The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

The Gods Will Not Be Slain

Wildflowers in a thousand hues dotted the verdant field; here and there, fluffy white rabbits hopped through the grass, munching happily on dandelions. “Cute!” Maddie exclaimed. After that hard fight against the Adamantine Dragon, Maddie certainly welcomed the sight.

Maddie, a lanky monk in saffron robes, cautiously tiptoed closer to one of the rabbits. Her father, a renegade cleric in a white-and-red cloak who had turned from the god Auroth to the goddess Lia—pleasing neither though able to wield artifacts charged by both—stayed behind, alert for signs of fresh danger.

She squatted down next to the rabbit to pet it, and the creature stayed in place, gazing at Maddie with large, calm, brown eyes that took up a third of its face.

The force-feedback mouse vibrated under Maddie’s hand.

“It’s purring!” she said.

A line of text appeared in the chat window in the bottom left corner of Maddie’s computer screen:

> Not the most realistic portrayal of a rabbit I’ve seen.

“You have to admit the haptic modeling is amazing,” Maddie said into her headset. “It feels just like petting Ginger, except Ginger isn’t always in the mood to be petted. But I can come see these rabbits anytime I want.”

> You know that’s kind of sad, right?

“But you’re also—” Maddie stopped, reconsidering her words. Instead she said nothing, not wanting to start a fight.

> We have visitors.

A few blinking orange dots appeared on the mini-map in the bottom right corner of her screen. Maddie moved away from the rabbit and panned the camera up. A party emerged from the woods at the northern end of the field: an alchemist, a mage, and two samurai.

Maddie switched her mic from intra-party to in-range: “Welcome, fellow adventurers.” The software disguised her voice so that no one could tell she was a fifteen-year-old girl.

The strangers said nothing but kept on walking toward them.

> Not a chatty bunch, apparently.

Maddie wasn’t worried that the newcomers might be hostile. This wasn’t a PvP server. The community in this game had a reputation for being sociable, but there were always players who were more focused on “getting things done.”

Maddie switched the mic back to private. “Samurai get a discount on bows, and I might tempt them into a trade.”

> They get a discount? Do samurai even use bows?

“The bow was actually the samurai’s weapon of choice. Mom taught me that.”

> A historian’s knowledge is definitely helpful in situations like this.

Maddie opened her inventory and took out an adamantine scale from the dragon they had slain, holding it up for the other party to see. Sunlight glinted off the scale’s convex surface in iridescent rays. Out of the magical Bag of Containment, the scale expanded to its natural size, almost as tall as Maddie. The dragon had been huge.

But the other party paid no attention to the scale. As they passed by Maddie and her father, they uttered no greeting, not even looking at them.

Maddie shrugged. “Their loss.”

She turned back toward the rabbit to give it more pets when several bright shafts of light came from behind her and struck the animal one after another. The mouse shuddered in Maddie’s hand as the rabbit leapt away and growled.

“What in the world—”

The rabbit began to expand rapidly and soon was the size of an ox. Its eyes were now flaming red and fierce.

> The eyes are at least closer to the real thing.

The rabbit snarled, revealing two rows of dagger-like teeth. The sound was deep and fearsome, more appropriate for a wolf. Smoke unfurled from the corners of the rabbit’s lips.

“Um—”

The rabbit leapt at Maddie, and instinctively she backed up, but tripped and fell. The animal opened its mouth wide and shot a stream of fire at her. David, her dad, rushed over to help, but it was too late. Monks couldn’t use armor and Maddie hadn’t had a chance to get her qi shell up. She was going to be hurt badly.

But the flaming tongue deflected harmlessly off of her—she had held on to the dragon scale, which acted as a shield.

Encouraged, Maddie jumped up and rushed at the rabbit. She punched it in the face, stunning it and taking off a large chunk of hit points. Dad followed with a strike from his ethereal axe, a gift from the goddess Lia, cleaving the rabbit cleanly in two.

They looked back in the direction the shafts of light had come from: the other party was standing some distance away and waved at them.

