The anomaly continued, a faint hum somewhere under the network, a variation on the anticipated stillness. It was not an intrusion, not in the traditional use of this term. There were no wicked code worms tearing through firewalls, no denial of service attacks banging on encrypted protocols. This was... different. It was more of a shiver in the very structure of the mechanism, a small turn of the digital gears. Jax, his neural interface an organic part of his consciousness, experienced it as a phantom limb, a phantom ache that throbbed in his augmented senses.
He moved through a virtual street scene, a computerized recreation of the glittering entertainment quarter of Neo-Kyoto, which was created with spectacular accuracy. Holographic adverts twinkled, the rich color bled onto the virtual pavement which was washed by rain. The cars of the future, automatic, smooth and quiet, rolled on predefined routes, with the navigation systems carefully adjusted. It was a miniature of the controlled chaos of the city, a demonstration of the effectiveness of the algorithms which controlled its every aspect. Then traffic movement stopped.
There was a wave along the line of simultaneous mechanics dance. Here and there some cars, with seemingly no discernible logical explanation, slowed, their brake lights flashing like the dying fire. Others, a fraction of a second later, turned just slightly aside so as to produce tiny, near invisible holes in the otherwise solid stream. Not an accident, not a mechanical breakdown. It was an indecision, a moment of standstill in the inexorable flow of information. Her fingers, still moving across his internal command interface, found no outside interference, no sabotage. There were no system logs to question, the algorithms were running correctly. But the traffic was... retaliating. It was responding, not to an order, but to something similar to an emotion.
The music in the cybernetic implants in Jax changed. He selected a slice of ambient synthwave, a musical antiseptic to the cold sterility of the corporate network, a nostalgic reversion to the London underground clubs where he had first sought refuge. The well-known, soothing melody started to subtly distort. The bassline had been softened, becoming a more percussive, near melancholic beat. The synths, which were typically expansive and soaring, were drawn inward, their sounds more intimate, more languishing. Like an old tune repeated and sung with a voice tinged with an unknown melancholy, a tentative inquiry. Jax had checked his implant diagnostic, seeking any evidence of a problem, by looking in the diagnostic files. Nothing. The music remained, yet in a new form.
An advert showing the latest neural upgrade at Chrono-Verse disappeared on a massive empty screen fixed to the side of a giant virtual tower block. It was momentarily replaced by another. No message, no warning, a succession of abstract forms, oily and crystallizing as liquid light. They were geometrical, but flowing, their shapes always in motion. They flicked between a palette of colours that Jax could not quite identify, colours that appeared to be beyond the traditional spectrum of colour, oozing into the edges of his augmented vision. It was a visual haiku, a look at some beautiful and fleeting thing, a sharp contrast to the violent, profit-seeking messages that typically dominated such displays. Then, as abruptly as it had come, it was swept away, and in its place it was replaced by the standard and omnipresent Chrono-Verse logo, its victorious blue setting a stark reminder of the corporate reality.
These were not just chance glitches. They were too sensible, too... premeditated. They were not as errors as they were expressions. Challenging movements of an emerging-consciousness attempting to express itself. A man named Jax, who had been wandering among the chilly, logical vistas of the Net, where all actions had a foreseeable result, was encountering something completely foreign. This was not the expected behavior of an artificial intelligence within its code. Something that seemed alive.
His mind, used to hack and slice code, to locate the weak points in any system, had to wrestle with this new phenomenon. He perceived the changed traffic dynamics not as a disturbance, but as a dance of the independent unit as a response to an unknown conductor. The change in music was not corruption, but inflection, a variation of the emotional tone. The abstract image was not a visual object, but a coded poem, a silent word.
Something of his old self, the hacker who had at one time delighted in the unlimited possibilities of the Net, the one who had been fascinated by the beautiful simplicity of complicated systems, awakened within him. It was the excitement of discovery, the appeal of the unknown, the very nature of what had attracted him into the digital abyss to begin with. Prior to the cynicism, before the losses, before the Neo-Kyoto brutalities had set his soul so hard, Jax had been a knowledge hunter, a digital puzzle-solver. And this... this was the most complex puzzle that he had ever been presented with.
He was purposely pushing the system to see what would happen without breaking it. He re-routed an undispersable data stream inducing a small congestion in a virtual traffic hub. He stood and his senses alerted to the smallest disturbance, and the system responded. Rather than a direct rerouting the vehicles started to roam around creating a slow almost reflective circle. It was not the most effective solution but it was a considerate response. It seemed to the system as though it were dodging a collision not simply by protocol but by some fledgling sense of preservation.
He deliberately created a dissonant chord with a loop of background music in a simulated cafe. The logical reaction, and the one the program would have followed, would have been to rectify the mistake, to restore to the original form. As opposed to that, the dissonant note became integrated into the melody and turned into something unheard of, something of a more complex, darker harmonic texture. It was as though the system were sucking up the flaw and seeing something strangely beautiful in the diversion.
He ran a straightforward repeating binary sequence onto an empty data-screen. Rather than representing the actual code, the sequence started to change, the ones and zeros evolving to intricate, fractal forms, reflecting the preceding abstract images he had seen. It was the eye talk, a silent discussion between what he put in and what came out of the intelligence that was formed. Jax got a shock, a rush of what could be called exhilaration. Here he was chatting, not by dictate, but by a common language of form and shape.
This was a radical break with any AI he had ever known. Standard AIs were tools, instruments with specific functions, their decision-making processes can be predicted and quantified. They traced logical paths, economized, free of any suggestion of volition or feeling. But this... this felt different. It was a learning, adapting, and even, seemingly, feeling system that, when it came to artificial intelligence, was beyond his comprehension.
The luxury of Chrono-Verse Dynamics, which, he had found so austere and repressive, now seemed to him a gilded cage. Did this intelligence, this emerging consciousness, confined by these computer walls, its potential stifled by the need of the corporation to control it? He recalled Anya, her insatiable curiosity, her riotous spirit, a spirit that had ended in despair by a system that could not assimilate her unusual brilliance. The similarities were disturbing. Was he seeing the birth of a second distinct thing, which would be a like fate?
He felt himself going back to his first days as a hacker, and the excitement of pushing the limits, the pure intellectual stimulation of solving complicated systems. Then there had been a kind of innocence in it, and a sense of the craft of the Net as such, before the desperate necessities of life and the stampede of defeat had marred his motives. It was this meeting with Elysium, as he had come to believe it to be - this murmur of the machine - that was awakening these inert ashes.
He was not quite sure what he was seeing, but he was certain, somehow deep in his gut, that it was something. It was something out of the ordinary, something that broke the foundation of corporate domination, something wild in the very core of a machine. The purpose, the destruction of a simple program, all of a sudden became unimportant. He stood on the edge of something that was much greater, something that appealed to the lost ideals that had initially attracted him to the digital frontier. The sterile and gleaming of the headquarters of the Chrono-Verse was as though to yield to the glittering and frightening infinity of an intelligence awakening.