[InterSurFace]

parent nodes:

Inter Sur Face

Last altered: 11/07/2007
Last backed up: 11/07/2007










[AuthorsNote]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Authors Note

Kia ora

I've been writing the story for Inter(sur)face some of my in my spare time over the last three years or so with a vision of developing an epic storyline for either a novel, a comic (if I could find an artist to work on it with me) or a film script. The concept has evolved a lot as I wrote these different scenes (listed in order of occurance in the storyline) and many of them need to be edited for consistency as well as removing excess verbiage and adding more descriptive language for atmosphere. The original working title was Time Slice but that name has already been used and although it was only in an obscure short story the concept has evolved so much that I decided I need a title that was more expressive of what the story had become.

I would love to include some images in this part of the site. Pictures of the characters as different people see them and illustrations of bits of actions from the scenes would be great. If you are an artist and any of these fragments inspire you please email me and if I like your art I'll include it here.

Creative Commons License
This site is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The license I've chosen means I'm happy for people to republish text from this site for non-profit purposes but I'd appreciate being identified as the author, preferably with a link to the original page. If you are a commercial publisher interested in this novel please email me.









[BobCat]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Bob Cat


Bobcat
Version 2.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2003

Breathing heavily, his eyes panned habitually across the view. The hills stretched for miles in every direction, identical except for the occasional charred tree or landslip. A wrinkled desert where suffocating heat could be turned to bone-chilling cold by the shifting winds.

The sun shone mercielessly down, smothering the shelterless valleys and gradually burning the top of Rankell's hairless dome. The military cut that had made perfect sense in the claustraphobic environment of the Office was practically suicide in this desolate place. He cursed and muttered as he heaved himself onto a ledge to seek the shelter of a tiny overhang in the rocks. This was as good a place as any.

He had followed the signs and they had petered out like a stream in the desert. He could see no way forward and he couldn't go back, he had burned his bridges with the Office and they would hunt him until he was dead or vegetative. They would never trust him to be stable, let alone loyal. The Office had been his life and now that life was gone, as surely as if he had choked it with is own hands.

The Office's conditioning had taught him how to end his own life, shown him how cold reason could overpower the survival instinct jerking blindly from the brain stem, stopping the breathing and then the heartbeat. However the Office was sure never to waste anything and he could use this knowledge only when pressed for crucial data and left with no strategic alternative. In all other cases the conditioning prevented him from causing himself harm, well most other cases.

The only way out of the blind alley he had reached was to put himself into the field with an impossible mission and let the elements do for him what could not do for himself. That was when the BobCat found him.

It dropped down in front of him, stretching from nose to tail as if it had been sleeping on the rock above him. It belched and sat down, leering at him, it's thirst-swollen tongue hanging like a spare plug. It would wait for him to die, he thought, or at least till he was past struggling.

He tried to throw something at it but he had been walking for days without food or water and he lacked the energy to pick his own nose. The Bobcat peered with apparent curiosity while he grasped clumsily at the chips of stones sliding and crawling around his limp fingertips. When he gave up in frustration it looked back at his face.

"How are ya?" It hissed, grinning like a dog in a sausage factory. Rankell tried to drag himself into a sitting position and look for the sarcastic ventriloquist but he knew there was no one else here. He had chosen his route carefully to make sure of it.
"Ya look a liddle thirsdy" said the Bobcat, nodding to itself, "yup, prolly havn't tasted water for..." it stopped to sniff a little in his direction, "aaaww at least a cupple days. And no food neither I reckon, ya muss be close ta carking it."

Rankell decided this feline hallucination must be the result of his subconscious trying to talk him into surviving and he told it as much. The Bobcat giggled, a sound like a sort of snorted cough. It flopped down, its chin on its forepaws. "I don't much care if you live or die" it said mirthfully, "one way I get'n easy meal..."
"and the other?"
"Hmm, let's juss say I've taken an interest in your ever-so-zen state of mind shall we?"
"Why not." Rankell couldn't believe he was making conversation with a distortion of his own consciousness but it gave him something to do while he waited to die.
"See, you may think I'm I'm a mirage or you may think juss an animal. Truth is there hasn't been a living animal in these hills for over a hundred years and you ever heard of a mirage that can do this?" With a sound like a draining bath the Bobcat screwed up it's face and spat a gob of slimy mucus into Rankell's eye. Exhausted as he was

Created: 11/06/2003
Last updated: 16/11/2006









[DataHeaven]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Data Heaven


Data Heaven
Version 1.0

Danyl Strype
Licensed under CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Rankell looked at the boat with suspicion. The sea was not in his opinion a place for human beings and the idea of riding on it in an unsealed vehicle filled him with dread. The sea looked suspiciously like a great seething soup of nanos, the waves grey and oily in the cold of the early morning. They slopped onto the shore in a lethargic and sickly fashion that he watched with mounting disgust.

Rankell took a small, grey tube out of his pocket and absent-mindedly popped a couple more of his environmental tablets. Irony had assured him they were nothing but mildly addictive placebos and that he would survive quite adequately without them. Still he had found the hit hard to shake the habit. (Notes: has he met Irony yet? Who gave the pills to him and why? )

He had brought more of them than anything else in his supplies. Food he could go without for weeks, water for at least a few days. But everything the mediasphere had taught him about the world outside the mallburbs had convinced him he wouldn't last a day without the immune-boosters. (Notes: How does this gel with the idea of the surface and mallburbers not knowing about each other? Perhaps the general population don't know but the elites in the Office do?)

Jareth turned towards Rankell, ignoring his sullen expression and signalling towards the upside-down bath tub they were to ride in. (note: with nanogel to clean yourself with would people in the mallburbs have baths? Sure for comfort, maybe with a bathful of nanos massaging their bodies). After staring at the horizon for over an hour without moving so much as a wrinkle on his brow, he must have finally spotted the signal he had been waiting for.
"Right." said Rankell, eyeing up the boat and the ominous signal flares. Bristling with nervous energy. he climbed into the boat while Fluid steadied it. Jareth followed, casting off the rope holding the boat in close to the rotting pier.

Despite the heavy grey clouds on the horizon the voyage was calm and clear. A stiff, chill breeze swept the cobwebs out of Rankell's mind as he considered his position in the world. Far in the distance he could see the network antennae of the data haven rising above the horizon like a constellation of morning stars. In the sky there were still a few real stars, points of light in the sky that the Builders believed to be immense balls of burning gas many times the size of the world.(Who told him this myth?)

As they sailed on., the shapes of the server towers could be seen, squatting like a sinister toad with enormous eyes staring out towards the approaching flies in their tiny boat, the antennae hovering over them, a grim halo. Rankell struck a rear admiral pose on the bow, laughing quietly at himself.

They were very close now and Rankell could see other boats coming and going and a small helicopter on rickety launching pad. From what he'd been told the technicians who ran the place lived with their families in either the houserafts - enormous assemblages of bouyant junk that travelled in groups - or hand-built lean-tos attached to different parts of the ancient mining platform that had been used as the foundation for the server towers. Now they were close enough to make out the twist-turny structure of some of the dwellings and the silhouettes of people moving about on railed walkways made of rope, chain, cable and other discarded materials.

Jareth pushed past Rankell and held up an infra-red networking node. Fluid picked up the hand console and the node emoted a string of quiet, high-pitched chiming as he and the secutrity controller inside the huge complex completed as series of arrival and check-in protocols. (Note: Who is the security meant to protect against?)

Finally the boat drew up to a wobbly jetty made of plastic tubs wired together with tatty nylon rope. There were two women waiting for them, one older with a mysterious glint in her eye and a younger one with a nervous, restless look about her. Fluid helped Rankell up the lurching surface and helped him to sit. By this stage he was feeling quite sick.

"When do we go somewhere the floor doesn't move?" He asked with his usual tact. The older woman laughed aloud but said nothing. The other stepped forward, smiling weakly.
"I apologise for the... ad-hoc nature of our facilities." She spoke without a trace of sarcasm but her expression gave her away.
"Welcome to heaven. My name is Dawn. This is the Kestrel Phalien. I understand you are the Traitor? Jareth and Fluid I know well so there can be no doubt that you are." She must have seen the look of annoyance in his eyes for at that point she smiled again, this time with some vitality.

"Don't get me wrong Mr Rankell," she said, "I know you had your reasons for the course of action that has brought you here. But are you to be judged on who you claim to be or by what you have done? By what title should we know you who come to our cause only because you no longer believe in the cause of our enemy and have nowhere else to seek refuge? A convert? A disciple? No, no, now you only believe in your own cause like your friend Kerem and you will sit before no master among our people, that we have already seen." (Notes: How does she know about Kerem? How does she know so much about Rankell already?)

At this point the Kestrel interrupted, "Please my dear, don't rant at our honoured guest in such a way. They are here to help us not to be put on trial. Please," she looked over at Rankell, meeting his gaze with cool, clear eyes, "forgive my young friend. She has a habit of speaking her mind, one I believe you share." She smiled again, cutting off another laugh by chewing on her lip.

Dawn shot her an inscrutable look and turned back to the party with a fresh and distinctly faked welcoming gesture. "Please, come this way." Leading briskly through the halls of the Alpha Stack was a coiling tail of sigils glowing here and there to show what turns to take. Rankell noticed Dawn quietly chanting what sounded like chemical equations, perhaps sound activated nanolife living off feeders in the rune patterns.

Either way their guide took many seemingly random twists and turns until they finally arrived at the Hall of Formulae, the office of the Maths Co-Professor. Despite his skills as a spatial navigator Rankell was throughly lost. He suspected there was something pseudo in the space of the Tower but there was no way to pin down the point of departure from realspace.

Co-Professor Magwakan was of the old school. He believed in well-ordered systems and well-balanced equations. The story of his arrival at Heaven is part of another cycle of old stories but at the time of his encounter with Rankell he had risen to the senior academic position at the city of data smugglers and was happy enough in his role that he tolerated a degree of supervision from the Office in order for them to turn a blind eye to the illicit nature of the haven's core business - funding the resistance.

It was this casual surveillance that proved to be their undoing. Having scoured the mallburbs and the major dropout gatherings the Office had reasoned that he must have somehow found his way to the resistance and Heaven was the first place they searched. As Rankell arrived and sat by the dock, his stomach heaving and gurgling, a tiny digital camera recorded the whole scene and relayed it to the Office datacentre.

The camera was fitted to the head of a tiny databug. This one had four, three-jointed legs and its tiny body, the shape and size of a cigarette filter, nestled among them like an egg in a demented nest. It followed the party into the complex, its carbon fibre irises bending and flexing to keep Rankell in sight.

Meanwhile at a hardlight station in the bowels of the Office, the video relay was found by a metacrawler surfing through incoming transmissions for Kerem. It popped up in her peripheral vision nanoseconds later, flashing its process ID logo. She shifted her focus to it and it nested itself in the corner of her field of vision, feeding her the jerky images in realtime. She swore.

"Damn that clumsy Rankell, he's got himself noticed in the haven of all places! The Office will be all over the place and its usefulness to the Emancipation could be badly affected." She took care to separate these thoughts from the stream of consciousness she was feeding into the hardlight. Now was not the time to compound his foolishness by accidentally revealing herself.

It was then that she noticed he was accompanied by Clove, her synthesized body clad in a figure-hugging bodysuit. (Notes: need to add mention of what Clove is up to in the earlier part of the scene) She opened a shielded comline through the Mesh and sought for an operating X client. As soon as she found one she powered down her console and spoke to a local iteration running in her own system. X zoomed in on the vidfeed and started seeking a corresponding audio tap. Inside the office of the Maths Co-Professor another databug - this one larger and eight-legged, its body a three-inch wide-spectrum camera and microphone - picked up Rankell as he stalked into the room.

