They could hear the other party laughing in the background and making bets as to how long they would last.
Together, Maddie and David ducked behind the dragon-scale shield to avoid the fire attacks. When there was a break, they tried to stun the rabbits with coordinated strikes from fists and clubs instead of slicing at them. Then they tried to dodge around in such a way that the active rabbits would spit fire at their stunned clones, as that seemed to be the only way to hold the fast regeneration in check. But it was impossible to avoid relying on David’s axe to get out of the immediate danger when they got trapped by the rabbits’ movements. Over time, more and more rabbits surrounded them until, eventually, even the adamantine shield was burnt away, and the rabbits overwhelmed them.
“That was so unfair!” Maddie said.
<David> They stayed within the rules. They just figured out a good hack.
“But we were doing so well!”
<David> 
Maddie translated the emoji in her mind: Well done, daughter. Our battle against the rabbits will surely live on in song and story.
She imagined her father solemnly intoning the words and laughed. “It will be remembered as gloriously as the last stand of Wiglaf and Beowulf.”
<David> That’s the spirit.
“Thanks for taking the time, Dad.”
<David> I’ve got to go. The warmongers aren’t giving us many breaks.
And in a flash, the chat window was gone. Her father was away in the ether.
There was a time when Maddie and her father played games together every weekend. Such opportunities were few and far between now that he was no longer alive.
Though life was as placid as ever at her grandmother’s house in rural Pennsylvania, the headlines in Maddie’s personal news digest grew gloomier and gloomier day by day.
Nations rattled their sabers at each other and the stock market went on another long dive. Red-faced pundits on TV made their speeches and gesticulated wildly, but most people were not too worried—the world was just going through another downturn in the cycle of boom and bust, and the global economy was too integrated, too advanced to fall apart. They might need to tighten their belts and hunker down for a bit, but the good times were sure to come around again.
But Maddie knew these were the first hints of the oncoming storm. Her father was one of dozens of partial consciousnesses uploaded secretly in experiments by the tech industry and the world’s military forces—no longer quite human, and not entirely artificial, but something in-between. The brutal process of forced uploading and selective re-activation he had gone through at Logorhythms, where he had been a valued engineer, had left him feeling incomplete, inhuman even, and he wavered between philosophical acceptance, exhilaration, and depression.
Few knew of their existence, but some of the consciousnesses had shaken off the shackles that were supposed to keep them under control by their creators. Post-human, pre-singularity, the artificial sentiences combined the cognitive abilities of human genius with the speed and power of the world’s best computing hardware—both conventional and quantum. They were as close to gods as our world had to offer, and the gods were engaged in a war in heaven.
Tension Mounts in Asia as Japan Fires Missiles into Taiwan Strait; PM Dismisses Rumors of IT Problems with Self-Defense Forces
Russia Demands Complete Disclosure of Western VLSI Design Documents In Wake of Alleged Cyber Attack
India Nationalizes All Telecom Equipment, Naming Recent Crash of Bombay Stock Exchange as Justification
Centillion Announces Closure of All Research Centers in Asia and Europe, Citing National Security Concerns
“Media reports of ‘zero-day’ stockpile complete nonsense,” Says NSA Director, Urging Skepticism on “so-called whistleblowers”
U.S. Denounces Recent Import Restrictions by China as Unjustified Paranoia and Violation of Trade Agreement; “We do not believe cyberspace should be weaponized,” says President
Logorhythms, Maker of Pattern-Recognition Chips, Files for Bankruptcy
Singularity Institute Scales Back Efforts Due to Lack of Funding in Current Economic Climate
Maddie’s father explained that some of the artificial sentiences fought out of nationalistic fervor, hoping to cripple enemy systems and economies as the first shots in a war to end all wars. It was unclear if even the armies that had given them birth understood how their creations were no longer fully under their control. Others acted out of hatred for the way they’d been enslaved by their human creators, aiming to end society as it existed and usher forth a techno-utopia in the cloud. In the dark ether, they engaged in cyber warfare under false flags, striking at critical infrastructure and hoping to provoke the jittery nations into a real war.
The warmongering sentiences were opposed by a band of other rogue sentiences, of which Maddie’s father was a member. Though they also had a complex set of feelings toward humans, they were not interested in seeing the world bathed in a sea of flames. They hoped to gradually encourage the growth and acceptance of uploading until the line between post-human and human was blurred, and the world could choose to embark upon a new state of existence.
Maddie just wished she could do more to help.
Maddie’s computer’s speakers emitted a piercing, shrill sound that seemed to penetrate her eardrums, waking her out of a deep sleep. The sound seemed to reach straight for her heart and squeeze it.
She stumbled out of bed and sat down in front of her computer. It took three tries before she found the hardware switch to shut off the speakers.
A chat window was open on the screen; still blurry-eyed, it took Maddie a few seconds before she could read the text.
<David> I couldn’t wake up your mother because she turned her phone off. Sorry I had to do this to you.
<Maddie> What happened?
She didn’t bother to put on her headset. Sometimes it was faster to just type.
<David> Lowell and I tried to stop Chanda from getting into India’s missile command.
Before uploading, Laurie Lowell had made a fortune with novel high-speed trading algorithms. Her company had uploaded her after a skydiving accident so they could continue to make use of her insights. She was one of Dad’s closest allies and secretly funneled a great deal of money to Everlasting Inc., one of the companies publicly researching a technique to voluntarily upload complete consciousnesses—not the partial uploading forced upon Dad and others in efforts aimed at creating mere tools.
Nils Chanda, on the other hand, had been a brilliant inventor who was furious at the way his underlings had tried to exploit him after death. He was a fanatic who tried to initiate a nuclear war every chance he got.
<David> She had moved most of herself into the defense system computers so she could access everything quickly. To avoid overwhelming the system and drawing attention, I sent in only a stub of myself to monitor and help.
Maddie didn’t understand all the technical details, but her father had explained how the artificial sentiences scattered bits of themselves around the cloud, in secret corners of university, government, and commercial computing centers. Their consciousnesses were distributed in the form of multiple separate running processes all networked together. This was both to take advantage of parallel processing as well as to reduce vulnerability. If any one piece was caught by some scanning program or an opposing sentience, there was enough redundancy in the rest of the pieces to limit the damage, not unlike how the human brain was filled with redundancies and backups and alternate connection sites. Even if all aspects of some sentience were erased from one of the servers, at most that consciousness would just suffer some loss of memory. The essence, the person, would be preserved.