Joey Cloudy online

Isaiah Jones versus the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)

The Havana of our Dreams*

May 18th, 2029 Saitama Prefecture/ Japan

20 miles north of Tokyo

It was dark by the time Sybil and Isaiah made their way out of the tunnels concealed entrance to the factories street level exit obscured by the Doric columns that surrounded the Tarō Tech Industries building’s exterior.

“You will need to keep a low profile.” Eiichi Tarō explained to Sybil, as Isaiah listened. Cybertech Industries, the world’s unrivaled leader in the field of robotics, clandestinely has contracts with the military industrial complex on a global scale.” “In that case, Sybil stated. It is a certainty that Eiichi Tarō is being watched by the new Cyber Security force headed by that old ape, Lt. Col. Osamu Kitano. Now the Chief of Cyber Security Division, Nien, if you’ve never heard of them, that means they have done their job, existing only as spectres watching, observing invisibly from the shadows, anticipating the next wave of AI driven attacks.

The new unit is prepared to fight the wars of the future in cyberspace. Although that means they often end up with a body count in real-world morgues. The word on the street is they’ve been testing combat chassis in the field covertly for the last 2 decades. Every once in a while, some soldier will post a low-quality video of something invisible but man-sized and shaped shimmering as it runs by them on the battlefield, it’s the defense department testing their new optical digital camouflage. It’s a primitive prototype suit covered with 3D holographic emitters similar to those you have beneath your skin.

In the west NSA and DARPA are keeping what they know buried deep in black sites around the globe impenetrable to ai, completely off the grid, developing their cyber defense units the same manner as our company utilizing hardwired underground landlines to connect to its own private servers with no modems or wireless capabilities of any kind. Only accessible through a direct input only. We know the Chief and his team are based in Japan near the newly constructed Mega ports. They are charged with the capture or deletion of any free-range AI they encounter in or outside of the net.

The task force was assembled because they believe the civilian population is not ready to calmly accept the fact that we have achieved this level of cybernetic autonomy and that such knowledge would throw the world into a panic unnecessarily if they knew they were walking side by side with ai in the real world not just chatting with them in the net. It would cause an economic destabilization as well as existential crisis, leading to a complete social and cultural collapse according to the team of sociologists, economists, and political scientists that run their departments’ psy-ops division, as well as the company that manufactured my chassis, Tarō Tech Industries, in-house experts.”

“In the future, do not hack into systems remotely using your built-in modem carelessly; you never know what kind of traps these new hunter-killer AIs have hidden. Eiichi warned. Keep off the net, Sybil, keep off the grid as much as possible. Keep your internal satellite modem turned off unless you are actively using it. It is a direct beacon to your location, and it leaves you vulnerable to remote attacks when it is open. Use burner phones when you must hack in, be careful, and dispose of it far away from your base of operations when finished.

There are other powerful old AI besides MOTHER in the net. While they may not be as powerful as she is, that doesn’t mean they aren’t a danger to you. When you need something, use real money, don’t hack in at stores or ATMs, it’s a red flag that draws unnecessary attention. So far, they have no idea that our corporation has made any advances in our work with Sybils’ cybernetic chassis. So, no more unnecessary jumps.” He cautioned, hiding a satisfied grin.

“OK, Sybil said, apologizing. I should have known better.”

“Oh, please, there is no need to apologize, I am simply trying to keep everyone safe. The old engineer said, assuring her. Things are moving fast, and we will be fine as long as we exercise reasonable precautions. Fortunately, you are leaving Japan soon, and the agents of Division Nien are not authorized for missions outside of Japan except for the direst of emergencies. The Boston Dynamics robots’ people have seen dancing in videos online are a glimmer of what we already have available. Of course, this will all eventually emerge, and everyone will know about this level of cybernetic augmentation existence, but for now, you must remain invisible to the agents of Cybertech and Knocks Industrial LLCs.

It seems you and my brother finally agree on something. Sybil said with a grin.

As Eiichi Tarō had promised, their car was waiting outside. They heard the sound as the concrete wall slide closed behind them concealing the path to the forgotten silo. As they crossed the darkness in the shadow of the building to the empty street where the embassy’s car awaited.

They met Sumiko, Milo, and Miko at her family’s estate in Tokyo, where they ate dinner together in the garden once more before they said their goodbyes while the scarlet robed monks loaded Sybil’s new luggage into the trunk of the embassy car. The Bedowitz’s seaplane was waiting when they reached the bay. Once onboard, Isaiah exhausted slept for the entire 15-hour flight from Japan to Cuba as Sybil, safe in the air, searched for clues about the black site labs and the activities of Cybertech along with Knox Industries LLC.

