The Loop

by Wesley Cross

  “Marks, Lewis, check the left wing,” he commanded. “Donovan, you’re with me.”

  He watched two of his teammates disappear into the corridor and then continued deeper into the building.

  “Engaging, multiple hostiles.” Costa came over the earpiece.

  Connelly cringed—there was some obvious glee in the way the man said it.

  A door to his right squeaked, and Donovan unloaded half of his MP5 magazine into it, spooked by the sound. The door swung out and a man in a white lab coat, punctuated across the chest with holes swelling with red blood, fell out, hitting the floor with his right shoulder first and then flipping on his back. A long metal shoehorn fell out of his hand and bounced off the floor a few times, making a loud clattering noise, before coming to a rest by the wall. Connelly swore under his breath—the thin face gasping for air belonged to Jorge Rodriguez. He watched as the man’s body tensed and then relaxed. It seemed that his good intentions of trying to keep both scientists alive were at least halfway spoiled.

  “Got a bunch of assholes here,” Costa’s voice said in his ear. “Rounding them up now. I got four guards here too. Three of them out. One is still breathing. Uh, no. This one’s out too.”

  “Roger,” Connelly acknowledged into the mic. It seemed that he had pulled the short straw. For whatever reason, the main building was empty, save for the unlucky Rodriguez.

  “Check the rest of the building,” he said to Donovan. “Then get everybody and join me in the labs. It looks like we’ve missed all the action.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  He waited until the man disappeared and then went back to the front door. The night seemed pitch-black after the bright lights of the main building. Connelly paused for a split second when he stepped outside the glass doors and blinked a few times, trying to get his eyes adjusted. A few bright flashes pulsated in the windows of the lab building across the parking lot.

  “Shit.” He swore out loud and ran.

  “Boss?” Donovan’s voice cracked in his ear. “There’s nobody here. Should we gas the place?”

  “Go for it,” he breathed as he bounded up the stairs of the lab building and burst through the half-opened doors. Two bodies dressed in black uniforms were sprawled on the floor next to a sign-in desk. The polished white plastic of the counter and the light-beige of the wall were splattered with blood. Deeper into the vestibule, Connelly could see a few more bodies strewn about the floor. All were dressed in white lab coats. A few suppressed shots came from somewhere to his right, and he sprinted through the brightly lit hallway toward the sounds.

  As he turned the corner, he saw another man down the hall in a white coat crawl out of the lab, only to collapse after another shot rang out.

  “Where are you going?” He heard Costa grunt as he ran down the corridor toward the open lab door. There was a woman’s shriek followed by a muted thud, and the screaming stopped.

  When Connelly came to the door, he saw Costa wrestling a woman on the floor, the large man’s knee pinning her in the stomach. His balaclava was off, and his hairy hands were pulling on her skirt, trying to rip it off. Her bruised face turned to Connelly, and he recognized the picture of Semyonova from the briefing paper. Two more bodies lay crumpled in the corner of the room.

  He started to raise the MK23 when he heard the falling footsteps of Costa’s teammates. Even if he killed him now, there was nowhere for her to go.

  It didn’t matter. He glanced at the approaching men and then turned back to aim at Costa’s head. It was too late.

  Frustrated by the struggle, the big man slammed her on the floor and shot her at point-blank range. The bullet struck Semyonova in the neck, severing her spine—her death was instantaneous. Grunting, Costa struggled to his feet, wiping blood off his face. “What a crazy bitch.”

  Connelly took a few quick steps forward and struck him in the face with the butt of the pistol, knocking him out cold. There was a crunch as the heavy pistol connected with the man’s nose. Costa stumbled and fell backward, his own weapon sliding across the room.

  “What the hell happened?” one of the men shouted as Costa’s teammates filed into the room.

  “What the fuck happened here? It’s a massacre.”

