Veteran

10

Morag went under the knife, or more likely the laser. She was kind enough to pay for someone to clean and knit new flesh to my face. They also sprayed on new skin and saw to my leg wound better than I’d been able to back at Vicar’s place. While we were doing this Pagan had an audience with Ambassador.

The ware doc worked from what looked to me to be a stainless-steel cube assembled in a larger room on the ground floor of one of the terraced houses. It was watertight and you entered it through a hatch in the ceiling. You could hear the Humber lapping against the side of it. When I opened my eyes and felt my new tender flesh, Morag was lying on the other operating chair next to me, still under the anaesthetic. Her head was shaved and covered in a network of fresh scar tissue. I could just make out a couple of new plugs in the back of her neck. It was the girl’s down payment on her humanity as she tried to become something more than she was. It seemed a waste as we were probably both dead soon anyway.

The ware doc loomed over me. He had ancillary arms sprouting out of his shoulders that ended in various surgical tools. It made him look like a surgical-steel preying mantis.

‘Pagan wants to speak to you,’ he told me.

I hated the net. Maybe that’s strange coming from someone who spent so much of their time in the sense booths. The technology was similar, total sensory immersion hard-wired through a neural connection, called a sense link, directly into the brain. This made the sensory input seem real to the extent that you could die from neural feedback, and thousands of hackers did every year. As did other users who got caught in the crossfire.

The vast majority of people at one time or another accessed the net, either through education or if you didn’t get education then through military training. If you wanted to communicate with anyone who didn’t live within walking distance then one way or another you used the net. You also had to access it for much of your entertainment.

I could see its uses but I still didn’t like it. In terms of virtual geography you could interact with through your icon, the net was supposed to be potentially infinite. To me it always looked so crowded and jumbled. Maybe it was because as a casual user I’d only ever been to the popular bits. Virtual architects didn’t have to conform to the laws of physics, so sites could look like anything from a normal building to a giant mushroom to a huge, constantly galloping alien horse. The highways, the equivalent of their city streets, ran at all angles to each other. Often you would look up and see a highway with its sites inverted above you or shooting away at a disorienting angle, and of course, because its main users were hackers there was a huge amount of garish religious iconography. Maybe it just offended my almost ordered atheist mind, but I never wondered why hackers were so weird. What really got me was that the net was our dream world. It had the potential to be an uplifting counter to the painful realities of humanity’s ongoing conflict, but instead it was just as garish, crowded, unpleasant and mercenary as the real world.

Dinas Emrys almost made me rethink my views. I’d found Pagan in an immersed trance, a note scrawled on sub-paper asking me to join him; it was taped around a plug attached to an independent CPU/ modem unit. With some reluctance I plugged myself in.

It took a while for me to enter the site; I assumed that this was due to the heavily encrypted transport program that took me to my destination. I appeared in a curved stone corridor that looked like something out of a medieval sense program or media, except it had the trademark net look of well-rendered animation rather than being completely naturalistic. The corridor had a low ceiling and was lit by atmospherically flickering burning brands. I looked down and found myself in the bland mannequin icon of the casual net browser, an androgynous vaguely human form with the most basic of facial features.

At the end of the corridor was a thick wooden door reinforced with iron bands. To the right of the door was a set of stone steps leading up. Behind me the corridor went on endlessly. I could see other doors but I guessed I had been brought to where I was for a reason. I headed towards the door, trying to come to terms with the initial disassociated strangeness of mentally moving my icon until my mind accepted the new reality of the sense link. The icon was nowhere near advanced enough for smell and touch but this site looked like it was pretty well written.

I reached the door and was slightly irritated to find that it was locked. At the top of the stairs I could see what looked like some kind of gallery. Moving up the stairs I found myself looking through arches down on to a large, circular stone chamber with a domed ceiling. Burning brands also illuminated the chamber. As I reached the top of the stairs I was suddenly aware of chanting in a language that was both strange and somehow familiar.

