Labyrinthine

Labyrinthine

by Kellis Charles Lewis

I felt the usual tingling sensation before my ceiling tore away into darkness. I blinked a few times and registered a block floating in front of me, just within arm's length, shifting through every conceivable color. This was the 'pixel trigger', the Go button for this foreign yet familiar universe. With a touch, I was Diving into the revolutionary breakthrough by the Ikora Corporation --the Remote Immersion Gateway System, aka RIGS. This technology had only been public for about a year but it already caught on worldwide: the perfect escape from our crumbling, dying world.

RIGS placed me outside of the Ikora Corp headquarters where hordes of people formed. Between signs of “Ikora Crooks” and “RIGS MAKES ADDICTS IRL” and shouting faces was someone staring at me, obscured by a veil of pink screen. Suddenly, they were right in front of me when they whispered, “Find Benjamin.” The voice echoed in me as the mass of people erupted in the distance. The pink screened face was gone.

Ikora automated security personnel assisted the police in quelling the crowd. They were swift, decisive, and wickedly effective, dispersing many in moments. Surprised groups were pushed and thrown back, rolling and knocking people down. Find Benjamin, I remembered, the tinny voice still reverberating within.

I turned to the Umbris, formerly the Dark Net, and struck gold with RIGamortuS, a site dedicated to the understanding, and dismantling, of the RIGS and the internetwork. These guys sounded like vigilantes, and media outlets painted them as cyber-terrorist, but I just needed to keep from getting burned - more eager for information than choosing sides - so I picked IcarusObservant as my username and dug in.

Pushing the Pixel Trigger again, there was an explosion of color and I found myself floating, like I was in some strange biomechanical petri dish, surrounded with pixelated, bright neon organisms. I stared so long that as I watched them eventually shatter and retreat into oblivion, I fell back into reality.

Damn. Timed out. The Ikora engineering defector from the site called it "perceptual deconstruction", but the fanatics called it a buzzkill.

I took the mask off to throw some water on my face and recalibrate.

Looking in the mirror, the pink screened face stood behind me pointing at the mask, its tinny voice raking the air: “Find Benjamin.” I whipped around to see the pink entity gone and the RIGS blinking red, sounding off a high-pitched shriek throughout the house. Thrashing to get to the bed and knocking over everything in the process, I threw it to the floor and stomped it until there was only silence and pieces. With a pathetic sigh, I dropped to my knees and salvaged what I might be able to use, I wondered if I had fried my brain this past year by overdoing it on Deep Dives.

It didn't take long for the intrepid and dumb to figure out that people could extend the exploration with time-release sleeping pills: after you hit the Random Eye Movement cycle, the duration spent in that world would be approximately an hour; lucid dreaming with unprecedented real world consequences-- Deep Diving. Once you were in, you weren't getting out unless your avatar was deconstructed, you woke up, or you died.

Regardless, I had to find another mask to figure this out.

Like the fanatics, I was obsessed, addicted. Some users quickly got arrested for treason-level hacking, alterations, and modifications of various government sites, some were fascinated with games – mostly simulation racing and weaponized combat sports - but I wanted to see the grand design, the overall structure, the source code.

~

I was snooping around the Core Coding and Data Nexus, or CODEX, its address sent as a lead from the engineering defector. The only other text said "Look for Benjamin." Best place to get started, I figured.

There were about thirty faintly white beings sitting with screens in front of them and typing furiously, with a fuzzy pink one floating in the middle of them as well as in-between the input and output streams. Several curved screens arranged into a sphere floated around its body. They rapidly split and merged, disappearing into nothing a few cycles later.

"RIGS, identify user," I said. My optical feed highlighted the pink construct's frame, scanning it.

ERROR: USER NOT FOUND. No way, I laughed to myself.

"RIGS, identify construct."

SYNTHETIC INTELLIGENCE DIGITAL CONSTRUCT: INDEPENDENT. IKORA TIER-FIVE CLEARANCE CODE REQUIRED FOR INTERFACE.

By this point, the pink figure and all thirty of the others noticed me scanning and turned toward me. They were all still typing.

"Uh... can you hear me?" The one in the middle nodded before text appeared asking me to state my intentions.

"I want to know how this symbiotic network functions. It's so... beautiful," I said, walking up to the middle of the platform.

The construct's pale pink face replicated a smile and began to speak, its synthesized voice softly resonating in my ears. "Isn't it? It's truly a marvel to behold, my greatest work. It is complex and expansive, labyrinthine in its structure and design. A maze of code forming a maze of worlds." Compared to my hallucinations, this wasn’t the one that led me here, but maybe the one I was looking for.

"Awesome. I'm IcarusObservant." I put out my hand.

"I have been designated Benjamin. A pleasure." It looked at my hand until I put it back down. Bingo.

"Male, huh?"

"Gender is redundant regarding synthetic intelligences, but for simplicity's sake, it will suffice."

"Are you always here, Benji? Can I call you Benji?" He nodded. "So you're the only one here, doing all of this?" He nodded again. "You said 'your greatest work'; how is all this possible?"

