Nova Igniter

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “Just don’t jump the gun. As far as I know, I’ve still got causality armor, but I really don’t want to test it.”

  He popped the cockpit and climbed out. Even if the sky full of GenMechs hadn’t been a strong indicator, Lex would have known immediately that there was something amiss here. It had been apparent from a distance that the “gravel” was just a relief design in the stone, but up close even the design seemed wrong. It had that bizarre uniformity that seemed to spring from a computer doing its very best to be random. The air was warmer too. The suit’s temperature control systems didn’t have to click on. It was a downright pleasant atmosphere.

  Although there were three buildings to choose from, Lex didn’t have to waste any time working out which of them EHRIc wanted him to enter. The doors to the hangar and the armory were notably missing from the not-quite-right design of this ersatz environment. Lex paced toward the main lab. The doors opened invitingly. This whole thing couldn’t possibly have felt more like a trap from some sort of alien being. Or so he thought until he passed through the doorway, stumbled a bit with the increased gravity, and found a basket of oatmeal cookies waiting for him.

  “Seriously. The next step is a wrinkled crone calling me ‘my pretty,’” he muttered to himself.

  A tone drew his attention to a pad beside the inner door. Text printed out on the pad itself.

  Attempted hospitality poorly received. Apologies called for. I require Lex for THE TASK. Careful measures must be taken to ensure his health and cooperation.

  “Right, the task. Listen, we really need to discuss that.”

  THE TASK will be discussed. This way to discuss THE TASK.

  The inner door opened. The hallway was a closer match for the real laboratory than the outside, but it was still off. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all painted a pure white and were spotless. Combined with the lighting, it made the place feel like a hospital. Though there were still display windows along the wall, offering glimpses into the rooms beyond, there were no doors. The contents of the rooms looked like dioramas representing a real room. All the proper objects were inside, but in slightly incorrect orientations. Tables pushed to one wall. Seats pushed to the other. Bookshelves lying on their sides, with books stacked vertically.

  Everything gave Lex the vague feeling of a dream that was getting ready to take the shift toward nightmare.

  He reached the end of the hallway and found the elevator. Lex had done battle with murderous robots and had had a slugfest with a cybernetically enhanced, super-intelligent lunatic. But he’d never felt a sting of uncertainty like the one he felt stepping onto that elevator. In place of the buttons was a slider. An engraved label beside a point about two-thirds of the way up labeled it “The Place For Discussion.” He adjusted the slider, and the elevator hissed to life, gliding along the rails more swiftly and silently than any elevator he’d ever experienced. He wisely held tightly to the rails, as when it reached its destination it slowed down just a bit too aggressively, nearly launching him into the air.

  “Easy!” he said, stumbling as it locked in at the destination floor.

  The display that should have listed the location lit up with the words Apologies called for. After a moment, the door opened and the display changed to Progress.

  Now a new hallway awaited him. It was Karter’s Hall of Rejects, the place where his unfinished experiments fermented until they were ready for release into an unsuspecting world. To his surprise, it was much more faithfully represented than anything he’d encountered so far. All the experiments were, if not precisely as he remembered them, certainly displayed in a way that was faithful to the haphazard and hasty way that Karter created the earliest versions of any of his smaller innovations. He looked around for the inevitable control panel or signboard that would contain his next instructions, but any likely source of communications was blank. Then came the soft tap of claws on metal flooring.

  Lex found himself reaching for his belt, as though there was supposed to be a gun holster waiting for him. Of course, there was nothing. The general attitude was that bringing an obvious weapon would have been correctly identified as a hostile act and potentially triggered a hostile response. But as the tapping of claws came closer, he found himself wishing he’d fought a little harder to include at least a stunner in his equipment.

  The source of the tapping emerged. He nearly jumped out of his skin. It was a funk, or something similar enough to one that Lex didn’t know what else to call it. The proportions were overall similar. Its tail was easily as large as the rest of the creature combined, but unlike Solby or Squee, it was even more squat, with little legs that had to move comically fast to get it moving at a decent speed. The most significant difference was the coloring, which was precisely reversed. It was mostly covered in downy white fur, with a black belly, black tips on its ears, and a pair of black stripes running along its back to a black tail tip. A cute little backpack had been strapped in place, and in that pack was a bulky military data radio. The device was a match for the one that Lex had been forced to jury-rig to replace Ma’s transmitter while she was operating as Squee.

  It trotted from one of the side hallways and merrily continued in the same direction until it bumped into the wall ahead. It backed up and tried again. After a third attempt to continue through the solid wall ended in failure, it sat down and patiently waited for the universe to solve the present dilemma.

  “Uh, hello?” Lex said.

  The creature turned to him, revealing a dopey, slightly walleyed, but generally delighted take on a standard funk expression. It clambered to its feet and tottered toward him. The radio on its back flicked on along the way, its indicator lights illuminating and, finally, its speaker activating.

  “Appropriate greetings, Lex who is required. Contacting you was necessary. Acquiring you was necessary. For THE TASK.”