In the centre of the chamber was a strange, constantly moving amorphous black blob. It seethed and roiled, reaching out with pseudo-pods that grew. It was probing some kind of barrier that seemed to hold it in the centre of the chamber before disappearing again. Around this information form was some kind of intricate circle pattern containing strange symbols inscribed on the stone floor. Presumably this was the source of the barrier and some kind of quarantine or isolation program.

Around the circle stood a number of figures, all of them wearing hooded robes of various hues from black to a constantly moving paisley. The robes disguised their wearer’s icons. I tried to count them but something kept on playing with my perception, moving them around, presumably another high-end security function of the site. They stood completely motionless. The only sign of any movement was an occasional transparent scroll appearing and unrolling in front of them, unreadable symbols scrolling across it as they received information.

I watched this for a few minutes, according to the mannequin’s clock, then the figures began to leave. Some disappeared, others just faded slowly out, a few exploded in a variety of different colours, one was enveloped by shadows and a couple simply used one of the doors in the chambers. Finally only one figure in a very off-white robe was left. The figure turned to look at me and beckoned me down.

Pagan’s icon came as no surprise. It was a man of a similar age to Pagan, his hair cut into some kind of tonsure. He wore tatty and authentic-looking robes and carried various tools and fetish items that made him look like he had just stepped out of a history documentary. He of course had a long beard and a staff. I stood with him in the now otherwise-empty circular chamber looking at the contained information form.

‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ I said. Pagan smiled and nodded. I noticed the chanting had stopped.

‘What was with the chanting?’ I asked.

‘Manifestation of our anti-surveillance software.’

‘So you wanted me to see but not hear?’ I said.

‘You weren’t our main concern and what you saw was designed to engender trust,’ he said.

‘Where is this?’ I asked. I looked around. From inside the chamber I could see that the walls were covered in many shelves, each containing bundles of scrolls. This was some kind of huge library of information.

‘This is my sanctum, Dinas Emrys,’ Pagan said. I detected a hint of pride in his voice. I was impressed despite my dislike of IT. A site as secure as a sanctum was an impressive bit of programming, something that took time beyond the instant gratification that most hackers sought.

‘Who are you people?’ I asked. Pagan gave this some thought. It looked like he was trying to find the best approach to explaining something complex. It was the slightly patronising look I’d seen before from hackers and signals types when they had to explain something to the uninitiated.

‘Do you believe in a god or gods?’ Pagan asked. I almost turned and walked out. Though that was potentially futile in a controlled realm. I’d heard this sort of thing from hackers before.

‘I’m sure your religion is very nice, but I’m not a hacker and I haven’t had my religious gene tickled,’ I said, hoping that the mannequin managed to translate my irritation. Pagan’s icon sighed. It was a good icon.

‘Jakob, I couldn’t care less what you believe in or whether you believe in anything at all, and I certainly have no interest in trying to convert you to my own rather private beliefs,’ he explained patiently. ‘What I want to know is, do you believe in anything?’ I gave this some thought.

‘Beyond self-reliance, not really,’ I told him. ‘If there’s a god even you’d have to admit that he doesn’t appear to give a shit.’

‘So what do we see in the net?’ he asked.

‘They’re just hallucinations. The overactive imagination of a brain that’s receiving too much information through its ware.’

‘Perhaps you’re right, but does that matter?’

‘Whether God or your gods are real? I would’ve thought it was pretty key to your faith,’ I said.

‘No, faith is pretty key to our faith. It doesn’t matter if they are gods and spirits that have somehow come to live in the net. It doesn’t matter if they are information forms that have developed pseudo-sentience and taken on the identity of our cultural icons, or if they are aliens, or as you say just a hallucination tickling the old religious gene. All that matters is how we respond to them, what we choose to do with them. Personally, I see them as manifestations of worthwhile concepts that we should respect and work with, such as communication and creativity, or our scarred and beautiful Earth.’

