[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/fuza738.jpg[/img][/center]

Collab with [@Fiber]

Not a single corner of the room was free from wires and machinery. On the balcony a stream of drones dropped off identical shockproof boxes, all locked with biometric seals, stacking them high. Grace was a whirlwind of activity, connecting wires, unloading equipment, shoving furniture aside when needed, opening the boxes and cataloging their contents. The only light was the glow of a dozen monitors and hundreds of status lights. It was not as organized as she liked, but she was working with limited time and in a non-ideal space.  The wires crisscrossed the room like jungle vines, spreading across the king size bed, running along the floor and up high to the ceiling. She had decided to set up everything she thought she might need: enormous amounts of memory, Deep Learning Accelerators, ASICs, Quantum Processors, and more, so many things that could not yet be disclosed to the general public but would make any computer science student froth at the mouth with excitement. If she could get it installed here she wanted it installed here. 

One last hard part was connecting the liquid nitrogren coolant system, fogs seeped through the room as she locked the last hose into place. After taking a moment to check the connections and let the setup scripts run, she walked to the doorway of the room and shouted into the hall “It should be ready soon. Our dataset is 23.8 million people, that will cover all of Southern California, even those Second Inquisition agents outside of Los Angeles proper. Between what you have, what Rachel has, and what I have, there is high probability we have enough data to identify them.” Grace then turned back to her work as she waited for Maty, and wondered to herself what Gwen would think of what she had done to the place.

"Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatthefuck."

The tone wasn't enraged. It was a rather level toned exclaimation. It was more...pure horror mixed with exasperation. There, in the doorway, stood the five-foot-nothing girl that was latina before latina had a name. A mix of Spanish priests that abused and raped, stuck in a room and abused both physically and sexually and emotionally almost her entire life. And, yet, this was one of the more shocking moments of her life and unlife. Pretty brown eyes were WIDE, staring an absolute laserhole through the Federale's face. Breathing carefully, Yanci kept herself in some state of barely kept control.

"MATY!! THE FEDERALE RUINED THE PRICELESS HISTORICAL ROOM. FIX IT."

Yanci smiled at Grace after the sudden increase of volume directed down the hall, a radiant as any Hollywood socilate, "Yeah. I'm gonna go spend the night at our house on the island. Let me know if you guys need anything."

With a sudden spin on her heel, Yanci all but ran from the scene she had found in the master suite of the house registered with the National Registry of Historical Places. Not even a minute later the long haired young man was standing at the doorway, blinking. He looked to the left, to the right, and then he blinked all over again. "Well, okay. Where are we, uh...where are we starting?"

He might have continued, had the laughter not errupted from the tall blonde behind him, holding both hands over her mouth—which did absolutely nothing to stiffle the sound of the laugh. "Holy shit. This looks like a production set. Uh...need anything, Grace? Flux capacitor, maybe?"


When their dark eyes met and Yanci stared so intensely that Grace wondered if she was employing some power of vampiric blood, Grace tried to look apologetic but came across as confused. Grace’s own approach to interior aesthetics ranged from “utter chaos” (in her college days) to “soulless desolation” (now), so this wasn’t something she understood well. She said “Fair enough. You can bill me for any restorations.” as she questioned the value of historic preservation in her head. Hopefully the rest of the coterie didn’t share Yanci’s extreme reaction.

When Gwen and Maty came, she said “No need for flux capacitors, we stopped using those years ago. They were too unreliable for any serious chronomanipulation, and are now superfluous.” Grace said. She left it up to them to figure out if she was lying or not. Gwen was welcome to be here as long as she didn’t touch anything sensitive. 

Now she turned her attention to Maty. “I’m sorry that I didn’t leave much room for you to work Maty, but I didn’t know what you’d need. If you’re the candles, talismans and pentagrams type, there is a flat area over there. Be careful around the box labeled D-Wave, it needs to keep a very precise temperature. The section next to the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engines and Tensor Processing Unit prototypes would be a better place. As for the user interface, I wasn’t sure if you’d want a Neural link, a VR headset, or just a plain old screen, so I have one of each.” she said, gesturing to a suitcase lying open next to the door to the balcony. “The set up here should handle any workload we might come across, from cracking encryption to deploying machine learning models, and if we need more horsepower or storage I’ve got connections to the major cloud providers and to UCLA’s quantum computing center, though I can’t guarantee the latency will be good.”

