New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!
Urle watched the man alter the world on a whim, but he did not feel the awe the man hoped to inspire.
“I saw you die,” he said plainly. “A memory you left in a part that was then sold to me . . . you hid the data in there, in an executable to show whoever next used the part. You wanted someone to know . . .”
“Then I guess I was weaker than I thought,” the man sneered. “I’ll have to fix that next patch. Don’t you get it? This was always the plan! I gave up everything for this!”
Realization dawned on Urle. “You mean that . . . you traded your body for this server space?”
“My body, my data,” the man said. “I wasn’t going to get to the top in my company, I didn’t give a shit if they got access to the whole corp’s system. Worth a fortune to them, everything to me.”
The man gestured, and a data packet appeared. Urle probed it cautiously, but then saw that it was merely text; biographical data about a man.
His birth name had been Bror Jackson. After becoming an aug he’d gone by JaxIn. He’d been a middle-level executive in one of largest and most profitable companies in Gohhi, who had their hand in everything from aquaponics to real estate to shipping to entertainment.
Three weeks ago, they’d suddenly changed direction, as new leadership had taken over in a merger that seemed a terrible move for the company, subserviating it to one of its largest competitors. It had been a news event, and in the shuffle, JaxIn had disappeared. No one had even bothered to report the disappearance.
And then the body had been taken care of. The flesh incinerated, the parts chopped and resold through storefronts, and the data assimilated.
Over seven hundred trillion credits in value taken over.
“Any one of us would have done it,” JaxIn said, laughing. “I was just the first to actually do it. The little club at the top never would have let me in, so when I realized what I had access to, I jumped.”
“They scanned you in here,” Urle said. “As payment.”
“Yeah. Their only other price was the end of the physical half. But that’s fine with me.”
“It wasn’t fine to you in real life. You’re a copy, but the original died afraid, trying to save himself. He wanted to have justice.”
“It was just business. He was the me who made the original decision – I remember it all. I was willing to die for this.”
Not when it had actually come time to pay up, Urle thought. But he knew that JaxIn would no longer care. It had not been him.
“So you’re here now – for how long?” Urle asked.
“Forever,” the man said. “I rented it in perpetuity. And I have the blackmail material ready in case they try to back out – the records of everything we did if my server ever goes dark.”
Urle severely doubted that. But it hardly mattered because now the deed was done. JaxIn was digital, and he would either have to occupy a huge server or else let himself be cut down into a shallower digital copy of himself.
Which, it was telling that he had not elected to do that, Urle realized. If he’d truly wanted to leave himself behind, why have an exact copy of his neurons? It was so, so much more wasteful this way . . .
Suddenly, Urle felt something around himself. It was not around the manifestation of himself in the digital world, but it had locked his code in, trapped him.
He cursed as he realized the man had been working while he’d been talking. Moving the city had allowed him to scale it back as well, and Urle had let him do it! He hadn’t taken down the whole server, but enough that he’d effectively blockaded Urle’s own consciousness – or at least a dangerous portion of it – into his server.
“I can’t let you go. And frankly you’re going to be hogging my space if I let you stay.”
“If you delete me,” Urle said, “my friend will break the server.”
JaxIn froze. “No way you brought someone else in with you. One person, all right, maybe some are that skilled. But two? No fucking way.”
“He’s a Shoggoth,” Urle told him. “And he doesn’t like technology.”
He saw the man pale. His digital presence shifted, apparently trying to access the outside, to very little effect.
“I’ll show you,” Urle said, showing some of his own memories.
He let the man see Kell ripping the head off Madspark.
“That man tried to kill me. And he’s the one who killed you. Kell knows I’m in here.” That part was a lie, but JaxIn couldn’t know. “And if I’m not out in a little while he will destroy this server.”
JaxIn seemed unsure now. “If you tell people about me they’ll shut me down,” he said in a pale voice.
“I won’t tell anyone about this,” Urle said. “I’ll even help bury you deeper. I’m not out to get you. Honestly . . . I wish you the best. That’s why I’m trying to find out about the group that killed your physical self.”
JaxIn looked truly bothered now, stepping away. “If I tell you anything, they might find out. And they’ll come and delete me no matter what dirt I have.”
“They’re the last link to know you’re here at all,” Urle pointed out. “And given the value they got from you – do you really think that they’re not going to do this with someone else? They can force you to share the servers with another, or partition it against your will. Or they could even just delete most of you to save processing power. You couldn’t stop them – you might not even know if they did.”
JaxIn cursed aloud, a string of furious spacer slang. Urle felt the digital noose around his neck switch off.
“I did my research before agreeing,” JaxIn told him. “I don’t know everything, but I’ll give you what I know.”
“That’s all I ask,” Urle told him. “I’m going to find justice for you. And anyone else they’ve hurt.”
Other Terrestrial 
One thought on “Episode 7 – Puppets, Part 34”
Comments are closed.