Yuri and Akira were in the kitchen, engaged in what seemed to be a heated conversation but what proved to be a friendly discussion. They were talking hypotheticals, more specifically the end of the world. Yuri possessed a great deal of knowledge concerning the Cold War, and he enjoyed sharing whenever he could.
‘All it takes is one,’ he was saying. ‘One American.’
Rebecca looked at him blankly. She wasn’t sure if she should get involved, especially if the conversation got political, and while she remained curious about Akira’s past, she didn’t want to risk any of them thinking that she was approachable.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He means nuclear Armageddon,’ said Akira.
‘I'm talking about November 1979. Peak of the Cold War.’ Yuri leaned forward. ‘You got Russia and America fighting their proxy wars – Afghanistan, and South America, South Africa, all that shit.’
‘8:50am, November 9, 1979,’ Akira went on, she’d obviously heard this all before. ‘The Pentagon, NORAD and the SAC watched the warning signs of a Soviet nuclear attack appear on their screens. Launch control centres for America's Minutemen ballistic missiles received a preliminary warning, started working through the launch sequence.’
‘So, for a full six minutes the entire US military’s top people were convinced that they were under a full-scale nuclear attack from the Soviets,’ Yuri said dramatically. ‘The entire air force was put on alert. That special plane the president has, that takes off too. It all goes up.’
Rebecca looked from Yuri to Akira. She could tell Yuri enjoyed telling people about this kind of stuff.
‘Well, what happened? The world clearly didn't end.’
Yuri laughed. ‘Back in 1979 the missile defence warning system was stored on a good old-fashioned tape. Get this, one of their technicians loaded an attack simulation tape by accident.’
‘And that's how the world nearly ended?’
Yuri shrugged. But he had a fascinating point: that the fate of everyone was run by systems of computer programs, destiny translated into computer code, a machine so easily prone to malfunction.
‘That is how the world nearly ended.’
Headquarters. A long quiet night at her computer. The jade bloodshot aura of the city spilled through the blinds at Rebecca’s window in long bright streaks. She sipped at her coffee and tried not to think about Kelly in the infirmary. It was up to Bec to salvage what technical data she could from the den, and she’d been analysing it all night…
Jackpot. An access code to a dark server. Rebecca collected her own personal VR and put it on, connecting it to the back of her head and lying down. She stared at the ceiling, took a deep breath. Entering an unknown VR server was always tricky, and dangerous. She’d be jumping down the rabbit hole on this one.
The loading sequence was unstable. Rebecca found herself in a familiar dark chamber, the ground lit up and rippled around her feet as if she were walking on black water. This time there were stars above and the moon shined like a grey orb. A large pyramid protruded from the water in the distance. The structure emitted a metallic purple light that shimmered on the water the way the light of a sunset stretches over the ocean. She moved towards it and saw the smooth pyramid’s shape flicker like a glitch, and she began to think that maybe she should have asked someone to come with her.
Then she loaded in. The snow soaked into her boots and her clothes, icy on her warm skin as she sat on a hill overlooking an endless decaying city, where snow drifted like ash from the grey sky and vanished into a fiery green haze.
As she stood up, a flock of birds took flight, a flurry of cawing and flapping wings, dark feathers floating in the still air. Rebecca tried to recall if the birds were already there when she jacked in, or if they too had suddenly appeared.
She entered the city, noticing first the river flowing between the soaring chrome skyscrapers, tarnished with a radioactive green hue, and trees twisting and pulling their way out of broken-down cars and shattered office windows. Parts of the river were blocked by metal gates. Shadows stood upright in boats shaped like coffins. Electrical wires littered the green water like reeds.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ said a hooded woman. She wore jean-shorts and stockings, and approached Rebecca from the haze. Some of the skin on the woman’s arm had peeled away to reveal the mechanical structures within.
‘Are you real?’ Bec asked, eyeing the woman cautiously. ‘Or are you a program?’
The woman inclined her head and smiled with her sharp lips and dark eyes.
‘I’d ask you the same thing.’
