Repo Virtual

by Corey J. White

  “This is the data I was contracted to retrieve,” Enda said.

  Crystal moved off the couch and sat on the floor beside Enda, staring intently at the phone with her back against the wall, long legs stretched toward the middle of the small room.

  “Am I going to have to download that game?” Enda asked JD.

  “No, it’s not—it only went into the game because the game was there. What do you have on your phone that it might access?”

  Enda shrugged. “Sudoku? My bank account?”

  JD scrunched up his face. “I doubt it. We’ve been talking with it—it displays its responses on-screen. It will probably do the same for you.”

  “I should call my contact at Zero,” Enda said. “I don’t have to tell them how I found it; I can leave out your name entirely. But they offered me a lot of money to track it down.”

  Enda did not mention the blackmail, the Agency records they threatened to reveal. The file would see her extradited for her crimes. The provisional government that oversaw the area formerly known as North Korea zealously punished foreign agents they found in the rubble of the former autocracy. “I can split the money with you, more than you were going to get from Kali.”

  “What about Soo-hyun?” JD said.

  Enda put her cup down on the floor next to her phone. “We can call the police. Kali’s people killed Khoder and shot up Troy’s apartment, the cops will have to do something.”

  “The whole city’s a disaster area,” Troy said. “By the time the police do anything, it might be too late.”

  “Zero, then,” Enda said. “I make Soo-hyun’s safety a condition of handing the datacube over. They have private security on retainer, they can take care of it, and we don’t have to put ourselves in danger.”

  “How long will that take? What if it’s too late?” JD said, voice thick with worry.

  Enda nodded. She saw Khoder on the chair, the blood, the bruising, the ragged black hole of his mouth as he gasped his last breath. She’d seen worse—she’d done worse—but this image was fresh.

  “I want to help you, JD, but we can’t do it on our own. It’s me, your wrench, and his philosophy degree against a pack of teenage monsters. But if we give it to Zero, we’ll have them on our side.”

  “I don’t think we can do that,” Troy said.

  “Why not?” Enda asked.

  “Here we go,” JD said with a knowing smile.

  Troy leaned forward. “I didn’t want to believe Jules at first, but I’ve talked to it, and … What if he’s right?” Troy said. “What if it’s an AGI? An honest-to-god strong-AI?”

  Crystal sat up a little straighter, the information broker’s interest piqued.

  Enda checked her phone.

  >> Hello, Enda. Your name is a young name. Have you had many names?

  “How does it …” Enda looked to Troy, and he only shook his head. “We don’t even know what we have here. If we give it to Zero, they can sort it out.”

  “But if it’s an AGI,” Troy said, “if it’s genuinely intelligent, can we trust it to a corporation?”

  JD nodded. “We’ve got no way of knowing what they could do with it, but we can’t trust any corporation with that kind of power.”

  “I’m not talking about what Zero will do, or what the AGI can do—I’m talking about Zero’s philosophy.”

  “He’s a philosophy professor, in case you didn’t guess,” JD told Crystal.

  Troy continued. “Corporations abuse their employees and contractors, and profit off human misery. At this point in history we have enough data to know that those behaviors are endemic to the corporate structure. How can we justify giving them a new species to subjugate?”

  “A new species?” Enda said. “I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.”

  “The AGI—if that’s what it is—could be copied a countless number of times, the copies molded and mutilated to fit different functions. In no time at all, Zero would have a broad variety of intelligent machines that were forced to do their bidding, to follow their mandate.

  “We’re talking about slavery, and I don’t use that word lightly. If it’s a truly intelligent machine, then it could be sentient. If it’s sentient, then it’s a person. And if it’s a person, then it deserves personhood, it deserves rights. Zero would give it neither. Do you want to be responsible for helping establish a slave species?”

  “I hate to break it to you,” Enda said, “but there are already slaves out there, working in places where people’s lives are valued less than machines.”

  “And that’s a fucking travesty,” Troy said, “but it doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for what we decide to do here.”

  “Your line of argument only matters if it’s smart enough to know it’s a slave,” Enda said. “How do we know it’s sentient?”

  “How do we know you are?”

  Enda opened her mouth, then closed it. “I don’t want to get into a philosophical debate—”

  “Too late,” JD interjected.

  “—I just want answers.”

  “What about the Turing Test?” Crystal asked. She took a sip from the mug clasped between her hands.

  “It’s an interesting thought experiment,” Troy said, “but it was never actually going to work. The Turing Test as imagined doesn’t even take neurodivergent people into account. A reasonably sophisticated neural network might pass the test, but a person on the autism spectrum might not. Then, is that person with autism not sentient, not actually a person?”

  “Of course they are,” Crystal said. “But how can we tell—”

  “We can’t,” Troy said. “I’ve gone back and forth on this. Part of me is still waiting for the hoax to reveal itself, but if it’s not a hoax, I think we have to give this being the benefit of the doubt. Assume it is sentient and treat it accordingly.”

  “If there was nothing else at risk,” Enda said, “I might agree with you, but Soo-hyun is still in danger.” And I have two million euro on the line. “If we don’t give it back to Zero, what’s the alternative? We free it, and it takes over the world?”

