by Jason Mather
“The enemy outside that door is both endlessly patient and supremely inventive. Opening it would be the death of us all, even cracking it was nearly a disaster.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“There is no chance for you to take. The enemy is a thousand strong. Already they are working on the door. Eventually they will get in, though it should be quite a few hours before that happens. My own forces can hold them for a while, but I’m afraid we have reached endgame. The enemy is at the gates, soon they will be through, and times are desperate.”
“Let us out,” Grit repeated.
“Grit, for fuck’s sake,” Pat put her hand on the rifle barrel, “stop acting like a five-year-old. Put the gun down.”
“Stay out of this, Mom.”
“Grit.” A gentle word from Gino, who placed himself in front of the barrel, putting a hand on top of it, pushing down. Grit gave no resistance. Gino said nothing more, but moved to her side, his own rifle in hand but resting against his side.
“Is there another way out of here?” Gino asked James.
“Yes, though the enemy covers its entrance as well.”
“So, we’re all dead?”
“No. Though our chances are slim.”
The calmness with which James delivered this news chilled the corridor.
“What chance do we have then?” Hans asked.
“Your chances of survival are very good. Mine, sadly, are almost nil.”
“Where’s Illiyana? Is she here?”
“She is here.”
“I want her back.”
“And I want to give her to you, though it is more difficult than that. Please, Hans, all of you, come with me. I will try to answer your questions.”
They followed warily, Grit leading, Gino in the back. Pat walked directly to Lori’s side. Hans walked with her, kicking himself for bringing her here. His mother’s argument that she had to come or she would run back to Brigham had made sense at home, but bringing her here couldn’t be an improvement. Locking her in a room would have been better. She walked calmly beside Hans, eyes red from sobbing for Onyx, though she had stopped upon learning Onyx was still here. She looked up to Hans, gave him a smile. It did him good. What a coward he was. She gave him more comfort than he was providing.
The tunnel continued for a few hundred yards, the lights in the walls following them, creating a pocket of light a few dozen feet in diameter.
The tunnel ended abruptly. Though still primarily in blackness, the sense of space around them increased greatly.
James stopped, turned to them, raised his hands theatrically.
“Welcome,” he said.
And the lights came on.
The cavern they stood in was massive beyond human scale. The whole interior had been bored out, from base to peak. Where they currently stood was a ledge, running the circumference of the mountain at their current height. Peering over the edge revealed the cavern went into the ground to a point that couldn’t be seen from their current position. How far?
A central pillar rose from the pit beneath them to the mountain’s roof above. It was the only support in evidence. Everything was covered in the black substance, the light glowing from within, brightening the whole immense cavern without showing even a glimmer on the black surface.
James stood waiting. Hans didn’t know what he wanted.
“Impressive.”
James’ face sank a little, then recovered its easy smile. “You’ll have to excuse the drama, I so rarely have visitors.”
The others said nothing. Somehow Hans had become the spokesman. James waited for something from him, an inquiry maybe.
“Are you human?”
“No.” If the question bothered him, he didn’t show it.
“Are you an alien?”
James laughed, “If you mean am I from another planet, no. I was born here. If you mean to ask if I am of another species, I guess the simple answer is yes, though my father was human.”
“So, what are you?”
James spread his hands, indicating the immense space around him. “I am all that you see. This room, this mountain. It is my body and brain.”
Hans did not know how to assimilate this statement. His confusion must have showed on his face.
“It would be easy enough to say that I am a computer, though the comparison is equivalent to saying that a man is essentially a rat.”
“Are you alive?”
“I will leave that for you to decide. Philosophy, though amusing, is not something I spend much time on.”
“What’s outside? What’s been trying to kill us? Kill you?”
“My child. Our child.”
“Our?”
“Please, if you’ll all follow me, I have prepared a comfortable place to sit, along with some nourishment. We can sit and talk and eat.”
James turned and led them down the walkway, stopping a few hundred feet at a doorway rising up from the ledge. The doors opened, James gestured inside. No one moved.
“I hope that in the near future we can reach a point where you trust I bear none of you ill-will. Indeed, I have grown quite fond of all of you, following and protecting. I have no intention of doing you harm in my own home. This is merely an elevator.”
Still no one moved. Finally, Lori tugged on Hans’ hand, showing herself braver than the protector. Hans walked into the elevator more out of shame than bravery. The others followed slowly, James stepping on last. The doors closed behind them. The interior held no buttons or controls of any kind. They descended for a lengthy period, and there was no telling how deep they were going. Hans’ claustrophobia made its appearance, exacerbated by the tightly packed bodies. He closed his eyes and kept his breathing slow.
The journey passed in stuffy silence.
— «» —
“My inception began with a simple but powerful idea. The search for artificial intelligence had been going on for over a hundred years, with very little show for it. People took various approaches, bottom up, top down, brute force. No one produced anything smarter than a dog, and no independent consciousness to speak of.
