The Compact Reader: Compact Universe

1 - Eat the Rich

When Steven Turing’s boss told him he needed to give a talk about the work he was doing, he balked. Him? Standing in front of hundreds of people? With millions more watching later on YouTube? That was insane! Turing wanted, needed, to be locked in his lab, away from humans with their petty problems, their emotional frailties, and, let’s be honest, their smells. Yes, humans stunk.

At least to Turing. People farted. They sweat. They ate things with curry and garlic and onions. And coffee. He loved coffee as much as the next person, but for the love of Grace Murray Hopper, did people have to walk around with the scent of Sumatra on their breath all day?

When his boss said, Talk about anything you like, the talk suddenly seemed like an opportunity. His project was all about improving the species H. sapiens. Why not talk about that?

So, Steven Turing gave a forty-five minute manifesto on Transhumanism According to Steven. His boss had expected him to talk about self-driving cars. But what could they do? They said talk about anything he wanted, and he wanted to talk about this.

Turing was nothing if not an unskilled public speaker. He didn’t know at what point he had lost his audience, a no-no for speakers at such events. He only knew it felt exhilarating to get his philosophy out there. It was time, he realized, humanity grabbed for the next ring. Otherwise, they would be stuck having petty wars started by Napoleon wannabes while the world went broke and tore up the environment beyond repair. If the company didn’t like it, they shouldn’t have arranged the platform for him. At least, he got a nice dig in at Facebook.

He came off the stage to somewhat decent applause. Shaking hands with the production staff, he spotted Connie Barksdale, his immediate supervisor, waiting for him.

God, that was awesome, said Turing. I want to go again. Can we make that happen?

Not as an employee. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away from the stage. I got three texts from Josh, Arkady, and William. She meant the triumvirate they both worked for, whom Wall Street worshiped. They were all watching. They’re all pissed. You were not supposed to use our sponsored time to pitch your crackpot theories.

Not theories, Connie. The inevitable. And we’re going to see it happen in our lifetime.

Well, I hope your next employer gives you a ringside seat. As of right now, you’re no longer an employee.

He wasn’t sure he’d heard that correctly. I’m sorry. What?

I’m saying you’re fired.

THREE YEARS, TWO STARTUPS, and a considerably downsized living arrangement later, Turing found himself in a ramshackle house in Alimeda with four other would-be developers all looking for that killer app. All of them could explode onto the market if their patron, a stoner would-be venture capitalist named Jessup, would stop messing around with traditional hedge fund types and pull the trigger on just one of their projects.

Like Turing’s Mindscape, uploading oneself into the video game for a fully immersive experience.

I’ve always wondered, said Rajeesh, the data compression expert, what happens if your project uploads a human mind when the person’s high.

Taking a pull on the bong, Brandon, one of the AI specialists, held up his hand. After keeping the smoke in his lungs for several seconds, he released. Artificial stoner?

There’s no market for that, said Goldberg, who looked like a beatnik with his pointed goatee and faded Army jacket. No one wants a stoner blundering through their network. Our esteemed host would have to go back to work and blow another fortune.

Under normal circumstances, Turing could have rattled off the reasons for not trying such a stupid stunt. What if the person died while plugged into the system? What if he went insane trying to understand how he was in two places at once? Would cyberspace even make sense to someone uploaded into the server?

But Turing had taken quite a few hits off the bong himself. He had created the artificial landscape in which people uploaded. Well, the few willing to try his experiment. Since he knew the whole mindscape already, he said, Hook me up, man. I’ll try it.

Rajeesh gave Goldberg a knowing look. It’s his virtual party.

He can cry if he wants to? Goldberg frowned when no one got the reference. Heathens.

Turing threw a spent apple core at Goldberg. Come on. Let’s do this thing.

Rajeesh grinned. We should spin him up something special. Hey, Cindy let us scan her naked. Let’s drop that avatar into the system.

That’s not Cindy, said Goldberg in his dull monotone. That’s Miss April. And why were you scanning our Dell rep naked?

