Pattern Black, page 39
Calliope situated herself on the chair and shifted the topic.
“And all of that was fascinating. But what interested me most — what we need to figure out and deal with — was this idea of a second entity. I didn’t have the context to know that’s what we’d been seeing all along until I accepted there’s a sentient copy of myself still inside the machine, living her own independent life. Once I knew that — and that Digital Calliope was autonomous in a way code or an AI never would be — I had a frame that let me understand this other.” She leaned closer. “The records suggest you saw it, Mason. Did you see anything inside like I’m describing?”
Mason looked at Dakota. She nodded for him to answer.
“You mean Preacher.”
“Who’s Preacher?” Calliope asked.
A crazy story, but as he heard his own words anew, Mason found he could increasingly put them into order. Preacher wasn’t a god, after all. He was a demon in a box, trapped safely beneath them. All the chaos that “independent entity” had caused was now inside a jar with its lid screwed tight.
Calliope nodded when he finished. “It makes sense. Once I knew what to look for, I could see your Preacher’s footprints everywhere. It seemed to be following us back when I was with Immunity. In the background, unseen but felt, with every incursion we made. It appeared to be waiting, never coming forward, and eventually stopped following Immunity. Then it stopped following me—”
Mason knew what was coming.
“—and started following you, instead.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you were more interesting, by whatever criteria its creator programmed into it. Or maybe it outgrew its original programming as it attained sentience and simply decided, for reasons of its own, to change targets.”
“What does it want?”
He remembered Preacher standing over him, eyeing that turbulent black vortex.
Give. Give now or I’ll rip you open to find it.
Mason looked to Dakota. “Thank God I got out.”
“Not so fast. Even if your Preacher can’t come into the real world, he’s dangerous.” Calliope tipped her head toward the room where paperwork still littered the floor, and three monitors remained lit. “I know what it looks like now. As soon as I understood what we were dealing with, I realized I could track it. Kind of.”
“Kind of?” said Dakota.
“It’s a little like watching whales. Ever go on a whale-watching tour?”
Dakota and Mason both shook their heads.
“You spend most of your time looking out at the calm blue ocean, and every once in a while, a whale comes to the top. That’s what it’s like, tracking this Preacher. I can’t see him when he’s down deep, but then he’ll surface like a humpback breaching for air.”
“We’re in the real world,” Mason said. “He’s digital. He can’t get us.”
“But things like the program controlling the prison fail-safe? That, I think he can get.” She got a far-off look in her eyes. “That, I think he’d very much like to get.”
“You sound like you know him.”
“I know the man who set him on me. That’s enough.”
Mason knew who she meant — Blake. He had guesses about what happened between them, now that he’d heard Calliope’s version. Blake unleashed Preacher on Calliope for his own reasons, but then Preacher began making his own choices and decided Mason was more delicious.
The room was quiet. After a long silence, Dakota slapped her thighs with finality, stood, then reached for her backpack.
“You’re not leaving,” Calliope said.
“We got our answers. There’s nothing to be done.”
“You did get answers.” Calliope stood. “But I don’t think you’re hearing them. I said he’s still a threat. The HRO’s system was built for human control, but I can already see where he’s rewritten code. He may have begun as a character in a glorified video game, but he’s evolved into much more.”
Calliope buried her hands in her hair and tugged at the strands. “See, I knew the codebase because I wrote it. That means the digital version of myself knew the codebase. It’s how she must have tunneled out of Kassidi and how she seems to have taken run of the system. We always thought it was too dangerous to rip through the membranes, to travel from sim to sim, but she’s done it. Problem is, I’m not sure she knows she’s been followed. Preacher’s used all her back doors. He can go wherever she goes. And Digital Calliope’s fingerprint isn’t on a lot of the new backdoors. That tells me Preacher can write his own. To go where she never cared to go — or maybe even where she couldn’t.”
Dakota set the backpack down.
“Good move,” Calliope said. “You can’t leave, much as I wish you could. See, I left my own footprints since you’ve been here — since I’ve been digging into archives to discover what happened. After a while, I could see the back of the whale far out at sea. He’d already sniffed my codes by the time I noticed. He seems to know we’re here and what we’ve learned. He has more access than me. Now he’s the god in the machine.”
“But … in the machine,” Dakota said.
“The machine still has arms everywhere, including out here. It controls surveillance. And the drones. Like I said, it controls the fail-safe. You both carry blood dongles. If the fail-safe is triggered, you’ll be as dead as everyone else.”
“You must have contingencies,” Mason said.
“We do. Nathaniel and I saw The Terminator, same as everyone. Nobody really trusts AI past a certain point — not enough to drop our wallets and turn our backs. We took more than enough precautions, so no, the fail-safe can’t be triggered directly. But it does respond to system discord, the so-called ‘chaos alarm.’ And chaos, it can cause plenty of.”
She looked hard at Mason, and he understood in a blink that none of what she’d said had been casual. They’d never really been having a conversation. Calliope had opened with a goal in mind, tailoring her words to fit an intended close. She wasn’t educating them. She was making a pitch. Building a case — an argument for what came next.
