Artificial Wisdom, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
A REQUEST FROM THE AUTHOR
Acknowledgements
First published in the United Kingdom in 2023 by Chainmaker Press
This U.S. edition published in the United States of America in 2023 by Chainmaker Press
Copyright © 2023 by Thomas R. Weaver
The right of Thomas R. Weaver to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-7394343-5-9
Typeset using Atomik ePublisher from Easypress Technologies
Cover design by Mecob
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
http://chainmaker.press
@chainmakerpress
To all those stricken by nature’s fury,
And to the young souls inheriting our storm-tossed world:
May hope always light your path.
KUWAIT CITY
She held her swollen belly and rolled over, the hot tarmac sticking to her face. “Oh, my child.” She looked up, and the sun blinded her last moments. “Oh, my love.”
1
LONDON, JULY 1st 2050
Marcus Tully pitched the tumbler as hard as he could at the screen. It slipped through the floating image and shattered against his study wall in a burst of golden rum. He glowered at the undamaged display, still hovering in his vision six feet away. Afternoon sun from the dusty floor-to-ceiling windows glinted from the crystal shards now scattered across the carpet tiles.
“Well,” a pundit sneered at the newscast host, “I just don’t accept the premise of your question. Ten years since this so-called tabkhir hit the Persian Gulf, and I see no credible evidence the heatwave really killed anyone. It was a coup, nothing more.”
Damn all tabkhir-deniers to a humid hell. Ten years since the threads of a hundred million lives were cut from those left behind. Ten years since Zainab, his wife, had died. Ten years of holding tight onto every memory in case they slipped away when his back was turned.
Shit, he was drunk.
The faint whirr of cleaning bots sounded across the room. He staggered over to the window, placing his palms against the glass, then his forehead. Far below, the poor and desperate of London scurried around in the baking summer heat.
Ten years. Ten years today, but it still felt so fresh. Move on, they said. Get over her. But what if he didn’t want to? What if the day he forgot her voice was when she was truly gone?
Play call recording, he told his neuro-assistant. Marcus Tully and Zainab Tully, July first, 2040.
There was a beep—the sound of the old phone systems.
“My love?” Zainab said.
He squeezed his eyes shut at the sound of her voice, so alive, so real, as if he could reach out and touch her.
“Hey, I’m here, Zee,” he said, a man with no idea his world was about to change. “You okay?”
“I’ve been better. Didn’t sleep well. None of us did. It’s too hot, and we’re having brownouts.”
“Pretty warm here too, today, though it’s early. Must be 8 a.m. in Kuwait?”
There was a pause. “Marcus, it’s really, really humid here this morning, and the heat … I can barely move.” Another pause. “It can’t be good for the baby.”
He could still remember the feeling of that first flickering moment of worry, that sudden sharpening of his attention. He opened his eyes again and stared at the skyline.
“But your father has good A/C, right?” Tully said.
“The brownouts, Marcus.” There was a crackle and she cut out for a moment. “—A/C isn’t working. Nothing’s working apart from the phones.”
“Maybe you should come home early? I know your mother wanted to spend time with you, before the birth, but—”
“I’ll come,” she said, too fast. “Let me know when you’ve booked the ticket, I can’t do it from here. The connection is as bad as the air—”
There was another crackle, then nothing more.
“Zee?” he said. “Zainab? Can you hear me?”
But she was gone. It burned him up, not to know what really happened to her in the hours after that call, like a fathomless acid in his belly.
He lurched over to the desk and grabbed the rum bottle. Where the hell was the glass?
He sensed a pang—warning a notification was impending, like an artificial tingle deep within his forehead. A second later he could see the message teasing at the upper right periphery of his vision. Red-edged, for unknown contact. He ignored it and pulled the cork stopper, then took a gulp of the rum.
There was another pang, also red. He shook his head now and took another sip. A third pang made him groan, but he looked up.
Tully, read the first message. Got a story you need to hear. Can we meet? Has to be right now.
The second message read, Government secrets, okay? Not safe.
A third followed. You got two mins, big shot, or I’m going to your competitors. Bradley maybe. Oh, this also concerns your wife.
