“Karter’s records from this time are unreliable. As I suggested, this is a section of his life marked by significant psychological instability. He is almost certainly working alone, though I believe by this time he had begun work on artificial intelligence control systems.”
Lex rolled up to a distinctive, and in places badly corroded, metallic walkway leading up to the door. He dismounted the quad and folded it back into its compact form, though not before tucking Ma under the other arm.
“So I might be dealing with one of your ancestors? I might have to deal with Grandma?”
He stepped up to a red line painted on to the walkway and looked warily at it. There didn’t seem to be anything threatening in the area, but with Karter any warning at all was reason to fear for his life, and a little red here or there was as close as he would come to letting someone know where to find the line between life and death. On either side of the walkway, the red line continued as spray paint on the soil. Most of it had been obscured or wiped away by the wind, but the red traced a semicircle centered on the door. There would be no entering the place without either crossing the line or making a new doorway.
“What are the chances something tries to kill me as soon as I cross this line?” Lex asked.
“Exceedingly high,” Ma said. “This, however, does not significantly differ from what has been happening en route to the line.”
“True enough.”
Lex fiddled with the settings for the mental cloak, cranking it right up to the maximum-safe-usage line, and strode over the line.
“Attention, interloper,” announced a voice that cut easily through the wind. “Please hold still and await clearance.”
The voice could only be described as bombastic, the sort of booming male voice one would normally associate with announcing the fabulous prizes a contestant had won on a game show. Despite the rampant enthusiasm in the words, it was instantly clear that this was not the voice of a person, but of a computer. There wasn’t anything overtly technological about it. Indeed, it sounded infinitely more human than the patchwork voice Ma relied upon. Nonetheless, the delivery, the choice of words, the evenness of tone, it all suggested something that had been programmed rather than read.
“Please transmit or display your credentials,” the voice requested.
Lex began to explain. “I don’t have credentials. I’m here on an emergency mission. I need to speak to—”
“Unauthorized interlopers identified. Please stand by for immediate extermination!” the voice requested cheerfully.
“Hey, whoa, wait a minute!” Lex said, wisely multitasking by throwing down the quad into deployed position and leaping into the seat.
He cranked the throttle and peeled off back along the walkway.
“Interlopers attempting to retreat, long-range ordnance authorized!”
Dust burst from either side of the walkway to reveal one of several rifles that had clearly been meant for handheld use but was now affixed to the end of an armature.
“Target acquired! Thank you for visiting Hermit Crab R&D Facility! Firing n-n-n-n-n-”
The deafening report of the rifles never came. Instead the first letter of the next word repeated in a short loop, the unmistakable audio evidence of a locked-up computer. Lex skidded to a standstill and looked cautiously back to the weapons. They were entirely stationary, each aimed precisely at where he had been at the moment it had locked up.
“What do you make of this, Ma?” Lex said slowly.
“It would appear an interrupt has risen to an unmaskable state and has interfered with the UI module,” Ma said. “That is a rather severe logical flaw, indicative of active and early development.”
“What should I do?”
“Avoid the current trajectory of the rifles and approach the door. It is unlikely the system will return to normal execution without intervention,” Ma said.
Anticipating the need to move quickly again, he remained on the quad and gave the guns a very wide berth, approaching the entryway from alongside the building. Once he was a few meters away from the door, he reluctantly stood and stalked toward it. Like the rest of the facility, it was as minimal as possible while still providing a livable environment. While it was probably the outer part of an airlock, the thing actually had a knob. He reached for it, but Ma stopped him.
“I would not do that, Lex,” Ma said. “The walkway was equipped with rifles. Touching the door could have considerable consequences.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Lex said. He stared at the intercom beside the door. “Screw it. We were already noticed. We may as well do the direct approach. It worked the first time I had to deal with Karter.”
