The Wastelands
It took time to learn how to run the continuum.
It took time, and it took a certain kind of panache, and you had to be just a little bit crazy, as Sheila’s mentor used to say. She was a small, twisted up woman with a potbelly, contrasting strangely with delicate wrists, long fingers. Marcy’d had a port permanently installed in the back of her neck so she could jack in anywhere. Hardwired.
She was from the generation before the chips became standard, a last remnant of the cable jockeys.
“You can’t just plug in and go,” she’d say. Sheila, back in those days, still smart-mouthed and teenaged, said,
“You don’t plug in at all.”
“Don’t be cute,” Marcy snapped. “I’m trying to impart some fucking wisdom here, so shut up and listen.”
Sheila, for all her faults, was good at that. That’s why Marcy took her on, in part.
“You can’t ride the roads if you can’t feel them,” she said. “It’s not binary, not code, no matter how those fucking program toads would like it to be.” Program toads. Another bastion of the old guard.
“It’s part gut instinct, part know-it-all-smarts—all panache,” Marcy said. Grinned. Perfect white teeth, despite the hunched posture and bird nest hair. She took care of the things that mattered.
“Treat her like a lady, and you learn how to feel for the bump in the road, the path less traveled, the bright spot, and a driver can go anywhere,” she said. “And the anywhere is why it’s so dangerous.”
She didn’t really get it, at the time. But at the time the most dangerous thing Sheila was doing was playing footsy with the dumb AI’s that surrounded seedy money service businesses and maybe the odd run against a university library.
Nothing crazy, nothing too special, but Sheila was bright and did have the panache, did have the feel for the roads, and when they took the continuum quantum just two years later—
Well, the thing about sending the roads into near infinite possibilities meant just that.
Infinite anywhere.
When it happened, Sheila had been taking the newbies out on a joyride. Sheila had a team of her own by then. Smart team, smart mouthed—
She could feel Marcy grin in the back of her head every time they bit back, wondered half-despairing if this was what being a parent was like. Endless teenager-dom.
She had gone sort of white hat, at this point. Well, maybe not white, but at least grey, if you squinted, corporate and on a salary and with a whole legal and compliance team to back her up. A little too tired from running from the government acronyms that had popped up around continuum security.
Marcy had never gone white hat, never even looked at grey. Had existed outside of an even partially binary color system. She’d jacked in one last time, plugged the last of her brain waves into the continuum and rode them, rainbow-colored, into the sunset.
Her last gift had been a cheeky, very vintage style kind of chat-bot, a Marcy-flavored rudimentary AI that Sheila sent her new team members and baby drivers to when they first joined her team. A rite of passage.
Ten years since she faded out, and Sheila still missed her dearly, kept that bot on a local drive saved somewhere in the vicinity of her brain stem.
Every supercomputer continuum was different, and every continuum was the same in the difference. There were rarely similarities even when you were hopping on at the same starting port—
Port, an old fashioned slang term that had stuck around how long?—
It was like playing hopscotch. You started at your home base, the stripe of color and code you knew was yours, your operating number. Some people tattooed it on the base of their neck, so if they went offline some other driver could maybe drag them home.
Sheila considered that rather tacky— your ON on your meat?— and had just saved it in a READ THIS IF OFFLINE txt file to her local c:// drive.
Not like there was much of a point. If you went offline, you didn’t really come back. Not all the way, at least.
The point was—the point before—this was where gut came in, where instinct happened, because the whole point of the continuum was that it was never the same. There wasn’t a route, there wasn’t a map, there wasn’t a neat row of code to follow. There was just the road, and the ability to make your own turn.
That had been why it was built, originally. When blockchain was in its infancy, routing through hardware cables, decentralized and everywhere and so, so primitive. If the way to your bank account, to your money laundering, to your illegal-ill-gotten-gains was random, there shouldn’t be any way to find it, right?
And for a moment, that was right.
The problem with innovating for criminal reasons is that someone was always willing to innovate just a little bit further, to use those criminal reasons against you.
