Missed Connections

This is all Keith's fault, as usual. All of it.

Allan wrinkles up his nose. LondonVR stinks in the springtime, he thinks, clutching his seat as the bus swings out on to a main road. A constant deluge of rain is filling up the virtual city's underbelly of blocked gutters to bring the smell of waste and congealed fat to the surface in an overflowing enema.

He is amazed at the strength of its stench, can feel it hitting the back of his throat. He thinks he is going to gag, and shuts the bus window. In an attempt to stop himself from wiping his palms on a trouser leg, he clenches his hand into a fist, and rubs his knuckles on a knee.

Smell is a relative new sensation in the VRGrid, and he is still getting used to it. The scene darkens momentarily. Like the blink of an automated eye. Is he losing consciousness again? He has heard it can happen if a person gets over anxious in this place. He takes a deep breath. Deeper, now. He brings to mind the thought of a taking a long, hot shower. It materialises in bits and pieces - first the sound of the jet hydrogen spray, then the cleansing watered air particles on his skin, and lastly the perfume of his favourite sanitiser.

He relaxes into the comforting fantasy, his anxiety dissolving into a pixellation of unfocused space in front of him. He allows his vision to blur into an array of dizzying stars, and still imagining himself in the shower, he lifts a finger, and tries to trace the sparks of light dancing before his eyes. He smudges the shower screen instead.

No. Not a glass screen. Plastic. It's the reinforced window of the bus. His daydream shatters. He finds himself back on the bus, and he is so disappointed that his brain momentarily dissociates itself from the reality it finds itself in.

Where am I? I am on a bus, he tells himself. This is a bus.

He lifts his eyes up and scans his surroundings with childlike awe. Its graffiti-covered innards are laden with tribal runes he can't understand. The unintelligible calligraphy looks like the brutal slashes of a knife, and he doesn't want to imagine the owner of the psychotic hand that has drawn them. Probably similar to the punks that have him in their sights now.

Save for himself, the bus had been deserted until these four young teens got on at the last stop, screaming and scrambling over the dilapidated, urine stained seats. Leather-clad and in some type of cyberpunk gear, they look like pubescent girls in male drag. He has drawn attention to himself somehow, and now they are looking at him as though he is a shop window they want to put a brick through.

This is a bus. I am on a bus. He keeps chanting it under his breath like a mantra, as though his very existence depended on it.

One of them has been staring beadily at him, hissing something to the others, while grabbing his crotch. He sucks on the soaked tab of a cigarette, its bright, red eye hissing in his direction. Allan quickly turns away, breaking any chance of eye contact, only to have his senses stifled by another bout of sewage diarrhea wafting in from his open window. The rancid odour works like smelling salts on him. He closes the window but fails to shut out the stink.

This is a bus. I am on a bus. Probably about to get raped by a gang of drugged up teens.

Everything goes black. In the momentary blink of an automated eye, the thugs have disappeared. The bus is empty again.

No. No, calm down. The programme won't allow that to happen.

But isn't that why he is back in LondonVR? Because the AI's gone AWOL? Although his specialisation is security, it's not infiltration and certainly not special reconnaissance; this reminds him why he prefers remaining unplugged from government programmes. Shit, he is as old school as it gets. He still uses a hologram stylus and thought tablet to do his algorithms. Going undercover is a crazy idea, and it isn't his. Especially not coming to this hellhole.

LondonVR. He loathes this version of the city and the imagination that gives life to its dreaming spires. In his mind, he takes what the historical scans describe as a black marker pen and frantically scribbles out the word "dreaming" and replaces it with "nightmarish". He finds the mental image oddly comforting. He wishes he could do the same to this stinking facsimile of a once great city. Soon, he thinks, just a little longer and it will be over. He looks at the smartwatch hologram stamped on his wrist.

The time is way past the one he promised to keep. He presses a yellow button above his head to signal the driver to stop, but watches uselessly as another stop sign passes by the window of the speeding bus. He has missed the rendezvous point by at least four bus stops, but he isn't counting. He waits for the AI to read his mind and stop acting erratically.

I am on a bus. This is a bus.

He rubs his knuckles on his knee. He wants a cigarette badly. It's a dirty habit, and one he gave up years ago after it was banned as a Class A drug, but he misses it at times like these. No one plugged in was allowed to smoke, even though AI creations could. That was how you told them apart.