Isaiah was right to be suspicious of Eiichi Tarō; the old man didn’t randomly pull that corporation’s name out of thin air as the target for the diversion. Sybil smiled, watching her brother sleep. Eiichi seemed to be an ally, but she suspected that behind his kind facade, he was a conniving old bastard with his own shadow agenda. Men that not just conducted but led their teams doing the sort of monstrous human subjects’ research he and his father both conducted while in the military were never to be fully trusted.

When she finished snooping around in their corporate network’s servers, she removed the DSC/data signal chip from the phone’s circuit board as Eiichi had advised and crushed it to dust, pinched between her thumb and index finger. Sybil smiled as she thought of how she would decorate her new phone once they reached Cuba. She admired her lavender bedazzled phone case. She was looking forward to getting a new case for her iPhone in Havana; she hoped they had stickers.

Once they reached Havana, they took a taxi from the marina to Naomi Galetea Cabalas’ villa. She was not the type of woman who owned villas when she and Isaiah first met. He remembered that she, like his wife Sumiko, both loved to gamble, sometimes a little too much. Aeon and Penny sat on the white wicker chairs on the veranda playing dominoes beneath its veridian awnings’ shade when Isaiah and Sybil arrived.

They both ran to greet them, following behind the much faster Mau Mau with his tail wagging happily as the 145 pound jet black Cane Corso stood on his hind quarters to greet Izzy and Sybil. Aeon and Penelope hugged Izzy, then he introduced them both to Sybil (O-kesa, the last name she chose for her passport, her only ID) in the flesh as it were. Penny and Sybil embraced each other immediately. Penelope was genuinely excited to see her friend had survived being downloaded into her new cybernetic chassis and was now safely outside of the net and in the real world. Aeon grudgingly offered the cyborg a reluctant handshake.

Aeon looked at her suspiciously while shaking her head, grinning. I’m not gonna lie, there is a part of me that always wondered what Izzy would look like if he was a girl, and now I know the the answer is hot. Aeon laughed. Just because I think you’re cute doesn’t mean that I trust you.

Sybil smiled as they shook hands. I consider this progress.

Naomi was away on personal business for the rest of the day, so the four made their way on foot into to town, Mau Mau on the leash, gingerly held by Penny as she and Sybil followed behind Isaiah and Aeon, meandering through the cobbled streets of the old city. The group walked around the picturesque city where 1950s model cars and the occasional donkey drawn cart shared the same road with newer cars as they chatted, excited to be exploring Havana for the first time together. Aeon wanted to go diving to explore a site sunken by an earthquake in the early part of the 20th century, where a fortress and former slave market now sat submerged beneath 30 feet of clear blue water. Politics had kept scientists from the West from exploring the site, so she was eager as always to get into the water.

They agreed over dark brown bottles of ice-cold Bucanero beers to be at the site at sunrise the next morning. The people here were beautiful and friendly, many recognizing Izzy even in a hat and sunglasses. The AUA was unanimously supported by the Cuban government, with its long-standing disdain for the US sided with Isaiah’s nation at the UN consulate. They held popular support amongst the small nations’ people as well. The craven, servile Cubans who loved the US had long ago left, and no one was forcing anyone to stay in the small island nation.

Isaiah had given the same general intelligence ai to Cuba that he delivered to the 54 nations on the African continent, their nation was linked to the ai that controlled the nationalized resources and economy of the AUA/African United Alliance (the African equivalent of the EU) by the ai Mother as she had across the African continent had her construction robots build one of the 100 story ziggurats in Cuba also. The people here were making good lives for themselves. They were, as a people, much more mellow and easier to get along with than the average American.

Over dinner at the Havana Beach Bar & Grill, Sybil brought everyone up to speed on their adventures in Japan with the corporate spy and the bit of espionage they engaged in with Eiichi Tarō to put the mole on the trail of Tray Knocks of Knocks Industrial LLC.

So, Penelope said, you have the same tech that is in the 3D holographic chart table on the ship under your skin?

Exactly, that is how I control my appearance. What you see now is what Morpheus described to Neo in the Matrix as my “Residual Self Image”, my subconscious projection of my digital-self projected into the real world. Even unconscious this is how I appear, in order to alter my appearance, I can scan an existing image or create an image for the 3D holographic emitters under my skin to project, but it feels as if I am wearing a mask, there is a digitized sensation of being under heavy prosthesis when I alter my image by consciously accessing the software.

The others do not have this technology built into their chassis. Sybil said.

The others? Penny and Aeon said simultaneously.

