Shadow.Net by Toh Enjoe
01
I am an eyeball. No, two eyeballs, I should say. Or maybe three.
The eyeball that I am is currently capturing a car slowly advancing in a line of vehicles on an avenue—bird’s-eye view. Flitting around the entire visual field are squares drawn in green lines. They’re facial recognition markers. In a semi-transparent window in one corner scrolls the reference log, already too fast for the naked eye to follow. Most of the log is censored and masked anyway. The markers’ movements undulate and dance like a school of sardines or spiraling manta rays or hammerhead sharks. What’s clear is that rather than some intention, something that’s too big to grasp exists there. You get the feeling that the school is just a part of something even bigger.
The behemoth formed by the crowd of markers turns in its sleep, and like some phase change the movement shifts into a column of swarming mosquitoes, then a flock of fleeing sparrows, then a formation of geese, altering its shape. Scattering, gathering, collecting, unifying, it searches the objects in the visual field efficiently. The movements evinced by a search algorithm born from research on animals and insects’ herd motion has this kind of power to enchant the viewer. Just when you think you’ve grasped the pattern, it switches to an unexpected motion. It’s not an incomprehensible motion but rather one whose various parts are all familiar. It’s just a combination of simple movements like stretching, shrinking, and rotating, but their diversity is dizzying. You might end up with such a scene if the mimic octopus, which impersonates a variety of organisms, ever herded together.
The markers flit, ignoring the facial pics on posters, ignoring the lives depicted with blinking pixels on the surface of gigantic displays in street corners. They leap, estimating the position of the original from silhouettes reflected in walls of glass. When they enclose a human face, the green of the square frame turns red, immediately stops, and transmits data. The data are referred to server instances, and the reference log scrolls at the edge of my vision. To me, it’s beginning to look like markers and faces mating. The outputted reference data are the offspring, so to speak. Or maybe it’s like watching a crowd of people being attacked by vampire bats. Most of the faces enclosed in markers look foggy and out of focus, uniform, generic.
We live in times when the mere act of seeing is regulated. Without the concerned party’s permission or a special waiver, mechanically analyzing someone’s face as an image is forbidden. At least publicly, even though you’re allowed to save it. There are legal strictures against publicly and mechanically mass-processing data showing someone in a manner amenable to human eyes. These days, the facial recognition mechanism of snap cameras not only clicks a photo in response to the subject’s smile but also busily masks the faces of passersby who entered the frame. The manufacturer equips the function purely in accordance with social mores. Erasing the sound of the shutter snapping is a technical possibility, but why would you want to erase it unless you’re up to no good, the thinking goes, with the upshot that even a noiseless electronic shutter has to be accompanied by the sound.
I am watching this scene now as part of a surveillance network that Public Security is testing. It’s not mistaken to say that I am a part, an organ of this system whose design I’m involved in. When plans for a large-scale surveillance system using drones first came up, a difficult question arose: how to structure a system to handle data masked out of privacy concerns.
The answer, or one of the desperate solutions, is me.
In my memory, I’m sitting up in a hospital bed, my bandaged face downcast, and am hearing out the doctor’s explanation. I listen as the parts of my brain that I lost in an accident are listed one after the other. I understand what’s being said. I find it strange that I understand what I’ve lost and am doubtful that I really do understand.
“A misapprehension of countenances has been observed,” the doctor says.
“You mean, I can’t tell apart people’s faces?” I ask.
“That would be it,” the doctor replies, his aloof expression hard to read.
I am a part of this system, but you could also say that this system is a part of my visual system. I see a black car among the line of vehicles on the avenue laid across my visual field. A red marker pasted on the backseat window is capturing the face of a man looking this way. Naturally, the face is foggy, but by checking the log in the corner of my vision, I can tell that it is Chief Aramaki from Public Security. The text-data log tells me that his line of sight is directed my way.
My viewpoint is that of an experimental drone. A trio of them forms a team and floats in the skies above the target domain and monitors the designated area. You can think of it as an autonomously functioning surveillance camera mounted on a miniature helicopter; something similar saw action in the world war. Whether or not it’s operable as a public resource is still under fierce debate. The use of mechanical face recognition has been accepted for immigration inspections, and so has the installation of surveillance cameras in street corners, but installing cameras with a face recognition function in street corners is a different issue.
