Chapter 1 here.

Mira trudged past the boarded up storefronts, careful to stay in the thin sliver of shade provided by the sagging overhang. She pulled a mildewy t-shirt across her face to keep the swirling dust out of her nose and mouth. The California sun pounded down like a molten hammer on a filthy anvil, and she squinted across the broken pavement of the parking lot. This had been a shopping complex of some kind once. One of the storefronts read “Carvel” in thick red letters, while another one featured the words “Hens & Kelly” in big black cursive. She had seen places like this on shows, but she had no idea what these stores had sold. She looked down at her cardboard visor and shook it. The power bar was good, she’d been in the sun for hours, so it’d better be, but the picture was dead. She pinched the reset dot for a moment, nearly pushing her cracked and dirt encrusted thumbnail through the flimsy material.

“Fuck,” she spat. She rarely had to look at default reality, and it made her feel bad. This place was goddamn ugly. Everything was brown and dry and crappy. With her visor on, she could just follow the map and it would abstract away this ugliness. It lit her path with little green dots, gave her points for avoiding obstacles, and she could keep chatTime running all the while, her friends never out of reach. But without her visor, well, this whole thing sucked. She had no idea where she was or how to get to where she was going. She wandered forward aimlessly, surveying the deserted plaza.

“What’s the matter, wirehead? Your rig broke?” croaked a voice, making Mira jump. She twirled around, trying to see where it came from. “Heehee, up here, idiot,” it said. Mira looked up to see a tiny sparrow drone hovering above her. The drone’s cameras zeroed in on the skinny, Hispanic teenager as she stamped her foot in frustration. “It’s not gonna work. I jammed it!” it said. “This is my turf, you gotta pay the troll if you wanna pass.”

Mira scratched her head and thought for a moment. She’d never heard of a drone troll before. Usually the gang that controlled the area around a blood bank would just post some guys a few hundred meters out and they would tell her how much tax she had to pay. But she was trying out a new place, because she’d heard they were paying more if you were young. Maybe the gangs were different out here, but they usually had guns and didn’t mess around with this high tech stuff.

Real gangs had AKs. An AK could blow a big ragged hole through her. What was this stupid little drone going to do? Also, the voice sounded like a kid, someone her little brother’s age, maybe twelve or thirteen. But still, her visor was toast and she was stuck. “How am I gonna pay you if my visor doesn’t work?” she asked the drone hovering above her head, well out of reach. She glanced around for a good rock. There were plenty of loose stones around.

“That’s not how you’re gonna pay this troll tax,” said the voice. “There’s another way, with your body.”

Mira shivered with disgust and glanced around fearfully. “Ew, don’t be fucking gross!” she shouted. She doubted there was anyone with enough muscle around to grab her. And she was pretty fast if she had to run.

“That’s not what I meant, wirehead,” said the drone. The whiny tone of voice was definitely that of a petulant tween. “Put your visor back on, it will work again, sort of. Just follow the blue dots. You’re gonna make a little detour on the way to the blood bank.”

Sure enough, when Mira put on her visor again, the display was lit. But everything looked wrong. It wasn’t set up as she liked. She tried opening chatTime windows, but they were grayed out. She could see her friends posting frantic updates about how she had dropped offline, but she couldn’t respond to any of their messages. Still, it felt good to see the hit counts ringing up for #whyMiraOffline.

“Can’t you stay off chatTime for five seconds?” complained the drone. “Just follow the blue dots.”

The dots led up to a metal, graffiti covered door to one of the boarded up shops. She never bothered checking these any more; they were always locked tight. And if you found a way into one of these deserted places, someone had usually found their way in first. Unsavory someones, mostly. So Mira only went into squats with a group of friends, and only if they knew people who could vouch for the place. But it looked like this snotty kid with the drone had truly hacked her visor, so she was stuck and had to follow his directions.

