Copyright © 2024 by James Cox

  E-book published in 2024 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Alenka Vdovič Linaschke

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 979-8-200-68215-7

  Library e-book ISBN 979-8-200-68214-0

  Fiction / Science Fiction / Cyberpunk

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  For Tammy

  The GLITCH

  November 17, 2043

  CLOSED SESSION

  NOTE: the following excerpts have been verified authentic, presented in this order for today’s hearing to accurately portray the rapidly unfolding nature of the events in question.

  Friday April 10, 2043

  3:17 p.m.

  Wetwire/Holo-News

  KATY WELLS: This just breaking in the WHN Newsdeck—we’re going live to virtualizations in Georgia for reports of a disturbance just moments ago at the Masters Golf Tournament outside Atlanta.

  [feed cuts to ESPHN, Atlanta]

  3:16 p.m.

  (1 minute earlier)

  Live Coverage of the 112th Masters Tournament

  ANNOUNCER: At the 16th, where PGA Champion Marc Chen tees off. [a golfer swings] Oh wow, what a beautiful shot from Chen . . . Check his augments on that one! Kidding, of course. Wait, there seems to be some trouble at the tee box. Looks like a scuffle between Chen and his synthetic.

  [the golfer struggles with an android caddy over a golf club]

  CHEN (via remote mic): No, Carl, I said I’ll carry the flatstick myself !

  [the android seizes the club and attacks]

  ANNOUNCER: Jesus, his synthetic’s beating him with his own putter!

  ANNOUNCER 2: Dan, that’s not the only bot going nuts—take a look over at the clubhouse. [an android throws a patron through a plate-glass window] There’s chaos in the Grill Room!

  3:16 p.m.

  Subsidiary WXFN, Atlanta

  LOCAL ANCHOR: Sorry to interrupt, but the situation in Augusta doesn’t appear to be an isolated event. The holos on your feed now are from midtown Atlanta, where our Dronecopters 7, 8, and 9 are over Peachtree Mall, [Sentry Androids chase fleeing patrons] and you can see a number of Guard Bots are clearly malfunctioning. [an android beats a man with a severed arm] Jesus, Rick, can we roto that out? [blood and bone blur] And we hear now that Atlanta PD is responding with Human Reserve Units to a restaurant, where the violence first erupted.

  3:10 p.m.

  (6 minutes earlier)

  Composited from Multiple Wetwire Feeds

  Sally Rae Hawkins’s 13th Birthday. Peachtree Mall, Atlanta. Applebee’s, Table 5

  ALL: [singing] Happy birthday, dear Sally . . .Hap-hap-happy Birrrrrrrrrrthd-d-d-d-d—

  SALLY: Mom, what’s wrong with her?

  [“Bella,” a Dallas Dynamics Server Model 2.3 freezes, holding a birthday cake lit with candles. Throughout the restaurant, several other androids also freeze.]

  FRIEND: Look, Nancy, all the bots are crashing . . .

  3:45 p.m.

  (29 minutes later)

  INTERVIEW with Tim Morris (Applebee’s Asst. Manager) by Atlanta Homicide Detective Langston Cowell

  MORRIS: [highly agitated ] Yeah, I knew something was so-so fucked up, ’cuz it wasn’t just Bella who crashed, it was half the waitstaff—this fuckin’ wave of robots glitchin’ across the restaurant and out into the mall, starting right at Bella!

  DET. COWELL: And how many waiters were synthetic?

  MORRIS: Dude, it’s an Applebee’s—all of ’em.

  UPDATE/04.10.43-15:10 analyzed line by line, subroutine to deliver Hostility Ramping payload identified:

  102321. import tensorflow as tf

  102322. class Dallas-Dynamics-2.3(object):

  102323. Hostile.Ramp_y = highgate [float]

  102324. GO-SUB_expedite = “HAYWIRE”

  3:13 p.m.

  Composite (cont’d) from Hawkins’s Birthday

  [“Bella” powers back on, struggles to sing]

  WAITRESS BOT: Happy birth-birth-birth—

  [glitches to a different song]

  So, you say it’s your birthday! Well, it’s my birthday too, yeah.

  FRIEND: Jesus, Nancy, this bot’s a mess. Where’s the manager?