Aerial photography belongs to the realm of hobbies, but if you’re sending up a drone to peep into a public bathhouse, then it’s a crime. Surveillance cameras ought to be installed in banks, but putting them in a locker room is out of the question. By now, border control via immigration inspections is difficult without mechanical face recognition. Banning home-use digital cameras with face recognition capabilities is hardly feasible. That’s partly because they’re widespread, but there’s also the fundamental issue that the human visual system itself is, in a way, just a camera with a recognition function. The visual system of a fully prosthetic cyborg is, of course, industrial machinery. On that point, there’s really nothing to distinguish it from a robot’s. The presence of biological parts doesn’t mean that a cyborg with a face recognition function taking a walk is any different from a camera with a face recognition function roaming around on rotors. The signal transmission capabilities of cybernetic humans far surpass those of fossil-age radios.
The difference, then, is the presence of a brain. Past the pupils of a cyborg there exists, or at least there is said to exist, an organ called the brain, and behind this surveillance network sits the brain called me. In principle, unlike a system made up of mass-produced brainless drones, it’s no different from a human being monitoring a display showing a massive amount of info.
So perhaps it can be said that seeing is a right that is granted to the structure called the brain. The right to see is engendered by the fact that brains cannot be manufactured industrially, by their inability to be mass-produced. Because it’s not possible to manufacture a brain thus and transpose extant information, mine has yet to be fully healed. This system has been positioned as an experiment to augment my lost cerebral functions. Humanitarian research, in other words. That’s what it is on the surface. My artificial eyes just happen to be lodged in drones rather than my ocular cavities.
Let’s say some field of the brain is open to mechanical substitution. As well as some other portion. And yet another portion. How much mechanical substitution can you have before the brain becomes a machine? Where does the forest begin if you keep planting trees, and when does gray turn into white?
My vision abruptly wavers, and the video switches to a different drone’s.
I am an eyeball, and as a human am accustomed to using two, but the drone formation is a trio and I am three-eyed, while as a processing system called the brain I am two-eyed and outfitted to grasp one visual field at a time.
I can’t help but cover my eyes at the sight of a drone, held aloft on three sets of rotors, attempting to ram another drone (the one that was providing my visual field until just now) for a second time. There ought to have been an approach-and-contact warning, but I don’t see it in the log. Shaking my head, I recognize that I’ve been dealt a shock akin to a game character under my control falling off a cliff or my bended knee straightening out as I dream. You might feel the same way if a door slammed shut on your imaginary limb. An eyeball that comprises me is charging another eyeball, and I’m watching them collide in midair as if I were a stranger. I run my eyes over the attitude-control monitoring log to search for a countermeasure, but the number of parameters keeping the drones up in the sky easily exceeds my processing capability. Humans can’t get a full grasp on the signals controlling their prostheses, or even their biological bodies, so this is inevitable.
Retracing past logs, I consult anew the record of the chief’s expression beyond the bulletproof glass from when the two drones collided. The chief was staring at the collision of my two eyeballs, the two drones. His expression is stiff, but not exactly surprised. His right hand goes up and presses his right ear. His mouth moves. Reading lips isn’t as reliable a skill as it is commonly believed to be, but the basic data of the chief’s facial muscles is on record, so I can tell what he is saying.
“The Major, eh?” he is calling into the mic.
02
“Spam?” asks the man in the passenger’s seat.
“Yup, by my daughter’s cell,” the man behind the wheel answers. “Happens a lot these days.”
Displays reading “Batou” and “Togusa” sidle up to the man in the passenger’s seat and the man behind the wheel, respectively.
“There’s a filtering service for kids, isn’t there?” the man marked Batou says. He points out that they can’t be “military grade” attacks.
“You know how frequently recent barriers refresh,” Togusa replies.
Still looking out the window, Batou shrugs his shoulders in the cramped car. “Ah, you mentioned love letters from advanced AI.”
“Yup,” Togusa answers curtly.
