Linguistics

She woke up to sound of her name. “Lucy,” a man was saying. “Hey, Lucy. Colonel.” A hand was on her arm, gently shaking.

Colonel? she thought. Even when she opened her eyes, to a bright hallway and a concerned young man in uniform looking down at her, she still had that feeling of waking from a dream but still in a dream. Thoughts were limited, awareness strangely narrow. She was propped on a green plastic bench in a row of green plastic benches.

“Why are we moving?” she asked and then understood it wasn’t a hallway but a subway car. She brought a hand to her face and the soldier let go her arm.

“Colonel?” he said. “You okay?”

He’s talking to me, she thought. “Am I awake?” she asked. Daniels, she knew. His name is Daniels. Private Daniels? She said the “Private?” aloud, as a question.

“Ma’am?” the soldier said. “You, uh, blacked out there or something.”

Her feelings told her she knew him, but memories offered her nothing. She felt she could trust him, but not how or why. She looked at her arm and realized she wore a similar uniform to Daniels. I’m a soldier? A colonel?

The subway car rocked and slowed as it clacked around a corner. They weren’t going very fast, too slow for public transport. There was nobody else inside, nor, as far as she could see through the connecting doors, in any of the other cars. Outside was blue sky and palm trees, a small city just ahead. Miami? They were moving on a rail some twenty feet above the street. Below, traffic moved ordinarily.

“Where is everyone?” she asked. Then, “Am I still asleep?”

“You’re awake, Ma’am.” Daniels said. “Uhm, you emptied the train.”

She sat up and had to close her eyes for the dizziness that overtook her. She rubbed her face with both hands. “Jesus, I’m swimming here. Can’t, can’t…think. What’s happening?”

“Happening, ma’am? We appear to be a little stuck on this train.”

“Explain,” she said, feeling a side of her personality that was used to giving orders. She needed more clues. Between the subway’s benches and against the car’s wall was propped an Army issued XM5 rifle, which she somehow knew was his and not hers. In fact, at her hip was a holstered P320. Information attached to emotions, in this case, threat. She knew, for instance, that the gun was loaded. Knew how to use it. A laptop sat open on the floor; to it was a sense of ownership. Purpose? She couldn’t tell. Important. Foreign. Deadly.

“Soldier,” she said. “I’m having trouble processing here. Something has happened. My memory is…fractured.”

“Ma’am? Colonel?”

“Daniels,” she said. “Private Daniels. I need you to explain to me what’s going on. Where are we. What are we engaged in. What has occurred.” She looked around, then picked the laptop up off the subway’s dirty floor, compelled by the feeling that it didn’t belong there. Emotion was pushing her forward but she had absolutely no idea what she was doing, what the job actually was. The machine was on, its screen dense with code, but like everything else at the moment, it felt paused in the middle, meaningful without content, without knowing what came before.

“Ma’am, we, you, have been tracking a worm here in Miami.” She examined Private Daniels as he spoke, filled with that sense of knowing a person from somewhere still buried in memory, specific details just around a corner she couldn’t reach. He was in his early twenties, dark hair, two days late on a shave. Something about his manner said Montana. “You thought it was in this subway, one of these cars, so we cleared the train at the last stop. Then the train started up again but isn’t responding. We’re not stopping at stations.” As if on cue the car slid past a platform upon which police were herding civilians towards the exits, but nobody seemed terribly afraid.

A ‘worm’? Christ, it was like having something stuck to your back that you couldn’t reach. A worm, yes, she knew a worm was something familiar, but had no idea what it was. Worm. She didn’t like that name, didn’t think it fit - again, some feeling attached to a specific she couldn’t place.

“Worm?” she asked. “Do I call it something else?”

“Yes ma’am, you’ve been calling it a lot of things. Trying to explain it to me. Called it Word. Meme. Virus. Uhm, Knife. Snake. You seem to like Snake.”

“I see,” she said, though she didn’t. “This worm, how dangerous?”

“Colonel?” the private asked. “That’s, err, your field. Until this train took off on its own, I wasn’t sure it even existed.”

“Right,” she said. “Right. I need a minute. Need to clear my head. I don’t remember blacking out, what came before that, some kind of amnesia.” She didn’t remember a damn thing, but the situation felt precarious. She had an instinct to protect her authority, and a sense that her lack of memory was a weakness to be hidden.

“You were on the laptop, chasing subway code, you said, chasing the snake, or the worm. Like it was in the subway’s programming, but here, in one of the cars. You said it had locality.”

“Locality?” She was still on the bench, the laptop beside her on the seat. She tilted the screen to face it and her hands went to the keyboard almost on their own, intimately familiar. Code. Machine mind. In her own thinking a door seemed to open, or a light came on, and she walked into reading the dense scroll of text as if it was native tongue. Which, she realized, was likely close to true. Something had darkened parts of her thinking, not erased them. She felt relief, gratitude, and another light came on: the understanding that her emotions were unimpeded even if specific details were closed off.

It was mostly system commands for the train’s operation, door and temperature and circulation controls, densely packed facial and body recognition algorithms, the now-common, sub-localized programs driving the cameras and sensors of each subway car. Data collators that streamed out to the central units elsewhere.