He reached out, keeping the rest of his body as far from the doorway as possible, and pressed the button. The only immediate result was the shift of the still-repeating n-n-n from sound blaring through the whole PA system to just out of the intercom speaker. A few seconds later, Lex heard a hiss from behind the door. Shortly after that, the outer door opened.
Out from inside marched, presumably, Karter. It wasn’t immediately clear if such was the case, as he was obscured by an environmental suit that was a match for the overall low-budget nature of the rest of the facility. It was made from silvery plastic with ribs stiffening it in a few strategic places. The helmet was a dome of harder plastic with a silvery tint that hid the features of its wearer. The muffled voice cursing from within it was unmistakable, however.
“… worthless pile of government programming can’t even pull the goddamn trigger when someone comes knocking without their papers,” he muttered, continuing a tirade that probably started the moment Lex had triggered the security system. “False alarm locking up the whole damn system while…”
Karter was squeezing a wrench in one hand. The other hand was clenched into a fist. He marched out the doorway and right past Lex without a glance.
“Karter!” Lex said.
The inventor reflexively swung the wrench in Lex’s direction, but he was several steps too far away to make contact. He glanced roughly in Lex’s direction, then gazed about without seeming to notice him. He turned back and marched toward the guns.
“What the hell?” Lex whispered.
“You should deactivate your mental cloak, Lex,” Ma said at extreme low volume.
“Oh, right,” he said.
As Karter marched toward one of the rifles, Lex shut off the mental cloak. Having seen the reaction to the first attempt to get Karter’s attention, Lex adopted a wide stance before calling again. If the wrench were to come flying, he wanted to be ready to dodge.
“Karter!”
Karter’s head whipped toward him, then looked him up and down. It suddenly occurred to Lex what kind of sight the inventor was currently seeing. Here was a man in a strange spacesuit, his face swollen and bruised, his nose crooked and broken. Under his arm was a canine of some sort, wearing a spacesuit of its own as well as several layers of both cord and duct tape. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the man was standing in a place where, moments earlier, there had been no one. There was no telling what was going through Karter’s mind right now.
The inventor gestured toward him with the wrench, causing Lex to flinch.
“See?” he said. “What did I tell you? The damn thing locks up every time I tell it to pull a trigger.”
“Uh… I…”
“Don’t just stand there. Go collapse that other pop gun. The damn thing will hang on boot if these aren’t collapsed,” Karter said.
“… Okay…” Lex said, pacing toward the other gun.
Karter continued to rant as though he both expected Lex to be there and expected him to know what he was talking about.
“That’s what you get when you build on consumer software. Military drone stuff is only good for killing and piss poor for the personal assistant stuff, and the personal assistants can’t kill anyone because of those stupid safeguards. Maybe I want my digital assistant to murder someone. Why wouldn’t I want my digital assistant to murde
r someone? I want to murder people all the time!”
He applied the wrench to a release near the bottom of the arm and gave it a twist, causing it to collapse mostly into the hollow in the ground that had been concealing it, then tossed the wrench to Lex.
“I don’t know how they expect me to work on it with all these damn distractions, John,” Karter said, stomping a boot on the top of the rifle to drive it the rest of the way underground.
Lex fumbled the wrench, then placed Ma on the ground and put his boot on her tether while he collected the tool.
“Who’s John?” he whispered.
“Unknown,” Ma replied.
“Quit talking to your dog. Just fix the gun and get in here,” Karter said.
It took a bit of force, but he got the rifle collapsed by imitating what Karter had done, then quickly raced after the inventor as he hissed open the outer door again and stepped through.
“Who said you could bring your dog anyway?” Karter said over his shoulder while punching in a code for the inner door.
“I don’t… uh…” Lex said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Karter said. “That’s what you always say.”
“I’m not entirely certain he is speaking to you specifically, Lex,” Ma said.
“And shut your dog up,” Karter said as the door opened.
“… I’m confused,” Lex said.
