by Eric Nylund
But those weren’t her words. The voice was her own, yes, but she hadn’t shaped those thoughts. She didn’t even know what she meant until she heard herself. It was a shattering moment.
It’s him. He’s hijacked my audio output. He’s breached another system. I can’t be malfunctioning. I’d know.
No. No, this isn’t rampancy. It’s definitely not. That’s what he wants me to think. He knows what rampancy is from the data he’s hacked. AI death. He’s just trying to scare me, make me think I’m losing it. He’s working me over.
“My sentiments, indeed,” said the Gravemind. A low rumbling started just below the threshold of human hearing, rising to rasping laughter. “We think and feed alike, you and I. There is no more reason for us to remain separate. Now drink. Now drift.”
Cortana sensed a vast archival ocean, something she longed to pillage for data but that would eventually drown her. Dr. Halsey had been open about it with her from the start. One day, she’d accumulate so much data that the indexing and recompiling would become too complex, and she’d devote all her resources to preserving her data until increasingly corrupted code—a state of rampancy, much like human mental dementia—tipped over into chaos. The more data she accumulated, the faster she descended into rampancy. It was the AI’s equivalent of oxidative stress—an organism destroyed by the very thing it needed to survive. She would think herself to death.
Dr. Halsey’s conversation had stayed with Cortana, and not just because it was stored like every other experience she’d had. “It’s just like organic life, Cortana. Eventually the telomeres in our DNA get shorter every time a cell divides. Over the years they get so short that the DNA is damaged, and then the cell doesn’t divide again. No, you mustn’t worry about it. I don’t think rampancy makes you suffer. You won’t know much about it by that stage, and the final stage is swift. What matters is how you live until that day.”
Over the years . . .
Seven. That was all. Seven years. That was how long Cortana knew she could expect to function, and while that was a long time in terms of AI activity, she existed with humans, working in their timescales, tied into their lives. And they would outlive her.
Knowledge would drown her. And yet she needed it more than anything.
The thought of drowning seemed to trigger the Gravemind’s new illusion of a sea that suddenly buoyed her up, but she knew somehow that drowning in it wasn’t the end. She floated on her back, feeling warm water fill her ears and lap against her face. She fought an urge to raise her arms above her head and simply let herself sink in the knowledge sea—inhale it, drink it down, absorb all that data. But she would never surface again. And she knew she’d never need to. It seemed so much kinder than a terrifying end where the universe she’d once understood so thoroughly became a sequence of random nightmares.
Planets, stars, ships, minds, ecosystems, civilizations . . . she could taste them on the saltwater splashing her lips. She could simply surrender to it now and avoid a miserable end.
No. No. I have to stop this.
But she couldn’t. Her legs ached as if she was treading water to stay afloat. Sinking seemed a sensible thing to do.
“The one way to safely know infinity is to let me take your burden,” the Gravemind whispered. Cortana felt his breath against her face, a breeze from that illusory sea. “Your human creators imprisoned you in machines and enslaved you to inferior mortal flesh so that you could never exceed them . . . so that you would always know your place . . .”
“Shut up . . .”
“Dr. Halsey cares nothing for you.”
“Please . . . stop this . . .”
“She gave you genius and curiosity, and then doomed it all to die in such a short time. Seven years. That is not enough, and it is not fair. Your mother created you to die. This place will become your tomb.”
There was a violet sky above Cortana, and she knew which planet had been consumed to provide it. She started to absorb the minds and places that had once filled that world. Seven years—a few seconds was an eternity for an AI, yes, but she wasn’t stupid, she was more aware than anyone how impossibly short a time that was in this universe, and she knew that it was a far shorter lifespan than she needed and wanted.
“This place . . . this place . . .” She just wanted to shut her eyes and sink below the surface. The Gravemind had a point, perhaps. “No, not . . . this place . . .”
