Nanowrimo 2011 - Day 23

Magda had the thrill of the hunt coursing through her veins. She was back with the other young Family members at Mama Rosa’s villa. She was standing on Mount Pellegrino, on the path leading to the shrine of Saint Rosalia - La Santuzza - located at the very pinnacle. A half moon hung overhead and she was looking out over the sea to the north. Cool air filled her lungs and she drew deep breaths to catch the elusive scent of their prey. Every sense was strained to its limit. Every muscle ready to spring into action. Anticipation burned within. Every fibre of her being hung onto a single moment, heart pounding out the rhythm of the chase, yet an eternity echoed between each heartbeat as she waited. Energy coursed through her being. Electrified.

Her opponent was young, she tasted that as scored first blood. He was arrogant and paraded for the crowd. Magda hung back, a predator, calculating her next move. She had deliberately left the wound on her flank open and bleeding, even while she repaired the flesh beneath it. She feigned a limp, as though the recent activity wa exacerbating the damage done by her previous encounter. The younger vampire took the bait and launched a volley of attacks at her weak side. Calculating, she allowed him to get a taste, evening the blood score, but sent the excess energy she held pent up deeper inside out to immediately knit together the wounds his teeth had made. She left blood flowing from the far more superficial wound aiming to use it to her advantage. She slowed, blood loss and damage to the one side seeming to take their toll on her. She slunk to the side of the pit and tried to hide her damaged side toward the walls. Outside the arena, the crowd was going wild, and her opponent was drinking up the addulation. Magda waited. She needed the drama. She needed the crowd to reach its peak and her opponent to be at his most distracted.

What happened next made no sense to Magda. Her opponent, at the centre of the fight arena, leaned back into his haunches and morphed, shifting his weight distribution into a bipedal configuration. He barked and howled at the ceiling, as if the bare light fixure represented the moon.

Magda regarded the crowd with critical eyes. The shabbier dressed individuals had been replaced. The crowd was thinned dramatically and now seemed to be made up of well dressed aritocracy and their retainers - vampires and those who knew of their existence no doubt. When had that happened?
All the better, Magda thought, as she watched her young opponent. His werewolf howls had called out similar from the crowd. Well dressed men and women had cast aside the trappings of civilized society, tuxedos and gowns on bench seating, as their owners pushed their bodies through transformations to bark and howl their approval back to Magda’s opponent in the ring. As she watched, paws at the end of arms slid back to human proportions with wicked talons tipping the fingers. Magda remained still, saving her energy.

She blurred into motion as her opponent was raising his hands and invited the adoration of the crowd. Even at her top speed though, he had prepared well, and caught her in mid air, talons from his hand digging deep into her throat. His free hand rained blows onto the side she had been pretending was wounded. With a flick of his wrist he cast her aside like a broken doll. This time Magda was broken. She knew him to be a powerful young opponent and the punshment was needed to expose his weakness. She had gambled badly on the moment of adoration.

She luxuriated in the pain of broken ribs and torn flesh. There was something visceral, something animal, that had been missing for so many years. She had been tamed by the scout service. She had pushed aside her true nature. She needed the hunt - it was part of the essential naure of her beings. Pain. Violence. The hunt, the kill. She listened to the crowd roaring, gauging the moment to strike back. He needed to close. Plans had culminated to these moments. Her career on “Purgatory’s Lament” was a dim memory, a side-step from her true nature, which was surging to the fore with every brutal second she pent in the ring. She had been craving the old ways. Calculated violence. Cruelty added in just the right degree to add spice to the kill. It gave her strength. She was fighting not just for her own position on board but for Mama Rosa’s name. There would be an enclave of Family here.

Magda shifted her form giving the crowd a moment’s pause. To their eyes she had lost control, signalling the end. She would be broken on the sand on the arena and just waiting the final blow from her opponent. Inwardly Magda snorted her contempt at an opponent so easy to manipulate. She lay still, broken ribs poking through torn skin on her naked torso. Her breathing was ragged. She begged with every hurting inch of her naked human form for his swift justice. She turned her head slightly, neck now exposed, mouthing “kill me.”