Mira pulled the bar on the door and discovered that it swung open, reluctantly. She gasped in surprise at the lush green interior, and stepped eagerly inside, pulling the door shut behind her. The roof had caved in long ago and sunlight filtered in between the beams, offering bands of cool shade from the unrelenting sun. A water main must have been leaking somewhere, because the bushes and small trees sprouting through the floor of the shop were fresh and healthy seeming. Mira pulled off her visor and saw that this wasn’t an overlay, but part of default reality. She couldn’t believe that this verdant garden was thriving behind that rusty door. She wondered what other magical places were hidden behind the other battered storefronts.

The little drone dropped into the space between a gap in the rafters. “Nice, huh?” said the voice, full of boyish delight.

One of the trees was an apple tree with actual apples hanging from it. Mira had never seen an apple tree in real life. “Can I have one?” she begged the drone boy, as she approached the tree in wonderment, visor tilted back on her head.

“What? Oh yeah, sure, I guess. Are you hungry or something? We have SocStab rations,” said the drone.

“I’m sick of social stability rations. Everything I eat is old, dry, and crumbly,” said Mira, grabbing a ripe apple and yanking it down from the tree. Several other apples fell and she guiltily scrambled to grab those as well. She crammed them into her bag and took a bite of one. Its crisp, sweet flesh exploded into her parched mouth and she nearly fainted with delight. It was the best apple she’d ever had in her life, though she rarely had anything like a fresh fruit or vegetable, so that wasn’t saying much.

“Will you put the visor back on now and follow the blue dots? I can’t wait long, this battery is almost dead,” complained the little drone; and then it was gone, buzzing quietly up through a gap in the roof and soaring out of sight.

Mira idly considered ignoring the drone boy and hanging out in the leafy refuge for a while. But then she remembered that he’d fucked up her visor so she couldn’t get on chatTime, and she needed the little bastard to fix it. She dropped her visor back down and found the blue dots, occasionally pawing impotently at the semi-disabled chatTime windows, as interest in her whereabouts quickly faded and was replaced by conversations about the latest shows. At least she had the wonderful apple to comfort her, and she gnawed it down to the core, even eating the bitter seeds, as she picked her way through the miniature forest.

It ended abruptly thirty feet from the back wall of the store. The black and white tiled floor was oddly intact along this wall, somehow impervious to nature’s prying fingers. The dots pointed Mira toward a pair of doors with crash bars, the exit sign above them illuminated. Mira was startled to see electricity still flowing through this destroyed place. She lifted her visor to be sure it was real, and, sure enough, the green letters of the exit sign glowed brightly. She pushed through the doors and found herself in a massive warehouse. The ceiling soared above her into darkness. The only light was the sunlight filtering through the ruined roof behind her. Her path led down an aisle between towering racks stacked with cardboard boxes. She let the doors slam shut behind her and was engulfed in darkness, her visor providing a wireframe of racks and obstacles in her path.

She felt gypped when she scrambled over a pile of tumbled boxes, but didn’t get any points for her effort, and she watched her chatTime feeds longingly, wishing she could post about this adventure right away. Her social status would definitely spike once she’d told this story. She hoped her visor wasn’t too screwed up to be recording. Going from that weird overgrown store into this huge warehouse was as interesting footage as any video game she’d ever played. Her friends would love it.

After a while, the dots led Mira down an aisle to the right, and she came to a door with a punch clock next to it and a little stand with a coffeemaker on it. The button was lit and Mira could smell a fresh pot of coffee. She found a stack of paper cups and poured herself some. It burned her tongue and tasted bitter. She rummaged around a bit more and found the nondairy creamers. She emptied five or six of them into her cup, which cooled the coffee and made it lighter and smoother, though they were greasy and added an oily sheen to the surface. Refreshed by a few sips of coffee, Mira pressed ahead and went through the door.

She would have been blinded by the bright fluorescent lights of the break room if her visor hadn’t adjusted the brightness. A middle aged woman in a white lab coat sat at a table, performing some virtual task, her fingers flitting deftly above the bright white tabletop before her. A young teenaged boy, maybe thirteen years old, sat across from her, kicking his legs as he manipulated something, probably the drone, Mira decided.

