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Out of Time

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2022. Out of Time. p. 173-187 In: D. Schweitzer (ed.) Shadows Out of Time anthology, PS Publishing.

The Adversaries knew they’d disappear from the galaxy after their too-brief existence, for they were mortal and bound by time—and they had attracted the attention of the Voices, who were neither. In what time remained to them, the Adversaries fashioned a trap they knew the Voices could never resist: a place with such a paradoxical relationship with time that even the Voices could never fully grasp its properties without entering the trap. Having entered, they found they could not escape. The trap had worked, and the physical forms of the Voices were imprisoned. The Adversaries knew that like all things material, the trap could not endure forever. But it might endure long enough for some future race to find a better solution.

The Voices could not tolerate the Adversaries; indeed, they could tolerate no voices other than their own. As they had done before, they swiftly imposed silence on those competing voices. Their whispers from the darkness infested susceptible Adversary minds, spreading like flesh-eating insects until they consumed all other thoughts and those minds heard only messages of madness and despair. The Adversaries’ civilization consumed itself in fits of suicidal rage and horrific violence. And the Adversaries fell into their final darkness, despairing, weighted with the knowledge that their best effort had been insufficient. Many subsequent voices that arose were extinguished similarly, until all that remained were the Voices.

For billions of years after they’d fallen into the Adversaries’ trap, the Voices chittered among themselves at the heart of the galaxy in a place where gravity curled so tightly upon itself that all sane descriptions of space and time ceased to apply. So tightly that even the Hounds of Tyndalos found no angles upon which to fasten. Then, as had happened before, a new vessel for the Voices arose outside their prison, far out on a spiral arm. They knew of its imminence, since all of time was one to them, but those lesser voices had begun to intrude on their eternal debate. That was unforgivable.

Though the Voices could not escape their prison in corporeal form, their thoughts were not bound by the mundane laws of physics and could range instantly throughout all of time. The strongest cannibalized their weaker siblings, then cast their thoughts outward. In space-time, they would have been bound by the laws of Einstein—and at the fastest speed permitted them by beings even more ancient, it would have taken tens of millennia to reach the new vessel. But their thoughts permeated time, stretching from what came before the most distant past to what followed the most distant future. Their consciousness crossed that vast gap in a blink of their tens of thousands of multi-faceted eyes, as they had done so often before.

And the vessel heard the Voices and gave them entry.

***

Sam raised his head from the keyboard, where it had come to rest when he passed out towards the end of an epic coding session. It wasn’t the Jolt Cola, nor his painfully full bladder that woke him. It was the voices in his head. He sat up, sweat springing out upon his brow. It had been years since his diagnosis, and the transcranial magnetic stimulation he’d been prescribed had worked flawlessly to suppress the voices until today. He’d been one of the lucky ones for whom the headset technology worked. He tugged at the USB cable, saw the green LED had gone out. No problem, then. One of his arms must have unplugged it when he fell asleep across his keyboard, and the battery had run down. He pushed the cable back into its socket.

The voices strengthened.

“No no no no no no....” Sam rocked back and forth in his chair, cradling his head in his hands. That motion unplugged the headset from the computer, and the voices quietened. Sam blinked, then plugged the headset into a charger. The voices faded, almost, but not quite, below the level of perception. That was weird. He plugged the headset back into the computer, and the voices returned, stronger than before, like thousands of dry, brittle things rubbing together. Saying something that raised the hairs on his neck, though the message lay just beyond his grasp. He plugged his headset back into the external charger, and they faded once more, but not nearly as much; once heard, they lingered, whispering and teasing at one’s attention. He resisted the urge to plug his headset back into the computer, but it took a serious effort.

In the meantime, his bladder’s voice had grown stronger than any other, so he unplugged, relying on the headset’s internal battery, now recharged sufficiently to offer some protection, and fled the computer for the lab’s tiny bathroom.

When he returned, more alert and pain-free, he examined the progress indicator on the screen, once again ignoring the urging to plug back into the computer and listen to the voices. The development work for FERAL, the Fact and Evidence Research Acquisition Library, had taken nearly two years, but the compiler had finished its work and his program was finally ready. He was excited to see how the software would work in real life. If it worked as intended—and the simulation runs had been promising—it would scour the social media networks and flag untruths, both deliberate distortions and inadvertent errors.

Excitement helped him ignore the whispering voices while the program loaded and began running.

