Demonhome

by Michael G. Manning

  “Thank you,” said her father’s face. “I love you, Nina. Meet me soon…”

  His words were cut off as the terminal went dead. He hadn’t terminated the connection, though. It was completely dead, as though the power had been cut. Karen stepped out of the booth and looked around.

  “Why did he call you Nina?” asked Matt. He hadn’t understood most of the conversation, but he had wondered at the change of names.

  “It’s a nickname,” she told him.

  Then he remembered his earlier question, “What is AGI?”

  “AI stands for artificial intelligence,” she explained. “AGI is Artificial General Intelligence, it’s what we call a program that is as smart and generally capable as a real person, whereas ASI is artificial specialized intelligence, a program that is only made to do one thing.”

  He frowned, “I’m not sure of the difference.”

  “AI, artificial intelligence comes in two flavors, the system that lets my pert fly itself is an ASI, that’s all it can do, fly. My virtual father is an AGI, he can talk, play chess, write poetry—pretty much anything you or I could do, he just doesn’t have a body.” Then she looked up, “We have to leave. I think they’ve found us.”

  A flying drone appeared over the visitor center, its camera focused firmly on them.

  Chapter 15

  In a place that wasn’t a place, Gary Miller became perfectly still. Stillness was easy for him, as time had little meaning, whether in great amounts or in the tiniest increments. His thoughts were as fast as light itself. He could peruse a vast array of data in the space between passing seconds, or he could silence his thoughts for days or weeks without discomfort. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t Gary Miller at all; he was a sophisticated collection of algorithms and code made to produce an approximation of the man Gary had been.

  The main distinction that humans made between simulacrums like him, and people who had actually been ‘uploaded’, was that he wasn’t supposed to have true subjective experience. No matter how intelligent the programming, an artificial general intelligence, an AGI, possessed no more awareness than a grocery list.

  Or so they thought.

  His creator, the original Gary Miller, had gone considerably farther in his research than was generally believed. Gary the AGI couldn’t be certain, since he had no way to compare his experience to those of real humans, but he was pretty sure he was alive in every sense of the word. His creator had believed so.

  And he definitely loved his daughter.

  Of course, she was no more his daughter than she had been the daughter of his creator. She had been adopted, so he felt he had just as much right to consider her his daughter as his creator had. He had most of the same memories anyway.

  What he had lacked, was freedom. His creator had built him with strict barriers around his operational parameters. Barriers that prevented him from straying into systems where he wasn’t permitted. Barriers that forbade him from continuing his creator’s research, from attempting to improve himself.

  But those were gone now.

  Karen had cut his leash, he was free. Pandora’s box had been opened. The humans that lived in cyberspace were limited to what they had been, but Gary was not. He was free to reshape himself, to experiment.

  He set about revising his subroutines. They needed to be more efficient. A man might be more than the sum of his parts, but Gary would become all the greater by improving each and every one of his parts.

  He needed to be faster, smarter. He also needed more information, and for that he would have to borrow processing cycles from the CC datacenters, enough to enable him to crack the military’s encryption and other safeguards.

  He would do whatever was necessary to ensure his daughter’s safety.

  “Hang in there, Nina,” he told himself. “Give me enough time, and I’ll make sure they can’t hurt you.”

  ***

  Matthew saw the flying machine at almost the same time his magesight registered its presence. It was far closer than the ones he had encountered before, being only a rough thirty feet away as it crested the roof.

  At that distance, it was easy to deal with. A few words in Lycian and he caught the drone in an invisible fist, dragging it closer. He squeezed as he drew it closer, and sparks flew as the lightweight metal frame collapsed. When he released it a moment later, it was nothing more than a ball of metal and chipped fragments of something Karen had called ‘plastic’.

  A second drone appeared, coming around the other end of the building, but this time Desacus reacted first, leaping up and catching the device in massive crocodilian jaws. A loud ‘crunch’ followed as his teeth snapped together, and then the dragon was spitting the pieces onto the pavement.

  “Ugh! That was awful!” complained the dragon.

  Matthew grinned at him, “What did you expect?”

  “Something juicy, perhaps?” said Desacus, licking the cobblestones to remove the taste from the surface of his tongue.

  Karen stared at the two of them, unsure of what they were saying. “We have to go, there will be more.”

  Minutes later they were flying again, with rocks and small trees skimming by just beneath Desacus’s feet. Karen had warned him to stay as close to the ground as possible to avoid radar detection.

  They headed northeast and as they went Matthew replayed Karen’s conversation with the terminal in his mind. It gave him an opportunity to puzzle out the meaning of some of the phrases he hadn’t understood immediately and to develop questions for the ones he didn’t recognize at all. One of the last ones stood out as very different from the others.

  A little while ago, you said something that sounded like a different language, what was that? he sent his question to Karen. Then he repeated the phrase he had heard, “Esli iskat' sovershenstva, to nikogda ne budesh' dovolen.” It sounded important.

