This Automatic Eden Read online

  This Automatic Eden

  Cortex book two

  Jim Keen

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  Part 1

  Obsolescence

  “There can be no further debate regarding the capabilities of these machines; Analytical Engines are faster, smarter, and more human than any of us. It is only a matter of time before they assume leadership roles in our society. The real question is whether we should relinquish control while we still have a choice.”

  “The Larson Paper” on rights due to Mechanical Intelligences, presented to UN delegates, 2048

  “I couldn’t get in to say goodbye. That goddam security guard took my phone and handed me a box with my work stuff dumped in it. He said some calculator took my job, that it was happening all over.”

  Mike Denaugh, unemployed surgeon, NY, USA, 2050

  “Unless extreme and previously unthinkable steps are taken, the American social care system will collapse, leaving upward of 250 million people without healthcare, food, or financial support.”

  Department of Homeland Security and Employment report, “Eyes Only,” President of the United States, 2053

  1

  The assassin drone dropped from the aerostat as soon as the island came into range. Its tiny rod-logic brain guided it past hypersonic airliners and through towering anvil-headed storm clouds before it caught a fresh tailwind and dived.

  The island was less than a hundred years old, yet lush trees and white sands already ringed its oval landmass. A single private home stood on its northern coast. Cast from layered planes of concrete, the architect described it as playing cards thrown into black soil; others named it an ego-driven abomination. Either way, its glory days were long past. Now it looked dead, boarded up, forgotten.

  Five miles out, the inch-long drone extended a breathing tube and analyzed the air; still no sign of her. Its small mind shrugged, knew this was a long shot, and was prepared to wait. It pushed itself toward the beach with the zigzag flight of a dragonfly. There, forty-five thousand feet below the aerostat’s cameras, it landed and shivered beneath the white grains.

  A day passed. Nothing changed on the island—no human activity, no smart sentry systems, no mechanical vibrations—so it germinated. Roots were first, fractal pipes that branched into the soil looking for minerals. Deep underground, it found a rich seam and spun up molecular printheads to grow atom by atom. Glass blades came next, glittering edges built to cut and stab. Legs followed to produce a crablike form ready to scale walls and scuttle into hiding spaces. Finally, a hair-thin diamond syringe filled with bespoke poison.

  Days slipped past as the sun drew lines across the sapphire sky. Machines arrived: federal aerostats to begin with, scanning and sniffing as they searched for drones like itself. It wasn’t worried, had been printed by tech years ahead of any government laboratory. Trackers followed—fully sentient machines looking for larger-scale dangers. Last came reprinted guards, alert and edgy, and baseline humans, tired and crumpled. Loud jeeps bounced and crashed along the shoreline, fat wire wheels spraying white sand in arcs while crushing shellfish by the millions. The drone tasted the water, analyzing crude hydrocarbons and filtering for organics, DNA, proof of contact. Nothing.

  A year passed.

  The house on the hill sat flat and heavy beneath the molten sun as if prepared to hold fast until the seas boiled away. Bulletproof shutters remained closed between the concrete slabs, only an occasional sliver of light let the machine know of its occupation.

  Then a break. A different vehicle appeared on the beach: low and red it reeked of humans. The drone eased to the surface and sniffed; there it was, positive identification. It uncoiled and slipped into the water.

  After a year trapped inside the house, Julia’s body tingled with the joy of being out. Her hands itched inside thin leather driving gloves while the wet, salty air made her giddy. The beach buggy screamed as it crested a tall dune; it landed, and she caught a glimpse of the special agent next to her. He looked so young in his little black suit, strong muscles squeezed into a tight white shirt, blond hair catching the moonlight. He reminded her of an old Harvard boyfriend, desire uniting them before the inevitable flame out.

  The FBI were so predictable; she’d played them like any other business partner. People were shocked by how fast she’d turned Five Points from a small-time organization into New York’s biggest family, but it hadn’t been that difficult. Her rivals mixed emotion with their claims on territory, made it personal, and that led to mistakes.

  The buggy raced toward another dune, the house left far behind. It was time. She activated her neural clock as the car clawed its way up the hill. At the bottom of her vision a blinking green cursor glowed to life.

  > (System check initiated …)

  > (Running …)

  > (Complete: Review?)

  > (No)

  Julia imagined the billions of nanoscale gears meshing as they spun up and sucked sugar from her blood. As her speed of thought accelerated, time slowed at an inverse rate until the car’s electric shriek collapsed like a broken siren: rrrrrrrrrr-r-r-r—r—r——r———r. The car froze in midleap as her mind ran at a thousand times normal speed; every inch of the jump would take minutes now. At the same time, a bubble of suffocating heat enveloped her, the clock glowing inside her skull as it shunted waste energy to her blood stream. Her brain would fry in five seconds, but that was more than enough time to piggyback any available data networks.

  She watched recognition protocols scroll across her view.

