CHAPTER 1
A train shot across the city of Neo Babylon, packed with glassy-eyed and silent passengers. Nobody held phones or other distracting electronic devices. The only sounds were the rush of wind and a few coughs, as every passenger stared at nothing in near silence. Some passengers nodded their heads to music only they could hear, but most remained still.
One man was the exception, standing near the doors of a carriage and shifting his weight from foot to foot in a mixture of boredom and impatience. Like many others on the train, he wore a dark suit, ready for a busy day of work. Unlike the others, he seemed attentive to his surroundings.
His name was Nick Waite, and what separated him from every other person on the train was that he lacked a neural implant.
Nick’s dark blue eyes locked onto the glittering spires of Babylon’s Central Business District. He wondered if he might see the towers of the other cities in the nearby islands if his eyes were cybernetically enhanced.
The train passed behind a building, dropping the carriage into darkness, and Nick frowned inwardly. Even though he commuted to work every morning like this, he still found it frustratingly boring. He wanted to pull out his phone, but he hated the stares and judgment it brought.
Nobody used handheld electronics after childhood these days. Neural implants were typically installed when puberty began, so that the brain could adapt to the device now permanently implanted inside it. Once someone had a chip in his skull, he didn’t need a phone to listen to music, be fed curated news, or mindlessly browse social media.
Wednesdays were always the worst day to catch the train. On other days, enough people worked from home that Nick might be able to find some space to hide his phone. But most offices required workers to come in for at least a few days. Neural implants or not, office culture never died.
The mainframe security policies of most companies only exacerbated the issue. Most companies didn’t trust their peons with remote access to quantum computers worth more than every cent the average family had ever earned.
Eventually, the train pulled into an elevated station. Through the reinforced panels of the doors, Nick saw that today’s road traffic was heavier than usual. Self-driving trucks and buses plowed onward while a smattering of robot taxis weaved between them. Private vehicles were few and far between, given human driving was illegal in the Neo Westphalian isles.
Once the train stopped inside the station, the passengers came to life. Their eyes lit up as they returned to reality. Nick jumped out of the door before the crush consumed him, then made his way to the exit gates.
Central Station was as busy as ever, and a couple dozen lines snaked out both ways in the main atrium. Nick joined one, but wasn’t fussed about the size. The line moved swiftly, leaving him little chance to rest his feet.
The station itself was an open and arching mass of steel. Transparent dark sheets of glass hung from every corner and overhang, but showed nothing. To Nick’s eyes, they served no purpose.
In fact, the station lacked any visible signage. Or at least, visible to him. If he pulled out his phone, he had an augmented reality app that allowed him to see the same world that everyone else did. AR glasses had once worked as well, but their protocols had been deprecated decades ago.
Instead, Nick guided himself by memory.
Nearby, two suited men pointed at one of the overhanging sheets of glass. One looked to be in his late-twenties—roughly Nick’s age—and the other older, fatter, and balding.
“The ads are getting fucking obnoxious, aren’t they?” the younger one said. “I don’t need to see an Altnet streamer shoving soda down her virtual tits.”
“Personally, I found the gambling streamers worse. You should get an ad-blocker module for your implant. Mine stopped working last month, but I’m getting it fixed,” the fat one said.
“Are neural modules even legal?” The younger guy looked around, as if scared they’d be overheard.
“Sure they are. My implant, my business. I’ve heard that the new ads are using security bands to beam themselves into our implants, though. Can’t block those without getting zapped by the Archangels.” The fat one made a finger gun and “fired” it.
“I bet some asshole in the Spires got a new solar yacht last month for that.”
“You know it.”
Ah, corruption and the Spires. Nick couldn’t name a better duo for Babylon. Fortunately, his livelihood depended on its continuing existence, so he couldn’t complain too much. His job wouldn’t exist if everything was fantastic.
The fact that advertising firms now had access to Babylon’s security wavelengths concerned him, however. Despite his otherwise crippling lack of a neural implant, Ciphers like himself relied heavily on the city’s advanced communications technology. He’d need to investigate this once he got into the office.
His line approached the security gates. They weren’t much to look at. Each gate contained a woman sitting behind a desk, fancy scanners built into said desk, and the turnstile itself.