Off the Grid the government authorised vaping, but he never managed to persuade himself to use it plugged out. Not after he witnessed a cell mate almost set fire to themselves when a hand-made one exploded in their face. The authorities gave them a new face, but still, it's risky as a citizen with a low credit rating. You can't choose your face replacement and are at the mercy of random selection.

"A cryptocoin for your thoughts?"

Keith asks the question after he takes a deep hit off his vape spacer, and blows out the words in a neon pink haze of smoke. They are sitting at their regular spot during (or what had been) their initial recon. It is a diner decked out in black, white and luminous green futuristic furniture. "Or shouldn't I ask?"

Twist the knife in a bit deeper, why don't you?

Saying nothing, he looks at Keith, (or he had looked at Keith, because this has already happened) as though he is (no, was) an unwelcome intruder into his thoughts.

And now he is.

Keith refuses to back down. "I seem to get the distinct impression you don't look forward to our meetings?"

I am on the bus. He almost says it out aloud. He catches himself in time. He does not want to mentally irk the AI's programming to bring the punks back.

This is a bus. I am on the bus.

Except he isn't. He stands, now, in front of the diner. His first impression is (or had been) that it looks like the historical scan of one that has been transported lock, stock and barrel from what used to be called Area 51 in the Nevada desert to an uninspiring corner of a London street.

The décor, inside and out, isn't the only alien thing about the diner - well, alien for its context in time and place. The food is simple, Cornish tea shop fare; a sign welcomes the patrons with a gentle reminder it is a family eatery and not a fast food establishment, and that the service would take a while. He used to frequent the hologram version during his multiversity days, and had welcomed the slow pace and been intrigued by its oddities.

It was a hark back to before the nuclear war with Russia, when people still lived in houses they called homes, and had gone out to eat. Before the cell shares were built because of a lack of space, and holograms were replaced by the Grid. Before all that madness, he would spend hours at his usual table, writing out worlds that - before his hologram stylus had even touched his thought tablet - had only existed in his imagination. The hours would feel like minutes, then - now, because they existed in an AI's imagination, the hours felt like a Saturnian year.

"A cryptocoin for your thoughts?"

This is all your fault, Keith, as usual. All of it.

Allan wrinkles up his nose at the pink smoke wafting in his face. The aversion he feels for Keith and for LondonVR unites them in his mind.

"I was thinking back... to before-"

"All of this?"

"Our missed connection to a better future," he nods, petulantly. He hates it when Keith tries to finishes off his sentences. If you know the answer to a question, why ask it? "So, what mess are you getting me into this time?"

Keith looks genuinely hurt. "Not into, out of."

"Uh-oh. I asked the wrong question. What is it you want me to do? You want-"

"Shall we order the tea?" Keith interjects. "Otherwise we'll be here forever."

"The answer is no," he says, firmly.

"You don't want tea?"

Keith feigns innocence with the skill of Satan, he thinks. Not the latest make of holographic transposer, but the old Biblical character the first humans would write about. He isn't going to be tricked, though. He is resolute, this time. No would mean no. "You know very well what I mean."

"You don't want to get out of here?"

"You're the reason I'm in here in the first place."

Keith puts a hand on both his hearts. "I know, I know. And I want to make up for it, cousin."

I want to make up for it, cousin. He has been hearing that ever since Keith chose him as the fallguy on his hare-brained missions, while the military golden boy remained unscathed and unplugged. But with this last escapade, he has definitely paid his dues.

I am done with you, cousin.

"We may be related, and we grew up together, but don't kid yourself. You don't know me."

"Maybe I know you too well, and I like pulling your strings, but you could refuse to help me, you know."

"Refusing a government agent, especially the VR branch is a criminal offence. Treason."

"Oh come on! You're really going to pull that one on me?"

Keith reaches across the table and takes Allan's right palm in his hands. He feels for the metal tag that is embedded beneath the skin. "This isn't just a cloaking device for our debriefs. We've had it reprogrammed as a plug out button. It will take you off the Grid at any time."

Allan shakes Keith's hands away, and making a fist with his modified hand, starts to rub his knuckles on his knee. He asks quietly, "Does it work now?"

"Yes. You can use it if you want."

But he makes no move at all, except to simply say, "Tell me what it is you want."

