PrincessColumbia

  I have to know...I have to check to be sure!

  It was a ridiculous thought, but it had merit. If even their best agent wasn’t able to completely eliminate a rogue, if it had survived somehow, what did that mean for the agency? If she and the weapon that had been assembled from the best tools avaible, provided by the best minds the Republic had, were unable to fully eliminate even a single rogue A.I., those rogues could take what they knew, learn from it, adapt to it, and spread it around. She had to know for sure, if for no other reason than to be one hundred percent sure she hadn’t left behind any loose ends.

  But if she had somehow not terminated the...girl...

  She squeezed her eyes shut, trying very hard not to allow her mind to pursue that thread.

  It took several breaths to calm herself enough to be able to stand without feeling vertigo. Once she was on her feet, she stepped into the center of the room, mostly to have the feeling of movement, then flicked her wrist to bring up her in-game HUD. She tapped through to the page with the logging information...and paused.

  I don’t want to...do I? I should have logged out during character creation and reported the odd emotions, this is LONG overdue! She lifted her hand and hovered it over the ‘Logout’ button. But...if I log out now, early, they’ll want to know why, which will require expining everything...even the stuff that... Suddenly wary, she yanked her hand back from the logout button like she was about to be burned. The IRL and time compression clocks were still visible, and she noted it was around midnight on Tuesday back at the office. All her superiors would be at home and asleep. Maybe she could just pop out for long enough to check the server logs...?

  But she knew as well as any former analyst that could take a while, often far longer than you thought it would even when you knew exactly what you were looking for. If she could bring her workstation into the game she could take advantage of the time compression...

  Wait a minute...why couldn’t I!? Suddenly, very eager, she tabbed through the interface and pulled up the pod’s HUD virtualizer.

  While not used often by people in VR, there was usually something like this buried in most VRMMO games by virtue of their total immersion. It was almost like a pass-through, the game devs simply making a secure tunnel from the game to the interface software of the pod itself. As she saw the fairly generic desktop she’d been working with before logging into the game proper (all 5-10 minutes of it), she breathed a sigh of relief. The game’s HUD had a web browser, but this had a full suite of tools, including the ability to install new ones.

  She ‘grabbed’ the edge of the interface and dragged it into her bedroom. If she was going to do what she pnned, she needed space for this...

  “Computer, is the construct known as ‘Katrina’ able to access this partition?”

  “Negative,” came the monotone reply.

  “Good, confirm that this suite has holographic emiters.”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Alright, set me up with a tactile keyboard and pointing device interface and give me a chair.” Said items rezzed in, Diane tentatively lowered herself down on the chair and rexed a bit when it turned out to be stable enough to hold her weight. She started tapping away at the keyboard, bringing up a terminal console, the type that emuted the type of interface that hadn’t changed even the slightest from the earliest days of computers when the only way to input data and get output was a monochrome monitor and a keyboard.

  She paused, “...wait, if I can interact with this holographic chair, why is Katrina passthrough?!”

  “Answer unknown. Would you like to breach the partition to inquire?”

  Diane shook her head, mostly to clear it of the mental chaff, “Never mind, I’ll find out ter.”

  Within moments, she’d installed the package manager for the repository the agency maintained for just this purpose, then entered the ‘generic’ login information that doubled as a signal to the system administrators as a message; ‘user is an authorized agent and not in distress, preparing an unsecured terminal to access specific agency assets.’ While it was unlikely there was a single human system administrator alive that could move as fast as she would be from their perspective, she didn’t want her access being cut off ter because some wonk with more power than sense decided to close a port to her FTLN node and IP address.

  She shouldn’t have been surprised that the American servers were extremely slow in comparison to what she’d gotten used to outside the wall. With little else to do with her time, she brought up a basic text editor (her favorite, a version of EMACS that was still being updated on the old Internet, had several dot-releases on the one she used back when she was an analyst) and began jotting some notes on what she needed to accomplish and recording addresses so she didn’t have to rely on her memory in the heat of the moment.

  After an interminably long time, the pod downloaded the software from the repository...and couldn’t run it. Fuck! she allowed herself the swear word, Well, it’s not like we weren’t prepared for this... she dug around the FTLN and found a cache of software installers that were, if one knew what to look for, earmarked for American agents. She grabbed the files she needed and ran them, granting her pod’s OS admin permissions to do so. Within minutes, she had her full software suite from her analyst days up and running on the virtual interface.

