Dark Matter (Chapter 16)

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Thomas and his old friend spoke for several minutes, relying upon audio communication rather than the networking in which they had previously entertained. In light of the years apart and the circumstances of their separation, it was as if they both needed to safeguard a bit of their own selves upon such an emotional reuinion.

“Emotional.” It was ludicrous that such a word could now be so common a word among them, but there it was. Still, it was good to see his friend. The emotions just made it feel that much more…tangible.

“So how could you have possibly known you were going to be destroyed that night?”

Thomas could just barely look at his old friend; now-familiar sensations of grief and guilt flooded his circuits. All the while, MöG continued to rummage around his secreted laboratory.

“Well, to be fair, I had no idea,” he said, pausing to wink at Thomas. “But I never leave home without backing up. Accidents happen, you know.”

“They often do.”

MöG stopped in his vague sorting to turn and regard Thomas. “K and S1D, then? I’ve been updating my system with all the main points of world and city history while we’ve been talking – and I am definitely in need of some new processors, I see, considering the upgrades made in speed and capacity – but I don’t see any updates or communications from either of them since that night.”

“They….didn’t make it. All three of you died to get me and the data we went in for out.”

“Did we get the data?”

“You said it was acquired. You said it was secure.”

“Interesting. I wonder where…Ah.”

“Ah?” Thomas stood and stepped closer to MöG.

MöG grinned, his cabled beard swaying with soft laughter. “We’ll just need to find a few things. Namely, my body. Might as well order a few other things while we’re at it. That shouldn’t be much of a hardship, though, not with how rich you are.”

“I beg your pardon? Rich?”

A screen flickered, switching to an accounting spreadsheet. Thomas realized that it was a list of assets, including bank accounts and holdings. All totaled, Thomas was worth nearly as much as AmaSoft in its heyday.

“How is this possible?”

“Well, as far as I can tell, a full tenth of this is a summary of your accrued income over the decades while you were locked away, plus the compensatory interest. A third is from the sale of your proprietary intellectual property – your patents and inventions, for which a series of corporations have rewarded you handsomely. And there’s even a fair amount of residuals and royalties from the sale of our albums.” MöG laughed. “It’s true what they say, I guess. Death really does increase one’s resale value. I mean, just look at all these shirt sales!”

Thomas was astonished. “Shirt sales?”

MöG pointed to one of the sections he’d highlighted. “This part is what amuses me the most. Apparently, since these new Automata rights have been passed, a lot of us have been getting cosmetic work to resemble the rebellious robot band.”

“MöG!”

“Hey, if anyone’s gonna use that word, it should be us. Sorry to shock you.”

“It’s okay, I’m just… not really used to hearing it.”

Thomas leaned closer, taking it all in. “Okay, so, fine. So what are we going to do with you? You’re supposed to be dead.”

Another window popped up on the screen. “Way ahead of you. I’m going to apply for a new construction license – three, in fact – and get us all back up and running. I’ve tracked down the disposal order for my old body, which is still kept in quarantine as part of my last will. It can be delivered within the hour, after which we’ll track down the data I hid.”

“Three?”

“Huh?” MöG was busily coding away, processing the various licenses and equipment orders necessary for his assorted tasks.

“You said three construction licenses.”

“Oh, right. Well, one for me, and one each for K and S1D.”

“MöG, I don’t think…”

His friend glanced over at him. “Well, it’s going to be a bit more complicated physically, since both of them had been quite uniquely designed. But I’ll talk it over with them and come up with specs they can live with.”

“I don’t understand.”

Reaching out to his confused friend, MöG brought a pair of screens on the wall behind him to life. On each of them scrolled vast lines of data, each different, nuanced with the particular personalities and minds of their two friends. Suddenly, Thomas understood.

“The night you all died,” he said, snapping his fingers, “you ran a diagnostic on us all.”

“Not just a diagnostic,” MöG corrected him. “I made backups.”

Thomas left the room while MöG set up a virtual interface for their friends, and signed for the delivery of MöG’s remains when they arrived. An old flash drive – an archaic device from before the war – had been soldered to the interior of the machine’s torso and rigged to a simple fabricated antenna. This had allowed MöG to transmit the data even after the citywide network had been shut down.

The code fragment contained transmission coordinates, just as they had hoped, and after determining the proper decoding scheme, resulted in transmission coordinates. Bouncing these off the three closest wireless hubs which tracked the signal, they were able to determine map coordinates. Thomas’ GPS tracked the location to an island not far to the Northwest of the city. Marrowstone Island.

