Reality 36 (3 page)

  Veronique had thought before about programming Chloe's morning cheer out of her. She resolved to do it later that day.

  "I hate you," she moaned.

  "I love you, Veronique!" replied Chloe. "You have a message, from professor Zhang Qifang. Playing message. One message. Play…" The professor's voice, internationally neutral with a faint Cantonese accent: "'I've tried you several times. Your phone is off. I need to speak to you, please call as soon as you can. I'll be in my office for as long as I am able. Hurry.' Message sent 3.13am," said Chloe. "Sender Professor Zhang Qifang. Reply?"

  "What the hell did he want at three in the morning?" Veronique said. She rolled on to her back, clutching the phone to her chest.

  "Reply?" said Chloe. "Reply? Reply? Answer, Veronique, answer!"

  "Chloe! Shut up! I've just woken up. Do you understand?"

  "No, silly!" giggled Chloe. "I am a machine! I do not sleep! How could I understand?" Then she sang, "Get up, Veronique, or you will be late. Work time! Work time! Sleepy time is over. Sleepy time is over!
Attention
!
Reveille-toi
!"

  Veronique wrapped a pillow around her head. "Go away, Chloe." The bed was warm. If she only had a hammer.

  "I love you, Veev," Chloe said tenderly. "And I always will, now get up!" Raucous post-neo-romantic rock blared out of Chloe's speakers, music Veronique hated.

  Chloe was evolved from Veronique's first doll, a life companion, the only thing she'd saved when her family had escaped the hell of the south. Her life in Africa had sunk into the shadows of nightmare, but Chloe had been with her always, upgraded, uploaded, tinkered with, but at heart the same. Chloe knew Veronique better than she knew herself. Veronique gave in, as she did every day, and threw the pillow aside.

  "Get up, sleepy head!"

  "Jesus! I'm getting up, aren't I?"

  "Not fast enough! Late late late late late."

  Veronique glared at the phone, snatched it off the bed and stood. She shook her head, squinted at the phone's screen to doublecheck the time of the message. 3.13am was both too late and too early for Qifang – he'd probably got muddled. He'd been seriously distracted of late. He was old, seriously so; anti-gerontics only bought you so much more time, she supposed.

  "He doesn't even have an office anyway, so what the hell is he talking about?" grumbled Veronique. "We're supposed to meet at the lab." Californian communitarian law forbade all divisive workplace affectations, and that included private space. Working together, all that New New Age Dippy bullshit, open plan and open hearts all the way. Back in Quebec they didn't have time for peace flowers, team mantras and confessional circles. Group hugs made her flesh crawl. Thank God the free love was optional – some of the men she'd been propositioned by were frankly vile.

  "His virtual office, silly!" giggled Chloe. "Shall I try and patch you through? Put your dreamcap on for full immersion!"

  "No, no. Just give me a view," said Veronique, and prepared to apologise in her pyjamas.

  Chloe went silent for a moment. "I am afraid his office address is non-functional, possibly due to Grid system upgrade in sector twenty-three."

  "You mean Beverly Hills."

  "Sector twenty-three is a more efficient designation. Whatever I mean and however I express myself, the end result is the same: his office is temporarily unavailable."

  "
Again
. You've got to love California."

  "Happy day!" giggled Chloe.

  "At least I've learnt something while I've been here" – she walked across the room – "and that's not to move to California…" She lapsed into irritated muttering. If Qifang himself hadn't sent the job offer, she'd never have come to UCLA. If she had her time again, she might not come anyway. One more group bonding session would send her screaming over the edge. She had grown to hate the smell of essential oils with an intensity she'd not thought possible. "I should never have left the army," she moaned. "Oh, get a grip," she snapped at herself. "You're an adult."

  "I agree!" trilled Chloe. "Stop being a baby! Up! Up! Time to work! As you cannot meet, shall I call the professor? There's enough bandwidth for that."

  "Yes." She thought for a moment. "No, he can wait. This is my time."

  "You changed your mind! You were quite happy to patch through to his office!"

  "He
demanded
I go see him at 3am, Chloe, at the start of the vacation. I'm not his slave. Let me wake up. Send him a message to tell him I'm on my way in and will meet him at the department. Tell him I'll be there before seven, which is the time I'm supposed to be in, at work, fucking dippies."

