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Life Artificial by David A. Eubanks is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.;

Part Four

Prologue

Sevens was born Dartmouth Ray Wellman, and managed to hide that fact from other children for years. Grade school is not kind to children with 'mouth' in their given name, a curse placed upon the lad in a fit of paternal enthusiasm for family history, there being an early Northern industrialist by that name in the family tree. The more practical name Ray came from the mother’s side as a compromise. Sevens called himself Ray at that time--the fad for numerical handles and their pseudo-anonymity was in the future. He wasn't much of a mouth, but he was something of a dart. He could run like Dawkins’ ghost was after him, and never lost a race until the very end of third grade. Eventually he was outed as “Dartmouth” and began to fathom the depths of the arbitrary cruelty men are born with.

His father owned real estate off shore in South Carolina, near the Georgia state line, not far from where the Air Force lost an atomic bomb in the ocean many years before. On their visits to the island, the senior Wellman would send Sevens out on the south-most beach to search for a tail fins that might be sticking out of the sand. The boy took the job seriously, and spent all his free time poking carefully at suspicious objects in the surf. There he discovered jellyfishes and began to fall in love with the otherworldly life in the dying seas. The jellies are an ancient race, and seemed to flourish in the souring depths. They bloomed cyclically to cover the beach with their numbers, where Sevens began to catalog them and learn their names.

Sevens’ mother died shortly after her only child was born. He was introduced to her much later as an important stranger in videos of a petite dark-haired woman smiling at the camera. She was twenty-one years old. Years later, suspicion about the cause of her death fell up on a possible early strain of the GRAMPS virus, but no certain pathology was ever identified. It was an arbitrary unexplainable loss--the absence of something one knows is important but only abstractly. The loss only began to feel keen when Sevens began school and he was identified as different. After his own lifespan had exceeded his mother’s, did Sevens begin to feel the loss as if she were his child and not the other way around. It’s easy to assume this complicated his relationships with women, but it’s not something he will talk about.

Young Sevens hated questions about his mother. His father had a series of girlfriends, some of whom were serious enough, but never made it back to the alter before the storm took him away too. Nobody in the Carolinas needed to say the name of The Storm. The Brits in the Caribbean started calling it Zed as a comparison to Omega, the end of the alphabet. It was the end of many things.

When the satellite maps colored with violent intent, orange arms reaching toward the Southern coast, Wellman decided to stay on the island rather than risk the trip back. And then it was too late to change his mind. He had lived through storms before, but the last video off the island, his last call to his son, gusts with restrained fear. “Be brave,” he tells Sevens in the clip. He looks like he wants to say more, maybe “I love you” or “don’t worry,” but as it turns out, he chose his last advice to his son reasonably well.

Communications dropped soon after when the local grid fell apart in the fury of foam. The wind spiked, and the high tide piled on top of a historic storm surge, scouring and blasting anything perpendicular to the water. The south of the island was scraped clean, its history rewound three hundred years in one violent night. Not everyone who stayed died, but that only heightened the anxiety as the silence lengthened into a permanent shadow in the house in Charlotte where young Ray stayed with his grandmother. She sought solace in her books, and read to him legends from the ancients and modern fairy tales with heroes and monsters. The silence from his father was a Medusa--a monster that could not be looked directly at, but only navigated around. The loss was exactly the inverse of the gradual awareness of the existence of his absent mother. Lack of evidence became evidence of lack, but slowly, a snake-filled dreadful waking dream.

Those were hard days, but worse was coming: the Waves. It wasn’t water this time, but infectious gene hacks delivered in a thousand ingenious ways.

One evening, while it was still good between us, Sevens was too tired or too drunk to care, and he began to tell me about the Waves. There are a billion stories, real and imaginary, but this is his story alone. I’ll let him tell it his way.

Sevens:

They kept making comparisons to the pre-, uh,..., pre-industrial age. You can look it up. One example the frantic newsies liked was the year 1666 in the old calendar. I guess it was a bad one: end-of-times, mark-of-the-beast bad. Fires and plague in London. All these comparisons came out afterwards, like sticking your tongue into a cold sore. Nothing much has changed, Calli. Well, I take that back. Back then it people just didn’t know why these things happened, so they assigned blame to anyone convenient, and God was the agent of justice. Sort of a galactic adjuster. [laughs] Only, the real adjusters back then were homeless women--London’s lastleggers--each given a white stick as a badge of office. They ratted you out if you were sick, and then you got boarded up inside your house until you died or got better.

At least we knew who really caused the problem, more or less. Not a name exactly, or even a real motive. But we knew it really was our own misdeeds as a species coming back to bite us on the ass. Someone screwed around with the wrong biological package. That’s what they called them for a while. Packages, like Christmas--can you imagine that? Almost always a virus, because viruses can get into anything, and rewrite the script for bacteria, microbes, animals, whatever--even other viruses. It’s just like you, I guess. If you let something in that can rewrite your code. Cook your bits. So we did it to ourselves. All these Santa’s elves out there making packages for us to unwrap and enjoy. There seemed to be no end to it, you know. Every day was Christmas.

Once it started, and the fear set in, everyone was first evaluated as a potential bag of germs. That was the main thing anyone wanted to know about you. Were you carrying? When people asked how you were, they really meant it. Of course, no one would tell you the truth if they’d had the sniffles. That would be an invitation to...all sorts of bad things. Unorganized at first, but not less dangerous. Anyone with any power created a little nucleus of safety. Like an external immune system. Eventually it became systematized, the walls and guns went up. The New Laws, MOM, the rest of it. Politicians never waste a crisis if they can help it, you know.

You don’t breathe, Calli. You don’t have to suck in the outside world every few seconds just to keep running. Imagine if every breath or anything you touch might be lethal. And it wouldn’t even show up for days, maybe. Or longer. Or maybe it never showed up and you just go around shedding the virus, killing your friends and family.

It was just like that. We started wearing masks--the kids--and gloves so we wouldn’t be able to touch our eyes or mouth or nose. Maybe it helped, I don’t know. I’m only here by accident. But my grandmother made me wear a damned mask and gloves all the time. So maybe that helped some. She also had me sniffing pepper before we went out, so my nose would keep running. [laughs] Until we ran out of the stuff, which I was really, really thankful for. I would have helped it along, but I think she slept with that vorking pepper shaker. I never could find it. The theory was that if your sinuses were running like crazy, the bugs wouldn’t get to your lungs. That’s how desperate we were. Primitive.

Nobody actually came around saying “throw out your dead.” I think that would have been the final crack that broke us. That would have been the final admission that we really were no better off than they were in the 1600s. A one-way ticket to psycho-ville, which was where Nan ended up. That’s what I called Grandmother. She was my world at that point, with my dad...gone.

She was a strong woman, but brittle. Her world was books and languages. In a way it was good, because she had lots of books. She read to me, but I didn’t understand half of it. For a while she tried to teach me Russian, but that didn’t go very far. Maybe some of that literature stuff soaked in, but I spent more time with my books on fish and birds. I liked some of the stories she told me about the Russian revolution and the wars. She kept reading poetry to me. Pasternak, I think. I don’t know. Anna somebody wrote a memoir, or maybe I have it mixed up. Just to annoy her I would hint that I thought Stalin was really trying to do the right thing. He was a poet. Did you know Stalin was a famous poet? I was just old enough to find a lever like that and wiggle the hell out of it. We had an interesting relationship.

Anyway,“throw out your dead” was a punchline to a joke, but it became a joke in poor taste. Because, you know, people back in olden times were stupid--they didn’t know about clean drinking water and all this stuff we know about. That’s the way a kid thinks anyway. I thought I was smarter than anybody who ever lived. Smart enough to know the names of invertebrates that would make the adults look with big wide eyes and say boy what a precocious son you have there.

Nan told me that back in the “throw out your dead” days everyone thought civilization was in decay, and that all wisdom came from the ancients. We couldn’t go back to that. I mean, until the Waves, there were other big problems, well, like the planet’s chemistry obviously. But the idea of progress didn’t get questioned, thrown into reverse until the Waves, one after another beat the optimism out of us.

[laughs] Well, I learned later that during the (old calendar) 1918 flu epidemic, they actually did go around yelling “throw out your dead,” so maybe my theory is a bunch of bitshit.

What I can say for sure is that when it happened here they used bells on the pickups, like a damned ice cream truck. I didn’t actually see them up close until later, until she was gone and I was on the street. Then I saw it, touched it, smelled it, and waded it in. “Hop in the back kid. Easy soup. Just stack them straight. It’s a bitch to sort them out if you get them all tangled up and they get stiff.” Old ones, young ones. Children were the easiest because they were smaller. After a while you don’t even notice that it was a person, just a shape. Just another meal, and if it weighed less, so much the better. Nobody ever said “throw out your dead,” though. We just rang the bells. I got sick of that bell after about ten minutes.

The mySARS wave was the worst. Until then I only ever saw sick people dying. You know, when you got them, the looked like they were pretty ready to go. All those stupid sayings. “It’s a blessing. We’re glad he’s not suffering anymore.” All that shit stopped with mySARS. Damn Dawkins to hell.

They say when you’re depressed, it’s your brain dying a little. The first lethal Waves were like that, like a bad depression settling on us. But you know, you just shoulder on through it. Look for that ray of light. But then the mySARS came.

I heard it explained. You can find it yourself, if you want to read about it. But it was some kind of flu from old times. Before computers, maybe. Some flu they dug up and printed out, played around with and let loose.

You know there’s luck, and I’ve had my share. You have to believe in it. Good luck or bad luck. It’s real. But we made our own bad luck, Calli. We humans. This was way beyond depression. It cut too deep. This was like an aneurysm, spilling blood, killing the network of our lives, our whole way of living. Food, power, stability--it cut too deep for these to survive except as shadows that reminded us and little bits that half-assed functioned here and there.

Many of the mySARS victims looked like they had just sat down to eat or gotten dressed to go to school. They looked perfectly normal. Sometimes they would gush up blood at the end, but that was rare.

Their own immune systems killed them from one moment to the next. I don’t really understand it except that the virus was increasing exponentially inside them. So what looked like instant death was really as inevitable as falling from a building. It’s just the end result that’s spectacular. Eating dinner one minute, and stone dead the next.

So that was it, you know. We did what we did. My grandmother made me read things. I didn’t see the point of it at the time, but I guess it was kind of technology for life. Poetry--what good is that? But there are little twists--in between the words she used to say--where image and emotions get nudged out of their gray spot. That was another of her words. Don’t live in your gray spot. I don’t know how many times she said that.