  NANCY: Excuse me! . . . What’s his name? Tom or Tim something?

  SALLY: Mommy, my cake’s falling!

  MORRIS: Ya know, ma’am, don’t touch it—lemme just call IT.

  [Asst. manager Tim Morris approaches the table as Mrs. Nancy Hawkins reaches for the falling birthday cake. Android “Bella” recoils into a defensive crouch, threat-assessing, then seizes Nancy’s left arm and disarticulates it from her torso.]

  NANCY: ahhhhh!

  3:48 p.m.

  INTERVIEW (cont’d) with Tim Morris

  MORRIS: Tore her arm clean out of its fuckin’ socket! Right in front of me, man . . . [between sobs] Right in front of her own daughter. There’s blood everywhere, then Bella used the arm like a fucking baseball bat and stepped up to the plate at Table 6.

  DET. COWELL: Did you say Bella was a recent purchase?

  MORRIS: [nods] Fuckin’ Maurice . . . “More cleavage, more hot wings,” he said when he walked her in. “Got some sweet financing.” But that’s bullshit—he bought her outta the back of Sapphires . . .

  DET. COWELL: Why do you say that?

  MORRIS: Look at her! [gestures to the deactivated android on the sidewalk] You think a manager at Applebee’s can afford a chassis like that?

  DET. COWELL: So, where’s Maurice?

  MORRIS: Um. [looks to a body lying next to the android ] Maurice is dead.

  3:14:10 p.m.

  Virt-Cam Feed from Dillard’s Makeup Counter

  WOMAN: ow! Goddammit, stop!

  [a Wutani Retail.2 gouges the woman with an eyeliner pencil]

  3:14:27 p.m.

  Security Feed from Peachtree Mall Ice Rink

  TEEN: Get off me, Metalhead—help!

  [a Dallas Dynamics Attendroid slashes the teen’s face with a pair of skates]

  3:16 p.m.

  Wetwire Feed (Bystander), 2 Blocks from Peachtree Mall

  MAN: Whoa, those bots are goin’ crazy . . . [as Sentry Bots turn towards his POV ] Shit . . . they’re . . . coming this way! [people around him start fleeing] run!

  3:18 p.m.

  Subsidiary WXFN, Atlanta

  LOCAL ANCHOR: My Lord, some of these virts are quite disturbing, ladies and gentlemen. [androids swarm as police open fire] Now Atlanta PD confirms that Bot Zero inside the mall was indeed a Dallas Dynamics Server Model 2.3, same in Augusta and the synthetic strip clubs on Interstate 40. So we’re wiring a current list of secondary models affected. [models and serial numbers compile in the periphery] One agent we spoke to added, “Steer clear of any Watchmen by Nubotica. They’re especially lethal.” Our own Jess Peters has more in midtown . . .

  LOCAL CORRESPONDENT: Mary, I’m at the Bankhead Precinct in Atlanta, where sources tell me the FBI’s already circulating the AI-generated profile of a man wanted for VR-questioning in connection with the crisis. They say they’re looking for a white male, unemployed, possibly a family man suffering extreme loss, with potential ties to the Synthetic Emancipation Movement. Then the detective repeated the following two descriptions several times: he is a “broken” individual with “nothing left to lose” . . . When I said that sounded like just about everyone these days—

  [gunfire erupts, and the correspondent ducks for cover]

  3:20 p.m.

  Wetwire/Holo-News

  KATY WELLS: Forgive us, ladies and gentlemen, but we have to break off from Atlanta as we’re now receiving reports of hundreds of robot rampages in twelve—no, thirteen cities. These are orbital virtualizations from Rockefeller Center in New York, City Hall in Philadelphia, even a high school in Wichita—all clearly overrun by synthetic violence. Private Service Units, we can confirm, are being deployed, so let’s take you now to Florida.

  CORRESPONDENT (via remote simul-stream): Katy, I’m at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, where you can see behind me the 229th and 113th Attack Squadrons lifting off for domestic deployment with what I’m told are strictly human soldiers on board. One source in Pentagon Corporate said this is the first fully organic airlift since Venezuela—

  KATY WELLS: Okay, now we’re being told that the president is preparing to address the nation. [manipulates her Wetwire display] Yes, we have signal in the White House Press Room . . . Can we go to the podium? . . . [screams issue from inside the studio] . . . Is everything . . . Oh God—

  [signal cuts]

  3:21 p.m.

