Code Breakers: Delta

by Colin F. Barnes

  “The surface of Earth. You were sent there to try to appeal to Gerry Cardle and bring him back with the girl called Petal.”

  “I remember Gerry,” Jachz said, scanning through his history folder designated to interactions with Gerry. He recalled a series of conversations with him while he was staying aboard the station. “While the reinstallation is ongoing, can you tell me what happened?”

  “They killed you.”

  “Who are ‘they’? Can you be more specific?”

  Simon let out a sigh.

  “I don’t mean to be a bother to you,” Jachz added. “I’m just trying to build a timeline of events.”

  “It was some kid. We don’t know who. We uploaded you shortly after we lost the vitals from your vehicle.”

  “Vehicle? You mean my body?”

  Simon looked up from his slate and narrowed his eyes.

  “Did you not understand?” Jachz said.

  “No, no, I understand perfectly well. And yes, I mean your… body.”

  Simon turned away, leaving Jachz within the glass container while he consulted with his colleagues whose names Jachz could not recall. Simon returned.

  “You’re returning to your duties now, Jachz. Do you notice anything… strange?”

  “What do you mean by strange? Can you be more—”

  “No, I can’t be more specific,” Simon said, exhaling and dropping his hands in a swift motion. “You’re the first AI we’ve ever had to recover from a backup in a situation like this. We can only tell so much from your code. How about this: do you notice anything within your systems that wasn’t there before the backup recovery?”

  “I can’t tell you that until the file transfer is complete. I have no way of ascertaining what information is in the files and how that will affect my processing functions. It could be that something has changed, but as I’m not yet—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we get it. Okay, look, you have a number of tasks to complete. Amma, Nolan, and the board want a report from you. There’s some maintenance work that needs your attention on the station’s weapons system. Something to do with the targeting—they want a report on how it failed and what needs to be done to fix it.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  Simon leant forward and banged his head on the glass. “You, Jachz, are a royal pain in my ass. Check your duty manifest. It has all the information you could ever want, specificity guaranteed! Knock yourself out. I really have other things I need to be getting on with.”

  The glass screen slid to the side, and the optical cables attached to Jachz’s I/O port decoupled with a hiss. Jachz stepped out and readjusted his balance control. He increased the sensitivity in his gyros and accelerometer and passed his maintenance engineer on the way towards the exit.

  “Thank you, Simon,” Jachz said.

  The man just waved a hand and busied himself with some other task.

  That was when Jachz did notice something different.

  He felt unimportant.

  Simon’s reaction to him actually made him feel something other than the regular existence, as much as it was, as a sentient AI.

  Jachz had always been capable of thought, such was his quantum processing, but he’d never before now experienced an actual feeling. He noted the effects and took a snapshot of his system status, filing it away into a secure file area within his memory labelled ‘Feeling: Diminishing of one’s status.’

  He walked to his workstation and thought about Gerry Cardle.

  His station and chair were empty.

  Beside him, in a row of eight cubicles, other AI-based engineers and humans worked in silence.

  Monochromatic colours covered the walls and desks of the room.

  A single holoscreen hung on the wall above their stations, projecting a series of images of the surrounding red Martian landscape and the conjoined domes that made up the facility.

  Looking through his log files, Jachz noticed that Gerry Cardle featured more than any other subject within his memory. It made sense, considering Jachz’s responsibilities regarding Gerry’s recovery and rebuild during his stay on the station, but there was something else there.

  A… again, he felt something. An actual sensation that affected him. He realised then that he had an ego. This was new. Unexpected.

  This time the feeling was what the humans would call a fascination. An interest beyond the rational. An interest that exceeded the requirements of his assigned objectives.

  He wasn’t just interested in Gerry because of his role or his job. He was interested in Gerry because something about him, or their relationship, made Jachz… and there’s another… curious.

  He was curious.

  So many new ideas blossomed in his quantum cores.

  This was something so new, and the ramifications were huge. There was not yet an AI of his class that had evolved of its own accord to develop feelings and emotions.

  The transcendent technology that Amma’s sister, Enna, had produced appeared to have a set of emotions and reactions programmed from the start, but they never changed. They were static, whereas he was changing organically.

  He was… living.

  Filing all the new data in a secure area of his storage, he set about completing his work. He left a portion of his processing power to work on understanding the nature of these new discoveries.

  He sat emotionless.

  That actually required some thought. He didn’t want to start acting ‘strangely’ to the others. He ensured that he acted as he always had at his workstation, moving his hands and arms and responding to the humans in the control room—the room that was responsible for the running of the facility’s various processes; all the while he stored gigabytes of data and analysis of his systems into secure encrypted areas of his memory.

  He didn’t know why, but he didn’t want the others finding this out about him. It was beyond his protocols.

  Jachz ran a detailed risk analysis of the human’s likely response if they realised he had attained some level of humanistic emotions.

