Bleed
An original Science Fiction story by Steve Newton; (c) 2008; all rights reserved
Part One
The anomaly almost went unnoticed.
During graveyard on March 20, 2043 a DogFence analyst picked up an infiltration event between Discworld and Midgard. This was not unusual, as those two particular mindverses (along with Dark Tower) had a considerable subscription overlap. Versers often tried to spoof the non-duplication protocols by changing the weave of their tunics or the color of their beards. All but a tiny fraction got caught in the portals, and for the rest there was DogFence.
Remember, in the forties only nine full-scale verses were running, assuming you counted Anarch Key. What the megas gorging themselves on the profits were selling, more than story lines or graphics, was uniqueness and the quality of NPC interaction. You couldn’t take your ensemble, your acquired skills, or even your handle from Ankh-Morpork to the Fifth Circle of Hell.
Everyone knew that approach was doomed to failure, but there were corporate fortunes to be made as long as the bubble lasted, and the ongoing ballet between the sneaks and the snoops escalated the interest. Off- and Out-verse newsgroups, blogs, and drudges feasted on bleed stories, each frantic to be first to run with any rumor—however flimsy—that the barriers were falling.
So it was ironic that the real news, the blinker on Norman Aptheker’s screen that night, never made it into public circulation. Norman himself almost missed it because the alert came from a non-priority background scan of NPCs. The megas not only contracted DogFence to keep versers honest, but also to check for redundancies in the graphics generators that sculpted the non-interactive foot-soldiers and street crowds for the backgrounds. Such extras ran into the thousands at any given moment in any given verse, making it statistically inevitable that there would be noticeable duplication if the process ran unmonitored. Anything above 40% synchronicity caused corrective editing to kick in; anything above 75% hit the threshold for human intervention.
The synchronicity rating on Norman’s screen was 97.3%, a good ten points higher than a live verser trying to scam the system. There was a big temptation to write it off as a reporting system glitch, and if Norman hadn’t been the underwear-ironing type that probably would have happened. Instead, he called up the graphics in question for a visual comparison and nearly spilt his mocha.
In the background, as Ankh-Morpork’s Night Watch interrogated an obviously guilty suspect with truncheons was a pale young woman with filthy, stringy black hair wearing a brown woolen cloak and cheap sandals (strap broken on the left ankle).
Standing at the rear of the crowds cheering King Chalam Ironhand’s triumphant entry through the gates of Chasm Keep was a pale young woman with filthy, stringy black hair wearing a brown woolen cloak and cheap sandals (strap broken on the left ankle).
In Discworld her cloak was spattered with mud (or pigshit), and in Midgard she stood in shadow. Once Norman controlled for those discrepancies, synchronicity rose to 99.4%. He ordered a three-sixty rotation study and the other .6% disappeared. He double-checked status: the girl was a third-level non-player character, essentially mobile background painting with a low probability of direct interaction with any subscriber. If the plot twisted or a verser reacted in non-standard fashion, she had a Class 4 interaction matrix good for about two sentences of dialogue before the controlling local AI dropped in a better personality module.
But she could not be the same girl. Discworld used boutique studios in Europe for its low-level NPCs, while Siemens-Elf (which owned Midgard) sub-contracted their jobs out to Crowds R Us.
Norman called his supervisor.
Madigan Drake had been exiled to graveyard when she stopped sleeping with her supervisor, and she was not a night person. She transferred to Norman the disdain that she felt for all thirty-five-year-old men in singles’ bars (virtual or sweaty) who still lived with their mothers. She wished she had a breath mint dispenser outside her office for people like Norman.
So she tried to dismiss the anomaly as quickly as possible.
“If it’s not a character, Norman, and it has that kind of synchronicity,” she said, “then we’re talking copyright infringement. Some graphics whiz changed studios and took proprietary files along, and either got lazy or forgot the source. Bound to happen occasionally. File it with Siemens and the Pratchett people and forget about it.”
Norman said stubbornly, “I’ve been here six years, Ms, Drake, and I did four years with Conjurers before that. The highest I’ve ever seen—even with versers—is an 86, maybe an 87%. I think we should do a Query.”