  "Language, Veronique!"

  "Screw you."

  Qifang was up at five doing Tai Chi on the lawn every day and thought everyone else sluggardly. Another pig of a drawback to working for him.

  Veronique opened the door to her tiny room in the tiny duplex she shared with the not-so-tiny Chantelle, some crazy match-up made by the Archimedes, the department's Class Six AI, "intended to unlock your potential, facilititating cross-germination through personal antagonism" the dippies had it. They were supposed to become fast friends. They loathed each other.

  Veronique's body ached from dancing. She'd wanted to come home early but Fabler was leaving town for good, and she'd been half-bullied into staying, but only half. She was a sucker for dancing; it was the only time she let herself go. She liked to think she was good, and went out of her way to prove it. And she was. She didn't need one of the city's Swami lifecoach charlatans to tell her that. But all night on the floor and in the air of the Dayglo would make anyone hurt, and three hours' sleep was the sting in the tail.

  She yawned. "You took the risk, you idiot, now you pay the price," she muttered.

  "Exactly!" trilled Chloe.

  "Shut up, Chloe."

  "He'll be furious!"

  "That's his problem."
Still
, she thought,
best look as willing as possible
. At least she didn't drink anything last night. Fabler would be nursing an obscene hangover today, anti-tox or not. She put her slippers on and left the room.

  "Hooray!" shouted Chloe. "You are up. Welcome, Veronique, to August 4, Thursday, 2129, in glorious, lovely, lovely Los Angeles California! Pacific Coast Time 05.26 hours. Outside temperature 38 degrees Celsius. Weather prognosis…"

  "Thanks, Chloe. Please be quiet now."

  "I love you, Veronique."

  "I know," said Veronique. "Thanks. Now shut up."

  The usual routine, breakfast scavenged from whatever scraps Chantelle had missed in her nocturnal bulldoze. A handful of rebalancers, and she felt like she'd had a decent night's sleep, although she'd pay for it later. The drive in to the UCLA AI faculty was OK, the weather was fine, but Chloe told her that there was a rainstorm due for 10.30, so she kept the hardtop closed on her aging groundcar. It was a bitch to get back up again. If she could, she'd have bought a new one, but who was she kidding? It'd be the twenty-third century before she'd have enough for a new car, and the dippies would probably have got round to banning them outright by then. Come the next century, they'd all be skipping to work behind a man in a robe, banging tambourines.

  She stopped at Starbucks on the way in, a small vice but a necessary one.

  She pulled into the AI campus at 6.46am. It was up in the Chino hills, having moved out from the historic campus in Westwood fifty years before. Forever ago, as far as she was concerned, although Qifang still complained about the lack of decent eateries so far out. Personally, she liked the view, way out over the tight bowl of southern LA, over to the Laguna hills and the blue of the ocean beyond. She parked her car in the auto-racks, then took her eyes from the scenery to watch it swing vertical and get cranked up the side of the building, because she didn't trust the racks. When she'd satisifed herself her car wasn't going to fall off the wall, she went inside, doors hissing out chilled air, and then her shoes were squeaking off faux-marble. She waved her ID at the desk clerk, some guy named Guillermo who behaved like everyone's best friend, then past Archimedes' reader. The internal gates pinged open and she wandered through corridors where robot cleaners whirred quietly. As she'd expected, the lab was empty; practically the whole building was. There was no sign that anyone had been there during the night.

  "Professor Qifang?" she called.

  "Professor Zhang Qifang has not yet arrived, Veronique," said Archimedes from nowhere.

  Veronique's neck tickled. The notion was irrational, but there was an ineffable fear that came with the scrutiny of a powerful AI; the urgent feeling of being watched.

  "Thanks, Archimedes."
Now butt out
, she added to herself. "So much for rushing in," she sighed. "Might as well get on with something while I wait."

  "That's the spirit!"

  "Shut up, Chloe."

  "Shall I inform you when he arrives?" The AI's directionless voice haunted the air.

  "Yeah, please, Archimedes."

  "I am afraid I will not be able to assist you greatly. I have suffered a systems malfunction in half of your lab. Maintenance will be here presently." It called itself Archimedes, but its voice was colourless and androgynous, the voice of something actively avoiding personality.