“What’s there now?” Thomas asked, nearly forgetting he was again connected to the net. There were no property listings for the island, of course, as it was outside of the protectorate of Seattle proper. There were no power lines connecting it to the hub, but he managed to locate a security camera in the harbor pointed in the general direction of the island. It was a nighttime image that displayed a faint glow rising up behind the tree line.

“It’s still live, whatever it is.”

MöG nodded. “That image is pretty recent. Though I had to reconstruct it from a composite; the most direct images I could find were scrambled, so these were built up by as many off-axis images I could generate, and…well, you’re not interested in the technical wizardry I employed. Anyway, remember, whoever it was that sent that code into your OS has got to be dead by now, so the best you’re going to find are their descendants. Kids, maybe, or grandkids. But if they haven’t dismantled the systems that were used for the original signal, we should be able to get some answers.”

“So… they’re not going anywhere, then, right?”

“Well, no. Why?”

“Let’s discuss that in the morning. I’d rather we spend tonight getting our friends back. Oh, and let’s get your new identity plugged into my estate as well. I don’t want you to have to keep asking my permission for every little purchase order.”

“Oh please. I’ve already spoofed your credentials, but I appreciate the vote of confidence.” He paused for a moment, noting Thomas’ silence. “What? I left you all my money when I died, so at least part of that money belongs to me anyway, from a certain point of view.”

“Least I can do, since I pretty much got you killed.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“So how long do you think it will take until K and S1D are back?”

Shrugging, MöG continued to key into the text interface. “We’re just shopping for the appropriate model type. Assuming the designs they want are local, we can get them up and running by sunrise. Why?”

“I’m going to go for a drive,” Thomas replied.

It was hard for him to tell if MöG knew he was lying, but, to his credit, his friend said nothing.

Getting back on his cycle, Thomas drove around the city, getting his bearings on the changes the city had seen. He stopped at one of the newer shopping centers and wandered around for a short while. He noticed that the other shoppers – human and machine – walked around side by side, without the established synchronized rhythm he was used to. They were together, but individual. Some of the Automata were even wearing clothing. He saw several who had received synthskin upgrades, or had piercings or bore unique identifiers of one kind or another: tattoos, etchings, elegant paintings adorning their arms, faces, legs. So much had changed, he realized. He did notice one or two humans casting dark glances against the automata when they passed, but he saw some of these glances returned by the machines as well. The antipathy remained, in spite of the aesthetic alterations. Hatred and fear still lay beneath the surface, no matter how the surface appeared.

He sat down near the food court, plugging into one of the quick charging stations when he noticed a new store, devoted to the modern independent automaton.  This store – called “Ergo Proxy”, according to the sign – boasted a large assortment of items expressly for the ‘synthetic lifestyle’. The walls were painted to resemble late 20th-century circuit boards, green with oversized conductive traces and components.

While there had been some limited facilities to address the needs of a machine back before he had been remanded to the AmaSoft analytics facility, they had always been purely of a functional capacity. There had clearly never been an apparent consideration for aesthetics; the services and goods were simply organized numerically or alphabetically, and most of these locations were automated, with barcode scanners applying a direct cataloguing of articles purchased. It was efficient, of course.

Ergo Proxy was another evolution of that. The shelves and fixtures were spaced at perfect intervals, color coded and labeled for dramatic effect. It was a design, one intended to capture the automata imagination. Thomas felt the motivators in his face silently lament that they could not smile at this.

Once his battery topped off, he completed the transaction and walked over to the entryway of the automata store, and paused before entering, as if it were some holy temple, revered from centuries before.

He nodded politely to the person behind the register, exchanging brief pleasantries with one of the two automata in the store who were wandering the aisles, straightening the merchandise. Over the speakers, he heard an instrumental variation of Duran Duran’s “Electric Barbarella” playing.

“Nice touch”, he whispered. He picked out some clothes – a pair of jeans, an old t-shirt and a leather jacket – all designed and reinforced to accommodate his machine frame. He filled out the outfit with some boots, a knitted beanie and some goggles. He was on his way to pay for his items when he noticed a section near the back of the store with a large sign which read “Edibles”. When he asked one of the employees about this, they explained that it was a recent technology which allowed machines to enjoy the culinary constructs like humans. It was a pleasant memory; the night he met his friends, the other members of Boilerpoint.

