Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [20]
Air’s lousy with psychoactive volatiles, a voice in his mind replayed.
Uh-oh.
He started to run. Along narrow pathways, over a little bridge, up flights of stairs and along the corridor to the door of his room. He banged through it. The gun, alerted, lifted on to its bipod; camera and IR-eyes and sound-scanners swivelled.
HELLO, spelt the desk screen.
The word was repeated on the screensight head-up of his glades, echoed in his phones.
SIT DOWN. HANDS ON.
One hand reached for the desk touchpad, the other for the data-input stock of the gun. Its screensight lurked in his peripheral vision.
The desk screen flickered into fractal snow. Kohn stared at it. His hands moved independently, fingers preternaturally fast. The images changed. They resembled the blocks of colour in his head. Changed again, and they were indistinguishable from those blocks of colour in his head. Again, and they merged, outer image meshing smoothly with inner, changing with it.
Changing it.
Something had got into the university’s system, tracked one of his agent programs back to the gun. The macro computer had hacked into the micro. Now – punching messages straight along his optic nerves in the mind’s own machine code, digitizing the movements of his fingertips – the system was hacking into him.
The colours vanished, a spectrum spun to white. Nothing but that Platonic lucidity remained. Memory opened, all its passwords keyed.
Test: rough sheet ocean smell mouth hair
Test: warm soothe smooth soft swing la-la
Test: chopper clatter black smoke hot bang crowd roar fierce grip run
Test: sick fear shut mouth shoulder shake harsh voice swear boy swear all right god damn the bloody king head sing metal taste thrown book slam face run
Test: Cat
Test: Cat
Test: Cat
Enough.
All there, in all the detail you could ever want. Panic washed him as identity became memory; life, history; self, story. Millions of pinpoint images which could each (eye to pinhole, camera obscura) become everything at a moment’s noticing. He tried to turn the intense attention on himself, and found – of course – the self that turned was not the self turned on. And on, leaping his racing shadow, chasing his reflection through a succession of facing mirrors.
You are a man running towards you with a gun CRASH you are a man with a gun running towards you CRASH you are a running man with
Without a gun, and suddenly it is all very clear.
Moh Kohn found himself standing in a clearing in a forest. Some kind of virtual…Forget that: take it at face value. The virtual can be more dangerous than the actual. So: a forest of decision trees, labels growing from the branches. The ground was springy, logically enough: it was all wires. Chips scurried about on multiple pins. A line of tiny black ands filed determinedly past his feet. Something the size and shape of a cat padded up and rubbed against his calf. He stooped and stroked its electric fur. The blue sparkle tingled his hand. Words flew between the trees, and swarms of lies buzzed.
The cat stalked away. He followed it, out of the would to an open space. All was plain, and Kohn set off across it. He found it as difficult as walking across the campus had been. Blocks of logic littered, making varied angles to the ground. Chapter and verse, column and capital, volume of text and area of agreement interrupted his path. The sky was like the back of his mind and he couldn’t look at it.
A woman stepped out from behind an elaborate construction. She wore a smart-suit, strangely: she was far too old to be a combatant. It made her hard to see against the background assumptions, which remained rigid except when changing without acknowledgement. She lifted the helmet of her smart-suit and shook out long white air. The cat sat back on its hunches.
‘You are here,’ the woman said in a thin voice.
‘I know.