And so the first drivers hopped behind the wheel, drove the roads with little more than a very long ethernet cable and guts, and thus the continuum was born, small and crude, to follow the money.
Ancient history, at this point.
Now the continuum was quantum, now it was almost infinite, near-organic and growing closer to the Turing singularity every damn year, anywhere.
The cables went away, for sure, but that gut instinct didn’t, and so one morning Sheila told her latest team to gear the fuck up, they were going on a ride.
Latest team, ugh. At some point Sheila had climbed the corporate ladder, more through seniority and sheer knowledge than any sort of effort, and was now used to taking some new drivers for a spin on the continuum every six months or so.
This batch seemed horribly young, even to Sheila, and for a brief, terrible moment, she realized she was getting old. Maybe even as old as Marcy had been, when Sheila had gotten dragged into her broken down little data recovery shop, seventeen and bright eyed and sharp toothed.
“Good lord,” she said, eyeing them. “Are you even old enough to drink yet?”
A brief, nervous titter. Drinking age stayed one of those strange, archaic laws, near-constitutional, even as alcohol itself fell in and out of fashion.
The conference room they were in hadn’t been updated in the last twenty years, and still spotted the organically grown table and chairs that had been so fashionable back then. Sheila repressed a shudder. She remembered that trend, horror of horrors.
“How many of you have hop-scotched before?” She asked.
Silence.
“Ridden the roads,” Sheila said after a moment. No answer. Wracked her brains. “Ah,” she said weakly, “jacked into the super-computer continuum?”
“Oh,” one boy said. Had the cheekbone dermals that were in fashion now. “Yeah, I have.” Two girls raised their hands as well.
“Thank god,” Sheila said with feeling. “Right, you’re with me. The rest of you, you’re with Kellen here.”
Kellen waved cheerfully. Her assistant. She was old enough to have an assistant. Awful.
“Kellen’ll run you through the basics,” she said. “You three, we’re going on a joyride.”
Cheekbones grinned. The two girls—one totally hairless, no eyebrows or eyelashes even to speak of, and the other almost startlingly bland with no outward mods to speak of—nodded.
Sheila left the babies with Kellen with a sense of harsh relief. There were few enough of them that she just went to her office, not quite a corner but near enough.
“Fewer and fewer of your cohort know how to jack in,” Sheila said absently as she pulled up a couple of holograms. “Why is that?”
“The continuum isn’t viewed as necessary anymore,” Cheekbones said. “Like, it’s more like an elective class, you know?”
“Mm,” Sheila said.
“The now is very in vogue,” Baldie said. Bland agreed with a hum. “Very much a return to the earth, less of the ether.”
“Oh, drugs are back in,” Sheila said without thinking, raised her head.
Cheekbones barked out a surprised laugh. Bland gave a serene smile. “Yes,” she said. “Very in.”
“Well, you don’t need to be high for this,” Sheila said. “Really don’t want to be,” sort of an afterthought. “We’re joyriding,” she said. “Know what that means?”
“Just…looking around?” Baldie said.
“Your task,” Sheila said, smiled at the three of them, “is to find me something I’ve never seen.”
It wasn’t hard, per se, to find something that Sheila had specifically never seen before. Quantum was quantum was quantum for a reason. Infinite possibilities meant infinite specificities meant that if you could find the same thing twice, you were fucking good at your job.
Sheila was pretty damn good at her job.
Still, Sheila wasn’t going to take technicalities for this. Well, she might if they were really struggling.
The task wasn’t so much a task as it was an exercise—wanted to see how these kids ran, how they dealt with information overload and what colors they turned once they were in the continuum.
She ran Bland first, just because she liked the girl’s close mouthed Mona Lisa smile.
Bland started in a parody of vintage hacker movies, which Sheila found funny. 2 points for that. Bright neon green, scaling across the screen for a brief moment, and then a hard right turn to a harsh red tone.