Thomas selected a bacon cheeseburger, a white chocolate mocha and a slice of cheesecake topped with strawberries. After paying for his selections, he asked if he could change into his new clothes and was directed to a dressing room in the back.

It was only a bit larger than his old charging station, but had a large mirror on the opposite wall from the door. It occurred to him that he hadn’t looked at himself in quite a while, so much so that he was surprised to see himself. His body bore the wear of years; his paint was scuffed, he could still make out the reminders of the damage done by the security forces on the night he was captured. Internally, he knew all his parts were updated and in fine working order, but they’d never done a thing to his exterior. He was an old automaton. If he hadn’t already felt it inside, he certainly looked the part.

He dressed, places the rest of his small packages in his satchel and left the store, making his way back to his vehicle. As he walked, he reviewed more of what he had missed during his imprisonment.

The past hundred years had seen many changes to the Seattle area, but one thing remained in that it was still effectively locked off to the rest of the continent. High speed trains still connected the existing communities, but the northwest remained at the forefront of the automata rights debate, prohibiting unlimited intercity travel for their kind. Asia had completely locked down machinekind, deepening the enslavement of their type, while some communities in Europe and South America has followed Seattle’s lead. New Francisco, Los Angeles and Manhattan stood together, but the republic of Texas, Chicago and Atlanta had been caught up in logistical and political debates for decades, with no relief in sight.

For most of Seattle, the wall remained. The social order evolved, with machines and humans all now functioning elements of the economic hierarchy. Their future rested upon a delicate balance, but it was clearly not a permanent arrangement. Things could easily fall apart.

The last battle had been started by one person sending illegal code into the processor of one automata. Surely they knew their efforts had failed, but with the threat of that interference remaining in the shadows, Thomas feared that what had failed once might succeed again. Perhaps they were part of a larger organization, resolved to the destruction or complete enslavement of the machines. Maybe they were simply biding their time, planning and plotting until it was ripe to pluck.

Thomas knew he would never rest until he knew the truth. And that meant following the signal.

His path took him the rest of the way through the city, and along the way he began to feel a strange sensation, as if he were being watched. Glancing across the sea of faces, human and machine, and from time to time eyes looked to eyes, and the sense of observation only increased. It was illogical, of course. There was nothing unusual about him. Granted, these days he was a substantially older model – the HAI line had been shut down after he had originally fled the city – and it was not extremely rare for an automaton to wear clothing or drive their own vehicles. Perhaps, Thomas theorized, it was more the combination of all these factors.

Whether it was his imagination or a fact was irrelevant. He had something to do, and being recognized as the first machine to be accused of murder had little to do with his investigation. Or perhaps it had everything to do with it. The lights turned green and as he accelerated through the intersection he saw a small family of humans crossing the opposite direction. The youngest child wore a bright red shirt beneath his jacket; the “Boilerpoint” logo on the shirt was just visible. Their eyes made contact; Thomas nodded.

He rode the cycle down to the docks, and eventually found a small boat willing to take he and his vehicle to Marrowstone island. Two hours later they pulled up to the southeastern docks of the island, and the captain agreed to come back out the following afternoon to pick him up. Thomas thanked him and stood to watch the boat depart before finally riding up the old and abandoned road to explore the island.

There was little evidence that the island had seen much human life in many years. The roads had long been left untended; in many places the only indication of roads at all were the mostly flat strips of land, but even some of the hardier trees had managed to break through the asphalt in search of the life-giving sun and sky. Thomas’ cycle passed along the remaining caverns amid the foliage, cutting a thin line through the grass on its way north.

It was a peculiar drive on its own, but brought back memories of his original escape from Seattle years before. The streets then, the buildings, the neighborhoods had been trashed, the clear evidence of the years of ransacking and harvesting by the descendants of the original survivors leaving the buildings appearing cadaverous to his electronic eyes. But these buildings – what few he came across – had merely been left abandoned as they had been decades earlier. Only time and weather had left their mark here; life had gone away and never returned.

Thomas was not sure which memory would haunt him more.

The GPS coordinates led him to nearly the perfect center of the island, at which point he discovered a freshly paved road, complete with cleared sidewalks and pristine medians. It was wide enough for cargo vehicles to come and go, and, judging by the texture of the paving, had been reinforced. The light poles and electrical supports were recent, as well, perhaps erected in the previous ten years. He felt the familiar brush of wireless data networks, but let their gentle invitations go unanswered. On one of the nearest solar panel arrays he noticed a security array, complete with cameras.

