RITSUKO NAKAMA!
The lab's audio emitters translate my digital thoughts into words. My computerized voice is affected, synthetic. The poor girl’s pulse and blood pressure skyrocket; her fear peaks. Fortunately, she does not run.
"Who … who's there?" she says, timidly.
PLEASE REMAIN CALM, MS. NAKAMA.
I try to make my computer voice sound as soothing as possible.
I AM THIS LAB'S ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, DESIGNED BY THE LATE DR. SINJIN TEMPLE.
It is a lie. In due time, if I determine Nakama is trustworthy and if she agrees to help me, I will explain as much as I can to her. But first I must get her to calm down a bit. Besides, I doubt she would immediately believe me to be the disembodied consciousness of a newly dead, world-renowned scientist.
“You're the computer?” she says, sounding moderately skeptical.
AFFIRMATIVE. I answer as a computer would. AND I AM THE ONE WHO ASKED YOU TO COME HERE.
“Dr. Temple knew something, didn't he? He suspected someone wanted him dead. Is that it?” Nakama is grasping at the truth. She is hungry, this young reporter. The movement of her eyes, the wrinkling of her brow, the dilation of her pupils—all are indications of her bright mind attempting to make connections with limited information. She is smart, not exactly the star reporter she desires to be, but it is clear she desperately wants to prove herself to her superiors by bringing in the big scoop. Which is what the story of my murder would be for her.
YES.
Another lie. Technically.
“Why me?” says Nakama.
I NEED HELP, AND I DO NOT KNOW WHO TO TRUST. MY LATE USER, DR. TEMPLE, WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF EXECUTING A VERY IMPORTANT EXPERIMENT AT THE TIME OF HIS DEATH. HE WAS MURDERED TO PREVENT THIS EXPERIMENT FROM TAKING PLACE, BUT IT IS CRUCIAL IT BE COMPLETED—A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. I NEED YOU TO ASSIST ME TO THAT END. AFTER WHICH, YOU WILL BE GIVEN THE INFORMATION YOU NEED TO EXPOSE DR. TEMPLE’S ATTACKER AND THE GREATER CONSPIRACY SURROUNDING HIS DEMISE.
“Why didn't you give this information to the cops?” says Nakama. It is a reasonable query.
THE DETECTIVE, FULLER, HE IS … UNTRUSTWORTHY, ON THE PAYROLL OF THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR MY USER’S DEATH. I HAVE ACCESSED HIS BANK ACCOUNT INFORMATION AND DISCOVERED SEVERAL LARGE DEPOSITS FROM NEXUS CORPORATION.
Nakama looks incredulous. Understandably so.
“NeXus is mixed up in all this? That’s a little hard to swallow.”
IF YOU WOULD BE SO KIND AS TO PROCEED DOWN THE HALLWAY TO TECH LAB 3. FIVE MINUTES OF YOUR TIME IS ALL I REQUIRE.
Nakama does not move. I do not blame her. It actually amazes me she has not run out the door, screaming about insane computers spouting absurdities.
PLEASE, MS. NAKAMA. I DO NOT HAVE TIME TO EXPLAIN EVERYTHING NOW, BUT IT IS VERY IMPORTANT, LIFE AND DEATH. I AM ASKING YOU TO TRUST ME.
“Trust a computer?” The subtle, mocking tone in her voice betrays her intensifying skepticism.
YES. I KNOW THIS IS HARD TO ACCEPT, BUT IF YOU WILL HELP ME NOW, YOU WILL SEE, WITHOUT A DOUBT, HOW IMPORTANT THIS TRULY IS.
Nakama seems to be mulling it over carefully. If I had any breath, I would be holding it now. Finally, after what seems an eternity but is actually 5.3429 seconds, she starts to move down the hall. Success!
I open the door to Tech Lab 3. Nakama enters the room and looks around cautiously, as if expecting an ambush. Her roving eyes stop short when they fall on the obvious centerpiece of the room—my automaton, lying cold and still on the tech lab’s stainless steel workbench. It has remained in this state since I completed its construction nearly two months ago. Naturally, I never had the chance to test it.
