"I, Simulacrum"

The message came in just as I was finishing my afternoon lecture, from someone called “Yasmine Patel.” The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it immediately. The header was not at all enlightening - it was the standard “Yasmine Patel has invited you to VR Chat” that most chatroom providers filled in by default in their invites. Curious, I opened the message.

In addition to the boilerplate invitation message and a hook to the VR room from which it originated, the message bore a few sentences supposedly entered by the sender. “It’s about someone close to you, I think you’d prefer if I didn’t say more in this message.” It said. ”The VR room is set to full privacy. Bring your friend if she can make it.”

I pulled out of the classroom as soon as the last student’s avatar fuzzed out into nonexistence, and the world became a simple box of gray, on each face a different graph to tell me the performance of my computer terminal. That done, I flicked the message toward the dedicated space in the corner of my vision that sent something to Annabel’s adjacent terminal. She replied almost immediately: “Think she means Mark1.0? We should at least check it out.”

I sent my agreement, and poked the chatroom handle in the original message. The tiny gray box vanished and was replaced by a simple, undecorated conference room, with a long table and a single occupant. She was pacing by the simulated window as I entered, staring distantly out at the simulated cityscape beyond. In the corner of my vision, I saw that a marker that said “PRIVATE” had appeared - this Yasmine person had been true to her word.

The system must have informed her of my arrival, because she turned suddenly. The avatar was labeled Yasmine Patel, and depicted a rather good-looking dark-skinned woman of perhaps thirty dressed in business attire. As she saw me, she took a half step forward but checked herself, her eyes catching sight of the name on my avatar’s chest.

“I was expecting someone else.” She started simply.

There was a chime, and Annabel materialized off to the side. She was using her casual avatar, the one with the circuit-board tattoos and the single earring. She frowned at me, and I remembered that I was still using the avatar and handle that I used for my lectures, the name and face of Marcus Arden. I quickly swapped to my “real” set, the one with the face I no longer owned and tattoos to match Annabel’s. The name on my chest changed as well, to “MarkLewis”, not that I had any real right to my old first and middle names anymore. “You expected me.” I replied. “I just came from a lecture.”

She seemed satisfied by this change. “Mark, my Mark that is, told me about you two.” She started. “I know you don’t really exist, but I need your help anyway.”

I bristled at this, and nearly replied angrily, but Annabel beat me to it. “What can we do for you?” She kept her voice even, but I could tell that remark annoyed her as much as it did me.

“Well.” Yasmine looked away. “To be honest he’d probably be angry that I found you. Not an easy thing to do.”

“By intention.” I replied simply. “It would bring up some complicated legal issues if we were well known.” After all, to my knowledge there was no case law on whether an artificial intelligence could be considered a person, and neither Annabel or myself had any desire to be that first case. Even though it had been five years, thinking of myself as an artificial intelligence was hard - I had been twenty-four when my path branched, so I still remembered life in meatspace quite clearly.

“Of course. I’m not here to make a mess of things.” Yasmine Patel gestured to the table. “Please, sit.”

Annabel and I exchanged a look. We couldn’t really grow tired of standing, but if it made this woman more comfortable if we sat down at the simulated table then we supposed there was no harm in it.

As soon as we were seated, Miss Patel seated herself as well. “As you already know, I am Yasmine Patel.” She gestured to me. “I was in college with the real Mark, perhaps you - ”

I remembered her now - that was why her name sounded so familiar. I wasn’t in very many classes with her, and didn’t really have much interaction with her outside of class. I didn’t recall her being particularly noteworthy, save that she was a rather rare species - a female at an engineering/technology school. “I remember you. We had a writing class together.” I did not humor her decision to assign my past to the person Annabel and I had been referring to as Mark1.0. It was mine as much as it was his, and I resented her a bit for trying to take it from me.

She frowned, but recovered, understanding my meaning. “Mark and I ran into each other three years ago, interviewing for the same job. We’ve been dating since.” She must have remembered that Annabel was the simulation of my then-fiancee, and shot an apologetic look across the table.

“Go on.” Annabel waved off the pause. Mark1.0 had been true to his word - aside from exchanging digital Christmas cards, we hadn’t seen or heard anything from him since he left us to our own devices. I knew he’d keep his word, of course - he was me, more or less, and I didn’t make promises lightly. Annabel had not seen him since her simulation was started, and I’d only held two conversations with him after that, both in the first year.

“Anyway.” Yasmine continued. “Mark’s missing. Neither he nor his car have been seen since last Tuesday evening. The cops looked into it, they think he might have just run away but they’re still investigating.” She shook her head. “I know Mark. He didn’t run away. He’s in trouble.”

I was interested, and worried - it was a strange thing, the instinctual self-preservation despite the fact that I wasn’t tied to that body anymore. “What do you want from us?” I asked.

“I want you to help me find him and get him back.” She said simply. “You know him, both of you, maybe better than I do.”

I shook my head. “Look, Miss Patel - ”

“Yasmine.” She corrected.