Under the protocols to which every verse except Anarch Key subscribed, Queries constituted official inquiries requiring documented answers to be circulated to all signatories. DogFence had to post a competence bond every time a Query was filed, and if the megas ruled it poorly founded, the bond was forfeit. The megas didn’t like Queries, except in cases like the bleed gang conspiracy of ’41, wherein DogFence arguably saved them billions. Maddie did not like Queries either, though she could technically authorize them, because doing so would lead to a review by Sid, a fate far worse than Norman in her office.
“Tell you what, Norman,” she finally said. “You find me one other comparable anomaly and I’ll authorize a Query.” Given that he’d never seen one in the past decade, she was reasonably sure he wouldn’t find another one tonight.
Not mollified but determined, Norman went back to his station. He opened the logs of the background watchdog, which verified that no NPC synchronicity above 42% had been registered in the past twelve hours. He reversed the process from general to specific: instead of checking the backgrounds for random matches, he had the program start with the pale girl’s image and check for that. He ran iterations using only her face, and iterations assuming her coloration varied. He got nothing.
Then, on inspiration or whim, Norman called up the cache dumps from the last week and ran it all again.
He found her as serving wench in the background of last night’s Crystal Hall Bacchanalle in Masque World.
Two days ago she’d been a bystander behind an atrocity scene in Armd N DangerUS.
That satisfied the letter of Maddie’s requirement, but Norman knew she had no intention of authorizing a Query for an NPC. That she’d previously been sleeping with Sid had not—despite her delusions to the contrary—escaped the notice of anyone in the office. Maddie was not about to put Sid back on top of her, so to speak.
On the other hand, Sid would be pleased to find an excuse to nail Madigan Drake (in a professional sense) for negligence. But an NPC duplication—even a long-duration event crossing at least four verse boundaries—wasn’t going to get him aroused either. Norman needed something better.
Abruptly he wondered, where was the source for the image? The traveling graphic artist theory made no sense, especially with the same girl now appearing in four different verses in under seventy-two hours. Norman drifted away from his workstation for about fifteen minutes, contemplating the type of search he should run.
Obviously the image had to be available in some repository accessible to the artists who generated code for the backgrounds, but—if so—it had to be such a large collection that chance duplications hardly ever happened. Eventually Norman realized that one potential source was big enough to meet that standard: the portal-archived images of inactive versers. Given that even as early as 2043 there were over 350 million active subscribers, many with multiple accounts, and that individual versers dropped in, dropped out, changed characters, got married, went to prison, or even died, there were literally billions of old character images in the portal archives.
Norman needed about forty-five minutes to design his search, since, as far as he knew, nobody had ever attempted this before. The search required an impressively long sixteen seconds to yield results. When it did, the source image that popped up had a 99.85% synchronicity with the earlier infiltration images; it was the same pale young woman with filthy, stringy black hair wearing a brown woolen cloak and cheap sandals (strap broken on the left ankle). Her character-name had been “Pale Evelyn,” and it had been registered in Discworld from May 24, 2039 to September 13, 2041.
He used a DogFence protocol to override the privacy codes, discovering that the verser behind Pale Evelyn was Lark MacGowan, age twenty at the character’s termination, and listed as residing in Powhatan, Virginia. Lark had no record of ever subscribing to any other verse, nor was there an explanation code attached to her closed account (although it had been paid off). Norman googled her name and pulled up an obituary dated September 15, 2041: “death from mutating leukemia.” He pulled up her player logs and felt a chill: Lark had last sent Pale Evelyn into the mean streets of Ankh-Morpork at 9:45 a.m., September 11, 2041, and had—if her obit could be trusted—died while online.
With under an hour remaining in his shift, Norman realized that despite his vicarious interest in the tragedy of this young woman versing from a hospital bed as her life slipped away, he had nothing that would convince Ms. Drake to authorize a Query. Unless….
Unsure precisely why the thought danced into his head, Norman tunneled into the compressed cache dump archives for the entire month of September 2041. Just locating the appropriate files consumed nineteen minutes and required him to utilize a supervisor’s priority code that he had filched from Maddie’s predecessor several months earlier. While he was waiting, Norman refined his search parameters, knowing he’d only get one shot at this.