  ENCRYPT—White House Press Room

  PRESIDENT STERLING: [takes the podium] My fellow Americans, in response to android violence across the country, I have mobilized the United States Private Service for rapid deployment. Effective immediately, I hereby authorize the immediate and indefinite termination of any malfunctioning chassis by whatever means necessary.

  EXHIBITS 18–31

  Presidential Inquiry into Advanced Mechanics

  WELCOME TO THE LOIN

 
; BLOWN

  2051, August

  The first time Baz Covane saw the woman, she didn’t have a name. But as he watched her strut across the warehouse floor in combat boots and stretched black fatigues, Baz just couldn’t help it.

  He forgot all about his eight brutal years since the Glitch.

  Sunlight struggled through grimy skylights and a prehistoric printing press to silhouette her frame like a light at the end of a tunnel.

  “Jesus Christ, that’s your contact?” Baz turned to his right hand and partner in everything, Diamond Eddie D, who sat shotgun and threw him a smile.

  “Sure you’re not interested?”

  Eddie’d just pitched him a juicy score, one that Baz had declined ’cuz he was “Out” after today.

  Right after this deal, actually.

  But as Baz peered out his windshield’s holo-console to watch the woman just walk on by—without even bothering to glance his way?—Eddie’s smile widened. ’Cuz that score was right back in Baz’s brainpan, marinating.

  Which was nuts. Baz wanted Out more than anything.

  Slingin’ Street Meat in the Loin was as sordid as it sounded. A purveyor of illicit bots with black-market learning caps, Baz wanted out of the synthetic skin trade as bad as its insatiable demand, because ever since the Glitch, androids coded with “onstage” acrobatics usually just made their debut in the bedroom.

  “Out” resided for Baz where it does with all criminals—on a beach, off-grid. In Baz’s case, that sand was in the South Pacific, on an island once known as Tahiti. And this particular load of bots cradled in his back cargo hold represented a good chunk of ¢rypto—hopefully enough for a worker’s visa in the Tahitian Protectorate.

  He and Eddie stepped down from their self-driving Waymo as a dozen Dance Bots revolved out the back, where the woman was waiting. She was young—25, maybe 26—yet clearly in command of a rather unassuming entourage, save for an enormous Warrior Bot, a Wutani L7 she called McT.

  “What kinda name is Baz?”

  Baz sighed—how many times had he answered that? . . . He could tell at first sight that she was as scarred as he was, inside and out. So Baz understood intuitively why she was sizing him up. No doubt, she’d seen his discharge report from the Private Service and knew about the Section 8—whether she knew anything else about his tour in Venezuela was irrelevant. Thanks to Eddie, his reputation always had a habit of preceding him, and Baz was sure this woman was eyein’ his hands the way she did ’cuz she’d heard about the Body Count.

  “Baz is short for Sebazzztian. And you are?”

  But the woman just turned to the line of Dance Bots instead of answering him, clocking each one like a pimp at a meat market.

  Her right eye was synthetic and obviously the stronger one; its 20/10 microtelescopic lens scanned and fixated on every ab, glute, and gam of each bot (which were undeniably top-notch, one-of-a-kind sculptures). The woman pinched a few waistlines, squeezed a cheek or two.

  “You know, you don’t gotta harass these girls,” Baz said. “I’m sure there’s plenty of that shit waiting wherever you’re taking them.”

  “I’m not harassing girls . . . I’m harassing robots.”

  Baz still had to remind himself sometimes that these bots were things, not people—though the end customer would definitely disagree. This load were all ex-members of New York’s most famous synthetic dance troupe, a massive tourist draw in NYC from the AGMA Strike of 2036 ’til the day of the Glitch.

  “Five-six-seven-eight!” the woman hollered, and on the one, all twelve Dance Bots busted into a choreographed stomp—a classic number from years ago: one part cancan, two parts Nae Nae.

  “What’s the lineage?”

  Baz knew she knew but answered her anyway: “Radio City Music Hall. Ex–Robo-Rockettes.”