“Yasmine.” I repeated. “It’s been four years since I talked to... your Mark. He’s obviously living a life of his own, but if he’s in trouble I can’t see how we can help figure out what that trouble is. I honestly don’t understand why he told you about us - I wouldn’t have, but he probably had a good reason. We can’t very well unplug and look for clues ourselves, and even if we could why would we be better at it than the cops?” I held out my simulated arms helplessly. A simple fact of life lived as a simulation was that the closest thing Annabel and I got to fresh air and exercise was in VR, like Yasmine’s conference room. Not that we could still benefit from either.

Yasmine shrugged. “How about cracking passwords?“ She slid a squarish black plate across the table to me, and I realized it was a terminal prompt asking for a password, with the username “Mark” already filled in. “I’ll bet there are clues in his logs. Who’s been sending him messages should help. I can go to the cops with that.”

I slid the slate back. “Look, I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but I need to see corroboration of your story before I go trying to break into his files.”

Yasmine nodded. “Ah, yes, how silly of me. One moment.” She pulled a media window into existence in the air over the table and entered some parameters, then waved that to the wall. Like a projector’s image, the window grew until its contents were painted on the wall large enough for us to read easily. It was a police report, and detailed that the cops had been told someone was missing. It was dated last Wednesday, and I winced, seeing the name I once went by listed as missing.

“The Mark I knew never tangled in anything dangerous.” Annabel looked to me for confirmation, and I nodded, so she continued. “We’re computer people. We write code for a living.” I did not bother to clarify that these days we were also teaching people to write code for a living. “Not even the dangerous military guidance systems sorts of code. Back when this happened, we were writing new chatbots.” She tapped the circuitboard patterns on her simulated arm, meaning them as a stand-in for our current state. “What’s changed?”

Yasmine shook her head. “I wish I knew.” She said quietly, eyes cast down to the table. “He’s always had his secrets as long as I’ve known him, but it’s descended into paranoia. I don’t even have credentials on his terminal. Does he - do you, I mean, have a history of mental illness?” She asked me.

“Nope.” I shook my head. “Pass me that slate, I’ll take a crack at it.”

The dark-skinned woman sent the terminal slate my way, and I pulled up a media/search window in private mode next to it. Anyone could create a screen-capture of a police report, after all. As I made a list of things to try as Mark1.0’s password, I looked up his place of residence and pulled the local P.D. records on my own. My physical counterpart had indeed gone missing. I started digging further, going through social media records.

“You haven’t tried one password yet.” Yasmine pointed out after two minutes.

“I’m making a list of things to try.” I replied annoyedly. “I’ve... six so far.” This seemed to satisfy her, but Annabel could tell that I was multitasking, and opened a private text channel.

“Can I help?” She offered.

I replied in the text channel, in the meantime pretending to read from my media slate for Yasmine’s benefit. “Something doesn’t add up. Trying to verify her relationship with Mark1.0.”

Annabel acknowledged, and moving over to my side of the table, joined me in my searching and net scrape. Yasmine, blocked from seeing our work by the private settings on our media windows and on the list of password candidates I was compiling, got up and paced by the window while she waited.

Annabel found it first, a detail I would have missed. Mark1.0 had indeed been dating this Yasmine Patel, according to the social nets - but by all accounts the relationship had ended six months ago. That was a big red flag. I reopened the missing person report from the P.D. and went through all the attachments. The cops had thought that perhaps there had been a struggle in Mark1.0’s apartment bedroom, but in its state of disarray it was impossible to be sure. My alter ego’s organization problems clearly hadn’t gone away, I decided as I perused pictures of the room - the bed was unmade, the end table covered in a thick layer of opened mail and receipts, and the closet door partially blocked by a collapsed stack of tech textbooks. Nowhere in the police report was Yasmine mentioned by name or description.

I dismissed my media views for a moment and rose to my simulated feet, having seen enough. “Miss Patel, you broke up with my... with your Mark six months ago, didn’t you? Why should I give you access to his files?“

She stopped mid-pace and looked surprised. “How did you...”

“I’m an AI, Miss Patel.” I said calmly. “Data mining is the only way I can learn about your world anymore. Care to explain what the hell you’re about? Soliciting a hack is a federal crime now, you know.” Not that I was going to put myself on government radar, but I had a hunch that she wouldn’t call that bluff.

I was right. Her avatar visibly shrunk back from mine. “Okay, okay, look. He is missing.”

I nodded. “I know. You’re not in the police report, though.”

“No. Someone paid me to get close to him and get a copy of his private projects. He won out on that job I mentioned, and I was getting desperate, so I...”

“You conned him.” Annabel finished hotly. “You played him for years.”

“Yes.” Yasmine agreed. “That’s how it started anyway. I figured he’s a tech guy, a loner, probably shouldn’t take too much for a girl like me to get his guard lowered. He’s got his private work locked down, though - I thought I’d just be able to get what I needed quick, but I never got anywhere close. His terminal would never even let me connect to the file system. Took me nine months just to get his messaging logs... That’s where I found out about Anna, and you two.”

“So you hung on, hoping he’d slip up or give you access?” I prodded.

