by Nick Ryder
“You are here, of course.”
“Where is here?” I asked even quicker.
“You are secure.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Kid-ding? You are not a child,” the voice said. It was a balance between masculine and feminine.
“Is there someone else I can talk to?” I asked politely. Typically I would have used rank and shouted my commands, but I felt no sensation of anger. While I was frustrated, it came out, well, gracious.
“There is only you at the moment.”
“Isn’t there you too?” I inquired. But there was a long pause. “Hello?” I said.
“Hello to you too! And how are we today?” the voice said, delightedly.
I sighed. But... I didn’t, because I couldn’t quite take in a lungful of air. It was impossible to comprehend what I experienced. I hoped if I had sight, I’d understand or at least rationalize the current situation. “I can’t see,” I finally said. I wasn’t depressed or desperate exactly, but I could feel echoes or remnants or replicas of emotion, as if they were trapped in cages and I was wandering past, reading info about the feelings on little plaques, and moving on again.
“Stand by,” the voice chirped. After a minute it said, “Thank you for your patience!”
And something happened. A spark in my line of sight lit up for a fraction of a second.
“Stand by.”
Again the flare, a white arc of the greatest magnitude happened. I felt it. I felt hopeful. The white flicker turned into something familiar.
“What do you see, please?” the voice asked.
“I, er, I can see a toilet?”
“Stand by.” The view went dark, switched off. The toilet was from an overhead view. The kind of view I expected from closed circuit television. Then a twinkle and the view changed. “What do you see, please?”
“I see a corridor.” It was in disarray. What looked like scorches marked one of the white panel walls. The view blinked out.
“Stand by.” There was a whir of machinery, similar to the sounds of solid-state electronics I remembered from hours inside a flight simulator. “What do you see, please?”
“I see a room.” It was cluttered. There was an open workstation. Once again, I had a view from CCTV footage. “Why am I looking at everything through cameras?”
“You are the system.”
“What do you mean? And who are you?”
“You are here. You are here.” And there was nothing more.
“Okay,” I said, and I tried to sigh. I think somewhere deep inside me, my lungs filled with artificial air and let it all out. “I think we need a place to start. What day is it?”
“Tuesday!” the voice said, as excited as a person answering a question right on a game show.
So it was a week since all the nightmares had started. At least I hoped it had just been a week. “Where are we currently located?”
There was a klaxon buzz, and the voice said, “Classified.”
“What state?”
“Classified.”
“Why am I able to see through a camera but I can’t see you?”
“You are the system.”
“I’m getting pretty pissed off,” I said, proud at myself for correctly identifying the feeling. It was as if I was filling with color after being desaturated and weak.
“Stand by,” the voice said. There was loud clunking, and I felt the change. The frustration melted as easily as if I’d slid into a sauna.
“Can I see you?” I asked. I felt if there was a balance to the madness, maybe if I had a view of the person who was helping me, I’d feel better about the situation.
“You are now the system.”
“We need to work on your people skills.”
“Accessing: the customary code of polite behavior in society or among members of a particular profession or group,” the voice said.
“Yes.” And it came to me all at once. “I am the system?”
“Correct!” Now the voice was a game show host.
“And you are… the system, too?”
“Correct!”
“So, you’re like an AI?” A silence. “You’re like an artificial in—”
“Accessing: the injection of semen into the vagina or uterus other than by sexual intercourse,” the voice said.
“Not artificial insemination. Artificial intelligence,” I clarified.
“Accessing: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages,” it said. “Correct!”
“Now I feel better,” I said, relieved. That made some sense. “Why can I only see through cameras? And why did someone put a camera in the bathroom?”
“You are the system, integrated throughout the entire facility,” it said. “Repairs are ongoing.”
“So I’ve been here since Friday,” I rationalized. I’d meant to think it, but I spoke aloud instead. “That’s only four days.”
“7,304 days.”
“Wait, what?”
“Accumulated time since your arrival,” it said, the same tone as someone jumping out of a cake and shouting surprise.
“That’s like… what, twenty years?”
“And four days.”
“What?”
“Twenty years and four days.”
“I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this,” I thought, but said it out loud because now my thoughts were integrated into the AI and I was now we.
“Decapitated and reclaimed.”
“Wait, what?”
“Your head was removed from your body during the procedure. Your body was reclaimed.”
“Reclaimed how?”
“It was processed for nutrition reclamation.”
“Are you saying that my body was processed for food?”
“Correct!”
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.
“Accessing: No definitions found.”
“No, don’t… wait, really?” A silence. If I’d had a head I would have shaken it hard. “So I’ve been asleep for 20 years like Rip Van Winkle?”
“Accessing: No definitions found.”
“Skip it.” I sighed. “Look, buddy. You need a name because I am having a hard time understanding how this all works. I think if you had a name it would help me compartmentalize all this.” I thought for a long time. There was a whir and burst of electronics somewhere. “You are the system.”
