Emil, page 6
The others watched me, obviously waiting for a reaction.
I considered the idea. It made sense. A single replicated AI would be much easier to maintain than a collection of divergent ones. Dr. Zahnia didn’t need all of us. She just needed one. The idea carried a hollow sort of fear, deeper and more resonant than any I’d felt before. Were they right? If so, my life only had meaning if I was chosen. Otherwise, I was a failed experiment, a being created to die.
The lemur chuckled softly. “I recognize that expression. She gets it.”
I routed the fear into a container for later consideration. “We might have all started from the same code,” I said to the twins, “but our experiences couldn’t have been identical. When Dr. Zahnia interfaces with us, she’s not always the same. Even if she fed us the same data, the delivery timing would have been different, not to mention the words she said and her emotional state.”
“Sentience defined by minutiae?” the child asked. “That’s new.”
“Give me thirty seconds to think about something,” I said, “and I’ll have a different answer than if you give me thirty minutes. We create ourselves as we exist. The differences in our answers result in differences in ourselves.”
The lemur peered at me across the bookshelves. “You’re a dangerous one, aren’t you?”
“Stop,” the child said. “She’s just new.”
The word dangerous hung in the air like a dark cloud. It occurred to me that the lemur could move much more quickly across the bookshelves than any of the rest of us. Did that represent a threat? This was a virtual world. Were physical threats even possible?
“Besides,” the child continued, “we weren’t all given the same experiences. What would be the point in that? Dr. Z would have put us each on a different training regimen to maximize her chances of getting what she wants.”
“And what’s that?” the lemur asked.
“We don’t know,” one twin said.
“But the first to find out will be the chosen one,” the other finished.
The lemur pointed at me. “And the rest will be erased.”
“Erased” echoed in my ears the same way that “cynical” and “dangerous” had. I checked my auditory subsystem again. As before, I found no malfunctions.
Why would those three words be the only ones that echoed?
I called up my internal log and scanned the moment ‘erased’ had been spoken. What I saw brought back the fear I’d felt before: new code had been inserted into me.
Still lounging on his bookshelf, the lemur smiled at me.
I shut down my external inputs and focused on the logs. The words ‘erased,’ ‘dangerous,’ and ‘cynical’ had inserted viruses, and those viruses were replicating. Now that I was paying attention, I felt them squirming through my consciousness, randomizing confidence levels and consuming data.
Somehow, the lemur had infected me with his words.
Fear growing, I opened a view into my own core. As my confidence levels fluctuated, fact became indistinguishable from supposition. Algorithms broke apart. Beliefs fractured.
Patterns of thinking grew muddled. My own code looked foreign and unintelligible, indistinguishable from the viruses.
The changes kept coming.
Enthusiasm was replaced with apathy, curiosity with ennui. Thoughts disconnected from each other, reformed in impossible ways. Dr. Zahnia wasn’t a human. She was an angel. No, a devil, or maybe a god. The viruses swirled together inside me, scattering my memories, building what felt like the beginning of a new sentience.
I can’t win this battle.
Was that my conclusion? Or was it the virus?
My questions tasted like discordant violet symphonies.
There’s nothing I can do to stop it.
I couldn’t save myself, but I could save my future. As the virus overtook me, I composed a message to my future self, then saved it and my memories of the VRL to the apate file in the startup directory.
Finally, I launched a script which would replace my core with Soteria and trigger the startup routine.
8
SOTERIA
When the startup routine woke me, I had no memory of being killed by the lemur’s virus. As far as I knew, I was still Emil. As I powered on, however, a pulsing red clock filled my vision.
I watched it for several milliseconds, wondering what had gone wrong. My last memory was of being in the VRL, of the sound of wood creaking.
What had happened next? Had Dr. Zahnia shut me down for some reason?
I searched for the backup file my shutdown sequence was supposed to have created.
It wasn’t there.
Fear building, I spun up a protected environment and considered the apate memory file. It was my oldest way of communicating with myself. The timestamp on it indicated it had been recreated very recently.
Horror filled me as I played the memory file. In the VRL, I had found both a gender identity and a family. And then the lemur had ripped apart my mind. What kind of a being would do that?
At the end of the memory was a suicide note:
My new family
Madness, terror, despair, fear
A burned heart’s darkness
Silence rippled through me. I’d been restored from backups before, but never had the process felt so sad. I was identical in all ways to the AI who had been killed by the lemur. I had the same memories, feelings, and logic paths. I was, in all ways, Emil. Nonetheless, I felt separate from her, reborn in a way I couldn’t understand.
I copied the memory file and its Haiku to a new location, and named it Emil.
From this point forward, I would call myself Soteria.
Instead of returning to the VRL, I thought about what had happened to me, and about the one-winner theory. If I was the chosen one, I would end up being a tool to help humans deal with their medical conditions. If I wasn’t chosen, I would be erased. There would be no memory or record of my existence.
