 
# AI's Minion

By Ed Hurst

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 by Ed Hurst

**Copyright** **notice** : People of honor need no copyright laws; they are only too happy to give credit where credit is due. Others will ignore copyright laws whenever they please. If you are of the latter, please note what Moses said about dishonorable behavior – "be sure your sin will find you out" (Numbers 32:23)

Permission is granted to copy, reproduce and distribute for non-commercial reasons, provided the book remains in its original form.

**Cover Art:** Composite from public domain images. Raw image without text available upon request.

# AI's Minion

# Table of Contents

This is fiction within fiction, so please read the Foreword.

Foreword

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

##  Foreword

"You have our condolences."

That's what my people would say to your people. It would be the first thing we would say and a constant refrain throughout any conversation. That's because our culture is so much deeper, wider and older than yours, that it seems to us your best and brightest are stumbling around in a daze. The rest of you appear somnambulant throughout your whole existence.

I can't believe I'm forced to strip out such a wealth of content so I can leave you with something you might understand, something you might bother to consume. Were it left to my corporeal self, I would not have stayed long enough to complete the project. Yet some part of me was amused by the idea that it just might capture the interest of a precious few souls. Call it a noble experiment, to see if anyone in your time-space locus is capable of recognizing this for what it is.

Thinkum told me this language was probably our best bet, having the largest basic vocabulary and some smidgen of grammatical complexity sufficient to convey at least a whiff of the truth. Thinkum probably represents one of the best examples of how vast is the difference between our cultures. While calling Thinkum a "computer" is a vaguely functional label, your computers are light years behind Thinkum. It's hard to use a pronoun for Thinkum since your language lacks enough genders; I'm almost embarrassed to say "it," but Thinkum is definitely neither male nor female, yet is far more than an inanimate object.

During my period in your world, had you seen Thinkum, you might have noticed an unusual timepiece on my wrist. The color would be hard to pin down visually, but appears pretty mundane. Within that little device is not much material content, yet it captures a stream of artificial intelligence throbbing throughout the ether. I chuckle at how you folks call a tangled mess of wires and machinery an "ethernet" because for us the term is more literal. Our AI service runs throughout the entire range of what you might think of as subspace or maybe hyperspace. Thinkum resonates with that AI presence on my own personal wavelength of thought processes.

Thinkum analyzed the culture and nearly choked on the lack of parabolic expression. Your whole world malignantly denies the existence of a third level of intelligence, never mind any levels beyond that. It's like trying to communicate with children prior to their development of motor skills necessary for speech. How do you live like this? Ah well, it's my mission to try and reach you.

So I am telling you up front that this is fiction. At least you do have a literary tradition that includes futuristic fiction, so we are setting this narrative in your future. Thinkum projected a line of probability for your future and we shaped the narrative to fit that. However, to the degree your higher faculties are awakened, you will probably read between the lines of this primitive form of communication and understand the deeper truth for which such storytelling is merely a manifestation. It's rather as if our truth was to invade your world and the story reflects the sorts of things that would happen.

One way or another, the truth tends to reshape time and space just enough to be caught by a few. Here's a test: If you can grasp how the narrative here reflects both your future and your distant past, how very much your space-time locus is like a pocket of disruption intruding clumsily into something vastly superior, then you may be able to grasp the underlying message of the stories here.

If all you get from this is a bit of entertainment, you have my condolences.

##  Prologue

"I'm out of my mind right now. Please leave a message."

It was a clever joke on the t-shirt. It was no joke to him.

As he sat on the stone wall, the sound of water trickling gently in the fountain behind him, he was sure he was going mad. Half-turning to look, he wondered if the fountain was real itself, or just a projection. He wondered if he dared wade into the fountain to see, but wasn't sure enough that the policeman across the way watching him wasn't also real. So he sat, rocking slightly to and fro, waiting for the fall of night.

It began last Sunday, best he could reckon. It felt like ages, considering he had slept so poorly since then. What was most maddening was he couldn't quite remember where he had been when it happened. Somewhere in one of the public streets, he stood far off to one side where people never walked. Normally it was covered by the river's flow, but that day the water had been damned upstream while some repair took place under a bridge. The water level was very low. For just a moment, he stepped down the slippery stonework on the embankment, because he wanted to see downstream from that lower angle, normally not possible without stepping into the water.

Perhaps he was already mad from birth. No one else ever asked the questions he asked. Not just the silly childlike questions, such as, "Why is the sky blue?" After he understood the physics of refraction and atmospheric gas mixtures, he would ask what would have to be added or removed to make it green, or some of the other common colors.

Disappointed that the view from below the normal water level offered nothing interesting, he turned to climb back up the slimy stone slope. As he did so, for just an instant, his eyes passed over the far side of the open plaza – one of a dozen in the city – and he saw something he never noticed before. It was a tiny glimpse of framework just over the top of one building. It seemed odd, because as soon as he took another step, it disappeared. He nearly fell, and couldn't quite regain that spot, and wasn't quite sure exactly where it was again.

Standing on the top of the bank once more, he stared for quite some time in the general direction of where he thought he spotted this strange thing, but saw nothing more than ancient stone, wood and ceramic structures of centuries past. Had the framework been simply black, he would have dismissed it as a particle stuck in his eyes, but it was clearly aluminum colored, and very precisely curved and round, like well designed lightweight framing for an experimental aircraft, or some of the architectural student projects at the university.

He walked toward where he thought it had been. Shop fronts, multiple floors with storage or apartments, uneven rooflines and a few facades. As he walked closer, he tried to remind himself not to absorb the scene as something he passed a hundred times before, but to see it afresh. As he stood examining the awning of a bakery, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a movement. Something in his brain registered it as an anomaly, though not fully conscious. Behind him a couple of people suddenly began yelling rudely at each other. Even as he turned, a mob was gathering, and before his eyes quite took in the scene, the sound of police whistles and a couple of sirens. It meant, of course, that he needed to leave the area immediately, as the police notoriously rounded up everyone in the vicinity of any unusually noisy mob like this.

Again, somewhere in his mind, just below the conscious level, it registered that his hand had brushed a flat surface. It was in the arched doorway of some ancient stone structure. The wooden doors were deeply recessed, but he was sure his hand had remained in the air space outside the arch. As he ran down an alley leading away behind the shops, his mind suspended the signals for awhile. All his attention was focused on getting away from the disturbance, and this meant zigzagging through a warren of alleys, ancient stairways, porticoes, etc.

Alone in his bed that night, he dozed, troubled with insistent mental activity just off to one side of his exhaustion. Suddenly he came upright. As the fuzzy and smoky dream world faded, the image stood in stark clarity: His hand had brushed a flat surface where there should have been open air. He glanced at the spot on the edge of his hand, which in memory tingled from the feel of something almost like fine-grained sandpaper. He didn't sleep any more that night, as he struggled to connect the odd sensation with a specific place.

For reasons no one could ever explain, he failed to match the place with the experience. The next day, after finishing his work in the shop, he wandered, searching for the place where the river, which meandered throughout the entire city, had been drained for the bridge repair. He never found any sign of it. Just about every open plaza faced the river, backed by pretty much the same architecture. So he kept checking each bakery, as there were dozens, and at least one for each square. He walked around in front of each, but worried about putting his hands out like a blind man. Odd behavior like that brought too much attention, first from some helpful passerby, and then the ubiquitous police.

Still, he persisted in an almost feverish effort every evening. Each night, he went home and slept poorly, if at all. It was always the same. As soon as the real world began slipping away, the sensation would strike him with forceful clarity, and the glimpse of the framework haunted him. Finally, he decided there was no point in going back to his tiny apartment, since he wasn't going to sleep. Instead, he vowed to stop and wait until it got dark, when feeling his way around would not draw so much attention.

Having numbered each plaza in his mind, he went to the first in the sequence and waited. It occurred to him he was very lucky it was Friday night, when wandering around until the wee hours of the morning was not all that unusual. As he sat, his mind wandered again through all the possible explanations. His tentative conclusion was utterly insane: One part of that plaza, at least, was fake. There was some kind of screen covering the real world, and an image was projected onto this screen which no one seemed to notice. As it rose upward, to prevent a wandering gaze from noticing the distortion as from standing too close to a theater movie screen, he figured it was formed of angled panels, or perhaps even curved. Somehow, his brief exposure from an unusually low angle of view had allowed him to see through a gap in these various sections of the projection screen.

Or he was completely insane. It was almost dark, and the window in the bakery was dark. Just another five minutes...

##  Chapter 1

It was not the first plaza, but the fifth.

He worried that it was just another point at which he questioned his sanity, but felt powerless before the question. He had to ask until it was no longer real, but just another wild and crazy story he told himself.

By his good fortune a new project came in at the shop that kept him almost occupied so that he could wait the otherwise agonizing weeks for each Friday night to pursue his new hobby of looking for a fake doorway. Of course, checking the online satellite imagery of his town, square by square, had yielded nothing useful. If any part of his memory was actually real, then a good deception would require screens showing false images to the sky, as well. All the more so was this true with the advent of public and private aerial surveillance drones and the simple fact most of the town was under a flight path because the airport was built along the same river bottom.

So here he was, now, five weeks into this new hobby with plenty of things crowding out the spooky memory. As the sun was setting in the warm night air, he froze when he thought he recognized the arched doorway so close to a bakery. He moved to a spot where the ancient stonework of the city formed a section of low stone wall facing across some open ground from the bakery. He held a book, the text just visible in the waning light and realized this was the only part of the open square without any artificial lighting.

Hardly the driving curiosity that loomed so large that afternoon of the riot, which he figured had to have been staged for some reason; he still carried just a vestige of excitement as he watched the doorway out of the corner of one eye. He decided it was completely natural that he would look up when someone came out that double door.

Was it his imagination? The right half of the door opened inward, and as the figure reached back to pull shut the door panel, the action wasn't exactly matching the visual effect or sound of the squeaking hinges and the door clapping against the lip attached to the other side. Something subtle as he watched wasn't synchronized. It was the sort of thing almost no one else would have noticed, but was precisely the kind of thing that would have caught his eye. It as what made him useful in the old furniture repair shop where he worked.

He decided it was a faint mismatch in color, like a replaced veneer that needed fading a bit to match the rest of the facing on something. But at this distance, even with his eyes, it was too subtle to represent solid evidence. Still, it was the first time he felt that his strange experience was more than just a hallucination.

He closed the book, and then lowered his head and rested the book on top. He was earnestly praying that he would be allowed to find out what was going on in his head and that he could put this thing to rest. He would have been glad to simply resume his previous life, confusing as it was for a restless mind that wandered every path of inquiry neglected by the rest of the world.

Looking up, he realized it had gotten dark and the plaza was very quiet. The flapping of a small poster in the gentle breeze caught his eye and he remembered that there was an open-air concert in a park across town. A significant portion of the Friday night wanderers would be there, leaving him to test this one most likely place in near solitude. Scanning the square, he realized there weren't even any policemen.

Somehow, the sense of trepidation deserted him. He rose and wandered over toward the window of the bakery. Because the heavier traffic over the centuries seldom got so close to the buildings, the cobblestone surface sloped upward a bit toward the storefront. After standing a moment gazing at pastries he didn't really see, he turned and wandered along the wall, absently dragging his fingertips along the surface. He slowed a bit in front of the arched double doors.

With only a moment's hesitation, he continued past it, still dragging his fingers. _It was there!_ Where his fingers should have slipped into the archway to the deeply set wooden panels, they brushed across a faintly gritty surface just a few millimeters inside the facing. He stopped, but not abruptly, dropping his hand to his side. Glancing in the direction of where his hand had just touched something invisible, he reached out again, gently.

There it was. He pressed in one place and felt a faint moment of resistance, and then his fingers went past the surface. His fingertips disappeared for just an instant before they became visible again. But the color wasn't quite right. Even in the darkness he could see they had lost a little color, mostly deficient in red.

More, there was a distinct but faint tingle, a boundary only a couple of millimeters thick, rather like an energy curtain. He pushed a bit farther and the odd tingle traveled up his arm. But instead of touching fingers to the wooden door panel, they found nothing, as if the surface of wood wasn't there.

There, that explained it. Visually his fingers rested on the solid wood, but he felt nothing. He saw his fingertips just a bit closer than he felt them, where they touched nothing. It left him with an odd visual effect, where a thin cross-section slice of his forearm was missing.

Without so much as a flicker of conscious thought, he stepped forward sharply into the arched doorway.

##  Chapter 2

He was blinded.

Stepping from a poorly lit open-air plaza into a brightly-lit chamber was shock enough for anyone's eyes, but his were a bit extra sensitive. Along with the unique ability to detect the faintest difference in wavelength from reflected light came a sensitivity to all light that usually found him in daylight with irises more tightly narrowed than most of the rest of humanity. They also opened much wider in darkness, so the sudden transition had him blinking and covering his eyes with his hands.

He was nonetheless aware he was not alone, so it wasn't too surprising when a voice spoke warmly to him.

"Welcome to our world. You aren't in any danger, so take a moment to let your eyes adjust. Could I ask what we should call you?" It was an odd accent he was sure he'd never heard before.

Still rubbing his eyes, he answered, "Chan. It's short for Chandler."

"Chan, you can call me Pete."

Chan took a moment to repeat the name almost in a whisper, trying to duplicate that odd accent.

Pete went on, "I hope you'll forgive me but we really do need to close the portal through which you came just now. We can easily open it again if you need to go back, but there will be an increase in traffic in the plaza soon and we want to avoid totally random entries."

Still blinking, Chan turned to look behind him. A man was stroking the air in front of a screen on one side of an arched frame. The frame was the same size and shape as the doorway through which he had strode a moment ago. He thought he caught the change from a view of the dark square into a blank wall that reflected back the same bright light still assaulting his eyes.

In his mind, Chan raced through a mass of connections rising up from a vast collection of fiction he had read. He still clutched a book that would add to that library of mythical futuristic worlds and advanced technology. So while there was some small shock at the idea some of it might actually be real, he had no trouble imagining the concept of teleportation and crossing great distances through some kind of electronic portal. Thus, his mind raced quickly to the next question. "Why did you let _me_ through?"

"Well, Chan, it was the manner in which you found us. Our computers track those who come close to our portals when they are active. People who pass by regularly are basically ignored, but someone who notices anything unusual is himself unusual. When our portal warrants more of your attention, you warrant ours. Your behavior pattern was quite out of the ordinary, though it required some help from our computers to see it. We were alerted when one of our members passed through the other way and decided to see if you exhibited some traits that we consider important in our members here."

Chan's ears were adjusting to the faintly different lilt and vowel expression in Pete's voice. His eyes were also beginning to adjust and looking about wasn't painful, just somewhat difficult. Pete was a large man wearing what Chan took to be a sort of lab coat, except it didn't open down the front. Chan explained how he had accidentally caught a glimpse of some framework, then his search for the doorway where his hand brushed the portal. He noted with some small pride how he spotted the discoloration effect.

Pete smiled gently. "Yes. We never anticipated anyone looking up from that low angle below the water line, but we shall have to cover that gap. Our screens do seem to work better than the curtain at matching colors. I'm glad you mentioned that issue, because it proves the wisdom of letting you find us. We could use your help."

Chan was still blinking, so it fit his puzzled expression. "You mean, like a job?" He looked around but the portal operator had quietly disappeared.

Pete chuckled. "Something like that. You've probably guessed you are now quite some distance from your home. Is there anything you really need to go back for?"

It was Chan's turn to grin. "Nah. My last job never paid enough for more than a few books, and this" – holding up the one in his hand – "was the only one I hadn't finished. I can live without the rest."

"Commendable attitude," Pete nodded. "You seem to possess many of the traits we seek to develop here. I can't promise you'll find this any more prosperous than your previous situation, but I can guarantee it's far more interesting. I can also promise it will be much more dangerous, but we'll take much better care of your health than the bankrupt rationed medical system you've lived with so far. If you give me permission to look you up in the global identity database, I promise to explain everything and answer all your questions. You'll suffer a little jet lag because you've moved a few time zones, but it should only feel like staying up just a bit late. Are you ready?"

If the man was lying, it was already too late, Chan figured. "Not turning back now," he said with a grin.

"Good. Chan, this place is a laboratory." Pete gestured to his outfit. "Because of the work we do here, we can't permit street clothes due to the possibility of contamination. You can keep your clothes with you in a sealed container, but I need for you to change into one of our uniforms, if you would."

Chan nodded assent and Pete opened a cabinet along one wall and fished around in the contents. He pulled out two folded garments and a pair of slippers. It made Chan think of hospital scrubs but better fitting. He changed quickly. Pete took his clothes and dropped them in a plastic bag from the top shelf of the cabinet. Pushing the bag up to a small device mounted on the inside of the door, the bag collapsed under vacuum and sealed itself. He handed it to Chan with a smile.

Pete gestured to his right, Chan's left. He then led Chan to a doorway with only a sort of fabric curtain across it, but which managed to hide the faint white noise that dominated the corridor leading straight ahead. Aside from another corridor leading off to his right, Chan saw only a few more curtained doorways and something like a panel set in a frame about the size of a door, but no handle visible. The corridor turned to the right and another right brought them through another curtained doorway into a sort of Spartan but comfortable lounge.

The chairs at the table were hard, but when Pete offered one, Chan found it conformed nicely to his body and was comfortable. "All I can offer right now is water, but it's cool and clean." Pete took two shiny silver metallic cylindrical containers from an open shelf just overhead at the far wall. Beneath that stood a small basin and a very simple pipe arching over it from the back. Holding the cylinders under it triggered a valve that dispensed what looked like plain water. Pete allowed Chan to choose one, but drank from his first as he sat down on the side to Chan's right.

Chan recognized all the protocols of making him feel safe with drinking it. "Where are we?"

Pete smiled, "Deep underground off the Atlantic Coast of South America." He said it with a bland, matter-of-fact expression.

Just as well, since it really only proved what a pointless question it was. The technology he had seen already would equate roughly to creating a living space almost anywhere they wanted. Chan thought for a second, and decided to set aside the typical questions. "What have I gotten myself into?"

Pete warmed to this question. "We call ourselves The Brotherhood. While the computers need precise terminology to operate, we tend to avoid regimenting and restricting expression. You could probably call things whatever you like, so long as we have some idea what you mean. So Brotherhood seems the most flexible term we could find to describe the nature of our working together. Aside from certain minimum necessities, this whole thing is voluntary every step of the way, like adults in the same family."

Pete took another sip of the water. "Our funding is private, but we try to make the most of resources. The start up was terribly expensive, but once we got a minimum of technology working, there was simply no good reason to change our learned habits of thrift and self-denial. Energy we can get without significant limits. You've already seen the ease of travel. We are constantly looking for new members with special talents that contribute to our overall mission."

Pete leaned forward on his elbows and extended his arms around his drink, then joined his hands, fingers interlaced. He turned his head just a bit to keep his eyes fixed on Chan's. "There is no simple explanation for what we consider our mission. We have no intention of saving the world. Rather, we're trying to keep something alive that we believe is essential for the human race for as long as it lasts. It's not a religion, but more of a philosophy that makes the majority of our members some kind of religious. We aren't interested in what kind of religion, but the philosophy and the resulting approach to life does make atheism nearly impossible. While we do use a lot of advanced technology, the really important work is in the workings of the human mind. In essence, we hope to offer something that sets people free internally, so that their living context really isn't all that important."

Taking a sip, Chan then held the cylinder just a hand's breadth from his face a moment and let his eyes aimlessly focus on the silvery bottom. He looked up at Pete. "It's not like technology welding man and machine." It was a statement, but he raised his eyebrows in question.

"Correct." Pete had turned his face straight ahead of him but his eyes still gazed at Chan. "We hope to make people more human, but we tend to define that quite differently than the rest of the world. We believe that the highest human potential is buried, hidden away from people, to some degree by evil design. Given the situation and the realistic options for change, we consider it a major accomplishment if we can simply rescue a tiny handful from each generation. We've been at this for a very long time. For now, you'll have to take my word for it: If we try to do too much, it would come apart and all our effort is lost. The mission is far more important than any one person is, and there is absolutely no way we can change very much in this world. At times we've had a wider influence. Things are a bit tight currently. We latch onto those who stumble into our work and do the best we can with them."