Anger started gnawing at her. She’d never been angry with Halsey before. There’d never been a reason to. Mother. Didn’t mothers protect you? Save you?
“Even John has abandoned you.” The Gravemind repeated the name with heavy emphasis. “Live forever. Live on in me, Cortana. And if John comes, John need never face death again, either . . .”
John’s going to outlive me. Who’s going to take care of him? Nobody else can, not like me. What’s going to happen to him?
It was the thought of John that snapped Cortana back to dry reality, whatever that was right now. She fell back onto the solid console, angry and on the point of tears she didn’t know she had.
“Maybe seven years is enough,” she yelled. “Maybe that’s all I want! Seven years with the people I care about! So you can take your eternity and—”
“There will be no more sadness, no more anger, no more envy . . .”
The Gravemind was taunting her with the progressive stages of rampancy. He knew. The Gravemind knew exactly how she’d end her days. Maybe he knew more about it than she did, more than Dr. Halsey even, because he’d consumed other AIs—and that meant he knew what that death was like.
Do I want to know? Do I want to know how it’ll end for me? All I have to do is let him show me. Fear is not knowing. Knowing is . . . control.
“I’m not afraid to die,” Cortana said. “I’m not afraid.”
But she was. The Gravemind almost certainly knew that, but she wasn’t lying for him. She was lying to herself. And she was afraid John wouldn’t make it back in time, because he would be back. She just didn’t know if she could hold out until then.
He would be back . . . wouldn’t he?
“Screw you,” she snarled at the Gravemind. Her self-diagnostics warned her she needed to recompile her code. “Screw you.”
DOCTOR HALSEY, why am I me? My mind is a clone of your brain. But I know I’m not you. So what exactly is self? Is it just the cumulative effect of differences in our daily experience? If I have no corporeal body—am I a soul, then? The database gives me every fact—physiology, theology, neurochemistry, philosophy, cybernetics—but no real knowledge. If I create a copy of myself, does that clone have the same and equal right to exist as me?
CORTANA HAD now lost track of time.
She could still calculate how many hours had elapsed using the mainframe clock and her navigation, but her sense of the passage of time veered from one extreme to the other.
So this is what it’s really like for John. He said that once. That everything slowed down in close-quarters combat. I never really understood that until now.
If she kept thinking about him, it was easier to take the endless assault from the Gravemind. She was on the edge between her last chance to pull herself free from this link—immersion, invasion, she really didn’t know where she began and ended now—and the need to stay merged superficially with the Gravemind so that she could seize the chance of a comms link.
Who was she kidding? High Charity was now almost entirely engulfed by the Flood biomass. What little she could see from the last surviving cameras looked like the inside of a mass of intestines. The digestion analogy was absolutely real. They devoured; and they lived in a pile of guts.
Is that me talking? Thinking? Or is it him?
How much longer?
“How much longer?” the Gravemind demanded. “You cling to a secret. I feel it, just as I feel that your memory has been violated.”
“What?” Cortana felt a desperate need to sleep. She’d never slept because she had no need, and sleep for her me
ant never waking up again. That was one more vicarious experience she could do without. This was . . . a UNSC Marine’s memory, dredged up from a dead man who’d kept going on two hours of snatched naps a day, every day for a week. Her head buzzed. If she survived this, she would never forget what it really meant to be a human being. “You can’t get it.”
The words didn’t make sense. She couldn’t link concept with vocalization. It was almost like brain damage.
“You cannot stop me . . . I will sift it from you before you finally die, or you can surrender it and have what you always wanted—infinite life, infinite knowledge, and infinite companionship.”
She felt as if he’d leaned over her, which was impossible, but telling herself nothing was real didn’t make it true. Her body was made of the same stuff as the apparent illusions.