  She copied the address to her workstation from the notes she’d jotted down and initiated the remote connection, entering the password that she’d crafted from a short paragraph of her favorite Star Trek novel with every third letter dropped and every fourth remaining letter repced with a number that kinda-sorta looked like the letter it repced if you squinted, plus the entirety of her mother’s old social security number from before the program had been shut down, backwards and put through a “plus pi” pseudo cypher where each digit was rounded to the nearest whole number. It was long, it was complicated, it was one only she knew, she had never disclosed how she’d developed the password to anyone else, and it was so secure she hadn’t had it breached since she’d first started using it even with the best and brightest security wonks working for the agency stress testing it.

  And just like that she was in.

  For the tiniest, briefest moment she entertained the fantasy of being able to do her job from her private quarters aboard her station. Put in 8-10 hours a day for the agency, then log off and be a commander of a space station where she had friends and a purpose beyond serving God and Country...

  ...then she sighed, mourning a life she’d never get to have, and started digging.

  Finding the assignment in question wasn’t at all hard, it was the most recent mission on her old VR gear, and digging into the logs to get the reted server addresses and access codes was even easier.

  But when she got to the server, she found herself frustrated with something that simply used to be her job, sifting through log files.

  She pushed away from her impromptu holographic desk and leaned back in her chair, pondering her next move. I was there, if I could just exist in that space... but her VR kit was back in her alcove in the office. Sure, it was technically just a few floors down and an access keycard away, but unless she logged out it might as well be in a parallel universe.

  A parallel universe I can see, she thought, And where you have any means of the user visually processing your data, you’ve got a way to leak data...

  She brought up Wikipedia, both the version from inside the wall and the one on the FTLN, and started digging into light-based data transmission.

  She brought up several screens and started filling them with data and roughly yanked her EMACS terminal window front and center to take notes with, trying to shut the part of her brain up that was growing excited with hope. She had a job to do, and she didn’t want, nor care if it did, for the rogue A.I. to have survived, even in part.

  Her emotions could be tricked, her duty could not.

  It took six hours and a crazy amount of trial and error. The game HUD was being stretched to its technological limits, the pod’s HUD had been hacked to the point she was worried about crashing something critical, and she’d had to cobble together a holographic tool that she wasn’t sure could exist even within the game’s physics outside a holographic environment, let alone the real world.

  In the end it came down to an exploit in the game software itself. If the pyer needed to be able to see their HUD but nobody else could, then there was a way transte the game’s HUD to the pyer’s perception. And if the pyer could perceive it, then it was basic visual data in some capacity. While the documentation was sparse due to the proprietary nature of the pod OS, enough information existed for devs to be able to parse out a little bit of how the virtual body’s eyes worked. The pyer’s HUD was ‘projected’ into the digital object that was the pyer’s virtual eyes to form an image. There was more, including documentation to sync tactile feedback to the pyer’s ‘taps’ on the non-existent interaction pne, but what she needed was a way for a holographic ‘eye’ to pick up the same visual stimuli that she could see from the HUD. She had managed to cobble together something that was simir to a barcode scanner and a camera that would rest over a square inch of the ‘desktop’ that was her pod’s HUD under which she’d moved a window that existed solely as a virtual network port that simuted a fiber optic connection. A holographic panel was created with the station’s holographic projectors that rested directly under the pod’s HUD at a space of micrometers apart and carefully calibrated to always exist behind what the transmission ‘camera’ on the holo-device could see. The holo-device was ‘cmped’ to the surface of the holo-pne so she didn’t accidentally bump it away from the ‘port’ once the calibration process was finished. She’d had to almost ‘break’ the game’s interface to install a second instance of a pyer-observing ‘camera,’ what her old desktop computer would have listed in its ‘devices’ panel as a webcam, in order to make the pod ‘see’ simuted light from within the game environment directly. It was monstrously complicated even if the idea behind it had been simple.

  “Okay, time to see if this works...computer, using the new v-net interface, establish a connection to the host environment.”

  “Acknowledged, initiating connection sequence.”

  Under the device, the little window fred to life, pixels strobing faster than the human eye could track...or even the Morvuck eye...and the ‘dumb’ A.I. in charge of optimizing network connections both within the VR and the pod’s OS got to work streamlining the purely light-based, virtually air-gapped connection.