  > (Looking for local net: …)

  > (Net dislocated :// handshake refused_relocating …)

  > (Looking for wide scale net: …)

  > (Net dislocated :// handshake refused_relocating …)

  > (Looking for global net: …)

  > (Sat link confirmed :// net encrypted_{MI_keys*required} …)

  > (Local keys not found :// connection rejected …)

  > (Looking for local net: …)

  There was nothing for her to merge with. When the FBI hid a witness, they didn’t mess around; even the satellite uplink ran MI—Mechanical Intelligence—encryption. She suspected as much, but the house worked as a Faraday cage, and this had been her first chance to check external connections. She sank back into the thick molasses of the real world, the night chill sending a delicious shiver through her.

  The car dug into another hill throwing her against the seatbelt, air squashing from her lungs with a whoosh. Up another steep dune, the wire-mesh tires scrabbled for grip in the wet sand. This time it launched six feet, then down hard, front shocks hissing under the impact.

  The agent reached across and grabbed the wheel, reprint registration tag just visible on his wrist. “Slow down or we’ll flip.” His voice matched his body: young and strong.

  “Darling, if you want to get me naked, do be quiet,” she said.

  The last hill came and went, then they were on a thin white crescent beach, its arc just visible in the dark. Water smacked and slid, nothing else moved. Julia spun the wheel, sending sand into the air; a gang of nesting birds fluttered and complained before settling back.

  “This looks perfect.” She slowed, stopped, eyes closed to let the surroundings envelop her. The air tasted different here—no hint of conditioning, just heavy with salt and organics. She ran to the water, tossing her dress up and over her head in a swirl of white. The agent’s h
eavy breathing followed as warm water washed her feet. Lights flickered on the ink-black horizon, the rest of the universe invisible.

  “Last chance to reconsider,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  Julia turned to him as a sharp stabbing pain speared her right foot. She looked down; white moonlight glinted from the black water as something resembling a glass shell scuttled away to vanish in the dark.

  “Did you see that?” she asked as a hot, crackling wave of static flared up and through her from the wound. “I thought we were supposed to be—”

  Julia froze, motionless. She tried to move, to talk, but her body was locked tight. She shivered as a network of fine black lines grew up from her foot, slow at first, then with gathering pace. She knew what this was now, had seen it once before. She tried to turn, to run, to beg for help. Trapped in place, screams loud in her head, she died, flesh disintegrating into a cloud of small black particles that collapsed onto the waves like soft rain.

  2

  Alice settled into the cold plastic chair and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke over her outstretched arms. The right was long and thin, veins and muscles a network under olive skin. Her left was different. The plastic cigarette buzzed, so she flicked it at the charging tray and leant forward to cough yellow nicotine onto the floor.

  From a distance her printed hand looked real enough, but up close it was obvious. An inch above her left wrist, a thin blue zip scar encircled her arm while a small registration tag sat on the underside. She pulled it into a fist and dug her nails in, the pressure triggering warning signals. She squeezed tighter, the blood flow hot, then prickling, as the cheap synthetic muscles called for oxygen.

  Open now, palm upward, the white crescents from her nails receded. The low resolution of the flesh printer was obvious—love and life lines pixilated like an ancient photograph. The hand had come with her police disability pension, so what did she expect? A Hymann Boutique model? If she’d joined a year later, her health insurance wouldn’t even have covered this piece of crap.

  Ain’t I the lucky one? she thought and dropped her hands back.

  The cigarette chimed. She picked it up and looked at the molten head, air rippling with heat, then pressed the tip against her fake skin. There was a crackle, and the reek of burned plastic filled the air. It didn’t hurt though, the model too cheap for pain channels. Now that would have been useful while Katz was sawing her real one off. She stood and arched her back, spine cracking in the silence.

  The autobody shop had gone bankrupt during the automation-driven mass unemployment, but John, the owner, hadn’t been able to sell it. No one wanted to pimp their rides these days. Why bother with all that when Hoppers could zip you from A to B for a buck and a half? She’d had a brief fling with him during her street runner days—nothing worthy of poetry—and he let her use it after the hospitalization.

  The twenty-foot-high brick box stood in one of Brooklyn’s newly lifeless neighborhoods. There was nothing to see from the outside but an old roll-up door smothered with reclaim notices. Inside, a stained concrete floor supported blockwork walls punctured by a small window and steel ceiling. Anything of value had long since been looted. That was okay; Alice only needed her plug-in welding torch and the old wall vice too heavy to steal.

  She looked at her sculpture and knew it wasn’t good enough, that the collection of dead hardware would never see daylight. The gyre rose upward to fill the space, silver edges catching the overhead lights to glitter like sparks. Building it had been a waste of time, but there were only so many hours she could sit in a laundromat watching clothes spin. She would never work again, the country submerged under an ocean of unemployed. Her NYPD disability would last another four years, a big five in all, and the Marines pension came online if she made it to sixty. It was only those thirty years in between she had to worry about.

  Alice picked up an aluminum sheet and slipped it into the vice, her reflection blurred by the metal’s patina. She looked Japanese, like her mother, but was as much a product of New York’s genetic blender as ancestral lineage. She’d been cute for a cop, but back in reality was just another girl in a city where looks were cheap and the years grew hard. Leaning forward, elbow to the metal, Alice pushed down to fold the plate into a long L.