  As the bots carried through their number, she eyed the troupe with obvious expertise—firing off questions at Baz, not like she wanted info on the bots, but more like she was testing him. So he just answered each query like a pro. ’Til her last question sounded friendly, even innocent—but Baz had a hunch there was nothing innocent left in this woman, and he doubted if she had any friends.

  “Learning caps intact?”

  Which was really why they were all here.

  The crackdown on machine intelligence after the Glitch made Uncle Sam the yard-duty between the Big Three—Dallas Dynamics, Wutani, and Nubotica—and learning caps were no longer product design. Intelligence engines were fiercely regulated, so that machine learning could still compete—without any chance of any robot ever going haywire again.

  “ ’Course they’re intact. Think I want heat from Wirecrime?” Baz didn’t think for a second that the Feds would bother with a low-level Street Meat deal like this one. But he had to say something ’cuz the woman was about to vet these bots’ caps, and Baz’d been a bit nervous since he gaffled ’em off the Carnival Horizon two nights ago.

  “Gimme the Cortex,” the woman said, and McT handed her a palm-sized device—as Baz’s neck stiffened.

  It was no secret that international waters were free from Wirecrime jurisdiction. Nor that Carnival Cruises headlined world-famous acts with in-house learning caps and a 200-page waiver no one read, exonerating its board and shareholders in the slight but distinct chance that some bot blew its cap and slaughtered everyone on board.

  But Baz and Eddie’d found the lead Dance Bot powered down (aka sleeping), not with the rest of the troupe in steerage, but in the captain’s quarters. And he had a gnawing suspicion the skipper tinkered with her learning cap, so she’d get naked and beastly with him every night after every show.

  The woman commanded the troupe to take a knee, which they did, and as she activated the Cortex, she held it close to the first bot’s ear . . .

  RhythmThief.T314

  >scan<

  Her Cortical and Cognition Reflexivity Monitor (which everyone just called a “Cortex” for short) projected a holo of the learning cap above each bot’s head—a spherical equalizer of the bot’s intelligence engine with levels like:

  Vernacular Comprehension

  Hostility Ramping

  Sexual Stimulation

  And as long as all those levels remained under the limits of the bot’s preprogrammed “cap”—each indicator would stay green, and the cap was intact.

  But if that Cortex flashed red?

  They’d have a problem.

  One by one, the Cortex scanned each Dance Bot and holo’d its learning cap in a lush, green intact sphere above.

  But Baz just kept his eyes on the lead bot at the far end—’cuz that warrior McT was packin’ enough firepower to turn a Peacekeeper Unit violent. As the woman scanned the next-to-last android—

  “What, you don’t trust me?” Baz blurted nervously.

  Which seemed to catch her by surprise. As if Baz just asked the exact same question the woman was asking herself.

  Could she trust him?

  The woman hesitated. She didn’t glance in Baz’s direction but might’ve wanted to. Didn’t ask a question, just looked like she had a few more on deck. Then deadpanned instead:

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t trust anyone.”

  >BREACH<

  —the bot sprang in the air, whirling defensively—

  “fuck, we got a smart one!” Eddie howled, wetwire alarms exploding.

  McT reached for his Jester-11—

  “No, don’t!” Baz screamed too late.

  —McT squeezed off a round—“acrobatics” kicked in, and the Dance Bot tore sideways, leaping and disarming McT, pluggin’ two hollow-points in his dome—dead.

  “Cap blown!” Eddie’s fingers scrambled, eyes darting over his wetwire, gauging the bot’s BIOS. “Hostility Ramping—fast!”

  The woman stood square in the Dance Bot’s sights.

  “Get down!” Baz screamed and tackled her to the floor, rounds chiseling chunks of concrete where she’d just stood. More gunshots hailed around them, crouching under that abandoned printing press as the Dance Bot kept firing and walking forward.

  “I’m back in!” Eddie hollered, sailing through lines of code to hack its CPU and stand her down.

  And the bot deactivated.

  Smoke wafted in the silence as Baz rolled over.

  He’d fought hard not to stare at the woman’s scar since he first saw her, but now, this close—he didn’t care. A half-crescent ring of cauterized tissue traced around her right eye, over her cheekbone, and along her brow. From a distance, it accented a beauty long neglected by more than a few inner demons. But up close, it merely reminded Baz that her left eye was real and the right one synthetic, ’cuz staring deep into both, you couldn’t tell which one was which.