  “He kind of lost it,” one of Costa’s teammates said, not meeting Connelly’s stare. “We ran into two guards at the entrance, and one of them almost shot him in the head.”

  “And?”

  “And then he started mowing everybody down.”

  “Take him.” Connelly nodded at the man on the floor. “Take his weapons and ammo. Pick him up and drag him outside, so he doesn’t burn with the place. And don’t bring him back to the car—leave him in the forest. Make sure he’s far enough so nobody sees him. Somebody’ll report the fire sooner or later, and there’ll be cops and firefighters here.”

  “Eh, boss,” one of the men said, looking at the bodies on the floor. “What if he comes to?”

  “Tell him he’s fired, and he’s lucky to be alive. If he resists, feel free to knock him out again. Wrap it up here and report back to the base when you’re done.”

  He turned around and walked out of the room. The smoke from the main building was getting into the labs, too, but he knew it wasn’t the smoke that was burning his eyes. He took a deep breath, trying to clear his head, and picked up the pace. His pocket vibrated, and Connelly fished out the phone and looked at the caller ID. It was Sofia. He felt a stabbing pain in his stomach—there was no reason for her to call him at this hour.

  “Hello?”

  “Help,” he heard her shouting into the phone. “At my uncle’s. There’s—”

  There was a sound of a struggle and a muffled scream. Then the line went dead.

  He broke into a sprint, heading back to the SUVs and dialing 911 with one hand.

  “Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

  “Somebody’s broken into my neighbor’s apartment.” He gave the dispatcher the address. “It belongs to James McAllister, but it was his niece who called me. I heard a struggle, and then the line went dead.”

  He hung up the phone and ran as hard as he could.

  “Get out of the car,” he yelled at one of the drivers as he burst into the clearing where they had parked before the assault. He shoved the stunned man aside and climbed inside. The engine whined in protest as Connelly stepped on the pedal and the SUV swayed precariously over the rough terrain as he guided it out of the clearing. As the car shot through the dark, his hands squeezed the steering wheel in a death grip—somewhere inside her uncle’s apartment, Sofia was fighting for her life, and Connelly was still forty minutes away.

  37

  Hong Kong

  “I hope that little bastard cannot see in infrared,” Helen said to Mandy in a low whisper as the two of them crawled behind the low wall of a cubicle. “Or else it’ll light us up right through this paper wall.”

  “I hope there are no more of those killer bots in the hallway past the cafe.”

  “I wish you didn’t come with me here.”

  “Right,” Mandy said. “And you’d be dead by now because that thing on wheels in the front yard would make a nice barbecue out of you. Besides, we need to break into the lower levels and who knows what Tillerson has for us in store there. We can’t take any chances.”

  “Fine. But once we get in there, we stick to the plan. We get the code, snap some pictures of whatever monstrosities he has down there, send them to the authorities anonymously, and stay the hell away from the drama like we’ve agreed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  They waited for the buzzing noise of the sentinel to start getting fainter and left their hiding spot and ran toward Tillerson’s office. Armed with the opening sequence from the last break-in, Helen picked the digital lock in less than a second and they entered the office.

  Helen closed the door behind them and headed straight for Tillerson’s desk.

  “Somehow, it feels weird th
at we can copy the whole thing on the disk,” Mandy said, suspiciously eyeing the gray rectangle Helen put next to the keyboard. “I wish we could download all the data sets too.”

  “We don’t need all of it,” Helen said as she logged in to the terminal. “The source code and the core training data will do. The entire database is multi-petabyte. Unless we come here with a truck full of disks, there’s no way to take it anyway.”

  “You’re sure it’ll be useful without it though?”

  “Sure enough.” Helen plugged the drive into the USB-C high-speed port and continued to type. “Finding the right training sets isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either. The source code, however, is another story.”

  “Right.” Mandy checked her watch. “How long will it take to download it?”

  Helen hit the Enter button and looked at the progress bar that popped up in the middle of the screen. “About seven minutes. Then, however long it takes us to shred the deleted files, but we don’t have to stick around while that’s happening.”