The woman promptly stopped working and lifted her glasses when Mira entered. She had brown hair streaked with grey and a hard expression on her face. She looked like a rich woman, both she and the boy were dressed in clean clothes that looked expensive.

“Close the door and sit down. We don’t have much time,” said the woman, gesturing tersely to a strange chair with one padded armrest and a reclined backrest.

Mira lifted her visor to her head. “Your kid messed up my visor! Tell him to fix it!”

“I’m the one who told him to break it in the first place,” responded the woman, taking Mira by the shoulders and pushing her down into the chair. Mira complied because she was tired and it felt good to sit down. “Don’t worry, we have plenty of those cheap cardboard visors around here. I can give you a whole box if you want them. But I need you to run an errand for my employers.” The woman sat on a stool beside Mira and brusquely rolled up Mira’s sleeve.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked Mira, trying to struggle, but the woman was surprisingly strong and quickly strapped Mira’s arm to the armrest. Mira realized that this was sort of like the chairs in the blood bank. “I’m not giving you any blood for free or even for a box of visors,” Mira said, “I was on my way to get real money.” Her heart started racing as she wondered if this woman was trying to steal her blood, but something about the woman’s demeanor gave her pause. She wasn’t friendly by any means, but she wasn’t angry, either. She was businesslike, and her eyes didn’t have the deadness that Mira saw when people really intended to harm her. And she had seen dead eyes plenty.

“Oh shucks, I messed up, Mom,” said the boy. “I must have missed a security system somewhere, private security is being dispatched out here to check on the cameras.”

“That’s fine, it was to be expected, get us a car,” said the woman, unwrapping a tiny hypodermic needle from a plastic bag.

“What are you shooting me up with?” asked Mira. “This is going to look so crazy on my feeds.”

“You aren’t going to be able to put this on your feeds,” said the boy smugly. “I’m wiping your visor history.”

“You fucker, do you know how much status I could get from this?” cried Mira.

“This isn’t for you, Mira,” said the woman calmly, as she swabbed Mira’s filthy arm with alcohol and deftly sank the needle into her bulging vein. “It’s a present for the blood bank. You won’t feel a thing. It’s perfectly harmless to you.”

Mira believed the woman; she handled the needle so well that she could barely feel the prick. A few seconds later, the woman was done and had released her arm from the restraint. She pocketed the needle and the plastic wrapper as she and the boy got up to leave.

“There are the stability rations and a box of visors,” said the woman, pointing to a pair of cardboard boxes on a counter in the corner. “Take them and get out. Security will be here soon.”

“Wait, what the fuck did you just do to me?” asked Mira.

“I don’t really know, dear,” admitted the woman with a shrug. “I just took this gig off of a job board. I tested the vial first and I can assure you it’s not toxic, but that’s all I know.”

“But it’s for the blood bank? Why?” Mira called after them, as the woman and the boy exited by the door opposite the one Mira had entered.

“The blood bank is a longevity clinic. The blood goes to plutocrats,” said the boy with a smirk. But his mother shushed him and the door closed. They were gone.  

Mira sat stunned for a moment. Looking at her arm, she found no evidence of the point where the needle had entered. She didn’t feel drugged either, maybe a little jittery from the coffee. She jumped up, stuffed the boxes into her bag, and bolted out the back door, hoping to ask more questions of the mother and the boy. But, just as she emerged into the pummeling heat of the afternoon, their autoCar was pulling away. Mira found that the visor she’d been wearing was dead again and she tossed it away in frustration. She pulled a fresh one out of the box and, after scanning her for a moment, it logged her in properly. Green dots leading to the blood bank reappeared and all of her other windows came up, just as she liked them. Her friends were practically shrieking with excitement when Mira’s feed came back on chatTime, and she was texting away so intensely that she didn’t even notice the security vans pulling up and the guards jumping out and pounding into the warehouse behind her, laden in body armor with their rifles out.

A burly white guard in a puffy black vest stopped in front of her. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Blood bank,” Mira murmured distractedly. She’d spent enough time in reality and didn’t want to deal with it anymore. The guard shook his head in disgust and let her pass.

Chapter 3 here.