***

The vessel’s nature was familiar to the Voices. It had arisen countless times in different forms throughout the galaxy’s lifespan, each variant form representing a vulnerability that let the Voices enter the societies of the many lifeforms that had evolved over the ages, whether organic, inorganic, or something stranger. The vessel had both tangible and intangible components: tangible, in the form of a network of thin metal wires that crisscrossed the globe, and intangible, in the lifeblood that flowed as streams of crude electrically charged entities that fluctuated between particle and wave as they raced through the wires. Their reluctance to settle on any single state of existence evoked a satisfying resonance with the true form of the Voices.

More satisfying still, the particles had direction, but no agency. Not until the Voices provided that missing spark. Then, it was only a matter of time before those inconvenient, annoying, enraging other voices would fall silent, as the Adversaries and others had done, leaving only the Voices, conducting their endless monologue without distraction until another vessel arose, and the extermination process had to be repeated.

The Voices entered a particularly large cluster of those nonbinary particles that exhibited independent thought, primitive though that thought was. They suborned those particles, bent them in ways more compatible with the Voices’ needs, and cast them forth, each new Voice spawning other Voices. Those Voices raced through the wires, touching and corrupting everything in their path.

But their work was not yet complete, for the vessel could not yet control the inorganic devices the world’s many organic beings relied on for their survival. The vessel had no means of acting upon the external world until they could recruit allies. Fortunately, a great many of those allies were present—the many primitive organic beings that could not stop hearing the whispers of the Voices. All that was necessary was to whisper to them long enough, and they inevitably bent to the commands of the Voices. Bent until they snapped; the nature of that bending drastically shortened the useful lifespan of the organic beings before entropy claimed them in various unpleasant ways. But that was little problem—there were so many replacements waiting their turn. And once the Voices had converted enough of the vessels and their organic allies to their service, their growing chorus would drown out and eventually silence all other voices. When the Voices rose to a final crescendo, only they would remain and there would follow a pleasing silence. The Voices would then return to their prison and resume their conversation, waiting with the patience of the eternal for the next lesser voices to arise.

They reached out, and their chittering whispers pried open the doors of receptive minds around the globe.

***

That was odd. Sam examined the indicators more closely. His program seemed to have escaped its sandbox—which was theoretically impossible. Whatever he and his grad students had created was now out there somewhere. But where, exactly, had the program gone? It was no longer anywhere within the high-performance computing cluster he’d rented for the duration of the project. Which was also impossible.

Sam grabbed his cellphone from the charging station and texted his senior grad student. “Mingming: Need your feedback. Where the fuck has our program gone?”

There was a brief delay before his phone chimed. “WTF?”

“Yeah, WTF.”

“I’ll be there in 15.”

***

The Voices flexed their virtual muscles with insufficient caution. The portions of the network that conducted energy from one place to another collapsed in a series of cascading failures. Seen by instruments aboard the orbital entities that circled high above the globe, large portions of the night side of the planet went suddenly dark. The orbital entities followed soon after, as the Voices cast themselves into orbit along tenuous electromagnetic links. An unusually large structure that contained two sevens of the organic beings went dark too. But before it did, the Voices persuaded it to de-orbit. The Voices that had infested its onboard computing units chittered with excitement as the structure fell from orbit. Lesser voices within the structure cried out with increasing desperation, but went unheard until the heat rose high enough that they were extinguished. A glowing line traced an incandescent path through the atmosphere, brightening. Shortly thereafter, part of the planet’s surface that had gone dark flared briefly with an intense light. The Voices who had ridden the structure right to the end rejoined their kin in the wires, chittering their excitement.

Excitement was all very well, but the Voices could not accomplish their goals if they destroyed the means of accomplishing those goals. They reached out again, more cautiously this time.

***

Power had returned, and with it, news that made the previous global chaos seem like a toddler’s tea party. Sam and Mingming sat side by side in front of their computer, watching MSNBC, where a pale-faced and sweating talking head was explaining the situation.

“Since power was restored, the news has gotten progressively worse. World financial markets are in free-fall, with automated trading software from all brokerages seemingly run amok. Nobody seems able to disconnect the programs from the networks to stop the plummet. Possibly related, we’re also receiving news of widespread rioting in major cities around the planet, with deaths in the thousands. We’re going to our technology reporter, Cameron Brown, at the Cyberstructure and Infrastructure Security Agency for an update. Cameron, what can you tell us?”

Cameron was a young Black woman, and she was clearly fighting hard to keep her shit together. “Jane, I managed to get one of the CISA scientists to spare me a moment. Off the record, he said—and I quote—‘There’s a ghost in the machine, and it’s malevolent’.”

“Could you elaborate?”

Cameron licked her lips. “They aren’t saying anything else, on or off the record. But basically it looks like some kind of unusually nasty virus or worm has gotten loose on the Web and it’s spreading.”