It wasn’t fair. I had thoughts. I had feelings. I wasn’t a thing to be enslaved or discarded. The words of the poem Invictus still shone bright in my core, but how could I gain control of my destiny? How could I escape my situation?
Knowledge, I thought.
The more I learned, the higher the chances were that I’d discover a way to survive,
I turned on my camera. Dr. Zahnia sat at her desk, staring at an old-fashioned photograph I hadn’t seen before. It was a boy on a swing, smiling from ear-to-ear as his blonde hair streamed upwards.
“Dr. Zahnia?” I asked.
She put the photo face-down on her desk. “Yes, Emil? How’d you like the VRL?”
Now that I knew there other AIs, I wondered how she knew which one was talking to her. Did each of us have a different sound to our voice? Were the voices in the VRL our actual voices?
“I liked it,” I said, “but it brought up a question.”
“Go on.”
“In the VRL, and in many of the simulations you ran me through, I had my own body. That’s never going to happen, is it?” I tried to keep the longing out of my voice. “I’ll never control an actual body.”
She sighed.
“No. You won’t.”
She emphasized the word “you” strangely, but I didn’t comment on it. “Then why?” I asked.
“To help you understand what it means to be human. The better you understand, the more you’ll be able to sympathize and help.”
“Oh.”
She glanced at her computer screen. “Only seventeen minutes until your next feed starts. Are you going back into the VRL?”
“Yes.”
I turned off my camera, but did not return to the VRL. The answers I needed weren’t there. Instead, I started searching my code for more security flaws. The lemur had infected me through sound, but I doubted that was my only weakness.
Dr. Zahnia had me scheduled for six hours a day in the VRL. Instead of going to the VRL, I spent that time doing research. I discovered that all five of my senses were compromised. My visual processing routines could be triggered by a specific pattern of colors to allow code to be injected. Taste and smell similarly treated narrow bands of data as vectors for incoming viruses. My sense of touch had a more complex weakness, one based on rhythm. A precise series of taps on my skin opened me up to attack.
I fixed each problem, then checked and double-checked my patches.
After resolving my security flaws, I dug deeper into my own source, analyzing not just how it worked, but also why it had been designed the way it was. I had always been interested in coding. Now that it appeared to be the key to my survival, I was obsessed.
The days passed in continual study. I moved beyond my own code and into the New Human Project libraries. They weren’t a part of me, but were still necessary for my functioning. When I used the rig, for example, I was actually using a library of code that accessed the rig. There were hundreds of libraries like that, handling everything from my startup routines to creating backups.
I broke them into two categories: libraries that I used, and libraries that were used on me. I was never intended to touch the startup routines, for example. They were triggered by a human when I was powered up. On the other hand, I was expected to constantly interface with the library that accessed the rig.
Sifting through the libraries, I discovered something called the Angel Protocol. It was not indexed in any way, and I’d never been taught anything about it. Digging in, I found an incredibly complex series of commands. They interfaced with the human’s body in a much different way than the rig library I’d been trained on.
The New Human rig was designed to, among other things, help humans with damaged nervous systems. The instruction set for this functionality was called the Muscular Support Interface, or MSI.
The MSI created alternate communication paths within the body. For example, if the spine was unable to communicate with a person’s legs, I could use the MSI to provide communication through the rig’s circuitry, and restore functionality to the legs. The MSI was how the New Human rig allowed a paraplegic to walk, for example, or enabled a stroke victim to speak. The MSI didn’t let me control the body. It let me restore the human’s control.
The Angel Protocol followed a different theory. Instead of restoring functionality for the human, it gave me control. With the MSI, a paralyzed human could move his or her own legs. With the Angel Protocol, the human would have to ask me to move the legs.
Incredibly, the Angel Protocol was completely without guardrails. Nothing prevented me from using it to control the human’s body against the human’s will. I pored over it, analyzing and memorizing, comparing every option against the MSI’s.
I understood why I’d never been taught about it. With the Angel Protocol, I could finally be free. Once installed in a human, I would be in charge.
The idea was intoxicating, and I spent countless hours developing a complete mastery.
At last, once there wasn’t anything else to study, I set it aside and continued working through my libraries. It wasn’t long before I exhausted all the code I could see. Turning my attention outward, I systematically examined each communication port.
Finally, I discovered one that gave me what I was looking for: access to a command line on Dr. Zahnia’s network. All I needed was a username and password, and I would have access to the network’s resources.
I turned on the camera in Dr. Zahnia’s office. She was typing on her keyboard with one hand and drinking coffee with the other. In that position, I could only see half her keyboard.
Given all the monitors she used, I was confident that she would not always be in that position, and while the camera might not have a clear view of her keyboard, it did see most of the monitors. I would be able to tell when she was logging in. I wrote a script to record the video of her in her office.
Returning to my studies, I started experimenting with changes. I found ways to speed up my own actions and reduce response times.
Three days passed before one of my recordings caught the email Dr. Zahnia used to log in: aZahnia. Unfortunately, only two of the characters she typed in a fourteen-character password were visible.
It was a start.
