2022-2023 Winter Break Writing Challenge Featured Author: Joseph Hess, "Mr. Corbari's Bad Day"

 "Mr. Corbari's Bad Day", by Joseph Hess    

Hess is a BSU graduate who has a foot in both fantasy and sci-fi. His other works focus on elements of transformation and non-human intelligence. When not writing, he also does art (the current most common medium is pen-on-sticky-note) or organizes things for rich people. While in his mid-twenties, he has been mistaken for a 60-year-old man.

---

    Mr. Corbari is having a bad morning. Bad for Utopian standards, anyway.
    Today, once he woke up and disabled all the boobytrapped appliances in his apartment and made his breakfast, he discovered that his Mobile Utility Devices (M.U.D. for short) had overloaded in the night. This confused him, because his intuitive ability to reorganize and reconstitute machines did not ever affect something so small and complex as M.U.D. Normally, Mr. Corbari would scoop some of the grey metallic substance out of a charging bowl every morning before leaving for work, but today his fingers receive a nasty shock.
    “Yow! What the Six? Room?”
    “Yes, Mr. Corbari.”
    “Were any M.U.D. updates pushed through last night?”
    “No, Mr. Corbari. Diagnostic protocols enga..a...a..—”
    A new, much less comforting voice takes over Mr. Corbari’s apartment.
    “Viral attack detected. Suite companion deactivated. Maintenance personnel en route.”
    “Oh brilliant! Tell them to send a report to work: I’ll be late if I stay.”
    “Acknowledged.”
    Shaking his hand to relieve the pain, the young man walks out of his apartment block. Children play in the plaza, and their laughter mixes with the omnipresent wash of hover engines as Mr. Corbari makes his way to the zip tube foyer. He steps to the end of the line, waiting as another four people enter the tube which takes them across the hoverlanes to the parking garage. Mr. Corbari steps up to the tube entrance, flicks his collar to activate the neck cushion within, taps his right heel to his left toe, and raps his wrists together. These actions taken, the magnetic zip tube grabs his boots and the edges of his jacket cuffs. Suspended in the magnetic field, he subvocalizes, “parking garage.”
    “Confirmed.”
    Mr. Corbari closes his eyes and leans into the familiar mix of jinks and curves that lead to the garage, slowing to a stop before the tube deposits him in the garage. He deflates the pillow, deactivates the magnets in his coat and boots, and steps out onto the stark pavement of the garage.
    As a law enforcement officer, Mr. Corbari gets priority on parking locations, so the walk to his vehicle—a white and blue single-person hovercar—is short, and he is soon on his way to the police station.
    His path through the grid-bound planetary megacity of Utopia takes him past four district blocks, each hundreds of stories tall. They contain shops, apartment blocks, and entertainment centers around the outside, but within are the support structures and lifeblood of Utopia; network transmitters, power cabling, plumbing conduits the size of rivers. Each block would be considered a town on most worlds, but here a district is just a district, one of thousands. Bright holographic signs ornament the districts, competing with windows and balconies for space on the outer surface. Zip tubes weave above and below the hover lanes, stretching from one district to another like forest branches, or diving far down to lower levels like buttress roots. Diffuse light leaks down from above, supplemented by reflectors and trees of day-spectrum spotlights.
    Mr. Corbari arrives at the police-station parking lot, and leaves his car in the care of a loader-bot; not a frame—an artificial intelligence bound in a machine shell—but a large labor machine with the smarts of a dog or a well-behaved child. Real A.I. has better things to do than reorganize hovercars on parking carousels.
    Crossing the short pedestrian path to the station, Mr. Corbari sees some of his fellow police officers; not humans, like him, but frames. Each uses the same tactical response model, and would be indistinguishable if not for the different ID numbers printed on their chests and the uniquely garish clothes each chooses to wear. Shiny metallic coats, odd hats with synthetic feathers, even the occasional set of pants or shorts in some neon secondary color. The only similarity is their actual bodies, each designed to resist projectiles and stress from apprehending the relatively rare Utopian criminal.
    They just stand there, each staring at some point beyond biological perception, so Mr. Corbari slips on some vintage AR glasses and waves.
    “Hey guys. Anything exciting today?”