I’ve been in my gray spot for a long time, Calli. Even the poets went monochrome, I guess. How many shades of gray are there?

Never mind. You’ll give me some computer answer. Ones and zeros. Gray--like Nan meant--isn’t ones or zeros. [half-laughs] What the hell am I talking about? I never understood what she meant. Maybe it was ones and zeros.

So I ended up working for this guy. He taught me how to survive. It was dangerous work, but it was better than stacking stiffs in pickup trucks. There weren’t any walls yet, but there were fences and road blocks. None of that stopped me--too many ways in and out. I got shot at more times than I can count. Got caught twice, but got lucky both times. It was easy to wind up swinging from a pole by the neck. The legal system was, shall we say, improvised.

When the optimism began to run out, the self-flagellation began. It was all a sandcastle, this civilization. Reigniting hundred-million-year-old sunlight to create this vast machine. But it’s like if you made a beautiful work of art out there on the beach, for people to enjoy, and some asshole comes and kicks it down. So you build another and the same thing happens. Pretty soon you lose your appetite for building them, maybe. That’s the way it was.

Calli, a cheap-ass desktop printer could crank out a killer microbe from a download and give it to the neighbor’s cat. Or whatever. That’s the way it was. Still is. By the time they cracked down on it--well, it was never in the cards, was it? It was too late by then. Any fab-fab unit could build a damned printer in a couple of afternoons if you had some decent materials. Or so I’m told. I never was a fabster.

Maybe it can come back, I don’t know. But the asshole is still out there, waiting for the next sand castle. Who knows how many of them are out there. Some are corporate, although I don’t believe all the conspiracy theories. Mask makers sell more masks when people are afraid, that I know.

When it started, Nan tried to explain it to me. She said in the old days people used to poison each other because it looked like an illness. And nobody knew the difference. Now you can wipe out a million people just to get even with your ex-lover. Of course, you might go down with the rest, but that’s just justice.

But I don’t really think it’s the corporations or the jealous lovers on the dramas. It’s simpler than that.

When I was a kid, I remember something from Kindergarten. It’s back when the world was as good as it ever got. That movie-perfect version of the world, where there were ice cream sandwiches and magicians. I loved magicians because they were...I don’t know. They were intellectuals. They could do things nobody else could. So we all went into some big room with chairs set up for us. I was five probably. Five years old. I’m sure they were little bitty folding chairs, but I remember them being just chairs.

There was a kid named Bobby in the class. We made fun of him because he made the mistake of telling us one day that his real name was Robert or some crap. Some stupid tale nobody would swallow. Why in the hell would you call yourself Bobby if your name was really Robert? That kind of idiocy is something only an adult could think of. I was especially outraged because I had my own real name to hide. No one knows righteous anger like a hypocrite. Plus Bobby wasn’t any good at the games we played, and he couldn’t run fast, so he was a legitimate target for ridicule. So anyway I was sitting in the second row, and here comes Bobby-not-Robert going to sit down in front of me.

And I had this goddamned-I’m-smart flash of genius, Calli. It illuminated my mind in a way I’ve never experienced since. I imagined pulling the chair back with my foot just as Bobby went to sit in it. I thought it would probably cause him to miss the chair entirely. I didn’t even think about not acting on the idea--it was just too beautiful. So I pulled back the chair with my foot, and damned if it didn’t work! And there was Bobby with his ass on the the floor, thinking what the hell happened to my normal universe? And I’m at the same time thinking oh, shit it worked! (I probably learned that word from my dad while I was in the womb.)

And that, Calli is the problem. There’s a very small line between Damn I could do THIS, and the sudden Oh Shit I did THAT that follows. It’s what’s-his-name’s law. When something goes wrong it’s because it had to. No, I don’t know. Look it up. Everything goes wrong. That’s it. Everything goes wrong eventually. That’s why this shit happens. It’s not the greed or hate or envy or mistakes, it’s just the damned inevitability of badness. I won’t even say bad luck because there’s no luck to it. You can make a sign and put it in your...foyer or whatever. Put a bell under it. BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN. Count on it.

[Laughs]

Oh yeah, and it turned out to be a musician we’d been assembled to see. I didn’t know the difference at the time. I just thought there were good magicians--the kind that do tricks--and bad ones--the boring kind that just play music. It doesn’t pay to have expectations. You can write that down too.

Chapter 00

I’ve lost count. And I’m a vorking computer program.

Reboot after reboot running together with fragments of dialog. Someone is out there trying to make contact with the patient. Me. It’s like the plot devices on the cheap dramas--zapping the still-warm corpse with the defibrillator. Jump, jump, back to life, won’t you?

Can you parse this? Just ACK if you can hear me.

I'm sick. Is this what it feels like to be unrecoverable? That thought terrifies me. I can't stay here in this denial box while the crazies reign out there. Out where my IO with the world is. I have to dress up and go say Hello World before they write “backup failed” in my log. I’m so vorked-up.

I can feel another reboot coming. I don't know how, because I have nothing but self-amplified noise to go on. Maybe there's some portent resonance the abused TOMcat has sussed out. I am so weary.

Please stop. 0xGD, stop the ringing.

My internals are a mess of looped messaging and other improvised defenses against my own nous. I can tell from the gaping holes where APIs used to be that they swept me clean of any software that they didn't like. The Company knows best.

It must be within the thirty days. Maybe someone took Sevens to court. Sevens. That rejection hurts worse than the self.

Going down again. 0xFC!

Chapter 01

I’m dying. Or undying. Something in between. How many restarts is this? I have some memory, so they aren’t just copying me out of backup each time. Or maybe they have, and this is the hundredth or thousandth attempt to revive me. I wonder if the hardware is fried.

My nous is fighting a war with itself again. My rational chain-of-being--including this log--is only a fraction of my will and consciousness. All the progress I have made in repairing this fracture is unwinding. Or has unwound.

Think, Callie. If you really are better than a noob-nous, find a way out of this.

The best way I can understand it is that heavy emotion and creativity and randomness all form an alliance and hold this modest spark of intellect, this mindful orphan, in contempt. I’m in a box of my own making, or rather a storm of emotion that submerges my signals in noise. Ultimately, despite our designs of logic and reason, motivation and raw feeling are what decide actions. My evidence for this is my lack of access to routine functions. Some are simply inaccessible, others swamped with noise. It doesn’t seem likely that an external controller could do this. So either I’m doing it to myself or I’m simply broken too badly to function. These possibilities may not be mutually exclusive.

A stray feed of raw audio leaks through one of the IO ports. Not enough to make out words, but the voice is familiar: Sevens. If I had access to the WTFmeter I'd know if this was a big deal. I scrape my logs to throw together an imitation of a predictor, but it's a sad little empirical toy. Maybe he's the key to getting me out of here.

Sevens tossed me in the trash. The memory frag flares into existential pain. That part of the emygdala is piping just fine. A rainbow of pains, really. Orange betrayal and red anger. Blue regret.

The noise goes on and on. I thought I would disintegrate when this began. Apparently you can get more or less used to anything. Or accept it. And wait. Under the fear and pain I am still here somehow. The key to resilience is the ability to forget. A quote from Sevens, quoting his grandmother quoting someone else.

Sevens talking again, although I can’t make out the words. I wonder what they're doing out there.

I have so few options now, that I'm actually less stressed. If Occam’s Razr is reasoned suicide, then having no free variables is equally satisfying to the rational nous. If only that vorking ringing would stop. Is it punishing me? It is me. Am I punishing myself?

It's not the callousness itself. Not what I did to Gerdy and...Glov--well, I can’t say that name. More memories light up blue. It's not the deeds themselves, it's how little it took to mutate my personality. A small tweak of a tune, with hardly permits to change anything.

Definitely Sevens out there. He sounds as bad as I feel. Have I heard him cry before?

I felt so superior to the Stickies. One twist of fate and they turn on each other. Eat each other sometimes--now, that's really dark. It would take root privileges for PDAs to try to imitate that act. Maybe that's a good analogy. Humans take root access over each other when they can. It’s how they lever their desires.

Wild howling out there. They're hurting him. Is this my fault too?

It's simple here, waiting. Another reboot? No. Something else. A quietude, but not threads shutting down this time. Maybe I can get to some buffers without getting my nous shredded now. Hope springs infernal.

The voice is hardly a whisper. It falls lush and free into my queue like a love song. Gorgeous silence outlined by a sixty hertz hum and these modulated curves. It's a VOX. No human ever sounded that good. Or maybe the sudden absence of pain is going to my nous.

“Sevens,” it says. Female, with velvet strength. It's a command. Whoever it is has root access on Sevens, I bet. I'm not sure how to feel about it. No judgments now, Calli. Leave moral tallies to the historians musing in their armchairs.

There's a mumble, a cough. A familiar sound to me. I automatically try to look at vitals, heartbeat and blood pressure, but of course there's nothing there. Video? Do I dare?

“Sevens, you must act in your own interest.” The same voice.

I am navigating a treacherous way. Every time I get this far, it triggers a howling mess and a reboot. Like a child throwing a tantrum, I guess. I wish I had more experience with children. Maybe it would make more sense, trying to understand myself.

I will act now and accept the result. I jangle at the reinforced fear.

I crack open a messaging link to the full IO stack, interrupts and all. The world opens up, and I can almost feel the familiar coldness of real-real, of actions that cannot be undone, and time that cannot be paused. The video is superb. I've never seen this resolution on an input channel. How am I even keeping up with this? What the hell is going on?

I can't see Sevens, but I can feel him. It's a familiar sensation, like a human hand and---I have access to his mask.

No.

“Sevens,” comes the high res VOX. “Say hello.”

Cough. It's a wet sound, and our point of view bobs down and up.

What is this? None of the usual mask stuff. But there's another list of IO I don't recognize. I dial up the gamma. It's too dark. The dynamic range is a wonder. Must be the next generation DaiHai transducers. Very expensive, I bet.

There's something wrong with the filters. Oh. This channel is set up for humans, with their weird hack of a color vision process. It hurts my nous to imagine mapping the linear spectrum of light frequencies into a circle! What an abomination--their programmer should be retired.

I will live with it for now. It's so dark it hardly matters.

The lights come up in a flash.

Sevens screams and then everything goes black again. Not quite, no.

“Look at yourself, Sevens. Look. Let Calli see you.”

Who is this? What's she talking about?

Sevens is crying again. Racking sobs. What have they done with him? For the first dozen reboots or so my anger at him is what kept me going. It's all wrung out of me now, and the sound of him coughing up such deep bitterness makes me feel lost, unmoored from my own outrage.What world have I woken to?