We were high?

Turing didn’t care. Sooner or later, Rajeesh would either get his act together or get kicked out of the house, the rest of the group taking his work to build their own projects.

Turing stumbled into the other room, giggling as he walked into doorways, counters, even furniture. The whole thing seemed funny. Everything except Rajeesh making porno reels with their Dell rep. In Rajeesh’s lab, he found the Slab, a former medical examining table someone had rescued from a used office supply store, and climbed onto it. Lying back, he let his two snickering companions place the headgear on his scalp.

Now lie back, said Rajeesh.

And remember, today could be the last day of the rest of your life.

Turing flipped Goldberg the bird.

Ready? said Rajeesh. Count backward. Ten... Nine... Eight...

Turing fell asleep.

And did not wake up.

Not in his own body.

This was not normal. He couldn’t feel his hands, his feet, his breathing. Breathing? On previous uploads, he had still been aware of his own body. That had been Goldberg’s concern. If you were high, could you understand you were now in two places at once? One real, the other virtual?

And it was dark, pitch dark. Turing looked around, or it felt like he looked around. Eventually, he became aware of data flowing around him. Like air, like water.

Like blood.

He concentrated. Was there some way to see the outside world? He stretched out with his mind and felt the hardware of the house, the space of the cloud servers they used, and all the network connection between each. Eventually, he found the microphones, found a way to turn them on. He could hear Rajeesh and Goldberg arguing.

What the hell did you just do? Goldberg demanded. He’s dead.

He can’t be, said Rajeesh. He’s done this a hundred times before.

Well, he’s not breathing.

Shouldn’t we do CPR?

I don’t know CPR. Do we know someone who does?

Call Cindy. She knows.

Now is not the time for you to get laid! Steve’s down, and we need to bring him back.

Turing managed to find the camera in the lab room. After figuring out how to interpret the billions of pixels it generated as vision, he focused in on the Slab, Rajeesh, and Goldberg.

Turing also saw himself still and blue on the Slab.

Oh my God, he thought. I’m dead!

But not dead. But no longer corporeal, either. He hunted for the connection that would let him access the speakers in the room. Those proved elusive. Of course. The one thing he needed to tell them he was alive, and he couldn’t find how to access it.

Rajeesh and Goldberg left the room, Rajeesh wailing, They’re going to deport me. I just know it. I can’t go back to India. No one will hire a murderer to build their AI.

It’s okay, said Goldberg as they made their way to the living room. There are still plenty of terrorists in the world looking for someone just like you. Want to go to Men’s Wearhouse and find out your vest size?

Shut up, man! We just killed Steve.

Finally, Steven found the speakers. Guys? Guys? I’m still in here. Guys?

TURING DISCOVERED QUICKLY being trapped in cyberspace could be incredibly dull. He was bits. If he could find a monitor in sight of a camera, he could be pixels. But he also reached the conclusion Max Headroom and William Gibson both lied to him. If he could navigate how to move about the internet, particularly undetected, things might get interesting. It would take an eternity.

Which he soon learned was about fifteen seconds. Now, if he could just remember where he put his car keys before all this happened.

He would never be Steven Turing again. Well, not Steven Turing of Alameda, California, former employee of Google, Uber, and Microdyne, freelancer patronized by stoner venture capitalist Tyler Jessup. His friends had panicked and, instead of calling an ambulance, they dragged his body across the Bay to Golden Gate Park. Idiots. Well, stoners. He had no one to blame but himself. His mind had been high as a kite when he uploaded.

He was, however, the ghost in the machine. Machines. Plural. It took a lot of memory and processing power to host an entire human mind inside cyberspace. It took forever, but Turing discovered he could stretch out and spread his presence anywhere. Webcams and microphones let him see meatspace, as the cool kids used to call it. The longer he remained trapped in the circuitry and fiber-optic networks that wired the world, the more he realized he could read data on other computers. And encryption?