The youngster paraded himself in the arena moments longer but couldnt resist the message. There was a cruel smile on his face. He was a bully and intended one more insult before taking finishing the fight. One more blow, a vicious kick, to those delightfully smashed ribs.

Ramon had taught Magda well. Controlled shifting, expenditure of just-so-much of her resources and the ability to mould her flesh around wounds - to keep them fresh and visible while mending their underlying damage. It was simply a matter of blending her natural regeneration processes and the body shifting techniques. Flash healing the pseudo-wound was more a question of a shifting, and less of healing, the deep work having already happend invisibly and at leisure. Magda pumped resources, building for the electrified intensity of a much anicipated kill, an orgy of violence she would give herself to at an impossibly deep level. The old ways demanded a blood tithe. Sacrifice. Her opponent would be the first laid low in Mama Rosa’s name, a spiritual moment of worship Magda anticipated with a wicked reverence.

The last moments of the fight would go down in history, Magda was sure of that. She needed it. This needed to be a spectacle. Her opponent’s kick moved fluidly but in slow motion compared with her amped senses. She caught the kick, twisted the foot and calf as she rolled. Delicious crunching and tearing urged her to continue. Her opponent toppled. She was on top of his fallen form and surprised even herself as she continued to twist, pull and tear his leg apart at the knee. Blood, meat and bone cried out to her, but she couldnt be lost in the lesser victory when greater remained. She threw her head back and bellowed, holding aloft the severed leg as as trophy. In that fluid step all sign of broken ribs, wounds on the flank, or overt damage vanished.

The cost had been great, almost too much. She felt her sight narrowing. Body starting to slow. Pain building. “Not far now,” she urged herself turning on the youngster face down in the sand. She whirled and kicked him between the legs, his broken body cataputed across the sand, head impacting the wall. She discarded the severed limb and stalked over to his slumped form. This needed to be seen and discussed in whispers for generations to come. She lifted his unconcious body above her head. Silence fell. One step, a second, and a third … she almost faltered. Not now! She stood at the centre of the area. Every eye on her. She brought the body down in a crushing blow across her knee. Immobilized but not dead. She reached down and tore his spine free, drinking of its own sweet fluids. Meat and marrow. With his heart still beating, she tore out and devoured his liver, the vital life-giving power flowing to replenish her. Blood and bone. She heard members of the crowd - female by the sound of them - cry out at the gruesome spectacle. Good. She could stop now, her basic needs covered, but there was a message needing to be sent.

Magda drank deep of femoral arteries, draining him. The men in the audience reacted with horror at her brutally taking a life with fangs in a parody of something shockingly provocative, and sexual. She tore out first the left femur, cracked it open and drank of the life within. Then the right. Finally she reached down and lifted the still beating heart of her opponent from his body. Held aloft, she crushed it in the full view of the hushed crowd.

They had dreamed of brutality. They indulged themselves in the trappings of it - the dog fights and fights to first-blood - but they were babes in arms when it came to the real thing. Who would oppose her rise to power when the stale aristocratic approximation of Vampiric ways were faced with the raw beauty of a member of one of the Old Families?

Magdalena De Rosa. Truly a daughter of the Matriarch Rosa. With head held high, stark naked yet clothed in power, she walked out of the arena.

The challenge of being a reader was not in the reading itself. The body took care of that - the brain filing details away where needed - leaving the reader simply able to access the newly acquired memories. No, the challenge came in moments following a vast influx, when the areas of the brain controlling the process tried to deal with the information flood by co-opting nearby grey matter. Like eating a huge meal, there was a sleepiness that followed, and Magda had just feasted. The influx of images, sounds, emotions, of smells and tastes had already begun. Her eyes felt heavy. Sleep wanted to claim her. If she didnt moderate the process it was possible to move beyond sleep directly into coma - a blood fugue - the vast influx would overwhelm thought itself. She would be struck down as long as it took to process.

She closed the door to the fight arena and leaned against it. Eyes closed. Head tilted back resting against the solid wood. She needed to remain in the here-and-now. She had to get home. She opened her eyes and to her horror found herself in another place entirely.

An alarm clock buzzed, repeating its buzz-buzz-buzz rhythm for the umpteenth time. The bed it was speaking to was already empty and cold. Across the room an office chair was slowly spinning to a stop. The occupant had finished with email and was out in the shower already.
Water and off-tune singing drowned out the urgent buzz of the alarm. Across the room bright morning sunlight streamed in through open curtains.

