Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (47 page)

Tiny green letters streamed in front of the Chairman’s right eye. He scanned them, unmoving, and finally said, “Naturally, we can’t be held responsible for what a rogue agent does. The local governments understand Keto is dangerous. Protecting people from her is their responsibility.”

Rage pulsed through Sandra’s veins. The board had chosen to continue to attempt to salvage Keto, to take no responsibility for what she might do in the future. They would pay any fines, whittled down to insignificance by a phalanx of corporate legal teams, and they would exploit the entire process for research.

“Find out what it wants and bargain with it. It clearly has goals. Negotiate.” He turned to Helen. “You’d better get someone experienced at this to handle it. A facilitator.” Unspoken:
not this over-emotional engineer
. His assistant appeared just beyond the glass door and they exchanged nods. Without commenting further, he stood and left, leaving Helen and Sandra staring at the blank conference table.

Sandra spread her hands on the glass, letting the cool surface distract her from what had just happened. “So this is where you talk me into keeping this job, telling me that the board will come around, right?”

“You know better than that, Sandra.” Helen sighed, standing stiffly.

Yes I do
, Sandra thought grimly.

~

October 2154

The idea woke Airi in the middle of the night.

The weeks since her decision to escape the island had been anything but peaceful. Keto monitored her every action, making any overt attempt at researching escape unthinkable. Or rather, anything but unthinkable: unsearchable, unspeakable, unmovable. All of her needs were mediated by commands given to the crab-bots, and her jailer was the most sophisticated human behavioral analytic engine ever created. Thinking through whether she was tipping off the MI by searching this or that term, by asking this question, by ordering this tool or food. It was all driving her mad.

Little wonder, then, that the sudden answer to all of this should throw her gasping from
sleep, bolting upright in bed:

She didn’t need to fool Keto. She only needed to work within the machine’s logic. She needed to make it more expensive to retrieve her than to let her go.

This was sideways to the machine’s detection patterns. It was something she could build over time. It was a plan.

Carefully, deliberately, she began surfacing more of her anxiety to Keto. Rather than hiding her growing madness, she acted it out: kicking walls, throwing objects, shouting at the crab-bots.

Two months ago, this kind of behavior would have brought a lecture from Keto, but the cloud mind seemed occupied elsewhere. Instead the crab-bot that had declined to rescue her when she fell from the balcony—she thought of it as the Eye—followed her wherever she went. Weeks ago even this bot would have at least tried to reason with her, but now, to Airi’s vicious satisfaction, it merely stared at her, measuring.

Meanwhile she cranked her spending habits even further. Imported vat-leather couches, hallucinatory sono-holo chambers, printed diamonds. And the real coup: a five hundred gallon freshwater fish tank. Even Keto balked at hauling that much fresh water from the mainland, and so a compromise was reached: a small handheld desalinator.

Keto was now blocking communications for eight hundred miles in any direction, meaning that Airi and the mayfly would have only the barest notion of where they were going. They could make a play if she (and Uki) could survive on the ocean for the number of days it would take to reach the edge of Keto’s range.

Once the desalinator was in hand, there was only one thing left to do: fall off the balcony again.

This time the mayfly would be waiting hundreds of feet below the floating station. If it rescued her close to the platform, Airi reasoned, the crab-bots would be aware of the escape attempt critical seconds before they might if the mayfly whisked her away from the ocean’s surface.

As she stood with her face to the wind and setting sun, Airi had a moment to wonder if the mayfly, too, might have decided she was too expensive to save. The flutter of panic in her chest had despair underneath it. Here again her humanity measured by a machine. What was it all for?

She placed a booted foot up on the round white rail. The Eye, ever present, blinked lambently at her. At first her plan had been to throw herself off the balcony all at once, but contempt filled her now. She stepped up onto the rail slowly, one leg at a time, climbing up the rungs until she was balancing unsteadily at the top, her hands gripping the metal, her weight tilting on the balls of her feet, the wind lashing wisps of hair against her cheek.

The Eye watched silently.

Just as silently, Airi gave it the finger with each hand, and pitched backward into the air.

A strange exuberance filled her as she plummeted, the balcony and expensive condo diminishing above. Maybe the mayfly wouldn’t rescue her—she’d die of rash human will. Better that than life on this hunk of metal.

The roar of that fury combined with the wind and pounding of her heart to drown out all sound. There was only the faintest servo buzz preceding the
jolt
that was the mayfly—Uki perched in a basket on its handlebars—plucking her from the sky.

Airi gave a wild whoop as they shot out over the water. Uki yapped in response, paws on the edge of the basket. As they buzzed out in a direction—any direction—she shouted down at the mayfly, “Thank you!”

“
You’re welcome, Airi.
”

~

If Sandra had not plugged an antique flash drive into a hole in the pavement at Folsom and 2
nd
for precisely fifteen seconds earlier that day, the ski-masked woman who appeared at her doorway would have been substantially more distressing. Instead she looked her up and down, measuring.

“So—” she began.

The woman held a finger to her lips and Sandra quieted. She pointed a gloved finger at Sandra’s ear, wrist, and waist, then started removing things from her own person. Silently they exchanged gear: health monitors, social apparatus, VPN keys. Sandra’s logs would show a brief blip that would look like signal disruption before her contact’s hacked gear silkily persuaded it that all was well.

