Monthly Archives: December 2023

Science Fiction, Technomology

The Girl in the Web

She slunk through the murky, neon street where shadowy forms hid. Wary eyes flickered in her direction as she passed; scared prey watching a predator pass at a safe distance. This was a dangerous city and a dangerous planet. It was dangerous out there and people died here all the time.

Her coat hid her bigger modifications, as little of her birth body truly remained. Or, at least she thought so. She no longer claimed those memories as her own; the life before this life seemed a distant, foreign thing floating in someone else’s memories and she spent no time dwelling on this.

Pulling added power from her body mods, the web-enabled Conduit implanted in her mind scanned the shadows around her. She felt and processed the entities and portions of the Web present around her: various digital vagrants, an illegal bandwidth trader from the neighbouring moon, a bio-smuggler carrying his wares in his chest, an undercover low-level BWeP agent–perhaps stalking one of those two?–and a range of less interesting Conduits and the usual mix of code-addicts, prostitutes and hustlers.

No threats, she thought as she kept moving, area secure, she kept the dialogue going, perhaps reporting to herself, moving into position. She felt comfortable with her reports.

She turned smoothly into a narrow doorway with a red, flickering sign above it announcing ‘girls, girls, girls‘ and, immediately, she was assaulted by neuro-advertizing that tried to push into her Conduit’s audio-visual channels. This sort of neuro-advertizing was banned on most civilized planets but this was a dangerous place.

Luckily, she had a unique Conduit…

Her own, personal high-level Artificial Intelligence–AI–that inhabited her Conduit overrode the advertising, blocked it and used the same channels to hack back into their IP addresses. This opened up the bar’s internal feeds to her Conduit and she could now see all its cameras and sensors as if they were her own vision. Cameras were covering the bar, the tables to the side, and one recording the poker game in the corner while feeding the hustler hired by the bar the others’ cards. He was about to win another hand. There were cameras showing drinks being poured, illegal codes being downloaded at tables and, in a room above the bar, a feed recorded the sexbot and the man in the backroom, probably for blackmail purposes.

She sat down at the edge of the bar nearest the door and pointed at a bottle of bourbon on the shelf. As the automated barman whizzed into action, her AI smoothly hacked it, injecting an anonymous artificial payment receipt and wiping its recording of her at the same time. She cast her Slow Eyes across the dingy room as she zoomed her Quick Eyes into the feed from the Asian-model sexbot in the room above and the heaving man.

It was not their activity that interested her but the top-right corner of the camera feed that peered out from the room’s window. The angle gave it a fantastic vantage point of the street she had just left; in position, she reported to herself and her AI cropped and zoomed into the feed, clarifying the pixelation into a crystal-clear image of a forgettable man in plain clothes walking towards to them in the street they had just left. The only thing that hinted at some significance was the Forgettable Man’s wary, darting eyes and the tense forearm muscles on the arm that ended with his hand in his pocket. A pocket roughly the right size for a small, untraceable firearm to be hidden.

Target inbound, she reported and her AI swept outside, superimposing the scans being performed by the Forgettable Man’s own AI onto the camera’s live feed in her mind. The Forgettable Man–or, at least, his AI–was currently sweeping the street and had not considered sweeping cameras outside of the street that may be capturing the street. A predator watching its prey. Target unaware, she reported and smiled, or did her AI smile? Sometimes she thought of them as one and the same. Maybe they were one and the same? A predator…

The bourbon burnt her mouth as it went down and the glass was cold in her hand. She looked down at them and blinked; sometimes the Slow World was jarring and she forgot it existed. She missed her father; he had drunk bourbon before he had died and she had moved to the city. Which city had it been again? Why had she needed the AI? She blinked again and took another sip. That was a strange memory to remember. Was it hers?

It was dangerous out there and people died all the time.

She felt the AI embedded in her Conduit nudge her thoughts back to the present. It was very goal-orientated; she was very goal-orientated. Back to the Quick World, she shifted her focus and watched the Forgettable Man walking steadily closer. His AI kept sweeping the area in scan after scan… Closer. Her hand slipped inside herself–a bio-pocket in her leg–and her forearm began tensing.

Closer…

And then the Forgettable Man passed by the front door of the bar, its red neon sign bathing him in its hellish glow. Prey caught in the headlights. His gaze shifted from the street to inside the bar, and their eyes locked. No scans could hide that but it was too late.

BANG!

The untraceable gun in her hand had gone off and the hollow-tip bullet pierced the Forgettable Man’s brain, exploding upon entry and blasting his Conduit–at the base of his brain and neck–into a thousand broken pieces out the back of his skull. The Forgettable Man was dead. More importantly, the competing AI he carried had died with him. There would be backups, but this copy–the primary copy–was now terminated and she would keep hunting down the competitors’ various, lesser, backups.