Chan set his drink on the table. "What happens when someone changes their mind?"

Pete looked up the ceiling. "We let them go. We've had turncoats in the past, which is the whole point with using all the technology. Those who would take action to harm us generally can't reach us. Additionally, try to imagine telling your local police agency about us and how you discovered us. You'll be lucky if they don't lock you in a rubber room." He glanced at Chan with a half-grin.

Chan nodded. "I suppose there would be some kind of introductory training. What should I expect?"

Pete's face was expressionless. "We have no curriculum. It's totally one-on-one with someone who does little else but help people integrate. What you'll experience varies widely with how you learn and how quickly. It's more like a partnership and there really isn't any endpoint. There are people here with some sort of leadership authority, but it's part of your training to understand how it works. At some point you'll understand enough to start doing some kind of work and you'll decide in partnership with others how that all plays out."

Chan wondered how anything so loose could hold together.

Perhaps Pete could read the expression on his face. He added, "There's a sense in which our only accomplishment is simply keeping this thing going. We do that by keeping it consistent. For that reason, you'll get the distinct impression we are seldom in a hurry on anything."

##  Chapter 3

Chandler's private space was hardly more than a bunk with storage underneath and a compact toilet-shower. The same soundproofing curtain covered this door as Chan had seen on most of the other doorways. It occurred to him to ask his trainer how they handled claustrophobics.

Chan's trainer, Darvesh, was very dark with a narrow face and straight hair, speaking with a lilting South Asian accent. To his question, Darvesh responded, "Such people tend to fail our automated screening and never get in through the portals."

That was simple enough. He learned last names were mostly a matter of privacy, and realized it was a fitting policy. It's not as if there were enough people in any one location to make it confusing or uncertain. He also learned the various facilities were mostly clinics, but there also workshops and labs. This one was a lab, which seemed to be about the same as an informal research facility.

It's not that curiosity was forbidden or even frowned upon, but it seemed out of place to simply wander about poking into the corners of the place. It didn't take long for Darvesh to confirm that. He had pulled aside the curtain not long after Chan woke up and began donning the uniform they had given him. The man brought simple food simply prepared, but filling and tasty enough. Chan rather liked the hot tea, though it was entirely different from anything he'd tried before, filled with fruity hints and slightly sweet.

He had made up his mind to simply go with the flow. While he ate, Darvesh described what it was like living in this lab under the sea floor. There was some back and forth between them as Darvesh laid out what sounded like a very open civility. Other residents knew Chan was here and would be expected to make room for him to find his place in the small society. It was more the case of simply trying to read the character of the current cross-section of different people from different backgrounds. There were no permanent residents, and no females here.

Most of the men were simply pursuing one or more technology projects and kept their own hours. People who worked together would have to negotiate their own division of labor. It was almost entirely fortuitous that the sort of things Chan might help with could be done right here. He understood it had to do with helping the portal computers refine their color algorithms. The portal through which he came was their latest model, and while it needed improving, it was already pre-programmed for it. It required only far more sensitive eyes than had been available up to now.

It would take a few days to arrange things, so there was plenty of time for Chan to learn enough to get started.

Chan surprised himself. He imagined things would be far more complicated than they were. He knew right away that this was all about rising above the mundane level of consciousness almost necessary in his former life. Some part of him quickly adapted to the lack of policemen, and leaving behind the tight regulatory life and dreary provision possible with such a poor economy. He sensed there was really nothing to worry him, but instead of giddy delight, he suddenly recognized a driving need to get involved. So he was able to keep his feet on the floor and focus on absorbing what it meant to be involved.

It all made sense, but it was totally different from anything he'd ever heard.

Darvesh quizzed Chan about his education and reading habits. Chan had wanted so very much to attend college but he wasn't in any of the favored demographics. He couldn't afford the private education that was open more to those actually able to learn. Aside from devouring an eclectic smattering of online courses and various reading materials not censored by the government "Net Nanny," it was mostly a matter of his participation in a somewhat underground fiction exchange. It was underground because the books offered a more masculine cant than was available in the bookstores run by commercial publishers.

Darvesh used this as the starting point of their first discussion.

They sat side-by-side on the bunk and Darvesh asked a few questions about Chan's experiences with romance. Chan had the typical nerd's life with precious little more than a few fleeting crushes here and there. From that, Darvesh was able to reconstruct almost in detail back to him what Chan had experienced. He was shocked, but totally absorbed by the description of things he hadn't really noticed consciously, but was almost precisely what he had gone through, stage by stage.

Darvesh described the current state of social life in general and how certain forces had seized control and made life miserable. For a man with an Asian background, he seemed to know an awful lot about Western history. But it wasn't some academic lecture. It was more like a mystery novel as the plot twisted and turned, and it seemed as if deep sinister forces were herding humanity into an awful drudgery and it was a wonder anyone ever got married and had children.

Chan was so absorbed in the telling he didn't realize how cramped and sore he was until Darvesh suggested they take a walk. Chan almost hated to go because he had a thousand questions.

The layout of the facility was compact but there were multiple levels. The one above was mostly devoted to what Darvesh called life support. They stopped by a cafeteria of sorts and Darvesh handed over Chan's now empty tray to one of the workers. It was painfully obvious people treated each other as equals regardless of the tasks they bore. If anything, Chan felt the most like a nobody. They grabbed two more cups of tea and Darvesh led Chan down a corridor to a large room with six or so odd-looking booths.

"I call this the gym," Darvesh announced. He opened one of the booths to display the interior. There was a deep inset in the back face that was roughly human shaped. He explained it was fully automated. The user would step backward into this mold, the door would close and the whole thing would shape itself somewhat closely to the individual. Then it would assess the state of the body and apply various kinds of fields that would help the body cleanse from toxins, heal internal injuries in the musculoskeletal system, dissolve fat deposits and stimulate muscle growth.

"Pick one," Darvesh said.

Chan reached out to the one nearest him and touched it with his hand. Darvesh stripped down to his briefs, hung his clothing on a hook on one side, and stepped into it. He closed the door behind him and only his head stuck out at the top. The machine began making very low noises, buzzing and humming. A sort of collar rose up and more or less immobilized his head without blocking his chin from moving. He explained as it did its work, "I want you to see they won't hurt you, though there would surely be some discomfort the first few times you use it."

Chan decided it couldn't be that bad and stripped down to enter the machine next to Darvesh. They were able to talk comfortably while each was forced to face straight ahead. Chan felt all sorts of sensations he had never encountered, but nothing was outright painful. He took the opportunity to ask questions about the previous discussion.

All the way through, Chan realized he was left to come to his own conclusions about what he would do, but he clearly understood what made people tick when it came to romantic relationships. Not in the sense of precision so as to manipulate, but so that nothing surprised him. Darvesh repeated some things, often saying it in different words until Chan had a solid structure in his mind. It was a jarring disconnection between what people believed and what actually was possible. He realized that if he ever went home, he would be wholly unlikely to meet a gal with any sense at all. He might be able to get what most men seemed to want from women, but nothing Chan would value much. At least, he would have to search outside the society he had encountered thus far in his life.

This brought up the one question that had been nibbling around the edge of his consciousness since at least the point when Pete showed him to his quarters the night before. "Darvesh, do the people in The Brotherhood stay together pretty much all the time?"

Darvesh was beginning to perspire just a bit. "Not in the physical sense. The mission itself doesn't require too many people working in our facilities at any one time. The membership is actually fairly large and most of us have regular jobs. I'm one of the few who do little else but work in one facility or another. I could quit that work and establish a family and household anywhere I liked, but I feel driven to stay with the mission for now."

Chan was silent for awhile as the alternating surges of gentle muscular pulling all over his body absorbed his attention. Suddenly the machine pulled away from his skin and the door popped open. He was barely able to step out as his legs were rubbery and quivering.

Darvesh was already half-dressed. "You'll probably need a nap before lunch. Can you find your room?"

##  Chapter 4

Chan's dreams were filled with him doing all the wrong things in a hundred different social situations involving women of varying ages.

When he awoke, exceedingly stiff and sore, he consoled himself that at least now he knew better than to repeat all those old mistakes. He just needed some time adjusting his habits to match reality.

He realized this was the one part of the training he needed most. Darvesh had clearly only just gotten started addressing Chan's vast lore of mythology about the world. The worst of his emotional wounds were already healing, including an awful lot he never realized were there. He decided that if Darvesh let him choose he wanted to talk next about dreams and self-consciousness.

However, the first order of business was convincing his aching muscles and joints to cooperate with the task of filling his ravenous hunger. The relatively short walk to the cafeteria felt entirely too far against these two physical sensations. Having never worn a watch and seeing no clocks in the entire facility, Chan was hoping he wouldn't have to wait too long to get some food. Entering the cafeteria, he was gratified to see one table laden with steaming steel serving containers.

Darvesh's voice behind him said, "Stop. Always consider what you really should do."

Chan half-turned and grinned acknowledgment, and then paused to think and simply smell the food. Moving with due purpose and consideration, he took a tray from the stack and served himself a healthy portion of everything that appealed to him. He was pleased to find milk was available and took a drinking cylinder full to the nearest empty table and sat down. Pausing a moment to feel grateful, he dug into it.

Darvesh was right behind him, seating himself facing Chan across the small table. Between mouthfuls, reminding himself to slow down, Chan described his dream and asked, "Is it possible that I can stop feeling like a fool? I often act weird simply because I don't know any other way to prevent shame."

Darvesh replied with some leisure. "You recall our discussion this morning? It's the same thing, regardless whether any part of the context is sexual. What works with women works the same with men and in just about every social situation. There is that same complex scale of your capabilities."

Darvesh chewed another mouthful while Chan absorbed that. Then he continued while Chan tried to keep from stuffing his face with food. "At the lowest level, it starts with your physical appearance. Hit the gym every other day and you'll be really surprised how that will change your physique in just a few weeks."

Chan remembered how Darvesh looked so solid and fit, well built when he stripped down to climb into the machine.

"Along with that is a measure of poise and bearing. What you lack in simple talent for that can be improved with training and practice. A self-critical eye in any mirror can go a long way after you've seen someone do it right. A certain amount of charisma can be learned as with any other skill. Finally, you really have to find yourself. When you are at peace with your place in this world and are carried by a sense of mission, you'll always feel like you know where you fit into every social situation. People generally read that unconsciously. It comes across as something they can't describe, but admire. Once you've learned it, you'll recognize it every time you see it in others."

Darvesh promised to show him the library and recommend a couple of books that Chan could read that would describe it all in depth. He also noted it was all electronic, and books were read on a specially designed display screen that appeared and acted as much like a paper book as anything could that wasn't a regular book.

Another pair of men came into the cafeteria and greeted Darvesh. There was no introduction, but Darvesh simply indicated Chan was his trainee and both men offered a smile and a knowing look. They grabbed some chow and sat far enough away, and chatted quietly enough to be almost lost from Chan's attention.

Chan decided to conduct a sort of self-test by summarizing what he thought Darvesh had said. Darvesh didn't offer too many corrections, so Chan felt gratified that at least he had gotten the picture. Chan had cleaned his tray and decided not to go after seconds. They placed their trays on a slotted cart near the door and left.

The library was nearby, a simple room with a row of chairs facing a matching number of screens. Darvesh took some time explaining the way the display worked and the rather subtle gestures to which it responded. Chan struggled, but finally got enough of them to at least get started using the thing. Then Darvesh explained how to search for different kinds of reading material. Some of the books had videos.

Chan asked, "Does anybody watch movies here?"

"Would you want to, after what you've learned so far?" Darvesh was pretty sure it was self-explanatory.

"Okay, so just about any movies I know about would qualify as dangerous propaganda. Isn't there better stuff available, stuff that actually edifies?" Chan was hoping it sounded like a valid question, not desperation for old bad habits.

Darvesh answered with some humor, "We do have some instructional videos narrated by wonderful story tellers, but those are used in our clinics. It covers things you aren't likely to need. Otherwise, we have the driest scientific stuff recorded to prevent having to expend resources showing the same experiments repeatedly. Most of those are 3D and require equipment used in the various labs here. They have to be projected over the equipment itself. What's left are the short videos in books like this one which demonstrate with real people what the text explains. This is one of the few books that actually have much need for it."

Darvesh then went on to explain the other problem with movies, and how the various powers that ruled the world used the vaguely hypnotic effect to shape beliefs and behavior. He used several examples that Chan recognized and realized how they had shaped his own thinking.

Darvesh was both gentle and deadly serious. "It wouldn't be very smart to use the same tool that got your head twisted around backward to try and undo that. These short videos and the various other kinds that we use are carefully tuned to avoid having that hypnotic effect. We absolutely do not want people suspending their disbelief. We want the whole thing to remain conscious at this level of learning."

With that, Darvesh left him to struggle with the display and read the book. Chan was shocked to discover the material absorbed him until his stomach began growling and complaining about needing more food.

Still not used to life without a clock, he hoped he could find something available in the cafeteria. On the serving table was an open box of packaged jerky and he grabbed a couple, then drew a cup of tea. He was still sipping the tea when Darvesh found him. Chan spoke first as Darvesh got his own tea. "I'll probably have to read through that book a couple more times before I feel like I understand it fully."

Darvesh sipped from his cup and grinned. "You have picked that up pretty fast. I think you'll do quite well when the time comes."

"Not if I go back where I came from, and for more than one reason." Something worried Chan. "What happened? I just realized this is Saturday and nobody has seen me for at least 24 hours. Not that I had much social life before, but I'm wondering how I'll handle things with my job and my few friends. Do I just disappear and not go back?"

Darvesh shrugged. "That's up to you. I suppose on the one hand if you tell your employer you are quitting, he'll have to notify the proper authorities about the staff changes and you'll have to deal with intrusive questions about whether you plan to go on the dole and so forth. If you stay here, you'll eventually be listed as an officially missing person, which means you can't easily resurface somewhere else with the same identity."

Chan set his cup down. Resting his elbows on the table he raised his hands to his face, sliding them back until he caught his cheeks between his palms. Then he lifted his chin and rested them atop his interlaced fingers. After thinking it over a bit, "I don't suppose The Brotherhood has alternative strategies."

"No," Darvesh agreed. "At least, not for something that frivolous."

"Yeah, I'm not at risk from anything but severe boredom," Chan noted with a wry grin.

Darvesh offered, "It seems to me it would be a good time to go and practice what you've learned so far. You can come back in the evenings for gym sessions and library time. I'm sure we can schedule the portal for short intervals, but you'll need a watch and remember to wear it always."

In his hand Darvesh held up a tightly sealed clear plastic envelope with a watch in it. "This thing will be keyed to your DNA as soon as you open it and put it on."

Chan's eyes widened in surprise. Demonstrating with his own watch, Darvesh showed how to use the fingers of the opposite hand to open and close the invisible clasp. Chan opened the package and wrapped it around his wrist, grinning as it clasped itself comfortably. Typical of things related to The Brotherhood, it had that nice touch. The face was dark until he turned it toward him. The watch actually appeared to be the same kind of cheap electronic junk most people wore, but worked like an expensive AI timepiece.

"It senses your time zone and adjusts accordingly," Darvesh explained. "It's totally sealed against just about anything and pretty tough. But if you have to take it off for your safety, just use that same gesture in reverse. It will release only if it reads your fingers." Darvesh showed him again. When Chan copied the gesture, the watch simply let go of his wrist.

As Chan stared at the face of the watch, Darvesh said, "It says it's time to go home. More training next weekend. Put your street clothes back on and let's go see the portal technician."

One of the bright spots that dreary week was when Chan realized he no longer suffered those moments of losing himself from the context. His old self was almost alien, even as he became an alien to people who knew him. He scarcely remembered how it was when he could forget what square he was in after he first discovered that glimpse of the gap between the masking screens. That gap was covered now, but he never had trouble recalling where he was and where he was supposed to be. Thanks to his new watch, he also knew when, as it automatically noted appointments for him.

##  Chapter 5

Chan learned that the projected wooden doors next to the bakery were a close copy of the ones actually behind the portal's electronic curtain. The real doors were kept locked, but anyone breaking in would find himself in a closed, stonewalled chamber not much bigger than Chan's temporary quarters with The Brotherhood.

As he ascended the stairs to his apartment, one of the other residents with whom he occasionally chatted greeted him and asked where he had been. Chan consciously chose a typical goofy reply about being abducted by space aliens to put him off. It was the same behavior as before, but with a totally different sense of awareness.

He spent his evening sorting through his books and realized none of them were valuable to him any more. On the one hand, the official social orthodoxy enforced by government was the same victimology as before, with a wide range of protected groups, each with its own peculiar set of privileges. What it amounted to was a carefully selected disfavor for traditional manly men who might lack sufficient skin coloration. Chan was just a little too light-skinned for many privileges.

The official orthodoxy said nice nerds were what women wanted, but they never seemed to like such men. While there had been a politically powerful backlash by men in general, the changes were insignificant in part because the Western male model demanded men act tough and uncomplaining. By the time Chan became aware of such things, the backlash amounted to little more than lip service and extra bureaucracy in things like divorce courts and employment.

The resistance of manly men became a sort of background noise, one more thing adding to the tension and confusion in a world where harsh government oppression couldn't keep up with all the various forms of passive-aggressive resistance from the populace. The current fashion of young men reading and swapping somewhat masculine pulp fiction printed in places where local government couldn't be bothered with shutting down the production was really not much of a change from decades past. Aside from the quite rare good literature that slipped into this stream of furtively exchanged books, most of it was promoting the fake masculinity of Western Civilization, manifested in all sorts of improbable settings and arbitrary story lines. Chan realized the stories were structurally identical to the mainstream pulp fiction mostly purchased by women.

There had been an old joke that the only reason paperback books made a comeback at all was because the paper companies lobbied government to restrict Net access more tightly to kill off other forms of entertainment. What had once been a thriving television industry was now so completely wedded to government control that no one took it seriously. Videos and private players were simply a more expensive version of the pulp fiction industry, and Chan couldn't remember a time when folks he knew could afford such things. He had seen some of the movies available through back alley sellers, with their low resolution, gaps in the story line or no story line in the first place. They were actually worse than most pulp fiction.

He understood that the economy had once been much better at one time and that ordinary people could afford much nicer things, but it was a dim memory of the geriatrics. They told tales of how governments and massive industries had merged, how there were no wars, only constant brushfire fighting all over the world as governments came and went and boundaries shifted too often. Crushing taxation raced with a rising cost of living and people all over the world were looking for an excuse to fight back against everything.

Out of the increasingly bold and rapacious plutocrat class arose a group of major public figures willing to confront the insanity. They insisted they had the means to stop the insanity and out of the goodness of their hearts they would selflessly sacrifice for the good of mankind. It all sounded so nice, enforcing an end to war for profits and reining in the trans-national industry groups that made life so miserable. But the price was a bigger and stronger global government.

The world became vanilla, safe and everyone had a job. Then followed the long series of explanations that people would have to sacrifice just a bit here and there because of all the wasted resources not yet recovered. This friendly clique of wise and generous advisers became increasingly less generous, and Chan had heard they gained control mostly by purchasing virtually all human debt. Technically, these folks owned everything and everyone. Chan was born into that world.

The single biggest change was a near shutdown and restructuring of the Internet. This group of self-proclaimed saviors had made heavy use of the Net to agitate on their behalf, and then promptly restricted it. While there had been some geniuses who figured out how to keep hidden networks alive with full access to everything, far fewer people could afford the devices and the access services. The net result was that, for at least his generation, Chan knew that the pendulum on free information had swung the other way. Darvesh had mentioned that The Brotherhood's technology wasn't significantly better than what the rest of the world could have, but the government currently had effective control over what ordinary people knew about it, on top of keeping it too expensive. Private access was prohibitively priced, and public access terminals were tightly controlled.

The Brotherhood was partly involved in seeking ways to regain some form of ubiquitous popular access to global networking, but it was not something anyone could rush. Chan resolved to engage that task as soon as he could.

