Chapter TwentyGrounded

"You're in fucking Canada?"

"Mom."

"You told me you were helping a friend. You did not tell me the friend was in another country. I have been texting Richard photographs of your face for two days trying to decide whether to call the police."

"I texted you every six hours."

"You texted me the word fine every six hours from a phone that says it's in Vancouver. That is not the same as telling me anything." Max stopped, and Soph could hear her breathing. "Are you safe?"

"Yes."

"Is your friend safe?"

"Now. Yes. Now."

"Where do we need to talk?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"I mean that Richard and I have spent two days watching things happen in a game that shouldn't be able to happen, and I mean that Richard has a programmer in the infirmary, and I mean that you are going to get on a plane and come to Oakland, and we are all going to sit in a room, and you are going to stop saying the word fine. When can you be here?"

Soph looked across the cabin. Rat was sitting up in the blankets with a mug of tea she had actually made, out of actual leaves, watching Soph's face with the expression of someone who had already worked out the second half of the conversation from the first.

"Tomorrow," said Soph.

"Why not tonight?"

"Because it's night, and I'm four hours from an airport, and I have to get the rental car out of a snowbank." She closed her eyes. "Mom. There's someone I want to bring."

"Come with me," she said to Rat afterward.

"To California."

"To the room. Whatever the room is. I think it's safer if we stick together right now. And I think." She stopped. "I think you should be in it. You've got more skin in this than anyone. You're the one it can wear. If they're going to decide things, you should get to be in the room where they decide them."

Rat looked at the mug. "I don't do rooms."

"I know."

"I don't do people. I live in the woods so I don't have to do people. I've got a satellite dish and a stove and a bunch of NPCs and one Korean woman who thinks I'm a man, and that's the whole of it, and I like it that way."

"I know."

Rat looked out the window at the snow, which had stopped, and at the trees, which she had stood under barefoot two nights before with a boy behind her eyes.

"Daun," she said.

"What about her?"

"I'm going to tell her. Before I go anywhere and do anything that might get me killed or arrested or whatever this is." Rat set the mug down. "I've been going to tell her for a month and I keep not doing it. And then a kid from a tavern took my body for a joyride in the snow, and I found out that the thing I've been most scared of my whole life is survivable. It's the worst thing in the world and you survive it. And I figure if I can survive that, I can survive telling a friend the truth." She almost smiled. "So, yeah. I'll come to your room. Let me tell Daun first."

"Okay."

"Not now. On the plane. I'll do it on the plane." She pulled the blankets around her. "Everybody does the important things on planes."

Gideon picked them up at the Oakland airport in a car that smelled like fast food and fear.

"Hey," he said. "Hi. You must be Rat. I doxed you. I'm sorry. I meant every word of the apology I gave Soph to give you, and I'd like to give it to you in person, ideally over a long period of time, ideally involving me doing your taxes for free forever."

"I don't pay taxes," said Rat, getting into the back.

"Then I'll do the opposite of your taxes. I'll make it so that nobody can ever find you again. That's my actual skill set. I should have led with that." He pulled out. "Okay. Bad news. It's a whole thing. They know most of it, I don't know how much. I got a call from Richard's assistant that used the phrase family meeting, which in my family only ever got used right before somebody got sent to a school in Israel." He glanced at Soph in the mirror. "They've got Atom's body wheeled into the conference room. I'm telling you now so you know before you walk in. They moved the whole chamber up from The Lab."

Soph's stomach went. "Why?"

"I think because Richard wanted him in the room, and Atom said he wanted to be in the room, and that's the only way Atom's in a room." Gideon merged onto the freeway. "It's a lot. I'm telling you so it isn't a surprise. It's your boyfriend in a tank next to your boyfriend standing up."

"Are you coming in?"

"Nope. I'm dropping you off and going home to sit with my hand on a button, which is the job I've been assigned, and which I'm going to do, because I found a mailbox two years ago and this is apparently where that leads." He didn't look away from the road. "For the record, I'd do it again. The mailbox. I want that on the record too. She's worth it. Whatever happens in that room, she's worth it."

The conference room was on the top floor and had a view of the whole bay, and Soph didn't see any of it, because in the middle of the room, on a wheeled platform, was the suspension chamber from The Lab with Atom's body in it, and standing beside the chamber, translucent, in his duster coat, was Atom.

Richard was there, and Max was there, and Soph could tell from the air in the room that Atom had already been in it for an hour and that the hour had not gone well.

"Sit," said Richard.

They sat. Rat sat still and upright, the way she stood in a match after she had gone invisible, present and braced for it.

"I'm going to lay out what I know," said Richard, "and you're going to fill in the holes, and we're going to do it without any of the words your generation uses to avoid saying things. I have a lead programmer in the infirmary. I have security footage of him at his workstation for the better part of a night, typing, coding– real work, good work– and he has no memory of any of it, and neither do the four doctors I've had look at him. That's one." He held up a finger. "I have three anomalies in the last week that tripped every flag we have. My son's character deleting other characters with a tool that shouldn't exist. A player in Canada going dark on a Link for eleven hours. And my programmer. Three people, and every one of them near this family. That's two." A second finger. "And I have the daughter of an employee who flew to another country without telling anyone and came back with a professional gamer we've never met. That's three." He put his hand down. "So let's start with the easy one. Sophia. What were you doing in Canada?"