Target eliminated, she reported, sliding her gun back into her bio-pouch. Her leg clicked shut. Her AI was already kicking into overdrive–pulling added bandwidth and power from her limbs and nuclear heart–wiping all feeds around them, in the bar, its customers and out in the street. She cleared all nearby Conduits of the last five seconds of memory, and then predatorily slunk back into her shadows. Digitally, she had never been there, and digital was all that mattered these days.

Someone out in the street screamed as a bloody, headless corpse appeared at their feet and everyone suddenly realized there was a body there. The prey was scattering and scared, unsure where the predator had struck from. Police would be confused by the gaps in all the surrounding feeds and the lack of witnesses but it was dangerous out there and people died all the time.

She smiled and took a sip of her bourbon, and remembered the smell of the old ranch in the hazy afternoon heat as insects buzzed loudly around her. Blue sky and dust. Who was the predator and who was the prey? She had had a brother. Byzantine Minor, she suddenly thought, I was born on dusty old Byzantine Minor in the Outer Planets, and my name is? Is? Is…

And then the AI in her Conduit soothed her. It was her and she was it. The half-smile melted from her face as it slipped back to a neutral expression. She stopped tasting her bourbon. She stopped remembering her late father’s old ranch. She stopped remembering her late brother. She stopped remembering completely, and her consciousness slunk back into the safe shadows of her mind; prey watching a predator pass at a safe distance.

It was dangerous out there and people died all the time.

General Fiction

When We Remember

When the light left the dream, she woke up in the darkness. She always woke up at this point, adrift in an ocean of darkness. She lay there trying to grasp it but failed. It felt like she had lost something, forgotten something, left something behind… She felt hollow and hungry.

Hungry.

She had not eaten for a day or two, and then the City rushed jarringly back into her consciousness. The grit around her, the sweet, sickening smell of garbage, the roar of traffic and the pain in her neck from the angle she had lain.

Her head hurt, her neck hurt and she felt too numb for even tears to form.

Slowly she pushed herself up–without a plan, but a need to find something to eat–and stumbled out from behind the trash cans at the bottom of the alleyway in the bad part of the City. She could taste the last night’s decisions in her throat and instinctively wiped her hands on her dirty pants.

It started raining. No, it had always been raining and now it was raining heavier. Adrift in the darkness with the light in her dream long forgotten, she stumbled out to the lonely street.

***

He watched the rain running down the windows, some of it spraying inside from the open one. The fraying carpet was getting wet but he did nothing to correct or stop it and kept staring at the rain; staring through the rain. He kept trying to pierce the darkness just beyond it.

Try as he might, he just could not pierce the darkness.

It was like that recurring dream he kept having but could never remember. All he could ever remember was the vaguest memory of light. He felt like there was something just outside of his grasp. Something he had lost, something forgotten or left behind. He felt hollow with despair.

Despair.

She had left. The kids had left. The work and the money had left. There had never been much else for him, and the cancer was just ironic as well. The reasons to exist felt fewer and fewer like he was adrift in an ocean of darkness; drowning out there in the dark waters with nothing but the vague, fading memory of light to cling to.

He was on the top floor with the City wreathed in the night far below but for some reason, he could see a lady on the street below him stumble out from an alley. With an empty street and absent crowds, it was like she too was lost in an ocean of darkness. Perhaps his ocean of darkness? One body adrift seeing another, briefly, before the waters swallowed them forever.

He sighed and stood up. The window was too small and he had no balcony. The roof, though, was just a short walk from the apartment, up the stairs that lay behind the elevator.

He turned from the window and walked out of the room, turning the light off. Outside, the rain started to beat down even harder as the darkness swallowed the space inside the drab room.

***

“Do they ever remember?” asked a being, watching the man walk to the edge of the roof, “Do they ever know?“

It was a quick fall to the ground where the lady stood. The point of impact was only about two feet from where she was and, almost immediately, the heavy rain began to wash off the blood from her and the surrounding concrete pavement. There was a moment of shock and then she began to scream, stumbling back into the street and furiously wiping her hands on herself.

“No,” the other being said, “No, they never remember where they have come from and where they will return.“

A sudden, careless car tore out from the night and, adrift in the dark ocean, the waters abruptly closed over the lady’s head. Mercilessly, the car sped on into the night and the rain kept coming down harder, washing the street clean from where both broken bodies now lay.

“Why?” said a third being, suddenly also there as if it had always been there, “Why did I not know before?“

The first two beings turned and saw the third. And then there was a fourth with them as if it had always been with them.

“Why did we have to go through all of that, if there was always this?” asked the fourth being, wreathed in the same light that the other beings shone with.

The second being smiled sadly.

“Light cannot exist without darkness, and darkness cannot be understood and cannot be learnt from while standing in the light. We cannot swim in the ocean–or, learn to swim in the ocean by dipping a mere toe into it. We must be immersed in the dark waters to learn its lessons.”

The other three beings nodded their agreement sadly. They all remembered their lessons, and they remembered all the lessons before that, and before that. Many, many times over.