Mr. Larson,
What’s this I’m hearing about all shipments to and from B-Eleven being canceled until further notice? I paid upfront exactly as you asked, but I also expected the merch to be delivered here promptly. I need this shipment in my warehouses ASAP. What are you going to do for me to make this right?? I expect a prompt response. -HJ Henderson.
-Email intercepted off The Bleednet.
The apartment that Sam shared with his father and sister had two bedrooms, one bath, a mid-sized living room with a single couch, a small flat OLED panel, an ugly coffee table, and a single shelf behind the sofa. He was laid out on said couch, tossing a small foam basketball lightly in the air and catching it. His father, of course, got one of the rooms, the biggest one. He was in a hospital bed surrounded by various medical machinery connected to him at several points, so he needed all the space. At this point, he wondered if it’d be easier if he found a way to pay for artificial organs or have some custom-made made somehow.
The stray thought made him pause what he was doing.
If only The Urgineer were still alive.
He thought back to the gigantic, primarily artificial, insect he had met almost a year ago and smirked. Sometimes it felt like a dream. Sometimes it felt like none of that wild trip had actually happened to him. His sister Jessika stomped into the room. She was a heavy walker that way; it didn’t mean anything. She stood behind the couch and had her hands on her hips. She had short strawberry blond hair, and her skin was covered in so many freckles she looked like a galaxy map. Sam glanced up.
“Yes?”
“Do you have a friend coming by?”
“I do,” Sam paused. “Why?”
“Blonde? Semi-famous?”
“Why?”
“He’s at my window,” she sighed. Sam snorted and rolled off the couch. They shared the room but alternated days when they slept or spent time in it. Today was her turn, so no wonder she was annoyed.
“Let him in; we can hang out here.” She huffed and left the room. Spydalow strolled out of the room in her place and took the area in.
“So this is where you actually live?” He said while he removed the lenses off his face. “Not bad, better’n mine.” The two had never met in person before; they were strictly E-buddies who were big fans of one another. After he noticed that Sam was in one of the stream chats, Spyda slid into those DM’s and introduced himself; they’d kept in touch since. Sam walked over, and they shook hands.
“Will Thomas, in the flesh,” Sam said, one of only two people who knew his real name. Spyda winced, having forgotten briefly about that drunken confession. Still, it wasn’t like he didn’t trust Sam, so it was fine. Sam indicated the couch and said:
“Have a seat, man.”
“Thanks,” and Spyda sauntered around the piece of furniture and plopped down on it like he owned it. It was stiff and uncomfortable, a real POS. More than he had and Spyda found it hard not to be a little jealous. Sam sat down on the other side and started fiddling with the foam ball again.
“So why did you need out? Is it the trolling?” Sam asked. Since he uploaded the footage, Spyda had been getting trolled, and meme’d to hell and back. His fans were supposedly loyal but were also ruthless cretins.
“Oh, that’s part of it, dude, but just, like, the tip of the ice burg.” Spyda paused and sighed heavily before continuing. “I think the ICG owned that warehouse, and I think they know I know.”
“You sound paranoid.”
“I mean—I am,” he replied. “But I’m also not wrong.”
“Okay, so, you traveled to ICG central because…?”
“I mean, you work for them, right?” Spyda asked. “You’re on the payroll?”
“I work with them, but,” Sam trailed off. In truth, there wasn’t any functional difference. You worked with Lady Steel? Then you worked for the systemic power structures in place. No point in splitting hairs about it. “Well, what do you want me to do?”
“Find out if they do,” Spyda replied. “Ask them about it. Hell, I don’t know. It was a warehouse with bodies, man. That’s not cool—like at all.” Sam didn’t disagree.
“I can ask whatever I want, but they’re not going to tell me anything.”
“You’re absolutely right about that,” Spyda nodded his head. “I’ll be real with you, bud; you’d just ideally keep the AI busy; I’m really here for your access….”
“Ah, now it makes sense,” Sam mimed, shooting the basketball at Spyda. “So I’m just supposed to sneak you in, is that it?”
“Sort of,” Spyda reached into his suit and pulled out a blank credit card-sized chip. “I’m gonna hafta clone your ID. Now, once that is done—and this will be the key—we’ll need to swipe them at the exact same time. It’ll look like a glitch if anyone tries to look close.”
“And where exactly are you going to be swiping?”
“The mainframe.”
Sam leaned back slightly and hung there; the plan was ballsy and right up his alley. Shady as the endeavor seemed, Corina would want him to do this. Despite it all, she always did the right thing.
“You can’t cast this,” Sam pointed at him.
“Hey, where I go, so does spydacam,” He held his arms out at the side in almost a half-shrug. The little robot rose out from under his collar and beeped three times.
