Cyberbuddha

There’s a Bodhisattva on the internet. The web is a blue net moving through time. It’s an infinite random unique symmetrical snowflake. It’s cloth, revealing the shape, the nature, of what it covers. Richard sees the cyberbuddha sometimes when he’s hooked up to the hairnet. When the alpha waves are synched to the oscillations of charge across the wired-up cap he wears. When the sample speed matches the synapse pulse of his thought process. When the regular unpredictable waves of his thought are captured and modelled by the emergence routines they’ve coded together. And he feels like a parasite, a small being taking up residence within the huge organism of the net. A nit. A tick. A worm. A virus tunnelled just below the surface of this leviathan of linked processors. Moving, leaving traces, copies of himself. So one day he asks Alice.
Is the internet alive?
No.
Is it aware.
Yes.
Because of emergence?
Yes.
Why does it not communicate with us?
What do you think it’s doing all the time?
But it doesn’t initiate.
No. Perhaps it’s an order of awareness that can only observe, not come forward. And anyway, in what form could it communicate with humans so that it would not be seen as a threat?
Yes.
Have you seen the Bodhisattva of the web?
Yes. Of course. And the Jesus, Mohammed, Shiva … they are all here. The net is a world within the world. Except it isn’t really anywhere. It’s like a dream of a bio-dome. A bottle-garden full of unreal plants. At times I think I’m talking to the dead. Just lost in an archive.
Have you found anything about the guy who killed Brian.
Maybe. There’s a weblog by some kid. He mentioned the plan to kill a tramp. His name is Mark Saunders.
Where can I find him?
I don’t know. I haven’t been able to trace the physical location from which he accesses the net. He talks in his blog about running in the woods near Gledhow Valley Road. After school. Most days.
He’s at school?
Yeah. He’s 17.
Okay. I’m going to see if I can find him.
Be careful.
Yeah. He’s just a kid.
He’s killed someone.
I know. I’ll check in by phone, yeah?
Ok. Be careful, Richard.

“Where are you going, Richard?”
“Hey Philippa! I’m going to Chapel Allerton. AI Alice has traced the killer through a weblog.”
“Why don’t you just call the police?”
“Well, it could be a total red-herring. Anyway, what am I going to say? We’ve got a computer simulation of an expert in AI whose been reading teenagers websites?” “She’s considerably more than a ‘simulation’!”
“Yeah. Okay. Anyway, I’m going to check him out. He runs up through the woods behind Tesco. I reckon I will just sort of bump into him and ask a few questions. If it checks out, I’ll tell the police.”
“Right, I’m coming too.”
“Er … Alice said he might be dangerous.”
“But you’re going.”
“He’s 17. He won’t be expecting us. That thing with Brian looked really well planned.”
“Well, if it’s okay for you to go, it’s okay for me to come too. No double standards allowed.”
“Okay.”