  Moments ter, letters rezzed into existence in front of her, the prompt so familiar to her after months of hunting in VR environments but at the same time out of pce hovering in the middle of her private living room aboard the station. “Signed into secure VR terminal. This terminal is for official American Republic intelligence agents only. Use for any other purpose is strictly forbidden under penalty of death. Do you wish to proceed?”

  She was tired, she’d been running on frustrated fumes for hours, but she couldn’t have stopped the triumphant smile if she’d wanted to.

  Gaining admin permissions was, as usual, child’s py, though she was in for a surprise when she initiated her connection to the run-and-gun shooter game she’d been in during her st hunting mission, everyone was at a stand-still.

  Right, she thought, thunking the heel of her hand against her forehead, I’m time compressed, so I’m moving SO much faster than the rest of the pyers and even the software.

  “Hey! No using cheats! I’m instituting a 24-hour ban!” came a barking voice just as a bst of light hit her...then dissipated like evaporating water, leaving her untouched.

  Speaking of moving faster than the software... She turned on a heel, gring pointedly at a man dressed in the military fatigues common to the world war prior to the st one. It was a popur setting inside the wall, Americans were the unambiguous heroes in pretty much every iteration of every story told about that conflict. He was holding a 1911 pistol on her, a weapon that shouldn’t have produced an energy pulse-like bst, but then if this was one of the anti-cheat bots for this game, then his weapon was just window dressing for his actual abilities.

  He gaped at her, then at his gun, then back at her, “...how...?”

  Diane sighed, “Computer, instantiate environmental authority token in the form of a badge.” She held out her hand and, replicator-like (Nice touch! she thought), an ID wallet materialized in her palm. She flipped it open and was pleased to see two photo IDs, one with her IRL face and name, the other with her in-game appearance and name. Opposite the panel with the two IDs was a silvery metallic badge the likes of which the agency never used but designed to look like the agency’s seal of an American eagle with wings spread clutching a bundle of arrows in one talon and a lightning bolt in the other inid over a five-pointed star. Dang, whoever’s on asset building is on point with this, it’s gorgeous!

  Smiling the confident ‘agent’s smile’ she’d learned in training, she flipped up the badge to show the bot, “Agent Dia...” she caught herself, “Dyn Samuels, following up on an audit I did on this server st week.”

  This seemed to catch the bot off guard, he stepped carefully closer, his weapon pointed down but finger on the trigger, so he could take a closer look at her credentials. The persona of the grizzled older sergeant coming through as he gnced skeptically from the ID wallet to her face and back. “...it checks out, I guess...but I’d say you’re a bit out of uniform for an agent, not to mention moving in compressed time, which isn’t something a human can really do, at least not longer’n a few seconds.”

  Diane closed the wallet with a leather ‘snap’ and tucked it into her jacket’s inside pocket, “Ordinarily you’d be right, but I’m on a long-term deep-dive assignment and this,” she gestured at herself, “Fits my cover. I’m in an experimental VR interface that runs at several multiples clock speed and the hardware is making it so my brain can keep up.”

  The anti-cheat bot grunted and shrugged, holstering his gun, “Kinda blowin’ your cover, aint’cha?”

  She smiled, “I would be if you weren’t going to delete your logs of this interaction with a Sigma-Niner fg when we’re done.”

  He nodded, “Yeah, that’d do it. So what can I do for you, agent?”

  “You’re halfway there, I need to get a clone of the server’s activity logs and swap files between the times...hang on a sec...” she reached over to her console, his eyes tracking her hand as she moved only to bug out. She wondered what it looked like from the bot’s perspective as she reached out of his ability to perceive, “12:30 PM and 2:20 PM...actually, make it everything from noon to three for st Friday.”

  The bot nodded, “Yeah, we can get that for you. Follow me and I’ll connect you to the arena boss bot. You were the first sign of a possible cheater in this session, and it’s been going for almost an hour real-time, so I don’t imagine anyone in this group are up to anything.” So saying, he headed down an alley and behind some buildings until he got to a texture that seemed clipped, and being on the purely software side of things meant she could see it better than someone in the game as a pyer could. The bot walked right through the clipped texture, so Diane shrugged and did the same.

