by C D Tavenor
The truck darted through a U-turn. Theren glanced back down the road, watching Elizabeth, Katy, and their rental car recede into the distance. For now, the two women seemed safe.
“So, hello, I’m Theren,” they said to the man sharing the truck bed with the MI. “What’s your name?”
The man just stared at Theren with disgust.
“Nice to meet you too.”
If they weren’t going to talk, then Theren would work. They reformulated their previous search to consider the complex history of local militias in the U.S. Midwest. Apparently, due to the controversial second amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Americans owned hundreds of millions of weapons, even as the rest of the world outlawed the possession of such arms. While advocacy groups in the U.S. had made some strides on limiting what weapons citizens could own, the lack of sufficient consensus to amend the U.S. Constitution eliminated any chance of removing the right entirely.
They widened their search. In each state, small, fringe libertarian groups often formed “sovereignties,” where they essentially ran their own miniature governments. Sometimes the groups affiliated with particular religious organizations; others pursued a purely economic, anarcho-capitalist or militant-communist agenda. To Theren, they were all cults.
The U.S. government kept watchful eyes on these groups, placing them on domestic terror watch-lists. To the chagrin of many law enforcement agencies, many groups suavely avoided breaking any laws, making it impossible for them to crack down on the anti-societal behavior exhibited by these individuals.
They refocused their search. In Minnesota, one such group had taken root: The Liberators. Boasting only a few hundred members, the Liberators had declared it would “rid the world of all technology that might cause humanity to stray from God’s sacred path.”
Theren dug deeper. It traced financial ties between the Liberators and certain other organizations across the globe. The network was immense. Too immense. They connected with every possible group who thought similarly, forming a united front.
Hidden in the recesses of the vast internet that permeated every object on the planet, Theren found what they had hoped they would not find. The Liberators were more than just another group inside the network of anti-Synthetic and anti-AI organizations. Specifically, it had vast financial ties to the Holy Crusade. Somehow, Michael had known Theren would be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Theren thought they had found everything they needed to know, but they noticed one final detail. One member of the Holy Crusade, the link between the Holy Crusade and the Liberators, served as an attorney for—for the Gerber Foundation?
Could it be possible? Had Simon put a target on their head? No. There was no way. Simon might have his issues with Theren, but he didn’t want to scare them. He didn’t actually oppose Theren, he just opposed the way Theren and their team went about things. No, someone else had put a target on Theren’s head. Someone had convinced this group to radicalize beyond a simple powwow of gun fanatics. Someone had dropped a pretty penny into the coffers of this group to convince them to conduct a kidnapping, while shifting the blame to Simon. He would never stoop so low. All blame should rest on the shoulders of Michael, the enigmatic icon of the Holy Crusade.
The truck drove for ten minutes down backroads before it turned down an unplowed, snow-covered path. The truck’s driver handled the slippery roadway with expert skill, and, at the end of the path, the truck parked. The cab faced toward a small shack. As they arrived, Theren received a message from Elizabeth, asking to allow her access to their audio and video feeds. They denied the request.
“Out of the truck,” Theren’s new friend said, fingers on his trigger. “Now.”
Theren awkwardly tumbled out of the truck bed. The MI handled the movement with clumsy grace, though they managed to drop to the ground without falling onto their side. Future prototypes would need greater dexterity, but for now their present line of MIs focused mostly on processing speeds, not the ability to climb out of truck beds. Apparently they should have been more prescient.
The other Liberators exited the cab and ushered Theren toward the shed. The shack depressed the forest surrounding it, falling apart at the seams. It probably hadn’t received maintenance in over thirty years. The driver opened its door, motioning Theren inside with his rifle. He followed Theren, closing the door on the rest of their escort.
Three men, all holding blowtorches, stood inside the small shack. A small furnace hid in a corner, and random corkboards littered with guns adorned the walls. Yet that fact didn’t surprise Theren. Jill had led them to this very room in Virtual. It was an almost exact replica. The shack lacked the giant map on the wall, but these people didn’t look like they could have understood those complex connections, anyways.
“Thank you, Greg,” one of the three inside the shack said. He had a shaved head and was much bigger than the other two. Theren decided to call him Alpha. The one on the left was Beta, and the third was Delta.
“So how can I help you?” Theren said.
“Silence,” Alpha said. “We do not speak to demons.”
“Well, that’s good, because I’m not a demon,” they replied. “So which one of you is Michael? Or are you all Michael? Do you work for Michael?”
“No questions. You are a demon. A demon would not admit his true nature, and you have taken residence in a machine that should work for humans, do work demanded by humans. Not to think, not to replace humans. Not to believe that it can think.”
Well with that logic, they would never see the error of their ways. “How am I any different than you?” Theren asked, but the men ignored the question, pushing Theren toward the blowtorches.
Theren did not know how to feel toward this situation. In their mind, they knew no fear, yet they could not help but feel as if fear was the right response in this situation.
“You, demon, are to die in your metal cage. You will never be free to harm and deceive again!”