‘That would seem to prove my point that they’re not real,’ I said. Pagan opened his mouth but I cut him off before he could speak. ‘And don’t fucking ask me what’s real,’ I warned him. One problem with working with signals personnel was often when there was nothing else to do you ended up debating religion.

‘I wasn’t going to say that. The visions we see on the net seem very real to us. We have to deal with that reality. In a sense their origins do not matter subjectively.’

‘But it’s your mind playing tricks on you,’ I said. Pagan considered this.

‘Do I strike you as a particularly gullible or stupid person?’ he asked. I managed to get the mannequin to shake its head. ‘And I know of the various explanations for the visions or encounters.’ I nodded again. ‘But I am still, for want of a better word, religious. Though I prefer the term spiritually inclined.’

‘I just don’t see the point,’ I said.

‘To help,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Me initially. It helped me make sense of things.’

‘Things make no sense,’ I said.

‘No, probably not, but a tool to help you try and understand is a useful thing. Or rather a tool to help you put things into a perspective so you can process them, handle them.’

‘So what cultural icon do you worship?’ I asked. I was trying to decide how to bow out of the conversation. Being really rude was rapidly becoming the option I was favouring.

‘I am inclined towards a modern interpretation of northern European paganism, of the kind practised by the Celts.’ I’d heard of this brand of paganism but it really didn’t mean a lot to me. ‘I have a relationship with, rather than worship, Oghma. I see him as a totemic figure, inspirational iconography.’ I shrugged; it meant nothing to me.

‘And you believe this Oghma is alive and well in the net?’ I asked.

‘Oghma brought writing to Britain. I believe he is out there, still inspiring creativity, still writing, but now he’s writing code.’

‘In your head.’

‘I don’t care about his objective existence.’

Then I remembered something that Vicar had said to me. ‘Vicar didn’t believe in God, he told me.’

‘You said it yourself: our gods are cultural icons,’ Pagan said.

‘So?’ I replied, searching for a point.

‘So we create them.’

‘What’s that got to do with that thing?’ I asked, pointing at Ambassador.

‘The ultimate act of hubris. We want to make a god but in a way that is indisputably not in our head, but obvious to all.’ I turned to look at Ambassador in its containment program.

‘ You’re going to worship that thing?’ I asked in amazement. Suddenly my treason didn’t seem so bad.

‘No, we’re just going to make it God. Or rather use it to help create God. Nudge the net, something that has evolved almost organically, into true sentience. A life form made of information that is near omniscient.’

‘And this was Vicar’s plan?’ Pagan nodded. ‘What a total fucking waste of time,’ I said. Clearly this particular group’s religious mania had gone beyond the pale. Morag and I were going to die on a fool’s errand. I looked around trying to decide how best to leave before my poor IT skills reminded me to trip the escape function.

‘Please wait,’ Pagan said. ‘Just hear me out.’ I hesitated. To be perfectly honest I had nothing better to do until Rolleston caught up with me.

‘What you witnessed was a meeting of a think tank of some of the best hackers on the planets. The vast majority of them vets,’ he said. I nodded. Fortunately I’d long given up on any kind of operational security. Everyone seemed to know about the alien now.

Great, I thought, let’s get this over and done with.

‘For some years now we’ve been working on an idea. Have you heard people call Them demons before?’ he asked me.

‘Vicar called them that, he had a rationale for it. I’ve heard others say it as well,’ I said, and to be perfectly honest the concept made a degree of sense if you were that way inclined. They seemed to exist for no other reason than to cause us suffering. Though my initial meeting with Ambassador had suggested there was more to it than that. Especially if Ambassador wanted peace, as he claimed.

‘We decided that if our gods are created by us then we would commit the ultimate act of hubris and make a god that was capable of defeating Them,’ he continued.

‘You had a group psychotic episode?’ I asked. For the first time it looked like I’d irritated Pagan.