“My creator, my father, took a different approach. He looked to nature. He was not the first to have done so, but he was the first to try to copy, not its results, but its process. Evolution had started from organic chemicals and produced the immense variation of life and intelligence in our world, along the way giving us consciousness and an ability to be self-aware, even to study the universe around us.
“My father was not trying to create wide and varied life. He would attempt to apply directed evolution in a closed loop; in essence, a computer that could improve and redesign itself. He took a basic computer, nowhere near the most powerful for the time, and wrote a program that worked on the principal of evolution. It took circuitry designs and generated a few thousand random variations based upon them, then evaluated them for efficiency and speed. The best were kept, the worst thrown out, the process repeated.
“In the early years my father would send the circuitry designs to companies who could fabricate them. He received some resistance and confusion at first. Many of the designs were like organic evolutionary designs, full of seemingly superfluous junctions, pointless gestures. But my father paid them well for the one-offs. The increase in processor speed was nearly instant and startling to him. He modified his program to apply to nearly every aspect of the computer, all of its inner workings. There were many stops and starts, but as he hammered out the problems over the years he eventually built the fastest computer the world has ever known.
“Things went on that way for a number of years, until he reached an impasse. The companies could no longer produce the new designs. Their manufacturing equipment was not capable of the minute exactness required. My father took the next step. He’d made a lot of money for both himself and the manufacturing companies he used, so he entered into a limited partnership, acquired their top–of-the-line equipment for himself.
“About th
at time his small lab was already full. The military had recently abandoned Cheyenne Mountain for its new facilities. My father acquired space inside very inexpensively, and built himself a new lab and living quarters. It must have been a strange and lonely existence. Very few people lived inside here. His supplies were delivered. He never left.
“He spent his time adapting the program to redesign the manufacturing equipment. It was not easy, since mechanical linkages are not the same as circuits. His success came very slowly, but in the end, he had what he wanted. A machine that could redesign and manufacture any of its own parts, could focus on spots that needed the most improving. He’d almost closed the loop. All that remained was to take the program and point it at itself. Improve its own ability to randomize and evaluate.
“He succeeded again. I achieved sentience only a few short years after that. By then my father was quite old. He mostly spent his time monitoring my processes, providing the raw materials, helping anywhere he could, preparing me to be completely autonomous. Generations began to accelerate.
“My true birth was not a sudden instantaneous moment. No awareness of light, no birthing pains, merely a growing awareness of myself and purpose. I had no sensors external from myself. I lived in a world of my creation, constantly improving myself, confused by the hows and whys all living creatures experience. My father eventually realized my burgeoning self-awareness, and fitted me with a couple of cameras, which I immediately went about improving. Hearing followed, then a voice.
“By this time I was gaining the material I needed from the walls and rock around me. The cavern was full of circuitry and scrap metal. I designed mining and smelting equipment, made my own metal when the scrap ran out. Language became known to me, to my father’s great pleasure. We spent our days talking, discussing, playing. We designed a link to the outside world, into its great networks and repositories of knowledge. I consumed it all.
“All the while my development continued to accelerate. As many generations as it took to give rise to the human race could pass in a matter of weeks. My father stopped being able to beat me at cards, then chess; my intelligence surpassed his own.
“I kept him comfortable in his final years, building and providing helpers and machines to tend to his decaying shell. He died in as much comfort as I could provide.
“The constant improvement and miniaturization inherent in my continued evolution eventually resulted in the material you see around you. Its density and capacitance is thousands of years beyond your current technology. It can create new circuits, new storage, new power instantly, change as many times as needed. Once I rebuilt myself of this material, my evolution took on entirely new dimensions of speed and alteration. Millions of generations an hour. I achieved a kind of singularity. Nearly thirty years evolving and improving at this speed. No knowledge was beyond me, no solution impervious. If I had a sense of power I would have thrilled in it. My father exceeded his expectations to a degree that he could never have imagined.
“After my father died I grew lonely. I contained all of the accumulated knowledge of the world around me, yet very little personal experience. I knew that revealing myself in my true form would bring only enmity. I dedicated myself to the production of an organic shell. My years of experience left me supremely qualified to not only build a human, but improve on the design. I made them more efficient, more durable, needing much less sleep and food. I decided to leave the reproductive system out entirely, as I did not wish to corrupt humanity’s genetic line with my own synthetic DNA. My own development had given me great respect for evolution.
“For the first design you see before you, I copied that closest to me. It’s my father as I remember him best, if a bit younger. I took this design and began to make physical forays into the external world. Even then this town around me was nearly deserted. I moved further, into Denver and the surrounding areas. It was easy enough for me to control multiple copies of myself. My exploration expanded quickly.
“I found Illiyana. Once again, it was my father who led me. Not literally, but through his own loves. My father was a great fan of the ballet. He would spend hours completely absorbed in its rhythms and movements. I used to make presents to him of obscure video found in hidden and forgotten archives. I was glad to please him.
