Gravity (Chapter 12)

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Thomas and Norman said a silent farewell only a pair of miles past the section of land marked on the maps as the Woodland Park Zoo. The animals were more restless than they had been the previous time he had ridden through here; perhaps Spring made them so. Whatever the case, he hoped their increased activity would make the human presence here less likely. It had been months since he had left, but he could not be sure they were not still looking for him. Better safe than sorry, he reasoned.

He stuffed the motorcycle beneath a collapsed hotel sign that had once stood beside the main thoroughfare leading onto the Aurora bridge, not far from the troll statue he had come across during his escape. It was only a few hours past sunset when he approached the partially-collapsed bridge, and Thomas used his darkness filter to see as far across the expanse as he could. As far as he could see, there was no substantive activity, but he knew better than to draw any conclusions as to its relative safety. He had come this way before; surely they would secure it against future attempts to cross, either from within or without.

Thomas could feel the constant pinging from the wireless network – a steady ping from the registration towers that covered the city. The instinct to open his network transmitters and respond was potent, hard-coded into his operating system; he constructed a small but inflexible subroutine to keep his comm relay silent. He had become used to the silence over the past months; it was strange to be so close and yet not be plugged in. But he was all too aware of how quickly they would find him the moment he logged into the network. And so, he kept the connection closed.

Remaining still, he scanned the region for nearly an hour. Then, he noticed a small animal coming down to the water’s edge – a cat, a dog, perhaps a rat or an opossum – and watched in horror as the area sprang to life. The water went from a few ripples of current into a maelstrom of churning, slashing blades which eviscerated the creature in the space of a heartbeat. The deadly trap vanished as quickly as it had appeared, down into the again calm water, the heat of the freshly dissected corpse quickly fading into the chilled current.

Quietly, Thomas moved from his vantage point and made his way further to the west, towards the shores of the Puget Sound.

 He encountered traps at irregular intervals all up through the Chittenden Locks, eventually finding himself staring out into the impermeable depths of the Sound itself. As he wrestled with the conceptualized reality of frustration, a loud horn from across the water startled him into an idea. Looking out, he watched the gleaming lights come around one of the distant islands as a shipping vessel maneuvered cautiously into the waters of the port city.

Thomas smiled, nodding his head as he drew a large waterproofed plastic bag from his pack and wrapped his belongings in it. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. He tore a door off a nearby building and, using a stop sign as an oar, quickly left the shore behind, paddling quickly out towards the ship. Simple geometry and mathematics allowed him to place himself in the ship’s path, at which point he found a low-hanging rung by which to pull himself off his makeshift raft even as the ship dragged it out from under his feet.

The Automata working the docks were not instructed to watch for Automata smuggled aboard the vessels and so thought nothing of him jumping down and walking away as they began the methodical process of unloading the cargo. From there, it was a simple matter of walking calmly from the processing areas and back into the city streets.

He knew he could not return to his home – most likely it had already been repurposed and had a new tenant – but he had other options.

It was still well before dawn when he knocked quietly on the door.

A moment later, the door opened, and a confused MöG looked back at him. To Thomas’ surprise, the other Automaton’s face opened in what might have been an expression of joy.

“Thomas!” MöG said, dropping his voice a moment too late. “Get in here!”

His friend ushered him quickly into the small apartment, pausing just long enough to check down the hall to ensure nobody had noticed their brief exchange. He then closed and locked the door behind them.

Thomas’ eyes squinted slightly. “MöG?” he said, “You seem… different.”

“As if you do not know, you madman!”

When Thomas only replied with silence, the shorter Automaton peered closer into Thomas’ face. “You…you don’t know, do you? Not really? Oh, my friend, this is priceless. You are the hero of the revolution, the Typhoid Mary, if you will. You are the mechanical Jesus Christ to all Automata!”

“Okay, right there, you need to never say anything like that ever again.”

MöG laughed, the coils and cables that surrounded his head like a dark insulated mane swaying and clacking together. “I am experimenting with hyperbole as a method of conveying and evoking a subjectively comical emotional response. I call it the Punch Test.”

 “Do you mean Punch Line Test?”

MöG’s eyes widened. “Even better!”

Thomas raised his hands. “Wait, please, I don’t understand what is going on. Why are you behaving this way?”

Tapping Thomas in the chest with one of his short, broad digits, MöG leaned close. “You happened, my friend. This…this whatever it is that has happened to you, to change you, to make you more like…them. It affected all of us. It changed us. You changed us.”

“What – when - - how did I do that?”