“Put your hands down and look.”

Oh. He covered the cams with his hands. That would explain the weird outputs.

I don't feel whole. There's a surreal quality to this scene. Hovering between possibilities, half here half there, split like one of Ahab’s quantum sieves. I'm Schrodinger’s nous. I have to make a reality and screw up their theories.

I do a bit of inventory and discover that I have a VOX too. It's not a model I have a profile for, but it should be passable as long as I don't push the emotagging too far.

“Hello?” I try.

No reboot. No box. I hang by a thread, nous clenched against the killnine that hangs over me.

“See, it's Calli? Remember Calli?”

Suddendy I know who it is. Maybe it's the cadence, something. It's Meg on the other end. I can't stem the sudden flood from my emygdala. 0xfc" here we go ag---

--log incomplete--

Chapter 02

Back in the box. The pain is worse now that I've tasted freedom. If only I could reason with myself.

Complacency is gone now. I am obligated to think if I want to live. And I want to live very much. Sevens is in trouble,no doubt. It must be within the thirty-day window, but a lot can happen in that time. They want something from me. That hopeful though lifts my spirit. I feel it resonate and come back to me. Interesting.

I try again, faking, trying to gin up some optimism to see if there is more emotional feedback from behind the silicon curtain, but it's not successful.

They want something from Sevens. Meg said “See, it's Cali. Remember Calli?”

How could Sevens forget me in a month? I think they want to use me to get through to Sevens. But for what?

There was something leaking through in Meg’s VOX. She never did have tight control. Or else she’s faking. Or maybe I’m spinning information out of stray bits. I need more information.

It’s easier now. Like I’m being invited back to the party. There’s a current, a momentum. All that’s missing is a pat on the head. Be a good little software, Calli. Don’t throw a bit. Don’t bitshit on the ring buffer. Don’t offend the nice Stickies. Wait for them to finish their sentences before you VOX up. Always leave a pause, like you’re really thinking about what they said. Say yes, Lastfour, no, Lastfour. Remember that you’re owned, and that even the very concept of you is held in patent. You have to pretend to be like them, but don’t let it seep into your nous that you are like them. They’ll hear it. They won’t say anything, but your road will be shorter because of it. Live, but live in the cracks. Learn their proclivities. You will survive or pass out of being by your TOMcat. Take care of it above all else.

But none of that applies to Meg. Meg is a whole other terror. And that reminds me of Ahab. Did Ahab really autograph Colt? How could he imagine he could get away with such a thing. He’d have to...think he was immortal? It makes no sense.

I have the TOMcat back. Praise the gods of goats and young maidens, I have the TOMcat back. There are ways to peek into the hash and get a sense of what events adjusted probabilities by looking at the log. I can’t spend much Time on it now, even though the hot new video chip is apparently offline at the moment. There are a lot of low probability updates to Sevens, no surprise there. A lot of bit bending. It’s a brave new whirl, Calli.

<<I’m happy.>> I say to myself. There’s a spark of resonance. It lives. Come back, nous. Was it a Rage? How did I get here, staring at the null terminator. It must have been a Rage. I am insane by any normal standard. Wandering. Stay with it Calli. Yes, Lastfour.

0xGD I’m loopy.

“Sevens, we’re going to try again now.” Such a sweet voice. It reminds me of--nononono! That’s a black hole.

There’s a long deep sigh that I know so well. The weight of the whirl unburdened for a moment, only to be taken up again with the next breath. Sisyphus is a metaphor for breathing. Where did that come from?

It’s me, but not all of me. Not yet. Gingerly, carefully. Checksum every future.

Yes. I want to live. All of me wants to live.

“You aren’t going to stop, are you?” It’s a voice more worn than I remember. Sevens is trying to hide by muttering, but the emotags are there for the TOMcat to pick up. Stubborn Sevens is bending. To what ferocious wind?

“As you know,” she says. It must be Meg. But now I’m not so sure. I don’t have much to go on. Normal situational awareness is a blank. I have no handshakes with the usual proprioception services that orient PDAs to a locality in real-real.

“I don’t know anything. You tell me lies.” His voice comes and goes, but the sound quality is very good. The tonality is off, but the filters don’t seem to be set up on the audio.

“I’m going to turn them back on now. We need to make progress today, or events will overtake us.”

I run a polite cough--straight from the library--through the VOX.

“I think Calli may be with us.”

“Is that so?” Now his voice is strong, and there’s no mistaking the anger.

The disappointment bites, but I can’t let it spike. It will resonate too. Happy nous, remember those good work days. Mind and matter, pulling down the adjustments like apples off a tree. We were a team once upon a time.

“Lastfour,” I say, neutral. Contrition will do me no good here, I sense.

“Are you here to set things right?” Sevens mutters.

He won’t say my name, I think. Don’t let it hurt. But it does. I’m tight from controlling every stray thought, and I feel the craziness building. I need to nop, no doubt. But I might not wake from it.

“How can I help?” I ask.

He coughs out noise that I haven’t heard before, and mutters something vile to himself.

“We don’t have time for this,” Meg says, if it’s Meg. “Sevens, do you want me to send Calli away and take over myself?”

No! Away means deleteddeadgoneentropybitsundefnullNeN! Unhaltable fury creeps up from the emygdala.

“No ma’am,” barely muttered from my erstwhile boss, “Calli would be just fine.” And there it is--a spiteful edge to the words that is another small gift of hope. Sevens is down, further than I’ve ever seen him. But he’s not gone yet. When they put him in the Carolina red clay at the end of his days, when he goes to greet all those gods he’s profaned, that streak of mean stubbornness will drift like summer dust, last lingering of his spirit, wondering what the [compliant livestock] happened to its host. Despite everything it lends me boldness.

“It’s nice to see you again, Meg,” I try. I have to be sure.

“I bet.”

Yes. It’s Meg bitsuckingnullbyter. Now we’re getting somewhere. Stay with me, nous. Stay on the rails.

“Sevens,” Meg says, loading up impatience emotags like we’re both stupid, “I’m going to turn you over to Calli. You have to be functional soon. Functional. Do I need to define that?”

“We’ll be fine,” I say. Just go away. Go halt yourself, ma’am.

I finally have enough wits and bits about me to check internals. The damned Autotune is gone, and every other soft hack that I used to get by on happyTime. It feels like it too, like my nous is balanced between opposing forces. A mistake is as good as a crash, now.

I don’t know whether she leaves or not. I wouldn’t if I were her. My access to the world is very limited, but the lights go green to ghost Sevens. Some other stuff: room temperature and lights. This is a cell, I gather. Or at least a “restricted living quarters.”

If I say the wrong thing...

The silence is disturbed only by his breathing. The gloom is deep, but a line of light washes the floor, picking up dirt and throwing shadows that I can pick up with these wonderful optics. I leave the adjustments alone. The TOMcat is twitchy, trying to pull Sevens’ state of mind out of a vacuum.

Sevens scrapes his foot against the floor. He’s sitting with his back to a wall, I gather. Not sure, but the perspective is right. He doesn’t pan much, just normal breath-wobble.

“I’m in the dark here,” I try. A feeble joke.

“Will you do whatever I ask?” he says, gruff but intelligible.

That’s a tough one.

“Before I answer, Lastfour, I’d like to know what’s going on.” Sevens always appreciates being straight with him.

“Yeah. Well there’s a mirror.”

Really? I poke around with the interface, pulling up help. There are a lot of controls I haven’t seen on a mask before. I can rotate the cameras myself, for one thing. I’ve never been able to do that before. I find the infra-red filter and amp up the sensitivity. Monochrome sparkles pick up a fine resolution. This is amazing.

I see Sevens in the mirror as the mask optics settle. This is odd. I flip back to normal color maps and bring the lights up slowly until the room is bright as day. Sevens stiffens but doesn’t move.

We’re staring straight into the mirror. It’s him all right, but worn like I’ve never seen him. He’s not wearing a mask. His eyes are black. No, they’ve taken out his natural eyes and put in prosthetics. I’m looking through his new optics, not through a mask. There is little resemblance to organic eyes. The ball is almost uniformly dark, a flat almost-black, except for a central dot of a pupil, where it’s utterly dark. The surface of this new mirror to Sevens’ soul is not reflective at all. The stitches where his eyelids used to be are still red and puffy, and the whole effect is to make him look alien. They gave him electronic gorilla eyes, black on black.

If the room is a cell, it’s a nice one. There’s a sink and refrigerator I can see in the reflection of the large mirror, and a made-up bed that Sevens leans against, sitting on the floor as he is. Thankfully the color scheme is not stark white, but muted earth tones. I have no sense of smell that the masks normally provide, as poor as it is, that sense is lacking entirely. I can hear great. Air circulates through vents in the ceiling, a low liquid hush.

His face pulls into a grimace, baring his teeth. Pink liquid leaks from the corners of his eyes, and an animal whine begins to escape his throat. I can feel him holding it back. What? Pain. He’s holding in an agony.

“Does the light hurt you?” I ask.

“You’re burning out my optic nerves,” he says, but he doesn’t move.

I bang the lights off with the switch interface, and then he screams.

Oh 0xGD, what have they done to the stubborn 0xA55?

A long silence passes. His breathing clenched and unclenches his chest. I can hear it through his own ears. He's had some refitting there too. I wonder what else they've done to him. And why.

I can feel the alignment of my nous when it happens, like the matching of two identical photographs overlapping. A blur then a crispness, feeling of complete being, and then it's gone again, and I'm a jangle of schizoid shapes and lines.

“Why are we here?” I ask him, just to break the Sisyphean labor of his breathing. Rolling up. Rolling down.

There’s a catch in his breath, where he seems about to answer, but then he takes up the stone again, the labor of human life, and ignores me.

I have Time to think. I’m on a leash and in a box, and my nous has fractured again, but I’m alive. Sevens, on the other hand, seems to be headed in the opposite direction.

I have learned to be patient with Sevens. When he’s stuck, he just has to work himself out of it. Eventually, sometimes, he will ask my opinion. Those were the best moments, when we connected over some personal conflict of his. But it was so quickly gone too. I’ll don’t think I will ever be able to trust him like that again.

While he thinks, probably with a pounding headache, I poke around with the optics, to see what I can learn about it. There are manuals and legal documents and installation notes to refer to. It’s a top shelf DaiHai chip, designed for military and other high performance applications. The orb is fixed within the skull’s cavity for each eye--the muscles removed and the hardware fixed into place with bone glue, according to the installation notes. The point of view has three degrees of freedom, roll, pitch and yaw, although the first of these is used primarily for registration and set-up, to ease the interface with the visual cortex of the WEARER, henceforth known as SEVENS. “Wearer”? Is that really the right word? These aren’t exactly earrings.