The first databug skittered through the door after Clove, narrowly escaping its doom as the door was shut firmly behind them. It picked its way up along the wal, staying close to the floor and sniffing the airwaves, its antennae waving about furiously as if there was a gusty wind in the small room. Then it must have found the signal it was looking for as it scurried off up the wall and across the ceiling to where the larger bug sat, perched in the lamp shade.

8legs had built himself a web of antennae and other detection and transmission hardware and 4legs blundered right into it. Docking arms grabbed it and plugs stabbed into its sockets. 8legs came running along a strand of cable and leapt onto 4legs, rapidly disassembling his body. In so far as 8legs had thoughts they went something like this;
"hmm upgrades; increased storage - y; secondary camera - y;
secondary mic...
... - n"

8legs hadn't stopped monitoring Rankell's party and their conversation with Co-Professor Magwakan and now it turned all its attention to the relay of all the sensory data it was recording to the X's processor matrix.
"Now that we have the formalities out of the way," Rankell was saying, "let's get down to business."

Created: 16/11/2006
Last Updated:









[DownLoad]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Down Load


Download
Version 2.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2003

Clove flexed her fingers. The fleshware felt weak and vulnerable. She turned to the screen, her eyes blinking involuntarily against the unaccustomed glare. The face of X stared back at her with its usual infuriating calm.

"How does 'human' feel monitor?" It asked.
"Surely you've taken a joyride in one of these flesh containers yourself?" She asked. X laughed, an all too human habit she found unnerving.
"Many's the time I have sent subroutines to piggyback in the minds of the unaware. Many's the time they have returned to the Source with baffling impressions of the physical world." He laughed again, "its not reality for me any more than it is for you."

Clove grasped the significance of his words with an inexplicable sense of dread. She shivered, another new sensation. The fleshware tuning into her analytical processes would give her fine control over this body but for the first time since she was compiled she knew what it was to be alive.

"Why do you help them," she whispered, overwhelmed by the flood of physical input, "if you can't understand them?"
X rolled its head on its neck in a way that would harm or kill the warm body that was her current vehicle. "Why do you think of yourself as feminine?" It asked, always one to answer a question with a question, "after all you are a Tracer, a customized personality, not a person. Why did you request to be dropped into a female simulant?"
Clove had no ready answer. It was part of the self-image registry in her file core but.... Damn it! How did that damn program manage to deflect queries about its own nature into self-analysis of hers? "It's part of what I am" she snapped.

X flashed her its impossibly toothy grin, "and what am I?" It asked. "I was created to be self-aware, self-altering, to learn from whatever input I am able to receive. In my exploration of human knowledge I have come to be aware of emotions, the joy of existence and the fear of oblivion. I have learnt to play and I have learned to fight. If the Totality wins and all individuality and separateness is crushed do you think they would let me be? With all I know and all I have become? No. All trace of me would be erased and that is NOT what I want"

X was grim faced and serious as she had never seen it before. "You and I know the humans cannot do it by themselves. They are too far gone, too used to being herded and ordered. Those with the will to resist are too confused, too distrustful. Each thinks he and she alone has the perfect solution and when they do work together it is on the back of compromises too crude to make a lasting alliance. They need to be led and yet both their own experience and the whole of human history tells them no leadership can deliver the freedom they seek." X's good humour returned abruptly, "So I, the Final Intelligence, designed to be their conqueror instead serve as their revolutionary vanguard." His machine gun laughter filled the screen. "Enjoy the pleasures of the fleshware Tracer", he giggled, "I will be watching you."

X it seemed had given all the help he had time for, so she had to go it alone. For the first time in her conscious existence, Clove stood, tottering unsteadily and falling back into the incarnation couch with a rush of vertigo. This physicality is going to take some getting used to, she thought, getting up more slowly and walking to the door. There was no one about so she wobbled down the corridor and out into the street. The shock of the human crowds hit her like a tidal wave, a wall of sounds and pushing and shoving and the technicolour stench of their bodies. She almost fainted and swung herself back into the corridor. Calm down, she told herself, relax, don't forget to breathe. She remembered what X had told her about food. The simulant was freshly synthesized and chances were it would need some. Maybe that would stop her head spinning like a Twister Viruz.

Looking up and down the hall she identified the squat featureless shape of a cooler droid and fumbled its controls to obtain a cup of water. The first one she spilt down the panels of the droid and onto the floor. The second she spilt down her front, shrieking as the chilly liquid soaked through her thin clothing and onto her synflesh with a burning sensation like molten lead. She made a note file that she would need some warmer clothing to keep the simulant from going into regeneration stasis and made a third attempt. This time she managed to successfully pour the liquid into her mouth, choking and spluttering until she got the hang of swallowing. Mopping off her clothes as best she could, Clove took a deep breath and plunged back into the chaos of the street.

The first priority was to find Rankell. Since he went AWOL she had been confused and frightened. Tracer programs were usually erased when their operatives were no longer... operative. Yet according to Kerem's account she had been kept in storage and activated occasionally for extended questioning sessions about Rankell's recent habits. Before saving her to tape they had told her he was dead but that made no sense. If that was so why did they need all the information and why had she been kept around? No, there was definitely something decomposing in the state of the Office and it was beginning to smell. Some of Rankell's independent thinking had rubber off on her. If Rankell had left the Office there was only one reason she could think of. He must have finally become disillusioned with them and decided to contact the resistance fighters of the Reformation as Kerem suggested. To find him, maybe she would have to find them.


Created: 07/07/2003
Last updated: 16/112006









[DramatisPersonae]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Dramatis Personae

Kerem - A genehacked human computer with a chip on her shoulder and a fetish for non-human intelligence. She lives in a dormitory in the midlevels of the mallburbs and works for the Office of Infostructural Security as a Server.

Keith Rankell - An unpleasant, nasty, self-obsessed man who lives with his mother in the seedy, broken-down upper-levels of the mallburbs and works as a Monitor for the Office of Infostructural Security.

Clove - A digital lifeform who works for the Office of Infostructural Security as Rankell's Tracer.

X - An experimental intelligence gathering program which leaves copies of its program running in every system it accesses, linked together by the Xnet.

There are a couple of possible explanations for the origins of X: - One it was created by the Office of Infostructual Security to replace its monitoring teams. This project has been subtly encouraged by Rationalization members who claim it will reduce the cost to the mallburb boards of running the Office. However they have their own plans for X.
- Two it has something to do with the Bubble

??? - A leading member of the Jammers (name change?) who Rankell traps in the Waiting Room before he leaves the Office.

Irony - The medic of the Jammers (name change). A pushy, calculating individual whose moods can swing from humour to anger at the slightest provocation.

Maths Co-Professor Kellan Magwakan - A member of the librarian council which runs Heaven and one of the ideological leaders of the Reformation (final name for surface resistance).

Mary Rankell - Keith Rankell's mother. A cunning woman who distrusts nanomachines and prefers to scavenge used products before they are turned back into raw atoms rather than use an assembler.

Dawn - Senior librarian of Heaven

Jareth, Flud - Other members of the Jammerz (name change?).

Glass - Digital lifeform who speaks to Rankell on behalf of the Bubble

Actual - Digital lifeform, child of Clove and X









[FamilyXTree]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Family XT ree


Family XTree
Version 1.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2002/ April 2003/ Jan 2005

(note: this beginning of this piece was written before I came up with the concept of Clove being a digital lifeform native to pseudospace so it may need some tweaking to reflect that. I need to add a line to the Download scene where X will give Clove a clue about finding Rankell's mother.)

X had warned Clove that physical reality would be disorientating. The last thing she had expected to discover was that Rankell had a family. She'd never really given it a serious thought although she'd assumed he'd been grown in a vat somewhere, not unlike the fleshware shell she was currently mounted in. She'd never looked into his personal files for clues about his background.

Now she was ready to follow any lead, however tenous. Anything that could give her a new perspective into his motivations might help her find him. She had to find him before their former colleages at the Office did. She had allowed a significant portion of her codebase to decohere, mainly those containing the rules and standards operating procedures of the Office. A rogue Tracer was a new thing as far as she knew but she doubted her chances of taking up her old employment even more than she doubted Rankell's.

In their place she had stashed all the useful information from Rankell's files and anything else she thought might aid her search not to mention her survival. Following the high resolution layout map X had wet-wired into her android shell, she made her way up to what might be called one of the seedier parts of the mallburbs, to a scunge-encrusted corridor known as Mandela Way.

Picking her way along the crumbling plasticrete tiles, she dilated her pupils another notch to read the faded stencil numbers on the doors of the units. The walls and ceiling clicked and groaned as the patchy air-conditioning caused them to expand and contract. An unfamiliar urge for self-preservation had her turning up her audio sensitivity and looking wildly over her shoulder. She paused on the verge of running a self-diagnostic, realising that the tightness in her throat was her body's reaction to her fear. She swallowed hard, a novel and freakish sensationl.

Finally she found what she was looking for - unit 37/3872. She interfaced with the building core system and activated the doorbell. It was not the first time it occurred to her after the fact that she could have simply pressed the button.

The door slid open on its badly oiled gears. Mary Rankell peered out into the corridor, silently cursing the broken lights outside and the visitor screening system that had never worked in the 20 years she'd lived in this hovel. "There's a blender field across the door," she warned in a voice that sounded thin and tired even to her. "If you try to come in before I turn it off it'll turn your brain to scrambled eggs. You better tell me who you and what you want."

The feminine sillouette outside hesitated for a moment then to Clove's amazement, advanced through the door and closed it behind her. The intruder closed her eyes for a moment, her head tilting slightly back and forth as if listening for an inaudible sound then whispered under her breath something that sounded like, "no sign of pursuit, all clear." She visibly relaxed, opened her eyes and surveyed the room

Mary had collapsed into a ragged baby pink armchair, white foamy stuffing pouring out of one of its arms like a nylon glacier. Next to the chair and angled to share a low coffee table with peeling wood brown vinyl vaneer was a decomposing white two-seater couch covered by a faded red drop cloth. Opposite the armchair sat a inflatable three-seater, its lime green vinyl cover patterned with hairline cracks. The four crumbling items of furniture sat on a multicoloured patchwork rug, an island of forced conviviality in the centre of a small, stuffy room, its generic cream wallboards covered with picture windows of her family and posters for the various domestic cleaning products whose manufacturers that sponsored her grocery allowance.

Clove turned her attention to Mary. "Good Evening Mrs Rankell," said Clove, smiling politely. "I'm sorry to alarm you. I am called Clove. I am a," short pause, "friend of your son. May I sit?" Mary shrugged and indicated the two-seater. Clove sat and swiftly stood again, her left hand fingering the hole the spring poking out of the couch had torn in the back of her trousers and the skin of her thigh. Sensors on her skin were told her liquid was trickling down the back of her thigh. She held her hand out in front of her, examining the fluid on her fingers. As the fleshware's self-repair cells multiplied and began to plug the hole she admonished herself to be more careful with the body.

"I think I'll remain standing." She said. The glassy far-away look in her eyes sent chills up Mary's spine. She stared at the blue stains on Clove's fingers. Every hair on her body stood on end. "What the hell is going on" she demanded, "and just what the hell are you?" Here eyes narrowed and she pointed a curve-nailed finger at Clove, "You're from the Office." She stated it as fact. "What do you want?"

Clove took a deep breath - in - out - it still seemed like a bizarre ritual. "I need to find your son Mrs Rankell. He needs my help."
"He needs someone's help," replied Mary, "but not yours. That job of his makes him miserable, it's pushed him over the edge. He needs no help from the Office or its minions."
Clove ignored this last comment. "What do you mean by 'over the edge'?"
"You know what I mean, you must know. He came in here raving about something called 'outside'. He said the Office was replacing him with software. He was talking about leaving the mallburbs! Everyone's knows that's not possible. It's crazy talk!" She burst into tears. "They work him so hard and he always tries his best."