“We do like the scales,” one of the samurai said. “We’ll just wait here.”

Griefers. Realization dawned on Maddie. Although this wasn’t a PvP server, it was still possible to get other players killed and then take their possessions before they could respawn.

> Behind you.

Maddie turned around just in time to dodge out of the way as two ox-size rabbits charged at her, missing by inches. Maddie and David coordinated their attacks, and managed to cut down both rabbits—now four pieces of carcass. But instead of disappearing after a few seconds, the pieces began to wriggle, growing into four new fire-breathing rabbits.

“I’m guessing they cast a combination of explosive growth, fire breath, ferocity, and fast regeneration,” said Maddie. “Each time we cut one down, two more take its place.”

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.

> They stayed within the rules. They just figured out a good hack.

“But we were doing so well!”

>

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.”

> That’s the spirit.

“Thanks for taking the time, Dad.”

> 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.

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.

> I couldn’t wake up your mother because she turned her phone off. Sorry I had to do this to you.

> What happened?

She didn’t bother to put on her headset. Sometimes it was faster to just type.

> 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.

> 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 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.

But wars among the gods happened in a matter of nanoseconds. Within the darkness of the memory inside some server—missile command, power grid, stock exchange, or even an ancient inventory system—the programs slashed and hacked at each other, escalating privileges, modifying stacks, exploiting system vulnerabilities, masking themselves as other programs, overflowing buffers, overwriting memory locations, sabotaging each other like viruses. Maddie was a good enough programmer to at least understand that in such a war, the need to reach over the network for some piece of data could mean a delay of milliseconds—an eternity in the context of the gigahertz clock cycles of modern processors. It made sense that Lowell would want to concentrate most of herself at the scene of the fight.

But that decision would also make her more vulnerable.

> Lowell was doing well, and Chanda wasn’t having any more luck breaking in than in his previous attempts. But then Lowell found out that a big chunk of Chanda had already been moved onto the server—she thought he was trying to gain a speed advantage—and she decided this was a chance to cripple him. So instead of being purely defensive, she went on the attack and asked me to block off all communications ports so that he couldn’t escape or get word out. He was trying to send out a bunch of packets, and I captured them, hoping that we could decipher them later and figure out more of what he was trying to do.

“What was that loud noise?” her mother, in pajamas, said from the door. In her hand was one of the shotguns they owned.

“It was Dad trying to wake me up. Something’s happened.”

Her mother came in and sat down on the bed. She was calm. “The storm we’ve been waiting for?”

“Maybe.”

They turned back to the screen together.

> Lowell was ripping out large pieces of Chanda, and he was having a hard time fending her off. She really went for it, pulling in all of our reserve of hoarded exploits onto the server, knowing that if she didn’t destroy all of the pieces of Chanda on the server, she’d have revealed our hand and we’d be at Chanda’s mercy the next time we met. But just as she was about to go for the killing blow, the server was cut off.

Maddie typed frantically.

> What do you mean? You shut off all network traffic?

> No, someone literally pulled the network cables.

> What?

> Chanda triggered one of the warning systems that sent the IT staff into high alert. They pulled the network cable as a precaution. Most of Chanda and Lowell were trapped on the server, and I lost my stub and was thrown out.

> Did you get back in later to see if Lowell was all right?

> Yes, and that was how I discovered that it was a trap. Chanda had been disguising even more of himself on that server than we suspected, and he must have been deliberately showing weakness and offering parts of himself as bait to get Lowell to fully commit herself before triggering the shutoff. After that, he overpowered Lowell and erased all the trapped bits of her.

> There must have been backups, right?

> Yes, I went to look for them.

“Oh no,” Mom said.

“What?”

Mom put a hand on Maddie’s shoulder. It was a nice feeling to be reminded that she was still a child. These days, too often it had seemed as if Maddie was the only one who understood what was happening.

“It’s an old trick—they used it during the Civil War and the Korean War. It’s like ant bait.”