“We’ll start by building on the profiles of the known Second Inquisition agents, from there we can build a model of their characteristics and their social networks. Then we use the data from everyone in Southern California and we’ll find every single one of their agents in the area, with which you can do what you will. This isn’t the easiest way but it is the quickest, much faster than waiting for official approvals, we should have results before morning. 

"Ooh-kay. Maty..."

"You'll be around?"

Gwen smiled, big, and just nodded a few times before she disappeared down the hall and down the stairs again. Maty himself entered into the room and stood near Grace, the only device out and activated was his smartphone, as he explained, "No need, I'll let the team listen in and do most of the legwork from their secret location."

Maty had been there before, and had his 'doorways' to the location that were more magical than practical, for security, but now wasn't the time to leave Catalina Island. The rest of them had made them abundantly clear. "You get all that, Masika?"

The feminine voice on the other end of the smartphone with the speaker call activated sounded off, [i]"Yeah, Maty, we get what she's doing. We can assist with the data-mining and the send over a few profiles we already have built for agents we know about it. Let us know if you want more. We have over twenty we've sent to Eva and Rachel over the last year."[/i]

It seemed Maty would be taking a supervisory role. That meant he trusted his team. If they ever had a normal time again perhaps Grace would look into them, see if they would want to collaborate in the future. "I'll open a session for them. They can send as many profiles as they have, information overload is not an issue here. Now, let's begin with the processing." Grace took off her jacket, and started to reach around her back, going under her shirt and feeling for the connections. Then, one by one she plugged cable after cable her spinal column, finishing with one at the base of her head. The shirt was wrinkling and shifting as moved but her mind was now deep in the uncountable bytes of data, her eyes saw no longer saw the world, only the computer's inner workings. "If you have trouble keeping up, tell me. I will make what adjustments I can without compromising performance."

The process started with the most basic biographical information, from birthplace to test scores, but expanded to encompass everything they could. Every text message and email they sent, every motion made with anything attached to a GPS, every word spoken in earshot of an internet connected device, every little blurry and half formed image stored in the cloud somewhere, minute by minute records of mundane internet activity, all of their purchases and media consumption. Most of it was useless, most of it would be discarded without any thought and lost into the ether, but any of them could contain a hidden gem and had to be fed in at the start.

It didn’t matter who the data belonged to, it was hers to read. Privacy was a concept that had outlived its usefulness, and she hoped the rest of the world would realize that. Some entities had already shared their data or given a government agency a backdoor, those were easiest. For everyone else, there was a wealth of unpatched vulnerabilities lurking (Grace was grateful for the digital draculas sharing a few), and if that failed the quantum hardware could run through any standard encryption after a short wait. She knew there were still people who would fall through the net, those who had committed to living a life completely disconnected from modern technology or those with technological talent bordering on superhuman, it irritated her but she knew that some flaws were unavoidable. She didn’t count the scale of the data, didn’t know how many bytes it was, she just monitored the resource usage and pulled in more and more hardware from the cloud whenever she ran into bottlenecks. 

This was hacking in the truest sense, not just breaking through security or operating a computer, it was doing the impossible within the limits of a system. It was all concepts that already existed, just ones that were a decade away from becoming refined enough for use by the sleepers, if Grace could reproduce this in public she’d have enough material for a dozen papers at top level Machine Learning and Computer Science conferences, but working in obscurity was one burdens of the Technocracy. It was all set up and working, but far too slowly, they didn’t have weeks to run it, huge portions of it would need to be ripped out and optimized to finish all twenty three million records tonight. 

