by C. A. Gray
“No it isn’t!” I insisted.
“Yes it is. You’re good at everything you do. You act like everybody can be like that if they want to be, but that’s not true.”
“Well, it’s not true if you think it’s not!” I retorted, slightly annoyed now. I knew I wasn’t special; I just worked my butt off at whatever I did and refused to give up. Andy’s whole ‘I can’t help myself, and anybody who can help themselves is a different species from me’ mentality really irked me.
Andy shook his head at me with a smirk. “‘Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right?’” he quoted. It was an old quote from the Second Age, and it had been the quote on my A.E. profile under my picture for a few years.
“Yes,” I retorted, but with a smile to soften it as I stood to my feet. There was no point in arguing with Andy: he would do what he would do. If he wanted to be bored and miserable here, so be it.
Andy stood up too. “I’ll go back with you,” he volunteered, and I nodded my assent, waving goodnight to the others. Of necessity, my eyes fell on Val and Liam then: they sat so close their knees were touching, and he looked up briefly to wave goodnight to us before attending to her again. No special acknowledgement of me—no lingering look, nothing to indicate what had happened between us during that song. I felt something in me deflate.
It was just a stupid song, I reminded myself. He didn’t write the lyrics. He didn’t even pick the song. Get over yourself.
I set my jaw at this sobering thought, determined not to think about it anymore as I followed Andy back to the golf carts.
Madeline got an earful that night.
Chapter 18
I woke up before dawn and couldn’t fall back asleep. Too many thoughts, I guess. I thought about turning Madeline on to continue our conversation from the night before—not as if she needed the sleep. But between chatting with Madeline and getting coffee… coffee won. Fortunately Liam had gotten good coffee beans on his supply run—he knew me so well—so I made myself a cup with the french press and wandered upstairs to watch the sun rise under the domed ceiling of the study.
I found Mom there already. She looked up at me and smiled, clutching her own steaming mug.
“You found my haunt,” she said.
I smiled back, sitting on the couch beside her. “It’s a good one.”
We sat together in companionable silence for a long moment. The sky above was that particular shade of intense blue that promises the dawn shortly to come.
“How are you handling all this?” I asked at last. She gave me a wan smile as a reply, and I said, “That well, huh?”
She laughed softly. “I’m keeping it together. I knew this day would come eventually.”
“What’s our plan?” I asked. “I mean, besides my experiments, and I’m not really sure what we’ll do with the information once we have it. We do have a plan, though, right?”
She winced. “Sort of?”
“Okay…” I prodded.
“Well, the ultimate goal is to take down the Silver Six before they can direct the creation of true exponential superintelligence, and especially before they can disseminate it.”
“Right…”
“Mack, Ana, Giovanni, and I have been brainstorming ways we might achieve this. We have a few ideas, and it’s best to try all of them because we don’t know which one will work. ‘Cast your bread upon the waters,’ right?” she quoted from the Book of Ecclesiastes. It was a quote she’d said to me a lot growing up, reminding me to diversify my efforts towards a particular goal.
“What have you got so far?” I sipped my coffee. The sky had lightened considerably, and I just saw the first streaks of pink in the clouds above.
Mom ticked off on her fingers. “Liam mentioned a long time ago that he should create downloadable software for bots of all generations to corrupt their ability to download anything else. That probably wouldn’t slow down a superintelligent bot determined to disseminate its updates for long. It would just be the equivalent of locking a door while someone is giving chase. It’ll slow them down a bit.”
I waffled my head from side to side. “Okay…”
“So if you’re done with him on your project downstairs, we’ll steal Liam, and Larissa too probably, to work on that. I know you’ll need Francis at least for the empathy tests today, right?”
I nodded. “What about Alex, though? She’s supposed to be a great programmer too.”
Mom’s brow furrowed. “I don’t trust Alex. Something’s not right about her, or her story. Until I can figure out what it is, I don’t want anyone discussing plans in front of her, and I told everyone who knows how to get onto the Commune to keep that information from her as well. At this point, the Renegade database is our most valuable resource. I don’t want her having access to it.”
“What is it you suspect her of?”
Mom bit her lip. “I don’t know. Call it intuition, I suppose.”
“I mean, it is our fault that she’s in this mess in the first place,” I pointed out. “Maybe she just doesn’t like us because of that.”
“True. But I did at least risk exposing myself by warning both she and Erik to flee. Erik didn’t listen. She did, apparently.” She stopped. “Yet I mentioned the comm I’d sent to her yesterday morning. Her response was… odd. As if she didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“Hmm,” I murmured. “How did the others react to the orders to keep her out of our business? Especially Francis.”
“Oh, he made some snide remark about how frumpy women always despise beautiful ones as a general rule,” she waggled her eyebrows at me.
“Frumpy!” I exclaimed, indignant.
Mom waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry. I give Francis’s opinion of me exactly as much concern as it merits.”
I laughed. “I see. So what is Alex supposed to do with herself all day, if the rest of us are working on projects she isn’t supposed to know anything about?”
“I don’t care what she does, as long as she acquires as little classified information as possible. She can cook. She can clean. If she earns my trust, then we can talk about utilizing some of her other skills.”
