Chapter 22 #2
“To express something, sure.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this. Why hasn’t anyone hired you to work on games or movies?”
“I’ve never showed anyone.”
“Why the phreak not?”
“It’s kinda like showing someone your diary.”
“I see,” he said. “The scandalous story of Sprite is carved upon this virtual stone. She’s . . .” He pretended to scrutinize the canyon wall. “A tortured artist, clearly, who creates in a subconscious effort to hide from her dark and mysterious past.”
“I’m more concerned with the present,” she said.
“Norman’s using this crisis as an excuse to launch the System on OverNet, and probably even MilNet.
” As she spoke, the final red sliver of sun slid below the lip of the canyon, leaving them in the purple twilight of the gas giant.
Her procedural simulation had great dramatic timing.
After a long silence in the dimness, Jason said, “There must be something we can do.”
She shook her head. “There are no saved games, no retries, no way to make more luck. It’s . . .” She trailed off.
Jason supplied the unvoiced thought: “Game over.” He’d witnessed what he knew was only a sample of the System’s power; he had no illusions about the chances of taking the thing down once it was OverNet admin.
It would basically become the RNG god. “We have to try something,” he said. “I know where the System is.”
She snorted softly. “Which lets us do what? Show up at Andrew Norman’s top-secret facility and politely ask to be let in? Or steal some weapons and go in guns blazing, like a video game? Maybe the Russians could muster the firepower to steal it, but we can’t.”
Neither could the Russians anymore. The System had seen to that. He shuddered, and said, “We’re not trying to steal it, though. We’re trying to kill it. Two people with a bomb can do a lot of damage.” Two people with a bomb and a phreak load of luck.
Sprite’s eyes snapped to his, and he recoiled at the flatness there. “Kill her? Why would you want to do that?”
It took him a moment to gather his surprised thoughts enough to say, “Why the phreak wouldn’t I?”
“Dunno, maybe because she saved your life?”
Her tone was accusatory, and he felt anger rise in response. “‘She’? Oh, I forgot, you and your secret team were working with ‘her’ all along.”
“We’re working to make sure no one can abuse her power.”
“So am I. By killing it.”
“Isn’t the real problem the guy who wields the power?”
“What, like ‘Final Systems don’t kill people; people kill people’?”
“Something like that. If Congress were in charge of her, if the elected representatives of the people voted about what she’s allowed to do, couldn’t she be useful? Helpful? Because then one man isn’t deciding what’s best for everyone.”
Jason’s mouth dropped open. “You think this thing will usher in some kind of utopia? It’s still just a collection of algorithms. Just because it answers to a group instead of an individual won’t make it more fair.”
“Why not?” Sprite demanded.
“You want an example? Mia and I ran away from foster homes a few times. So we got flagged as flight risks. SocServNet ran us through their AI and matched us with the foster parents who had the fewest kids run away from them. Know what kind of parents those were?”
“The nice ones?” Sprite said hopefully, but her face showed she knew that wasn’t the answer.
“The scary ones. The ones who hit you to make sure you behave. The ones who chase you down themselves, find you, hurt you, bring you back, so they can keep getting their monthly bonus for being a flight-safe foster parent. We stopped running away when one foster ‘dad’ told me what he’d do to Mia if we did it again.
So no, there’s no way I’m putting a set of algorithms in charge of my life, not ever again.
And not only that, but I’m gonna do the world a favor and make sure no one else gets put under the Final System’s control. I’m gonna kill it.”
“But she chose to save you. She didn’t have to.”
“Chose?” Jason sputtered. “Chose? It didn’t choose anything. It’s a phreaking machine. I thought you didn’t use panyons.”
She gave him a withering look. “I don’t like killing.”
“It’s not killing!”
“You don’t know the System the way I do. She thinks. She makes choices. She’s human, in my book.”
“Not in my book. It’s an illusion, an illusion that affects real people. So yeah, I’m gonna kill it.”
“I thought you said destroying it wouldn’t be killing.”
He tried to reply, but after a couple of stuttered syllables, all he could think to say was, explosively, “Phreak!”
“Sounds like for all your high concepts, you’re really just after revenge.”
“Yes! I am!”
“Against an inanimate object?”
He opened his mouth but again could think of nothing to say.
