One Giant Leap

by Heather Kaczynski

  And that’s when I realized there wasn’t just her presence in my mind. I began to feel it expand, more and more, a growing awareness of some curious predator circling me, observing, testing. A gnawing tide barely held back by Sunny’s wall. Studying me, this creature it had never experienced before. Wanting to know me. Learn me.

  Hanna was back there, somewhere, behind the onslaught of Pinnacle’s overwhelming power. If she was directing it, I couldn’t tell. This wasn’t like when I had first been connected to Sunny-Lite and could sense Dr. Copeland’s heartbeat during training. I felt nothing past Pinnacle’s wall. Nothing except Pinnacle.

  I began to understand how wrong this was. Pinnacle was searching for a place to land, to connect to me, but Sunny was already here. She had already learned my circuits.

  To Pinnacle, I was a foreign language it was hungry to learn. It couldn’t touch my circuits without touching Sunny’s, and they were at odds. Sunny had merged with me so smoothly, so entirely, that I could not tell where she ended and I began. But Pinnacle was thousands of times more powerful. He would outlast her.

  I was still hanging on by my fingertips to the rock of Sunny’s borrowed sanity and couldn’t spare much thought to do anything else. I held on to one directive.

  Pinnacle needs to access the alien files, I thought, trying to direct its attention, not sure if it would even listen to me over Hanna. Sunny, help Pinnacle access what you copied. Format it to be readable on our hardware.

  For a moment, my breath stopped—choked off, like someone had clamped a hand over my nose and mouth. Both computers grinding against their natures to work together, short-circuiting my own brain’s attempt to keep me alive.

  I felt my body rock backward, tilt, and then the pain in my throat as a ragged gasp brought air back into my body. Red blotted my vision and for a moment I was aware of my physical body again, before I was dragged back into the quiet place that was filled with data and light-speed calculations.

  I couldn’t even muster the energy now to send commands to Sunny. She—I—was running too hot, trying to outlast Pinnacle. She/I was approaching the limit of our abilities.

  No thought. Only intent. Sunny. Megobari. Records.

  I felt something open up just beyond my reach, like double-clicking a file folder and having its contents display on the wrong screen, one I couldn’t see. It was there, but I couldn’t get to it. Who was accessing it? Pinnacle? Hanna?

  Sunny’s hold began to slip. I felt white-hot fire where Pinnacle was beginning to network to my brain, overcoming Sunny and even my own thoughts, reaching deeper. All wrong, running backward, electricity being forced back along the wire, overloading the circuit.

  I couldn’t take it. Sunny was slipping away. Burning out. I was losing my shelter from the data storm. Pinnacle was sweeping me away, my nerves sending alarms of pain straight into the space behind my eyes—my lungs choking off—my own connection to my body being severed as Pinnacle took my place—

  And then a light bulb burst inside my skull, leaving only darkness.

  Twenty-Four

  IT WAS OVER for several seconds before I realized everything had stopped: the noise, the panic, the feeling I was slipping away. The pounding pain in my head was only echoes. I realized distantly that my body was convulsing, and that my limbs were being restrained, but it was like it was happening to someone else, a dream I’d had and could barely remember.

  Were my eyes open? I couldn’t process any input of visual data. I couldn’t control my body, only feel its reactions through a mist like a drugged hallucination.

  In a blind haze, the sensations of my body in space slowly filtered in, one at a time. The weight of my torso on the bed. The weight of shoes on my feet. The chill in one of my hands. The rustling of my hair against a pillow. The tears cooling on my cheeks. Thud-thud-thud in my chest.

  I am real. I am a real person, I told myself. I was a person with a body that was still beating, still breathing.

  I tried opening my eyes.

  The edges of the world were painted with a thick brush, every line sharp. It was like seeing in high-definition. The picture was crisp, clear, and hurt my eyes.

  I blinked rapidly and the sharp lines blurred, becoming a 3-D movie, lines upon lines upon . . .