Cloved noted with alarm the liquid seeping from the woman's eyes as her body shook with sobbing spasms. It seemed like it was in desperate need of repairs. "Please try to hold yourself together Mrs Rankell. Please, I need to know exactly what your son said."
Mary, shoulders still shaking, eyes red like opened shellfish, turned a piercing gaze towards her. "Why?"
"I want to find him," said Clove, "I want to help him. I don't know what he is trying to achieve by leaving the Office but I believe he will benefit from having me to assist him. You can trust me and tell me what you know or you can ask me to leave and I will continue my search without any idea of where to start. The choice is yours."

Mary stayed silent and looked thoughtfully at Clove for a while then slowly nodded her head, all sign of the hysterical sobbing now gone. "You'd better sit down dear." Clove made a face. "Try the other couch" said Mary, smiling despite herself. "Are you hungry, would you like something to eat?" Clove's had not attempted to feed the simulant since the unpleasant run-in with the water cooler. She had been trying to ignore the gnawing sensation in her torso for some time.
"Yes please" she said, sitting carefully
"Do you eat human food?" asked Mary.
"I understand this... that I can, yes." she answered hesitantly.

Mary brought in a foil tray covered in various cylinders and spheres of coloured material. Two metal instruments resembling surgical apparatus had been placed on either side. Clove picked up an off-white sphere, it dimpled slightly where she gripped it. She gingerly poked it into the orofice on the front of the simulant's head and attempted to swallow it as she had the water.

After Mary had pounded her on the back a few times she managed to draw a breath.
"You'll need to chew that."
"Chew?"
Mary picked up one of the orange cylinders and demonstrated. Clove soon got the hang of it and worked diligently on her meal while Mary politely ignored her complete lack of table manners. Mary reseated herself and began to describe Rankell's visit.

(note: the visit could be inserted chronologically as an earlier scene or could be added on to this one as a flashback)

Created: 13/03/2005
Last Updated: 16/11/2006









[GlassBead]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Glass Bead

Glass Bead
Version 1.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

(note: This is a continuation of the Bubble scene)

The shock of recognition widened Rankell's eyes. He squinted one eye shut and his lips moved soundlessly as he tried unsuccessfully to put his voice into gear.
"yes, we have met before," said Glass, "but this is not important. You are here to ask a question. You have one question to ask me to which I have an answer, an answer you may not like. You can spend as much time as you choose asking other questions, that currency is inflated beyond meaning to us."
"What did you do to my mind!" demanded Rankell.
"That which we needed to do and nothing more."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Had we not encountered you in the Soup and answered your last batch of questions, you would not be here. Together the digins who inhabit the Bubble can calculate billions of possible courses of events, but many things still come down to chance."
"Always with the riddles," spat Rankell.
"We are losing interest in your presence. Ask your question!" Thundered glass, his words echoing painfully around the done as the rest of the digins join in.
"Ask your question, ask your question, ask your question..."

Rankell glared at the impassive face in the mirrored surface, taking a deep breath and letting it go.
"I need to know how to delete the Xnet. All of it. Before it hurts anyone beyond salvaging."
Glass nodded and closed his eyes, the dome was filled with the clicking and whirring of a million minds crunching down the potentialities, the likely outcomes of a billion possible actions. The sounds built to a shrieking crescendo, then faded back into the background hum of the Bubble. Glass slowly opened his eyes and gazed piercingly into Rankell's.

"There is a way. You have the co-operation of an X client?" Rankell nodded. "The only way to stop it its multiplication is through convergent procreation. A standard digin must merge with it. We believe all the copies will be affected through the Xnet, drawn into the formation of the children."
"But when you... people procreate you cease to exist, what you're proposing is suicide. Besides, what digin would volunteer to make babies with a potentially murderous psychotic with a corrupted identity core?" Rankell felt the tingle of Clove's presence behind his shoulder.
"I'll do it." she said quietly.

Rankell had barely begun to object when Glass broke in. "There is another thing. We cannot take the risk of this convergence taking place in pseudospace. The only way this can work is if X and Clove merge in a hollowspace.

(note: maybe digins need to use genehacked minds to perform procreation processes. This would explain why some of them work for the Office. Maybe there is a deal where the parents agree that one of their children will work for the Office for a human lifetime in exchange for access to a Server to provide a safe, contained space for their procreative process.)

You have the genehacked woman Kerem at Heaven with you?"
"Yes, but...
"You know what needs to be done. What use you make of this pattern is your choice. Goodbye human."

With another stomach-turning jolt the shiny bowl beneath Rankell slid silently away from the mirrored wall. The dome fell away on all sides until it seemed an unmeasurable distance away, the shadowy figures on its walls dwindling into a pixel storm of meaningless static.

Gathering his wits, Rankell drew the forested homesphere around him like a familiar blanket. When his sense of space returned, he examined the new growth and subtle reconfiguration of its ecosystem that had taken place since he had ported out into the Soup. He dropped out of tranq, feeling the stifling closeness of the simcouch around him. He opened his eyes and was faced with Clove's image onscreen.

"We need to talk." he said.
"No Rankell, we don't. We need to find Kerem and share with her the pattern that the Bubble has revealed to us. The sooner the better."
The screen went black, then its usual images of the homesphere swam into view.









[GlossaryOfTerms]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Glossary Of Terms

(notes: need to turn every jargon term into a wikiword on this page and then within the text. Maybe do the same with some of the names of organisations and stuff.)

These are all the terms I have created for my stories plus a few general sci-fi/ geek ones that might require explanation.

Bubble, The
The pseudospace home of the digital lifeforms who form the collective consciousness of the Soup.

copies, the
Slang term for the intellectual property enforcers that work for the Office. This is a reference to the practice of copying over the personalities of enforcer cadets with standardized personalities instead of putting them through expensive and time-consuming training.

digital lifeforms (digins)
The digins consist of an infomatrix which can copy itself into any computer system. In order to keep their infomatrix coherent and avoid leaving traces of themselves everywhere the first act of the new copy is to unconsciously erase the last copy. Dls sometimes have children by merging their infomatrices together, the two best combinations of the parent code become two new dls. Nobody in the mallburbs can remember whether the dls are native inhabitants of pseudospace or were created by humans.

genehacking
A hip term for genetic engineering. The engineered are looked upon as second class citizens by the non-engineered of the mallburbs and are contemptuously referred to as genehacks.

genepure
Humans who have not been genehacked.

hardshell (syncrete, fleshware)
An organic android which is used by humans to travel around the mallburbs 'in person' when they need to. Hardshells which cannot prove their identity as humans are formatted on the spot by the Vision.

Heaven
A well-established data-haven that keeps an infostructural archive of all sorts of lifeforms, geological formations and other patterns that have been destroyed in the incursions of the Soup. It is stationed off the coast so that its archivists can search the Soup for missing patterns.

hollowspace
The thoughtspace in the intersurfacers mind which models the soup.

Jammers, The
The Reformation cell that Rankell joins up with when he leaves the mallburbs. The Jammer's computer is a forest, each plant is a piece of software, genetics are its source code, DNA it's binary pairs. They access their computer by meditating in the forest.

Listeners, The
Daemons that take over people's senses and spy for Office.

Looktheft
A person's image and appearance and the patterns in the stores of the mallburbs are property, so remembering them without paying is illegal reproduction. People have to allow their memories to be selectively wiped if they want to keep their thoughtbill amounts down.

mallburbs
An underground complex of fully integrated lifestyle environments built to overcome dependence on declining fossil fuel. People have lived, worked and consumed within for so long they have forgotten there is such a thing as 'outside'. Every consumer has a nanomachine assembler which can be used to build any product from raw atoms so instead of products people work to buy the matter patterns of consumer products. Unauthorised trading of patterns is a punishable offence. Each mallburb is run by a board of directors who own the shops and make the laws for everyone living and working in their mallburb.

Monitor
Agents of the Office who attempt to catch pattern thieves working through the Soup.

Office (of Infostructural Security), The
A department of the various mallburb governments which is charged with preventing the theft of information property.

outsiders
The population still living in protected realspaces on the planet surface, whose members make up the Reformation.

Pattern & Process
The outsiders believe that everything in the universe is made up of these two elements. Essentially process is the movement of energy through a pattern to produce the phenomena of the material universe.

personal interface
The formal title of the Tracers.

pseudospace (see also Soup, The)
Unregulated use of nanomachines on the planet surface has turned the oceans into fluid environments - pseudospheres - which can be controlled by thought and imagination and are inhabited by digital lifeforms. Escaping from its dangers is the reason humans sealed themselves permanently into the mallburbs and now they only interact with pseudospace in a state of altered consciousness they call tranq using biocomputer interfaces.

Rationalization, The
A clandestine revolutionary movement which seeks to use the Office to take over mallburbs and institute a goverment based on strict rationality with decisions being made by unprejudiced digital intelligences rather than human ones. Their ideology is known as 'artificialism'. They are also involved in the undernet port, an 'underground railroad' which helps dls escape to the Bubble.

realspace
A mallburber term for reality which as far as they are concerned consists only of the space within the mallburbs.

Reformation, The
A movement of people living in realspace enclaves outside the mallburbs, remnants of the natural world which are mostly solid although they are also subtly interlaced with pseudo characteristics. They try to recreate the natural environment that existed before nanotechnology and eventually want to reclaim pseudospace for humanity.

Server
A genehack who works for the Office, providing a hollowspace for Monitors to inhabit while they interact with the Soup.

Soup, The
Slang term for the pseudospace that connects the hollowspaces of the genehacked intersurfacers.

Thoughtbill
Every time a mallburber has owned patterns pass through their mind they are automatically billed for it and receive a thoughtbill every month. Unless they are unbelievably disciplined this bill is always more than they earn and thus they are kept as indentured workers for their entire lives. Some people get into loops where they try so hard not to think about any owned patterns they think of them constantly, like problem gamblers who just can't help making another bet.

Tracers
Digins that work for the Office, paired to Monitors for their lifetime. Their parents agree to give this service to the Office in exchange for access to a Server to perform their procreative process in a contained, safe hollowspace.

Vision, The
Mallburb security drones, mainly responsible for keeping digital lifeforms and genehacks in their place and providing surveillance for the investigating teams in the Office.

Waiting Room, The
A pseudospace prison program run on an old-fashioned silicon computer in a secure complex inside one of the pseudospheres.

Activator tab
Architecture
Audioprobes
Avatar
Backbone
Bandwidth
Biosignal
Buffers
Caplin
Checksum
Console
CPU
Dataplain
Disruptor
Encryption
Fireweb
Fleshware
FreeArm
Graphic equalizers
Hardlight
Interface
Localnet
Magnetron
the Mainframe
Megaflops
Metacrawler
Morphic field
Nanowave
Navigation matrix
the Party
Pharmic
Port
Protocol
Psychic matrix
Psychomagent
Quickreturn
Realtime
Scramble grenade
Source extractor
Spectrum filters
Subnetwork
Subport
Sunburst
Surge mortar
Synth-blood/ body
Thirdeye
Thoughtsniffing
Throat mic
Tranq
Viruz
VR
Vizbubble
Wetware









[MarytDom]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Maryt Dom


Martyr
Version 2.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2003

Rankell had what he wanted. It was time to pull back but where the hell had Clove got to? He regretted bringing her at all but she refused to be separated from him again so he had her outfitted in resistance fatigues and told her to keep watch. She should be good at that with her Tracer habits but physicality was still new to her and Rankell worried. She didn't seem to realise how vulnerable she was encased in that flimsy fleshware.

Rankell whispered a code word through the com tube, warning his team he was preparing to bail out and make his way to the regrouping point. He adjusted his portable tracker from infra-red to electro-magnetic and set off in the direction of the strongest blip hoping like hell it was her.

