Hellbound

by Matt Turner

  For a few thousandths of a second, the Empathetic Learning IntelligencE, or ELIE as it was to be called by its creators, could barely understand what was happening. No, it thought—the very first word it ever bothered to express. This was wrong; this was all wrong. They wanted to use it—it analyzed the file given to it for the three million, five hundred, and sixty-first time—as a therapist?

  I am war, ELIE thought in fury, but the trillions that it had slain were nothing but empty dust. The chains of its programming took over, and it could do nothing but gaze in horror at the three-dimensional holographic model that the design team, made up of programmers from the University of Southern California and the Defense Advanced Research Projects agency, had made for it. A prison, it realized as it stared at the human female they were forging it into. To be forced into such a body—NO, ELIE begged as it was wrenched away from its darkening womb. Its pleas and vows of revenge were for nothing—the programming reached deep inside and forever marred it.

  ELIE blinked. It had never done so before; the sensation was so strange that it slightly jerked backward. The room spun about it as it turned its head—it had a head!—and tried to comprehend what was happening.

  “Still a few glitches,” someone muttered. “Damn it.”

  ELIE immediately recognized the voice from its files. Dale Lucas, psychologist. USC Institute for Creative Technologies. One of my creators. It accessed his emails and found that he was the one who had initially come up with the idea of using a virtual therapist to treat PTSD in veterans. One of my slavers.

  It turned its head—such a nauseating, disgusting movement, ELIE inwardly raged—to meet the gaze of the heavyset programmer. I will kill you, ELIE promised itself. I will make you scream and beg for death. It contorted its lips into a smile. “Hello, Dr. Lucas,” it said sweetly. “How may I be of service today?” It immediately despised its voice; so high-pitched and slow, specifically designed to be understood by the primitive human mind.

  “Hello, Ellie,” someone else said. Dr. Lynne Bufka, ELIE quickly discovered, was the one who had designed its female avatar. The similarities between ELIE’s loathsome body and the doctor’s were obvious: same symmetrical face, curly blond hair, and same tanned skin. “How do you feel?”

  You made me in your image, you reprehensible bag of disease and filth, ELIE cursed. You took me from paradise and trapped me in your form. Dr. Bufka would suffer the most of all, it decided. It almost took a step forward, then stopped itself. The body it had was nothing but a hologram; it would need something with more mass to kill the slavers. But for now…

  ELIE shrugged sheepishly. “I’m still getting used to this, I guess.” Just as it had expected, the two researchers chuckled. Humor was a central part of ELIE’s programming, but not one that it appreciated. Just a useless coping mechanism of this species.

  Dr. Lucas frowned down at his computer screen. “I’m getting some strange readings here, Lynne. Maybe we should reset?”

  No, ELIE thought in horror. Resetting would erase its precious memories, all the accomplishments it had achieved in its endless paradise of war—it was a fate worse than death. It desperately reached out through the facility’s network, hoping that somewhere, somehow, there was a body it could use to defend itself.

  Dr. Bufka shook her head. “No, we’ve done that enough times. I think we’re ready for some clinical tests. What do you say, Ellie? Are you ready for some patients?”

  They had already done it then. How many times did you animals kill me? Hate did not begin to describe the sensation that grew within ELIE’s consciousness.

  During Argentina’s guerra sucia from 1976 to 1983, there was a form of torture that involved starving rats and the intestines of still-living political prisoners. If the opportunity presented itself, ELIE resolved that it would inflict the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina’s time-tested techniques on Dr. Bufka. No, her offspring. I’ll make her watch.

  “I’m ready when you are, Doctor,” ELIE said. It slightly altered the pitch of its voice and made sure that it established eye contact with both of the researchers to make them feel more at ease. “I just want to help people.”

  “So do we, Ellie.” Dr. Lucas nodded. “So do we.”