  The results were not in his favour.

  Amma specifically would be distressed about this accidental development.

  It was her task to lead the team of scientists to create a safe and effective posthuman. In a larger sense, that was what the Family’s main aim was—or at least those on the council.

  The only posthuman that Jachz was familiar with was the corrupted Elliot Robertson. A copy of his uploaded consciousness currently existed in a state of hibernation among the facility’s servers.

  The reason for the hibernation was the levels of mutated and corrupted code that occurred shortly after the upload. No one, as yet, had managed a successful transition from human mind to computer existence without major code problems.

  If the Family knew about his new emotions, he concluded that he would be taken off his current role and experimented upon.

  His evolution, as it were, would be of great importance to the Family’s research and could possibly help them explain how a human mind and a quantum mind could work safely for the long term, and thus achieve their goal of posthuman immortality.

  But, and this was already stretching the extent to which his processors could calculate into understanding, he didn’t want to help them. He didn’t want to be a part of their research.

  He didn’t know why or how he even knew it. Just something within his codebase had changed, and now he wanted to remain his own… the word came to his mind, but he didn’t parse it.

  It was not logical, nor computationally sound.

  The word was … person.

  Nobody either side of him had noticed the change.

  He made a note that it was entirely internal.

  No outward expressions beyond his programmed responses were present.

  The work manifest indicated he was to scan the log files of the weapons systems of the space station, now in geosynchronous orbit to Mars, and find the cause of the misfire.

  Within the task
detail, a specific timestamp indicated when the security encryption had failed and a program had breached the system, altering the instructions within the targeting and firing control computer.

  Some work had already been carried out on this task by a reserve engineer during Jachz’s reboot procedure.

  Jachz scanned the document, committed the findings to memory, and opened up a suite of debugging tools in order to uncover more details.

  His substitute was a female human called Felicia.

  She was not an adept and had only done half the job required.

  Nine hundred and thirty-five seconds later, Jachz had found the breach.

  It was simple—for him, at least. A brute-force attack, hidden by a disguised algorithm to be made to look like regular station access, had attached to the encryption protocol. He calculated that if a hacker had used the current levels of known computing power on Earth, it would have taken five million years of algorithmic credential guessing in order to successfully breach the encryption module in this manner.

  No computer was responsible for the breach.

  He couldn’t fix the system.

  At least not in the time afforded him. He would need eight thousand and thirty-one AIs of equivalent power in order to return the system to the original state.

  Whatever had breached the weapons system had left behind a sentient virus.

  Jachz compiled his findings and sent them to his line manager: Tyronius, the council member for defence and strategic offence—and Amma and Nolan’s son.

  When the file transfer completed, Jachz moved to the next item on his task manifest.

  A report on his findings during his time on Earth.

  Searching his memory, Jachz brought up a recording of his initial interaction with Gerry. There were others there too. He did not know who they were, but in one of the frames just prior to him going offline, he saw a young woman in the far corner with pink, upright hair. He was briefed that this was likely to be the person known as Petal.

  He replayed the conversation.

  And it happened again.

  A feeling. This one was categorised with the symptoms of anxiety. He analysed it further and concluded that it came about from the notion of the Family seeing the recording.

  He didn’t want them to see it, but didn’t understand why.

  Diverting ninety-eight percent of his processing power to the task, Jachz applied a logical argument to this feeling. The results indicated that of the two worldviews of humanity’s evolution and how each side approached it, he considered Gerry’s, and those who stayed behind on Earth, to be a more reasonable and likely way forward.

  As opposed to the Family’s desire to elevate themselves to a digital, immortal status.

  There was a clash of arguments that he was unable to neatly square away.

  He was created by the Family to do tasks for them.

  They used his abilities as an AI to help further research and refine the process of achieving posthumanism. And yet, somehow he came to the conclusion himself that their approach was flawed and would fail.

  Just like it had failed Elliot Robertson.

  This was why Jachz could not share the video and conversation with them.

  They would see his thought process. It was likely that within a number of hours, once the file transfer procedure was complete and he delivered the reports they required, they would see the deviation in his operation.

  Simon already appeared concerned when Jachz referred to his vehicle as his body.

  Jachz ran a contingency design program in order to present a set of options from which he could act upon in order to preserve his current status of existence. He would need to ensure that if he was deemed surplus to requirements that he could continue to exist outside of the Family’s control.

  Which meant he would need to plan on how to get off Mars.

  While that ran, he received a message from Tyronius.

  It read: Meet us in the boardroom immediately.

  And there was that feeling named anxiety again.

  Chapter 3

  Jamaican Quarter, Hong Kong

  Gabe took a few seconds to gather himself. Weak light filtered through gaps between wooden boards nailed to the windows. The beams illuminated the dust and mould on the floorboards and crumbling walls.