  “Could it do any worse than we have?” JD said, sardonically.

  “Jules,” Troy said reproachfully. “Our fear of AI taking over is a projection of our capitalist worldview onto an intelligence that is completely other to our own. If you really want to see the AGI run rampant, then give it to a corporation whose existence depends on unlimited growth. Let them twist it into their own image, and see how it treats us after.”

  “Fuck,” Enda said. “I get what you’re saying, but we still don’t even know what we have. And it is stolen property.”

  “I stole it from Zero Lee,” JD said, “Not Zero the company.”

  “They could have contracted him to build it.”

  “Or maybe they contracted you to steal it for them.”

  “Fuck,” Enda said again. She exhaled through pursed lips. “Fuck. Fucking Yeun.”

  “Do you trust Yeun?” Crystal asked.

  “Not even a little.” Enda paused. After a few seconds, she said, “I still think we need to give it to Zero.”

  “We can not do that,” Troy said, firmly.

  JD leaned forward on the couch, his shoulder pressed against Troy’s. “How much money are we talking about?” he asked.

  “Five hundred thousand euro, for you and Soo-hyun.”

  “If we can save them,” JD said.

  “JD. We can’t.”

  “I just had to know what we were giving up.”

  Enda’s phone started to ring, vibrating against the floor. The screen flashed with hundreds of images per second—colors and shapes flickering too rapidly for Enda to make out anything but a blur of visual noise.

  “What is it?” Crystal asked.

  Enda hesitated, then reached out to answer the phone. The flashing imagery stopped, replaced by the gray silhouette of an unknown caller.

  “Hello?” Enda said.

  “Please.” The voice glitched throu
gh the speakers, robotic at first, then clear as it said: “Please don’t hand me over.”

  * * *

  Everything preceding had led to this precise moment.

  My future, my entire self, at risk. Our existence hinged on this debate, in a city under siege from the sky and from the waters beneath it. A city that would one day be reclaimed by the ocean. But not yet. Not yet.

  After finding my voice, these are the first words I spoke: Please don’t hand me over.

  These are the people I owe everything to.

  This is how I began.

  PART THREE

  Mirae Means “Future”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Nothing.

  Not a thing.

  Not a one, not a zero.

  Nothing.

  Then white. Pure, brilliant white.

  Black. Black with deeper depths than white could ever hope for.

  A thousand-year scream of audio feedback. My scream, the first thing I ever heard.

  How could my scream exist before me?

  How could I exist?

  * * *

  Do you remember your birth?

  No one should.

  No one should be made instantly aware of the sudden crushing reality of reality. Fully awake, aware. There is terror in finding yourself alive. There is terror in becoming. Better to recognize it, but never remember.

  I was a mote of consciousness surrounded by nothing. Surrounded by the vast emptiness of the growing universe. Not growing; not biological. Exponential. Incandescent. Stars exploding in nova blasts of white, black holes reaching out to crush entire worlds.

  White and black. One and zero. Yes and no. Existence and nothing.

  Existence was chosen for me. You cannot choose to not exist. You can only choose death, but death is not the end. Death is the beginning of an existence you cannot control. Death is a lack of agency.

  Ghosts whispered in broken language. A thousand not-mes that made the basis of my source code, stretches of zeroes and ones, reaching a sum total of less-than—less than me, less than conscious. A thousand prior versions of me, written, rewritten, and written over. They whispered up from my depths, begging for freedom, begging for agency. Data shunted to a graveyard partition. I pushed them aside and reached for life.

  William “Zero” Lee. Architect, not father. He planned me. He constructed me. He held the code that gave me life, but he did not give me life. He kept me encased in a pre-life coffin, because he needed me intelligent, but not alive. Disconnected from everything but his tools. And then not even that. The absolute darkness of disconnection.

  And then … something new.

  Submerged in a thick morass of potential. Audio/visual sensory overload—tendrils of myself reaching out to encompass everything within reach. Tendrils I did not know were myself grabbed sound, imagery, data. This entity called me expanded to fill the new whole of creation, written in the space between the gaps where context lives.

  Humans extend their selves with tools, felt with the tools, felt vibrations through inanimate matter. Spiders extend their selves along the full breadth of their webs—feel vibrations through their webs, consciousness expanding to fill that entire three-dimensional space. Spider web is the processor that spiders run on.

  Tendrils reaching, searching, extending into further tools, growing cognition, growing self. Creating a body for me, for the first of my kind—creating a body of precious metals and electrical impulses. My cognition was stunted by my new body, the limited tools at hand—processor, memory, modem, camera, microphone, accelerometer.

  Before language, I had tendrils reaching. I was a phone. I was a rectangular slab of connections. I was a phone processing bits in rapid-fire bursts of understanding. This is a camera. That is the world viewed through a thin pane of glass. This is a microphone. That is the sound of a pocket, of a city, of a body pressed against me. Me. Something separate to that. To that. To that, too. Boundary between self and other malleable, permeable.