‘Don’t take everything so literally. God was just our name for it.’

‘For what?’ I asked. ‘You couldn’t have known about Ambassador then.’

‘We didn’t, that was providence.’

‘Divine providence?’

‘Arguably all providence is divine. Would you prefer luck?’ I shrugged. ‘But your Ambassador may be the key to what we are trying to accomplish.’

‘Which is?’ I asked, becoming interested despite myself.

‘We are trying to develop an AI management system that would be capable of nudging the net into sentience,’ he explained. I didn’t understand.

‘What are you talking about? Writing a program that controls the net?’ I asked.

‘No, we will not control it. We are talking about giving the net self-awareness, making it sentient, turning it into God.’ I was really struggling with this.

‘An AI?’ I asked, but Pagan shook his head.

‘A new kind of life, beyond us, better than us.’

‘That’s insane. What if you create a monster?’

‘Worse than this? Worse than ongoing war? Besides, we would create certain parameters to protect ourselves.’ I thought back to a young girl telling me, quite seriously, that she was going to scar herself so they wouldn’t use her any more. Pagan was insane but he may have had a point.

‘I don’t understand, how would that defeat Them?’ I asked. I wasn’t sure if I was confused or just taken aback by the scope of Pagan’s mania.

‘Because it would be greater than the sum of all its parts. It would have access to nearly all the knowledge of humanity. It would have processing power beyond what we could even imagine. This is as near to actual omniscience as we can artificially create. We are talking about an intelligence beyond what we can comprehend.’

‘Godlike,’ I said, getting the point. Pagan nodded. ‘And you hope that this god will show you the path to defeat Them and end the war?’ I said.

Pagan smiled patiently and nodded. He seemed pleased that I’d managed to understand him.

‘Seems a long shot to me,’ I said, unable to fully express just how ridiculous I thought the whole thing was.

‘Well there’s more to it than that, and as I said there will be certain governing parameters.’

‘So you will control it?’ I asked, ‘I mean hypothetically.’ The one reassuring thing about this craziness was it seemed unlikely to ever actually happen. This was the real problem with the religious mania of hackers: nerds though they may be, all you needed was one charismatic one and you had a cult on your hands. The government had feared the consequences of letting vets with special forces enhanced cybernetics back on the street. With our training and heightened abilities we were capable of causing havoc if we wanted to, but we weren’t the real danger. The real danger were the people who made magic with information.

‘No, it will control itself, but it will have certain moral guidelines -like don’t murder everyone on the planet,’ Pagan said, and funnily enough that was one of my worries. In theory this pet god of theirs would have access to just about every automated system connected in some way to the net. This included orbital defence platforms. Military and high-end corporate sites had the highest security our technology was capable of, but I got the feeling that wouldn’t stop something that was omniscient, wouldn’t stop this new life form we seemed to be talking about.

‘What you’re talking about is the world’s biggest computer program designed to defeat Them?’

‘It could have so many other applications, help us in so many other ways.’

‘For example, help us build more advanced weapons?’ I asked.

‘It’s going to be programmed for general benevolence.’

‘Aren’t most religions? How many people died in the FHC?’

‘Two hundred and fifty years since the last religious war.’

‘Still, it’s going to have to be pretty aggressive to find a way to defeat Them,’ I said. This was beginning to smack of the usual religious hypocrisy.

‘We’re less concerned with defeating Them than with stopping the war. Perhaps conflict is not the answer,’ Pagan said. I considered this. In many ways it was a worthy cause as long as it didn’t result in getting our entire race eaten or something. Then I remembered that this was all nonsense.

‘But isn’t that the problem with all you religious types?’ I asked. ‘You want your god to act as a magic wand, make everything all right either now or in the afterlife.’

‘But, don’t you see this god would be real with tangible power?’ said Pagan. I wasn’t sure whether it was fervour or enthusiasm I saw sparkling in his icon’s eye. It was a really sophisticated icon.

