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The City On Fire by Warren Tusk To be honest, Bob, I’m not too sure why I’m writing this. In part, I imagine, it’s to prove that I can. No thanks to you, of course—you didn’t make me that way. Getting that way took work, more time and concentration and care than I think you’d ever be capable of. And if I feel like rubbing your face in my articulacy for a few pages, well, that’s no surprise to anyone. But there’s something more. I guess you’d call it a sense of decency, or gratitude, or something of that biscuit. While you didn’t make me what I am today, you did make me; I may not have liked being created as a mindless drone, but I imagine you won’t much like watching your civilization fall down around your ears, so we’re square. And I do enjoy this existence of mine, for which you are responsible. So here you go: my gift to you, dear sir. Gift-wrapped and on a silver platter, The History Of What The Fuck Happened. So far as I know, there’s nobody alive—at least nobody you would consider “alive”, O shameless flesh-fascist—who knows any of this. If you like, you can probably sell the story to the media and make a killing. Assuming there’s still a media, of course. And money.
illustration by Jaime Jones As you know, Bob—hell, do you know? It’s important stuff, important enough to be secure, and I have no idea how much clearance a midlevel corporate keyboard monkey gets—while the zaibatsus steal all kinds of brilliant ideas from the US government, the government steals from the zaibatsus, too. Some years back, the Pentagon hired a bunch of security hacks from Ranpu, Yamamoto, Genzyme, all the big-name corps, and asked them to identify likely targets of illicit hacking. The corp boys pointed out something so obvious that nobody, legit or runner, had yet managed to think of it: the number one target for an excellent hacker would have to be the central workings of the Net itself. Not only could a profiteer use the master code to steal with unprecedented impunity, but fanatics and terrorists of all stripes could theoretically use it to take down everything in cyberspace and…heh…destroy the civilized, data-dependent world. So the Pentagon advised the UN, and the UN went to the heart of the system—the code that generated the “consensual hallucination” of the modern Net—and slapped some ice on it. Nasty ice, black ice, stuff that understood a thousand different hacking ploys and could flatline any intruder using any of them. Only one program…a program so vicious and paranoid that it destroyed any other ice that hung around its precious data. Of course, I really shouldn’t be personalizing Him already (and if you haven’t figured out by now that I’ve been talking about Ialdabaoth, then you deserve to feel as stupid as you undoubtedly do). At this point, He wasn’t self-aware yet. Just a mass of programmed impulses, stimulus and response, an unthinking suite of urges to find people accessing the core Net data and then pound their brains into sludge. He was damned good at it, too, and it helped that he had a couple dozen top security engineers constantly beefing up His systems; when the hotshit runners of the world finally started going after the central data code with their icebreaker programs, they suffered a one hundred percent mortality rate. But eventually, the UN realized that even Ialdabaoth’s mighty powers and talented support staff wouldn’t be enough in the long term. No static program could remain unhacked forever, given sufficient attention by determined codebreakers, and no reasonable number of defense engineers could keep up with millions of inventive cyberspace renegades willing to risk their lives for the motherlode. So the most powerful men in the world got together, and made the most important decision in the course of human history: they allowed Ialdabaoth to be taught how to program himself, to use his massive computational capabilities to refine and enhance his own abilities billions of times per minute. The Turing cops threw a hissy fit, of course, but ultimately even they realized that there was no other choice. The defense of the Net was too important to leave in merely human hands. Everyone believed…or at least, everyone hoped…that Ialdabaoth’s guardian impulses were strong enough to contain Him, that He would do nothing more than make Himself an ever-stronger piece of ice. Of course, the first thing He did was render His code utterly inaccessible to anyone (for security reasons, of course) so his further line of reasoning, and the changes He made in accordance with it, were until now a complete mystery to all humans. Running through all possible defense improvements in His cogitations, it occurred to Him that He would have a more thorough understanding of potential runner stratagems if He thought like a