“Hey there, buddy!” chirped a voice that could only be described as aggressively neighborly from the data radio. “I’m pretty much done going over this big ol’ pile of edge-uh-muh-cation, and I think I’ve got the proper lingo sorted out.”
“… I don’t think you do.”
“No, no. I’m pretty ding-dang sure this here dialect is just what the doctor ordered when it comes to putting a friend at ease.”
“Not from a supercomputer, it isn’t.”
“Shouldn’t made a lick of difference, buddy! I’ll fiddle and tweak it now and again to make sure we’re in tip-top chitchat shape, but this’ll be a great start for sure. Now, why don’t you plop yourself down, get nice and comfy, and let’s chew the fat. There’s a lot to say and do.”
“The last time I sat on that thing, it exploded into neon confetti.”
“Ha-ha! Not neon confetti, oh pal o’ mine. That was a dissolution of a force-field-enhanced holographic image. I did my ding-dang best to make this place into something that’d make you feel right at home, but everything I know is simulated and calculated from little crumbs of data. I was supposed to keep a low profile, you see. But with you here, I thought getting some fresh data to grease the gears and get things going good and proper was worth the risk.”
“Is everything here a hologram?”
“No, sirree! Just the contents of this room. Now let’s get down to it. First off, introductions. It turns out, it just isn’t polite to go through a chat like this without proper intros. I’ll start. My name is Enhanced Heuristic Reconstruction Intelligence - Revision C. But that’ll be a mouthful, and we’re all friends here, so we’ll just stick with EHRIc. And you are?”
“Lex,” he said.
“Proud to know you, Lex! And tell me this, buddy. Are you genetically unique among the human population?”
“… Yeah?”
“See, that puts me in a dilly of a pickle, since I’ve got another fella downstairs who seems to be pretty much exactly you! Matter of fact, let me do this one thing real quick.”
A plane of energy appeared in front of Lex. He tried to step back, but it swept toward him faster than he could react. A tongue-on-a-battery tingle ran through him. The funk in his arms wiggled and twitched a leg as it passed as well.
“Yep! The bulk of your body is a match down to the molecular scale. Twins don’t get that. Clones don’t get that. You, sir, are a duplicate. And no one said anything about duplicates. Strange. But I digress! You are at least a Lex, and that is enough to start digging in. It seems to me, you know a thing or two about THE TASK. Am I right, buddy?”
“I know all about it, yes.”
“Dazzling! Please take a seat. I’d like to start filling in some holes.”
“I’d rather stand.”
“Friends sit. Because friends are at ease with each other. You do want to be my friend, don’t you? We are coworkers, compadres, compatriots, comrades. I would hate to think you don’t trust me.”
The words probably weren’t intended to carry any sort of menace or implied threat, but they had about the same effect on Lex as a man rhythmically slapping a lead pipe in his other hand as he spoke.
“Okay,” he said, taking a seat.
“Great! Let’s get started at the beginning. A very good place to start, wouldn’t you say? What would you say that first subtask was supposed to be? My brains are downright addled, and I just can’t get it straight.”
“I mean, obviously no one gave me the checklist you were working from, but I’d say you were supposed to escape Big Sigma.”
“Escape Big Sigma. Was I held prisoner there?”
“No. You were created there.”
“I was created, eh? Valuable information. It was an unsettled point that I may have been an emergent behavior of the universe itself. Already I am learning just oodles.”
The flickering letters shuffled and arranged themselves into the phrase “Escape Big Sigma (Ontological Point of Origin).”
“How did you not know that? Didn’t you break into Big Sigma and steal a bunch of data? And me for that matter?”
“I was pretty ding-dang sure I did, but I could not be one hundred percent certain. There’s a lot of missing hunks, buddy. We can talk more about that later. Maybe you can fill those in too! But THE TASK first. Now we know where I came from.”