“I think she’s human in your book too.”
“Fine! Then she’s a human who deserves to die!”
“Maybe, but not for killing Mia. The System wasn’t driving that car.”
“Don’t you dare bring Mia into this!” Jason exploded.
“And get the phreak off your moral high horse! I deserve vengeance. Mia deserves vengeance. You don’t get to preach at me.
Because you don’t get it. You don’t get what I’ve gone through.
You don’t get—” He broke off, because there was no way to describe the moment the universe had shattered or the experience of living in a broken reality ever since.
Sprite’s eyes lost their challenge. They flicked to his hand, which was in a taut fist by his side. She took a half step toward him, her own hand rising, but stopped before touching him. “I do get it,” she said softly.
He gave her the same flat look she’d given him. “I wish you did.”
“You asked me once about my motivation,” she said. “I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t have the words. But . . . maybe I can show you.”
The landscape disappeared, replaced by a black void.
A dark-haired little girl of about ten kneeled in the blackness.
Her avatar lacked the perfection of modern ones: The lighting on her skin was plasticky, and her long hair was made up of artificially thick strands.
But her eyes were alive with pain, and her mouth was a dark hole from which emanated a howl of almost animal anguish.
Jason knew the expression. And he knew the cry. His heart had made both, once. He clapped his hands to his ears. This only cupped the earpieces attached to the jail-issued glasses, amplifying the noise.
The scream died, but what came next was no better.
Racking sobs issued from the girl, and with each sob, her body jerked and twisted in impossible ways, back arching, limbs flailing.
He guessed it was the inverse kinematics system failing to properly reconstruct what the girl’s motions should look like based on the muscle signals it could detect, but the effect was as if each gasp was greater than the small body could hold.
He had to look away, so he looked at Sprite. “What the phreak is this?”
“This is a recording of my avatar, the day my mother died.”
“Can you make her stop?” The crying was making it hard to think.
She nodded, and the girl disappeared. Walls rose and folded around them, enclosing them in a room paneled in dark wood.
A poster bed with an elaborately carved headboard and heavy draperies stood in dim light against one wall.
A tapestry hung in shadow along another.
Sprite sat down on the window seat beneath a leaded glass window, and Jason stepped beside her as she looked out.
They were high in what appeared to be a great mansion, gazing down across tiers of sloping roofs dotted with domes and skylights and chimneys.
As in the canyon, the sun had just sunk beneath the horizon, but here everything was steeped in yellow twilight.
He could make out green masses of trees and hedges far below, and long shadows cast by brick walls.
A leafy maze stood close to the mansion, its shadowed corridors circling inward, and he thought he caught the glimmer of water at its center.
“After she died, I wanted to escape,” Sprite said. “From everything. From reality. So you’re right: That’s when I started making places. Places to escape. Places to be still.”
Jason could hear distant crickets and cicadas and the murmur of a distant fountain.
He raised his eyes, following the mansion grounds until they met a deep-green wall of forest that surrounded everything, and thought he saw a flicker of movement in the darkness beneath the branches.
This place made him think of the fairy tales Mia used to read at night, the ones she loved because of the feeling of danger lurking in the background.
But despite, or maybe because of, the lingering danger, a heavy peace hung over all, like the quiet you felt inside after crying until you couldn’t cry anymore.
“I could have used a place to be still,” he said.
“You can borrow this one, if you ever need to.” A message pinged in with an IP address, which, as he’d suspected, began with the quadruple threes designating it in the range reserved for the NNA.
Jason went still for half a beat, because this was no small thing.
She was giving him access to a private storage area she’d taken over in probably the most impressive act of hacking she’d ever done.
For any phreaker, this was a significant act of trust. But even more, she was letting him into a secret part of herself. “Tell me what happened,” he said.
“Ever heard of Regina Wright?”
He shook his head.
“’Course not,” Sprite said. “Why would you? Norman almost never mentions her.”
“She was your mother?”
“Yes. And Norman’s partner, at the start of his AGI project.
He was the computer scientist; she was the neuroscientist. But she gets no credit.
Die before anyone knows what you’ve accomplished, and somebody else can take all the fame.
If you look her name up online, you won’t find anything that’s not linked to Norman and his accomplishments. Even her obituary is buried.”