The Gardens had been sacked. Damien dashed up the shallow concrete steps, heart pumping blood that felt as thick as paste. The tall, beautiful glass walls had been shattered in many places. The doors had been wrenched off their hinges. Inside, the place was a mess – the middle section of the stairs had been torn down, and the pillars of plants lay uprooted and strewn over the ground. The remains of smashed Harvesters were scattered over the floor.
Damien felt sick. And below that, something was rising. Cold fury, he realized, coupled with vengeance. This could not go on any longer. He was going to stop it.
Something moved in the fragments of the stairs at his feet. He glanced downwards towards the ground. A half-crushed Harvester was rocking back and forth on it’s back, trying to drag itself back for repairs.
He gently reached downwards and flipped the thing over. Camera hanging loose from it’s socket, the machine began to drag itself away on it’s two good legs.
“Dad! Dad, are you okay?” He shouted this, running around, looking. The Harvester was still functioning, but who knew how much damage the assassins had done to the Gardener’s processor banks. He was struggling to remember when the Gardener had last made a backup.
Suddenly, he caught sight of a figure standing about halfway up the stairs, overseeing the damage.
The Gardener looked.. odd. Fuzzy. Like he was too distracted to bother to exist properly. He glanced down and noticed Damien. He waved him up.
Damien mounted the stairs, anger growing in him as he saw the extent of the damage. On the platform above where the stairs now were broken off, the rosebushes had been uprooted, and the chessboard had been torn from it’s pedestal and smashed.
The Gardener look down at Damien. His eyes were a thunderhead, dark, and deep, and furious.
“You wouldn’t happen to know the folks that did this, would you? I’d like to have a couple of words with them.”
He was positively growling.
“Are you okay, Dad?”
“Aye. They didn’t even know about the area underground. Assassins these days – can’t even be bothered to locate the brain of their victims.”
“How much damage did they do?”
“They knocked out three quarters of the Harvesters, and they probably killed a quarter of the plants.”
Damien looked up. A Harvester was scaling the wall across from him, stretching blue tarp to cover a hole in the wall. Below, another one was repotting uprooted plants.
“I tell you though, I gave them hell.”
The Gardener extended one finger. Damien followed the line of sight, and immediately flinched away.
It wasn’t hard to see what had happened. One of the vandals had been dashing across a support beam, probably to help take down the stairs, when something (Damien suspected the smashed Harvester) had pushed him off. He’d fallen three stories, and landed half in and half out of a broken window, still covered in pointed daggers of glass. There was a lot of blood.
“Need any help cleaning up?”
“No, the militia will be here shortly to give me a hand. What I do need help with,”, he said, “is tracking down the folks that did this.”
“I’ll meet you in the Terminal.”
In the World, the sky burned like iron. Damien sat back, letting the wave of nausea subside as his brain adjusted itself to the new method of perceiving the world. In the computer generated world, the Terminal was a sea of people.
He stood in his booth and looked out over the streaming crowds. They glowed and pulsed with the more creative body-types. He himself was fairly conservative – he looked very much like the true Damien, except he wore studded leather armor, and carried a katana.
The World was huge – it was estimated that one thirds of the world’s population was online or idling at any given time. The place was a planet the size of North American, and developed to the edge of the atmosphere, and it was still crowded. The Terminal was the most popular method of travel.
A few seconds late, the Gardener flickered into life. He too looked very much the same as he had before, except that here, anger could actually burn you. He blazed with a hot internal radiance, and he carried a walking stick.
Damien turned around, and waded into the sea of people.
They arrived at their destination very shortly. The sea of people, where they were too dense to maneuver, became insubstantial. As a result, it was like walking through a sea of ghosts. They arrived at the Terminal booth within minutes. They needed information. They needed to go to the Arbiter.
They reach the booth. Damien touched an orb of blue glass. The Gardener touched the other side. They hesitated for a moment, and then they were gone.
The warehouse was a hidden place, tucked within a nook at the edge of the World. Once you came out of the Terminal transit, you had to immediately step forward onto a ledge, or else you would fall and splatter your virtual brains out on a ledge ten miles below. Here, the atmosphere was deathly thin. Damien shuddered, and wrapped his arms around himself against the cold, gasping as the thin, frosty air rasped his lungs like knives.
He hurried down the corridor to the Arbiter’s quarters.
“How did you muster such good will with the militia, anyway?” he wheezed as they waited at the doors.
“Used to be a member when I was alive. Still help out when I can. My name is on their constitution. I wrote part of it.”
Damien was shocked.
“You never told me.”
The Gardener shrugged.
“You never asked.”
The door slid open, and they hurried inside into the warmth.
The Arbiter had originally been an experiment by one of the Gardener’s friends when he was alive. Like the Gardener, he had eventually consumed his creator. He was originally intended to be President.
The Luddite party had still been in it’s formative stages, then, and it had needed a leader. One of the members, who (Damien now realized) had probably met the Gardener when they framed the constitution, had come to the idea of a truly benevolent dictator: an artificial intelligence bound to the constitution rather than Friendliness.
However, he ran into a problem. The AI was dumb. It could not understand the issues it was being asked to weigh. Thus, he was presented with a dichotomy. If he sent data into the AI from his glasses, it would gain intelligence, but loose objectivity. The act of creating it made it unfit to rule. Eventually, he decided to make it a judge instead, for whom objectivity was not so vital. As he developed it, he poured more and more of himself into it, until eventually, when he was assassinated, the AI no longer had any desire for government service, and took up developing itself where he had left off.
AI’s were deeply feared. Improperly built, they could be more dangerous than a dozen nuclear bombs. The Gardener was allowed to live because the city could not live with him. Otherwise, he would have been destroyed or bound long ago. The Luddite party was still weak in those days. They could not afford to harbor an AI, and so the Arbiter, rather than be bound and broken by the companies, had fled into the World.
However, it still had power, and it was still consulted frequently by members of the Luddite party.
It’s quarters were luxurious, for a prison. Gas lamps lit the place cheerfully, and a large bed occupied the majority of the room. Directly across from it, sat a bench. The Arbiter stood there now, mindspace blazing with information.
“Hello Tiresias,” said the Gardener.
The Arbiter disengaged sharply. It stepped down from the bench, and turned towards the Gardener.
It looked… strange. It’s eyes were silver sphere’s in it’s head, and it’s body was indefinite. It had evolved far further than the Gardener had after it’s creator’s death, and had lost much of it’s root identity in the process.
“Gardener. Old friend. It is so good to see you. Or, hear you, anyway.”
“I never understood why you didn’t just code yourself a visual processing module.”
“I have a thousand eyes, friend. Why would I need to see?”
“Fair enough. Tiresias – I need a favor.”
“Don’t we all? What can I do for you?”
“The Gardens have been sacked.” The Gardener’s lips were a fine white line.
“I know. I was just catching up on that. I’m so sorry. What can I do to help?”
“You can help me find the men who did this. There were six of them. I killed one. They were just paid idiots, though. I want to know who sent them.”
The Arbiter’s chrome eyes glowed, spinning gently in their sockets.
“I don’t know.”
The Gardener started to slump back in his chair.
“But I know someone who does,” he finished, calmly.
“Who?”
“His name is Rice. Darren Rice. He lives downtown, usually.”
“Usually?”
“He’s homeless.”
“And he’s trustworthy?”
“He’s a world-renowned physicist.”
The silver eyes glowed, and pierced Damien’s soul.
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