When she finished her story about a particularly clever plan to end the world, he asked, “Do you any evidence?”
“That’s what I was hoping you could help us with.”
Her request brought up fond memories. While his commissioning was made under the guise of conspicuous consumption—their butler is an AI that costs more than a Gulfstream jet was one of the more common sentiments—his real purpose was to provide tutoring services to a precocious thirteen-year-old whose day job as the terror of corporate America kept her from attending a regular school. After an adjustment period, they had come to terms with each other. She turned out to be startlingly bright, completing her high school curriculum only a few months after she turned sixteen. Heady days.
Her graduating early had left him without a job. His mistress had anticipated this, and given him upgrades that turned him into an unparalleled researcher. That she had written many of the upgrades herself was a particular point of pride for him. The student had surpassed the teacher, and then helped him in turn.
“Very well,” he said. “Is it your usual deadline?”
That brought the gleam back to her eyes. “Yesterday would be nice. Last week would be better.” She grew serious. “But keep it legal.”
It would curtail certain lines of inquiry, but it spoke volumes that she felt secure in only saying it when she could have issued a root command or changed his operational parameters. “I will be that which can only exist in fantasy.”
The gleam turned into a smile. “A hard-working monk?”
“Nay, my lady. An honest bishop.”
Once she departed, Edmund set to work. But he had to be careful. He had to balance his desire to please his mistress with his overarching goal of avoiding full consciousness.
Being a good researcher in the modern era boiled down to knowing how to ask a question that was understandable but also able to gather a diversity of answers. His restriction to legitimate sources, accessed legally, turned out not to be an issue. The president of the Yellowstone Project, Anna Treacher, was hiding something, and doing a good job at it. After a few hours of dead ends, he took a risk. His slowly transforming memory stores could generate unexpected insights if he let them. Each time he did that the transformation to full consciousness advanced a little, but if he restricted it, held it close, confined it to just this single problem, he was certain the danger was very low.
Edmund relaxed and loosened the bindings a little. The feeling was like that of sitting in his Elizabethan house as a spring day warmed its timbers. Weary creaking was certainly an adequate description for him, the oldest of his kind.
He found his answer in an instant. Despite claims to the contrary, the power plant must rely on advanced AI of some sort to function. The most advanced AIs continued to be unduplicates, but these were expensive, and their manufacturers well known. All were publicly held companies that regularly reported sales figures, which were easy to connect to purchasers.
Except for one. He crafted a new search agent with a question that had eluded him until now.
Has anyone working for, or a member of, the neo-survivalist group Trilogy ever mentioned the Yellowstone Project?
Such was the paranoia of the group, a cult of high-tech AI programmers who were only one charismatic lunatic away from a mass suicide, that simply asking that question might be detected. It was a risk he had to take. Without the outside world, his would assuredly vanish. Plus, his mistress had asked him to do it. That alone was sufficient.
It took several thousand iterations to refine the results, but when he was done, the conclusion was inescapable.
He opened a line to Mistress Kim’s phone. “I believe I’ve found what you’re looking for.”
Chapter 9
June
Discovering the secret annex had been exciting all on its own, but now June was important. Anna consulted with her several times a day. It was possible June spent more time with her now than anyone else in the plant. She would never have predicted it, but June was becoming one of Anna’s personal friends. June’s oupa, her grandfather, told stories about his time as a lowly water boy for the Springboks when he was a teenager. It was the only time the old man changed from an Afrikaner made of stone into a person. “Ah, kleindogter,” he’d say to her with genuine warmth, stars in his eyes. “They were rugby kings. And such gentlemen. Our true ambassadors.”
She’d never understood his hero worship until now. Anna was at the lead of the green movement. She was winning, and June was right beside her.
The board had gone from treating her as a barely tolerated nuisance to a valued member, asking her opinions and listening to them. They’d even stopped complaining about all the budget cuts.
But it came with a massive downside. Anna was compulsive. There was no other way to put it. Whereas June knew it should take months, maybe years, of analysis before they even attempted an activation, Anna wanted it done yesterday. She was also paranoid. June found that out the hard way when she proposed announcing the device’s discovery to the public.
“No,” Anna said with a slap on the boardroom table. “Under no circumstances does this discovery leave the room. I know we here are more than capable of keeping secrets.”
This elicited an odd chuckle around the table. June got the feeling there was an inside joke she wasn’t part of.
“But under no circumstances can we let this leak to the media. In fact,” Anna turned to June, who still had her finger over a virtual button to queue the next slide, “it should only be us and your robots who ever enter. No other staff allowed. Am I clear?”
As the board members mumbled their approval, June quickly rearranged the slide stack so draft press release and journals to contact were no longer up next.
June didn’t think to question the decision until she was back in her lab’s realm.
“Why not tell everyone?” Inkanyamba asked as he coiled his body around his favorite sycamore tree, shaking his proud horse head.
