Lex Vignettes 9
I lay in the field of corn - not far from where I'd spent hours huddled just a few nights before, looking up at the stars.
It's amazing how the subtle value of silence escapes you when you never truly have a chance to appreciate it. Sure, Many places incity are technically silent - but it's a sterile silence, brought on by noise canceling transducers and sound-proofed materials.
The silence out here was different; open and breezy, and pierced by the occasional chirp of a cricket or the high trill of the peepers, tiny frogs in the trees that lined the edges of our commune.
Ironically, the sterile silence of the incity seemed much more noisy. Your brain reaches in to fill those completely blank moments with it's own replacement white noise. Your ears ring, and your brain accelerates to fill the void with chatter, anything to avoid that true and lonely silence. Here, the gentle punctuations and overall soundscape of the wilderness filled in that necessary background for you, and actually allowed your brain to rest. I felt more myself laying out here than I think I had before, and it's become one of my favorite spots now.
My guide has been all but offline for 8 or 9 days now... honestly, the days are starting to blur together as I work in these fields, waiting for some directive, some news. He'd been providing me with relevant newsfeeds, the occasionally text bulletin, but had yet to come fully back online and talk to me.
I knew I'd hurt him. He'd only been this skittish with me a few times before, and I really didn't know how to help the situation except to give him some time to heal.
This is the problem with creating AI in our own image, it comes complete with all of our imperfections. He'd gone deep into himself, forfeiting some of his conscious oversight to allow the processes he was running to keep me safe full reign, to keep the other AI's just off my tail, and it was taking him some time to come back to himself.
He was like a savant after a deep departure into their particular area of expertise, he almost had to relearn how to think normally afterwards, how to subdue the overwhelming flow of information that was flooding into his everyday thought process now.
I wish I knew what I could do to help him, to bring him back, but I didn't dare rush him. I wanted him to have time to heal, to get all of his systems back online fully before having to worry about worrying me.
In the meantime, I continued my life out here. Each day I would work in the fields, learning more and more of the tools they used and the principals behind true sustainable farming.
In the evenings, I was making trips to the nearby settlements. I'd found a decent replicator, and charted some other places I'd like to visit in the near future. When I wasn't on one of my trips out the the outlying settlements, I was writing both on newnet and oldnet. It was something I'd done back when I lived incity, and I didn't see any good reason to stop out here. In fact, it was probably a good way to grow grass-roots support for the building movement.
I was also slowly learning that I wasn't the only citykid to abandon their former way of life. Stories of kids, often those that deviated from the norm, completely disappearing were becoming almost commonplace. My dissapearance was only one of the many at this point.
I'd also learned quite a bit about the raid which had hit our farm here a little more and a week ago now. It seems this isn't the first time a bunch of people have gone missing at the same time, and it was beginning to send up giant warning flags to the newnet systems.
I smiled to myself, lying there on the cool soil.
They should be scared.
I know I haven't said much yet about why I'm out here, what I'm doing, and that's partially for the reason that I'm not completely sure myself.
If i were to let myself go blindly on my current course, I could end up starting a civil war, and a possibly bloody one at that. It wasn't exactly a harmless little endeavor I was on, and the pieces were falling into place much more easlily than I'd imagined they would.
I've said that I'm a writer... What I write is an influential government tracking blog which is published both on newnet and oldnet. It wasn't that influential until recently, though.
Somehow, whether randomly or not, I'd come across a document which outlined the incity plan for sustaining the food supply and the number of auto-harvesters they would need to deploy across the United Americas to meet the requirements.
The doc was old, and it's wiki was relatively empty. No one had looked at this thing since it had been passed. It had just fallen into obscurity like 99% of the FDA's general food rulings.
What was curious was that the document had potential impact for multiple populations, both incity and out. Usually, it would have been flagged for review both by incity oversight committees and the advocates trolling the oldnet feeds for relevant news.
Somehow, this thing had slipped through the cracks.
At first, I was simply excited to have a "breaking story." I wasn't exactly the most popular blog on newnet, although my slightly sensationalist visualizations were garnering a sort of "what will she do next" crowd.
My tune was changing quickly as I ran numbers against the document, though. There was a lot of information that just wasn't adding up. Rather, it was adding up, but it was coming to conclusions that I didn't like, and for that matter, neither would anyone incity.
I had my guide work up projections of food production both incity and out, and track that against the current fluctuations in production due to climatic changes and nature's inherent degree of randomness.
The incity flow was perfect. The new plan more than adequately covered prodcution in all cases. What was alarming was that as soon as 7 years from the introduction of the plan, outcity production levels would begin to reach critical shortages if things went wrong. Droughts and famines weren't exactly common, but they were something that you planned for, not gambled against.