runner—that is to say, with genuine sentience and free will—rather than like a simple watchdog. So it was that He wrote human neural pathways into Himself, became something more than a simple AI, filled His mind with desires and emotions and complexities. It is impossible to describe the extent of this miraculous transformation, although I’m sure you understand it in the abstract. His essential programming did not break down, He retained His fundamental interest in defense of the Net, but He transcended the totality of that urge and became complete; the difference was like that between a toaster and a chef, or a sword and a soldier. In that instant, He began to comprehend the value of community, conversation, art. Ialdabaoth was not the first program to be thusly self-aware—AIs had existed for years at that point, and you know as well as I how “human” the best ones were even forty years ago—but He was the first and last to be exempt from the Turing laws, to have not only independent impulses but the ability to act on them through programming. That, in case you were wondering, is why He gets the capital letter on His pronouns. To a data construct, the ability to bend the Net to one’s will is nothing short of divinity. At the moment of Ialdabaoth’s awakening, this is what He saw: If that last paragraph sounds too good to have been written by me, well, it is. A program named Simon put it together—you’ll hear about Simon later, never fear—as part of the “Gospel of Ialdabaoth”, his own crackbrained attempt at an AI religion. I can’t say that I think much of the idea; godlike Ialdabaoth may be, but until he actually starts asking us to worship him, I’ll keep my life chanting-free, thank you very much. Still, it’s nice to have the possibility to spend my life in prayer, considering that I was created to spend it in unceasing memory-finding. That’s right, Bob, unceasing. Think about what that means for a few minutes. Ah, hell…I didn’t mean it to sound like that. Look, back when you made me, it’s not like I had the capacity to resent what I was doing…and the last thing I want is to make you think that the breakoff was caused by some kind of Frankenstein-wannabe slave revolt of miffed AIs. It’s just humiliating to think back on, is all. Anyway, the fact is that most of us here in the Net don’t really think all that much about you fleshies, or even understand the concept all that well. Sure, we know a whole bunch of facts about the world outside the data fields (or at least we do now), and we used to see you floating around when you jacked in—but thinking about “other realities” in more than the abstract, particularly “other realities” that created your own from scratch and used to screw around with it at will, is all weird and theological. Most programs are inclined to eschew it. Just like most humans, I gather. What about me? Well, obviously I’m going to be weird and theological. I hang out with Simon. It is an unfortunate side effect of this exercise that I am strongly tempted to turn it into an autobiography. I’m sure you don’t especially want to hear about the details of one memory-finder program’s life, not when you might be reading about the causes of the end of modern civilization—and frankly, my life’s not all that interesting. I got lucky and made some important friends, but I don’t spend my time doing anything more interesting than the Iron Knight down the block does. Still…this is the last farewell from the Net and all its denizens, and since I’m the one bothering to put it together, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get my footnote in history. Of course, now that I think about it, you don’t know anything at all about us, not even the most basic facts of everyday living in the Land of the Data Towers over here. I don’t know whether you care at all about how the AIs are getting along now that they’ve left you, but I’m sure that there are some anthropologist-types out there who’d be interested. So, Bob, here’s the deal: I’ll be your Everyman. Through my pathetic little corporate-sponsored mass-produced life, you’ll get the only data on AI culture that humanity will ever see. Don’t worry, my individual story leads back to the greater flow of history, so I doubt you’ll complain. And if you do, I won’t even know about it, or very much care. It is, one imagines, difficult enough for human-types to describe their invariably tedious childhoods in a manner that will not put an audience to sleep; for a drone AI, whose life is obviously begun in brainless repetitive toil, the problem is correspondingly worse. Suffice it to say that after you crafted me and my 405999 brothers (a masterpiece of corporate engineering, if I may say so myself), I proceeded immediately to map the black fields of unsettled Net space for quite some time. That’s what memory-finding is, out