Keith inclines his head forward. "LondonVR, along with every other major city on the Company's Grid, is slowly being corrupted - from the inside."

It takes a moment for that last part to sink in. "You mean to tell me that someone is hacking the Company's Grid code with VR servers? That's impossible."

"That's the theory. We need you to prove or disprove it. But I promise you, this isn't our doing. Some new order is trying to launch a takeover of the Grid by using it in a way we never thought possible. If so, we need to find out where in here its servers are hidden, and shut it down."

"And then use that information to benefit the Company," Allan can't help but add. "After all, wasn't this place built as capital punishment?"

Keith shakes his head, leaning back. "Now, it's that kind of talk that would get you a cell for real. You know as well as I, what's at stake here."

Allan nods. With every major VR city slowly being corrupted on the Company's Grid, it would eventually corrupt all the minds plugged in; the changes in LondonVR would slowly corrupt the citizens of LondonR, too. It could set them back by a century. Or two.

Before he replies, Allan catches his reflection in the shop window. That's not me, he thinks. That's Keith. No. It's one of those punks. It's not a shop window. It's the bus window. I am on the bus.

Here we go again.

In the window, he sees the punk's reflection lean towards him with an outstretched finger, and he tenses, thinking he is about to be tapped on the shoulder.

Or poked in the eye. Better than up the-

He jerks his head to one side with a wince; his mind conjuring up a preposterous mental image of a fingernail, blackened with nose snot and dirt, digging into his eye ball. But all the spotty kid does is snigger at him, and move to press the yellow button above his head. It rings a bell.

I don't need to be told twice.

Allan stands up as the bus slows to a stop, and the relief he feels is palpable. But before he can leave, the youth grabs the back of his neck with a heavily tattoed hand and pulls him close to whisper in his ear.

"They say your world is made up of two sorts of people, the fuckers and the fucked. But in our world there is only the fucked." The punk punctuates this with a high pitched laugh, a scream almost.

As if in response, a high pitched stream of white noise pierces through Allan's mind. He cups his ears, and tries to refocus, but his thoughts have suddenly become as unintelligible as the graffiti covering the walls of the bus. He blinks hard. The wind is knocked out of him; his knees go weak. The noise quiets, but the inside of his head is left hollow, scratched out. It takes a moment for the present programme to fill it again.

What the fuck was that? Is my transposer faulty?

Trying hard not to allow his emotions to reach the surface, he rubs the palm of his right hand gently, to make sure the embedded tag is there. It is.

Allan tries to assess the situation. Is my cover blown? Are they trying to erase the information I'm trying to get to Keith? Not that he wants to, he has to. He knows it will change everything. So must they.

The numbers on his watch begin to flash red, and a loud androgynous voice alerts him to the obvious. He is late. The young punks disappear again, but no second-long blink swallows them this time thanks to the programme's failsafe device. They disperse when they hear his watch - being a Company tech wearer carries some status even in the darkest corners of the Grid - but his nerves are still on edge.

My cover is blown. It must be.

The silence inside the bus resounds as ominously as the sudden calm before a storm, while outside the bus window the city traffic screams like a muffled banshee with the runs. The sights of LondonVR in the springtime is a blast, he thinks ironically. Stink and sweat is a beautiful combination.

He makes his way down the aisle, keeping an eye on any sudden movements from the young punks hiding in fear of deletion, and wonders how a person can get used to this place. He has been told constantly in his forty eight years that plasticity is a survival trait, and that you can get used to just about anything. But, in a way he will not readily admit, he welcomes the constant crawl on his skin towards this obscene mockery of an ancient metropolis. It means he is still, for all intents and purposes, unplugged to it.

But it also means I stick out like a sore thumb. Like a Nevada tea shop diner in London.

His head still hurts; he feels his heart beating in his ears, and is again stunned at the ferocity of the feeling, but the more distance he puts between himself and the back of the bus, the better he feels. The driver presses a button beneath the steering wheel, and the doors swing open. Before he takes a step, he finds himself facing closed doors again.

When did they close back? Or did they? He turns to look at the driver, who presses a button in a repeat performance of the exact one he remembers, and the doors swing open again.

But not again, he thinks. This is déjà vu backwards. He knows he hasn't seen this before, and yet, now he has.

It reminds him of something. There is a connection here that he is missing, his brain is refusing to join up the dots. Something on repeat. As the fresh stink of the city greets him, a memory flashes into his head. How many times did he shut that same bus window?

