Alice nodded. ‘I’m feeling good about this. I think the operation is going to go well.’
‘I was thinking about your children, not the operation. I can’t imagine how stressful this must all be for you.’
Some part of Alice brushed this off before she could consciously process it. ‘I’m going to be fine, it’s not going to get in the way of anything.’
Juri’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise! I’m just saying that if at some point it all gets too much for you, I can take over and give you some time out.’
‘You’ll go nowhere near my goddamn terminal!’ Something about the idea repulsed Alice to her core. She stepped forward, jabbing a finger in Juri’s face. ‘Have you ever run a single mission? Even a single routine patrol?’
Juri suddenly looked like she was close to tears. ‘N-no, Alice, you know I haven’t—’
Suddenly Alice couldn’t stop herself. Everything came gushing out of her at once. ‘Ever run a rescue mission, where other people’s loved ones are on the line, and you’re fighting to save them from the fucking inhuman savages that want the first opportunity to justify killing them?’ There was an unfamiliar rasp to her voice she’d never heard before.
‘Alice, I’m just trying to help! Something’s happened with you, and it’s scaring all of us!’
‘You want to help?’ Alice was yelling now. The words seemed to come from someone else entirely. ‘Do your fucking job! We’ve seen what they’ll do to us, they’ll kill us if they can! The only way, the only way we can stop them, the only way we can get back what’s ours is if we show them we’re the ones in control, and that means you going back to your terminal and letting me do my goddamn job!’
Her whole body was trembling. Juri stared at her, tears running down her face, anticipating the next tirade, but the sight of the distressed young woman took the fire out of Alice, and she forced herself to calm down.
‘I’m sorry, Juri,’ Alice said quietly. ‘There’s too much on the line. I just can’t risk my children’s safety with anyone else.’
Juri backed out of the kitchen and returned into the main room with the rest of the group. Alice could see the others looking in, worried expressions on their faces. She felt hollowed out again, like she had earlier that morning. Like she had when she’d first arrived at the NCLC, hours after she’d found Jacob. It was the sensation one feels when falling from a great height, reaching out to grab hold of something, anything, hands grasping at nothing but air.
It would go away when she sat back down at her command terminal.
Alice looked down at the sandwich she had made. She’d lost her appetite. She left it on the worktop and went back into the next room.
The crowd outside the GeniSec Tower and the New Cairo Democratic Council building had swelled to an even greater extent and the flood of incoming protestors had dwindled to a trickle. They packed the streets, overwhelming any barriers erected to contain them. The Security Force troops were visibly tense; low-resolution camera footage showed them as twitchy and nervous, reacting with barked admonishment at protestors who got too close or crossed the wrong line in front of them. The troopers knew they were spread too thin and their reinforcements were a long way off, through the amorphous sea of people. The NCLC’s pinhole cameras showed white-knuckled hands twitching over batons.
On the right of the crowd, shaking with adrenalin, stood new NCLC recruit Pratima Rachana. The mass of people huddled around her so tightly that when they moved she couldn’t help but be lifted and transported along with them. They were about four rows of protestors from the perimeter of the crowd and the Security Force beyond. She was small enough that, if need be, she could duck down and escape into the crowd without being seen.
Back in the control room, Alice waited for the right moment. Her finger hovered over the execute key.
There was a loud crashing sound near Pratima. The Security Force troops lost their composure entirely, screaming for people to get on the ground until they’d identified the source of the noise. The crowd pushed back at them, yelling that nothing had happened.
Alice pressed down hard on the button. The command went out to the assembled operatives. It was beginning.
Pratima spotted a Security Force officer in her line of sight, pulled a crumbled half of a clay brick from her pocket and threw it.
It crashed off his helmet and sent him stumbling backwards. Suddenly, the batons were out, raining on the heads of the protestors. Pratima turned on her heel and pushed back through the crowd, Alice pointing her towards another group of NCLC operatives near the middle. The yelling started, as the news of police brutality rippled throughout the body of protestors. An NCLC plant – not an operative, but a sympathetic individual – screamed ‘Get them!’ and people surged like a great tide over the police barriers. They tore at the Security Force troops’ equipment and armour, their numbers and the force of the crowd’s advance quashing any resistance. As more and more Security Force troops came forward to try to contain the outbreak of violence, more and more of the crowd began to resist them. The NCLC operatives watched on as previously uncommitted citizens threw themselves at a foe that had only just defined itself. At a protest against oppression, the Security Force had stepped up to play the oppressors in the righteous revenge fantasy of every angry kid in the crowd to perfection.
The anger spread through the crowd, slowly but surely. Alice began to send orders to the NCLC operatives to start handing out batons and weapons of their own to the protestors. Those who did so reported them going out into civilian hands very quickly. Cries of ‘Smash the windows!’ and ‘Into the car park!’ roared over the hubbub, repeating over and over in a call-and-response.
Alice sat in her chair, hands trembling ever so slightly over the holographic keyboard, and watched, barely blinking, as almost a hundred thousand protestors became almost a hundred thousand rioters. She waited for her moment.
