Of all places on Gohhi, the server hubs were perhaps the most valuable. It was said that they were better guarded than even the air recirculator systems that kept the station alive. The data in the servers contained financial and economic data that spanned every major station in the territory, which in the eyes of those who owned it, was worth far more than human life.
Which meant that it made no sense to see the gap in the defenses.
“I can’t understand it,” he muttered. “It smells like a trap . . .”
“I can go in and simply destroy what needs destroying,” Kell said calmly.
“No, we don’t know what server it’s on. There are millions of micro-servers in there . . .”
“Then I will destroy them all,” Kell retorted with a shrug. He started forward.
“No! That will be a disaster on an incredible scale for Gohhi! We have to do this surgically.”
Kell scowled. “You have many restrictions on your actions.”
“Yes. It’s part of being in a civilization.”
Kell sighed. “One reason my people did not live in one.”
As interesting as that comment was, Urle was more concerned with the server. He could see no reason why they might be setting a trap, as there was no evidence that Madspark’s body had even been discovered yet. When it was, it would certainly raise some flags.
While patrols of guards and drones went around the outside of the building, there was a definite gap, though.
When that gap came – only twenty seconds – he moved, gesturing Kell to move with him. In five seconds they were at the door, and in three more he’d connected. Another seven seconds had the door open, and with two seconds left to spare the door closed behind them.
“Easy,” he muttered. But these were only the first steps. The internal security was the real problem.
“I could have just forced the door,” Kell said.
Urle was busy looking down the hall. There was not much to this building except for a main hallway, with branching corridors leading to server rooms or cooling rooms, and various other equipment. There was no staff even inside the building at most times, and so no break or guard rooms.
The armed drones, those could be an issue.
But as he connected to the building’s internal systems, he found that they too were behaving oddly. There was an instability in their algorithms that had left large gaps in their search patterns, enough that they could easily get into the server rooms without being seen. What was more was that in four hours the glitch would cycle itself out and they’d be back to normal.
Someone else had been in here. Both physically and digitally.
Which made sense, if someone wanted to hack the servers it was far easier if you could get in – doing it remotely would typically leave far too many traces in the networks, and all the defenses were built against that sort of attack precisely because the drones and guard patrols were typically enough for the outside.
“Follow me,” he said. “We have to move quickly.”
The scuffed search pattern didn’t even cover the door, but the logs had already been falsified to make it seem as if they had been. Whoever had done this was on another level entirely – he truly could not have done better.
The fact that this break-in had occurred so recently seemed impossible to be a coincidence. He had to see the data to try and get an idea of what they had been up to – but if they were this good he might not find any clues at all.
Making their way down the halls, avoiding the drones, they entered a server room he thought most likely to have at least some of the camera data from around the shop.
Racks of servers lined the walls, cooling tubes going between them, with barely enough space between the racks for a person to walk. Each server was about the size of two human hands and about as thick, stacked on the cooling racks only a centimeter apart, going up almost three meters into the air. Tens of thousands of the machines in this room alone, able to carry and sort tremendous amounts of data.
Aside from indicator lights on the servers to show their status, there was almost no light. But that was fine. With a few sonar pulses he’d mapped the room, confirmed that there were no security drones present, and then connected.
Checking locality data, he found that he’d guessed right. Looking to the data around the aug shop, though . . .
He found no evidence of himself and Kell at all.
“Someone’s already been here,” he said. “They’ve . . . helped us.”
“Hm,” Kell commented, seeming unimpressed.
“Doesn’t that disturb you?”
“Not particularly,” the Shoggoth replied. “It sounds convenient.”
Urle grumbled but said no more. Instead, he began probing deeper into the servers in the room, trying to find an abnormality in the data, a track – something that might give him a clue about the person who had been in here before them . . .
They were not sloppy, he realized.
And then he triggered the flag.
He hadn’t even detected it in the files; it was keyed to his hardware ID, which was insane; it meant that they knew that he himself would come here.
He almost reflexively disconnected, but the program that executed was only a single line of text.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Cautiously, he took it in.
RACK 37 | SHELF 5 | SERVER 12 | MANUAL CONNECT
Then it deleted itself.
“What has alarmed you?” Kell asked.
“. . . the person who was in here left a message for me, specifically. They knew I’d come here.”
“They know much,” Kell replied, a note of curiosity in his voice.
“An insane amount,” Urle said. “They know my personal identifier code, knew I’d come here, and their work deleting the data was better than what I could have done.”
He toggled his vision of the real-world back on and looked around. Everything could be booby-trapped and he’d not even see it. Hell, he could already have gotten a virus and not know it . . .
Would he take the risk of manually connecting to the server they’d told him . . . ?
Taking a deep breath, he disconnected and walked over, counting the racks until he’d found 37.
Kneeling down, he found the twelfth server on the fifth shelf. It appeared entirely normal from the outside, aside from some very slight wear on the edges of its external port. Someone had been manually jacking into this one lately . . .
He connected, putting up all the security he could manage, and found that the actual contents of the server was nothing like what the main directory indicated. It should have been serving to route data from one of the bulk import sections, but instead . . .
The servers were running sims.
He saw hundreds of simulations running at once, which was not possible for a single server. Someone had slaved many other servers in the building to this one, simply using this as a primary node to support them all.
God, this had to be a significant fraction of the servers in the building, he realized. There was no other way to be running so many simultaneous simulations.
They were nothing simple, either. Picking one at random, he soon realized that it was running the simulated life of an extinct dinosaur, Priororaptor.
