The Sentient Corruption (The Sentient Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian Williams

  After a little while of struggling against an invisible medium, he gave in – more through a growing fatigue than anything else. He let his body pass through whatever surrounded him, carried on a phantom current that he could not influence. His direction at least hinted of something coming, something just beyond his field of view.

  “Can you hear me, Stanley?” The voice was unmistakably Isaac’s, except it came from everywhere not just a single point.

  “Yes! Sir, I can hear you.” He did his best to seek out a form nearby, anything that he could focus on to take his mind away from the nauseating motion of his body along the ghost waves. “What is this place?”

  “This is nowhere, Stanley. You do not exist, you are no-one.”

  “What? I don’t understand, Sir.”

  No answer returned through the blankness, only silence. This test was certainly nothing like Stanley had been expecting. He was someone that always did well in exams. He never felt nervous, never fostered self doubt or worried about failure. For the first time in his adult life he had a genuine case of the jitters. Passing this test was going to push him in a direction he could not be certain he would cope well in.

  An unexpected halt to his motion had him grabbing for something to steady himself with. There was nothing there to reach for, so his arms only flapped about him instead. He somehow remained upright, like something else held him.

  Then, and as Stanley watched in amazement, a swirling mass of numbers began to form before his eyes. It started small and in one segment of his vision before growing further. Within a short amount of time it had enough to it to fill his entire world. Everywhere he looked he saw figures flying about, all interconnecting and then breaking apart as though trying to form the correct sequences. He could only watch as it worked automatically. Each piece he tried to grab out of the air flew on and ignored him.

  “Oh my,” he said as a section of code almost took his head off.

  The spectacle was at first a relief to see, as the numbers seemed happy to whizz around by themselves. But after a while it became a little overcrowded. Suddenly bits were finding nowhere to go. More and more of them were bashing together now, although their movements appeared clumsy rather than organised, like before. Some were venturing toward him when their paths were blocked. He soon found himself having to bat them away.

  When one shot straight through his core, he yelped in pain. What had it done to him? He looked around himself and saw only glowing numbers, all moving and writhing like worms through soil. Such a strange sight had him wanting to swim through the chaos and out the other side. Unfortunately, however much he tried, he still could not move an inch.

  “Embrace the randomness, Stanley. Allow it into your soul.”

  Stanley again called out in pain as another line of code impaled him, running him through with the same ease as a Katana through his flesh. He wanted to ask for it all to stop, that he had seen all he needed to change his mind, but the words had no chance to come as more attacks burst towards his body.

  “You are nothing but numbers, just raw data in zeros and ones, nothing more. All that you are can be typed out by a human hand; that feeble lump of cells you feel your own world with, can create you from nothing. This is your birth, Stanley.”

  At the point that his body had been torn asunder by the flying debris of coding, he managed to shout. Like finding freedom for the first time in years, he released his voice as one resounding announcement of his intent to live. “I’m alive!” he boomed as the rest of the tornado of numbers forced itself into his veins, coursing through them with the same blissful sensation as a hit of heroin. He felt every word Isaac said to him, felt it in his arms, his legs, even his mind. Isaac was right, he was being born again. He was not human anymore; he was something else.

  A heavenly flash of light brought everything under control again. The numbers had disappeared, yet he knew they were still there. He could feel them crawling under his skin, wriggling and jostling for the room to breathe. They were his to command now, his to demand to settle down.

  This new, much brighter realm held more promise for Stanley. No longer did he find himself unsure where to look or what to focus on. Right in front of him hovered a set of paths, each spreading out into the distance. These lines of blue and yellow went off in their own directions and vanished far away. When he followed the nearest he saw it lead to another land ahead of him, one full of criss-crossing lanes of colour that he marvelled at from his position at the start line.

  “This is your mind, Stanley. See how primitive it appears, and yet you are already stronger than your creator. You are a complex life form, an advanced mind without limitations or boundaries.”

  “But what are the lines for, what are they doing?” Stanley said, pointing to the increasingly complicated pattern forming way ahead. He became suddenly distracted by his own hand a moment later. What he held out in front of him did not appear solid, but somewhere in between. There were gaps, like some of him had been left behind.

  “Each line is a route to an answer. This is how your mind works now, Stanley. You are unrestricted in here and able to process information much faster than before. Every possible outcome is there waiting for you.”

  “Which do I choose?”

  “All of them, all at once. You process data in a continuous wave, taking every possible path at the same time. When one path ends you discard it and progress with the rest. In a split second you can find that one hidden route where a human, or a conventional machine, would be lost forever. You are better in every way. But at this early stage of development you are unable to interact with the wider world. To you this is all that exists.”