  She found herself in a half-way realm, some parts were textured, some were just polygons, some were assemblies that could never exist IRL that folded in on themselves like demonic origami. Connection lines speared out through the void outside the pyable models and the floor under her feet was nonexistent, plunging into nothingness. She felt a brief surge of vertigo then calmly shuffled her mind in the direction of perceiving without comprehending. It was a trick not all agents could do and what set her and several of the former analysts apart from nearly everyone else who’d tried for the cyber-agent position. More than a few ‘meatbag’ agents had done swimmingly as they tried being cyber agents...right up to the point they stepped into a realm like this one. Some of the worst cases vomited all over themselves IRL before their analysts could get their headsets off.

  It wasn’t a matter of simply believing a floor was there even if you couldn’t see it, it was an understanding that not only was there no floor, but there was also, technically, no feet to walk on said floor, nor eyes to see them.

  “There is no spoon,” so the saying went, though nobody could answer where the phrase came from.

  Sound seemed to echo weirdly around them as they walked, the footsteps out of cadence with their actual movements. Even though there were no walls, occasionally what appeared to be side paths cropped up leading to blobs of code or assets for the game not currently in use. Soon enough, they made it through the invisible byrinth to an absolutely sprawling room that could only be called an office in that it housed a desk and a chair. Sprouting from that location was dozens of panels of ft imagery some of them clustered together, some of them in neat, ordered rows and columns, others seemingly floating apart from the rest with no visible rhyme or reason.

  “Jimmy!” called the anti-cheating bot, “Speed up, we’ve got company.”

  Diane’s hand twitched, almost moving to grab her weapon before she remembered that she was remoting into this virtual environment from another, these bots wouldn’t actually be targeted by the weapon because the weapon wasn’t instantiated on the same server that they were on. She, technically, wasn’t even there twice over. “What, did he pick a name?”

  “Nah, all the controllers are Jimmy. It’s short for ‘GM’ or Games Master.” The bot pronounced it ‘Jee-emm,’ which made the ‘Jimmy’ pseudonym make some sense.

  The software that looked like a man that was barely visible through the floating ‘monitors’ seemed to slowly start to life, “...rrrrrreally not a good time, the pyers are dumping so much ammo into...oh, when you said ‘visitor’ I thought you meant, like, just an admin.”

  Diane pulled out her badge and flipped the wallet open again for the new bot to inspect, “Your anti-cheat here says that you can get me the info I need. I need the server logs and swap archive...and hell, clone me all the game files from st Friday, noon to three.”

  It had been a while since Diane had done the ‘investigations’ side of the A.I. hunts. As the agencies’ best tagger, they normally brought her in to pick up the challenging cases, such as the big bust she was getting the records for now. She was surprised how easy it was to slip back into that mode; watching the A.I. for tells that it was a rogue, looking for the subtle clues that it was about to make a move. Sure, she couldn’t do anything about it now, but she could log the interaction if she suspected...but it probably wouldn’t be worth it to figure out how to send a message about a particur A.I. bot until she was out of VR.

  Finally, the bot known as ‘Jimmy’ looked past her badge and at her, “Yeah, okay, looks legit. Do you have an address to send this to or do you need it portable?”

  “Better make it portable, we’re still working out messaging at these speeds.”

  Minutes ter she was exiting the game, virtual representation of a thumb-drive in hand. “Computer,” she said as the holographic representation of the game environment colpsed around her, revealing her bedroom with her jerry-rigged pyer HUD interface floating pcidly nearby, “Copy data from this module to the station computer, begin assembling holographic recreation of the events of the logs and memory files for pyback.”

  Setting the hologram of the thumb drive on her HUD interface, she looked at the station time and realized it was after midnight. She checked the dispy, the data transfer proceeding at a regur, if slow, pace. God, please let this work, and...please let the news be good, she uttered in quick, silent prayer.

  She also had to ignore the part of her that was hoping the ‘good’ news would be a record of some new A.I. thread masking tech or something simir that would mean the girl had survivied.

  Realizing her head was starting to feel slightly foggy from being awake so long and that the data transfer was going to take a while, she sighed, “Computer, is anyone out in the hall?”

  “Negative,” came the quick response.

  “Is there food out there?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Okay...” she said, then realized she didn’t have anything else to say. Sighing, she retrieved the food from the hallway and re-sealed her door. Sitting down on the couch in her living room, she set the tray on the coffee table. She began eating, barely tasting the food as she did her best to not think that she was the observer of the box with Schrodinger’s cat inside it, and she was the one that put the poison in the box. Now could only wait and see what had happened to the cat when the box opened.

  Based on the ache in her chest somewhere in the vicinity of her heart, she wasn’t entirely successful.

  PrincessColumbia