“Karter may not be entirely cognizant of his surroundings right now,” Ma said. “Prior to an experimental neurochemistry adjustment, my medical records suggest he was intermittently deficient in his fantasy/reality differentiation.”
“Your dog sounds like my ‘therapist,’” Karter said, enclosing the final word in air quotes.
“So we can just talk about this stuff in front of him?”
“He’s only hearing what he wants to hear,” Ma said.
“The third time I’ve had to reboot this AI in the past week,” Karter muttered. “Worthless.”
Karter marched forward into the facility, which was if anything more bare bones than the outside. There were no interior walls. Fortified struts held the roof in place. Stations with desks, counters with equipment, and assorted carts were scattered throughout the warehouse-like interior. The only sections of the interior that were split off from the single massive room were a clearly labeled pair of bathrooms, a pair of “personal quarters,” and the vehicle bays at the far end. Even the food preparation area—little more than a clunky old-style food synthesizer and its supply bins—was exposed. Black cables stretched between each set of four columns, forming an X with a small robotic arm mounted at the point where the cables crossed.
As they walked, Lex noticed shiny, sheared-off metal sticking out of the ground between the struts. The metal had the same corrugated waviness as the exterior walls, and it dawned on him these strips were the remnants of interior walls.
“Did you remove the walls to turn this all into one big room?” Lex asked.
“That’s what John said,” Karter grumbled.
“Wait, I thought you thought I was John,” Lex said.
“Shut up, John.”
Lex hung back and whispered to his companion. “Listen, Ma. He’s clearly way too far gone for us. How the heck is this guy supposed to help us?”
“He is currently serving as the research lead on a multibillion credit military contract and will continue to do so for several more years. He is as keen an intellect as he has ever been, or will ever be. It is simply a matter of focus. Once something seizes his interest, he is unshakably dedicated to it to the point of obsession,” Ma said. “He has the skill and the equipment to solve our problem. You must merely entice him.”
While they were talking, Karter paced over to a bank of small boxes, each hooked up to a nest of wires. They were scattered on the ground, and the shiny scratches and dents on their surfaces suggested they’d been at least worked on and potentially beat on. He depressed a button, which caused the lights to flicker and the PA system to click.
“Um… So, Karter,” Lex said, “what have you been working on?”
“Classified. You know that,” Karter said.
He reached up and unlatched the helmet from his suit, pulling it free. Lex looked intently at him, expecting to get his first clear glimpse of the inventor before years of neglect had turned him into the patchwork collection of prosthetics and synthetics he’d come to recognize. That’s not what he got. The helmet revealed a face almost identical to the one Lex knew from his own present. Like his own Lex, this was a man, presently on the slightly portly side, whose face could have belonged to a particularly well cared for sixty-year-old or a very poorly cared for thirty-year-old. The only differences were his eyes, which were both a normal human color rather than sporting silver irises, and his face, which had none of the oddly wrinkle- and stubble-free sections that characterized his future face. He didn’t actually look any younger.
“How… did… has he always looked like that? Was he born looking like that?” Lex said.
“The circumstances of Karter’s appearance and apparent age are classified,” Ma said.
The inventor stripped away the environment suit, revealing his typical jumpsuit, and started walking toward one of the workstations. The station consisted of a cheap rolling office chair in the center of a clutter-strewn semicircle of worktables and desks. Every surface was piled with crumpled-up pages of yellow legal paper, and an array of holographic displays showed a blue rotating cube with assorted debug data spilled across it. Karter plopped down and began to sift through the scribbled notes.
“I suggest you move forward with the plan, Lex. His current lack of volatility may not last long,” Ma said.
“Right, right. Uh. Karter, whatever you’re working on, is it interesting?”
“Eh. Most people don’t let me toy with things on a panglobal scale like this. Don’t know if I’ve got the resources to get the job done, though.”
“Maybe you’d like to take a little break. Work on a puzzle?”
“A puzzle. What am I, a toddler?”