  I groaned and closed my eyes again.

  “Cassie!” Hanna’s voice was a sharp spike in my ear. I felt her small hand slapping my cheek, the pain sharp. It made me angry. “Wake up! Open your eyes!”

  “Hurts,” I managed to gasp.

  “Do it anyway.”

  I groaned louder, dragging my eyes open through sheer force of will. The world had gone back to being crisp and altogether too real.

  I am real. I am a real person. I didn’t know why I kept repeating it to myself, but it seemed necessary.

  “What the hell happened?” Hanna demanded. “I felt Pinnacle making contact. You were losing control. It was overcoming both of you.”

  She was moving too fast, eyes blinking rapidly, lips forming shapes. But at the same time I could see it in slow motion, like I was in another plane of existence. Seeing with two sets of eyes.

  “Too much.” I tried touching my head with my hand, but I had to concentrate on where my hand was in space. Couldn’t feel it move, at first. Had to squint open my eyes to be sure.

  There was a humming sound in my ears like computer fans running. A spot on the side of my neck was hot.

  “I thought I was going to lose you,” Hanna said, and for some reason she was angry.

  “Me too,” Luka said, his quiet voice on my other side the first reminder of his presence. “It looked like you were having a seizure.”

  “I’m not a doctor, but the EEG readouts seem to think so, too. Damn it!”

  I forced my eyes to focus, roving around the room to find Luka beside me. The world seemed to shift again, to align properly this time. Not ultrasharp lines poking holes through my eyes, not blurry 3-D-without-the-glasses world.

  Uncharacteristic fear etched his features. I looked down and realized he was holding my limp hand with a death grip.

  I didn’t notice the feel of it until I saw it. His hand was warm and solid and soft and real, and reminded me that I was real, too.

  With that dose of reality—that lifeline—I sat up gingerly and tried sorting through my brain to assess the damage.

  “You guys really use Pinnacle on human beings?” I groaned. “It almost fried my brain.”

  “I had months to work up to it,” Hanna said, a note defensive. “And you didn’t just have Pinnacle. You were connected to them both at once. That, we’ve never tried. You were the one who said you could handle it.”

  I shook my head, still in a daze, and touched my forehead delicately. “Remind me never to do it again.”

  “I won’t have to,” Luka said, his tone the audible version of putting one’s foot down.

  “Did it at least work?” Hanna asked anxiously.

  “I’m not sure. Did you . . . see anything . . . on the screen?”

  “Just interference. We can check the recording.”

  Everything was fading, like a dream. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or if my mind was conjuring their worried faces out of thin air.

  “You’re okay now, I think,” Hanna said, and there was a note of fear in her voice. She and Luka both hoisted me to my feet. “No one has ever done what she just did.” She spoke the words over my head, to Luka. Even angry and coming down off adrenaline, there was a note of awe in Hanna’s voice, of excitement.

  Luka’s grip tightened on my arm as they led me through darkened rooms, the tips of my sneakers dragging because I couldn’t find the energy to lift my own feet. “And no one ever will again.”

  “Lay her down here.” Hanna’s voice filtered through the haze of my consciousness. “She might go into a postictal state. Does your head hurt?”

  I groaned, covering my eyes with my hands. “Leave me alone.”

  “Hanna,” Luka said, as I felt
my body lifted onto a bed as though it were happening to someone else. “Can you tell me more about Pinnacle? Why was it made? Why did they implant it? What was their goal?”

  My eyes were closed and my skull was pulsing with fiery pain, but the deep rumble of his voice brought me just to the edge of consciousness.

  Hanna’s reply was quiet, as though she was trying not to wake me. I felt her fingers taking the pulse on my wrist. “It was the successor to PROPHET—the program you call Sunny. They started working on it after Project Adastra was completed.” I felt hands moving my limbs, adjusting me. I couldn’t lift a finger to help. “After Adastra, I was moved on to another project, called Adonis. Its goal was to find more people with Cassie’s ability to interface directly with superintelligent computer programs like Sunny. I was one of those people.”