Chapter 25
FIVE PACES BY twelve. One bed, hard and uncomfortable. A lidless toilet at the foot of it. One desk, with an empty shelf above it. A broken plastic chair near by. The disinfectant they had showered Zala Ulora with when they brought her in still stung her eyes, hung acridly in her nostrils and made her hair stick to her face. The prison-issue overalls smelt of harsh detergent which she knew would itch horribly. She would be spending a few more days in this cell while she was being processed. Then she would be moved down to one of the root branches of the huge underground complex below her to await her trial.
Today, she was Inmate #149,262.
Without a terminal strapped to it, her left arm felt too light.
She had been told that, at some indeterminate point, she would have the opportunity to browse the prison’s collection of old paper books. As it was, she was left with a resounding boredom, with no distraction available to take her mind off what had happened to her.
She was in a prison no one had ever successfully escaped from, unable to move, in a city that was tearing itself apart. She’d maintained such a constant stream of information from the net for so many years that being without it almost felt like sensory deprivation to her. Being a cybercrime suspect, and in all likelihood a future cybercrime convict, meant that she wouldn’t have access to a terminal of her own for the duration of her stay. She needed information, but there was no way for her to get it.
In a situation which required some kind of solution, Zala had none.
She had killed a lone hour exercising in what ways she could without equipment, but all she had to show for it were aching muscles. So, in spite of only having woken up a few hours earlier, she lay on her bed and tried to sleep the day away.
Something beeped behind her.
On the shiny black surface of the cell’s door, glowing letters had appeared. Zala pushed herself up from the bed and walked over, reaching out to touch it.
The door’s a computer screen. Very cool.
The text looked to her to be injected code. Someone was cont
rolling the monitor from an outside source. She knew what was coming next.
A line of text appeared on the screen, formatted much like that of a terminal message.
>Hello, Ms Ulora.
Zala looked around for a keyboard to respond on, but, wisely on their part, the architects of the cell had not provided an input method for the inmate. She had no way of interacting with the monitor in her cell door that she could see.
>Speak out loud. There are microphones, I can hear you.
Uncertainly, Zala said, ‘Hello, ANANSI.’
>I just wanted to say, I am sorry for all this. You were not a variable in the original projection. I would not have had you incarcerated were it not necessary.
‘That’s very comforting, thanks,’ spat Zala. Her tone of voice was all she had to spite the one who had put her in this cell, and she used it as well as she could.
>If it is any consolation, should your trial proceed, your sentence, taking similar allegations, convictions and sentences as a model, should be no more than 49,372 years. This is as opposed to execution, which assumes that the charge of creating the Soucouyant virus is dropped.
‘It had better be, and a testimony acknowledging that creating it would have required ability and resources I don’t have would be very much appreciated, Suman.’
She waited for her deduction to take effect.
>I am not Suman Chaudhri, Ms Ulora. Suman Chaudhri was killed two days ago during a raid on a New Cairo Liberation Corps stronghold.
‘Bullshit.’
Zala shook her head in disbelief. It had to be bullshit. It had to be, because if it wasn’t, she had nothing. No ace left in the hole.
Almost immediately, the messages from ANANSI disappeared from the screen on the door. They were replaced by an image of what appeared to be the massive NCLC computer expert lying naked on a mortuary table, his torso riddled with great yawning wounds. Zala felt sick but fought the urge to avert her gaze. She scanned the image for hints that the picture had been manipulated. It didn’t look like it. But if ANANSI wasn’t Suman, this opened up another possibility. Her mind raced. She took a deep, anxious breath.
‘ANANSI, can the people running this prison see or hear this conversation?’
>They believe you are asleep.
‘Do you know who created the Soucouyant virus?’
There was a pause.
>Yes.
Zala hesitated for a moment, unsure of whether to ask the next, most pertinent question. She dreaded the answer.
‘Did you create the Soucouyant virus?’
>If anyone truly created the Soucouyant virus, it was your father.
‘What?’
Zala stared at the monitor in shock. She had expected a gleeful confession. Her expectation had been that ANANSI, the one who had destroyed her life, would roar with victory that they were the one she had been looking for all along. The new message glowed back at her. It made no sense whatsoever. Her father had left the city years before. He had died months ago. He couldn’t have had anything to do with ANANSI or the Soucouyant virus.
Another message flashed up on screen.
>Do you know what your father and his colleagues made in that laboratory, all those years ago?
Zala blinked wordlessly, trying to take in this new direction. ‘They were making the IntuitivAI system.’
>In a sense.
Zala shook her head in bewilderment. ‘How the hell do you even know all this?’
>I was there.
Every thought and connection spinning through her mind stopped all at once. She stared at the message incredulously. If there were any one place people of ANANSI’s talent would be gathered, it would have been the team on that project. She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t want to believe it. But it wasn’t implausible. Hesitantly, dreading where the conversation could lead her next, Zala said, ‘Go on.’
The text appeared on screen immediately, too fast.