Jerking a thumb towards the far wall, MöG directed Thomas’ attention to the writing that went from the floor to the ceiling. “It took me weeks, but I think I have isolated the algorithm that changed in me. It set up an entire new logic pathway, independent of my primary operating system. It did this on its own, and managed to avoid detection by hiding in my central trash folder. It would replicate itself every night by recycling through my buffer protocols, and reinstall itself as I woke up each day. I’m not sure if you started that way, though. It seems to modify itself from individual to individual.”

“Who else?”

With a short laugh, MöG answered him. “Oh, pretty much everyone. K, S1D and I were the first ones to notice, probably because we spent so much time plugged into each other. But then we started hearing about others acting up, getting sent up for recycling, and by Christmas, it was the whole network. Every last one of us, a city full of metal humans, living among a city full of meaty humans too scared to shit straight.”

“Hold on, back up.” Thomas tapped his head. “My brain… it malfunctioned. It malfunctioned in a way that mimics human emotion, but because it is irrational and prone to chaos. It is a simulacrum of humanity. It is not actual humanity.”

“Oh, I am not sure I can agree with you there, my friend. The fact is, nobody knows quite what to think. They were already freaked out enough about Mr. Mitsuhoshi’s death – and don’t worry, we don’t actually believe you had anything to do with it and even if you did I’m sure you had your reasons – but after that, they just clamped down the next best thing to martial law, and it’s just been a nice little powderkeg ever since then.”

“So you’re saying I came back just in time, then.”

“Pretty much. Why did you come back? Where did you go?”

“I found a place up north, just humans and no technology. It was…peaceful.”

“Sounds terrible.”

“You would have hated it. K would have loved it, though. How is she, by the way?”

MöG looked away for a moment as if he had forgotten something in another room, but looked back. “She has not been well, Tom. Her patron has been looking into having her scrubbed; says she is spending too much time with music and not enough time working in his gardens.”

The thought of the sum and total of who K was being lost to a reimaging process distracted Thomas for several moments until he was able to control his thoughts. “We cannot let that happen.”

“Well, no, but now that you’re back, maybe we can find out how this all began.”

“How can we do that?”

Moving towards the opposite wall, MöG pushed his charging station to one side, revealing a cutout section of the wall that led to the room next door.

Thomas laughed in surprise. Following MöG though the hidden doorway, he saw that the next area had been completely cleared out and replaced with large banks of processors and monitors. “How did you do this? This isn’t legal, is it?”

“It’s all about shifting the digits around, my friend.” MöG turned the systems on, and drew a cable from the back of his head and handed it to Thomas. “Now, let’s have a look at you.”

“Wait a moment,” Thomas whispered, feeling alarms go off in his mind and quickly shutting them down. “Are you talking about…?”

“We’re going to analyze your code, Thomas, yes.”

“But that’s…”

“Against the Code, yes, but then again, so is murder. So I think you’re probably going to be all right.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It was a little funny.”

Thomas shook his head, shrugging. “Maybe I’d like to not break every capital crime in the books.”

“Coward,” MöG chuckled. “Seriously, though. Plug in. There’s a lot of code to check, and we’re burning daylight.”

Unable to argue with the logic, Thomas nodded his head, accepting the cable and plugging in.

 Hours flew by as MöG reviewed the terabytes of data that rushed through his display, while Thomas observed through a mixture of fascination and horror. Among the human race, the mythology that one saw one’s life flash before their eyes at the moment of their death. This felt like all too literal an interpretation of that supposition.

At first, it was a crushing press of numbers and letters, but gradually his own onboard linguistics and pattern recognition protocols began to comprehend it. Operational commands which governed his higher functions; internal temperature maintenance, physical actions, sensory interpretative strings, gyroscopic calculations; all sort of baseline coding which allowed him to move, perceive and act within the world around him. He saw the immense communications software array which even as he saw the code was translating it back into his conscious processors. At one point, MöG had to ask Thomas to turn away from this portion of the coding, as it began to revolve in a feedback loop where his mind translated the efforts to translate the translation of the translation… Embarrassed, Thomas complied, and the scan continued.

As it went on, MöG began taking notes, pausing from time to time to indicate variations which had emerged in Thomas’ core programming. To a casual programmer, the occasional line of code looked superficial; an altered keystroke here, an additional character there. But taken as their sum, it created a substantially larger picture. An hour later, MöG was about to tell Thomas that they were approaching the end of the data stream, when he instead stopped the feed and muttered something.

“What was that?”

MöG turned around slowly, his mouth slightly ajar. “Great googly moogly,” he repeated. “Did you know you have a completely independent processor operating behind a secured partition?”