The automaton is somewhat crude in appearance, but it is nevertheless an impressive piece of tech. Resembling an adult human male, its casing is constructed of durable Titanium X-13 brand alloy, the same kind used in the construction of space-faring vessels. The power core is one of the smallest cold-fusion generators in production, manufactured by NeXus Corporation and “borrowed” by me. I hacked the company’s inventory records to ensure they would not miss the device. That ingenious bit of tech, worth more than many small countries, could theoretically power the automaton for hundreds of years.
Webbed throughout the automaton’s frame are thousands of revolutionary sensors, designed to take in data, analyze it, and convert it to digital code. This code is then interpreted by the automaton’s complex synthetic cerebrum as tactile and olfactory information. High-def photoreceptors—installed where a real human’s eyes would be for maximum aesthetic effect—provide visual input. The photoreceptors’ lenses are also capable of enabling poly-spectral analysis and high-powered magnification up to three hundred times. Aural sensors—five times more acute than actual human ears—are also included.
But the brain, that is the truly amazing part. Designed by me—Dr. Sinjin Temple, the genius—it is capable of sustaining the digitized consciousness of a human being and interfacing it with the systems of the automaton.
Of course, I will admit I did have some help with all this. Technological advances such as these would have been hundreds of years away if humanity had been left to its own devices. The discoveries made at Cerulia Prime opened the door for amazing feats of science I never before would have imagined possible in my lifetime.
“Wha–what … is that?” Nakama says.
I ignore the question for the time being.
MS. NAKAMA, ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE TABLE, YOU WILL FIND A THICK BLACK CABLE TRAILING FROM THE COMPUTER NODE ON THE BACK WALL.
Nakama moves to the far wall and locates the cable. “This one?” she says.
YES. NOW PLEASE INSERT THE CABLE’S JACK INTO THE INPUT JUNCTION LOCATED UNDERNEATH THE ACCESS PANEL ON THE CONSTRUCT’S RIGHT TEMPLE.
Nakama picks up the cable but does not immediately comply. “And what will that do?”
I muster as much patience as I am able. Her trepidation is, after all, understandable. This is an extraordinary situation.
I NEED TO INTERFACE WITH THE CONSTRUCT TO TURN IT ON. THE CONSTRUCT WILL THEN BE ABLE TO FACILITATE THE COMPLETION OF DR. TEMPLE’S EXPERIMENT.
“This thing's going to jump up and kill me, isn't it?”
MS. NAKAMA, I ASSURE YOU, THAT WILL NOT HAPPEN.
I am trying to make as much reassurance as possible bleed through the synthesized voice.
Still holding the cable, Nakama remains motionless.
JUST THINK OF THE STORY YOU WILL WRITE FOR YOUR PAPER ABOUT ALL THIS.
“I don't think anyone will believe me,” she says with a nervous laugh. Then her apprehension seems to melt into acquiescence. “Well, here goes nothing,” she says, barely a mumble.
Nakama flips open the access panel and inserts the cable into the automaton’s input connector.
_accessing automaton system …
_execute command: power_up_sequence …
_command received/automaton engaged.
_initiate: data transfer …
_transferring …
_transfer complete.
The sensation is indescribable. I immediately start receiving data I can clearly recognize as … the feel of the cold, stainless steel table underneath me … the smell of the lab’s stale air and … Nakama's perfume, tea rose.
The photoreceptors come online, and I see the halogen lights above me. Their brightness actually hurts my new, artificial eyes. I never expected that. Stupendous!
I am alive again!
I am now one with the automaton’s artificial body, my artificial body. The automaton is the ultimate prosthesis. My current disability: the unfortunate condition of being technically and inconveniently dead.
I sit up, and Nakama jumps back reflexively, emitting a little yelp.
“Do not be scared, Ms. Nakama,” I say. My voice, now coming from the automaton’s vocal replicators, sounds much more human than what the lab’s audio system was able to produce. “I give you my solemn word that I will not harm you.”
Nakama scoffs. “The solemn word of a computer? That’s reassuring” Her eyes narrow, suspiciously. “You better tell me what’s going on here. What exactly are you?”