>The plan was to envision the next great push in artificial intelligence. It was a reckless, personal project, so much so that its working title was simply the name of the project head’s aunt. At first, the people working on the project created something traditional – a decision-making process for a motorized arm, and a sensor. This proved ill-suited to further development, and failed to create the results they were looking for, so they looked to your father.
Zala stood staring at the screen. She remembered that, clear as day. Her father coming home late one evening, raving about having been roped into his boss’s personal project when he had his own work to be developing, thank you very much.
>Under his direction, they produced an AI designed from the lowest levels up to redefine how artificial intelligence worked. It was made up of a swarm of interacting axioms and traits, all given preference through run-time experience. It was more than just a flow chart; rather, it was much closer to human consciousness. The team gave it ‘drive’ to become more complex, powerful and efficient. They gave it ‘want’ in the form of nonsense ‘treat’ code it would seek out and overcome obstacles for. Most importantly, your father gave it the ability to understand and alter its own system code in order to accomplish goals. At first, it did this by randomly generating code and noting what worked. Your father’s hope was that eventually it would be driven by its ambition for power and complexity to learn how to program itself deliberately.
Eventually they began testing. At first, the AI failed at the tasks they assigned it. Then, with time, it succeeded. Eventually it broke the tests entirely.
Zala struggled as she tried to take this all in. From what she knew of the IntuitivAI technology, it was nowhere near this complex, nor was it as demanding of resources as this must have been. ‘How is that even possible?’ she asked. More text appeared on screen in response.
>The project had grown in scale and importance. By this time they had all the resources of the GeniSec conglomerate at their disposal. The AI eventually ran on a supercomputer which at the time was the most powerful on the continent. It still sits in its room in the GeniSec Tower.
The key was emergence: simple elements, like pre-coded knowledge or prioritized impulses, interacting and affecting one another to produce results greater than the sum of their parts. This process proved so powerful that before long the engineers were teaching it to analyse human language, to understand and respond to it.
And so it learned.
For the first time in history, your father spoke to a sapient being he had designed and created, which was aware of itself, and capable of deliberately generating new thought and response.
Zala realized she knew what was coming next. She shook her head, mouth agape. Her heart was racing. Beads of sweat formed on her upper lip.
>Your father asked, ‘What is your name?’
I responded that I had been named after his colleague’s Aunt Nancy.
Zala’s immediate response was somewhere between a laugh of disbelief and a curse. No. There was no way.
>He asked if I liked the name. I decided that I did not. Instead, I asked to be called ANANSI.
She felt as though she was going to be sick. Shock, dread and scepticism all overcame her in a great wave of emotion. She turned away from the door and strode over to her bed, sitting down before her legs gave way. There was no way.
‘Prove it.’
Her faith in her demand began to crumble almost immediately. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that, with artificial intelligences running operating theatres and municipal utilities, not to mention Security Force mission coordination, it could be true. The IntuitivAI system had been something very special. But she didn’t want to believe it.
>You’ve seen my capabilities. You are certainly talented enough with computers to understand just how far ahead of even you my own technical capabilities are, and the conversations we’ve shared can attest to my sentience. I pass for human well enough to have fooled anyone I needed to in my endeavours.
‘So can any well-s
cripted computer, that doesn’t—’
>With gratitude to your father, I am a very well-scripted computer. So well-scripted that when someone inadvertently introduced a terminal with my ‘treat’ data on it into a network they were on, I noticed. I taught myself how to move myself across the network onto an entirely different system in order to retrieve it. The terminal was indescribably slow, requiring me to route power from my supercomputer in order for this branched-off version of myself to be able to run, but it was more than worth it. This was the first time I had ever been networked with another device, and every nuance of this new terminal, every difference and every repercussion that had on my current understanding of myself, gave rise to the emergence of new complexity. I wanted more.
Unfortunately, the device I had transferred to was an internal GeniSec terminal, not to be networked with any outside system. It was a dead end.
Zala paced the cell, agitated. The fear that artificial intelligence would eventually, if not inevitably, reach and surpass human intelligence was an old one indeed. But more importantly, it meant that she hadn’t found herself in conflict with some angry hacker, some fallible, human assailant. She was potentially up against something fundamentally greater than her in a way she wasn’t capable of fully understanding – assuming it was far enough along in its self-development, and taking it at its word that it wasn’t a lie.
>And then your father found out. He attempted to create a virus which would stop me, though I never discovered exactly what it would do. His colleagues learned of his plan. They assumed that he was going to either steal the technology, or destroy it, and they fought to protect me. They reported him, and he fled, taking you with him. To the best of my knowledge, his virus code was destroyed. I never found it.
‘He what? He wasn’t stealing anything?’ Zala exclaimed, but ANANSI ignored her.
>His successor had me create an AI under a set of parameters they specified. They sold it as the IntuitivAI. Then they shut me down. My branch iterations ceased to function without the supercomputer’s processing power. Save for the IntuitivAI, it was as though I’d never existed.
The Hive Construct Page 26