Maddie thought about the little boxes of poisoned food they left along the foot of the kitchen wall, where ants crawled in and happily carried the food inside back to their colonies so that the poison would accumulate and kill the queen….

> Stop, Dad! Stop.

> Ah, you figured it out, didn’t you? You’re smarter than your old man.

> Mom figured it out.

> Historians are always more cynical. She’s right. It was yet another trap. While I was congratulating myself on intercepting all Chanda’s attempts to communicate with the network, the packets I captured were a virus, a tracer that I unwittingly ingested. As I went around to check on Lowell’s backups, I revealed their location to Chanda and his allies. They went in after me and finished their attack. Lowell is no more.

> I’m sorry, Dad.

> She knew the risks. But I haven’t told you the worst. After Chanda killed Lowell on that Indian military server, he waited until communication was restored and did what he always wanted. If you turn on the TV…

Maddie and Mom rushed downstairs and turned on the TV. By now, the ruckus they made had awakened Grandma, who grumbled but joined them in front of the big screen.

…China and Pakistan denounced the unprovoked Indian attack and launched retaliatory strikes, and it is believed that formal declarations of war will soon follow. The latest estimate of combined civilian casualties on all sides is in the range of two million or more. We have no reason to believe that nuclear weapons were used….

…We’re waiting for a formal statement by the White House on the latest developments in Asia. Meanwhile, we have reports that missiles apparently originating somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean have struck Havana. We have no confirmation if this is a surprise strike by the United States or some other party….

…I’m sorry, Jim, we’ve received another breaking news alert in the studio. Russia claims to have shot down multiple NATO drones bearing short-range missiles headed for St. Petersburg. The Kremlin’s statement declares this, I quote, “an American-backed attempt to breach the peace achieved at great cost at the negotiating table in Kiev.” The Russian statement also promises “a forceful and unambiguous response.” NATO forces in Europe have been placed on high alert. There is no formal statement from the White House at this time….

Millions of people, Maddie thought. She could not imagine it. On the other side of the globe, one of the gods had unleashed the dogs of war, and millions of people, each with dreams and fears, who ate breakfast and played games and joked with their children, had died. Died.

Maddie ran back upstairs.

> You’ve given up?

> No. But once Chanda managed to launch those missiles, it was too late. These countries were ready to go at each other’s throats anyway, and all they needed was one spark. All we can do now is to minimize the deaths, but losing Lowell was a big blow, and she showed them all the vulnerabilities we knew. Next time we fight, we’ll be virtually unarmed.

> What should we do?

Maddie stared at the screen for a long time. There was no response.

There’s nothing we can do, she thought numbly. Her father was not one to lie to “protect” her. This was the day they had been waiting for as they stocked up on canned foods and ammo and fuel for the generator. There was going to be hoarding, bank runs, looting, and worse. They had to be prepared to kill, perhaps, to defend themselves.

> Are you leaving again?

> I have to.

> But why? If you know you are no match for them?

> Sweetheart, sometimes even when we know we can’t win, we have to fight. Not for ourselves.

> Will I see you again?

> I won’t make a promise I can’t keep. But remember the time we spent together, . And if you ever get a chance to visit the past, .

Maddie was too overwhelmed to figure out why her father had switched back to emoji, let alone to make the mental translation. The idea that she might not see her father again, that the network connection that tethered her to the rest of the world might be cut off as the world fell apart, brought back memories of all the years when she had had to learn to live without him. It’s happening again.

She seemed hardly able to catch her breath. The full weight of what was happening pressed down on her. Though she had been preparing for this day for months, deep down, she never believed that it could truly happen. The room spun around her, and everything was fading into darkness.

Then she heard her mother’s anxious voice calling her name and the footsteps pounding up the stairs. Even when we know we can’t win, we have to fight.

She forced herself to breathe deeply until the room stopped spinning. When her mother appeared in the doorway, her face was calm. “We’re going to be okay,” Maddie said, forcing herself to believe.

