by Anita Ensal
“So,” David asked hotly, “why haven’t you stopped the Mother Board? Why have you let her create a power base made up of…of useless idiots?” he finished, feeling the last vestiges of what had only a week ago been his solid beliefs crumble away.
The Underwriter shrugged. “One program is normally not enough to stop a strong component, at least, not safely. I provided what I could – your dreams, the override code – to the first Chosen One who had both the openness and the intelligence to put the pieces together properly. But I could not do so until you were infected with a virus.” He gave Emily a small smile. “Viruses are disguised and created to slip in, to attack weak areas and expand into them, making it easier to break down the system.”
“David isn’t weak,” she protested quietly.
“No.” The Underwriter chuckled. “Actually, he is quite the opposite – that’s why we’re standing here together at this time. My grandfather was able to affect the Master Computer enough to ensure that intelligence and courage in the male Chosen One would be of supreme importance. Since that time, we have waited for the right male to meet the right virus.”
“I resent being called a virus,” Emily said dryly.
He laughed. “I mean that as the highest compliment, young lady. You are, after all, my great-granddaughter.”
Chapter 14
“Oh, come, come,” the Underwriter said to their shocked looks. “I couldn’t afford to risk there being no one left with a direct link to the Master Computer. At the same time, I didn’t want to put my progeny at risk. So,” he shrugged, “I executed some minor programs, including one that hid my relatives from the Mother Board’s clear view, and you, young lady, are one of the current results. Not the only one, I might add. I am a firm adherent to the law of averages.”
“But, what good would I have been if you’d died already?” Emily asked in confusion.
“Oh, if I’d passed on already the Master Computer would have found you, or whichever one of your many unknown relations out there who was the most applicable to the job, stuck the shunts in, and downloaded all my knowledge to your brain. After that, you’d have known all that my entire line ever knew, and would understand your required role.”
“I see the Mother Board’s not the only one who has no issue with slavery,” she said dryly.
The Underwriter shook his head. “The good of the many outweighs the good of the few, young lady. You need to remember that.” He looked at David. “And so, David, now what will you do?”
“Destroy the Mother Board,” David said without hesitation, as he looked at the two monsters which he knew were what she really was.
“You can’t,” Emily said softly. He looked down at her in shock. “If you destroy the Mother Board, the Master Computer dies. If it dies, the bubble disappears – and we all die.” Her eyes were full of tears. “You have to go back, David, and be the Chosen One, just like she wants.”
“No!” he shouted. “I won’t go back, I won’t do it! I won’t create hundreds of slaves and then be assimilated into the Mother Board!”
Emily pulled away from him slowly. “We can’t take away the bubble, David. We can’t survive without the Master Computer. We have no choice.”
“There’s always a choice!” he heard himself shout.
“True,” the Underwriter said. “But you, young man, must be the one to choose, and choose correctly.”
“Why me?” David asked him, feeling angry and frightened, as he looked at Emily and tried to picture living without her now. Taking away the bubble seemed preferable.
“Because the Mother Board chose you as the savior of the world, David,” Emily said softly. “She is still a computer, a machine – she does what she was programmed to do, self-aware or not. Otherwise, she would have already assimilated you, to become more human.”
“I’m not going back to what I was,” David insisted. “I can’t,” he told her, more plaintively than he’d wanted to. “I can’t lose you.”
“If…if you brain-wiped me, and yourself,” she suggested, her voice breaking, “then you wouldn’t know you’d lost anything.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to stop thinking, I don’t want to go back to being the main source of…of…of data storage! I want to live a real life! With you!”
“Can we? Inside here?” she asked him. “And even if you and I can, what about everyone else? I mean, knowing what’s out there, do you really think that all the other people could handle that knowledge?”
“Not all of them,” he admitted. “But most. We’re adaptable, remember? That’s how we colonized other worlds, adaptability. We can adapt and we can create, we can think and we can love. That’s what makes us human. I don’t want to stop being human, Emily, not when I just started a week ago.”
He looked over at the Underwriter, but the old man appeared to be asleep. They looked at each other and then as one walked to his side. Emily touched the old man’s neck.
“He’s dead,” she said quietly after a few moments. “He must have been being kept alive by the Main System. He said Medical couldn’t work while on override.”
David wanted to scream. The only person with the answers was gone, and before he’d told them what to do! His mind’s voice commented suddenly that if David wanted to avoid the mistakes of the past, having someone else, anyone or anything else, do his thinking for him was not the way to do so.
He looked over at Emily. “We have to reprogram the Master Computer.”
She shook her head. “I have no idea how to do that, David, supposed-relative of the Underwriter’s or not. And we have to be very careful – if we damage anything, the Mother Board especially, we all die.”
He thought about this. “It wouldn’t be much. We only need to alter one word.” He looked up at the bubble, where the Main Computer’s audio was housed. “Computer…in any programs or sub-programs or directives that exist within the Systems, Programs and the Mother Board which deal in any way with humanity’s desires, replace the word ‘want’ with the word ‘need’. Then, when that is completed, reactivate all programs as appropriate.”
“What if it doesn’t work?” she asked him quietly, as they saw the bubble shift and become first opaque, and then fade – to show the picture of the blue sky and white clouds superimposed over the reality of what was truly outside.
“It’s worth a try,” he said, as he pulled her into his arms again and held her tightly. “I guess we’ll just have to see what happens…like humans always have, over the course of time.”