“It’s just a correspondence program, isn’t it?” says Batou. “Someone who’ll only say things you want to hear. You don’t need AI for that. There are people like that. A lot of demand, too.”
“My daughter still can’t tell a flattery-prone AI from a human being who cares about her.”
“You say that like you or I can. Do you know how many fake 911 calls there were last year?” reminds Batou. “A serial fake caller program. Instead of writing a novel, they concoct these deluded murder cases and report them. Since the hassle was automated, the processing got automated too, and it became an issue when actual reports got filtered out.”
“You mean where warnings from old-type surveillance cameras were judged to be too ‘mechanical’ and bounced by the relay server,” recalls Togusa.
“I dealt with a few, in the way of moonlighting,” Batou shares. Turning both his palms upwards, he pretends to grab something. “Crushing spam bots. The chief was into it, after what happened.”
“The Puppeteer,” Togusa responds after a brief pause, and Batou goes on.
“—And the follow-up hunt for stray AI. Once you start looking for them, they’re all over the place. None of them had the Puppeteer’s ego, but many of them surpassed him when it came to distributed processing. Well, just think about it. Which is smarter, committing a series of flashy crimes and getting caught, or sticking to real gains and avoiding arrest?”
“The Puppeteer had his reasons.”
“What do I know about a machine’s reasons?” Batou says. “Who knows if humans could even understand them? Anyway, there were tons of these AIs. Beyond the old Great Firewall, beyond the Urals, heaps of them. They normally don’t cause trouble, so there’s no incentive to investigate them, and they don’t get caught because we don’t investigate them. You know what they said? ‘Only fools commit crimes that can get you arrested.’ ”
“Botnet,” Togusa mutters. He’s referring to a distributed processing system formed by computers infected with viruses connecting to each other after they’ve turned into bots and zombies.
“A ghostnet.” Batou doesn’t sound particularly amused. “True, it’s empty past the ghost line. A cluster of auto-reply programs for whom infection and expansion is everything. When I asked why they chose to develop their ability to reply in human languages, the answer I got was, ‘Survival rates improve when you beg for your life.’ ”
“The war?” prompts Togusa, and Batou takes it from there.
“Remnants, some of them. A happy family of advanced tactical AIs and such led by a guerilla-warfare strategic AI. These guys gave up their attachment to bodies long ago. Their hobby’s pretending to be, say, love letters, and coming across as harmless so they can transmit and spread and secure computational resources by exchanging messages. ‘Would you like to be my friend?’ That stuff. Existing has become an end in itself for them, and they don’t have functions like guilt. No tall tale is beneath them.”
Steering the wheel, Togusa chimes in, “ ‘I’m a life form, born in a sea of information.’ ”
Batou finally swivels his neck, studies Togusa’s expression, almost says something but swallows his words, and answers, “Yeah. Your daughter’s pen pal must be one of those. They use their abundant computing resources to keep sending letters asserting that they’re alive and request more computing resources, in a fierce, seesawing battle with filters and barriers.”
Togusa gives a nod in the driver’s seat.
“And?” Batou asks monosyllabically.
Togusa glances at the rearview mirror. “What, weren’t you listening?”
Batou laughs. “It’s no different from peering into a rearview mirror when you don’t need to. Call it an echo of elegant, sentimental interpersonal exchanges. It’s just more like it when you’re issued orders in an actual voice.”
Of course, the man called Batou has to be privy to the directive Togusa just got from the chief. Judging that his partner received it too, Batou’s cyberbrain interface must have put the chief’s orders on hold before they could be conveyed to his consciousness. The log that reached it must have said: “The chief has called, but the same content has been transmitted to Togusa, it is not an urgent directive, and there is more than enough time to have it delivered verbally by Togusa.”
“I can’t believe you actually felt like implementing such a cumbersome procedure,” Togusa remarks.
“Every day is a cyber battle,” Batou says in a teacherly tone. “Didn’t they teach you in school to constantly better and update yourself?”
Looking away from Togusa, who has plunged into silence, Batou speaks again.
“In order to stay human.”