  "Probably rats."

  "I assure you I do not suffer from rats," said the AI equably.

  "It's OK, I don't need anything," she said.
Now, seriously, butt out,
she thought.

  Veronique plonked her coffee down on her workbench, cursed as some leapt out and scalded her. She sucked at her hand as she walked across to her locker, realising it was for her that "Danger! Coffee! Hot!" warning labels scrolled round and round paper cups.

  "Are you OK, Veronique? Shall I call a paramedic?"

  "No, Chloe, I am fine, it's nothing."

  "You shouldn't drink coffee, Veronique, it's bad for you."

  "Shut up, Chloe." She pressed her thumb against the locker and spoke her sig out aloud, feeling thankful that at least the dippies allowed you a locker. An embedded part of the complex Six read her print and implanted Gridchip. The small door popped open.

  "Huh?" She caught herself before she said, "That's not my notebook." Archimedes was as nosey as machines came, a blush out of the ordinary, and it'd be filling her ears with morning pleasantries as it deep-scanned her brain for anti-liberal thought crimes.

  She kept her mouth shut and pulled the computer from the locker.

  "Archimedes?"

  "Ms Valdaire."

  "Please describe your malfunction, in case I need to work around it."

  "Of course," replied the AI. "All devices and subsystems supporting autonomous functions are operating correctly, at least, so far as I am aware. My problem is a matter of connection. I am unable to engage with the majority of my components anywhere four metres beyond the laboratory door. Everything is working but I feel… numb. I have access to biometrics and staff Gridsigs, nothing else. I trust all will be available to me once the fault is identified and repaired."

  Veronique raised her index finger and mouthed something incredibly rude in French at a nearby beadcam.

  As a Class Six, Archimedes could speak many languages, extrapolate the meanings of many more from the ones he knew, and lip read. As a jobsworth, there was no way he'd let an insult like that go without comment.

  Nothing.

  "OK, thanks Archimedes."

  She hunched over the notebook just the same, covering as much of it from view as possible. She flipped the lid and her brow creased. There was a paper inside, covered in what looked like New Mandarin characters, but the ideograms were all wrong, nonsense apart from Qifang's neatly blocked signature at the bottom. She scrutinised it. Anomalies leapt out. Hidden within each character were sigils created by some of the inhabitants of the Thirty-sixth RealWorld Reality Realm, the ex-game world Qifang's department were currently studying.

  There were about three sentients on the planet that understood that language. Veronique was one. She read it, slowly and with difficulty.

  "We have been made victim to set-up. Get out now. Serious Realm anomalies. VIA think it is us. Get the v-jack. Get away before they get you. Meet me in Reality Thirty-six. Can explain no more. Data speaks for itself."

  Very carefully, she activated the notepad. A presentation began to play, no audio. A graph. Lines tracked energy output, Grid resource assignation, second world traffic, the measures of the worlds locked within the Realm House out in Nevada. All looked normal. She continued to watch. All of a sudden it didn't. All of a sudden it didn't look normal at all.

  "Shit."

  "Language, Veronique," said Chloe from her purse.

  "Shut up, Chloe." The presentation continued. Power and resources were being drawn incrementally off over a period of six months. Scrolling information ran along the side, detailing which packets came from where, giving the story behind the graph's simple lines. Somebody was using the Realm spaces without permission. It had been very skilfully hidden, but when you saw it, clear as day.

  The presentation stopped and looped to the beginning.

  Veronique ran a finger over a seam in the notepad's casing, and its memory module slid out. The screen went blank. The module was rough, homefabbed, not quite like anything she'd ever seen before.

  "Chloe," she said as normally as she could manage. "Check out this data, Cameron wants us to look it over."

  "Cameron can do his own work."

  "Just look at it, and give me it visually, on the screen, not 3D! I'm tired of your chirpy voice."

  "Charming."

  She popped the memory module into Chloe's slimport. Quickly she typed on Chloe's touchscreen: "Sorry, play along. Trouble. Is this genuine RR data?"

  The screen blinked one word.

  "Yes."

  "What is this module?"

  A tick, and another word: "Trouble." The screen blinked. "Faked key and access codes for the v-jack cabinet."