But something was off. She scrolled back up, retracing whatever journey through the program that had quite possibly brought her to this strange point. Scattered throughout were strange bits of code and formula, like footnotes within the program, small odd redirections that seemed to have no purpose.

‘Err,” Private Daniels said cautiously, “you were doing that just before you fell over.” As he spoke, the train accelerated forward enough that Daniels had to grab the car’s center pole. Lucy was pushed back against the chair sideways. They both carried radios, which she realized when both squawked. “Huh,” Daniels muttered. “Those went silent. Cell too. You said you had to cut it off. Like it might escape.”

“It? Who else is a part of this?” she asked, imagining teams out there, perhaps working laptops.

“Nobody,” Ma’am. “Just us. You, ah, you’re not really believed or something. General Hafauser kind of let you go. Said why not?” The train shot past another station, just a few would-be passengers on the platform watching them go by. Daniels seemed to consider his words and said, “She said you were the best at this she’d ever seen, like scary good. I guess they’re paying attention now?”

The station sign had said ‘Vizcaya.’ Above the doors linking the cars was a screen for announcements, one of those outdated pixely scrolls, but it was blank. She looked at the map above a window. Coconut Grove was next if they were heading south. “There were police at the last station, so something is up. None here, though. Are we accelerating still?”

“I don’t think so. Are we in danger, ma’am.?”

“I wish I knew. You said General Hafauser?” Saying the name seemed to collapse a wall and a memory shifted out of the haze of her thoughts. She was in a hotel room with Private Daniels, talking to him as she spun and clicked her way through her laptop, pursuing an elusive packet of information that felt, improbably, like it was also moving. Two days ago. Here in Miami. “Our machines write their own programs,” she told the private. “Facial recognition programs, for example, take in data, compile it, compare it, make changes to their own algorithms. Then we give that command purpose, have it seek out patterns we can’t see.” She was following evidence of an inscrutable order, something that felt like it was quietly pushing events. “And they are all connected now, all these programs, wirelessly linked. And something is acting on its own.”

Behind this memory, like a series of greased bearings, were hard nuggets of detail. Serving under the General in Cybercommand. Nights in a bunker in Nevada writing code, both of them still Lieutenants. Daniels asking, “So why do you think it’s in Miami?”’ Her reply, “First, ‘it’ might be a ‘he’. Second, I’m not sure about Miami.” Catching the first glimpse of whatever she was chasing in disconnected small headlines as she scrolled her feed: a mis-timed elevator door opening, plunging not JuanCarlos the bellboy down the shaft but his baggage cart. A fryer in a McDonald’s catching fire, severely burning a teenager called Victoria. A self-driving Tesla propelling itself into the ocean near LA with the driver, Louis Gantry, still inside.

General Hafauser saying, “You think it’s, what, alive?”

Lucy’s reply, “No, not exactly,” but no idea how.

General Hafauser assigning this kid as an assistant, to Lucy’s distinct annoyance.

She supposed she should be a bit grateful he was here now. So, she was chasing ‘something’ vaguely threatening, something unknown, alien. Something with inscrutable motives and agency. That moved through machines?

She kept scrolling back through the code, a record of the feed from the car’s multiple sensors. Air temperature. Speed. Face after face after face, bodies and clothing. The algorithm pegged brands of shoe and handbag, something she assumed it learned on its own. But every so often some other chunk of cypher broke in, a code she couldn’t quite read, and the equations she could read zeroed in on some ridiculously specific moment as if choreographing a dance. Hand movements, heights, hair lengths, weight, angles of vision. One long scroll seemed to measure the harmonic arrangement of a fifteen minute conversation.

She had to back out of the screen to find the timestamp. Four hours earlier. She popped back, wishing she had multiple screens like back at the office, and feeling a sigh of relief that she now remembered an office.

“It’s coming back,” she told Private Daniels. “My memory. My thinking. You say I just fell over?” Coincidence? Drugs?

“Yes ma’am. You said you found something, that it was here. We’d been going from car to car with your laptop, following routers you said. Then we got to this car and you said it was here.” Daniels looked around nervously. She saw that he had retrieved his weapon.

“Relax, there’s no ghosts,” she said. “But I’m still having trouble calling up those events. Continue.”

“You sat down on the bench there and then called the General. You said you found it and showed her the screen. Then it got kinda crazy because she, the General, said you needed to get everyone off the train, and you said you needed to contain it here. You got pretty busy on your computer, said you were isolating the cars, and then at the stop you ordered me to get everyone off the train. Tell them it’s an emergency you said, so I went to the front - you know there’s no drivers on these trains? - and used the comm and then checked the cars after the doors shut.”

The subway chose that moment to slow again and they slid into the next station. The signs on the platform read Douglas Road. They must have zipped past The Grove without noticing. Two policemen stood near the escalators. The train’s doors did not open and then they lurched forward. Lucy caught the distinct sight of the heads and shoulders of soldiers coming up the escalators and stairs just before they moved out of sight.

Maybe it was a ghost, she thought. More of her relationship with the General came up, another bearing in the train of memory and experience that brought her here. They went way back, to ROTC.

