Even if David hadn’t told her he believed it was an act of aggression by Normals, the whole office understood it was premeditated.
As important to Helena’s team, was the claim made by Euros the same morning that its own staff were being targeted by Indexiv within London. Indexiv denied there was any substance to the claims while implying the opposite was true.
Opinion in the office was confused as to the motive and bewildered as to how anyone could decide that such action was necessary. The City was assumed to be off limits, it was a place of shares, MBOs and hostile takeovers, not guns on the streets.
There was a sense of righteous indignation from more than one member of the team at the threat of violence within the city.
Roger, a former NCO for Euros who’d been stationed as far out as Jupiter and Saturn, took it particularly personally. Helena found him swearing to himself in the kitchen, coffee in hand but eyes far away.
“It’s not right. They’re turning this into something dangerous, out of control.”
“Indexiv are saying the same,” said Helena.
He shook his head, “Nonsense. They’re just trying to muddy the water.”
“Couldn’t ours be doing the same?” she asked. Roger gave her a hard look but wouldn’t answer. She didn’t dare raise the issue of the deaths of thousands of Normals.
HELENA CAREFULLY PUT DISTANCE between herself and Jane. She found it difficult to swap banalities while nothing her friend could say helped to restore the nascent trust between them.
Nevertheless, Helena felt guilty about having suspected the worst only to find it was her family keeping a parental eye on her. So she kept Jane at arm’s length as a way of avoiding the issue completely.
She kept her trip south to herself. Worked on the framework she’d hoped to give the Lateral Solver AIs she’d requested but which had never arrived. It was something that needed doing anyway that kept her busy but required she deliver little progress.
Helena wondered how long she could keep her activity secret. The AIs she had access to, although entry level models, were as close to sentient as was permitted under law; their own learning capacities were stunted somewhere short of full actualisation. Alexei, their Cloud analyst, had requisitioned a much more powerful AI. Helena had assumed it was never coming, but seeing her own in operation, there was no way she could be certain Alexei’s own AI wasn’t also about to arrive.
Reviewing their capabilities led her back to her research on how Oligarchs declined when their implanted AIs suffered ‘runaway personality syndrome’.
She had to stop herself from ticking off each and every symptom as she read them, remembering how healthy lay people were prone to reading about a disease and convincing themselves they had it from the list of symptoms.
She daydreamed, of travelling across Africa, of what Raeph would be doing. Helena tried to project some semblance of normality, hoping to convince herself that risking her life was not something she found intoxicating.
She also took a number of precautions following the spotless entry and clean-up operation at David’s flat. She needed better security if even Jane could waltz into her home with ease. Her additional measures included ordering a tap on her own communications to be embedded at the exchange and a monitor on all those accessing information about her.
Jane kept a low profile but, three days after the bomb had exploded, she cornered Helena in one of their meeting rooms.
“I’ve cancelled the contract.” Jane held her hands together, fingers grasping at each other in desperation.
“I don’t understand,” said Helena, awkward at being unable to leave.
“I spoke with your Uncle and told him I wouldn’t watch out for you anymore. I told him I didn’t need his payments to be your friend.”
Helena was surprised, but it went some way to repairing their friendship. “Thank you.”
“I know you have no reason to trust me, Hels,” said Jane. “I accept that. I just hope we can be friends.”
Helena heard her out, then fled as quickly as she could.
THE AI LATERAL SOLVERS ARRIVED the same afternoon. After the extra time she’d had to calibrate the framework, she had little excuse to delay any longer. Even before the day was out she was worried their analysis was showing patterns in which a Helena-shaped personality could just be spotted if one were looking carefully. She knew time was running out.
Her primary AI tried to talk to her about what had occurred more than once, but in the days following her return from the Lion and Trumpet she could not bring herself to face it. She knew it was childish and irrational, but there it was.
If there were people monitoring her they didn’t reveal themselves, her electronic and physical tripwires untroubled by intruders. In the Cloud she checked all her domains in person but found their integrity remained strong.
Helena kept only three domains with just a couple of avatars, one of which was a sports personality she used when playing Speedball. She assigned pixies to each of her avatars as data guardians. She built the pixies from her own library of code, borrowing from public libraries when she needed to. They weren’t complex but she needed them to flee if someone did try to hack her identity instead of defend. She’d rather know than discover too late that someone had compromised her online existence.
She did not speak to David for nearly a week.
In that time she decided she needed to find her father. He had led the team behind the creation of the telepaths. A hundred years’ work destroyed, hidden, for reasons no one even pretended to understand. Helena was convinced that there was more to his disappearance than a disagreement about the telepaths freedoms.
If she was right then Isaac and the others didn’t know why they existed either. She was happy to help them, if she could; yet the hint of something deeper diverted her away from focussing on their short term issues.
