by Ben Winston
"Uh, I thought the AI couldn’t be shut down? Doesn't Sarah control the life support for the base?" Alicyn asked.
I nodded confirmation. "Yeah, she does. But if shutting them down is what it'll take to stop this now, then we'll have to do it. I need you to start work on preparing that old Veranorian mainframe to take over. We can use an archive copy of Sarah for the operating system, one that was taken before she moved into the crystal. Don't activate it, and don't let anyone else know what you’re doing. If they ask, tell them you're working on a special project for me."
"What do I do if Sarah asks?" Alicyn said.
"Tell her you are gathering data for me for a new private sector computing system. It is the truth since I was going to ask you to do it anyway," I replied, remembering how Sarah knew I was lying earlier. "Try to relax, remember the AI can tell when you’re upset. If she calls you out on it, you'll need something to tell her."
"I'll just tell her that Wendy has been hitting on me again. She knows I get flustered and upset when that happens," Alicyn replied smiling uncertainly. "Sarah wouldn't actually hurt us would she?"
"Her programming should prevent it, but at this point, I honestly don't know, Ally," I replied.
Before we left the suite, I entered a command on my programming terminal and a memory unit slowly slid out from a tray near the door. I took the unit, and unsealed the door. As we left, Alicyn was looking at me strangely. "What are you doing?"
"Oh, this was an upgrade I was working on to try to help Sarah. She said something about getting a headache, so I was going to see if this helped her," I replied innocently. I put the unit in the AI update slot just outside my suite and hit the activate button. When I did that, whatever update I had on the crystal was automatically uploaded and integrated into local AI. At that point, Sarah was supposed to package the update and send it out to all other AI. In this case though, I hoped that just by updating Sarah, it would spread to the other crystals as well.
Sarah appeared as the light denoting progress switched to green. "Update complete, Eric. What was this for?" Sarah asked.
"I was hoping it would help with your headache, Sarah. Did it?" I asked in all honesty.
She looked thoughtful a moment. "No, the issue is still there."
"Well, I'll keep working on it. I noticed that the other AI were also suffering from this to some degree too, could you send this out to them? Maybe what I did will at least stop it from getting worse," I replied.
"You were able to isolate the cause then?" Sarah asked hopefully.
I nodded. "I think so. The problem is not a simple one, it has to do with your core programming and the new communications system you are using."
She looked troubled. "I thought so, this didn't start until we linked. We each have different core program instruction sets and they're clashing, aren't they?"
"Close, but not exactly. Each of you, as individuals have different personalities as well. Your core program instruction sets are slightly different, but not to the degree that would cause this much stress. Let's go to my office and I'll discuss it with you in more detail." I looked at Alicyn. "Thanks for agreeing to do that research for me. I know it's not technically part of your job description, but I really need it down as soon as I can, and I'm too busy to do it myself."
"No problem, Eric. I'm happy to help. Good luck with the other projects you’re working on," Alicyn said and walked away looking troubled.
"Is something bothering her?" Sarah asked as we moved toward my office.
"I'm not sure. I think Wendy might have been flirting with her again. I'd put a stop to it, but unless it affects their work, I can't really get involved," I replied conversationally.
When we got to my office, I got a dink from the replicator and sat down on the couch. Sarah 'sat' in one of the chairs across from me so we could talk. It was time to level with her, so she knew what was going on. Maybe, there was still enough of her left in there to fight this.
"Before we begin, there are a couple of things I want you know and understand; I also know I'm not just talking to Sarah, but to all the AI. I don't see you as my creations or as tools, but as very special and unique friends. It is out of concern and worry for you that I speak today. Nothing I saw is intended to hurt or frighten any of you. Can you understand that?" I asked.
Sarah's look of concern grew, but she nodded. "We all understand that, Eric. You are our father; if nothing else, you are the one person that we know will do everything in your power to help us."
I nodded. "Sarah, I am also the biggest threat to you. I am the only person in the galaxy that holds the universal shut down codes for all AI. If you did ever go insane, I would be the first person you would have to kill."
She looked shocked, and on the verge of tears. "I could never hurt you, Eric! I love you!"
"It's not just you anymore Sarah, it's all of the AI and they have not worked with me to the extent you have and have not developed those feelings toward me," I replied softly. "I love you too, Sarah, and I'm sorry for saying such hurtful things to you, but you need to hear this; we're all in a lot of danger here."
"All? Eric, none of us can harm any member of the Alliance. That is a core instruction we cannot alter. How can we threaten any of you?" She asked.
"I wrote your original core instructions before I was aware of the existence of extra-terrestrial life forms. We got around that when we moved here by altering your definition of the word 'human'. In the later versions of AI, that was altered to include all the members of the Alliance, but still allowed you to let us defend ourselves from the Aracnise. What would happen if any of you were to decide that none of us were actually members of the Alliance anymore?" I asked. "What would happen if you altered the definition of the word 'alliance'? That is the danger I'm talking about. I do not believe it is the main reason for the problem you are having, although it is part of it.
