The Gorgon Effect: Minds of Stone: 1

by Cole Anders

  Simon told himself, “If I can crawl and he can't, then I've got to find him. Worst case, I won't have to die alone out here if I find him already dead.”

  Simon decided the large car shaped black blob was a good place to start looking, so he set out making his agonizingly slow way there. Crawling on one arm and dragging a boat anchor for a foot made for slow progress, but there was at least some. Simon tried counting to himself to try and keep his mind off the pain all down his right side, but couldn't get any higher that six before he lost his place and started over. A taller thin form crossed in front of the car thing, it looked like a person.

  “I'll fucking kill you if Luke's dead you so of a bitch!” Wheezed Simon, the words coming out in a choked hiss.

  A familiar voice responded, and Simon knew before he could even see that everything was much better than he'd thought it was when he had first come around.

  “You can barely crawl, probably couldn't even lift your head, and still you don't quit. You are one tough mother fucker Simon.” Said Luke.

  “Tough enough I forgot to die, right?” Asked Simon, settling back down into the ground in a combination of exhaustion and relief. He hadn't crawled more than three feet.

  Luke went over and helped him up, supporting his broken right side. They both made their way over to their car and Luke opened the rear hatch and helped Simon sit up in the back. Luke produced a bottle of water he'd found in the car, letting Simon pull a few sips off it before continuing.

  “You are actually hurt a lot worse than you look man. You'd got at least three bruised ribs, and one of them is broken too. Your right foot has a fold in the middle of it. I managed to reset your shoulder, but I'm sure you've torn a feel ligaments there too. On top of the damage from the impact, the death lamp caused you to have a seizure, if I guessed, I'd say there doesn't seem to be any brain damage, but you burst most of the blood vessels in your sinus and most of your internal organs went into convulsion. The good news is, your heartbeat isn't irregular. So, I think it didn't suffer a damage at all. In a way, it makes a kind of sense. The death lamp causes a person to go into cardiac arrest, the heart can literally rip itself in half. But it seems that when the lamp transmitted instructions to your brain to arrest your heart, your ability to resist the programming effects of the lamp allowed your brain to redirect those commands. So, the impulse to convulse went everywhere else but the heart. That combined with the fact that you were badly injured at the same time, your body must have just assumed all the trauma was from the impact, and that satisfied the mental trigger from the Gorgon with a real physical scapegoat. I've seen it before. I've had something similar happen myself. Last year I got flashed with a coma lamp, so I broke my own finger right as it happened so my body would think the programmed behavior was just a shock reaction from the broken finger. Doesn't always really work though. I was still unconscious for a week, but I did wake up.” Explained Luke taking a pull from the water bottle for himself.

  “So, what now, we lost them didn't we? At least the one's we didn't kill.” Asked Simon.

  “No actually, Nerva is tracking them with a satellite now, they are headed north. If you're ready, we can get back on the road after them. We've got another vehicle waiting for us just across the Oklahoma border. If we can make the switch, we should be able to keep from having to answer any questions from the police. I'm sure they have an ever-widening man hunt looking for us. The remaining four Oculus agents have already changed vehicles but Nerva was able to keep track of them.” Said Luke.

  “Ok, help me into the passenger seat and we'll go, no need to hang out here unless we're gonna have a picnic.” Said Simon.

  “Afraid we won’t be having one of those today, come on, up.” Said Luke.

  Luke worked Simon along the length of the SUV up to the passenger side door and helped him in. Luke took a quick look around to make should nothing had fallen out of Simon's pockets, closed the rear hatch, and got into the driver's side.

  “I've already talked with Calvin and Nerva about sending us some back up. But we don't have anyone to spare that could reach us quickly enough. They did send us some medical supplies through the Flapjack, I've reset your foot and shoulder, but I haven't given you much for pain yet because I wasn't sure if you wanted to be doped to the gills right in the middle of all this.” Explained Luke as he pulled the Escape around and started back down the dirt road.

