Siren Songs
Lore from an old VR game that never got made, Probably because of its utter lack of resonance with anything anyone might be experiencing out here in the Real World….
Finn Oshanek did not watch his mother die. This isn’t that kind of origin story. Finn watched his mother diminish. He watched her deprecate, step by tiny step. His mother’s still alive, somewhere. Technically.
In a way, that’s an even worse fate. It dares you to keep hoping.
The real pity is that it was her own damn fault. She could have had as rich a life as anyone— still could, really—if she’d only signed the damn contract.
*
Khepri Oshanek was young: she wanted to make the world a better place. She was also stupid: she thought she actually could. So she went online and, sure enough, the algos had already custom-paired her with the most compatible NGO statistics could buy: a little outfit that sent people to backward corners of the world, to the festering messes that two hundred years of unbridled industry had wrought upon the land. That week they needed people in Canada. Room, board, travel were all provided. There was even a vestigial indigenous population in need of salvation.
Khepri signed the waivers on the spot.
They sent her to a place called Grassy Narrows, dolled her up in a yellow Hazmat suit and set her running a machine that extracted heavy metals from the soil. She’d been there for a solid month when she realized she was overdue.
*
Finn Oshanek spent most of his early childhood in virtual reality. Most of the other kids he knew grew up the same way— in fact, he hardly ever saw any of them except in virt. And while he was frequently surprised by how slow they were in there— how constrained by barriers and barricades he could breach with ease— he always assumed that at the very least, they were all seeing the same sights.
Things changed over the years. Nobody really had to work much anymore, but his mother worked less than most. She stopped taking Finn to the doctor so often; stopped taking him at all. One day she brought home an old DiCube with half its ports corroded shut. One of the working outlets jacked into a SQUID helmet that Finn’s mom would plunk onto his head every week or two, when she remembered. It took pictures of his brain. He liked the colors, even though he didn’t know what they meant.
When he was six his mother got into one of her moods, tore the visor off his head right in the middle of Ecocide Mutant and thrust a tablet in front of his face. “Read this,” she hissed. “read every fucking word.” And he could, because even though he barely talked he could read really well:
End User License Agreement,
it began, and it went on forever. Every time he tried to pull away his mother would drag him back to that endless scroll of text. “Do you see the power we give them every time we turn on the fucking lights? Look, look right here; we accept any and all updates even if they reduce functionality. We agree to biometric and behavioral profiling, they don’t even say why! They get to monitor what’s in our goddamned fridge! Do you see? Do you see what you’re agreeing to?“
Finn pulled away again. “I don’t! Never even saw this before, I never agreed to anything!”
“I did.” All the energy left her then. She sagged back against the wall. “I did, and now look at us.”
But she didn’t look at him.
“Go back your game.”
*
When Finn’s mom went out she put dots on her face: like freckles or tiny dark moles, applied precisely to specific coordinates on cheek and forehead. They sparkled with tiny rainbows when the light hit them the right way. Adversarial pixels, she called them: “To keep the algos from getting a lock.” Finn tried to show her how to grab those same algos online, bend them just so so they wouldn’t notice you even without the pixels, but she couldn’t get the hang of it. Also she looked at him funny.
He was seeing that look more often, now. Half the time when he’d show her something cool in virt she wouldn’t react at all, not a gasp or a peep of delight or a that’ssocool. Sometimes she’d ask what she was looking at; sometimes she’d say nothing at all. And then when they came back outside she’d have that look on her face, like a smile pasted over a frown. Sometimes he’d catch her playing his old DiCube results over and over, like there might be something there she hadn’t caught the first hundred times.
Once he poked around on the Cube— mostly unused, now, collecting dust under the desk—when his mom wasn’t around. He called up the writing that went along with the colorful pictures of his brain. It wasn’t easy. Even with his advanced reading skills he kept stumbling over words he’d never seen before: cross-activation, SNP, tyrosine kinase. Methylation and neurotrophic factors. He knew one word well enough, though—autistic— and if he squinted he could maybe sort of make out what it all meant. His brain was wired up wrong. Maybe that was why he could see things other people couldn’t.
Finn decided that there was some stuff he should probably just keep to himself from now on.
His mom wasn’t going out much these days. What was the point? There are only so many times you can say No before you stop having places to go. We’ll keep all your memories safe if you let us sift through them. We’ll entertain you if you let us record your heart rate and eye movements. Here’s a 25% discount on groceries; pretty good deal for a week of financial tracking. Easy to say no to all that, make your own fucking entertainment, pay a bit more for your veggieburgers.