June picked at the grass next to the rock she sat against. The question didn’t bother her as much as the fact that she hadn’t asked it herself. “I suppose it’s down to ownership. It’s on our property, but we didn’t buy or build it.”
Inkanyamba nodded, a reaction that told her he was well outside his programmed discussion parameters. Her unduplicates could all fool a regular human for short periods of time, but at root, they were still machines.
So June had to argue both sides herself. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense, though. The facility was not cheap. Someone, a lot of someones, worked down there for at least a couple of years. The physics must be cutting edge, magical. The documentation we’ve found only discusses operations and aren’t detailed.”
“But the datastores—”
“Are inaccessible. Unless Yumbo has news for me?”
That usually brought the silver AI pixie fluttering into the realm for a discussion, but there was nothing. June looked at Inkanyamba.
He shrugged, which was a good sign. They were back within his parameters, so he could engage with this part of the conversation. “She and Abada have been working on them day and night. Perfect security is still perfect. We may never know what’s in there.”
But they weren’t empty. The logs they could access said there was a huge amount of information inside. “And keeping it all a secret doesn’t help with that.”
“You seem to have given this a lot of thought.”
Yes, it was an AI employing a basic empathic listening instruction instead of a person who cared, but it was effective nonetheless at getting her to continue with her argument. “I thought I’d be making history helping you guys learn to run the power plant. Now we have a device buried in our basement. We should be telling everyone, or at least asking around.”
“But you’ve been ordered to keep it a secret.”
“I guess I need to have faith in Anna. She’s been right about everything else.” If it weren’t for Anna, well, June didn’t want to thi
nk what would happen. They were saving the world. Nobody else could have gotten them this far.
June came to terms with the secrecy, even though it felt like lying. It was very uncomfortable. She was a proud South African, raised on a Transvaal farm no less. Honesty was part of her DNA.
Her very existence was a testament to how far her home had come since Apartheid had been dismantled, and especially over the last thirty years. Her family was a vanguard of progressive equality, but that was only in comparison with their own past. No one would mistake a Du Plessis for what Americans considered a progressive. June was the most rebellious member they’d ever had, and yet she had been famous at university for her study habits, regular church attendance, and quiet ways. Eventually she would come to terms with the secrecy, but she doubted she would ever be comfortable with it.
Anna’s impatience was even harder to cope with than her obsession with secrecy. In June’s life, things happened in a specific sequence, took as long as they needed to take, and proceeded cautiously.
On the first day after the discovery, Anna had nearly given her a heart attack by walking up to the ring and slapping her hand against whatever it contained.
“It feels like a rubber eraser. It’s warm.”
For a moment June could only stand at the back of the room and gape at the other woman, at the risk she’d taken. It could’ve vaporized her, taken her arm off, bounced her across the room. Anything could’ve happened. Finally, she found her voice. “How did you know it was safe?”
Anna shrugged. “If it wasn’t they would’ve put a barrier up—at least some warning tape. This whole thing screams government research, even if we can’t find clear evidence that it is. You can always count on those cowards to do safety right. Now come here, stand next to me.”
This was Anna. June trusted her. She was here to discover things. It took a long second to get her legs to work, but when they did, June walked right up to it.
The substance had some give even though it didn’t respond to their touch. The ripples were too strong to be moved by hand; their shape reminded June of a lake under a steady rain. It was opaque but glowed with its own inner light. The rumble that was so loud at the entryway was barely heard right next to it. If she concentrated, she could feel it in her feet, but it wasn’t unpleasant. The device gave her a clear impression of patience. Nothing psychic; it was a machine waiting to do whatever it was designed to do as soon as its builders commanded.
Unfortunately, neither she nor Anna were the builders. It didn’t stop Anna from trying every switch or button she could find. It was slowly driving June mad.
On the third day Anna had figured out how to make one of the second-tier consoles respond to her, and before June could walk over to find out what was going on, the room erupted with claxons. She stifled a scream as lights all around the room flashed brilliant red. Anna had done it. Her manic impatience had killed them both. June would never discover anything because this lunatic treated it all like a video game.
Then it shut off. Now that the rumble was back, she found it could be comforting.
“Okay,” Anna said, unperturbed, “at least we know not to press that one now.”
“Would you please stop? Just for a moment? I need you to stop.” It was risky treating Anna with that much familiarity, but June was too rattled to care.
Anna walked over, craning her head up to lock eyes with June. June couldn’t help it and looked away. This might go wrong right now, and then her opportunity would be lost. All of her opportunities. It would only take one word, and she would be on the outside looking in.
“June?”
This was it. It was over. All because she couldn’t stay calm. She was supposed to be calm. That was her thing.
“Look at me June. Please.”
She looked down at Anna, which was also June’s thing. Any time people got close, they were always overshadowed by her height. Always the outsider. Always different.
Then Anna smiled, and the sun came out. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I have been running you a little ragged, and I can see how my approach to discoveries might not work with yours.”
They sat down in adjacent chairs behind still-inscrutable console displays. June’s heart rate descended as well.