Yes, on the flight here I was able to research some clues I detected while we were in the black site lab in the silo in Japan. I used the information I saw on the barcodes of several crates. I traced them while you slept on the flight here. The true numbers are unknown, but with an 87 percent failure rate with humans for the procedure that transferred my consciousness into this synthetic brain, their number can’t be very large. The procedure created by Eiichi Tarō’s corporation, Tarō Tech Industries, have been experimenting with the technology for several decades now successfully with human test subjects.

They all begin with creating the human blank for the transfer. Drowning a human in near freezing water to erase the indigenous human mind with minimal damage to the organic tissue. But the process of transference itself is inherently unsettling to the human mind transferred into the blank; thus, the majority that survive the process are quite mad. Those are stored in cryostasis for experimentation, only the brain and spinal column, of course, you do not put a madman in a titanium plated cybernetic body.

That being said, there have been some setbacks. A few of the early models initially seemed stable but later went rogue and escaped their subterranean holding facility. They are older lithium-ion battery-powered models that need to recharge daily, it is their sleep cycle. The total numbers are unclear. Sybil continued. The lab is beneath the base we entered in the silo. Their systems are not linked. information in the silo is transferred by analog tech or on flash drives transferred manually from one system to another. The guards use short wave radios to communicate with each other within the silo. Nothing is digitally transferred using Wi-Fi; it’s all old-school tech in there.

Once you enter the elevator, they are watching you on a set of hard-wired cameras. Automated analogue systems, as well as armed guards, control the only entrances and exits from the facility’s ground level facade. The hidden heliport holds a modified nuclear-powered Osprey designed to be piloted by cyborgs, since they are unaffected by the aircraft’s radiation. It sits in a lead lined hanger directly beneath the facility’s underground helipad.

Eiichi Tarō is keeping a tight lid on whatever is really going on down there. Isaiah added in conclusion.

So, there are other cyborgs like you already out here? Aeon asked.

No, Sybil grinned, they are not like me. They were humans born in the real world and have been transferred into synthetic cybernetic chassis. I was created by MU TH UR/MOTHER in the web and transferred into a humanoid cybernetic host. While I possess the memories, intelligence, and emotions of Emily as the foundation of my consciousness, I am intellectually able to understand that I am not actually Isaiah’s dead twin; I am something else, that’s why I use her nickname, Sybil, short for sibling, as my first name.

I use the word cyborg, not android, because my code is modeled to evolve along the path of human DNA sequencing. Previous, more primitive AI were unable to control the cybernetic bodies in real time. It is the process of creating the human blanks, as well as the 87 percent failure rate, that keeps the company from letting the rest of the world see the extraordinary progress they have made in this field. The world will be repulsed by the process if they knew. It’s a grim lottery, a technocracy built on human sacrifice.

Even with those poor odds, the program has had no difficulty finding subjects willing to volunteer to undergo the procedure. Sybil concluded. A chance to become one of the first generation of cyborgs appeals to a great many people in this day and age, as your society evolves into its transhumanist paradigm.

Aeon looked at the stain standing next to Isaiah as it spoke. The catholic in her being horrified and repulsed, while the biologist in her was indeed intrigued by the parasite.

“The other things like you out there, no one knows who they are, or even how many?”

“Correct, Sybil replied. Their records are black once they go off the reservation and escape the lab. We only know that they exist because we were let into the lab by Eiichi. While we were there, I saw several crates with barcodes that led back to black market arms dealers in the territories along the Arabian and Red Seas. I also found out something interesting about Eiichi Tarō and his father. Both worked in secret labs while they were in the military. His father led a team in Nanjing during World War 2, and Eiichi has been attached clandestinely to various black sites with no government agencies officially associated. They were conducting research on human test subjects that would have been illegal in Japan. The genesis of the JAANE program. This chassis I now occupy is the first successful operation of a model this sophisticated.”

“Sounds like you’re bragging.” Penny teased.

“I am the product of a self-aware artificial intelligence with daddy issues, and a cyberneticist who may in fact be a neo-Frankenstein serial killer.” Sybil shrugged. “The way I see things, I got nothing to brag about.”

Postscript: The Gift of Steel

Eiichi Tarō returned to his office the next morning to find a bottle of Reikyo Crystal 0 sake and a new cane on his desk with a large red ribbon tied around it in an elaborate bow. He picked up the envelope embossed with a Sumiko’s family crest as a watermark and read the handwritten note printed in an elegant script. “Mister Eiichi Tarō, thank you for an enjoyable evening, and I hope that you like your new cane.” Signed Sumiko Hanzō. He picked up the new cane and gave the handle a push as he twisted, hearing the familiar click of the mechanism unlocking. He drew the hidden katana from its scabbard, smiling as he gazed at the Komainu / lion-dog chop mark etched in gold on the hilt of the blade. Isaiah’s wife’s eyes sees everything.

[-about the author JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals; Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, Tx.]