“I slept less than you seem to think I did,” Calliope said. “I’ve been thinking, and you’re not going to like what I have to say.”
“What?” Dakota asked.
“With the clock ticking — with this Preacher aware and able to find us — there’s no longer any choice. There’s only one way to stop what’s happening, and that’s to stop it all. Go big or go home.”
“And how exactly do we do that?”
“We contact your father.”
“But he’s … He’s …”
“I know. But your minds have been reaching out to each other this entire time — despite his Pattern Black. Even though everything we know says Carter should be dead and gone, his influence still managed to reach into your Pattern Black enough to build you a cocoon. Without him breaking your fall, you’d probably have stayed as gone as he is. But his memories gave you enough familiar comfort to survive. With luck, we can follow that tether. Reach all the way back to the source, wherever Blake is holding him.”
“But why?” Mason looked at both women, sure he was missing something. “My father was just a cop. What’s so special about him that he can help when you can’t?”
Calliope hesitated for a moment as if wondering whether she should proceed. “Carter is special because while I was teaching him the techniques we use to ‘tread water’ inside unstable space, I embedded something inside his mind he never knew was there. I couldn’t hide it inside myself because I was wanted and subject to scans every time I left the protected network. I could have put it in anyone but chose Carter because his investigations made him familiar with Revival’s operations, and his stubbornness meant he could hold onto subconscious information, even during fully immersive sims, in ways most people can’t. Now I know why. Carter’s connection to you gave him a release valve.”
She took a breath. Mason thought he heard a hint of defeat in her sigh.
“I thought we could protect him once he was with Immunity. What I’d hidden inside him would be safe, so long as he was with us. But Blake managed to rally the Docents and drones then extracted Carter to an extreme CT session, anyway. The next time he went under, he never came out — and what we need now went with him.”
“You hid something inside my father?”
Calliope nodded. “A mnemonic originally greenlit by both me and Blake as part of our checks and balances. It forces a system reset and purges anything that shouldn’t be there. We have to find Carter so we can force the reset and delete Preacher.”
Dakota looked from Calliope to Mason, then back. “How the hell are we going to find Carter? And how are we going to get to him even if we do manage to figure out where he is?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“But she does,” Calliope said.
Mason didn’t understand until she looked at the computers.
“You mean—”
“You have to find my digital self. She’s the one who tried to reach you. She’s the one who’s tunneled backdoors through the system like rooms in a rabbit warren. If anyone has the answers — or can find them — it’s her.”
Dakota looked lost. Or maybe afraid. “But … that version of you is …”
“She’s inside Pattern Black,” Calliope said, “where you’re going to go, Mason. Again.”
FORTY-THREE
Why Blake Kept Him Alive
“No,” Mason shook his head, almost violently.
“Hear me out.”
“I heard,” he told Calliope while Dakota looked on, her expression unreadable. “Three years ago, I came here for an interview that became an intervention. Lucky me, I got to try out a new kind of therapy despite everyone knowing it’s an awful idea for someone with my family history. But no big deal. I just spent three years dead, then woke up in prison, fucked — despite never being convicted of a crime. I’m a cop, so I know how big a dick you need to swing if you’re hoping to handle ‘due process’ your own way. So, you tell me, ladies. What on this fucking planet would make me go willingly back into the death I barely escaped from?”
“But—”
“No. Absolutely not. You want to find your other half, you go get her.” Mason turned to Dakota. “Or you can do it. You wanted to screw with the system and burn something down. You aren’t borderline nuts like I am, and you haven’t done … whatever she did” — he indicated Calliope — “to trap your brain inside the machine. You want it so badly? Great. Go fetch.”
“It has to be you,” Calliope said.
His head snapped back like a toy on a spring. “Oh, it does, does it? You sound so sure. I guess that’s how it is. But have you considered this?” He raised his right hand, then his middle finger.
Calliope looked past the insult, unfazed. “She contacted you. I helped design this system, Mason. I know the number of redundancies. The entire network and connected devices are constantly scanned for anomalies because they know minds sometimes fragment. In a learning matrix, the system is designed to adapt to its contents — to learn subject patterns so it can present better, more-attuned moral choices. Didn’t you notice how the simulation changed when you fought it?”
He did, but Mason would be damned if he planned to surrender so much as an inch of ground. “So what?”
“Sometimes mistakes are made. It’s okay. We always knew it would happen. People learn from the sims, and the sims learn from people. That’s why once a day, the entire system is read line-by-line by a team of AI, and that means it’s only failing to notice anomalies it’s been programmed — say, by the other Calliope or Preacher — to ignore. Think about it for a second. You didn’t somehow end up inside Kassidi’s mind, and that means if you ran into the other Calliope, you did it somewhere else. That means she got out of Kass and into the wider system, apparently carving out a place that can access Pattern Black. Or at least to reach you even when you were supposed to be gone. My other half has been evading all of our carefully laid double-checks for what, a year? Two? If it were me on the inside instead of her, I’d break some things and hope the breakage didn’t kill me. I’d hide and know how to stay invisible. So, believe me. She won’t just be found. She has to find you.”