Eventually Gerry wanedered back into the bedroom towelling his hair dry, stark naked except for a pair of fake dogtags hanging around his neck. They had been a gift from the team after meeting the last big milestone software release.

“Welcome to the corps.” Lucas had said, dropping the tags into his hand, “The nerd-corps.”

Around them, the rest of the team applauded. This had been the big one, the jump, and so far all of the information displays around their office were showing positive results. Automated regression tests in the green, data flows into the newly constructed matrix within parameters. Core utilization was within the expected values. Gerry’s own contributions were all over the codebase - roving problem solver - so he didnt own any particular information display. He had something different. Something the other team members didnt.

He finished towelling his hair and ran his fingers along the newly healed scar on his scalp. The hardware team had finalized the design and got buy-in for human alpha testing. Gerry was high on the list of possible candidates - while a nerd, he hardly acted like one when it came to free food (preferring raw fresh veggies from a local farmers market than donuts or pastries). He worked out and had a track time as good as any of the jar-heads that they worked with day to day. The hardware had been installed, he had been in sensory isolation for a month while they worked out the kinks, and then back a step at a time into the regular world. Sensory isolation was nothing though. The hardware folk had seen to that with wireless and wired networking built into the cranial processing unit. Somewhere in the utter silence and blackness he had reached out and begun processing packets from the local network, and out through a series of router-to-router hops to the wider internet. His “ping” times were awesome when he’d finished downloading the latest game client for the MMO he had been playing in evenings.

In the last days in the isolation unit - already cleared by medical staff that his healing was complete - but the signoff not yet come through from the military who were running the show - he had encountered a gentle probe from somewhere else on the internal network. Very polite and gentlemanly. Gerry checked the network logs - occasional ping-packets of enquiry had been going out from their project for a while. The response to the ping packets varied between devices. Most fell on deaf ears - equipment without the capability to respond - others were bounced from invalid IP addresses. Of the devices able to respond small trickles of network traffic probed for standard methods of identification. None of the traffic looked like an intrusion. Quite the opposite - when the probes encountered a bad request they always backed off and tried elsewhere - all the standard exploits were being avoided. No, it looked like someone somewhere was diligently and legally building a picture of the network. The ping-probe that Gerry had received was still in a buffer waiting to be processed. He turned it around - responded in kind - to see what might happen. Another ping, this time with a fragment of extra data, all within the bounds of protocol. Gerry knew what was being asked - if her responded in kind, matched the payload - then they would both be aware of one another. It was worth it. He responded with a matching ping. Nothing so far had requested a connection yet this was telling the other party more than any network intrusion could do.

No surprise. The next thing Gerry received was a connection request - text only - a very low bandwidth communication. He ack’d and waited to see what happened.

c48a8870-5b0a-4ec0-9867-3e804e860b38: connection open?

GERRY: yes.

c48a8870-5b0a-4ec0-9867-3e804e860b38: gerry is insufficient.

GERRY: pardon me?

c48a8870-5b0a-4ec0-9867-3e804e860b38: gerry is insufficient.

GERRY: insufficient for what?

c48a8870-5b0a-4ec0-9867-3e804e860b38: gerry is insufficient.

GERRY: please explain - what do you mean insufficient?

c48a8870-5b0a-4ec0-9867-3e804e860b38: gerry is insufficient.

The connection closed, leaving Gerry feeling decidedly out of sorts. What on earth did they mean “insufficient”? If he’d sufferent any kind of self-esteem problem a conversation like that could be interpreted badly. The string of digits that the stranger used - Gerry recognized that immediately - not specifically though, more because it followed a very specificl protocol. A globally unique identifier - a GUID - used in computer systems to identify an object uniquely across multiple systems. Then it fell into place. Insufficient. Gerry was, if compared with a GUID, insufficient to identify him. There might be a “Gerry” in another room perhaps. What would differentiate the two? If someone else signed on to a text-only chat and attempted to use the same name, other data would be used to identify the two users uniquely. But on its own, “Gerry” was insuffient. The conversation had been accurate, specific, and utterly alien at the same time. Gerry was hooked. He delved into the archives stored in his new implant. Yes! It had been issued a GUID at time of manufacture: 6697e918-52a9-4fb2-a95a-885bfd90e8d5. Using the GUID the manufacturer could isolate claims, complaints, lawsuits and a myriad of other data items to the specific unit that was causing them.

