[ID]entity Read online

  ALSO BY PJ MANNEY

  (R)evolution

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by PJ Manney

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503948495

  ISBN-10: 1503948498

  Cover design by Ray Lundgren

  Cover illustration by Adam Martinakis

  To Hannah and Nathaniel:

  You are my teachers.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE MUSIC

  (ID)ENTITY PLAYLIST

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  I have no idea who I am anymore, thought Dr. Who. But can I know myself? And if I’ve changed, am I still me?

  The gray-haired, heavyset woman hobbled on two canes along the extensive decks. It had been two years, but she had never gotten used to the endless 360-degree vista of ocean and the bitter saltiness that pervaded everything. Sunset, painting the sky with meteorological brushstrokes of puffy pink and green, didn’t help. After the world turned upside down, she left a lifetime of beauty and hard work behind in her garden in San Anselmo, California. She missed the creature-soft smell of compost and the velvet of rich soil under her fingers. Even as the slight movement of the floating platform made her queasy, she could see things growing and adapting all around her, like the ocean-sturdy structures of the seastead Sovereign that she stood on. Or the salt water–resilient plants she helped tend. Or the sea-adapted animals, so unlike her former gophers, sparrows, and earthworms. Those sea animals included water-loving people.

  Dr. Who tried to be one of them, adapting in her way. Regardless, she hummed to herself as a joke “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others).” Her kids and grandkids always liked that Sesame Street song. However, they remained on the mainland and refused to join her. How had she raised such wimps, more afraid of what could lie ahead than the obvious threats back home? She had never felt she belonged anywhere until she had entered the online virtual world in a variety of guises, especially that of Foxy Funkadelia, kicking virtual ass and taking virtual names. If the Sovereign still made her feel like a terra firma–loving foreigner after two years, then who was she? Was she a seasteader? An entrepreneur? An economic opportunist? Some might even say a criminal? And what was her name? No one had called her by the name her parents had given her in years.

  A lithe young woman in a wetsuit, with wide-set hazel eyes and black hair slick from salt water, loped along the decking toward her and waved. “Le Médecin!” Sylvie Thibault loved to call her “doctor” in French as a joke. Years before, another young woman on the run had dubbed her Dr. Who. The Doctor loved it, and with global notoriety, the name had stuck.

  “Come, le Médecin! See the cobia before it’s too dark. So pretty and delicious.” She pointed to one of several submerged geodesic, metal-screened spheres with flexible walkways leading to hatches at the top. Sylvie scampered up the walkway and threw open the hatch.

  “You kiddin’, honey?” said Dr. Who. “I’m no goat!”

  “I’ll let you name them!” said Sylvie.

  Following Sylvie along the undulating planking with great caution, Dr. Who said, “Oh, I can eat ’em just fine without baptizin’ ’em and payin’ for their college!”

  Sylvie laughed for a moment, then quieted, studying the fish inside the hatch. She was a marine biologist turned fish farmer. Like many on the Sovereign, she had pivoted her intellect and passion away from research and into new industries to help the seastead and the rest of the world survive through new food sources. Sylvie’s spherical fish farms had motors, propellers, and GPS that allowed them to deliver themselves to ports around the Pacific, with mature, market-ready fish inside. Some former scientists and technologists on board manufactured algae edibles and biofuels. Others worked on new versions of wave, wind, and solar energy systems. On another part of the Sovereign sat nanofabricators, once illegal after 10/26, the greatest terrorist attack in history. Along with 3-D printers, nanofabbers were making steps toward solving food shortages, as well as manufacturing pharmaceuticals, tools, spare parts, and more nanofabricators.

  The Doctor had set up her operation here two years ago for the same reasons the others did: to be left alone to do her work in peace, away from global politics, small-mindedness, and government regulations.

  “Mmm . . . ,” muttered Sylvie, observing the fish, the water illuminated by powerful spotlights. “They are agitated. I do not know from what.”

  “Sylvie, girl, till they’re on my plate with a side of fries, I’m still not interested.” Dr. Who peered into the hatch. The fish were all pushed to one side of the sphere, as though trying to escape through the tight metal mesh. “Looks like fish swimmin’ to me. What’s different?”

  “They are trying to school away from something. Maybe in fear?” Sylvie sat at the hatch’s edge and put on her diving mask. “Maybe a mesh break? Predator?” She spoke into a waterproof radio. “Agitation in sphere five, Lyle. Look for predator or malfunction for me? I’m going in.”