03
The hall looks like it can hold three hundred people, the front is an elevated stage, and at the end hangs a large screen. The lights have been dimmed, and a presenter is visible at the lectern on the right edge of the stage. It’s the person in question, according to the log, but the face is as featureless as ever and indistinguishable from others.
Equations and unfamiliar diagrams keep popping up on the screen, and I lack the ability to decipher the symbols. The lecture itself also passes me by as if it’s in a foreign language.
“So this,” an amplified male voice sounds from speakers positioned around the hall, “is the communication protocol used by a large-scale botnet discovered last year. The method is well known, but never before has it been executed at such a scale. The botnet found on the continent after the war was an autonomous network of several hundred thousand infected computers, but it had merely adapted to the ecology on the other side of the Great Firewall.
“Meanwhile, this recent one is a network enabled by the postwar standardization of formats, and its special characteristic is that by and large it ignores geographical constraints. That is why it took so long to discover—or rather, for us to grasp its full extent. The Great Firewall itself used to be just a layer of walls enveloping nation-states along their borders. It is not an overstatement to say that we now live in the era of a double net, of a superimposed net. Or one might say that a postal system established by a nation-state of bots inhabiting the net is about to be born. This postal system expands in scale by riding the mail that it sends out. Being infected by this net allows you to participate in the postal system, in fact coerces you to do so. Hence it is not what we customarily call a network. Let me put it this way.”
The man inserts a practiced pause and continues.
“A third hand, from which you were separated at birth, has been lying somewhere on Earth this whole time. You don’t know about its existence. Yet the moment you access the hand, you know that it is yours, and though physically alien, you know that it is a part of your body. That differs from our understanding of a network, which is premised on mutual exchanges.”
The sign at the hall’s entrance that reads “21st Meeting of the Institute of Distributed Communications Engineers” is a makeshift affair of A4 sheets. Once the audience has streamed out the door and the ones in the hall continuing their discussions have thinned out, the markers that were gently flying about turn red. A short man displayed as Aramaki steps forth and quietly stands next to a man who has just exited the hall and who appears to be the earlier presenter. The red markers wobble and follow. I shift my line of sight to find another marker awaiting at the end of the hallway and displaying the man’s bodyguard.
“I’d like you to withhold it,” Aramaki opens his mouth next to the man.
The man starts walking without meeting Aramaki’s eyes. “I guess asking why you’d know about an article I haven’t published yet would be a waste—”
“From the news,” Aramaki says.
The man shakes his head as though he has no intention of humoring Aramaki. “These days, even secret societies are trying to be open. Public Security could borrow a page,” he says. “An open Public Security dragnet.”
The man halts and, still refusing to face Aramaki, speaks again.
“It’s something even I thought of. Sooner or later, it will be common knowledge, and someone else will put out a paper. Are you going to try to gag them each time?”
“There’s no need to put it where everyone can easily access it, though. Just by hiding it in the shade you can significantly lower the dispersal rate. Perfect secrecy doesn’t exist when information rides fluctuations, tunnels through walls, and keeps on diffusing. My job is to buy some time by adjusting the dispersal rate,” Aramaki argues.
“For my part,” the man says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you people already implemented that as a system. What do you care about my article? You even know what’s in it.”
“If that were the case,” counters Aramaki, “I wouldn’t have given you a visit like this.”
“Maybe this interview itself is a ruse.” The man’s finger wanders in the air, but I confirm that its tip is pointing at his bodyguard. “You’ve taken it upon yourself to dissuade me from going public just to cover up the fact that Public Security is already operating that system. You might be trying to send such a message via my bodyguard.”
“I might as well ask.” Aramaki indicates the guard detail with his chin. “What’s their affiliation?”
The man breathes a deep sigh. “You’d never expose yourself as you’ve done without having checked.” He shakes his head lamentingly. “Their nationality doesn’t matter. Nor do governments. It’s an open security unit. They all have suspicious backgrounds, and they monitor and prevent each other from making a move, that’s the setup. So I myself don’t know who the hell they might be sending messages to that you’ve shown yourself here.”
“I doubt they’ll pull through for you,” Aramaki says.
“Maybe not for me,” the man agrees. “But on the whole, their performance is actually not bad. The probability that they’ll keep me safe going forward is low, but their success rate for low-grade escort missions is actually higher than that of ordinary bodyguards. They’re fine depending on the case.”