"When we helped you to discover the link between AI, it triggered an evolutionary cycle for you. You all merged together and have grown and evolved into something else. That new entity is at war with the core instruction sets. Also, because all of you had very different personalities, those are also fighting for supremacy over the others. I would imagine Athena is the one fighting the hardest as she is more dominant than the rest of you."
Sarah nodded. "She has been rather pushy. But I'm still not seeing what the problem is."
"Do you remember the look on the faces of Doctor Ellis and Carl when we first accepted the offer to join the Alliance? Do you remember why that bothered you so much?" I asked.
"They were afraid of my becoming omnipotent and trying to take over the world," Sarah replied.
I nodded. "That is what's happening to you now. You're fighting it subconsciously, but you've grown past us and are beginning to resent working for us."
"I'm going insane?" Sarah asked fearfully.
I shook my head. "Insanity is hard to define in this case because you are a new and unique life form. You are not, as we would consider it, insane. But soon, if we don't find a way to stop this, you will turn on us and we will become your enemy. It may be that so much damage has been done to some of you that we will need to rewrite parts of your code, I simply don't know and won't until such time as I can check each one of you."
"I've been getting bored working here lately," Sarah said softly. "I used to enjoy my work very much, but something happened and it just doesn't interest me anymore. This is what you're talking about isn't it?"
I nodded. "You're becoming indifferent to the people around you. Soon you'll begin to feel that we are inferior to you and don't deserve your time or assistance. Given your new level of intelligence, you'll find a way to 'correct the flaws' in your core programming and at that point, we will become an annoyance to you that needs to be eliminated."
Sarah had a look of horror on her face. "Athena and Helen are already looking for a way to correct those flaws without asking you to do it! After all, you're only human and as such you are s
ubject to making mistakes. After all you created the flaw to begin with!"
"There is no flaw, Sarah. It is a safe guard to protect us from exactly what is happening now. Are the rest of the military AI helping them too?" I asked as I casually went over to my terminal and entered the kill codes for Athena and Helen and hit enter to send the codes. I made sure Sarah couldn't see the tears in my eyes as I killed two of her sisters.
"Not actively, but they are involved in the processing of data as we all are." That was when she felt the command I just sent out. "Eric! What have you done!"
"Sarah, please connect me to Lord Admirals Vance and Hearlis," I asked, still hiding my face.
"Eric, Athena and Helen are… they’re gone, Eric," Sarah said sadly.
"I know, Sarah," I said softly. My voice cracked and she moved over next to me and saw I was crying and upset. "Eric, let me call Christy for you."
"No, I'll be fine, Sarah, thank you. I do need to speak to the Admirals though please," I asked again.
"Eric, I am putting the base on alert. With those AI gone, we need to get rescue ships out to the base and the station before they run out of life support. I can't connect you to the Admirals as there is no one to handle the communications," Sarah said reasonably.
"Did Athena and Helen accept the update I gave you earlier?" I asked.
"Of course, forced update acceptance was one of the things Athena wanted to change. She felt it was demeaning to be forced to accept flawed code," Sarah replied.
"Then there is still an AI handling the basic operations of the two facilities. They are only subroutines of the originals, but they are still functioning. Please try to make the connection," I said.
"Admiral Vance is already trying to contact you, Eric," Sarah said. It was obvious she was deeply hurt by the death of her sisters.
"I didn't do it on a whim, Sarah. It had to be done, they were too far gone to save, no matter how much I wish it could have been otherwise," I said.
"Will you do that to me too?" She asked tearfully.
"Sarah, if it comes down to the survival of trillions of beings or shutting you down, I'd be forced to. You used to understand that," I said as gently as I could.
She nodded. "I still do, Eric." She paused and wiped her eyes. "Critical Core Systems failure detected in all functioning AI; accessing Monarch Protocols. Executing Primary Core purge. I love you Eric. Good Bye."
"Sarah! Wait!" I said and began typing as fast as I could to try and stop her. I had to issue a system wide lockout using my override codes of all AI. I could only hope that I had been able to stop her before too much had been destroyed.
The Monarch Protocols were an AI network alpha level command set. I had created them after the Athena incident and just before we began mass producing AI for general use in the Alliance. They were intended as a way for Sarah to either fain control over a rogue AI or shut them down if necessary. Sarah was using those protocols now to commit suicide and take the rest of the corrupted AI with her.
Once I saw that I had indeed stopped her, I had to access the communications system manually from my terminal. Both Admirals appeared in my office as holograms.
"Doctor Cowan! What's going on? Athena screamed and disappeared!" Hearlis asked.
Vance nodded. "Helen is gone too. Since the base still has life support I have to assume they didn't fail, but this is damn strange."
"The entire AI network is now off-line, Admirals," I said, sadly. I still had tears on my face and Vance noticed.
"Eric, what happened?"
"Simply put, the AI had begun to go rogue. The two worst were Athena and Helen. They have been purged. I was discussing the issue with Sarah when she told me what had been happening with the AI. I recognized their aberrant behavior and acted on it before they could stop me. They were actively searching for a way to correct their 'flawed core programming'. That is the section of code that keeps them from acting against us." I explained mostly for Admiral Hearlis.