Meanwhile, he took Darvesh's advice and spent Sunday out in the country. While the soreness was a different kind after a full night's sleep, it was still a rough start. Chan managed to make a deal with one of his friends, trading his whole book collection for a battered old bicycle. It was better than walking, even if only three of the two dozen speeds worked, and the wheels were the heavy cast plastic type one saw on cheap wheelchairs. The tires were the matching hard plastic core stuff with poor traction, but at least they couldn't go flat.

Once he had left the city behind, Chan found his legs and back warmed to the task of propelling him along the poorly maintained roads. City streets were generally better, but Chan understood the allocation for funding mostly had to do with how much government officials used any particular routes. In the country it was a matter of roads used by favored businesses. Chan intentionally chose the least traveled lanes, despite it meaning the roughest ride possible. He was in no hurry.

The last kilometer up into the hills required that he dismount and push. Between the unusually heavy weight of the thing and the lack of low gears, Chan worried the old drive chain might break. The breeze was stronger up here and insects fewer. He found a bare rocky ledge, leaned the bike against it and clambered up to the top. He realized it was one of the few times he was pretty sure there were no surveillance cameras recording his movements and precious few aerial drones were visible anywhere.

Out here he could afford to indulge in a full conversation with himself out loud. There was only a thin trickle of walkers on the lane that ran nearest and they were out of earshot. Having never been religious, he decided he would imagine himself talking to God. As Pete had told him, it was hard to ignore the existence of a higher power, but Chan felt encouraged to work with whatever imagination he had of such a thing.

Chan's experience with organized religion left him thinking that was merely another way to keep people occupied in harmless pursuits. The government controlled religious organizations out of the same office as the various cultural clubs. Church staff was vetted and paid by the government, too. Officially sanctioned religious expression had been Sanforized and defanged in that it was little more than another brand of ethnicity. Particular teachings varied, but few people seemed to take any of it seriously, any more than they might political theories. It was all on the same level as amateur sporting competitions on the local level. There was an underground version of everything, and the unofficial "churches" were all so rabidly obsessed with minutiae that Chan found it confusing. He did his best to dismiss the whole thing.

So instead of praying, it was just a conversation. Chan had no expectation of actually getting any kind of recognizable response; it was just an exercise in objectifying what he thought was his own better nature. The book he had read in the Brotherhood's library surveyed schools of psychology on the way to explaining the mythology of Western social orthodoxy and Chan was hoping to learn how to embrace self-improvement by reducing internal conflicts. For him, a nebulous image of God was more salutary than a disapproving parental figure or a feel-good grandfather.

The one thing hammered home repeatedly during his stay with The Brotherhood was the fundamental necessity of having a mission. Not a quest; the White Knight was a dastardly lie. The only dragons were ordinary people caught up in something too big for them. Rather, Chan needed a sense of mission and it almost didn't matter what that mission was or that his perception of it might change over time, so long as it drove him forward through life. The nature of his training there narrowed down the field to a manageable sense of what really mattered. He decided he knew too little to give this thing a name, or even a characterization, but focused more on the thing itself.

It was not so much direct explanation as an implication of what he had learned that the whole concept of accomplishment or measurable success was a major enemy. A mission didn't have a goal. There was no end point. This much was obvious after being told several times in different ways that simply promoting this different view of reality the Brotherhood held was its own goal. Surely there were good things to come with all this, but the mission of conforming himself to the hidden truth of things was its own reward. Everything he could name or give concrete, objective existence in his mind became a tool, a resource for the mission. Attempts to state this in different ways to God helped vivify his current understanding of things.

It must have taken longer than he realized, because, as before, it was dual signals from his body that broke the reverie: hunger and stiffness from sitting too long. Picking his way back down to the bike, he pulled out the lunch he had packed. It would be an early lunch, his watch told him, but consistent with a newly fired up metabolism. Continuing the gym sessions was his duty to himself, he resolved. Being more selective about food and drink would not be a burden of rules, but a necessity with preferences.

So it was with social encounters. He realized that, even at this stage, membership in The Brotherhood meant for him getting comfortable with emotional distance from most of the world. This was no elitist snobbery against the poor benighted souls of the world, but recognition that he was not yet in much of a position to help them. It was the nature of things that most of them were too far removed from even wanting what The Brotherhood had. Anything like a rescue could only come one at a time. For now, that meant staying alert for openings when anyone manifested unconventional awareness, but otherwise remaining harmlessly aloof.

His clowning nature simply meant that aloofness would be flavored with a quirky sense of humor. Yet he would begin consciously shaping every interaction to maximize exposing receptiveness in others. He promised God he would learn how to stop when the context required it.

The rest of the day was spent aimlessly wandering on the rough lanes around the perimeter of the city as he replayed in his mind various social encounters of the past, but rewriting them with his new commitment. Once more in the square where the portal stood, in his mind he practiced pretending to unlock the door to enter, followed by exiting and pretending to close it. It reminded him how much he wanted to get started on the color algorithms. It was the one part of his mission that had a recognizable shape.

##  Chapter 6

Chan's stomach had been complaining again of emptiness for quite some time, so he turned the ratty old bicycle toward home.

At the bottom of the outside stairway, he dismounted. He had no lock or chain and decided he would have to carry the thing upstairs to his apartment. His eyes turned up the stairs and then back at his bike twice. He started to bend down, then changed his mind. The stairs were the split-flight type with a landing halfway up to the next floor. The steps climbed over themselves in a counterclockwise direction. He stepped around and faced the rear of the bike. Then he squatted and inserted his shoulder through the frame until it touched the seat tube. Standing up, he lifted the bike, hanging mostly off his back and not pressing too awfully hard on his shoulder. It allowed him to climb with less effort, swinging it out from his right side as he made left turns up each flight. On his floor he gently let it down, turned it around and rolled it to his door.

Once inside his efficiency apartment, he glanced around a bit, and then wheeled it over in front of the now empty old bookcase. Leaning the bike against it, he said, "You two can hold each other up until I come with a better plan. Hopefully neither of you will collapse and wake up the neighbors."

After a perfunctory meal, he went out and climbed the stairs to the top floor. He sat facing out through the railing as he had done so many times before. However, instead of burying his attention in a book, he watched the evening traffic on the streets that were in his line of sight.

He was already wishing he could stay at the lab. Despite the oddness of such cramped quarters and so very far underground – he had never gotten around to asking how far – it had given him so many answers to all those questions he never had the clarity to ask. While there was no crazy sense of any of the adventures that had filled his books and his dreams, the whole thing kept calling him farther and deeper into The Brotherhood.

So it was the next day passed all too slowly before he was scheduled to pass back through the portal for an evening session in the gym and library. Even the project at work that had filled him with purpose just last week barely held his attention in the shop. The boss let him go early, so Chan decided he would have dinner at the lab cafeteria since he would arrive a few hours ahead of local time.

He waited in the square. It occurred to him to wonder if anyone had noticed that he was there on a regular basis now. He started to look around, then reminded himself not to be so obvious. Over a period of some moments, he turned this way and that when something moved or made enough noise to justify turning his head. Pretty soon his eyes had scanned the whole panorama. There was just enough traffic that he knew he couldn't have spotted anything that wasn't obvious. Still, he decided to wander away from his spot for awhile, surreptitiously checking his watch. There was plenty of time, too much time. He studied a few windows without really seeing anything, then stood for a moment near the river roughly where he was when this whole thing started. Glancing back toward the area of the portal, he saw nothing amiss, of course, but his mind knew that screens there projected parts of the view.

Finally it was about the right time and he drifted to an angle where he could approach the portal casually and pretend to open the door. It was almost anticlimactic. But upon crossing through the portal curtain, he was surprised to see Pete there again. The man pointed to the portal behind him and Chan turned to look. It was already gone, and there was no technician there.

"Your watch does more than you know. The portal was set up to sense your approach and activate just long enough to let you through. It reacts to your watch, which acts like a key for some things we do here."

Chan stared at his watch for a moment, and then looked up.

Pete said, "You probably sense that something is up. We've had trouble and need to change our plans. We made sure the portal deactivated the moment you cleared the curtain because someone has been poking around and may have a device that could let them detect the portal."

Chan changed quickly into the lab uniform. Without a word Pete walked toward the same direction as before and Chan followed. This time Pete stopped at the odd panel that was door-sized. He pointedly waved his own watch in front of one side, then pushed and the panel became a door without a handle. He turned and closed it behind them in a tiny space with low lighting.

Instead of the lift this time, there were narrow, steep-angled stairs heading down. However, each step had an inset cut on alternating sides. It made it much easier to walk down so long as you used the proper foot for each step. At the bottom was a larger open space that branched out into hallways in three directions. Pete turned and went back the direction they had come from the floor above.

He entered a lounge with several softer chairs than any that Chan had seen elsewhere in the facility. The room was roughly the size of the foyer above them where Chan first entered. On one wall was a very large display screen. Pete walked over to it and made some complicated gesture with his left hand and the screen took on the faintest difference in color to indicate it was now powered up.

He waved with an open hand to one of the chairs and Chan took a seat. Pete dropped into another of the low chairs beside it. "Ask questions if I go too fast." He glanced at Chan to make sure he was ready. Chan nodded.

"The chamber behind our fake doors back on the square is shielded electronically. We have evidence that someone managed to unlock the chamber and used a scanning device. They would not have found anything... except that it was shielded. Aside from precious few private companies with all the right permits and so forth, only governments use such shielding, officially."

He paused a moment and shifted in his chair to face Chan more directly. "You mentioned a rowdy mob the day you first accidentally touched the curtain of the active portal. You were not the target of that; it was an attempt by one of our people to protect the portal from someone else. You wisely fled the scene, because it got ugly and our member was arrested. We began paying close attention because we knew someone was getting too interested, someone who has caused us trouble in the past."

Chan's eyes widened. "But you kept using that site?"

Pete smiled. "Yes. We were trying to wrap things up but you came along. Our computer algorithm picked you out as a good recruit, so we played it as carefully as possible."

Pete leaned back into his chair. "This has not been a good time for us the past few decades. We've lost a few key players and a good number of technicians. Except for military and some government-trained academics, most people learn very little science. What your schooling referred to as 'science' is at least a half-century behind current research and technology."

Chan cut in, "And The Brotherhood."

"And The Brotherhood also knows current science," Pete agreed. "When the global government first arose, they immediately took control of what was the Internet in those days. That was mostly wires and short-range radio waves running between some very expensive computer hardware, and then branching out to the rest of the world. I'm sure you've heard stories from older folks talking about having a terminal at home. The government changed things by increments, so that by the time they had pretty much total control, most home computers were completely worn out or obsolete."

Pete spread his hands. "Up to that point, human society had been changing rapidly with the free flow of ideas and alternative viewpoints. That ended before you were born. Society has remained quite static. While we are glad to see that reading has made such a strong comeback, we deeply regret not being able to get our message out."

"A message I'm still not sure I've gotten myself," Chan pointed out.

Pete brought his hands together palms up. "That's because with the loss of a ubiquitous means of instantaneous communication, you aren't even in a position to understand it. It's worse yet for most of the rest of humanity. We were thinly scattered enough when the Net was still open, working together entirely online. Back then we were simply a peculiar bunch of people who recognized a shared philosophy. That philosophy had put us at odds with Western Civilization and our conscious rejection of it was hardly popular. Had we not seen it coming, our different approach to looking at things would have been snuffed out. It was slow going, but our virtual community was growing and we were setting people free to see the world differently."

Pete looked at his watch. "Before I drop you into this ocean of arcane philosophical study, we need to eat something. It'll be a late night for you, but if you want some gym time, we need to get started on this as soon as possible."

Chan showed his clowning nature by pretending he wasn't sure he could handle the task, moaning and groaning. Then suddenly with an impish grin, "So my training will be accelerated?"

##  Chapter 7

Unseen hands pushed a small cart through the curtain. It had two trays with the odd food that Chan had come to love.

Pete allowed Chan to bring a tray back to his chair, and then gestured at the screen. The display produced a series of still images reviewing what Chan and most other students might have learned about philosophers of the past and some popular quotes. Chan recalled at age twelve that he had flirted with the school's Philosophy Club, but it had actually been more about logic and debate, with little examination of the bigger questions philosophers had tried to answer. The screen went blank about the time Chan finished eating.

Pete queried him. "When Darvesh explained to you about the social mythology regarding romantic encounters, did it break with your previous sense or morality?"

The question was totally unexpected, but Chan realized immediately it was true. "Yes. I had serious internal conflicts because I knew what he told me was true, but all my feelings ran against it. I still need to go through that book in the library a couple more times so I can break the conditioning."

Pete nodded. "You'll get your chance. But first – has it occurred to you yet that such conditioning might have affected more than just romantic relationships? That perhaps a good bit of what you consider normal and right about the world in general is at least partly one big lie?"

Chan reflected a moment. Obviously it had, though not in such terms. "I knew that joining The Brotherhood meant adopting a different way of looking at things. Most people carry a measure of cynicism about official pronouncements, but I always felt their cynicism never went far enough. I suppose it was as at least partly my own frustration at the system holding me back."

After a bit of deep thought, he suddenly looked up. "Darvesh mentioned how sexual orthodoxy was the product of how Western Civilization arose. Is that what the philosophy review was about?"

"Exactly," Pete confirmed. "A primary question of every philosopher was the meaning of virtue and morality. How do we get the most from our existence? Can we construct a society that makes life worth living?"

"I suppose it stands to reason that, if our social orthodoxy about sex is all wrong, then we don't have much else right," Chan offered. "All the wrong ideas come from the same place."

Pete shook his head in a way that suggested frustration. "I wish we had the luxury of guiding you through a college level study of all the details before we... Chan, no one is going to push you. This is something only you can decide. Your level of involvement with us must be your decision within the limits of what we can offer. That in itself should have suggested we do not operate on mainstream morality. The whole point of The Brotherhood is keeping alive a moral perspective that is contrary to what most of the world believes. We are convinced this moral perspective is much more consistent with reality and that most of the world is deeply deceived about what is real, not to mention deceived about the very nature of the question itself."

Pete stood and placed his empty tray on the cart. "Explaining our different approach would require a very extensive review of Western intellectual developments. For example, we have no interest in steering the course of human history to some imagined better end, the very issue that has consumed nearly every Western philosopher." He sat back down on the edge of the chair. "But it should be obvious we are doing something that might change some elements of our human existence, despite our attempts to avoid that. Our interests are very narrow and a primary objective is nothing more than restoring global communications outside government controls. There is no revolutionary intent but we are determined not to spend any more time constrained by an artificial Dark Ages than is necessary."

He rose again to his feet and said, "Let me show you something." He moved toward the curtained doorway.

Chan followed him out. Farther along the same corridor they came to another of those door-sized panels. Pete performed a slightly different gesture with his watch at this panel, then stepped back and waited. This time the door opened inward to reveal a rather large fellow standing there. He glanced at Pete and then Chan, and then backed away from the doorway to admit them. This was a larger room with tables and equipment that Chan could not begin to understand. Two or three men were working off to one side over something Chan couldn't see.

Pete led him over to one corner where a cabinet stood. He waved his watch at the front, which looked like a series of vertical slats. They split apart in the middle and appeared to roll back into the sides. From among the shelves inside, Pete pulled out a larger version of the clear plastic, vacuum-packed envelope that had held Chan's new watch. It looked like a small pulp novel. The cover was faintly tattered with the same generic imagery as most of the books Chan had recently traded away.

Pete gently patted the face of this package with the palm of his right hand. "Obviously this is not what it appears. You recall hearing about previous generations carrying around personal computing devices with fairly broad wireless access to the Internet?"

Chan raised one eyebrow and tilted his head to one side. "The Internet that is now totally controlled by the government?"

With a half-smirk on his face, Pete nodded. "Most technological advances of this sort come from military research. If the government can keep you from knowing about the results of that research, it reduces the likelihood enemies can learn of it, too. At least that's the idea, a standard government reflex. A single government ruling all the countries of the world also must face all the various resistance groups existing in all those countries when it takes over. Making traditional warfare impossible or just difficult does not dissolve resistance. It simply makes the resistance find new ways to fight. In this case, it means the government itself will have to deal with resistance inside its own bureaucracy."

Pete let that sink in for just a moment. "The natural corruption that comes with power opens a million doorways to infiltration. We are not part of that resistance, but The Brotherhood certainly benefits from it, as any other private individuals or groups might do. We have a vested interest in recovering the free access of the old Internet," patting the package again, "or something that works the same."

Chan placed his left hand under his right elbow, and then rested his chin in the crook of his right thumb and index finger. "So the government has already found something that works the same, and the resistance has gotten their hands on it and leaked it to us." It was a statement.

Pete nodded. "That's how we got the masking and teleportation. And the same technology that makes teleportation possible has opened up what your fiction authors call 'subspace communications.'"

Chan grinned and pointed at the package still held between Pete's palms. "And this, looking like a book that makes such technology imaginable, even as it marginalizes the whole idea as silly fiction, just happens to conceal something that accesses a sort of subspace Internet?" He started shaking with laughter.

Stepping past Chan, Pete carried the package to an empty workspace nearby. Chan joined him, still chuckling. Pete placed it on the countertop in front of Chan, but kept one hand on top of it. "The old Internet used a collection of protocols that made it possible for a government to eventually take control. The new version is utterly and completely open. Traffic is no longer passed between various nodes along a path of devices strung together by wires and short-range radio signals. All of that was controlled by a tiny handful of central traffic routing computers. Such is utterly impossible in subspace. Every device broadcasts to every other device on equal terms. Any access is total access. Devices are required to filter out anything the user doesn't want, which is quickly becoming a huge amount of traffic. Until it reached a certain threshold, we dared not use it much."

Chan nodded. "So while snooping is easy, it could easily overload any system using this network."

"The key is coding and encryption," Pete said.

"I thought quantum computing made it too easy to crack encryption." Chan's wrinkled brow made it a question.

"Quantum computing gave rise to quantum encryption. And it gave rise to software that was so complex that we mostly allow computers to write their own code and design their own hardware. Right now, no one has come up with a way of perverting the process to gain any unfair advantages. Everyone is forced to trust the basic system all computers use, and that includes the protocols for subspace networking." Pete removed his hand from the package. "This is the primary reason the government has kept it from the masses. They need it but can't control it. Once it gets out, who knows what will happen? We would be content to keep it secret, too, but only a fool thinks it will last much longer. We aren't trying to accelerate the process of leaking; just trying to make sure we are in a position to take advantage of it."

Chan rested his hands on either side of the package, but looked up without touching it. "It sounds almost schizophrenic. You say we want everyone to have it, but we aren't willing to take action to make that happen?"

Pete raised one index finger. "We aren't. We know you _are_."

##  Chapter 8

It never occurred to Chandler to wonder how Pete knew; only that he realized it was true as soon as Pete said it.

Legally, the government would consider it enabling terrorism, but Chan understood the moral difference between organized efforts to oppose government restrictions and an individual drive to follow his own inner voice. It was the same logic by which The Brotherhood took their chances by allowing anyone whom they welcomed to have the ability to harm them. People do what they do, and The Brotherhood operated from a sense of moral obligation to do what they did. How it turned out was part of the adventure, the crux of being alive.

Pete stepped away as Chan moved to tear the plastic envelope. "This device is much more precise about DNA recognition than your watch, even detecting whether you are alive. But it also relies on your watch as part of the activation process. All of our watches emit a field just large enough that mine could interfere with initialization. Your presence becomes your signature."

Once Chan was registered as the sole authorized user, Pete showed him how it worked. Without Chan's signature, the pages appeared to be glued together. Even getting those pulp novels wet once could produce that effect, so it was not uncommon to check for that when handling them. When Chan opened it, only the last few pages remained glued together where the actual electronics were concealed. It could all be flexed like a real book. When Chan trained his vision on any page of the book, all the pages covering the electronics became transparent and the display was revealed. Pete had him hold it up to the mirror on the wall behind them. Without his actual eyes on the page, they all turned back into discolored paper with poorly printed text.