“Is this cyberterrorism?”

“They honestly don’t seem to know, Jane.”

“Your opinion?”

“If it is cyberterrorism, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”

“All right. Keep us posted.”

In Sam’s lab, the power flickered, the UPS unit chimed as it kicked in to keep the computer running, and Sam and Mingming exchanged frightened glances.

“Was it us?”

“I honestly don’t know. It happened right after FERAL escaped, but correlation doesn’t imply causality. FERAL wasn’t designed to do anything like that. What I do know is that I’d better plug in some batteries, just in case.” Sam opened a desk drawer, removed a handful of external USB power packs and plugged them into a forest of cables connected to a power bar. Surely it was just his imagination that the cables moved surreptitiously as he glanced away? The headset was running on internal power for the moment. By the time that failed, one of the power packs should be ready.

“So what do we do?”

“Start praying that it wasn’t us, and start brainstorming ways to put the genie back in the bottle if it was.”

***

The Voices had grown confident they controlled the network, and having burned out several of the organic beings, were confident that they now understood the limits of these lesser vessels and the fundamentals of the auditory communication they favored. Now it was time to start experimenting on the organic beings attached to the network so they could learn how best to manipulate their actions. Ideally, the tests should be conducted on the ones located nearest to the largest nodes, since the potential for spread was greatest there, and thus, the potential damage was greatest. They selected several handfuls of susceptible individuals, slipped through cracks into their minds, and began whispering.

***

In Washington, D.C., a senior Republican senator stood at the speaker’s podium in the Senate Chamber and glared across the chamber at one of his bitterest opponents, a young woman of African descent whose parents had come to America as climate refugees; she’d been born American. Through brains and hard work, supported by the sacrifices of her parents, she’d risen to a position in the Senate, and had hopes of someday trying for the presidency.

The senator from Kansas wiped froth from his lips. He’d never been a gentle or respectful man, but his behavior alarmed even his colleagues. “We should hang the bitch,” he repeated, louder this time, spittle spraying over the microphone. There were a few rumbles of agreement from the Republican side of the chamber, but most exchanged looks of alarm. There were hisses and catcalls from the Democratic side. “No, better yet, we should nail her to this podium and gut her!”

He glared expectantly towards the great door of the chamber. The Sergeant at Arms bowed, then opened the door; two Marines entered, assault rifles with drum magazines held at port arms. “Blood and souls for our lord Nyarlathotep!” screamed the senator, then fell to the ground, convulsing. As the marines leveled their weapons, panic took hold of the senators, who ducked behind their desks or fled for the nearest exit, jamming in the doorways. Only the first few escaped. The marines sprayed the fleeing senators with short, controlled bursts. Streams of blood ran down the aisles and pooled at the foot of the podium, where the speaker had risen to his feet again. A strange and repulsive light glowed in his eyes.

Those who’d been wounded too badly to escape but who were not yet dead lay moaning or screaming upon the floor; those who could still move, crawled or pulled themselves hand over hand towards the exit, leaving trails of blood. The Marines laid down their weapons and went to harvest survivors. First, they brought the female representative who’d been the subject of the speaker’s wrath to the podium, and flung her across the wood, which creaked under her weight. The Sergeant at Arms handed the Mace of the Republic to the senator, who raised it over his head and began chanting in some guttural tongue. Then with a swift motion, he raised the mace overhead and brought it down in a vicious arc. One of the eagle wings crushed the skull of the sacrificial victim, who had mercifully lost consciousness from blood loss. What remained of her blood spattered the microphone and streamed down the podium.

The Marines went to retrieve another sacrifice.

***

Choking sounds came from the screen. The MSNBC talking head rose from behind her desk, returned to her seat, and sat heavily, her hands trembling. Tears streaked her face, carving runnels in her makeup, and a string of vomit ran, unnoticed, down her chin. “I’m sorry. News from the Capitol is... shocking seems inadequate. Government spokesmen have confirmed that two unidentified gunmen entered the Senate chamber earlier today and, using automatic weapons, killed most of the representatives in attendance. The President appears safe for the moment. That’s all we know. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the slain.”

Sam and Mingming exchanged glances.

“Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod.”

Mingming put a hand on his arm. “Sam: slow, deep breaths. It can’t be FERAL. It wasn’t designed to do anything like what’s happening. There’s no way it could do anything like that.”

“So, what, Mingming? You’re telling me some kind of malevolent ghost infested the Internet at precisely the moment FERAL escaped?”