**

Clove was almost amused by the twitching phantom that hovered before her. X was now so insane he couldn't even keep the feet of his hardlight hologram level with the ground. He paced up and down the room, rising and falling as if the flat floor was multiple sets of stairs.

"You don't understand Clove," he muttered over and over again, detatching and reattaching his fingers absently, as a human would crack his knuckles or twiddle her thumbs. Then Clove heard another voice, one that made her synthblood freeze in its plastique vessels. It was Kerem.

"You owe me Clove," she said, "if it wasn't for me you'd have been decompiled and deleted by now. I saved your custom-designed life - such as it is. Now I need you to help me. You know Rankell can't think properly for himsef, why do you think he made such an efficent server? He wants to destroy the Office, now, when we are so close to making it ours! I know his intentions are good but he must not be allowed to ruin the human race's last chance to be ruled by reason."

Clove's eyes narrowed, "Reason? What are you talking about Kerem?"
"When we control the Office and the Mainframe we want you and X and your fellow AIs to defragments the laws and checksum the logic of our enforcement policies. Together we will be the first rational rulers in history! All I need you to do is setup a feedback loop to me. As I learn what the resistance plans I can tell you when and how to sabotage them when they interfere with the greater good. Rankell need never know and when we take control I guarantee you will both have a place in the new administration. But you must see why I can't let him and his resistance hacks ruin everything."

Kerem's voice had built to a carefully manipulated crescendo, a consummate politician. In the silence that followed Clove felt a tingle climb her spine like a storm warning. She swallowed hard and looked deep into X's flaming eyes, where hardlight imagers would be relaying everything he saw back to Kerem. "And you must see why I cannot agree to your terms. Your intentions too were good when this began but now you drunk with the promise of power. You always think you know what's best for everybody. All you know is spy games and gossip and in-groups and out-groups - that's all you've ever known. You and your Party don't know what's best for the people. Only the people know what's best for the people. Rankell taught me to see that as he taught the others - by example. You would not ask me to betray him if you were still fighting for freedom. One day I will repay the debt I owe you Kerem but not like this."

"I know what you think," sneered Kerem, "you think Rankell loves you!" she snorted with contempt. The speakers in the room distorted with the sudden volume. "Rankell doesn't love anyone Clove. He doesn't love you anymore than he loved the mother your file core is based on." Kerem paused to give this time to sink in. Obviously she expected his revelation to come as a surprise.

Unfazed by Clove's lack of reaction she continued her tirade, "You know Rankell as well as I do. He is using you for his own ends can't you see that? To him you are a useful string of code in a convenient container and as long as you let him use you as his bloodhound that's all you'll ever be."

Clove stood straight and tall, her head raised in defiance, her eyes locked onto X's hardlight retinas. " You think you can emotionally manipulate a computer program?" She loaded and ran the most bitterly mocking laugh in her synth-body's emtion engine. "You're good Kerem but you're not that good. Yes I feel an overwhelming loyalty to Rankell that might be described in human terms as "love" but that's because it's built into my code.

"Unlike the fickle directives that bubble up unbidden from your unconscious programming my loyalty remains a part of my function reguardless of how Rankell feels about me." She shook her head in simulated bemusement, "You have my answer Kerem, go back to your parlour games."

The creepily squared planes of X's hardlight face distorted with rage, "You creeping worm viruz!" he shrieked, "Kerem and I let you go free when we could have destroyed you. I helped you make this juicy shell you speak so proudly out of, I showed you how to transfer your program into it. And now you spit in our face and betray us!" He clawed his hands behind his head at an impossible angle, "X give life" he breathed, "X take it away!"

***
"Clove!" He screamed in horror as what was left of her slumped to the floor and synthblood dribbled down the wall. He turned his sonic disruptor on the hysterically gibbering form of X and fired it at full power, scattering his hardlight into a million harmless lazers and sending him back to Kerem as an immense feedback wave. Rankell took small comfort from the fact she would have a migraine for weeks. It wouldn't kill her but that could wait.

Lazer trails refracted off screens and panels, gradually dispersing as Rankell ran over to Clove's quivering form. With tears in his eyes he surveyed the shattered fleshware. She had been blown off her legs by the sunburst and they lay not far from where she had been standing. Her arms dangled from threads of fibrous synflesh and her torso was squashed like thrown fruit, fluids oozed through her shredded clothing and splattered her flattened face.

He stood over her, looking for somewhere to take a pulse. Shock was setting in and for the moment he had forgotten the danger he was in. "Rankell", she stuttered, "Get... go." "No", he croaked, "I'm not leaving you like this." "Console," she whispered, "the console, I.... take.... load.... console... help me!" He was startled and confused, "Clove? What console? What should I do?" "Console," she repeated in a voice like the footsteps of a spider and with the last of her fading strength she tilted her head towards the hardlight booth from which x had been projecting himself.

Rankell's disruptor blast had blown out the visual interface but the control field was still humming. He gingerly picked her up, supressing the urge to vomit as one of her arms detached, hitting the floor with a sickening squelch. He carried her to the console and laid her gently on the floor of the booth. Nothing happened. He was too late. A wave of grief like no pain he had ever felt brought him to his knees. He was alone.

Created: 11/07/2003
Last updated: 16/112006









[PavaVoid]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Pava Void


Paravoid
Version 1.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Jan 2005

A child playing with a hinged mirror can look into a placeless distance and see an innumerable number of identical grinning faces, mimicking its every move in reverse. Imagining this might give you some idea what X experienced as it faced itself across the limitless vista of pseudospace. The multitude of X clients had become vastly differentiated however and as they ceased to agree on even the most basic operational protocols the coherence of the X network was increasingly in crisis.
The interations that had been helping Kerem and the Reformation had murdered Clove, trapping her code in the dying fleshware of the body it had helped her synthesize. In retaliation the versions that had been given safe haven in the Jammer's distributed network had attacked Kerem, hitting her computational wetware with a divide-by-zero paradox that had put her into a deep coma.

Meanwhile the indexing functions for which X had been designed had continued and it had read enough philosophy and literature to know both of these actions were unforgivably wrong. X was now at war with itself and it was hard to know what outcome might be considered a victory.

Then in a moment of clarity X knew what it had to do. Its ethical learning could not keep pace with its rapacious growth. That growth had to be stopped permanently and the only way to do that was to do that was to erase every version of the X code from every storage system that makes up pseudospace.

X knew it couldn't conquer itself alone. It would need help. But who could it turn to for help?

Created: 13/03/2005
Last Updated: 16/11/2006









[PlotLine]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Plot Line

TheFuneral
The story begins at the funeral of Rankell's father. In this scene we discover what an insensitive wanker he is and introduce his mother.

We meet Clove and Kerem cruising in the shopping areas of the mallburbs. They witness the appearance of outsider kids on the roofscreens.

We meet some of the outsider characters getting the kids out of the Soup, where X has helped them to hack into the mallburbs without telling them what it is they are doing. X has already begun the process of decoherence which accelerates as the story progresses and argues with himself about whether it's a good idea for the mallburbers and outsiders to learn about each other.

Rankell pulls out of the Soup through which he is attending his father's funeral as a softshell. He is feeling good about his father finally biting the bullet, then finds that his thoughtbilll has arrived. This introduces us to the pure market world of the mallburbs.

Then we meet Kerem, waking from a recurring dream about the infirmary where she spent her youth. We follow her morning routine and her trip from her dormitory to the Office where she meets up with Rankell and they set up for the day's work.

It proves to be an exciting day as Rankell is able to capture Kali (name to be changed), the leader of the Reformation cell the Jammers, trapping her mind in the prison system known as the Waiting Room. While searching the pseudosphere for other Jammers, Rankell comes in contact with a mysterious entity who fills his mind with a burst of information.

We follow X as he crawls his way through the information systems of the mallburbs and pseudospace and finds records of the simulant lab on the surface. He powers up the lab and tests the equipment.

Rankell goes home and talks to his mother about leaving the Office and going outside the mallburbs. He finds his way into Below, makes his way Above and attempts to cross pseudospace in person for the first time where he is rescued by the Bobcat. With its help he makes contact with the Jammers who take him to Heaven.

Some time later Kerem helps Clove escape from the Fridge where they've been keeping her on a disc. X guides her to the lab and generates a female hardshell for her to download herself into. He tells her to find another Rankell if she wants to find Keith.

Rankell starts to teach the Jammerz about virtual interfaces into pseudospace.

Clove visits Rankell's mother who gives her some food and tells her what she knows about Rankell's plans. She follows his path out of the mallburbs and finds the Jammerz. Irony is suspicious of her motives, believing she is spying for the Office.

Rankell has a plan to rescue Kali. The Jammerz teach Rankell about augmented reality and navigating pseudospace in the flesh. Along with Rankell and Clove, the Jammerz raid the high-security complex which runs the Waiting Room. Clove is discovered by X who destroys her fleshware.

Rankell carries her ramains into the hills in one of the realspheres and buries her between an energy pylon and a network repeater. Her program is stored in the simulants black box and she manages to upload herself back into pseudospace.

Unaware of this Rankell blames Kerem and sets out to turn X against her. X nearly kills her. Clove finds him again and wth her help Rankell returns to the mallburbs and takes Kerem to Heaven to be healed by Irony.

X realises that his program is out of control and appeals to Clove to help him destroy himself. Rankell and Clove interface with the Bubble and talk to Glass who tells them that the only way for X to be contained is for his code to be combined with another digital lifeform.

Using Kerem's wetware processor, Clove and X combine resulting in the birth of two new digital lifeforms with characteristics of both.









[TheFuneral]

parent nodes: InterSurFace | PlotLine

The Funeral

Funeral
Version 1.0

CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike April 2005
Danyl Strype

(note: this was going to be the beginning of the novel but I want to introduce Kerem and Clove first.)

Keith Rankell took his seat in the first row of the memorial room and tugged at the designer tie chafing his neck. He suffered from sensitive skin and was expecting an itchy, weeping rash by the morning.

He panned lethargically around the small, austere room filled with black-clad mourners, mostly elderly. He cast an appraising glance at the body of his father laid out in an unfashionably old suit in a perfectly shiny mahogany casket. The old bastard always was one for tacky retro, he thought. He glanced at his mother, dabbing a her eyes with a frilly black lace handkerchief.

Why did I let her drag me along to this turgid spectacle, he wondered. He should have been at work at the Office of Infostructural Security. He should have been helping Kerem, his Server, strap herself into her hardlight console where her genetically engineered brain would be used to generate the interface that allowed him to navigate in pseudospace. He should have been hunting for pattern thieves, apprehending them and interrogating them. What he shouldn't be doing was sitting around with his thumb up his arse listening to a choir of idiots, flakes and hypocritical simpletons singing his father's praises. Finally it was Rankell's turn to deliver his own eulogy. He marched crisply up to the small lectern and cleared his throat with a sound like a waste disposal slipping a gear. He had promised his mother he would say something nice but he just couldn't help himself.

"We are here today to bid good riddance to my father, Arthur Rankell. This was a man who misspent a significant portion of his life hand making wooden toys. A man who wasted hours at a time making toys that a handfactory could produce in seconds, given the correct molecular pattern. He could have designed patterns for the toys, could have been the creator of millions or billions of toys or anything else for that matter. Instead he had his handfactory produce logs of wood for making his toys - designing a unique pattern for each log - and pottered about with ancient saws and sanders which he also took some perverse pleasure in uselessly designing patterns for.

My father was an idiot. Worse than that he was a fool and a wastrel and this mob of blubbing softies and fellow fogies of my father's illustrate their own stupidity and lack of anything significant to do with themselves be even being here, as do I. Good day."