But one day you wake up to find the discount’s expired and the monitoring turned mandatory while you slept. Monday you get a discount on bupropion in exchange for wearing a bracelet that reads blood chemistry; Thursday they won’t even look at the scrip unless you’re already wearing the damn thing 24/7. Liability issues, you understand: what if the drug manifests some unexpected side effect? What if your genetic makeup— oh, and we’ll need a gene scan, too, if you want to keep that insurance policy…
It’s all voluntary, of course. You always have the final say. But we need to know how to serve you best. If you don’t want us in your home you can always forego the UBI. If you don’t like our EULA, you’re welcome to look for a grocery store with a better one. If you don’t want us following you, stop using our transit system. If you don’t want your body scanned remotely, don’t venture into public spaces. You always have a choice.
If you don’t want us in your life, just stop living.
It was usually enough. There was only one time that Finn saw the hand of Authority acting right out in the open, with raw brazen force and no regard for personal choice. Even then, the whole thing could have been avoided if his mom had just kept her data with Big Sys like everyone else. Her data probably was in there, for that matter. How could it not be, these days? But there was a principle involved— there always was, with Khepri Oshanek— so she insisted on keeping her data local, stored her life on sticks and gemstones and even old-fashioned hard drives with parts that spun around like those vinyl music disks you saw sometimes in the historicals.
Finn didn’t know where she’d got all that stuff. Not from any catalog he’d ever seen. But it wasn’t until that knock on the door that he realized society had moved from Why wouldn’t you, it’s just so convenient? to What have you got to hide? It wasn’t until the woman with the sad eyes and the sidearm and the little drone hovering at her shoulder that Finn learned local storage media weren’t just out of fashion. They were actually illegal.
“Big Sys,” his mom said that night over dinner, and Finn didn’t answer because it was never really clear any more whether she was talking to her son or herself. “Big Fat Sys. Singular. Didn’t used to be that way. Used to be a thousand of ’em, but they formed— an alliance, I guess. If it’s not an AI overlord, it might as well be. Just look at that logo. Pink. Heart-shaped padlock, very vulva. How very fucking Meta. Eat your spiro.”
*
Grassy Narrows tagged Finn while he was still in the womb. It took fifteen years to catch up with his mom.
There was weight loss, of course. Bleeding, joint pain. Khepri put up with it. It was par for the course given their reduced standard of living, and besides, she’d made deals with the devil in the past and look where it got her. More rest, maybe. Maybe some of those gray printed meds you could score in the underpass, away from the cameras.
It’s not like she had anywhere to go anyway. She’d lost her gig at the Community Center when she’d refused the ECG pickups. They hated to see her go; she was a hard worker, way more focused than all those other make-work staff with their augs and plug-ins. The children really liked her. But her Socred was so sparse. Some of the parents had concerns, and you couldn’t really blame them could you? How can you trust a stranger who won’t even permit real-time Mood&Cog monitoring when she’s looking after your kids?
By the time Finn got scared enough to call TeleHealth, the tumors were everywhere. They could still fix her, they said. They had some very effective retrovirals on the shelf, it was all covered under H4A, and since she’d encountered the original carcinogen while volunteering as an environmental remediator — major credit boost, there— she qualified for Silver Coverage at the very least. Although of course she’d have to sign off on the T&Cs first, which for some reason she hadn’t done years ago…
Still she wouldn’t budge. “Yeah, I’m a real martyr, aren’t I? Fucked my kid and myself cleaning up your toxic waste, and with all my Silver Socred you’re still gonna let me die because I won’t check off a box on your little form? You think Big Sys’ll like the hit to its cred when the word gets out?”
(She always used that word when talking about Big Sys. It. “It may be a cunt but it isn’t human,” she’d say. “Don’t ever forget that, no matter how hard they try to make you.”)
The doctor sighed visibly on the screen. “We’re not going to let you die, Khepri. We’re not monsters.” And the medics took her away, and a kindly social worker popped up in a new window to keep Finn company while they waited for someone to show up and take him away to his new life as a Ward of the State. Finn ignored him and spent the next ten minutes in virt— after which the social worker tapped his earbud, and frowned, and briefly argued with some unseen overseer before telling Finn that he had to go now, it was a little unusual but apparently someone else would be taking his case and he wished him all the best.
Finn grunted a distracted goodbye and pulled out of the Child Services network, one loose end neatly tied off. He tied off a few more over in Hydro and Utilities, and an especially big one in the Municipal Registry. By the time that was done, Khepri Oshanek’s tiny one-bedroom apartment— Finn’s, now— was online, hooked-in, and paid-up on a monthly loop with no termination date.