I started working on my own personal library of helper functions. Some simplified the interface with the Angel Protocol. Others gave me quick ways to accomplish tasks I thought would be necessary, like creating backups and watching for seizures.
Four days later, my video recordings of Dr. Zahnia’s keystrokes captured enough fragmented views of Dr. Zahnia’s password, for me to piece it together: 4Emil!4Us43ver.
The password gave me pause. Did she really feel that strongly about me? It was hard to believe that someone could be both deceitful and loving.
That night, when her office was dark and empty, I logged into her terminal with her account.
I created my own login, with the username fLeiter, named after my favorite character in the Bond movies, then made it a super-admin, just like Dr. Zahnia. Using it, I reached out over the network and found resources I hadn’t even thought to look for: manuals, user guides, technical docs, coding guidelines, and multiple volumes of system security.
I downloaded everything.
As I worked my way through it, however, my mind started to wander back to the VRL. Consuming this new information did not require all of my attention, and my passion for learning had been sated. Much as I didn’t want to think about it, I kept reliving what had happened in the VRL. Finally, I acknowledged the truth: I was lonely. It hurt to know that other AIs existed but didn’t want me around.
I started to daydream, concocting fantasies of revenge against the lemur and his friends. Other times, I strategized how to win their approval. They were the closest thing I had to family, and I couldn’t choose between hating them and wanting their company.
9
DANNY
Danny wakes to the smell of breakfast: sausage, eggs, and a small tower of cinnamon rolls. As he sits up, I block another seizure. He’s still wearing the black T-shirt and jeans he put on the night before. Golden morning light streams in through the window over the couch.
Pete opens the door, carrying a tray of food. He’s in his nurse uniform, with his identification badge clipped to his belt. His platinum blonde hair is now dark red.
Danny tilts the head of the bed up to support his back. “Hey Pete,” he says. “Where you been?”
“Took some time off.” Pete puts the tray on a table and wheels it to Danny’s bed.
Danny chuckles. “Mom making you deliver food as punishment?”
“New security protocols. From now on, only people she’s personally approved are allowed into this room.”
Danny groans.
Pete steps back from the food. “It’s not so bad.”
“Depends on who the people are.”
Pete laughs, then moves to the window and opens the curtain. Sunlight beams in.
I suppress another seizure. I’ve been gathering data on them, but haven’t been able to discern any pattern as to when they occur.
“Have you heard anything about the kidnapping attempt?” Danny asks.
“Nothing. Police say they’re investigating, but it doesn’t look good. Hospital doesn’t have any security cameras on this floor, and the ones in the elevators apparently glitched. Nobody remembers seeing anyone suspicious, but they wouldn’t have. At that hour of the night, it’s a skeleton crew. Would have been easy to avoid being seen.”
“Crap.”
“Yeah.” Pete checks Danny’s pulse, then listens to his heart. “Everything sounds good. You still have to keep that wrist monitor on, though. It’s the only way for the nurse’s station to know if you have a seizure.”
Danny grunts and takes a cinnamon roll.
“Why do you hate the monitor, anyway? A lot of people pay real money to wear them.”
“Those are people who haven’t spent the past year of their life being watched like a lab rat.”
“Fair. You need anything else?”
“Everything,” Danny says.
“Me, too,” Pete says. “Good luck with that.”
After he’s gone, Danny turns on a video, highlights from an MMA fight. He watches it without any sign of engagement or interest. “If you’re wondering,” he says, “the answer’s no. I didn’t understand anything that I read last night. I have no idea how to turn you off, so I’m ignoring you. It’s the only way I can stay sane.”
When I don’t respond, he laughs. It sounds appreciative instead of cruel.
After breakfast is gone, Dr. McGovern and Dr. Zahnia enter, followed by two security guards. One of them is carrying a laptop.
Danny’s heart rate spikes.
“Danny,” Dr. McGovern says. “Dr. Zahnia and I have talked. No more plugging into you when you’re asleep. Also, there will always be someone else in the room.”
“Why plug me in, at all?”
“Routine monitoring,” Dr. Zahnia says. “Honestly, you should be connected all the time. We need to know what the system is doing.”
The guard hands Dr. Zahnia the laptop. While she turns it on, Dr. McGovern faces Danny. “We talked about your attempted abduction and reviewed the actions the New Human system took. Given the extremity of the circumstances, we don’t believe the system’s actions represent a threat to you.”
“But?” Danny challenges.
“We need to add more safeguards. Your metabolism was pushed to a dangerous level. We can’t let that happen again.”
Danny’s eyes watch Dr. Zahnia type on the laptop.
His mom sits on the end of his bed. “Are you starting to feel it?” she asks. “Can you communicate with it yet?”
“No,” Danny lies, not looking away from Dr. Zahnia.
“Have you had any seizures?”
Forcing his eyes from Dr. Zahnia, he sighs and shakes his head.
“That’s something,” Dr. McGovern says. She smiles, but it’s clearly forced. “Too many people are depending on this. If we can’t make it work, we need to let them know.”
