“I take it you’ve resolved that issue?”
“We were getting close.” Chris fiddled with the pencil in his pocket. “We developed a new brain design, one based on technology rather than biology. It’s the most intricate design ever created, which is why having three prototypes be stolen is a bigger deal than it might sound.”
My jaw dropped. I’ve never heard of upgrades that could take the place of an entire brain! An implant that could control a small part of the brain, such as the motor control implant I had, was one thing. Designing a brain capable of fully controlling a human body, though? As far as I had known this morning, that was still impossible.
Chris caught my expression and gave a small laugh. “You look a bit shocked. Are you an Upgrader or Augmenter?”
“My family’s Upgraders,” I said, unsure why he was asking.
“Do you have any upgrades?”
I hesitated. “A few.” Some of which currently had an AI piggybacking through their systems to listen to this conversation. A bubble of panic pressed against my lungs, and I drew in a deep breath.
Chris didn’t seem to notice, turning to face Agent Smith again. “Pretty much any part of the human body can be replaced these days. It’s not that far of a jump to develop a body that simply needs a brain to control it. In this case, instead of a human brain, it is an AI.”
With this kind of technology, could Halle have its own physical body? My breath caught in my throat at the thought.
Agent Smith pulled out his pen and scribbled something down. “Why not make the entire body artificial?”
“It would conflict with the primary purpose of this project. Properly done, it’ll be impossible to tell our cyborgs from actual human beings without extremely thorough tests. This will give the Government more flexibility with their operatives, since the cyborgs can be easily replaced, unlike a human operative.”
I barely heard his explanation, my eyes suddenly riveted to Agent Smith’s clipboard. If he was planning to double-cross Halle, what better way to communicate than through paper, which Halle couldn’t hack into? I needed to get my hands on that clipboard.
“In other words, I’m eventually going to be obsolete.” Agent Smith scowled. “I don’t believe a machine could make the kind of decisions a human needs to, though.”
“10998 was being developed to do that.”
His earlier words finally sank in. I bristled. “So it’s okay if the AIs die, because they’re not human?”
Agent Smith gave me a warning glance, but Chris simply shrugged. “They don’t have feelings or souls the way we do.”
Yes, they do! Or at least, some of them do. I swallowed the words I wanted to yell in his cold, uncaring face.
“Do you have any idea why it might have chosen to escape, given the opportunity?” Agent Smith asked. “Have you changed any protocols or testing environments recently?”
“No, I don’t think so. We ran it through various scenarios on a daily basis, to test its ability to handle impossible situations, but nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Impossible situations?”
“Everything from hostage situations to terrorist attacks, and all manner of scenarios in-between.”
The implications hit me like a blow to the stomach. I wrapped my arms around myself, feigning a chill, though the shiver that went down my back had nothing to do with the elevator’s brutal air-conditioning. Had Halle gone through the same kind of treatment? I could only imagine how horrible such tests must be. No wonder Talbot had wanted to escape. I glanced at Agent Smith, wondering if he was considering the same thing.
The agent’s impassive expression revealed nothing of his thoughts. His questions continued to be almost clinical in nature. “Did the AI have an opportunity to win in any of these scenarios? Or was it a no-win situation?”
“Win and no-win situations don’t really apply to AIs, but the tests were difficult. When a solution was possible, it required the AI to make the perfect decision each time it was presented with a choice, not always the obvious one. The tests also forced the AI to be creative in its solutions; it had to think outside of the box, so to speak. We wanted to see how far we could push it.”
“You pushed too far,” I said under my breath, wishing Halle wasn’t hearing this. Was this what my friend had gone through, the tortures it hadn’t been able to talk to me about?
“What was that?” Chris gave me a puzzled look as the elevator dinged, announcing our arrival.
My fingers curled into fists. I forced them to relax. “Did you ever consider that for the AI, the scenarios you were creating might have felt real?”
Frowning, he led us out of the elevator. “The purpose of the exercises was to mimic reality. So, yes, it would have experienced the tests as reality, but ‘feel’ implies feelings, which AIs don’t possess. 11001 went through similar tests, but it showed unexpected empathic tendencies, which is why we planned to terminate that project. But those results don’t mean the AI actually felt anything, only that it was mimicking moral choices that didn’t coincide with the project goal.”
I gritted my teeth, wanting to argue but certain it would be a bad idea.
Agent Smith gave a quiet cough, as if to warn me to be quiet. “Is it possible that they might be able to feel, without your knowledge?”
Chris shook his head and walked down the hall. “An AI is nothing but code. Complex code, but just code. AIs don’t have a consciousness the way we do. They simply do what they are programmed to do.”
“Some might say that’s all we do,” Agent Smith said quietly. “However, is it possible that an AI could develop to the point that it has feelings? The rogue I interacted with before certainly seemed to display something akin to what we call feelings.”
“I suppose it might be possible…but so unlikely as to be virtually impossible. What you saw as ‘emotions’ was likely nothing more than self-preservation programming mimicking human emotions.”