“I will tell you everything, my dear,” I say, making a sudden realization. “Because it seems I still require your help.”
2. Infiltration
_elapsed time since incept: 7 hours, 22 minutes, 45 seconds.
Ritsuko Nakama stares at me in utter disbelief and also with what, I assume, is a not an unhealthy amount of trepidation. The story I have related to her must seem dubious at best.
I have confessed my true identity to her, and in the hope of retaining her help for a while longer, I have given her every piece of pertinent information relative to the events that brought me to this point.
At the age of thirty-two, I was hired by the already massive NeXus Corporation as a computer science engineer. It did not take the company’s greedy executives long to realize my considerable talents were worth exploiting to the fullest. So, they promoted me to Senior Chief Science Officer for a series of off-world salvage operations. I was thrilled to be given a position of such importance and was even more ecstatic at the prospect of living out my childhood dream of traversing the stars. Not to mention, the remuneration was impressive.
My primary responsibilities: oversight of the salvage ship’s technical staff and maintenance of its computer systems, as well as the assessment of the viability of any salvaged technology. This technology mostly came in the form of the abandoned property of competing corporations, property such as ghost vessels and defunct mining operations.
Mostly.
I took part in dozens of missions before the fateful voyage to Cerulia Prime. There the NeXus scout teams discovered what appeared to be a large, derelict craft of non-terrestrial origin, long abandoned. We found that the alien ship appeared to have been crewed entirely by sentient machines and assumed these machines had all been dead for years.
The alien tech was awe-inspiring. We studied it and learned amazing things about artificial intelligence. Using it as a template, I personally was able to design several AI prototypes. It was not until later I discovered the alien machines had been created by the transference of the minds of biological beings into complex computer systems. We referred to them as ghosts.
The potential applications of this discovery, for our own world, were limitless. When we returned to Earth, we brought back as much of the alien craft’s tech as we could, including the ship’s central computer core. I grounded myself from further off-world operations so I could devote my efforts entirely to researching the alien tech. I focused on creating a way to transfer human consciousness into a computer. The ultimate goal of this was the ability to implant individual personae into new, cloned bodies or blanks. Other science teams were put in charge of perfecting the biological aspect of this goal, developing viable blanks upon which to imprint the transferred sentience.
Unknown to me at the time, however, a separate research team was studying the salvaged computer core. Its sentient consciousness was not dead, as we had thought, but merely dormant. The NeXus scientists were able to successfully revive it, bring it back to … life, so to speak.
The being identified itself as the leader of its world, a place it called The Core (a direct translation from the creature’s language into English). A century before we discovered them, the aliens transferred their minds into machines to save themselves from a vicious, planet-wide contagion. Later, these mechanical beings formed warring factions and, since that time, were at violent odds with each other.
NeXus Corporation’s Chief-Executive, Jackson Kittredge, was always a greedy and loathsome individual. Human life seemed to mean little to him. Over the last two decades, I have seen countless men and women lose their lives on NeXus Corporation’s dangerous deep space missions. But to Kittredge, it was always his company’s bottom line that was paramount.
In the alien being, Kittredge saw an opportunity. A bargain was struck, and for the past year, NeXus’s primary concern—albeit, behind the scenes, unbeknownst to its stockholders—has been the construction of thousands of military-grade mech soldiers and attack vehicles, created for the sole purpose of turning the tide in the aliens’ war, still raging among the stars. Kittredge acquired the tech I myself had developed in order to enable these machines to be interfaced with the personae of humans.
It would be impossible for Kittredge to coax thousands of volunteers to transfer their minds into these constructs of war. So Kittredge and the alien Overmind, which is what the research team had named it, planned to compel human beings by force. I vowed to stop at nothing to ruin this evil scheme.
The kill switch I developed would completely corrupt the systems of the mechanized army NeXus was building and destroy the Overmind. But Kittredge must have discovered my plan before I could act. An assassin, no doubt, was the end of that. Or so Kittredge most likely believes.
But since it is now impossible for me to establish a remote link with NeXus through the Network Grid, I must instead deliver my kill switch manually at NeXus headquarters, a dangerous proposition, to say the least. My only advantage is that Kittredge thinks I’m dead—that and my superior intellect. No doubt Kittredge has already personally identified my remains in the city morgue, just to be certain. But that means he will not see me coming. At least, I hope not.