“Yeah. But spend two years pretending to love someone, especially Mark, and... I dunno. I resented him, at first, didn’t feel bad about stealing from him. But it’s hard to resent a nice guy forever.” She turned away and stared out the window. “Six months ago, I told my employer I was out, and gave back the bulk of the money I’d been advanced, then I went to Mark and came clean. I told him that the job I’d been pretending to have was a fake, that I’d been living on money paid to con him, and that I had given even that up for him.”

“And he threw you out.” Annabel guessed.

“Probably not.” I countered. I knew myself, and thus Mark1.0, too well to think that.

Yasmine Patel nodded to me. “He was more reasonable about the whole thing than I’d expected. He asked for some space, a few months to figure out if he could still trust me.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “He called me last Monday, asked to meet me for dinner that Friday. When he didn’t show, I went looking.”

“None of this is making me want to give you access to his system.” I pointed out.

“That’s just it. I don’t have to look far to guess what happened to him.” Miss Patel shook her head.

“Your employer.” Annabel filled in. “Still after his projects.”

“Right again.” Yasmine pointed to the slate. “I figure if I have what they want I might be able to get him set free. It’s my fault he’s in this mess.”

Annabel pointed out what I’d been worrying about. “They’re probably after PAIC. I’ve no idea why though.”

I shook my head. “Any number of reasons, but probably to weaponize it.”

Both Yasmine and Annabel turned to look at me strangely. “Weaponize?” Annabel asked. “My PAIC?”

It seemed obvious to me why someone would be after Anna's brainchild, the Personal Artifical Intelligence Copier, so I cast about for a way to explain that both Annabel and Yasmine would understand. “Look.” I conjured a black chess-knight from the VR menus and set it on the table. “Let’s say I’m a crime boss, and I have a star hacker who can get into anything. But I don’t use him often because he’s my only good hacker and I don’t want him locked up.” Back in the menus, I selected “Copy Object”. “I run PAIC on him, and save the profile. Now every time I need someone’s system taken down or broken into...” I brought up the paste palette and hovered my finger over the “Paste 1 beside” button. “All I do is set up a blank terminal somewhere and...” I hit the button, and another chess-knight appeared.

Yasmine frowned, but Annabel nodded, so I continued.

“Now let’s say I want my star hacker to break into every bank in the world at once and steal all the money ever earned.” I said, and even Yasmine began to catch on, a look of horror growing on her face. For emphasis, I moved my finger to the “Paste X” panel and dragged the slider up as far as it would go. Hundreds of black chess-knights popped into existence, coating the table from corner to corner. “All I need are terminals, and those are cheap. The talent’s always the limiting factor. And it’s not just stealing money. Even I could take down the government nets, if there were enough copies of me working together. And I’m no security expert.”

The result didn’t need to be stated - anarchy. Societal collapse, probably, brought about by digital slaves in the thousands and tens of thousands. “Who was your employer?” Annabel asked.

Yasmine, recovering from her shock, picked up one of the knights from the table’s corner. “I don’t know. The job came off the nets, I never met anyone. I posted anonymous status updates, they paid me enough to keep the power at my place on.”

I shook my head. Could be anyone - a hostile foreign power, a crime syndicate, even just a private interest who thought to benefit from chaos. “Miss Patel, even to save your Mark’s life, I won’t try to let you into his files.”

She nodded. “I’ll find another way then. I have to.”

“And we’ll help as much as we can.” Annabel promised, stepping forward to put an arm on Yasmine Patel’s shoulder. “It’s the least we can do. But we can’t give them what they want.”

We set to work then, mining the nets for any trace of Mark1.0. Yasmine disconnected after a few hours to get some sleep and do some real-world research, but Annabel and I stayed in that conference room all night, following lead after lead and hoping something would pan out. We didn’t and couldn’t get tired, and the severity of the task ensured we would not grow bored.

We had his probable location by morning when Yasmine reconnected. As Annabel left for her morning lecture, Yasmine Patel and I sat down to plan a rescue. The plan was complicated by us only having one pair of boots to put on the ground, of course, but Yasmine had Annabel and myself to watch her back. It’s amazing what one can get to from the nets if one tries - power grid substations, security cameras, even newer walkie-talkies and intercom systems. Almost any new device running on electricity has a handle on the nets, and Mark1.0’s captors were state-of-the-art. Armed with the manuals for every piece of tech they had and the building blueprints, I knew we could do this.

Yasmine never looked back, never balked at the risk. She reminded me here and there in glimpses of my own Anna, and I knew what Mark1.0 saw in her. They were a good match, as good a couple as Annabel and myself. It was too bad they started off as they did.

I didn’t tell Yasmine when I ran my PAIC6.5 scanner on her. If this all went well, I intended on deleting the copy without even telling her about it, but I wanted to hedge against the dangers of what we were planning. After all, every computer professional knows that the first thing you do before attempting a risky operation is back everything up.

This story written for Klazzform's Short Story Competition on dndonlinegames.com. It is a stand-alone continuation of "In Memoriam", which was also written in response to a prompt from that competition.