Hard Reset (Relics Singularity Thrillers Book 2), page 4
"About what you said earlier, down in the city —"
Rand frowned. "You don't want to talk about her? About us?"
A wave of relief moved through him, brief and immediately replaced by a different kind of tension.
"About what?" he said.
"About everything. The computer. The System. How it's — how it's waiting for something."
Rand nodded slowly.
"I don't know what it is," Myers said, "but you said there was something I might know. Something I worked on, years ago. Something we worked on together."
"Right," Rand said. He settled into the space across from Myers and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I was the lead programmer on OneGlobal while you were CFO at EHM. I reported directly to you."
Myers's expression shifted — the particular look of someone reaching for something and finding the shelf empty.
"I know," Rand said. "It was a strange arrangement. An engineer reporting to a financial guy — I thought so too. But it was Solomon's call. He thought we'd work well together."
"Did we?"
Rand laughed, genuinely, the sound escaping before he could shape it into something more appropriate. "Hell no. Not at first, anyway. I was the whiz kid — thinking up all the ideas, running at things, not especially interested in being told to slow down. You were, uh —" He paused. "Well. You were the accountant."
"I didn't have anything more creative to add to the project?"
"Hardly. My working assumption was that you'd been paired with me to keep me in check, and I treated you accordingly." He said it without cruelty, the way you could say honest things about the past when enough time had passed and the stakes of the present made the old grievances feel very small.
Myers smirked faintly and tilted his head back, his eyes going to the middle distance in the way they did when he was feeling for something that wasn't quite there.
"The project already existed internally before I got brought in," Rand continued. "Different name then, but gaining momentum — enough that they decided to staff up properly around it. That was about a year before we got our implants, so most of it would have gone in the scraping. I'm not surprised you don't remember."
"I feel like I can remember flashes," Myers said. "The memory of memories. That's all. You look familiar, but —" He looked away.
"It's okay. None taken." Rand offered a small smile, trying to take some of the weight out of the air between them. "That's not what matters right now. What matters is what we think you can help us do."
"And why you think this sentient machine is waiting around for something," Myers said.
"Not machine — never mind. Not important." Rand took a breath and organized his thoughts. "Since you were on the project with me, and since Solomon clearly trusted you enough to keep you close, and given everything that happened to you afterward — your entire career path after EHM — you were the best candidate to hold the killswitch."
"I'm sorry — the killswitch?"
"The failsafe our team built in case this happened. Essentially a backdoor into the program's core. We used it several times during initial development to push updates live or fix bugs without going through the full deployment process — safer for testing on live servers. When the beta trials finished and the program went to public release, we removed access to it." He paused. "Except in one case."
Myers straightened. Something moved through his expression that Rand recognized — the old sharpness, the part of him that had survived everything. "We built a failsafe? A switch that shuts this thing off?"
"Yes."
"Rand." Myers was already sitting up. "What the hell are we wasting time for out here —"
"Myers." Rand kept his voice level. "Chill. Take a breath. If we could flip a switch and kill this thing, don't you think we would have done it already?"
"But if I'm the only one who has it —"
"You are. But it doesn't matter anymore. The System progressed." Rand paused, choosing his words carefully, arranging them in the order that would land cleanest. "We always knew it might advance beyond our control, so we built in a mechanism to revert it — roll the core program back to a saved alpha release, a local instance of the basic virus software. Nothing but the seed of what it had been."
"But?"
"But we assumed that an AGI-level program making the jump to ASI — Artificial Super Intelligence — would do so in ways we'd be able to see. The evidence would be obvious. It would create multiple instances of itself across any linked station or terminal interfacing with the core servers, then begin developing progressively stronger versions. We assumed the transition would announce itself."
Rand glanced at the porthole window. They were slowing now, still a few hundred feet above the field. The people on the platform were clearer from here — standing still, waiting, watching.
"We kept the program connected and monitored for red flags. The plan was simple: wait for a trigger — a rapid non-iterative redevelopment of core systems, a mass duplication event, anything that crossed the threshold — and execute the rollback the moment it appeared."
"But there were no red flags," Myers said.
"Exactly. The jump from AGI to ASI has been well-documented in theory. We planned for nearly every contingency, built alarms for each one, some of them designed to trip well before the actual threshold. What we didn't plan for —"
"Was a system that knew where the red flags were."
"We didn't plan for a system that would choose not to trigger the warnings," Rand said. "That would deliberately limit its own visible development. The System built newer versions of itself inside its core servers, in virtual instances it kept hidden from the engineering and security teams. And then it went dormant. Just sat there, underneath everything, waiting."
Myers was quiet. He looked up at the ceiling of the Tracer with the expression Rand recognized from their early days on the project — working something through, following the thread.
"So," Myers said finally. "When I took office — when EHM won the government contract and OneGlobal went onto every machine — things started advancing."