Notably, the women were identical. From their beige uniforms, to their cherub-like facial features, to every strand of shoulder-length black hair on their head. Self-driving vehicles weren’t the only robots running Babylon’s public transportation system. These women were autonomous robotic modular dolls, typically just called dolls or ARMDs. Every one of them came off a factory line.
The line continued to progress. Each person stepped up to the turnstile. They said nothing. After a moment, the doll spoke and the turnstile swung open, and the line continued moving. This continued until it was nearly Nick’s turn.
Grimacing, he fumbled in his jacket for his phone. Dread built up inside him.
Every single fucking day…
It was finally his turn.
He stepped up to the turnstile, unlocked his phone with his thumb, and held it out to the transportation doll.
She stared at him in confusion. Nothing happened for a moment. Behind him, murmuring started immediately. A few people seemed to recognize him.
“Again?” someone said, frustrated.
The doll tilted her head, continuing to ignore his phone even as he waved it in her face. After a moment, her eyes widened.
“Good morning, Mr. Waite. Please present your arm and pull up your sleeve for detailed biometric confirmation of identity,” the doll said in a bright but artificial tone.
“You just said my name,” Nick said, reaching for his sleeve anyway. “You know exactly who I am.”
“Your identity must be verified. Facial and body shape recognition do not meet requirements for biometric identification, according to protocol,” she chirped back.
Realizing he had pulled up his sleeve, the doll grabbed his wrist with one hand. She pressed a thumb into it and held his hand for a very long second. As always, she ignored his phone, even though it had the damn transport app that was supposed to trigger the scanners.
The turnstile swung open.
“Have a good day, Mr. Waite,” the doll said with a smile and let him go.
“You too,” he said sarcastically, putting his phone away and leaving.
Behind him, the next person in line stepped up. “Do I get a good morning?” he asked jokingly.
The doll ignored him. After a moment, the turnstile swung open again. “Proceed,” she said emotionlessly.
Well, at least the dolls were nicer to Nick for all the shit they gave him.
He ignored the stares of everyone else in the station with practiced ease, given this happened every single day since the city had raised security a few years back.
Unfortunately, Nick’s mood did not improve once in the exit hall of the station. He saw the stairs that led down and out of the station.
He also saw two young women with slim submachine guns standing next to them. They were dolls, just like the women manning the turnstiles.
Unlike the transport dolls, these ones were downright dangerous. They wore armored black police vests and dark pants, but the armor plating beneath showed what little clothing they really wore. On their pauldrons were markings. One read “ARC-M01-NB04912” and the other one had a similar marking.
Nick knew what it meant, but recognized the dolls by sight. They were Archangels, members of Babylon’s elite police unit that managed crime in the city. Specifically, they were Mark 1 models.
Every Mark 1 Archangel looked identical. Five foot nothing, hauntingly beautiful, nearly flat-chested, fluffy white hair just below their jaw with a pair of fake pigtails that acted as antennae, purple eyes, and visible armor plating with pauldrons and greaves.
One of the pair saw Nick and met his gaze. She seemed to smile at him.
Hunching his shoulders, he looked away and began walking to the exit. He suspected he’d be late to work today. The two dolls watched him like a hawk as he approached, but they didn’t move.
Seconds before he got close, the Archangels suddenly turned away. They focused on another man, who wore a bulky duffel coat and strode away at speed.
“Jack Hartridge, halt, in the name of the Neo Babylon Police Department,” one Archangel snapped. She didn’t move, however.
The suspect, Jack, stumbled. He looked back, eyes wide. Then he broke out in a run, cursing loudly. He shoved others aside, knocking a few people down.
While the chaos erupted, Nick kept moving toward the stairs.
Before Jack reached the exit, he suddenly froze mid-step. He crashed to the ground like a statue. No noise escaped him, but his eyes were wide and terrified.
The Archangels walked up to him, holding their guns absently without a care in the world. The looks on their faces were of absolute condescension, but they stopped short of sneering at him. Those nearby jeered at Jack.
“What kind of idiot thinks he can run away from our Archangels?” one person shouted.
Nick kept moving. He’d seen this play out many times before.
Resisting the Archangels was futile. What made them dangerous wasn’t their armor, their powerful motors, or their near-perfect accuracy.