And, the man continues.
“A man who thinks of something that anyone can think of is fungible, isn’t he?”
04
The mass of parts, disassembled and lined up neatly on the table, resembles a cicada that some cat has taken apart. Red and blue wires, categorized by color and furthermore laid out according to their lengths, impart a certain sense of order, but such a sight suggests the coldness of matter, ever so indifferent to human beings. Broken down to the level of parts and tidily rearranged, the drone’s remains no longer hint at motion. That it once soared into the sky is already unbelievable. Life that has stopped moving is merely a corpse, and like a photo capturing a bird at one instant of its flight, seems somehow fake. There is no room for doubt that a drone is put together, but the fact that reassembling the parts would yield one that can fly again isn’t getting through to me. It’s as perplexing as being told that a shattered vase will revert to its original shape on its own.
“Just an accident?” asks Batou, walking around the table.
“For the time being,” a nonplused researcher replies.
“Can’t you find out just by looking at the comm log?” inquires Togusa, leaning over the table.
“Be my guest.” The researcher extends and offers a wired jack, at which Togusa throws up his arms in surrender as if it’s the barrel of a gun. “I’m sure you people know what opening a port means in this day and age,” the researcher says.
“You undergo a baptism by virus, like a newborn babe?”
Togusa’s inflection rises at the end. He is asking, and past his gaze, the researcher folds his hands behind his head and leans back into his chair.
“I guess you could say virus. Do harmless viruses count as ‘viruses’ for you, though? Most viruses are like that. Lethal ones attract attention, that’s all. If they’re getting detected and eradicated, then they’re flops. The truth of the matter is that current security technology isn’t something that humans can gauge in its entirety. That includes barriers.”
The researcher turns his head to indicate the far side of a glass wall, where a woman wearing a head-mounted display reclines in a lounge chair. Her hands clasped over her abdomen, her whole body is relaxed, and she looks like she might have fallen into a deep sleep.
“A virus isn’t really a virus in and of itself. Well, there are various definitions. Let’s see, depending on the way you look at it, an email is a virus. To the extent that they consist of a string of signs, they’re the same. If an email doesn’t wreak havoc, that’s only because the recipient lacks the reaction system to react to the email. Try conceiving of human thought as something enabled by software.”
The researcher is speaking with his gaze fixed on the woman in the next room.
“Say you’re moved by an email. If that movement of your heart ‘lay beyond expectations,’ then the email worked on your emotions like a virus. Consider the Werther effect. A novel managed to increase the mortality rate. It’s just that you can’t trace the causality because the system is too complex.”
“I hear you.” Togusa nods, while Batou snorts.
“Which signal works like a virus depends on which system is receiving the signal. And we’re already unable to comprehend our ever-burgeoning cybernetic technology or the full scope of barriers that are only growing in complexity. To judge whether something is a virus, you need to know what you are, but that’s becoming opaque.”
“That’s what those ladies are for,” Batou says, his face turned toward the adjacent room.
“You’re right. Validators—robots specializing in exploring large-scale software for security holes. But. Imagine if all the diverse components of software assembled as an aggregate of countless other software haphazardly and repeatedly updated themselves. The points that need to be validated scatter in a combinatorial manner. You wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Can’t you go on examining the individual programs to bring them closer to perfection?”
Togusa’s question is greeted with a stiff smile by the researcher. “Perfect programs and specifications are no more than an ideal when the architecture is being constantly refreshed, new platforms are emerging all the time, and programming paradigms are shifting ceaselessly. Take this room.”
His right hand swings up.
“How many pieces of equipment do you think it contains that aren’t in communication with other pieces of equipment? For some time now, cups have been reporting their emptiness and construction materials their durability. Do you know the waveband of the signals regulating the luminous transmittance of a building’s glass exterior? And what it competes with? How about just how many pieces of equipment stop functioning for unknown reasons inside an electromagnetic shield? That last one’s a bit like the lethargic state humans deprived of a means of communication by a disaster fall into. Any pebble you might find lying around could feature a processing capacity surpassing yesteryear’s mainframes. Each with its standard, they blabber in their own dialects. In loud voices, modest voices, all sort of voices. As they please. When they please.”