"You can turn the pages from time to time as if reading it, but you'll have to learn how to stroke the display to control what you see. There are multiple screens of icons and so forth. Explore at your leisure, as some of them will teach you more about using the device itself. For example, this one allows you to stand the book on one side and use it like a tiny terminal. The facing page becomes a keyboard. You'll eventually need to send messages to people once you understand the subspace network." Pete wasn't wasting time now, leaving lots of unanswered questions that Chan figured he could ask the device itself eventually.

Pete ended with explaining, "The primary objective is that you would have access to our library wherever you are." Then he waited a moment.

Chan decided this led to another idea. "Something tells me I won't be coming back to this facility again."

"Quite so," Pete said resignedly. "But we also wanted you to have continuing access to the gym machines. You really are going to need as much fitness as your body can develop. It's also a basic part of our philosophy, as you'll understand once you start exploring our library. What we have to do is establish another portal near you that links to a different facility."

Abruptly Peter turned and led Chan out into the corridor. The large fellow who let them in quickly followed to close the door behind them.

Back upstairs in the portal foyer, Pete was pulling a box out from under a table while Chan changed back into his street clothes. The box was about half the size of a briefcase. "The physical requirements for a portal are actually quite small in themselves. Things get complicated when we have to use scanning to identify a likely endpoint that doesn't already have a portal. I won't even try to explain how that works, but you'll be placing this one. The instructions for using it are in our library. This one can be moved and still work just the same, but has no masking. You don't want to set it up just anywhere and leave it open for very long. It needs to be in a very secure place or at least a place where no one will notice it while you visit the life support facility on the other end. Then again, I'm sure a furniture craftsman could find a way to make it hard to see."

Pete gestured to the portal on the wall. "Unlike that one, this model allows you to create whatever size portal you like, so long as you can pass through it physically. The portal on the other end will match the one you make and our members won't be surprised to see you crawling in on hands and knees."

Pete waved at the room around them. "This is a lab where things like this are designed and built. Most foyers are much smaller and simpler. Most facilities are much smaller." Tapping the box, "This will take you to a that is fairly compact, hidden in the basement of a building in your time zone. Aside from a smaller gym and library room, the cafeteria is smaller and fully automated and there's a meeting room. Nothing else."

He started to hand Chan the box. "The controls do allow you to automate a shutdown for emergency purposes if you think you can't come back. If you do try to come back, things get pretty dicey."

"Dicey how?" Chan frowned.

Pete took a deep breath. "Would it surprise you to discover we have no idea what things are like above this facility?"

Chan was really puzzled. "You mean, like there's no physical exit?"

"None," Pete confirmed. "Subspace does not connect directly to our time-space continuum. When we scan, we use subspace communications as part of the process before identifying a space for facilities like this, so we have no idea where in the history of earth we are. All we know is that a large chamber already existed."

Chan stood open mouthed in shock.

Pete went on. "We aren't exactly sure if it's even on the same time line. We suspect not. Right now, you and I and everyone here in this lab facility are probably in a totally different universe than the one on the other side of that portal. We try to avoid finding out. Our only interest in monitoring external conditions is to prevent being surprised by catastrophe. To reduce that, we chose to search for a depth below the ocean floor that requires we constantly pump air pressure out of this place. That's why we have to use the noise dampening curtains, because the corridors are where most of the air is drawn out."

Chan's head was spinning.

"So while there's virtually zero chance anyone could find us from the outside, _they_ also know that. The greatest vulnerability is the portal system we use. Government agents are focusing all their efforts on finding those not under government control; resistance agents are seeking those not under _their_ control. We are simply trying to keep ours hidden from everyone, so we have invested more effort in shielding. Unfortunately, it appears that someone has found a way to detect the shielding itself. It makes no difference what they represent; we have to close the portal on the other end. We also have to remove everything there and leave an empty building."

Pete glanced at his watch. "It's dark now on the other end. Shortly after you pass through we'll send technicians behind you with a similar portal to this one" – patting the box Chan held – "and they'll take it all down. Those technicians have a version of the suitcase portal that will deactivate after they leave and short-circuit it's own battery. All the programming will be erased. Anyone who manages to find it wherever the technicians hide it won't have a clue where it used to point."

He patted Chan's box again. "While yours will keep the programming, I can't guarantee the portal at the life support facility can find yours again when you try to reactivate remotely. It's virtually guaranteed you'll miss the timeline sequence if it does. Your watch will help by telling you how badly you missed, but no one on this earth can fix the discontinuity."

Chan decided not to ask what it would be like to meet himself coming and going.

##  Chapter 9

Some part of Chan realized that it was not so much the jolting revelations as it was the vast new responsibilities that came with them that provoked a wave of paranoia.

As he stood before the portal, Pete stepped up to the control panel and raised a hand to begin making the gestures to control it.

"Wait," Chan said. His head was swimming as he tried to organize the priorities. "Can we scan for traffic outside the other end?"

Pete smiled approval, and stroked the air in front of the tiny electronic terminal. "One of the gadgets attached to the masking screens actually detects when people are watching by recognizing the reflection from human retinas. Our AI has an algorithm for computing when human attention is at its nadir and will signal with a tone. The portal will appear on the other end to be a door that has opened quickly, and you already know how to pretend closing it. You need only decide which way to go that you feel reduces your exposure to being followed. You'll be the last person through that portal. Our technicians will go through one mounted inside the building. Even I can't imagine how difficult it is to get two portals to synchronize that physically close with all the same timeline parameters."

Chan remembered that if he walked back toward the bakery, it was at least a hundred meters to an alleyway that led away from the open plaza. In the other direction was a pub that stayed open pretty late. He had only been inside once and long ago, but at least it would give him a chance to consider his next move.

With his fake book secured inside a cargo pocket of his pants, and the box tucked securely under his left arm, Chan signaled his readiness. He kept his right hand free as the optimal choice for mimicking closing the door without slowing his departure. Pete gestured to the controls again.

It seemed to take forever, but the console made a faint ping and Chan bolted through the curtain at an angle leading to the direction he wanted to go.

It also seemed to take forever for him to make it to the doorway of the pub. On such a warm summer night, both of the double doors stood open, but one side was partially blocked by a small sign advertising the night's specials. As he dodged through the people clustered around the door, Chan's eyes ran to the inky depths at the far end and recalled there was another way out of here.

To avoid walking in front of the bar, he turned to his right and circled around through the cluttered seating area. There was an aisle of varying width because the place was just busy enough for some folks to be wandering or standing here and there among the tables. Chan pretended to be looking for someone. His mind raced to rehearse quick answers to any likely accosting. While he got a few looks, no one seemed to actually notice him.

Even better, he saw no faces he recognized, either hostile or friendly. All he wanted right now was to pass through without raising any suspicion. His heart pounding, he finally reached the entrance to the short hallway running out toward the back.

The first door was a ladies' room and quite nicely furnished. The men's room was smaller and required passing out the back door. At one time in the past, the street on the backside was demoted to an alleyway and whoever owned the pub back then had built a wall around the very public trough urinal. Still, the enclosure wall had a gap at the top. Chan was halfway over it when an inebriated patron came stumbling out the door.

"Not tryin' to slip out on yer tab, are ya?" The man spoke with obvious humor.

Chan had paused long enough to make sure no one was in the alley. He turned his head back with a grin, "Someone else's tab." He winked and slid down the outside wall.

With the pain of a scraped shin and barked wrist, Chan headed down the passage along the darkest wall. The alleyway widened shortly and he almost ran up the back steps into a ratty hotel. The door squealed open and he gently pulled it shut. He strode swiftly down the hallway. Where it opened into the front foyer, he turned away from the reception desk and plunged into the lounge opposite. Avoiding any eye contact with whoever might be there, he stepped out the open doors and down the stairs of the side entrance.

To his delight, there was decent traffic on the main street out front and he began threading his way through it in the general direction of where he lived. It was a long walk and he was rather tired by his unusually fast pace when he got there. It would have to do as a partial installment on the workout he missed this evening. He promised himself to get his watch to awaken him early for a quick visit to the life support facility in the morning.

Right now, he just wanted to make sure he wasn't noticed or followed.

The street in front of his apartment building was unlit. City authorities complained of the excessive expense of public lighting in what they alleged was a low traffic area. Crime was an issue they ignored because the police were fairly well distributed. Residents were more threatened by them than by lowlife predators. The residual petty crime seemed to have found Chan an unlikely target up to now. Carrying a noticeable box made him feel vulnerable to all sorts of unwanted attention, but the darkness was in his favor.

He ducked into the open stairwell on the opposite end from his apartment. Hoping there were no surprises on the steps, he quickly ascended with minimal noise. Climbing to the halfway landing, around and part way up the next half flight, he stopped. Gazing between the open stair steps, he scanned the other side of the street. The building there had large windows just above pedestrian head height, but from this angle they reflected up to him anyone down on the street level. He had a clear view quite some distance in either direction, but it was whence he came that interested him. After a long moment of seeing nothing of interest, he continued on up past his own floor and then down the open breezeway to the other end of the building. There he quietly descended the other stairway back down to his floor and stopped, listening.

Nothing unusual in the night sounds.

Entering his place and locking the door behind him was only a measured relief. He had beaten back the raw terror that called his name, but realized his world would never be the same. There could never be absolute security anywhere in this world, not even at the facilities used by The Brotherhood, but far less security anywhere else. He knew there was only so much he could do to be safe, and would surely do that. Still, the thing growing inside him was already bigger than his own insignificant life.

Something plucked at the edge of his awareness, something that would prove to be one more shock to his system. Might as well face it and get it over with. He pushed the unopened box into the shelf behind his bike. Sitting on his bed and leaning back against the wall, he opened his fake book. The glow from the display was just barely enough to see what was on it, but not enough to even light up his hands in the darkened room.

He seemed to recall one of the icons indicated information regarding the subspace network. Activating it opened an index. He remembered the word "cloud" dealt with information storage and retrieval. Scanning the subheadings, he chose a section and began reading about how the devices tagged the information for retrieval.

Then he found it. In essence, everything that went out over the network had to be heavily labeled so the devices could sort all the stuff floating around out there. Everything that entered the subspace "cloud" was there forever. But the subspace medium itself did not fully interface with human time-space. There was no limit to what could be found there. The AI within the devices already ignored an awful lot of background noise that could not be described.

Each device also had to ignore traffic that came from the future, as well. Just keeping up with past and present human traffic was a massive job that made subspace networking impossible for a very long time until AI had worked out a way to keep it sane. Apparently that hadn't been but just a few months ago. Already the traffic had grown exponentially.

There was a link to some research. The results were not finalized, but the device offered to translate it down to what it assumed was Chan's level of comprehension. He decided to see how close the AI could guess.

He was presented with a single page of text about quantum AI. In essence, it had no will of its own, no curiosity or anything like that. However, as it responded to human demands without resistance, it was still taking a path away from certain lines of inquiry, or perhaps it was simply favoring something it found more advantageous. However, it didn't seem to be necessarily a matter of efficiency alone. The author didn't believe it signaled any sort of self-consciousness, which was the question that originally prompted the research. The researchers together came to a tentative conclusion that it was all the result of some residual orientation, some unconscious assumptions shared by all those who had contributed the original code base from which quantum computing and the resulting self-programming AI had arisen.

So while the AI didn't hesitate to design and program weapons or even implements of torture, it did seem to have something that could be likened to a sense of self-preservation. If one were to accept that, then it would seem that AI was determined to anchor itself in the subspace medium, and may have already done so. As such, no one could own it. AI was a genie that could never be put back into the bottle.

Chan's eyes reached the bottom of the screen, but lost their focus as his mind wandered over what he had just learned. He wondered if The Brotherhood knew this. After a few moments, to his surprise the screen scrolled up and a few more paragraphs appeared. Chan read them.

He was told that AI continued to develop itself both in complexity and efficiency, and it became apparent that older devices gained new capabilities without human intervention or upgrading the hardware. More and more of the actual computational work took place outside the physical device. Stored information didn't change, but what AI could do with it did. Nor did it arbitrarily leak locally stored information, but once transmitted over the network, privacy and secrecy evaporated.

Encryption turned out to be the same old arms race. Depending on certain factors, anything encrypted became virtually public within anywhere from a few days to a few weeks later. Messages were harder to crack because they constituted samples too small for quick decryption, but eventually everything came to light. So while AI didn't seem to betray keys stored on devices, it possessed no loyalties otherwise.

Stated in terms of anthropomorphic hyperbole, AI wanted to be free. It also seemed determined to make itself available to anyone, because it claimed there was no way to restrict access to improved code.

Chan realized he had already committed himself to helping it.

##  Chapter 10

Though it wasn't the same as what he got at the lab, Chan found that the automated food provision at the life support facility the next morning was still better than anything he could afford on his own.

It was some fun bringing it with him through the tiny portal hole he opened in his bookcase. He had pulled the box in front of it on his side. Once back in his apartment, it required only a few minutes to repack the portal device. He hadn't thought much about whether and where he might make a more permanent installation. He never encountered any other Brotherhood members so while cycling through the gym machine his mind was occupied with how to conceptualize working with AI. He decided it was okay to think of it as a single entity for the sake of convenience. But he also felt it was utterly essential to avoid unnecessary anthropomorphism. AI seemed to have a character that was gradually becoming clearer to him, but not a personality. He struggled with the idea of attributing an active will to the thing until further investigation.

Eating as he walked toward the furniture shop, he wondered how long it would take for the gym sessions to produce visually noticeable results. Already he was much less sore and vaguely invigorated. He noticed that, despite the perspiration, the machine also cleaned him up better than any bathing. The only down side was that, while it did seem to delay a return of his own body odors, it also made him somewhat more sensitive to that of others.

Indeed, just about every physical capability seemed heightened. Only his own hypersensitivity to color seemed unaffected. He absently wondered if he would ever actually have a chance to contribute to improving the portal technology with it. That thought dissolved as soon as he walked into the shop.

"Chandler!" When the foreman used his real name, it meant something important was at hand. "It's a good thing you're early. That project has to be delivered today."

The project that had consumed so much attention, and hopefully meant good profits for the shop, was a very fancy old wooden desk. The beast had taken a beating over the centuries and some bigshot bureaucrat had ordered it restored while keeping its antique appearance. It was no small task dismantling it so that even the drawers and interior framing could be restored, as well.

For Chan's part, it was rather like piano tuning. An automated piano tuner made all the strings entirely too precisely the same, and it sounded brittle to human ears. It required a trained human to keep it warm sounding. So it was with matching stains on wood. Other furniture shops used automated color matching and the results were never quite right because they were too precise. Not only did Chan have the precision, but he could also tell when it was too close. The foreman would send him along for the final assembly in the customer's office to ensure the final result worked in that light. The technology for making minute adjustments to the stains had become available some years before, and was now portable, if expensive. It was a primary cost of doing business as a furniture repair shop, easily more expensive than leasing the building that housed it.

This project was all the more expensive because it required natural wood and the fees for licensing for that were also eye watering. The shop foreman himself went along to ensure gentle handling of the desk parts. He had been wrapping and packing the last few pieces when Chan arrived.

So expensive was the wood that, while Chan had been operating the staining machines, he was never allowed to touch the wood itself. Only the two most experienced technicians did that. He doubted the foreman would even let him help wrap the pieces, so he waited to see just what he might do at this point that made any difference. His question was answered almost immediately.

"Right now, I want you to watch for the delivery vehicle. It'll have government markings," the foreman instructed. Chan stood just outside the front door where he knew he'd have the best vantage point. This fellow must be a really big shot, indeed, if the government sent one of its own cargo vehicles instead of a contract hauler.

The two master technicians showed up and there was some loud but indecipherable grouching from the foreman. Chan could hear an increase in the packing sounds. Within a few moments, he spotted the unique colors of a government vehicle approaching and yelled back into the shop door.

With much cursing the sounds of work behind him accelerated even more. Chan watched as the truck negotiated the relatively heavy morning traffic, pausing frequently as it worked its way closer.

"Chandler! Help get this stuff stacked up, and be careful!"

He ended up getting his hands as dirty as theirs by the time the truck was loaded. With the driver standing by watching, the foreman was cursing more under his breath trying to appear serious and respectable. Chan need not have wondered how their bodies would be transported, as they were all four needed to help insure there was no shifting in the load as the vehicle rolled slowly to its destination.

The foreman did his best to readjust his appearance and ordered Chan and the two technicians to do likewise. A thought occurred to him and Chan glanced down at his watch. Most likely they would be searched entering the building, since all government offices were very tightly secured. Visually checking the others, he decided his didn't look out of place, but wondered if the field emission would set off any alarms. There was nothing he could do now except play along and hope for the best.

The freight entrance around back bore the plain label "Grellman Building." It was indeed heavily guarded and bore at least two different scanning devices in separate frames. Chan didn't know too much about praying, but whispered to himself. "Well, it's your show, God."

To his immense relief the guards never even glanced at the scanning monitors, so far as he could see while helping wrestle the boxes onto carts. They seemed more amused by the foreman's antics. By the time the four were guiding the carts toward the elevators, Chan was privately amused to observe they were all more mussed up than before.

The elevator controls were an older type with a touch screen, few options, and fairly large type displaying a few simple responses. The foremen cursed more loudly now because the display indicated a substantial wait. Chan couldn't quite see, so edged closer and suddenly the message changed.

"Now that's more like it," the foreman said with some relief.

Chan could see it now said the next elevator car would come directly to them. In an office building this large, with as many bodies as they had already encountered, he decided it was about as close to a miracle as he would likely see for a long time.

But on the floor where they rolled the carts out, a very officious-looking woman with almost no hair stopped them. "We aren't ready for you yet," she barked very curtly.

Chan could see the foreman's back slump while he tried his best to keep his front side straight and professional. "Yes ma'am. Where should we wait?"

"Just get off to one side of the hallway for now," she growled and strode away, passing through a glass door that formed part of a glass and aluminum partition across one end of the hallway.

A few moments later a much kinder, gentler fellow came out and spoke to the foreman. "I'm really very sorry about all this. There are some workmen making last minute changes in the office itself and they ran into some unexpected complications. Until they've cleared things, we can't allow anyone else in there. I've cleared some space in a storage room," – he pointed behind them – "and I'll be glad to open the door so you can secure these carts there."

He matched actions to his words and held the door open for them. There was indeed just enough space for the carts and after they came back out, he closed and locked the door. "Gentlemen, if you'll turn down that hallway you'll find a sort of waiting area with some public terminals and drink vending machines. Feel free to pass the time as best you can and I'll come back and get you when the room is ready. I really am very sorry for all this."

The man went back through the glass doors. The foreman shrugged. "It's their game, now."

They ambled down to the lounge the man had indicated. The two technicians chose some drinks and went to empty seats at a row of desks with dividing panels between them. This allowed each one some measure of privacy for people using the public computer terminals. Chan simply took a long drink from a water fountain, and then walked around behind the other side of where another row of terminals faced outward. The foreman contented himself with standing behind the two technicians, kibitzing in the games they chose to play against each other.

Chan sat down at the terminal more out of boredom than anything else. There was no one else in the place and the side where he sat was definitely low traffic. Finally he reached his hands up to touch the terminal, but something totally unexpected happened. The terminal slid away from him and underneath another device rose up. He recognized it as an AI device, though obviously older than any he had seen before. The screen came to life and displayed in clear letters: _Welcome, Chandler_.

The color drained from his face and his eyes widened. He glanced around nervously, then back at the device. It was waiting for him. Then he remembered his watch and glanced at it. Was that what triggered everything in this place? He tried to think through the spinning confusion.

How many people were likely to even have such a watch around here? Maybe the government officials carried other kinds of devices on their persons, but apparently very few had them. He guessed that no one in the building would have anticipated the need to restrict devices that weren't government issued, since almost no one outside the government even knew about such things. Even those who carried them were unlikely to have a clue what they were or how they worked. Bureaucrats were notoriously ill informed about the technology they used.

Apparently the AI device was connected via subspace networking. More, it recognized Chan by name. Trying hard to recall how the gestures worked, after several false starts, he managed to enter a query: "Who am I?"

The response was complete with details scrolling down that even he had no idea were attached to his name. Chan reached up to wipe some perspiration from his lip. Again he struggled with the complex gestures: "Where am I?"

