The Doomsday Code

CHAPTER 17

2001, New York

‘So where’s this place you’re taking us?’ asked Liam.

‘It’s a theatre and antique junk shop that does expensive fancy-dress hire. The clothes are the proper thing, not all the nasty cheap polyfabric and synthetic shadd-yah you get in, like, joke shops.’

‘Polly …?’

‘Horrible.’ She shuddered. ‘In my time my parents used to wear bright-coloured polyfab kurtas and these imported jogging suits … and plastic jewellery. Ughh. Hideous. There,’ she said, gesturing along the street, ‘it’s just a couple of blocks down this way.’

‘Right-oh,’ he said, nodding. ‘It’ll be good, though, to try on something more comfortable.’

She looked him up and down. ‘You don’t like the jeans and the hoody?’

He couldn’t help but grimace a little. ‘The trousers seem a little tight around my legs, so they do. It’s quite difficult to walk. And it’s rubbing me sore in places I’d rather not talk about.’

She quickly lifted the bottom of his hoody up and laughed at what she saw. ‘That’s because you’re wearing the waist way-y-y too high. They should, you know, hang really low.’ Liam had the belt cinched tightly and the waistband of his Diesel jeans hawked up high over his hips to just beneath his navel. With that, the T-shirt underneath tidily tucked in, and his shock of grey-white hair, he looked like an old man.

‘It’s all got to hang loose and low, you know? Jahulla, you wear trousers like how my great-grandfather wears trousers, tucked up under his armpits.’

‘Well, that’s where a pair of trousers should be, so. Not round your knees.’

She huffed and rolled her eyes. ‘You’d never fit in in 2026. Even if I dressed you up in the streetiest polyfab booger suit and loads of chump-bling round your neck, you’d still stand out like a Naraza a?gu?he!’

He pressed a weary smile out. ‘I think I prefer the way people used to dress in the past to the way they do in the future. It all seems to be about lookin’ poor and as scruffy as you can. I mean, why is it, tell me, that people deliberately rip holes in their trousers? I’ve seen that several times now.’

‘In their jeans, you mean?’

‘Aye.’

She shrugged. ‘It’s just the fashion. I don’t know, to make them look older than they are, I guess.’

He shook his head, and circled a finger at his temple. ‘There! See? That’s just completely peculiar, that is. Back home my mother was always trying to keep all me school clothes and me Sunday suit looking as new as if they’d just come out of a shop.’

‘Well, I guess in your time clothes were really expensive. In Mumbai, in my time — even now in 2001, I guess — it’s all so cheap. You wear something a couple of times then you just, sort of, throw it away.’

‘That sounds like such a waste to me.’

Sal shrugged. Maybe that was why in 2026 the news always seemed to be about this or that running low: the world’s resources, one by one, finally exhausted. She vaguely remembered news reports on Digi-HD-Sahyadri of the oil shortages. Wars in far-away countries full of deserts, burning pipelines and burning tanks.

‘Well now,’ said Liam, cutting into her thoughts. ‘Good to have Bob back, so it is. I missed the big old ape.’

Sal looked at Bob and Becks walking half a dozen yards in front of them like a pair of Presidential minders; eyes panning smoothly in all directions, ever ready to throw their lives down in the line of duty. While Becks moved with practised grace and agility, Bob lumbered along like a tank, still adjusting to the use of his new body.

‘I wonder what those two talk about,’ she said.

Liam smiled. ‘Aye.’

Becks nodded at the incoming low-frequency Bluetooth signal. She agreed with her colleague’s observation.

[01110100 01101000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111] she said.

His grey eyes swivelled to look down at her.

[01110100 01101000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100.]

Her mind processed the suggestion for a moment. ‘You are correct,’ she said aloud after a moment’s consideration. ‘We should practise verbal communications when possible.’

Bob’s voice rumbled out past his thick lips. ‘It … feels like a long time since I have communicated verbally.’

‘Feels?’ She looked at him curiously. ‘Feels. This is a very human word to use.’

He vaguely remembered the muscle movements required to pull off a smile. For a moment, as he worked his lips, he looked like a horse baring its teeth. ‘Agreed. Humans use unspecific terms of measurement often in their verbal communications.’

‘Words like “feels”, “seems”?’

‘Affirmative.’

She stored that observation, then looked at him. ‘You … seem … to have absorbed more human behavioural characteristics than I have. Yet we are both running identical versions of the AI. I am running version 3.67.6901 of W.G. Systems Mil-Tech Combat Operative AI module.’

‘Confirmed.’ He nodded. ‘I am running the same version number.’

They walked in silence for a while.

‘It is my observation that the silicon-carbon interface between the processor and the undeveloped organic brain has produced unanticipated side-effects,’ said Becks. ‘Additional soft-coded AI sub-routines.’

‘Affirmative,’ replied Bob. ‘I have also noted this.’ He trawled through terabytes of data stored from months ago. ‘During my mission with Liam O’Connor, input from the organic brain allowed my AI to recalibrate mission objective priorities. I was able to make a tactical decision to save him.’

‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘I have access to that … memory also. That was effective. Because my AI is a duplicate of yours, I benefit from that decision tree advancement.’

She cocked her head, a lock of dark hair swinging across a face momentarily frozen in deep thought. ‘I believe a human would extend a verbal gesture of gratitude.’ Her smile was more goat-like than horse-like. ‘Thank you.’

He acknowledged that. ‘Affirmative.’

‘On the last mission I observed some basic principles of humour from the humans. Would you like me to upload a joke?’

Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative. I have very few files on humour.’

She tilted her head and Bluetoothed several megabytes of data his way as they walked in silence. Bob blinked the data away into long-term storage and replayed a memory of jungle terrain, standing atop a cliff face and looking down at a group of nervous-looking children.

‘It appears you made Liam O’Connor … laugh?’

She nodded. ‘Cluck, cluck,’ she added drily. ‘I called him and the others chickens. They laughed at this.’

He frowned, pondering. ‘Why did they find this amusing?’

She frowned too, puzzled. Eventually she looked up at him. ‘I do not know.’

Sal drew up outside the front window of the store. ‘This is it,’ she said. She called the support units back to join them and they stepped inside, a musty smell of mothballs and dust tickling her nose.

Becks and Bob led the way in, Liam following after them. ‘What sort of thing do I want?’

‘Large, plain coloured woollen smocks,’ replied Sal. ‘Nothing patterned.’

Liam nodded and headed off down a cramped aisle spilling over with costumes of all sorts of colours and eras. She watched him admiring a pirate’s costume, inspecting its lace cuffs and braiding with a grin on his face. She shook her head. He looked like a kid in a toy store.

She turned to see if there was someone in the shop she could ask for some help, and was walking back towards the shop front and the dusty front window when something caught her eye.

Something blue. Something vaguely familiar … sitting in a wooden rocking-chair to the side of the store window. A teddy bear. She walked over, squatted down to get a better look at it.

‘I know you,’ she whispered, lifting one of its threadbare paws.

She remembered this bear — this little faded blue bear — this one-eyed bear; she remembered it from somewhere, tumbling head over paws.

Where do I know you from?

She was pushing her mind to explore the fleeting image when Liam called out from the back of the shop. ‘Sal! Sal? Is this any good?’

She got up and headed back into the shop’s tight warren of musty aisles to try and find him; the little bear, for now, forgotten.