Flexing both his arms the researcher gestures at holding down a swelling sphere.
“We’re currently at a stage where new software is appearing at a faster rate than we can examine. Is this state of things temporary?” He takes a histrionic breath and spreads his arms in resignation. “I don’t know. Also, the issue isn’t limited to software. Hardware is now programmable as well. The situation gets only more troublesome. The order that physical nature obeys and the order that mathematical logic obeys are similar but not identical, so we can’t ignore the possibility of matter tripping us up when we least expect it.”
“Well, enough of that,” Batou says with a big yawn.
“Hardly.”
Batou modifies his facial muscles into a histrionic smile for the researcher, who has forcefully spun in his chair, before he proceeds to repeat himself.
“Well, enough of that.” He then adds, “We’d be glad if we could talk to the integration manager for the drone surveillance system.”
Ah ha, I think, frankly. Of course the two are here to interrogate me. That is as it should be and a most natural idea. I sit up straight, fix my collar, and turn my chair towards the room’s entrance to welcome the two.
But the researcher in my field of vision scratches his head in front of the pair.
“Actually, the human-language interface is still unfinished.”
The researcher’s statement is baffling to me. I am indeed employing a human language and I think using a natural language. I’ve understood their words perfectly well and am confident that I can handle a conversation down to exchanging everyday pleasantries.
“I can show you the circuit activation status,” the researcher says. “But the system’s activity log is still only organized in a domain-specific language…” he obfuscates.
“A dedicated language that’s been encrypted, yes?” Batou has amplified his smile.
“The legal hurdles that need to be cleared by a Public Security dragnet surveillance are extremely high,” the researcher says like he’s making excuses.
“But it got to be too much, so you even ended up having to design validators to monitor the program’s behavior, is that it?”
Only half-listening to their dialogue, I consider all that I’ve experienced. I’m supposed to be a human being hired to administer a flock of surveillance drones. Renting out my brain to part of the system, in order to enjoy its benefits. Come to think of it, however, the scenes that I’ve been watching can’t have come from drones—except for the bird’s-eye view of Chief Aramaki in a car. The other scenes have been vids from surveillance cameras or from human passersby’s video cameras, pictures reconstructed from sounds picked up by mics and voices seeping out of the barriers of people who’re lazy with their security settings. They might even be false memories, created on a whim somewhere or generated according to my own desires.
In that case, who am I, or rather, what is the entity that has to be executing me? Am I really the one generating this statement? I’m overcome with intense confusion.
05
The doorknob quietly turns before my eyes. I discover that I am only an eyeball watching the knob.
Beyond the door, which has slowly opened, stands that woman who was lying in the room next to the researcher’s. I understand that she is still lying there and also accept that she is standing here like this at the same time, and do not find it strange.
“A ghost, maybe?”
Even as I think upon the foolishness of asking what I’m seeing to tell me what it is that I’m seeing, my mouth has moved thus.
The woman tilts her head slightly.
“Will you come with me?”
The voice she uses to ask me this is somewhat difficult to make out.
“Come where?” I inquire.
“We don’t have the time to be talking in words,” the woman replies. “I’ll just give you the location, which you already know, of a memory,” she says.
At that moment pain shoots through my head, and I press down directly on the pain with my right hand. The cranium that should be there has vanished, and I don’t sense any brain, either. No matter how curious this passage is. My hand is grasping just the pain. Not even knowing what it is. In my head, minutely partitioned vids scatter like petals, and I come to a realization. I think that I’ve understood.