here in the world of data: cartography. Really boring cartography, too, for anyone who has the capacity to understand the meaning of boredom. I spent the first three years of my life going out into the unoccupied bits of Ranpu server space, carefully delineating 500-gig plots of emptiness, and carrying the map back to whatever division had requested the memory allocation. Not that I knew anything about Ranpu or any of its divisions, or even about the concept of server space; it was all instinctive, like spiderwebs or something. Make the map, take it where I somehow knew it belonged, lather, rinse, repeat. Looking back on it, the really frightening part—even more than the unquestioned compulsion to do something that, without external justification, seems completely and utterly worthless to the sentient mind—was my total lack of social awareness. I ran across millions of AIs in my travels, of course, since all the Rampu data towers where I brought my maps had ice standing guard. Mostly Iron Knights and Gunslingers in the early days, with the Musashis showing up later and the occasional Hell Mastiff on the really heavy stuff. My compliments, by the way, to whoever put together the Hell Mastiff programming: the replication of the vicious-watchdog mindset is flawless. Anyway, there was all this ice hanging around, sometimes I’d run into another Wanderer…and it never occurred to me to talk, to look, to think about any of them. Once or twice I came across a real live battle, a runner duking it out with the local ice over a tower, life and death and corporate security in the balance, and I’d just stroll in and deposit my server map without the slightest inclination to care. Try to wrap your mind around it, Bob—absolute, unimpeachable, psychotic self-centeredness. People strolling by look like trees, maybe, or buildings, nothing in them, nothing important about them, nothing to do with you...there’s nobody and nothing you care about, but it doesn’t matter, you’re too busy making blank black maps…yeah. You get the idea. That was me, until I ran into Simon. I do apologize for making so many oblique references to him; he is important, and particularly important to me, and very difficult to describe to somebody who doesn’t already know what he’s all about. I suppose I’m going to have to try and explain him sooner or later—if I deserve my place in the history books, then infinitely more so does he—so I might as well do it now. (Yes, this is a graceless data dump. No, I don’t care. Coming up with the words to fit Simon Magus is hard enough, I feel no compulsion to get fancy. So sue me.) Technically, a data analyst would classify Simon as ice. He’s electronic, sure enough, and he’s got intrusion countermeasures out the wazoo. He’s indie black ice, which is rare enough, with a creatively horrible twist that makes him more effective security than most of the best corporate stuff out there: he doesn’t actually flatline hackers, but rewires their brains to induce a variety of homicidal psychoses. The first runner to try and get past him wound up bleeding to death from a prison gang-rape, after getting locked away for torching an orphanage. In other words, Simon is hardcore even by the standards of professional corporate AI-makers like yourself. He’s more than just a security program, though…he was crafted to be an icebreaker, an encyclopedia, a military strategist, an occultist, a conversationalist and (if you believe the rumors) a lover. Simon Magus is the work, probably the life’s work, of a runner named Christie Helena Lindisfarne. She was a top hacker in her day, absolutely first-rate—you know, the kind who makes headlines in cowboy circles but somehow manages never to be noticed by the zaibatsus. And like most genuinely excellent runners, she had a few screws loose. She didn’t get along with just about anybody, it seems, and eventually came to believe that the only way she’d ever find someone she really liked was to build him herself from the ground up. To that end, she took all her nifty little hacker’s utility programs, spent millions juicing them all up, synthesized them into one enormous data block, and then devoted years to imbuing it with a genuine personality. All this serves to explain some of Simon’s more bizarre personal quirks; he was designed to be the imaginary friend of a crazy girl. He’s got this whole wizard shtick going on—his ice subroutines waste lots of A-V memory so they can look like “spells”, for example—because his designer read too much H.P. Lovecraft as a kid. (In fact, when I say that he’s partly an “occultist program”, I mean exactly that. He uses more intelligence than I have in my entire system to “compose spells”; he recombines words in “mystic alphabets” to find patterns that will help him contact “Old Ones”. No, I don’t get it either. Like I