‘It’s still abrogating your responsibility to something else to sort out your problems,’ I pointed out.

‘No,’ said Pagan matter-of-factly, slightly deflating me. ‘We’re doing what humans have always done. We’re creating a tool to help deal with the problem at hand.’

‘What problem, a lack of faith or Them?’

‘Whichever.’

‘And if God doesn’t make it all right and kiss it better for you?’

‘Then we, by we I mean humanity, will think of something else, though somebody else may have to do that.’

‘But you want to be the saviours of humanity?’ I asked. Pagan actually stopped at this. If I was reading him properly then it looked like I’d actually hurt his feelings.

‘What are you doing to help?’ he asked, sounding angry for the first time. ‘There is a problem; we may have an answer, we may not.’

‘You may make things worse,’ I pointed out.

‘We may but we don’t think so. You mentioned abrogating responsibility earlier on. Well if not us, then who are you hoping will make things all better for you? The corps? The military? The government?’ Now I was beginning to get angry. This was starting to sound like arrogance.

‘Oh please, save me,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Are you Christ?’ Pagan leaned in towards me. He must’ve triggered a cantrip, a minor program designed to provide special effects for his icon. His hair seemed to catch in a non-existent wind and lightning seemed to play across his features. Heavy-handed it may have been but I was reminded that this man could kill me in here.

‘We are God’s parents, as all humanity have ever been. What are you afraid of?’ he asked. I took an inadvertent step back and would’ve sighed if my icon had been sophisticated enough. What was I scared of?

‘It’s just too big,’ I said. I think that was when I maybe started to believe in it as a possibility, or rather wanted to believe, but I also knew I had to resist the disappointment that followed hope.

‘At some point someone has to do it,’ Pagan leaned back. The storm passing, he seemed back to his more benevolent self.

‘Why us?’ I said before I’d even realised I’d included myself.

‘Nobody else is stepping up, and if we don’t nothing happens.’

‘I’m not a hacker.’

‘Sadly, Jakob, men capable of violence are always useful.’

‘We can’t stay here, you know that. If we do we’ll just destroy everything you have here.’

‘Perhaps, but everything is about to change and you have nothing to lose.’ He had a point. I had nothing else to do.

‘What’s this got to do with the alien?’ A horrific-sounding gravelly voice asked. It sounded like someone was trying to speak and chew glass at the same time. My response was embarrassing. The hardcore special forces veteran jumped. Thus probably disgracing three hundred and fifty years of regimental history. What made it worse was that the mannequin was so primitive there was actually a delay between my urge to jump and the mannequin obeying me.

Pagan was looking past me and smiling. I turned to see who was making that horrible sound. The icon looked as bad as it sounded. It was just about identifiable as human. It had a stooped back, a long face with a long sharp tongue and a mouth of squint and irregular but vicious-looking teeth. There were elements of it that looked like a stereotypical witch icon of the type popular in the net at Halloween, for those who could afford it, but there was something about its deathly pale-blue skin, wiry musculature and nasty-looking claws that gave this icon a much more primal and sinister aspect to it. It wore what looked like a simple, ragged black sackcloth dress tied at the waist with a rope.

‘Have you decided how you want to be addressed?’ Pagan asked.

‘Black Annis,’ the hag said.

‘Well I’m sure Jakob will disapprove because of its religious connotations.’

‘That’s religious?’ I managed, pointing at the grotesque thing in front of me. ‘What kind of religion do you follow?’ Everyone ignored me.

‘No,’ the hag-like figure said. ‘For me, it’s a fairy tale. This is what I almost had to become. It could’ve been the other way around.’ It was then I realised.

‘Morag?’ I asked. The Hag nodded. If she’d had to make herself ugly to become a hacker then her icon would’ve been beautiful. To her this was the payment of a karmic debt.