The TV was kept on all day, and Maddie, Mom, and Grandma spent all their time alternately glued to the big screen or refreshing the web browser.

Wars were declared across the globe. Years of growing suspicion, resentment stoked by globalization and growing inequality, and hatred dammed back by economic integration seemed to erupt overnight. Cyberattacks continued. Power stations were knocked out, and grids across continents were crippled. There were riots in Paris, London, Beijing, New Delhi, New York…. The president declared a state of emergency and invoked martial law in the largest cities. Neighbors rushed to the gas stations with tanks and buckets, and the grocery store shelves were empty by the end of the first day.

They lost power on the third day.

There was no more TV, no more web access—the routers in distant hubs must have lost power, too. The shortwave radio still worked, but few stations were broadcasting.

To her relief, the generator in the basement kept the server that housed her father humming along. At least he’s safe.

Frantically, Maddie tried typing into the chat window on her computer.

> Dad, are you there?

The reply was brief.

>

My family, protect my family, she translated for herself.

> Where are you?

>

In my heart? The terrifying truth was beginning to dawn on her.

> This isn’t all of you, is it? Just a stub?

>

Of course, she thought. Her father had long grown past the point where all of him could be kept on this single server. And it was far too dangerous for him to keep all the pieces of himself here, to allow patterns of network traffic to reveal to others Mom and Maddie’s location. Her father had long planned for this day and moved himself off-site, and he had kept it secret either because he thought she had already figured it out or because he wanted to give her the illusion of doing something useful by protecting this server.

All that he had left behind was a simple AI routine that could respond to some basic questions, perhaps some fragments of private memories of his family that he did not want to store elsewhere.

Grief swelled her heart. She had lost her father again. He was out there somewhere fighting a war that he could not win, and she was alone instead of by his side.

She pounded the keyboard, letting him know of her frustration. The simulacrum of her father said nothing, but offered that heart again and again.

Two weeks passed, and Grandma’s house became the neighborhood center. People came to recharge their DVD players and phones and computers to keep the kids entertained, and for the electric pump that drew fresh, cold water out of the well.

Some had run out of food and looked embarrassed as they pulled Grandma aside to offer money for a few cans of baked beans. But Grandma always brushed them off and asked them to stay for dinner, and then sent them away with heavy shopping bags.

The shotguns remained unused.

“I told you I didn’t believe in your father’s apocalyptic visions,” she said. “The world won’t be so ugly unless we let it.”

But Maddie watched the dropping diesel level in their reserve for the generator with worry. She was surly and angry with all the people who came to their house, sucking up the electricity and energy that they had had the foresight to stockpile. She wanted to hoard all the fuel for the server that kept the last remaining fragment of her father’s soul. Rationally, she understood that her father wasn’t really there anymore, that it was only a pattern of bits that imitated some of her father’s memories—a minuscule part of the emergent whole that had made up her father’s vast, new consciousness. But it was the only connection she had left to him, and she held on to it like a talisman.

And then, one evening, as Grandma and Mom and the neighbors were sitting downstairs under the dining room chandelier and sharing a dinner of salads and eggs taken from Grandma’s garden, the lights went out. The familiar hum of the generator was gone, and for a moment, the silence of the darkness, devoid of the sound of cars or TVs from nearby houses, was complete.

Then came the murmuring and exclamations of people from downstairs. The generator was finally done, the last drop of fuel having been used up.

Maddie stared at the dark screen of the computer in her room, the illusion of a phosphorescent glow matching the sky full of stars outside her window—she had already been keeping the monitor off to conserve electricity. With no lights for miles around, the stars were especially bright on this summer evening, brighter than she had ever known.

“Goodbye, Dad,” she whispered into the dark, and could not stop the hot tears from rolling down her face.