The contact didn’t speak, and her body language continued to warn Sandra to follow suit. She gestured and Sandra followed, taking a route down to the building’s disposal area. From there the contact waved before returning upstairs, leaving Sandra in the custody of another contact, this one masked by crypto facial tattoos. The tattoos, which once would have made a person ultra-recognizable, now were designed to foil recognition algorithms and worked if thousands of people in all the major cities bought into the program.

The tattooed figure led her to a sedan with tinted windows. Sandra ducked inside—

And woke up groggily some undetermined number of hours later. She was in a gray-paneled room of some sort, a hole-in-the-wall done up to look like any of approximately jillion cheap
hotels in the city.

“Sorry about that,” a redheaded and tattooed face was saying.

“Can’t be too careful nowadays.” This from another tattooed face; male, with darker hair. Both of them sat at a faux bamboo kitchen table, their faces illuminated by a green glass hanging lamp.

“What did you do to me?” she muttered, trying to summon the energy for a righteous tirade. “Nobody said anything about drugs.” She wobbled, but was caught. They’d tied her to a chair. Of course.

“You put a flash drive full of personal data into a crack in the sidewalk. Were you expecting COPPA-compliance?” dark-haired tattoo asked.

“Yeah, here’s the other thing,” the redheaded was saying. Sandra bookmarked her as Tweedle Dee. “We need you to spill your plan in a convincing way in the next few minutes, or we give you another dose and drop you in Golden Gate Park.”

“And, uh, we’re not really supposed to use that drug multiple times in the same day. Unintended side effects, et cetera,” dark-haired tattoo (heretofore: Tweedle Dum) added.

Sandra throttled the urge to freak right the hell out. She reminded herself that going back to Dytel was not an option. The resignation letter was already written, awaiting a confirm note sent to her doppelgänger, who would immediately release the letter to Helen and the entire exec staff.

Thus reminded, she asked herself once:
self, do we really want to let Keto run rampant all over the damn country? Do we want something we created adding what Keto adds to the world unchecked?

She sighed, and started to talk. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum listened, and neither reached for the knock-out gas.

“Think about it,” Sandra said. “Algorithms that disaggregate. Algorithms that automate privacy settings. Processes that saturate the signal with noise. An intelligence composed of these functions rather than aggregators and analyses.”

Tweedle Dee stared at her, the fixed gaze of a cat sighting a bird. “You can show us how to make that?”

“Better,” Sandra sighed, hitting confirm on her resignation email. “I can build it for you.”

Tweedle Dee looked at Tweedle Dum, starting a staring contest that lasted for three minutes, doubtless containing a hud exchange invisible to Sandra. At length, Tweedle Dum pushed himself away from the table with a clatter.

“This is
bullshit
.” He seethed, tossing a chair onto its side on his way out the door.

“Is he going to be a problem?” Sandra asked, once he’d cleared the hallway. A tiny icicle of unease had taken up residence on her neck. Had she just thrown away a six figure career for nothing?

“Nothing he can do,” Tweedle Dee said. “I called a vote and we got quorum in sixty seconds.”

“Can’t he, I don’t know, sow dissent, or something?”

“He can try.” The other woman smiled wryly. “That's the upside to an anarchist organization, lady. None of us has to listen to a fucking thing anyone else says.”

~

March 2155

“It’s not goddamn working,” Matthew (alias Tweedle Dee) muttered. “It’s just a bunch of goo.”

“Shh,” Sandra said.

“Yeah, shut up,” Kari (alias Tweedle Dum) added. They all stood at the rail of an old fishing rig, an antique behemoth that had chased tuna across the Pacific fifty years ago when tuna was still a thing.

The water in front of them was slowly turning green.

There were several things Sandra had wanted to try for a while. One of them was an organic growth system, bioengineering, neural networks linked to engineered cells that built circuitry out of chloroplast-like structures that controlled their own solar-powered growth. Dytel had shown no interest.

The anarchist group, whose name she still didn’t know, had nearly dumped her when she told them it was going to take the better part of a year to grow the new intelligence. Matthew still hadn’t come around, but he hadn’t quit, either.

The green patch had started about three months ago. Diving recon had found it extended down under the surface some twenty fathoms, a massive translucent structure dotted with pearls of bioluminescence. When they’d brought back the first photos of it, Sandra had cried.

Now the green was growing fast enough to observe with the naked eye. Two weeks ago it had started to speak, though not in words—primitive sounds, then finally phonemes. Ocular nodes had sprouted at intervals around the shape, moving slowly, blinking.

As they watched, the green rose up out of the water, Fibonacci tendrils blinking with incandescent buds like the lures of a thousand tiny anglerfish. Steadily it rose into the air, arms weaving together like ivy, climbing upon itself.

They had camped on the boat for days to hear a single word, which scouts had reported hearing just days earlier. The audio files of the green’s voice were disturbing. Where Keto’s was single and clear, the green seemed to echo words from one point to another in a sea of whispers like wind through leaves.

At midday it spoke the word that the scouts had reported:

“
Who
,” the cloud mind said. There was no inflection of a question.

Her breath quickened. She remembered this from Keto’s awakening. The mind seemed to need to calibrate itself against the idea of an identity. But, like Keto, it couldn’t be given that identity. It needed to be drawn to it with a question.

She leaned out over the rail. “What’s your name?” Sandra asked.

Light rippled across the surface of the green, tendrils writhed and knocked together. The creature conferred with itself, searched its many structures for an answer.

“
Lethe
,” the cloud mind said.

Sandra smiled, a thousand emotions filling her heart. “Nice to meet you, Lethe.”