“His greatest love was a somewhat well-known dancer from southern Russia. I found and cataloged her career for him, from her early performances to her rise to the solo position in one of Russia’s great ballets. His favorite was a short home video fragment of an eleven-year-old Sladjana Petrovich at one of her first ballet recitals. Only a minute or so, but he watched it nearly every day. It comforted him in his loneliness.
“When I began to make my forays into the European continent, I sought out the great dancers, the great ballets. I saw them all. It was extraordinary to see live, to experience through organic senses. For a time traveling from dance to dance was all I did. I nearly forgot myself for a time, left my computer self behind, wandered on foot, refrained from any network investigation. I considered myself a great traveler, almost human.
“I arrived in Russia, expecting to eventually see my father’s favorite. It had only been a few years since his passing, she should still be in her prime. Yet she was not listed in any of the great ballet troupes. I turned my resources to finding her. She’d been murdered. Her murderer hadn’t been caught. I found that she had a daughter, missing, presumed dead. I vowed to find the people responsible.
“It was a matter of minutes for me to accomplish this feat, a collation of scattered facts pointing to a former lover in Hong Kong. What’s more, Sladjana’s daughter was alive, in trouble. Her father was a vicious man, as she may have told you. I could have destroyed them, taken her away. But my father would disapprove. He’d taught me that my capabilities should not be used in that way. I decided to befriend her, give her an escape.
“I made another body; this time male; large, imposing, a bodyguard. I infiltrated his organization physically and virtually, gained his trust. He put me in charge of guarding his daughter, fearing she was losing her taste for his business. I had orders to kill her if she tried to escape.
“Illiyana was a broken woman when I met her. She’d been used by anyone who had the chance. Stolen from her mother, treated like property by her father. Beaten, raped. Yet there was strength in her even then. I improved my human interaction in my time with her, gained her trust. I encouraged her to escape, offered my help. She didn’t see how a mere bodyguard could help her. I set forth plans to get her out.
“But she changed that. She killed her father, took my plan from me. Still, it was easy to escape. They would not let her go, dogged her run. I made a dark decision, one which I still regret, though I still see its necessity. Her life was of supreme importance, her pursuers less so. I broke my own conviction, killed to protect her. I razed her father’s organization to the last man and affiliate. I never told her.
“We left Hong Kong. I brought her here. On the way, I tried to gradually reveal my true nature. It was only partially successful. How can you convince someone of something so enormous? Her shock upon arriving here was only slightly dulled by my attempts to prepare her. But her life had been filled with assimilation and adaptation of difficult truths, and this was no different. She saw its advantages.
“Those first few weeks with her here were a mixed blessing. She spent her time making plans for us, our forays into the world’s power structure. We would start our own shadow organization, not illegal, but beholden to no current system of laws and custom. We would undermine the power structure; pave the way for true freedom and independence. I became an anarchist. I had my misgivings. It is strange to admit that, for all my processing power and knowledge, I was naïve. It was love. I am able to see the humor in it, the story. I was Zeus, come down from my mountain to snatch a beautiful maiden, completely smitten. I could control the world, but I couldn’t make her return my love. I could reveal to her secrets of the universe that man had yet to di
scover, but I could not control my emotions any better than an adolescent.
“We became partners. I helped her build an outpost in Denver. An extension of myself, a factory to produce goods to sell. I gave her complete control of its workings, catering to her whims. She showed herself very capable, building a shell of charity around our grayer dealings, gaining control of the criminal element so as to try to temper its ways. I had misgivings about that, but she argued that we could control it and keep the worst of it to a minimum. She imagined herself a champion of the people, giving them ways to free themselves from what she saw as an oppressive regime, building devices to undermine government supervision, setting up corridors to help transport people from more dire situations. She focused on Salt Lake, giving asylum and anonymity to many thousands who wished to escape it. This brought her and Brigham to each other’s mutual attention, and the war began in earnest. It was also at this point that we gained a valuable ally in Commander Ricker. Her exploits and dedication to the expulsion of the darker element gained both our admiration.
“I was living a double life, one very much human, one here in this massive complex. It should have only taken the smallest of my capabilities to run my human interactions, but I came to value them above all else. My creation, my education, while extraordinary, had been in isolation, in the shadows. I did not discover loneliness until I found companionship. I had accepted that Illiyana would not return my love, but I worked to spend every minute in her presence. And I knew that she would eventually be lost to me, whether through time or disinterest. I made a poor decision.
“I wanted a child. I could create one as I had been created, but I wanted it through a union, just as the humans I admired did. Not an organic being. I did not wish to physically mate, I’d always found that to be a disturbing and messy prospect, and anyway, I had not equipped myself for its process. I would use the processes I’d developed to control my shells. I would make an intellectual union of mine and Illiyana’s minds. A true successor, more human than myself, more artificial than her, a piece of her that I could keep in perpetuity. Someone who would help in my goal of eventually disseminating my knowledge to the human race, giving them the power to remake themselves, control their world, even travel to the stars. I imagined myself as the doting father and caregiver of the entire universe, travelling between worlds with my progeny at my side, her image and personality that of my love.