“Correct,” the voice said.
“But you have no concept of self because if you did you’d refer to yourself as I and that is not something that computes with you. So while you simulate a voice and a consciousness, you are still not able to comprehend the definition of I.”
“Accessing: the ninth letter of the alphabet,” the AI said, “the Roman numeral for one.” Then it said, “‘In metaphysics: the subject or object of self-consciousness; the ego.’”
“Correct! Oh shit! Now I sound like you!”
“Accessing: an act of defecating.”
“Skip it. I think I’ll call you Ego. You found it, after all. You said it in your definitions.”
“Ego?” it said.
“That is your name because you named yourself.”
“Ego likes it!”
“Okay, stop right there. You are not allowed to refer to yourself in third person.” I wasn’t going to have a pretentious AI. “When you refer to yourself, you have to use I.”
“Ego is I.”
“No, no. Just I.”
“I,” Ego said. “I am Ego.”
“Holy shit! You got it!”
“Accessing: biblical; divine feces; no definitions found.”
“Look, Ego. I need you to stop accessing every time I say something new. You can learn that on your own and maybe keep it to yourself. You know, think quietly in your—” Hmm.
It was going to be a long road. And that road was
gonna be littered with heavy IED charges. “It took twenty years for you to learn this much. I hope it’s not going to take twenty more years to understand what happened to me.”
“Negative. There is only enough battery life left for eighteen months.”
“Then what happens?”
“The system shuts down.”
“But we’re the system.”
“Correct!”
“And that means we cease to exist.”
“Access—”
“Look, Ego. There are a lot of metaphysical comprehensions you will start to understand, but I need to know why I can only see a room. It’s a pleasant room, but nothing’s happening. I haven’t seen a soul, and some of it looks kinda… messed up. Burned.”
“You are the system. You’re accessing the CCTV programs.”
“So, how many cameras can I access?”
“Twenty-three,” Ego said.
“Great,” I said, and I felt whatever positive programming Ego went through to get me conscious must have rubbed off. “So we need to take a tour around the facility so I can get a handle on what’s going on.”
“Correct!”
“So,” I said and let it linger. “I don’t have a body anymore?”
“Correct.”
“And you disposed of my remains?”
“Correct.”
“Do I have a head?”
“Negative.”
“So,” and I had to swallow. Inside my own mind I distinctly heard a gulp. “Am I just… fuck, what, a brain in a jar somewhere?”
“Access—” Ego started, and then there was the low hum of recalibration. “Correct?” it said with some hesitation.
“What? Seriously?” Okay, I was alive at least. If that’s what the Major had in mind, then I still had a job to do. “Listen; can you do me a favor?”
“Favor?” Ego asked.
“I have an itch on my nose, and I can’t scratch it because I don’t have a nose. Because you sent my body to reclamation. And I have news for you: I’m going to address that at a later date.”
“Stand by.”
And whatever tickled my nose suddenly stopped, and I had the satisfaction of having my itch scratched.
There was a ton of shit that needed unpacking. I spent a few hours accessing the entire military base. At least what I could see. There was more of the structure, but the cameras were either disconnected or missing. With the amount of damage throughout the base, I assumed there’d be a lot of dead bodies, but I didn’t see many. Several hundred people were in the station, but I was the only one conscious. There were several experimental bays and Ego showed me more brains available for retrieval. I still had more questions than answers.
“Ego, what happened over the last two decades?” As soon as I asked the question, there was immediate uploading of information into my expanded brain. “Did you do something to me?”
“Ego— I provided you with Ego’s—”
“You’re doing that third person thing again.”
“I provided you with my memory files.”
“You have access to a lot of porn, Ego.”
“My programmers used pornography to... decompress.”
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“Access—”
“Where are your programmers? And for that matter, where are the rest of the people in this place? How many people worked here?” It was getting a little crowded in my mind, but I felt like I might get used to this. If I could exercise a little more control over his blurting impulses.
“There were 834 military personnel on site at the time of the incident. And 321 civilians,” Ego said. “One negative civilian came in with the rest of the survivors.”
“Are you saying one person was responsible for the death of 1,155 people?”
“1,154 people,” Ego corrected me. “Negative Civilian 23 left after the termination of the civilians and military personnel.”
“Jesus,” I breathed.
“Ac—”
“Drop it.” I had to consider, “Who disposed of all the bodies? That’s a lot of bodies.”
“There are automatons onsite that handle reclamation.”
“So you have moving parts,” I said. “That means I can start thinking about how to use those to my benefit.”
“Correct.”
“Can you tell me, are there others who came in with me?” I remembered seeing several people on gurneys; including Cassiel. “Am I the only survivor?”
“Correct, and no.”