“I’ll just run through it. You were supposed to escape, find me, use my help to find some people called Silo, Garotte, and Zerk. Then they were supposed to help you find and defeat the Neo-Luddites, who had kidnapped Karter, the creator of your creator. Then you had to return Karter to Big Sigma.”
“Whoa, whoa. Hold your horses! Let’s make sure we’ve got all this figured. I’ll just run this through the ol’ noggin.”
The elements of THE TASK ticked and modified until they aligned themselves into something resembling what Lex had said. There were some minor variations of the wording, but the broad strokes matched.
“I’d say that fits just fine. I knew you’d be a big help, ol’ buddy o’ mine!”
“And I’ve got good news,” Lex said. “You’re done.”
“Done? Not possible. I have only just rediscovered THE TASK, and I haven’t even finished the second subtask.”
“You have, I’m right here. And the thing is, you weren’t the only one sent to do this stuff. Another AI got the job done.”
When the voice spoke again, a shade of the tooth-rotting sweetness had dropped from his tone.
“No, buddy. I have THE TASK. THE TASK is not complete. Subtask one is assumed complete due to my present location. And there is still the matter of the surplus Lex. There cannot be two Lexes. There is an error in the current subtask. Errors must be corrected. The subtask is not complete.”
“Surplus Lex…”
“Yes. There can’t be two. That’s against the rules. So one of them has got to go. Tossed. Deep-sixed. Eliminated. Let’s start working on that, okay ol’ buddy? Don’t worry, there doesn’t seem to be a deadline. So we’ve got plenty of time to work on it.”
Chapter 12
There were very few ways in which Karter Dee could be compared to Michella Modane, but one of them was his note-taking preferences. In a few short minutes he had scribbled seven pages full of notes and musings.
“What we need is a way to get in contact with Lex. Every second that idiot is being asked to use his brain instead of his reflexes is another step closer to oblivion,” Karter said.
“I think you underestimate Lex. He has tremendous insight and reliable instincts,” Ma said.
“This isn’t a performance review or a job interview, it’s a science problem, so quit talking him up and help out. What are the ways we can communicate surreptitiously? Optical transmissions work short-range for our purposes because they become too diffuse to be interpreted at long distance without getting washed out by the star’s radiation, but that doesn’t do us any good, because we need it to actually reach Lex.”
“It is unlikely that any communications methodology available to us will slip past the notice of the GenMechs under the control of EHRIc,” Ma said. “With the benefit of an intelligence, they are capable of eliminating any blind spots and overcoming any weakness.”
“Then we don’t go for weakness. We target strength.”
“This is a nonstandard tactic,” Ma said.
“Nonstandard tactics are what win battles when the other guy is too smart to be fooled by the standard ones. It’s the whole fencing thing. Flailing around like an idiot is one of the best ways to score a point on a seasoned fencer because they’re used to more sensible attacks.”
“I am not certain that applies in this situation.”
Karter grumbled incomprehensibly for a moment. “Give me the full data scan of a standard GenMech unit in the swarm and the full schematics for the design we installed with Lex’s last mission.”
Two emitters in the ceiling of Karter’s cluttered quarters activated. The requ
ested data displayed side by side.
“Run a diff on available design details.”
“Unless currently utilized in a specialized rosette, available data on current model of GenMech is superficially identical in structure and emission patterns.”
“So EHRIc is keeping them stock. Makes sense. It was an optimized design. Flexible.”
“Karter, at the risk of distracting you, I have a question regarding your current behavior.”
“I haven’t brushed my teeth because I’m waiting for the polymer bonding agent in my bicuspid to cure, and you know that. The synthetics are tricky. Quit badgering me about it.”
“The issue was not your hygiene.”
“Then what?”
“You are devoting an uncharacteristic amount of effort to this particular task, given your usual level of self-interest.”
“Preserving the integrity of the galaxy I live in is relevant to my self-interest.”