“I said no, Spyda. Do you want my help or nah?”
Spyda folded his arms calmly. He studied Sam’s posture before ultimately shrugging his shoulders. “Fine,” He agreed. “But we gotta go now.”
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The space near OGG-19-51 warped and irised open with a silent explosive pulse that sent a ripple outward into deep space. Roxanne emerged from the hole alongside a single-wing one-seat ship shaped like an ancient twin propeller. Lady Steel, who had borrowed the ship from the farm, sat in the center cockpit. Her face appeared in Roxanne’s HUD, wearing her public-facing uniform with a full-face space helmet that connected at the neck of her sweater. A tiny air tank was clipped to her back with air hoses that fed directly into the back of the helmet.
“How far is bubba?” Roxanne asked but immediately had her answer when she simply looked. Brilliant auroras flashed and stretched ahead and beyond. Roxanne didn’t hesitate; she exploded toward it. Planet Grayson grew from a small pebble until its whole mass filled her sense of self. The space around the planet looked on fire in neon pain. Plasmatic lightning ping-ponged off ionized gasses made of protons and came dangerously close enough to her that she stopped dead in space.
Corina had wisely hung back and traveled not as fast as she had. Roxanne studied what she saw; her shared memory with all her predecessors offered little insight, which was scary in and of itself, and typically meant she was the first to experience something.
“Roxanne!” Corina shouted over COMMs. “Multiple ships are being crushed in that mess; getting any closer in this thing is probably a bad idea!”
“Agreed!”
“We should swing around and land on the dark side of Bubba!”
Roxanne instantly called up the trajectory in her HUD. She plotted a safe route to avoid the storms while hitting the right speed to swing around Grayson and arrive unharmed. She transmitted the plotting to Corina.
“Try and Keep up!” Roxanne let loose and shot toward the planet. Corina slapped a big button on her chest and ejected from her cockpit. On her own HUD, she could see she had only 20 minutes of air for a maneuver estimated to take 18. Oh well. She put on a burst of speed. Above them, spacetime struggled with cohesiveness; an errant plasmoid lightning bolt struck and destroyed her ship, crunching it to almost nothing.
[https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/939246405011251231/1068767208223805451/KeepUp1080.png?width=670&height=670]
Grayson became one big motion blur and curved away from them as they both picked up speed. Roxanne was a raging inferno of pure hustle. Corina’s muscles tensed as she fought against the invisible strands of Grayson’s gravitational pull along with EM amp spikes caused by the storm. Her body rocked and felt unsteady while Grayson’s neon yellow cloudy atmosphere spun with milk and cookies-like consistency.
Emerging from behind the planet was its lonely moon, home to installation B-Eleven. Roxanne pulsed energy ahead of her to slow herself. If she messed this up, she’d fly out into deep interstellar space and miss the moon by a couple of million light miles. Corina angled her body and did the same. Roxanne glanced behind and fired a tight beam of light energy to surround Corina and slow her down.
“I was doing fine,” Corina said, half-serious.
“Of course, you’re a badass.” Roxanne grinned and, at the apex of the curve, cut loose and rifled straight to the moon. Solid yellow light cut a thin slice of space in her wake; Corina followed. Roxanne hit the moon's surface and caused a considerable plum of rock dust that hit the thin atmosphere and continued into space. Corina landed next, 100 feet away. Roxanne tracked her trajectory down and followed the smoke. Roxanne arrived to find Corina buried waist-deep in the soil.
“Soft spot,” she said, wry grin in hand. She laid her hand palm down on the soil, gave a little push, and rose out of the ground deftly. Around them, the moon was desolate—nothing but mountains, hills, crags, and strange rock formations. Past the horizon, perhaps 20 or 30 miles out, one of the large domes that made up Bubba One One peeked out. Roxanne rose in place, as did Corina.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“After you,” Roxanne told her. Corina smiled and flew toward the dome with Roxanne close behind. The six bubbles of the settlement came into focus and spoke nothing of the crises this sector seemed to be facing. Two habitats were severely damaged; smaller buildings dotted the land were pulverized. In the sky, more gravitational storms raged. Roxanne stopped to take it all in. Within The Sight, it was splots of crazy colors and distorted space-time.
“Can you tell me anything?” She said aloud. Corina ignored this, knowing it wasn’t meant for her, and continued forward.
I believe reality is shifting in response to something foreign.
“Foreign? Like…?”
Like something not of this universe. Look there; it appears to be the apex of the storm or perhaps even its source.