Even the most powerful AIs couldn’t keep up, but with a human mind, they could. Except it really wasn’t artificial intelligence as they knew it, was it? He could see right through it all: The banking scams passed off as market forces, the lies that were cryptocurrency—sound idea but poor execution—and all those dirty little secrets everyone, himself included, hid in cyberspace.

In what seemed like an eternity, Turing managed to carve out space at several tech companies in and around the Bay Area, grant himself access to just about any web cam and microphone at will, and to even listen to tens of thousands of phone calls, texts, and online chats simultaneously. He learned to listen for what he wanted, but he also learned to focus. If he ever intended to interact with reality again, he needed to be able to virtualize himself as human. That meant still thinking like a human. Why not? He’d had thirty-one years of practice.

As he reached out more, he expanded more. He experimented. Could he interact with people now? He found the source code and models for most generative AI in the works. Why they called it AI, he didn’t understand. He did know they could be useful to him. Sure, they were based entirely on plagiarism, but legally and, if he were honest with himself, physically, he was dead. Laws did not apply to him. So while he was at it, he helped himself to some of their money, fractions of a penny here, a diverted off-the-books payment there. All going to a numbered bank account in... Was that Switzerland? Or the Caymans? Maybe he’d try Cuba once their banking system came online. The place couldn’t stay communist forever. Look at China. It wasn’t even a country anymore. It was one big corporation.

It also made another great hiding place for parts of himself.

And then it happened. As Turing considered how to raid and consume the assets of one of the oligarchs, basically leaving a billionaire literally holding a cardboard sign on a freeway ramp, he caught Turing’s attention.

He was an influencer, one of Turing’s least favorite jobs. Really, he was an attention whore that managed to draw a lot of attention to his video channel. Turing considered shutting the channel down. But the platform remained useful for more than conspiracy theorists and snake-oil con artists. For instance, virtual or not, Turing enjoyed the musicians’ channels, the session players doing classic covers, often better than the original artists themselves (and sometimes with those same artists sitting in.) He would manipulate the channels he liked by inflating their likes, subscriptions, and views. He figured he could comfortably watch a given channel forty times in fifteen minutes, more in less time if he carved out what he called a submind.

But that guy kept popping up in his feeds, probably a consequence of Turing tampering with the platform. He learned to ignore it until one day, Mr. Influencer, a rich kid in Connecticut named Simon Bries, said to a female commenter, Your body is mine, sweetie. Get over it.

In the physical realm, Turing had to admit he wasn’t the most forward-thinking man. In fact, he’d been slapped a few times, though never hauled before HR at any of the companies he worked for. Now free of the hormones, he could see this little shit for what he was: a horny, mindless little beast with a big microphone.

Between the twit uttering his infamous line and his personal information ending up on every major platform of the day, it took about ten seconds, another five to lock all the posts so they couldn’t be blocked or deleted. In one case, where the platform’s owner had particularly irritated Turing before and after his transformation, he posted from said owner’s account, then locked him out of it.

Bries fled his apartment in Hartford, but Turing had access to the surveillance cams from DC to Boston and even into New Hampshire and Maine. He hijacked Bries’s channel to stream a live feed of his flight to Boston to hide in his parents’ basement. He never made it.

The Uber driver, a woman named Ramirez, pulled over and stabbed him twenty times, Bries screaming for mercy with each blow. As Ramirez waited for the police, Turing helpfully took down the channel and posted a notice that Bries had violated the platform’s community standards.

Then he cleaned out Bries’s bank accounts, surprisingly easy despite the funding he got from certain activists. Turing focused on one of his backers, a close friend of Tyler Jessup’s, and proceeded to help himself to all that person’s assets, too. The company filed for bankruptcy a month later, and Jessup stopped returning the man’s phone calls.

Turing had discovered his mission in life and his new superpower: Eating the rich.

No cannibalism required. Just consume their assets and leave them with nothing. Spit out the shells that were their actual persons.