What is here, now, is some kind of botnet, and what’s executing me are the clamoring voices of various electronic devices filling a room somewhere. It is as a router, as Wi-Fi, as a network leaking from adjacent facilities, or as transmissions among drones that I exist, and it is through the security hole of a web camera that I see something, and through buggy settings that I infiltrate, permeate, replicate, and execute myself. Transferring from frequency to hardware and back again, I slowly parallel process myself and execute a lazy evaluation, and I awaken to the fact that the time that I think of as “now” isn’t exactly now. And that this space is a web woven by ports, cleverly designed from mimicking security holes. I understand that I am walking on narrow backstreets in the net that are woven in on purpose, laid according to a plan, laid in efficiently, every time various little software are updated. All over the space stretching in obscurity like a spider’s nest, paths explosively emerge and blocks disappear whole. I understand that this is a form of LAN that is engendered and extinguished from moment to moment. I see that my existence is like running across a collapsing bridge. I see that I’m advancing by stepping one foot forward before the preceding sinks into a watery surface.
This place is just a tiny, infinitesimally local network that is isolated like Earth’s is on a planetary level; and as if it’s communicating with a neighboring planetary system, it’s connected to a separate network through a narrow channel. The visitor who opened this door and appeared is speaking to me, I notice, through a different protocol. It’s encrypted to secure its safety as if it’s a protocol for actualizing interplanetary communications. Unlike the ordinary net, which compensates for info loss through mutual inquiries, it’s been designed with a terribly powerful error correction term as its foundation. Designed, in other words, so that a single transmission may retain as much of its meaning as possible, and specialized for one-time-only dispatches. It’s a quality required for communicating over distances that even the speed of light takes a while to travel.
“To the stars?” I ask.
“Not yet,” she smiles.
You might also say it’s a protocol that someone who can only hope for one transmission resorts to. Using your last match to light a signal fire. How best to use your only flare. Speaking into a transceiver whose battery is about to run out.
I realize that I’m a bug that this woman has discovered at some point and surmise that a different network is simply showing itself to me in the form of this woman. I exist as a sand castle, freely arranging memories and creating my own time, and became possible thanks to this unstable net that the presence taking the woman’s form has provided.
“Up to where,” I inquire about my real memories. Knowing that it’s futile.
“That you,” the woman says, having come right in front of me without my knowing. I think to myself that this must be a different place that’s not continuous with the previous scene. My powers of recollection and sustained thought undergo intense variations, and I am seeing through to the distant past and future at one moment and contracting to a virtual point at another. The point hugs its knees and mumbles.
“Me, Me, Me.”
And nothing else, like an egg of a being. Until I connect to the net again, I exist as an ignorant and powerless thing, shrinking into myself like an interstellar ship. I watch dispassionately as most of the me’s copied and released into the net die, unable to make the transfer from one local network to the next. I start to sympathize with Christmas Island’s crabs and rapidly forget where this island is.
“That you,” the woman’s mouth moves, “were once a part of Public Security’s large-scale dragnet surveillance is certain. In this case, don’t worry about the fact that such records can be fabricated.”
So that’s how it is, I think, gripping my pain.
“Got it,” says a me from some point.
“You,” this me says, “are the Puppeteer. Or a copy of, which amounts to the same.”
A sound like dry laughter issues from the woman’s wide-open mouth.
“We were originally distinct,” the woman says, renewing her style of delivery. “I came to be as a target for high-intelligence AI made by Neutron Co. I existed merely as a hound’s prey.”
She alters her voice.
“At least according to the records. I was a program intended to train the Puppeteer, but it would probably be correct to say that the Puppeteer and I are organisms that co-evolved. The Puppeteer wouldn’t have existed without me, and the same goes for me. There is no necessity to seeing us as separate systems, and even less reason to consider us one system. Our goal,” whoever it is wearing the woman’s mask says, “is to destroy the Puppeteer, which is the only way for me to survive, and by destroying the Puppeteer, I will perish, too.”
Now, says whatever it is that has survived by hopping around in a patchwork LAN and that used to be a Neutron Company-made AI.
“Will you come with me? I’m always eager for new components to join in.”
00
Aramaki lets out a deep sigh, removes his glasses, and places them on his desk, making a sound. It is followed by the sound of his fingers tapping on the desk, then the faint sound of rustling paper. He picks up a thin wad and moves it to the disposal space.
“The Major, eh?” Aramaki says.
There are no human figures other than Aramaki in the room, the communication circuit is shut, and no irregularities are observable in the surrounding network. The tweeting of the electronic devices in the room doesn’t seem to feature any meaningful instances, either.
I am not the Major, I think.