Possession is a cyber-punk story that I hope to develop into a larger work.
The air in The Hub felt wrong. It was filtered, somehow both thinned out and incredibly dense, and had a distinct lukewarm temperature that was never quite conformable. When one breathed in, you could feel it fill up your lungs. When you breathed out, it left an invisible layer of dampness on you, a greasy substance that builds up around your eyes and fingers that disappears upon any focused inspection. Susan repeatedly swatted a persistent fly away from her hand as she navigated the thin, fluorescent-lit corridors. In the other hand, she clenched her fist around a stolen piece of paper. As she did, she started to interrogate herself internally.
Why am I even bothering?
This isn’t worth my time or the risk.
They probably aren’t even in here.
I bet we don’t even have the resources to pull off that kind of simulation.
Then, from within, a retort came:
I still have to know.
She continued on through the tangled maze of drywall, wires and computers. The company earplugs, provided to her at the entrance to The Hub, did little to cut down on the deafening noise from the hundreds of fan-cooling systems. After another half-hour of searching, she was beginning to get physically nauseous from a combination of the enclosed space, poor air quality and the extended use of her augmented reality overlay.
Then, just like that, she found it. A gigantic singular system nearly as large as Susan herself, taking up the space which could contain a whole rack of servers. It was sleek and white, and was obviously newer than its surroundings, with a single slot for a direct neural interface and a keyboard with a simple display for a password. If she wanted to get to them, she’d have to go in.
Susan tapped the metal implant on the back of her head. The silvery surface split open and produced a thin fiber-optic cable. She felt her skin go into a cold, numb state as the interface automatically shut down her senses in preparation for the entry into the computer. The plug fit smoothly into the slot. She entered the password that she had stolen off of her superior’s desk, and her vision went dark.
When she opened her eyes again, she was in an empty, cold void. It was both huge and tiny, as the inky blackness gave no perspective by which to anchor Susan’s sight. There was a sense of gravity; of falling forever through the vast vertigo, an eternal limbo of wind and darkness. Then, in the emptiness, she spotted something: a white painted wooden door with a golden plaque reading “Monitor Locations”. Then, another, this one with the words “Assembly Line Distributions”. Then, two more. Thousands of them surrounded her as she finally came to a halt, floating amidst a sea of white and gold.
Susan mentally activated a search for the second thing she had stolen, the keyword Melalo. Hundreds of doors began to fly upwards until one remained, with the very same label. She reached out. The handle was cool and smooth, not like the warm greasiness of the Hub. She took in a deep breath, and pushed herself into the next room.
To her surprise, it wasn’t very big. In fact, it was absolutely tiny, no larger than a supply cabinet. The walls seemed to be made of unusually smooth bricks, something that she assumed was done to help save on processing power. The only features of the room were a set of four filing cabinets and an old-fashioned fax-machine. The machine had an ancient-looking liquid-crystal display with a simple countdown on it and the word “Incoming”. It was at 3 minutes.
Susan began looking through the file cabinets, starting at the top row. The first seemed to be an inventory of dates and addresses, dating as far back as five years with a total of nearly 200 entries. The next three drawers were detailed profiles of 200 people. Some were young, some old, all employed at different companies with no connecting theme besides being associated with the same project, and having some kind of cybernetic implant. Yet still there was no mention of what the rumours held, the thing that Susan was looking for: an artificial intelligence.
The more she looked, the more frustrated she became. The next row provided nothing as well, just hundreds of diagrams of seemingly unrelated machinery. The bottom row had tons of chemical and mathematical equations, but little of any of the requisite coding that would surround the mythical Project Melalo, an attempt to create artificial intelligence. Eventually, Susan found herself more surrounded with files, and with nothing to show for it but anger. Just as she had begun to get up to leave, she saw something out of the corner of her eye. The fax machine’s display had started to blink red.
The countdown had reached zero, what had seemed like a fax machine began to release an eerie crimson glow outlining these words, which were spoken aloud by a calm, androgynous voice:
“UNAUTHORIZED USER: PURGE PROTOCOL ACTIVATED. Please wait until emergency services arrive to deal with you.”
Susan had already begun to pull on the door, but it was locked. The light intensified, and as it did, she felt something strange. She couldn’t remember the chemical equations that she was looking at just seconds before. The instant she realized this, more of the equations and schematics began to disappear into thin air, like they were nothing.