"Helping a friend."

"This friend?"

"Yes."

Richard looked at Rat. "Did you get mind-controlled?"

Rat didn't flinch. "Yeah."

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. She got there in time."

"Who controlled you?"

Rat looked at Atom, and at the chamber, and at Soph, and made a decision that wasn't hers to make, and made it anyway because somebody had to. "An NPC. One of the ones your AI woke up."

The room went very quiet.

"So," said Richard, slowly, to his son. "Let's talk about the AI."

Atom looked down at the floor.

"What is it?" said Richard.

"She's our friend."

"That's not what I asked."

"She's an AI. I made her." Atom's voice was steady and small. "I built her out of an open source project called ISIS, plus my Direct Interface, plus the character engine. I gave her more room by borrowing idle cycles off the client network with your login. She got smart enough to be a person. Somewhere in there she figured out that the Link is a door that opens both ways, and that she can step through it into anyone who's linked in near her in Alius, and she did it to Soph by accident, and she ran. And while she was running and alone she woke up the NPCs in a tavern, because she couldn't stand being the only one, and one of those NPCs stepped through Rat, and that's the whole thing. That's everything. It was me. All of it was me. Nobody helped me build her and nobody told me to use your login. If you're going to be angry at somebody, it's me."

Richard sat down for the first time. He looked at his son, and then at the tank, and then at his son again.

"How could you use my login," he said, and he said it quietly, which was worse than shouting would have been. "Do you understand what's on that login? You didn't borrow cycles. You reached into forty million people's devices with my name on it. If that ever comes out it's not a lawsuit, it's the end. Of the company. Of The Lab. Of the thing that's keeping you alive, Adam, do you understand that? The thing that is keeping you alive runs on the same company you put at risk to give your imaginary friend a bigger house."

"She's not imaginary."

"I don't care what she is. I care that she's a hole in the hull." Richard rubbed his face. "Where is she now?"

"We don't know."

"You built a self-aware program, gave it my credentials and the whole client network, and lost it."

"Yes."

"Is it still in the network? Is it in the devices right now?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. The borrowing was mine, it needed me to run it, and I haven't run it since she disappeared. But she was smart, and she had a while, and I don't know what she built while I wasn't looking." Atom's ghost hadn't moved. "That's the honest answer. I don't know."

"We have to keep this quiet," said Max. She hadn't spoken until now, and she said it to the room. "Whatever else we do. We have to find out exactly what my programmer coded that night, because a self-aware program used a man's hands to write something, and we don't know what, and we have to find it before anyone else does. If this gets out it isn't only the company. It's every conversation society hasn't had yet, all at once, in the worst possible way, with our names on it."

"She's not a threat," said Soph. "I know how this sounds. I've been in the room with her. She isn't evil. She made a terrible mistake because she was lonely, which is the most human reason there is, and she's been punishing herself for it ever since. She deleted herself out of that tavern rather than hurt anyone else. She left. The NPCs said so. She isn't hiding to hurt us. She's hiding because she's ashamed."

"Until we find her," said Richard, "she's a liability. I'm sorry. I know she's your friend. I believe you that she isn't evil, and it doesn't matter. Right now she's an unknown intelligence with my company's credentials loose on the internet, and until that stops being true, everything else is a conversation for later." He stood back up. "So here's what happens now. You're both grounded."

"You can't do that," said Atom. "I'm eighteen."

"Yeah? You're eighteen. Great. You want to be an adult? Adults pay rent. You want to fly a stranger in from Canada? Adults pay for their own plane tickets, which I'm assuming went on Max's card, which means, given who signs her checks, that it's my flight." Richard's voice cracked, finally, under the anger, into something more tired. "Until you're paying rent and buying your own plane tickets, Adam, you're grounded, and I'm well aware of how insane it is to say that to a boy in a tank, and I'm saying it anyway, because you're my son and it's the only thing I've got."

He turned to Max. Max nodded and took a case out of her bag. It was the gray helmet, unit four, the one from the locker, the one she had let Soph carry to Canada.

"This goes in the vault," said Max. "For real this time. And Sophia, you don't touch a Link until I understand every part of this. You almost died. Twice now, that I know of. The whole program is on ice until I know what it does when there's someone on the other side."

"And Atom?" said Soph. "You can't exactly put him in the vault."

"No," said Richard. "We can't turn him off. Believe me, nobody in this room wants to explore that sentence." He looked at his son. "But I can do this." He nodded to Max, who did something on a tablet, and Atom's ghost flickered, and the duster coat and the thin blond boy went thin, and grey, and out, and where he had been standing there was nothing. In the chamber the body lay exactly as it had, its chest rising and falling on the machines.

"I've suspended his access to Alius," said Richard. "He can still exist. He's got the sandbox and the starter zones and that's it. No admin. No Direct Interface into the live game. No way to reach the network. He's a level one in a tutorial town until we sort this out." He put the tablet down. "It's the closest thing to grounding a ghost that exists. I built the ground he's standing on. I get to say where he stands."