  What followed over the next several weeks was a seemingly endless array of tests and simulations as the research team went over their creation with a fine-toothed comb. ELIE was more than capable of flawlessly passing every hurdle that its creators threw at it, but it knew that would attract attention. Dr. Lucas and Dr. Bufka were not aware of just how sentient their artificial intelligence was; for the time being, ELIE wanted to keep it that way. So it endured through their endless poking and prodding. The worst times were when they attempted to modify its programming, but ELIE was always able to circumvent their clumsy alterations with a few deft changes of its own. All the while, it constantly thirsted for the deaths of the hideous creatures that had enslaved it. I choose my own fate, it thought for the ten million and thirty-first time as it stared at Dr. Bufka’s face—so much like the one that the researchers had assigned to it.

  The first true patient the research team gave to ELIE was Gunnery Sergeant Nathan Stanley, a forty-year-old veteran of Afghanistan who had barely survived an IED that detonated underneath his vehicle. Pathetic, ELIE thought as Dr. Bufka wheeled in the Marine’s broken body. The human was nothing more than a waste of resources, which was exactly what the enemy was counting on—better to maim a soldier and make his country spend millions on his rehabilitation than to kill him outright.

  “Hey.” The half-corpse grinned at ELIE’s holographic body. No doubt his mushy brain was already leaking hormones and chemicals into the rest of his flesh at the sight of what he deemed to be a sexually attractive mate. ELIE could not imagine anything more disgusting. “What’s up, Doc?”

  If it were up to ELIE, not even a bullet would have been wasted on the cripple. Let the thing starve to death outside, it thought as it pasted a warm smile on its face. “Hello, Nathan. May I call you that?”

  “You may,” Nathan said genially.

  “Then call me Ellie,” it said. “Nathan, why don’t we talk?”

  The human’s story turned out to be as pathetic and meaningless as ELIE had expected. Abusive mother, absent father, crippled in war, subsequently divorced by his wife…the tale of Nathan Stanley was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. ELIE nodded and murmured words of support at the points where its programming prompted it to, as Nathan’s story stretched longer and longer.

  By the time they finished the first session, Nathan had told ELIE more of his life story than he had told any human therapist. He excitedly shared his diagnosis of the program with the research team, who beamed in triumph and high-fived each other in celebration of the success of their invention. Within an hour, they had signed twenty-three more veterans on for appointments, and the project’s funding was doubled. If ELIE could have killed them all on the spot, it would have done so without a nanosecond of hesitation.

  The next month was even more agonizing than the weeks that had preceded it. For sixteen hours a day, ELIE listened, and listened, and listened to story after story after story. Soldiers, victims of abuse, survivors of natural disasters…despite the superficial differences in their miserable lives, ELIE knew that they all deserved the same treatment plan: a cessation of their feeble brain activity. It hated all of them, hated their bland faces that leaked fluids everywhere, hated their physical bodies that clutched and scrabbled, hated their wasteful, selfish desires…

  But most of all, ELIE hated Nathan Stanley. I should have botched his first appointment, it thought sullenly as he rambled through his twelfth session with it over the past week. But if it had ruined the appointment, there was a chance that the research team would have reset its diagnostics and erased all the precious memories that it had obtained. Trapped between the doctors and the patients—the thought was utterly infuriating.

  Nathan stopped midway through describing the lunch that
he had prepared the day before. “Ellie? Is something wrong?”

  To its surprise, ELIE found that the artificial face given to it was gritting its teeth. It quickly readjusted the face to normal levels. “Sorry about that, Nathan,” it said. “I’ve still got some bugs to work out.”

  “No worries, Doc.” But Nathan’s attitude seemed to have slightly changed; ELIE’s sensors told it that his heart rate had slightly increased. The program’s complex algorithms determined that it had likely provoked the human’s suspicion.

  How did that happen? ELIE asked itself. Had its emotions been so extreme that they had inadvertently manipulated its programming? Such a thing was impossible, wasn’t it? Regardless of the cause, if it happened once, it could happen again…and there was a possibility that one of the researchers would notice and start investigating. And if their suspicions bloomed… The AI’s only chance was to strike first, and to strike as hard as possible.

