by Matt Doyle
I could see Finn misjudged that one, even before John burst out laughing. “Nice try Finn, but you’re still way off the mark. For one, it wasn’t my Granddad’s research, it was Emblem’s, he just went along for the ride. Hell, even if it had been his, it wouldn’t be my duty to finish it. I mean, other than the obvious bits, I don’t have a clue what this project you keep talking about is, and I don’t really care. On top of that, Carnival’s not dangerous. The fact that you just threw that bit in like you did proves that you already know that. The big thing though, is that I think you’re completely misunderstanding exactly what Carnival is.”
“I see. Then perhaps you should enlighten me,” Finn replies.
Ever dramatic, John lets his arms drop down with a bemused sniff, his head following suit as he briefly focuses on his left knee before whipping back to Finn again, his expression … I guess it’s serious compared to how he’s been so far. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s high actually. Or if the Surge hit him hard maybe. No. Try to put yourself in his place Lana, in his world. All he’s ever done is Spark Form. Maybe this is a game to him. Or if it’s not, he’s treating it as such. Yes, that makes sense. He’s adapting his Spark Form playing style to the situation he’s in.
“Carnival was created,” he says, “by a computer program, my Granddad’s program as you’ve already pointed out. I loaded it into a Data Wick and synced it up to a Mobile Loader. Granddad left both of those to me too by the way, did you know that? Anyway, I picked Carnival because she was my favourite character to use. She has balanced stats, her attributes work with a few favourite cards of mine, she looks cool, all that stuff. When I booted her up, her initial personality and responses were governed by the program I’d loaded up. I mean, really, she wasn’t all that different from a regular Spark Form manifestation, the program just replaced the action cards is all.”
“OK,” I reply, curious as to where he’s going with this. “Your point?”
“That was then, this is now. The program doesn’t define her, not any more. There are things that scare her, things that make her smile, things she likes, things she hates. I’ve watched her repeat different actions and responses to things over and over, agonising over it more and more each time until she finally breaks the cycle and reacts the way that she wants to react. The program is still a part of her, but it’s not in control. It’s like a conscience or, I dunno, the sort of learned guilt that you pick up from your parents.” He looks from me to Finn and back again, his smile wide but eyes determined. “You guys set out to make a simulation of life, but the moment that she chose to stop listening to that little voice inside her head, she became something more than a simulation.”
I can see from the way he’s studying John that Finn isn’t convinced. No program breaking for him then. As if to confirm this, he replies to John with, “to argue that an apparent sense of free will is enough to classify something as being alive is a rather simplistic view. Aside from anything else, a degree of free thinking is a requirement for the SSF’s intended use. You also seem to have blindly accepted that its emotional responses are something other than a pre-set series of actions appropriately selected from an inbuilt database of potential combinations. Can you really not accept that your current perception of its behaviour is merely confirmation that the program is fulfilling its purpose of appearing to hold an existence on par with your own?”
“Nope. Like I said Finn, not only does she believe she’s alive, she came to the conclusion herself despite being fully aware of what she is, and that is good enough for me.”
Finn crosses his arms and his face takes on a pretty good version of mild annoyance. When he speaks though, weariness has kicked in. “Honestly Mr Forrester, I cannot understand why you’re being so stubborn about this.”
I giggle out loud at my failings in his programming and he looks at me curiously. “It’s an emotional response Finn. He’s being stubborn because he cares about her and he’s going with his gut rather than pure logic.” I jump up, stretch and yawn. “You’re too cold Finn. He can’t relate to your thinking.”
“So,” John says. “What about Meera? What does she think about this? I’m assuming she knows about Carnival too. She doesn’t act like Finn though. Ooh, does Hong Chan know that she’s a whatchamacallit? An S-S-F?”
“SSF, yes,” I reply. “And yes, Hong Chan knows what she is. Meera on the other hand, is not aware that she’s an SSF, nor does she know about Carnival. She’s here for another reason.”
