The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl Read online

  Stainproof? She smeared some mud on the dress, and the whole of it turned a deep, muddy brown. She giggled a bit. It was certainly one way of making the stain disappear, but Helen had no idea how to make use of that. Maybe if she spilled a nice red wine on it...

  "Hoosegow permeability" would be a difficult one to test. The Hoosegow was a holding pen for troublemaking players, located miles from anything interesting, connected to the city only by an interminable bus ride. Boredom, it seemed, was a more potent threat than an outright ban. She didn't relish the idea of spending the next several hours on a probable dead end, but it was her only real lead.

  She found the bus stop easily enough, along the road separating the red light district and the train yards at the edge of town. It was well outside the noob zone, and Helen wasn't familiar enough with the battle mechanics of Burning Lights to know what to do in a scrape. But she wasn't on anybody's enemies list, and death was pretty forgiving in this world anyways.

  The bus came roaring along the deserted street, headlights cutting through the dense rain and blinding her. With a piercing hiss from its air brakes, the bus came to a halt. A pair of mobsters stepped out, each carrying an enormous machine gun, with chains of ammunition draped over their shoulders. They saw Helen, and both gave her a sheepish, hand-caught-in-the-cookie-jar look before disappearing into the night.

  The driver didn't really grasp the concept on the first pass. Or the second. Or the third. Finally the character ran out of script and escalated her question to a human being. She saw his manner change when someone else entered his body. "You mean you want a ride to the Hoosegow? Why?"

  Helen shrugged. "I've never been. What's the fare?"

  "Six hours of your life, spent in the most boring way possible. The trip is boring. The Hoosegow is boring. The whole thing is designed to be one long, excruciating exercise in sensory deprivation. That's what you want?"

  "Yep." She tried to step on the bus, but the doors closed in her face. They opened again when she stepped back.

  "Sorry," the driver apologized. "I'm playing with the scripts, but I don't see a way to get you on the bus without an admin ban. I can give you one, but I'll lose rep if I don't have a reason."

  Helen looked around. She picked up a rock and threw it through a window. "Am I evil yet?"

  The driver shook his head. "That's one of Four Fingered Federico's joints. Picking a fight with him is all the punishment you need."

  She picked up another rock and cast about for a suitable target. Oh no. A bedraggled three-legged dog was hobbling by. She winced as she stepped back and gave the rock a throw. It caught the dog behind the ear; it yelped and hobbled faster.

  "Wow. You're a really terrible person," the driver said. "Six hour ban. Hop on." The script took control of the driver again. The bus doors closed behind her, and the bus lurched forward, throwing her back into her seat. The driver reached above him to grab a mic. The voice that came over the intercom was a ham-handed caricature of boredom. "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Burning Lights Metro Z Line, traveling to the Hoosegow Memorial Penitentiary. This is a direct line with no stops. Weapons are disabled for the duration of your trip."

  "Please note the red button under the window. It will light up every three to five minutes, at which time you have twenty seconds to press it. Each time you fail to press the button, an hour will be added to your sentence."

  The driver continued to ramble, and Helen opened a newspaper.

  Half way through the trip, she stood to stretch. As she turned around, her heart caught in her throat. There was a woman sitting three rows behind her, engrossed in some book, looking perfectly at ease. The thing was, nobody had been on the bus when she had stepped in.

  Helen came forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. "Excuse me, but was that woman here when I got on?"

  "What woman?" he asked, glancing in his rear view mirror.

  And my heebies get jeebie in three, two, one... She turned around and walked straight back to the woman's seat, folding her arms, and glaring at the woman until she looked up. Which she did, a bored smirk on her beautiful, overpainted face. "You can see me. Interesting." It was Rita, Eric's girlfriend from back in the bar. "Don't talk, not until you're sure it's safe."

  Helen sat down next to her, staring forward. Rita opened her newspaper again. For a few seconds, a Grid resource address appeared on the page. Helen opened a connection to it, and poked around it for a few minutes to make sure it was secure. When she was finally convinced, she said, "You're starting to get on my nerves."