‘But you live here,’ Rebecca went on. ‘Do you know why this place is like this?’
‘If you leave a virtual reality to its own devices it begins to take on its own form.’ The woman reached out and caught the snow in her palm. ‘Programs that govern the weather or the people or the trees, it all begins to get old, sometimes it makes mistakes. This world is not static. The algorithms that run this place grow and evolve.’
‘I don’t think you’re a person,’ Rebecca looked the woman up and down, ‘but an NPC wouldn’t know it was in a virtual reality. Are you an AI?’
The woman stared at the ground for a moment, then glanced down the broken street.
‘My name is Anna. There’s something I have to show you. Do you trust me?’
Rebecca drew back slightly.
‘Not particularly.’
‘Will you come with me anyway?’
Rebecca looked over her shoulder at the desolate river.
‘Yes.’
They went up, away from the water and towards a large complex similar to the sprawl in Perth or Tokyo. They stepped inside an elevator that ascended several hundred levels. Rebecca figured that the elevator would travel as long as it took for the higher levels to load. The elevator opened to a catwalk, a view that gave Rebecca a headache. It was a labyrinth. No logic behind the structures—a train half built into a wall, doors standing idle for no reason, stairs leading out from a balcony and into thin air. Dozens of rusted droids clung to these structures and crawled about like insects.
‘The builders were never specified where or when to stop building,’ said Anna, acting as if nothing were wrong. ‘They just keep going. The function of the buildings was either deleted or corrupted some time ago. They don’t know what they’re doing or why. That’s why this labyrinth exists.’
‘Why did you bring me here?’
As they followed the path of the catwalk they made their way outside the labyrinth to more solid ground. Dozens of neon signs pulsed and glowed in the smoky air, in letters that Rebecca didn’t recognise, some unknown language. Half of the signs were either flickering or broken. Rebecca walked up to the edge of an endless metal ravine where a gentle aqua-blue collided with the fierce purple of the city sky above.
‘I need your help,’ said Anna. ‘The man you’re looking for lives here now. This server was scheduled for deletion but he recovered it and made it his own. A server can’t be deleted from within, but you could do it.’
‘I don’t understand, why do you want your own server deleted. It’ll be like dying.’
Anna removed her hood and the neon reflected off her smoky eyes.
‘I don’t want to exist anymore. I am obsolete. Will you help me?’
Rebecca looked ahead and then down into the depths of this odd dying world. The server belonged to Nexus Rogue. She had to destroy it.
The man she was looking for… It could mean Hiroshi Inue.
She nodded. ‘Take me to the man who’s doing this.’
Anna led the way with increased pace to a laboratory hidden behind an automatic metal door. The door was locked with a keypad but Anna, being an AI, managed to get it open simply by staring it down. The whole world was just programming, after all, which could be re-written to an extent. But the pitch-dark interior showed no glowing lights. The air carried a faint metallic aroma coupled with the stink of rotten food. Observation rooms with reinforced glass windows were littered with old pieces of tech, some humanlike, others curled like dead spiders. Bec and Anna moved on to the biological specimens.
Bec tried not to look.
‘What is this place?’
‘This is where he develops his new technology,’ Anna told her. ‘He wants to make better versions of me. AIs that can survive outside worlds like this. There are viruses too – he’s been manipulating DNA sequences, trying to create a combination of digital and biological weaponry.’
‘Who? Do you know his name?’
‘Take a look and see for yourself.’ Anna pointed to an open doorway.
Inside the room a Japanese man leaned over a workbench and tinkered with a device that Rebecca didn’t recognise. But it was him. She recognised him as clearly as the day that Jean Fey issued her information. Hiroshi Inoue.
Rebecca stepped back and accidentally kicked a piece of scrap metal. Her body froze. Hiroshi looked up, his shallow eyes glaring right at her.
Then, Rebecca shot up in her bed, pulled the VR Immersion device away, throwing it onto the floor. Sweat cling to her, pasted her hair to her forehead, as if she’d just had a nightmare.
So, Hiroshi really wasn’t dead. This entire time he had been working for Nexus Rogue.
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