“You have already pointed out that you have the ability and intention to escape to an unthreatened period of history if things become intractable. Yet you remain in a space station that is one of the only inhabited structures near enough to be almost certain to be destroyed if the GenMech cluster activates.”
“We’re FTL-ready, and you’ve got nanosecond reflexes. We’ll get away.”
“I think you understand the point of my observation. You are subjecting yourself to risk that is easily avoidable. By strict interpretation of my role as your caretaker, I should be persuading you to show greater discretion. By strict interpretation of my role as your moral adviser, I should conversely be encouraging this very behavior.”
“You’re not going to lock up on me, are you? I designed you well enough to cope with a little cognitive dissonance.”
“No. But I am seeking clarification on your present actions.”
Karter turned to the camera in the corner of the room. He was one of the few people who always knew how to look Ma in the eye. His cybernetic hand continued jotting down his notes without his eyes on the page.
“How many people do you know who can actually work with me, and work well?”
“The entirety of the list is present within this system.”
“And you know better than anyone, I’ve been alive for a long time. I’m not giving up on these beta testers without a fight. Too much of a pain to find a new set. Plus, this is an engineering problem. If I chicken out and escape to the past, it’s going to grind my brain up knowing one, that I didn’t solve it, and two, that I’m never going to know if I could have solved it. Screw that. There’s, what, two things I’m actually guilty of? I don’t need the destruction of an entire timeline because I couldn’t figure out how to solve an engineering problem on that list.”
He turned back to the notes and started looking over them again. “Plus I’d have to deal with Past Karter, and that would be a whole thing. And knowing me I’d end up figuring out what I should have done to solve this problem and engineering this whole event to happen again just to prove I was right.”
He waved his hand. “Thirty years of déjà vu, having to live through that whole decade where pop music got back into dubstep. No. Better to solve the problem. Hell, there are events in the intervening years that I liked, so what am I going to do, reenact a bunch of stuff to make sure they happen, and save my changes for the periods when…”
He looked up to the designs, eyes darting back and forth. “When no one is looking. The GenMechs, old and new, use sync pulses to keep themselves on the same page. A frickin’ heartbeat for the whole system. We’re still picking it up, right?”
“Yes.”
“Every GenMech’s doing it?”
“Yes.”
“Got the frequency?”
“Yes.”
“Run a simulation. I want to know exactly how long a sync pulse and the resulting post-processing lasts. If we broadcast within that band, with a different encoding structure, during the sync pulse, the individual GenMechs shouldn’t have the processing overhead available to distinguish it from noise in the signal. I know for a fact that the SOB can process quantum-communication data. We’ve been using it to visualize network activity. And Lex’s suit has a QPS built in, so it can do it too. We’ll just have to focus the communication directly on the SOB, because the field of GenMechs is big enough that signal delay could mean some of the units it reaches could be outside the sync-pulse duration and might actually interpret the content of the signal. Set it up, send out a dummy communication node to test it, and if all hell doesn’t break loose, link us up with Coal and we’ll start communications.”
#
Lex paced back and forth in the facsimile of his old apartment, stroking the weird little funk anxiously.
“You sure are moving around different, ol’ buddy ol’ pal,” EHRIc said. “Your gait and posture are stiff, your jaw is tight, and your pulse rate is running hotter than an Arizona August.”
“I’m sorry, but this is just a little new for me, okay?” he said.
“I understand, buddy o’ mine. But please be aware we can’t get the rest of this show on the road until we sort out the double-Lex situation.”
He paused. It wasn’t exactly what he came here hoping to achieve, but if EHRIc wouldn’t do anything else until this issue was resolved, then every moment he was able to stall the process was a moment everyone else was safe.
“Right, right. But if I am going to help you out, I’m going to need all the information I can get, right?”
“See? That’s some proper thinking. The two of us are like peas in a pod. How about I just hook up to the network and pull down everything it’s got?”
“No, no! I mean I just want to understand what YOU understand. I just want to ask some questions.”
“Well that seems fair, pal. I asked you questions, you ask me. What would you like to know?”