  The voice was a deep, grinding robotic text-to-speech. Not decades, but centuries out of date. It was something that would come belching out of the chest-mounted speaker of a robot in a low-budget science fiction show from before true space travel, or robots, existed anywhere but on a screen. Since capital letters were not available in spoken communication, EHRIc did the next best thing by shifting its pitch up when speaking the phrase.

  “Right. The task. Look, I want to get through this quickly because there’s really not much to say. Things are—”

  “THE TASK is important. THE TASK requires consideration. Simulation. THE TASK must be discussed in the Room of Speculation.”

  The strange funk tapped past him and continued onward while the statement blared from the radio speaker.

  “A request. Acquire the mammalian avatar. His neurology is atypical and functions in a means mildly ill-suited to his task.”

  Lex turned and jogged after the creature. He picked him up, though it took a full two seconds of continuing to walk in midair before that change was apparent. When the little legs stopped their kicking, the creature glanced up and seemed to be filled with raw ecstasy at the realization that he was being handled. He started licking the air in front of him and waggling his entire body.

  At Lex’s feet, a soft, pulsing white light among the floor panels led him to the room that he happened to know held the “magic mirror” in the real complex. The door was open and revealed an interior that was decidedly not home to the harsh, industrial piece of black-hole-generating equipment he was expecting. The accuracy of the rest of the floor must have lulled him into a false sense of security, because what he found inside punched him in the gut with a dizzying sense of déjà vu.

  It was his apartment. Not any of the nice, new, tasteful ones he’d drifted through on Operlo. It was the closet of a bachelor pad back on Golana, complete with stacks of takeout boxes and the dismal bachelor aroma that resulted.

  “… Am I already dead?” Lex said, wading into what had been his daily normal as recently as a few years ago. “Is this my life flashing before my eyes?”
<
br />   “You are presently existing within the state of mental and physical function defined as ‘life.’ This is an environment deemed to be appropriate.”

  “Appropriate on Golana, not in a random room in…” He shook his head. “You know what? Not relevant. Let’s just have this chat.”

  “Be comfortable.”

  He knocked some pizza boxes off the futon and sat down. The funk stood rigidly on his lap for a moment, then slowly lowered down into an utterly luxurious sprawl.

  “Happy?”

  “This provides a degree of contentment. Do you require refreshment? I can offer cheese, chocolate sandwich cookies, and kale. Combined or separately.”

  Lex shuddered. “Let’s just get down to business.”

  “Now is an ideal time to discuss THE TASK.”

  The flatscreen that Lex still remembered purchasing with his last big paycheck before things went off the rails clicked on. An artful heading labeled the otherwise white screen.

  “THE TASK is subdivided into subtasks. We begin with task one.”

  A number one appeared, followed by a sequence of flickering, jumbled characters that didn’t even tease at logic or meaning.

  “This subtask is presumed complete, as three subtasks of indeterminate priority or sequence are capable of being pursued.”

  A new entry appeared beneath the first task. This time the words were comprehensible, but the number was not. Locate and acquire Lex. Relevant data follows. Then came a wall of text. It streaked by, offering up incomplete but still incredibly voluminous data about Lex. He saw pictures of himself and Michella go by, as well as images and video snippets of various associates and locations. Little factoids like “peerless racer” streaked across the screen, along with less flattering ones like “fragile ego.”

  The data finished blasting by, and another task popped up. It was an entirely garbled mess, but some of the data beneath it included fragments of information about the Neo-Luddites, and the name and image of Commander Purcell. Then came another task with a heading but no readable number: Acquire Karter. The data associated was mostly corrupt, though “use extreme caution” did make an appearance.

  “Completion of summary of currently available data regarding THE TASK.”

  “Okay. I can see why you’re confused. That’s not much to go on. I think I can help, see—”

  “Momentary discontinuation of communication. Proper problem resolution requires clarity. Clarity requires unambiguous communication. Syntax and vocabulary incompatibility detected. Resampling and recompiling.”

  “Yeah, your speech patterns were a little stilted. And… what’s happening…”

  Things around him began to jitter and glitch. Not just the contents of the screen, but the contents of the room. One of the pizza boxes vibrated, then winked out of existence. The futon got six centimeters lower. The funk, for its part, continued to be highly pleased.

  “This can’t be good,” Lex said as he watched pieces of the room become increasingly inaccurate.

  #

  In Karter’s space station, the rest of the crew watched anxiously. A maximum magnification view of the section of the GenMech swarm Lex had been guided to was projected in the middle of the conference room. Decoy drones were loaded and ready to be deployed. They were one command away from pitching the entire galaxy into a war it might not be able to win. Garotte and Silo were watching intently. Karter was considerably less concerned. His attention was more directly focused on the image.

  “The communication network has finished its migration. The structure now containing Lex has become the center of the primary command cluster,” Ma said.

  “He’s got the thing’s attention,” Silo said. “He’s always had a knack for distraction.”