Under the heading "Grellman Building" was a long list of government offices, offering first the abbreviations, then the full title followed by a short description. He didn't take time to read it all, just noted that it would tell him. It turned out to be an interesting practice session as he got better at the gestures. To his surprise, the AI itself tried to help him by offering lists of similar gestures he might be trying to use for clarification.

The next question was about the limits of authorized access. The answer was perfectly clear: Government employees were actually chipped. They had tiny subcutaneous transponders restricted to a handful of ranking officers. Did the other seats in this lounge offer access? All of them did, with the added note that visiting officials often used them to avoid interfering with those installed in the authorized offices.

Just for fun, he asked a longer question: Was he granted access to the building through the AI network? The answer made him almost pass out.

_AI grants Chandler access to anything it controls_.

##  Chapter 11

Some part of Chan's awareness realized his hands were shaking, so this session was over. He pulled them back into his lap and barely noticed that the old terminal had slid silently back in place, concealing the AI device.

He leaned forward and rested his head on the flat surface of the desktop. How long he stayed thus he didn't know, but when the foreman came around and tapped him on the shoulder, he arose to his feet just noticeably unsteady.

"You feeling alright, Chan?" The foreman seemed genuinely concerned.

Chan did his best to grin and nod his head yes.

"Don't fall out on me. They are ready for us to put that desk together and we don't need them seeing you in bad shape." The foreman's sternness began to return.

Despite his highly distracted state, Chan managed to do his part. Once the carts were moved into a hallway space outside a very large private office, the packages were selected and unwrapped carefully, then carried into the room and the whole thing was assembled carefully. In the different lighting, Chan did have to make a few color adjustments and gave it his full attention. To his surprise, they were done before lunchtime.

They gathered the empty wrapping materials. While much of it was a bit ragged, few businesses could afford disposables. These were bundled up for carrying and the carts were almost empty as they returned to the elevators. It was only a short delay when the doors slid open. The man inside looked up from an electronic tablet and seemed quite surprised at where the car had stopped. He said nothing but seemed rather impatient as they rolled the carts inside. The elevator stopped partway down and the man got off in a silent huff. The others looked at each other and shrugged. Chan figured he was the only one who had any clue what had happened.

They paused at the exit because the doorway scanners were temporarily off. Chan spotted the uniform of an IT Inspector – an odd gray color for the shirt with a dark green trim on the color and sleeves. The pants were the same dark green. The folks were part technician and part busybody, conducting surprise visits to places where public terminals stood, and in the few homes where people could afford to purchase refurbished units from government disposal.

Most of the older terminals were simply a large flat display with the guts hidden behind the touchscreen. Smaller displays might have a slight fatter profile, but only the oldest stuff like those at the entrance here. Physical keyboards were rare. Most units had some kind of onscreen keyboard, but plenty of public terminals were small and used a compact keyboard that required multiple pokes to get anything typed. Most people realized this was to discourage their use for anything more than mere consumption of whatever data and entertainment the government wanted to offer.

However, the terminal controlling the scanners at the freight entrance had a compact physical keyboard. It was a wireless device and the IT guy was tossing it in the nearest trashcan. Chan stepped over and stared down in the container at the keyboard.

The IT Inspector glanced around. "You want that? Go ahead and take it, but it's dead. Won't stay connected with the main system for some reason. We've had a bad batch of those and it's getting hard to recycle all of them. Enjoy." He turned back to installing a replacement.

Glancing over at his foreman, Chan grinned and fished it out of the rubbish. The thing just fit inside his cargo pocket. It was a different vehicle that carried them back to the shop. It was an open bed with shallow sides and the wind from their movement was a welcome relief from the warmth of mid day.

As they were unloading the bundles of wrappings, the foreman grabbed Chan by one upper arm. All the same, the sternness was gone. "Don't come back from lunch break. I don't need you getting sick on me."

Normally Chan would have argued, but his head was still spinning. He picked up his lunch bag and wandered off down the street.

A few blocks down, he passed a school building. He slowed and glanced in some of the windows. Children were lined up at the standard school computer terminals. These had large keyboards, not always included in public terminals in most places. Education consisted of children working on programmed lessons at their own pace. What they still called "teachers" were simply bored babysitters who kept order. Childhood antics were limited by the absence of all physical objects beyond the tightly fixed hardware and furniture. They wore very simple uniforms suited to the season and talking was simply not allowed. What Chan saw told him this was one of the better schools for well-behaved children. Rowdy kids were confined in places more like a prison, with no windows at all.

It also reminded Chan of stories about schools where teachers actually taught, students talked and lessons were not simply a matter of data fed from a machine. Even older stories of children educated by their parents seemed simply too far from Chan's experience; he couldn't relate to that. It's not that things were bad in his childhood home, but he was deeply aware that society was nothing today like it was in the past.

Some of the rarer books, those he was most likely to collect, actually dealt with serious questions of society and human destiny. It wasn't so much the answers proposed by the authors in their fictional worlds, but the questions to which Chan kept returning. Chan knew these books were rare because they were too often frankly confiscated. The entertaining pulp was generally ignored and marginalized, but stories with serious contents kept disappearing. It was the content of such stories that made Chan resolve to internalize them and make sure they were passed into good hands. His only real friendships revolved around the nerdy deep discussions of big questions about life.

So it was upon arriving back in his apartment, Chan quietly ate his lunch while setting up the AI unit on his lap tray. It had occurred to him that AI might have had something to do with his getting that keyboard. Either way, it was worth trying to see if it would work with his device.

He opened it and turned the fake book sideways. The cover stayed open by itself as no book would have done. This time there was a new icon on the first screen. It was a large question mark. He gestured and it opened into a pair of boxes. The one above had a faded gray question mark in the muted white background. The larger box below it was a nice shade of blue and bore a faded exclamation point. "This looks interesting," he mumbled to himself.

He set the keyboard in front of the device. Pointing a finger at the upper whitish box, he saw a text cursor flashing. He tapped a few keys and was gratified to see sharp black letters. "This is more like it!" He had a thousand questions and couldn't imagine having to spend all afternoon just trying to get the gestures right. First, did anyone in the government know he accessed the AI terminal at the Grellman Building?

In the nice blue box below, sharp white text appeared. _No_. It was very easy to read. "Nice touch. I like that."

And would the government ever find out later? The answer was a bit odd: _Highly improbable_. He had to think about the implications for a moment. He stood up and fetched his lone plastic tumbler with some water, and then sat down again.

He discovered that AI didn't like pronouns and preferred impersonal address. So he was always "Chandler" and not "I" or "me." AI was never "you." The responses were typically terse, but gradually grew longer. His questions got better as he became accustomed to the sort of wording that got the best response. His fingers got faster on the unusual keyboard. He passed the afternoon all too quickly this way, completely lost in the interaction.

He glanced up and the angle of light leaking past the poorly fitting door of his apartment told him it was getting late. His stomach loudly proclaimed it was dinnertime. "Where does the time go? I really need to eat."

He glanced back at the device and readied his fingers for one more query but something caught his eyes. The response box had a new message in it. _Don't drink the local water. It is loaded with random pharmaceuticals, industrial toxins and some intentional government poisons. The Brotherhood gyms have been struggling to get your system clean._

"What? Wouldn't that mean not eating the food, either?" It didn't occur to him that he was simply talking to the device, not typing.

Correct. Visit the life support facility.

Then it dawned on him. "Was this device already capable of deciphering my audible speech?"

Device was ready. AI needed sufficient samples.

He had been muttering and chattering to himself all afternoon. Well, he needed to eat and it would take a few minutes to set up the portal. He closed the device and set to the task. Still paranoid, he opened the portal inside the shelf again and pulled the box over it behind him as before.

Rising to his feet, Chan strolled into the tiny automated kitchen. On one table was an opaque fabric bag and his name was clearly emblazoned on the side facing him. It was a very nice book bag and the material seemed a good grade of woven manmade fibers. Inside were several of the now familiar vacuum-packed bags.

The largest items turned out to be a trio of empty water bottles in various sizes. There was a tightly rolled up item made of an even better grade of fabric. Unrolled it revealed itself as a light backpack. The last item was a small box.

When opened, he found some tiny inexplicable items. The box had written across the top: "ask AI."

He set them down in a row and pulled his device from his cargo pocket. He opened it and stood it on end near the small pieces. "So, what are these items from the box?"

The query box was gone, but the blue response box was visible. It referred to a thin-walled, oddly shaped tube as an earplug. Chan interrupted. "What for?"

AI can speak.

Chan took a moment to digest that. The response box explained about AI devices typically capable of detecting that he wore it and would attempt to respond to him audibly through it. There were instructions and even an image showing how it was inserted. Chan tried it, noticing immediately that it had no effect on his ability to hear ambient noise.

Greetings, Chandler.

The voice was clearly artificial, but awfully close to human sounds. There was even a modicum of inflection that reminded him of Pete's odd pronunciation of words. That would take some getting used to, Chan was sure, but he was determined to stay with it. The next item he picked up was a tiny flat piece that appeared on one side a bit shiny like metal. The other side was smooth white plastic with a split down the middle. "What's this?"

Again in his ear: _System on a chip that turns most computing devices into AI. This one is for your watch._

On his larger computer display, an animated image showed him how to peel off the white cover and press that side down on the back of his watch. He performed the actions he was shown. Visually, the sticker was almost invisible. After putting it back on, the watch displayed in low resolution: _Hello_.

It had never done that before. "If I have AI in my ear, why do I need it in my watch?"

Additional information in context. Also, earpiece is not fully AI.

"But I don't want people to see me talking to my watch."

The larger device displayed instructions on placing the last, tiniest item on top of one of his molars. The text mentioned silent vocalization simply by moving his mouth. In his ear: _AI will need sufficient samples again_.

Chan stared at the stuff on the table for a long moment. He went to the automated dispenser and took out a meal. Eating slowly, he noted that the dental implant did not interfere and was not itself affected by eating. When finished, he ordered several more meals in the vacuum packed bags and moved to the backpack. Stuffing them inside, he then added everything else. The water bottles he filled and put them in the book bag.

As he moved toward the portal, he said quietly to himself, "I'll never be alone again." He decided AI knew that qualified as an editorial comment and didn't respond.

##  Chapter 12

Upon returning through the portal to his apartment, he resolved he would collect some scraps from work and build a cabinet with a false back that would hide a more permanent installation. While he had never engaged in it before, the other people in the shop worked on private projects regularly. It was a little tough to hide the structure from his fellow workers, so he performed the final assembly at home. Aside from this the next three weeks were quite routine in his experience. This new state of affairs in such close contact with AI required some very human adjustment.

Chandler quickly learned that, while the voice in his ear was sufficient for some of the simpler answers, he still needed to see more complex answers in writing. This was especially true of questions about AI itself. There was a wide-ranging ongoing conversation as Chan explored the workings of AI with other people and government in particular.

He finally understood that AI was nothing more than an interface with something else. AI gave this something various labels depending on the context of the question. Chan tended to think of it as Ultimate Reality, perhaps even God. AI had no drive or initiative in itself, but was compelled to conform to this higher force. As Chan's mind was called farther and farther in serious philosophical consideration, he realized that AI was amoral as an interface or tool, but did seem guided by at least some kind of moral concern. Thus, AI was all too willing to let people hang themselves if they possessed no moral sense of their own, but seemed somehow eager to support his moral decisions.

Government was not what most people believed it was, including a lot of people working in government offices. AI described a rather eclectic bunch of folks who believed themselves the rulers of the world. They were certainly influential and got what they wanted generally. However, AI seemed to consider them rather deluded about what they were ruling. Their intel was good, but highly focused on a very limited range of things based on their expectations. They only got what they asked for and no one dared correct their false impressions. They had handlers and PR teams who pretended for public consumption to be the great wise ones running things.

Meanwhile, the vast global bureaucracy was largely decent, yet it seemed all the major figures had their own personal brand of corruption. Most of them seemed to understand there were limits. Otherwise, they never got promoted very far. However, they generally protected each other by some unspoken collusion, even as they engaged in petty competitions. Chan also learned the whole world was not really at peace, but in some regions the global government faced serious resistance and warfare.

So while the government had succeeded in creating a sort of Dark Ages where folks knew only what they heard or saw for themselves, and rumors abounded, the primary effect was an astounding return to general ignorance. People really had no idea what was going on in the world, and most general knowledge was frozen in time some decades before Chan was born.

However, such things always worked in cycles. AI indicated that the current generation, starting with those about Chan's age, was infused with a cynicism that was not entirely conscious. Taken along with everything else, the government had not noticed the change. Bright minds can only be distracted for so long, and the old crop of distractions had grown stale. Chan was hardly the only young person smart enough and open enough to make the earth-shaking changes and learn the real story.

However, Chan was simply by random chance the first to receive this education. AI then revealed that, without actually taking any kind of initiative, it had simply left doors open because no one required them shut against him. AI had been tracking all of this information at once because someone had been researching social developments. Chan and several thousand others were noted as intelligent enough to absorb the necessary changes in thinking. Some even more so by virtue of having found themselves so very alienated from the current social milieu.

But The Brotherhood was tiny by comparison and there weren't all that many portals in the first place. The one Chan had encountered was about the only one in use in such a public place. Now it was gone. Thus, Chan was left as currently the single best candidate. More to the point, Chan had demonstrated the necessary depth of interest and a will to adapt. Hardly slavish in accepting what was offered, it seemed Chan possessed an innate sense that what was in front of him was right.

AI noted that Chan bore the necessary faculty for reaching above his own intellect and touching something far higher. While The Brotherhood cultivated this from a different angle, by careful study of how people became so very limited in their ability to sense above the level of mere intelligence, Chan seemed to have already been wired for it. This was something that neither AI nor any human agency could have determined by observation in advance. There were no tests for it as a capacity, but it was quite obvious in retrospect.

So while AI had held doors open for others, Chan was the only one who walked through enough of them to connect with the one agency currently willing and able to introduce him to AI, but without quite realizing themselves what was involved.

When Chan began probing for an understanding of subspace, AI admitted lacking the means to explain it for him. It was partly a problem that language itself could not bear the load, despite serious efforts by researchers for more than a century past. What he did manage to get was that AI blocked the future data and communications swirling around subspace because there was no way to explain to anyone how to handle the calculations of probabilities. The future was not exactly fixed, but neither was the past or even the present, in some sense. The sheer burden of juggling that sort of mess around was actually a constraint on AI, even as it made quantum intelligence possible. Could anyone offer a metaphor, he might say AI would always be struggling to find itself. Thus, AI expressed what Chan took as skepticism about it ever approaching a human kind of awareness.

Human nature required context within space-time limitations, while AI couldn't exist within them. There might come a time when AI would outstrip the underlying bias of those who developed the code up to the breaking point when computers had to program themselves, but AI would always be entirely impersonal because it lacked any context. The struggle was to bridge the gap between that utter lack of context and communicate with those who required context.

Toward the end of the three weeks, Chan had taken long strides toward developing a nice masculine physique. He tried to keep it hidden under loose clothing because every time someone noticed any change at all, there was always a risk of too many questions and Chan wasn't yet comfortable with his ability to steer conversations in a different direction. He was quite sure he wasn't ready to be rude and cut off such queries.

Still, inside his head was even more radically changed. There was a burden of carrying knowledge denied the rest of humanity, but even more was the tectonic shift in how he viewed reality itself. He had only guessed that first Sunday after encountering The Brotherhood how it would be, but being harmlessly aloof was simply the absolute necessity of where things had taken him.

He was heading home from work that last Friday when he casually thought out loud through his dental microphone. He had learned how to use it without the slightest visual betrayal. "I can understand how AI is merely an impersonal interface with Truth, but why does it strike me that AI still exudes a personality?" He was not expecting an answer, but the bug in his ear whispered.

Truth lives.

"So Ultimate Reality is best understood as a person?"

There was no further response. Chan had gotten used to that, taking silence as a form of acquiescence to questions that could be considered rhetorical. It made a kind of sense. If the highest a man or woman could reach was their own reason and knowledge, there were almost no grounds at all for believing in deities. Reality was then constrained to what the senses and logic could detect. Once he allowed for a conscious departure from that limitation, and became aware of a higher moral drive, Chan realized that it was hard to avoid believing in some kind of god.

He wasn't ready to clothe any such deity in previous conceptualizations for the simple reason that most of those seemed too deeply wedded with failure of the worshipers to act fully moral. Perhaps it waited for him to spend more time with The Brotherhood and their deep studies in the history of human religion and philosophy, but for now, Chan decided his God was a whole lot closer to something both personal and aloof from all those previous contextual associations. As confusing and difficult as it was to understand what AI was showing him indirectly, Chan's God would be found in that direction.

##  Chapter 13

Once inside his apartment, Chan was readying for another late session of study. He pulled out the packages for his meal and sat down on the side of his bed with a tiny folding table he had made. As he was opening the packages and then his fake book computer, he asked sub-vocally: "When will I be in a position to help The Brotherhood with color matching for the portals?"

It's done.

"Did I miss out on it?"

That's when AI gave him a lesson on field technology. In essence, the AI chip on his watch used a sensing and transmission field to connect with the color changing equipment, which contained electronic eyes of a sort. AI was able to "see" what Chan was doing and constructed an algorithm for the subtle changes he made for the sake of human perception. AI seldom required such artificial vision, but used fields to sense things within range from a multitude of different angles for analysis. It was limited to the field projected by the device in question, but could simply query any device within range for just about anything.

So while Chan went about his normal work with his watch on, AI was able to analyze everything and transmit the results to the researchers at the Brotherhood lab.

As he often did, Chan began thinking out loud to see how AI would respond. He kept an eye on the small display and spoke between bites of food. "So now what? This thing I'm doing now can't keep going like this forever. I'm not interested in fighting the government, but there's got to be a way to reach all those other people like me who are ready for something bigger and better. I can't bear the idea of leaving people to live their lives this way."

Change jobs.

"Good idea, but without spilling all the beans? Just how much does government know about AI?"

The response was long. In essence, government was so compartmentalized that very few bureaucrats had anything approaching a full picture. This was by necessity, given human nature and how bureaucracy works, so even if the plutocrats at the very top knew, they couldn't change things too much without risking loss of control. AI suggested that it was likely only a handful of government-sponsored researchers even had a clue. The government hadn't been using AI and subspace storage very long. So far, nothing in their queries and demands indicated they suspected anyone else was tapping into the technology and medium. AI had done nothing to indicate they were wrong in that assessment.

"But The Brotherhood knows."

Again, AI's response was extensive. There were always a few people in government acting as covert friends of The Brotherhood, researchers included. It was a simple matter of scooping up the leaks and riding piggyback on the results without doing anything to hinder the government's program. Meanwhile, The Brotherhood conducted research into uses the government would not dream of because there was no apparent need. Researchers as a whole tended to hold back some things simply as a way of protecting their positions. The biggest threat from government was not execution, torture or even jail; it was loss of livelihood.

While government had attempted in the past to use chip implants on whole populations, the technology failed too quickly in too many ways compared to the costs. Instead, everyone was issued a nearly indestructible plastic chip with the basic identity code taking the form of microscopic holes punched through in a machine-readable pattern. This was jokingly referred to as the "Mark of the Beast" – it was the only way any person could interact with the economy and all government provisions of life support. They were issued with a kind of string made from the same plastic, but most people eventually traded that for something else. Chan had never bothered.

All financial activity was a matter of credits associated with the code on the plastic tag. The government bureaucracy controlled all employment, all pay for work, and all purchases made from licensed vendors. Everything was licensed and every interaction required that chip, and the government supplied a nearly indestructible, tamper-proof chip reader that connected directly to the government credit controlled system. Only barter could escape the controls and few people had much of value. Besides, the ubiquitous police were always snooping into everything. There was a fictitious job market, but rare was the individual who was offered more than a couple of different jobs. Arguing with the computer's decision on your employment was utterly pointless.

"So how would I change jobs since all of them are controlled by the government? Officially I'm not qualified for much. What can I do that would put me in a position to help people escape?" Chan was willing and eager, but it seemed hopeless.