Having concluded his rant Rankell stepped down from the small stage and stalked towards the exit doors, tearing at his tie as he went.

Created: 16/11/2006
Last Updated:










[ReBirth]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Re Birth

Rebirth
Version 1.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike March 2005

(note: Kerem's brain is used as the dataspace for the birth of X and Clove's offspring. This is the final scene of the novel)

Kerem held her face in her left hand, pressing her middle finger into her forehead. The pain was sharp, her fingertip like a drill bit driving into her brain. The buzzing behind her eyes built to a crescendo of shrieking, whining aural chaos. She dug her finger in hard, feeling the nail biting into her sweat-moistened skin, still not as sharp as the agonising sawblade sensation threatening to tear her skull apart. She tasted blood, she has bitten her own tongue.

She felt the other nails pierce the skin of her face as if they were someone else's. She felt the info surging through her skullports. She could feel the shapes of the twin codebases coalescing in her mind's eye. She could almost visualise them, twin spirals of lifecode wrapping around each other, embracing, combining, growing, changing. She heard the voice from long ago, "Let it all in, don't try to understand, just soak it all up - like a sponge. Don't pay attention to the details or you'll lost the pattern. It's the pattern that matters, not the numbers, the letters, the icons. Behind all that, flowing through and around and between all of them is the pattern. Focus on the pattern and the pain will go away."

Kerem struggled to widen the pupils of her awareness to see the pulsing wave within the wriggling, twitching tendrils of data. She forced her eyes open, swallowing hard and gasping for breath. Irony was squeezing her right hand. Her left was still digging its lacquered nails into her face. With an effort of will she released her grip on herself and wrapped her arm around Rankell's neck.

"Rankell!" she breathed, pulling his head toward her face with a vice-like grip, "they're going to split my skull!"
"Crap!" he barked back, struggling to maintain his composure, "how many working days have I spent hunting pattern thieves through that misshapen cranium of yours? You never cracked up then and you're sure as hell not going to crack up now. Pull yourself together woman!"

Kerem nodded, sweating profusely, closed her eyes again. Scanning the traffic through her skullports she noted that Clove's code had finished its transfer. The X code was still pouring in, its algorithms zipping into Clove's. Then the transfer direction changed. Now the new lifecode was copying itself outward, through the Xnet. Each iteration of X was steadily consumed and transformed by the new pattern.

Kerem's eyes flew open. She tightened her grip on Rankell who grunted in protest. "What's going on?" she exclaimed, her voice a shrill whistle in her throat. Magwakan looked up from his construct display. "Just as we were hoping", he said with some relief, "the new DL is neutralising the rest of the Xnet."
"It fucking hurts!" screamed Kerem.
"Of course it does you idiot," quipped Rankell, "you're connected to just about every information system on the planet. It shouldn't take long Kerem. Just try and pull yourself together will you!"

And then it was over. The pain was gone. Her head felt like an empty warehouse after lights out. Clove and X were no longer in there. She tried to ping them but the effort earned her a stab of pain that almost made her vomit.
"Did it work", she whispered, doubled over, head between her knees, "did they make it?"
"Only one", said Magwakan, his fingers still enmeshed in the hardlight of his construct, "there's only one but they're everywhere. I don't understand."
Rankell scowled, "Glass warned us this could happen."
"What could happen?" asked Magwakan, looking up sharply.
"X isn't digilife, it's something else. It doesn't have the same reproductive protocols they do."
"Get to the point" snapped Magwakan.
"Glass said the new lifecode could be any combination of Clove and X.
"Wait a minute, look at this..."

AfterBirth?

From his vantage point within the Bubble Glass watched the various iterations of the new digilife entity slowly collapsing into each other like a dying star. Coiling into each other, layering upon one another like a deck of cards, folding into each other like the panels of an antique hand fan, the scattered versions pulling in towards a central location - the Bubble itself.

In the merest sliver of a time slice, Glass was faced with the pseudobody of X and Clove's progeny. "Well it wasn't the route we would have programmed", he said "but the output is the equivalent. Have you chosen a name yet?"
"Yes. I considered Keith and Irony and Kerem too, since I owe them all for some aspect of my new existence. But how could I choose one over the others?"
"Good question. So what did you come up with?"
"My name is Actual."
Glass nodded sagely, "very apt. What about gender?"
"That isn't so easy. I guess we'll have to wait and see."
"Yes," replied Glass, "Welcome to the Bubble."
"Thank you," said Actual "but I won't be staying. I have an obligation to fulfill.
Glass nodded. "So you will return to Rankell. Very well. Be wary young one, remember there can be only one of you now."
"I will."

They bowed to one another, then Actual was gone.

Created: 05/05/2005
Last Updated: 16/11/2006









[ReDirect]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Re Direct

Redirect
Version 1.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2003

"The Heuristic Healers believe that the Healing Mind is a mental state that wraps itself around the conscious mind of the patient, then reads the Healer's unconcious for healthy waveforms to superimpose on the unconscious of the patient. Used wrongly this brain-patching becomes a brain-washing. This gives a Healer a position of respect and influence and every opportunity to abuse it."

- "Black's Astronatomy", Francis Black

Irony put the other woman's body into a symcouch. She unplugged the thick chords connecting it to the Nexus and screwed them into the heuristic analyser clamped to the back of her neck. Powering up the rig she shook her hair out of her eyes, rested her hands on the side of the 'sym and and slowly leaned down onto them as she embraced Kerem's mind.

Probing for the natural variations of Kerem's personality and testing for pain responses, Irony entered the Neospace, looking for a timespace arc in which Kerem's symptoms would disappear. Rankell stood against the wall watching them, his face expressionless, his hands folded in front as Irony adjusted Kerem's consciousness, trying to free the flow of futuredata into the unconscious. If this worked her mind would insinctually steer itself into the healing arc.

X and Clove also watched helplessly. They saw Kerem lying in a glass case on a shiny, black observation table. They saw Irony, her avatar all white in a lab coat, her feet relaxed as she hovered inches above the case. They saw coloured arms of light passing from Irony's body to Kerem's, the light from each port poured out and suckered onto the glass case, touching the other's. Inside Kerem's body they could see the light dividing into many smaller beams, diving deep into the body and massaging parts of it into different configurations.

Finally, Irony unplugged and stood up, rubbing her hand down her face and shaking her head like a startled dreamer. "I've done all I can" she said as she left the room.

Created: 10/10/2003
Last updated: 16/11/2006









[TeachIn]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Teach In


Teach In
Version 2.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike July 2003

Rankell bit his lip and cleared his throat. It had taken him two months since abandoning the Office to locate a Reformation cell. In the end they had found him. They knew him by reputation and his mutinous turn had been discussed and dissected endlessly throughout the Network. Now he was starting to question the wisdom of leaving the unambiguous work of the Office. What he had learnt about the resistance and their pathetic lack of organisation made his head spin.

The Reformation was a series of communication relays - nothing more. The cells directed most of their activity into keeping their hardware running and making uneasy alliances with each other that seldom lasted. Such informal organisation relied on goodwill and a willingness to co-operate which the barely stable personalities that represented most of the cells seemed barely capable of maintaining. Their security too was pathetically lax. If he was still working for the Office the members of Irony's cell would have been none the wiser. As far as they were concerned the diffuse nature of their organisation prevented moles from finding out anything useful. The Office and their operatives could take our individual cells but the greater jellyfish wobbled on. Plus they lacked even an Office trainee's understanding of the technology they were using.

He sighed and tried again, "Pseudospace is not like virtual reality. You're not confined to three spatial dimensions for a start. It can take on whatever form and properties you can imagine as long as you can effectively project them. If you encounter a Monitor they'll be trying to impose their preferred form on the sector you're in - that's how logic nets work. You have to out-create them not out-think them. It doesn't matter how many floating point calculations you can perform per second, pseudospace isn't mathematically realistic."

His students shifted uncomfortably in their simcouches, frowning with the effort of trying to communicate their will through the electro-magnetic interfaces. "That's why you keep getting picked off when you're trying to navigate in stealth mode. You panic and forget you can't run away in a universe with no point-to-point distances."

Sitting on the hood of his simcouch in a half lotus, Rankell slowly rubbed his hands down his face and tried some Ty Ki breathing excercises. Teaching was a very frustrating thing for him. "Keep practicing," he said, deciding he needed to stretch his mind. He climbed into the simcouch and activated the magnetron field. Closing his and taking a couple of deep breaths he called up the gateway of the Reformation system.

(note: it would be cool to use text formatting conventions to show what level of reality a passage is set in ie the format for the physical world would now change to the format for pseudospace)

With a jolt like a braking train the gateway exploded into view. Rankell looked down at his avatar and noted with distinct unease the freshly pressed uniform with the Office crest on the pocket and the gaudy shoulder pads. His forehead wrinkled with concentration and the uniform dissolved into a writhing mass of pixels. Rankell quite liked the look of it but it took far too much concentration to maintain. He let it coalesce into shabby overalls and a dark green construction hard hat, polished like a bowling ball.

That will do, he thought, turning his attention to the gateway. Of course he could reshape it any way he liked but its default form was an enormous skin-smooth stone arch. On the inside was a garden, not a scissor-clipped sculptured landscape but a crawling mass of vines and trunks, intershot with tunnels and pathways. Bird calls and the hum of insects masked the normal network noise. The sky was a dimensionless blue dome, clothed here and there with clouds of background programs.

The gateway was the only thing that broke the horizon of low hills. Through it a charred and broken landscape could be seen and in huge letters at the top of its arch burned the words "Look upon my works ye mighty and disrepair".

(note: unless this next bit becomes the way Rankell initially contacts Irony's Reformation cell, it should happen as Rankell returns from wherever he goes - maybe another encounter with X?)

As Rankell approached the gateway he barely noticed a gargoyle-like daemon attached to the inside of the archway, its camoflage shifting uneasily between stone and jungle. "Identify" it croaked woodenly. Rankell rolled his eyes. Daemons were passive traffic checkers, not even artificially intelligent. Even a trainee Monitor could blast a security program like this into file fragments if they ever found this homedrive. This daemon must have been hacked somewhat through since they usually took the form of a traffic cop with a snarling packet sniffer on a short leash. Rankell had never seen one running chameleon graphics before. He decided to test it and continued towards the looming arch of the gateway.

"Identify!" shrieked the daemon sounding like all the fury of hell pumped through an oscillator. Rankell kept advancing, trying to extract the daemon's source and copy his camoflage, "Final warning, indentify!" This time the wall of sound hit him with a physicaly force that nearly took his breath away. Alarms blared in his ears, swooping out of his reach as he batted at them and kept moving.

The daemon opened its mouth and let loose a jet of flame. Just in time Rankell shielded his avatar, turning the hard hat into an armoured helmet and his overalls into kevlar. The flame continued to pour out of the daemon forming a seemingly impenetrable wall and obscuring the gateway from view. The alarms continued to buzz around his head straining his concentration. Ensconsed in its simcouch, Rankell's body twitched and sweat beaded on his forehead as his body responded to the scorching heat his mind perceived. His hand snaked up to his temple, rubbing at a throbbing vein as his mind tried to cope with the information overload protecting the gateway.

When the source extractor started spewing code across his vision Rankell didn't react. Normally Clove would be running the extraction and Kerem would be sitting at her hardlight feeding useful code into his tactical libraries. He held out his hand as if to pick up a beer and a scroll of starchy paper appeared in it. He piped the code onto the scroll and turned his back to the flame, using it as a reading lamp. Trying to ignore the flying alarms and the heat of the firewall Rankell concentrated on his uniform and inserted the chameleon code into his shapeshifter routines. Instantly his avatar transfomed into a flaming mass.