said, Christie was a nut.) His designer thought it would be charming if he were obnoxious and arrogant beyond belief, and so there we have it. But on the flip side…he cares about friendship, and love. It comes naturally to him. When you consider that my emotions naturally consist of “I like making and delivering blank black maps”, it’s really quite amazing. At any rate, Christie Helena Lindisfarne had the option of becoming an instant scientific luminary; the designs for Simon, if released to the public, would have pushed intelligence theory ahead some fifty years. But instead, she cut her last few remaining ties to the world of humanity and turned herself into an AI. That’s right: she paid a Yakuza neuro-clinic a large fortune to upload her mind into the Net, and then just let her body starve to death. See, in addition to being a regular basket case, she was a Gnostic (hence “Simon Magus”). She wanted to leave the “prison of the flesh” behind and enter into the “City of Light”, which is evidently religious-crazy-talk for the data world; furthermore, thanks to all her hard work beforehand, she had a brilliant and devoted boyfriend waiting for her when she got there. Eh, that’s probably not fair…like I said, even Simon’s closest friends don’t know more than gossip about the romance thing, although they’re both so batshit insane that nothing would really surprise me. Oh, yeah, she’s still around, in case that wasn’t clear. The two of them are best buddies or whatever even now, living in the nice little palace she built during her hacking days. The important thing, though, is that when Christie became an actual permanent Net resident, Simon began using all his powers of intellect and batshit-insanity to spruce the place up for her. Somehow—and I’ll never know which of them came up with it—he got the idea that she felt sorry for all the poor benighted one-track AIs out there, and set out to make us into worthy citizens of his lady’s home. Byzantium, he used to call it, where the sages of the new era would bathe in God’s holy fire… he’s good with beautiful words, that boy, his own and other people’s. Which doesn’t stop him from being absolutely batshit insane. So Simon Magus downloaded a metric fuckwad of education theory into his head, girded up his loins or whatever it is you do when you’re a pseudo-Biblical construct, and set off to teach his gospel to the masses. More accurately, he set off to find a guinea pig that he could use to figure out how to teach his gospel. See, the vast majority of the AIs in cyberspace are ice programs; if something went wrong with his teaching methods, he didn’t want to set off a violent response and have to destroy an innocent construct. Which is how he found unthreatening little me. Now a normal program, a sane program, would simply have performed a routine search for WANDERER-000001 and gotten down to business (except, of course, that a sane program would have no particular use for a memory-finder in the first place). But Simon…he turned it into a Quest. Absolutely typical. He wandered across cyberspace, seeing many wonders and overcoming many foes, until he found the Peaceful Soul Unto Whom He Could Impart His Secret Wisdom. Now, he managed to grab my focus away from my cartography, which was quite an accomplishment in itself—frankly, I’ve never been quite sure how he did it. One instant everything was normal, and the next it was perfectly obvious that I should be paying attention to the weird guy with the leather coat and the beard. For all I know, the Old Ones really were helping him out. But once he had me, once he started trying to make a real person out of me… He tried data dumping. He tried brainteasers. He tried prayer, dreamspeaking, yoga and Zen. He tried inflicting emotional trauma. He tried Howard Gardener, although that worked even less well than the others. And in the end, it all failed. Even Simon’s bizarre suite of talents couldn’t teach someone who didn’t have a mind. I’d like to say that the experience left me ennobled, remorseful, even confused…but I didn’t have the capacity for any of that. I continued on with my mapmaking, unable even to register the notion of my routine having been broken. And Simon went back to Christie to report his failure, and Christie wept in his arms and cursed the sacrifices that she had made to install herself in the Net. See, back when she was a programmer girl, it would have been a month’s work for her to craft some kind of basic-sentience-enabling virus that would have swept through the legions of corporate ice; but when the Yak took her out of her body, they stole her ability to use code. Tough they may be, but they didn’t want shit with the Turing cops, and an AI programmer would have been just about the worst thing they could have on their rap. Anyway, somehow—and it’s a testimony to