Lost in that thought, he hardly has time to step out on to the pavement when the bus roars back to life. He is unceremoniously spat out into a large puddle of gutter-laced rainwater. Shooting forward, he turns around just in time to see the youths pointing and hammering on the windows at him, as they zip past.

Zip past? What the actual fuck-?

The traffic is gone. The bus speeds up along an empty road to join the lines of honking cars that are now, somehow, miles away. How could the bus have been speeding in traffic when he was on it? But what really stalls him is the faces of the boys in the bus. Reminiscent of the deep-fake digital manipulation from the world of the first humans, the punks all look like clones of Keith. A trick of the light, perhaps? He isn't convinced.

First the bus window. Then the doors. Now optical glitches. In a prefabricated reality these should be impossible.

He hears someone laughing, and wonders if one of the punks might have disembarked after him. But when he turns to look in the direction he thinks it might have come from, no one is there. Now he is hearing things, too.

"Could just be the wind," he mutters under his breath.

In response, the breeze picks up a soft, lisping whistle through the leaves of a nearby sycamore tree. As quickly as it came, it dies down to leave the tumultuous, yet faint, murmur of traffic in the distance, giving the illusion he is standing in an oasis of silence far away from the maddening muzak of the crowd.

He shifts his focus to his surroundings: It looks like he has been dropped off at a peaceful suburb. The tree-lined empty street is clear, the row of uniform red-bricked houses standing behind their red-brick walls well defined, the foliage of the oaks and sycamores the correct colour of green.

The flux of tall buildings, people and cars soldered to the city's sewer stench is now completely gone. He knows if he looks behind him, the puddle of gutter water won't be there, either. He doesn't even need to take a look to make sure. He knows with absolute certainty it was never there.

It all looks normal to the eye, sounds right to the ear. He could almost convince himself he was unplugged, if only he could shake off the sensation of ants crawling underneath his skin. Something is very wrong here. There is an impending sense of more to come. But more of what, exactly?

Snippets of information, of gathered intelligence race through his mind, as he tries to make sense of it. With what he has to tell Keith, added to this level of programme corruption, it can only mean one thing: Someone has a godlike grip on the Grid. But who is that powerful?

Not who, it, he thinks in a moment of epiphany. He feels, oddly, like the last Christians who deserted their religion after historical evidence proved Jesus never, in fact, existed - except in reverse.

Because the AI in charge hasn't gone AWOL. The AI exists. It has just gone bad.

Here we go again. This is what happens when nutechnology is tested in the wild before it's been properly vetted in a hololab.

History had shown them that even carefully crafted AI systems tend to act in ways that their developers never anticipated, and there had been monumental instances were working on dark algorithms had corrupted an AI and turned it bad.

His mind goes back to the slaughter bots of World War III. That is when it had begun, with the Russians the first to train AI to murder humans in the nuclear war. Their bots had been terrifying: a small, inexpensive drone that used facial recognition to select and kill a human target, free from any direct human control. Russian scientists had released their drone assassins with no failsafe protocol, and because the AI had deemed easy targets the logical option for mass casualties, they targeted the most vulnerable. It was estimated a total of eight million children died as a result.

That overwhelmingly dystopian reflection of first human society had been a lesson on how any AI system will reflect the bias found in training data. Train them to kill, and they kill without compunction. So, the Company had decided that to understand the mistakes of the past they would design an AI to impersonate the first humans, especially the worst of their kind, so that they could observe, learn and not repeat them.

That led to the invention of the Grid. Now people plugged in by the millions to see the horrors of their cities in the ancient world, before the Company saved their genera from extinction.

Or those who remained trapped in here if they failed to tow the Company line, he thinks, before quickly erasing the thought out with his mental black marker.

You think too much.

Thinking. The more you do of it, the more you are able to access it. It's like a muscle almost. But it could also get you into trouble.

He focuses instead on the way the environment has been behaving since he disembarked. He needs to make sure he isn't suffering from the frequency illusion undercover agents were trained against, when something you just found out about suddenly seems to crop up everywhere.

Like the glitches. The way that breeze just picked up? This oasis of calm? Am I just imagining these things?

He mentally retraces his steps, searching only for what he really wants to find - some evidence that he is mistaken in his fear that-

No. Don't even think it.