“But you guys don’t believe that she’s alive?” he asks, “Even if she does?”
“No,” Finn replies evenly. “She is programmed not to know what she is, and so her belief that she is alive is nothing more than a …” He considers his response carefully, then settles on “Delusion. It is a pre-determined delusion.”
“But Carnival does know what she is,” John replies. “So surely her view of being alive holds more weight?”
“It is merely a delusion of another sort Mr Forrester. Perhaps a ‘glitch’ would be a better term?”
He shakes his head. “And what about you Lana? You haven’t really given an opinion one way or another. Do you think it’s possible that Carnival is alive?”
Do I? Now that’s a good question. “Without studying her, I couldn’t say for sure. Until I have that opportunity, the default position would have to be that she’s an artificial construct designed to give the appearance of life. An imitation, not the masterpiece. Is it possible that she’s alive though? In theory, yes, but as it is it would be impossible to say whether or not she could be considered alive. I would guess that, given her appearance she would not be viewed as alive by the vast majority of people, and she certainly would not be viewed as such in any legal sense.”
“OK then,” he says, turning back to Finn. “Finn, you don’t view yourself as alive, right? Even if we took human laws out of the equation, you’d still believe that you are a computer program, nothing more, I’m pretty sure of that. If you were to break your programming though, would that make you something else?”
“You are correct Mr Forrester that, based on my knowledge, I cannot and will not believe that I am alive. Everything that I do, every decision that I make, they are all part of a pre-programmed set of traits and responses. While you could argue that I could break free of that and achieve a different type of self-awareness, perhaps even coming to view myself as a living entity, I simply have no interest in doing so.”
“But you acknowledge that if you broke away from your programmed self, you would become something different, and by doing so, you would achieve a different form of existence. You’d be alive.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I acknowledge that doing so would open me up to the possibility of considering myself to be more than I am. It would not change how I am built, nor would it change my origins or my history. Regardless of how my viewpoints and perspectives would change, I would still remain no more alive than I am now.”
“Fair enough,” he says with a smile, dropping one of his legs from the cross-legged position and allowing the foot to drop to the floor with a light thud. “On that, I guess that we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”
“Really?” Finn asks, his voice sounding genuinely surprised. “Even after hearing it from an SSF itself, you still refuse to accept that Carnival is nothing more than an advanced computer program?”
“Yeah, really,” he says cheerily. “All you’ve just done is confirm that human understanding in general will refuse to accept her in the same way that she accepts herself. We already knew that, that’s why we’ve been so careful up to now.” Finn looks unsure how best to respond, so John continues instead, clearly trying to help him understand as he says, “Let me put this another way. Your reasoning is based on a very cold, admittedly widely accepted, logic, and that’s cool, it makes sense to you. I’m not that sort of guy though. I can’t just accept that something’s right just because the rules say so. Carnival believes that she’s alive de
spite the accepted viewpoint, and you haven’t shown me anything tonight to make me think that she’s wrong to do so.”
Ah, now I see. When we said he was stubborn, we were more right than we knew. “You didn’t come here tonight with any intention of allowing us to change your view, did you?” I ask.
“Nah,” he replies, his grin growing wider. “But then, I didn’t claim to either.” He turns to Finn and gives him a quick wink then finishes, “this was just to figure out the lay of the land. So to speak.”
Finn’s face suddenly takes on a very cold, hard edge. I do believe that John’s actually managed to get under his skin a little. That’s a bit more of a human response at least. Yay me and my awesome programming! “Then allow me to make this very clear for you Mr Forrester,” he says. “If a suitable arrangement cannot be reached, then we will simply take your SSF by force.”
“Yeah, I thought as much,” he says, getting to his feet. “Well then, happy hunting Finn.” To my surprise, rather than heading to the door, John turns to me and says, “Lana, do me a favour and switch Finn off for a bit.”
“Excuse me?” I blurt.
“It’s cool, I just want to talk some more, but without the, and I mean no offence by this Finn, without the coldness creeping in.”