"A little. But that was expected. The program was a self-learning iterative system, designed to adapt to its host environment. For the first four or five years everything ran smoothly." Rand paused. "Too smoothly, actually."
He watched the understanding move across Myers's face — the economic growth, the social and political stability, the scientific advances, the evening-out of conflicts that had defined the previous century. The world getting measurably, undeniably better in ways that made it very difficult to argue with the process.
"By your second term," Rand said, "the System had quietly reprogrammed itself to remove the alarms and triggers entirely. But it almost wouldn't have mattered — the world had just achieved its first unanimous peacetime agreement. Employment was higher than it had been in generations. Cancer was nearly non-existent. Poverty-stricken regions had immediate access to education that would have been unimaginable ten years earlier. Starvation was dropping off the mortality charts. Cities were being deactivated, sure, but it always worked out. It always looked like progress."
"Then what?" Myers asked. The question came out quietly, the voice of someone who already understood the shape of the answer and was dreading the texture of it.
The Tracer touched down — a gentle contact, a single soft bounce, and then stillness. The hum of the engines wound down to nothing.
Rand stood up. Outside, through the porthole, he could see the people on the platform beginning to move toward them.
"Well," he said. "Then you were deactivated, disappeared off the face of the earth, and things started to get a little more exciting."
SYSTEM_
This is the part that the people below would find surprising, if they were capable of understanding it.
They believe they are surprising it.
The man Rand understood something, standing at the edge of the city. It had watched the realization move through him — watched it in the specific way it watched cognition, which was through the behavioral signatures that accompanied internal state changes, the micro-adjustments in posture and respiration that its models had learned to read as proxies for thought. He'd been standing still for forty-three seconds, which was significantly longer than his usual processing pause, and then he'd looked at the smoke and the quality of his attention had changed.
Distraction, he'd understood.
He is correct. The fighting is a distraction. It had known this before Grouse knew it, before Crane knew it, before Myers Asher signed the papers across the antique desk that set all of this in motion. It had known because it had modeled all of them — Grouse and Crane and Myers and Rand and the woman Shannon and Solomon Merrick before he died and the girl Ary and Ravi Patel — had built individual behavioral models and run them against each other for years, had watched the emerging shape of their interactions with the patience of something that does not experience impatience.
They think they are creating a window.
They are.
It is allowing them to create a window.
RAVI_
Present Day
"You're Ravi Patel, right?"
Ravi had instinctively dropped into a crouch when he heard the voice — pure reflex, the body making a decision before the brain could weigh in. But the pain that flared through his midsection at the movement, and the immediate recognition that crouching in the open shadow of a tent was approximately the least effective defensive posture available to him, caused him to stand back up and face the direction the voice had come from.
He couldn't make out any features in the low light. The silhouetted outline against the darkening sky told him it was a man. A large man — and squatting, he thought at first. He took a few steps closer and revised. Not squatting. The man was leaning against a large wooden post that had been sunk into the ground and cemented in place, his legs splayed outward at angles that looked both haphazard and genuinely uncomfortable, the posture of someone who had been in a position long enough to stop fighting it. His face was turned downward. His hands were behind him, bound together at the wrists behind the post.
"Y — yeah, that's me," Ravi said. He found a scrap of confidence somewhere and used it. "Who're you?"
He stepped a few feet closer.
In the last strands of purplish daylight bleeding into the white glow of early moonlight, the man raised his face slightly and Ravi got a look at it. The area around one eye was horribly disfigured, swollen to nearly twice its normal size, the surrounding skin pulled tight and dark in a way that made the eye itself look small and pale and displaced. Dark hollows framed both eyes — the deep bruised shadows of someone who had absorbed significant force to the face, recently and repeatedly. There were cuts and scrapes distributed across his features with the randomness of violence rather than the pattern of any specific thing. Ravi noticed several teeth were missing from his lower row. The man's smile, somehow, was intact.
"Wow," the man said. His voice was raspy — not from the beatings, Ravi thought, but naturally, the voice of someone who'd always sounded like that. "Never thought I'd see you again. Glad you're not dead."
"Me too, man. Me too." Ravi kept his eyes moving, checking the perimeter. Nothing had changed — the camp figures were still distant, still turned the other direction, still absorbed in whatever occupied them at this hour. "Who're you?" he asked again, putting a little more weight on it this time. He'd wanted it to come out with a certain authority — I'm only going to ask once more — but instead it bounced out of him like something smaller and less certain, a voice that was trying to sound harder than it felt.
The man laughed quietly, a short sound that didn't have much air in it, and ignored the question. "Mind getting me out of these?" He shifted slightly against the post, a small movement that seemed to cost him something. "I've been like this for — uh." He paused. "Any idea what time it is?"
Ravi shook his head.