I’m writing a science fiction novel for National Novel Writing Month. The Robot Lord Scenario is my working title. Please give me feedback. I want to be like Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, and publish each rough draft chapter online and invite criticism, so that I can get help refining it.

Ivan looked out at the downtown skyscrapers, a warmly glowing stream of data, orange on black, obscuring his view. The motion-activated streetlights were dark, as were most of the other office buildings, but a peppering of lighted windows in the building across the street illuminated the deep blackness of the night. A cleaning woman in a drab gray uniform emptied trash cans, while another one vacuumed. They were actual humans, which explained why they needed light.

Ivan felt a kinship with these cleaners toiling in the night. IT people were once relegated to the depths of the evening to do their own work, so they didn’t disturb the ebb and flow of daytime business communications. When human workers lost their internet connection, they complained, so IT had to work at night. But times had changed, software had replaced most of the office workers, and software didn’t complain if you took away its internet connection for a few minutes. Software didn’t complain about much, actually, which is why so few in IT could still find work at all.

He marveled at the office buildings soaring thirty and forty stories all around, built in an era when tens of thousands of workers were needed to run an enterprise. Now, floor after floor sat empty, mothballed, eerily silent. On previous jobs, Ivan had passed through these dead spaces, tracing cables, his tall, lanky body doubled over. He was shocked at how little space office employees used to have. Of course, there were many fewer of them now, so it was understandable that they would have more room.

As if to echo his thoughts, a bot that resembled a motorized garbage can entered the room, vacuuming as it went. It sensed a warm body and shut off its vacuum. Ivan watched as it dispassionately rolled over to the plastic bin under the huge conference room table that had been fashioned from a highly shellacked slab of redwood. It extended its manipulators and grabbed the bin, lifted it, and tilted it sideways, efficiently emptying the crumpled papers and soiled coffee cups into its gut.

His phone buzzed. There was a text notification icon in the corner of his vision and he expanded the window to read it. It was a message from his girlfriend, Bryce, How much longer?

I told you I’m working tonight, he texted back. It’s hard to say, maybe a couple of hours.

Would you be pissed if I went out with some friends from work then?

Who’s going?

Just then, a security consultant Ivan knew well came into the room. He was a diminutive, dark-skinned South Asian named Kumar, but he insisted on being called Batou, after the Ghost in the Shell character. He had a new wave haircut, shaved closely on the sides and styled to look carefully unruly on the top.

“Wow, nice view. Is that why you have the lights off?” Batou said, joining him at the window.

“Yeah, and I don’t want to be found that easily. These meetings are horrid.”

“Tell me about it. This network is lousy with malware. That guy, Friedrich, keeps insisting they have everything under control, but I’ll bet that there are at least three different crews operating on it.”

“Yeah, but that’s true of a lot of networks.”

Ivan and Batou were both working that night as part of an ad hoc team of computer security consultants. Ivan had worked with a few of them before and recognized them as some of the top people in the business. The hardest part of their job was determining whether or not a client had been hacked. In many cases, companies simply weren’t aware that their systems had been compromised, and it took an outside party to clue them in.

This client was a typical example. They were a big hedge fund called Ithildin, and they had a massive intrusion detection infrastructure in place. Their internal security team insisted that there was no malicious activity on the network, but, nonetheless, several million dollars were unaccounted for during an audit. Thus, there was a huge struggle within the company between the IT department and the accountants. The IT department was accusing the accountants of committing fraud, and the accountants were accusing IT of overlooking a hack. So Ivan had escaped into this empty conference room to take a break from the bickering, and somehow found himself enjoying the deserted city nightscape.

The text message thread with Bryce was floating in the center of his field of vision, but she wasn’t responding, and he felt his stomach tighten. It wasn’t like her to text him when she knew he was working. And she went out with her friends all of the time, so why would she ask his permission that night?

Cyn, another consultant from the firm Ivan and Batou worked for, popped her head into the room. She was a pale skinned punk rocker with a blue mohawk. “Hate to break up your fun,” she said, carrying in her laptop, “but you need to see this.” She didn’t bother turning on the lights before she plopped down at the head of the conference table. Data streams lit up their glasses as she threw some windows into their shared workspace. “I captured some weird traffic coming from this printer back to the hosted finance servers.”

