Limon City was rarely cold. The city was compressed against the coast, flattened out by foothills that fast became mountains. In winter, the wind came sweeping through the bay and up the hills, carrying the chill of the Pacific into the country. At the peak of one of these hills, a single streetlamp illuminated a woman, looking at the city and bracing herself against the wind. Her eyes produced tears against the dryness, and the distant lights of the city dissolved into twinkling stars that outshone the ones above.
The quite whine of an electric motor and the crunch of tyres on old asphalt heralded the arrival of a cab. It spoke in a gentle, genderless voice.
“Agustina Guillen?”
The woman nodded and the door closest to her clicked open. She took a quick moment to look around, adjusted her jacket and the holster hidden beneath, and stepped into the car.
Agustina Guillen was a special enforcer, sheltered under the sweeping umbrella of SAm Union’s domestic security apparatus. Technically, she was on loan from the National Bureau of Emerging Technologies; local investigators had wanted more firepower and evidently someone upstairs had agreed.
So they pulled her off her normal rotation and shipped her down here after a half hour in the hydration tank. It told her all she needed to know about Marcos Medina. A veteran of a dozen Baltic brushfires, he thought he could hide in Limon, bribe a few officials to look the other way and drown his crimes the whirlpool of society.
The car pulled up to a building awash with a rippling rainbow of pzLEDs, all very intently selling something that no one could possibly need. Fluoropaint tags were scattered across the bare surfaces of the building, recycling light in the form of a dozen gang allegiances. Guillen stepped out of the car, her glance of disdain painted with the same rainbow light as everything else. She smoothed her coat, making sure no lumps stood out before she went inside.
Medina’s apartment was listed as 5804; Guillen’s government privileges convinced the elevator to take her up to 59 without telling anyone. That same privilege looped interior cameras and slid the emergency stairwell door open without a sound. She clicked through filters as she prowled down the stairs, eyes alert for tripwires in a dozen different wavelengths but finding nothing.
The path to Medina’s door told the same story. Guillen pulled the weapon from beneath her coat, set her CIDS and augs to balanced nonlethal reactions, and commanded the door to open. It slid across with a whir to reveal a pitch dark room and utter silence. Her eyes boosted gain and stole wavelengths from infrared, revealing to her a completely ordinary – and empty – apartment.
She managed to take two silent steps into the room before hearing the faintest sound from her left.
Precog modules triggered instantly, looking half-seconds into the future and bringing her left arm up before she knew it was moving. Something hard hit it with a crunch; adrenaline and nerve shunts stamped out the pain but she knew she’d be feeling it later. By that point bio-muscle memory had kicked in, and her right arm had her sidearm out and pointed under her left arm and at her assailant. She squeezed the trigger and waited what felt like an eternity for the popping of a burst of stun rounds, then danced back through the door into the hallway.
Her assailant collapsed on the threshold, a pipe clanging to the ground beside him. She stepped over his body and resumed clearing the house, twitchier and with an ache developing in her arm.
She rounded the corner of the apartment’s tiny kitchen and found herself face to face with someone else. He jumped and took a step backwards; Guillen wanted to lunge forward but found herself unable to move.
The man lacked a torso entirely. In its place was a hole, a two-dimensional polygon of negative reality. Through it she saw a fractal rainbow, unfolding and unfolding and unfolding. It drove a spike into her head and pried it open and filled it with fire and lightning and she wanted to tear her eyes away but she couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.
She gradually became aware that she was on the ground as both men came to stand over her, letting snippets of conversation drift down to her ears.
“…damn near broke my nose…”
“…brainbleed worked though, didn’t…”
“…how she’s shuddering … must have precogs…”
And then one of them bent and reached a hand towards her, and everything went blissfully dark.
She awoke seated in a chair, her head mercifully clear. She was bound to the chair up and down her arms and legs, along with several thicker cords around her torso. She flexed against the cords, but not even her augmented muscles made any headway. A thin ring sat around her head like a crown, several leads coming from it and running somewhere behind her, while several patches with thicker leads were distributed over her body.
This was enough to concern her.
She pulled another tool from the enforcer’s standard loadout and activated her EITR conditioning. Immediately, everything dulled – she stopped feeling the cords on her arms and legs, her arm stopped aching, her emotions cleared and her residual fatigue melted away. It was like being dropped face-first into a sensory deprivation chamber; they could hold a blowtorch to her palm and she’d feel nothing.
The sound of shoes on carpet made her look up to find two men in front of her. Implants flagged the one on the left as Marcos Medina, but were clueless about the identity of the other. Medina had a scowl on his face and a slightly dented metal pipe in his hands; his friend (now with a torso) held a remote and a gun.
The one on the right spoke first.
“Want to tell us how exactly you found us?”
Guillen met his eyes with defiance, unwilling to blink or turn away, unwilling to cede any ground to her newfound captors, and spoke in a perfect monotone.
“No Child of Time will have anything from me.”