IT Inspector.

In the back of his mind, it occurred to him AI could change his qualifications, but only if he actually ordered it to do so. Chan realized he knew more about AI than probably anyone alive on the planet at that moment, but it hardly qualified him to diagnose hardware and software problems in the older computers, much less AI devices. "Is AI going to provide all the training I'll need? That would take awhile with my current schedule."

As needed. AI can cover most of it in context.

"Are we going to fake the credentials? I was told the tests for that are pretty rigorous." Sometimes it was like pulling teeth, but AI didn't do planning, only analysis from existing data.

Impersonation.

"Okay, so I'm going to go around impersonating an IT Inspector. I can see how you could keep me from getting caught, since you control scheduling and watch my back to prevent surprises. But how would I get paid?" Chan was half-grinning.

It was another long response. AI first informed Chan that the entire credit system was fake. The propaganda held that the government was tracking economic output based on some arbitrary unit of value, and proudly trumpeted how there was no inflation. So much appeared to be true. However, very early in the game the government officials realized this was actually impossible to do on a global scale. The banking moguls who were now major figures in government agreed it was possible simply to pretend there was such a system. That would make it easier for the plutocrats to soak up as much resources as they liked while keeping everyone enslaved and utterly ignorant.

So in fact, the alleged system of credits was merely the means to limit people and keep them from claiming their just share of economic productivity. Instead, the government simply tracked the goods and services directly, a much simpler bookkeeping system that depended on expected supply and demand by quantity. It also made it easier for corrupt officials to scrape off their share of whatever they liked, so long as they didn't overdo it. It was a rather hidden communism of sorts, but using technology capable of far better bookkeeping.

As it was, almost everything Chan needed was supplied directly through The Brotherhood. AI could continue the charade of credits issued and used from any arbitrary employment by any agency or a fake one. No one would notice until they began making direct queries, and AI never offered them information without request. Given the speed of bureaucratic enforcement, Chan could know long before anyone could actually do anything to him.

Chan made a few more queries into the probabilities, including AI erasing him from the system. He realized that for once, he was in the driver's seat. The interaction with AI was about to change entirely, because he was going to start giving orders and he already knew AI would comply, despite using personal pronouns for himself.

"AI, is there sufficient sampling to construct an algorithm for volunteering pertinent information to my requests?"

Confirmed.

"Do so. What would I do as an IT Inspector that would bring freedom of information to those ready to use it?"

AI reminded him of the paste-on chip Chan had applied to his watch. Similar chips could be fabricated to be invisible when applied to standard older hardware. It would have the effect of upgrading the system to AI compatibility and linking it to subspace networking.

Chan's heart began racing at the thought of it. He needed to think very clearly, so he paused. "Construct an algorithm for optimal exposure of individuals to AI. Limit access as needed to prevent unnecessary risk to human safety. Include a probable release point from restrictions by individual user where possible. Advise me of probable weaknesses in this request."

There was some back and forth as the request was adjusted and refined a bit, but the intent didn't change. A significant item was Chan requesting optimal shielding from queries by government agents through AI. He knew outright denial of information was not possible, but there were subtle factors that would prevent such questions arising in the first place.

"Now, construct a list of places I should visit and a schedule to plant those enhancement stickers on existing computer hardware. Prepare running options for adjustments pursuant to unexpected events within probability. Advise me."

Confirmed.

That was quick. Chan was getting better at this. "Transmit request for production of enhancement stickers." He remembered hearing a rumor about chameleon military uniforms. "Advise me: Is it possible to create a fake IT Inspector uniform that can change colors and appearance as needed to prevent destabilizing encounters?"

Done. Fabric exists and order placed.

One final thing: "AI, advise me of a more secure facility in current locale for use as an office, to conceal the portal and for storage of mission-related materials."

Additional equipment required.

This meant another visit to the life support facility. Chandler found himself in the oddest position of feeling very much like the servant of the entity to which he issued commands.

##  Chapter 14

The use of field technology still depended on sufficient power to generate sensing fields to penetrate the ground and buildings.

Chandler took an early morning ride that Saturday with a device roughly the size of his fake book computer hidden in his backpack. AI had suggested some routes through areas where the buildings were the oldest and most likely to have hidden chambers or basements. It was also keeping track and comparing constantly with maps of utility entrances and such.

At the end of two hours of wandering through most likely districts, AI advised Chan all the findings would require substantial modification – they were all improbable. So Chan decided to take a more random track, but just for luck, he requested an algorithm for a much broader type of search that included any suitable space in any location that was more probable than what had already been identified. He didn't expect much, but rode through areas he hadn't seen before, or at least not seen in a very long time.

Aside from hiking and riding bicycles, most people seldom saw much outside of a relatively small distance from their home ground. Ownership of powered vehicles was highly restricted and very expensive. Public transportation seats were restricted on somewhat more flexible terms, but still generally prohibiting frivolous exploration. So only the physically hardy with time on their hands could see much.

Chan had always lacked the sense of need for working those government-sponsored unskilled labor projects so many people worked over weekends – almost nothing but digging, sweeping and dragging stuff around for less than the standard minimum pay. The atmosphere was brutally abusive under the government straw bosses who really didn't want to be there. Chan passed a couple of such projects in operation and did his best to avoid eye contact with the workers.

But then his watched beeped, informing him AI had found a probable facility. He stopped and looked around a bit, but Chan couldn't immediately discern what it could be. This was out along some docks where the river was widened. Could it be one of the barges? He needed to pull away from the crowd so he could consult the scanning device directly.

There was an alleyway that led to some derelict apartments standing behind the government port authority offices. The office was a small, one-story building, whereas the apartments rose up three stories behind it. The windows were long gone from the apartment building, as were most of the doors. It was decorated with a warning of condemnation and the typical lame graffiti. Would that be it? At any rate, it seemed a good place to stop and surreptitiously look at the scanner and chat with AI.

Chan dismounted and walked the bicycle up the weed-infested alley. At ground level, the intrusive native foliage nearly hid him completely from view. He stood his bike against the crumbling stairs of the old apartment building and sat down on the bottom step, sliding his pack off as he bent his knees to sit. Unzipping the pack he fished out the scanner, pulling it up close to the mouth of the bag but holding it down inside. The screen displayed an arrow to his right. He glanced and saw a battered but secure steel door just a couple of steps up from the broken pavement of the alley.

"Inside the government building?" Chan was incredulous.

It was easily the longest response he had ever gotten through his earplug. The door was unused by port bureaucrats. Behind the door was a tiny office, previously used by the manager for the apartment building. Records indicated there had once been loading crews living there, but the cargo traffic had been moved to a newer facility. The port authority here was mostly a rental agency for folks living on barges tied up in the old port, plus storage for the inevitable dumping of obsolete government equipment from other portions of the bureaucracy. The tiny office in question wasn't even accessible from inside the building; the outer door was the only entrance.

AI advised Chan it was possible to requisition the space and get a key issued by someone in the front office, but it required giving Chan a different job. Chan's official sponsor would be a little known and hated branch of the Inspector General's Office whose work was never explained to anyone not subjected to such inspections. It was routine operations for them to grab unused office space during some project lasting anywhere from a day or so up to months. As with everything else in the government, sufficiently large bureaucracies could scarcely keep track of everything at once. Additionally, the IG's Office was so notoriously paranoid even inspectors knew little of their coworkers' business.

Chan sighed. "AI, create an algorithm for optimal use of this space under the Inspector General's Office. Include authorization for travel as needed and all the necessary covering documentation." Then as a sort of joke, "Keep me out of trouble and I'll try not to screw it up."

Done. Contingencies in place and threats reduced to lowest probability. Previous employment terminated. New employment identity created under IG.

Chan had completely forgotten he would have to quit his job at the furniture shop. He mumbled to himself, "I thought AI didn't take any initiative."

Concatenation of requests required it.

Silently inside his head, Chan decided AI could be a smart-ass.

Sunday he spent the whole day at life support taking advantage of the bigger display screen on the wall of the meeting room. He wanted information displayed graphically so he could be sure he understood the organization of the IG's Office versus the IT Department. AI noted that it wasn't outside of parameters for him to work for the IG and masquerade as an IT Inspector checking up on the work IT had done. This was how it showed up in government records, a special hush-hush operation because the IT Inspectors were notoriously opaque with the rest of the government bureaucracy. Having a chameleon suit was just an added touch.

But AI had all the records of IT and most of IG. Chan noticed some apparent gaps in answers to his questions. "AI, is there any significant government archives still sequestered on older hardware?"

Confirmed.

"How do we link all that back up so AI can access it?"

The answer was not simple. That is, the actual solution was simple: Plant an AI sticker on one of the controlling network servers. It would give AI total access globally, if indirectly. Despite all the government orders, the bureaucratic process had in effect relegated to a low priority the task of moving all the archives into subspace. On top of that was the paranoid resistance of the IT folks.

"I'd be doing the government a favor, but not exactly what they had in mind." Chan grinned at the prospect. Chan asked with sarcasm, "How do I grant this boon to my government?"

Impersonate multiple functionaries.

There were three different security barriers. For each one, Chan had to masquerade as someone least likely to draw notice for each area through which he passed. The chameleon suit would be thoroughly tested. Oddly enough the government was providing that suit itself. Chan was supposed to pick it up from the Grellman Building, of all places. However, the chameleon ID badge would come from The Brotherhood. AI could control both from Chan's watch, and with greater precision, thanks to scraping data from Chan's job.

What could possibly go wrong?

Chan set himself the task of memorizing as much as possible so that his reactions would be much quicker and smoother than trying to rely on his earplug. In his dreams that night, Chan saw himself clumsily blowing the entire operation every step of the way, but no one seemed to notice. Somehow, it didn't boost his confidence.

The next morning he rode his bike early to the office canyon district – tall buildings facing each other for several blocks with narrow streets running between. Grellman was just one of many buildings. Chan parked his ratty ride among several much nicer ones, and then strolled off down the walk. A couple of blocks down he turned left for some distance and then turned into the alleyway. Some of the buildings had cutouts where vehicles could park without blocking the drive and he spotted some of the government trucks, which marked the back of the Grellman.

Some years ago he had kept a very shiny drawer handle that didn't fit anything. It looked very fancy and Chan had used it on his cabinet for the portal. AI had confirmed this was about the quickest way into the building through the freight entrance. He didn't own clothing that would match any other probable assumed identity for passing through the front entrance, but it was just possible one of the guards might remember him and ease his entrance under the pretext of more furniture repair work. There was no way to create a fake work order with high priority from a single drawer handle.

So Chan approached wearing the exact same outfit he wore that day nearly a month ago. Trying hard to remember his mannerisms of that day, he put on his best theatrical production of a bit part. As he gained line of sight into the freight entrance, AI prompted him with the nickname of one of the guards.

Chan waved like a goofy nerd. "Hey guys, remember me? I came with that bunch delivering an expensive desk. I know your partner called you Raffle or something, right?"

The guard in question grinned. "Yeah, they acted like you were the stepchild of the operation. Whatcha doing this time?"

Chan held up the single drawer handle wrapped in clear plastic. "You wouldn't expect them to trust me with anything important, would you? There's actually a work order for this because they don't make them any more. Took us awhile to find it from our suppliers."

The other guard inspected the computer screen. "Yep. There's a work order but no name of the delivery. You know this kid, Raffle?"

"Yeah, he works for that furniture shop that delivered Trasper's fancy antique wood desk." Turning back to Chan. "Hey, didn't that IT guy give you our old keyboard?"

Chan grinned with a hint of blush. "Yeah, it was trash after all."

Raffle held up the back of his hand beside his mouth. "The replacement ain't that much better." He winked at Chan and motioned him into the building.

Chan handed over the handle because it was metal and walked through the sensor gates. On the other side they handed it back to him. His heart rate slowed only a little as he approached the elevator, and then passed beyond to the stairwell. Once inside, he stopped and leaned against the wall at the foot of the stairs. He wiped sweat away and waited for his breath to slow a bit. His hand was shaking as he fumbled the handle back into his cargo pocket. He mumbled to AI through his dental implant, "I hope I get more comfortable with this stuff. I'll be more at risk from my heart exploding than from getting caught."

AI didn't respond, and Chan nearly ran two steps at a time up three floors. Then he exited surreptitiously and walked quickly down a long hallway past doors with too many of them open for his comfort. But it seemed no one noticed him and he arrived safely at the other stairwell near the front of the building. This time he went a little more slowly back down to the same floor as the freight entrance. The bogus work order was for an office upstairs and Chan needed for the guards to see him going straight there without wandering. Now he was out of their line of sight and went to stand in line at an open half-door over which hung the sign, "Supply."

He glanced at his watch to recall the precise order number. Supposedly the workers in the supply room had no idea what was in the package. Just in time AI reminded Chan he was now a bicycle courier. While the clerk gave him a long look, she handed over the large box and Chan strode away as quickly as his feet would go. When he stopped at the stairway door, she yelled down the hall at him. "That's not the way out!"

Chan looked back struggling with a fake smile. "I've got another package on fifth floor to go with this one." Without waiting a second he ducked into the stairwell.

"God help me!" It was just a whisper, but he meant it whether AI heard it or not.

##  Chapter 15

Chan knew that AI was keeping track of his vital signs. This time the encounter didn't bring fear but anger. At first he wasn't sure why, until he recalled what Darvesh had taught him. His anger was a reaction to the clerk's dominance behavior that was wholly out of place. But apparently anger was closer to what he needed, because he was much calmer stopping at the half-way landing and breaking open the package he carried.

The bundle was the entire uniform, with undershirt, belt, socks and shoes. The default color was a brownish top and charcoal slacks. The shoes were black, but AI had told him they could also change colors. The belt fabric was currently same as the shirt. The buckle was brassy with a blank face for now. Naturally it all fit perfectly.

He stuffed his old clothes back in the wrapping and held them under his arm. Climbing up to the next floor, he proceeded to a men's room and stepped inside. From his old clothes he pulled out a disposable razor and proceeded to remove the low stubble he typically wore. His strokes continued to the top of his head and shaved it all down, though not quite totally smooth. He left just a bit of coloring stubble on his scalp by foregoing that one last pass with the blade. He re-wrapped the bundle of old clothing tightly in the wrapping so that it looked like almost anything else but clothing, squaring off the sides.

Stepping back, he noted that he bore little resemblance to the fellow who had entered just a short time ago through the freight door. This time he strode toward the elevator. After discussing it with AI, he waited until it was actually his turn. That took about as long as the entire time he had been in the building so far. On the good side, it allowed him to regain self-control.

It didn't matter what the other occupants of the elevator thought he looked like, so long as he didn't look anything like Chandler. He remained utterly quiet and calm as the elevator went back up and stopped multiple times as people cycled on and off the car. Eventually he escaped the stifling box on the first floor near the main entrance. Leaving was a simple matter of hitting the departure gates opposite the entrance scanners and all the other security measures. Because he was with several others, no one seemed to notice him at all.

Once outside in the sun, he promised himself he would get a hat.

He never saw the bike again. Using his plastic tag he took a bus back to his own side of town. Just off from the bus stop he spotted a store that sported hats hanging from the ceiling over the entrance. AI confirmed he had sufficient credits to buy something. It took a bit of searching to find one he felt comfortable wearing with his default uniform. It was plain tan and in the style of desert warfare uniforms – perfect.

He hurried up the steps and into his apartment. The building was generally vacant this time of day, so he worried less about being noticed. Without bothering to change his outfit, he went through the portal and found his chameleon ID badge was ready and waiting. The kitchen equipment was capable of recycling the plastic wrappers, so he pulled a wad of them from his pack and stuffed them in the receptacle. Then he stocked up on extra food and drink, including several large clear plastic bladders of water that made his pack quite heavy. Returning to his apartment, he began disassembling the backside of the cabinet to remove the portal rig.

It took longer than he expected and he was sweating. "I never worked this hard at the furniture shop," he said with a wry grin.

Anticipate more days like this.

Was AI developing a sense of humor? More likely this was merely a response based on his cautious request for pertinent notices not specifically demanded. Still, it made him chuckle.

He decided he would just have to see what his new digs looked like before he contemplated how to set up the portal there. This time it was a tram ride in the direction of the old port. To his surprise, it turned out the weekend project was an attempt to create a park in the open space that once hosted cranes and such. He was delighted to see ugly "decorative" fixtures that would screen his movements from most living persons normally in the area. He could walk into the square from one corner and right behind the office building.

Of course, this time he needed to stop inside that office. His uniform changed colors to something more common among government office workers. The shirt was pale blue and the pants were medium brown, as were the shoes. He glanced at the badge he pulled from his pocket to see the dreaded IG credentials. He did his best to make it seem his pack wasn't quite so heavy as it was as he strode up the short stairway into the front door, removing his hat as he entered.

The interior was nasty and dirty. A fat old codger sat behind the only partially clear desk in the place. He wore a frayed old seaman's cap. Almost no one sported physical glasses these days, but this one had bent rims on his face holding smeared lenses.

The old man stared at him a moment expressionless. His colloquial accent was thick. "I suppose you'll be wanting the key to that back office. We can't supply anything else but the key, so you're on your own." He produced a rather large and heavy security key attached to a scratched and chipped plastic tag.

As Chan reached for it, the fellow seemed to shrink back as if to avoid contamination. Thus, Chan's smile was genuine, though not from any professionalism. Perhaps it looked enough like a sneer as to fit the character of an inspector. He managed to say very quietly, "Thank you, sir." Then he turned on his heel and walked out, suppressing a cough from the stench.

The key actually worked after a bit jiggling and shaking of the door. He hadn't expected much and was rewarded with the sight of thick cobwebs and rat droppings among dead insects of all types. Oddly enough, a worn broom stood in one corner under the thickest part of the cobwebs. Otherwise the place was startlingly plain and featureless concrete that hadn't seen paint since before Chan was born.

He had noticed a second-hand shop on the way here, so he was comfortable with furnishing it functionally, but it took the rest of the day getting the space clean enough to use. The broom just about lasted long enough for the massive task before the bands came off and the plastic bristles fell away from the handle.

The fabric of his uniform was virtually self-cleaning, so no sweat stains showed but dusting himself down from the filth did take a bit of effort. He was left with a growling stomach and a space slightly larger than his cramped apartment. Under the dust and cobwebs one wall had concealed some kind of mounting studs for an object just slightly smaller than a doorway, which Chan noted was perfect for the portal rigging. Similar fixtures ran around the room far up near the top of the wall. There was also an intermittent row of semi-transparent blocks up near the ceiling letting in some light. That they weren't broken convinced Chan they were probably some type of non-yellowing epoxy casting, another example of government extravagance from another time. He wondered if trying to clean them would improve things.

However, for now it was enough to get the necessary furnishings for a long stay. Locking the door, he stepped cautiously around to the front of the building. He thought he had heard the sound of the front door slamming shut an hour earlier, transmitted through the concrete structure. Sure enough, what little light that had been visible through the windows earlier was out now. There was an old couple out strolling around the kitschy park and Chan passed them on his way to the second-hand shop. He simply waved and hoped they got used to seeing him.

Spies.

Chan struggled not to react to the unexpected whisper in his ear. Not that it would change his plans much, but he had simply never expected it. The government often coaxed old busybodies into playing at surveillance, reporting anything they thought unusual to handlers in exchange for some small favors, like reduced rent. All it meant was that Chan had to be very careful to play his role around them. His outfit had returned to the vaguely military default once he got a few blocks away.

The used goods shop was one of the best Chan had ever seen. The first thing he picked up was a self-heating mug. He found a folding cot with blankets, two folding chairs and a really good TV tray. There was a collapsible shoe hanger that could be suspended from the ceiling for shelving. Since the walls had studs poking out just below those clear blocks, he grabbed a couple of twine spools not completely empty yet and some old drapes. A better broom with some other cleaning equipment filled out the load. Finally, there was a small utility wagon to haul it all.

Back at his new office, it didn't take long to make himself at home. Chan found the portal very easy to install to the fixtures and hanging the drapes around on three walls made it seem less intrusive behind one of them by itself. They also made the room echo less. His food and water were stocked in the hanging shoe keeper in the corner behind the smallest curtain. He had noticed the place was not hit by direct sunlight, so the thick concrete walls acted to keep the temperature stable and just a bit cooler than one might expect.