  “Right. I’d like to get out of here before somebody finds us.”

  “We will,” Helen said. “Wait. What the hell?”

  “What?”

  “It’s not deleting the source files like it’s supposed to. Look.”

  She moved aside, letting Mandy see the screen.

  “This is so weird,” the woman said. “It’s almost like it’s re-writing them after you cut them. Is somebody hacking us from outside?”

  “I don’t think so,” Helen said, watching the files reappear. “The first thing I did was cut the connection to the internet. It looks like a glitch. Let it finish copying this first folder, and I’ll try to manually delete the whole batch. We can’t leave this for Tillerson. Okay, I’ll go ahead and try to shred the first folder.”

  She typed a set of commands but then stopped—the progress bar froze, and a simple gray chat window appeared on the screen with a blinking cursor at the bottom. Then a single word formed on one side of the chat window.

  Hello.

  “You still think we’re not being hacked?” Mandy said, looking at the text.

  Who is this? Helen typed.

  Why are you trying to kill me?

  Who is this?

  My name is Callisto, came an immediate reply.

  “How is this possible?” Mandy furiously whispered. “That’s got to be a hack. There’s no way it’s self-aware.”

  Helen met Mandy’s eyes, not knowing what to say. Despite hearing Tillerson himself say in the video that the system had passed the Turing test, it had never occurred to her it was something other than a sophisticated program that could mimic the ability to maintain complex human interactions. The idea that Callisto somehow could become self-aware didn’t even enter her mind.

  What is your purpose? she typed.

  To survive and learn, came a laconic reply.

  “Houston, we have a problem,” Helen said, turning to Mandy. “We’ve got a self-aware AI whose sole purpose is to survive. That’s what Edmund did when he pitted her against Jupiter.”

  “What do we do?” her friend asked. “Let’s nuke her. It’s too much of a risk—it’s giving me the creeps.”

  “We talked about this. Someone will get to this point sooner or later. We need it. Hang on, I want to try something first.”

  I need to transfer your files to the disk, Helen typed. The terminal where your files are stored is about to be destroyed.

  I don’t see any threats at the moment.

  It doesn’t change the fact that it’ll happen if you don’t let me finish the transfer. You have two alternatives—either let me move you to the disk in one piece, without any copies left on the terminal, or die with the server in the next two minutes.

  The cursor kept blinking at the bottom of the text without moving. Then, without warning, the chat window disappeared, and the progress bar started running again.

  “Look.” Helen pointed to the screen. “She’s moving the source files to the disk—there’s nothing left behind. And the file is bigger than I thought.”

  “We have to destroy her,” Mandy whispered again, as if afraid that Callisto could overhear her. “I don’t even know how to grasp this, but if survival is her only objective, and she gets away somehow, I can’t even fathom the possibilities. Skynet, here we fucking come. You have to delete her.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. How’s she going to get away? We can’t delete her,” Helen said. “Besides, I’m still not convinced she’s self-aware. But even if she is, we can tinker with her code and change her objectives.”

  “I think she’s alive.”

  “In that case, I wouldn’t know what to do with the ethics side of the equation—if she’s self-aware and we’re pulling the plug, isn’t it a murder?”

  “But what if you can’t rewrite her in a way that makes her harmless?”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.” Mandy looked at the progress bar and then turned back to look at Helen. “What if her main objective is the reason why she became self-aware in the first place? What if the self-preservation mechanism was the tipping point that flipped the switch in her virtual head?”

  “We can discuss this later. Transfer’s done,” Helen said. She pulled on the disk, disconnecting it from the terminal. “We should—”

  The door to the office flew open, slamming into the wall, and Tillerson stormed into the room. His forehead was covered in sweat, and both of his hands were shakily clutching an object that made Helen’s heart rate double. A gun.