  "You poor dear."

  "I hope this is the part where you explain who you are and why you're following me."

  "I'm going to leave you guessing. Let's just say that, if you're not who you're trying to pass yourself off as... or if you're not quite who you think you are... it falls to me to deal with you."

  Not who I think I am? "So they sent you to protect Eric?"

  The woman only shrugged. "Don't give me a reason to come after you." She disappeared.

  The button by her seat began to flash. Helen punched it hard, scraping some skin off her knuckles. Bitch.

  For the last hour of the ride, Helen kept looking over her shoulder, hoping to catch another glimpse of her stalker. She could tell she was making the driver nervous. He only grunted as she said goodbye and stepped off the bus. A couple of players got on, then the bus pulled away, leaving Helen standing alone in front of a large but unremarkable yellow brick building. She could see through the chain link fence into the exercise yard. A single tower rose from each corner, with a floodlight and an armed guard. The main building was six stories of yellow brick, with tiny slits for windows.

  A large, official-looking silhouette came toward her, rifle poised, and motioned for her to follow. She followed the guard in through the entrance, along a long corridor of dark stone and bare metal bars. He stopped, and motioned with his gun for her to step inside. "You know I was framed, right?" she asked. He motioned with the gun again. "It was self defense? The dog had it coming?" The guard seemed to be getting impatient. "Fine," she said. "I didn't want my freedom anyways." She stepped inside, and the door swung closed, locking her in.

  As the guard walked away, she heard Eric's voice over the intercom. "Your incarceration begins now. At this time, you may log off and return when your sentence is completed. If you choose to stay, please take advantages of the many amenities available to you, including the cot, the toilet, and steel bars which can double as musical instruments. Spoons not provided." Moments later Helen invoked the permeability function, stepped through the bars and out of the cell.

  Hoosegow permeability.1 She figured that was what it had meant. Still, the dress had to be more than just a get out of jail free card. There had to be something in this building that it would allow her to find.

  There was no guarantee that this wasn't just some dumb in-game quest, where her reward was a machine gun silencer and a bag of cash. But she couldn't shake the belief that if any of her sisters were out there, that Eric would be helping them find each other.

  But it could just be wishful thinking. William had disappeared. Kriti had gone back to India with Mardav, then both of them had fallen off the Grid. Vincent was still Vice President and therefore surrounded with security, and even if she could sneak a message to him, what would it say? For all she knew, he had been in on the decision to execute her. So part of her needed to believe that Eric at least was on her side.

  For the hundredth time that day, she wished that she knew where William was.

  Her footsteps echoed as she walked the empty corridors, a few tired, bare bulbs lighting her way. She never saw anyone, either guards or prisoners, which seemed wrong. If nothing else, there should be occasional patrols. She pushed through another wall, and found herself out in the exercise yard. The yard and the guard towers appeared to be empty. That didn't seem right. She turned the permeability feature off.

  Instantly alarms started blaring and searchlights
cut through the night air. The guards along the walls let out inhuman cries as they leapt down toward her, moving faster than any human being should have been able to. One of the guards opened its mouth wide, showing off rows of long blade-like teeth. The guard dogs? Way worse. She turned the dress back on, and everything fell silent again. Guards and dogs disappeared, and she was left alone in the silence, a bit shaken. Oh god, the dogs.

  She walked back inside. She walked up and down the corridors, occasionally poking her head through walls. She spent a half hour doing that, seeming to get nowhere. There were no secret rooms or tunnels, no hidden notes, no concealed stash of microfilm. Come on, just give me one good narrative cliche, she thought. Is that too much to ask right now?

  The universe heard her, but being fresh out of helpful cliches, it rummaged around and pulled "Time is Running Out" off the pile. A ghostly outline of a guard dog passed through her, skulking through the corridor. She pulled up her status, and only then realized that the powers of the dress had a time limit. As she used it, it was disappearing; the skirt had gotten noticeably shorter, and the back was gone.