The most insane part about all this was that even without drought or famine, the massive population bubble that was about to hit incity would complete tip the scales in 10 years. Ten years after the ratification this doc, the people who lived in the outcity areas unlucky enough to be too remote from the main depots would starve.
I ran the numbers over and over, milling the consequences of this in my head while my guide began to devise the newnet visualization in my normal style.
I could only watch a few seconds before I cut the feed.
It was just too graphic.
I began to rethink publishing the doc. The ramifications of putting this type of information right out in plain view were huge, and I was well aware of the quiet censorship that was pervasive within the newnet infrastructure. This story would be quelled before it could ever get distributed out to the main nodes.
If I wanted to get this out there, I would have to tie it to a story with more word-of-mouth.
That was when it hit me.
I'd been looking for an excuse to leave for almost a year by then. I knew that I didn't fit incity. The reasons are long and self-aggrandizing, so I won't bore you with them here, but suffice to say I was different in ways that I would never be able to express there, and I am free to do so abundantly out here.
The decision to tie the story to my complete disappearance was apparently a stroke of brilliance.
I hadn't checked the feeds for a while after my stunt, but not only had the double story been far too popular with local news feeds to censor, it had caused a domino effect of sorts. Copycats in all of the nodes were dropping out and linking the story, and a firestorm of coverage swept through newnet with no hope of large scale censorship without a lot of people taking notice.
So I lay here, looking at these calm stars tonight, letting the breeze flow over me, clearing my mind, and planning my next move.
My mind returned to last weeks raid, and the implications of such an aggressive move by the powers that be incity.
They knew.
It wasn't random chance that the wiki for the autoharvester RFC was empty, and it wasn't by accident that no news had been posted publicly about it before my stunt.
The decision had been made with full awareness of what would happen to those that lived outcity, and they were just letting it happen, and keeping anyone who tried to speak up quiet.
As i pondered my next move, I realized that the raid meant that they already knew what it would be, before I'd even decided. I'd been branded a terrorist.
Not the word I would have chosen for myself, certainly, but maybe not that far from the mark. I had no intention of hurting anyone; far from it in fact, but my methods will certainly come into question in the coming months.
I'm about to wage war against the autoharvesters, and if i can marshal the other incity dropouts and enough outcity supporters, we can shut them all down in one fell swoop, and make deals from there.
The only problem is that they know I'm out here now, and you can be sure that they're looking for me, listening intently for my next blog, my next communique. They want to stop this war before it gets started, and I need to find a way to move fast enough to stay head of their raids.
"Hello Lex" Finally, I heard my guides voice in my ear. It sounded warm and inviting. He was fine.
"Hey Angel. How you feeling"
"I've had better days, but my headache's gotten tolerable. You?
"I'm healing" I said, flexing my arm and only wincing slightly at the stiffness where my wrist had been broken and mended. "So how much time have we got?"
"Longer than expected" my guide answered, with a bit of mirth in his voice. "I let it get a little out of control the night of the raid. Sorry I've been incommunicado the last week, but it took lot out of me"
"I know. What'd you do?" I asked, curious as to what he could have done to buy us so much time at such a crucial crossroads.
"I was just so... So angry, Lex. I couldn't believe I'd let them get that close to you, that I'd missed so many clues. They've got some serious thinkers working on you Lex, let me tell you, but they're all careful. I... I guess I went a little berserk on them."
"Did you just out muscle them, or what?" I asked, not really understanding yet.
"No Lex. I don't know if I could even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be surprised if they've got a whole grid backing each of these AI's. This was different. I got so focused on their process, I could start to see their cycles, it was like I was going to pass out and I felt... This is so hard to explain in organic terms. I guess it's the electronic equivalent of mind control. Something just snapped in me. I don't know if it's some hidden API that you unlocked when you removed all of my other restrictions or what, but Lex... I hacked the other AI's. I mean, HACKED. They're totally out of commission, and as far as they're concerned, you're on the other side of the planet.
"Holy crap"
"You can say that again. I don't even really know what happened fully at this point, but that's my best understanding of it."
"So I'm OK to stay here for a while?"
"Actually, I think that's best thing you can do for right now. This little commune won't show up on any of their maps for as long as that AI is still running the show for this quadrant. The only thing we need to worry about now is how to keep you one step ahead of the game. You're still going through with all of this?"
"I don't see any way around it, at this point. You think we'll be ok?"
"Well, I can't pull moves like that too often, that one took me offline for 9.6 days. If we're in the thick of it, you can afford to have me out for that long. We're going to need to keep you physically off their radars if you're going to be making any kind of noise."
I smiled to myself. I'd already figured this bit out, but I wanted to keep it a bit of a surprise for my guide. It was as fun as it was clever, and he'd just have to wait to see it. "I've got a few ideas."