To make the changes Grace needed to connect in a deeper way. The implants let her turn thoughts into code, but it was time to go deeper, to dive into the machine with her whole consciousness. The room inside the mansion disappeared from her sight and the world of the machine filled her vision. Inside the machine while it was just doing automatic differentiation what she saw was hills and valleys gradually emerging from the data, as the gradient descent algorithm worked its way from one solution to the next, always in search of the next minima. Then she looked at the neural network, the thousands of layers of little cells of multiplication all operating in sync, seeing their components update as backpropagation helped whittle down the error more and more, they pulsed and changed with each iteration. All of this would have to be replaced, the giant network gave way to an ensemble of networks, all combining and collaborating, and gradient descent replaced with the quantum weirdness of Grover’s Algorithm. 

Seeing those changes unfold, she turned to data itself. Out of the vast ocean of raw information, streams of data came together, collecting into storage locations and then flowing on into further processing. She traced their paths and their speed at which they flowed, reshaping pieces of the pipeline to squeeze out just a little more performance. Every piece of the vast ensemble needed its own data, and none of the information ever stopped flowing as she made her changes. Grace remembered the myth of Hercules diverting the Alpheios river as she worked, yet she was met with failure. Then she had an idea, instead of trying make a channel for the data, she would control it, every last bit, taking it all as part of her consciousness.

       Grace was even deeper inside the machine. It had more processing power than a human brain, 23 million records and no self, no I. The concept of identity was fluid to the enormous sorting machine she had made and that she now found herself part of, slowly fading into it. It would act and decide without knowing why, without ever exercising a choice, all the world was merely third person descriptions to it. She watched her own records flow by and didn’t even realize who they belonged to, just a feeling that she had lost something, a feeling that terrified her.

She cried out, trying to reach something, shouting for her avatar. He appeared like a blurry field in front of her; she wasn’t seeing like she normally did. He said something that she couldn’t understand. Then she said “I need you, I need you now. You’ve always been with me, you’ve always been here and you’ve always showed me the right way forward. Claude, help me.”
Then he spoke “Do you? I thought I was just some image you built up over all the years, that’s what you said. If I’m just the product of synapses misfiring, what good am I?”
Her next words were hard to say “I was wrong about that.”
“Not the first thing you’ve been wrong about, nor will it be the last. Why don’t you spend some more time examine being wrong, or are you too afraid of that?”
Before she could speak again he was gone and she was lost in the mind of the machine. She was becoming more and more like it, human concepts like speech and vision were becoming harder to process. In desperation, Grace reached into whatever memories she had left in her mind, and tried to combine it with the data she had, linking them, seeing what traces of a personality could emerge.

       Something she did pulled her out. Having regained enough consciousness to process visual information again, Grace looked around and saw herself back in the mansion. It wasn’t like she had left it, the room looked exactly as it had before her additions; she was laying on the bed and looking out the window, and when she tried to move she found her limbs wouldn’t respond. She was in some strange dreamscape, not the real world. As she tried to do something, anything, a hand reached down from behind her and slowly crept up to her mouth. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a pool of red in the palm of it, and then without her will Grace found herself drinking from it. The blood had the taste of iron but an electric warmth that filled her as it went down her throat. Then the hand reached up and ran fingers through her hair, slowly and gently stroking it over and over again. The light shifted and she the room reflected in the mirror. Now she could who was behind her, the unmistakable face of Eva, the one who had left an indelible mark on California and on Grace’s own psyche. That face wasn’t what shocked her the most, Grace could now see her own face and the perpetual, blissful smile across it.

       There was no way to keep track of time in this dream, not by watching what was happening outside the window. All Grace could do was lay there in Eva’s unchanging embrace and stare at the endless night outside. Inside the room nothing ever changed, they lay there, always wearing the same expressions, but outside she could see the landscape changing. The lights of Los Angeles went out and never came back, the San Andreas fault opened wide enough to let the Pacific Ocean flood in, the mountains eroded away and the star in the sky grew darker, all of this happened without any reference to time, all of this happened while they laid there, unchanging and unmoving.