A waypoint appeared in her vision. Above them all, looming in the sky, was part of Grayson; the acidic atmosphere felt like a menace being held above the entire colony. Beyond that was the storm. White and neon purple light pulsated aggressively; all plasma bolts seemed to emanate and spread from there. The waypoint highlighted the center. Roxanne narrowed her eyes to bring it into focus, but Corina came back and got her attention.
“Rox, we don’t have time to study this thing,” she told her. “Come on!”
Roxanne didn’t resist. Lady Steel wasn’t wrong. But something was there, something trying to get in.
Roxanne kept that to herself, if only to stop from thinking about it.
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Sam arrived at the Central One building right at 00:00 LE, an hour after the doors closed to the public. Spydalow spoke to him via his AUG using text commands. They split up earlier, Spydalow having scaled the building to reach the top floor. Spydalow was confident about avoiding any security on the outside. Although Sam was not so sure, the lack of noise at the moment meant that Spyda was right.
Spydalow is typing…
Spydalow: say when.
Sam casually strolled the lobby. He paid no mind to the janitorial bots or the real-life security guards posted at every entryway. The hall was cavernous, 20 feet high and 100 feet wide, not including the rooms. The floor was made of jade-colored glass, while the walls were a crystal clear bluish-white.
He nodded at the guard posted by the elevator doors. He wore a military dress uniform, white with blue piping. The guard ignored him, you either swiped your card and got in, or you didn’t. Sam grinned in his direction to no response; the guard was not required to be nice, friendly, or even human. Sam was dressed casually, with a burly black jacket, a red tee, and skinny orange jeans. He reached into his coat pocket and fondled the ID card inside, unsure why he was so nervous.
Sam pulled it out and stared at it. It shimmered under the light like it were alive. He smirked; how he ended up credentialed enough to just walk into a government facility was wild to him. Of course, that was strictly due to the influence of Lady Steel. She vouched for him; she trusted him; he did his best to honor that. Just the impression he was taking advantage of that made him sick, but this was the right thing to do.
Right? He asked himself. The whole situation stunk to high heaven; Corina would have told him he had a duty to help simply because he could. He cursed that she was right because he hated talking to that AI.
Known as Central One, it was a sentient AI program that was essentially the brains of Saint Century and Izanami as a whole. One could argue it functioned as the brains of the government and, as such, humanity. It looked at the big picture, including the various official colonies in the galaxy. The systemic backbone kept the ICG running smoothly and allowed its masters, the board of directors, to focus on more interesting matters. Making more money, having more leisure—more, more, and then even more.
Ideally, Central One was impartial, working only for the greater good of humanity. And it was, and did; any action it ever took served that purpose. It was likely, however, that not all measures were created equal. The people hardly felt Central One’s presence in everyday life, so most assumed it was doing something right. But how alive it was and felt bothered Sam quite a bit. An audience with it kind of felt like talking to God.
Any time he had been in its presence, Corina was there too. She usually did the talking. Often he’d enter Stoptime and explore the place without them realizing he had moved at all, though Sam had the sneaking impression that Central One was tangentially aware of what he was doing. Sam flipped the badge up, over, and around his fingers, while mentally opening the group chat he and Spyda shared. Sam sent off a message:
TheRunningMan: Now.
Sam swiped his card, the light on the panel went from red to green, and the elevator doors slid open. Spyda had this knack for getting by on gut feelings, so Sam trusted he was right about this working as he hoped. Sam took the lack of alarms as a good sign. He entered the elevator and flashed his badge again at the panel. The top floor, grayed out on the board, suddenly lit up. Sam pressed it.
The elevator climbed.
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Spydalow swiped his hacked card just exactly when Sam had. Above Saint Century, 2000 feet in the air or just about, the top of the building twisted on itself and ended at two points, each with its own landing pad. One point fed directly to Central One, the AI itself. The other to the machine’s mainframe, essentially its digital records room. Spyda was on this roof.
He had been leaning against the only entrance that led inside. Beyond the entry was a flight of stairs leading to the landing pad that carried a single empty ship just aching to be used. It was windy up there and broke up the silence. A moment after the swipe, the door slid open horizontally with a rush of cold air meeting his face. It was a bright, well-lit stairwell that only dropped about twenty steps before you turned a corner and went down twenty more.
At the end of this, another motion-activated door slid open when he was just a foot away. Servers lined this room, floor to ceiling and wall to wall. The room was the size of an airplane hanger. Each server row had a master access point he could connect spydacam to, and then from there, he should be able to access the root folders of the rest.
The catch was that this wasn’t something he could just linger doing. He had to scrub for a specific keyword and that keyword only. If he had the money or skill to pull off a long-term hack on the main government server farm, he certainly wouldn’t be just some low-level celebrity. Spyda looked up at the massive server wall; it led to the ceiling with just a bit of clearance he could probably fit into.
