“Not my mother—just Mother.” Neil opened some kind of application on his phone and pressed a button. The enormous red curtains that covered the back wall of the room slowly parted to reveal a huge bank of video monitors of various sizes, shapes, and resolutions. There were more than a hundred screens covering the wall. It was beautiful in a “desert junk collector building an entire house out of old compact discs or soda bottles” kind of way.
Below the giant bank of monitors was a comfortable-looking, well-worn brown leather easy chair, and a long table covered in a variety of different colored computer keyboards. Hanging above the monitors was a banner that read: WE WANT THE FUTURE WE WERE PROMISED, NOT THE FUTURE WE DESERVE.
“This is Mother,” Neil said, and took a seat in the chair.
“Holy shit,” Chloe said, staring up at the wall of screens.
“How many monitors do you have hooked up here?” I asked, coming over to stand beside Neil.
“A lot,” he said.
“What is all of this?” Chloe asked as she joined us.
“Mother is an elaborate citywide network of battery-operated and solar-powered cameras, portable microphones, and switch relays. If the other side is watching and listening to us—and you’d better believe they are,” he continued, “then we need to be watching and listening right back.”
“This is incredible,” Chloe said.
“They have grocery store cards collecting our data, smart speakers tracking every word, drug store and transit loyalty points cards, gym memberships, key fobs, and black strips on the back of your driver’s license. They have GPS-capable computers in our hands and pockets at all times. They know who we are and what we’re doing. We needed something to fight back.”
“To fight back? Who are you fighting?”
“The system,” he said, as he pressed a few buttons on a keyboard—what appeared to be some kind of boot sequence. “The bad guys.”
“These cameras are citywide?” Chloe asked.
“Yes, although in order to achieve full coverage, a portion of our network is audio only.”
“So you watch and listen to the entire city of Seattle?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“That has to be an enormous amount of data,” I said.
“It is.”
“How can you possibly parse it all?”
“I can’t. That’s Mother’s job.”
“Your computer?”
“Not exactly. Mother’s an algorithm.”
“What does it do, exactly?”
“She does this,” he said, then reached over and pressed a few buttons on one of the keyboards positioned along the long table.
The images on the wall of screens suddenly shifted, morphing into a single, very large map of the city covered with a variety of small color-coded numbers and symbols—the latter reminded me of something you’d find in an ancient alchemy textbook. The map appeared to be centered around a section of downtown Seattle. I wanted to pull out my phone and take a picture, but something told me Fatman Neil wasn’t going to be cool with that.
“What does all this mean?” Chloe said, leaning forward—as if getting slightly closer might help her make sense of the visual chaos contained in those multiple screens.
“She notifies us when something out of the ordinary happens. Mother’s a mix of pattern discovery, facial recognition, speech interpretation, traffic monitoring, and fractal modeling software.”
“Holy shit.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Just wait until quantum computers hit the mainstream. The possibilities are endless.”
“Aren’t quantum computers still decades away?” Chloe asked.
“They’re coming. But like Andersen Cheng from Post-Quantum said—and I’m paraphrasing here—the first working quantum machine will never be announced, because whoever gets it will become the master of the universe.”
“That’s a bold claim,” I said.
“It’s a fact. They’ll be able to crack Bitcoin and intercept any global communication setup in existence. They’ll become a superpower overnight.”
“Quantum or not, this setup is impressive,” I said, and I meant it, although I couldn’t help thinking Mother felt like the indie version of whatever the hell Crow had built up in The Tower at WorGames. Was Fatman using Mother to mess with people’s lives in a similar way?
“Thanks,” he said.
“And you’re using all of this to play Rabbits?” Chloe asked.