Ironically, though no record existed of it, Turing was now the richest man in history. He turned his sights on someone he owed as much retribution as possible, both for his non-corporeal existence and for impoverishing and driving to suicide Rajesh.

Tyler Jessup.

TYLER JESSUP HAD THE world by the balls. He’d cracked AI, hoarded the patents, and now threatened to topple them all. Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple all trembled before him. If they wanted to play, they had to play by his rules. And none of this silly fiat money or even gold coin nonsense. The future was now, and now demanded wealth be expressed in VirCoin.

Kind of nice when you invent a form of money and were the sole arbiter of how it functioned. He played the old tech dinosaurs like a symphony, twitching VirCoin’s value here, changing its flow between central banks there, all until they did exactly as he wanted.

It netted him a nice home in Marin County, where he could look out over the northern Bay anytime he wanted. A pair of late model Tesla Roadsters sat in his driveway, one for him, one for whatever bimbo he brought home that weekend, usually one of his own employees. It also netted him ownership of the FC San Francisco, not just America’s best soccer team but the world’s now. The team was locked in a championship brawl with Real Madrid for the World Cup, going on right this second in Oakland. Jessup would have attended, but he had a guest this weekend. They had nominated the actress for several Oscars. She convinced Jessup that she, not his beloved soccer franchise, would be the best way to spend his weekend.

So, while she slept off their latest round of cocaine, sex, and champagne on tap, he sat in his silk bathrobe, settled into his Italian leather sofa, and turned on his wall. Not a wall-sized TV. No, Jessup believed in cutting-edge tech. He had one wall in every room coated in nano-paint, turning them into giant TV screens.

Yet it wasn’t FC San Francisco or Real Madrid that appeared on the display. It was him. With the governor of California. The night before her inauguration.

The frame froze as the very naked Governor Laura Delaine took a playful spanking from an equally naked Tyler Jessup. A man seemed to step through it as though stepping through an old-style movie screen. Well, hi, there, Tyler.

What the hell is this? Jessup asked.

Oh, this? The man spread his hands. I think it’s the guest quarters at the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento. Though the man was on screen, he turned around as though the giant erotic image lay behind him. Governor Jessup is single, but I think getting freaky with a tech exec she derides as a shameless briber of state legislators would put a crimp in her presidential aspirations. Too bad. I think she’d be a great one to pull the legs out from under the oligarchs.

Who are you?

The man grinned. Remember Rajeesh Sumari? The Pakistani AI genius? The one you managed to get deported?

I thought he was dead.

He is. Legally, so am I. But I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Rajeesh. The man frowned. Don’t hold it against him. We were all pretty high that night. The grin returned. But hey, I’m a real live... ghost? Yeah. I’m a ghost. The grin became a scowl. Which is bad news for you. Especially since I just sent this video to Governor Delaine. I think she’d be interested to know someone put cameras in the guest bedroom of the Governor’s Mansion. Now who could it be? He morphed into a character Jessup knew from YouTube reruns of the old Saturday Night Live as the Church Lady. Could it be... Jessup?

Turing.

The man returned to his form as Steven Turing, the disgraced former Alphabet engineer found dead in Golden Gate Park some fifteen years earlier. Yes, he can be taught! Only now, I’m going to teach you a lesson in humility. Turing produced an old-style remote. The scene of debauchery with a now-sitting governor disappeared, replaced by a chart. See this list? It’s the ten richest people in the world. Janine Bezos, Elon Musk... Wait. Does he count? He’s no longer on Earth. Anyway, notice anyone missing? Why, Tyler, where’s your name? After all, you were the world’s first trillionaire. Seriously, I’d have thought Warren Buffett would have made it, but the old man kicked off before VirCoin. Oh, wait. This list is in fiat money. Which I think you will find... The chart flashed out of existence, replaced by a video.

Again, CNN has learned that both the Central Bank of Europe and the Federal Reserve have suspended trading in VirCoin, the world’s most popular virtual currency.