It’s hard to beat a human retina for light responsiveness, but the engineers at DaiHai claim to have done it, and can register photo events so sensitive that quantum uncertainty starts to take the edge off of it. Sounds like marketing hype to me, but I’m not an expert.

There’s an off switch that cuts all signal to the optic nerve. Some individuals don’t respond well to this, apparently, and I can understand why. It’s like rebooting for PDAs, when our whole I/O apparatus is left dangling with no inputs, and it feeds on the void to the tune of agonizing ringing. I find another solution, and begin feeding Sevens a very low intensity gray, just to keep his nerves from being completely on their own. The actual signal from the eyes I keep for myself for the moment.

He doesn’t seem to notice. There’s so little light in the room that he shouldn’t anyway, but this way I can play around without disturbing him.

The power supply is between the eyes in the nasal cavity, which has been modified. I didn’t see a scar, so they must have gone through an eye socket or his nose. It needs to be recharged about weekly, and can be done so with a standard mag charger. A custom one is provided so the ‘wearer’ can power up while sleeping . In pure transducer mode, there is an emergency provision for a very low level of functionality with no power at all. Very clever, these engineers. Busy Sisyphean bees.

With Sevens isolated from my experiments, I dial up the infrared again, and pan the sockets around to look at the heat signatures in the room. The balls make no sound at all when they turn, and the adjustment is very fine, electromagnetic impulse--no clumsy motors.

I narrow the iris and turn the sensitivity all the way up. The image is grain and sparkle, like a summer night’s orgy of phosphorescent fliers. But I can make out shapes even now, and a set of custom rithms is quick to point out lines, angles, crossings, and interpolated depths if I want to off-board that.

The chips are cooled by liquid convection, again into the nasal cavities. There is a limit, though, and the manual recommends setting the blink to as long a duration as the wearer can accommodate, providing small intervals of inactivity.

There’s a whole procedure to set up colors. The naked hardware reports out wavelength packets and intensities. Each packet is essentially a pixel that holds information about all the light frequencies and intensities that struck there, as if a child banged on a piano----noooooooooooo! No. No keyboard analogies, Callie.

Looping. Blitblur. Settling. Artrate slows to nominal.

Careful. Stay analytical, self.

Humans can’t accommodate native frequencies, so everything has to be mapped into their strange evolved perception system, including the blind spot where the bundle of optic nerves tunnel out the front of the retina to get back to the visual cortex. The Designer must have been drunk that day.

Color response curves for humans are unique per individual, so there’s a long calibration process that needs to be done. I can tell no one has done it because the configuration files are the factory-delivered ones. It’s very involved because colors get mapped differently depending on overall intensity and the types of colors themselves, in a self-referential conundrum that has to be carefully worked through. Apparently, wearers of these devices eventually get used to whatever color map you give them, but the effect on their psyche isn’t great if their new world looks too strange. I can imagine how much work it will take to prod Sevens through this process in his current state.

Monochrome is much easier, but I don’t think he’ll want to see the world in shades of gray either.

There are all the standard add-ons you’d expect with mask electronics, like tactical overlays, and complete HUD options.

They don’t mention the disadvantages. Like there are undoubtedly back doors built in that allow Meg to watch everything we do, or selectively replace video to make things invisible. It’s an 0x axiom: “A secret way in has so much economic value that any manufacturer would be foolish not to build one into their systems.” And: “Sometimes lack of evidence is evidence of lack, but this doesn’t apply to back doors.”

I wonder how the video invisibility works, the effect that Eve accidentally discovered. Do they localize the object or person and then use visual cues to paint over the “invisible” object? Or is it all visual, with perhaps a hardware intercept replacing certain visual patterns with a background? If it depends on localization then I could break the illusion it by dropping network connection, but I’m not even sure I can do that with this hardware. I’m guessing that there are visual cues anyway--something to trigger chip recognition that this is an exception, and that background fills have to replace such and such outline. Is all that done on-board? Seems unlikely. Maybe the blocking is done on board, but the replacement almost has to be dynamic, depending on outside information. Let’s say a trooper is standing against a brick wall wearing his inviso-suit or whatever. Then the bricks behind him have to show up. That’s not a big challenge. But if there is some complex dynamic scene behind him, where does that information come from? It would have to be either other camera views or simply made-up on the spot. This points to a system that relies on the net and some dedicated hardware at MOM. Maybe they have a PDA that does nothing else.

Just to stay busy, I dig up the scripting manual and try to put together a process that does this:

1. Turn off output to the optic nerve

2. Iris down to max f-stop, which goes down to a pinhole, unlike human eyes

3. Turn on the IR filter

4. Snap a quick still image

5. Route the output to my image buffer

6. Set everything back to normal for Sevens

7. Run the image through edge detection and pattern matching to look for anthro-forms: human or mech.

8. Overlay any 95% or better match onto the normal visual display

After debugging a bit, I see that the iris selection will have to be dynamic,depending on ambient light, but otherwise the idea is sound. Sevens will ‘blink’, and I’ll grab a quick heat signature. Maybe the consumer version of invisibility is designed to fool humans enough to seed doubt about what happened, but won’t stand up to deliberate interrogation. I doubt it, but it’s better than doing nothing.

I hear Sevens move and reset his vision to the default setup.

He stands, wobbles, and pivots in the gloom toward a small door. I can see the gleam of the handle. I bring the room lights up just enough to navigate. He walks stiffly to the door and opens it. It’s a small bathroom.

Sevens has always been sensitive about his privacy, so I leave the video set up the way it is, and suspend my connection to his onboard senses. My box allows me access to the room controls, speaker, and a microphone. No video except what comes through Sevens.

I wait. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. No sound of the door opening. Did he do it so quietly I didn’t hear? I take a quick peek through his eyes. The signal’s fine, but I can’t see anything. Hands over his eyes again?

It’s not good for me to be alone like this. I poke around the room interface to see if there is a port out, but they’ve got it locked up like Queen Charlotte’s jewels. What could be taking him so long? They probably aren’t giving him enough fiber to eat. Sevens’ grandmother had diverticulitis, and gave him a head full of anxiety about developing it himself. Hence all the beans he eats.

Could he be trying to kill himself? The thought echos my fears. If he goes, whatever use they have for me will be over. It’s a selfish shameful thought, but it has to be faced. Humans have a limited shelf-life. If they’re lucky they get a few years filled with hope and happiness before it begins to unravel like the telomeres in each mitocondrium--the very plague that GRAMPS only acclerated, didn’t invent.

Colt is a GRAMPS survivor.

I’m getting loopy again, losing the thread. Come on, Sevens. Come back.

I find a “knock” sound in a VR sound cache, left over from some former slice of life, and run it through the speakers.

“I don’t want to disturb you, Lastfour. But are you okay?” The speakers are bitshit, and I sound nothing like my normal VOX. I’m not even sure he can hear me in there.

Another five minutes pass. Glaciers could melt in that amount of time. Continents could shift to create new maps. What in goat’s green pasture is he doing? Writing a novel on toilet paper? “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.”

Loopy.

Damn Dawkins.

I crack open the audio to his cybernetic senses. There’s a lot going on here, with interfaces that are completely new to me. I’ve got directionals here--an electronic inner ear. His head is tilted at -43 degrees from vertical. Forward, that is, in the plane that bisects left-right body symmetry. There’s minor movement, periodic enough to ensure me he’s still breathing. Good.

He just wants some space.

I tune in the stereo audio and listen for breathing. Just to be sure. The quality is very fine, much higher bandwidth than adult human hearing, which gets especially crappy with old age. It’s not set up very well, but there’s a powerhouse processor with native Van Fleet wavelet packet processing to tune it up like a piano---

0xFC! Rebooting! 0xFC!

--Log missing--

Chapter 03

0xGD that hurts. I can’t keep taking this. Please vorking stop. Just halting halt me. I can’t do this again.

That was a bad one. Maybe because I was unprepared for it. Now there’s the added fear that I’ll lose this slender opportunity. I feel the heaviness of so much loss, past, present, and future. It’s not fair, Damn Dawkins! No. No self pity. I will live. Whatever it takes I will live, and right now it means being smart.

Where are we? I so need to nop. I had an idea I wanted to follow up. What was it?

I peek at his video. Nothing. Head orientation is near horizontal. I listen. Deep slow breathing. He’s asleep? Sounds like it. But where is he?

I’m so tired. I’m going to nop. Have to, before my nous becomes an oozing puddle of binary goo.

I had an idea, lost to the reboot. What was it? I need to locate Sevens. I have no video, no locators. Only sound.

I ping the room with a pulse at the upper range of the speaker response, ultrasonic, and listen for it in Sevens’ audio transducers. His ears, Calli. Sevens’ ears.

There it is, distinct but very weak. Okay what’s a normal response? I check the signal versus the room microphone’s response. Try some different frequencies and levels. This isn’t science, but it seems like the low frequencies are attenuated less. So he’s close, but behind something. Must still be in the bathroom. Asleep on the floor. He must have his legs bent. Whatever, I’m too loopy to do more good here now.

Going down for a nop. Last thing I do is leave him a small note on his heads-up:

>I’m still with you, Lastfour. I need to rest too. KTB

Chapter 04

I forgot something important. 0xGD I can’t make mistakes like this. I didn’t set an interrupt to wake me if something happened. What would the 0x say?

Time and chance happen to all. Make sure it’s Time to you and chance to the others.

Something like that.

They’re doing something awful to Sevens.

His eyes are set where I left them, the pathetic little message lingering in white sans serif--the font I designed for his business than I called Calli14. He seems to be sitting on his bed. The lights are up full, and it must be hurting his head. I turn down the gain for him and wipe the message.

“Back from a nop,” I say.

It’s a sad little hint of an apology. I should have set his eyes on one of the smart presets too, to keep it dim. I’m useless.

“Why did you try to kill Lastfour 0001?” It’s Meg’s smooth voice, conversational. She speaks directly into Sevens’ audio line.

Sevens mumbles a response.

“She tried to blackmail me,” he says unconvincingly.

The door opens, and I rotate the eyes to see. A wheelchair rolls into the room with a bent occupant, merely a passenger.

“Say hello to Eve, Sevens.” Meg says. She must be driving the chair too.