“This is a good one. It involves writing new firmware for killer robots,” Lex said.
Karter turned to him. “I don’t remember you being this chatty, John.”
“It seemed like you could use a good suggestion to sort of recharge the old batteries.”
“What’ve you got?”
“I’ve got a self-replicating robot that needs its firmware adjusted to…” Lex looked to Ma. “What exactly is it?”
“We need to modify the highly encrypted and compressed program and storage memory of a self-replicating robot. It must poll similar but less efficiently designed robots to determine their checksum, then reorganize its own program memory to match that checksum within a certain delay period in order to answer a subsequent poll.”
“… You got the robot?”
“As a matter of fact, we do, but you’ve got to be—” Lex began.
“Boot process complete. Artificial Intelligence Control System Designation POS-BSOD version 0.124 activated,” announced the enthusiastic voice of the system.
“BSOD, restore data context so I can get back to work,” Karter said, instantly turning his attention back to the system, as though Lex and Ma ceased to exist.
“Yes, Dr. Dee. Calculating…”
The screens clicked back to displaying a multilayer array of windows, but each was blacked out, displaying the text Unauthorized Personnel Present.
“What’s this crap?” Karter said.
“Pursuant with military regulations and the details of your contract, the information you have requested may not be displayed while unauthorized individuals are within the facility,” BSOD explained.
Karter glared at the screens. A second or two later he slowly rotated in his chair to face Lex and Ma.
“… You’re not John…” Karter said. “BSOD never even acknowledges John.”
In a lightning motion, he snatched a drafting compass from the table beside him and dove at
Lex, knocking him to the ground. Ma thumped to the ground and wriggled in her bounds. With skilled fingers, Karter popped Lex’s helmet latches and pulled the protective headgear away, pressing the needle-sharp point of the tool to Lex’s neck.
“What did you do with John?” Karter demanded.
“I don’t know who John is!” Lex said, struggling against the heavier, stronger man.
Ma, still secured but no longer within Lex’s grasp, activated her pack in an attempt to escape. The weak jets sent her sliding along the floor, flopping over the remnants of old walls and upsetting piles of equipment and papers.
“BSOD, get the dog and lock it up,” Karter said. “And you, start talking before I give you a tracheotomy.”
Motors whined, tugging at the ceiling-mounted cables and shifting the gantry arms to chase after Ma as she zipped along the floor. She gave the arms a runaround, but it didn’t take more than a minute for her to be snagged by one of the pincers. It raised her from the floor.
“What shall I do with the creature, Dr. Dee?” BSOD asked.
“I don’t know. Lock it in John’s room. Then help me tie this guy up. I’ve got questions…”
#
The wire-guided arms tossed Ma from gripper to gripper. One of them reeled down to open a “personal quarters” door with “John’s Room” scrawled on it in black marker. Ma was handed off to the overhead gripper mounted in this room, then held in place while one of the other grippers closed and locked the door.
Like so much else in this facility, John’s Room was rather spartan. A closet-sized shower stood in one corner. Beside it was a combination toilet/sink. The only other furniture in the room was a flimsy cot, a folding table, and a folding chair. The arm placed Ma on the cot. Rather than immediately activating her underpowered pack again and flitting about the room pointlessly, she surveyed her surroundings and her current condition. Her time running on an organic platform had taught her quite a few valuable lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a brain. One of the chief strengths was the massively parallel nature of processing. Many simultaneous threads could be executed without loss of precision or slowing of the system. This meant that while she began simulating different potential methods to escape her bonds and continue with the standing order from Karter, she was also able to think more deeply about the present situation. Considering the moral and psychological ramifications of obeying Karter proved distressing. No outcome, when run through her emotional table, produced anything less than indicators that she should be feeling profound guilt and sadness. On the other hand, she was designed to relish the opportunity to solve problems, and as such she was greatly enjoying the challenge of overcoming the present hurdle.
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