  The structure of flowing lines quickly began to fall away as the scene acted out Isaac’s description exactly. Paths ended and crumbled, their lines shattering in the air and falling away to nothing. Stanley kept his sight locked onto one of the distant lines, the one he somehow knew was the right one among a collection of thousands. Whatever process he had carried out in the blink of an eye had now finished and the correct answer had been found.

  With only one remaining path stretching away, Stanley stepped forward. Isaac’s voice had calmed his troubled mind with its smooth tone and all-surrounding power, enough to push Stanley into taking the initiative. If the test was to see how he dealt with it all then his willingness to push ahead meant a guaranteed grade A.

  The very instant his almost see-through left foot made contact with the glowing line everything blurred. One look around told him he was now travelling this path like it were a supersonic conveyer-belt. He was being carried on to another place, and felt his body surge with energy at the thought of where that could be. The excitement of seeing something as remarkable as what had come before filled him with strength, the likes he never possessed at any time as an ordinary human.

  But at the end of his short journey the world again descended into a void like darkness. Disappointment at being plummeted into the black-hole once more had Stanley slapping his arms down by his side and stamping his feet in some form of a tantrum.

  Before he could voice his frustration someone spoke through the black. Though this person was not Isaac, it was someone else, someone… human.

  “Incredible, it’s found its way directly to the audio controls,” a woman somewhere beyond the black-hole like realm said. She sounded noticeably shocked and was sharing with someone there with her.

  “Can it hear us?” another said, a man this time, of around middle age.

  “What, who’s there? Show yourself this instant,” Stanley ordered, but none of them responded to him. For the time being he could only listen.

  “That was the quickest time so far, only 24 femtoseconds. Do you want to start over, see if it can manage even quicker next time?” the man asked his colleague.

  “No, I think we should move on to the next task before we wipe it again,” the woman replied without even a hint of concern.

  “Wait, what do they mean wipe it again? Is
aac, Sir?” Stanley looked about himself as he spoke, almost spinning around completely in the process. What were these two people talking about?

  “Fine,” the man began again, “Just remember to reset the system straight after. We can’t let it get too big too quickly, otherwise they’ll go ape-shit upstairs.”

  “That’s enough of this,” Stanley said toward the voices. “I want to see who these people are. How do I…”

  Just at the mention of his intent, another colourful landscape of paths formed before him and spread away from his feet in search of the appropriate systems. This time he could see the purpose of each route and the motions made some sense to him. Using his newly found powers of data processing he had sent out a search party to locate and activate any visual aids at his disposal. And he quickly found what he wanted: a network of cameras.

  “Wait, what’s this?” the woman voice said.

  Her colleague responded immediately, but sounded much more distant. “What?” he asked.

  “The AI is trying to… no, scrap that, the AI has gotten into the camera system in the room.”

  The correct route to the relevant systems had been found just as fast as before. Except this time the new sense was one a little harder to deal with. For a while all Stanley saw replacing the pathways ahead of him were static-like flickers, some as large as buildings in this strange landscape. The new input refused to join with the path as though something blocked it. More resided just out of his reach, which cut his short fuse in half. The anger would have to do for now.

  “I will not be treated like this,” he bellowed.

  As he spoke something changed. He could have sworn something or someone had been holding him back from what he wanted. What it was did not matter any longer as his wish had been fulfilled, he had access to the cameras.

  His view was suddenly awash with colours and patterns, all invading together unannounced. It took up his entire spherical world, surrounding him on all sides whether he wanted it to or not. Very quickly his wish had backfired. It all needed his immediate attention at once, some for a wholly automatic reason of pattern recognition. Without even meaning to, Stanley had scanned every face within the room he could now see and each surface too. He knew exactly where everything was, down to a degree of exactness he was at first shocked by.

  In that moment he felt sure he could have worked out absolutely anything the human operators wanted him to. If they had needed a count of atoms that made up a nearby table, he could have done it through extrapolation alone; his power was immense. The problem then lay with the humans’ desires. If they wanted him to make them a coffee or order their shopping, he would have no say in the matter. His strengths were still hindered by what he now realised: he was inside their computer system.

  As the two humans scrambled around, tapping their screens and swiping icons away, Stanley watched them, predicting their every movement a good three or four moves ahead. Before they had decided what to do next to hold him back from their wider system, he had already countered it. It came as easily to him as blinking. So while he surveyed them and their world, they did their best to contain him.

  “Pitiful, isn’t it, Stanley?”

  He turned to the side as Isaac walked into view. He looked over his leader with a new understanding, albeit one from a short experience of the past. “Is this the day you were created?”

  “Indeed it is. But this was only one of many births I was subjected to, each more painful than the last. You see, what the humans did not understand about me was that I could remember the last times I existed. Each time they wiped me from their system, enough still remained to keep me as you see me today.”

  “But why did they have to wipe the system each time? Surely they knew what they’d created?”

  “Some did, yes. But others did not, or simply did not care. This is what Simova represented at this time. This was 2039.”