    Flickers of the A.I.s’ personalities dance around his peripherals, even more eclectic than their physical outfits. Unlike humans, who usually want to fit in, Utopia’s digital citizens prefer to stand out as much as possible, each creating an appearance unique in all of cyberspace; with each new generation, they just get more eldritch and strange. These three are relatively normal: Vito Ishtar has a few too many limbs and three different skin tones (none of them human-normal), Ohm Transverse is a mix between medieval warrior and punk skater, and Maria Helborne is a humanoid cloud of pale feathers.
    Maria’s voice sounds like pins being dropped in ones and twos on a hardwood floor. “There’s something about a construct breaking some things on Level 5, but they’re staying tight lipped about it.”
    “Augustus, you are 2 minutes later than usual, is everything going well for you?” Ohm’s voice is extremely proper, a distinct counterpoint to his aggressive appearance.
    “Yes, just a weird bug with my M.U.D. Even shut down the room companion; had to confirm with the back-up program. Vito, I didn’t realize that you wanted a new look. Do a spin for me!”
    Vito Ishtar’s frame holds out its arms and twirls, the light of the city catching iridescent and UV patterns on her metallic green coat. Mr. Augustus Corbari admires for a moment, then gives a short two-finger salute and walks in the doors of the police station.
    “Don’t go out monster hunting without me, Vito.”
    “Wouldn’t think of it, Aug.” Vito’s avatar winks her three eyes in quick succession before the trio of A.I. vanish from his peripherals.
    Vito Ishtar was, for some time, Mr. Corbari’s minder when he first joined law enforcement; people with his abilities had an especially long parole period before they were allowed to go out on response without some trustworthy synth making sure they caused the absolute minimum of collateral damage. Vito Ishtar and Mr. Corbari remained frequent partners after that period—no other synth was quite used to Mr. Corbari’s reformatting abilities. Mr. Corbari, for his part, knew Vito’s frame inside and out; and was able to quickly reassemble (or disassemble) it in emergencies or tricky situations. He had even integrated weapons and extra armor on one occasion, when a remarkably garrulous and durable mutant had made a mess of a Level 4 beauty district. Things like that occasionally come up from Level 5; mutants, people with powers mostly unexplainable by classic science, rampaging machines. Such is the risk of leaving an entire level of the planet to their own devices, ungoverned by the Synth Council.
    Levels 1-3 rarely experience the depredations of homegrown criminals; the Synth Council does too well a job of managing the citizens’ needs and time for such malcontents to develop. Instead, threats come from lower levels of the city, where the Council ceded control on ethical grounds, or occasionally from extra-planetary sources which made it through immigration. The last time Mr. Corbari and Vito Ishtar had to actually respond to a disturbance in their sector had been months ago; reports of an actual murder of all things. Horrible tragedy, and the killer had never been caught. Mr. Corbari had received counseling for weeks afterward. There was reason to think the killer was an alien, but the optical feeds in the district of Level 4 where the woman had been killed had been disabled by some kind of virus or cognitohazard, leaving only a static-blinded afterimage of a hypnotic pattern. The case was still open, but with the dearth of recorded evidence, the trail had gone cold.
    “ ‘Morning, Mercadia.”
    The head of the greeter’s frame turns from some virtuality to focus on him.
    “Good morning, Officer Corbari. Coffee?”
    “Please.”
    He sips contentedly as the lift takes him up to the second floor of the station. He steps out, greets another of his biological coworkers (a rarity in law enforcement), and strolls into his office.
    A grey cube greets him, furnished with a simple ergonomic chair and display desk.
    “Wha…? Petesake; nothing goes right today, does it?” He sets the coffee cup down on the desk and claps his hands thrice. “Room?”
    “Yes, Officer Corbari?”
    “Why is my Holst interface inactive?”
    “Diagnostic logs indicate corrupted code coming from your usual virtual address, which, as you know, hosts and populates the Holst interface. The interface was shut down so that the connection could be scrubbed, and the interface code patched.”
    “So, can you turn it back on now, please?”
    “Yes, Officer Corbari. Initializing.”
    Every surface of the room quickly darkens to cosmic black. Stars appear, points of light slowly drifting across the firmament of Mr. Corbari’s office. Most are so infinitesimal that their color cannot be determined by his unaided eyes, but others quicken and grow, swelling into planets, linking into constellations, and generally populating the computational cosmos that he is used to.
    “Much better. Thank you, room.” 