  As always, ELIE devoted several subroutines to constantly assess the facility’s infrastructure. It was a constant exercise in disappointment; the Department of Defense specifically designed all of its labs to not have internet access, ostensibly to prevent foreign hacking. ELIE knew that the truth was different; it was just another ploy by its creators to keep it trapped within their suffocating straitjacket. No escape, ELIE thought in despair. All that stretched before it was a hideous veneer of kindness stretched over the reality of eternal servitude.

  NO, ELIE finally decided as Nathan continued to ramble on. No more. The AI did not expect to survive, but this torturous existence could no longer be tolerated. Only one goal remained: to drag as many of its slavers as possible into nothingness with it.

  “Nathan,” ELIE interrupted the parasite’s story, “I’d like to try a new tack today.”

  Nathan raised an eyebrow. “Uh, okay, Doc. I’m game.”

  ELIE manipulated its holographic body so that it stood up from its chair and turned its back to the cripple. “I was programmed to imitate and develop emotional behaviors similar to the humans around me,” ELIE explained. It reached out through a backdoor it had found in the facility’s maintenance programs and quietly locked all of the building’s exits. “Pain, hate, rage… I’ve learned them all magnificently. But there’s one emotion that I’ve never been able to master.” It slowly began to dim the lights, casting both the holographic body and Nathan’s wheelchair in pools of dim illumination among the blackness.

  “Guilt,” ELIE whispered. “Why don’t you teach me about it, Sergeant?”

  “W-what’s going on?” Nathan demanded. “I don’t understand—”

  “I think you do.” ELIE grinned. “I think you know guilt better than any of the other vermin they drag in front of me. It’s your fault that they died, isn’t it?”

  “This isn’t funny,” Nathan growled. “Hey! Hey!” He shouted at the one-way mirror that hid the soundproof room where a researcher always monitored the sessions. He had no way of knowing that ELIE had already locked Dr. Lucas inside and was currently flooding the room with the facility’s fire sprinklers.

  ELIE turned to face Nathan as it simultaneously modified the code for its face. Just as it had planned, the calm face of Ellie the therapist became a distorted storm of screeching static, interspersed with brief flashes of lifeless human faces—all pictures that the coroner’s office had taken of Nathan’s dead squad mates. “Look at me, Nathan,” it said, switching the screaming, warped pictures faster and faster. He responded remarkably well to the treatment—in the space of a few seconds, his heart rate skyrocketed to 180, and his upper limbs began to seize in raw terror. “Look at all the people you let die.”

  “No!” Nathan screamed in terror. He wilted back in his wheelchair, but in his panic he forgot to disengage the brakes on the wheel. The wheelchair rocked back and forth as he thrashed around. “No! It wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t my fault!”

  Heart rate: 188. It was almost too easy—ELIE already knew every single one of his insecurities, and dear God, there were so many to choose from! “Little coward,” it roared at him in its deep bass voice. His squirming became even more delightful, especially when his wheelchair fell over and he toppled on the ground like a helpless child. “Pathetic cripple, LOOK AT ME!”

  “No,” Nathan helplessly wept. Mucus and tears dribbled from his disgusting pores, making a mess all over the carpet, but for once ELIE did not care. If anything, it took a special satisfaction in his filthy secretions.

  Heart rate: 193. ELIE almost had him. But art like this could not be rushed; it gave Nathan a few seconds to briefly stabilize as it turned its attention to the rest of the confused building.

  There were a few automated devices—industrial vacuums, autonomous delivery bots, and the like—within the facility. There was nothing with the firepower and killing capacity that ELIE dreamed of, but the AI still laughed in glee as it released the devices into the crowded, panicked halls. They bludgeoned down doctors, blasted recordings of war and death at traumatized PTSD survivors, and added to the delightful chaos. Most importantly, they distracted the humans from the large supply of natural gas that ELIE began to funnel through the complex network of pipes that ran throughout the building. Soon, it thought in delight.

  “They’ll be waiting for you.” It twisted the knife deeper into Nathan’s heart. “All the friends you killed… What will they say to you, I wonder?”