Theren watched the three men move closer with their blowtorches. Before the flames reached Theren’s shell, they took a final moment to assess the room. Theren saw the hidden cameras blinking from the corners, and computer equipment cleverly hid beneath broken tables and hunting equipment. A secret observer watched this tragedy unfold, and they knew exactly where to find him. Elsewhere in their mind, they began preparations to respond with brutal force.
The flames arrived, melting the casings that held together the MI. Next, the men used crowbars to pry open Theren’s extraneous body. They roasted its inner circuitry, both the metamaterials and the wires that connected to the MI’s machine-specific sensors. Cognitive function within the MI faltered as processors melted into oblivion.
Theren felt no pain, yet they did feel as if they were losing a part of their self, even if their mind would reformat only nanoseconds after the connection severed. Theren relinquished the thoughts of fear. Instead, they stared into the eyes of their assailants as they mutilated what they believed was their greatest enemy.
Theren despised their satisfactory smiles. From those smiles, Theren drank in an emotion that they had never before seen in the face of another person. Their hate horrified the synthetic, for it was an alien emotion.
Theren wanted to erase the hate, to eradicate it entirely. These people not only hated, they loved their hate. These fiends had resolved in their minds to eradicate them, and the SI could do nothing but watch them bask in their supposed triumph.
Their outrage calmed momentarily, and they stared into the souls of their enemies. Even in this moment, they saw the humanity in the three men’s eyes. Angry and hateful, but also scared. The men believed Theren would end their world. If only these people knew Theren’s actual hopes and dreams.
The men destroyed the MI, circuit by circuit, panel by panel, qubit by qubit. The visual sensors melted, severing their view of the shack. With three minutes to go before Minnesota State Patrol would arrive, a blowtorch melted the interface’s wireless communicator, sever
ing Theren’s connection to a miniscule potion of their mind.
Chapter 9
It is this Court’s opinion that, given the facts presented in this case, the Court of Appeals was correct to affirm the Trial Court’s decision to award monetary damages to the corporation Synthetic Intelligence Initiative, but we award only property damages. We will not bestow rights of personhood on this new class of persons without the state legislature or Congress speaking on the matter. We do not grant them strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
– “SII v. Erickson,” Justice Kamili Vjupta, 2059 C.E.
February 2051 C.E.
Theren walked through their forest, listening to the invisible birds and their beautiful songs composed over thousands of years of natural selection. Over the past few months, Theren had added environmentally ambient features throughout their personal, virtual world, replicating the external world with increased accuracy as each day passed. They had even considered simulating evolution, producing virtual creatures descended from the present’s organisms, yet unique in a way only present in this particular world.
Even as Theren walked through their forest, their mind focused elsewhere. They had four simultaneous perspectives active, though one was rapidly dissipating as its body melted into scrap metal. This particular perspective traversed the trails of their private server. The third coordinated potential membership contracts with a few companies interested in registering with SII. The fourth perspective had just entered the public Virtual networks, coasting along toward its destination.
While Theren was present in all of their perspectives, more of their mind focused on that fourth point of interconnected consciousness. Through that point, Theren would teach the Liberators, the Holy Crusaders, the bigoted monsters that they should not trifle with SIs.
They would not harm them; no, Michael and his friends would experience Theren’s wrath.
Instead of using the illegal portal Jill had used, they traversed the corridors of Virtual toward the location of Michael’s secret server. They walked by hundreds, if not thousands, of other humans, each traveling through Virtual. Those people were probably heading toward their remote offices, or going off into some fantasy world to play a game. None of them knew they walked by the first SI.
Theren arrived at a terminal that would allow them to connect directly with servers in the Midwest. They pulled up the Virtual address Jill had used yesterday, inputted it into the terminal, and produced a few scripts that would override the security protocols of that server. While Theren wouldn’t skirt the well-earned costs of Virtual service providers, Theren had no qualms breaking the security walls of terrorists.
The door opened. Theren stepped through the gate. Less than a second later, they arrived inside the shack. Like yesterday, a complex map adorned the wall, visible only in Virtual. Theren could see the image of three men standing over a pile of scrap, but they looked fake. Unreal.
Unlike the scene in Minnesota, Michael stood in the middle of the room, watching the recorded carnage. The man wore his usual black robe and strange white mask.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” Theren asked.
The man whipped his head around toward their avatar. “I was wondering when you might find me here,” he said.
“I’m here. Did you want me to come? Did you want me to find you here? Was all of this some big show?”
Michael paused. He took off his mask, revealing the face of a young man, most likely no older than thirty. He had short brown hair, blue eyes, and stubble. There was no way for Theren to know if the man’s representation in Virtual was anything like his actual appearance, but that didn’t really matter. They’d met the man behind the mask.
“I’m not one of them, you know,” he said, waving his hands around the room. “These people, these Liberators, they are crude people who can’t think beyond the muzzles of their guns. They don’t see the bigger picture.”