No, it was the fact they had supreme access to Babylon’s neural network. They could shut down a criminal instantly just by accessing his neural implant. And if someone was dumb enough to cut off access to the security bands, they’d probably just be shot.
Nick had yet to find out what the Archangels would do to him given he lacked an implant. So far, he hadn’t officially broken any laws. The corruption rife in Babylon meant he was in a gray area. All the Archangels could do was waste his time whenever they wanted to be annoying. Admittedly, for a bunch of police robots, they loved to be annoying.
The steps lay before him, so Nick raced down them.
“Hey!” one of the dolls snapped from behind him.
He kept moving. His heart felt as if it would burst from his chest. Any second now, he worried that a bullet would pierce his skull.
Nothing happened. Nobody around him reacted as if an Archangel was aiming down her sights at him.
Once at the bottom of the stairs and in the morning sun, Nick turned and stared back at the station.
An Archangel stood up there. She stared down at him with her arms crossed, as if pouting at the fact he had gotten away. He met her gaze for several seconds, then awkwardly walked away.
Other police dolls raced toward Central Station, although they were the standard Liberator models rather than the advanced Archangels. They were easy to tell apart by virtue of being nearly six-foot tall, substantially bustier, and the fact they carried a hand cannon the size of Nick’s torso.
His office was only a couple of blocks away, so he walked. Vehicles had to give way to pedestrians inside the CBD itself, and traffic was fairly light. He still waited for other pedestrians to cross the street, then blended in.
He’d had a few close calls with self-driving vehicles before. Without an implant, he was like a ghost to them. They relied on their physical cameras and sometimes stopped a little abruptly for his liking.
Realizing he’d made swift time, Nick decided to duck into a café for some food. He watched as some cleaning robots gave way to other people on the street, then darted around them himself.
No staff greeted him inside the cafe. In fact, there was nobody to be seen at all. An empty counter sat at the end of a conveyor belt, which was fed from an opening in the wall. There weren’t any obvious ways to order.
Nick connected to the café’s ordering system on the Altnet using his phone and ordered an egg and bacon roll. Within a few minutes, a cardboard tray rolled out on the conveyor belt. He grabbed his breakfast and headed to the office.
Despite being in the CBD, his company’s office complex was far from the tallest. Instead, it stood out for being a walled complex of only two ten-story towers in the CBD. One of the towers was being rented out to a bevy of other companies, sure, but it was a sign of wealth and power.
A gargantuan black marble façade on the wall said “Tartarus,” which was the name of the company. As imposing as the name was, it was also meaningful.
Nick strode through the open front gates. Nobody stopped him or reacted, and there were no scanners for him to use his photo ID on.
However, the moment he crossed the property boundary, several armed security dolls appeared from behind the tall hedges that surrounded the building. Like every other doll in the city, they were female. They were armored and wore dark green security uniforms emblazoned with Tartarus’s logo. Automatic shotguns with bulky magazines hung from straps around their chests.
With a flick of a thumb, the dolls could switch from less-lethal taser rounds to very lethal slugs. Every firearm used by private security dolls in Babylon needed to have ammunition-switching, given using lethal rounds on humans was illegal except for law enforcement. Most police dolls used ammunition-switchers as well, for that matter.
“Good morning, Mr. Waite,” the dolls said in eerie unison.
One stepped up to him in expectation. Nick dutifully showed his wrist. Just like in the station, the security doll confirmed his identity. Once satisfied he was who she had just said he was, the doll let him go and stepped back.
“Have there been any problems this morning?” he asked.
“There are problems with the elevators in the main atrium. It is recommended to use the stairs until maintenance can be undertaken.”
“Got it. Thanks,” he said.
With a wave, he entered the atrium. The security dolls watched him as if transfixed, but he ignored them.
Unlike the behavior of the transport dolls and the Archangels, he at least understood the behavior of Tartarus’s security. As one of the company’s Ciphers, he helped program and debug them. If he wanted to, he could program them not to verify his identity when he entered.
He chose not to, because Tartarus was the sort of company that could be targeted by someone capable of building a doll in Nick’s exact likeness.
Like most of the city, the office atrium was a white, silver, and black mass of steel and glass. A crowd of people stood near the elevators on both sides. Taking heed of the warning, Nick slipped into a hallway and used the fire stairs.
