting difficult to hide.
“…but Jimmy Scadden, head of conscious security for Atopia, says that terrorist actions related to Sidney Horowitz…”
Sid’s smile evaporated.
Going through his list of projects, he checked the decryption agents working on the POND data, to see if the mysterious messages from a parallel universe could be unwound into anything intelligible. Nothing yet. He felt a familiar phantom pulling his consciousness, and his smile returned. He didn’t resist.
Coming back into real space, his proxxi, Vicious, was disgorging his body from the mechanoid and onto the terrace of the White Horse Pub. He tweaked the serving bot for a round of beers and slid himself into a seat between Sibeal and Zoraster.
“Anything new on the POND data?” Sibeal asked right away. It was a hot topic in the pub.
Sid shook his head.
“I’m sweating like a glassblower’s asshole!” whooped Shaky as he sat down on the other side of the table with Bunky. The serving bot slapped a beer down in front of him and he grabbed it up.
Sid turned to Sibeal. “Anything new on your side?”
“Some bad glass out there.” She spun some data into a private workspace with Sid. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. What do you make of it?”
Sid slid a part of his mind in to take a look. “Doesn’t look like it was doing anything wrong.”
“Did you see how it was mutating? And it’s not attached to any human tags—”
“Come on, it wasn’t doing anything.” Sid felt annoyed at the way she always targeted machine intelligences. Maybe he felt like he had to stand up for his proxxi, Vicious, who was sitting across from them in his virtual projection.
“Yet,” Sibeal replied.
Sid put his beer down. “I’ll bet you’re happy SyBCoR got slammed.”
Sibeal frowned. “SyBCoR would make my job a lot easier, if you want to know. The big AIs hide inside corporate structures so even if they kill people, it’s hard to get the shareholders to stand down.”
“Worse than people?”
“At least if they had civil rights and obligations, the playing field would be evened. And it was your friend Killiam who killed it, and I bet it wasn’t on moral grounds.”
The argument wasn’t really anymore whether the machines qualified as “people” philosophically, but more about the economic chaos from granting billions of machines even basic civil rights. The rise of Atopian pssi was, in theory, supposed to buffer this effect by moving economics into virtual consumption.
“Anyway, machine intelligence is different,” added Sibeal. “I don’t know why—”
Sid knew she was about to get into the statistical inference versus biological debate. He cut her off. “Do you understand why you do things?”
Sibeal looked at him defiantly. “Of course.”
“There’s a difference between rationalization and reasoning. You do things because you want to, because a set of reasons put up afterwards always make it fit. Reasoning is just an illusion—”
“You’re going to talk to me about illusions? You’re the master of illusions.”
“Exactly.”
“Kids, kids,” Bunky interjected. “Come on now, we’re here for a nice pint.” He raised his glass and grinned. “And those results are coming in from the materials lab. How about we focus on that?”
Sibeal took a deep breath and looked away from Sid. She opened a virtual workspace and dragged everyone’s subjective into it, and then pulled in the results from the rock sample testing.
Living underground, they were all experts on rocks.
After a few seconds, Sibeal sighed. The results looked typicaclass="underline" mostly metamorphic rock, the mica schist that formed the bedrock under Manhattan. Some flakes of quartz and granite gneiss—the crystalline basement of the crust under the East Coast—and some ground-up glacial till.
“Wait, what’s that?” Sid asked, dragging one of the test results to the top of the workspace.
Bunky and Shaky’s avatars frowned, but Sibeal’s eyes grew wide.
“Quasi-crystals,” she said aloud, pulling up more samples into the center of the test-result world. “Do you see that?”
Shaky’s avatar nodded. “What’s that doing there?”
Sid looked up the definition: A quasiperiodic crystal is a structure that is ordered but not periodic.
“That’s not even an icosahedrite,” Bunky pointed out.
Sid shook his head. “What?”
Sibeal forwarded him some background data, but it was barely intelligible. “Quasi-crystals don’t occur naturally—at least, not on Earth.”
“The only ones in nature are from the Koryak Mountains in Russia,” added Bunky. He was something of a rock historian. “And some in the New Guinea highlands. But all have extraterrestrial origin.” In the pub he took a sip from his stout, leaving him a foamy mustache. He smiled. “What I mean is they’re from meteorites.”
Sibeal spun the model of the crystal structure around in space. “And these look natural, not lab-grown. There’s residue of uranium.” She popped their viewpoints back into normal space at the pub. “Bunky, can you contact underminers in cities where Wally’s proxxi made stops, see if they can find any more of this?”
Bunky nodded.
Sid didn’t quite understand, so he pulled up the tech sheets Sibeal had forwarded him.