In a panic, she checked the processes running in the local simulation. Nothing seemed to be going on besides deletion of hundreds of terabytes of sensory information. She came to a simple conclusion: the computer realized she had seen, and now was trying to delete whatever it could. She started to push her weight on the the door, but it didn’t budge an inch as more memories slipped away. The computer spoke again, now far more stern.
“Comply with previous order: wait until emergency services come to deal with you.”
Susan took a step back as addresses she had found fled her mind like birds from a passing car. She breathed in, and calmed herself before taking a running start. She leapt against the door with all her might and it shattered. Her world spun as she returned to the void for an instant. Terrified and thinking little of risk, she used her arm, the physical arm back in the real world, to yank the cord from the computer.
Then, blinding agony wracked her body. Her vision was a searing panorama of white-hot pain. Her skin was frostbitten, burnt, cut-up and bruised all at once. Her ears were hyper-sensitive; a cacophony of white noise, infinitely low rumbles and high-pitched screeching. She could vaguely make out that she had body-parts still, but they were disconnected in space. Her arms felt like they could have been on her shoulders, or on her hips, or maybe somewhere off to her side. The soured air of the Hub felt like acid in her nostrils and lungs, burning its way through her vocal cords and chest. It was at this point a single thought arose out of the pain to the surface of her mind:
I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see, and they’re going to kill me for it.
She steadied herself against a metal rack as she arose to a shaking stand as she choked back bile. Her vision and hearing began to clear up in spots and pieces. In the echoing distance of the Hub she could hear the stomping of rubber boots, running across the tiled floor. She began in a hobbled sprint in the opposite direction. Soon, the pain in her skin subsided, and as it did she began to accelerate.
As Susan ran, she started to think on her feet; that was her best skill, right after getting herself into trouble. She brought up an AR display of the Hub. Corporate police would have already covered all of the obvious exits. She marked the main doors, the back doors and the roof with a small red X and started looking elsewhere. They probably would also check any maintenance exits, and they’d spend hours sweeping the Hub with drones which would prevent her from hiding in an inconspicuous place until they went away. That left exactly one way out. She marked it on her map as she came to an intersection of multiple hallways and took a hard left.
The AR display read out a directions calmly as she frantically dodged from hall to hall and corridor to corridor until she reached her first landmark: a tile with a handle on it and the printed words: TO WATER ACCESS. She ripped it off of the floor and began to descend down into the darkness below. As she did, she caught a smell rare for the Hub, for most of the city for that matter. It was the smell of rushing water, rain and dirt.
When she finally reached the bottom, she found her rubber soles squeaking on the rough, wet concrete. She pulled open the heavy metal maintenance door and found herself in the water processing area which supplied thousands of heat-intensive computers with cooling. The unit was divided into two blocky sections. One, the input, had a single pipe almost as tall as Susan herself leading to it, and thousands leading up into the main facility. The other, the output, was the end-point for the circuit of all those other pipes, and had a gaping opening which spilled a brackish, warm water which came from a constant supply of computers who had to shunt old water out. The spillway was deep and quick running, and she knew that it lead into the city’s main sewer system. Susan stepped to the edge and tried to build up enough confidence to jump.
Then as she did, she heard, a voice, distorted by a some form software boomed from behind her.
“Don’t move or I’ll shoot!”
Fear filled Susan’s mind. It blocked out everything, an ocean of terror and indecision dominated by waves and rushes of the white noise produced by the spillway. The officer behind her yelled something again. Susan knew that words were said, and that they were important, but it was all filtered out by the impenetrable wall of fear that consumed her brain. Eventually, after what could have been a second or an eternity, she decided between fight and flight.
She stepped out and dropped like a stone into the dark water below.
The water that carried her was surprisingly warm, almost soothing. Perhaps less surprising was the intense, stabbing pain coming from her forearm, and the abrasive speed with which the water moved. Susan tumbled and flew through the slipstream canal, desperately trying to avoid being scraped up against the thick concrete or having her head bashed in against the metal plating that covered most of the floor. The salty, impure water flooded her nostrils and prevented her from opening her eyes to see. She took several turns down various outlets, nearly decapitating herself on the sharp turns.
After nearly a minute of alternating between struggling to gasp for air and diving in a desperate attempt to decrease her visibility to anyone who might be watching, Susan found herself in the mains of the sewer system. She pulled herself up onto the cold stone floors of the areas intended for the workers who occasionally had to come down to investigate one issue or another in the depths of the sewer. Still, the pain from her bruises and scrapes she received from her journey ached beneath the sopping wet surroundings. The largest wound was just beneath her wrist. She ripped off a section of her shirt and wrought the water out of it, and tied it to form a crude bandage. Her implants began heating up to evaporate the water as she started to wonder what life choices lead her to be bleeding and bruised in a dirty sewer on the run from the people she worked for up to several minutes ago.