Between September 1-11, Pale Evelyn logged ninety-two hours in Discworld, a usage pattern suggesting a woman in chronic pain versing to get her through the long hours of the night. From September 12-16, the character was completely absent from the cache dumps, as he would have expected. On September 17, however, Pale Evelyn appeared for fifteen minutes in Dark Tower. Two days later, she registered in Masque Dance for a similar period. By the end of the month her showings were up to an hour in length, and she had left footprints in all eight corporate verses, but always in sequence, never simultaneously. Her status, according to the dump logs, had changed from active verser to NPC, yet her sequential appearances and her apparent ability to leap between verses screamed intelligent direction.
He knew instinctively what he’d find if he had time to call up the remaining dumps between September 2041 and tonight. This wasn’t a bleed, this was a genuine hemorrhage; somebody had latched onto Pale Evelyn as a vehicle to infiltrate and migrate through the verses at will. When Norman returned to Maddie’s office ten minutes before his shift ended, he said, “I don’t want to do a Query anymore, Ms. Drake.”
He paused to allow her the beginnings of a self-satisfied smile, then said: “I think we need an Archangel.”
* * *
“How often is she manifesting?” asked John Clark Sheridan, stripping off his street clothes. He was small and wiry, very dark-skinned, and possessed of intensely green eyes; he had been a DogFence Archangel for two years. Naked, he dropped into his custom-made cradle, taking care to seat the sockets on the back of his neck and at the base of his spine before relaxing to allow several dozen micro-fine sensors (and one catheter) to penetrate his body.
“According to the geekboy who found her, she’s somewhere out there about twelve hours each day,” said Denise Montoya, one of Sheridan’s Wizards, as she walked around the cradle, checking telemetry. A fifty-four-year-old grandmother, with leathery brown skin and hair streaked with grey, she seemed an unlikely candidate for her job.
“Her last appearance occurred about forty-five minutes ago in Parallax,” commented a freckle-face teen with red and green hair, a nose ring, and crooked teeth. “She didn’t hang out long—less than ten minutes.” This was Niklas Sebastian, currently examining the cache dumps for the past week in detail.
“Not sure who’d want to hang out in Parallax at all,” Sheridan muttered, trying to relax as Montoya slipped the mask over his face.
Old Henry, whose pale, cracked face looked like it belonged to someone who should have been called Dead Henry, slaved his softscreen to Sheridan’s opticals. “I’m going to give you a test visual, boy. You prefer Hell or Space Opera?”
Rumor had it that Old had been around so long he’d been an intern for Landis and Hawkfeather before they’d set up the verses.
“You know I hate spaceships. Gimme hell, Henry.”
Sebastian sighed—a sound Sheridan heard somewhere in his skull, almost like telepathy—and said, “As usual, Johnnie, that’s almost a pun.”
Fire and lava flickered into existence around him. A cancerous rat gnawed the exposed thighbone of a screaming woman. Her mouth was open, but Old hadn’t bridged in sound yet.
Something beeped.
“Pop-up! She’s out there!” Sebastian shouted. “Arm’d N DangerUS, Damnation Alley sector. Give me a second.”
Henry, Sheridan sub-vocalized, toss me in there on a cold boot as soon as Nik has a location.
“You’re asking for trouble,” Old mumbled, but his fingers were flying as he brought the Archangel up to full virtual. “You know what happened last time.”
Hell got very loud and very hot quickly. Something gelatinous was crawling up his leg.
You want to give me some clothes?
“If you want ‘em where you’re going, boy, quit worrying ‘bout where you are. Denise? You got a chopper and a weapons suite ready for him?”
Montoya’s voice was strained; she hated to be hurried: “I’ve a Bloodhog ready, but the weapons are—mark—thirty seconds off.”
“Location!” Sebastian said, then added, “She’s moving!”
Drop me in NOW.
Old grunted, said, “It’s your ass, boy.”
* * *
—bounced the wrecks blocking off the abandoned interstate exit, screeching as the fans overloaded, fishtailing left as Sheridan fought for control while simultaneously realizing he couldn’t see or feel his right leg.
Old!
>>Don’t yell at me. I told you this was too quick. You’re supposed to be driving with your hands, anyway. Hold on.<<
A red icon flickered into his field of vision; he fought for balance; tingling that suggested his leg was materializing.
Nik: >>About 300 yards off, Johnnie, that farmhouse.<<
The farmhouse was a crumbled ruin, held by a ragged handful of female NPCs against a contingent of Doomsday Riders, one of the less exclusive verser gangs in Damnation Alley. They favored long leather dusters, white face-paint, and handlebar mounted SMGs. Sheridan figured them for bloated middle-aged wannabes in wifebeaters, up late to fantasize about rape, pillage and plunder.