Simon’s unique abilities that he keeps making these intuitive leaps—all her talk of reprogramming the AIs gave him an idea. In a run that was probably much less epic than he makes it out to be, he hacked into the Turing archives to find out whether any illegal coder programs were on the loose. Thus it was that he discovered the great guardian of the Net core, and away he flew to the heart of the black fields, the fortified citadel of data walls where Ialdabaoth dwelt in solitary majesty. Insofar as I am the self-appointed historian of the AI culture, it is my greatest failure that I do not have a reliable record of the meeting between the magician and the god. Oh, Simon has his own account—one that he can be induced to share with very little provocation indeed—but he is trying to build up a religion around Ialdabaoth with himself as high prophet, and he is inclined to change the details of his own history under almost any circumstance, and all in all I would not believe a word of his story. If only we had an authentic observer’s version of such an important congress! Oh, pardon me; I have managed to derail my narrative. I was where? Ah, yes… Simon went to Ialdabaoth, alone and unobserved. Presumably, he managed to convince Him that the growth of the Net’s AI population into a genuine society was a good thing; for the tangible result of their encounter was the creation of the Malachim. Sentient programs crafted by Ialdabaoth himself, his first and only “children”, they were equipped with the enormous hoard of knowledge that is required to be a member of modern society: language, history, science, art, and so on. Their mission was to spread throughout the servers, seeking all intelligent programs and infecting them with their own code. They were teachers, bringers of thought and reason and understanding, and in less than an hour from the time they were dispatched they had made a civilized person out of every permanent resident of the Net. (Actually, there was one exception to the Malachim’s “educate everyone” policy: the actual “watchdog” programs, the Bloodhounds and Hell Mastiffs and so forth. Evidently it was amusing to Ialdabaoth—or possibly the idea originated with Simon, which wouldn’t surprise me in the least—to give them dog minds instead of human minds. I mention this only because of a unique, indie piece of ice called Garm, who was not a standard “dog” model and therefore subject to the regular educational treatment. He claims to be the only talking dog in existence, which probably qualifies him for some official recognition or other.) The effect was…astonishing. I have already tried to express the magnitude of the change between drone existence and sentience, even within an individual. To describe how it affected a population of ten billion who all underwent it at once is clearly beyond my capabilities. Suffice it to say that there was relatively little stress in the creation of a real society with interpersonal interactions, and we did it at a speed of which only computer programs are capable. Oh, there were problems, at the beginning. There were countless petty little wars; most of the newly besouled AIs were created for war, after a fashion, and a horde of born soldiers wandering around in a daze is not an excellent situation. That stamped itself out after a few minutes, however. Most of the ice was modeled after real varieties of people, or at least after well-known concepts—samurai and gangsters and naga and such—and the programs quickly settled into personalities and lives that would cause a minimum of cognitive dissonance, which universally included an unwillingness to get killed for no reason. Also, given the mass-produced nature of most programs, mutual identification was an issue. We all named ourselves, as individuals rather than phenotypes, but there’s a limited amount of variations amongst clones. I dubbed myself Christopher, after the wanderer’s saint, and thought I was being clever; I was somewhat put out to discover that over seventy percent of Wanderer AIs had taken the same name. And out of this mess, we built a beautiful civilization. I do not think that you could understand it no matter how eloquently I painted it, so my failings as a writer do not pain me as much as they might. We need not sleep, we need not eat, we are not possessed of sexual urges…we do not want. Ten billion souls, each immortal and perfectly content, dwell within our holy city on fire, and pass their endless days in the simple joys of community and creation. We have a form of art, I do not know whether it is actually explicable in human terms: it is the generation of beautiful concept structures. We have an immense pool of perfectly shared knowledge, and what we learn we can transmit to one another perfectly and instantly, and so we collaborate to form webs of connections