The bottle slipped from his hands and smashed on the edge of the desk, releasing a sickly stench. The cleaning bots bleeped disapprovingly. Tully blinked at the last message, reread the first two, then stared again at the third.
She’d been dead for ten years. What the hell would a whistleblower know about it?
2
Adrenalin began to clear the boozy fog from Tully’s head, but nowhere near fast enough. One moment, he managed to reply.
He jerked open a desk drawer and rifled through the mess inside before slamming it shut again and yanking open a second one. He grabbed a pack of disposable jet injectors and pulled one free. He hesitated only a moment. He’d rather have faced the hangover, but he jammed it to his forearm and pressed the release, grunting at the jolt of chems blasting through his skin, spreading a cold sensation up his arm. He sucked in air as pain hit his chest, his lungs, his liver, wracking his muscles in a spasm, but within seconds it’d decelerated his drunkenness with a kick like a parachute ripping out a backpack at five thousand feet.
He steadied himself, blood alcohol level painfully back to normal, and looked again at the messages. He subspoke the follow up, lips barely moving. Neuro-reality?
Yeah NR. What the fuck else? came the reply.
He took a deep breath and pulled up his chair, sniffing and surveying the study, hoping his team hadn’t heard the noise. There was a price to pay for having them live and work on site—a complete and utter abdication of privacy.
The cleaning bots were working their magic on the wall and carpet stains, and one was heading for the bottle. He left them to it, took off his earset, and grabbed the bigger, heavier neuro-reality headset. He pulled it on and powered it up, pulled a pill dispenser out of his pocket and pressed a button. It spat a tiny bubble of gelatinous liquid into his hand which he let dissolve beneath his tongue. Billions of neurograins would swarm his brain in seconds. The idea of the nanobots crawling around his skull like microscopic spiders made him shiver, but it was better than getting a permanent chip surgically implanted. The sights, sounds and smells of his study faded to a black void for the briefest moment as the headset jacked straight into his consciousness. A Mindscape logo appeared in white and vanished again.
His personal neural ‘home’—or egospace, to use the jargon—faded in. The sweet and sharp tang of rum in the air mellowed
His egospace melted into a marble-floored hotel lobby, columned and triple-height. The nostalgic scent of a log fire—now illegal outside of NR—filled the air. He sat in a comfortable cuboid sofa chair with high arms, facing a second, empty sofa over a low marble table. Three tall aquarium tanks acted as dividers from other meeting spaces—not that they were actually there.
A lean, wiry, androgynous individual flickered into existence in the second chair. Head shaved, face hairless, no sign of stubble. Casually dressed in an army-green hoodie and black baggy trousers. Amused eyes, mouth working at some chewing gum.
This one would have an attitude, Tully was sure of it. “I’m Tully.” He held out his hand; it was ignored.
“No shit. Not gonna tell you my real name, though you can call me Whistle. Not gonna tell you where I’m from, who I work for, my sexual preferences or how I identify, the name of my first pet or any other pigeon shit that’d help you figure out who I am. And you’re not gonna try find out, right?” The genderless accent was like a cheap cocktail that had lost all hint of its individual flavors.
Tully shook his head. “Whistle, huh? Well, no, I don’t work like that. I need to know who my sources are, so my readers can trust I’ve done my due diligence.”
“Maybe you gonna wanna make an exception this time,” Whistle said.
Maybe this was going to be a complete waste of time. He sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “So you’re whistle-blowing? May I ask, on who?”
Whistle grinned. “On every shithead in power doing things they shouldn’t be.”
“You’re after justice, then? Or perhaps you just want to see the world burn.”
“The world is already burning. Seems you’re one of the only journos actually trying to expose the bastards holding the flamethrowers.”
A compliment? Not generously delivered, but he’d take it. He wouldn’t let it soften him up, though. Tully leaned forward and put on the hardest, iciest stare he could summon, the kind of stare that says, the chit-chat is over. The kind of stare that says, it’s time for business. The kind of stare that says, get to the fucking point, or I’ll get back to getting drunk. “What’s this got to do with my wife?”
Whistle pulled a white data cube from a hoodie pocket and placed it carefully in the center of the table, then gestured at it with one hand and sat back. “Go for it.”