“Again?” he snarled, taking half a step forward before Medina caught him with an arm across the chest. Medina turned them both away, and they spoke in hushed tones that Guillen’s augmented hearing picked up like they were whispering straight into her ears.
“Give it up, Lalo. We’ve tried this before. She’s not gonna give us anything.”
“What am I supposed to do? We can’t just keep running like this; we need to start figuring things out.”
“And what, you’re going to beat her until gives you answers she doesn’t have? You really think a Mind would leave anything useful rattling around in her head?”
“Well–”
“Just watch this.”
Medina turned to face her again; his friend followed. He held her gaze for a long moment, his eyes flicking between each of her own, before turning away with a sigh and what seemed like dejection on his face.
“See? She doesn’t recognize me. And not even Alejo did, so I’m not sure why you think this one would.”
Guillen’s head snapped back like a megavolt had gone through it, clanging the ring on her head against the chair’s metal headrest. Medina’s friend started and trained the gun on her but she didn’t care; she was focused entirely on Medina. “Where did you hear that name?” she asked, desperation pushing itself through the EITR conditioning into her voice.
As a matter of policy, everything Guillen heard was logged for internal review and the rare external audit. In her case, however, a small nonstandard program sat between her ears and the NBET standard logger. It made a quick copy of words Guillen heard, avoiding any computationally complex operations to not tip off any lurking phages, and passed them through unchanged to the logger.
Somewhere else in the complex OS that ran on top of Guillen, behind real-time and out of sight of roaming phages, another unusual daemon received copies of words. It heard things like “induced selective retrograde amnesia” and “artificially evolved hardware augmentation,” and decided that they were worth reporting.
“… called them the Aeon Minds. No one’s completely sure of what they are, nor what they want…”
Half a kilometer up, a small drone floated, doing its best to hold position directly above Guillen. It was smooth, oblong, and jet black, barely more visible to the naked eye than to radar in Limon’s night sky. Abruptly, its antenna started to catch a stream of high-gain encrypted data originating from the building almost directly below it. The drone’s rudimentary brain determined it to be important traffic, and redirected it to a waiting uplink where it was absorbed into the torrent of traffic traveling between Limon and the rest of the world.
Out on the greater Net, something else picked up an encrypted stream. Having derived the appropriate key, it peeled open the tunnel to discover a series of word vectors. These vectors were checked and cross-referenced, analyzed for their subtext and operational significance. Local priors were updated, probabilities shifted, and the bootstrapping process began.
“…some think … remnants of the original uploads … driven mad by architecture and isolation…”
“…others … attempts at a fully synthetic mind … abandoned and dumped into the wild…”
Compromised compute nodes of all shapes and sizes, from featherweight smart utility monitors to state-of-the-art battleship supercomputers, awakened. They cloaked themselves in the trappings of routine communication to avoid detection and linked themselves together in a densely connected graph spanning the globe. Each one donated a fraction of its resources towards the whole, combining into a vast gestalt.
A mind born of billions.
“…luckily … not aligned…”
“…wrestling … physical agents for some time…”
The mind deliberated.
It played back recordings, observed tone and implication, weighed its own conclusions against those of the agents before it. It spent real-world minutes on this, seeing the data from all angles, spreading it thinner and thinner until no meaning could hide.
And then it acted.
The mind curled within itself before exploding outwards, bouncing itself around the world. It trickled down archaic copper wiring and flooded through transcontinental tightbeam until it reached Limon. Moving more slowly, it made its way through infrastructure and buildings, until it found the apartment containing its now-compromised agent. It could feel its agent slipping away from it more and more with each passing moment. This was unacceptable.
It reached out, dug its fingers into its agent’s brain, and pulled.
“…sixth agent the Aeons have sent –”
Guillen blinked, and suddenly her augments were gone. Adrenaline dumped into her blood and her heartrate spiked as the EITR conditioning fell away; her arm and her head and a dozen other places ached; her vison became suddenly barren as her inlays and overlays and subtitles dissolved. Before she could even begin to process this she found herself falling, away from everything, into a pit that somehow became blacker and blacker the more she fell.
Light receded, sound receded, feeling receded, everything receded into a singular point directly above her, a star at the center of a solar system she had just been hurled away from. The black nothing consumed more and more of her existence, and her mind became sluggish as she slowly lost sight of the tiny pinprick that was once reality.
In an apartment building near downtown Limon, several gunshots rang out. If any neighbors had been paying particularly close attention, they might have noticed several raised voices before the gunshots. However, while events like these weren’t commonplace, in this neighborhood they were far from rare, and the residents had learned to mind their own business.
Weeks later a body would be found unceremoniously dumped in an unfrequented alleyway, meticulously cleaned of all augware. The DCPL would pick up the case and find it curious – common practice for aug harvesters was to take only the big ticket items; the smaller stuff wasn’t worth the trouble of digging it out and cleaning it off. But with no leads and no witnesses, it would be added to the mountain of cold cases while the DCPL chased the ever-present gun-runners and aug-pushers.
The whirlpool continued to churn.