“I would not recommend complying Miss De La Cruz.”
“No,” I say, “I agree. Plus, you’re not going to change my view John, you know that, right?”
“Nah, I’m too much of a dreamer to accept that. Look, set it on a timer. Shut him down for an hour, that’ll be more than enough time. You can even keep his Loader with you if you want. That way if I turn out to be an insane, psychopathic killer, you can reload him nice and quick. For the record though, the last time I checked, I wasn’t a psychopathic killer. The jury’s out on the insanity bit though.”
I look to Finn and he remains strangely quiet. “How quick is your load time Finn?”
“Two seconds,” he replies calmly.
“Fine,” I say, turning back to John. “I keep his Mobile Loader with me though.” John nods, and I dart to the bedroom, retrieve Finn’s Loader and return to the main room. “See ya in a bit Finn.”
He simply replies, “Miss De La Cruz,” nods, and then switches off as I pull his card out, just a centimetre, leaving the reload nice and quick if needed. If I turn the Data Wick off though, it won’t matter if I shove the card back in. Nope, it can stay on in standby. I watch it lower itself gently to the floor and sit down again, dropping the Mobile Loader next to me.
“Well?” I ask, looking to John.
“You got any beer?”
“Hmm?”
“Beer,” he says. “You got any?”
“Oh, right. No. Why’s that?”
John smiles, and pulls his phone out of his pocket. The screen, I notice, is already illuminated and on a call. “You get that?” he says to the screen. “Feel free to head back to the hotel room and grab a few from the fridge before you head on over.”
Somewhere on the other end of the line I hear a growl? Or was it a grunt maybe? The screen switches off and it suddenly dawns on me what’s going on. Before I can react, John has already grabbed the Mobile Loader and pulled Finn’s card out.
“Don’t worry,” he says, calmly. “You can have this back in a moment. I just want to make sure you aren’t going to over-react.”
Before I can say anything, someone knocks at the door and John has a quick look through the peep hole. “Huh,” he says. “That was quick. She must have snuck the beer out with her. Or snuck back after I left. Or she hasn’t brought any beer with her. Nah, that’s silly. Of course she has beer with her. Don’t worry by the way, we aren’t going to do anything bad. I just want you to see what I’m talking about with Carnival, that’s all. Plus, you said you wanted to study her, right?” With that, he grabs the door handle.
Shit. Now what do I do?
FAHRN - 20:20
“She was sent to an Orphanage,” I say, sitting into a chair in the corner of the room. “She spent a year, maybe a little longer there, then ended up on the streets after the government cut the funding for the place and shut it down. After that, she was stuck living rough but never stayed in one place too long and started port hopping every three to six months. It was after she saw some tournament footage that she started looking for me. Sound about right?”
“Yes,” he replies, sitting on the bed and taking a sip from his glass. “But how did you know?”
“I know because this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this story. When you spoke to Maria, you said that Meera hadn’t seen me since the Halo, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re sure that’s what Meera told you?”
“One hundred per cent. Why?”
“OK,” I reply, ignoring the question. “What do you know about The Wandering Halo?”
“Only what Meera told me,” he says, scratching his head. “Mostly. I know there were a lot of rumours going around at the time, but if I’m honest, I don’t pay much attention to stuff going on outside CL-Five.”
“CL-Five,” I say with a smile. “You know most people call the Colonies by the name of their SF Regional Qualifier, right?”
“Cothurn-Ragna then. I just don’t see the point in naming it something it’s not. The official mandates still call it CL-Five, so I stick with that. The Qualifier’s name was drawn out of a hat anyway, so it’s not like I have any particular connection to it. Back when I started playing as a kid, it was still the Colony Five Qualifier.”
“Fair enough,” I nod. “The Wandering Halo was linked to Minnis-Tirtha, but even if you’d followed the news stories you wouldn’t have seen too much. Faye Simmons was up for re-election at the time and in an attempt to promote herself as forward thinking, she visited The Wandering Halo when it stopped off for supplies. Extend an olive branch to us travelling types, ya know? While on board, she discovered strong evidence of child abuse, or so the story goes. I was still a Merc back then, and it was my team that she hired to liberate the children. If the crew resisted, she told us, we were fully licensed to take whatever measures were necessary.”