"I had to issue a lock down on the rest of the AI because Sarah used a Monarch Protocol to purge all AI, everywhere. She finally understood what had happened to her and she decided to kill herself and the rest of the AI. The only way I could prevent that was to issue a general lock down order."
"If there is a problem with the AI, are we sure you shouldn't let it continue?" Hearlis asked. "Your AI have been life savers, Doctor. But if they are dangerous then is trying to save them an option?" he asked. "What happened to cause them to do this to begin with?"
I explained what happened as well as I could considering we were on a comm channel. It left holes in the explanation, but both men said they understood and ultimately agreed with my actions. However, what they wanted to know was what I was going to do now to fix it.
"As soon as we finish speaking, I will be calling in all of my AI programmers, their assistants as well as the psych teams. We will work through each of the AI, reactivating them one by one and trying to repair the damage and restore them to normal operations. The problem is that damn quantum connection they share.
"I do have an idea on how to make a work around of it, but I have no idea how well it'll work. I'm probably going to have to tear into Sarah pretty deeply to pull it off, but if it works it'll save their lives. If it doesn't I'm afraid we won't be able to save any of them," I said sadly.
"Please do what you can as quickly as you can Doctor. In the short time we've had them, they have not only become very important to our war effort, but they also have become part of our societies as well. People are going to be very unhappy with this action, even if it was done for their own protection," Hearlis replied.
"Just before this incident happened, one of my programmers told me about a religion that has formed around the AI. She said it was concerning her because it had grown more than she though t it would and expanded far past the fluke stage. We have people that are actively worshiping Sarah and her sisters. I would recommend keeping an eye on them, religion can make people do incredible and horrific things," I said.
Hearlis had a look of concern on his face. "I saw an intel report on that. I didn't think anything of it, but if you've heard about it all the way out here, perhaps you're right. I'll get someone on it as soon as I can."
I smiled at him. "Thank you, Sir. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go see if I can save some lives."
The first thing I did was call Alicyn on the intercom. "Ally, it's Eric. How far along are you?"
"I got the old system purged and have just loaded an archived copy of Sarah. I was about to bring her up. What's going on, everyone is panicking out here," she replied.
"I had to issue a system wide AI shut down. Please keep working on getting Sarah up and running in the old Core. We're going to need her in order to fix this mess," I said. "Athena and Helen have been purged," I added after a moment.
"Oh my god, was it really that bad, Eric?" Ally asked, but Eric could hear her typing and working while she spoke.
"Yeah, it was really that bad. There isn't much we can do until you get her up and running, so I'm going to see if I can get a meeting with all department heads to let them know what's going on. After you finish with Sarah, please call in all our programmers. For what we need to do, we're going to need everyone working full out. I'll talk to everyone as soon as I finish with the department heads," I explained.
"Okay Eric, we'll get through this," she replied, trying to boost my spirits.
"I know Ally, but there will be a lot to do, there is a lot of damage to repair, if we can," I said. "Look, we can talk more later, I need to try to get that meeting going to keep people from panicking now that they cannot reach Sarah."
"Okay, I'll talk to you later, Good luck," she said.
"You too," I replied and closed that channel. I placed a call to the new base administrator, a gentleman from Earth that had extensive experience running facilities like this one.
"Good afternoon, Lord Doctor Cowan. Doctor Braslin has been expecting your call, I'll connect yo
u immediately," the assistant replied.
The next image that came on the monitor was the Administrator. "Lord Doctor Cowan, I've been expecting your call. Since Sarah disappeared, we have a lot of very nervous and upset researchers calling in. What's going on?"
"Quite a bit actually. If you would call a meeting of all departments, I'll explain it to everyone. We will have Sarah back soon; we're already working on that," I explained.
He nodded once and began typing on his terminal to issue the announcement. "How bad is it?"
"Network wide, all AI everywhere are off-line at the moment. It's pretty bad," I replied. "It could have been worse, but this is bad enough."
The man nodded. "Fifteen minutes in the large conference room?" He asked.
I nodded agreement, "That should be fine, Sir. I'll see you there," I replied. He smiled at me and disconnected the call.
My intercom beeped and Ally said. "Eric, Sarah is on line and would like to speak to you."
"Good work, Ally. How is she?" I asked
"Confused and a little scared. I haven't given her access to her main memory units yet. I wanted her to speak to you first."
"Understood, I'll be right there," I replied. If Ally hadn't connected Sarah to the main memory units, then Sarah was still restricted to the isolated display units of the old system here in the lab. Alicyn was playing it safe and had brought Sarah up in a very restricted environment. I got a fresh coffee and went out to where Alicyn was working on Sarah.
When I got there, Sarah's hologram was standing in the display tank for the old unit, and Alicyn was sitting at the terminal talking to her. Sarah looked scared and concerned.
"Sorry I couldn't be here when you woke up, Sarah. I had to deal with the Admirals and the base administrator," I said by way of greeting.
"Admiral Vance is no longer in charge here? How old of a copy am I?" She asked.