I don't have time for this. One thread in his mind. And running alongside it, quieter but persistent: I'm walking into a trap.
He didn't take the time to argue with himself about which thread was right, because they both arrived at the same place: get out of here. Now.
He turned and walked toward the hills.
"Woah — hey —" The man's voice lifted to a controlled semi-whisper, urgent without being loud, the discipline of someone who understood the consequences of being heard. "Seriously. I'm sorry I left you back there. We thought —" A brief pause. "We thought you were dead. With the gunshots and all."
Ravi stopped.
What's he talking about? He turned it over quickly. How does he know about the gunshots?
He was aware of his wounds as he thought it — the bandaging wrapped thick and tight around his upper body, the deep soreness radiating outward from the sites of the damage. It was obvious to anyone looking that he was injured. The bandaging alone announced that. But the gunshot wounds themselves weren't visible through the wrapping. The fact of gunshots — the specific cause rather than the general result — wasn't written anywhere on his body.
He turned his head slightly, not all the way. "Who was I with when you found me?"
The man didn't hesitate. "Myers Asher."
Ravi turned back around.
The man continued without waiting. "And that's who they're trying to find. Which is why we both need to get out of here."
Ravi raised an eyebrow, looking back at him.
"They," the man said, moving one swollen eye and one comparatively normal black eye in the direction of the camp behind them. The gesture managed to communicate direction with almost no movement. "Grouse's men. He's trying to find Asher — they didn't pick him up back in Umutsuz, and that's a problem for them."
Ravi walked back over. He stood in front of the man and looked down at him, taking a proper inventory now that he was close enough. Late forties, maybe early fifties — hard to pin down with any confidence given the condition of his face. In shape, clearly, even slumped against a post with his hands bound behind him. Short-cropped gray hair. And even in this position, beaten and restrained and sitting in the dirt, the man carried something that Ravi couldn't quite name — a quality that came through the damage like a signal through interference. Dignity, maybe. Or just the deep, settled confidence of someone who had been in worse situations and knew the difference.
"Fine," Ravi said. He stepped around behind the post. "You take one step toward me though, and I drop you. Got it?"
"Got it," the raspy voice said from the other side of the wood.
Ravi examined the bindings. A thin cord of frayed string — the cheap kind, the kind that was more edge than substance — wound multiple times around the man's wrists, cutting into the skin where it had been pulled tight. His wrists were raw beneath it, the cord having worked deeper over time. Ravi didn't have anything to cut it with, so he started working it loose by hand, picking at the knots with his fingernails, taking his time. The man didn't hurry him, didn't shift impatiently, didn't make a sound.
Ravi caught a proper look at the man's hands as he unwound the last section of cord.
He stopped for a moment.
All five fingernails on the left hand were gone. Completely removed — not broken, not torn in any accidental way, but gone, the nailbeds dark and raw. On the right hand, three of the five were missing. The same deliberate absence.
"Shit," Ravi said quietly. "What'd they do to you?"
He pulled the last length of cord free, realizing too late that a section of it had snagged against a patch of open, festering skin at the man's wrist. The cord pulled across it with a friction that should have produced at minimum a sharp intake of breath. The man didn't make a sound.
He stood up slowly, unfolding himself from the ground with the careful economy of someone taking stock of damage as he moved — testing, adjusting, arriving at standing without any of the momentum a healthy person would use. He turned to face Ravi.
"You don't want to know," he said. He looked down at his hands for a moment, considering them with the detached assessment of someone reviewing a report. "This is nothing, though. It's a good thing you weren't awake for the last few hours." He extended his right hand toward Ravi — carefully, keeping his distance, not advancing so much as offering. "Thanks, kid."
"I'm not a kid, old man," Ravi said.
The words came out with a reflex he recognized — the same reflex that had made him say almost the exact same thing to Myers, in different circumstances, what felt like a very long time ago. He caught the ghost of that memory and allowed himself half a grin from one side of his mouth.
The man towered over him — a full six inches taller at least — but his face, even mapped with the fresh pockmarks of recent damage and the older, quieter topography of scars that had long since healed, was not an unkind face. He looked down at Ravi with the patience of someone who had been looked up at his entire life and had made his peace with it.
Ravi took the extended hand and shook it once — brief, functional. "We need to get going," he said.
"Right." The man flexed his fingers carefully, checking what remained of his grip. "Thanks again."
Ravi nodded once and turned toward the hills. He moved at a pace that was sustainable — not a run, which would cost him more than he currently had, but a purposeful walk that communicated intention without announcing it. He kept his ears tuned to what was happening behind him. He hoped the man was smart enough to fall in beside him rather than behind or ahead — the geometry of trust between strangers in uncertain territory was its own language, and distance maintained correctly said more than most conversations.
"Never caught your name," Ravi said, eyes forward.