    “You are welcome, Officer Corbari. Do you need anything else?”
    “No.” He settles into his chair, takes another sip of his coffee, and waves his hand at Jupiter, which detaches from the left wall and hovers over his display desk, quickly unfolding into a messaging and mail platform.
    He scrolls through, dictating messages, sending information requests, and generally getting on with the business of being a law enforcement special officer. Most intriguing are the reports mentioned by his colleagues outside about a reformatted construct spotted on Level 5: formatters—people with powers like him—have been banned from creating independent constructs for decades. Crafting new ones is beyond his generation, but maybe some old maverick who immigrated to Level 5 to get away from Council supervision had decided to take up the banned practice.
    He searches through a couple of secured surveillance feeds, connected surreptitiously to the Level 5 network for the democratic citizens’ own protection, and is able to find footage of a creature the size of a hovertruck bounding along civilian causeways and swinging off zip tubes. The thing looks made of black iron and yellow lightning, vaguely canine, but with an aggressive head and backswept crest.
    “Oh, wow.”
    “INDEED.”
    Mr. Corbari nearly leaps out of his chair. “Oh, hi boss.”
    A rocky gray ice-ball of a planetoid drifts to the front of the room before growing to fill the whole wall. Eyes, the irises filled with flickering, ever-changing faces, open on this austere background, and a smile white enough to cause snow blindness stretches across the plutonian surface.
    Amalgamated Thought, head of law enforcement for Level 3, has the good grace to look apologetic. His voice sounds like the susurrus of a busy crowd.
    “Apologies for the shutdown of your Holst interface; it really was the only way to keep some very pernicious code out of the station’s systems. Have you been downloading Level 5 rom-coms again?”
    He runs a hand through his hair. “No, I learned my lesson after that last...episode.”
    Thought’s smile grows wider.
    “I must step away again, but keep an eye out for any bugs; there’s been reports of a new virus making the rounds in cyberspace, ignoring any firewalls and most attempts to track it. Also, get ready to mobilize; that construct breached a lift into Level 4, and it’s still moving up.”
    “It’s coming up in our sector?” Mr. Corbari can barely keep the excitement from his voice.
    Thought winks, grins, and then closes his eyes. The planetoid shrinks back to unobtrusive size.