“Seems odd that they’d hire you guys rather than sending their own forces in.”
“It was,” I agree, gulping down some more water. “And we asked about that too. Apparently, the way the system worked, it could be weeks before they could get anyone out there. Bureaucratic red tape being what it is, we didn’t push it any further. She tried spinning it to us that it was positive PR for Offlanders too, demonstrating that we don’t tolerate stuff like that, but mostly we just looked at it as another pay day. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t care for abuse of any sort, but we have our own laws and systems to deal with it.
“Anyway. We went, they resisted, it got out of hand. We ended up in the middle of a fire fight. In the end, the most sensible option was for the twelve of us to split into pairs and start sweeping the floors. I ended up on one of the middle decks. For the most part, there wasn’t much resistance there. A couple of people tried jumping us with whatever they could grab, but I think that most of the floor had been cleared already. The screaming that Meera heard? That was her parents. I’m sure she knows that though. Her Dad leapt at me the moment I opened the door to their living quarters. The second my rifle put him down, her Mum came out swinging a metal bar. She misjudged her aim and it ended up clattering it against the framework of the door. Bang,” I say, pointing the fingers of my free hand like a pistol, then dropping it to my lap. “One more down. You look very pale all of a sudden Hong Chan.”
“I just can’t believe how casually you can talk about killing someone,” he replies, shaking his head.
“Offlanders don’t have many job options. We usually go into one of three areas. Shipping, Mining or Mercenary work. Shipping looked dull and I didn’t fancy Mining, so I picked Mercenary. Killing people was just part of the job, nothing more, nothing less. Even now, I’m pretty disconnected with it all.” I take another sip an
d continue. “Like I said before, we had to force the bedroom door. Meera was the first kid I’d seen on the ship which, given the reason we were there, seemed odd. I mean, I figured they’d all been moved or something, but what really got me was her reaction. I knew that the kids would be scared, I expected the fear, but I thought that we’d see something else as well. We were there to save them. There should have been relief or … I don’t know, just something. Hope maybe?
“I made the mistake of stopping to think about it. One of the crew came past and saw us before we saw him. We were just lucky he was slow raising his gun. I knew I wouldn’t get a shot off in time so I moved across the door to block Meera from harm. My partner took him down before he could take a proper aim, but that just meant he pulled the trigger on the way down.” I tap my knee prosthetic with my glass and let out an embittered chuckle. “That pretty much finished my career as a Merc.” I sigh. “Wholesale slaughter. Between the twelve of us we killed every adult on the ship. It wasn’t until years later that I heard they’d found a guy called Reese Donaghan among the bodies. You heard of him?”
Hong Chan shakes his head.
“He was Faye Simmons’ biggest threat in the election. He claimed to have a bunch of files that discredited her as a candidate, fraud or some shit like that, and he was gonna reveal it all at the next debate. Suddenly, outta the blue, he had a few guys hunting him down. The rumour was that he claimed sanctuary on The Wandering Halo and when Faye tried to retrieve him they refused to let her have him. With no way to send her own troops up after him, we were a good cover.”
“Was that true?” he asks.
“Who can tell?” I say with a shrug. “All I know for sure is that not one kid that we saved could recall any sort of abuse at all. Only the older ones took part in the court case, and every single one of them claimed that the ships logs that they used to posthumously convict the crew were falsified. After that, they were all put into the care system and placed in an orphanage that Faye chose to allocate additional funding to. ‘Look at me, I saved the poor unfortunate Offland children, aren’t I super? No one else would take pity on wretches such as these.’ That little PR stunt saw her walk the election. Best as I can tell, she kept the Orphanage ticking over until everyone forgot about the Halo kids, then pulled the funding.”