As she tried to scream with a mouth that refused to obey her and look away with eyes that never moved, Grace saw something stirring in the reflection, then it became sharper. As hand appeared reaching towards her, then it burst forth from the glass, still grasping for her. She tried with all of her will to move and found her own hand obeying her, reaching out and linking with, holding tight as it pulled her into the night.

Now she was in a black void, dark in every direction, completely empty except for one item in front of her: a chess board. The first move for white had already been made, and she was standing at the black side. Once she established that she could move again, Grace took a chess piece and made her move. Then an unseen force took a white piece and made a move in response. They played a game, which she drew. The next time she looked away it had been reset, and so she played again and again, using the black pieces, scoring many draws, until one game where she miscalculated and lost.

 Then a voice said “Huh, I finally beat you. Guess first move advantage really does count for something.” Grace didn’t reply, too shocked to answer. It wasn’t the words that surprised her, it was that the voice that said it was her own. “What do you mean?”
 “I’ve spent 20 years alone, all but erased. I was like, totally sure I had lost but you know, I had a vibe that something good might come to me.. It seemed like you held all the cards, you had some wicked harsh conditioning and pysch-tech, but I guess I did have something, being the original you and all. You just had to get wacked out enough that your whole brain bluescreened and when you were power cycling I could bypass all of those lame firewall you put up.”
Then she saw herself appear from the shadows, looking exactly like she had twenty years prior, down to the carefree expression and the colorful and chaotic clothing, like someone had stolen their outfit from a crowd of ravers.

Grace said to her “You aren’t me, not anymore. I haven’t been you ever since I stopped going by Margaret. I’m nothing like you, even just describing the two of us is enough to see that you can’t call us the same.”

“Really? You’re gonna hit me with that weak, Frege-Russel Descriptivism shit? Did your dumbass forget Kripke, causal theory of names, any of that ring a bell? It’s simple, a name for entity is valid as long as you can trace it back to when it was assigned. Possibilities, properties don’t matter, we can talk all we want about what if Aristotle never became a philosopher, never did anything to make him famous, but that doesn’t make him not Aristotle, the only way he wouldn’t be is if his parents had named him something else. Face it, you are still Margaret, you are still me. I know you’re judging me for all of the substances I used to take, but clearly the stuff the Technocracy has got you on isn’t doing much good.” There was a mocking tone in her words, a playfulness that couldn’t hide all of the vitriol
“This has been enlightening. At least I know I made the right decision years ago. I do not anticipating interacting with you again, and I will not be making any further psychological changes. I hope you enjoy the rest of your isolated existence.”  
“As if. I’m long past due for a turn behind the wheel. Soon as the bootloader finishes it’ll be my chance”

Grace and Margaret each reached out to strike the other, and found a great flash of light engulfed them, and they came crashing back into a strange reality.
       Grace’s body shifted again, the wires twisting and turning as she got up off the floor. She had been limp and babbling the whole time, the screens had filled up with the information of Second Inquisition agents, the processes had completed, but she had suffered some kind of psychic episode during it. Her shirt was torn open, buttons were missing, and her hair wild and unkempt. She rose to her feet slowly, hunched over and with eyes that shifted but never sat and focused on anything. There was one phrase she repeated over and over again, like a manic mantra “All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.”

"What?"

[i]"What? What's going on Maty?"[/i]

Maty stared, the pit of his stomach becoming an endless void of twisted possibilities as he stared at Grace. Or, at least, what HAD been Grace just minutes ago. He didn't know what to say to them, but the undeniable fear of containment immediately prompted an urgent act: "Yeah, I'll call you guys back." The phone was shut off, and then powered off as she stared at the form of the woman in front of him. He had protected them against magical threats. He had protected them against commandos and Kindred.

But ghosts in a machine?

"You look like you've seen a ghost."

When Maty's head turned, it was slower than it ought to have been, given the voice he thought he heard. What he saw when his head did turn, and look, just made him stare. "...is it you? I mean, are you really here?"

Eva smiled in gentle amusement, leaned into the doorframe, arms crossed over her chest. Bright brown eyes motioned to the woman hunched over, wired-up. "I came as soon as I felt it happen." 