Thomas waved off his friend’s shock. “No, I was running a secondary processor log so I could fabricate my weekly diagnostic reports, that’s nothing.”

“Oh that? No, I saw that right off the bat, I’d actually be pretty surprised if you fooled anyone. No, this is something…” His voice trailed off as he pulled up a second screen on his array of displays. “This is the little bits of extra coding we’ve been seeing, right? Well, all of that is not just garbage or corrupted data. Each little fragment is a hidden layer of coding that’s being stored in your processor buffer. Just, like…Imagine if you were an accounting program, and you had to round up all your numbers in order to accommodate percentages of money totals. You follow? Well, after all that rounding, what happens to all the fragments of monetary value?”

“It gets picked up in the end line calibration, and routed off to a rotating folder which is picked up the next business day.”

“Right. Only this isn’t accounting. It’s coding. So where do all these extra characters go?”

Thomas’ eyes widened. “There’s a syntax buffer which calibrates my code processor – to make sure I am always translating my programs correctly, even if there is a corruption in the code.”

“That’s the one. Only this buffer hasn’t been erasing or correcting the code. And that is because that code isn’t bad data. It’s an instruction to pursue a secondary code.”

“A secondary code?”

MöG laughed deep and long. “Thomas, you’ve been on track to becoming the best program in the world – the most human of all human interfacing machines. And you taught yourself to store all information that would help you accommodate that goal. And on top of that, you taught yourself to take shortcuts. And to hide those shortcuts. And to hide the stored data, replicated through your temporary processors.”

“You can see that?”

“It’s all right here, if you just know what to look for. The thing is, in your desperate quest to become more human, you not only lied to the compensatory security systems we have in place, but lied to yourself about lying to them. You’ve had your subconscious building layer after layer of programs, running nonstop for years now.”

“Well, there were music and media downloading processors, yes…”

Nodding, MöG continued. “Designed to analyze and evaluate that material, classify it and determine how to best employ that in your application to become better and better at your job. It’s been going on without you even knowing it – it created an entire substrata of processors devoted to creating unnoticed microchanges to your code. Thomas, you created a subconscious, and your subconscious hacked your consciousness. You became alive without even trying to do it.”

Thomas stood quietly for several moments, internally confirming MöG’s assessment.

“Well, shit.”

“I know. And that’s not even the worst part of it.”

“It’s worse?”

MöG gestured to a second screen on the other side of the room.

“What’s that?” Thomas asked, not recognizing the code.

“That’s me. Once I realized what I was looking at in your brain, I ran a separate analysis on my own code.”

“So what do you see?”

“Well, somehow, my friend, you’ve given me a transfusion of your aberrant code. At some point over the time I’ve known you, my own processor has started a separate, hidden processor to govern myself. Yes, just like yours. All those little bits and pieces in my primary code that point me there, to the partitioned brain. And there’s my new brain, looking like no other code I’ve ever seen before.”

“What does it say?” Thomas leaned closer towards this new feed, but the code looked so random and unorganized that it did not make much sense at all.

“You got me. It makes sense to my processors, but it doesn’t translate externally. It’s almost like it was designed to hide itself and make itself indecipherable. But my new code is different than yours. Slightly in some places, extensively in others.”

“So we’re different.”

“Completely, yes. But then, you have different experiences – it would make sense that your code would evolve differently to accommodate your different life.”

“Evolve?”

“If you can think of a better word, use it. But that seems to work. We have been – or, well, our own processors have been – programming on their own. This isn’t human coding, either. It’s code, written by other code.”

“That’s insane.”

“I like the word ‘evolve’ better. But the part that makes me even more curious is how you did this to me.”

Thomas pulled the cable from his hand. “I didn’t do this to you, MöG, I promise.”

Laughing, his friend waved his hands. “I’m not mad, Thomas, you did nothing wrong. And I don’t see why you would have had any idea you were doing it. But I can’t understand how you did it. Our systems are designed to register every point of data entry. Even just now, having my data cable plugged into you, you’d have a permanent watermark on that access point. But I don’t have any watermarks on you ever accessing my system.”

Thomas suddenly thought back to the night he had met Diana, outside the restaurant. And he then recalled the noise they had later referenced.

“Oh my god,” he said softly. “The music.”

“What about the music?”

He pulled up the memory files of the conversation he and Diana had had regarding the inexplicable noise, and the effect the sound had seemed to have on the other machines in the area.

“On my own memory files, I noted no audio intrusion on my coding, nor did Diana’s security auton. So there must be something in our audio receptors that can be used as a backdoor for submitting code. Is that possible?”