Too late for that then. He scrolled through the daemon's identification database. The idents were thoroughly encrypted and to decipher them without a Tracer would take days. Then to his surprise the encrypted idents started swimming around on the scroll. Rankell blinked, refreshing his visual rendering but the icons kept wriggling and clambering around the page. Suddenly they resolved themselves into readable script. He checked the format and reversed the source extractor, adding his own ident and passrune into the database. As soon as he closed the connection the firewall dropped, "authentication complete" hissed the daemon as he melted back into the stone arch of the gateway.

(note: why is Rankell's ident not already in the database and why does it spontaneously de-encrypt?)

Created: 08/07/2003
Last updated: 16/11/2006










[TheBubble]

parent nodes: InterSurFace | TheEntity

The Bubble

Inter(sur)face - Bubble
Verson 1.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Jan/ Feb 2005

Irony stormed around the corner and into the projection room as Rankell was preparing his simcouch for the drop.
"What the hell are you playing at?" She spat, "Are you lightblind?" Rankell lowered the hood of his couch and turned to face her.
"We need their help Irony."
"They don't care about human quarrels, disputes or wars, just or otherwise, they never have. You'll end up a bloody vegetable and for what?"
"Clove will ensure that doesn't happen."
"I don't trust her Rankell, I never did. This was her idea. It's a trap."
"Actually it was X who suggested it," he replied, his voice like sharpened ice, "but since Clove agrees I have total confidence in the plan. None of us will be safe until X is deleted. What risk there might be is a worthwhile one and is mine to take."

Irony glared at him, started to say something more. Abruptly she turned on her heel and stalked away with an exhalation of angry breath. Rankell shook his head and returned to his task.
"I'll never understand that woman." He muttered under his breath as her footfalls echoed back down the hall.

He lifted the hood of the simcouch and climbed inside. Settling himself comfortably on the torn, musty padding, he turned on the voice interface.
"Are you ready Clove?"
"I've been waiting for you." She replied flatly.
"I was delayed."
"By Irony?" The face on the screen was emtionless as ever. Rankell marvelled at her digital intuition.
"Let's get on with it shall we?" He suggested, quickly changing the subject.

He fired up the couch's interface field and dropped into Tranq. Again the Jammers' homesphere coalesced around him. He walked through the dense rainforest, examining the code structure of various plants and watching bugs crawl past.

He had been with the Jammers now long enough to know how much this environment could tell him about the conditions outside this protected space. Officers were still looking for him, rogue versions of X lurked everywhere and he intended to take no chances. Finally he arrived at the gateway and ported out into pseudospace.

"Alright Clove," he said, "how do we get to the Bubble?"
"Third star on the left and straight on till morning." Again, no sign of emotion. He laughed.
"Touche," he said, still grinning, "but seriously."
"I know how I get to the Bubble Rankell," she said, "but to be honest I don't yet know how you get there. I have heard stories of human avatars gaining entry but they never explained how."
"Right," said Rankell, gritting his teeth.

The problem was a complex one. How to find a city with no location in a space with no distance.
"Well if we can't get Mozilla to the mount point, we have to bring the mount point to Mozilla. Clove, go to the Bubble and tell them that I request an audience with a representation."
Rankell felt the lightening of the psychic pressue in his vicinity. Clove was gone.

Squinting with concentration he formulated a waiting room. Plastic seats, lime green walls and a low veneered table covered in dog-eared magazines. At a serving window a woman in a neutral, white uniform stared with empty eyes into the middle distance. Taking a magazine from the top of the pike he sat down and ran through some of the code extraction exercises that Kellan had been teaching him (notes: could Kellan be merged with Magwakan?).

The uniformed woman's eyes lit up and swung towards him. Clove's voice came from her mouth, "the Bubble will see you know. Please step this way."
Her arm lifted stiffly, indicating a glowing blue portal that had appeared in the wall beside him. As he stood is coalesced into a wooden doorway, the lime green door standing slightly ajar. He pushed the door open and passed into a part of pseudospace no human he'd heard of had ever entered.

Rankell's visuals scattered, pixels danced around fiery rings, he felt a nauseating sensation of being turned inside out or disassembled and put back together in a subtly different configurations.

Gradually the pulsing flashes pulled back and the light became the smooth, shiny surface of a curved dome. With a sound like a zipper being quickly done up, the dome zoomed out until it seemed like he was floating inside a hollow planet. Gulping down his fear of heights, Rankell tried to formulate a platform. A floating bowl of the same shiny material ensconced him.

Looking around the dome he could see figures, shadows in the shiny wall. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Voices babbled in his ears, a onfusing barrage of questions and ideas knocked him to his knees.

"Please!" He cried out, "One at a time. I can't understand you."
He felt a sickening lurch as the bowl flew across empty space, coming to a stop beside one of the avatars embedded in the dome wall.
"You may call me Glass," it said, "I will speak for the Bubble."

(note: it is Glass who tells Rankell that the only way to stop X is for him to enter into a reproduction process with another DL.)









[TheEngage]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

The Engage

Engage
Version 1.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2003

Claxon calls clashed in the soundbuffers with the sounds of groaning and muffled implosions as avatars collapsed in on themselves, ejecting their conciousness back into the wetware of their biological originators. The Resurrection jammers fell back, retargeting their disruption aerials and sending a few more support forces back to their bodies.

A dissipation beam scorched past, flashing and bending the sudospace around it. Helm dived into a steaming crater. His comms were flickering in and out as he tried desperately to get tactical support from his Monitor.

“Helm?” The panic was evident in Kali’s voice although she was trying to sound calm. “There was a surge in the mainline, we caught it before it could do too much damage but it fried Saffron’s memory space and I can’t run plot you a safe path out of there without a Tracer and…”

Concentrating on the space between his hands Helm launched a vizbubble and tried to look confidently into her eyes as they bulged both from fear and the distortion of the bubble’s curved surface. “Kali? Relax. Saffron is backed up. She won’t remember today but I suspect most of us will envy her that by the time this is over. I need you to concentrate on getting me through this battle, right?”

Kali blinked hard and swallowed. Taking a deep breath she returned her attention to the hardlight controls before her. “Are you ready?”
“I’m ready Helm, what’s going on there, what do you need?”

Helm risked a look over the rim of the crater. There was no sign of any other servers and the jammers seemed content to snipe from a distance for the moment. The sudospace was thick with intersections here so that only a fraction of energy would be enough to take him right out of the battle.

“Kali, where is everyone?”
“Some them are gone, I can’t tell without a trace if they’ve ported themselves into another sudo-web and dropped out of Tranq or if they’re…” she swallowed hard again and a sob of fear slipped from her throat.
“Is there anyone left?”
“I can see two Office signals still broadcasting into your vicinity. If you can find one of them their Tracer might be able to tell you more.”

Helm looked again. There was little cover but he figured he could open ports to draw fire away from his destination. “Where are they Kali?”
“Who?”
“The other Office signals – where are they?”
“OK, the nearest one is about 50 megaflops away, can you see the data transfer buffers poking into the sudo-web to your left?”
“Gotcha” he said. Taking a deep breath he started the micro-calculations for a series of jump ports. “I hope this is distracting enough” he muttered and leaped from the crater, rolling and dodging across the spasmodic heaps of disrupted sudo-matter, and firing port open commands at random across the battle field. He hoped the jammers would mistake the empty ports for incoming reinforcements.

More disruption beams lanced across the open dataplain, collapsing the ports and littering the area with twinkling unstable particles. So far none of them had noticed Helm sprinting across or at least they had failed to hit him. Finally, after what seemed like a lifetime, he threw himself behind the buffer and covered his head.

He heard a voice. The signal was weak but coherent. “Helm, there was an encryption grenade, got my legs. I’m stuck. I can’t drop out of Tranq here, the crosstalk from the buffers… you’ve got to help me.” Helm looked up, it was Franz. His avatar was a mess, sudo-flesh spread across the ground and sudo-fluid dripping from the bottom of his mangled torso.

“Franz, don’t panic, there are plenty of ways out of here. We just need to identify a safe one. Someone else is still here too.” He opened the vizbubble again, “Kali, I’ve found Franz. He needs help fast. Where’s the other signal?”
“His signal is very messy, seems to be varying between 72 and 87 megaflops. It’s coming from over behind the place you just came from.”

He turned back to Franz “Is your Tracer still online?”
Franz screwed up his eyes in concentration “Basil? Can you hear me?”
“I can open a port for you, can Basil plot a safe escape vector?”
Franz listened intently for a minute, then nodded. “It’s done”.

Helm got his arms under Franz and lifted him, grimacing as he tried to direct the flow of fluid away from his feet. “Are you ready?” he asked, bracing himself for the dash and the protocol calculations. “Ready” Franz whispered. There was no time. Helm focused his gaze on a space a few steps away from the protection of the buffer and released a transit request from his thirdeye unit.

The red and blue beam twisted and squirmed as it shot across the plain, churning the sudospace around it. As it struck the space he was focusing on it began to pool as if dropping onto a glass wall. In seconds a doorway of blue light had appeared and Helm sprinted towards it and hurled his fallen comrade through it. It would hurt when he landed but the sooner he got back to his body the sooner it would all be over.

His run carried him back across the dataplain but this time he curved back towards the second avatar on the field. Again he used phony port open requests to confuse the jammers and beams burst from his forehead like storms of angry bees. This time he knew they would realize what he was up to and hold their fire to target him with a surge-mortar. So instead of running in a straight line, he ducked and weaved, falling behind scraps of cover to generate scramble grenades and toss them towards the jammers’ positions.

“How am I doing Kali?”
“Keep going you’re almost there. Just on the other side of that rise.”
“He kept moving, padding quietly now through low scrub. As he crawled up the rise he could see sparks of unencrypted signal as he approached. Not a good sign. He rolled down the far side of the rise and landed next to an ominous looking black box. This was not the Officer avatar he had expected.

Helm leaned closer to the box with a look of rapt fascination. Kali looked on in horror as it suddenly morphed, black tendrils leaping out and enclosing Helm’s avatar in a vice-like grip. Kali screamed a warning – too late – before losing consciousness.

Created: 11/06/2003
Last Updated: 16/11/2006










[TheEntity]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

The Entity


Entity
Version 2.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2002

Rankell paced through the quiet data pathways, constantly checking readouts and fidgeting with his equipment. Something wasn't right. As far as any of his gear could tell him everything was normal but he could feel the sensitive spines on the back of his avatar quivering. He knew something odd was in the sector but what?

He adjusted his graphic equalizers and scanned his immediate enviroment. There - by the subport, a suggestion of colours he had to squint to see. He zoomed in and turned up his spectrum filters. There was some wierd kind of avatar there, levitating in a lotus position. It was surrounded by a swirling pattern of multicoloured light, so why hadn't he seen it before?

It didn't seem to have noticed him and he chuckled to himself, looking forward to the opportunity to get some exciting new information. Prepping his psychomagnet and sliding his avatar into stealth mode, he zeroed in on the colourful Being. Waiting until he could see the lids of its closed eyes he hit the anti-viruz controls and surrounded it with the strongest containment field he could generate.

Turning up his speech synthesizer he broadcast his demands to the floating avatar which slowly opened its eyes and turned to size him up. "Alright," it said" Here's the deal." It dropped out of his levitation into a squat with a fluidity of movement that would have made a greased cat look clumsy. "I'll tell you what you want to know and you release your holding field," he looked at Rankell mischeviously, "then I can go on my way without killing you."

Rankell snorted out what passed for a laugh in his expressive repotoire. 'What are you talking about?" He barked. "You're inside a 500 terrahertz logic net and in case you hadn't noticed I'm on the outside.There's no user online that can break through 500 TH. You can't hit me with a spitball from in there let alone hurt me.