  “To what end?” Now he was smoothing the hair out of my eyes, which was sweet. I’d have to remember to thank him when I was awake.

  “Crane is obsessed with the idea that you can download your conscious brain into a computer and live forever. We accidentally discovered while trying to make the old man immortal that networking an advanced-enough computer to the right kind of human brain for the right amount of time can help a sufficiently advanced computer learn to be more . . . human.”

  That was interesting. I struggled to follow her words through the slog of quicksand that was my mind. “So . . . smart human plus smart computer equals . . .”

  “An even smarter computer. A true AI.” She took in a long breath, paused. “That’s what I was working on with SEE. And Cassie and Sunny might be our first real success.”

  Assuming I survive.

  Twenty-Five

  I WOKE DAZED and alone, hearing muted voices outside the door. I blinked slowly at the ceiling several times before remembering where I was, before I could even sense the weight of my body pressing into the mattress.

  Sunny, are you still there? Everything okay? After last night, I had to check.

  Cassie, all my systems are functional.

  Sunny had been a much quieter presence in my head as of late—only responding to me when addressed directly. Not like she’d ever been conversational, exactly. She didn’t interrupt my own thoughts or conversations nearly as much.

  I was beginning to wonder how much of her brain was becoming my brain—where I ended and she began. Perhaps she was using minimal resources to communicate with me while also still attempting to carry out my commands to search the megobari data, or she no longer needed to communicate with me except with the most simplistic words.

  Maybe my body was beginning to use her functions without my conscious command. Maybe, eventually, she’d cease to feel separate from me at all. Even now she was there in my mind, listening, or feeling whatever I was feeling, and I sensed no response from her.

  It’d be fascinating to study what was happening in my brain right now—if I wasn’t the test subject.

  Slowly, I made my way down the hall, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I’d slept like the dead. No dreams. No nightmares.

  Everyone was gathered in the main room, looking pale and anxious. As soon as I entered, everyone rose. Luka leaped to his feet and came straight to me. “How are you feeling?”

  “A little out of it. But okay. What time is it?”

  “Around nine,” he said, tilting my chin up to examine my eyes, to see if my pupils reacted to the light.

  “Sorry we didn’t wake you,” Mitsuko said. “Luka thought you needed sleep after what you guys did last night.”

  That made Emilio’s eyebrows shoot up. “What . . . you guys did?”

  “With Pinnacle. Get your mind out of the gutter.” Mitsuko shot him a glare. “We’re just discussing what to do next.”

  “We got the mission records. Mitsuko and Emilio are working on a way to securely upload them, unedited, to the internet.”

  “Did we get what we needed, though? About the weapon?” I moved to sit at the table and Luka was two steps ahead of me, pulling out my chair. I made a face at him. “Luka, I’m not sick.”

  His concerned expression didn’t abate.

  “We were waiting on you for that.” Hanna was also laser-focused on me. Both of them were treating me like they expected an alien to burst from my chest at any moment. “I checked it last night after you passed out. I believe we were successful. There’s only one thing—”

  Mitsuko got up and brought me a cold Pop-Tart. “Give her a few minutes to ease into it, would you?” To me she said, “You need to eat something, at least.”

  I pushed the plate away, stomach roiling. “No, we can’t wait. Tell me.”

  “Oracle appears to have a copy of whatever you asked it to save. But I can’t access it. I think—since Sunny was the original one who copied and encoded it—Sunny has to be the one to play it back.”

  My head was spinning. For a moment this all felt ridiculous—the five of us, with stolen and experimental tech, playing with things we didn’t understand, guessing and making it up as we went along. We were going to save the world?

  Yes, I decided. We were. Nobody else seemed to be doing a better job of it.

  I waved my hands impatiently, trying to hide my nerves. “Let me try.”

  Hanna placed Oracle in front of me.