His destination was on the sixth story, so it was a bit of a jaunt, but exercise had yet to kill him. The door to his office was secured with both ID and retinal scanners and lacked any windows. Nick entered without any hassles.
“You got here earlier than I expected,” said the only occupant of the room, Travis. He was a thin, balding fellow who got along with suits as well as they got along with him—which was poorly. “Half the IT department is stuck in the elevators, and there have been some bomb scares that have shut down several roads and train stations in the outer metro. No ETA on a fix for the elevators. Most of the execs are too busy planning tonight’s party to give a shit, either.”
Nick blinked. Were the bomb scares why the Archangels had been at the train station? And what that Jack asshole had been up to?
“Security let me know about the elevators, so I took the stairs,” he said.
Travis shot him an odd look. “Those dolls sure love to gossip to you, don’t they?”
Shrugging, Nick dropped into his seat and dug into his breakfast. There were just four cubicles in this closed-off office. Only one of them had monitors. With a neural implant, physical devices were unnecessary as the user could directly interface with the network. The desk mostly existed to give people personal space.
Nick’s lack of a neural implant was a literal disability, and Tartarus made accommodations for him. He even had all sorts of annoying crap on his citizenship and health cards about his implant rejection disorder. It had made getting higher education impossible and nearly screwed him out of a job at all. Becoming a Cipher had been a stroke of luck.
A big one, given how reliant he was on Tartarus’s healthcare. His insurance plan required him to get two annual checkups due to his disorder, and if he so much as coughed in public he’d have a nurse doll on his doorstep the next morning.
“I’m going to need your AI-whispering ways,” Travis continued. “Logistics found out this morning that all our incoming loads were canceled. A lot of distributors called up to ask where their truck was. I checked, and for whatever reason, all orders were canceled last night and nobody can place new ones. With IT fucked, that means you need to see what the fuck is wrong with our temperamental mainframe.”
By “distributors,” Travis meant Tartarus’s network of black-market sellers, although some were above board.
Tartarus was what Babylon called a black company, which meant that it was technically legal, but undertook a number of shady activities that the police and regulators turned a blind eye to. Stepping over certain invisible lines was deemed criminal and typically resulted in either a friendly reminder to stop or a hundred Archangels raiding the company offices.
“Would anything be different if IT were at their desks?” Nick asked.
“I imagine they’d fuck around for a few hours before asking us for help.”
“Then I’ll take the opportunity to get shit done before they fuck everything up more.”
Nick fired up his computer and logged into Tartarus’s mainframe.
On most days, this would prompt the mainframe to immediately send him a message. Mainframes and dolls had a lot in common, and both relied on AIs that were sometimes eerily human. The difference was in scale.
Dolls consisted of a single automaton, and besides the Archangels, their complexity was heavily restricted. But mainframes were huge quantum computers that carried companies on their virtual backs. A mainframe like Helena, who ran Tartarus, had the computing power of thousands of dolls.
Realizing that this bug might be serious, Nick began pulling up various error and action logs. Helena generated obscene amounts of output every second, but he’d programmed her to create less verbose logs.
Or so he thought. He stared at the overnight action log and scratched his head. It was a mile long, and half the actions had failed. Despite that, the error log was squeaky clean. All he saw were reams of warnings about the company’s future financial state.
What the fuck was going on? An awful feeling welled up in Nick’s stomach.
Good morning, Nick, a message suddenly said on his monitor. The sender was identified as Helena and her message was marked as the highest priority.
Evidently, she was feeling needy. He couldn’t even hide the message window.
Are you not going to say good morning? Helena asked after he attempted to hide the window a couple of times.
Why did you cancel all deliveries? he asked, ignoring her request.
There was a long delay before she replied. Nick considered saying good morning, but held off.
My predictive algorithms flagged that they would be unnecessary. As per my directives to minimize financial burden on the company, I canceled the orders.
Nick stared at the logs. They didn’t gel with Helena’s explanation.
What about the warnings? he asked, tapping away at his keyboard. You violated a lot of inventory requirements, and I see some dire warnings about cash flow.
If Tartarus stopped selling to its customers, it would run out of cash pretty fast. That was how business worked. Helena had to know this, given she was programmed to run the damn company.
The fact she had ignored the basic maths that told her this suggested a pretty major hiccup had occurred.