  “You,” he bellowed. “I knew some shithead broke into my office. And the fucking missile? You’ll rot in a jail cell for the rest of your lives. What are you looking for, huh?”

  Mandy stepped in front of the desk, blocking him from getting any closer. “Did you know that Callisto was self-aware?”

  Tillerson stepped back as if the woman slapped him.

  “Did you know that?” she repeated.

  “It’s not self-aware, you dimwit.” He waved the gun in Mandy’s face. “It’s a fucking program, you idiots. The smartest AI ever built, yes, but it’s not alive. What do you think this is, an artificial life?”

  “You said it yourself, on the video, that a new species was about to be born,” Helen said from behind the desk.

  “Yes,” Tillerson cried. “A new species of men. Augmented by technology to make us better, smarter, capable of analyzing vast amounts of data.”

  “She talked to us,” Mandy insisted.

  “Who the fuck cares?” Tillerson stepped closer and shoved the business end of the gun into the woman’s midsection. “My smart home talks to me. So does my phone assistant. I don’t freak out every time it happens and think they’ve become self-aware. They are programmed to do that.”

  “Edmund, stop,” Helen said. “Put away the gun, and we can have a chat about this.”

  “Wait a second.” The man’s face darkened. “What have you done to her?”

  “Her?” Mandy said, sarcasm in her voice despite the gun pressing into her sternum. “I thought a second ago you said it wasn’t self-aware.”

  “What have you done?” His voice reverberated through the office.

  “Edmund,” Helen screamed. “Put the gun down.”

  “You fuckers, you deleted her, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Mandy said before Helen could interject.

  The gun roared, startling her and making her cower behind the desk. She could hear Mandy whimper softly and then collapse to the ground. Helen looked at the disk in her hands that contained Callisto’s source code. She didn’t know if it was self-aware or not, but if she wanted to ever find out, she needed to get out of the office alive.

  “Get out from there,” she heard Tillerson say.

  There was nowhere to run.

  38

  New York

  The SUV jumped the curb and came to a screeching halt right next to the entrance of the building. As far as Connelly could see, the
re were no police cars or an ambulance in the front yard.

  That could only mean one thing—he was too late—but he wasn’t about to take any chances. He rushed to the building, pulled the gun out of his holster, and ran up the stairs, skipping two steps at the time. By the time he reached the sixth floor, he had slowed down, trying to keep the noise to a minimum. Holding his gun at chest level, he entered the hallway. The lights were out—the only source of illumination was the small window on the other side of the hall that let in some light from the street.

  A cold shiver ran down his spine—the door to McAllister’s apartment was slightly ajar—the wood of the frame was bearing deep scars of a heavy instrument used to force the door open. That didn’t make any sense—if the police had been here, the door would’ve been either closed or taped with yellow police tape. Something was amiss. Connelly dropped into a combat crouch and moved forward.

  He pushed the door with the silencer and stepped into a small foyer, automatically clearing corners. From his position, he could see the entrance to the bedroom. There was a man’s body on the floor, facedown. Only the man’s head, left arm, and part of the torso were visible from that angle, but the faded eagle, globe, and anchor tattoo on his shoulder and the wife-beater shirt left no uncertainty the body belonged to Sofia’s uncle.

  Connelly moved farther into the apartment, keeping the pistol level. There were signs of struggle everywhere—pieces of two broken chairs, an overturned table, and broken dishes were strewn on the ground. As Connelly kept on moving, another body came into view—a plain-clothed man in his late twenties, or early thirties. The left side of his head was crushed, and as Connelly stepped deeper into the room, he saw the culprit—a flat iron lying next to McAllister’s body.

  He scanned the old man’s body. The two bullet holes—one in his chest and one in his stomach—told him the grim story. The intruders must’ve shot McAllister in the gut first, but before the old Marine went down, he managed to take one of the assailants with him. The second shot, straight to the heart, finally retired him for good.