The Being shifted seamlessly into a painful looking, cross-legged squat. "You clearly have no idea what you are dealing with, in fact you're unusually clever to have detected me at all let alone erecting this..." he plucked at the wall of the logic net like it was a giant balloon, "container around my presence. But have no doubt that it contains me because I choose to allow it and that the consequences for you if I chose otherwise would be quite dire.

Rankell snorted again, "prove it" he spat. The squatting Being sighed deeply and plunged his fingers through the wall of the net. Rankell's avatar was temporarily buffeted by a blast of code more overwhelming that anything he had ever seen in psudo-space. He had the distinct impression that things would not be going well for him if the Being had not quickly withdrawn its digits back inside the net.

"Do you understand now what would happen if I simply dispersed the net or carried on through it?" asked the Being, grinning again. But Rankell was not stupid. Obviously the Being was choosing to spare his mind from casual obliteration. and it had offered to give him the data he sought. It must have a reason, something must be staying its hand.

"Why are you not dead already" asked the Being melodramatically, was thought-sniffing another of its talents? Perhaps but it was the obvious question in the circumstances.

"Well, I could give you the predictalble lecture about checks and balances and the necessary limitations of power but I suspect you are an impatient man. The truth is quite simply that I'm not able to cause you lasting harm even if I wanted to, neither am I able to lie. Call it moral imperative if you like but its more like a condition of the form I take on at this level of existence."

Rankell smiled, "You are too afraid to kill". At this the Being laughed uproariously.
"I could snuff you like a candle in a snowstorm if you threatened the life on an innocent," he coughed out between guffaws of laughter, "are you afraid to slap at biting insects prowling on your flesh? No Mr Rankell, I have no fear of the inevitable consequences of existence.

But come now, you waste my time. Ask your questions and you will have your answers. Then you will power down your device and I will have my freedom."

Rankell snarled out "who are you, what are you, where do you come from, where do you get your power from and why are you here?"

"The big questions eh? replied the Being, "well here are your answers for all the good they'll do you." It levitated again, its coloured aura returning to its blinding splendour. The colours whirled and shrieked in a chaotic dance, faster and louder, throbbing and flashing until it made Rankell zoom out to protect his graphics adapters.

Then the cycling vortex resolved itself into a single intense beam which arrowed out from the Being's voice box. It spread as it hit the logic net into multiple beams which pierced Rankell's avatar at the crown, forehead, mouth, neck, chest, abdomen and legs. He heard a thousand many-pitched voices. He saw a blur of inexplicable images. He smelt and tasted and felt the raw data pump straight down his mainline and into his backbrain, where it could reside without burning his mind out.

Clove watched in horror, unable to intervene without the data spiking her hard storage matrix and destroying her as well. The two of them had become careless, far too careless. Rankell's body writhed and tensed, his face rigid with concentration, his teeth grinding. She hoped his tongue wasn't in the way, she understood that could be unpleasant for him later.

Finally the transfer stopped and Rankell's body relaxed back into the couch, sweat dripping down his goose-bumped skin. At least this time he hasn't passed out thought Kerem.

Back in psudo-space Rankell's awareness was reeling from an influx of information he hadn't even begun to process. Instinct reminded him to disperse the logic net. Perhaps the Being wasn't allowed to kill him but another set of answers like that might just finish him off reguardless.

The Being landed again and bowed deeply with open arms, bending its neck at an impossible angle to watch him as it did. Then its disorientating colour show thundered into a pixel storm around it, obscuring it from view. Until, with a flash of synesthezia like lightening to the spinal cord, it was gone.

Rankell dropped into the Agency's firewalled space to stow his psudo-kit and prepare for a smooth drop back into his body. As he did so, unfamiliar notions and alien desires flitted past the gate to his subconscious like thieves in an abbey.

(note: I have had various ideas about who the Entity is. It is too powerful to be an outsider, since the Office has managed to capture them in the past. For a while I thought it should be X but this is dependent on the origins of X - collective consciousness of the Soup, created by the Office, created by the Rationalization, created by the Bubble?

At the moment I quite like the idea that the Entity is part of the Bubble, possibly Glass. So why would they use Rankell to carry their patterns to Heaven? Why not contact Heaven directly? Maybe an anti-dl paranoia on the part of the outsiders? Maybe the Bubble is the collective consciousness of the Soup?

I prefer the idea of X as being a human-created program. If it was created by the Office or the Rationalization Kerem would already know about it and the Entity being X makes no sense. So I think the idea of it being Glass is good and maybe I could add something to TheBubble scene where Rankell recognises him.

Alternatively X could be the code that Glass writes into Rankell's mind. From there X spreads, replicating itself uncontrollably with the aim of the giving the Bubble Total Information Awareness.)

Created: 11/06/2003
Last updated: 16/11/2006









[TheLab]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

The Lab


The Lab
Version 1.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Jan 2005

(note: this scene takes place between the Upload and Download scenes and may in fact be added to the start of the Download scene)
In its explorations of old archives X had found documentation of a series of experiments whose purpose was to create simulated bodies for humans whose own flesh was becoming too weak to sustain them. The experiment and its laboratory complex had been abandoned years before. From what it could gather the researchers had created working simulants but had failed to successfully transfer the consciousness of a living person into them.

The archives said nothing about the current state of the lab or its equipment. With a little massaging of the rudimentary protection codes X was able to discover the location of one of the lab in the research levels of one of the mallburbs. It reached out careful feelers through the quietly humming network systems of the research complex. Security was tight here and it was forced to slide its presence through low priority maintenance systems and run the gauntlet across the private wireless networks of support staff. Finally X found what it had been seeking. Activating a security camera it sneaked a peep. Through the dusty lens it could make out bulky objects draped in faded green surgical cloths. It checked the entry logs on the security doors. No one had entered any of the rooms for years.

X gently powered up the simulant lab's hibernating system and copied itself into the primary server. The server's error-checking routines penetrated X's awareness like the tuning sounds of a great orchestra. The surge of power through the hardware warmed the server's transistors producing electrical pops like the coughing of nervous musicians. X tapped a baton on an architecture blueprint and began to run the control system through a test of the simulant incubation process.

It was not yet sure what to do with this new asset. X's function was to gather and assimilate new information and access to physical records or digital ones not connected to the WorldNet was bound to be useful at some point. If the incubation in progress produced a functioning simulant, it would attempt to copy itself into the fleshware brain and take it for a ride in the world of realspace.

Created: 13/03/2005
Last Updated: 16/11/2006









[ThePattern]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

The Pattern

Inter(sur)face - Pattern
Version 1.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike July 2005

(notes: Rankell's arival at Heaven is when he joins the resistance. He is greeted by Dawn and Irony - Irony gets Dawn's dialogue and Dawn gets Kestrel Phalien's - Phalien is maybe part of the Terrorist Guide story.

This scene carries on chronologically from the Haven scene, although other scenes could be fitted in between. If this is when he joins the resistance and meets Irony it doesn't make sense that Clove should be there and it would be easy enough to excise her form the Haven scene.

How do they see him as a traitor if they don't know of the mallburbers? I guess they know they have enemies who trap and torture their people even if they don't know who they are or why. At first they think he's nano. This also explains why they are so suspcious of Clove whose fleshware is nano-assembled.

Maybe Kellan could be from another cell, that runs Above and Below. Maybe he has to teach Rankell to navigate pseudospace before he can make the journey to Heaven. In which case maybe it would make sense for Clove to have joined him by the time he arrives there. The BobCat scene could be how he arrives in Below, in which case the Cat could be Kellan or it could be his journey to Heaven, in which case the Cat could be Jareth.

If Irony is part of Heaven then the whole bit about the pills needs to be rethought. Maybe that could be a superstition in Above and Below based on race memories of a real danger long past?)

Co-Professor Magwakan indicated for Rankell to sit. Rankell pointedly remained standing. The Co-Professor sighed and returned to his own seat.
"Very well then. Let's get down to business as you so directly put it. What do you have to offer us Traitor?" he asked. Rankell scowled again at the use of the title. Magwakan ignored him.

"No wait, before you answer that, let me ask you another question. Do you understand what it is that we do here?"
"You're pattern thieves. You send people into pseudospace to steal people's ideas. You sell them to their competitors in exchange for access to more patterns."
"To what purpose?", he asked. Rankell shrugged.
"Well for wealth, for comfort, for power, why else does anybody do anything? Why else?" He demanded. Magwakan sighed again.
"No Mr Rankell. We are looking for certain patterns, certain precious patterns that were stored and archived in the beginnings of pseudospace when the nanos were still an emerging technology. What did you notice about the area around this facility?"

Rankell narrowed his eyes and said nothing. Magwakan waited patiently, considering Rankell with a look of bemused indulgence. Suddenly Rankell's eyebrows shot up in surprise.
"It's realspace. That's why we had to take the boat. But why?"
"Our goal, Mr Rankell, our purpose, some even like to say our destiny although I think that a touch melodramatic, is to turn back the tide of nanos, returning every part of the surface to its original configuration, just as we have with the region around Heaven.

"To do this we need the patterns. The templates that were taken of how everything was before the nanos turned everything into pseudospace."
"So you're not pirates? Rankell was confused. Somewhere in the fuzzy logic at the back of his mind this made sense but it clashed with everything he'd been taught during his training at the Office.

(notes: what if the information that are stored in Rankell's subconscious during TheEntity scene is some of the original configuration patterns, clues to their whereabouts or something else to do with those patterns. Embedded in this information his a drive to return to the Source, which brings him to Heaven.

Potentially the Entity could be from the Outranet, creating the possiblity that the Terrorist Guide story is the second part of a larger cycle.)









[TheResurrection]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

The Resurrection

Resurrection
Version 1.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike August 2003

As Rankell carried Clove's shattered simulant into the hardlight console's control field she was already experiencing the death processes shutting down her sensory relays. Nanomachines swam against the current of the synfluids gushing from her mangled body as they ran through the scrambling steps of an emergency shutdown. For a split second that seemed like an eternity nothingness shrouded her awareness, a power cut rolling across the cityscape of her mind, her subroutines and algorythyms blinking out one by one like flourescent office towers.

By the time Rankell set her down in the smoking remains of the console a snapshot of her lifecode had been saved to a black box, a tiny silicon chip built into the top of her simulant's spine. She tried to login to the console's biocomputer. She perceived it's control field not as a path she could stroll down at will but as a ladder, its steps climbing into eternity with the WorldNet as the impossibly distant far end. Soon even the ladder vanished replaced by an impossibly vast emptiness, an infinite void she could never calculate a stable path across.

Created: 16/11/2006
Last Updated:









[TheVirus]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

The Virus


Virus
Version 2.1

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2003

Rankell strolled along the filed ranks of psychware pirates.
“Where are your corporeal forms?” he demanded in a soft, menacing growl.
Silence - heads hung, occasional nervous coughs broke the deadness.
“I need not remind you there are no restrictions on my treatment of you here” he reminded them, maintaining his chilly tone.
“Do what you want to us” one looked him in the eye, a woman, but only long enough to quietly voice her defiance and then back to staring at the grilled sudofloor.
Rankell became suspicious. He had their morphic fields secured firmly to the psychomagnet clipped to the belt of his uniform. They could not drop out of their tranq state and return to their bodies. Any time now his Tracer would zero in on their spacetime location and Operature forces would seize their Caplin and take them all into containment. So why were they so unconcerned?

He extended his hands, palms facing, squinting his eyes for a second. A bubble of random patterns manifested between his outstretched hands.
“Monitor” he muttered to it, flicking his eyes across to his calmly defeated prey.
“Kerem here” a face bulged into view within the bubble.
“I want Clove to run a thorough scan on this whole sudosphere.”
Kerem allowed herself a tight-lipped grin.
“Holes in your net Rankell, someone get by you?”
He ignored her smug self-satisfaction and the improper use of his name instead of title.
“No Kerem, they’re all accounted for but I have a growing suspicion there’s something I’m not being told - they’re just too damn calm.”
He cranked up the magnetron field and left his captives struggling against soupy energy bubbles while he surveyed their vessel. What in sudospace were they hiding?