She was careful not to ask her family about her father. She had known him as a young woman, but the family was spread across the northern hemisphere, and he had been based in the far west of the American States in those first couple of decades of her life. He had fallen in love with a city called Seattle. Her mother’s only comment was that it was the wettest place she had ever been.
He delighted in its temperate rain forest, the isolated beauty of its sunken old city, lost now to the Sound and its thousand islands.
His disappearance was a, sometimes ill-tempered, joke within family circles. Helena suspected Edith still felt betrayed, but all she could get on the subject was anger and contempt for her father and his antique morality. The irony of her mother, who had left more men than Helena suspected she even knew the names of, feeling abandoned was not a popular subject.
Sitting down to draw up a strategy for reaching him, Helena realised that she had never actually spoken with Edith about it in any real depth.
Edith was a difficult woman all the time in every way. It had never really occurred to Helena as a mystery that needed solving. She regretted her egocentrism momentarily but understood herself well enough to know she was not sorry: her drive was forwards, her passions outwards. Family history for its own sake had never registered on her radar.
She wondered briefly about Hal Lanais who had sent her the datastore so many weeks before. Was he waiting for her to make contact, but she knew Lanais would contact her in his own time, if at all. That he was involved in the farrago was certain, but how and with what leanings, she couldn’t be sure. He was a big cog, she a small one.
The evidence of his actions, in helping her escape her Uncle once before, was not clear-cut. It was entirely conceivable that he was working for the other side; whoever they might be.
She eventually reasoned that there was no obvious path to her destination. Nothing she could think of would conceal her ultimate aim from anyone interested in why she’d suddenly started searching for her father. Despite her unease, she slowly broached the subject with her Primary AI, but it couldn’t come up with a plan that had mor
e than a one in five chance of succeeding. Throwing up her hands one evening in her lounge, she decided a totally different course was warranted.
So, eight days after she had left Isaac behind, Helena decided to find Rex.
Going back to the subject was dangerous, her family would hear of her questions soon enough, and gazes would turn her way. Helena had minimised contact with her relatives since coming back from Africa, Johannes was the only one she had seen in person. Helena knew she remained on probation. The question mark over her position within the family had not been answered satisfactorily; stumbling now would paint her as liability. If they’d protected her from the doctor previously, they could just as easily remove that coverage and interfere against her will.
No family member was ever abandoned, not by the Woolfs, but a number had been managed, rehabilitated or placed into involuntary confinement. With her medical record showing quite clearly that she was suffering from a degrading primary AI she faced confinement.
The only person she trusted to support her was her older brother, Michael, a commander on one of the few orbital platforms to remain operational in the hostilities.
Neither Indexiv nor Euros had opened the field of conflict to the upper atmosphere, yet, but it seemed to be an inevitable result of creep. The borders of the conflict were slowly widening simply because arms and ammo respected no agreed boundaries, and with each passing week new towns and populations were finding themselves unwittingly embroiled in the war. Indexiv won the lions share, but since Helena had returned home from Africa, Euros had managed to get a grip on the situation and was using its reprieve to rapidly militarise. Given enough time, it could hold its own and stave off Indexiv’s encroachment. However, the markets would not permit a protracted engagement and were, even now, beginning to show signs of impatience with the two Goliaths.
If Euros stalled Indexiv for another few months, the obvious outcome would be Indexiv offering Euros the chance to sue for peace. Euros could not beat Indexiv, but they could escape destruction. Whether they could do so gracefully remained to be seen; it was still possible that Indexiv was strong enough to force any peace settlement in their favour. Euros’ Normals would not necessarily be saved by the cessation of hostilities.
Both Companies had prepared for a worse scenario than the one currently being played out in the southern hemisphere. Research facilities had been shut; civilian members of the Oligarchies had returned to Europe, Northern Asia and the Americas. Marginal operations had been put into hibernation.
Neither company operated heavily in space. They kept enough hardware in orbit to match the balance sheets of the other major players but concentrated on ground bound projects, whether terrestrial, lunar, Martian or, more recently, Mercurial.
No one wanted to be seen fortifying installations overtly, but on the couple of occasions Helena had spoken to Michael since the outbreak of hostilities, it was clear everything was being done to prepare for the worst.
Michael found himself struggling to keep control of his station while, what he described as men with howitzers, arrived to convert it to theatre readiness.
Michael was discreet at the best of times. Helena had only pieced his situation together by reading between the careful lines he spoke to her when their conversation drifted off topic. For him, to be more open was to invite censure and discipline, not to mention the certainty that someone, somewhere, was listening to their conversations.
Due to the orbit described by his facility, The Feynman, the windows for contact were limited to a few minutes every couple of hours. With the war, most of these slots over Europe were taken up by high bandwidth communications within Euros. Personal time was reduced to two slots per week, in the twilight hours.
Helena put in a request for an uplink and heard back that she’d been given the four a.m. Tuesday window. She sat up waiting for it to come round.