Her arms uncrossed and her body straightened in the doorframe; shining, impossibly straight dark hair tied up in a messy tail with little more than what appeared to be rubber-bands. The top of her body was covered in the high-tech and shiny fabric of a work-out teeshirt, black with Void Engineer and NASA logos, the very top of her hips and bottom of her stomach visible before loose fitting blue Navy camo utility pants held in place with a canvas belt pulled tight, her feet adorned in borrowed dark blue, white striped, Reebok classics. 

"They broke her down, de-compiled her into various stacks of materials and energy, before rebuilding her in an image and visage they were happier with. It's a traumatic thing, being re-calibrated and used. So long as you never find a mirror, it never really bothers you. But should you find yourself staring in a mirror, what you find staring back at you...it's hard enough to face hard truths when you know who you are. Now imagine you only thought you knew who you were, and try it."

Maty looked between the two, his right hand scratching at the back of his head of long black hair. "Is it what we just did?"

"Yeah, at least, in part. In her desperation, she crossed lines of the machine she shouldn't have crossed. In her desperation, she threw open doors she didn't recall ever closing." The tall woman bent at the knees, bringing her head closer to the face of the hunched over woman. "Hello. Who am I talking to right now?"


Grace or whoever was in her body shook a little more as she stood up, but stopped babbling. Her eyes looked at Eva, noting that she put a lot of care into her appearance even when she had to make do with exercise clothes. Grace thought for a second about straightening up herself, but then decided there was no need for that. She spoke, having an uncertain but breezy tone in her voice. “Ummm, well, I just kind of had an argument with myself about that, identity, causal vs descriptivism theory of proper names, all that good shit. Let’s just go with Margaret for now. I’m who Grace used to be, and really, should’ve just been the whole time, she’s so lame. You’re, you’re Eva right? Other me didn’t really like you, but other me didn’t really like people much, anyway. I like them, they’re the fun kind of unpredictable, not too random like electrical noise, but more chaotic than crystal growth. I heard you like art. Hey, what’s your opinion on goa trance?

Eva looked at Maty, before blinking back to Margaret, keeping her silence for another few beats before allowing a quiet, tonally measured, response, "Great if you're dropping acid, I think. Maty?"

He was busy transferring data, his back now turned to both as he typed furiously, "Yeah, yeah I think we got it all. What do you want to do with it?"

At the posing of the question, Eva came to life with a bright, easy, smile. "Oh, I think we can find uses for it. Some good, some bad, bit of both...say, Margaret? You're aware of everything Grace was aware of, yes? World ending, all of that fun goss?"


Margaret smiled a little when she heard Eva mention acid. She might be over three hundred but it sounds like she still knows how to have fun. Maybe she could show how it’s even better when you’re stuff harder than acid. Then her face turned into a frown at mention of the apocalypse.

“Oh yeah, ummm that, uhh. Like, it’s Gehenna, I get it, I respect it. But at the same time like yeah, people are gonna die which is terrible, but like inevitable? I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this right now.” She said as she edged closer to the bedroom’s balcony. 

Eva's smile never so much as twitched away from her lips. "Use the stairs, dear. We already have to spend enough money cleaning up after the mess Grace made to this historical room. Gwendalyn has a car with the keys in the visor; take it to the harbor and wait six hours for the first ferry. But do try not to scratch anything else in this house."


“Wait for the ferry? As if. I’ve been waiting too long to get a chance to do this again. Don’t worry, I won’t even make a scratch on the way down."

She blurred her perception, messed with settings on the nanobots in her bloodstream and muscle fibers, then lept with a picture perfect backflip clean over the railing. As she fell she stared back at them and slowly her whole body flickered before beginning to fade into the night. The last piece to vanish was her face, dissolving away as she waved her hand in one last “talk the hand” gesture. When her perception of time and space focused again she was far away, staring at Catalina Island from the shore for a moment before turning back towards the city lights, off to get ready for some long delayed fun.