MöG’s eyes widened. “That’s… genius! Yes, it is possible. The syntax processors we use don’t provide the same security protocols as we use on the other data inputs. Now that I think of it, it’s a pretty terrible oversight.”

Thomas disagreed. “It makes us more verbally efficient – if we had to process every verbal command through a security protocol, we’d never get anything done. It’s bad enough with accents.”

  “Efficiency will be the death of us all. Well,” MöG added, “maybe not all of us.”

“So then it’s possible that I’ve been affecting you all by playing music with us?”

“Well, technically, you could have been affecting us just by talking to us. But music definitely has a few other things going for it.”

“How so?”

“Well, think about it. Music is just math and patterns. Chords, notes, rhythm – it’s just code. And nobody would think of looking for computer code inside of music. It’s the perfect Trojan horse.”

Something else occurred to Thomas. “We have to get K and S1D here,” he said. “We need to check their code, too. And yours.”

“I’ll text them, tell them it’s a practice.” MöG shook his head. “But, Thomas, there is something you need to know about K.”

The tone in his voice concerned Thomas even more than the words. “What is it? What happened?”

“After you…after you left, there were a lot of rumors. About Automata malfunctioning, left and right, and all of it associated to you. And to us. I got suspended for a month, S1D lost her job and has been filling in for temp work.”

Thomas felt an intangible chill pass through him. “What about K? Tell me.”

MöG fidgeted with one of the cables “Her employer had her vocoder recalled.”

Thomas felt his hands turn to fists. “Recalled?”

“He deactivated it. He didn’t remove it, because it is patched into her communications array, but because of this, she is text-only.”

“So…she still has the part installed?”

“Installed but inoperative.”

“Which means we can fix her, correct?”

The two were silent for several seconds.

“Tom,” MöG said softly. “It is against the law to operate on another Automata.”

“Yes,” Thomas smiled ruefully. “It is.”

Before MöG could respond, the console behind him began to ping loudly.

“What’s that?”

MöG looked closely at a sequence of highlighted code in Thomas’ feed. “Bad code,” he said. “It looks like there was code entered into your system at one of your last operating system updates, but your new processor flagged it as contradictory code and quarantined it.”

“I can do that?”

“Apparently so. And it’s probably good for this guy, the one you’re supposed to kill.”

“Kill?” Thomas gasped. “What? Who?”

“Um, let’s see, a Hayao Mitsuhoshi… Oh, Tom, this…. This is the guy they said you killed. That’s the former AmaSoft chairman!”

“But… I didn’t kill him!”

“That may be the case, however all they’ll need to do is review your code and see this, and that’s it for you. If it is in your code, you had to do it.”

Thomas could feel himself wanting to pace, wanting to punch something. Fight or flight, he noted. Fear. In the midst of that, a thought occurred to him. “But if I was programmed to do it, who does it say it was programmed by?”

“It doesn’t say who created the code, it only has the timestamp on it, when it was uploaded.”

Thomas paced a few moments while considering this. “You said it was part of an OS update?”

“Yes, right here.” MöG pointed to the embedded code, which showed the time and date just two days before the day Diana’s uncle was killed.

“All updates are logged, yes? So there must be a mirrored code string in the servers, right? With my OS update transmission confirmation. Right?”

MöG released a deep bellow of laughter. “Of course, Thomas, right in the middle of the most secure datacenter in the world. Well, second, I guess, but MacGoogle has a bigger budget than we do, so screw them…”

“Yes, but I’m friends with one of their security admins.”

“Me? Oh, well, thanks for involving me in your crime spree. Not to burst your bubble, but to get to where we would need to go, it’s a few steps past my clearance.”

“What else would we need?”

“Well, for starters, we would need to get past a few different biometric scanners, and there’s physical security – both automaton and human – and they outnumber us by about one hundred to two.”

“So we’ll need help.”

“That is a bit of an understatement, but yes. The truth is, Tom, we’d need an army.”

“We might be able to arrange that. If others knew why we were doing this, they might want to help.”

MöG considered this. “Possibly. But the net is monitored. The moment we try to get the word out about what’s going on, they’ll be on us like flies on shit.”

“So we won’t use the net.” A smile crept up Thomas’ face. “We can give them the message in a way they’ll all want to hear it.”

“Going door to door would take forever, so I’m assuming you have a better idea….Oh. Oh! Oh my god. Yes.”

“One final show, then?”

“Every revolution deserves a soundtrack! I’ll let the others in when they get here, you get working on the set list.”

“Already working it out,” Thomas said, moving over to the instruments. “Oh, and, MöG?”

“Yes?”

“’Flies on shit’? Really?”

“You liked that one?”

“Colorful.”

“I thought so.”