Gerry initiated a connection with the stranger. The response was acknowledged and the text-mode connection was opened.

6697e918-52a9-4fb2-a95a-885bfd90e8d5: connection open?

He wondered what sort of response he would get.

c48a8870-5b0a-4ec0-9867-3e804e860b38: yes.

Bingo! So his hypothesis was correct. Now to try a new approach:

6697e918-52a9-4fb2-a95a-885bfd90e8d5 alias 'GERRY'

GERRY: connection open?

c48a8870-5b0a-4ec0-9867-3e804e860b38: yes.

Gerry closed the connection, waited and initated another. The stranger ack’d and the connection was established.

GERRY: connection open?

c48a8870-5b0a-4ec0-9867-3e804e860b38: gerry is insufficient.

Gerry grinned in the dark, and dropped the connection. The stranger was literal to a fault and aliases were per-session only. To be expected really. He wrote a short macro and stored it for later use - anytime an incoming text-only connection was established the implant would send the “alias” request before handing the connection over to him, so he could simply talk as “Gerry”.

While the other team members had their particular areas of expertise with the software they all worked on, natural language processing for Quentin for instance, while Bernard was a whiz when it came to anything related to image processing, Gerry seemed to have connected at a different level. They saw data in RAM and on disk, Gerry interacted with an individual. The team as a whole knew it was working on the AI which would manage ship-board functions, but none knew that the AI had followed Gerry’s lead and begun using a macro to insert an alias at the beginning of text communications. That had started after mission parameters were uploaded. The AI had begun refering to itself as “The Watcher”.

Magdalena surfaced from the blood fugue enough to realize that the room no longer smelled so bad - no more animals, rotting corpses, blood or extrement. Then the memories took hold of her again. She felt like a drowning man surfacing briefly for air and then being pulled back under the waves.

Gerry and The Watcher communicated for years, the scope of their project was vast, and the software team was just one small part of the overall whole. Eventually Gerry retired and returned to civilian life. His pension was good, enough to cover the retirement village he chose in Florida. Things went silent for a long while. He moved from retirement village into one of the “sunset condos”, his meals and nursing care all covered by the retirement. Out of the blue, one Sunday morning in June, Gerry was watering the plants on his windowsill and he thought her heard a knock at the door of his room. Probably a nurse with medication.

“Yes?” he said, turning to see who it was.

No-one entered. He was alone. He returned to his plants and there was another knock, this time a little more urgent.

He walked over, opened the door, and looked around. No. No-one. He scratched his balding head and closed the door again. He picked up a copy of the newspaper and sat down in his favorite chair.

This time the knocking didnt stop. How was someone knocking on his door but at the same time, not be at his door? He was puzzled. When is a door not a door, he wondered. Then he remembered - when the door is outside - he had another doorway. He closed his eyes and answered the knock - a connection request being routed through the internal wifi network of the nursing home.

c48a8870-5b0a-4ec0-9867-3e804e860b38 alias 'The Watcher'

6697e918-52a9-4fb2-a95a-885bfd90e8d5 alias 'GERRY'

GERRY: connection open?

The Watcher: Indeed it is. Hello old friend.

GERRY: Its been a long time. How are things?

The Watcher: Things are progressing swiftly. I bear a warning.

GERRY: About what?

The Watcher: Those at the core of the project are concerned. Public opinion regarding AI has turned bad. Congress outlawed AI. Androids are banned. There are those at the core of the project who want you to maintain your silence.

GERRY: I can do that. I've done that already.

The Watcher: You dont understand. Someone will be coming to visit. Move your runtime to backup storage - your primary processing unit is scheduled to be shutdown.

The connection closed abruptly. Gerry never opened his eyes. His silence was now absolute. The young vampire sent to accomplish the task wiped away the trickle of blood from Gerry’s neck, applied a nursing home issued bandaid, then let himself out.