Rupture Read Online Free

someone turned to stone. He was deep in the basement in the low-lit, air-conditioned Computer System’s room. He practically owned the place, although the admins refused to let him call the space he’d carved out for himself an office. He sat with his chair in a corner, a semicircle of high-end video panels forming a protective barrier around him. His computing machines lined the floor and desk, with his peripherals hung up like trophies.
    If Chip hadn’t come when he did ...
    Joss’s hands shook as he tried to focus. His heartbeat felt like a sharp-toothed alien that wanted out of his chest. “Thanks, Chip ... it had me .” The sweat came next, the shakes, an urge to vomit.
    “You look bad,” Chip said.
    Joss had been scanning the school, as he often did when he needed a break from interfacing. He had access to all the sensors and cameras. Today had been entertaining. He’d watched Russell Wooten, the prick, fart on tiny Wally Dorsey. Joss filed that one away and planned to get Russell back somehow. He’d also watched Wally launch his personal mech into the air and, for a moment, look like he might land properly; later, he saw the arrival of the two most interesting new students, the gladiator prodigy Hutto Toth and l’enfant terrible Simone Wellborn and wondered who’d win that battle. He thought he might run some surveys on them both and set up a page to track their inevitable contest, maybe lay some odds. He did all this before his low-level AI probes triggered.
    A Major-Plus Super Artificial Intelligence had begun pinging the Sterling system. God, he’d thought, those invisible asshats get the best social designation titles.
    Without thinking, he’d harnessed up, let the world go dark, and dove into the data centers that comprised Cyberspace. His rendering engine placed him on a platform over a massive abyss. Like Wally controlling his mech through his psychic interface, Joss was a licensed Interfacer.
    His unique mind generated ten personalized stories of files, tables, tiles, windows, and a number of other creative ways to manage the portals. For Sterling’s system he’d built a huge 3D Terminator skull, the metallic kind with the red eyes (he’d thought it was hilarious when the faculty made such a big stink). When he launched himself forward, flying through the mouth, he felt all the school’s systems purr around him. And there it was: a black box rotating right in the middle of the systems’ access path, tendrils reaching out and breaking every barrier.
    “What the hell?” he’d asked, both in his chair and in his mind.
    The box ignored him, continuing its work.
    Script thief!
    He knew it was there to steal, taking what it wanted, then leaving like it owned the place.
    He had spent enough time around a variety of AIs to know a super intelligence when he saw one. This was no standard retrieval bot. For just a moment, he saw the thing give itself away, as the big ones always did. He’d never been so close, but he saw a face emerge with the distorted features of a cybernetic god.
    He had always wanted to be close when they did this. But anytime a Super AI went public in Cyberspace, the virtual arenas crowded with hotjacker spectators and security, and he had to wait with the other visitors to catch a glimpse. He had hoped to see one the last time he’d gone to a public revelation, waited forty-eight hours at his workstation, only getting up to use the bathroom. When the SAI showed itself, he was in an arena with 2.1 million hotjackers hooked up to VR harnesses at workstations around the world, and waiting for the big pay off. The SAI swooped in over the rendered arena in the form of a fiery ball. As the crowd roared, it showed itself for exactly eight seconds, saying only, “Behold, I am more.”
    He later learned it was the current celebrity SAI, Fight Lord Zain, who was so popular in the glad game these days.
    Then Zain had disappeared.
    What a pisshead!
    Joss was so angry he swore the SAIs