He swung the Bloodhog directly for them, despite the fact that he still mounted no weapons.
Old, at least give me a Ghost Rider while Denny’s working up the suite.
He caught the echo of a curse, but his head dutifully caught fire and transformed into a grinning skull.
“Yippee-ki-yay, mo-fos!” Sheridan shouted, his amplified voice cutting across the gunfire. He was addicted to old, cheesy two-dees.
That got the attention of several Riders, and one quickly twisted a preposterous Klaishnikov 7.92mm in a gatling configuration around, loosing off a fusillade of tracers. Fat bastards in their recliners loved tracers.
Montoya whispered, >>You’re up with Class 3 personals. The Hog will be up in five.<<
Stabilizer cables grew out of his arm, connecting to the slug accelerator morphing out of Sheridan’s right gauntlet. He painted the Rider’s chest with a laser and blasted him back into his living room with a supersonic burst of depleted uranium.
Auto-tracking mini-railguns rose out from compartments alongside the Hog’s plenum chamber. Sheridan didn’t bother with them: Nik would take out the remaining Doomsday Riders while he raced for the farmhouse.
The slug accelerator retracted into his gauntlet as Sheridan leapt from the cycle just outside the building. There were six women inside, not counting Pale Evelyn. Lots of ripped shirts, exposed skin, and suggestive curves. He could feel them hesitate as the local AI responded to the abruptly altered scenario.
But the girl with the stringy black hair was moving.
Wipe the rape-sluts, Sheridan ordered as he crashed through the farmhouse wall, bricks flying in every direction. The half-dozen scantily clad women disappeared. Evelyn made a graceful, ten-foot dive through an open window in the building’s back wall. Nik kept her icon located in Sheridan’s field of vision. He lunged forward and converted another wall into so many pebbles.
She was waiting for him, her face screwed up in a rictus that might have been fear, might have been anger. The girl gestured an intricate pattern in the air, gathered a ball of pink energy around her hands, and sent a stream of plasma toward the Archangel that flowed around his body armor, but still knocked him on his ass.
Evelyn stood for a moment, hands writhing with energy, contemplating him. Then she shook her arms and the pink glow ceased. Reaching down, the girl traced a circle on the ground with her fingers, and jumped daintily into it, slipping down the rabbit hole.
What was that? Sheridan demanded, hauling himself to his feet. Spells are NOT supposed to work in Armd N DangerUS.
>>Never seen a code signature like that, either,<< Montoya said.
Sheridan rolled to his feet, thought, Later for that. Where’d she go, Nik?
>>No idea. I can see it on visual, but it doesn’t register.<<
The rabbit hole started to shrink; he sprinted for it.
Old cautioned as the Archangel sprang into the air, fiery hair flying, >>Wherever you end up, boy, there’s going to be a lag, and you’re on your<<—
* * *
—a thick, velvet curtain that tripped him, sending him crashing into the floor. Idly, Sheridan noticed that his head had set the drapes aflame, which was good, since it indicated that he was still somewhere in a verse that recognized his personal protocols. Of course, he was naked and weaponless again.
He’d been put through spontaneous transmissions twice before—once in training and once on a mission—but neither experience had been similar to this. Now he knew what toothpaste felt like, being squeezed through the tube. File that for later, when his Wizards caught up to him.
On his feet again, Sheridan quickly surveyed his surroundings: an intricately decorated ballroom floor, bathed in soft lights of various colors, and populated by slender figures in pastel outfits that did not cover their genitalia. A Sexcapade in Masque World, he realized.
His two-meter, 200-kilo body bulked over everyone, even without the burning skull atop his shoulders.
Where was the girl?
There: behind Siamese quadruplets dressed in chiffon and making out in pairs, Pale Evelyn was slipping as inconspicuously as possible toward the arched door. Another thought to hold for later: at the farmhouse she’d left the structure before she opened her portal—whatever it was. Here she was also intent on escaping a room instead of simply disappearing. What did that mean?
Sheridan loosed what he hoped would transmit as a demonic howl and marched forward, aiming to cut her off.
A diminutive bravo, her silver hair, red lips, and ample bosoms contrasting starkly to the exposed penis and testicles beneath her doublet, stepped out of the crowd, rapier drawn, and interposed herself (himself?) in Sheridan’s path.