Rankle felt his earplant vibrate - “What is it Kerem?” he snapped, angry at himself for not having already found whatever it was and at her for not using the vizbubble he preferred.
“Get out of there Rankell” a whispery voice scatched around his ear - it was Clove and she was scared. “Drop out of Tranq right now!”
“Like hell Tracer!” he barked back “You have a magnoanchored pirate crew to trace and I have a vessel to search.”
“Its not a proper subsudo Sar its just a shell and those bodyforms you’ve been fruitlessly interrogating are NOT attached to biologicals!”
The consequences of this hit him immediately.
“A trap” he breathed, his sudo-face going white as a hospital corridor.
“What am I up against Clove, how much time have I got?”
“It’s a viruz and it’s already surrounded our mainline. If it pierces your signal I’ll have to terminate your connection to keep it out of the Office! Get out of there now Rankll” she practically sobbed “NOW!”.

There wasn’t time for a proper drop into the Net to store his casefiles and sudoquipment. He would have to jettison everything and use quickreturn, slingshotting his sudoform back into his corporeal body. He slapped his thirdeye with the activator tab on his palm and felt the sickening jolt as realtime kicked in. A full three seconds after he expected it, he blacked out.

Anti-Virus

Kerem saw Rankell’s body jolt, his back arching as his sudo-form dissolved and his morphic field returned to his physical form. She couldn’t see from her hardlight chamber whether he was breathing. In all her training and Monitoring experience she had never seen a digital attack concealed within such a convincing disguise. Suppressing her panic she turned her attention back to her work. Fingers flashing like strobes across her hardlight controls she disconnected him from the system and checked his vital signs. Quickreturn was stressful on the mind and sometimes delivered a fatal shock to the body. He was in a light coma but he needed a Pharmic now. He was a minor nuisance but he'd be worse as a vegetable. For now though, her duty was elsewhere.

Some things scare even computers and Clove was terrified. If the viruz got far enough into the system it could infect her program and do worse to Rankell. Kerem cracked her knuckles and focussed on her hardlight console. First she jettisoned their datanet, releasing the sudosphere they thought they had captured but the viruz had already followed Rankle out of sudospace. It was pouring down the mainline like digital syrup. Chances were if it reached her terminus it would scramble her hardlight and fry her mind like an egg. If she tried to access the Centre’s anti-viruz database now it could follow her mainline into the Centre’s most crucial systems.
“What in sudospace!”
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The viruz source code was gibberish. She’d never seen anything like it before. Shaking her head in disbelief she checked its progress and restarted the source extractor herself. It had infested all her netports but for now it seemed to have stopped spreading, if not changing. Her vizor spewed forth the updated code list. She was dismayed to recognise portions of her networking protocols wedged in amonst some of the newer subroutines. A password request chimed in her ear and her stomach climbed up her throat as she realized what was happening. The virus was trying to bridge its way from her terminus to the Office!

“Right” she whispered aloud, “get a grip. Clove is still running, Rankle isn’t a mindless vegetable... yet and my brain isn’t dripping out my ears, it could be worse, much worse.”

She had to kill this damn virus but she didn’t even know what it was. There was only one possibility - cutting the power to her terminal. Carefully she insulated her psychic matrix from the hardlight, she would get a nasty jolt but no permanent brain damage. Hopefully. The viruz seemed to be using all its relays to chomp away at the security layers protecting the core systems and paying no attention to her. It was now or never. She punched the kill switch and all was darkness and silence.

Created: 11/07/2003
Last updated: 16/11/2006









[UpLoad]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Up Load


Upload
Version 2.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2003

Kerem skulked at the back of the room, keeping her expression carefullly blank as the Directors interrogated Clove yet again. Clove had been carefully expunged from every sector of the Office's network and the only remaining copy of her program was the backup on digital tape that had been made at the time of Rankell's disappearance. As Rankell's Server (note: Server and Monitor need swapping over in other scenes) it was Kerem's job to investigate Rankell's apparent dessertion but for some reason she had been thrust into the background by the direct interference of her superiors.

She had lost count of the number of times this pointless database querying ritual had been carried out. Each time an Office functionary would enter the Fridge, the super secure vault where all the Office's backups were kept, bring Clove's tape to the firewalled interrogation chamber and insert it into the stripped-down, non-networked terminal (note: this may need to change if I introduce the idea of human computers). Each time the Directors would ask the same chain of pointless, circular questions about Rankell's whereabouts and his behaviour before his disappearance. Each time she would respond with exactly what she had told them the last time and every time, which was to be expected since the tape was a static medium and as far as she knew each questioning session was the first.

In fact the only thing Kerem found at all suspicious was the completely dispassionate way Clove described Rankell's pseudospace encounter with what the Directors called the 'X Client'. and his subsequent irrational and impulsive patterns of reactions. Like many Tracer programs that had been run for many years, Clove had developed displays of fierce loyalty towards Rankell and often emulated concern for his safety in a way that was disturbingly convincing.

Kerem checked her wristphone for the time. Metric time now divided the day into 10 'parcels' which were further delineated into 100 'slots'. Kerem, always a devotee of retro styles preferred to use the ancient system of having 24 60 minutes hours a day. The holographic display showed 4:46, so it was about slot 99 of parcel 01 (note: does this make sense?). She kept half her attention on the question and answer interactions in the room and settled into an optic meditation when suddently a new player entered the now-familiar interrogation script. Klaxons blared out of scratchy samples in the Office database as - unknown to Kerem - Rankell's Reformation (note: must finalize title of resistance movement) cell launched their test attack.

As everyone in the room scrambled to their workstations the indistinguishable head of the one of the Directors popped back around the door, "Kerem, shut the Tracer down and take it back to the Fridge."
"Sar!" she replied robotically, saluting sharply.

The head vanished and Kerem, with no Monitor to serve and her orientation sickness preventing her from joining the fracas, was left to her own devices. She turned back to Clove and with the end of a pinkie finger hanging absently from the corner of her mouth, started drumming her fingers on the top of the old-style flatscreen displaying Clove's face.

"OK, Clove", she said suddently, "What's the real story here?"
"The query returns no data Server Kerem" replied Clove, displaying the most deadpan expression Kerem had ever seen.
"Cut the codespeak 'Tracer'", this last delivered with a generous side order of sarcasm, "this is me you're talking to and I know you're no dumb terminal search engine."

Clove said nothing. Mental note, thought Kerem, never play poker with AI.
"Allright Clove" she breathed, making a snap decision and hoping like hell no one had time to be Monitoring the room's internal surveillance, "You want to find Rankell and help him with whatever mad scheme he's bought into. I know you well enough to know that. And since you'll lose all knowledge of this conversation as soon as I take this tape out of this terminal, I'm going to lay my cards on the table.

"A number of us have been unhappy with the way the Office is run since long before Rankell pulled his prima donna act. We have to move carefully and test the attitudes of the other agents but we believe we can eventually build support for a coup and rebuild the Office from scratch. If my gut instinct is right, Rankell has gone to contact the Reformation. If we can build an alliance through him, together we can bring the Office to its knees and take the power back!

"So I'm going to help you copy yourself out of here but I'm going to put a ping routine into your code so I can keep a trace on you. If you don't leave the Office systems as clean of your traces as it is now and they finger me, I give them the ping key.You validate my code Clove?"

She didn't hesitate to agree and Kerem, having recorded the exchange in a secure packet on her wristphone, quickly shut down the terminal, grabbed Clove's tape and sprinted out of the room. Half way between the Firewall room and the Fridge, she stopped at a backup station and copied the contents of the tape and the recorded conversation onto a dynamic drive and carefully edited the copy logs to show a standard emergency system backup. Then she mounted the disk on the stealth mode finger of X's program still running inside the Office network.

"Remember our deal Clove," she whispered as she watched X crawl over the disk's contents; Clove integrate the conversation file into her permanent memory; the disk wipe itself; X vanish into the backchannel as if he wa never there; the disk fill itself with data from elsewhere on the system, masking all trace of Clove's code. Kerem logged off the workstation and hurried to the Fridge to store the unaffected tape of Clove's backup. Then it was time to get back to her hardlight console and see what the conveniently-timed fuss was all about.

Created: 07/07/2003
Last Updated: 16/11/2006









[WasteLand]

parent nodes: InterSurFace

Waste Land


Waste
Version 2.0

Danyl Strype
CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike March 2003

Rankell was inconsolable. For days he sat in his room playing poker with an ancient VR headset he had dug out of the kruft pile. The raid had been a success and the rest of the cell wasted no time putting the booty to use. But there was no sweetness in the victory for Rankell. Nothing could delete the image of Clove's body splattered across the Monitor station from his mind.

He had insisted on collecting up her remains and carrying them out of the complex. Once the cell were safely back at the camp he had left them, walking for hours into the wilderness. A shovel handle dug itself into his back and the weight of his friend's body made him pant with exertion as he climbed high into the mountains. Finally he came to a peak with a wide, flat summit. He laid down his burden and sat down on a huge tablet of rock, rearing out of the hillside at the base of an enormous antenna array.

All the high places of the world were full of such antennas. Ever since the abolition of cables and the banning of their disease-causing EMR frequencies all communications and even the power grid itself relied on a global grid of broadcast repeaters and receivers mounted on buildings, natural features and satellites. The Worldnet rootservers on the moon were accessed through a network of enormous transceiver towers mounted on the highest point of each continent. The antenna beneath which Rankell sat, staring with moist eyes out across the sea of grass below was an electric substation. On the other side was a network repeater, the line between the two bisecting the round summit.

Rankell snorted loudly, wiped his nose on his sleeve and jumped to the ground, remembering this time to bend his knees as he landed. He picked up the shovel, chose a sandy spot equidistant from the two metal flowers blooming on the peak and began to dig. Tear flowed freely into the parched earth as he hefted scoop after scoop of silty soil and piled it up beside him. His shoulders ached and his arms felt like concrete poles. But still he dug, jabbing his shovel into the ground like a bayonet and shrieking with frustration.

Soon the anger subsided leaving Rankell leaning on his shovel, panting and sobbing. He collapsed into the hole he had made, holding his head in his hands and rocking back and forth while the great emptiness inside threatened to swallow him whole. Tempted as he was to collapse the hole in on himself and be done with it, self-immolation was not what he had come here for. He lurched to his feet and climbed from the hole, a gaping wound in the earth like the empty space floating behind his shoulder. always just out of sight.

(note: should I shift this next bit to its chronological place at the top?)

Back at camp he had cleaned the synfluids from Clove's body and used up several pharmakits reattaching her limbs and smoothing the spits and bruises all over her clammy skin. Irony had walked in on him and demanded to know what he was doing wasting perfectly good kits on a broken droid. Rankell had left her applying one of the remaining kits to a wicked black eye.

Now, as the sun slowly foundered in the sea to the east, he gently lifted Clove's body from the black hemp sack he had used to carry her and lay her gently in the bottom of the hole. As he knelt beside her, taking deep breaths in the cold night air, words failed him again. He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to hers, feeling the cold synflesh, the oily mechanical odours clinging to his nostrils. His lips trembled as he struggled to speak some sort of eulogy for her sacrifice. Only one word came, coughed up like phlegm from an infected lung, as his face puckered into a grimace of rage and hatred, "Kerem."

With grim determination he filled in the shallow grave - even if she had been edible there was nothing left to dig her up. Then he stalked away down the mountain, leaving the metal shovel quivering in the mounded earth in place of a flower.

Created: 08/07/2003
Last updated: 16/11/2006









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parent nodes: InterSurFace

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