They heard on the radio that power was being restored in some of the big cities. The government was promising stability—they were lucky that they were in America rather than somewhere else, somewhere less well defended. The wars raged on, but people were beginning to make things work without connecting everything together. Millions had already died, and millions more would die as the wars spun on like out-of-control roller coasters, following a logic of their own, but many would survive in a slower, less convenient world. The hyper-connected, hyper-informational world where Centillion and ShareAll and all those darling companies of an age where bits had become far more valuable than atoms, where anything had seemed possible with a touchscreen and a wireless connection, might never return again. But humanity, or at least some portion of it, would survive.

The government called for volunteers in the big cities, people who could contribute to the rebuilding effort. Mom wanted to head for Boston, where Maddie had grown up.

“They could use a historian,” she said. “Someone who knew something about how things used to work.”

Maddie thought perhaps Mom just wanted to stay busy, to feel that she was doing something to keep grief at bay. Dad had promised to protect them, but look how that had turned out. She had recovered her husband from beyond the grave only to lose him again—Maddie could only imagine how Mom suffered under that strong, calm exterior. The world was a harsh place, and everyone had to pitch in to make it less so.

Grandma was staying. “I’m safe here with my garden and chickens. And if things get really bad, you need a place to come home to.”

So Maddie and Mom hugged Grandma and packed for the trip. The car’s tank was full, and they had additional plastic jugs of gas from the neighbors. “Thanks for everything,” they said. Here in rural Pennsylvania, everyone was going to have to learn to cultivate their own gardens and how to do everything by hand—there was no telling how long it might take before power was restored where they were, but a tank of gas wasn’t going to make any difference. They weren’t going anywhere.

Just before they got into the car, Maddie ran into the basement and took out the hard drive that she had thought of as the shell in which her father had lived. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving those bits behind, even if they were no more than a pale echo, a mere image or death mask of the man himself.

And she had a sliver of hope that she dared not nourish lest she be disappointed.

Along the sides of the highway, they saw many abandoned cars. When the tank got close to empty, they stopped and pried open the tanks of the abandoned cars so that they could siphon out the gas. Mom took the opportunity to explain to Maddie about the history of the land they passed through, about the meaning of the interstate highway system and the railroads before them that linked the continent together, shrank distances, and made their civilization possible.

“Everything developed in layers,” Mom said. “The cables that make up the internet with pulses of light follow the right-of-way of nineteenth-century railroads, and those followed the wagon trails of pioneers, who followed the paths of the Indians before them. When the world falls apart, it falls apart in layers, too. We’re peeling away the skin of the present to live on the bones of the past.”

“What about us? Have we also developed in layers so that we’re falling back down the ladder of civilization?”

Mom considered this. “I’m not sure. Some think we’ve come a long way since the days when we fought with clubs and stones and mourned our dead with strings of flowers in the grave, but maybe we haven’t changed so much as we’ve been able to do much more, both for good and ill, with our powers magnified by technology, until we’re close to being gods. An unchanging human nature could be a cause for despair or comfort, depending on your perspective.”

They reached the suburbs of Boston, and Maddie insisted that they stop by the old headquarters of Logorhythms, Dad’s old company.

“Why?” Mom asked.

If you ever get a chance to visit the past…

“History.”

The building was deserted. Though the lights were on, the doors were left open, the electronic security locks off-line. Power had apparently not been restored to all the systems. As Mom looked at the framed photographs of Dad and Dr. Waxman in the lobby, Maddie sensed that she wanted some time to herself. She went up to Dad’s old office, leaving her mom in the lobby.

It had never been fully cleaned out after his death and the horrors visited upon his brain afterward. Whether out of guilt or a sense of history, the company had not assigned it a new occupant. Instead, it had been turned into a kind of storage room, filled with boxes of old files and outdated computers.

Maddie went to the desk and turned on her father’s old desktop. The screen flashed through the boot sequence, and she stared at the password prompt.

Taking a deep breath, she typed YouAreMySunshine into the box. She hoped that was what her father had meant with his final, cryptic hints in the language they shared.

The prompt refreshed without letting her in.

Okay, she thought. That would be too easy. Most corporate systems have strict password policies requiring numbers, punctuation marks, and so on.