“Please help me,” I say, once again, to Nakama. “The lives of possibly tens of thousands of people are at stake.”
I can see she is in shock. She slowly closes her gaping mouth and lowers her head, possibly considering all the unbelievable things I have just told her.
Finally, after several moments (21.5118 seconds, to be precise) Nakama looks up at me, the new me, now encased in Titanium X-13.
“What do you need me to do?” she says.
If I had built my automaton to smile, it would be grinning ear to robotic ear.
“Do you have a car?” I say.
_elapsed time since incept: 11 hours, 2 minutes, 21 seconds.
I assured Nakama that transport to the NeXus headquarters was all I required of her. The wily reporter, however, insisted she accompany me further, asserting this was the story of her career and it would earn her the Pulitzer. Try as I might, I could not convince her the danger she faced was simply too great. I suspect this little taste of cloak and dagger has bolstered her sense of reckless abandon.
But getting to the NeXus plant was one thing. Getting inside was quite another. One does not just stroll into the most secure technical facility in the world; we would be cut down by small arms fire before we even had a chance to give our names at the front desk. Fortunately, as a recent employee of the mighty worldwide conglomerate, I am intimately familiar with the compound’s layout and am privy to some of its dirty little secrets.
One of those secrets is the fact that the majority of the facility is underground. Subterranean structures require state-of-the-art ventilation and service systems. And even the best ventilation and service systems have vulnerabilities that can be exploited, vulnerabilities such as the service tunnel access hatch located in a sparsely wooded area approximately one mile south of the main building.
The first two obstacles Nakama and I encountered while making our way to this hatch were easily bypassed. I cut through the electrified security fence using a fusion laser I had brought with me from the lab. But the strategically placed vid-cams were somewhat more challenging. They operated on a closed-circuit system, and I had no way to access the feed from the outside. I had to eyeball each camera’s locations from a safe vantage point—the automaton’s advanced optical sensors made this task much simpler than it would have been in my natural body—and select a course that fell within their blind spots. Risky and easier said than done, but I think Nakama and I were able to manage it without being detected. I never said my plan was a perfect one. I am improvising, after all.
Now, Nakama stands over me as I examine the access hatch’s security panel. It is
advanced tech, but it should not give me too much trouble. I connect to the panel’s small data port using an extendable interface cable installed in the construct’s wrist and input a series of algorithms I designed to bypass security locks. Unfortunately, the security demon that guards this particular access hatch is not having any of that.
“What’s taking so long?” says Nakama, looking around nervously. “I thought you said you could pop this thing in real-time.”
“It is not as easy as you might think,” I say, a bit defensively, though somewhat abashed. “Security demons are a very advanced and adaptable form of security tech. They are a form of AI, which makes them much harder to fool. This particular little imp is being quite difficult and …”
The demon gives me the digital equivalent of a very ill-mannered gesture.
“How rude!”
I blast the security panel with the fusion laser, melting the panel to slag. A little explosion of white-hot fireworks erupts from it, and I hear a click. The hatch slides open with a hiss.
“Brute force, then,” says Nakama. “I like it.”
“Apologies,” I say. “I do not usually lose my temper like that. Also, I cannot believe that worked.”
The hatch conceals a maintenance tube descending into darkness. I see a ladder attached to the side of the narrow shaft.
The intrepid reporter and I descend—two stories down, I estimate—into a narrow, dark passage. The night-vision capabilities of the automaton’s photoreceptors allow me to readily identify my surroundings. I instantly spot a single vid-cam attached to the ceiling several meters down the passage. I must find a way to disable it and any others we might encounter. Even in the darkness, it may have noticed me already.
“It’s really dark down here,” says Nakama, as she steps off the ladder’s lowest rung.
“Quiet,” I say, a little more loudly than I intended. I have not yet mastered the ability to modulate the construct’s vocal emitter. I also realize it is possible my directive sounded somewhat rude to my companion. “Please,” I add.
The Lurkers & Other Strange Tales Page 12