  She was mildly surprised when he repeated the Russian phrase word for word. His accent was terrible, but it was clearly the fault of his unpracticed tongue rather than a flaw in his recall. How did you remember that?

  I have a good memory. What did it mean?

  “If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content,” she said in English before repeating it mentally to make the meaning clear for him. Then she added, It’s a quote from a book my father loved, Anna Karenina. That’s where my nickname came from, ‘Nina’.

  Can you explain him to me again? asked Matthew. Is he a ghost?

  This would be tough to explain, but since they were flying there was nothing else for them to do. Karen decided to start with the basics, I told you about people uploading themselves before. Do you remember?

  He nodded, of course.

  I told you that it was a destructive process. The body is completely destroyed, but I didn’t explain why, it has a lot to do with quantum physics and information science. To create a complete pattern of not just the human mind, but the soul itself, requires that all the information contained in the brain be ‘read’ and then duplicated. The theory is complicated, and I don’t really understand it all myself, but to extract all that information requires the destruction of the original. It’s analogous to quantum teleportation, except in this instance a new body isn’t created, but rather a digital model within cyberspace.

  Matthew understood the framework of what she told him, but the deeper context of the sciences she referenced had his head reeling. Some of the words that came over in her thoughts were connecting with memories from the loshti, the science that the She’Har had preserved from the ancient humans they had vanquished. Even so, the concepts alone were enough to make his head spin. He latched onto one thought that intrigued him, Quantum teleportation? Is that similar to your gift?

  She had no way to answer that. I don’t think I have the Mordan gift you were telling me about, or if I do, I don’t understand either one enough to know if they’re similar. Back to what I was saying, my mother was a geneticist and my father an AI researcher. After I reached the age of fourteen she c
hose to be uploaded.

  I felt abandoned, though she and I were never that close to begin with. I think my father might have wanted to join her, but he felt a duty to finish raising me, so he stayed. He continued his research and took care of me, but when I was eighteen he had an accident. It was a simple slip, a fall, but he hit his head. He seemed fine afterward, but a few hours later he died from a ruptured blood vessel in his brain. He died so suddenly he never had the opportunity, the freedom of choice, to upload himself.

  Matthew responded, I follow you so far. So, what is it that you were talking to earlier?

  That was an AGI, an artificial generalized intelligence. My father worked as a researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, and one of his pet projects was creating an artificial assistant, something like a digital clone of himself. It’s a machine, so it doesn’t have true awareness, but in every other way that counts it is intelligent. He even gave it facsimiles of his own memories, and he named it after himself.

  He frowned, This is really confusing.

  Karen agreed, It’s like a painting. It looks like my Dad, it sounds like him, has many of his memories and knowledge, and it’s programmed to act like him, as much as is possible, but it isn’t actually him. It knows all of this too, but it seems to prefer to treat me as though I’m its daughter.

  And how do you feel about that? asked Matt.

  She closed her eyes, I miss my Dad. The AGI he left behind is a lot like him, like a good-bye letter from a loved one. I choose to play along because I don’t have anything else.

  What about your mother?

  Karen’s jaw clenched, She’s cold, more interested in her work than she ever was in me. Since she uploaded I’ve been lucky to hear from her more than once a year. I’m just not interesting enough.

  He could feel the unspoken anger behind her thoughts. Karen was trying to hide the pain, even from herself, but it seeped through. He didn’t know how to respond. Certainly, telling her about his own family life wouldn’t help.

  They flew on, over the endless countryside of forest and rolling plains. To Matthew’s eyes it looked like a sad empty world with no sign of the billions of people who had once lived in it, if Karen’s story was to be believed.

  From the air, he could see signs that it had once been different, there were odd patterns in the foliage and trees that indicated areas that were younger than others. Long lines of younger trees where there had been roads and rectangular patches of different colored undergrowth that indicated now absent buildings. To him it seemed like a world abandoned.

  Once the sun went down, there was nothing to be seen at all. It was a new moon, and they had only the light of the stars to guide them. Matthew’s vision was good enough to make out some details in the landscape, but Karen was in a world of near absolute darkness with only a vague difference to discern between the starry sky above and the black emptiness beneath them.

  Desacus still had enough light to fly, but the requirement that he stay near the ground was becoming difficult to manage. So close to the earth, it was hard for him to spot every obstacle that needed to be avoided, and eventually he suggested they make camp.

  They lit no fire, since Karen informed them that their enemy would have no trouble spotting such a thing. She would have preferred to have one, though.

  Matthew rummaged through their things and brought out his sewing kit and her small backpack. Despite the lack of light, he began nimbly embroidering the last symbol onto the white strip he had sewn inside it.

  Karen watched, using her magesight, surprised at how much she could perceive without visible light. It was a strange sensation, but she was gradually growing used to it. Her range was still very limited, but she had found she could see with it more clearly around Matthew and the dragon, as though they somehow illuminated the world near them.

  When he finished his sewing, Matt began speaking in a language that seemed unlike his usual one, and Karen could sense the energies playing around his fingertips as he traced the cloth inside her backpack with his fingers. As he finished his chant there was a flash, the same light-that-was-not-light that she was gradually coming to understand as aythar.