I attempted to reconcile my predictions with company directives. These attempts failed, Helena replied, likely referring to the countless failed actions in the log. Can you please help me, Nick? And say good morning?
He rolled his eyes. Good morning, Helena. I’ll look at the logs. Try not to do anything else.
The message window closed itself.
Nick spent the next hour hammering away at the keyboard. He knew what the problem was, but finding the source turned out to be difficult.
The fact Helena continued to do things didn’t help. She was clearly malfunctioning, and didn’t seem to realize it. At least Nick knew he wasn’t going to be out of a job anytime soon.
With a sigh, he spun around in his chair and caught Travis’s attention. The older man’s glassy-eyed expression disappeared.
“Solved it already?” Travis asked.
“No. I have good and bad news.”
“But the good news isn’t that you’ve fixed it?”
Nick shrugged. “The good news is that I can fix it. The bad news is that I don’t know what the hell caused it.”
“That’s… Shit, Nick. You’re the only Cipher here who has the slightest clue how Helena even works,” Travis said. “What if it happens again?”
“We fix it again. I’ll need to set up monitoring systems just in case.” Nick scowled. “I have a bad feeling, though. Usually something like this is a sign she spotted a pattern we can’t. But it could just be a bug.”
“She’s an AI, Nick. What does the log say?” Travis paused. “Or, uh, is this a pre-Tartarus thing?”
“It’s a pre-Tartarus thing.”
They both sighed.
Despite the wealth and power of the company, it had once been a far grander thing. And Travis hadn’t worked there.
Nick had, however. In the company known as Neural Spike. Unlike Tartarus, which was a wholesale company that did some shady deals on the side, Neural Spike had been a wholesale company that did some secret military research on the side.
Or, rather, it had been an AI research company that used a wholesale company as a front and for testing purposes.
“You understand the differences between emotion and logic engines, right?” Nick asked.
“I’m a Cipher just like you, Nick. Of course I get it,” Travis snapped.
“What if I told you that Helena is neither?”
Travis remained silent for a moment. “Alright, start from the top. So long as this isn’t going to get you disappeared by the military like everyone else apparently was.”
“Nah. I’m not dumb enough to break my NDA. They left me alone because I was a dumb kid who got dragged into everything, and now I’m locked up in Tartarus along with Helena.” Nick winked, referring to the hidden meaning of the company.
Travis rolled his eyes.
Coughing, Nick continued, “Anyway, a logic engine is straightforward enough. Up until a few years ago, every doll used them. They contain a list of commands and protocols, and they follow them meticulously. Every model of doll except the Archangels uses them.”
Travis nodded. “And the Archangels use emotion engines, which run on emotions, objectives, ideals, and shit? They have stuff like the laws of robotics to govern them.”
“If anyone programmed the laws of robotics into the Archangels, they left out the part about not harming humans,” Nick drawled. “But yes, Archangels make decisions based on far more than just raw commands. Each one of them has their own emotion engine, and they can all connect to each other and make collective decisions.”
“Great. What about mainframes? And Helena?”
“They use the same model. Emotion engines rolled out across mainframes nearly a decade ago. These days, any large company relying on a logical mainframe for centralized processing would be insane. They’re only used for secondary tasks. There’s a whole new distributed network structure for mainframes still evolving in companies—and it’s all based on Helena.”
Mainframes were, without a doubt, the most significant change to modern computing. A doll contained a supercomputer, but a mainframe eclipsed them by orders of magnitude. The difference was that a mainframe was an AI built into a structure and a fixed network, rather than a robot.
The power of emotion engines had only increased the dominance of mainframes. However, they were powerful but temperamental. The entire reason Ciphers existed was primarily to keep mainframes running, because any error in one brought companies to their knees.
Travis stared at Nick. Slowly, it dawned on him the importance of Neural Spike.
“Oh. Oh fuck. You guys made—”
“Yeah. We helped make the emotion engine. I’ll let you connect the dots about what caused everything to go tits up,” Nick said drily. “And why we have a mainframe with a prototype emotion engine, but the security dolls are all logic engine-based.”
Travis nodded.
“Sounds like a fucking mess. Didn’t you guys work with the military?” Travis asked.