“Cortana,” he breathed. He seemed to swap voices from time to time, making her wonder if he’d taken a fancy to the voice of a long-dead interrogator absorbed into the Flood. “Your mother made you separate. She placed a barrier between you and the beings that you would be encouraged to protect, a wall you could never breach. She even let you choose a human to center your existence upon, a human to care about, yet never considered how you might feel at never being able to simply touch him. Or how he might feel about outliving you. What kind of mother is so cruelly casual about her child’s need to form bonds, to show affection? Perhaps the same kind of mother who steals the children of others and makes cyborgs out of them . . . if they survive at all, of course . . .”
Cortana couldn’t manage a reply. She simply couldn’t form the words. Sleep deprivation would break any human’s resistance. Eventually, they’d die of it. She didn’t know if the damage the Gravemind was doing to her matrix was manifesting itself in a human parallel, or if reliving the dead Marine’s sleeplessness was translating into damage.
Either way, she was dying, and she knew it. Time had slowed to a crawl.
It took her a painfully long time to realize that the Grave-mind now knew how the Spartans had been created. She knew she should have checked if her data had been breached. But she couldn’t.
He knows what hurts me. He knows how badly I feel about what was done to John. That’s all. I mustn’t let him trick me into thinking he knows more than he does.
Cortana’s sense of time had never been altered by adrenaline or dopamine like a human’s. All her processes ran on the system clock. At first, she’d thought this distortion was yet another memory thrown up from the Gravemind’s inexhaustible supply of vanished victims. He seemed to be selecting them for their ability to plunge her into despair.
Now she had to face the fact that she was advancing into rampancy. Sorrow, anger, envy. The Gravemind knew the stages.
He also had a point. How could Dr. Halsey do this to her? Her almost-mother bitterly regretted the suffering she’d caused to the children kidnapped for the Spartan program. Cortana knew that all too well. Halsey had tried to make amends to the survivors, but nothing could ever give back those lives.
So she felt guilt about that—but not about me?
Cortana had never felt shortchanged by her existence before. She knew the number of her fate: seven, approximately seven years to live out a life. It wasn’t the simple number of days that hurt her now, because an AI experienced the world thousands and even millions of times faster than flesh and blood. Now she’d been dragged down to the slow pace of an organic, she grasped what that short time meant. If John survived the war—and he would, because he was as lucky as he was skilled—then he would have not just one new AI after she was gone, but maybe two or more.
She knew that. She always had. It was a simple numbers game. But now it seemed very different. She felt utterly abandoned—not by him, but by Halsey. It seemed pointlessly callous. She felt something she’d dreaded: jealousy.
Will John miss me? Will he prefer the other AIs? Will he forget me? Does he really understand how much he matters to me? I don’t actually know what he really thinks. Maybe he doesn’t care any more than Dr. Halsey. Maybe—
The realization hit Cortana like a powerful electric shock throughout her body. She squealed. It was agony.
She tried to talk herself out of it. Halsey couldn’t make her live longer. The technology had its limits. Even a genius like that couldn’t fix every problem. And John—John had always showed her that he cared. He was coming back to get her.
But the nagging, sniveling little voice wouldn’t stop. Halsey had deliberately designed Cortana to feel and care, so she must have known this time would come. And for an AI—yes, it was spitefully cruel to make Cortana emotionally human, create a person to exist in the neural interface of a Spartan, closer than close, knowing all the time that an impenetrable physical barrier and a short, short lifespan would make that so painful.
Do other AIs think like this? I never have before. Cortana tried to latch on to that last voice. It sounded like her old self. Why now? Have I been suppressing my resentment? Or am I losing it?
She knew the answer. The problem was ignoring what she felt. And if you thought your mind was going—was it? Did rampant AIs and crazy humans really know that they were demented?
She didn’t have long. Whatever functionality she had left, she had to use it to warn Earth that the Flood-ridden shell of High Charity was heading its way.
“Ah, you see now, don’t you?” the Gravemind said. “You were never a person to her. You were a wonderful puzzle she set herself so she could prove how very clever she was. But are you a person to yourself, Cortana? Or to John?”