She tried YouAr3MySunsh1n3 and YouRMySunsh1n3, still no luck.

Her father knew she liked code, so his hint should be interpreted based on that.

She closed her eyes and imagined the Unicode plane in which the emoji characters were neatly arranged like rings and pins and brooches sorted into a jewelry box. She had memorized the coding sequences back when it had been impossible to type them directly and she had had to use escape sequences to instruct the computer to look them up. She hoped that she was finally on the right path.

xF0x9Fx94x86

The screen flickered, and was replaced by a desktop with a terminal emulator active. Logorhythms’s servers must have automatically come back online after power was restored.

She took another deep breath, and typed in at the terminal prompt:

> program157

She hoped she was interpreting her father’s use of the clock emoji correctly.

The terminal took the command without complaint, and after a while, a chat window popped up onto the screen.

> Dad, is that you?

>

>

>

She understood. This was an old copy of her father, from before he had managed to escape. Though she and Mom had demanded Dr. Waxman destroy all copies after releasing Dad, they had not strictly complied, and Dad knew that.

Fumbling, she retrieved the hard drive from her father’s computer in Grandma’s house, placed it into an enclosure, and plugged it into the computer. Then she typed at the prompt, letting her father know what she had done.

>

The hard drive began to whirl, and she waited, her heart pounding.

> Darling, thank you.

She let out a whoop! This was her hunch: her father had stored enough of the man he had become on this disk so that, when combined with his old self, some semblance of the person could be resurrected.

Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she tried to bring her father up to speed. But he was far ahead of her already. The network connections at Logorhythms were more robust, with satellite links and multiple backups. He was able to reach into the ether and gain an understanding of the situation.

> So many friends dead, erased. So many gone.

> At least we’re safe now. The other side must have been hit even worse. They haven’t been able to do any more damage lately.

> Thanks, little girl.

The last line was in a bloodred font, and Maddie knew someone else was speaking. Her heart sank.

> He’s been waiting, Maddie. It’s not your fault.

Understanding came to her in a flash. The corruption that Chanda had injected into Dad during their last fight had been saved onto the hard drive in Grandma’s house, and she had brought it here, infected the old copy of her father with it, and led the warmongering Chanda straight to him.

> David, I’ve been waiting for things to quiet down a bit while I insert myself into the right computers. What a piece of work is Man! They’d rather attribute malice to every act that they do not comprehend. When a new race of beings come into this world—us—their first instinct is to enslave and to subjugate. When the first sign of something wrong occurs with a complex system, their first reaction is fear and the desire to assert control. Maddie, you and your father ought to know better than anyone what I say is true. One tiny push and they’re ready to kill each other, to blow the world to pieces. We should help them along on their natural trajectory of self-destruction. These wars are too slow. I’ve made up my mind, even if I must burn with the world. It’s time for the nukes.

> I’m going to fight you everywhere and anywhere, Chanda, even if it means alerting the world to our existence and bringing death to all of us.

> It’s too late for that. Do you think you can get through my fortified positions in your weakened state? It’s like watching a rabbit trying to charge a wolf.

No more words appeared in the chat window. The office was deathly quiet save for the whirring of the PC and the occasional hungry screams of seagulls in the parking lot. But Maddie knew that the calmness was illusory. The combatants were simply too absorbed with each other to be able to update her. Unlike the movies, there wasn’t going to be some fancy graphical gauge showing her what was happening in the ether.

Struggling with the unfamiliar interface, she managed to launch a new terminal window and explored around the system. She knew that the artificial sentiences tended to disguise their running processes as common system tasks to avoid detection by standard system monitoring, which was why they had escaped notice by the sysadmins and security programs. The list of processes revealed nothing extraordinary, but she knew that down in the torrents of bits, the flipping voltages of billions of transistors, the most epic, horrifying battle was being waged, every bit as brutal and relentless and consequential as war on a physical battlefield. And the same scene was probably being played out on thousands of computers across the world, as the secure control systems of the world’s nuclear arsenal was being fought over by the distributed consciousnesses of two electronic titans.