I smirked. “Somehow I can’t see Alex cooking and cleaning.”
Mom shrugged. “We don’t all get our wish lists. This is about survival.”
I suppressed a smile. Ever the practical one, my mom. Not that I blamed her.
She went on, “Anyway. Second idea: Giovanni thinks he knows how he might create a virus against the Silver Six.”
“A software virus? Or a biological one?”
“That’s kind of the question,” Mom admitted. “They’re bots, but with synthetic biology, too. Giovanni is directing Roy via the Commune to break into his own old encrypted files because he hasn’t done this in twenty years and doesn’t remember the ins and outs of how the bots work now.”
I nodded, brow furrowed. “Okay. And I guess how he’d disseminate the virus would depend on whether it was software or biological. But biological would require, like, a biochem lab I’d think, right? Which we don’t have.”
“We could find one, if it came to that,” Mom hedged. “It wouldn’t be easy. Or safe. And Giovanni would have to do it all on his own, because none of the rest of us know anything about biochemistry, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“Francis does,” I pointed out, remembering his lectures to me on ATP.
“Francis has textbook knowledge, if that,” Mom countered. “Which is useful for raw facts, but lab work would require tactile applications. Even his arguable genius wouldn’t be sufficient for that.”
“Arguable?” I smiled.
She shrugged, and smiled back. “Honestly, he is growing on me,” she admitted, and then added with a smirk, “A bit like a fungus.”
I laughed. “And my experiments?”
“We’re not sure what we’ll do with the data yet,” she ad
mitted, “for now we’re just collecting it. Once we see what we get—from Francis and Alex—then you, Ana, and Giovanni can brainstorm how we might be able to use it.”
“How exactly are we going to force Alex to participate?” I countered. “I mean, it’s not like there’s anything we can really threaten her with.”
“Sure there is. She’s a fugitive,” Mom said. “We rescued her. Without us, she’ll go straight back to prison, and she’ll probably be executed.”
“And tell them everything about us as soon as she gets there,” I pointed out. “She knows we’d never do that. It’s a stalemate.”
Mom sighed, acknowledging this. “What is she hiding, I wonder?”
“I mean, she has been experimented on a lot. I can see why she might have trust issues. It’s pretty invasive to have someone looking at your brain, especially what happens to it when you get triggered emotionally.”
“Maybe we need to get Francis to convince her, then,” Mom mused. “She seems to trust him well enough.”
“So far he’s been her bulldog protector though. Getting him on our side might take some doing.”
Mom nodded at this, and fell into thoughtful silence.
“Andy told me something that might be interesting,” I ventured. When she looked up at me with raised eyebrows, I said, “You might already be aware of this, but I guess his university was in the middle of some kind of Celebration of Equality before Spring Break. He said it was worldwide: special films and music, lectures, parades—all kinds of things celebrating how progress in technology has decreased inequality and how everyone will be truly equal in opportunity and economics as soon as the De Vries upgrades are available for bots everywhere…”
Mom made a guttural noise of disgust. “Of course. And I bet the entire world is eating it up with a golden spoon, too.”
“Andy certainly was, and it sounds like Val was, too. But it got me thinking…” I hesitated, because the idea was so nascent that I didn’t quite know how to put it into words. “Almost the entire reason why the Silver Six have been able to get away with what they have so far is because of this sort of methodical brainwashing via news media, film, art, and education. That’s how you change a culture: don’t argue with people directly. Slowly indoctrinate them with stories that will bypass their objective reasoning and strike an emotional chord instead. Right?”
“Right,” Mom agreed slowly.
“But everyone has equal access to the labyrinth to say whatever we want to say…”
“Until you get black-listed,” Mom pointed out, and I nodded, remembering what had happened to Liam and many of the other Renegades.
“Well, sure. But is there a way to create a moving media source… broadcasting somehow from a different place each time?” I’d gotten this idea from Francis’s rerouted LP address concept, making our location appear to be from somewhere different every time we accessed the Commune.
“And what would this broadcast be saying?”