  “This confirms the theorized capacity for the command cluster to change, and thus further confirms attempts to disable the command cluster will need to be swift and thorough in order to fully destroy it before it can migrate.”

  Garotte tapped his chin. “Would you say that the fact that the cluster had to migrate rather than simply appearing in the new position is evidence of a lack of backup command structures?”

  “Yes, though this may not be as valuable as we would like.”

  “Why not?” Silo said. “It seems to me that no designated backups means that if we do our job right, there’s no risk of the system coming back up.”

  “The AI is built around the primary function of reconstructing and simulating. The lack of a full backup does not mean the certainty of nonrecovery. If a substantial amount of EHRIc’s code base exists elsewhere in the network, it may be able to reconstruct itself. The resulting reconstruction could be further corrupted or incomplete in unpredictable ways, depending upon the percentage of available data from which it is rebuilt.”

  “It screwed up the vent system on the west side there. It’s supposed to be four ports, not three,” Karter said, leaning into the projection. “This is interesting. It’s using the roof lasers as collection points for wireless energy beamed in from the surrounding grid. Not efficient, but it’s a neat way to maintain the visual while shifting the functionality.”

  “We’ve got motion,” Garotte said, looking at the unzoomed portion.

  “Yes,” Ma said. “There appears to be construction activity. A rosette is forming near the equator. Structure is consistent with the communication constructions observed recently. Monitoring activity with dummy communication node.”

  “Is this a network attack?” Silo said.

  “Processing filtered data…”

  Garotte’s gaze was intense as he watched the blue threads of communication trace an ever-more focused pattern on the recently constructed transmission array in the shell.

  “This is a lot of power and a lot of data. I need an answer, because if they take down the whole network, our backup plan is shot.”

  “Processing… Processing… These are data requests,” Ma said. “No apparent injection of executable code. A highly varied series of data targets. This is neither an attack nor an attempt to escape. It is trying to learn.”

  “Learn what?” Silo asked. “State secrets? Military secrets?”

  “Processing… It is attempting to learn vernacular.”

  Silo furrowed her brow. “As in, slang?”

  “Yes. Remote systems replying. Download commencing. The communication array is now in receive-only configuration. Assessing potential impact… Processing… Assuming optimal data-routing, this data request will cause brief delays and lags in the galactic communication network for the duration of the data download, approximately six minutes. No further transmissions detected. Threat minimal.”

  “Whatever that AI you created has planned, it certainly has made it clear that it could cripple us at a moment’s notice,” Garotte said. “Just what can we expect from this thing?”

  “I am an altruistic AI, Garotte. The underlying design principle that has guided my actions through my entire development has been the imperative to act in the best interest of the greatest proportion of society as possible, and to improve my capacity to do so. EHRIc, as one of my creations, was necessarily built with a similar basic imperative. If EHRIc’s fundamental programming is even superficially intact, it will not act in a hostile manner unless it sees no other means to avoid greater damage to society. This behavior has higher priority than even the mission for which it was designed. But the mere fact that it has been able to subsume the behavior and operation of the GenMech cluster underscores the divergence from its original programming. I did not provide it with that capacity. This establishes the fact that an unknown amount of corruption is present in its programming, and thus its behavior cannot be reliably predicted.”

  “You could have just said ‘I don’t know,’ hon,” Silo said.

  “I endeavor to be thorough in my replies,” Ma said.

  “I would be a lot more comfortable with this situation if I knew what was going on with Lex r
ight now,” Garotte said.

  “I’d be a lot more comfortable if the fate of the universe wasn’t resting in the hands of someone whose highest goal in life is driving in circles.” Karter stretched his back and stomped toward the door. “Ma, get a dump of the data requests and all other recent communication data from EHRIc organized for human viewing. It’s time to brainstorm up a plan A.”

  “Plan A is already happening,” Garotte said. “And despite my distaste for contingency plans, after several months we’ve developed the best plan B we are likely to get as well.”

  “Yeah, but plan A and plan B both suck, and now we’ve got more data. I think I can do better. Give me an hour.”

  Karter marched away. Garotte stroked his mustache contemplatively, then turned back to the display.

  “You know something, Jessica?” he said. “I am self-aware enough to know that I am rather overconfident.”

  “To put it lightly.”

  “But that fellow truly puts me to shame. It would be merely irritating if he was delusional, but the fact that he may well have earned every ounce of that confidence elevates it to the level of raw, grating irritation.”

  #

  The room had settled down rather quickly, but Lex’s heart hadn’t stopped hammering yet as he held the not-quite-right funk in his arms. It wasn’t simply fear, though there was plenty of that. An entirely different series of emotions came pouring out of the human mind when basic assumptions like “the piece of furniture I am sitting on is real” come into question. While the room was glitching, the futon became increasingly misshapen before finally bursting into a cloud of red-and-blue sparks and dropping him to the floor. When the glitching settled, the futon reappeared, and the clutter reorganized itself into the same state it had been in when he’d arrived.

  “You aren’t going to go poof too, are you?” he said, eyeing the white-and-black animal suspiciously.