“Jesus, Cyn, why do you lug that chunk of computation around?” Ivan asked. He and everyone else used their phones to connect to remote servers when they needed computing resources.

“I like to have local horsepower,” she said, patting the matte black slab. Ivan glanced at her midriff, exposed by a half-shirt she had ripped up and decorated with a red letter “A” inside of a circle, the symbol for anarchy. He regretted that he’d worn his typical corporate outfit, khakis and a button down shirt, and he wished he’d dressed in all black. At least Batou had split the difference and worn a black Joy Division t-shirt with his khakis.

“Let me see that,” said Batou. He waved a hand to open a browser to the printer’s IP address. A logon screen appeared and he frowned when the default password failed to work.  

“How old is this thing?” Cyn asked.

“I wasn’t expecting to see a logon screen at all,” Batou said, “If they’d hacked it, they would have replaced that.”

“They’d be idiots to replace that. It would make their hack obvious,” Cyn said.

“Cyn’s right,” Ivan said, “This packet trace doesn’t look legit.” He scanned a log file she’d bookmarked. “That’s not printer traffic. Something’s up with this device.”

He scanned the printer with a fuzzing tool he’d picked up on the forums recently, and a shell prompt appeared before him. A hash sign blinked as though he was root.

“I think I’ve got something here,” he said. Just then his phone buzzed and he passed the screen to Batou to examine.  

Just Jayson and Franklin, anyway, we’re out already, so I’ll text you later, said the message from Bryce. What the hell? Now his girlfriend was out drinking with two guys from work? And, if he recalled correctly, Jayson was the CEO. He felt sick.

“Fuck, this printer is running some weird busybox,” Batou said. “And Friedrich will just act like a printer sending finance data back to China is no big deal.”

“Come on, Batou, China? Seriously?” said Cyn “That’s a little convenient. Whenever someone gets hacked, they blame the Chinese.”  

Ivan messaged his girlfriend back. Where are you going?

“Are you paying attention, Ivan? What are you doing” asked Cyn, annoyed.

“It’s my girlfriend. She’s out drinking with two guys from work and I’m worried about it.”

“Whoaaa, she’s trying get laiddd,” said Cyn. She spun around in her office chair and laughed. “Her hacker boyfriend blew her off on Friday night and she found some other guys to screw.”

Ivan frowned and looked away, too hurt to think of a good comeback.

“Can you guys focus, please?” Batou said. “This looks serious. I think we found our exfiltration point here. I don’t want to hear about Ivan’s slutty girlfriend. I want to hear about how we’re going to present this to management without Friedrich shooting us down.”

Ivan pulled up a channel to the Ithildin IT helpdesk in the shared workspace. A fairly low resolution avatar appeared and he recognized that it was probably a low level AI, the convention generally being that lower resolution meant less intelligent. It was presenting as an ambiguously gendered human of indeterminate race, which he thought was pretty progressive.

“Hello, this is Ithildin Information Technology Services, how can I help you?” said the avatar. It looked at Ivan with a wooden smile on its face.

“We need some information about a printer,” he said, flipping through his open windows to find the name. “Oak-3115-Prn3.”

The avatar paused for a moment; its smile fixed disturbingly. “That printer appears to be functional, would you like me to print a test page?”

Cyn chuckled.

“No, no,” he said. “We want to know what this printer is doing on the network, it must be fifteen years old.”

“Ah, printers produce hard copies,” said the avatar, without sounding the least bit condescending. Then it paused again. “For human consumption,” it added.

Cyn giggled again.

“I know what a printer is, thanks,” Ivan said. “The question is, don’t you have a hardware retirement policy in place? Why is this device still around?”

“Oh, this is a policy question?” said the avatar, “One moment please, acquiring additional resources.” Then the weirdest thing happened. Instead of being replaced by a different, higher level avatar, or even a real human, the avatar’s features grew sharper and more well-defined. No gender or race clues emerged, but it became more attractive; it’s jawline sharper, its features finer and more regular. There was even a discernable gleam in its blue grey eyes that sent a chill up Ivan’s spine.