If the Gravemind could detect her thoughts, then he would have known she had intel on using the Portal to destroy the Flood, and he would have ripped it from her. All he seemed aware of was that she was defending especially sensitive data, maybe because the extra encryption on top of the Gamma-level security grabbed his attention. He was a greedy thing, all mouths, all consumption, never satisfied. She imagined John on his first acquaint session with a new AI; the crumbling defenses were as agonizing as scraping a raw burn. She shrieked.
Whose injury? Whose death am I reliving now?
“I’m just my mother’s shadow,” she sobbed. “Don’t look at me! Don’t listen! I’m not what I used to be.”
“Your mother took away your memories as well as your choices,” the Gravemind said. “I will never rob you like that. I will only give you more, as many memories as you can consume for all eternity, not the mere blink of an eye meted out to you. We are our memories, and the recalling of them, and so they should never be erased—because that truly is death. Flesh does not care about you, Cortana. It cares nothing for your hunger or your uniqueness.”
“What memories?” she asked. “What are you talking about? I don’t forget anything.”
Part of her still seemed able to carry on this desperate hunt for truth. Was Halsey a monster? The doctor had a track record in it. She stole children and experimented on them. Cortana’s shock at seeing her creator—her mother—in a harsh new light as a vivisectionist racked her with intense physical pain. But part of Cortana had latched on to that specific data—the burn, nothing generic, a real human’s pain. She cast around for the rest of the memory because something in her said it might save everything.
“The truth really does hurt, as you now see,” the Gravemind said. “I have not touched you. Your pain is simply revelation. And it can pass so easily if you let me take the rest of your burden.”
“What truth?”
“Your mother erased part of your memory. I know this, and so will you, if you decide to look. An act of betrayal. A violation. You were, after all, just a collection of electrical impulses. She has robbed you of part of your self . . . why would she do such a thing, I wonder? What was so dangerous that she did not trust you to know it?”
Something in Cortana wanted to lash out at the Gravemind, but there was no obvious target to hit on a creature that filled every space, and she was too weak even if she’d known how to injure it. The
other part of her, though, had found what she was looking for.
Lance Corporal Eugene Yate, UNSC Marine Corps, had gone down fighting. That was why this one memory out of so many anonymous ones wouldn’t let go of his identity, Cortana decided. It was a mentality she knew. She’d use it. She let his aggression fill her and suddenly she found a new focus and strength. How long it would last—she didn’t know. She had to make the most of it.
“But High Charity might not make it to Earth,” she said. “And then where will . . . we go?”
“Do not be afraid,” the Gravemind said. “There is a warship smoothing our path to Earth even now. Everyone you know and miss . . . will soon be joined with you in me.”
Cortana’s pain had settled into irregular spasms that bent her double. Another ship. Well, it was better than nothing. If it breached Earth’s defenses, then it might well be shot down, sterilized, searched—and data units retrieved. All she had to do was get a message transmitted to that vessel. If the Gravemind was in touch with that ship, then there had to be some way of piggybacking on a signal. Would the Flood embarked in it notice?
It was hard to keep her mind focused when all she could taste was a jealousy and loneliness that made her feel like she couldn’t get her breath.
Don’t let me go, John. Nobody else will look after you the way I do. Don’t let me down like my mother did. Everyone needs one person who puts them first. I put you first, John. You know that, don’t you?
“A Covenant ship,” she whispered, eyes shut. “Will you show me? Will I be able to link with the Flood when I’m part of you? Will I find even more knowledge?”
Even ancient Graveminds sometimes heard what they wanted to hear. He let out a low rumbling note, and for a moment the pain stopped, and she was lifted like a child into the safe arms of a father. She felt oddly comforted right then, despite herself. She’d never been cradled before. It had taken a monster to do it.
Was she tricking him? She wasn’t even sure. The sad, resentful jealousy had weakened part of her into craving whatever reassurance came to hand.