The End of All Things (9 page)

Then I launched a barrage of missiles at the space station, aiming specifically for its weapon systems, the ones I could see visually, but also the ones I couldn’t, going off the data I had of the space station. I timed the missiles so they would impact all the weapons systems at the same time.

Which they did. And then, while everything was blowing up nicely, I opened up the throttles on the engines and headed straight into the mess.

And as the
Chandler
made first contact with the skin of the space station, something happened.

Everything went black.

Not just the captain’s screens, which would have indicated that the
Chandler
had been destroyed. No,
everything
went black. There was the simulation, and then, for several full seconds, there it wasn’t.

I spent those several seconds in the complete blackness wondering what the hell had just happened.

Then the bridge simulation popped up again around me.

I knew what had just happened: I’d crashed the simulator.

And then, I’m not going to lie to you—my brain just went
off
.

Here is the thing about that bridge simulator: The bridge simulator was now my whole world. I lived in it, running simulations, and nothing else. I couldn’t leave it—I was in it, but I didn’t have any control over it other than being able to run the simulations Control gave me to run. I couldn’t step outside of the simulation, or close it out, or mess with the code in any way. I was trapped in it. It was my prison.

But when I crashed the simulator, it booted me out. For a few seconds there,
I
was somewhere else.

Where else?

Well, what happens when a program crashes? You get booted back into the system the program runs on.

Not literally
in
the system; my consciousness hadn’t been sucked into a computer or anything. That’s stupid. My consciousness was in my brain, like it always was.

But before, my senses had been dropped into the bridge simulation. Everything I could see or sense was inside of it. For those few seconds when the simulator crashed, I was somewhere else. The system the simulator ran on.

I wasn’t seeing anything, and then the bridge simulation popped up again, which said to me that the bridge simulator crashing wasn’t entirely unheard of. Control (or whomever) had set up a restart routine to go directly back into the bridge simulator, without giving the pilot any time to figure out what was going on, or to see the computer interface he or she was working within.

But that didn’t necessarily mean the pilot was completely locked out of the system.

I launched the docking simulation again.

If Control knew the program crashed, then that meant it knew where the bugs were—or knew where some of them were. So either it knew where they were and did nothing about them other than relaunching the system directly back into the simulator, or it did something about it and tried to patch the code—and in the process possibly created new bugs when the new code interacted poorly with the old code.

Control wouldn’t know anything about the new bugs unless they glitched during a run it was watching. And no one would do what I just did while Control was watching because Control would probably electrocute them for farting around.

So: Control didn’t know that
this
glitch was there.

But some glitches are transient and not reproducible. Those are the hardest as a programmer to fix.

I ran the simulation exactly as I had before to see if the glitch would replicate in the same way.

It did.

So I ran it a third time.

And this time, when the program crashed, I thought about the commands that, when the system we programmed the bridge simulator on was booted up, would open the diagnostics and modification screens for the system.

I thought about them
really hard
.

And two seconds later, there they were.

The diagnostics and modifications screens. Ugly and utilitarian, just like they have been since the very beginnings of visual user interface.

They were beautiful.

They meant that I was into the system.

More specifically, I was into the
Chandler
’s system.

Well, a little, anyway.

This would be the part of the story where, if this were a video piece, the heroic hacker would spew a couple of lines of magical code and everything would open up to him.

The bad news for me was that this was very much not my personal situation. I’m not a heroic hacker with magic code. I was a brain in a box.

But I
am
a programmer. Or was. And I knew the system. I knew the software.

And I had a plan. And a little bit of time before anyone was going to bother me again.

So I got to work.

*   *   *

I’m not going to bore you with the details of what I did. If you’re a programmer and you know the system and the hardware, and the code, then what I did would be really cool and endlessly fascinating and we could have a seminar about it, and about system security, and how any system fundamentally falls prey to the belief that all variables are accounted for, when in fact the only variables accounted for are the ones you know about, or more accurately that you
think
you know about.

The rest of you would have your eyes glaze over and pray for death.

I assume that’s most of you.

So for the rest of you, what you need to know:

First, the work, the first part of it anyway, took more than a single night.

It actually took a couple of weeks. And during all that time I waited for the moment where Control, or whoever, looked at the
Chandler
’s system and found evidence of me wandering around in it, making changes and trying to get into places where I shouldn’t. I waited for the moment they found it, and the moment they decided to punish me for it.

But they didn’t.

I’m not going to lie. Part of me was
annoyed
that they didn’t.

Because that’s some lax security.
All
of it was lax. When whoever it is took over the
Chandler,
they left the system wide open, with only the basic level of security that would have been outmoded right at the beginning of the computer era. Either they were so sure that they didn’t need to worry about security where they were—everyone could be trusted and no one would try to screw with things—or they were just idiots.

Maybe both! The level of insecurity was actually offensive.

But it worked to my advantage, and without it I would probably be dead, so I shouldn’t really complain.

Those first two weeks were the scariest for me because what I was doing was pretty much out in the open. I tried to hide what I was doing as well as I could, but someone who was looking could have found it. If Control or anyone else looked into my extracurricular sessions, they would have seen me running one particular simulation the same way over and over and could have seen what I was doing.

It meant that if during the simulations where Control was watching, if the program crashed, it might code a patch, and that patch could affect the bug I was using to exit the program. Which meant I would be trapped again.