Tully picked up the cube and his neuro-assistant automatically initiated a scan. No virus, contents include one neuro-reality video file, file size of two hundred zettabytes, file creation date of July the second, 2040.
He froze.
Whistle winked. “Got your attention, right? Go on, take a look. I’ll wait.”
“What…” Tully’s voice was gruff, and he cleared his throat. “What is it?”
“You know what it is—what it has to be, with a date like that.”
“How did you get it?”
“You don’t wanna know. Get on with it, or I’m taking it back.”
Tully grimaced and ran his fingers over the smooth cube. Just an imaginary object in an imaginary reality that someone had decided should feel like porcelain. Would it break if he threw it in neuro-reality? Did he really want to see what was on it? What kind of investigative journalist would ever turn down information? Open it, he subspoke.
The hotel melted into sharp sunlight that made him cover his eyes. When he took his hands away, he was standing in front of seven bodies strewn across a scorched street.
Tully stared at the bodies and didn’t move. His legs went weak. He needed to lean against something, or sit, but there was nothing there to take his weight. There was no mistaking it. He’d been here, several times. Not this street, perhaps, but he’d seen this skyline, with Zainab by his side.
Kuwait City.
This was a mistake. He shouldn’t be here, would get no peace and closure in this sterile snapshot of the past, with no sense of heat, no scent of dust and decay, no sound of wind whistling through empty streets, only the sound of his own ragged breathing.
But was Zainab here, too? Somewhere in these savage streets?
The road beyond was littered with hundreds of corpses, like discarded rags cast down on the street from the rooftops. They’d died wherever they’d fallen, packed beneath a desiccated tree, stretched out on the pavement or in the gutter, curled against the sides of the buildings, twisted in a clump of splayed arms and legs in the dust of the road.
So many bodies.
He approached the first one, fell to his knees and looked at the face. A woman—not her, but it was a gut-punch nonetheless. He choked up and staggered to his feet. He turned, and saw more bodies packing the road all the way to the horizon. He took a few step forward and halted.
Could he find her? How long would it take? He’d need a system. He’d need to be efficient. Check each street off against a map. Avoid jumping around at random, with the risk he was just checking the same bodies over and over again. No, it was impossible. He could spend his life, looking. Ten million had lived in Kuwait City, before the tabkhir, before the whole Persian Gulf went dark.
Exit, he told his neuro-assistant. Get him the fuck out of there. A blink later, he was back in the NR hotel lobby.
Whistle didn’t flinch at his sudden reappearance, just snapped both index fingers and thumbs. “Got some real goods there, no? You got any idea how hard it is to get shit out the caliphate?”
“How did you get it?” Tully said. “And why give it to me? What can I possibly do with it? There’s no story here. Ten years ago, maybe.”
Whistle winked again and chewed gum, mouth wide. “Do whatever you want with it. Shove it up the ass of every tabkhir-denier talking shit on the newscasts. The footage is just for creds.”
“Creds?”
“And maybe, just maybe, you’ll find out what happened to your wife.”
“What the fuck would you know about my wife?” Tully snapped.
“She was there, yeah? When it happened. Didn’t stand a chance. Four hundred million dead, right? Two-thirds of the population.”
Tully needed a drink. The Mindscape tech had the capacity to simulate it, though they didn’t cater to his taste in artisan Scottish dark rum. It tasted realistic nonetheless, but they’d never really built in the calming effect of alcohol beyond the mildest buzz, so what was the point?
He ordered anyway. A tumbler of rum appeared in front of him. He picked it up and knocked it back. “No one knows how many people died,” Tully said, looking into his empty glass. “The caliphate suppressed everything after the borders shut.”
“The caliphate knows, so I know. It’s not easy for anyone to plug leaky holes, and a new state that big? Don’t get me wrong, the caliphate works hard at it. They censor, they shut down the internet, they block satellites, do all the shit from the authoritarian state playbook. It’s never enough, though. But look. The real deal with the tabkhir is much, much bigger, and is definitely not what it seems.” Seriousness swept away the mocking face. “Real big. Fucking big. Maybe the biggest story out there in the history of news, and I wish I was exaggerating. I’m not safe even knowing about it. You won’t be either, if you take this on.”