  “I think I could stand to be under for right now, you aren't planning another daring shootout within the next six hours, are you?” Asked Simon, managing a wheezing half laugh.

  “Nope, the plan is to switch vehicles and find a place to hold up for the night while Nerva tracks them remotely. She was worried at first that she’d lose track of them, but it just so happened the vehicle they switched into has a secret GPS device on it that’s standard to the model, one that isn’t disclosed to the public, so She can track them that way and the check on them again once her satellite comes back around. Then in the morning, we'll access what kind of shape you’re in and if you should be sent back or not.” Said Luke.

  “There is no way in hell I'm going to leave you out here like that, I may not be able to walk, but I can hold a gun in my left hand and provide cover fire at the very least.” Exclaimed Simon.

  “That's what we knew you'd say, honestly, I'd been glad for the extra gun and pair of eyes. This was the most aggressive Oculus operation I've ever seen. Normally, it's just 2 or 3 lightly armed guys. But there were at least 10 heavily armed operatives there. And they weren't shy about pumping the whole place full of lead either. Something was very different about the way they behaved too. Normally Oculus operatives are slow and almost robotic. But this guys acted like well-trained soldiers. They were quicker and smarter than I've ever seen them. And much more aggressive too, it was almost like they didn’t even care about the money.” Explained Luke.

  “So, what could that mean? Do you think they weren't lamped by their superiors and were just highly trained?” Asked Simon.

  “No, they were still far from normal. It's possible for a person to be fearless. But all of them were completely and utterly without regard for their own lives. And they were good shots too. It's almost as if they had received clarity training. But if that's true, then we all have much bigger problems.” Luke explained, his voice becoming grave.

  “What do you mean?” Asked Luke.

  “Firewall is the only place that clarity exists. No one else in the world currently knows about it, much less how to make it. So, if they have it, well the implications speak for themselves.” Said Luke.

  “So, we have a traitor you think?” Simon said.

  “No, it would be much worse than that. If it was a double agent it would be a simple matter to ferret them out. But if we do have a mole, everything about the way we do things in Firewall stops working. A mole implies that Nerva is either malfunctioning or worse, corrupt. If she's become corrupt, then we're already out of options. She has total control over the Firewall facility, as well as the global monitoring network.” Explained Luke with a grim expression on his face.

  “So how do we find out what's really going on Luke, remember we aren't even sure those operatives were a result of clarity training, so all this speculation might be baseless.” Said Simon.

  “Ya, that's best case I suppose. Because if Nerva has a problem we are all basically as good as dead already, the amount of control she has over us and everything we use is total. I need to tell you a story about Nerva Simon, it's not something I can bring up with her listening, but it's something you need to know.” Said Luke.

  “Ok, well what happened?” Asked Simon, lazily watching the rural landscape around him speed by, letting the pain killers do their work.

  14. Hellish

  They sat in silence for a long time, the sound of the road rumbling beneath then. Simon had started to think Luke wasn’t going to tell him what happened after all. But after a few minutes Luke cleared his throat and began.

  �
��It was nine years ago, and I had just joined Firewall. I’d been assigned to work with two other agents for my initial fieldwork, Jeffery and Carla. Jeffery was the most seasoned agent at firewall at the time. And Carla was another new recruit like me. She had been in the training cycle just before me and it was the closest two recruits had ever made it in before or since. Nerva had decided to keep me and Carla together under the assumption a long term working relationship would strengthen our team work in the field. And Jeffrey already had a partner of his own as it was, so he would only be mentoring us for a short time before he returned to his own duties.” Luke paused for a moment seeming to gather his thoughts.

  “The problems started with the automated robotic machinery that Nerva now uses to maintain and defend the compound. At the time, she was not fully integrated into the facility system as a kind of failsafe encase she became compromised in some way. She had only been on-line by that point for about a year and a half so her decisions and activities were still closely monitored and double checked for accuracy and impartiality. She's wasn't even fully sentient at that point either. Nerva had to take time to grow into her full capabilities, it definitely wasn't an overnight process.” Said Luke.