  Sylvie’s WaterGO, a waterproof version of the ubiquitous handheld communications device, rang a siren and announced, “Attention, Sovereign. New storm detected west-southwest at fifteen miles per hour. Repeat, heavy storm to make fall in twenty minutes.”

  “Non, impossible,” said Sylvie. “We are in the horse latitudes, the calmest part of the sea. No storms coming for days.” Confused, she looked in the direction of the warning. All she saw were cumulus clouds over a darkening horizon. “Do you see anything?”

&nbs
p; “Nope, but I’m gettin’ inside anyway, honey. See ya with the fish—cooked!” Dr. Who shivered. It wasn’t just from the looming cold, darkness, or storms. Looking at the watery horizon for too long made her feel dizzy.

  The Sovereign was a big facility to navigate, shaped like an octopus holding large plates at the ends of its tentacles, and she and Sylvie were two out of two hundred who lived aboard her. Its large central hub sat like a high-tech iceberg, fifty feet above and hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean. Eight connected arms splayed from the central core, and disk-shaped installations at each end housed different industries and living facilities. Like a space station on the high seas, she maintained her location approximately six hundred miles north of Honolulu with GPS and positional motors that responded to tides and weather. She was a model of the newest type of seastead: a single prefabricated unit, midocean, self-sufficient.

  Dr. Who entered the elevator shaft that plunged many stories underwater and exited on a floor that hummed with electrical activity. The ocean-current generators powered the biggest computer server system on the seas and one of the biggest in the world.

  She poked her head into the control room. Juan Reyes, a twenty-two-year-old Guatemalan, manned an interactive console in a room filled with a dozen screens and racks of servers. He wore mixed reality contact lenses that were common among most technical folks and a good percentage of the wealthier public. They displayed real-time, augmented image overlays to his retinas to help coordinate all the information he was monitoring. With his hands, he moved around the colorful and complex data only he could see. To the Doctor, it looked like Gustavo Dudamel conducting an orchestra. She could see only a fraction of the facility he was supervising.

  “Juan, baby, get you anything? ’Cept the right woman?”

  “I should be asking you that, Mamita.”

  Even if she didn’t fit in, Dr. Who was treated with great respect and fun. She was the seastead’s unofficial mama. Age had its benefits.

  Juan made sure the IT systems were happy. There was a lot on the line if they fried. With the most active identity, security, and cryptocurrency computers in the world, the Sovereign’s systems allowed a billion people to identify themselves without a government imprimatur. When nations collapsed, as some did after the Major Tom revelations, persecuted citizens needed to leave or change their identities. The facility both processed these new identifications and allowed money, goods, and services to be exchanged without national fiat currencies.

  Tools that freed people from a system in which governments and corporations were the moderators of all identity and financial verification were grabbed with great enthusiasm after the collapse. The primary tool was the blockchain, a “trustless verification system.” While the original blockchain underpinned the first cryptocurrency, called Bitcoin, there were now many blockchains. They were simple databases, shared by millions of computers around the world, through microtransactions of a digital currency. After performing a basic algorithm, the same data was placed in every computer that mined the currency and shared that blockchain. The fact that the data was the same on each computer was how the system verified it was true.

  Blockchain technology now verified so much that it was inherent in most transactions: financial, real estate, trade, barter, identity, gambling. Which blockchain you used depended on the transaction and the institution.

  However, like anything sold by big business or big government as “trustless” or “bulletproof” or “guaranteed,” better to assume it was as full of holes as Bonnie and Clyde’s car. Or Bonnie and Clyde, for that matter.

  The largest operators of blockchains, and the “miners” of the currencies to run them, were in China. They had turned a cottage industry of high-tech early adopters looking to level global economic playing fields into the biggest verification system in the world. But that didn’t mean they were safe. Their blockchains were suspect, and their hardware was, too. Governments discovered Chinese-made computing hardware was linked to Chinese bugging devices. China made the algorithmic chips that operated the world’s blockchains. That was reason enough to be suspicious.

  There were several uncorrupted blockchains out there, not manipulated by governments and multinational institutions. They were so popular that they created their own currencies. The Sovereign created the Shell, symbolic of its ocean environment and a reminder to the world that seashells were one of the oldest and most used currencies in human history.

  In fact, there were two sets of servers in this blockchain farm: one online, which participated in confirming the information on the blockchain, and one safely offline as “cold storage.” Hackers could infiltrate computers and steal cryptocurrencies, but this system allowed for multiple verifications of a transaction and a place to hide them and any money from hackers. This made people feel safer. As any financier will attest, if people feel their money is safe, the truth doesn’t matter.

