Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

Anne was startled by the truth of what he said. It made sense. They were caught in a simulacrum cast a moment before a kiss. One moment later they — the real Anne and Benjamin — must have kissed. What she felt now, stirring within her, was the anticipation of that kiss, her body’s urge and her heart’s caution. The real Anne would have refused him once, maybe twice, and then, all achy inside, would have granted him a kiss. And so they had kissed, the real Anne and Benjamin, and a moment later gone out to the wedding reception and their difficult fate. It was the promise of that kiss that glowed in Anne, that was captured in the very strings of her code.

“Do you feel it?” Benjamin asked.

“I’m beginning to.”

Anne looked at her gown. It was her grandmother’s, snowy taffeta with point d’esprit lace. She turned the ring on her finger. It was braided bands of yellow and white gold. They had spent an afternoon picking it out. Where was her clutch? She had left it in Cathyland. She looked at Benjamin’s handsome face, the pink carnation, the room, the table piled high with gifts.

“Are you happy?” Benjamin asked.

She didn’t have to think. She was ecstatic, but she was afraid to answer in case she spoiled it. “How did you do that?” she said. “A moment ago, I wanted to die.”

“We can stay on this spot,” he said.

“What? No. Can we?”

“Why not? I, for one, would choose nowhere else.”

Just to hear him say that was thrilling. “But what about Simopolis?”

“We’ll bring Simopolis to us,” he said. “We’ll have people in. They can pull up chairs.”

She laughed out loud. “What a silly, silly notion, Mr. Malley!”

“No, really. We’ll be like the bride and groom atop a wedding cake. We’ll be known far and wide. We’ll be famous.”

“We’ll be freaks!”

“Say yes, my love. Say you will.”

They stood close but not touching, thrumming with happiness, balanced on the moment of their creation, when suddenly and without warning the lights dimmed, and Anne’s thoughts flitted away like larks.

Old Ben awoke in the dark. “Anne?” he said and groped for her. It took a moment to realize that he was alone in his media room. It had been a most trying afternoon, and he’d fallen asleep. “What time is it?”

“Eight-oh-three PM,” replied the room.

That meant he’d slept for two hours. Midnight was still four hours away. “Why’s it so cold in here?”

“Central heating is offline,” replied the house.

“Off line?” How was that possible? “When will it be back?”

“That’s unknown. Utilities do not respond to my enquiry.”

“I don’t understand. Explain.”

“There are failures in many outside systems. No explanation is currently available.”

At first, Ben was confused; things just didn’t fail anymore. What about the dynamic redundancies and self- healing routines? But then he remembered that the homeowner’s association to which he belonged contracted out most domicile functions to management agencies, and who knew where they were located? They might be on the Moon for all he knew, and with all those trillions of sims in Simopolis sucking up capacity… It’s begun, he thought, the idiocy of our leaders. “At least turn on the lights,” he said, half expecting even this to fail. But the lights came on, and he went to his bedroom for a sweater. He heard a great amount of commotion through the wall in the apartment next door. It must be one hell of a party, he thought, to exceed the wall’s buffering capacity. Or maybe the wall buffers are offline too?

The main door chimed. He went to the foyer and asked the door who was there. The door projected the outer hallway. There were three men waiting there, young, rough-looking, ill-dressed. Two of them appeared to be clones, jerries.

“How can I help you?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” one of the jerries said, not looking directly at the door. “We’re here to fix your houseputer.”

“I didn’t call you, and my houseputer isn’t sick,” he said. “It’s the net that’s out.” Then he noticed they carried sledgehammers and screwdrivers, hardly computer tools, and a wild thought crossed his mind. “What are you doing, going around unplugging things?”

The jerry looked confused. “Unplugging, sir?”

“Turning things off?”

“Oh, no sir! Routine maintenance, that’s all.” The men hid their tools behind their backs.

They must think I’m stupid, Ben thought. While he watched, more men and women passed in the hall and hailed the door at the suite opposite his. It wasn’t the glut of sim traffic choking the system, he realized — the system itself was being pulled apart. But why? “Is this going on everywhere?” he said. “This routine maintenance?”

“Oh, yessir. Everywhere. All over town. All over the world, ’sfar as we can tell.”

A coup? By service people? By common clones? It made no sense. Unless, he reasoned, you considered that the lowest creature on the totem pole of life is a clone, and the only thing lower than a clone is a sim. And why would clones agree to accept sims as equals? Manumission Day, indeed. Uppity Day was more like it. “Door,” he commanded, “open.”

“Security protocol rules this an unwanted intrusion,” said the house. “The door must remain locked.”

“I order you to open the door. I overrule your protocol.”

But the door remained stubbornly shut. “Your identity cannot be confirmed with Domicile Central,” said the house. “You lack authority over protocol-level commands.” The door abruptly quit projecting the outside hall.

Ben stood close to the door and shouted through it to the people outside. “My door won’t obey me.”

He could hear a muffled, “Stand back!” and immediately fierce blows rained down upon the door. Ben knew it would do no good. He had spent a lot of money for a secure entryway. Short of explosives, there was nothing they could do to break in.

“Stop!” Ben cried. “The door is armed.” But they couldn’t hear him. If he didn’t disable the houseputer himself, someone was going to get hurt. But how? He didn’t even know exactly where it was installed. He circumambulated the living room looking for clues. It might not even actually be located in the apartment, nor within the block itself. He went to the laundry room where the utilidor — plumbing and cabling — entered his apartment. He broke the seal to the service panel. Inside was a blank screen. “Show me the electronic floor plan of this suite,” he said.

The house said, “I cannot comply. You lack command authority to order system-level operations. Please close the keptel panel and await further instructions.”

“What instructions? Whose instructions?”

There was the slightest pause before the house replied, “All contact with outside services has been interrupted. Please await further instructions.”

His condo’s houseputer, denied contact with Domicile Central, had fallen back to its most basic programming. “You are degraded,” he told it. “Shut yourself down for repair.”

“I cannot comply. You lack command authority to order system-level operations.”

The outside battering continued, but not against his door. Ben followed the noise to the bedroom. The whole wall vibrated like a drumhead. “Careful, careful,” he cried as the first sledgehammers breached the wall above his bed. “You’ll ruin my Harger.” As quick as he could, he yanked the precious oil painting from the wall, moments before panels and studs collapsed on his bed in a shower of gypsum dust and isomere ribbons. The men and women on the other side hooted approval and rushed through the gap. Ben stood there hugging the painting to his chest and looking into his neighbor’s media room as the invaders climbed over his bed and surrounded him. They were mostly jerries and lulus, but plenty of free-range people too.

“We came to fix your houseputer!” said a jerry, maybe the same jerry as from the hallway.

Ben glanced into his neighbor’s media room and saw his neighbor, Mr. Murkowski, lying in a puddle of blood. At first Ben was shocked, but then he thought that it served him right. He’d never liked the man, nor his politics. He