  She turned it off. Alarms sounded, and the dog came bounding back down the corridor. She sprinted toward the nearest open door. She grabbed the outermost bar, spinning herself around and into the cell, slamming it behind her. The dog stopped, returning to its normal form. He spent a few seconds with his head cocked sideways, as though confused at what had just happened, then returned to his patrol.

  Helen only had a few minutes of permeability left, and she wasn't going to use any of it until she had some destination in mind. She had searched every floor twice, and the top three floors three times. There was nothing on the roof. There was nothing outside. There was nothing inside, as best she could tell. Nothing above, nothing around, nothing within. What did that leave?

  She smiled. She turned the dress back on, tried to think her way downward. She began to sink, then to fall, landing in another cell. She repeated the process, and fell again. This time she landed in the middle of a break room, behind a translucent guard who was leaning back in his chair and reading a newspaper. The dog beside him stirred, giving a low growl.

  She tried it one more time, but it didn't work. She walked through the wall and into the hallway, where she tried again. Nothing. She heard the click click of footsteps behind her, and saw the shadow of a guard approaching. She took off in the same direction, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the guard. As she ran, she heard a snarl behind her, and the patter of running paws coming ever closer. She glanced back, and wished that she hadn't. In desperation, she tried one more time to imagine that the floor was as insubstantial as sky.

  As she tumbled downward into the darkness, she screamed.

  * * *

  1 As of this writing, typing "hoosegow permeability" into Google (with quotes) yields exactly one result. Bing returns zero. C'mon, Bing. You're not even trying!

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  // ALL THAT YOU CAN'T LEAVE BEHIND //

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  She fell for several long seconds until she hit cold water. The impact knocked the air out of her lungs and buried her. She flailed in the darkness, choked, and tried to swim up to the surface. With every stroke that didn't bring her to the surface, her panic rose. When she thought she couldn't hold out any longer, her hands touched air. She choked on a mouthful of water then coughed uncontrollably as she treaded water.

  The darkness was complete, and Helen fought down a sense of claustrophobia. She had no sense of which direction to go, or how far the shore might be, or if the water was moving. She tried to float on her back in an attempt to conserve her energy. She called out for help, and heard the echo bounce about the chamber.

  The echo seemed to go on for ages, giving her a sense of the vastness of the cavern. It also gave her an idea. She closed her eyes, trying to focus as she floated. She brought up an elaborate model of the internals of her mind. It would just be a matter of expanding some connections from her auditory cortex to the part of the hippocampus that gave her a sense of her own location. Then she'd make some temporary connections to her visual cortex, and altered the new gray matter to learn as quickly as possible.

  Finally it was done. In the space of a few minutes, she had done what evolution might have done over the course of thousands of generations1: given herself echolocation. She let out a whoop, and the echoes painted a rough and psychedelic picture of her surroundings in vivid, ever-shifting colors.

  It faded quickly. She whooped again, and it burst back into life. She could make out an island just a hundred yards or so away from her, and started swimming toward it. As she did, she tried varying the pitches and patterns of her vocalizations, finally settling on a high-pitched sort of seal bark. The image was getting easier to comprehend, but the resolution was still poor, like she was looking through a drunken haze.

  She swam onward until, beneath the water, her feet touched ground. She climbed out onto the shore, the mud beneath her made a wet sucking sound as she collapsed onto her back. "I went sploitch," she said, then giggled. After a few minutes of panting in the darkness, it got too oppressive, and she had to start barking again.

  This island appeared to be the first in a long chain of them. She made slow progress, making her way from one island to the next. She kept falling and scraping her hands or her knees, and it was starting to piss her off. "Bruised, bloodied, covered in mud, and barking mad," she grumbled to herself as she climbed onto the next shore. "If William could see me now."

  "Squeak?"

  She heard the scurrying of paws behind her, and turned around. It had to be a rat, but all Helen could see were coruscating flashes of light whenever the critter moved, as though the ground had caught a bad case of static electricity.

