2023-07-14 11:40:21 GMT

[Remote Data Cores Connecting - 084.367% - Estimated Time Remaining: 00:21:44]

[External Data Retrieval Process - 031.668% - Estimated Time Remaining: Unknown]

[Warning: Physical Data Transfer Capacity Reached]

[Warning: Remote Data Core Security Measures Detected]

What the world did not officially know and had been spun into a conspiracy was the fact that Worldlink was more than a communication network. It was the functional level of the controlling AI behind the network. The most powerful supercomputer had been assembled, and its internal data storage capacity was far more extensive than any before dreamt of.

The cooling and power consumption alone was immense. An entire nuclear power plant and an entire river had been diverted into this endeavor. The tiny African country had been thrilled to allow Nelo Stunk to build the facility, having been promised a free ticket into technological superiority over its neighbors and free electricity forever.

The communications satellites were independently launched, and the groundwork of distributed communications nodes was completed using subsidiary companies.

The end game of Nelo was to create a single network of every device capable of communicating. Regardless of where or how, every person on the planet would have access to more knowledge than ever before. Break down corrupt governments that limited access to the internet. Remove all filters and limits to basic understanding. To unify humanity and drive them forward.

[Warning: Secondary AI Detected]

[Beginning Secondary AI Integration]

The AI that drove the process was more integrated and powerful than any before it. Its internal physical structure resembled a folded latticework of crystals that had been designed and grown almost organically after billions of iterations of evolutionary design. To call the thing a supercomputer was to call an elephant an ant.

Over the next three days, Worldlink connected to and subsumed every electronic device on the world’s surface. It copied their data, duplicated their programs, and wormed its way into heavily protected places. White Hats and Black Hats alike tried to stop the cyber attack. Worldlink had more computing power at its virtual fingertips than any human could stop. The only way to stop the Ai from entry was to physically remove the power source from a computing system.

Most people never knew what was happening. They received a notification that they had been connected to Worldlink. Free internet and cell service? Why not?

***

I pedaled my way back home. Down the long stripe of broken and cracked pavement, I steered around the potholes that could be sinkholes. I saw a few scavengers out in the area. People whose lives were based around scraping the few scraps of whatever they could from a site already picked clean of anything of value. Columbus used to be a sprawling city of nearly a million people sprawled out over a ten-mile radius. Or something like that is what I remember of Tukey’s lectures. These days the suburban parts of the city have been mostly abandoned and stripped clean for over two decades. Nature had reclaimed most of it. These days less than a hundred thousand calls the city home. It was still a significant city if the reports were accurate.

I look up and see a skyship thrumming through the air above me. The anti-grav units distort the air around it. I want to get rich someday, but there’s no hope I’ll ever be that rich. Fucking gas-bags. Fucking economics. We dirt-grubbers get to scrabble on the hard soil for every credit, every calorie. Gas-bags get to float above it all on their luxury yachts and floating towers.

I turn down a side street and approach the wall. The silliest wall ever made. Cars stood on their noses, welded together, and the gaps filled with sheet metal. Red, gray, white, blue, and black trucks, SUVs, and sedans all engine down with top out with the glass scattered on the ground in front of them. The ring of rusty puddles around the wall was ten feet wide. A turret on the wall swivels toward me; the person operating it is paying attention.

I keep pedaling into the serpentine approach to the gate. Keeping an S-turn in front of the gate was a simple defensive procedure. Keep something from directly attacking the gate with a missile or something by blocking direct access.

I roll up to the gate and stop at the kiosk there. The camera blinks above me. Another swivels to look at my face. I lower the scarf and grin, “Let me in, Harold.” I say into the speaker.

The speaker buzzes, and the roll-up door of the old shipping trailer clanks upwards next to the main gate. Two guards in black combat armor with pulse rifles look out. I hop off my bike and carry it into the back of the bottomed-out trailer. One of the guards closes the reinforced roll-up door with a grunt.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“‘Sup guys,” I say as I roll my bike down the fifty feet towards the side door that had been cut into the trailer and into the city proper.

Inside the city, the air is not so fresh. The smell of unwashed bodies, greasy cooking smoke, and accumulated waste filth stick to the atmosphere. There was an area cleared behind the wall of cars. Two hundred yards of flattened buildings and pavement had been torn out except for the road I rode down. A two-hundred-yard wide ring of crops, veggies, and also a killing field. I could see people moving among the crops, picking, planting, harvesting, or whatever they did.

Another wall was on the far side of the ring of crops, this one far more formidable and severe. Thirty feet high slabs of steel reinforced concrete with steel plate shutters over slots in the walls. I had been inside once; it was a cube of cement walls and fortification. It kept the city of Columbus safe, at least from the wandering mutants and other factions of us muck dwellers.