I was very very
very
careful in the simulations Control watched. Never did anything rash, never did anything not by the book.

The irony of doing things exactly as they wanted me to, so they wouldn’t find out the things they might torture or kill me for, was not lost on me.

Those two weeks were, literally, the worst two weeks of my life. I already knew that whoever it was that had me was planning to kill me after I did what they wanted of me. But even knowing that didn’t ease any of the stress of messing with the code. Of knowing I was exposed if anyone decided to look, and yet doing it anyway.

It’s one thing to know you’re already dead. It’s another to work on something that might give you a chance to stay alive, as long as no one decides to look.

They never looked. Never. Because they didn’t think they had to.

I was so grateful for it.

And at the same time, so contemptuous of it.

They deserved what I was going to do to them. Whatever it was. I hadn’t figured it out yet.

But when I did: no sympathy.

*   *   *

What I did with those two weeks: blue pill.

No, I don’t know where the phrase comes from. It’s been used for a long time. Look it up.

But what it means is that I created an overlay for the
Chandler
’s computer system. A just about exact replica.

I copied it, tweaked it, attached everything coming in from the outside to it, as well as the bridge simulator. It looked like, responded like, and would control things like the actual computer system for the
Chandler
.

But it wasn’t.

That system, the one that actually ran the
Chandler,
was running underneath the copy. And that one, well.

That
one, I was totally in control of. The reality underneath the simulation. The reality that no one but me knew existed below the simulation. The simulation that everyone thought reflected reality.

That’s
the blue pill.

For the next month, every day, all day, I ran more and more complex missions on the bridge simulator. More simulations where I had to juggle navigation with weapons.

It was clear to me that whatever they were training me for, it had a significant military component. They were expecting me to go to battle for them. They may or may not have expected me to survive the battle. I think “not survive” was the more likely scenario.

This was not a surprise.

Through this all, I kept up the chatter with Control. To engage it. To make it feel something for me. To make it see the person it had put into a box.

I was not notably successful.

But I wasn’t expecting to be.

What I had to be was the
same
person Control thought I was. The one who had decided to help. The one who had decided to trust Control.

I didn’t want to mess that up. I wanted Control and anyone else listening to get exactly what they were expecting. I wanted them to be as smug about their small-c control over me as they ever were.

They did not disappoint.

And while they were thinking that, when Control left me alone after a day of simulations, I had free run of the
Chandler
.

Which, as it turned out, was undergoing some drastic renovations. Notably, having the actual weapons systems reinstalled. Before it had been the
Chandler,
the ship had been a Colonial Defense Forces frigate. When it was decommissioned those weapons systems were removed and dismantled.

Now systems were being put back into place. The ship was crawling with workers inside and out. I hadn’t been aware of them before, because why would I be? I was a brain in a box, trapped in a simulation.

But
now
I could see, and hear, everything that was going on with the ship.

The workers were not mostly human. Most of them, as far as I could tell, were Rraey, just like the soldiers who attacked the
Chandler
in the first place.

Every now and then, however, a single human would show up on the ship, and advise or direct the weapons installation. It was always the same human.

She was not Ocampo. Or Vera Briggs, his assistant. This was someone entirely new. Whatever was going on, from the human side, there was more than Ocampo involved.

Watching the workers installing the weapons systems, I realized I had gotten lucky. In a couple more weeks, they’d be done with their installation and then the weapons systems would be plugged into
Chandler
’s computer system. If the work had been done earlier, or I had started my work later, I would have been found out. There was a small window, and I had plopped into it.

Which made me feel like the luckiest guy in the universe, until I remembered I was still a brain in a box.

Which brings me to the other thing I found on the
Chandler
:

Me.

I was on the bridge, in a large rectangular box that looked, for all the world, like a coffin. The top of the box was clear; from my vantage point of the bridge cameras, I could look straight down into it and see: my brain.

And the electronic elements that were attached to it, to the surface of the gray matter and, I assumed, inside of it as well. I could see the hard wires snaking out of it, toward a juncture on the side of the box.

I saw the liquid in which my brain was suspended, discolored, slightly pink. I saw tubes connected to my brain, I assume taking in and bringing out blood or something substituting for it. Something that brought in nutrients and oxygen, and took out waste. The tubes also snaked out to a juncture in the box’s interior wall.

A change in camera and in perspective and I saw another box, into which the wires and tubes went. It’s this box I saw two Rraey, who I assume were doctors, come to and open daily, doing diagnostic work. Inside were filtering systems, intake and sampling valves, hardwired computers to monitor my brain’s well-being, and something else that I couldn’t identify at first, until one of the Rraey accidentally jostled it, and the other yelled at it for doing so.

The
Chandler
’s system has within it a translation library for several hundred known species. It, like most such libraries on trade ships, almost never gets used because we’re mostly dealing with humans. Nevertheless it’s there and on hand for when or if you need to translate anything. It translated what the second Rraey said to the first.

“Keep that up,” it said. “You’ll blow up all three of us.”

“Then at least our remains would get to go back home,” the first Rraey said.

“I would prefer to go back home in a form that would allow me to enjoy it,” the second Rraey said, and then inserted a dongle into one of the hardwired monitors, I assume to check on how my brain was doing and make adjustments.