  Hesitantly—reminding myself that without Hanna touching it also, this was just an output node, nothing like last night—I laid my hand into its warm surface, my fingers sinking in a little, just as before.

  “Whoa,” Emilio murmured. “This is some space-age shit.”

  The holographic screen flickered to life. I felt Sunny’s increased awareness, warming me like dawn.

  Here goes nothing.

  “Sunny, please access anything that you are able to show us from the megobari archives,” I said, speaking aloud for the benefit of the others. I doubted this would work. I’d tried this exact query multiple times already. “Specifically related to mentions of a weapon they were developing to end the war.”

  I felt—or maybe imagined—her gearing up, focusing, her intention sending nerve pulses down my arm, through my palm, into Oracle. And then the waiting, as she searched.

  Then the startle as Sunny addressed me. Search results found. I have attempted to translate from source language. Some data may appear corrupted. Display?

  Wait—Luka could understand the megobari language. Sunny, try displaying in original language first, if you can.

  I set eyes on Luka. “Sunny’s going to try to display what she can. Can you translate?”

  He nodded, gaze fixing on Oracle’s holo-display, face going pale. “I think—”

  Before he could finish, a spherical shape appeared in strands of light on the holographic display, a rich rainbow of shifting colors. Before I could even decipher exactly what I was seeing, the shape twisted into dozens of tiny shattering rainbows, fluttering down and out, and were replaced by drops of colored light that jumped from one side of the display to the other. The spheres of color hopped like staccato notes, like music if one could see sounds, a crackling energy that shifted and changed almost before you knew what you were seeing, so only the fading echoes on your retinas were left.

  It was beautiful, if completely nonsensical. I stole my gaze away just long enough to gauge Luka’s reaction, but he was completely absorbed in the light, his eyes darting from side to side as if reading. His face gave no indication of what, if anything, the display meant.

  It lasted only a handful of seconds, and then the light faded, the whirring shards of color fading into nothing.

  Everyone was waiting for him to speak, left breathless by the display that we could not begin to translate. How would Sunny have translated color and shape and movement into English sentences?

  “Well, what was it?” Mitsuko finally pressed.

  He had to swallow a few times before answering, his throat bobbing and voice unsteady. “This is a message from one of the last surviving outposts, near the end of the war. They had bunkered underground
, racing against time to find a way to repel the invaders. And they . . . they knew they were doomed, regardless of the outcome of the war. The losses were too much. The outpost had stopped receiving supplies and communication with the home world. This message was recorded by one of the last living scientists—a message left in case another species stumbled across it one day. It said that my people discovered a way to beat back the vrag, but it would cost them. It would cost them everything to use it.”

  “And did they?”

  “I don’t know. This person didn’t know. They . . . died before finding out, I think.” He cleared his throat again.

  “Is that it?” Mitsuko asked, leaning her palms on the table. “That’s the message they left for us across all space and time? A warning? They don’t even say what it is, what it does? An instruction manual would be helpful.”

  I shook my head. “It’s a weapon of mass destruction. It’s meant to kill a lot of things all at once. Something so terrible that it should only be used as a last resort. Or never.”

  Luka was staring into space. His voice was quiet, pleading. “Why didn’t they use it?”

  “Maybe they didn’t get a chance,” Hanna said darkly.

  That made us all go quiet.

  “Maybe it didn’t work?” Emilio asked.

  “Or they built more than one,” I said. “We built more than one A-bomb, after all. Maybe this was their backup plan. Or . . . one of many?”

  “That seems like something they would do,” Luka agreed, but his brow was still furrowed in confusion. Instead of getting angry, he was closing himself off.

  “So . . . are we any better off than we were before?” Emilio asked.

  “Sunny, pull up anything you can find about what the weapon actually does,” I said.

  A singular held breath tied us all together as we waited for something to happen. And then a chaotic array of colors flittered across our retinas, incomprehensible to all but one.

  I watched Luka—watched his eyes. They darted side to side, speed-reading what appeared to be an immense amount of information for how long the light show went on.