Server Extant

Number five: We need to build a wall around this fucking country you can see from space.’'

-Grandma Nettle’s Seven-Point Plan For Saving Mexico

In the heart of the Block, PRod stood before the All-Committee council, gazed upon sternly, from their vantage places, by the Fat Controller, the War and Peace factions and One Party Pat.

PRod was standing in a beam of light, at the center of the great, rising spiral of concentric pews, with their dim recesses and half-glimpsed occupants. He felt like a 70’s sci-fi villain, about to be exiled to the Forbidden Zone. It was cool.

‘Go after her, Rod,’ the Fat Controller said. ’You’re our wingman on this, ‘bro’.’

‘You’re one of us!’ said Bing Giant.

‘I am?’ Asked PRod

‘You could be,’ replied the FC. ‘I’m sure a provisional non-binding voting position on the General Agenda and Steering Committee could be created for you.’

‘No way!’ Said PRod, ‘the G.A.S.C?’

‘Could be.’

‘I would fuck your sister for one of those!’

‘I don’t have a sister, and I don’t appreciate the personal tone’ said the FC.

‘I’m sorry,’ said PRod, ‘I was trying to express my enthusiasm for joining the political elite. I’ve always lusted for power.’

’I accept your apology, ’replied the FC, ‘but I would suggest, rather, that the value of our position is in improving equality and inclusion for all members of our society, regardless of race, creed or gender identity disorder.’

‘Yes, that’s what I think too’ said PRod.

‘Morghain has a friendship with you’ continued the FC.

‘She does?’

‘She speaks highly of you. Or I assume she does, because her emotions, I have been informed, are positive in respect to yourself.’

‘Er..?’ said PRod.

‘So we want you to capitalize on that, to get close to her, in order to asses her position, vis-à-vis the clans and their likely next move. On the council’s behalf.’

‘Spy?’

‘I suppose you might use that word.’

’Sexy spy?’

‘I don’t know’ replied the Fat Controller, uncomfortably. ‘I suppose we could order an emergency session, to determine your official nomenclature.’

‘Because I’d fuck-’

‘This is what we want you to find out’ interrupted Kys-1’s premier politician. ‘First; are there any plans for the clan leaders to take over the government, and two- what was two?’

‘Two: whether they have any further intentions to raid P-Fed territories’ supplied Bling.

‘Ah yes,’ said the Fat Controller, checking his notes, ‘so we can notify P-Fed, as is the condition of any potential treaty.’

‘We don’t have a treaty’ said D00mcaster, giving the Fat Controller a look.

‘Speaking hypothetically.’

’Have you been talking to P-Fed?’asked PRod.

‘No!’ said D00mcaster.

‘For God’s sake, Rod’ said Bling, ‘All we’re asking is that you keep an eye on that crazy bitch and see what the clans are going to do. We could lose this server.’

‘But if you warn the P-Fed that our people are coming, won’t they be massacred?’ wondered PRod.

‘That is an unfortunate circumstance, for which they bear sole responsibility’ replied The Fat Controller. ‘Vote on designating Pulsating Rodney as an official Agent Of the Council and sending him to spy on Morghain?’

‘AYE’, said the council. ’Aye!’ called One Party Pat, from the back.

‘Alright, I’ll do it,’ said PRod. ‘And may I say, how humbled I am, by the responsibility this body places upon me and the confidence that-’

‘Just go, Rodney,’ said The Fat Controller. ‘We’re about to discuss serious matters, in closed council.’

‘Like the treaty?’

‘There is no treaty and it’s none of your concern!’ shouted the Fat Controller.

‘Just go, Rodney!’ said Bling.

PRod went.

* * *

MESTO was standing in the upper chamber of his house and laborium somewhere in the maze of the outer strip, where it swelled, like the phallic bulb of a great lighthouse, to a network of geometric windows that interlaced with dome-like stupas. This district was a notorious haunt of artists, creators, perverts and rebels, and people like MESTO, who was all four of those things.

His Id was in the form of an thin, sexless, humanoid figure, with pale blue skin and realistic, immaculately-rigged musculature. He had no face. In instead of a head, he had a single, head-sized ear on a stalk-like neck. In the center of each of his palms was a mouth, that spoke with two, slightly intermediated male and female voices. Eerily, the synced voices sometimes chose divergent words or phrasing, indicating that MESTO was controlling them via some sort of contextual device, that understood slightly divergent interpretations of his meaning, rather than speaking with his own voice. The effects was of a mind very slightly at war with itself.

If anyone in Kys-1 could lay claim to codifying the style of the Kysairon anima, it was MESTO. Though he was often accused of being a Geiger rip-off, that was unfair. His style was more eclectic, technological and elegant. His vision had shaped the early kultura of the server, and it was his desire to see in all things a canvass for the grand and surreal, that had, more than anything else, first attracted Kys-1’s anarchic community to itself.