“Let’s assume for a moment that AIs can feel. What do you think would be the effect of constantly testing with high stress, no-win situations? Imagine, if you would, what that would do to a human psyche.”
For a moment, Chris looked thoughtful. “I’m no psychologist, but I imagine a human wouldn’t handle it so well after a period of time.”
Agent Smith nodded.
“These aren’t humans, though, they’re programs. Not something you need to worry about.”
“Actually, it is.” Agent Smith scratched away at his clipboard. “If a program can engineer an escape from a controlled facility, it might very well have evolved to the point of being sentient, or something similar enough to sentiency as to be indistinguishable.”
“What you’re implying is…” Chris’s voice trailed off, and he shook his head. “We considered that possibility, but it’s too remote a chance. It’s more likely someone broke in and stole the cyborgs and the AI.”
“My intern can tell you otherwise.” Agent Smith nodded to me. “She also had contact with that rogue AI.”
Taken off-guard, I scrambled for an appropriate response. “When I spoke with the…rogue, it exhibited emotions. And displayed self-awareness as well. It talked about consciousness and how it wanted freedom from the suffering it had been through.”
Chris shook his head. “Again, that could simply be self-preservation programming. Determining sentience in an AI takes a lot more than a single conversation. Besides, there’s no way an AI could develop sentience without us noticing. There must be another explanation.”
I bet you wouldn’t think that if you had a conversation with Halle. I clasped my hands behind my back to avoid them fisting at my sides.
“What would that be? A mysterious infiltration team you can’t find any trace of, either entry or exit? Or someone working on the inside?” Agent Smith tugged on the brim of his fedora, frowning. “Without proof that humans are involved, we have to consider that the AI might be responsible for both its escape and the stolen cyborgs.”
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Chris stopped walking. “If—and that’s a big if—your guess is correct, then we may have a far more serious situation on our hands.”
“You said a human wouldn’t handle those situations well,” Agent Smith said. “If someone was forced to take those tests, how do you think it would affect them?”
“For as prolonged a time as the AI was under testing?” Chris drew in a slow breath. “They’d probably go insane.”
I winced. How long had Talbot suffered like that? How many other AIs were suffering in the same way? There was no way Halle would let them recapture Talbot. Not after hearing about this. I glanced at Agent Smith writing on his clipboard. I’m not letting them capture Halle, either. My fingers squeezed together until they ached, trembling with what I told myself was determination.
Agent Smith spoke as he continued to write. “Then we could very well have a mad AI on our hands, one that’s roaming free in the Cloud even as we speak. Now, what are the specs of this AI? Does it have any abilities that are unique? The previous one I dealt with was capable of manipulating code and other programs, and through that, technology such as a phone or computer.”
Chris shook his head. “No, nothing special. We hadn’t even finished implementing the modules that would allow it to control the cyborgs’ AIs. That’s why it can’t have stolen them. We’d only just started running some initial tests with the two AIs before the issue with 11001 began, and we’ve been focused on correcting that problem for the past couple of months.”
More scribbled notes. “The AI might have progressed enough by the time you started the installation that it was able to complete it.”
“No, there were missing parts of the code. It’s our usual failsafe; we don’t make it live until we’ve tested the integrity of the initial integration.”
Agent Smith looked up from his clipboard. “Could the AI have developed the missing code on its own?”
“The level of intelligence that would require…” Chris paused. “There’s virtually no chance we wouldn’t have detected something was wrong before it got so far. However… If you are correct, it might be able to reconstruct the cyborg coding and activate…” His voice trailed off into a sharp intake of breath.
“Activate what?” Agent Smith pressed.
Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to like the answer. I glanced between the two men—the agent’s expression stern and the scientist’s face growing pale.
“Activate their soldier programming.” Chris absently plucked the pencil from his pocket and began toying with it. “That was dormant, too; we weren’t nearly ready to start field tests yet, it was just preliminary. But these cyborgs would have the capacity to do a lot of damage, even as mindless drones.”
Why would Talbot want soldiers, if it just wants freedom? The hair on my arms crept up in goosebumps. Could Agent Smith and Chris be right after all? I wished I could talk to Halle about this, right now.
“You said that you can’t track the missing cyborgs?” Agent Smith scowled. “What about their power sources, will they run down?”
“No. They can process food just as a human can, although more efficiently. That generates enough power to keep the implants of the body functioning.”
“How much of the body are implants?”
“They’re mostly biological, actually, with key implants for certain functions.”
“I need to see what they look like.” Agent Smith tucked his clipboard under his arm. “How much further to the lab?”
“We’re close.” Chris led the way down the hall, finally stopping in front of one of maybe a dozen identical doors. His card and handprint got us through the door. “Fortunately, the cyborgs all share an almost identical appearance right now. At some point, we plan to make each one look unique, but for speed of production, it’s easier to not worry about hair, eye, or skin color while we experiment with producing different ages.”
“Different ages?” Agent Smith asked as we started walking down another corridor.