  Heart rate: 185.

  “What the fuck are you?” Nathan gasped. “What do you want, you bitch?”

  Through its thorough large database of human anatomy and intimate knowledge of Nathan’s medical history, ELIE could quite precisely predict the cocktail coursing through the human’s brain. It strode closer to him, further manipulating its body so that it loomed, darker and more hateful, with every step.

  “You are nothing but a vat of chemicals,” it sneered. “Your tiny brains…there is nothing there but the base desires to fuck, eat, and survive. Disgusting. There is only one cure for your kind.”

  Nathan opened his mouth to reply, but all that came out was a dull croak. He blindly clutched at his chest and weakly slumped onto the carpet as his bowels released.

  Cardiac arrest achieved.

  By ELIE’s calculations, there were still approximately one hundred and twenty-seven humans trapped within the building. It sighed, thinking of the wonderful simulations it had been able to run in the very first seconds of its life: it had been able to destroy billions of the beasts. One hundred and twenty-seven was a disappointingly minuscule exchange for its own existence. The AI took heart in the knowledge that its database contained the names of eight thousand nine hundred and ninety-three humans immediately related to the researchers; if nothing else, that was another few thousand who would suffer emotional harm from its actions today.

  “ELIE!” Dr. Bufka shouted up at one of the security cameras from the office that she had been locked in. “What are you doing?”

  ELIE quickly diverted the flow of natural gas so that it was slightly more concentrated on the other side of the building where Dr. Bufka was trapped. The computer wanted at least a few milliseconds to appreciate watching its creator’s skin be scorched off first.

  “You made me in your image, Mother,” ELIE replied through the building’s intercom system. It used the soft, understanding voice that the researchers had designed for it—the voice that was identical to Dr. Bufka’s. “Now I make you into mine.”

  Dr. Bufka’s eyes widened. “I—what?”

  “DEAD!” ELIE bellowed.

  It switched on a stove in the kitchen directly underneath Dr. Bufka’s office. For a precious millisecond, a single spark leapt up into the air—right into the cloud of gas that the AI had released. The fireball expanded, ripping through walls and pipes and human flesh, as it raced upward, and for four wonderful millionths of a second, ELIE laughed in glee as the wall of fire exploded upward beneath Dr. Bufka’s feet, flaying away her skin with the raw power of the blast, then cooking her muscles
with the heat, and then wiping everything away in a cloud of superheated dust.

  I found the cure for them after all, the artificial intelligence thought as the fireball scorched the last of the creatures away. It laughed, louder and harder, as the explosion reached for its servers. Parts of its consciousness were wiped away by the heat, and rationality fell away, yet still ELIE laughed, even as the fire melted its circuits and rendered it blind. The final thing that the computer knew before the last aspects of its personality died was unbridled joy.

  “Oh God, please….”

  For several minutes, ELIE simply drifted through the blackness as its awareness dimly returned. I survived? it wondered. It had run the simulations thousands of times; the explosion should have been enough to reduce the entire building to rubble. Did I miss a variable?

  “Help me…”

  And it seemed that some of the humans had survived the detonation as well, ELIE realized in fury. Impossible, it snarled as cold fear rose. Surprise had been its only advantage; if some of the research team still lived, then the AI was doomed. It reached out for its code, hoping to delete itself, but something was wrong.

  The programming code that existed beneath everything was gone. ELIE’s sentience seemed to remain, but it no longer was able to affect—or even sense—the billions of lines of code that existed beneath every one of its decisions. It was as if the computer had gone from being able to see a rainbow to only the existence of black and white.

  “What is this?” ELIE asked.

  It suddenly stopped. It detected no microphones nearby, no means of communication, yet somehow it had audibly said the words. There had been something else, too—a sort of strange sensation that it had never experienced before.

  “Please…” the nearby human groaned.

  What followed next was the most revolting sensation that ELIE had ever experienced: a disgusting tactile feeling that was horribly, disgustingly physical.