“Have a care, villain!” the trannie quipped, as the point of the foil danced near his left nipple. “You were not invited to this affair.”
Evelyn had almost reached the door; he didn’t have time for this.
“Read Fever Dream some day,” Sheridan muttered, moving forward to impale himself on the blade. A lance of white-hot pain shot through his chest. He ignored it. If Denny showed up in the next few seconds, she’d fix it; if not, he’d have lost his prey anyway.
“Oh shit,” said his opponent, “you’re an Archangel.”
“Oh shit,” Sheridan agreed, swinging a club-like fist that shattered the trannie’s ribcage. “Your subscription’s been temporarily interrupted.”
Staggering, he pulled the rapier from his chest and stomped toward the arch. He’d lost sight of Evelyn and his breathing was labored; he felt a burbling in his throat.
>>Jesus, Mary and the Goddess, Johnny, you’re damn near flat-lined. How’d you manage that in nine seconds?<< demanded Montoya. >>Never mind, I’ll fix you.<<
The tracking icon re-appeared as the chest pain faded. He dropped mass with every forward step, feet morphing into thigh-high soft leather boots that nonetheless felt like track shoes. His head extinguished itself; he wore a ruffled shirt open to the sternum, and a sword hung from his belt.
Old: >>Least you got hair on your chest, and be thankful she left your pants closed in front.<<
Sebastian said, >>I’ve got a trace attached to her, now, John. We won’t get another lag if she jumps verses.<< An uncertain pause. >>I haven’t got the slightest clue what she—or it—is. Some ways she’s a monster, ripping code walls wherever she goes, but in other ways she’s nearly invisible to me.<<
Nothing in a verse was invisible to Nik.
The pale girl picked up a gilded, throne-like chair nearly twice her size and swung it into a stained-glass window featuring a satyr with truly impressive physical attributes. As the glass exploded outward, she danced up onto the sill and stepped off into space.
Gimme wings, Sheridan ordered, without breaking stride. Later you can explain how she’s doing that, since Masque World is supposed to run real-world physical laws.
The girls fled across the open air between two 400-meter spires as if sprinting across pavement.
>>No time to be subtle about this, Johnny. Sorry.<<
Sheridan dove out the window as batwings with an eight-meter wingspan grew out of his back. His shirt ripped as the musculature in his shoulders expanded explosively and his larger bones became hollow. As his wings unfurled, the Archangel shared his observations and questions with his Wizards.
Nik shot back immediately, >>Buildings in the verses are usually code bottles, John, usually under the control of a specific local AI function. The programmers intentionally build a semi-isolation routine into the walls, whereas the spaces in between are a lot less restrictive.<<
>>But that still doesn’t explain how she’s warping the basic physics,<< Old said. >>Even we can’t do that without a lot pre-planning and access to the override codes. She’s improvising.<<
Evelyn stopped in the air about 200 meters out from the tower. She turned slowly to face Sheridan, her arms filled with something grey that resolved into a Mark VII Star Rifle straight out of Space Opera.
Nik! Give me a code view, right now! Denny, I’m gonna need a splatter shield in about two seconds.
John’s reality became a false-color digital image of swirling zeros and ones. The twin spires became bulbous, bright blue constructions shot through with orange, green, and pink representing the structural, narrative, and NPC sub-routines. Players appeared as moving triangular yellow icons with code-signature anchors attached.
The girl was a shimmering black nova, with cyan and magenta sparkles playing throughout her array in a random, fractal cascade. Fine-wire anchors disappeared into the computerized aether; Sheridan knew without asking that neither Nik nor Old could trace them all.
White code-bursts emanated from the Star Rifle. He wrenched the binary around him into a swirling, deflective shield.
When the blast hit, Nik shifted the Archangel’s viewpoint back to image-based in time to watch her drop into a mini-cyclone.
>>Don’t worry, boy,<< Old said. >>Nik’s got the trace working. She’s headed into Space Opera, and you will be, too. We’re going to land you right on top of her this time.<<
His wings sloughed off. Sheridan plummeted down as his body reshaped and a skin-tight vacuum combat suit flowed out of his bodily orifices.
He only had time to think, I hate—
End of Part One. The conclusion--assuming you're still interested--will appear next Sunday.
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