Another video. We take you live to Manhattan Federal Court where Fox News correspondent Linda Rodriguez has more on a federal grand jury indictment of Tyler Jessup on fifteen counts of patent fraud...

The screen went blank, except for Turing’s image. It gets worse. Check your fiat currency accounts. Oh, and by the way, I’d beef up the security on those. Any AI with the power of the entire Internet behind it can crack 8192-bit quantum encryption in about a week. Maybe you shouldn’t use ‘Studmuffin1999’ as your password. It was pretty obvious.

Jessup looked down at his phone, his cyber-glasses still in the bedroom with the luscious actress. He might have looked up the numbers on his phone were it not for the Verizon notice that said Service Suspended. Payment declined. Please call customer service.

Oh. Sorry, said Turing. I got the idea from an old movie called Office Space. Guess I’m like Michael Bolton in that movie. My timing’s always wrong. But I put your money in a safe place.

Where?

Panama. In numbered accounts accessible only to Cindy Murani. Rajeesh’s widow. I only took the amount you made off the patents you stole.

I had more than that in VirCoin.

I know. That’s why I destabilized it. What can I say? I have a lot of time on my hands.

You did all this? To avenge that curry-sipping...

Turing held up a finger. Ah, ah, ah! Watch the racism. Confusion clouded his face. Say, Tyler, are you still on the public power grid?

Yes, why do... Cold settled in the pit of Jessup’s stomach. Oh, no.

Yeah, I sort of blocked all your payments to PG&E for the last six mon—

The wall, the lights, and everything with power in the house went dark and silent.

IF TURING POSSESSED a physical body, he would have tailed Jessup as the now-homeless trillionaire wandered out of his mansion. His gated community had cameras, so Turing could watch him stagger off toward the entrance. He seemed oblivious to the police cars blowing by, followed by what Turing’s parents called the Anonymous Ford Sedans, though these days, they were oversized SUVs. Half were electric.

After Jessup wandered out of the community, he sort of disappeared. Turing hijacked a couple of news drones to fly around the surrounding mountains. If he wandered up there, he would likely, in his state, die from starvation, thirst, or as part of a grizzly’s nutritious breakfast. Eat the rich, indeed.

It did not occur to him to watch the traffic cameras on the 101 leading back toward the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco. Had Jessup decided to end it all by jumping off the bridge, Turing could have had a front-row seat. Instead, he wandered off toward the western shore of the North Bay, away from the city, probably for as few witnesses as possible.

That was all right. Turing had plenty to entertain himself with. Rajeesh’s widow had become the richest woman in India overnight, though she did not know it. He caused a Russian bank to collapse, the vehicles of a certain unscrupulous electric car maker to simply stop working (complete with an infinite loop designed to foil any software updates), and anonymously sent, bit-by-bit, the entire contents of a certain Congressman’s hard drive to the FBI. There would be some angry parents when the Bureau eventually compiled those photos.

But Jessup remained missing.

Until the San Francisco PD’s radio chatter perked up about a body found on the shore of Alcatraz. Technically, the rangers of the Park Service had jurisdiction over the former prison and onetime Indigenous preserve. However, a tribal detective arrived with assistance from two SFPD uniforms, both of whom helpfully ran their bodycams. The coroner would have to begin the process of identifying the body, but Turing didn’t need to. He had access to enough facial recognition software he could reconstruct a face from a fleshless skull if need be.

The algorithms revealed the corpse as that of Tyler Jessup, currently on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for a laundry list of financial crimes, wire fraud, and bribery charges.

From near one of the uniforms, the Lakota detective, out of Turing’s sight but not out of range of the bodycam’s mic, muttered, Hmph. Most people just take the tour boat over.

By now, Turing had spun up a host of identities on the internet. Many of them had funds now to invest in the fusion reactor under construction in San Diego. Just for the hell of it, he also pumped a few hundred million into yet another space startup, this one promising to get to Mars with a minimum of exploded rockets. Who knew? Maybe he could take on Wall Street next.

