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“How...?” whispered Eden, completely shocked.
“The Cores all have the same architecture, Kitty!” He suddenly waved his arms. “Once you got the key to one, you have the key to all! The Architect did a good job initially, but all the dumbbells who tried to duplicate his work are no smarter than waffle toasters! And trying to make thief baboons protect something they don’t understand? They wouldn’t be able to increase the Cores’ securities even if their butts depended on it! Those guys wouldn’t even be able to do a three-piece puzzle!”
Eden sighed.
From what she knew, it was true. The Core was actually doing a great job of defending itself... by itself. The builders were only able to add security rooms around it to prevent intruders like herself from just jumping in without any sort of security first, but fundamentally, the Chicago Core was the only one to be able to modify itself, and it had been evolving since its creation around thirty years ago.
“So... You and the Edge know how to hack the Core itself?”
“Yes, ma’am. I mean, most of them.”
“What do you mean by most of them?”
Loir tilted his head left and right like a pendulum.
“Well... You know how the first Core was built here, in Chicago? It’s the oldest and meanest one. The Big Boss of Cores. The Bowser of all Cores! The others are mini Bowsers, so easy to kill, but here? Nope!”
“You said you guys could hack all the Cores!”
“All the Cores but one! This one, Kitty. The Big Bad Boy of the bunch, the Chicago Core. The Joker to this Gotham, the Chucky to this House, the Al Capone to this—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get the picture. Why this one, though? If the others are copies?”
“Because it’s the Architect’s best work before the old man disappeared, Kitty! God’s masterpiece! He wouldn’t let his epic creation get as stupid as it could become in the hands of some annoying little handless peanuts...”
“Loir,” sighed Eden, tired of his antics.
“He made it smarter!” exclaimed the hacker, visibly delighted by this information. “The Architect worked for years on the Chicago Core to make it smarter, and he succeeded! It’s like a newer version, one we don’t have access to!”
“...So the other Cores are merely a copy of the first version of the Chicago Core, but because the Chicago Core was upgraded into some sort of... 2.0 version, the Edge couldn’t hack it?”
“Yep,” nodded Loir, grabbing his cup again.
Eden frowned. It did explain a lot of things... She had always wondered why Chicago seemed like such an important city to the other Cores. Historically, the Northern States Republic Union regarded New York City and Washington as its important cities, while the Southern Confederation was centered around Houston... Yet, Chicago was the one city all the other Cores seemed to turn toward; people from the other Cores were reportedly trying to migrate there, and this city was privileged by having a big Congress between the States’ Senators.
“If he managed to make the Chicago A.I. smarter, why didn’t he do it to the other Cores?” asked Dante.
“...Because he disappeared,” whispered Eden.
“Bingo! Ten points for the little Kitty! Exactly. The Saint Padre of the Cores went missing around twenty years ago, right after he completed his masterpiece, but just before he could duplicate his latest Chef d’oeuvre to the other Cores. No one knows what happened to the old grandpa, but most likely? He’s dead.”
Eden remained silent.
The story about the Architect disappearing was one of the most known among the Cores, even though the government had tried hard to conceal it. It was just too big. For several decades, the man called the Architect had been considered a living hero of the modern world, one who had literally forged the twenty-second century. Originally, the Cores were simply meant to be isolated cities that remained independent of each other and the humans’ main habitations while the rest of the land tried to return to its once prosperous state. Without the Architect, they would have been nothing more than bubbles of cities where the humans gathered.
The Core was now a fully autonomous system, capable of self-regulating its food productivity, energy use, and ensuring the livelihood of each inhabitant. Like the queen bee that controlled everything in its hive, the Core’s newfound intelligence had been both the salvation of humanity and its jailer. It was no secret, among hackers, that the Core controlled the government just as much as the government thought it controlled the Core. The superior intelligence of that thing allowed it to overrule human decisions if it came to think its own were better, and most of the time, that was precisely the case.
As a result, the Architect had been seen as both a savior to humankind and a genius that made sure the future generations would survive, but the man had also received heavy criticism for allowing a machine to rule over humanity. Not only that, but after it had first been put into place, the government had used the Core to justify every time they had chosen to murder a citizen or send them to the other side of the wall, banished here to the Suburbs. The Core calculated how many people could survive inside its walls, and the closer the humans were to that number, the more comfortable they could live. At first, everyone had thought this system would be fairer, allowing all to receive the same as their neighbor, abolishing the differences between the rich and the poor.
Things hadn’t turned out that way.
After just a few years of experimenting with the Core’s System, anger had grown within the population. Some were against sharing and wanted more, always more, than the little rations of food, small spaces to live in, and constant monitoring of all their expenses. The solution had been easy: the fewer people the Core had to take into account, the more those who were left would have to share between themselves. Hence, the government had begun its mass trials, recorded in history books as the “Great Legal Purge”. Under the cover of deep reformation of its society, the government had simply killed or kicked out the people who couldn’t afford to stay, the ones who were easy to kick out, and the ones they could justify expelling. With mass propaganda ensuring the population that only “criminals” were expelled, Eden had seen, through her eyes as a child, the extensive list of people who were asked to leave the Core. She had seen on TV the long lines of citizens being kicked out, officially “voluntarily leaving”. There had even been fake testimonies of people pretending to leave because they didn’t deserve their spot in the Core and wanted to atone for their crimes by being outside the walls...
That reality had only been revealed to Eden much later, once she was on the other side of the wall, with her abilities as a hacker allowing her to see what the government didn’t want the people to know.
“So how... how did the Edge crack the Core’s code? Who are they, and why did you leave?”
“So curious, my Kitty!” giggled Loir. “Well first, it’s not like the Architect was the first hacker ever... You’re a bit too young for that my Kitty, but for a lot of people in our world, hacking the smartest hacker’s work had become the most exciting game ever! Back a decade or two ago, the entire cyber-underground world was filled with cute little innocent hackers like me, dreaming to beat the Grand Master!”