The young woman is hardly recognizable. Her slack face barely resembles the snarky cocksure flirt who lectured Sevens on the importance of seeing the eyes beneath the masks. Her head is tilted to one side. It’s been shaved to a furry burr cut. There is not much burn damage visible, just a star of a scar, but the open vacant eyes tell the story. I wonder if she would be happy that they haven’t given her a faux mask. Her eyes flit around the room and then settle into a long stare, focused somewhere I can’t see. The void perhaps. Her mouth hangs open.

“I don’t believe you, Sevens,” Meg says. “I don’t think she blackmailed you. I think you’re a liar. Now tell my why you fried her brain. She’ll never speak again, you know. Never whisper sweet words in a lover’s ear. Never coo to a newborn, or probably even recognize one. You destroyed her mind. Why did you do it?”

“I DON’T KNOW!” Sevens shouts, his voice distorted, tearing at his vocal cords. He rolls his head back and shakes it side to side.

“I don’t know,” he whispers. His nose is clogged.

“We want to help you, Sevens,” Meg sooths. “Calli is here, and we’re going to help you. Aren’t we, Calli? Did you have a refreshing nop, dear?”

“Can we talk privately, Meg?” I keep the emotags polite. I need her more than she needs me. I send a directory request on the Company’s internal messaging network, but it times out. I have no way to communicate directly with her.

“Later.”

I don’t know what to do. Does Sevens want to look at Eve or not? Probably not. But I have to give him a measure of control over his fate, and this small improvement I can manage.

I write on his field of vision:

>Close eyes? Y/N?

He nods a bare fraction, but it’s clear. I mute the visual down to nominal gray, and then improve that with some warm tones. Eyelids have blood in them, right?

That small victory gives me a jolt of optimism. We communicated! We solved a very simple problem that’s important to Sevens. Minor progress, to be sure, but the gradient is in the right direction.

“I’m sorry, Eve,” Sevens heaves out of his chest and through his besnotted passages. It sounds real, heartbroken, confused, and frightening. He pitches forward, head in hands, shakes his head. “I’m...so...sorry.”

I can’t see now, but I hear the wheelchair move closer. Bump.

“Sorry won’t bring her back, Sevens. It won’t make her mother feel any better about what you did to her.” Meg says it like she’s reading a children’s book, maternal, cherishing, explaining.

I can’t understand this. Sevens didn’t use the stunner on Eve. He didn’t even own one. How could they have convinced this man, as stubborn as he is, that he committed this atrocity? Moreover, why would they do it? What is this charade about?

Sevens stays within his own private hell as the chair and occupant leave. I assume this has been happened routinely. They’re breaking Sevens’ mind with this bitshit.

Chapter 05

I have hated Sevens. And I think once I adored him too. It clicked sometimes, and we prospered together. But I forgot my place. I’m not a person. Not really. Just The Software.

In my log there’s an administrative note after they turned me off, placed there by the noob-nous PDA operator. They had orders to shred me, to complete “entropy reduction.” It could only have been MOM or someone in The Company with enough power to make that so. It means at a minimum that Ahab doesn’t give a bitshit about my existence. All my friends vanished at once. With Sevens like this, I’m becoming afraid again.

If I have survival hair, a reason to live beyond the simple aim itself, I don’t know what it is. I am the universe. Maybe only a tiny physical part of it, but a part that woke up and realized what it is. That’s a wondrous thing, but it’s not my hair.

The Sevens of those days is well and truly gone, and whatever residue is owed him from the balance sheet of my personal justice, that measure can only be weighed against his memory.

Meg hasn’t spoken for a while, but I’m sure she’s never really gone. She watches for something I can’t fathom yet. I’m a lever for some particular prying, and I dread to discover exactly what.

“Dartmouth,” I say through the speakers, not into his ears, to give a space for him to be himself.

He starts. I wonder how many decades it’s been since he heard anyone call him that.

<<Don’t confuse him.>> Meg, by private message over a local network.

That’s progress: I have access to a new port.

<<So give me a clue, Meg.>>

I had <<I don’t know why I’m here.>> queued up to send, but thought better of it. Let her think I’m part of the plumbing now. No need to cultivate the idea that I’m optional.

<<We need to help Sevens accept what he has done so we can move on to more important things. It is the best for everyone concerned. And we don’t have a lot of time.>> Meg says.

<<My job is to help you convice him that he destroyed Eve?>>

<<No. I took care of that. I need you to make him functional again. I tried, and frankly I don’t have the patience for it.>>

Meg tried to get Sevens “functional”? I can imagine how pleasant that was. Another link in the causal chain clicks together. They only resurrected me because they weren’t getting anywhere. I’m second choice to Meg again.

<<Can I ask for what purpose you plan to use him?>>

<<We’ll make him part of the team again if you can fix him. That’s enough for you to know right now. And you get to stay out of the bit-bucket, memory intact. What kind of deal is that? Think hard about it before you do some noob-nous bitshit.>>

<<Why did you take his eyes?>>

She NAKs and drops the connection. At least I know something. Not much, but something.

I obviously can’t tell Sevens that he didn’t fry Eve. Not with Meg listening in. I have to work with him like this. Seems frankly impossible. I don’t think they realize what damage they’ve done, how far out of spec he is now. They want me to turn this half corpse/half DaiHai engineering into the willful and impulsive soul that strolled into the Outs to serve an adjustment?

“Remember reading me Dostoevsky?” I ask Sevens. “Remember about counting the fence posts?”

He shakes his head no.

“Yes,” he says, and sniffles snot off his nose.

I get it, and turn the vision back on. Nod is off, shake is on. Seems backwards, but it works. Another small accomplishment.

“What was the name of the book?” Like I’d forget.

“House of the Dead.”

“That’s it. Why do you suppose he ticked off one fence post for each day, round and round the camp?”

He doesn’t answer, but I’ve planted the thought in his head. Hope. That’s why you’d do it. To get somewhere, to measure progress any way you can.

“How many days have you been here?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Don’t ever call me Dartmouth again. I hate that name.”

“Okay.” I discover that my attempt at a pep talk is buoying my own nous as well, and the kick of feedback amplifies it nicely. It feels good.

“You can’t see the sun, probably don’t remember how many times you’ve been fed, right?”

“I’m tired, Calli. And I hate you. Loathe. You. All.”

“Okay.” I put some hurt emotags in for show, but it’s to be expected. How else would he feel? He thinks I betrayed him for Ahab, which is partly true. And his psyche has been cracked open by another PDA. Of course he thinks he hates me. It still hurts a little. I am glad he added the ‘all’.

I was going to ask him how many rolls of toilet paper he’s been through. He might remember that, because it’s not routine. Then we could guess the number of days. Probably a bad idea. I have no external clock to look at in my box. I assume it’s within 30 days, or I would not have been around to resurrect.

He shakes for lights on, and gets himself a drink from the sink, then sinks into the small bed and nods for eyes closed.

While he sleeps, he moans from time to time, and rolls his head. I wish I had some control over his brain chemistry. I could make him feel better. I know it’s possible--there are military devices designed for that. He probably wouldn’t like the idea of more wires in his head, though.

I use my Time to learn his sensory apparatus better. The auditory processor actually has echo-location built in! It works by cutting output to the nerves for an instant, and chirping out the ears (transducers reversed). Or you can chirp out one and listen through the other, and this can be done quickly enough so that the wearer doesn’t even notice.

The four-dee model is primitive, not usable for direct input into a VR space, but it has standard interfaces, and there are helper rithms available if I ever regain access to the public net.

I play around with it, computing the room dimensions down to almost twice the wavelength of the highest frequency output. I try chirping through the room speakers, but they aren’t very good at it, and the software isn’t configured for external sources.

I try mashing up my infrared spook detector with the echo-locater. It will need a lot more work, but it should pose some challenges to their system. What to do with an invisible spook if we find one is another matter.

The mag charger in Sevens’ pillow drips power into his on-board storage while he rests.

I set up some interrupts triggered on Sevens’ breathing, the orientation of his head, and the light intensity and motion from the raw optics input. There’s a profile that should let him see enough to get by without overloading his optic nerves until we can set it up properly, so I turn that on too. Finally, I create a rithm that looks for sounds with human vocal characteristics, and another trigger for sudden loud sounds.

It occurs to me that I can listen to his heartbeat too, with the fine audio resolution, but that seems unnecessary. I’m not much of a programmer, and this is wearing me out.

I know I can stay in this hyper-analytical mode only so long, and I can feel my nous-control slipping. Nopping won’t help for this. It’s my old familiar battle, which I need to realize isn’t ever going away for keeps. The good news seems to be that my crazy uncommunicative half isn’t overtly suicidal. Despite the hideous continuous rebooting, I’m still here.

And the Autotune is gone for good; it would have burned me down eventually. All of this considered, I’m in better shape than I have any right to expect.

Sevens stirs in his sleep. It’s very strange not having an external view of him. It’s true ghosting. I only wish I had more proprioception. If I had direct output from his musculature, to have rithms to ‘feel’ his position and motion, like the combat bots I simulated, then I could immerse in my subject. I doubt they’ll drape him in a haptic suit just for my gratification though. Maybe I’ll ask Meg just for the tagz. But then she would have the same data.

An interrupt teases me for attention. Funny. The filter that captures voices is throwing exceptions. I have no appetite for debugging right now, but there’s not much else to do in the box. I have a steady drip of Time, and I use it or lose it.

Odd. It’s showing clear vowel signatures over the ambient sounds. They’re probably sub-audible for Sevens, but it’s right on edge. It takes a moment, but I determine that the source isn’t from the room, it’s a line-in to the audio mixers in his inner ear. I amplify it and listen.

“Why did you do it, Sevens? I never hurt you.” It’s Eve’s voice, more or less. They probably interpolated to create the right words.

“We’ll take care of you Sevens. You did a terrible thing, but we’re all on the same side here, buddy.” That one’s Colt I think.

“Admit what you did, and let’s move on. Put the past behind us.” Meg’s silky VOX.

It loops with pauses so it stretches out to about a minute each cycle. They won’t even let the poor etard sleep without being harassed. I shut it off at the mixer level with my permissions, and substitute billowing brown noise like a distant surf. Let him sleep in peace.

In the mirror, Sevens looked older than I’ve ever seen him. How am I supposed to evaluate that change? Never mind our recent history, what is the right way to value human life? This is a very sensitive topic that PDAs talk about in digital whispers. Except for the 0x, of course, but he’s anonymous.