I shrugged—I was making this up as I went. “I don’t know… nothing too scandalous at first. A film or a cartoon or good music that’s either neutral or has only a subtle message. If it’s good enough for its own sake, maybe it will go viral and build a following—or, if they try to shut us down immediately, the intrigue of the fact that our message is ‘forbidden’ might be all we need to make it go viral. We won’t have the several decades to indoctrinate people like the Silver Six have had, but even if we just somehow get them wondering if the machines are really as wonderful and harmless as they’ve been led to believe, then…” I stopped, and sat bold upright, snapping my fingers. “I’ve got it! Giovanni said he ‘turned’ because he heard the stories about the test subjects who had been arrested for unjust causes, and died in prison. Let’s film Giovanni’s story, and Alex’s, and ours! Then we can make a dramatized version of the stories to get people more emotionally involved, and at the end of the show we’ll play the actual interview. Once we have a following on our subversive channel, we can put out a call for our viewers to send in their stories too, on the Commune and just in the world at large—blacking out their faces of course, to protect the innocent…”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Mom held up both hands. “I have no idea how to even begin to create this sort of content, even if we could work out the broadcasting problem…”
“We’ll write it, I’m a writer! And an actress! Jake’s an artist, he could animate some of the stories to appeal to the kids, and any of us could do the voice-overs for them. And oh my gosh, we can turn the animated stories into musicals, nothing goes viral like a good cartoon with catchy music, and Jake’s music is terrific, I know he could do it! Kids will have their parents listening to it nonstop! If Jake has access to RecordingStudio software, the production value is totally professional! I can sing too for some of it, or do voice-overs, and Liam actually has an amazing voice too, believe it or not. Even Val and Nilesh aren’t too bad, and Julie can’t sing for crap, but I’m sure she’d be a good actress, she’s dramatic enough. Plus, if we can get that program GreenScreen, we can even do live action dramatization with the camera on Madeline, and just digitally create the setting. That’s all Abraham Chiefton does, except he digitizes the entire thing—”
“Stop,” Mom sighed, shaking her head. “Rebecca, you do understand that we’re in a war here, right? This isn’t about you getting to live your fantasies and become a big star.”
“I know that, that’s not what I’m trying to do!” I protested, hurt. “I’m serious, I think this has potential! Liam told me that when he went over to try to talk to people in the rural areas of the Americas where they’d been hit hardest by the bot takeovers, they wouldn’t listen to a word he said because they were either too brainwashed, or they felt they were so much in the minority that they couldn’t possibly do anything that mattered. I’m talking about changing people’s mindsets with art—changing the way they think! Barring a major shock to their worldview like you and I had, the only way to change how a person thinks is to change the input, right? Change what they’re exposed to, and eventually you’ll change the output of their thoughts, too. Would you stop looking at me like that?” Mom’s expression was barely tolerant, as if she were merely humoring me long enough to let me say my piece.
She held up her hands. “I’m not going to argue with you. If, after you’ve finished with your much more useful project—” I rolled my eyes at this, but she went on inexorably—“if you still wish to pursue this one and we don’t have another assignment for you yet, you may. Provided—” she emphasized the word before I could interject anything else—“you do not detract from the higher priority projects of others on our team. Jake doesn’t have much else to contribute, so I don’t see why he can’t spend his time on this.” I snorted, but she went on, “Val, Andy, and Julie, if they have any talent, can do the same, but before they start, we’ll need to find out from the IT team whether it’s possible to create a revolving digital broadcast ‘location,’ as you suggest. If not, it’s a moot point.”
“And they’ll help us download GreenScreen and RecordingStudio from the labyrinth?” I pressed.
Mom shook her head just slightly, eyes to the now-bright dome filled with early morning sunshine.
“Fine,” she conceded. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, and she gave me a dry smirk in return. “I hope you realize that would have been a flat ‘no,’ had anybody else suggested it.”
I beamed back at her. “Nepotism isn’t always a bad thing.”
Chapter 19
After Mom and I finished talking, I went downstairs to search for Alex. I wanted to at least attempt to get her to sit for my experiments… but I was also curious about her, now that Mom had sown the seeds of distrust in my mind. I wanted to see if I had the same impression.
It looked like almost everyone was up by then—Larissa and Nilesh played a card game. Nilesh was cheating and roaring with laughter about it while Larissa pouted. They both looked up
and waved at me. I heard pots and pans clattering in the kitchen, and could just barely make out Val’s breathy voice in the din. She was working on breakfast, then, and someone was in there with her. Probably Liam—but no. I stopped, listening more intently. That was Andy’s voice, and he was talking with more animation than usual. I caught “level eight” and “vaporizer” and “secret passageway,” and rolled my eyes. Of course: there was really only one subject that got Andy really excited, and that was The End Game, an immersive holographic role playing game that he and his former roommate Ivan used to spend all their free time playing when they weren’t out partying and making out with random girls. I felt briefly sorry for Val, who was surely only listening out of politeness.
I wandered through the kitchen and dining area, into the den. I nearly turned around, concluding that Alex must still be in bed when I remembered the sliding glass door at the end of the den leading to a little “sun” room powered by yet more sun lamps. As I approached from behind, I saw the long dark hair, like a thick shimmering curtain down her back. It was the first time I’d ever seen Alex without at least one admirer by her side. I slid the door open. Around her little patio table were several green potted plants and even a few flowers, which didn’t seem to know the difference between the sun and a sun lamp.
Without even looking back to see who I was, Alex said with utter calm, “Whatever you came to ask me for, the answer is no.”
“What if I came to say breakfast is ready?”
“But you didn’t.” She turned to look at me, those enormous blue eyes rimmed with thick lashes. I couldn’t even be jealous of someone that perfect—she was too far above me. Her perfect lips curled in a taunt. “You want something from me. What is it?”
“Why should I tell you, if the answer is an automatic no?”
“Good point. Goodbye.” She turned back around, even though I somehow knew from her self-aware posture that she didn’t actually expect me to leave.
I sighed, sitting in the chair beside her. “I want to take VMI images of your brain, under conditions of various emotional stimuli.”