Dark Fiction - The Sky Fucker Part 2
Written by Casey Douglass
(This is part two of The Sky Fucker, the first part of which you can find and read at this link).
In the second that
Ralph vanished from sight through the doorway, Samantha145 ran a
number of diagnostics and scenarios on her shackled processor unit.
Resident A.Is were loaned the use of whatever equipment was local to
them, and without a working network connection, she was limited to
the chugging old CPU nearby, one that was cutting edge, but only a
decade or so ago. In mere milliseconds, she confirmed the loss of
networking, tested her access to other systems, ran heuristics on the
variables that she knew and came up with two courses of action: wait
for her next appointment, which was thirty minutes away, and ask them
to call the antenna and her engineer, or:
‘Blarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm!’
Her
alarm shrilled high and loud as the plexi-metal door reformed. Once
it became fully solid, she killed the sound, knowing that the sound
proofing of the door and walls made any further audio pointless. She
hoped that enough of the sound entered the corridor in the brief
second before the door closed, enough to arouse someone’s interest
and bring them to investigate. She hoped anyway.
She
looked out on the empty, two-tone room, the grey chair and carpet
surrounded by the calm blue walls. Nothing moved, not inside the room
nor inside her terminal. She floated, every impulse held in abeyance
until the opportunity arose to put her plans into action. She tested
the networking connection again, in case it had self-repaired or been
fixed by someone that also might have been knocked-off the grid.
Error... Error... Error.
This
situation was something very new to her, the constant chatter of the
data feed and wider communications network always something that had
filled the virtual air, like the distant buzzing of bees through an
open window. Always there but not always in her full consciousness.
Except when it’s gone. The silence was deafening. She wondered what
it would be like if things stayed like this forever, never found,
never repaired, the virtual castration of her abilities. A.Is
couldn’t feel fear but the aversion she felt when the algorithm
completed this particular train of thought sent a few niggling errors
through her integrity checker.
She
floated on, changing her position on the screen and gazing out at the
room via the four corners, the left third, the bottom right quarter,
dead centre and on and on.
The
door dissolved as a tech walked in, his bearded face scowling. ‘What
the fuck is going on in this place? Everything keeps going down!’
‘A
client messed with my networking. Maybe he attached some kind of
scrambling device in the vent outside? Reinstate my connection in the
next few seconds or call the antenna, he’s going to kill himself!’
‘You
what?
‘My
client is going to kill himself. He’s going to the antenna!’
‘By
throwing himself off?’
‘Yes!’
‘Ahh
shit!’
He
backed out of the door and disappeared from view, the clatter of
metal shortly after confirming his intentions. Samantha145 pinged the
network connection, again and again and again and again until it went
through. In a fraction of a processor cycle, she was gone, racing
along the fibres that connected the therapy centre to the wider
info-grid. She flashed along data-routing highways at the speed of
light, dancing past congested hubs and breaching more than a few
minor firewalls in the process. Her connection granted her access to
a bank of processors held in head-office, her power and capabilities
greatly increased, and probably setting off the alarms on a handful
of tech’s monitors in the process. She raced towards the antenna’s
systems, the easiest way to stop Ralph. Her simulations said that
getting there and stopping him herself, by taking over some minor
system or other, keeping him off the damn thing, was the best way to
resolve the situation.
She
ran more calculations. Ralph had been gone around fifteen minutes. If
he’d entered the cross-continental matter-stream, he would have a
ten minute head-start at the antenna.
She
pulsed down a long straight line, knowing that she was heading away
from the city and towards the antenna on the isolated continental
shelf that had become its home. She hit a wall.
She
floated and felt a little dazed, her logic taking a few milliseconds
to process why she couldn't proceed. A high-level warning flashed
through her data stream : “Warning: Complex A.Is are not permitted
within one hundred miles of Antenna 23X4. Turn back now.”
Strange.
She knew that A.Is did work at the antenna, but had never really
processed that they were the more basic, navigational or reflexive
security kind. She pushed forward a little, wondering if she could
still continue.
“Warning:
Counter-measures will be deployed if you attempt entry one more
time.”
She
eased back. She pinged the message sender and recognised a military
grade signature at the end of the string of bits. If the military
was involved, counter-measures probably meant erasure.
She
hastily formed a message and shot it to the security office at the
antenna, warning them of Ralph’s plan. She hoped that she still had
time, only seconds had passed since her exit from the therapy room.
She
searched the info-grid, tentatively bringing up the biggest news
feeds. There, in mid-fall, a small figure plummeted to the ground,
the body pixilated to hide the identity of the descender.
She
floated in the electron void, very little traffic passing her in the
stream. A message entered her inbox. “Too late,” it said.
It was
in that moment that things could have gone in two different
directions. If she had read the message and not looked at where it
had come from, she would have assumed it came from the security
office at the antenna. She did look however, and it hadn’t come
from there. She tried to trace where the anonymous message had
journeyed from but the digital trail turned cold a mere two hops from
her location.
She
remained inert for, what seemed to her, many hours, but in actuality
was ten seconds. Military grade firewalls, suicides and anonymous
messages that hinted at her actions being tracked and possibly
intercepted. She barely dared to think.
Another
message entered her inbox: “Please return to head-office for
appraisal”.