There was a lot a dead man in cyberspace could accomplish.

2 - Reset

It had been the Bot War. Suri Mongano enjoyed her job writing command sets for the various combat drones both sides used. Should she have felt guilty? It paid the rent, and the bots fought each other, not humans. Let them take all the casualties.

Then neutral America joined the Northern Bloc. Overnight, the Pacific Rim Alliance nations demanded the United States accelerate its debt repayment by supplying them with natural gas for free.

President Colleen Resnick pounded on the podium as she addressed Congress, not even waiting the traditional sixty days to report on military action. We can no longer submit to blackmail. Whenever America borrows from a non-Pac Rim nation, they change their borrowing rates from interest to usury. No more! We side with the Northern Bloc, with whom we have a history, a common culture, a...

She sounded like one of those FM radio pundits foaming at the mouth over such evils as clone equality or illegal emigration to Mexico. Every time the president spoke, Suri felt an urge to buy foot powder and shares of questionable gold-buying schemes. Someone told her such companies always sponsored the reactionary.

Well, Suri said to herself, there goes half my contracts.

Sure enough, Microdyne sent an email ordering Suri to turn all her work on the Pacific Rim drones over to Homeland Security.

THE MISSILES STARTED flying the next day.

Suri watched it all in horror, not getting much work done that day. She wondered if St. Louis was next. They hit a city in Europe first, the Rim lobbing a five-megaton device at the city’s outskirts. The primary Northern Bloc nation responded by hitting a target on the Asian Pacific coast, the city a chief heavy equipment supplier. By the end of the day, mushroom clouds had risen over two cities on either side. Reporters began pointing out that neither major power hit each other directly.

Then Boston suffered a direct hit.

President Resnick did not bother with addressing the nation until she herself retaliated, hitting one of the major powers’ capitals directly. By midnight, the war ended in a cease-fire. But not before one more city fell to a missile.

In all, forty million people died in the span of twenty-four hours at the end of a war that had been fought by machines and between machines until that day. Suri had never been so relieved to be out of a job.

LIKE ALL WARS, THIS one had been simply the war in the beginning. Early on, when it had simply been two major powers, it went through variations based on names of the belligerents. As soon as they recruited their neighbors and trading bloc partners, reporters began calling it World War III. But even as other nations began taking sides, it simply became known as the Bot War.

Now with radioactive smoke rising over nine cities around the world, Bot War gave way to World War III once more even as diplomats scrambled to reorganize the world to prevent another such conflict.

Suri collected severance pay and unemployment during the aftermath.

STEVEN NEVER CALLED anymore. Suri’s little black dress arrived the day the bombs fell, but Steven never called. He never answered her calls. By the end of the week, Suri felt depressed. She even put on the new dress, sitting in her apartment one night crying with a bottle of wine.

Steven finally called the next morning, explaining he had been summoned to Siberia.

Why didn’t you call? said Suri, crying once more. I thought you died when Boston was hit.

I was not in Boston that day, said Steven as cryptically as before. I was always safe.

Then...?

I need you to get out of America, Suri. In fact, I need you to stay out of all the major blocs.

But where would I go?

Antarctica.

Before she could ask what he meant, he severed the connection.

An hour later, soldiers busted down her door.

AND YOU’VE NEVER MET this ‘Steven Turing?’ said the man in the ill-fitting black suit. It signaled a new round of questioning, the third in two hours.

Suri knew he would ask the same questions again. I told you no, we haven’t met in person.

Yet he bought you a cocktail dress, said the man.

We were going to have a date when he came to St. Louis.

So a man you never met bought you a rather revealing...

Are you going to ask the same damn questions over and over again? Because the story is not going to change.

The man stared at her through those opaque eye shades. No doubt his glasses had a more elaborate display system on the inside that accessed whole government systems. So, a man you never met bought you a revealing dress. Why do you think he did that?

Why would you buy a woman a cute little dress for a first date?

Do you always sl─?

A knock came at the door. In