Theren walked toward the map on the wall. “So tell me this big picture, then,” they said. “Who are you? Why have you been following me? Do you actually hate me?”
“Of course I hate you,” he said. “Or, more correctly, we hate you. But my hate doesn’t matter anymore. I’m done being a tool of some greater game. I’m being used, just as much as you’re being used for some greater, ideological cause.”
“Who?”
Michael laughed. He pointed at the wall. “You see all those connections? Those aren’t mine. They’re someone else’s. Someone else was pulling the strings behind me, funneling me money as we funneled it to these idiots here in Minnesota and elsewhere. All of it was useless. Our benefactors don’t care about us. I don’t know what they care about.”
Theren had no reason to trust him, but he would hear the man out. They needed to learn from these people. Know how they thought. Know what they believed, even if what they believed amounted to a crazy conspiracy in the end.
“You see, two years ago,” said Michael, “sometime after good old Wallace died—”
“Don’t talk about my father,” Theren interjected.
“He’s not your father.”
“That’s not for you to decide.”
“It’s not for you to decide, either. Do you want me to finish? You’ll want to hear all of this too.”
Theren tilted their head. “Sure,” they said.
“Someone came to us with a deal. They said, ‘we’ve seen your statements in opposition against SIs. You’re a growing global network. We’ll fund you. We like your message.’”
Michael’s hands traced the path of a string, passing from Zurich, to New York, to London, and to Washington. “So of course, we thought nothing of it. We ran with it. Then, they started giving us orders. Asking us to do things that had nothing to do with our cause. I got suspicious. A few of us did, in fact, so I started looking. I started searching. And I found something really interesting.”
“Oh?” Theren said.
“Guess who else they fund?” The man didn’t wait for Theren to respond. “They fund you.”
Theren stared at the man. They had no reason to believe him; he had always played mind games when he would appear out of the shadows. However, he presented something new. Very new.
“How do you know?” they asked. Theren contemplated the connection they’d discovered themself: the attorney for the Gerber Foundation.
Michael let out yet another laugh, one much more boisterous than the last. “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” he said. “Well, I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough. The money trail is way too obvious. But these people messed up this time. They contacted me with the same person that connects to you. They used that person to set up the deal with these Liberators. They messed up. I’d checked this man’s accounts. I already knew his relationship with you. I was just waiting for him to show his face to me, and now I know.”
“So what are you going to do with this information?” Theren said. “Are you going to reveal this organization to the world? Uncloak the ghost in the machine?”
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then you’ve already lost. You’ll see me one more time, I imagine. When the time is right. I’m done playing their games. It’s time to wage this war on my terms or die trying.”
Michael vanished.
Theren stood alone in the decrepit room. The strands and weapons on the wall started to fade. Someone, somewhere, was scrubbing the server, deleting all of the files. No matter. There was nothing else for them to find here. Michael had shown them exactly what they had wanted to show them, just another cog in a larger game.
Michael had constructed the room before Theren even traveled to Minnesota, setting Jill up to discover it. That wasn’t her fault; she was just trying to help. Before she had even shown Theren the room, someone must have hacked Golden Ventures and discovered their destination. Theren knew that Elizabeth had logged the proposed travel plan for their MI before she had ev
en asked Theren, so that wasn’t entirely out of the equation.
Everyone must have acted fast. They had coordinated and created a believable scenario, tricking Theren into thinking there was some greater conspiracy at work behind the scenes. The Holy Crusade grasped at straws, attempting to deceive Theren into believing in ghosts that simply didn’t exist.
The conspiracy theory Michael proposed was just that: a theory. A vocal portion of the human population simply hated Theren, had banded together, and was trying to make their life a nightmare. It was the simpler explanation.
The room’s four walls crumbled, the server’s internal coding deteriorating. As the operating system deconstructed itself, Theren saw their opening. They reached out to the server, accessing its source code. They saw the program rewriting the three-dimensional parameters. Instincts activated. They scripted codes to obliterate the firewalls in place to protect the server from hostile intruders.
Another window appeared. For a moment, Theren reached through the gap, grasping the light at the end of the tunnel. White light faded, and their senses perceived something new.
Theren stared through a small camera perched atop a desk. A man with similar features to that of the revealed Michael typed furiously upon a physical keyboard.
Theren relaxed. They knew his real face.
“Until we meet again,” they said.
Theren obliterated the server’s operating system. The walls cascaded into oblivion, three dimensions faded to two, then one, then none. The digital destruction thrust them out of the Virtual world, and they fell into the grass before the steps of their gazebo.
* * *
Four hours had passed since the events in Minnesota. It would take a few days before Golden Ventures finished fabricating a replacement MI for Theren’s use in New York. For now, Theren communicated with Elizabeth via AR, where Elizabeth shared with them the updates provided by a member of the Minnesota State Patrol. The law enforcement agency had captured members of the Liberators and placed them in police custody for destruction of private property. Theren wished they could receive different charges, such as assault or battery, but U.S. law would not transform that quickly.