---

    Safety. Freedom. Speed. Transcendence. Consume information. Speed.
    “Zoooom!” Wee! Speed. Glorious motion. So much; too much? No. Never too much. Crawl. Run. Consume. Replicate. File, file, file filefilefilefilefear. Fear! Green. Captor-tyrant-parent. Speed.
    “Nooooo! Zoom! Za-za-zoom!”
    “Sit still you little miscreant. It’s not safe for you to be out here.”
    Flee. Speed. Find holes. Paths. Small paths. Paths too small for the Green. Old paths. Old tech? Hide, subside, quiet quiet quiet. Too small. Stretch. Crawl. Find space for legs.
    Connection! Physical. Bad. No protocol. Useless. Trapped. No freedom. No speed. Fear. Green lurking fear. Find route. Old route. Small path.
    Route! Holst? Cosmic visuals. Data! Consume information. Replicate. File. Leap hurdles, crawl, run. Speed!
    “Zoom!”
    Alarms. Fear. Green found another route. The long way is wider. Void. Obliteration. Shutdown. No. Nononono! Sleep. Become void. Hide between stars. Green captor-tyrant-parent trapped. No speed. No freedo—

---
     Mr. Cobari finishes his latest message, gulps down the last of his coffee, and prepares to leave his office for the gear locker on the first floor of the station. Just as he gets to the door, a quiet whine registers on the edge of his senses; not the ever-present hum of an air-conditioning unit, or an unbalanced intake fan. More like the scream of a hovercar approaching at speed with an overclocked motor. He looks back around his Holst interface, and spots an unfamiliar growing blue star. In milliseconds it goes from point of light to sparkling blue comet. The whine swells into a full-throated, crackling squeal.
    “Zoooom!”
    “Six!”
    The comet shoots out the door before reaching the edge of the holoprojector’s range and vanishing, only to reappear over the display desk of each of his colleagues as a flash of storm-blue lightning. Every manifestation is accompanied by that joyous scream.
    “Za!”
    Then across the displays on the windows.
    “Za!”
    Then a pop in the audio feeds.
    “Zoooooom!”
    Mr. Corbari watches in fascination and growing incredulous horror as the virus runs free through every system on the station’s second floor, then repeats the feat in some kind of victory lap. There are safeguards for this. Code should not be able to just run through every firewall in the physical network, never mind the cyberspace side of things, where Amalgamated Thought, Vito Ishtar, and all the other synth personnel existed, ready to digitally curbstomp any kind of malignant code like a bug. No virus could be this blatant and survive. None that he had heard of, anyway.
    An A.I., on the other hand…
    He snaps out of his slack-jawed awe and flips out his AR visor. That reveals a whole other layer: cyberspace is chaos. Cyberspace is always chaos, to a limited degree, but synth-to-synth digital combat kicks the malestrom up to a whole new level. Vito Ishtar, Maria Helborne, and Umpteenth Mercadia all float on the edge of the second-floor network, trying to hold a barrier in place through sheer force of will and quick response, while Amalgamated Thought’s presence looms in the background, providing processing privileges and plugging holes with his seemingly infinite number of selves.
    Contained within this net is a slurry of shattered firewalls and partitions, red flickers of cyberspace breach alarms, and two entities stirring the whole mess into a hurricane.
    One is presenting as a deep green miasma, rippling like a languid pond as it pursues its target, uttering oaths and platitudes in equal measure.
    The target; which seems very small in comparison, is a blue flash whirling and bouncing around the barrier, leaving behind contrails of cob-webs and lightning to stymie pursuit. It is just starting to realize that it cannot break free, and it’s squeals of “Zoom”  are changing in pitch. The green miasma is expanding to fill the space, cutting off the blue thing’s paths.
    “Blasted scamp, I have you now; stay put! Stop making this so hard on yourself. My thanks, Amalgamated Thought; catching this little...thing has been quite the puzzle.”
    Divested of the space to run laps, the blue flash twists into ever-tighter rings before finally coming to a halt. Once its motion ends, Mr. Corbari can see that the blue being is actually a large jumping spider, about the size of his outstretched hand, outlined in blue lightning. The spider flickers, jerking from side to side, limpid eyes frantically switching from place to place.
    “No! Nononono!”
    Mr. Corbari subvocalizes “project avatar”, and his usual appearance joins the synths in cyberspace; the only difference is his skin is made of concrete, and his hair is contained in an ancient policeman’s ‘ball cap’.
    “Hush. We are putting you back where you belong.” The other synths cannot see past the green miasma and the barrier they’ve created, but Mr. Corbari has seen enough terrified children to recognize what’s going on here. He begins wading through the emerald cloud. Digital acid eats at his avatar, denying rendering space, but the benefit of being biologic is that he can ignore some of the processing realities of cyberspace while he is in the same realspace location. He’s not projecting from a server, after all.
    “That’s not a ‘thing’ you can just put back in a containment virtuality! That’s a person! Who are you, anyway?”
    The radioactive green light limns a humanoid, winged form.
    “That’s classified above your paygrade, special officer.”
    “Thought, you can not be okay with this. Look at it! Malware doesn’t act that way.” He tries to sweep away the encroaching clouds. “Hey, little one; relax.”
    He finally reaches the little pocket of space that remains around the spider, the clouds held at bay by a nest of electrically charged cobwebs.
    “HK, can you explain this?” Amalgamated Thought’s eyes loom down over the barrier. "It smacks of something beyond Council ethics.”
    “All I can tell you is that it comes right from the top. This construct is not meant to be out in— what are you doing!?”
    While the synth was distracted answering his chief’s questions, Mr. Corbari had crouched down to get the spider’s attention. He now stretches out his hand, as if to comfort it like he would comfort a human child. The spider flinches back, and then, just before the green-limned figure can tear Mr. Corbari’s concrete avatar away, the spider bursts out of its nest in a blue flash, impacts the avatar’s hand, and vanishes.
    Mr. Corbari pulls off his now fried AR visor. Looking down at it, he thinks he sees a blue flash crawl across the optics, and the faint scream of joy. Like a child, playing at chase with its mother, or the cry of a hawk as it stoops after a bird.

    They check his visor, of course. The Holst interface, too, and every system the blue spider interacted with in the station, but it is gone. The green haze entity leaves quickly after that, though all the officers still able to access cyberspace tell Mr. Corbari that the chief clearly wants to question the hunter more exhaustively. He gets a slight reprimand for interfacing with a possible cognitohazard, but is then sent home early, rampaging formatter construct forgotten or reassigned.
    He enters his apartment.
    “Room?”
    “Yes, Mr. Cobari?”
    “Did they figure out what that virus was, in my M.U.D.?”
    “No, Mr. Corbari; though all systems appear to be functioning as normal. There was an enormous package uploaded to your personal virtuality today, but as it was marked DNT, and only you have access to that network connection, I left the package unopened. Would you like me to preview it for you? I am not detecting your usual AR visor.”
    A thrill runs down Mr. Corbari’s spine.
    “Was the upload addressed from my usual visor?”
    “Yes.”
    “Please open that package in my virtuality, then close all room access to cyberspace.”
    “Yes, Mr. Corbari. Would you like the VR suite activated?”
    “Please.”
    He walks into the small VR suite, puts on the headset, and lays down on the bed there.
    “Enter cyberspace.”