“What’s to say I won’t go in there and fry my brain … and meanwhile, she’s lost interest?”
“She hasn’t.”
“Really? Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Try me.” Then he looked at Dakota, to whom Calliope owed so many answers. “Try us.”
“I’d never lose interest. I gave up when Carter disappeared because from out here, I can only do so much. But she didn’t give up. The target was always Carter, but when he turned into a dead-end, she came to you, Mason. That tells me she’s seen what I just worked out — about your mental connection to your father. If I were her, I’d have seen the son as a new way to reach the father. I think that’s why she risked coming out into the open. Why she disturbed your signal enough to wake you up.”
“How did she know I could be woken?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then tell me what you do know. Tell me about this shit you put into Carter’s head.”
“It’s―”
“Complicated?”
Calliope shut her mouth, lips pursed.
“Is that all you can say?” Mason’s next words were almost a snarl, knowing he finally had the upper hand — the only hand, as it turned out. “You want me to even consider going back into the meat grinder? Then I’m going to need a damn good reason. I want to be treated like a person, not a goddamn idiot or a tool you can use whenever you want to. You want my help? Then I want the truth. All of it.”
“Fine.” Calliope took a deep breath and sat. On her lead, so did Dakota and Mason. “From the beginning, then?”
“Sure. Pile it on,” Mason said. “You’ll know if we’re bored.”
Calliope eyed him then began. “Nathaniel Blake and I co-founded Revival. That you know. We bickered a lot. Publicly. That you also know because the tabloids couldn’t get enough. It was never a bad thing. It’s how we worked through problems and disagreements. We always came to a conclusion somewhere in the middle, and for most of our working relationship, we usually agreed in the end.”
She shook her head, looking almost lost in the memory.
“But our last argument was different. Blake was more unsatisfied than I thought he should be. We were getting there, but Chamber Therapy still wasn’t meeting its potential. We needed to stand back, see what was working and what wasn’t, then make small steps until we got results we could live with and even get excited about. But Blake had been using the base technology for several years before I joined, so his frustration was greater. He didn’t want to take the methodical approach. By then, our funds were drying up, and we hadn’t yet secured the big state grants. There was other money out there — free funding we could have gotten with some paperwork and oversight — but Blake always insisted he didn’t want money with strings. Besides, the problem wasn’t just finding money. Blake saw himself as having been far too patient, of having deferred to an ineffective system.”
Her faraway look had faded away. She began talking faster.
“We’d been stuck in the same disagreement for months. Blake got edgier by the day. He insisted we were digging our hole deeper and no longer wanted to fix what we had. He wanted to shut the program down and try again with a new OS. We were deadlocked. We hadn’t piloted the program. Instead, we’d rolled it out into every Revival-owned HRO from the start. Blake insisted we didn’t need to pilot it before expanding. The original uses of CT — for therapy in a clinical setting, plus all the work he’d done with both autistic and gifted kids — were the pilot. I should have suspected something from the start. You ended up in prison without being convicted. That’s not supposed to happen, but neither is a large-scale medical/psychological experiment without controlled trials, a pilot, or miles of red tape. We had none of that and didn’t need it. Blake had built a loophole, knowing he’d end up using it.”
“What loophole?” Mason asked.
“The HRO system required a certain relaxing of the usual ‘social rules’ in order to work. Crime was at an all-time high. The entire country had split into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Lawmakers were willing to do just about anything to solve the problem and get reelected. So, we pitched an idea — prisoners enter an HRO for life. Supposedly those with lighter offenses get a few privileges that make for a more lenient sentence, but we all know that’s bullshit. All are declared ‘unpersons’ upon sentencing to simplify the transition. It got us off the hook in cases where Chamber Therapy warped a subject’s personality but declaring convicts ‘unpeople’ meant they had no civil liberties. Blake stacked political favors like a master bricklayer. I have to hand it to him. By the time we hit our log jam, he’d built a wall around himself and a way to move forward.”
Mason nodded, wary. “And what was that?”
“He got wide-scale approval to privatize California’s prisons by offering the state a deal it couldn’t refuse. We refunded our tax credits to the government and cut the state in on pretty much the entirety of our profits. The HROs, seen only as prisons, followed a business model that broke even only near capacity. Any misstep and the prisons lost money. The model was unsustainable by itself, but that was fine because admittance was our loss-leader. When everything shook out, Revival was basically providing free incarceration to the state in exchange for a chance to ‘sell’ Chamber Therapy to lawmakers as an alternative to incarceration. We had NIH funding for Chamber Therapy, plus a few black-hat grants I discovered later from folks like the NSA. The CIA. The people who brought you MK-ULTRA. I’m ashamed I didn’t see it. The applications of Chamber Therapy in different hands were obvious. And very, very lucrative.”