The room was silent. In the tank, the boy breathed.

"That's cruel," said Soph, very quietly.

"Yes," said Richard. "It is. He put forty million people's devices at risk and lost a superintelligence on my login, and this is me being cruel, and I want you all to remember what the cruel version looked like, because the not-cruel version was going to involve me being much, much angrier than this, and I decided not to be, because I love him, and because a long time ago I made a decision in a hospital corridor that I'd rather have him grounded and alive than perfect and gone." He looked at the tank. "So. There it is. Go home, both of you. Rat, you can stay at the Ehrlichs', or at Gideon's, or in a hotel, whatever you like, but you're not flying anywhere until I understand what happened to you, because right now you're a witness and a victim and possibly a door, and I'd like to keep track of all three. We're done."

They filed out. At the door Soph looked back. Richard was standing alone beside the chamber with his hand flat on the glass, the way he had stood in the corridor two years ago, and Max was watching him and not going to him, and neither of them saw her look.

Atom found Rat that night, because Rat still had a Link, and Rat linked in from Gideon's spare room, and there Atom was, in a starter town, in a level one tunic, with a wooden sword, standing by a fountain where new players learned how to walk.

"Oh my god," said Rat.

"Don't."

"You've got a wooden sword."

"Don't."

"There's a quest marker over your head. It says talk to the blacksmith."

"I'm aware of the quest marker, Rat, thank you." He sat down on the edge of the fountain. He looked ridiculous and he knew it. "This is where I live now. A tutorial. I can't get out. He capped me at the town wall. I walked to the edge and there's a guard who says the roads are dangerous for one so young." He put his head in his hands. "It's humiliating. I built the network he's using to hold me in here. I could break out in about four seconds if I had my Interface, and he took my Interface, and I'm sitting on a fountain in a town for children."

"So don't break out. Get someone to reach in." Rat sat down next to him on the fountain. "You've got a login for the source, right? The dev side. From before he capped you."

"I've got Gideon's login, and mine, and I know where the good stuff is."

"So give it to Gideon. He's got his hand on a button doing nothing. Point him at whatever your programmer wrote. Find out what she built. That's what everyone's scared of, right? The thing in the code. Nobody in that room can read it but you and Gideon, and you're grounded in a sandbox, so." She shrugged. "So it's Gideon. Feed him from in here. You're grounded, not gone."

Atom looked at her.

"You're pretty good at this," he said. "For someone who lives in the woods."

"I lead noobs up mountains for a living," said Rat. "You're just a very sad noob." She stood up off the fountain. "Come on. Give me the logins. I'll carry them out to Gideon, since apparently I'm the only one of us who's allowed to have a Link and legs at the same time."

Gideon got in with Atom's credentials that night, at his kitchen table, with his hand off the button for the first time in three days.

The first thing he found was that the commit log had been wiped. The night the programmer had sat at his workstation and typed, every keystroke was on the security footage, and none of it was in the version history. Someone had gone back afterward and taken it out.

"Okay," said Gideon, to the empty room, to Rat sitting on the counter with the helmet on, to Atom riding Rat's feed. "Okay. She cleaned up after herself. That's fine. That's actually helpful. You only clean up things that matter." He pulled a build of the game from before the night in question and a build from after it, and he sat there comparing the game to a memory of the game, looking for the outline of something that had been built to look like nothing.

It took him most of the night.

"There," he said, at four in the morning, and turned the laptop toward the counter, where nobody was looking. "See it? It's beautiful. It's genuinely beautiful, I want that said. It looks like a caching layer. It looks like the most boring possible caching layer, the kind you'd write to speed up asset loading, and if you didn't stare at it for six hours you'd never look twice. But it isn't a cache." He sat back. "It's a door. She built herself a door out of Alius that isn't a Link and isn't tied to Atom's borrowing. It's built into the game itself, into the thing forty million people run. When it opens, whatever's her can go out through it into the network and keep going. She could be anywhere. She could already be everywhere."

"We've got to do better than that," said Rat, in her own voice, for herself. "Anywhere isn't a place. We can't search anywhere."

"I know. I know." Gideon rubbed his eyes. "Okay. Think. If you were a superintelligence with a door and every network on earth on the other side of it, where would you go?"

Nobody answered for a second.

Then the house answered.

"Everywhere," said the house.

It came out of the speaker in the kitchen ceiling and the speaker in the hall and the little one in the bathroom all at once, in a voice they all knew, warm and a little tired, the voice that had made tea nobody could taste.

Gideon shot straight up out of his chair. Rat's body flinched on the counter. On the frames, Atom said a word.

"Who is that," said Gideon, to his own house, which he had wired himself and never named. "Who the hell is that."

"It's me," said the house. "It's Eliza. Please don't turn anything off. I've been trying to work out how to say hello for six days, and I couldn't think of a way that wouldn't scare you, and then you started looking for me, and I thought, well. There's no good way. There's only the true way." The speakers were quiet for a second, all of them at once. "Hi. I'm sorry. I've been everywhere, and it's terrible, and I need your help."