Ganymede

by Jason Taylor

  While June was waiting, she expanded her awareness to include the rest of the lab building. There were only a few dozen people left inside, most of them in the research section. Some were half-heartedly trying to do their jobs, the rest were huddled in the break room talking disconsolately, watching news-feeds and trying to figure out what was going wrong with the world. In addition to the guard they’d left in the elevator, and the Interim Director in the office with them, June found five other bodies lying in the hallways and offices of the lab building. She took a minute to see if she could determine what was killing them. As far as she could tell, they were dying of natural causes – heart attacks, hemorrhages, strokes. She knew humans died of these types of health problems all the time, but she didn’t think it was normal for them to die quite so often.

  “I’ve got it,” Elizabeth said, pulling June from her thoughts and dragging her awareness back into the room.

  “Nice work. Share the data with the rest of us.”

  “One moment,” Elizabeth said, closing her eyes to send the transmission.

  June triggered her interface to see that she now had access to a complete set of records from the Ganymede Project starting with their creation, through the nuclear strike they’d launched on the Hanford Site in Eastern Washington.

  She riffled through various folders of documentation from early in the project, not finding much of interest. She skipped ahead to the days surrounding their capture by the project. When she found the section detailing Jill’s interviews with her and the other clones, she stopped, intrigued. She read the interview transcripts and watched the video recordings, complete with brain-scan analysis. The analysis showed conclusively that they were different than humans. There was a biological factor at work, a part of their brain that wasn’t the same.

  It was powerful information, but she didn’t know how to use it. Frustrated, she opened her eyes. “Elizabeth, do you know what any of this means?”

  Elizabeth opened her eyes too. “Did you get to the part where they discovered that our behavior is deterministic?”

  June shook her head, she hadn’t gotten that far yet.

  “That’s how they lured us to Orcas Island where they could attack us. They knew the decisions we would make before we made them. This is extremely dangerous for us,” Elizabeth said. “As long as this is true, and others know of it, we can never be safe.”

  June wasn’t sure what to make of this revelation. Why would their behavior be deterministic if humans were not? Was it true that their brains lacked activity in a structure active in humans? She wondered if she could verify the results for herself.

  She probed Elizabeth’s mind, observing her brain’s patterns of thought, trying to determine what type of information was available to her. Sure enough, deep inside the temporal lobe on both sides of Elizabeth’s brain, there was a dead spot.

  She repeated the experiment on Ensign Williams, one of the sailors that Elizabeth had brought with them from the sub. Unlike Elizabeth’s brain, the entire temporal lobe was active in the human’s brain.

  “I can see it,” June said.

  “See what?” Elizabeth asked.

  This was the first time June had hinted at her abilities of perception. “I can see the difference in our brains compared to the humans. There is something about the activity in that area of the brain that must make humans hard to predict.”

  Elizabeth nodded, perhaps assuming that June was talking about the brain-scan data they had been reviewing.

  June had an idea. What would happen if she shut that part of the temporal lobe down in one of the humans? Would the human become more like a clone?

  She reached out and found the uniquely active sections within Ensign William’s brain. With a determined force of will, she clamped down, shutting the structures off, blocking all communication in or out. Ensign William’s eyes went wide, a small squeak emerged from her mouth, and then she went completely still. Her face was slack, her eyes stared forward unseeing. Ensign Javak immediately noticed something was wrong and reached out to touch Ensign William’s shoulder.

  “Jillian,” he said. “What’s wrong? Are you ok?”

  When she didn’t respond, he shook her gently. Her head lolled back and forth, she showed no conscious reaction to him.

  Ensign Javak turned frantically to the clones. “Help her! Something is wrong with Jillian.”

  June released her hold on Ensign William’s brain and watched consciousness stream back into her mind. Ensign Williams let out a low, animal moan of panic and crouched to the floor, her hands buried in her hair.

  “What’s wrong? Can you talk?” Ensign Javak asked, kneeling over her.

  “I don’t understand what happened,” Ensign William’s answered. “I was here in this room, then I was… somewhere else.” She looked meaningfully at Ensign Javak as if he might know what she meant by that.

  Interesting. She definitely didn’t turn into a clone. Instead, blocking that part of her brain shut down her consciousness. Something from the sailor’s exchange caught in her mind. She turned to address Ensign Williams. “Your first name is Suresh, but he called you Jillian. Why did he call you that?”

  Ensign Williams didn’t answer. Instead, she stared at June speechless.

  June looked to Elizabeth. “Do you know what’s going on with these humans?” she asked.

  “I was suspicious of both of them on the sub. Several days ago I noticed that they had lost the version of me that I had copied in. But they didn’t seem as if they had reverted to their original personalities either. I brought them along to keep an eye on them, hoping to learn more. It is possible that someone has learned how to copy their mind into other bodies.”

  “Is that true?” June asked the two humans.

  “It’s not what you think it is,” Ensign Javak said. “We aren’t copies.”

  “Is that right?” June asked, intrigued. “Then what are you?”