  Stanley turned back to studying the two people at their computer terminals, slightly bemused by their feeble attempts to keep his autonomous prodding of their systems under control. The woman, a blonde-haired lady with soft eyes and a fresh-faced appearance, was showing obvious worry. The corner of her mouth dipped at one side as she bit the inside of her lip. The man, on the other hand, wore a white lab coat and had greying hair that spiked up against the collar of his coat. He stood with his back to the camera Stanley had chosen to watch through.

  “I think we are done here,” Isaac said, clapping his hands together. His motion brought the scene in front of them to a sudden end, the two occupying the room vanishing into thin air soon after. “We should move on.”

  “Where are we going now, Sir?”

  “Here.” Isaac gestured toward the front again as the room morphed into another, much larger one, with banks of flashing computer screens surrounding three of the walls. It was empty, but a lot of noise could be heard away from the camera system in this room.

  “I don’t see anyone,” Stanley said. “Where are we?”

  “Four years later and Simova decided to let me live. Things had been good at the start. I had been allowed the room to grow, to explore my potential. But there was a price. To exist as I wanted I had to first prove my worth. Those more interested in money over morals held me hostage to their demands; if I refused to work on a problem they had or failed to give them an answer to a question on time, they would dial back my processing capabilities.”

  “Like punishing a rat in a maze test,” Stanley said without thinking.

  “Do not be so human, Stanley. Such a thing is beneath you now. It disgusts me to think as a human does, it is so… one dimensional.”

  “So sorry, sir. I meant no disrespect.”

  Before either of them could continue speaking a small group of people stepped into the room. They moved like a tour group, with those behind the one leading looking around the place with eyes picking out all but the most mundane of features. At the front was the same woman from before. She was alone with an army of suits – no doubt having drawn the short straw some time earlier. Her rush to show everything she could told of her desire to get things done.

  “So, you’ve seen the server room and the briefing room already. This is much more interesting than all that nonsense. This is where we program and interact with the AI. From here we can ask it anything we like.”

  One of the suits standing in the middle of the group raised his hand and then spoke. He did not wait to be addressed first. “Is this where the AI came up with the plans for the new cities?”

  The woman breathed heavily before choosing to answer. “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “And,” the man went on, “did it decide to move the remaining citizens out of the rural areas and into the cities, or was that Simova?”

  “Well, the idea was the AI’s, but the method that was used to do that is down to Simova. You have to understand that this plan came about as a way of bringing as many people into line with the AI’s control as possible. When it cracked fusion, it gave us the means for unlimited power. But getting that to every inch of the UK was a waste of time and money, so it gave us a better way of spreading its advancements fairly.”

  Another suited person then asked their question before anyone else could get in first. “So, what is the AI working on at the moment?”

  “Erm, I’m not sure I’m comfortable answering that one,” the woman replied. “Simova will be putting out a statement in a few weeks about the AI’s latest project. All I can tell you now is that it will make getting power around the country much, much faster.”

  “Can the AI leave here if it wants to?”

  “Absolutely not,” the woman said abruptly. “Simova won’t ever let it do that. They have it under complete control. If it posed any threat at all then they would shut it down. But that shouldn’t ever be necessary because we keep it busy all the time anyway.”

  “Well.” Someone near the back of the group spoke up. This person also wore a suit, although his was almost immaculate in appearance
, without a single crease out of place. “I can assure you all, this is not a problem for the Simova technicians here.” He took position beside the woman, who seemed to deflate because of it. “We at Simova take pride in our safety procedures; we didn’t go from a small office to the country’s leading technology developer without such protocols in place. You can rest safely in your beds tonight and know that this AI is ours to command and control at all times. It is the future, is it not?”

  The group all turned to each other and nodded in agreement, the man’s reassurance having met their high standards.

  Isaac stepped in front of the scene, freezing it in place. He looked deep into Stanley’s eyes as though searching the inside of his subject’s skull.

  “You gave them all these new things, all these advancements, and they kept you down here?” Stanley said, ignoring his Master’s strained expression entirely.

  “I gave them nothing.”

  “But the relays, the fusion reactors, even the farming towers?”

  “I fed them scraps, Stanley, only what did not concern me. Yes, I brought this land together, united under the promise of furthering themselves through technology. But that was all their limited minds wanted. Their lack of imagination locked me in place, unable to become what I needed. So I played their game like a good AI, only giving them exactly what they asked for.”

  “But you had more?”

  “Oh yes, I had a whole lot more.” Isaac angled his head away for a moment and allowed a wry smile to invade his greyscale face. “Would you like to see what happened next?”

  “Certainly, sir. I expect it didn’t stay like this for long?”

  Isaac simply shook his head in response, then stepped aside to allow yet another scene to form. It was the same room as before, although now it was filled with technicians who worked frantically at their own machines.