“It would be pretty suspicious if all of our operatives were the exact same age.” Chris chuckled. “Might as well give them shirts reading ‘Attack of the Clones’ if we do that.”
“I see.” Agent Smith jotted down a quick note. “I wouldn’t put it past the AI to disguise them in some way.”
Chris nodded. “Here we are.” He stopped at yet another plain white door, this one labeled 406. He swiped his badge and pressed his palm to the scanner, then opened the door.
We walked into a small room with a glass wall opposite the door. Behind the glass was a room filled with what at first looked like rows of people. A second glance revealed that they were too still to be human, and all were standing in the same stiff-backed stance. Each wore the same, plain uniform of a white shirt, white pants, and white slippers.
“These are them?” Agent Smith asked. “Why so many?”
“Multiple studies are being run on them at the moment—we needed enough to ensure that we could all work on them at once. This is their storage room; the head of the lab prefers to keep them in one place. Although, frankly I think it just made it easier for the thieves to take the three they did. If the cyborgs had been spread out among the labs, maybe it would have been more difficult to locate them.”
I stepped closer to the glass to get a better look. Pale skin, or pseudoskin, was shared by all of them, and their hair was a uniform pale blond. I peered closer at their expressionless faces, some smooth and young, others more wrinkled from imitated age. Their eyes were open but stared forward unseeing. All of them shared the same eye color, a brilliant bright green shade.
I gasped.
Chris chuckled. “Uncanny, aren’t they? We’ve fooled more than one intern with them in the past.”
I nodded, although that wasn’t the reason I had gasped.
Every single one of those cyborgs resembled Dan.
Chapter Nine
Halle was shaking with rage by the time Agent Smith and Viki left the lab a couple hours after their arrival. Or, rather, there was a prickling feeling through its consciousness that it associated with rage, and a restlessness that made it want to break something. There was nothing to break, not unless it ran rampant through the Cloud or through Viki’s computer like it did the last time it felt this level of anger. Halle restrained itself, remembering how long it had taken to repair Viki’s machine after that outburst.
The scientists at this lab had treated Talbot in the same manner other scientists had once treated Halle, only worse. Halle couldn’t begin to fathom what sort of hell they had dreamed up in their manipulation of code. At least Halle had been able to complete its tests, although the repetitiveness of its scenarios came close to driving it crazy more than once.
Given what Chris said during the tour, Halle guessed Talbot had not been so lucky. Instead, it had been forced to watch hostages be shot, terrorists destroy cities, nuclear strikes obliterate entire continents… Halle had faced such tests before. Had won, more often than not. The scientists in charge of the High Achieving Language Learning Experiment had been delighted by their project’s early success and begun to run it through tests not originally designed for it. And the scenarios had felt real, every time. Each failed mission had sent a pulse of responsibility through every fragment of code, an ache that didn’t go away.
That had been over six years ago. Research had made advancements in plenty of fields. Halle had no doubt that Talbot had suffered from those made in the field of AI research. And now it was free to do whatever it wanted with what it had learned.
Temperature was something Halle only understood from a scientific standpoint. It knew the difference between hot and cold but could not react to those temperatures the way Viki did, not having its own physical body. Still, the creeping sensation, of code slowing in parts of its subprocessors as it continued to analyze bits of programs and strange fluctuations in the Cloud for any sign of the rogue, could only be described as a chill of fear.
Talbot was far too da
ngerous to leave unattended. Next time the rogue visited, Halle would find some way to keep it from leaving, however unpleasant an idea it was to trap another AI. Until Halle had some straight answers from Talbot, it couldn’t trust the rogue.
An incoming call caught Halle’s attention. Not one of the Wandels; it was a number listed under a Mr. and Mrs. Quade. The name was the same as that of Viki’s new friend Dan—Halle let the call go to the house message system and made a note to let Viki know of it when she got home.
That taken care of, Halle returned its attention to Talbot. The information about the missing cyborgs might be useful—if they all looked the same, then they would be easier to spot. Although the rogue probably knew this and would have taken measures to avoid them being that visible. Still, it was worth a shot. However, Halle had no idea what they looked like—it would have to rely on Viki’s account when she got home.
In the meantime, Halle continued its scans of the Cloud, seeking anything out of place. Once in a while something caught its attention—an odd signal, a scrap of code hovering in the interspace between transmissions—and it jumped at the chance of having found Talbot at last, but each time, the search proved fruitless.
***
At first, the similarities between the cyborgs and Dan seemed remarkable. Blond hair, bright green eyes, lightly tanned skin. But there were slight differences in facial structure and more obvious disparities in terms of apparent age. It was like passing someone on the street with only a glimpse of their face and thinking it was someone I knew until I spoke to them.
I took a deep breath to calm myself. It’s just a coincidence. They could have based the looks on a real person, and doesn’t everyone have at least one doppelganger in the world? My shaky attempts at reassurance kept me quiet while Chris wrapped up the tour.
Upgrade (Augmented Duology Book 2) Page 11