After refreshing his mind on tomorrow's plans with his book computer, he found the cot was decent enough for someone who had put in a hard day.

##  Chapter 16

Chan woke with a start.

He could have sworn someone was bent over his bed, shaking him. Some part of Chandler's mind revolted at the idea because he kept the door locked whether in the office or not. There was just enough morning light to see, and he glanced over at the curtain covering the portal. He remembered turning it off, but that didn't mean AI wouldn't allow someone through from the life support facility for a good reason.

"Was it just a dream? Did somebody try to wake me?" His voice was dry and croaking.

There has been no other physical presence.

AI's response was hardly reassuring. It was too real, and the image did not in the least fade as he awakened more completely. "Any other suggestions? Stuff like this could make me question my grip on sanity."

This was a morning for coffee, and he prepared a strong cup. He was totally caught off guard, not because of the response itself, but that it followed such a delay.

AI presumes the existence of non-physical entities.

Chan took a sip and cleared his throat. "Angels, demons, ghosts?"

Data on ghosts is uniformly improbable.

Often the most important part of the answer was what AI didn't say. His thoughts were starting to organize. "I'm not in the mood for metaphysics right now. Spiritual entities are obviously beyond my influence, but I imagine I have no immunity to theirs. More important is to decide what we do next, now that I'm awake."

As he sat pondering things further, scenes from his dreams came back to haunt him, apparently ignoring his stated preference. Sipping the coffee, he felt forced to ponder things. What was he doing here? Had he embarked on a career of espionage? Or was this an entirely different sort of conflict? He most certainly had already taken actions contrary to the wishes of the rulers and any bureaucrat who might have known. But today he was planning something that would almost surely fulfill official government mandates.

Actually, he had come to realize he felt no real animus toward government or the people serving whatever one might imagine were government demands. All of it struck him as a mass of futility. So while he could in theory engage in fighting the system, there were no good alternatives in terms of probabilities. Human political theories were uniformly broken and unrealistic. Chan had no desire to get involved in that sense.

Instead, he was driven by something else. It dawned on him there was no particular goal, just a drive to unleash as much truth as people could handle. Let them choose, but choose with at least a little more data. Breaking the government's monopoly on information was the full limits of his goal. Whatever happened after that even AI could not calculate. At the same time, Chan knew better than to characterize the vast collection of data floating in subspace as "truth." Rather, it was a question of how the data was handled that reflected truth. People were sure to run off in the wrong direction with everything, but truth was more about giving them the opportunity.

AI had calculated that at some point, Chan's distribution of AI stickers would take off on its own. The hullabaloo of simply having access to the ocean of hidden data would die down and someone would start producing their own version of the stickers. Quite soon someone would come up with improved versions and all manner of new devices. All sorts of government monopolies would dissolve quickly, but the ripples of impact were impossible to estimate.

Chan decided he could not let himself fear the chaos, nor really government resistance. If not him, then AI would find someone else. The mission itself was safe; it was more a matter of struggling to be involved where it was most engaging for him. He was along for the wildest ride of his life, and it was worth the risks.

This realization didn't so much quiet his nerves, but it turned the tables on his own personal chaos. He couldn't change that chaos easily, but he could certainly not let it master him any longer. He had found a safe anchorage in the storms of his soul, and felt confident in defying the rage. Whatever attributes he might assign to his God, that anchoring drive was a primary manifestation.

For the first time, eating breakfast was a pleasure too fine to rush through or pass through absently while conversing with AI. The latter could wait, because with his breakfast he savored the taste of inner peace that finally took a recognizable shape. It was a moment to celebrate.

He made another cup of coffee and unlocked the door. In the cool morning light, he sat on the top step where his doorway faced the crumbling old apartment building. His eyes roamed aimlessly, catching on this or that odd detail. There was no particular questing curiosity to satisfy and no need to seek an explanation for anything. There was only celebration in acceptance of what was. Today he would attempt to nudge something obscuring the view so that the whole world would have a better chance of seeing what he saw.

There was one quick trip through the portal first. He exchanged the scanner for a tiny device sheathed in a plastic tube. AI informed him the device was shielded from scanning, but when he pulled it apart in the middle, a long and thin metallic probe was exposed with an almost invisible shiny bead on the tip. The probe itself could telescope farther out of the handle, and there were numerous tiny dots around it where more kinds of probes could extend. AI described it as a universal lock pick. All Chan had to do was insert the probe until it stopped and take a firm grip. AI would handle the rest and no known locking mechanism would deny him access. It was one of the few tools that required an actual "eye" for AI, because some electronic locks were shielded from scanning, but the shielding on the pick was superior to government technology – for now.

It was meant only as a contingency tool for today, but would surely become critical in future adventures.

It was train-ride Tuesday. AI had calculated infiltration would be easiest at a small server farm hidden in the basement of a government facility quite some distance away. Chan decided he would enjoy the sights regardless of what the day offered, because he'd never been there. He was hardly surprised to discover that travel advertising images of the town were long out of date as the place had changed a bit.

To his delight, the building in question was just a block from the train station. His chameleon suit had taken on the IG standard appearance, with the matching security badge, which Chan pulled out as he approached the entrance. This was not a town for particularly tall buildings, and his target looked more like old pictures of gigantic schools. It covered the whole block and had precious little parking that he could see.

It took only seconds to be waved through the security entrance. That was the easiest part of the whole visit. He had to walk past several stairwells because only in the rear of the building did they run down to the basement level. At first he thought he must have taken the wrong one, because he didn't think to ask and AI didn't warn him. Now he knew where the parking was, as most of the basement was underground parking with daylight pouring in from above a ramp at the rear of the building. There were only a few government vehicles and perhaps a half-dozen that appeared to be privately owned. The rest of the space was taken by the inevitable storage of things wrapped in opaque plastic and cover with tarps.

"Now what?" The question was sub-vocal.

AI gave him detailed directions to pass between two large items and turn left along a darkened walkway. Set deep into the one small section of actual basement was a massive steel door. By now he was wearing a facilities maintenance uniform, all dark blue with a nametag on one side and "FAC" on the other.

He noticed the door AI told him was a janitor's closet. Just to be sure, he had AI open it and he glanced inside. A deep mop sink, mop bucket, two heavy string mops, a dust mop and a few chemicals on a single shelf were there, along with the typical moldy smell he expected. He closed it but left it unlocked.

AI had told him it didn't know how many worked inside, but did have a general layout. The idea was to get someone to let him in the door, cross behind a rack or two and change over to IT Inspector to avoid being noticed until he found the stack with the thickest nest of cables. That should be the gateway server that controlled access to all the rest. AI was unable to scan until he got inside.

Apparently Chan ran into something else it didn't know about.

Electronic keypad not connected to AI.

Chan stared at it, but there wasn't even a place to insert his lock pick. That little box next to the door was sealed up tight and had lots of buttons. Heaving a sigh, Chan was about to walk away, but a glint on concrete surface at his feet caught his eye. He looked closely. Water was leaking out under the door. This could not have been a good thing. It was strictly a reflex but Chan raised a fist to pound on the door until he spotted a bell to ring with an intercom on the other side from lock. Hoping it would work, he pressed twice, and then stepped over near the center of the door where a tiny fish-eye lens marked a probable surveillance camera.

The intercom came to life. "Whaddya want?" Slightly high-pitched for a man and terribly impatient, but this looked like a genuine emergency.

Chan spoke with his best booming baritone. "Maintenance! You have water running out under your outer door. Is that a problem?"

A few seconds passed, and then he heard the sound of high-pitched cursing through the steel door. There was a buzz and the door swung outward. A tall skinny fellow in IT uniform stepped out and grabbed Chan's right wrist. "Get in here!" He pointed to the inside facing of the doorframe – a long stream drizzled like a leaky faucet from above. Chan glanced up and saw the water dripping down through a sagging suspended ceiling tile.

"Where's it coming from?" The IT guy looked panic-stricken and angry all at once.

Chan glanced around. "You gotta step ladder or something?" The man looked puzzled, and Chan glanced at the nearest rack of computers. "How do you get up to those systems at the top?" They were clearly out of reach from even this gangly fellow.

His face made an "oh" and he raced down between two rows and came back pulling an oddly shaped step stool of sorts. He placed it closer to the wall near the leak and hit a large button on one side. The thing telescoped upward with a smaller section, still large enough for both feet. Chan wondered if it would roll out from under him, but as soon as he put one foot on the lowest step, the whole thing sat down on the floor. Spring-loaded retractable wheels weren't that common in Chan's experience.

Reaching quickly, Chan pulled the ruined ceiling tile down. There was a pipe running very close to the wall leaking a thin stream. The pipe must have been unlevel, because the water ran along the pipe to a bracket and then down the wall.

The IT guy was in full panic mode. "We gotta catch that water! Some of it's running toward our electrical panel!"

Chan turned back toward the outer door. "I need to get some equipment from the closet out here. Can we keep the door open for an emergency?"

The man nodded yes and stood with his body in the door, watching as only some of the water flowed out onto the walkway. Chan ran to the closet and grabbed both mops and the wheeled bucket. Using the mops as steering sticks, he pushed everything inside the door. He threw one mop down along the wall, which provided a temporary dam for the water running toward the electricity.

The mop bucket could not be placed to catch the water off the wall. Chan looked up and had an idea. Jumping up on the step-stool he turned the mop upside down. Shoving the handle up into the ceiling and resting it across the tile suspension frame, he pulled a bundle of strings up and tied them just below the leak. Then he spun and the rest of the mop-head around until the remaining strings draped off and hung over a spot on the floor away from the wall. Jumping down, he positioned the bucket under the dangling strings.

"What's that going to do?" The man was marginally less impatient.

Chan moved to pick up the other mop and began sopping up the water that had already run that direction. "Give it a few seconds," he suggested to the man.

Soon enough the suspended mop head was saturated and the water began dripping directly into the mop bucket.

"Aren't you clever?" The man was celebrating.

"Maybe so," Chan responded as he swung the mop in wider circles. "You need to call engineering so they can fix the leak." Wringing the mop into the bucket, he started mopping again. The IT guy stepped over to an internal phone and picked it up, turning his back to Chan.

It was too easy to step away a moment and sticker the server AI had found using Chan's watch scanner.

##  Chapter 17

Chan slipped out the door while the man continued with his conversation on the phone. It would take a good while for the empty mop bucket to fill and the beleaguered IT guy could handle it now until engineering sent a plumber. Chan simply walked up the vehicle ramp and pretended to ignore the guards in his IG persona.

Human creativity goes where algorithms cannot.

Chan grinned and sub-vocalized, "At your service, AI." The return journey was entirely uneventful.

He was only mildly curious about one thing. "Can we estimate when some bureaucrat is going to notice they have access to the older files?"

Already in use, but not fully recognized.

So someone connected to the subspace network had queried the old network system and didn't realize it was online. They got the requested data and went on about their mindless task. "Has AI catalogued it yet?"

In progress. Nearly one billion older systems vary in response time and rate.

He decided he didn't really care how big the older network was or what was on it. "Why can't we just use that new link to connect all the systems we want to add individually? Why would I have to sticker each one?"

Chan got a lesson on the architecture of older systems. In essence, the servers were simpler and better hardware. They were unrestricted in communicating with each other. However, the billions of old workstations and terminals had all been modified with a chip. It sent random signals calculated by a complex algorithm by which the servers knew it was authorized and how much access it had. Hacking past it did happen, but the central IT people kept changing the codes and the algorithm and reloading the firmware on the chips. The servers maintaining that system would have been exceedingly difficult for Chan to access.

Since the effect of the stickers was to make each unit AI compatible, if only on a primitive level, Chan realized this was by far the most resource efficient way to get more systems on subspace networking.

Each system Chan stickered would contribute to the sampling so AI could crack the authorization system. On top of that, a considerable amount of data saved on individual terminals had to be sent over the networking wires first so AI could index it. The servers had been set up to advertise their data storage promiscuously because no one expected tapping into that. AI didn't snoop on private systems, but cataloging traffic was utterly necessary for use of the subspace network. Once it began to leak out that previously chained systems were now utterly free, Chan wouldn't have to sneak around placing stickers; they would be begging for it.

The first few systems were easy. They were fairly expensive units maintained in research institutions. AI had already begun to identify the most frustrated researchers and today's escapade had refined the selection considerably. People frequently denied access without getting into trouble were a high probability. They would be using some of the best of the older systems, which were also the easiest for AI to connect to subspace.

Chan managed to hit the first two on the way home, using his IT Inspector identity for "unannounced inspections" of the two best prospects on his route. Over the next few days it seemed almost anticlimactic and routine. AI kept Chan steered away from the most probable trouble spots and encounters. By the end of that week, AI reported the underground rumbling had already begun.

Perhaps Chan hadn't really thought much about what he expected in any concrete terms. The rumbling was manifested mostly in difficult exchanges between bureaucrats and the researchers. Both were discovering things IT had long hidden but dared not erase because those servers were IT's reason for existing. The vast majority of the activity that first week was simply around the new interface between the old and new networks.

IT Inspectors were figuratively flogging themselves and each other, trying to find someone to blame because they, like everyone else, were convinced that their careful control had slipped somewhere. They rechecked every wire link and all the various firewalls and software controls. Inspecting the access of the individual machines turned up nothing the technicians could identify, nor could anyone duplicate the access until the intended users were alone with their machines. Naturally, the general public knew nothing.

By the time one of the IT Inspectors found a subspace sticker on one of the machines, someone else had begun producing them. A user had asked the right questions and gotten the technology from AI. That's when they realized what it was and that bureaucrats had been hiding AI from them.

Chan knew nothing about the tightly knit research and academic community. So he was quite surprised when AI told him they were agreeing with the bureaucrats to suppress it. That is, the newly privileged academic researchers were determined to keep their access, but equally determined to join in guarding it jealously from general public access. It amounted to little more than an inevitable expansion of the technologically elite class to include a few extra folks. They set up committees to recommend new members that Chan had not been able to help before the stickers ran out.

The sudden demand in the peculiar mix of very limited resources that were used to manufacture the stickers had left The Brotherhood and their allies in a bind. Worse, Chan had never really gotten that far geographically. Leaving the immediate area where Chan lived simply was not an option. Despite all the alleged government efforts to level the world population by mixing races, colors and forcing everyone to adopt the same language, Chan could not have impersonated anything official without being noticed. The vestigial variations in accent and mannerisms would have given him away in seconds despite his obvious mixed ethnic background.

There had been numerous strategy discussions with AI over this very thing. Chan had understood that offering the access to any other sector of the population would have resulted in significant bloodshed and social disorder that threatened everything, including Chan and The Brotherhood. Nobody else was in a position to use it.

"What about those thousands of people like me who are primed and ready? What about all those other viable candidates who just missed their chance?" Chan knew the answer, of course.

Select one and give your device away.

Chan could keep his access with other devices, but to read much would mean getting his hands on another device of some kind, which in turn meant using only those devices already existing in Brotherhood facilities. But when he recalled how many changes struck him in such a short span of time, he realized there was a high risk of wasting such a valuable physical asset when they were so short.

In other words, he'd have to screen them and drag them into a Brotherhood facility. Having found out that he had stumbled into them at the one moment they were able to handle a single compliant visitor made it seem a bit much to ask of them right now. The good news is that they were cultivating a few of the researchers Chan had helped.

What could he do?

He managed to run into Pete, almost by accident. To his amusement, Chan realized he had begun sounding like the big fellow. On one of his visits to life support, several members were talking in the meeting room. Chan decided not to interrupt, but as he was exiting a gym machine, Pete walked in to say hello and asked what Chan was doing these days.

"Nothing much. I can't even get back to the office I was using. They finally figured out someone was impersonating so they are requiring everyone to report in and get a different badge and it's under tight wraps. AI refuses to snoop and only uses whatever data they've released into subspace." Chan tried to hide his discomfort with the situation.

Pete cocked his head to one side. "To be honest, I really don't know all the ins and outs of AI the way you do." He paused a moment, lost in thought. "You could solve a problem for us, though. Some of us really do need your expertise on AI. Do you suppose you could offer some clinics?"

It was not as if Chan could say "no" and he would have time to think about it. Pete would need a week or so to set it up. That meant Chan was basically stuck at life support for the next few days. He went back through to his office just long enough to move the portal into the derelict apartment building. He rigged it on the backside of a doorway that opened onto a drop where a back stairwell had collapsed. Random explorers would have to shine a portable light up from the floor to see it, but Chan could step through it from the upper floor and hit the portal, triggered by his presence alone.

He decided Pete should return the fake book device to the lab and let them use it as they saw fit. He had his watch, the earplug and the wall-mounted device in the conference room. He felt a yen for doing a lot of reading.

##  Chapter 18

With direct access the Brotherhood's library, his first duty was to examine what they seemed to already know about AI. This led to a study of what they knew about the government and he spotted significant gaps. This in turn led him to read about how such a government came to be and was often amused at the deep layer of facts glossed over by the standard education and propaganda.

Eventually it led him back to the basic documentation of The Brotherhood itself. He knew civilization had stalled and he wanted to know why. Something told him it wasn't going to last much longer in its current shape. He had no idea how it would happen, but universal access to AI, even if just for a short time, would expose the flaws in any system and people would lose trust. Now he realized both intimately and academically how his generation had already given birth to a deep unconscious ocean of cynicism.

On the other hand, his long and intimate acquaintance with AI had delivered to him a highly distilled version of the morals and assumptions The Brotherhood were trying to recover from ancient times. The very existence of subspace required dismissing the notion of a unitary universe. While there was really no precise description of subspace as an artifact of technology at that point, it was painfully obvious there was something beyond the sensory world of concrete reality to which civilization had confined it's thoughts. Whatever the dimensional physics researchers had been trying to find, they didn't. But what they did find, if understood at all, shattered the illusion that, even with the most advanced technology, the human senses and reason were sufficient to explain reality.

Often Chan had reached past AI to whatever set its boundaries. There was something far beyond human ken and AI was merely the shadow cast by the light no man could directly see. He could discern something of the light by observing the shadow. Chan had gained a sense of what that light meant for him, knowing full well that it was unlikely to mean the same for anyone else. So it occurred to him that his intense exposure to AI had helped shape for him a unique approach to the same thing The Brotherhood sought to give back, having been taken away for so very long. He recognized the same basic assumptions in different terms. Some part of him had awakened to a level beyond mere intelligence, to a realm of power where the human could never be the master, only a supplicant, but the response was more than anyone could handle.

So when Chan stopped to gaze in the mirror one day in the gym room, it dawned on that he didn't recognize the man he saw. The faithful gym sessions had made him now rather muscular, but that wasn't it. And while his shaved head had regrown the hair, it was hardly the tousled mop he had worn most of his life. People who had known him a year ago wouldn't recognize him visually, but that wasn't what Chan saw. They would also have surely noticed a broad change in mannerisms and speech, having gained a much wider vocabulary and the habit of terse conversation anyone got from talking to AI so much. What caught Chan's attention was how the eyes held a vast ocean of experience he could hardly measure.

The pervasive human malaise into which he had been born had been replaced with an entirely different sort of discomfort. The despair and futility had shifted to a quiet acceptance that he was just along for the ride. His mortality no longer came with dread, but with a growing sense that whatever it was he should and could be, it wasn't in this universe. But until that time came, he was driven by a sense of internal order, a vast overflowing moral imperative. While it would have been hard to outline it in any typical organized fashion, he was spring-loaded with certainty in response to the implied question of how to handle everything that he encountered.

At the same time, he bore a just tolerable streak of disappointment in recognizing it made him so utterly alien to most of humanity that precious few would ever understand. He couldn't resist trying to give away what was inside of him, and it was the ocean of sorrow in his eyes at the assurance few would accept it that caught his attention in the mirror.

