//------------------------------// // 1. Stand My Ground // Story: TCB: The Heart of Everything // by Madrigal Baroque //------------------------------// (Based on The Conversion Bureau as reimagined by Chatoyance. Settings and other elements used with permission.) *** She was adrift in a river of glowing green eels. The eels were subroutines and sections of code, alphanumeric fish swimming and breeding around her. Some would die, but those that lived would spawn more evolved forms of themselves - programming, once hammered out on keyboards, had become more like raising prized koi. Tib reached out and snatched a short, wriggling alphanumeric string from one of the eels, and pulled it free of the glistening primary algorithmic body.  She held up the glowing, undulating string, more chartreuse than green, and studied it with a sort of odd apathetic interest. She couldn't tell what was wrong with it, exactly, but she knew that if left unchecked it would corrupt the code, producing errant mutations that would ultimately cause the subroutines to fail, or worse, infect the whole system. ^Well spotted!^ said a chipper voice from somewhere near the base of her skull.  "Thanks, COREy.." Tib (the name friends would call her if she had any) tossed the errant fragment into the disposal program, which was manifested as a small cylindrical receptacle. A trash bin, it had once been called. Most codeworkers didn't even bother with physical representations anymore, but Tib was still grounded enough to cling to concepts that were at least cognitively tangible. She returned her attention to the swarming school around her, scanning for any other signs of corruption or deterioration. The glowing green eels swam and danced and multiplied without hindrance, with no faults or aberrations to be seen. ^The maintenance is now complete for this cycle. Your next work period will commence at 0500. Why don't you get something to nibble and snag some Z's till then, Tib?^ Tib fought back a chuckle. Okay, maybe she had one friend, even if that friend was an artificially intelligent and semi-autonomous maintenance program. "Sounds like a plan, pardner." Against the luminous column of green symbols lazily circling her, Tib saw her own hands reaching toward her face. She disengaged the microports from her temples and removed the AR syncspecs. The environment she'd spent days in, subjective time, winked out. Tib blinked to adjust her eyes. She had a post-interface headache, again. All these long hours. Her eyes itched, and she rubbed them with a tired sigh. Her shift had recently been extended from twelve hours to sixteen…and since every second she spent in the network seemed like ten or more to her augmented brain because of her unique and highly trained perception, she suffered from severe post-sync disorientation. Her mind felt sluggish, and her body heavy and clumsy. She wasn't exactly the embodiment of grace anyway. To her reorienting mind, she hadn't been "home" for over a week, barring the essential biological maintenance breaks every subjective "day" or so. When her vision cleared, she took a look around her domestic cubicle. As a Green level coder, she lived in luxury most Twopers could only dream of. Her living space was not only big enough to stand up in and lie at full length, she had enough space to stretch out her arms, if she stood in the middle, and not touch either side wall. She had her own replicator, her own infoviewer, and a waste recycle port. She didn't even have to leave home if she didn't want to…and she usually didn't. She had nowhere to go. Not anymore. Her stomach, empty for too long, growled and gurgled for attention. Obediently she went to the trusty food printer, outdated but still fully functional, and punched up her usual evening meal, soy turkey salad and Dr Barq's Strawberry Fizz. She sat in her lounger (a graduation perk for being first in her Code Cleaner class) to eat. Before tucking in, she tapped behind her right ear to start up her favorite playlist, giving her earlobe a quick tug to set it for Shuffle/Repeat. Soft strings swelled Inside her head, and a clear feminine voice rose and spoke across the ages to her. Nothing about staying low, keeping under the radar, felt right. She had gotten where she was, stayed at her lofty position, by keeping her mouth shut and doing as she was told. It rankled. It went against her grain. It wasn't like she had anyone to stand with her, either. Both of her parents were gone. Her father had dropped dead of an aneurysm caused by overwork when she was fourteen, and her mother had hung on just long enough to see her daughter through emergency training and settled into her legacy position before throwing herself off a levee into the poisoned waters of the once grand Mississippi River. Tib had no family left, at least none that would