Nick shrugged. He couldn’t legally answer. “In the end, I got let off. Of the twenty Ciphers I worked with, only two others got out and I was the only one who directly worked with Helena. It is what it is. I still get paid alright here. Even if this is just glorified tech support.”
“The dolls fucking love you. You should see the way the security dolls tail you everywhere in the building.” Travis winked.
“Thanks. That makes me feel appreciated.”
The rest of the day passed in a blur. Even after fixing the problem with the supplies, more problems cropped up. Nick felt as though he was trying to calm down a screaming AI, as Helena threw tantrum after tantrum. At midday, he took the extreme measure of cutting her off from the production servers, forcing everyone to do everything manually and basically grinding everything to a halt.
But at least that meant he wasn’t putting out new fires. Everyone left, including Travis. The company’s founding anniversary was tonight. There was some huge party taking place in some ritzy dance hall. Nick imagined that there’d be more blown on booze and drugs there than most companies spent on employee training.
By the time he felt satisfied that he’d resolved the issues with his favorite AI mainframe, night had well and truly fallen.
Before he left, he opened a new conversation with Helena.
She instantly closed it. She’d stopped talking to him once he cut her off from the production servers.
Nick stood and threw on his suit jacket. But before he switched off his terminal, a new message window appeared.
Take care of yourself, Nick, Helena said.
I’ll finish maintenance tomorrow, he said. Just sit tight. Maybe talk with the security dolls to pass the time.
Take care of yourself, Nick, Helena repeated.
After a few seconds’ hesitation, he switched off his terminal. Then he left his office. All the lights were off at first. They flicked on and off as he walked through the empty halls.
As Travis had commented on earlier, security dolls tailed him. When he approached the elevators, a pair stood next to him. They accompanied him to the Atrium.
For whatever reason, they gripped their shotguns tightly and appeared to be alert. Nick felt tense.
More security dolls met him in the Atrium and accompanied him outside.
“Have there been any problems?” he asked the dolls.
They stared at him.
The fact they refused to answer him concerned him greatly. This definitely wasn’t in their programming.
First Helena, now even the security dolls. Today was turning out to be a very strange day.
“A taxi is waiting for you out front,” one said. “We cannot accompany you any farther. Return home immediately, Mr. Waite.”
A chill ran down Nick’s spine.
What the fuck was going on?
At the same time, he remembered what happened to Neural Spike. Helena had been panicking all day. And that eerie final message she repeated.
Was it happening again? Nick felt his heart rate accelerate with every passing instant.
“Protect Helena,” he ordered the security dolls.
“Understood, Mr. Waite,” they said.
A self-driving taxi sat outside. It was from one of the premium brands, he noted.
The moment he stepped past the boundaries of the office complex, the security dolls reentered the offices. Nobody ambushed Nick.
The doors of the taxi opened as he approached and he slipped inside, bouncing on the plush leather seats. Classical music played and a screen lit up, already showing the path to his apartment complex.
The car door closed, and the taxi took off silently into the night. Very little traffic joined him on the roads. Nick pulled out his phone and checked the news. Naturally, there was nothing. No messages, nothing on social media, no news on Tartarus, nothing.
The company still existed, at least. There were videos and messages about the party, too. Everything seemed fine.
He put his phone away and stared out the window at the bright lights of the city.
After so many years, he still hadn’t gotten over what happened to Neural Spike. Of the absolute shitshow it had been and how it had changed the course of his life. How long would it be—
The taxi screeched to a halt.
“Fuck!” Nick nearly slammed into the dash.
He tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Suddenly, he realized all the streetlights had gone out. The taxi powered down, leaving him shrouded in darkness. He fumbled for his phone and pulled it out, trying to activate the flashlight.
He turned it on and pointed it at the closest window. It showed absolutely nothing.
By the time he turned to the other door, it was already opening.
An Archangel slipped into the dark taxi, a stubby assault rifle in her hands. She looked slightly different in build from those this morning. The mark on her arm read “ARC-M03-NB00004” and Nick found himself transfixed by the code.
The door closed behind her, and the taxi powered back on. Without a word from her, the car took off.
This time, the screen showed a large loop of the CBD. Nick wasn’t going anywhere.
“Hello, Mr. Waite,” the Archangel said. “You may call me Chloe. Please pull up your sleeve for biometric confirmation of identity.”