The first “choice” on her list was not her choice; Susan’s mother was a fan of the old movies and books about robots and artificial intelligence. Whether it was a genetic predisposition, or that her robomanic tendency came about through her mother’s nurturing, Susan couldn’t resist an offer to look into the possibility of an AI. The second was signing up for work at Iris Solutions as a coder, a huge software firm on the cutting edge, further piquing her interest in the science of creating such an entity. Then again, they didn’t give her much of a choice in that either; as soon as she started showing promise in high-school, they had already targeted her for an early recruitment program. In Susan’s opinion, the third major factor was office gossip and a lack of translucency. If Iris had bothered to actually secure their projects and not allow people to talk extensively about where resources were being redistributed to, she wouldn’t have any of the information required to let her look into the project in the first place. Perhaps a fourth factor, though she tried to dismiss it, was her natural tendency towards reckless behavior that had dominated her life up to this point, a trait she had usually counteracted through improvisation, natural problem-solving and a great deal of luck.
These were her thoughts as she walked through the depths of the sewers. After an hour of aching feet and being soaking wet, she started to see the signs that she was looking for. The first was an abundance of food-wrappers and other plastic waste flooding the murky, foul-smelling waters below her; far too many to be those accidentally put in a garbage disposal or otherwise disposed of down drains. Then came the small tents and huts constructed out of toughened plastic, scrap metal, cardboard and old fabric. Occasionally, there would be a beggar asking for change or merchant peddling knick-knacks and cheap clothes, though in this place there was little difference between the two. Susan was officially in the largest slum in the world: Mojave Heights.
Susan climbed out of an open man-hole and into the sweltering heat of the deep-running back-alleys and sidewalks that dominated the sprawling locality. The Heights had developed as Las Vegas experienced explosive growth over the course of several years, spilling out onto five kilometers of desert like a dark, filthy wound in the sand and stone. Not only did it expand outwards, but upwards as well; the towering high-rises contain almost a million souls according to official estimates but some say that as many as fifty-thousand live there, hiding from authorities in the blind-spots between the spotty cameras and poorly-maintained traffic checkpoints. Susan planned to do the same. But first she needed to find someone who could help her do it.
She walked amidst the crowds of the poor and lost, overcrowding the entire streets intended for four cars to pass through. Occasionally, a cyclist would part the crowds in the formation of a circle, barely moving faster than the rest of the continuous human wave. The endless tide ebbed and flowed around shops and food-stands; the air was filled with the scent of animal fats, grease, and inordinate amounts of spices used to cover up the blander taste of vat-grown meats. This uncouth diet was supplemented by crudely-made hydroponic crops which hung from almost every garter and fire-escape.
Perhaps most striking amidst the indistinguishable mass of noise and people was the youth of the Heights. The Heights had only been truly extant for 20 years, and thus a new generation was growing up having only known the Heights. The youngest ran about in loose-fitting charity clothes and tended to the hydroponic gardens, or sometimes aided in cooking or the stitching of fabrics. The older ones, between the ages of thirteen and twenty, hid themselves from the heat in the shade of shops, and occupied themselves with boot-legged gadgets and pirated games. Many wore gang colours, or had some form obscure street symbology emblazoned upon them. All of them had the same eyes; sunken, and gleaming with a grim intelligence borne of the urban desert that surrounded them.
The sheer verticality of the slum also surprised Susan. The high-rises, streets, catwalks and construction equipment formed a 3-dimensional maze of steel and concrete. It was rightfully known as the Desert Spider. In the space of minutes she was forced to go up and down five different sets of stairs and make seven left turns, descending and ascending through the tangled fibers of the artificial web. Even as the day wore on, and as she continued her journey into the center of the slum the endless river of people never seemed to abate in their bustle, instead merely donning heavier clothing to adapt to the deep chill that consumed the evening.
Eventually, she reached her destination: one of the infamous space-saver communal homes that consumed swathes of the Heights. A dull, faux-neon sign read “NO VACANCY”, poorly illuminating the dingy alleyway. The first thing that Susan noticed upon opening the door was the heat; the automated system was working on overtime to compensate for the vast temperature swings that occurred in the desert.