acknowledge her. Jean-Luc Claude Thibodeaux had been a Code Cleaner since the age of seventeen when his mother died, and he was a damned good one. Better, frankly, than Tib was herself, but she performed her inherited duties adequately enough to earn the wages he'd brought in, and to use the tools he'd bequeathed her–the interface specs, the maintenance programs, and best of all COREy, the Cognitive Observation and Retrieval Entity that directed and guided Tib into spotting broken and misproduced code fragments and clearing them out of the algorithm streams. She was a glorified cyber lintpicker. And she would never be anything else. She could always just quit and leave. Heh. And go where? To the favela, where she'd be even more of an outcast? Where she had no skills that would help her subsist in the meat world? She might not starve, not immediately, because every single one of the nineteen billion human beings crawling on the planet's  face were guaranteed food and water, enough to barely survive. But with no shelter, no refuge, no protection from…from anything? She wouldn't stand a chance. What about her mother's family? Even if she could determine which of the Good Families had produced her mother, they had disowned their errant offspring, stripped her of all identity, before she'd ever given birth to her only child. "Marie" hadn't even been her real name. The name she was born with had been taken from her, along with everything else from her old life. Tib knew she should feel grateful. She had a livelihood that provided her with a quality of life most people could only fantasize about. Yet it didn't feel like a life. This wasn't living. This was existing. And it wasn't enough. It wasn't just that code cleaning had become routine. It was supposed to be second nature for her to be able to recognize errors at a glance and remove them so that the stream remained healthy and prolific, constantly developing and improving and even reinventing itself. It was fascinating work, really. Routine, but fascinating. Yet she felt…trapped. She was where she had started out, seven years ago, and this was where she would finish. Her long hours didn't give her much time for any kind of social life, not that she'd ever had much of one anyway. Her father the cleaner and her mother the music lover had been her whole offline world, and they were both long gone.  She'd never had any desire to seek out companionship. Her companions were the voices of those long dead, a collection of once-popular music whoch her mother had accumulated in her own troubled youth. Names of musical performers most wouldn't even recognize today. Xandria, In This Moment, Epica, Within Temptation, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Kerli, Heart, Kate Bush, Evanescence, The Birthday Massacre… She had hundreds of songs stored in her microdrive–her mother's sole legacy–and she knew each one by heart.  But Tib had no one to share her music with, and no one to leave anything to. Not that she wanted children. All she had to bequeath to a child would be a dead-end job and a planet that stood a zero chance of outliving them. Outliving? Hell, the world was already dead. The land was ruined and wasted. Nothing would grow in the barren soil. The waters were poisonous sludge. Wildlife was a distant memory. The sky above was cloaked in a thick permanent layer of brown and yellow clouds of smog.  No one sane would bring a child into a dead world. But that left Tib alone. Completely…and utterly p…alone. No way out, no way back, and nothing to look forward to but an early death from chronic neural trauma. Just like her daddy. She could drop dead right now and no one would care. She could just give up and wander out into the favela to be killed and no one would care. She could walk out to the levee and jump, following her mother's path into the toxic flow that had once been a river teeming with life. And no one would care. It would be so easy to give up. To just quit. D'ain't no quit in her. She sink her teef inta sumpin, she gon' lock her jaw an' hold on tight an' deaf-roll what she got inta submission. No quit in dat girl. Dat my gator girl, she. Delphine Renee Angelique Thibodeaux was, if nothing else, her father's daughter. To give up would shame that legacy…and he was right. There was no quit in her. She couldn't do that. So what could she do? If she had someone else, anyone else, who could understand... "Except there's no one else," Tib muttered. She tucked the empty Fizzer can into the salad bowl, snapped the lid shut and tossed it at the recycle port.  Two points! "No one else…" Tib pressed a control on her chair arm and it immediately reclined into a sleeping platform with a raised headrest as the lights dimmed around her. "Just…just me." She closed her eyes and let Sharon den Adel sing her to sleep.  ***