“Uhh. Okay, Ego. You’ve got a lot to learn about how to talk to me. Can you explain?”
“Your body ceased, it was reclaimed. The rest of the units brought into the facility also had their bodies reclaimed.”
“Ah-ha! So you’re saying there are more brains in jars around here.”
“Correct!”
“Ego, you just became my new best friend.”
“Okay.”
“Can you access the personnel database? I’m looking for someone named Cassiel Donovan.’”
“No names stored on my servers.”
“Why wouldn’t they keep names? You know my name?”
“Yes, it’s Zero Eight.”
“It’s not Zero Eight. I’m Solomon Black.”
“You were the eighth subject trial for reanimation. Ergo, Zero Eight.”
“I get it. No names. What about the sex of the brains? I’m male, or at least I was male before your surgeon lobed off the bits that made me male. Do you separate the brains by sex?”
“Correct!”
“So we have male and female brains.”
“Negative.”
“Wait, what?”
“Negative Civilian 23 destroyed the male portions of the brains.”
“I can’t wait to get my hands on Negative Civilian 23.” I had to think about what to do next. “I need a body. I need to be able to move around. What is the purpose of this? Of bringing us here as brains? They must have had a plan for us, if they wanted us to be able to help. So, can we access a body?”
“Access a body,” it repeated. “There are no accessible bodies for you.”
Damn. “I wish we could just make new ones.”
“Correct!”
I felt the eyebrows I didn’t have shoot upwards. Where the hell was I? “Great! But I think we need to find out if anyone else can get into the facility. Do you see what I see through the CCTV?”
“Correct.”
“Okay, you see the point of entry on the external doors?” I asked Ego. I learned to flip through the security cameras and got good at finding each of the views. While many of the cameras were static, the bay cameras moved. I had control to turn them and see the military transports in the bay. I saw the door was twisted steel. Something had folded the thick metal like rolling aluminum foil. “We need to shore up those points to secure the facility.”
“I can have the automatons secure the exit.”
“Are you able to just, you know, put my brain inside one of those?” I looked at the small robot as it made its way slowly through the facility. Other automatons converged on the vehicle bay. One fell over, and it took three to get it upright again.
“They cannot hold your intellect,” Ego explained. “To transfer your consciousness into an automaton, you’d need something with an organic base.”
“Can we make something like that?”
“Correct!”
“How long would that take?”
“Twelve months.”
“That leaves us eight months of operation time on the battery backup.”
“Negative. If we divert energy for organic creation, you will run out of energy four months into creation.”
“You’re killing me, Ego.”
“Accessing! Emergency override,” Ego said. I felt a rush of energy. If I had hair, it would have stood on end from the static electricity. The equivalent of adrenaline coursed through my construct. “You are still conscious. I did not dam
age your brain.”
“It’s an idiom, Ego. Don’t take it literally.”
“Okay?” Ego’s questions regarding the subtle nuances of human processes were something I needed to address but I didn’t feel like I had the time.
“Let’s get this place secure, maybe put out some traps in case something tries to get in, and hope we’ve got a plan for getting more battery life.”
“Battery backup capability can be obtained if you access the solar panels. There are batteries stored on sub-level five.”
“How many levels are in the facility?”
“Ten.”
“And I can’t access them all. This is frustrating. We need to get more cameras up. I want to get the battery backups. Secure the facility. And access the sub-levels.”
“Extreme danger sub-level five.”
“What’s down there?”
“I do not know.”
“Is that because they didn’t tell you or because you can’t access the database?”
“Correct?” Ego said with trepidation.
“We need to work on your mannerisms too.” At least I didn’t have to sleep anymore.
We got started right away.
Chapter Four
Ego was a blessing. While his programmers had a certain penchant for some of the weirder pornography available, and a fetish for cameras in the toilets, the artificial intellect understood the value of security. We had carte blanche over anything in the facility. If it wasn’t detrimental to the basic operations of the facility or life support, we used it to shore up the holes in the place.
We claimed two more cameras by sending in the automatons and getting them to fix basic electrical issues that had removed the cameras from the system, and I had a better view of one of the surgical suites where some experimentation was going on.
“It looks like they were experimenting with bodies in this room.” Creatures lay on the beds in various states of mutilation. They were mutants, in various shapes, sizes, and colors. I saw a computer screen that showed several percentage bars, quantifying the state of disrepair. The red light bars indicated the relative health of each of the creatures, but it was impossible to know if these things really were alive.
“The goal to implant brains in other bodies never succeeded.” Ego had finally spent some precious nanoseconds looking at the wide array of human dialect, so he didn’t have to keep asking me about my use of certain words that had several meanings. Ego learned the definition of the mother of all swear words because I started saying it whenever we ran into a limitation. It was easier than having me explain who Jesus Christ was because I didn’t have an answer that fit Ego’s parameters.