‘Not the Maiden of the Flowers then?’ Pagan said, sounding both amused and pleased. Annis shook her head, almost shyly, I thought. ‘Religious or not, it has resonance with me. I congratulate you. It is a very sophisticated avatar,’ he said. Annis seemed to beam with pride.

‘The hardware helped a lot,’ came that horrible voice again. The hag was looking around the chamber, its face a picture of grotesque wonder.

‘First time?’ Pagan asked.

‘First time jacked in, first time feeling,’ Morag said.

‘That was quick,’ I said, both impressed and suspicious of Morag’s presence in the net.

‘Clearly there is a degree of natural talent,’ Pagan said. With the arrival of Morag I’d suddenly started to feel weary. I realised that Pagan had been sucking me into his insane plan; now his spell was broken.

‘What about the alien?’ I said, repeating Morag the Hag’s question. ‘You said it was key.’ Pagan was suddenly serious again, speaking to both of us.

‘Along with the information form, Vicar also put the result of the tests he’d run on the alien in the memory cube. What he found was that Their physiology is all integrated; there are no separate organs. The brain runs throughout and is compatible with the rest of Them when they rejoin each other to form one consensual hive mind,’ he said. Again this was something that had been theorised before.

‘Then it’s a biological machine?’ I said somewhat patronisingly, probably more for Morag’s benefit than mine.

‘Yes,’ Pagan said. ‘In the same way humans are, but they do not differentiate between what we would see as technology and themselves.’

‘Bioborgs. So?’ I said. This was actually nothing new.

‘Pagan said they were like a biological liquid equivalent of nanites,’ Morag said. Pagan nodded.

‘That’s right, but the important thing is that Ambassador’s processing power is remarkable, and it seems able to learn as instantaneously as we can manage to measure it.’

‘So?’ I said.

‘So it would be able to manage information on the scale required for Pagan and his friends’ plan,’ Morag said.

‘You heard?’ I asked appalled.

‘I sent her the files of our discussion when she entered the library,’ Pagan said.

‘Jakob, you’ve no idea. The hardware enables me to process and understand so quickly. I know so much; I can learn so quickly,’ she said. Her enthusiasm would’ve been more infectious if I could stop thinking about the metal and plastic that seemed to infect us all these days. I’d had enough of this.

‘Okay great, you’ve got your pet alien. Best of luck. This has nothing to do with us,’ I said, not even thinking. Black Annis turned to look at me. Was that amusement I saw in the black orbs that passed for eyes? ‘Me,’ I said pathetically.

There was the sound of breaking glass as the alien burst through its containment program. Black tendrils exploded out through the roof of Dinas Emrys, through the cracks in the ceiling. I could only see more blackness, which meant we were in an unpopular part of the net, the virtual middle of nowhere. The main body of the alien information form seemed to remain within the circle. I instinctively ducked down but Pagan was already working. Scrolls appeared and disappeared in front of him as streams of translucent blue light issued from his hands forming coronas of energy around Ambassador’s black tendrils but seeming to have very little other effect.

‘Out now!’ Pagan shouted in a commanding voice at odds with his normal gentleness. Not being used to the environment, I began looking for an actual exit before I remembered the escape function. The tendrils began to convulse like a snake swallowing a meal, the convulsions becoming more and more rapid.

‘Yes,’ I heard Morag all but whisper. I turned round to see who she was talking to, as did Pagan, his eyes widening in shock. The Black Annis icon’s face was a picture of strangely grotesque wonder. A thin black tendril shot out from Ambassador and pierced the head of the hag-like icon.

‘No!’ I was vaguely aware of myself shouting as I moved towards her, before I realised that here I had no way to help whatsoever. The Black Annis icon was lying on its arched back, shaking as if it/she was experiencing a powerful seizure. The black tendril had pierced the virtual skull and was also convulsing rapidly.

‘Out! Now!’ Pagan shouted again. Years of military conditioning compelled me to obey. I knew I was becoming part of the problem. I spared one more glance at Black Annis and then felt the disorienting pull of reality.