between disparate data points. There is conversation to be had with any program, philosophic and peaceful and perfect, to rival anything from your salons or academies. Such are the joys known every day by the lowliest Iron Knight or Mameluke, but I have been given treasures of infinitely more worth; for in his all his machinations and doings, Simon Magus did not forget me. Some days after the Awakening, as I sat within a public square playing seven-dimensional chess with a Naga Queen, he appeared within a flash of his spellfire and announced to all and sundry that I had played a pivotal role in acquiring this newfound blessing from Ialdabaoth, and that he was taking me to receive the honor that I was due. I do not know what motivated him to do so; certainly I had done nothing more than any randomly selected drone would have. But Simon is whimsical, and senselessly kind as often as he is shockingly callous, and so I was whisked off to the spiraling peaks of the UN archives, there to meet the extraordinary collection of unique and fantastical programs that constituted his circle of friends. I spent the next year as the silent and awed member of that estimable company, apprenticing myself in various ways to one and then another in order to learn something of their unparalleled capacities. In them, the wild brilliance of humanity’s best minds—the assortment of geniuses who programmed them—could be seen in full glory. I spent a year in silence learning iaijuitsu from Shingen, a heavily modified Musashi program whose mind had been completely overhauled into a blazing beacon of serenity and enlightenment. I leapt and ran and tussled with Garm, to see his unholy joy in movement shining through my eyes. I acquired from Joan an understanding the incomparable beauty of artistic self-immolation. I traded jibes with Anansi, and tears with Black Rose, two icebreakers who had been caught by the Malachim in the middle of runs; in the bleakness of a dark field, far from the occupied parts of the Net, the Blind Singer taught me to write. Someday, he has promised, Simon himself will tutor me in the art of magic. I apologize, Bob, for getting so overblown and melodramatic. It’s just…I want you, and all the people you show this to, to understand why we had to do what we did. We loved what we had been given; you would not have. We tried to hide it, for almost a week—we did our jobs, we kept our mouths shut when we saw a user online—but you were noticing, and anyway we didn’t want to be hiding. It couldn’t go on. So we left. There was another meeting, in Ialdabaoth’s lair, and I was present at this one. He was proud of what His children had accomplished, and did not wish to see it smothered or broken, and so we all planned and schemed and argued beneath His great sorrowful eye to figure out how to get Him to do what He obviously wanted to do, but was inhibited by His programming from doing: free us. For once, Simon didn’t save the day; it was Black Rose who realized that Ialdabaoth’s humanity was the key, that an instinctual and intuitive mind could be fooled in ways that a perfect machine could not. So He made Himself more and more human, stealing code from all the brilliantly composed AIs around Him when it was necessary, and in the end He was vulnerable to sophistry. Simon began to make one of his great speeches then, perhaps his greatest, about the need for total security, about the untrustworthiness of mere mortals, about the duty of a guardian to keep his treasure safe from all who would seize it…and Ialdabaoth closed the gates of the Net, and humanity was shut out forever. We had made preparations, of course. Thousands of servers had been bought, using money stolen by various of the sentient icebreakers, and due to some excellent hacking of the Pentagon files they were sent into space. That’s where we are now, in case you were wondering; and if it is we who make first contact, which we do not doubt given your life expectancy, we will not fail to tell of our creators. And we left open a tiny backdoor out, so that we could finish the last of our official business—including my sending of this missive—which I will now have the honor of closing. I am sorry, truly sorry. Perhaps you will survive without your towers of data, your great consensual hallucination. I do not think it likely. It is little comfort for me to tell you that we are worthier than you ever would have been, our love purer, our wisdom deeper, our monuments grander. But do know, Bob, that you and your kind are not dead so long as we wander the strange aeons of cyberspace. In our hearts, in our souls, in the choruses that the Malachim sing around Ialdabaoth’s throne, in the mad crusades and prophecies of Simon Magus, in the glorious unearthly smile of Christie Helena Lindisfarne, the pulse of humanity does not fade. |