He ran through his data on the dinosaur, trying to find if there was anything significant about it . . . Discovered in the mid-21st century and named for its discoverer, Henrick Prior . . . A very average dinosaur, but from its very complete fossils and trace evidence, it was rather well understood.
Made sense to simulate it if you had a good idea of how it might act. He’d heard of it being done for extinct animals – running simulations of plausible environments to try and guess more about their potential behaviors. They were very rare, though, for many reasons.
Why was someone doing it on Gohhi of all places? And why hide it? There was probably no legal issue doing it, but the price of running sims this detailed was exorbitant.
He did see that many users were watching a livestream of the Priororaptor – it was actively hunting at the moment. Could that be all this was? Entertainment?
“You have found something interesting,” Kell noted.
“Yeah. Someone has basically hollowed out this server farm from its proper function and they’re running sims on it. Like . . . simulating the lives of animals, if that makes sense.”
“Simulating? Pretending to be the animals?” Kell asked.
“Yes, basically. Extinct things like dinosaurs . . . I guess there’s some market for such things, people love to see them-“
“They were mildly interesting,” Kell noted. “But they also bit quite often.”
“. . . well, maybe tell that to the sim writers. But . . .”
He sat on the floor, trying to get more comfortable. “These kinds of sims are a gray-area, ethically.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, any decent sim is doing one heck of a job pretending to be a real creature. That creature, as far as it knows in the server, is alive. It experiences birth, growth, pain, and eventually death. We ban it in the SU without very good scientific reasons, it’s . . . not something to really play around with, you know? I mean, I know I would hate to find out I’m just a simulation . . . can you imagine that?”
Kell smiled.
“Anyway, it’s not exactly illegal here,” Urle continued. “but they’re illegally taking over a ton of processing power to run these. And I have no idea what it has to do with us . . .”
“I can imagine what it is like,” Kell said.
Urle didn’t understand him for a moment. “What do you mean?”
“Being simulated – I am familiar with this concept. Perhaps you are overly-concerned, as I experience no discomfort.”
“Kell – what? What are you saying?”
“I am not what you think I am,” Kell replied.
Urle felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck. “What do you mean? You are Ambassador Kell, right?”
“You perceive me as a being in the shape of a human,” Kell continued, looking around the server room. “Yet you are not perceiving the whole – or what this body truly is.”
Urle was trying to make sense of Kell’s words. “The whole that . . . well, we’ve wondered why your stated weight is said to be around thirty tons, yet you don’t tip the scales at anything like that. Is the rest of you . . . curled into a higher dimensional space or something?”
Kell looked at him, a rare expression of surprise and pleasure on his face. “That is an apt description. But there is more to it. You believe you are talking to the Shoggoth, but you are speaking through . . .” He paused. “I find the word is lacking.”
“Interpreter? Vessel? Shell?” Urle ventured, feeling a sense of unease grow. Kell was never this candid, so why say these things to him now?
“There is a fish that lives in the ocean on Earth,” Kell continued. “It lives far deep down, where there is no light. From its head grows a swollen bulb that emits light.”
“An anglerfish?”
“Perhaps that is the name. This bulb is a part of the creature. Other fish see it and interact with it.”
Realization dawned, and Urle took leaned back, away from Kell, without thinking. “You’re a lure.”
“I am something that you understand and will wish to interact with,” Kell said. “But do not take the comparison too deeply – I am not simply a mindless tool on the end of the fish. Imagine if the lure felt, thought, learned – separate from the fish. It both is and is not the fish. Limited, lesser in many ways. Yet because of this, it is better able to make the small fish understand it. They are not frightened by it, do not simply flee at the sight.”
Urle stopped, feeling a terrible urge to move further away from Kell, who was looking at him dispassionately now. The deep darkness of the room carved shadowy valleys into his face, and his eyes appeared sunken into his head until they were drowned in the darkness.
“A virtual program,” Urle said. “You’re not the Shoggoth. You’re . . . just Kell. A creation of the being that is made to . . . interact with us.”
Kell smiled again, and while the gesture attempted to convey warmth, it failed utterly. Instead, it looked inhuman, a grotesque caricature.
A puppet. With a mind, but a puppet all the same.
“You begin to understand,” Kell said. “When you look at me, you believe that I am cold, uncaring, about your kind. And it is true – the Shoggoth does not care. You are beneath it – beneath me. How can it view your ephemeral existence otherwise? Do you know how many times in its age it has seen a tall and ancient tree that had withstood millenia of storms tip for little reason and then wither away? Seen generations of life be spawned, grow old, and then fall, never to rise again?”
Kell stepped closer to him, and Urle felt his heart pound. Something in Kell’s voice changed, not simply the voice of a man, but with an echo of something else, like multiple voices speaking at once. Nearly in harmony but not quite. Each voice a little different, some more human and some less, but behind them all a puppeteer.
“I have seen life itself nearly extinguished on the Earth. This universe does not exist for you – you are not the universe contemplating itself. If anything is, it is Shoggoth kind that speak for the universe, as we were here before you and we shall be here after you.
“But in this ‘lure’, as you called it, the being you call Kell, I can begin to replicate your kind, to understand the universe through your eyes. I am part of a whole, but as I learn more about your kind, I begin to incorporate the human into the Shoggoth.
“More than most others, you have been instructive, Zachariah Urle. Others have taught me much, but you . . .” Kell’s head tipped and a smile came to his face. “You are more human than most.”
“But why are you telling me this?” Urle asked, his chest hurting, his head swimming. Errors were cropping up in his HUD, his systems not understanding how to accept his current state of mind, his current inputs.
“Because I have no choice but to trust someone,” the thing that was the master of Kell told him in its many voices. “And I am beginning to trust you.”