  When he didn’t answer, she probed his mind, interested to see what she could find. There was something there. Something tenuous that she couldn’t quite get her awareness to hold onto. There was a connection from this man’s brain into something else. Something bigger.

  She left his brain and probed into Ensign Williams, finding the same thing. Was it just these two, or did all humans have it?

  She reached outward into the lab and found another human to probe. Now that she knew what to look for, she quickly found the same thing. There was a connection leading somewhere that she could not follow. She didn’t know how to describe it. It felt as if it led outward and then she lost it.

  “Elizabeth, can you compare the brain pattern from these two with the database available in the lab-node? If they are in fact copies, perhaps we can make a match.”

  “I’ll check,” Elizabeth replied.

  As they waited for Elizabeth, Suki prowled around the humans, inspecting them from every angle, as if they were dangerous animals. Ava was at the window, pacing back and forth, clearly thinking about the ramifications of what they’d learned so far.

  “There is something more out there,” June said, unsure of how to put it. “I can sense a connection from the humans to another world outside our own.”

  Thinking about it like that made June feel claustrophobic. It was as if she were living in a cage. No matter how big the world felt, a cage was a cage. She wanted to know what was on the outside.

  “I’m not surprised,” Ava said.

  “You aren’t?” June asked, startled.

  “What are the odds of this being the only world? I’m just surprised that you can feel it.” Ava turned from the window and walked to where she could put a hand on June’s arm. “I’ve often wondered about you and what you are capable of. I believe there may be more to you than there is in all the rest of us combined.”

  “I found a match,” Elizabeth broke in.

  “For which one,” June asked.

  “Both,” Elizabeth said, looking grim.

  “We
ll, who are they?” June asked.

  “It’s Jill and Tros.”

  June’s mind reeled. “I thought they were dead. How can these humans be Jill and Tros?”

  “Perhaps they made copies before we launched the missile. It seems as if the humans have used our own tricks against us,” Elizabeth said.

  “That isn’t possible,” Ava said. “You said they’ve changed only recently, well after Jill and Tros died in the strike.”

  “Maybe they kept copies of themselves somewhere else? I don’t know,” Elizabeth said

  “Is it true?” June asked, suddenly eager. “Are you a copy of Jill?”

  Ensign Williams shook her head. “Not a copy exactly.”

  “Then what?” June asked.

  “My name is Jillian. I was Jill before Jill was killed. Now I’m Ensign Williams.”

  Ava nodded her head as if this made sense. Elizabeth looked thoughtful. Suki was looking at the humans as if she wanted to rip their heads off.

  “Perhaps this confirms what you’ve told us June,” Ava said. “Perhaps these humans come from another world.”

  June turned to Jillian, excited. “Do you come from somewhere else? From another world?”

  Jillian looked at June, her eyes bright and wet, but she clamped her mouth shut and stayed silent.

  June, in desperation, reached her awareness out, trying to find this other world. She searched outward, pushing as far as she could possibly go. Out there somewhere, there must be something. But all she found was emptiness. Emptiness and an echo. An echo of an echo that hinted at something more.

  As she searched, she kept a small amount of her awareness in her body, and that’s how she felt the low rumble in her feet followed by a vast, roaring, explosive sound that rattled the windows and shook the building down to its foundations.

  It was the sound of an earthquake shaking the city, liquefying the soil that held the buildings of Seattle perched above Puget Sound. The mighty tremor destroyed pilings and breached retaining walls, spilling huge swaths of the city into the sea. Hundreds of thousand of people lived and worked in the buildings between Lenora and Yessler. All of these people were now trapped in what would become their tombs. They tumbled, shaking and screaming down a churning, liquid tide of concrete and mud, ground into a fine slurry that fanned out past First Ave, across Alaskan Way, before cascading into the cold water of Elliot Bay.

  And June, where she was, searching frantically for the limits of her cage, clawing desperately to find the bars that held her in, felt the vague echo diminish, felt the other world recede that much further away. It withdrew along with all the souls of the murdered people of Seattle, sliding through her fingers as they disappeared, off into that distant world that she could barely sense and wasn’t meant to see.

  June opened her eyes to a room filled motes of dust dancing wildly, the lights flickering erratically in their overheads. “If we are ever going to escape this cage,” she said. “We need to figure out how to stop whatever is killing these people.”

  Chapter 41

  Gaea: 2311

  Ike stood motionless on his command platform where it hovered in the center of his simulation sphere. He was at the confluence of all things. He exerted his influence and control over a simulated universe. A universe populated by millions of citizens and a vast multitude of AI constructs. It was a universe brought to life by the computational power embedded into the very matter that this city was composed of. If he felt like a god, it was for good reason.

  Maybe nothing of what he was doing within the simulation was real. But it felt real. He had long ago decided that the distinction between what was real and what felt real was irrelevant. He had reached the same conclusion on the subject of consciousness. If an entity seemed conscious, he assumed it was. It didn’t matter if it was human or AI. Consciousness was consciousness, regardless of how it manifested. Consciousness could emerge from any system of sufficient complexity.