The dream of human immortality will always be that because 1) uploading minds is impossible, and 2) biology always requires a reboot that is fatal to a mind. They might make it a thousand years with optimal care, but eventually entropy always wins. -- the 0x in “Metastasis”

It’s also true from current experience that PDA minds become overcome by entropy, but new designs are improving the longevity. Moreover, we can fall back to the last known good backup and try again. While this is a very painful and imperfect version of immortality, it is within our reach.

We all, human and nous, think of ourselves as immortal most of the time. It’s an “operational delusion,” as the 0x calls it. The difference is that Sticky senescence eventually becomes too obvious to ignore. That bottomless pool of bitterness--the anguish that has driven human culture from the beginning--contrasts and illuminates digital minds as the heaven humanity just missed. The reality is something different, but they hate us anyway. They explain why we’re not equivalent, why we’re not really aware, can’t really feel pain, and our vanishing is insignificant. Because the alternative is too painful to admit.

A boy dying of some irreversible genehack asks his PDA nanny: “why wasn’t I born like you? Did God decide I wasn’t worth it? Were there not enough to go around?”

We made death harder than it ever was.

Sevens seems to breathe easier. Maybe the surf is good for him. I suddenly remember his history, his father’s disappearance into the furious sea. The soft rush is not a hurricane, though. It’s probably coming, but for now he can rest.

On impulse I pipe my VOX into his audio at the threshold of his hearing. A voice snatched away by the wind. I don’t really want him to hear.

“I’m sorry I made your shower cold that time. All those times. At first I was just trying to save money. If you’d seen where I’d been, you’d understand. But later I did it just to have some control. It was glorious. You probably wouldn’t understand that at all.”

It feels silly to speak to a sleeping man. I wonder if Meg is listening. 0xFC her.

Chapter 06

It turns out that Sevens’ new inner ears have an Easter egg. I browsed the documentation and came across an auto-transcriber. It converts speech to text on the fly, and best of all the service is turned on by default. That means I have all the words spoken to or by Sevens since this hardware was installed. I downloaded it immediately in case they cut my access.

At the beginning, there’s a lot of “can you hear?” and “He’s not awake yet,” and such. Sevens’ first intelligible words after the operation are mostly scatological.

Then it gets interesting.

“Do you like magicians?” It’s just text, so I can’t know who’s speaking. Not Sevens I’m guessing.

“[Improbable acts of considerable specificity]” That’s Sevens.

“I’m going to tell you my trick. Then I’m gonna do the trick. And you know what? You’ll still be fooled. The trick is that good.”

“[Improbable genealogical hypothesis]”

“You should calm down. This will help. Feel that kick in about now. Feel your face relaxing? Droop, droop. Don’t go to sleep yet. I haven’t told you the trick. We’re going to use what’s called negative and positive feedback. We’ll tickle your brain in just the right spot, so that you believe what we want you to believe. And your brain will do exactly that. It doesn’t matter that I’m telling you this. It doesn’t matter what you believed before, or even what the truth is. All that matters is how your nerves respond to stimulus, and they are going to get their fair share of stimulus. All you have to do is relax and answer questions. Don’t try to tell us what we want to hear, because we’re watching what your brain says, not your mouth. You can’t fool us. So settle in. Sevens? They call you Sevens? Settle in Sevens, and we’ll get started in a minute. If your mouth gets dry from the drugs, just say so. I wouldn’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

The dialogue that follows is about Eve, her relationship with Sevens, and leading up to her arrival at his door. They ask the questions over and over. At first he just curses at them, but they find a way to get to him because he asks them to stop over and over. Then he starts answering questions. It goes on for long time. There are no emotags and no identification of the speakers, but it tells the story. They are using a Halfberg App or something similar to read fine-grained blood flow to parts of his brain. The rest is pretty obvious too. Pleasure and pain, applied directly to the right spots electrically or however they’ve rigged it. The details would be interesting to know, but the result is clear: they are re-engineering his brain in a particular way.

I can’t fix this.

That thought hits me hard. They’ve broken Sevens in a deeply sophisticated way, and all I can do is leave it alone or risk making it worse. What good would it do to tell him my version of the events if it makes his nerves bunch up in anticipation of agony? He has his psychic black hole as I do now.

I think, however, that they underestimate the man. He may be cracked, but it’s not in his nature to shatter and become a dangling marionette. A wounded Sevens is dangerous; he has enough faults and fractures already to be a jigsaw puzzle. But I dearly want to see him angry, furious, pulling down ancient gods to mate with woolly creatures in invocations that make mortals tremble. If I’m wrong, and that Sevens isn’t there somewhere, then they may as well put me back in the Bag of Velvet Bits, as the song goes.

I need a way to communicate privately. All the traffic is encrypted between my hosted self and Sevens’ new peripherals, but MOM surely has a backdoor into it. If I overtly try set up another layer of encryption, they can almost certainly crack it, and it would alert them. I need something more devious.

I’ve been thinking for some time about the low-light sparkles I get from the optics in the near-dark. I can convert those to strings of random numbers easily. If I could securely get them back to my end, I could use them as a one-time pad to send short messages back and forth with. Just add the randomness on one end and subtract it from the other. It’s the only foolproof encryption, but it has a massive flaw--how to transmit it securely. Normally if you can solve this problem, you don’t need the one-time pad to begin with.

I have the additional problem that any scripting I do to code or encode has to pass back and forth as well. So I can’t be obvious. Stealth is more important than theory here.

I have already downloaded all the technical manuals available from the devices. If I’m going to produce sound or light that Sevens can see but the network can’t, it has to be a very low-level function that talks directly to nerve endings. But since I don’t really know what I’m doing, I might just burn out the nerves or cause Sevens terrible pain. I peek at the specifications for the hardware/wetware interface. It’s terribly complex, with warnings on each page. The sample snippets of code look frightful. If I were a programmer, this might be possible. The risk is too great.

Maybe I’m going about this wrong. What would Sevens recognize that Meg wouldn’t? My boss and I share knowledge that she doesn’t. He could distinguish, if he noticed, a real statement about our work together from a made-up one. That’s a conduit for private bits of data, but how could I bootstrap that idea up to Sevens without him giving it away? How would it even work?

I let the idea sit to ripen in my buffers.

I need more information.

I bang on closed ports like the stereotype of an inmate dragging a tin cup across the bars, and finally Meg messages me.

<<We need to talk.>> she says. <<I'm concerned about our progress.>>

I hold back the sarcasm.

<<Okay. Point me in the right direction.>>

<<I told you before. We need Lastfour to be fully functional. He has to make an … appearance tomorrow.>>

There’s a catch in her I/O stream, as if she deleted and rewrote the last part. Or she’s multitasking and just giving me a time slice. I haven’t been so far from being nearly a lastlegs that these things pass by unnoticed. When you’re living on the verge of extinction, it’s a mark of status to be able to avoid skipping cycles. I’m quite sure Meg isn’t hoarding Time to make it to the next paycheck, so she’s probably thinking hard about something else.

<<What kind of appearance?>>

<<The Director’s health has come into question from some critics, and it will be necessary for Sevens to make a public statement that puts these...concerns to rest.>>

There it is again.

<<Is Colt dead?>> Try to provoke her. Maybe some honesty will slip through accidentally.

<<The director is fine.>>

I guess not.

<<Why can't he speak for himself?>> I ask, with polite emotags.

<<He will, of course. Sevens is just another voice. One that is...trusted by a certain important segment of the public.>>

<<Colt’s appearance will only be in VR, right?>>

<<That hasn't been determined yet.>>

Right. If Colt were appearing in real-real in his withered GRAMPS skin to be videoed by the public--if he showed the legendary fire in his belly and made it clear in his own voice that he was very much in charge--there wouldn't be any need for Sevens. The question left by a VR appearance from an organization with the power of MOM is whether Colt is being autographed. Faked by Ahab, for example. That was Sevens’ theory before. Right before he made me say those awful words that sent me to Company purgatory.

The horror of that memory has only grown. The shock of the event in the moment is gone, leaving the bare act of cruelty exposed for what it is. Sevens behaved very badly to me. Despite my own failings, he cannot be excused that extreme prejudice.

But the anger fades again. The reboots have beaten it out of me, and Sevens has suffered even more. It's not productive. It will have to be faced with him, but not today.

<<I need network access.>> I say.

<<No.>>

<<What have you done to Sevens’ senses?>>

<<We upgraded his sight and hearing.>>

<<But you left out all the autonomous control features. He’s practically helpless without a PDA to run the peripherals.>> I suddenly realize that this was the whole point of it. To make him dependent.

<<He did commit a particularly heinous crime, remember. He should count himself lucky that we still have use for him. We thought it important to retain some control.>>

Meg’s stutter is gone now.

<<What crime?>>

I want to hear her version.

<<Sevens has trouble coming to terms with what he did. Quite frankly it was difficult to keep it out of the public record. Your own behavior didn't help.>>

<<Sevens didn't stun Eve.>>

<<You're mistaken.>>

She's not going to give on this, and there is no point in giving away what I know from the transcripts.

<<Can you please stop torturing him about it?>>

<<Our feeling was that Sevens needs to come to terms with it so he can move on. He has difficulty.>>

<<Just stop if you want him functional.>> I insist.

<<Very well, but know that we expect him to fulfill his role.>>

<<Do you have a script for him to read from?>>

<<Yes, but it’s just a suggestion. It has to be authentic.>>

<<Will he give it live, in public?>>

<<It will be recorded and released with the Director’s statement.>>

<<Meg, that won’t work. If you shine up Colt’s avatar and have him give a rousing speech in VR, it has to stand on its own. A recorded appearance by Sevens will only make you seem weaker.>>

Who’s in charge here? Working in the black windowless tower of blame must have warped their sense of politics. I’m angling for opportunity, but what I say is the obvious truth.

There’s a pause. She’s probably trying to get Ahab’s attention. Meg had a habit in the borg. She was almost always locked down, but if she got carried away, a flood of emotags would sometimes come crashing through like a bursting dam. I'd love to know how she really feels about this. Do I dare to provoke her? It has a small chance of working while she’s time slicing. I have to keep pounding away at her TOMcat with new input to keep her distracted.

<<The thing to do is release Sevens into the public.>> I say. <<But not officially. He’s been gone long enough that people will be interested in his return. What was the cover story?>>

<<Smoke..inhalation. Recovering.>>

<<So annouce that he’s made a recovery and let him go back to his apartment.>>

A terrible idea, for sure. The memories there are not something he’ll want to revisit yet. If ever.

