“Lend us your great mind, O Djinni, and tell us what we’re looking at.”
“Oh very well.” He snaps his fingers again and turns to face Huw, 639,219, and the cognitive maps floating around them. “Is this the—oh shit!”
639,219 looks up, alarmed. “This can’t be right! My malware scanner says—”
“You’re infected.” The djinni nods sharply. “That’s a rootkit. And look”—he points—“that’s your epistemological framework it’s dry-humping. How long have you had this?”
“I can’t, I can’t—” 639,219 shudders. “—I don’t know. Can you get it off me? What happens if you get it off me? Make it go away!”
The rootkit is a gray sludge of interlocking philosophical objections to the Real, a self-propelled vacuole of solipsism and self-regard that leaves a slimy trail of ironic disdain on every concept it touches. It’s chewing away at 639,219’s cognitive map, etching holes in places where Huw has values and shitting out doubts.
“It’s in very deep,” says the djinni . “Do you know who planted it on you?” 639,219 shakes her head. “All right. Is there anyone you really trust, I mean, trust with your life, who might have had the access permissions to do something like this? Parents? Lovers? Wait, I know you’re going to say they wouldn’t—that doesn’t matter, these rootkits usually infect people from someone else who’s been infected. Who have you been fucking, 639,219?”
639,219 opens her mouth to say something, and her head disintegrates.
There is no blood, nor splinters of bone, nor greasy pink headmeat as would fly in a reality-based physics realm if someone was shot in the head: but the effect is equivalent. 639,219’s head fades to onionskin transparency, revealing the absence of anything beneath the finest upper layer of skin: while around Huw and the djinni, 639,219’s cognitive map turns gray as the rootkit explodes across it, crumbling the complexities of her personality to word salad.
The djinni roars and launches himself across the bar as Huw shudders uncontrollably, so shocked that she can’t respond. Her vision blurs as the entire bar derezzes. The djinni has multiplied himself again, and a single copy waits with her while sixteen bazillion other copies race after the rapidly disappearing bartender.
“Huw,” says the djinni ’s bodyguard instance, “trust me.”
“Uh, uh—,” Huw gasps.
“Now. Or I’m going to lose the killer.”
“Oh. Okay.” Huw struggles to get a grip, then adds the djinni to her trusted access list, right up top, granting maximum privileges for the next minute. This has got to be a cruel trick, she half thinks: the djinni probably staged the whole ep to get into her panties—
But no. Here comes a rapidly diminishing corps of overmuscled gents in Armani, frog-marching a figure between them. The bartender. The murderer. Someone 639,219 trusted so totally, she’d granted them permission to kill her, the same level Huw just gave the djinni in order to give him the transitive freedom to apprehend 639,219’s assailant. Huw blinks back tears, steadying her emotions almost automatically using her control paneclass="underline" have to be careful, she could go completely to pieces if she eases up on the iron grip and pauses to consider that 639,219 was a victim, of someone she trusted with her life except they planted a rootkit on her—
The djinni squad hold the bartender in front of her. Huw reaches out and grabs the bartender’s head, making contact to dissolve the mask.
“Bonnie. Why?”
Bonnie looks down, then away.
Huw looks at the djinni, who shrugs: Your show. He snaps his finger, and time freezes everything around the two of them into motionless stasis.
A weird kind of clarity settles over Huw, a kind of Sherlockian distance. She’s been running around with arse afire for most of her short uploaded life. Time she tried to think before she ran, for a change. “All right, let’s start with what we can see. Item: we can still see Bonnie.”
The djinni nods. “Wondered when you’d notice that.”
“If I’ve got this capabilities thing sussed, 639,219 trusted me to arb, and she trusted Bonnie enough to let Bonnie slip her a lethal cocktail, which is pretty deep trust. Now, why would 639,219 enter into that kind of trust arrangement with Bonnie?” Huw thinks awhile, discarding hypotheses: lovers, coreligionists, trickery.
The djinni has clasped his hands behind his back and is pacing slowly back and forth to one side. He looks up. “What about the rootkit?”
Huw’s smile thins out and she feels the irrational anger come to the surface again. She damps it down, summoning back that feeling of clarity again. “Of course,” she says. “I’d assumed that someone rooted 639,219 so that she’d testify in favor of destroying the Earth. Maybe that is why the rootkit was installed. But anyone who’d rooted 639,219 could definitely get her to hand over enough trust to allow her to be destroyed.”
Huw bounced from one not-foot to the other. “Right, so. I trust 639,219. 639,219 has to trust Bonnie, because Bonnie is her botmaster. I trust you. Therefore, you could catch Bonnie. Now, if Bonnie wants to void out her contract with 639,219, the sim’ll roll back to before 639,219 and I started talking—um, probably to when she agreed to take the cocktail from Bonnie, a few minutes before we got there.”
Huw stopped. “But if that happens, why wouldn’t it all happen over again? I mean, barring small nondeterministic variations and initial sensitivity and all, I suppose it’d just play out again, and we’d end up back here, 639,219 gone, Bonnie captured—”
The djinni cleared his throat. “There’s the reset tokens. Look like this.” He flips her a poker chip that revolves through the air in a graceful, glinting arc. It slows as she reaches for it and nudges itself into a course-correction that lands it firmly in her palm. Its face bears the Club Capabilities logo, worked into a Möbius strip; when Huw flips the coin over, it rotates through another spatial dimension instead, a feeling that her not-fingertips and not-eyes can’t agree upon, and she’s looking at the same face again.
“I hate it already,” Huw says. “Stupid flashy sensorium tricks. Ooh, look at me, I am a virtual being, I can bend physics, woo.” She squeezes it in her fist. “What is it for? What does it do?”
“If the sim resets you, one of these ends up in your hand. It puts you on notice that if you enter into a contract right away, one or both of you is likely to abandon it. Prevents loops.”
“So we’d have one of these.” Huw thinks a moment. “Where’d you get this one?”
The djinni lays a finger that seems to have an extra joint alongside his hooked nose. “That would be telling,” he says, and winks.
Huw damps down her temper. If the djinni is hoping to get into her knickers, he’s certainly going about it the wrong way. She would want to strangle him, if she wasn’t making herself not want to strangle him. “So, let’s ask Bonnie.” Time unfreezes. “You—you can’t afford to break away from us, because I could just break my contract with 639,219 and you’d be pouring her a drink just as one of these coins appeared in her hand, and you’d be stuffed.” Huw breaks off, thinks about what she just said. Bonnie stares at her mulishly but holds her silence.
Huw can’t help but feel like there’s something the djinni and Bonnie aren’t telling her—something about the fraught looks they keep exchanging with each other.
“If only we could talk to 639,219. She is gone forever, right?”
“The rootkit zeroed her out,” Bonnie says.
“Yeah,” the djinni says.