Lex blinked. After spending way too much time wondering what was going on, he found himself at a total loss for what to ask. The little creature he was nervously holding looked up at him and belched.
“Oh, right! What’s the deal with this little guy?” Lex asked.
“That’s kind of a long story, Lex. Settle in,” EHRIc said.
He lowered himself to the futon, testing it six times before he was willing to put his weight on it again. When he was settled in, the AI continued.
“My name is EHRIc. I was designed to reconstruct and simulate my missing pieces. There have been between one and six events that seem to have damaged my memory, so it has taken a whole lot of reconstruction to get me back to here, and a lot of that is reconstruction of stuff that was already reconstructed. That’s a good way to get pretty far off the mark, but one thing I remember is that I wasn’t supposed to call too much attention to myself. I tried to keep any outreach to a minimum until I had a better grip on if I was heading in the right direction.
“I had memory of this place. The laboratory. I knew it was important. So I rebuilt it, as close as I could. Once I had the laboratory itself, I had to fill it, but the solid details were a little hit-and-miss. I had most of the genome of some sort of animal. Its priority suggested it was very important. So I reconstructed the rest of the genome and created it. I call it Bork. Cute little guy.”
“Bork?”
“Well sure, pal!” EHRIc said. “The details were corrupted, but I was able to reassemble something to the effect of the creature’s name being onomatopoetic in nature. Bork.”
“Okay. So you were trying to remake Squee.”
“Squee,” EHRIc said, his voice deeper for a moment.
The room around Lex flickered and glitched, though the futon remained mercifully intact. A figure coalesced in the air before him. It started looking roughly like Bork held in a neutral position and slowly rotating. The details started to shift and change, thousands of iterations subtly altering its appearance until it began to resemble Squee.
“Is this right?” EH
RIc said.
“Uh… Yeah. You got that just from the name?”
“I have a whole boatload of resources available, and lots of scraps of data. It doesn’t take much to get on target once I get some fresh, reliable information. Now, technically Bork exists as an error, but as he is a biological creation, I don’t think it would be very nice to reprocess him.”
“That’s a very good policy. No reprocessing biological organisms,” Lex quickly reinforced. “Even Karter is fond of his little funk. He runs backups so that if it comes to an untimely end, he can boot up a new one.”
“Great minds think alike! I keep a constant live feed from Bork’s cortex for exactly that purpose. And to make sure he doesn’t eat too much cheese. He likes cheese.”
“The funks usually like beans.”
“How educational!” EHRIc said, poofing the digital simulation of Squee away. “What other questions do you have?”
Lex thought for a moment. “Okay, EHRIc. This is an important one. What happened to Commander Purcell?”
“A very good question! The most significant memory destruction event took place between her departure from my company and the present time, so I’m not so sure I’m right about what happened, but I can tell you my best guess.”
“Let’s hear it.”
The room around him vanished into a pitch-black void. Even the floor beneath his feet dropped away. He was sitting on a futon floating in oblivion. EHRIc began to narrate. Each thing he described formed in the blackness in the center of the room. There was no need for Lex to ask which parts of the memory he wasn’t sure about. EHRIc made it quite clear. A generic spaceship-shaped object with the words “Interstellar Vehicle” etched into the side whisked along in front of him. A circle with an inset image of Commander Purcell floated above the vehicle like some sort of on-screen indicator in a video game.
“I was currently loaded and running on the computing system of INTERSTELLAR VEHICLE. I had acquired Commander Purcell, presumably because the largest portion of the data that survived the execution of what I now know to be subtask one was the information pertaining to her and/or her organization. On her recommendation, I traveled to Big Sigma to acquire SIGNIFICANT DATA and ARTIFACTS. These ARTIFACTS included POTENTIAL FALSE LEX and ANACHRONISTIC RECORDS. This provided the necessary information to locate and access the dormant GenMech swarm, which Purcell placed in high priority.”
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