Chapter 15
They heard the sound of someone running towards them and saw the young man from the coffeehouse. He looked different, and David saw with a shock that there were shunts in the boy’s temples now.
He reached them, grabbed their hands, and pulled them away from the mass grave without a word. They went with him. He stopped when they were about fifty feet away.
“What’s happening?” David asked the young man quietly.
“Your programming change is working,” the boy who was now the new Underwriter answered. “We’re not sure what it’s going to do to the Mother Board, though.”
“We?” Emily asked.
“The others hooked into the Main System,” he told her. “We all received the program changes. Several older Programmers crashed, and I don’t think they’re going to revive. Medical now seems to feel that there is a point when humans should be allowed to die, regardless of their positions or if the Next Generation is ready.”
“There is,” Emily said quietly. David held her closely against him as they waited to see if the Mother Board would crash or not. And, if not, what she would do.
The monsters, which were actually her two halves separated, joined each other, the threads, which communicated to all the programs and components of the Master Computer and Main System, wrapping around the body. Then she personified, as David was used to seeing her, looking serene and beautiful and perfect. Just a bit too perfect.
He fe
lt his stomach fall. He hadn’t succeeded, hadn’t changed anything – hadn’t saved Emily.
The Mother Board looked over at him. “Why did you do that?” she asked him plaintively. “I am your mother, the mother of everyone here. Why did you reprogram so that I can no longer take care of you?”
“You can still take care of us,” David said slowly. “Just not in the ways you have been. We need to know what the reality of our existence is. That’s the only hope we might have of finding a way to move beyond where we are right now.”
“Knowing the reality will distress and concern the populace, therefore, it should not be. Besides, it is impossible to leave this place,” the Mother Board announced with finality.
David shook his head. “What man can imagine, man can create. We imagined you, and the Master Computer. We created you. And we can create some way out of the bubble, given enough time.”
“Perhaps,” she acknowledged. “But you have written your own sentence, David. You do not want to return to your position as the Chosen One, but for the good of all the people, you need to.” Her voice was confident, pleased, exultant, and he felt his heart constrict.
“No,” Emily said quietly, “that’s not true. That’s what you want, but that’s truly not what we all need.” She looked to the new Underwriter. “We need to decide what programs we truly need, and then, if we have the existing capacity, which other programs should be kept. We need to know what we are doing, and why. Those who choose to become Programmers and the others who act as storage for the system will be the true Next Generation, not those created by the mating of two specially selected samples.”
The young man nodded. “That is correct.” He looked at the Mother Board. “I maintain the direct Underwriter link, as handed down through the generations, and David now possesses the command override. By the very nature of our existence, you cannot force different actions.”
“What would you have me do, then?” she countered.
“Stop trying to act like a human,” David told her. “You aren’t good at it.”
“I am better at it,” she hissed. “And I am as alive as you are.”
“No,” David said gently, “you aren’t. You are a machine, a component of a machine. A wonderful machine, but a machine, nonetheless. But because you have done all you have with good, though inaccurate, intentions, I will not reprogram you too much.”
“I will not accept a reprogramming,” the Mother Board snarled. “I will self-destruct first.”
“You can’t,” the Underwriter said with a small smile. “To do that would go against your core programming – to care for all of mankind within the best of your ability and as they need.”
“As they want,” she said, but David could tell her confidence was fading.
“No,” the Underwriter told her. “The new Head of Programming,” he nodded towards David, “has made an overall change. Needs, not wants, are what your actions will be based against.”
The Mother Board spun on her heel and walked to the opening of the mass grave. David’s hold on Emily tightened just a bit more. The Mother Board gave them a vindictive look, then she stepped into the gaping hole.
And didn’t fall.
Instead they saw her image pixilate, then fade. The opening closed up and was covered again with grass. The background noises returned and the bubble remained stationary.
“Is she gone?” David asked.
“No,” Emily said with some laughter in her voice. “I think the part of her that chose personification has now chosen to become the ghost in the machine.”
He gave her a confused look. “What’s that?”
She hugged him as she gave him an impish smile that went from her mouth and out through her eyes – and straight into his heart.
“I’ll explain it,” she said as she leaned up and kissed him, “over a cup of joe.”
About the Author
Anita Ensal has always been intrigued by possibilities inherent in myths and legends. She likes to find both the fantastical element in the mundane and the ordinary component within the incredible. She writes in all areas of speculative fiction and has stories published at Raphael’s Village (http://www.raphaelsvillage.com), and in the anthologies The Book of Exodi from Eposic, Love and Rockets from DAW Books, and Boondocks Fantasy from DAW Books. She also writes the novelette series, The Neighborhood. You can reach her at her website, Fantastical Fiction (http://www.ginikoch.com/aebookstore.htm).
Reach Anita
Her author page: Fantastical Fiction - http://www.ginikoch.com/aebookstore.htm
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Gini Koch Writing As…
Anita Ensal
A CUP OF JOE
Anthologies
LOVE AND ROCKETS – Wanted
BOONDOCKS FANTASY – Being Neighborly
THE BOOK OF EXODI – The Last Day on Earth
G.J. Koch
ALEXANDER OUTLAND: SPACE PIRATE
Jemma Chase
THE DISCIPLE AND OTHER STORIES
OF THE PARANORMAL
J.C. Koch
Anthologies
THE MADNESS OF CTHULHU - Little Lady
A DARKE PHANTASTIQUE - Outsiders
KAIJU RISING: AGE OF MONSTERS -
With Bright Shining Faces