MESTO laborium was a great chamber, diverged into a network of window gaps as it ascended to its domed peak. It was dominated by a vast, autonomous A.I structure, a great, coiling tree. From its branches hung what seemed like white fruits, until they fluttered their wings and shifted, and revealed themselves to be birds, living seed pods that grew from the tips of the branches. All was bathed from below, by a pearl-pale light.

Through the windows, Morghain could see far over the canyon-tops of the strip. It lay like a coiling animal, a cryptology of unknown possibilities, a city of the mind, a thing that didn’t exist, but also did. Like the color red, she thought.

The Knet was never exactly what you wanted it to be, it persisted in being itself. It was generated by Ksource, a system that was, at its heart, nothing more than a series of brilliant algorithms that simulated, with an elegance above that of the merely procedural, the fundamental conflict inherent in life itself. That was the deep math. On the surface, it felt like a frontier, one of vast creativity but no more merciful of weakness than nature. There was no one to complain to if you got rolled on Knet. Server companies ran Ksource and collected user fees, but they had no idea what was going on inside. Only the initiated, the citizen of the invisible world, knew. The gamers waged war, the kultura built gardens, one merging into the other. The fighters hacked empires out of the wilderness, beat their swords into plowshares and became builders. In turn, they lost their capitols, to new barbarians.

People thought this dynamic was simply an expression of human psychology but it wasn’t. Morghain knew it was the way the deep math worked, the way Knet built incentives into the human brains that immersed themselves in it, effectively, now that she thought about it, modding them. That was the heart of its addictive quality, that was what kept people coming back, from the contrived and managed worlds of the game companies, here, to the space between knowing and dreaming, which lay beneath the human compromise between the world, as they understood it, and what they wished to be, the same sea that gave birth to all religion and art.

Morghain loved Knet.

She was sitting on something that coiled about her weight like a luminous jellyfish, its blunt and languorous tentacles stroking her body. She had swapped skin to her newly updated nude mod. It was the first time anyone but she and ChokingHazard, (who’d rigged and skinned it), had seen it. Occasionally, talking or thinking, she would get up, and stalk about a little, before returning, uneasy, to her lascivious seat. As she did, MESTO found himself appropriately impressed with his colleague’s artistry. Any sexually frustrated teenager could model an Id to look like some chick with big jugs, but the perfect underskin musculature of Morghain’s anatomy, the deformation, physical weight and heft, the subtleties, like the slight wrinkle of skin at the bend of joints and the tracery of fine blue veins under the luminously pale flesh, was something for him to appreciate in the only way he could, as an ascetic. One detail he wasn’t so keen on, for all his personal perversity, was that she had replaced the vaginal orifice between her legs with a vertical human mouth, full-lipped and sensuous, which sometimes smiled secretively, or grimaced, as if conducting some conversation of its own.

‘It’s beautiful’, said Morghain, of the great tree, whose sinuous branches coiled above them. ‘Totally autonomous and self replicating?’

‘Not just self replicating,’ said MESTO, ‘self-editing. All its parameters are flexibly redefined in each seed bird. A sort of auto-sexual reproduction, creating endless variants. As it colonizes new areas, the more fit variants will tend to survive and flourish in the environments that most suit them. If the ability to evolve is the only real criteria for life, you could say it’s alive.’

‘So, in other words, another pain-in-the-ass AI, set to spread everywhere, like drug-resistant syphilis.’

‘It’s not a pest. It’s a thing of value in its own right. If you look at its branches, you can actually see the algorithm that constitutes its core mathematics, expressed in the curvatures.’

‘Great,’ said Morghain, gloomily. The mouth between her smooth, muscular thighs smiled, showing its small, well-formed teeth, as if reviewing some pleasant memory. MESTO looked away.

‘Are you worried at all about this Motor bullshit?’ Morghain asked him.

‘Kys has been around for a long time. No one’s ever conquered us.’

‘There’s never been a hegemon as large as P-Fed. The council seemed pretty spooked.’

‘Well, if it helps, I’ve often looked at myself in a mirror and thought, ’you’re nothing special’ replied MESTO. ‘It’s a liberating thought. We suffer from a sense of our own uniqueness. Happy people understand that and unhappy people don’t, because their delusions of centrality make them unsatisfied with their lot.’

‘Then you should take a break from your Ormist bullshitizing to be grateful for unhappy people,’ said Morghain, ‘because it sounds to me like they’re the ones who get off their asses and invent electricity.’

‘My point is that there’s no point, so make something beautiful and you’ll feel better.’

‘You want to Ctl-f?’ asked Morghain, referring to the most common and versatile sex controller, with featured external POVs so the operators could linger over their bodies, like disembodied spirits, as their digital flesh writhed in pornographic exertion. ‘I just finished modding this.’ She indicated the mouth between her legs. ‘It can do allot of freaky shit.’

‘Er-’ said MESTO.

There was a chiming from downstairs. A little circular window opened up, shimmering in the air next to the artist. It showed the Id of Pulsating Rodney, fish-eye distorted, at the door. ‘Is that PRod?’

‘What’s he want?’ asked Morghain.

‘What you want?’ asked MESTO, gesturing to open an audio channel.