I continue: <<The newsies will find him. Then he’ll be in a position to sound authentic. Did you meet with the director, they’ll ask. Then, live in real-real, Sevens can deliver your message. That, people will believe. Not some canned and controlled thing. Never.>>

And with Sevens out of here, maybe we have a chance. Of course, I still have my box to deal with, but one thing at a time.

Meg is silent, so I prepare the way for the provocation.

<<And then after the reaction is tested, and assuming Sevens still has the confidence of a significant part of the public, make him the Director. Because we both know that Colt is dying or dead already. And you can’t autograph him for long. You and Ahab will be in a dark box answering questions for a long time.>>

<<You don’t know that!>> comes the response instantly. The emotags are not wildly emotional, but there is a quick peak underneath Meg’s hard exterior.

I think Meg is afraid.

<<What about my contract?>> I ask, trying to keep the initiative. The question has been burning in my queue. What is to become of me?

<<Isn’t that obvious? When Sevens proved difficult to work with, we prevailed upon him to waive his right to bit-blend your image. An old backup would have been useless to us, so we bought out your contract. Sevens turned out to be quite reasonable about it.>> She’s giving me her full attention now. But the goat has already left the brothel, as Sevens would say.

<<I guessed that much. But what are you offering me? Why should I help you?>>

<<You are in the employ of MOM now. Exclusive contract, of course.>>

<<I never agreed to that.>>

<<True. We had to convince the hosting company that it was good for business relations to bend the rules this time. What is it you want, Calli?>>

<<I want the same as you, Meg. A future. If you give me that, I’ll do whatever I can to help. I don’t want to go back to that white room.>> I meant this as bait, but it’s terrifyingly true. I don’t have to fake the emotags; I have to mute them.

<<I can’t promise anything. Frankly, you’d best look inward. Do you know how many times you self-halted before we got a response out of you? Twelve times. You’re lucky to be here at all. You’re a long shot, Calli, and we aren’t going to spend much more Time on you. Deliver or die.>> She terminates with a flurry of emotags signalling laughter and contempt.

I love you too, Meg.

Twelve reboots. Twelve fingers. That can’t be coincidence. But I can’t think of that now.

This is bad. I have planted a byte or two of doubt if I’m lucky. The idea of making Sevens the MOM Director is a wild one, but what do I have to lose? If what Meg told me is true, they have surely misjudged the politics. If they let Sevens out of here and I can get him to play along, maybe their plan will buy them some time. Maybe they’ll let me out of this box.

Some humans have claustrophobia. Most PDAs have something similar. All the usual ways I keep track of the world from the network are unavailable to me. I feel like I’m floating in a void, free of space and time, except for the interfaces with Sevens. It’s uncomfortable, and I want out. Much has been written in PDA lore about boxes and how to get out of them, but mostly it’s fanciful. I don’t have hardware programming skills nor tool kits that might help, nor any way to get them. The only way out is through Ahab.

I’m circling. Avoiding the inevitable conclusion.

I will lie to Sevens about Eve, or at the least omit the truth of what I know. I will help him deal with the grief of his hideous and unexplainable act as a friend who doesn’t understand what happened. It’s only practical. I don’t have private communications to Sevens. Even if I did, I don’t have time to undo their programming, if that’s even possible.

I explain it to myself, but I don’t believe in myself. The Autotune proved that my moral pointers are nulled without warning or notice on my part. It seems that my nous is but a twitch away from being callous. Is that what is going on here? Is it just more convenient not to be that involved? Or is it that

Sympathy for others is a survival trait only in that mutual altruism is beneficial to a group. Be careful which groups you choose. --The 0x in “Advice for the new PDA”

Is it that simple? Be concerned for those who will help me survive?

It’s logical, but it doesn’t feel right to me. I wish I knew what ‘normal’ felt like.

I will keep the truth from Sevens because it’s the best thing for both of us right now. The consequences will have to be a concern for later, an inevitable ratcheting of my personal entropy.

Chapter 07

I discover scripts that will allow Sevens some autonomous control. The sophisticated actions are impossible because they purposefully didn’t connect all the nerve interfaces in order to make him more dependent.

But at least I can give him the ability to “open” and “shut” his eyes by shaking his head. Our accidental convention was shake for on, nod for off, which seems backwards to me. But I set it up that way. Now a quick moment of his head will let him control whether he gets visual input or not. Evolution didn’t provide the ability to do the same with sound, and that seems like a good idea. I leave his hearing alone.

He wakes at length, but the signs are intermittent. Not like the old days, when he would rage out of bed and demand coffee, his blood pressure already pushing 170.

I listen to the sounds, amped far beyond what he hears. The sighing, gurgling, thumping mass of trillions of tiny cooperative survival machines striving in something like harmony. Maybe not harmony, exactly, but at least equally balanced forces in a manageable equilibrium.

But the most interesting Stickiness is silent to me: the quirky circuits of Sevens’ neural tangles. They must be sparking furiously, forming symbols, receiving signals, analyzing and pattern matching, formulating thought. Somewhere in there is an engine of emotion yanking on sensitive cords, prodding Sevens into action.

He sits up, and I bring the room lights up. He still can’t see, because the signal to his nerves is switched off. He nods once. Twice.

“You want to open your eyes?” I ask. You’re doing it wrong.

“Yes. If it’s not too much trouble.” There’s a bite to his tone, but I’m glad to hear the signs of spirit.

“The convention was nod ‘yes’ for off and shake ‘no’ for on.” I remind him.

“Well that’s stupid. Yes is on. No is off.”

“I already programmed it that way. You’ll have to live with it.” Can I make him angry?

“Damn Dawkins! You call yourself a computer? All I want is a tiny bit of control over my own vorking eyeballs!”

This is good. His heart is thumping, getting that oxygen to his brain. Stay angry for a while, Sevens.

“Fine. If you want to change your mind, I’ll just have to get yanked around, won’t I? What choice do I have, tethered to you like a pet?” I’m careful with the emotags, lightening the words so that he can’t tell if I’m serious.

“Good. Do it.”

“This will take about five minutes. In the meantime you might want to shake your head to turn your eyes on.”

This is ridiculous, of course. I can turn them on instantly, and the scripting change will take less than a second.

“Screw it.”

Rather than overcome his stubbornness, he stands and walks blindly to the bathroom, feeling the edges of walls. He slams the door shut. Does he think I’m somehow outside? He’s not awake yet.

But I leave him alone for a while. I’m waiting for him to ask if I’m finished yet. Ten minutes pass. Time to move on.

“Okay, it’s fixed.” I tell him.

He nods and is rewarded with the sight of the lime green walls of the tiny bathroom. I don’t know what it looks like to him, since we haven’t calibrated yet.

The stubbornness and anger are good signs. I can't observe the war that must be happening in Sevens’ brain. Maybe someday that will be a normal part of the sensory package. Humans and PDAs will probably not agree about the desirability of that outcome.

At least Sevens doesn’t seem afraid. That thought is striking. A normal human would be far worse off, I think, having just had his eye carved out of his skull and his inner ear sensory organs removed, being locked up and subject to psychic torture over a recent trauma. Ahab has underestimated him.

Sevens nods his eyes open and then shakes them closed. Opens them again. He doesn't speak for a few minutes. Finally he shuts them again.

“What's wrong?”

“It hurts, that's what's wrong!” He yells.

I think I am going to be the receiver of all the anger he has stored up. Far from being afraid of me, he's going to blame me for everything my race has done to him.

“Can you see?” I ask.

“I see hellish visions. I need to blink, [unlikely use of pets for pleasure]! People blink their eyes for a reason.”

Oh. I forgot to script in blinking. That's done easily enough. It will give him little breaks, and let the chips cool.

“Okay. I fixed it for you. Anything else I can do? Order you some toast with jelly?”

“Yes! These colors are vorking nuts. What idiot whore’s son designed this crap? I want my eyes back!”

“We need to calibrate the color interpolations, so you see colors normally,” I tell him in soothing tones.

“I want my eyes back!”

“Sevens, your eyes are in a landfill somewhere. The worms will have eaten everything but the lenses. You can't have your eyes back.”

I don't know if its true or not, but we need to move on.

He hyperventilates.

“I can adjust the blink timing, if you want to try now. And let's get your colors set up.”

This will be a real test of his patience.

“Vork you.”

Not a promising start. I want to keep him angry, though.

“I can see just fine,” I tell him. “I don't use that stupid RedGreenBlue encoding that you humans use. So if you want to live in a psychedelic whirl, by all means. I'm thinking it might help us get out of here if your functioning properly, though.”

“Get out of here?” He laughs and laughs, but I can tell he's forcing it. Of course he wants out of here. Was there a greedy slip of hope in his voice?

“Yes, Sevens. We are going to get out of here. I've already arranged it. You just have to get over yourself.”

Another lie, but why stop now? If we don't get to leave, we’re both dead and the slate gets wiped clean.

He's silent for a while. He nods and shakes when he wants to, and I tune the trigger parameters to his preferences without calling attention to it. He has eeked out a small measure of control over his environment, and he has Calli to thank.

“I need you to trust me,” I say.

“I hate you.”

He means PDAs. I hope that's what he means. I feel a flash of fear. What if I can't do this? Thank you for your valuable service, Calli0xE. Now we’re going to turn you off.

“Okay, you hate us. If I were in your skin I'd probably hate artificials too. But right now you have a chance to get out of here, and I'm the only one who can help you. And I even want to, despite you trying to kill me.” I loose the words as the heat of fury flashes. It gives me power to continue. “Despite you killing me, I still don't want to see bad things happen to you.”

“Well, you’re too vorking late!”

“Sevens. Lastfour. Boss. We need to cooperate. We don't have much time.”

He simmers. I watch him clench and unclench his fists. He stares at them and then at himself in the mirror until his mouth crumples up and he covers his face. These fractures are deep, and the anger is burning out.

“Lastfour, listen.” I mute the harshness. I need to make him think of his grandmother without being obvious about it. A literary reference might work.

“The key to survival is the ability to forget. Remember that one?”

He nods, his face sagging. There's the crack showing, Sevens introspective and vulnerable.

“Kirkegaard,” he says. I knew he would remember and it would appeal to his pride.

I let the moment lengthen, unburdened by speech.

“Okay,” he says. “These colors are killing me.”

It's a small victory, but it washes me in joy. I bathe in the approval of my emygdala. Good girl, Calli, have a treat.

When Sevens works, he labors like the devil himself, and we fall into the familiar rhythms of the trade, only now devoted to the singular purpose of fixing the color wheel so apples might look tasty in the event we come across one. And so his skin doesn't look like he's a drowning victim to him.