  Governments were unhappy with this development. The Sovereign was designed to exist as far from legal jurisdictions and their overreactions as possible. The former United States were particularly annoyed. In the wake of the Major Tom revelations, without leadership at the federal level, some states took their gold back from Fort Knox as the basis of a local currency. With a collapsing dollar, new currencies became popular elsewhere, too. Barter systems, sharing economies, municipality dollars—like the multiple currencies in use at the beginning of the American republic, everything old was new again. This strengthened the Shell’s popularity around the world.

  “Hey, Mamita, look at this.” Juan pointed at a screen and expanded the image with his fingers. It showed a flood of currency requests, growing larger by the second.

  “Follow back to the beginnin’, baby.” She grabbed her GO to see what news might have motivated a gigantic movement of currencies.

  “Yes, Mama . . . ” His hand poked, prodded, swiped, and pulled the air several times. “It’s . . . everywhere. Do you see any patterns?”

  “No. What’s the AI say?”

  All large cybersystems had their own artificial intelligence programs to find and halt cyber attacks and runs on their “banks.” AI pattern recognition was good but not flawless. A combination of human intelligence and AI was still necessary to cover the cognitive bases. Juan ran the patterns through the AI software.

  “Mamita, nothing yet,” said Juan.

  Her international infofeed was filled with the usual crap of civilization. Fake news from fake political parties on fake outlets. Another country splitting apart at the seams. Kardashians, like cockroaches, still reproduced and proliferated. But no unusual currency fluctuations.

  “Hell’s bells!” she said. “A fancy DDoS?” A distributed denial-of-service attack could strike at any time, overwhelming their meshnet-connected servers. They happened everywhere. Every day. Every hour. To every government and corporation on earth. For many years, they were the blunt instrument of hackers large and small, either to punish, extort ransom, or crash a system and take advantage of its failure.

  “Yeah. We haven’t had an attack in weeks,” said Juan.

  Her GO was too fiddly to give her the information she needed. “Call Pavla and Chikelu for help. I need my files.”

  “Careful, Mamita! Storm’s coming!”

  She couldn’t move fast enough. It was dark, struggling down walkways hurt the joints in her legs, and the crutch cuffs chafed her arms.

  In her cabin, she had a few vestiges of her old life. A state-of-the-art computing system. A bonsai forest under grow lights. A lifetime supply of violent video games and their player platforms. Grand Theft Treasury III was paused on one screen. On another, her automated Foxy Funkadelia avatar pole danced, legs spread in a 190-degree, hyperextended standing split, while giving a lecture on anarchocapitalism. Foxy had passed the Turing Test, which early computer scientists imagined would demonstrate a program’s ability to exhibit intelligence resembling a human’s, but Dr. Who knew Foxy was just a sham of quick wit, s
alacious moves, and canned responses, designed to distract her viewers with her sexy wiles. Foxy’s audience was bright and therefore gullible to slick presentation and jargon, keeping alive the fantasies of those turned on by “smart” people, otherwise known as sapiosexuals. Someone had to do it. But Dr. Who’s business wasn’t currency. She ran the most successful and lucrative identity-reassignment service in the world, right from the Sovereign’s network.

  She settled herself with a groan into her chair. It felt good to get off her feet. Averse to surgery, she knew she didn’t have long before she would need a robochair or exoskeleton for mobility, but she was determined to put off that indignity as long as possible. Waving her hands toward the images on her screens, she pulled up her identity files.

  They were stable. For now.

  Dr. Who had earned infamy from her reidentification of a bioengineer and falsely accused terrorist named Peter Bernhardt. She had helped turn him into the avenging cyborg Thomas Paine and later the first uploaded identity, Major Tom. After she was forced to flee her Marin County home in the chaos that followed his revelations about the truth of American power, he promised to send her anywhere. She was clueless about where to go, so he recommended the Sovereign. Conscious of her advancing years and legacy, she’d asked him if she could upload her thoughts upon her death, upgrading Foxy into a real sentient digital being in perpetuity—like him. But Major Tom hadn’t revealed his uploading technology to anyone but Dr. Ruth Chaikin, who had helped create him, and he wouldn’t promise anything.

  Identity reassignment was a big business in the aftermath of Major Tom’s ascension. When his story hit the world, first came revelation. Then revolution. There were a lot of new customers. Many people needed to get into or out of nations, or just start again where they were. As fast as the world map changed, her business boomed. When each bit of life was codified and immortalized on the nets, and in corporate and government databases, there were many people who wanted a clean slate. These weren’t criminals in an ethical sense. Their governments may have branded them as such, but they were pioneers and revolutionaries whom their home countries didn’t yet appreciate.