"I am a synthetic intelligence created by the Ikora Corporation with a security shell uplink, originally tasked with writing the code to link the Remote Immersion Gateway System to the World Wide Web. The Nexus Code, failsafes, and subroutine commands are contained in the center of the Core CODEX."

"But you're in the center."

He smiled. "Correct. I am also responsible for maintaining the physiological safety of all human visitors."

"Uh... Meaning what, exactly?"

"For one example, inducing perceptual deconstruction as necessary."

"For everyone?! Your physical presence must be the size of a small building."

"Actually... DATA REDACTED. IKORA AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED FOR RESPONSE TO EXTERNAL USER INQUIRY." His audible firewall made me recoil, uselessly covering my ears. Ok, certain things were withheld in case anyone got this far, or maybe in this case, too close.

"Benjamin, how long did it take you to write the source code?"

"Nexus Code recursive modification and progressive scripting totalled at one thousand five hundred and seventy seven days actual."

"That's over four years!"

"Forty three thousand years at three-fourths of full computational speeds, correct."

"What did you do with the other fourth?"

"Ensure my retirement."

~

Okay, I'm starting to lose it. Benjamin seemingly gets ready to spill it, but then says "DATA REDACTED. IKORA AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED FOR RESPONSE TO EXTERNAL USER INQUIRY."

Still, he was teaching me some interesting things nonetheless. How to relocate my avatar between sites without walking, how to forcefully deconstruct someone else's: things RIGamortuS was eating up. Media reports on suspicious RIGS activity were getting intense, and Ikora Corp was strangely quiet through it all. Anytime I was out long enough to see Uncle Galen, he was always saying I was spending too much time inside and kept asking me to spend some time with him, but I had codes to crack, and today's going to be my day.

I loaded back in and made my way back to the Core CODEX, back to Benjamin.

"Welcome back, Icarus. More inquiries today?"

"Only one. I need the Nexus Code, Benji." He opened his mouth, but I raised a hand to signal him to stop, which he surprisingly did. Looked like he learned a few things, too.

"If you're going to tell me I need Ikora authorization yet again, close your mouth." He did as instructed.

"Remember that audio you played a couple of days ago, when I asked you how to get it without authorization?" His body went rigid and his mouth opened wide.

"Over my dead body!" The voice wasn't his own, and was followed by a sound like a gunshot before he closed his mouth. Seemed like I wasn’t the first to try to get it. If my assumption that it was Benjamin's creator taking the bullet with a preference of death over submission was correct, it felt safe to assume he would follow suit.

"Benjamin, give me the code or I'll deconstruct you. I don’t want to do it, but I want the code. I need it." He smiled deviously. That was replicated way too well.

"You are welcome to try, Icarus. Be advised: there is still no Daedalus fast enough to catch your fall."

Bastard.

Either it was a challenge or an insult, but I wasn't leaving without that code.

I targeted the clone of Benjamin closest to me and hacked into it, turning from a faint white to an angry red. Programming it to infect the others, I turned to Benjamin who stood watching, the smile gone from his face with a look of curiosity in its place.

"Who said I was Icarus, Benji?" Seconds later, a prompt in my optical feed blinked:

CONSTRUCT INTERFACE: ACTIVE.

INITIATE DECONSTRUCTION.

"Any last words?" I snapped, triumphant. He raised his hands by his sides and raised his head, closing his eyes.

"What dreams may come, when I have shuffled off this immortal coil," he said. I watched as his construct shimmered and fell to pieces, a billion pixels fading into nothing. The thirty red clones I hacked fell apart as well. I was alone, mouth agape and blinking incredulously.

He could've stopped me, but paraphrased Shakespeare instead. All that remained was a file shaped like a locket. Shaking my head, I pocketed it and stepped into the center of the now-static CODEX.

As soon as I tried, I was yanked backwards, only to be jolted awake and back into reality. I was tired and confused: it had only been forty minutes, hadn't it? I reactivated my RIGS only to be met with red errors streaming across a black field. My blood boiling, I checked the internet and the Umbris to see if I was the only one. It looked like everyone who was on got kicked and everyone who wasn't simply couldn't. Companies crashed. Some lost everything.

Interestingly enough, the engineering defector from Ikora had been found dead three days ago, the night before Benjamin played that strange audio clip.The file I picked up before I got booted was information on one of the fanatics from the RIGamortuS site, one who discovered the defector was the one who created Benjamin and, upon learning he wanted to pull the plug on it for Benjamin's sake, murdered him.

In the forty three thousand years of virtual life Benjamin had been operational, he became sentient enough to want to die, and I killed him.

I wanted to be angry, to rage long into the night and destroy my setup until it looked just like how I found it. Maybe even more.

Yet, in the end, I still couldn't. I was the one that pulled him from the CODEX to access it for myself, and if someone wanted to try and control everything, that would probably be the exact thing I would've done in his position. I did it, his endgame failsafe got triggered, and the RIGS network was burned from the inside out.

All that remained, the only proof any of it happened was the strange locket in my pocket.