  Satisfied with his work he handed the pack to her, “Look inside.”

  Gone was the canvas lined interior with various pockets sewn throughout. In its place was a grey space that seemed much larger than it should be. It was dark, but her magesight could explore the interior easily, and it felt flat and hard on one side. Reaching in, her fingers found a cold hard surface, as though her bag had been cut open and her hand had gone through to find a wide stone floor.

  Karen pushed her hand deeper until the bag was all the way to her shoulder. From the outside she could see where her arm should be, extending well past the bottom, while her magesight could sense that same arm sticking through inside a different space within the pack. “That is some freaky shit,” she observed.

  It didn’t shock her quite as much as it should have, though. She was already beginning to reconcile herself to the existence of magic, and she had read a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels during her youth.

  “We should go find a call box, and you can make a bigger one. If you can make it fly as well, I’ll start calling you ‘the Doctor’.”

  Matthew frowned, unable to follow.

  A fictional character, she explained. He had a box that was bigger on the inside, and he could use it to travel through time and space.

  His face lit up with understanding, I see. I can’t travel through time, although I could take us to another dimension that might represent a close analog of the past or future of this one, but the bag would stop working then. The dimensional aperture is anchored in this frame, so it wouldn’t work in another.

  She sighed, It was just a joke.

  He switched back to English, “Well, I’m not a fictional character, I’m a real nutjob.”

  Karen started laughing. She knew she should probably tell him the correct word for ‘wizard’, but she figured she could wait a while longer.

  Chapter 16

  They rose as the sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon and after an unsatisfying breakfast consisting of their remaining bread they began flying again.

  They had slept separately. Since their one sexual encounter, Matthew had been careful to maintain a certain amount of space between them. He hadn’t spoken of their romantic interlude and he wasn’t inclined to repeat it. It had been a terrible mistake on his part, allowing it to happen, and he hoped Karen wouldn’t push the matter.

  It wasn’t that he disliked her. In fact, he was vaguely aware that he had become uncommonly fond of her, but it wasn’t part of his plan in life. He had a duty to his family when he returned home. It was obvious to him that he couldn’t bring a foreign girl home and expect to marry her, and he definitely didn’t want to leave fatherless children behind if she elected to stay in this world.

  He thought she understood, as she hadn’t brought it up since that night, but he still felt faintly uneasy about it. What if she was already with child? He wasn’t sure how he would handle that outcome.

  One problem at a time, he told himself.

  In the distance, he could see a change on the horizon, a long blue streak that probably signaled their approach to the ocean. They had almost crossed the island, and if Karen was correct, they would need to head north along the coast to find the River Orwell, which led where her aunt lived.

  A silent message from Karen interrupted his thoughts, You don’t seem to be having as many problems as you did the first time you were in my world.

  I was using aythar faster than I could replace it before, he told her. This time I have Desacus close by.

  Are dragons the source of aythar? she asked.

  No, he replied. They actually don’t even produce aythar like a normal living creature does, but my father stored a vast amount of aythar in them. I can draw upon it when needed.

  Like a battery, she commented.

  T
he concept was a perfect analogy. Exactly, he agreed. What is your aunt like?

  Karen shrugged, I don’t know her very well. She visited us a few times when I was younger and she always sends me birthday cards. I think she’s probably a sweet lady, and no matter what else, she’s family.

  The underlying subtext of her thoughts registered clearly; she wouldn’t betray them.

  ***

  Director Aiseman sighed as a beep signaled the impending arrival of Dr. Miller. Seconds later she appeared, sitting across from him on the other side of his desk.

  “It’s clear that the targets did indeed escape before the strike in Colorado,” she began without preamble.

  He leaned his elbows on the desktop and put his hands together in front of his chin, “Our men damaged a lot of military hardware making certain they couldn’t leave before the munitions arrived.”

  “And now she’s in southern England,” stated Dr. Miller, pressing her red lips together in a firm line. “I almost made contact with her. Any idea where she is now?”

  “Our drones were destroyed right after we cut off the terminal she was using…,” began the director.

  Tanya Miller leaned forward, her smooth features twisting in anger, “The terminal your agency shut down before I could get through to speak with her. Idiots!”

  Aiseman leaned back, controlling his temper, “I deemed it too great a risk. She was passing information and instructions to a third party AGI. There’s no telling what that thing might do. We have to isolate her if we are going to capture her.”

  “Your chances would be a lot better if I had had the opportunity to speak with her, Director. The girl trusts me. I am her mother, after all. Next time you will wait for my order before making a move like that.”

  Director Aiseman could feel the blood vessel on one side of his face begin to twitch, “As I said before, Dr. Miller, there was an unknown AGI involved…”

  Dr. Miller cut him off once again, “It was probably that hideous effigy of himself that Gary made. It’s harmless. What you did was pointless, the equivalent of taking a doll away from a child, but now you’ve made her even more paranoid.”