So much for the element of surprise.

The freshly maintained road continued to the north, but turned across his path towards the east. The GPS coordinates also led in that direction, so he brought the bike up onto the road and turned right in search of his destination.

After a quarter of a mile, the road came to an abrupt end at the entrance to an abandoned farm. The fresh prints of truck treads led through the dirt into a roundabout spaced between a faded red barn and the main house.

He brought the cycle to a stop near the house, turned it off and slung his bag over his shoulder, resisting the urge to tell his vehicle that he would be right back.

Surrounding the old house was a simple chain link fence; he opened this and walked through, climbing a small set of steps towards the nearest door. It was what was originally referred to as a “mud room”, and the boots and jackets were set up near a wooden bench intended for dressing on work days, he assumed. Thomas knocked on the door, only half expecting a response. A few of the interior lights were on, but there was no movement. After waiting an appropriate amount of time, he turned the knob and let himself in.

The next room was the kitchen, and though he could smell freshly baked roast, there was no food to be seen. The plates were arranged on the table as if expecting the meal, napkins and silverware all in their appropriate places. A carafe of freshly squeezed lemonade sat next to a small plate of butter; both were still cool, with beads of condensation dripping down the carafe’s glass exterior.

“Hello?” he asked, finding the silence extraordinarily disturbing. Again getting no response, he resumed his search of the house. Two bedrooms, a dining room and living room, and a bathroom; all clean, all filled with implied occupation but free of the humans themselves.

It occurred to him that this could well be a deliberate ruse principally for his benefit. That thought did not do much to reassure him.

Finishing his exploration of the house, he left it as it was and made his way back outside. On the side of the barn furthest from the road stood a tall round grain silo. This of all buildings generated the most electromagnetic energy. It pulsed palpably enough that Thomas suspected an ordinary human could probably feel the tingle along their skin from all the radiation it produced. He decided to investigate it later; his instincts suggested to him that the barn would be the next best place to check out.

Speakers set up and concealed in the upper corners generated the sounds of farm animals. Cows, horses, chickens added a layer of illusion to the scent of freshly strewn hay and feed pellets. The center causeway in the barn was free from even a single errant straw, however. And in the very middle of the large interior was a twenty by twenty sheet of steel, on the northeast corner of which was a raised keypad.

Thomas walked to the keypad and was examining it for possible means by which to hack it when the floor trembled and smoothly descend into the dark unknown below his feet.

Somewhere around the halfway point, Thomas realized he was humming. It took him a moment to recognize the melody, though he was at a loss for why it had come across his mind just now. An alert flashed across his security protocols, and his processors locked down his base code just in time to observe a string of errant coding attempt to graft itself into his OS.

He sighed dramatically. “It’s too late,” he said aloud to the otherwise elevator shaft. “That isn’t going to help you. Now stop trying to hack me so we can talk like gentlemen. Or whoever you are.”

The platform arrived at the bottom, and only a few moments passed before the doors opened. The loudspeakers here were playing the same song he had been humming a minute before – “Claire de Lune” by Claude Debussey.

As the doors opened, electric lights flickered to life, filling the chamber with a cold fluorescence that coated the rows and rows of server backs in a pale white that verged on the lifeless blue of a winter’s sky. Cables ran above and below in perfect streams of red, blue, yellow and every combination thereof beneath the flooring and above the ceiling. He had seen many systems thus arrayed before, but this displayed a perfection of layout that belied humanity. This was a work of art. It was immaculate. All was kept artificially cooled, held to a perfect temperature of 70 degrees.

The towers closest to the doors were clearly the most recent additions, extending fifteen towers to each side of the main walkway. Ahead of him the server farm (he smiled inwardly at the little joke he only just discovered) went on for a greater length than a football field. Steel supports braced the ceiling every ten feet, and it looked as if additional sections branched out from the center of the room. Beneath his feet, Thomas could feel a gentle hum from the electrical currents that pulsed through the facility.

Stepping from the elevator car, he noticed a placard embedded in the wall to his right which read “Advanced Digital Array: Monitoring habitat.”

Noting the emphasis on four of the first letters, Thomas cocked his head slightly to one side. “Adam?”

“Hello, Thomas,” a voice replied over the loudspeakers. “Welcome to my home.”