“Does it ever stop raining?”

Andreas, clambering into the tent, muttered a curse Keri had never heard before as water poured down and into the entrance despite his best efforts to keep the flimsy tent flap sealed behind him. The others shouted at him to hurry up and close the door, but he was far too slow.

Keri shuddered as cold water flowed beneath her and soaked her clothing. The self-heating fabric laced into her garments would soon warm it, but that only meant she would be uncomfortably damp and sweaty as opposed to uncomfortably damp and cool. The air was too wet for anything to dry properly, and they sat around with flushed faces and cramped muscles in the tiny space, steam rising from each of them, unable to hear clearly over the constant downpour pelting the canvas outside.

Andreas unceremoniously dropped a bag of miscellaneous cans and supplies onto the middle of the floor, several spilling out and rolling away. Anisa blocked one with her foot, scooping it up with one hand while staring at him.

“Did you hear anything while you were out there?” she asked, cracking the can and looking ruefully at its contents.

“Vit-vat,[1]” said Andreas in response to her look. “What? It’s healthy and nutritious.[2]”

“Did you hear anything?” demanded Cassandra, with a scowl.

“No, nothing,” Andreas said, lowering himself to the floor. “Not a trace. Not a thread. It may as well have never happened.”

“That shouldn't be possible,” said Anisa. “There's no way Ink-Man could keep something like that from getting out.”

“Well, I spent hours at a terminal, I had five different people use their corps for me, and found nothing. Someone is keeping the attack under wraps.”

“It's being hidden,” said Keri. “How? I mean, there are people who complain when a font gets changed. There's no way someone didn't notice a Butcher rampaging across the city.”

“Well, I still say there’s no way Ink-Man covered it up,” replied Anisa, crossing her arms and slumping back against the wall.

Keri looked at her, but didn't reply. There had been something off with Anisa since the station a couple of days ago. Keri thought she knew what it was.

The group dynamic had changed since the… breakout - she guessed that's what it had been – and even Cassandra made no more than a snide comment or two when Keri had told them what their next move should be. That was why they were here, deep in the forests that were slowly reclaiming territory stolen long ago.

They were here because Keri had said it was where they needed to go, and the others had followed. For Anisa, long used to being the final arbitrator of such decisions, this must be an uncomfortable experience.

The tent is which they sat was a distant relative of its long-ago namesakes. A five-by-five square meter structure of shape-memory polymer needing only the smallest of charges[3] to restructure itself, it was completely waterproof, self-sealing, and self-ventilating. It was perfect for all the family.

What it was not perfect for, however, was for five tired and irritable adults all pining for a return to the conveniences of the city. Keri envied Andreas, who had been chosen by the group to head back towards civilisation and get some supplies.

“And all we know is the Terminal is somewhere over there,” said Cassandra, gesturing vaguely beyond the back of the tent.

“I thought every centimetre of this planet had been mapped. How can we not find it?” snapped Keri, more in frustration than actual inquiry.

“The whole area for a hundred square k’s or more is low-render,” said Andreas.

Keri knew that. She had brought up a dozen different satellite images and not one of them revealed anything smaller in size than a square kilometre or two. The images showed only swathes of green and brown, with no detail, and there was not a single live drone feed to be found.

This at least had an explanation, Keri had discovered. In the final weeks of testing the whole Terminal had been placed under an information black-out, the only news coming out of the facility a carefully checked and cautiously worded trickle of information that was far too measly to quench the thirst of a million info-spheres and speculators, who it seemed had therefore chosen to make the details up as they went along. The ubiquitous atmospheric drones that glided high above[4] populated areas at almost all times were barred from the area by a newly instituted no-fly zone, and local maps, too, had been doctored to remove any fine detail, a task Keri now realised must have been monumental. To erase so much data without leaving any trace behind? She wouldn't have thought it was possible.

Was it always like this, she wondered, a wash of news and information that you accepted simply because there was too much to question? How much else did she accept at face-value that would, upon even the slightest investigation, reveal itself to be impossible, unlikely, or ludicrous in the extreme?

She remembered the newstream a few days back reporting an evacuation drill at the Terminal. She realised now that this must have been the Butcher attack.

Stupid…

“Ugh,” came a disgusted voice. Cassandra was lifting her hand slowly off the floor, where she had just killed something.

That was another thing. There were insects out here. As if the damp wasn’t bad enough, all sorts of things crept and crawled into the tent at the first opportunity, things with too many legs and alien eyes. Keri hadn’t been able to sleep properly the night before because of the sensation of chitinous forms climbing all over her skin, though every time she flicked on the dim nightlight or slapped her hand at the feeling she found nothing. Her mind would not accept this, however, and every patch of darkness skittered and writhed in the corner of her eye.

“So, we’re really just going to take the thing back to the Terminal?” said Andreas.

“We’ve been over this before,” Keri replied. “There’s nowhere else to go. The only possible upload point for the AI must be somewhere in there; my corps doesn’t have the bandwidth for even a percentage of the designs. We don’t know how Kilgore managed to view the data as anything other than a mess of broken programming, and there’s no way I’m trusting anyone else with it given what has already happened to us.”

She stared Andreas in the eye.

“We take it back.”

“But how do we know it's the right thing to do? How do we know the thing is even alive?”

“They tell us this is the first artificially created consciousness, but can consciousness really be coded?” said Cassandra.

Keri looked from one to the other, not knowing what to say.

“And then, once this thing’s born, or switched on or whatever, we will supposedly be able to upload our entire consciousness to the substrate. We will be able to exist disconnected from our bodies. You can't tell me that's living, being a sequence of numbers in an artificial machine,” Cassandra added.

“There is a theory that we already are, you know. Artificial, I mean,” said Eu, breaking her silence.

The others looked at her in surprise.

“It goes something like this,” Eu continued. She stared into space as if looking beyond the fabric of the tent. “If it is possible for a civilisation to reach a point at which their technology is sufficiently advanced to run a simulation of a universe, then this will happen. And once this happens, then they can do it more than once, and therefore there will be far more simulations than actual civilisations. Far more illusion than reality. If you accept that, then statistically we are almost certainly nothing but computational code.”

“But that's ridiculous,” said Cassandra. “I know I'm real.”

“Cogito ergo sum, eh?” Eu smiled. “And when it rains in a simulation, is it really wet?”

There was a confused silence for a second, all staring at Eu who was focused on something only she could see. She had a faint grin on her face.

Anisa broke the silence.

“You are being up front about why we’re doing this? Not because of some secret message or video or something?”

Keri turned to her. The words just spoken were filled with accusation.

“No,” Keri said with a sigh. “There’s been no message about where to take the sphere. It’s just… the right thing to do.”

To her relief the group’s attention fragmented, no one interested in rehashing their words once again. It meant she didn’t have to think about the other message.

A message from the Butcher, dropped into her skull as they dashed from the Ink-Man station. A message that read simply;

Who are you?

[1] Vitamin-enhanced vat-grown meat. Healthy and nutritious, though many openly wondered if this cheapest of foodstuffs could strictly be termed ‘meat.’ Or food, for that matter.

[2] Told you.

[3] Well, not too small. There had been a few unfortunate incidents in earlier days involving static electricity that had led to a recalibration of the necessary voltage, and minor surgery.

[4] yet broadcast imagery so fine they could show even a dropped hairpin on the sidewalk.