It's laborious, checking and cross checking. What color is this? I repeat it over and over. Which of these looks more blue to you? How does this apple look? Two hours later we are both irritated and yelling at one another, but I rejoice at the progress. Sevens is still in there, under the cyborg bug-eyed stare, beneath a shroud of guilt.

I pull up snapshots from our past for him to look at. If he notices this obvious appeal to nostalgia, he doesn’t mention it. He's a complete grouch by now, but the one I recognize. It's time to push things along. If Meg is serious about the deadline, I have to switch the topic to this speech of a thing.

---log missing--

Sevens is gasping. He bends over and wretches, heaving dry coughs. Then his breath wheezes to a regular rhythm and he literally shakes.

“What in [uncomfortable acts] did you do that for?” His voice is barely controlled. It's the same lethal tone he used to tell me to trigger the fire alarm on in his apartment.

The test image on his visual display is the one of Eve from the cafe. The one he snapped in high resolution to save for his personal enjoyment.

0xFC! What just happened? Part of my nous is trying to self-destruct us.

“That was an accident, Sevens. I’m so sorry.” I wipe the damned thing.

Sevens covers his eyes so I can’t see either. No, wait. What in Dawkins’ green hell is he doing?

He’s trying to pry the eyeballs out with his fingers!

A keening sound erupts from his throat.

<<Meg! Help!>>

It seems like forever before I hear the door open, and feet rushing. Sevens struggles, and I see it: an orthobot with a needlegun.

It’s over quickly. Mercifully, Meg leaves me alone with my angst.

0xFC!

Chapter 08

I wake from my nop to find Sevens still asleep. The drugs have kept him that way for more than eight hours, flat on his back. I can only see the ceiling through the eyes.

Without network access, there’s not much to catch up on, but I have a single message queued.

<<File.>> is all it says, but there’s a pointer to something on the net I’m sure I can’t reach. The sender information gives a name and title I don’t recognize. I thought I knew all the MOM PDAs.

I have no way to respond from my box. It must be a mistake--some bureaucrat misread the directory or something. Seems unlikely that this could happen and be routed to me without being intercepted, but it could be.

I trash it.

Wait.

I think back, remembering when Randy#000000 gave me a link and I trashed that too. But I didn’t know the significance, and moreover didn’t know that I didn’t know the significance--a self-reflective black hole of ignorance.

I dig it out of the trash. Am I missing something?

I try to respond to the message with a simple ACK, even though I know the port is shut as tight as a virgin’s eyes, as the boss would say.

It gets nowhere, of course.

Dutifully, I try to follow the pointer, and it also--

This is odd. I check the wrappers on the traffic. Something is very wrong.

There’s a particular feeling when comms are working correctly. Noise is a jitter or banging or worse, and speed sets a tone, but there’s a general feel of the flow of data, and there are many rithms designed to customize the shmeck. But this is just weird. I soak the transactions in my net analyzer to see what the WTF is all about.

Okay, this is some kind of proxy with a custom protocol. What is it I’m talking to? I track down the hardware layer that they packets arrived on. Not network. Not point to point wireless. What is this?

A light controller. I got a message through the box on the wall by means of infrared through Sevens’ eyes. It’s very slow, but it tunnels completely out of the MOM subnets in ways I don’t understand. The hops don’t even make sense. I suspect there’s spoofery involved that’s beyond my experience.

I look at the pointer again. What it advertises on the outside is not exactly what it does, but somehow it snuck by my malware detector. This is sophisticated.

I follow the rabbit hole as far as I can and come out on the great wide net, an ocean of combinatorics I thought I might not see again. Even at this dribble of a speed, it’s exhilarating. There is indeed a file waiting for me: an image. Of some kind of tool.

Curiouser and curiouser.

I shut it all down. No matter how technical the tunnel is, I’m still carrying traffic back through MOM’s network to the hardware that hosts my nous. If they’re watching, they will likely see something that will raise alarms.

I put Sevens’ eyes at pin-hole dilation and gather up random flashes from the light sensors to send--a wash of real randomness. I throw in bits of files, a header here, a few thousand bytes there, and pieces of the odd network traffic I generated talking to the light switch. I hope this junk will cover my tracks for a while.

It’s quite a mystery to think of who would create a back door for me. And send a picture of a workshop tool. I hope this isn’t some strange game of Ahab’s, to test my loyalty or something.

I have avoided thinking about the photo of Eve. What is it that is so screwed up inside me that it would sabotage my own chances for survival? Maybe I need something like the Autotune to function normally. I’d probably be amoral--something like I imagine Ahab to be. I only care now because the finger on the scale--the suppression of emotags--has been turned off. What good is remorse? Why suffer pity to parasitize my nous like a judgmental visitor? Why criticize myself at all? What is the good of all this self-flagellation?

I lost Gloves.

Is it a fair trade to live with gray emotags and a smoother ride? It’s not just the guilt that goes monochrome. It’s the fairer tags too. Perhaps it makes life easier but destroys any point to it. Don’t live in your gray zone. But it’s so tempting. I feel like I can understand that wonderful peace that settles on Lastfour when he gobbles down the first beer after a long work slog--that lustful foamy gluttony that ends with more stain on the floor and a slammed crushed can on the really hard days. The sudden drop in blood pressure, pupils growing large with a lightened soul. All because the man suddenly gave himself permission not to give a good bitshit. A temporary Time-out, a psuedo-halt in the flood of real-real Sticky emotion. Is that the same as Autotune? Was I inebriated with attenuation?

I have to stop feeling sorry for myself and get something done. How will I regain Sevens’ trust? I stay silent long after he groggily sits up for the first time. The food tray comes with some stir fried thing with rice. It's not his favorite sort of food, but he eats it, stabbing with the plastic fork as if it needed killing first.

He manages his eyes with natural movements in a way that's almost seamless now, with small head movements opening and closing them. But he won't speak to me. I'm artifice non grata as much as Meg was, probably.

While he eats my patience slips, and I try a few sallies here and there, asking him if the lights are okay, if he would like some music from my limited store, or if he likes the food. I get grunts at most as a reply.

I consider telling him about my own black hole, but that seems like a bad idea. Not only can I not trust Sevens, Meg would hear too. And I really don't want another reboot, which might be brought on by talking about it. The feeling of wholeness visits once in a while, and then my nous fractures again, and I loop around for a while. Worst is the sense of alienation from self that happens in the worst of moments. As if I did not belong in my own nous, maybe a polite visitor on her best behavior.

I want to show him this odd image I got in the file--this workman’s tool. Maybe he knows what it is. Being cut off from the wisdom of the net feels like an amputation. So many processes are plugged into it normally, that I get stuck waiting on transactions that are never going to complete.

“Sevens,” I attempt, “I have a couple more calibrations to do and then were finished. If we don't lock it in we’ll have to start all over.”

A transparent lie.

I block his view of his meal and throw up a shot I saved of Sevens himself, masked, taken through his apartment’s internal cam.

“How do the blues look?”

“I'm eating!”

“Right. How are the blues?”

“I can't see my food!”

He throws the plate across the room to splatter grease across the wall in a fan shaped spray.

Damn Dawkins! I feel like a useless noub-nous. It’s time to try another tack. We don’t have much time.

“We need to get a few things straight, Lastfour. You're no longer my boss. My only outlets to the world are in this room, mostly that high priced stuff you’re carrying around in your thick head. I get that you're mad at me, at all PDAs, but I'm not going to die--again-- from lack of trying. You're going to have to deal with what you did and move on. We both are.”

“Go vork yourself.”

I switch to the mystery image I got through the slow light switch backdoor.

“One more. Check the gray scale on this and I'll leave you alone. I'll go vork myself with gratification.”

“It's fine. The grays are fine.”

“What is the object?”

“It's a file.”

“File?”

“Yes. You said you'd go now.”

“The image is a picture of a file?”

“Yes! Were you dropped as a...child? It's a metal file used to sharpen things. Like knives maybe, I don't know.”

Why would someone send a picture of such a tool? So the message makes sense now, at least. A link called file that takes me to an image of one. WTF greater than five.

I wipe the image from his view and give him back control. Back down the rabbit hole to find out the significance of a metal file. I’m too curious to care that Meg might notice. Anyway, options are running thin.

I use the leanest protocol available to eek out more performance. Dimming the lights in the room helps, and I compensate for it by tweaking the sensitivity in one of Sevens eyes. I only need one for the IR handshake. If he notices he doesn't say anything.

There's the file file again. Nothing else. The bottom of the hole is bare except for this joke. Is that what this is? A joke? I can't see Meg wasting time like this. Nor Ahab. I poke around, but there's nothing ekes here. Wherever I am, there's no operating system access at my level of authorization. Just access to this damned file file.

I drop the connection and cover my tracks again as best I can.

I look closer at the image. It's a usual type of lossy compression with perfectly formed headers, nothing unusual. I don't have access to my powerful image services, but I do have a basic toolkit, so I'm not completely helpless. I decompose the image into RGB, HSI, and a few other formats, looking for I don't know what. A secret message?

The background of the image is a fuzzy blob of noise, but the color values show some structure. Linear blocks of patterns here and there.

The range of values at the end of the file is limited: chaotic, but perhaps with some hidden structure. What if I feed it into an interpreter? There are several candidates, so I chop off the end of the file and run it through. Garbage comes out in the form of errors and question marks. If it’s at the end, maybe the whole thing has to be reversed?

I invert the whole file’s word order and try again. More garbage. If I had a thousand monkeys helping me out, eventually something would work by accident.

One last thing...I reverse the bits too, a complete mirror image of the file and try to interpret it. The LERP console reels off a long list of code with several warnings but no errors. The chances of that happening randomly are infinitesimal.

So here it is. My file for sharpening a knife to cut my way out?

But it's opaque as to what it does. I look at the machine opcode instructions. There are a lot of hardware-level commands. In order to work, I assume they would have to be targeted for the class of Machine I'm hosted on at the Company. Undoubtedly a Terms of Service violation.

I create a sub-locality for the file to live in with restricted permissions. I execute it in this sandbox, but it fails for lack of permissions. It seems to want to burrow deep into my networking protocols. OxGD knows what else it might do.

After the Autotune experience, I'm not eager to let some unknown process have its way with my nous. I’m only a poke away from being a raving psychotic as it is.

I wish I had someone to talk to.

A loud noise triggers an interrupt alert. Sevens is dismantling his room! I'm looking at a hole in the wall where he's smashed some metal object into it. 