  "Hello, little guy." She knelt down to greet it. It sniffed her hand, then gave it an experimental nuzzle. When she tried to pet it, it slunk away a few feet, then stopped. Helen got up and took a few steps closer. It darted forward, then stopped again, as though it wanted her to follow.

  She did, her steps tentative, letting the darting ball of light and the sound of her own footsteps light her path. It took all her focus to make sense of the extraordinary sensations, and soon she had lost track of time and self, and gone into an almost trancelike state. After what could have been hours, she saw a glimmer of real light up ahead, the orange flicker of torchlight.

  There was a door, made from rotting wood, held inside a stone arch with heavy, rusting hinges. She shoved at it, but it held firm. Knocking only seemed to make it angry. She looked all around for an indication of what to do next. There were no inscriptions, no signs, no handles or mechanisms, and no keyhole.

  Helen looked at the rat. The rat looked back at her. It seemed impatient.

  Helen took a few steps back, then took a run at it, crashing her shoulder into it. The door didn't give way, but her shoulder nearly did.

  "Ouch."

  "Squeak."

  Helen looked down. The rat pantomimed knocking on the door.

  Helen knocked again, three times in rapid succession. The door gave a rattling shudder, as if it wanted to fly off its hinges and attack her. The rat looked up at her expectantly.

  She gave it a single knock. Somewhere inside, she heard a metallic click, as though a mechanism had released. She gave a second knock, and was rewarded with another click. The third time, though, the door threw a fit.

  When it settled down, she began again. One knock. One knock. Two knocks. Another success. She tried one knock again, but the door didn't like it a bit.

  When she had it nailed it down to 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, something clicked in her mind. Fibonacci. She knocked 8 times, then 13 times. "Really?" she asked. "You're going to make me knock twenty-one times? You're getting to be tedious." But she did, expecting the door to swing wide for her. Instead, it gave a loud rumble, and tried to take her hand off.

  She tried again, figurin
g she'd miscounted. Now the door was getting very upset with her, and she had to wait several minutes for it to calm down. Helen was getting frustrated. The trouble with sequences was that there were literally an infinite number of next number solutions. The better you were at math, the more possibilities you could imagine, which meant more combinations to try.

  "Brute forcing a large problem space is no way to spend a Friday night," she muttered. The solution screamed "Fibonacci sequence," but the sequence itself didn't work. The faint stirrings of a memory tugged at her, and she spent twenty minutes playing cat and mouse with her own memories. Finally, she tried a recall technique she'd written a term paper on in her first year of college. She tried picturing herself back in the classroom where she thought she might have learned about it. The hope was that it would jar loose associated memories. The classroom was dingy white, half full of students, always too cold. A young postdoc with little talent for lecturing was covering a white dry erase board with blue equations.

  She had it. He had mentioned a really dumb variation on the Fibonacci sequence where, before adding the two numbers, you reversed the digits. So instead of adding 8 plus 13, you added 8 plus 31, resulting in a completely different sequence. She'd thought of it as the mathematical analogue to a bad pun. He had called it--

  "Iccanobif," she murmured. That must have been the magic word, because the door swung open with a satisfied groan.

  She stepped through. The small room was encircled by a dozen torches. In the center of the room was a stone pedestal. With a rubik's cube on it. Ick.

  The cube rose into the air and began twisting itself, destroying the pristine alignment of colors. It flipped faster and faster until it became a colorful, rattling blur. Then it clattered back to the stone surface.

  There was a memory that always surfaced whenever Helen saw a rubik's cube. It was a bright, lazy Sunday afternoon. She must have been eight or nine. She found one of the cubes in the attic, among her parents' stuff. She spent hours under a tree, trying to solve it, twisting it about, learning the patterns of the thing. Finally it fell into place, and with a few more satisfying twists the colors lined up. She had it. Victorious, she ran to her mother to show off her accomplishment.