Then she was working neatly, making her way from shade to shade and tint to tint in the continuum, a barely noticeable blend from their starting red to the orange of sunset, butter yellow, a near blue white—
When they stopped, they were at an unsecured surveillance camera somewhere in Uganda. A cow lowed, their horns nearly too big for the wide, fat body.
“Cows?” Cheekbones snorted.
“Nice,” Sheila said, looking around appreciatively. “This where they keep the Ankoles?”
Bland smiled slow. “Yes,” she said. “They’re going to be shipped off to be harvested for the horns, very popular with black market dealers. Same people who buy Ankole buy elephant ivory and snow leopard pelt.”
“Very nice,” Sheila said, put her hands on her hips, turned and viewed the whole thing. “Did you mark down their address?”
“Got it.” Bland said.
“We can show that when we get back,” Sheila said, and stepped back into the continuum.
Baldie hopscotched them next in a wilder, more free-wheeling path of memory association, going from the grey of an old air conditioner to the faded yellow of a warning sign, then the trawling green vines of a house on Earth-
Baldie was a traditionalist, which was funny. They showed up outside the main gates of the Cujas Library, just inside the student log-in.
“Some attorneys keep their student addresses,” Baldie said. “And shove their personal files on said address.”
“Decent execution,” Sheila said. “But I’ve seen it before. Try again.”
Baldie frowned, and twisted them off again, a little faster this time, a little rowdy. They paused on a bubblegum pink strata for a moment and then rocketed down shades of pink, growing more saccharine, more pastel.
Finally landed in the account servers for a dress up game, looking at rows and rows of baby’s first e-mails.
“There,” Baldie said, pointing. “Shreveport-Carver, Lucille. Daughter of U.S. Senator for Louisiana. She uses Daddy’s credit cards to buy points for better outfits.”
“Much better,” Sheila said, grinning. “We’ll run that number, see what else Daddy is buying on his personal card.” Turned to Cheekbones. “Right, kid, your turn.”
Right away Sheila was concerned.
Cheekbones went too fast, no pattern, no thought, just a click to click, running his numbers through a randomizer.
The thing about the continuum was you had to be able to find your way back. You had to know the path you were taking, whether that was thought or memory or Fibonacci sequence, it had to have some sort of internal logic, even if that internal logic was only yours.
To run the roads like this—
Sheila flattened her mouth, watched the droplet path of his run spread out and out and out, blur the color, and hit the gas on her own run.
Cheekbones ran the continuum like he was in a too-fast car- turns too sharp, tires squealing, car revving like he was asking for someone to chase him, and Sheila could feel the bumps in the road grow bigger, push harder, as the continuum woke up to the roughshod feel of someone trampling the code.
She could feel Bland and Baldie dropping behind, worry and caution tinted their numbers dingy and pale. Pinged a fast set of binary, STAY BACK, GO HOME, and watched their signatures drop off.
Micro-seconds that cost her, and she had to tear back off after Cheekbones, cursing the idiot and whoever the fuck hired someone so stupid, so suicidal—
Cheekbones slammed to a stop, popping out somewhere, and, swearing, Sheila tore open a door after that—
And found herself in the wastelands.
“Shit,” Sheila breathed, looking around.
Heat beat down on her shoulders, a red sun in a burnt pale sky. Cracked ground. Shimmering horizon, too far for Sheila to even guess at the millions of numbers that made it up.
Where you landed was always different, resolved based on location and budget and how you got in, whether through the back door or a faked access point or a real live log in.
Sheila looked around, her shoulders hunching up and fingers twitching.
This was real-life. Never seen resolution like this. Never seen anywhere that was so nothing like this.
She loaded up the chat bot that held Marcy’s memories fast, scanning the wastes for Cheekbones all the while.
MARCY: whats up kid
“Macy,” Sheila said, voice tight, “you ever skip to stripe that was just—wastes?”
MARCY: wym
“Like, nothing. Just a wasteland of red dirt and—”
A ping in her hand, messaging notification turned up to eleven, loud like an alarm.