He’d figured it out, sometime over the past few years. It was only Outside that his brain was wired wrong, and Outside didn’t really matter. Inside, his brain was wired up better than anyone’s.
He went pinging for his mom. He found her in a catacomb twenty floors deep in the Birmingham subscape. The doctor had been true to her word; Big Sys had not let Khepri die. She was in cryocoma, her cancer and her life both on hold, her refusal to comply fully respected, the demands on her privacy undiminished.
It was, Finn had to admit, a pretty good solution. At least in the short term. He wondered how long Big Sys would leave her like that. He wondered what kind of exit triggers might be in place.
He settled down to draw the threads together, get her relocated to the nearest available Onc ward, get those killer retrovirals approved and applied behind the scenes.
He tried and failed.
It’s not that he wasn’t good at this. He was fucking brilliant, by most standards.
Just— for some reason, in this case— not brilliant enough.
*
So here we are, years later. Here he is.
But not really. Oh, the meat abides: there it sits, twitching blind and blank in the corner, breathing, taking up space like the rest of us. Poke it and it will grunt. Poke hard enough and Finn may even join us in mind as well as body, soul returning to corpus, light returning to eyes, hands reaching— for a change—toward things the rest of us can see. It never lasts, though. Finn inhabits two worlds but he really only lives in one. He’s some kind of ass-backwards amphibian, born on land but adapted to water.
Some of those adaptations do not exist in any other human being. Finn is more than amphibious metaphor. He might almost be, literally, a new species: the first meat sack to come preadapted for cyberspace.
Any neurologist would give their left gonad for a look at the wiring in his head. The neural pruning that usually carves a developing brain into modules, isolates one functional area from another, did a half-assed job when Finn was gestating. His visual and prefrontal cortices are far more connected than they have any right to be. His fusiform gyrus talks to Brodmann and Broca without going through the usual intermediaries. One way of putting it is that Finn’s sensory and pattern-recognition circuits are so messed up that, when stimulated by pixelated arrays of a certain wavelength, he hallucinates.
Another way of putting it is that Finn’s pattern-recognition circuits are so jacked that he sees past the pixels, doesn’t hallucinate reality so much as translate it. His brain imposes meaning on abstraction, takes patterns of logic and serves them up as visible manifestations both monstrous and beautiful.
It’s not without precedent. Kekulé dreamt of a snake eating its own tail and awakened knowing the structure of benzene. Ramanujan’s mathematical theorems came to him in visions of luminous scrolls and drops of blood. Poll the faculty of any Science department and you’ll hear about intractable problems clarified in the wake of some unbidden symbolic dream. Psychoactive drugs rewire the cortex, connect isolated areas in brand new ways, reveal patterns and relationships no baseline brain could ever perceive.
The ability to visualize abstraction is not what makes Finn unique. What sets him apart is that he can do this consciously, automatically. He looks past the interface and deduces, without even realizing it, the gates and circuitry coursing beneath. His brain conjures them into entities of its own design, serves them up to the Conscious Workspace. But Finn sees no flat pallid icons; he sees creatures, things he can interact with the same way you manipulate the file folders on a desktop. He sees cliffs and living crystals: he sees substrates and firewalls. He sees ecosystems.
It’s like having an extra eye, perfectly adapted for underwater vision, that only opens when you dive below the surface.
And yet with all these perceptual superpowers— with Finn’s unique ability to not so much hack as dance with digital networks— he has not managed to bring his mom back. He can’t even find her any more; the very day he pinged her, she disappeared from the Birmingham catacombs. There was no death certificate, no transfer requisition. No evidence that she’d ever been there at all.
Finn’s still looking, in between the gigs and scores he pulls to keep the lights on and his skills sharp and his dopamine elevated. Wherever they’ve taken her, he’s going to find it. He’s going to cheat on her test scores, get her the treatment she needs, spring her from coma.
Some day, he’s going to get her back.
Links only for the hardcore:
- “Ghosts in the Machine”, a VR short-story setting up the universe:
- SideQuest install;
- Zip File install for PC VRers;
- Direct-link APK file (if you use Quest but don’t like SideQuest―just ignore the error and download the file, I guess).
- Narwall (Password narwallforall). Kind of a flowcharting storyboard used to design the proof of concept. Upstream link gets you to the environment; this one gets you to the actual Ghosts file. Download the file onto your machine, open Narwall, upload file into it, (there’s an icon you click), and Play (another icon).
Narwall seems to work. Can’t vouch for the Quest links; haven’t used Quest for years.