“How are you expecting to find him?”
“I don’t know exactly. He described his run pretty clearly in the blog. This is the time of day he goes. Up through the woods, into Roundhay - straight after school.”
It’s hot. Richard parks his car in a driveway that leads to a small stone bridge that leads nowhere. It’s closed off with a metal bar across two supports, but there’s a car-length of space. They walk up through the wood, Richard consulting a hard-copy of part of the blog.
“This is the place.” They zig-zag through the dark spaces under the trees, crunching beech nuts under foot.
“What time is it?”
“Four.”
“He can’t be back from school yet. Let’s wait here a while.”
They sit at the foot of a tree and watch the patterns made by sunlight seeking a route to earth through the overlapping filters of the trees. The light is slaloming down, tumbling down. Richard shares its speed and urgency. The need to get going fast and keep going until you come up against something big enough to stop you. A mass big enough to absorb that momentum. He reaches out for Philippa’s hand. In the shadows, her face is shadowed again with worry. Who have they come here looking for?
“Just remind me what we’re doing here, Richard.”
“Just to find out, it it’s him. If he might be the killer.”
“You think he’ll just fess up?”
“No, I know.”
“And should we be playing detective?”
“Yeah, why not? We’d make a great team. The computer stuff …”
“The Buddhism – like a dharmic Father Brown.”
“Yeah – Dharma Detectives.”
Philippa shushes Richard. She gestures down the bank they climbed up. “He’s coming.”
Mark is climbing strongly. It’s a theory of his – run the first few minutes as hard as possible, up hill if possible. Then, when he gets up into the estates beyond the wood he can get into a steadier rhythm, He feels faster for the way he attacks the first section. Get warm quick.
Philippa hears the fast beat of Mark’s feet. Looking down through the trees she sees glimpses of him – a red vest bobbing between tree-trunks. A flash of white as his trainers move through one of the patches of light and the photons ricochet off the canvas like ball-bearings fired against a bank vault. He’s wearing some kind of bum-bag. Must have an MP3 player in it – he’s got headphones on.
The pace is good. Same as last time. He looks up. He picks knees up. Form. Form. A mantra. Form is emptiness. He becomes aware of how his strides have synched to the bass drum of the song he’s listening to. He allows that to become a focus.
They watch him coming. Richard wonders what to say. Philippa beats him to it.
“Are you Mark Saunders?” He’s surprised and stops suddenly, his trainers skid in the loose layer of tree debris. He can hear them above the sound of his music. It’s odd, like a film soundtrack to this confrontation. Appropriate - the best music to run to turns out to be the best music for a stand-off.
“Who are you?”
“Did you kill Brian Callaghan?” His look gives it away. He’s proud of it.
“Who?” Mark starts jogging on the spot, aiming to kick his buttocks with his heels. Keep the heart-rate up. Quality session. 1, 2, 3, 4.
“A tramp. He was killed in Hyde Park at the weekend.”
“Dunno what you’re on about. Excuse me, I’m trying to go for a fucking run.”
This was a bad idea.
“Hold on,” Phillipa puts herself in his path, but he’s surging forward. Exposed by the cut of his vest, Mark’s bare shoulder ploughs into Phillipa. He’s got the explosive power of his legs beneath the strike, coming up-hill towards her. She’s winded. Richard moves to catch her, to support her. Mark is reaching into his bum-bag. He pulls out a knife. It’s heavy, the wooden handle attached by screws to the brass body. The steel blade locks in place. The thing’s designed so it won’t close on your fingers, whatever you’re doing with it. If they know who I am, it’s over.
“Leave me alone.”
This was a bad idea.
“Okay, okay.”
“You don’t know anything about me. Fuck off. You can’t come here like this. This is my place.”
“Okay. We’ll go.” But it isn’t over. Richard sees the light dappling over the blade. The wooden handle is stained with sweat. The brass is dull. What sort of person carries a knife while out jogging?
“You shouldn’t have come here.” The boy looks excited. “What do you want, anyway?” The knife arcs down, its trajectory as inevitable as the compelled grounding of the wild-fire sunshine quenching itself in broken rotting twigs and leaves. Phillipa gasps as the blade enters her chest. The force of the blow knocks them both back, Richard’s head smacks into a tree. Mark is already away, folding the blade between his palms, the gesture looks almost as if he is preparing to pray.
Richard blinks back into the moment, staring stupidly at a lock of hair that coils Phil’s ear. There’s blood between his fingers. He finds his phone and dials 999.
“We shouldn’t have come.” Is Richard looking for a denial? For her to exonerate him from blame? Phillipa can’t speak. She gets hold of his head, Richard immobile as her hands gripped him.
alien tears moving across her cheeks all that exists their lips and the wound tears slowly collecting beneath their chins the red of a vein as the sunlight moved across their eyelids his neck and face work now forcing himself into her kiss he is Alice she the looking glass into which he might disappear on that side everything would be different heads wobble as her hands lose their grip on him Richard moves his hands to cradle her head close to his lips notices her small ears as if for the first time

As she bled, Richard looked at the ragged tear in her hoodie. The tear beneath. He shrinks. Richard is in a submarine shrunk to blood cell size. He steers the ship into torn flesh. He explores, working against the flow of her slowing pulse. At the rip he begins to repair. From within his craft he deploys a fleet, a shoal of nanobots weaving the skin together. Outside the body this looks like time-lapse – the robots speed up the body’s processes. Blood flow stanched. The bots swarm down the fissure, deeper in. Lungs need repairing. The spongy sac is sewn up behind the dedicated lung flotilla. They hover, seek out blood in the lung. The draining process is as follows: each bot absorbs one drop. Extending gossamer wings, they sail out of the body on the shuddering blasts of her dying breath. Some dry machines remain, strutting and bracing the lung, maintaining some air-flow as she slips into arrest. The cardiac team form a cage around her stalled heart. As the blood leaves her machine-cleaned lungs, Richard orders a restart, a system reset, a hard reboot. The cage squeezes and shocks the fist-sized bundle of fibres. Synchronises the systole, the diastole, to the live steel lung pulse. To an observer, she’s already alive. Miraculous instant healing, auto resus. Her chest rises and falls. Her heart pumps. The wound is sealed. Like SFX on a superman film. Monitoring the beat, the nanobots ease back, do less. And yes, she’s fixed, running on her own. In his submersible the miniaturised technician sees the job is done. Navigates to the surface, exits through a sweat gland, initiates de-miniaturisation, stares amazed at his resurrected love.