MARCY: Sheila, leave now. Bad place. How’d you even get in—
“Marcy, what is it—”
MARCY: Danger. Danger. Danger.
“I got some idiot kid who skipped here, I have to pull him back to base—”
MARCY: Sheila. Leave. Danger. Danger. LEAVE. LEAVE. LEAVE. DANGER—
Marcy’s chat bot was pinging off in her head, just a constant ring of notification as Sheila’s nerves ratcheted tighter, tighter, scanning the horizon for any sign of the kid, any shred that he still existed—
“Excuse me,” a voice said from behind her, and Sheila’s blood ran cold.
MARCY: DANGER. DANGER. DANGER. DANGERDANGERDANGERDANGERDANGER—
Sheila turned around, very slowly.
There was a woman standing there. Small, slight, blue eyes. Smiling. She looked like a cut out, in this apocalyptic space.
But that wasn’t quite right, it was more like she was the real one, she was the alive body, so true that it made the hyper-reality of the wastelands fade away—
She was holding Cheekbones up by the collar, his body slumped and unmoving, like you would a kitten.
“Is this yours?”
“Yes,” Sheila said through a dry mouth, “yes, he’s a member of my team, I’m so sorry, he’s new—”
“Your team needs discipline,” the woman said, her mouth a small pink moue, and Sheila’s heart skipped a beat.
“I’m sorry.” Whispered it, half-wincing and cringing like an animal and too apologetic, the woman’s wide blue eyes locked on hers.
Marcy’s chat bot still blinking in the background of her mind, a constant stream of danger, the strange hindbrain knowledge this was not a safe person to be talking to, this woman with her sweet smile and too-real form.
The woman dropped Cheekbones onto the sand. He slumped there, unmoving.
Sheila reached down, not even looking at the boy, just feeling for his tag, whatever would allow her to pack up what was left of him and ratchet it back to base. Shoved her fingers into his head and wiggled them around, looking for his operating number.
Her fist closed around it and the adrenaline in her system was like a punch to the face now, her flight or fight so out of control she was trembling, holding the boy’s brains in her fist. She began backing up, keeping her eyes on the woman’s strange, porcelain doll face, first slowly and then faster, till she was far enough to turn and run.
Faster and faster, across the wastelands, till the woman was just a dot, a speck, unmoving, and Sheila could safely warp back to the continuum.
Even as the roads opened before her, she could feel that empty blue gaze on her back.
She landed in that stupid fucking conference room amongst a crowd of people, medics and legal and corporate, Kellen hunched over her like a protective bird, Baldie and Bland white-faced and silent.
Sheila sucked in a breath, her vision not correcting normally, colors too flat and vibrant. No shadows, punched out of hyperreality.
“You went fucking flat,” Kellen said, his hand tight on har shoulder. “Sheila, you lined out for two whole minutes.”
“The kid,” she rasped. “What—”
Kellen spared a look behind him. “No clue,” he said, dismissive. “Sheila, what happened?”
Sheila clicked in, for a brief moment. Had to fight through lines and lines of code of the chat-bot twisting in on itself, into sheer madness.
“What the fuck was that?” She said, one foot with Kellen and the other in the vibrating black space of her implanted c:// drive.
MARCY: The anywhere’s awake.
Pausing, the funny three dot of thinking, thinking, thinking as the old ROM personality of Marcy struggled to parse new information.
MARCY: Don’t go in again.
Then a click, a strange zoomed out noise, and the chat bot disconnected, and Sheila sat amongst the whirl of corporate lawyers asking where the hell she went, medics still trying to get Cheekbones back online, Kellen’s hand tight on her shoulder.
Felt for the presence of the bot like a child grasping for a parent’s hand, lost at the grocery store.
Stared straight ahead, eyes unfocused, and knew she could never run the roads again.
Isabel Yacura is an editor and writer currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently represented by Haley Casey at CMA Literary.