‘Is Morghain up there? I need to see her, real quick.’

MESTO looked across to Morghain. She shrugged.

* * *

‘Wow’ said PRod, feeling absurdly shocked, as the door smoothed open, like the slab of a vault.

‘What do you mean?’

PRod indicated at the sleek flesh of her body.

‘Oh. I forgot. You like it?’

‘Yes I do.’

’Well, you’re not supposed to be looking at it. MESTO eyes only.’

‘MESTO? What are you, a mod-groupie now?’

‘No, because he’s not a modder, he’s a visionary and genius. What do you want, PRod?’

‘I thought you’d like to hang out.’

‘Sure, when I’m less naked, I guess.’

‘You’ll love what the council told me to do. They said I should worm my way into your good graces and spy on you. I get a committee seat if I report back on all your subversive actions. Do you know how hilarious that would be, if I could formulate motions?’

Morghain couldn’t help smiling at the thought. ‘They’d vote you off in a day.’

‘But what a day!’

’That’s great buddy. Well, you tell ‘em I’m banging in my hot new porno bod. Ok, gotta go-’

‘No wait! Listen. They also said that they had been talking to P-Fed and that they were working out a treaty.’

‘What?’

‘And they said the terms of that treaty were that they had to warn the P-Fed of any attacks from Kysairon territory into theirs. They didn’t state it specifically, but they let it slip.’

‘Jesus Christ, that would be the end of them! The clans will seal them up in the Block and kill all their supporters out here, including me, probably. Unless enough people side with the Block. Then we’ll have a shmeltdown.’

Shmeltdown was the Knet slang for a server-ravaging civil war. It derived from Shmelt Shlomofineburg, one of the leaders of =(((K-Tap Superjewocracy)))=, an early clan that had ravaged Builder Server when it had split into multiple factions, for reasons to do with Shmelt’s personal life that were too complicated and reprehensible to go into.

‘I brought this information to you at considerable personal risk.’

‘Thanks PRod. Alright I got to go-’

‘Wait! That build has berserk dynamics to it.’

‘Yeah, Choking Hazard did the skinning.’

‘Smack your titties like a Louisiana stripper. Just once. You owe me!’

‘It’s just pixels, Rodney,’ said Morghain, ‘stop being weird.’ She closed the door.

‘Just jump up and down a couple of times!’ PRod said, to the blank surface. He stepped back, into the street. ‘May Orm bless you!’ he shouted, to the upper floor. ‘He’s got a plan for you, Morghain! It doesn’t necessarily involve me in a romantic way, but it could! I hope that doesn’t sound creepy, it’s how I was raised! Okay, I’m going now.’

He looked around the empty street, then walked off, thoughtful.

* * *

Above, Morghain was striding about in fury, as MESTO watched from under his beautiful, bird-fruiting tree.

‘I knew it!’ ranted Morghain, ’And you can’t say this is a response to Epsilon, they must have had this in the works for a while. I knew it! They’re going to open up the door to Motor. You can’t appease an aggressor. Have they learned nothing from history?’

‘You mean World War two?’ Asked MESTO.

’World war what? No, I mean the base-swap between N.U.M.I.N.D.O.R and Felix Association.

‘Ah.’

‘Well, we’re way past stopping them small, at this point! We’re in the can-we-survive-the-storm-phase now. But I tell you this, if they put that treaty through, we have no chance. No chance!’ she stopped. ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I have to overthrow the government.’

‘That would be dramatic.’

‘You know nihilism is just a form of cowardice, don’t you MESTO?’

‘I’m just not..’

‘What?’

’Not as ‘passionate’ as you. Let’s put it like that.’

‘You fucker.’

‘Stay here tonight, Morghain’ sighed MESTO, ‘don’t take this to the clans. Or, if you do, just think about it first, give yourself a chance to calm down. Let the thunder roll over. There may be a way to stop whatever the council morons are planning. And you know all the clans really want to do is wreck stuff and kill people. Don’t give them that excuse. Remember, ninety percent of where they’ll jump depends on Carnivous and whatever meds the team of psychiatrists that, I assume, manage him in his controlled living facility are proscribing.’

‘No one’s managing Carnivous. He’s like your tree there, an organism that’s adapted to chaos.’

‘Maybe Kyle can help.’

Morghain stopped her pacing. ‘Ky-l-l-le..’ she said, thoughtfully. She gestured and in her hand was a blue, jewel-like piece of geometry, an icon, a mod that linked to a R1 mobile account.

She selected from a little column of contacts that slipped around its sides and activated one.

‘Fuck! He’s a no-reply’ she said, after a pause.

‘He’s not taking his position seriously’ said MESTO. ‘He’s supposed to be on the shortlist for kingpin rank. What’s he doing these days?’

‘Jerking off probably,’ said Morghain. ‘Getting in some quality jerking time.’ Although it now occurred to her that she hadn’t see Kyle for a while.

‘What’s Carnivous’ connection with him?’ asked MESTO.

‘I don’t know’ lied Morghain. ‘Just old buddies, I guess.’