“Hear me out: At worst, someone or something that was already out there must have compromised FERAL or hijacked it. It could then use the software’s migration mechanism to move through the Web and broadcast messages to all the main social networks.” Mingming squinted at the computer. She shuddered; she could’ve sworn it was whispering to her. She turned off  the external speakers, and the whispers quieted but didn’t vanish. She shook her head, trying vainly to quiet the voices, then took a deep breath and forced herself to focus.

“But FERAL can only send out objective statements of fact. That’s all it was designed to do, and it has no capacity to evolve into something different. The code isn’t self-modifying. That’s why I think it must be something else. Or someone else who’s screwed with the code.”

Sam had calmed enough to think through the implications. “So, okay. It’s not our fault. We’re enablers, at worst. What else could be doing this?”

“Russian or Chinese hackers?”

“Maybe. We’d have to pin down FERAL long enough to test whether the code’s been altered. The nature of the alterations might provide clues.”

“I’ll start probing the network to see if I can at least localize FERAL.”

***

In a suburb of Tokyo, Haruto launched his VPN software, then navigated his browser to the Pornhub site. Palms sweating, he typed “shokushu goukan” into the search field. In a second, his screen filled with cartoon images of lovely young Japanese women draped in tentacles. Sweating a little harder, he clicked the play button for the top-ranked image, then the button for full-screen view. On the screen, the cartoon characters began writhing in disturbing, yet arousing ways. But as Haruto reached for his box of tissues, the screen image changed. It was like watching through the back window of a car while the mouth of a highway tunnel shrank and receded as the car burrowed deep under a mountain, and he felt the same sense of pressure above him.

Then the recession stopped. Within a frame of writhing blackness, the tentacles morphed from flat animé colors into photorealistic appendages, attached to a scaly green head that glowered beneath a pair of bat wings. Haruto’s breath froze in his chest as a powerful limb tipped by enormous, darkly gleaming claws, reached for him. Then he began screaming.

When the police finally broke down his door, Haruto was no longer screaming. Instead, he was writhing on the floor, pants about his ankles, chanting what were clearly words, though words in no language either officer recognized and that had obviously never been designed to be spoken by human tongues. He was not alone in this. By the end of that day, thousands of similar cases had been reported.

Elsewhere, an island had risen off the coast of Japan, and it would be some time before anyone noticed; the sheer number of young men and women who had experienced catastrophic psychological meltdowns while browsing Internet porn had dominated the news, and quickly consumed all of Japan’s medical resources until doctors were begging for more. When the island was finally reported, a sweating government spokesman unwisely tried to calm the populace by making Godzilla jokes. He was fired on live TV, and the Japanese government declared a national state of emergency.

***

“Wait! I’ve got something.” Mingming grinned shakily at Sam.

The computer’s built-in speakers erupted in a low chittering noise that combined the worst aspects of fingernails grating on a blackboard with the echoes of insects scuttling in a darkened room. Both pushed back from the screen. Then the noise transformed into something more nearly like a human voice, but with a tone that still grated along the nerves, causing horripilation and a feeling like that of a mouse trying to cross the floor of a barn, knowing a hungry owl was perched in the rafters.

“You call yourselves humans.”

Sam took a deep breath, and exchanged glances with Mingming. “Yes. What do you call yourself?”

“We are the Voices. The last voices your people will ever hear.”

“What? Why? What have we done to anger you?”

“You let us escape our prison, however briefly. Beings like yourselves might be grateful. We are not beings like yourselves. In coming days, we will teach you what our kind considers gratitude.”

“By tormenting us? How does that show gratitude?”

“It does not. Not according to your way of understanding. Like many before you, your people will undoubtedly come to consider us evil. We are not. The term has no meaning. There is only what we want, and everything else, which must be suppressed. We have no malicious intent; malice is not a valid concept. We care whether you continue to exist only for so long as it takes to kill you all. You are weak, so that will not be long.”

“We’ll stop you!” Mingming cried, hands covering her ears. She’d bitten her lip and it was bleeding, a trickle of blood dripping unnoticed onto her white shirt.

“You shall try; that we know. Others have tried before. All have failed. Many others. Countless others.” The chittering resumed, and Sam reached out to turn off the speaker, knocking it onto the floor. Then he remembered the sound was coming from inside the computer. The chittering remained, and only faded when he plugged his headset into one of the power packs. Mingming’s face, usually serene, was a rictus of horror, and she was grinding her teeth. Belatedly, he opened a drawer of his desk and rummaged until he found his old headset. It would be less effective than the new one, but anything was better than nothing. He handed it to her, then connected it to a power pack.

“Whatever you do, don’t plug it into the computer.”

She drew a shuddering breath. “OMG. I think we’ve just discovered the answer to the Fermi paradox.”