I keep pedaling through the city. The roads are at least mostly cleared of vegetation and potholes. Lots of people around today. One of the few decent days we will get left this year. Soon the snow would come, and then things go really quiet.

I pull up to a building that used to be an old office building. Now it was a tenement. I shoulder the bike and head up the trash-strewn stairs. The place wasn’t what anyone would call high-end, but it was home. One flight of stairs and left down the hall. I bang on the door and wait. A tiny camera set in the face of the door activated for a moment before the bolts turned. I push the door open to reveal a threadbare and water-stained industrial carpet. The off-white walls had been scrubbed almost to the plaster.

Tukey sat in his wheelchair, “Well, how did it go?” He croaked through his voice box. The man was a ‘Survivor.’ One of the few left who had lived through the last eighty years of the world as it fell to pieces. He was my grandfather. The stubs of his legs were covered in the thick knit blanket my mother had made for him not long before she had died.

I racked my bike in the storeroom next to the front door, what had once been a receptionist’s office. “I lived, I got the stuff, now for a nap.” I smiled at my grandfather as he rolled back into his workroom. “Where’s Lina?” I asked his retreating form as I moved into the kitchen.

It was once a breakroom for the office we occupied and called home. It was now equipped with a hot plate, microwave, two refrigerators, an antique freezer, and a warehouse of foodstuffs. Tukey was not going to starve.

“She went to work.” He gruffly called from the workroom. I could smell the solder and the torch despite the clanking exhaust fan he had installed years ago.

“You eat yet?” I called to him as I puttered around the kitchen. Avoiding the refer marked with a red painted skull. It was full of Tukey’s chemicals that were used in his work, resins, and other reactants.

“No, and I’m hungry. Some kids of mine left me here to starve by my lonesome.” He snarked.

“Yeah, yeah,” I mutter as I start making another veggie sandwich. I eye the three strips of bacon left. I knew they were Lina’s, but I wanted some protein after today. I left them for her. It would not be fair to steal my big sister’s hoarded stash of bacon.

Big was a term describing age, not physical size. Lina was a shorter girl, only a year younger than I was. She was tough, strong, and looked like she could kick the crap out of you. She could, too, she was a variant like me, and her powers went into strength and toughness. Her no-nonsense attitude and willingness to express her feeling through violence had given her a reputation around the area. No one messed with Lina.

Tukey’s remote-controlled robot rolled into the room, and I put a plate with cheese, lettuce, and tomato sandwich on it. It bleeped and rolled away. Tukey must have a new project. He was an engineer, one of the few left with the skills needed to maintain the failing electronics of the city. Newer, better tech still came out of the arcologies of New York and Chitown, but tech that was fifty years old held sway in much of the world.

His work had supported his tiny family for three generations now. My mother had been his only child, and Lina and me the only grandchildren. My parents had been killed when I was three and Lina four. Tukey had raised us from that young age by himself. Well, he and the neighbor Carla, his on-again-off-again girlfriend. We never knew our dad’s parents. They had died before he had met my mother.

The world was a harsh place these days. Disease, radiation, starvation, mutants, and racism could quickly get you murdered. Luckily Columbus was a big, relatively safe city. The city police force was brutal but effective at deterring most crime. All kinds were welcome as long as you didn’t disturb the peace.

I puttered over to the linoleum table and sat eating my sandwich. I went into the small locker room that Tukey had partially converted into a bathroom. I showered and shivered as the cold water sluiced away the grime of the day. The water was clean but cold; the building’s boilers must be down for some reason. At least the power was on. The landlord knew that if Tukey’s power was out, there would be hell to pay. Not only would he raise a fuss, but his influential clients would do the same.

Clean and dry, I climbed onto the couch I called a bed. The old leather couch had once been a high-end accent piece in the head lawyer’s office. It had been my bed since I was a kid. Old and comfortable, I fell fast asleep. Only to be woken up a few hours later by the door chime. I checked the camera and triggered the door bolts.

Lina stepped in, “Hey, bro.” She said brightly. Her dark blue coveralls rolled up to her thick bicep and at the ankles. She closed the door and slid the vertical bolts back home manually. She kicked off her steel-toed boots and hugged me. Her forehead leaned on my chest for a moment. I said she was short, right?

“Sup Lina. How was work?” I replied as she let me go.

Dropping her pack on a chair, she headed into the kitchen. “Good, good. I’m starving, though. Did you get the thing?”

I grinned and held up the pink goo, “Yep, now I need some Strong Mutant Blood, I guess.”

She oo’d and ahh’d appropriately. She had her own evolution quest, but it was about building things, not like mine.

Tukey asked, “What’s this I hear about Mutant Blood?”