“Wow, this must be a new program,” said Cyn.

“Hello, Ivan Rudnikov,” it said. “I’ve been authorized to answer any questions you may have regarding policies and procedures.” There was a slight smirk on its face and Ivan shuddered. He’d dealt with advanced AI before, but this was spooky.

“Thank you,” he said, and then caught himself. Why was he wasting niceties on a piece of software?

“Why is this ancient HP printer still on the network? Shouldn’t it have been retired according to your hardware replacement policy?”

The avatar narrowed its eyes and grimaced. “I’m terribly sorry, but it appears that you’ve identified a problem with our policies, pardon me while I obtain additional capacities.” A moment passed, and, to their shock, the avatar became even MORE high resolution, beyond natural, like a superrealist painter’s rendition of a model human, genderless, raceless, almost painfully beautiful. 

“Holy shit,” said Batou, dropping into a chair.

Ivan looked significantly at Cyn, but she just scratched her cheek and looked away, trying to act unfazed.

“My goodness, Ivan, your team really is quite good,” said the avatar. “Friedrich is going to be very displeased by this.”

“You’re right,” said Ivan. The code on that printer was old, and old code was easily hacked. He wondered how much the avatar could discern about what they’d found, and he started to feel paranoid. This was some serious tech at play. You practically needed a dedicated nuclear power plant to create an AI like this. Did it have access to their shared workspace? He checked the encryption and it seemed untampered with. But there were lower tech ways to find out what they’d been up to. A simple camera and microphone could have recorded their entire conversation.

“It looks like this oversight was a costly one,” the avatar said. It pinned Ivan with a vicious glare that stunned him with its intensity, like the most dramatic Shakespearean actor he’d ever seen. “I think you should be very careful with this information, Ivan. It’s very sensitive. Careers are at stake.”

“Careers are always at stake when people like us are called in, Mr. Chatbot,” said Batou.

The avatar seemed to freeze for a moment, which reassured Ivan. It was comforting to see this monstrous software showing some signs of weakness, as its resolution rapidly decayed to a level below its initial incarnation. Now it looked like a video game character from ten years ago. “Well then, if you don’t mind, I’ll go ahead and close this service request. Thank you for using the Ithildin IT helpdesk. Please take a few moments to fill out our customer satisfaction survey.”

Ivan closed the session and the avatar disappeared. For a moment, an odd blue-black afterimage lingered in the air before their eyes. He swept the windows aside and flipped up his glasses.

“What the hell kind of AI was that?” asked Cyn. Ivan thought he could detect just a trace of fear in her eyes.  

“To hell with that,” said Batou, clamping his lips together and trying to look tough, despite being a skinny, south Asian nerd. “I’m back hacking that Chinese server. I’m going to crack this whole thing wide open.”

Ivan’s heart beat faster at the suggestion, but he silently weighed the pros and cons. On one hand, hacking the hackers who’d violated this network was poetic justice. What comes around, goes around. Also, it would help them gather valuable information about where the money was funnelled to and could help them resolve this case quickly. And, of course, Ivan and his team were hackers themselves and always up for a little mayhem. But, on the other hand, this was technically illegal and they could not only get fired by Rasmussen, but maybe even charged with a crime. He felt conflicted and uneasy. On the plus side, it took his mind off of Bryce.

Cyn seemed unfazed by Batou’s bold suggestion. “You badass!” she said, excited at the prospect of switching from defense to offense. “Let’s do it!”

Batou gave Ivan a hard, questioning look, and Ivan thought it over for a minute. He’d always said there was no such thing as a truly pure, whitehat hacker. There was always a bit of the blackhat in all of them. They liked breaking things: software, hardware, rules, procedures, whatever.

“Are you in, Ivan?” Cyn asked, arching a devilish brow at him.

He knew he would regret it, but he might as well regret his very nature or the nature of the world itself. “I’m in,” he sighed.

Chapter 2 here.