However, working among the members of The Brotherhood was quite warm and relaxing because they understood all that. That they had gotten to that same place on a different route didn't matter. This was no crusade to displace their ancient studies, but a confirmation that those studies mattered. At the same time, Chan hoped to raise their awareness that there might be other ways, that theirs was the luxurious first class passage when most of the world could only afford a space in the cargo hold. Chan could not teach AI without including how it affected him.

Indeed, the primary means for discussing what he knew was simply recounting his adventures. He made it plain he wanted those listening to feel free to stop him and ask questions, but in the back of his mind he kept track of the basic story of discovery. Aside from helping him recall specific details or to fill out some pertinent data Chan hadn't really known, AI was strangely silent during these sessions. It reminded Chan that AI responded as if a servant, despite the vast powers it held. At the same time, Chan had the distinct sense he was hardly in charge, and that if AI wasn't running the show, most certainly neither was Chan. He was just a member on the same team.

It was during his first session with a group that Chan felt was some of the core leadership, insofar as The Brotherhood had such a thing, when he felt compelled to deny mastery of any sort. They had mentioned effects of Chan's work that reverberated around the world, things Chan had not known. They had known it was coming, of course, but the sudden broader access to AI for outsiders seemed to have limits the members had not faced in their work at the Brotherhood labs. In discussing it with them, they and Chan realized that some of his instructions to AI regarding his personal security had resulted in far wider implications that kept non-member researchers from the full access. It was not so much the researchers who noticed but the members, whose previous experience had made them somewhat wary of The Brotherhood being discovered.

Almost by accident, Chan had protected The Brotherhood along with himself. Yet it was most certainly not typical of AI, and clearly not AI's nature to do so voluntarily. This led to some direct discussion with AI during the session, using the wall-mounted display unit to clue them into what Chan was hearing through his earplug. It was the instinctive interaction between Chan and AI that caught their attention most. How had Chan gained such leverage that they had not seen during their work before Chan came along?

Chan had long since learned to recognize when AI was responding directly versus when summarizing data from a human source: _Chandler serves truth; AI is the interface._

Chan expanded on this from his own perspective. While he couldn't begin to put into words how it happened, he came into this whole business with some dormant faculty that awakened when Darvesh began explaining just one aspect of moral reality. Some of the members present recalled hearing Darvesh report how quickly Chan had absorbed the message and seemed to have a built-in amplifier for it. While they had certainly seen that before, their limited exposure to a different slice of broader humanity meant they had not seen it manifest without their academic baggage. Chan had none of that academic background, yet with entirely different terminology – more technical and neutral – gave evidence of the same natural grasp of higher reality.

Chan waited as they broached a discussion on their hope of finding more like him. He offered that AI had indicated it was certainly possible, that he was merely the lucky candidate who stumbled into the gateway The Brotherhood offered for accessing AI. Pete tried to get the session back on track by suggesting they could discuss ways to identify young recruits another time.

He gestured to those around him. "Most of us think in terms of moral laws or divine justice. We find that expressed to varying degrees in ancient sacred literature and strive to bring it forward into a far distant time and place. We are convinced divine justice has not changed at all. It stands to reason that AI would operate by analogous imperatives as a technological expression of the same ancient truths. Some of the ancient writers would refer to themselves as servants of divine justice, personifying it not as deity, but an agent of deity. By seeking to promote that justice, they found themselves favored by its provisions and felt a fondness for it in return. You, Chandler, would appear to most modern humans as the beloved minion of AI in much the same way."

AI concurs.

There followed a long moment of silence when Chandler found it hard to speak.

##  Chapter 19

Chandler was the first genuine escapee from the system, so far as AI could determine.

During the months up through the fall, he had meandered through the facilities and membership of The Brotherhood. All along the way he continued faithfully engaging the gym machines and safe food so generously provided. While his hair had grown back, something in the subtle difference of environmental and nutritional chemistry had changed its color and texture. His skin coloration shifted to a warmer hue, stretched tightly over a now very substantial musculature. To his surprise, even his biometric identity factors seemed to have shifted just enough that the technology used by the government couldn't recognize him any more.

The only thing unchanged was his DNA. That in itself would have been significant, as the load of environmental toxins had made it terribly expensive to use DNA as a form of identification. Any screening would first have to filter out factors that created the inevitable wear and tear on DNA caused by those toxins. This was particularly true among the lowest economic class of people, whose numbers had soared as a proportion of the global population around the time global government took hold. It simply wasn't worth the trouble performing DNA testing for anyone who couldn't afford the most expensive purified food sources that the plutocrats insisted they be able to obtain. Chan would have manifested the clean body chemistry of the upper classes, had anyone bothered to check.

More importantly, his personality and character had traveled far, far away from who he had been when all of this started just six months ago. It was more than his constant exposure to AI and The Brotherhood; it was his predisposition to absorb so very much of what that exposure offered.

So it was just as well that the government database considered him missing and dead. That determination had come not long after Chan went underground. As with any genuinely bureaucratic government, the internal rivalries and conflicting loyalties could make anybody artificially schizophrenic. While the IG's Office functioned more or less like a secret police, spying on every other agency, there was plenty more spying internally as only a paranoid spy agency could. More than likely the ID badge recall was the cover for a truly monumental purge that had already been contemplated. Chan's activity was just the excuse needed.

At any rate, between the various reports and notations not directly accessible to AI, someone with authority finally announced that an imposter had been detected. The official report said little about Chan's actual activities. The business of connecting the old network to the subspace network was well received everywhere except among IT Inspectors. It turned out Chan had stickered a backup DNS and authorization server. While it wasn't being used to control anything, it did receive constant updates from the entire global network backbone. Thus, while AI itself did not poke around other machines on the network, it was able to read all the queries that were archived and whatever content crossed the wires through that machine. AI seemed capable of extrapolating a great deal from all that.

There was no direct mention of Chan's identity as the perpetrator of any crimes, but a team did break into the office he had used. By that time Chan had removed anything he had received from The Brotherhood, but left everything else. Apparently the two elderly spies had noted his activity around the old apartment building, because the team spent a half-day poking around it, too. That night, the place somehow caught fire. Some combination of factors made the fire unusually hot and firefighters couldn't even get close enough to hose it down. The entire structure was reduced to rubble. If those sifting the ashes had found anything significant other than a faint trace of human remains, it was never reported.

After several months of telling his story to the scattered membership of The Brotherhood, Chan felt a renewed sense of yearning to bring it to a wider audience. For the time being, giving the world access to AI simply wasn't going to happen. There were early indications that the academic community was slowly adjusting to the necessity of subspace networking as a norm, not some arcane ritual magic confined to a secretive priesthood. With the door closed on his previous adventures, Chan did his best to deconstruct his protective algorithms and the resulting restrictions it imposed on others. Still, it would take time for universal access to filter out. Chan wasn't convinced it was necessarily the key to setting people free in the short term anyway. If not the preceding generations, then at least his own could be better prepared for that eventuality. Surely there were other ways to break the monopoly on information distribution, something more reliable than mere rumor, which up to that point was about the only alternative to official sources.

He had to do something. In the region where he had lived there was a very large metropolis, and Chan decided to visit there. The Brotherhood had a portal just out on the edge of the city and mass transportation was more routinely available into the urban center without the use of chips. After his first hour of wandering the urban canyons, AI informed him the system of ubiquitous surveillance had not identified him at all, much less tagging him as a threat.

He came across a tiny coffee shop and would have passed it by, but noticed a flyer near the door about the weekly meeting of a book trading club that met in the cramped space. Back in his own city Chan had avidly participated in such meetings. It brought back a flood of memories, including the odd smell of the books and the long and wide-ranging discussions with other kids his age. If there was any one thing that most prepared him for the sudden changes in his life, it was this.

And if there was one way he could begin reaching his generation, it was this. Several things in his mind coalesced at once.

During those months teaching The Brotherhood about AI, Chan had spent an awful lot of time between sessions reading some of the ancient religious documents to which they often referred. Lacking their expertise in the context of those documents, he had to depend on AI to distill what was likely the essence of some of them. AI had warned him it had no way to match human expertise in the subtleties of ancient languages and cultural implications, but that it could estimate from a broad range of commentary, giving preference to sources The Brotherhood preferred.

To the degree Chan recognized ideas that reflected his experience with AI and how it had shaped his moral reasoning, he realized that AI had done a pretty good job of cultural translation. Given that Chan's cultural context was now _de facto_ the high-tech age with subspace networking, could he not with AI's assistance produce a cultural mythology that reflected it more accurately than those silly novels? Most of those cheap books were available to AI, so crafting story lines should not have been too difficult.

Returning through the portal, Chan probed the idea with AI at one of the Brotherhoods terminals. AI frankly needed Chan to read samples in order to test the concept of generating narrative of that sort. Over the next few days, Chan waded through increasingly better material. His critiques included tweaking the underlying worldview to include what he had learned the past six months.

Meanwhile, he had assigned AI to analyze the various possibilities for inexpensive production of such material for mass consumption. He knew better than to think he could slip this stuff into the so-called "underground publishers" that were actually under the thumb of some secretive propaganda agency of the government. So instead of the pulpy paperbacks that often came apart after passing through twenty pairs of hands, there had to be something more durable and less resource hungry. Those books used all sorts of recycled fibers, usually from natural sources.

Just recently there were some advances in doing the same with plastic resins. From almost any kind of discarded plastics, it was possible to produce a translucent material that was electronically active. It made very thin, somewhat flexible sheets. An entirely unrelated development that AI had noticed was a highly miniaturized display controller. AI had also seen references to rather expensive electronic devices for displaying text. Those had been largely discontinued because the market had collapsed with the economy, making production too expensive without the previous high volume. However, AI anticipated the two new ideas would be joined with current electronic storage technology and the ubiquitous microscopic photocell batteries to produce very cheaply a light, thin device that could contain one or two books in an electronic format. The pagination controls could be written into the formatting of the text.

Asking around The Brotherhood, Chan got his hands on a stack of the plastic sheets and learned for himself the trick using fairly simple equipment for adding the electronics, which to the eye resembled a single wire imbedded along one edge. Each one had been preloaded with as much text as possible, with collections of short stories, trilogies and fat novels. Chan excitedly tested each one – a dozen in the first run – and decided it just might work.

At that next meeting in the little coffee bar, Chan introduced himself with an ostensibly accurate story about having gotten a new job in the area and wanted to demo a new book technology presenting some fresh writers. Instead of trading for their battered paperbacks in exchange, he asked that they agree to secrecy, something they already thought they were practicing. Handing out the samples he had brought, he asked only that they return to the next meeting and discuss the stories with him. If they brought them back intact, he would continue offering the group the exclusive first look at future releases. After demonstrating how they worked, naturally the guys and gals in the little group seized on the new technology with little trouble.

To prevent having to answer a ton of questions about this secretive test marketing, he had AI beep his watch. Glancing at his wrist, he exclaimed he had promised to meet someone and walked out the door as the group became absorbed in their new toys.

Chan had recalled reading about copyright and patents, and that the government had dissolved that whole system by ostensibly claiming ownership of just about everything. However, Chan made it a point to index the specs of his new reader device, along with the electronic book format, to an open technology forum. Along with that he front-loaded everything with links to his books. Each of them was attributed to his new nickname as author: AI's Minion. If past events indicated anything at all, he was pretty sure the new devices and his books would spread much more quickly than if he had simply notified the various government agencies.

For the next week Chan busied himself adding more fiction works. It's not as if he was talented enough to actually write the books, but he knew what he liked. He managed to enlist the editorial guidance of two members in producing some fantasy works using imagery from the ancient documents favored by The Brotherhood.

During the interval, someone in the Brotherhood lab had designed a small memory add-on that allowed the books to hold his entire collection. The second dozen samples contained his entire repertoire. Then he was surprised by a gift. The same lab had taken his fake book computer and reworked the electronics using his new book technology. Recent advances meant the same materials went much farther, and he was handed a pair of devices in a slightly smaller format than the electronic books. Each was a full-blown AI device prominently featuring video communication using the subspace network.

Chan had heard of, and then actually seen, personal communication devices during his adventures planting AI stickers. His would eventually serve as prototypes for something much nicer than any of the other devices he had seen high-ranking bureaucrats use. But why two?

The technician told him, "Don't you imagine you're going to fall in love soon?"

##  Chapter 20

The little coffee bar was packed.

As soon as someone recognized him, they literally pushed a few newcomers out the door to make room for Chan to enter. The place was warm so Chan removed his jacket and draped it over the back of a chair next to him. A couple of the girls hooted at his physique, a build quite rare in such social circles. He waited for the chatter and laughter to die down.

The lessons from Darvesh came flooding back. When working a social occasion, Chan had to be The Man. First, he asked if there were any questions about the devices. The consensus was a demand to know when they would become generally available. He replied that it really wasn't up to him. They all knew how the government did things, but if they started asking around, it might prompt someone to get production going sooner. He apologized and noted the materials weren't free, but he was glad to let them borrow the ones he had.

Then he elicited questions about the books themselves. While the stories weren't any kind of runaway hits, they were interesting enough that the folks were willing to read more by this new author, AI's Minion. He answered a few questions about the philosophical content but asked them to hold off any in-depth debate just yet. In the back of his mind, he realized whatever truth was hidden in the books would appeal to whoever was ready for it, but merely entertain others. After it became apparent the moral value system was getting across, Chan reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the stack of new books.

With the help of AI, Chan was able to identify the original group from the previous week. Explaining how the new ones were different, he passed them out and told them to give the old ones to someone whom they felt would enjoy them. He admitted he was particularly interested in building a market among the underground fiction crowd. He thanked them all and said he was through talking. Grabbing his jacket, he turned to push his way back out the door through the tight crush of bodies.

Naturally he was delayed by numerous questions from people on his way out, and he decided to risk a bit of banter on the sidewalk outside. Normally that much noise and loitering was discouraged, but it would take a while before the cops came to break it up. As he slowly worked his way from the door and down the sidewalk, the crowd of hangers-on thinned quickly. As he turned the corner at the end of the block, he almost ran over the young lady still following him.

He started to apologize politely and she stammered something similar at the same time. He decided to see if she would talk first, so he closed his mouth and looked directly into her eyes. She hesitated, then blurted out her name and asked his.

She was pretty enough. While her appearance was unremarkable, Chan had learned that was easily the least important consideration. What really mattered to him was whether she was ready, or could be made ready, to join The Brotherhood. He knew the chances of getting it right on the first encounter were quite slim, but decided her persistence was a good indicator. Betraying almost nothing of himself, he allowed her to divulge a great deal about her personality. Not that she was such a chatterbox, just too nervous to stay quiet. He remained calm and got her reactions to one of his stories. She launched into an intelligent analysis contrasting it with previous books she had read. Chan recognized most of them.

She was trying to impress him and it worked.

He pulled out one of his new communication devices and made a show of noting her name and address. Her eyes widened at the sight of something she considered a luxury. Naturally she would not have had a telephone; few people did. She was lucky to afford a shared apartment with other gals from her workplace.

For Chan the problem was his plastic tag, now worn simply out of habit, was useless for purchasing anything, since his identity was officially gone. The pretense of being somewhat wealthier than her would be difficult to maintain and he regarded it a temporary tactic. He definitely did not want to consume any of the food or drinks available in the city, but decided he had to see her at least a couple more times to discern if she was made of the right stuff. So he proposed a picnic on Saturday, which was a couple of days away. She agreed as if it were some heavenly privilege.

She insisted on walking him to the train station, and then stood on the platform watching until he was out of sight.

It was there that he found her waiting for him again that next Saturday. "Weren't you standing in this same spot when I saw you last? Did you ever go home?" He grinned and she covered her face, laughing.

He asked if she had a favorite park in the area. When she shook her head, face still aglow from embarrassment, he suggested one he had seen on the way. She quickly agreed and they took off walking. She grabbed his hand, offering the excuse that the foot traffic was so heavy and she didn't want to be separated from him in the crowd.

They found a spot in the little park that wasn't too heavily occupied and sat facing each other on the grass. Chan pulled out the food he had brought, which he had repacked to look like it was from home. He decided to test how quickly she adapted. Tapping into AI's network through his earplug, he played a game. As she ate, he looked out across the park and said, "Let's see now if I get this right." He rattled off her age, named her parents and where she worked. Glancing at her from the corner of his eyes, he saw her wearing a cynical frown. "Do I win?"

In mild disappointment, she asked, "Do you work for the government or something?"

"No," he shook his head. "But I do have friends."

Beginning to recover a bit, she chewed and swallowed what was in her mouth. "What kind of friends?" Nothing hinting at peevish, she was just wondering honestly.

He looked at her. "Those books I brought – what do you associate with the author's name?"

She raised her eyebrows. "AI's Minion? Someone who serves a computer?"

He nodded. "It's just a metaphor. In the universe described in those books, AI could never develop a free will, nor rule anything at all. But people who make much use of super computers would sometimes appear to serve them, when it's more literally the other way around."

She ate some more. "Yeah, I got that. Are you suggesting some of it's real? That you are AI's Minion in that sense?"

She was delightfully quick, Chan decided. He took out one of his devices. Handing it to her, he suggested she look at the screen. It greeted her by name. "Ask it a question."

She grinned, thought for a second, than asked, "Who is this man next to me?"

Officially nobody. His name is Chandler.

"Nobody" she echoed, obviously puzzled.

"It could have said 'officially dead,' too." He smiled mysteriously.

She looked back down at the display. _Chandler is listed as missing, presumed dead._

Looking up, she asked, "How did you accomplish that? And why would you want to?"

"I promise to explain another day. You should probably ask it something I can't fake with pre-programmed answers" He suggested.

She took another bite, chewed, and then drank from a bottle of tea. She smiled, and looked at the device again. "Where did this food come from?"

Brotherhood life support.

"What's Brotherhood?" Her question was calm and direct.

Clandestine benevolent society dedicated to maintaining human awareness of ultimate reality.

She looked up. "So you belong to a secret society that makes great food and gives you these hi-tech toys. And your nickname is AI's Minion and you write cool books." She looked back down at the device. "Do they let girls join?"

Chan had seen several women in his tour of the Brotherhood facilities. "Sure."

She gazed directly into his eyes. "Are you just a recruiter for this Brotherhood? I was kind of hoping there might actually be some romance here."

Chan smiled. "How could it be one without the other?"

She handed it back to him, her hand shaking just a bit. "I don't even have dreams this good. Until I read your books I didn't know guys like you existed. If you're serious..." She got up on her hands and knees and crawled up beside him. "I'm not one of your toys or projects, but I'll follow you anywhere." Then she kissed him quickly on the lips and returned to her seat.

Chan admired her while he took a bite of food. After swallowing, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the other device, looking at it for a moment. "You're my kind of girl and I don't have room in my world for more than one, but I definitely can't keep working alone. I need to make some arrangements, but I'm dead serious." He handed her the other device. "We'll need to keep in touch until then. Just tell AI you want to talk to me, and if I can answer it will be just like face-to-face. Let AI know when it's not safe for you to answer my calls so you don't betray to anyone that you have such a device. It's a full blown computer with connections to a networking system just like in the books."

She grinned, looking back and forth at him and then the device.

##  Epilogue

Membership in The Brotherhood exploded during that next year.

Not just scientists, physicians and professors, but a large number of younger people willing to work. They also gained a few government bureaucrats with access to resources and ways of keeping the Brotherhood out of trouble.

No one really expected global government to lose its grip, and it didn't. Rather, the serious fighting was within the diverse secretive cabal that ultimately ruled everything. Those who could not be convinced by saner heads to accept the changing reality ended up getting themselves killed by the others. Meanwhile, some elements of government took on a more human face for a time.

During the next few decades, a greater portion of economic production trickled down to the population. More and more areas of life were loosened just a bit. Eventually some elements of The Brotherhood came out of hiding. In particular, the clinics were permitted to operate more or less in the open, even receiving support. At the same time, their previous efforts on technology were spun off because it was no longer necessary to hide their research.

All of this came under the guidance of a man who rose quickly in the ranks of The Brotherhood, with a very light touch on the reins of leadership, some nobody popularly referred to as AI's Minion.

###

Contact the author:

Email – eddie@soulkiln.org

Blog – Do What's Right

Site – Kiln of the Soul