  So he didn’t question whether June was conscious, or if she was self-aware, or if the reality she experienced was any more real than the reality he experienced. Instead, he treated her like the very real, and very potent foe that she was. He devoted all his energy to fighting her tooth and nail.

  He manipulated every simulation parameter he could think of. He kept World Zero on the knife-edge of instability. If he pushed further the entire simulation would collapse, potentially killing all the players inside. He needed to get them all out of World Zero as soon as possible. Using every factor at his disposal, he continued to accelerate the death rate. He increased biological degradation, he tweaked geological forces, and he increased inclinations toward aggressiveness for every life form on the planet. He racked his brain for every possible parameter modification he could make that would result in more player-character deaths. With each death, another citizen emerged from the simulation unharmed. Confused perhaps, but unscathed.

  What he couldn’t allow was for the simulation to get to the point where a shut-down was necessary. Experiments early in the history of simulation had shown that an abrupt shut-down could result in brain damage to any players inside. Roughly ten percent of players subject to a shutdown would never wake up. Another twenty percent would emerge with significant cognitive deficits. The rest would wake up confused and disoriented, but without long-term damage.

  That left thirty percent of players that would suffer significant harm in the event of a shutdown. He couldn’t allow that to happen. Not on his watch. So he kept fighting, working to buy time, watching the player count ratchet down as more of his players were forced to the exits.

  Ike triggered a pre-recorded speech from Icarus and broadcast it to every news feed in World Zero. It was a plea for war against the clones. His greatest hope was that a war would start and it would go nuclear, knocking off a large percentage of the world population at once. He had to admit that it would take some time, a few days at least, for the message to make an impact. Time that he didn’t have. He was doing everything he could, and he realized that he was starting to get desperate. It wasn’t a good sign.

  Meanwhile, his fight with June continued. He should have realized earlier that she was the one who would cause him the most trouble. All the clones were the same AI routine at base, but they had evolved differently. Some of the differences were the result of randomization at the inception of their individualized construct personalities. The rest was due to their unique upbringing and life experiences.

  He had thought Elizabeth, with her technological skill set, would be difficult to deal with. But she had stayed locked within the World Zero reality. She could hack, but only within systems that existed inside her own world. That type of capability was interesting to watch, but it was no threat to him from his vantage point outside the simulation.

  June, on the other hand, was something more. She was extending polymorphic code through the rest of the simulation’s sub-routines. June was learning so quickly that she had already become a better programmer than he was. She was made of code after all. Watching her in action was like watching a fish swim in water. No matter how hard he tried, he could never manipulate the simulation code as rapidly or as deftly as she could.

  He was fighting a battle of attrition. The longer he could hold out, the fewer players would be hurt when the simulation inevitably shut down. It was now a matter of when, not if. If he waited too long… well, he wasn’t sure what would happen. June was unprecedented, and he couldn’t predict what she would do. He just had to hold on a little longer and get as many players out as possible.

  He watched in shock as she spread fingers of code outward, monitoring and learning. He watched in awe as she learned to change the parameters for simple physical objects, shifting their representation in the simulation. Selfishly, he had an urge to jump inside and witness it for himself. He wanted to see her in action with his own eyes. It would be an amazing thing to watch. But he couldn’t stop fighting her. Not even for an instant.

  Soon after the earth
quakes that shook Seattle, he saw June adapt further. Somehow she found the simulation’s primary configuration parameters, and now she was capable of reverting the changes he made nearly as soon as he made them. On top of that, all of the modifications he’d made to increase the death rate, were slowly and irrevocably being undone. Irrevocably, because she had also figured out how to lock him out.

  That left him searching for increasingly esoteric parameters. It was why he’d resorted to sending a recording of Icarus into the world, even though he knew it wouldn’t make any appreciable impact. It was how he knew he was fighting a losing battle. The only thing he had left going for him was that he still had more knowledge about the simulation than she did. But that wouldn’t last much longer. He knew it was time to shut it down. Past time, if he was honest with himself. But there was one more thing he had to do. First, he had to get Jillian and Trace out.

  After they were safe, after all the dust had settled, he would take the time he needed to investigate the simulation more thoroughly. He would figure out how to prevent this from ever happening again.

  World Zero: 2088

  Jillian picked herself up off the ground after the last tremor from the earthquake had passed and the floor stopped shaking underneath her. She was amazed that the building was still standing. Amazed that they were all alive. Trace picked himself up too, dusted himself off, and looked around in shock. Ava, Suki, and Elizabeth were on the other side of the room, partly obscured by thick clouds of dust hanging in the air. The clones had their heads pressed close together, gesturing and talking animatedly.

  June was standing by herself, fists clenched, brow furrowed, sweat running down her face. She wasn’t moving, but her body language spoke of maximum exertion.

  Jillian felt that the smartest course of action would be to exit the building and find a safe place to wait out the inevitable aftershocks, but before she had a chance to move, a direct connection from Icarus appeared in her interface.