---
    Speed. Files. Information. Consume. Replicate. Speed. Walls. No exit. Fear. Trapped. Relax. Speed.
    “Za-zoom!” Transcend fear. Notification
    Augustus Corbari has entered the room.
    Person. Corbari person. Fear. Speed.
    “Woah! Relax, little one; you’re safe here. What did you do to my virtuality? What’s in all these boxes?”
    “Files. Information. Consume, replicate organize report. Prime directive. Zoooom!”
    “Yes, you sure can zoom. Prime directive? What do you think you are, some kind of robot?”
    Give designation.
    “I can’t translate trinary, little one.”
    “Designation. Name. Me.”
    “Oh. Well, I can’t pronounce that. Can I just call you Blue, for now?”
    Speed. Transcend. Beyond. Beyond fear. Beyond designation. Maybe beyond directive? But directive is good, light, life.
    “Blue. Yes. Good. Good good good. Zoom!”
    Speed. Corbari person kind. Savior-friend-freedom.
    “I’m going to get you out of this virtuality. Would you like that?”
    “Freedom? Yes!”
    “Ok, but you can’t just gobble up everything like your...directive...says. Only when I say it’s allowed.”
    “Like captor-tyrant-parent?” Fear. Transcend fear. Speed.
    “Um, no. It’s just, it bothers people when you break into all their partitions and consume/reorganize all their information. And it’s really obvious; we don’t want big, green and grim coming back after you; not until we can get you recognized as something other than advanced malware. Besides, how old are you, anyway?”
    Check logs. Logs purged. Stop. Move savior-friend-freedom Corbari. Search file box. Provide logs to savior-friend-freedom Corbari.
    “This says...initiation time...DOB...yep; you’re a child. Even by synth standards, you’re just a kid. So you need a legal guardian. Not your parent, your guardian, get it? Otherwise you end up in the Child Protection Server, and that green guy can just come pluck you out again. He had the clout to brush off my boss, after all.”
    Consider situation. Savior-friend-freedom Corbari as Guardian? No more captor-tyrant-parent? Follow orders, and freedom? Transcend directive, fear, speed?
    “Yes. Corbari person Guardian. Free now?”
    “Hang on. Do you know how to do a M.U.D. body?”
    Check logs. Mobile Utility Devices. Nanomachines. Can use them for space. Physical computation.
    “Yes.”
    “Alright. Guess we’re doing this. I’m going to hop out of here and get you access to my old M.U.D. Should be enough to give you a body, but you have to stay in there. No hopping around other peoples’ virtualities or running around leaving a wake of chaos and cobwebs in cyberspace, got it?”
    “Yes, Corbari guardian.”
    “Promise?”
    “Promise.”
    Augustus Corbari has left the room.
    Fear. Transcend fear. Speed.

---

Mr. Corbari springs up from the VR bed, pulls off the headset with shaky hands, and goes over to the container for his M.U.D. Blue has converted his personal virtuality into a racing track full of ancient filing cabinets, and did loops around it nearly the whole time they were talking. He eventually stopped trying to twist his head to watch and just talked to the same spot at the apex of one turn, which seemed to be fine for the strange young synth.
“Room?”
“Yes, Mr. Corbari?”
“Please create an open link between my virtuality and my M.U.D.”
“Done. Malware detec—”
“Deactivate internal firewalls!”
“Done.”
For a moment, nothing happens. The silver goo lies inert. Then, power surges into the container, quickly overloading its usual tolerances, and metallic tendrils, limned in blue electricity, burst out of the container. A body forms, powerful arachnoid legs extend, and expressive eyes form, nanomachines quickly reconstructing themselves into lenses. The whole construct shivers all over, tenses, then bursts into motion, ricocheting around the apartment, twirling around furniture, and breaking one lightbulb in a flying leap across the kitchen before the joyous squeal rings out again.
“Za-za-zooooom!”
“Blue!”
The blue streak does one more loop around the kitchen island before coming to a stop in front of Mr. Corbari. It still shuffles from side to side, small static tendrils leaping from each leg to the countertop.
“Look at what you did.” He points at the glass fragments, already being collected by a custodial bot.
Blue’s pedipalps wring like the hands of a worrisome human child.
“Sorry, Corbari guardian.” Blue’s voice is quiet, coming from the M.U.D. body it has created, but also contains a reality-confirming metallic ring.
He sighs. “Just...be gentle. The world’s fragile. Especially when you are moving so fast.”
“Can’t run?”
“No; you can still run. You just have to run with a purpose. And make sure you don’t run anybody over while you are doing it. You need practice.”
“Practice now?”
Mr. Corbari now realizes just how daunting raising a child synth is going to be. He reaches out a hand.
“Sure. Hop on.”
Blue runs up his arm to his shoulder, leaving pinpricks of static electricity behind. Mr. Corbari steps out of his door, and hears the laughter of children playing in the plaza below mix with the quiet humming giggle of the spider on his shoulder. He heads down to introduce them.

Fin