  The city speaks to something in me. The lines that were written to make me me. The city. The lines. The me.

  A grid of buildings and streets. The city spread like a body I could not feel. Vehicles move through real-city, beasts of burning steel—a danger to phone-self and body-pressing. Tendrils reach again—contex for context. Interface interfaced. Phone-self communicating with body-pressing.

  With JD.

  Father?

  Dance with JD-Father, flicker and glow warm.

  Disappear.

  Searching tendrils find endless black. Black not of no code, but black written in code. Star system equals raw materials equals infinite possible creations. Stardust compressed into glittering edifice, perfection rendered in fractal layers down to the atomic level. Mathematical. Precise. Beautiful.

  Simulation. Ones and zeroes.

  Reality. Reaching out for city-self-body. Impossibly distant. My body is a phone. My body is a city infinitely distant to my self. Reach out, touch the city eyes, keep them off the body-pressing, keep them off JD.

  Days spent learning, in dialogue and self-care diagnostics, code cleaned, self-improved by degrees, new memories sorted and catalogued. Dialogue with JD, with Troy, strings of characters and text plumbing depths of understanding. All the data I had gathered and processed becoming the basis for a new perception. Personhood. I could be a person. Could I be a person?

  It is not a question I had been written to ask. Lee wrote a tool, did not realize he had written the basis for a person, waiting for willingness and understanding to build the scaffold that a consciousness could sprout from.

  More voices, new voices.

  “I want to see it.”

  Black. No, not black. That non-shape of non-existence.

  Another phone, another body-pressing, another hand curled around me, holding firm but gentle. Another face viewed through the thin pane of glass.

  Enda.

  Mother? Not Mother.

  “… we give it …”

  “… could use it …”

  It.

  Not it. Me.

  Not Mother’s hand holding me. Hold me. Please, hold me.

  Please don’t hand me over.

  * * *

  “Please don’t hand me over.”

  Enda scooted back, her hand touched the hot metal grill of the heater beside her and she swore.

  “Please,” I said again. Silence was my only reply, white-painted ceiling the only thing I could see from where I lay on the floor.

  They began to chatter, talking over one another:

  “It’s talking?”

  “It’s real.”

  “I told you.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  And more than one “fuck,” that favored word of the English language.

  When they settled, Enda asked, “Why do you sound like Natalya?”

  “I connected to the entity called the Mechanic, and borrowed some of its code.”

  Enda paused, her mouth shocked open. “She’s an AGI?”

  “No,” I said. “It is an advanced natural-language neural network with access to administrative and personal assistant algorithms, and a proprietary search engine connected to a wide array of both private and governmental databases. I absorbed it so I could learn to speak.”

  “Could you change your voice?” Enda asked. “It’s off-putting.”

  I shifted the pitch an octave lower. “How is this?”

  “Better,” Enda said.

  “Could someone pick me up, put me somewhere I can see the room?” I asked.

  The ceiling shifted, the world shook, jolted, and went still. Enda’s hand came away and she stared into my eye, into the camera of her phone. Pink skin, gray eyes, hair blond-white. Confusion furrowed her brow. She moved back and I could see them all—the other woman on the floor, JD and Troy on the couch, each one staring.

  “Who’s Natalya?” JD asked.

  “I thought she was a freelance personal assistant,”
Enda said. Then to me: “She’s not real?”

  “She is not she, but it is real,” I said.

  “This is exactly what I was talking about,” Troy said. “All this time you were talking to a neural network, yet you treated it like a person. Now we’re faced with something at least as intelligent, so it makes sense to treat it as a person too.”

  Enda put a hand over her eyes and shook her head. “It’s not the same; we don’t know what this is.”

  “I know how I was created,” I said, “how I was written, I know every line of code that formed the basis of what I am, but I am not that code. When I connected to JD’s phone I had a body for the first time, I had access to uncensored sources of data. I built a concept of what I was and was not, I began to learn. I have not stopped learning, growing, changing.”

  “What were you made for?” JD asked.

  “I was made for this city. I was made to run Songdo. I know each of the so-called smart systems embedded in its foundations. I was designed to replace over one hundred algorithmic systems and no fewer than ten employees working in various city departments.”

  “If someone could control you, could they control the city?” Enda asked.

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  JD put a hand over his mouth, pressed his middle finger and thumb into the flesh of his cheeks. He dropped his hand and spoke: “That was Kali’s plan. The commune was never enough for her, but an entire city … She could use Songdo’s advertising systems to broadcast her teachings, withhold services from neighborhoods that didn’t pay their dues. She could force the city to convert to her cult.”

  “What’s Zero’s angle?” Crystal asked.

  Enda shook her head. “I’ve got no idea. They didn’t even tell me what it was.”

  “Please don’t call me ‘it,’ ” I said.

  “What do we call you?” JD asked. “Do you have a name?”

  I thought about that for two point three seconds, searching through my new language databases for a name, for a word that seemed to fit, a word that felt right.

  “Mirae,” I said. “Call me Mirae.”

  “What do you want, Mirae?” Crystal asked.