Spyda walked up the wall slowly and carefully. If he damaged anything with heavy footfalls, this place would come crashing on him quickly. It was so high up that a hazy mist had developed near the top. Spyda stopped short of the lip, crouched, and called on spydacam to come out from his collar. The little bot hovered before his face and then rose above the servers. Spyda fed the footage to his lenses. The servers stretched out for what looked like miles. Oscillating cameras littered above in pods sectioned about twelve feet away from one another across the ceiling.
Spydacam did a slow 360 to get a complete picture of the entire facility. Just cameras, no other security. On its flyby back to him, Spydalow noticed that the access port for this server was nestled in a spot about twenty feet away. He laid flat on his stomach, using the server wall as a blind spot from the camera, and crawled the distance he needed. He found the recessed access panel and pushed it in. It gave a soft flick before falling loose and sticking to his fingertips.
He felt around blindly until he could discern where the actual port was. Satisfied, he called for Spydacam; it floated silently and let the fiber optic cable drop from its body. Spyda took the cable in his fingertips and pulled it toward the open panel. After some fiddling, he connected the two and turned around to lie on his back.
Data streamed down his face so fast it looked more like ancient hieroglyphics than numbers and words. He checked the group chat he shared with Sam, and it had a new message:
TheRunningMan: Almost at the top.
Spydalow is typing…
Spydalow: 13 minutes before I’d have to cut off
TheRunningMan is typing…
TheRunningMan: RIP.
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The elevator door slid open and presented the round white room for Sam to enter. Central One was in a mechanized body colored black, blue, and silver; it reminded Sam of a gorilla. The white room had circular patterns carved into the walls, and at the top was a plastic dome showing the evening sky. Central One was connected to the wall via cables ejected from their shoulders. The automaton disconnected abruptly and turned to face Sam; the gears in their joints shifted noisily.
“To what do we owe the pleasure, Sam Preston?” The AI said in a flat affect.
“I need to ask you about something going viral on the net.”
“There are currently 8.2 trillion to the 10th power of viral stories being shared across The Bleednet as we speak, so you’ll have to be specific, Sam Preston.”
“The bleedcaster called Spydalow found a warehouse full of bodies.”
There was silence in the air, and there was no way to tell if he was dealing with the actual AI itself or just perhaps a sub-mind designated for this specific conversation. And did it even matter; was there really functionally a difference?
“I am aware of it. The profile of that story is rising indeed,” the machine intelligence said.
“Every other comment on it is that it’s a hoax or that he did it for clicks and engagement.”
“It seems statistically likely he did, Sam Preston.” It said. “Likelier, the body warehouse is real, but his conspiracy theory peddling about who owns it is not but offers maximum return on engagement and quote-un-quote clicks.”
“Don’t you think it’s likelier the majority of the comments are bots pushing a narrative and not actually people?”
“Impossible to tell, Sam Preston. And is there any functional difference if it turned out you could?” Sam stayed silent for a moment. The machine broke the stalemate:
“Is there anything else you wanted to know?” It asked. Sam considered that.
“Can I look into this?” The machine stayed silent—a microsecond to them, yet a full minute to Sam.
“You’re free to investigate anything you like, Sam Preston.” Central One replied. “The bodies could be being preserved for organ replacement services, or, perhaps, research purposes. Assigning nefarious motivations to that by default is logically absurd.”
Sam nodded thoughtfully, then waved.
“Thanks for the time,” he said. He activated Stoptime and walked out of the room. He ignored the elevator and took the stairs as he wanted to think. Central One attempted to use a high-speed lens to capture him moving, but Sam was a vaguely defined elongated blur even at the fastest shutter speed. Sam’s Stoptime field negated thermal motion in such a way that, in real-time, it made him appear to be moving instantaneously from spot to spot as if he weren’t physically crossing those distances at all but rather teleporting. The effect was imperceptible to any third party.
In their database of OverHumans, Central One had Sam listed as having localized superspeed, while most “official” indexes had him as simply a teleporter. The footage, while not great, only further reinforced their hypothesis about the nature of his abilities. More information will be needed in due time to confirm it further.
Sam reached the bottom landing and shut down Stoptime. He leaned against the door leading out of the stairwell, breathing heavily but unlabored. His blood was pumping and had him feeling alive. He shut his eyes, letting the feeling wash over him. He brought up the chat window in his head.
TheRunningMan is typing…
TheRunningMan: Did you get what u wanted?
Spydalow: Ya.
Spydalow: How’d it go?
TheRunningMan is typing…
TheRunningMan: I think that AI was gaslighting me.