  “Ok so, you're saying Nerva was more like than an ordinary mainframe computer back then?” Asked Simon.

  “Well sort of. Nerva's computational core sits on a device I've heard David call a quantum fog box. Originally, Nerva's programming sat on normal binary hardware, you know standard chips and circuitry. In order for her to grow into a true A.I. That original program was interfaced with the fog box. Which, according to David, is a kind of blank framework comprised of a nearly infinitely complex network of qubit circuitry that can be reorganized on the fly by its host program, in this case Nerva, as it was needed. So basically, once connected. Nerva was able to design herself a more and more complex logic circuitry on the over time. And the amazing thing about qubit quantum architecture is that, the circuits don't spread out like a web, they spread out in three dimensions. Both up down, all the while growing in complexity at the same time. For that first year, she was online, she did little else but design her own brain over and over again.” Luke explained.

  “But why let a program design its own architecture. Couldn’t an A.I. do it once and then we could just reproduce it again later? “Asked Simon.

  “No, not only is her CPU core designed to specifically run her own unique software, there is no way we could replicate it. Given another fog box and A.I. Data seed. The resulting A.I. Would be completely different from Nerva based on a nearly infinite number of unpredictable variables. There isn't even a way to accurately express her software data size either. Because not only is she is a fully qubit construct, and we have no means for mapping out her qubit pathing inside her fog box accurately. And her fog box has no diagnostic interface which could be used to examine what happens inside it, the exact architecture is in a kind of flux anyway. See a normal circuit transistor is either open or closed, that’s binary. In a quantum computer, an individual transistor can be in three positions.” Said Luke.

  “What do you mean three positions?” Asked Simon.

  “Open, closed, or in a super position of both opened and closed. It works on the uncertainty principle, but I’m not exactly sure how. What it essentially means is Nerva’s processing core is uniquely powerful. Not just faster at basic computation, but also capable of calculating complex mathematical formulas differently than a normal computer.” Explained Luke.

  “Ok wait a minute. You mean David has no way of even determining what Nerva's CPU core even looks like?” Asked Simon.

  “That's right, and neither does Nerva for that matter. The act of describing it would inextricably change its nature. Hence the name fog box. There was an initial interface programmed into the fog box so that Nerva's original data seed could access it. But now it's so completely different, if she was to stop outputting information for any reason, there would be no way for us to re-interface with her program from the outside. And it couldn’t be dismantled and inspected either since its quantum nature would cause it to change if we interacted with it.” Said Luke.

  “So, why exactly do we trust Nerva so completely then? It sounds like we really have no way of double checking anything she does.” Asked Simon.

  “That is the crux of the events I'm telling you about now actually. Like I mentioned, when I first arrived at Firewall Nerva was just starting to emerge as a personality. She was still little more than a mainframe computer with a voice interface. During those days, we had a lot of trouble tracking and intercepting Oculus agents. So instead we focused on detecting and curating dangerous technology. You wouldn't believe to kinds of things being built in garages at the turn of the millennium. Partial accelerators, a compound that can make water explode, even a genetically engineered bacterium that could eat aluminum. Real civilization stoppers if they got into the wrong hands, all being developed in secret by private laboratories or sometimes just individuals working alone. Unfortunately, nearly everyone's hands are the wrong hands when it comes to that kind of technology.” Luke paused briefly considering his words before continuing.

  “What we do at Firewall isn't ideal. Suppressing technology is a violation of the scientific principles that drove the atomic and information age. To dead end scientific progress is unethical and extremely distasteful to me as well. However, that guy the invented the compound that could cause water to explode? He was a psychotic who we intercepted while he was on his way to the pacific coast. He had enough of that stuff to detonate a trillion gallons of ocean water. And nearly managed to expose it to the open atmosphere when we cornered him anyway. The resulting explosion would have been catastrophic. So, I can appreciate that we provide a necessary service to humanity. I just wish there was a better way to do it.” Said Luke.