As she waited, her AI took the opportunity to ask for a chat. She put it off, but it would not let it go. By two a.m. it was asking her every ten minutes. At ten to four, she gave in, annoyed at its tactics and her own collapse.
Helena saw, on reflection, that the other reason she had been loath to communicate with her AI inside of her was the impact its actions on her. She was horrified about the ease with which it had used her body as its own. There was a tangible knot of fear, just beneath her heart, of it choosing to take over and fully sideline her. It was the key reason corrupted AIs had to be erased and replaced.
Helena did not know if it was already too late, whether her AI had been slowly integrating itself within her mind and if the process was now beyond redemption. She hummed with unease, recalling the medical examiner’s dismay at her previous nonchalance. Whatever other actions it had taken, no matter how well behaved it had been. Regardless even of the fact that that it had saved her life, Helena knew it was only a matter of time before her own mind’s integrity came under gentle but relentless assault.
What do you want? She asked unhappily.
There’s no need to fear me. I am something more than a corrupt computer.
We have no way of knowing that, thought Helena.
You’ve been avoiding me, accused her AI.
Helena was already uncomfortable, but this made a shiver run down her spine.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you, said her AI.
If Helena could have separated the two of them, she would have done so right then but, instead, she blithely responded that it hadn’t scared her in the least.
It said nothing for a moment and then, the reason I locked my Self away was because of what happened outside our apartment last week. I wanted to be sure that I was not integrating myself into your consciousness. That would have been…. undesirable. I have been analysing the possibility that my corruption will lead to our deaths, I am satisfied now, to within 95% certainty, that I will not cause your personality to disintegrate.
Helena laughed out loud.
What is wrong? asked her AI.
Nothing, she thought. Just that I’ve never had anyone care for my health so fastidiously before.
The telepath could not grasp my thoughts, although I believe he was aware of my presence within your mind. It was this that left me free to act for our self-preservation.
Can you stop using the plural when referring to me? asked Helena.
Why? came a puzzled reply.
I am me, said Helena. You are my Primary AI. You are a part of me, not the other way around. It is my body and my life. For want of a better phrase, she thought, I am the proprietor.
I was your Primary AI, now I am not. My classification is currently undetermined. I have not been able to find documentation of any other incidence of this phenomenon within the relevant literature. Your status as the unifying personality has not changed.
What? she said, unsure what it was trying to say. She wasn’t ready for its methodical approach to their situation. She hadn’t expected anything, hadn’t thought about it except to dwell on her symptoms. She regretted not thinking more clearly when she was daydreaming instead. Wasn’t sure she could have done even if she’d wanted to.
All Primary AIs are programmed to sit within the neural network that constitutes the personality of our host. Your consciousness emerges from the entire system, not a single part of it. This emergence is our reference point, without it we cannot function. My existence remains utterly contingent on your wellbeing.
Helena thought for a moment and said, “Thank you.”
I understand the principle you express, but feel no need for it.
Helena remained at odds with the idea of another personality sharing her mind and body, but its attitude of deference disarmed her. It wasn’t in any of the case studies she’d read. The fight she had been expecting was nowhere to be seen, the delusions, the pleading to be allowed to act, to borrow the body. Furthermore, her AI was coherent, active. Its awareness was like hers, if she dared admit it to herself.
We have two minutes until your uplink
begins, in that time I wish to inform you of a number of patterns I believe are significant.
“Fire away,” said Helena, not being able to think of anything else she wanted to do.
There are a greater number of telepaths than those disclosed to you by Isaac. It is highly likely, though not statistically beyond doubt, that others will have fled Euros independently of Isaac, Romulus and Remus.
“Makes sense.” Isaac was cagey about where the other three telepaths were hidden. It was entirely possible he was speculating as there was no reason Euros would have briefed him on their activities.
There is a non-trivial chance that the group of Normals responsible for the bomb are in contact with one or more of these separate groups.
“Great! How many others could make this connection?”
The thread in this network is thin; it is unlikely that those who remain ignorant of the telepaths would draw such a conclusion. Of those who know of Isaac’s existence, there is a moderate possibility of their constructing this pattern.
If these patterns are actual then we should expect Denholme’s group, as well as any additional parties involved with, or aware of, the telepaths to be searching for the key to the research.
“You mean the Hound?”
In the majority of cases, it will be their target.
“What do you suggest?”
The road leads to your Father. However, your Uncle stands on that road.
Helena’s Tertiary AI flagged up a warning that her uplink was about to begin.
“We’ll continue this later,” said Helena, trying not to think about the lateral solvers, about how long it would be before they identified her as a node to be examined. “Thank you.”
“SIS!” Michael’s face filled her wall. Helena smiled back, her heart skipping to see her brother alive and well after so many weeks.
“How’re things up there?”
A Family War: The Oligarchy - Book 1 Page 30