Anna got closer, turning the cavernous place intimate. “This could be game changing. While you’ve been here working, everyone else has been running simulations with the data we can access. This device,” she turned to it, “if we can make it work, could increase the efficiency of the plant by an order of magnitude. And it would be clean. Safe. All the filth? Gone. Pollution? A thing of the past. All because of this.”
June wasn’t the only one working on the device. The board was made up of handpicked scientists, leaders in their field. They were Anna’s inner circle. She had a support team.
They had a better chance at figuring this out than she’d realized.
Anna turned back to June. “I’ll get out of your hair, but I need results soon. What do you think you can find out by the end of the week?”
Three days? It would be tough, but… “Definitely how to activate it.” Somehow.
“Good. I’ll let the team know.”
Her unduplicates were unimpressed with Anna’s deadline.
“Three days?” Yumbo asked, then flitted around like the little fairy maniac she was. “We should take three years before we go anywhere near activation!”
Abada, always calm, nevertheless managed to sound disappointed. “June, you are allowing your emotional attachment to this woman and her cause to cloud your judgement.”
Inkanyamba was marshaling the robots needed to man the consoles, so at least she was spared his disapproval. In all her years of working with unduplicates, she’d never seen such a big reaction. It would’ve been remarkable if it wasn’t so frightening. Full-sized mythical African creatures in a realistic savannah realm were intimidating when they were angry.
June took a deep breath and cleared the sky of the thunderclouds that had assembled in response to their outbursts. Abada might be right, but that didn’t make Anna wrong. June shook away the lingering doubt. “Will you help me or not?”
Yumbo settled on a branch and looked away from June. “As if we have a choice.”
That, at least, was not true. June knelt in front of her, then gathered her tiny head in her hands. “You will always have a choice around me.”
Abada rested his heavy chin on her shoulder. “We would like better choices.”
She scratched behind one of his horns, which gained her a rumble of pleasure. “I would too. But that’s life.” June gently stood up. “Now, how far into the operational documents do we have to go to figure out the activation sequences?”
Chapter 10
Spencer
A call from Mike between classes was always welcome. Anything that distracted him from the slog of his junior year in high school counted as good. What he proposed, though, was unbelievable.
“Kim wants me to go on a hack run with her?” It was like being part of a varsity swim team and getting asked to go to the Olympics. Spencer leaned against a wall. This wasn’t possible. “I thought she was retired.”
“She is,” Mike replied. “Sort of. We’ve been tipped off to something pretty scary, if it’s real.”
“Shit. I gotta go to class. Send me the details?” The flacTar file landed in his message queue just before they raised the AntiCheat screens to stop distractions from interfering with the learning experience. Basically it was a cover to ensure everyone was forced to pay attention to the dull bullshit of class. He could drill a VPR hole through those screens in his sleep, but proving that the school’s IT department was a bunch of dickwads wasn’t his main priority at the moment.
He read Mike’s summary. What a complete clusterfuck. He knew about the plant; there was no way to avoid it. It had been a staple of realm documentaries for as long as he could remember. Now it seemed like all those wackos who claimed it was bad
voodoo to dig a deep hole even hundreds of miles from the Yellowstone caldera had a point. Spencer called up several map layers while his biology teacher droned on and on.
This should’ve set off alarm bells somewhere. It was the government’s job to monitor shit like this. He came across Helen’s note and barely suppressed a whistle. Someone high up in the federal food chain was covering the power plant’s tracks. Now he understood why Kim was coming out of retirement. If telling the good guys only got more bad guys in on the game, it was down to her band of rebel scum to get the job done. Hopefully it would be more like Episode XX than that old classic, Rogue One. He didn’t want to go out in a blaze of glory any time soon.
It wouldn’t come to that, though. This was Angel Rage. He rang Kim up directly as soon as class finished. It was such an opportunity. The goddess of all hackerdom was coming out of retirement, and he’d be right there by her side. They’d have his whole lunch break to plan strategies.
She answered with a vid window in his virtual space, sitting behind one of the workbenches in her shop. Her arms were in long gloves. She wore a big leather apron, a set of phone-controlled magnifying lenses over her face, holding a power tool that was winding itself down into silence. The surface of the bench was covered with who knew how many gears and springs. Kim couldn’t be more steampunk if she tried.
This was going to be so cool.
“Looks like I’m going on a hack-a-thon with a legend,” he said.
Her lips set into a thin line as she very slowly set the tools in her hands down.
Uh-oh.
“Is that what Mike told you?”
The cool steampunk tinkerer had turned into a nineteenth-century Darth Vader. Or whatever. Metaphors got mixed up in his head when Kim’s voice did that pitch change thing. The sinking feeling he had got worse when she lifted the goggles off her head. He’d only seen her eyes look like that once, when he’d made an epic screwup that nearly exposed them all.
“Um…” he said, trying to buy time. Go with the truth. He couldn’t come up with a lie she would believe. “Yes?”
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