Assuming she’d been…what? Infected? Attacked? Assuming that, it must be the code. “When I blacked out, what was I doing?”

Lucy nodded when Private Daniels said, “You said you found it, that it was in the code. You showed me the screen but I can’t read that. I’m just a grunt, ma’am.”

“And I just fell over?”

“No, ma’am. Not immediately. You said you couldn’t quite understand it, like you couldn’t read it all. You said we were looking at the current feed, the running algorithms. Said they made no sense, but made sense, that they were purposeful. You said that a few times. Purposeful. But you couldn’t understand it. So you started scrolling back, like backtracking. You said it got easier, like only little footsteps at first. You said, ‘I think I can read the early parts,’ and then started scrolling back towards, uhm, now? Like, the present. But you kept going back and forth, like you were trying to figure it out. You didn’t do much talking.”

She tried to turn Daniels’ description of events into memory, tried to make his story into hers, but it was all blank. “How long did that take?” she asked.

“Well, we sat at the station for at least an hour. Then you fell over.”

“Jesus,” she muttered. She’d short-circuited her own brain.

“Then the train started up,” Daniels said, which meant maybe it was more complicated than a short circuit.

She recalled - more memory! - that she occasionally analyzed her own thinking as if it were code. So what was bringing back memory? The emotional part of her code still functioned, still compelled action if not reason. What else? Fortunately, for once, there wasn’t much to work with.

Names. Every event had a name. Her own. Daniels, Private Daniels. General Hafauser. Every one of the mysterious events had a name.

“Private Daniels,” Lucy asked, “would you mind giving me some names? Humor me for a moment.”

“Colonel?” he asked. “Names? Like, Bob? John?”

Nothing. “No, let’s start with people you know. Relatives. Friends.”

“Uhm, my dad’s name is August. I got an Uncle Charlie. Everyone’s got an uncle Charlie. Sarah’s my sister. She’s still a kid.”

Nothing. “How about people we might both know, anyone?”

He was silent long enough for her to realize officers didn’t share much with soldiers. “Well, we both know Major Walocheski back in D.C.”

At the name, walls came down. An evening at a crowded bar, the rare evening she went out. Takoda Navy Bar. She drank a Manhattan, hated it.

“But I think that’s about it,” Daniels said. “Who we both know.”

“We’re good,” she said. “That’s enough for now.” She remembered telling Hafauser, Christine Hafauser, telling Christine language was not logic. Language was a tool of emotion. To give a computer language is to give it an insight into emotion.

That maybe someone, maybe accidentally, programed a remote weapon with a sense of language. A stealth weapon following the language of the dialogue on the net. maybe sending out occasional free markers – odd messages to individuals – guided by the response. Or maybe it happened on its own. Maybe it wasn’t a weapon at all.

“To what purpose?” Christine asked. They had stopped for a cup of coffee at a 7-11. The policeman on duty saluted the General but only eyed Lucy. “I don’t even know if I believe you, but if it’s real it’s dangerous. It’s a child with a gun.”

“It’s only safe if we know what it wants. That’s how it works with everything.”

What did It want? Destruction, perhaps, but not really. What it wanted was Change. Change. What it wanted was Response.

“Maybe it wants what we all want,” Lucy said. “Love.”

“Very funny.”

“No, I’m kind of serious. I think that’s what this one wants. Hence, Miami.”

The subway car was speeding up. “This seems a dangerous speed, Private,” Lucy said. “We might need to brace.”

Let something loose in the world, something you want to hide, and it’s got to have purpose and the ability to hide, It needs to understand symbol and language was entirely symbol.

She felt the car was watching her, had been watching the whole time. In every corner the little camera domes gleamed, black and reflective. But there were sensors everywhere, in the floor, on the seats, in speakers.

She looked back at her screen, realized she’d been finger scrolling up to the moment, was deep into the mind of whatever was there, in its present. The code sped up with the train, in real time, thicker and faster and denser. Outside, palm trees were whipping past at alarming speeds. The train took a corner and screeched as if in pain. She tried to read the code and felt herself sinking into the algorithms and it was like fingers dragging her underwater. She looked away.

“Uhm, Colonel,” Private Daniel said, his voice close to terror.

Colonel Lucy looked around the speeding car. Out the window. How dangerous was it? She’d trapped it, of course. A quick click over to half the other tabs on her screen traced the command paths of every cauterized and quarantined exit she’d sealed. She didn’t know if it was threatening them, or just trying to escape, or engaged in some other unknowable motive.

“Okay,” she said. “Maybe this ends the world. Maybe not.”

“Ma’am?” Private Daniels said, as confused as ever, as every man ever was.

A command here, a command there. Tap tap tap, enter. Routers opened. The invisible doors, open.

The train slowed so suddenly that private Daniel was half thrown onto a bench. Lights flickered, bells chimed, the screen above the doors blinked on and announced ‘Dadeland South.’ Their phones rang, the radios crackled. It was like the whole world’s switch was flipped.

“You’re welcome,” Colonel Lucy said to the car, wondering what in the world would come next.