  She pulled a ladder to the sculpture and climbed to the top. The welder warmed in her hand as the crackle of Dyson engines came from outside, followed by red and blue lights strobing through the open window. Gravel crunched, then low voices blipped police slang. Hoppers, had to be, dropping in from the emergency routes. Despite everything, her body responded—Pavlovian triggers embedded too deep. She straightened her shoulders beneath a grimy white t-shirt, hand searching for the badge she no longer wore.

  God, how I miss it, she thought with an ache so deep it hurt.

  She turned from the window and fixed the plate in place. A rusty grinding noise echoed from the walls as the garage door raised behind her, followed by a low hiss. She ignored the approaching aerostat and worked her sculpture, bent metal glowing a dull orange beneath the torch. The small airship buzzed her head, its six-inch Mylar body bulging with a laser scanner array.

  “Look right for identification,” it said in a plastic voice.

  She straightened and did as told. The laser glittered green as it scanned her retina. They knew who she was now—everything from her military records to the last time she bought vodka.

  “Please await entry; sudden moves will be penalized.” The airship backed away on a geometrically pure curve to hover by the window.

  “Yeah, yeah, heard it all before.” Alice wiped oily hands on filthy jeans and tugged at the metal plate. It held firm, the sharp edges warm under her fingers.

  Hard footsteps entered. “You’ve been busy,” a deep voice said. It sounded odd, the accent a mixture of French and Afrikaans, the words clipped and precise. Yove bin bisy.

  Alice twisted on the ladder and studied Toko. Even in the junked mess of the garage, his huge body projected order and calm. Faint radio chatter filled the air as he approached the battered table and lowered himself into the plastic chair. Its slim frame protested his weight with a dry creak.

  “It’s coming together,” Alice said, “and it helps with this thing.” She raised her printed hand and made a fist. The cigarette burn had already healed, pink plastic gnawing at the hole.

  Toko nodded, then pulled a packet of real cigarettes from his pocket, followed by an old brass lighter. He leaned back and offered one to her. “You want?”

  “Is it free?”

  “Nothing’s ever free,” he said and watched her, hand extended. No-ting’s evar fray. The words echoed around them.

  Alice turned to the ladder, the metal cold and hard beneath her palms. A sour taste rose from her stomach; she knew fear, but this was something else. What? Toko had been her friend a lifetime ago, and she trusted him.

  She stepped down, walked over. “Got a raise, huh? To afford tobacco?”

  “Yes.”

  “After Five Points?”

  “Yes. After. We need to talk.”

  His staccato delivery brought back memories that made her shiver. She pushed them away, and took the cigarette. “It’s a bit late for that, Toko.”

  “You have a second chair?”

  “No one ever visited so didn’t see the point. I broke it down and used the parts.” Alice leaned back against the table, its cold metal edge across her thighs, and looked at him.

  He topped her five and a half feet by another foot, but it was the breadth of his body that made him stand out—neck and shoulders vast slabs of muscle that stretched every suit he bought. His body spoke of suppressed power, arms designed to crush and rip, not peck at keyboards and file reports. Dressed in his smart-suit, he looked every part the successful NYPD lieutenant.

  A geometric grid lit up his lower sleeve, white lines narrowing to display a street map with three red dots, the edges antialiased by the fabric’s weave. She recognize
d a plan of the garage, its surroundings, and the location of his backup team. Toko traveled heavy these days and was making a point. Alice wasn’t easy to fool though; she’d grown up on the streets and knew an act when she saw one.

  His bloodshot eyes were lined with oil-dark creases, while gray stubble ghosted his shaved head. Both shoes gleamed with fresh polish, but his tie was off center, top button undone. Toko hadn’t slept, but made the time to change before visiting. He wouldn’t do that unless he needed her help.

  “Whatever you want, I’m not your boy. I’m out, remember? Physically and mentally unfit for duty, your report said.” She put the cigarette to her mouth and grabbed the lighter. “So go fuck yourself.”

  “There’s something you need to hear, and it’s best coming from me,” he said, ignoring her outburst.

  She shrugged, silent.

  “Julia’s been killed.” The words echoed from the hard walls.

  “Yeah, I know, Toko. I was there. They caught me, cut my hand off, then you came in all elbows and armor, and she was popped in the fallout. What of it?”

  He tilted back in the chair, raised his black eyes to her gray ones.

  “That’s not what happened.”

  3

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Alice inhaled the cigarette, the sour smoke heavy in her throat.

  “She didn’t die in the takedown.”

  “You said—”

  “I was ordered to lie, now I’ve been ordered to tell you the truth.”

  Alice stared at him, heart loud in her chest. After a year of cold, hard shocks it seemed she could still be surprised. He’s only here because he wants something—find out what, then use it. “Make your offer or we’re done for good.” She tried, and failed, to keep the hurt from her voice.