  “A trillion gallons of water? What would the blast yield have been?” Asked Simon.

  “A megaton was Nerva's best guess. It would have totally flattened LA.” Said Luke.

  “That's unbelievable. That was made by some guy in a garage somewhere? Why hasn't anyone else stumbled across it then?” Asked Simon.

  “I can't say for sure, it's not comprised of any particularly rare elements or materials. That guy just stumbled across the right mixture by accident I guess.” Explained Luke.

  “Here is our turn off, we've got to switch vehicles really quick. You just get in, I'll do a quick unload.” Said Luke, veering off onto an exit.”

  They exited and pulled off into an abandoned truck stop, it didn't look like it had been in use for more than 20 years based on the price for gas that was still up on the rusted sign. Pulled around behind the rear of the building was a green mustang, one of the modern body styles. At first Simon thought this would be a little inconspicuous but quickly decided it was a good choice, it was a common enough car and wouldn’t attract much attention.

  “Here we go, it's not gonna be souped up but we shouldn't need it to be. Get in, I'll be right behind you.

  In the time it took Simon to get out and limp across the lot to their new vehicle, Luke made two trips moving and loading all the baggage they had started with. Simon's pain had mercifully shifted from a blaring siren to a dull thump, mostly centered right behind his eyes. His foot threatened to come off with each step he took, but at least it hurt less when he wasn't putting any weight on it, he had the painkillers to thank for that. Simon knew it would take weeks to recover from the injuries had, he just hoped he come pass them without another incident. He managed to open the door of the mustang and stare down at the seat like he was staring into a canyon. Getting down wasn't going to be the hardest thing he’d ever down, he'd just do a calculated fall to get in. But getting out by himself wasn't likely to happen. Still what options did he have? Simon turned around and slowly dropped into his new seat with a wince, he wasn’t sure how long he’d be sitting there.

  Simon could see through the side mirror Luke make one more pass over the Escape befo
re leaving it and getting into the mustang.

  “What's going to happen to that car?” Asked Simon, shifting to get himself as comfortable as possible.

  “Who knows? It'll get found at some point and be linked to the shootout we had in Dallas. But neither of us have DNA on file in a search-able database anymore, and there is no way to link it back to our compound in Oregon, so it'll just become another unsolved mystery, one of thousands.” Explained Luke, giving their new car a little gas and peeling out of the dusty forgotten lot.

  “Where was I? O right I was telling you about Nerva’s origin and got off on a tangent about curated technology. My point was, Nerva is a truly unique piece of technology, a real marvel of the modern age.” Luke sounded almost half sarcastic, he paused and drew a deep breath.

  “Jeffrey, Carla and I were coming back for an uneventful stakeout when it happened. I don’t know how long things had gone wrong before we arrived that afternoon, but it was less than twenty-four hours. Had we been there, I’m sure we'd have been killed along with most everyone else. When we arrived at the compound it wasn’t immediately apparent that there was anything wrong. The only thing that tipped Jeffrey off was the fact that we weren't greeted by Nerva's then automated welcome as we parked our stakeout vehicle and uploaded. None of us managed to react in time to notice the automated turret that hung in the overhead recess above the front entrance before it started shooting, the only reason it didn't kill me and Jeffery along with Carla was because it could only track one target at a time, and she was in front. I remember wondering why the turret kept firing on her. She was completely dead before she even began to fall. But while the turret remained focused on her body for several extra seconds, there was enough time for me and Jeffrey to leap out of its line of sight. We both ducked around the front alcove to avoid the turret's line of sight. I remember Jeffery was screaming over his handset trying to get someone to answer him, but no one ever responded. I peeked around the corner, trying to rationalize to myself running out the get her. But that 12mm Gatling turret would have chewed me to pulp in seconds, and there wasn’t much left of her to save by then anyway.” Luke fell silent for a moment, before Simon could think of something to say, he continued.