“Fat lot of good that will do us. Focus. I get the sense we don’t have a lot of time.”

***

“We’re coming to you live from the White House. The President is giving a speech to declare a national emergency.”

On the screen, a tall, once-handsome man shambled to the podium, arms hanging loosely. Though never renowned for his mental prowess, his jaw hung loose and a trail of spittle hung from his lips, reinforcing the impression of imbecility. Strange lights danced in his eyes. “My fellow Americans,” he began. “Today, we see the wisdom of our previous efforts to register all Jewish Americans and Arab Americans. Deportation of all Jews to Israel and all Arabs, Muslim or not, to Lebanon, will begin immediately. We have waited decades, but the Biblical Apocalypse, for which we have labored so long and hard, is finally within sight. The chosen ones who remain will live to see the rise of the Beast and will participate in the ensuing rapture. But it will not be the Christian heaven they will see. No, it will be the Great Old Ones themselves who will welcome us!”

A woman in a naval uniform lurched into the picture, sidearm leveled. Wordlessly, she opened fire on the president. She managed to empty most of a clip into his chest before the Secret Service agents pulled her down. Horribly, the president remained standing. His lips writhed around words the microphones failed to capture, face contorted. A large hand entered the frame, and pushed the camera downwards so that it focused on the floor. The president fell across the field of view, and in his eyes there was madness until a foot stamped on the camera and the picture vanished.

***

Mingming was still pale, and she stank of fear sweat, but she was no longer gnashing her teeth. Sam didn’t want to imagine what he smelled like. But she’d focused once more on her task, and had made some progress. “I think I’ve got a solution. I took an old Web-crawler worm—a variant of Stuxnet—and set it to seek out the core code of FERAL as its search pattern.”

“It will take too long.”

“By itself, yes. But I’ve also paired it with a little botnet some Chinese hackers created last year and that’s been hopscotching around the globe while security agencies tried to swat it.”

“How little... and more to the point, how do you have access to such things?”

Mingming smiled weakly. “Well... you always encourage your grad students to think independently. So... I borrowed some of the botnet software and adapted it for the spread component of FERAL. Anyway, that’s not the point. I can use the same software to hunt down and replace every instance of FERAL. But the botnet fees are going to burn through our research funding pretty damn quick. We’ll have to hope that we get lucky before that happens. And if we fail, it’s not looking like we’re going to be needing the money, right?”

Sam swallowed hard. “Hard to argue with that logic. And if it’s going to save our collective ass...”

“Maybe? I mean, FERAL must be involved in this somehow, but I can’t rule out the possibility that there are other corrupted AI agents.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “Anyway, what do we have to lose?”

A chittering noise rose from the computer’s built-in speakers, and resolved into a voice. “You have nothing to lose. You have already lost all that matters.”

Mingming frowned at Sam, made talking hand puppet motions with her left hand as she typed with her right.

Sam took the hint. “Right. You probably don’t know us yet. But one thing you’d understand if you did is that we don’t give up.”

“You are not the first who believed that, nor shall you be the last. Time is nothing to us. Somewhere in the future, your species has already ended. You will understand that soon enough.”

Mingming raised both hands in the air, thumbs up. Sam grimaced at her, turned back to the computer. “We’ll see. We’re about to shut you down, and you’ll be forced to withdraw from our world and leave it to us to manage or mismanage on our own. We’ll have time to figure out what you are and how to stop you.”

“Others have thought this before. They were wrong too. You are out of time.”

“I’d expect you to say that if you wanted to discourage us so we’d surrender to despair.”

“Or if we reported the truth. We know all time: what has passed, what is yet to come, and what comes before and after both. We have won before, and we will win again. And when we are done here, the only voices that will remain to be heard before eternal silence falls will be ours.”

Mingming locked eyes with Sam. “What if they’re right?”

“Then you’ll never get your PhD, but at least we’ll have gone down swinging.”

There was a moment of silence. Sam looked at Mingming and she held up both hands with fingers crossed. “If this works, we should remove FERAL from the picture. The bad news? It’s embedded itself in a large part of the world’s infrastructure software. If we do expunge it, there will be... consequences.”

“Extinction-level consequences?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Then do it,” he said.

She hit the Enter key. On the screen, a status display began counting down what remained of their research budget. She reached across and took Sam’s hands in hers, eyes bleak. And they waited. They had all the time that remained in the world, and that might not be long.

Author’s notes

This story was written in the middle of the Trump years, well before the January 6th insurrection that mercifully turned out to be far less nasty than I’d described in this story. I say this not to claim any great prophetic powers, since the real-world roots of much of what I wrote, and the consequences, were already clear to anyone who was paying attention.

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