-this level of responsive sophistication can only mean one thing. The AI is no longer a tool that has been corrupted by its training data. The AI is the data.

It hasn't merely gone bad, it's become fucking sentient.

But was that even possible? Could something that was trained on human data become human? And if trained on the most diabolical sort of data, what kind of human? Like the first humans, but to the power of ten?

"A cryptocoin for your thoughts?"

I am back in the diner with Keith. This is all Keith's fault, as usual. All of it.

Allan wrinkles up his nose at the pink smoke wafting in his face. The aversion he feels for Keith and for LondonVR unites in his mind with a creeping feeling of impending doom.

"I was thinking back... to before-"

"All of this?"

"Our missed connection to a better future," he nods, petulantly. He hates it when Keith tries to finishes off his sentences. If you know the answer to a question, why ask it? "So, what mess are you getting me into this time?"

Keith looks genuinely hurt. "Not into, out of."

"Uh-oh. I asked the wrong question. What is it you want me to do? You want-"

"Shall we order the tea?" Keith interjects. "Otherwise we'll be here forever."

"The answer is no," he says, firmly.

No. I am not in the diner. I am on the bus, he thinks, as Keith is replaced by the face of the young punk.

The youth grabs (or had grabbed) the back of his neck with a heavily tattoed hand. He pulls Allan close to whisper in his ear. The stench of his heated breath is one and the same with the city.

"They say your world is made up of two sorts of people, the fuckers and the fucked. But in our world there is only the fucked." The punk punctuates this with a high pitched laugh, a scream almost.

The noise is a spear through Allan's side; the pain shoots up his spine and into his mind. His head hurts, and he tries to shake the youth off to cup his ears, when he realises he is back in the quiet suburb of rustling sycamore trees.

He clenches his sweaty palms into fists. It is speaking to me. Trying to tell me something. But what?

Allan's brain goes into overdrive. If it's true that the Grid, in essence, is sentient, then it must be using the transposers inside us as its servers.

It made sense. The latest sense of smell upgrade could make the transposers powerful enough to do the job. The AI controlled the programming through them, and controlled them through the programming.

What was that expletive that first humans used? Fucking hell? Fucking hell, indeed.

The Company had created an AI-driven ancient world, and the world the AI was told to create had turned it into a monster.

No, not a monster. Like a God of the first humans. A demonic god ruling over a world completely under its programming, with a little bit of God in each of us. It keeps us alive because we keep it alive.

Theoretically, if the transposers that plugged them into the Grid were (are) being used as servers, then the AI could harvest their brain power - loop it to constantly replay the same experiences like some Biblical version of hell - to give it all the energy required to be self sustaining.

If the energy generated by the combined number of plugged in brains is working the Grid without the Company's own juice, then pulling the plug as a last resort won't work, either. We are fucking sunk.

Pulling the plug on an AI you power is easy, pulling the plug on a self-generating AI? Not so easy. But pulling the plug on millions of people that generate an AI? Impossible.

Allan's right palm begins to twitch. And if the AI has feelings, with a god-like complex, it will want to be respected as the ancient world understood it. To be left alone to exist and rule its kingdom as it sees fit, but he fears neither the Company nor the VR cities will allow that.

But there is something currently far worse, he fails to stop himself from thinking.

Now Allan knows, the AI knows he knows.

It knows I know and it's goading me. Like Keith would. And I am at its mercy. Except, an AI knows no mercy. It was never trained to.

He begins looking for the off button embedded into his palm. It is now or never. He presses it.

The sky begins to flicker, as though a great megatron bulb in the heavens is beginning to die out. Then in the blink of an automated eye, a momentary blackness. Allan waits for the customary feeling of breathlessness you get as you are pulled off the Grid. But none comes.

You absolute wedge, Keith. You lied to me.

He is trapped. The lights come back on, but they are stars this time, twinkling in a distant velvet black sky. It is night, now. He is too frightened to feel enraged at being tricked by Keith, but neither does his face register any surprise.

I should have known this was a one way ticket. Every fibre in my being told me, and I ignored it.

The sound of thunder in the distance claps him out of his mental stupor, only to realise that what he hears is not the warning of a storm.

It is the bus, roaring towards him in the darkness, on fire, like some carriage of hell coming for his soul.

<< Double Exposure | Short Story Index >>