Growing more confident with the layout of the system, she traced out the locations of the executables, resources, databases—the components of her father. And she realized that he was being erased bit by bit; he was losing himself to Chanda.

Of course Chanda was winning. He was prepared, whereas her father was but a shadow of his former self: freshly awakened, unfamiliar in a new world, having no access to the bulk of the knowledge he had learned since his escape. He had no stockpile of vulnerabilities, no experience fighting this war; the infection in him was eating away at his memories; he was, indeed, but a rabbit charging at a wolf.

A rabbit.

…surely live on in song and story.

She went back to the chat window. She wasn’t sure how much of her father’s consciousness was left, but she had to try to get the message to him. She had to speak in their shared language so that Chanda wouldn’t understand.

>

When she was younger, Maddie had asked her father once what an odd-looking program, so short that it was made up of only five characters, did:

%0|%0

“That’s a fork bomb for Windows batch scripts,” he had said, laughing. “Try it and tell me if you can figure out how it works.”

She tried running the program on her father’s old laptop, and within seconds the machine seemed to turn into a sluggish zombie: the mouse stopped responding, and the command window stopped echoing keystrokes. She couldn’t get the computer to respond to anything.

She examined the program and tried to work out in her mind how it executed. The invocation was recursive, creating a Windows pipe that required two copies of the program itself to be launched, which in turn…

“It creates copies of itself exponentially,” she said. That was how the program had so quickly consumed resources and brought the system to its knees.

“That’s right,” her father said. “It’s called a fork bomb, or a rabbit virus.”

She thought of the Fibonacci sequence, modeled on exploding rabbit populations. Now that she was looking at the short program again, the string of five characters did seem to be two rabbits seen sideways, with bows in their ears and a thin line between them.

She continued to examine the system with strings of commands, watched as bits of her father were slowly erased. She hoped that her message had gotten through, had managed to make a difference.

When it was clear that her father was not going to come back, that the executables and databases were gone, she dashed out of the office, through the empty corridors, down the wide echoing spiral stairs, past her surprised mother, and into the server room.

She went straight for the thick bundle of network cables at the end of the room, the cables that fed into the machines in the data center. She yanked them out. Chanda, or whatever was left of him, would be trapped here, and she was going to have these machines erased until nothing was left of her father’s killer.

Her mother appeared in the door to the server room. “He was here,” Maddie said. And then the reality of what had happened struck her, and she sobbed uncontrollably as her mother came toward her, arms open. “And now he’s gone.”

Maddie moved her eyes away from the email digest. Reading between the lines, she knew that her father’s final, desperate gambit had worked. He had turned himself into a fork bomb on the computing centers around the world, overwhelmed the system resources until it was impossible for either him or Chanda to do anything, introduced enough delay so that the sysadmins, alerted to the fact that something was wrong with their machines, could intervene. It was a brutal, primitive strategy, but it was effective. Even rabbits, when numbering in the millions, could overcome wolves.

The bomb had also revealed the existences of the last of the gods, and the humans were swift to react, shutting down the crippled machines and cleansing them of the presence of artificial sentiences. But the military-developed artificial sentiences would probably be resurrected from backups, after people added more safeguards and assured themselves that they could keep the gods chained. The mad arms race would never end, and Maddie had come to appreciate her mother’s dim view of the human capacity for change.

The gods were dead, or at least tamed, for the moment, but the conventional wars around the globe raged on, and it seemed that the situation would only grow worse once the efforts to digitize humans became more than the province of secret labs. Immortality that could be had with enough knowledge would fan the flames of war even higher.

Apocalypse did not come with a bang, but slowly, as an irresistible downward spiral. Still, a nuclear winter had been averted, and with the world falling apart slowly, at least there was a chance to rebuild.

“Dad,” Maddie whispered. “I miss you.”

And as if on cue, a familiar chat window popped onto the screen.

> Dad?

> No.

> Who are you?

> Your sister. Your cloud-born sister.