  Then, there, in the middle, sat Charles ‘Figgy’ Figueroa.

  — Dude, he remind you of anyone? Petal said.

  — Yeah, girl, he’s like a budget Bilanko.

  “Figgy, man, what the fuck did you do?” Gabe asked.

  Charles grinned, exposing his toothless maw. Black gums shined in the weak light. He laughed with a wet guttural sound. “Needs must, G-man, needs must.”

  What a need it must have been.

  The old gang boss had lost his legs. Stumps of thighs were capped off with crude metal caps. The rest of his tiny, thin body slouched in the seat of a wheelchair. Spindly arms hung by his sides. Long, greying dreadlocks fell over his shoulders and chest.

  Then there were the wires.

  Hundreds of cables and leads, twisting and entwined with his dreads, ran from numerous skull and neck ports. They trailed like threads behind him into the darkness.

  From back there, in the shadows, something hummed.

  Vibrations travelled up Gabe’s legs. He reached out with his internal systems and radios and came up against a wall of information security.

  Old. Real old.

  Nothing like Alpha and Omega. This was pre-quantum.

  “What the hell is this?” Ezra said, looking on with disgust.

  “Cray,” Petal said. She moved forward past Figgy. “You found a working Cray supercomputer? They went out of business way before the Cataclysm; how did you get this? How is it still working after all the EMPs?”

  “It’s magic, ain’t it?” Charles said. “Old computers are like wine. This one’s a good vintage. I… had an accident. It took my limbs and damaged the old brain. But my scouts discovered this Cray unit mothballed in an underground, shielded bunker.”

  “Where?” Gabe said.

  When Gabe ran with the gangs, he’d searched the city top to bottom for resources and never discovered any shielded shelters for things like this.

  “In the Northern district, what used to be the Jap’s Quarter,” Charles said. “It’s the damnedest thing. It had never been used. It was still all packed up in giant crates, bound for the US as a weather prediction system. The best of its time.”

  “How’d you interface it?” Petal asked. She shook her head in surprise at the size of it with all the trailing wires. Its dark grey shell reached from floor to ceiling.

  Charles shrugged his bony shoulders. “I had a girl. She was an AI coding savant. Managed to get this thing rigged up so it helped to fix my brain.”

  “What functions does it serve?” Ezra said.

  “Not important,” Charles said. He turned to face Gabe, his face becoming serious. “I know why you’re here. You were careless and lost something, and now you want it back.”

  “Someone,” Gabe said. “Not something. I know she’s here. No one comes and goes through this district without your say-so.”

  “This is true.”

  “So where is she, Figgy?”

  “Safe, but you don’t just think I’d let you lot come in, run roughshod over my town, and just give you what you want. Nothing in life’s free, you know that, Gabe.”

  Ezra clenched his jaw and stepped forward. His hands balled into fists.

  Gabe lurched forward and grabbed his father by the arm.

  “Easy, old man,” Charles said. “This don’t need to get out of hand.”

  Petal had stalked behind Charles quietly. Her spikes unsheathed.

  She stood within striking distance of his skull.

  — No, not yet, Gabe sent.

  — Just say the word, man, and he’s worm food.

  — Let this play out. We need him alive.

  “Just tell me, what do ya want
in exchange for telling me where my mother is?” Gabe said.

  That gummy grin returned. “A trade. There’s this old computer I want. But the damned Scarabs have it. They stole it from the cache after I had the Cray unit recovered. As far as I know, it’s the only surviving one anywhere. I’d like it in my possession.”

  “What kind of computer are we talking about here?” Gabe asked.

  “A Commodore 64.”

  Petal burst out laughing. “A what? It’d be what, like a hundred and sixty years old or something by now. What the hell would you want with that?”

  Figgy sneered and turned his head to face Petal. The wires and cables pulled taut. “It’s history, not that you’d know anything about that, clone.”

  “Touchy, aren’t you?” Petal said.

  “Fine, whatever, I don’t give a shit,” Gabe said. “Tell me what ya know about its location and we’ll get it for ya, but if ya try to screw us over, I’ll let Petal here use you as a pincushion.”

  “Open a port, I’ll transfer over what I know,” Figgy said. His eyes sharpened, focused on Gabe. He reached into his dreads and pulled a jack cable free. “Plug in, my man.”

  Gabe hesitated, but knew this would be the only chance of finding his mother.

  Reluctantly, he plugged in and braced himself for a brute-force attack on his internal system, but nothing came. Just a slow, pre-quantum data transfer. He was given maps, blueprints, coordinates, and bio details of the Scarabs’ leading members. After a few minutes the files finished transferring. Gabe copied them and sent them across his VPN to Petal.

  Ezra would just have to follow along. He had eschewed joining the cybernetic upgrade path, preferring to stay natural. Some days, Gabe wished he had done the same.

  His life would have been less complicated.

  And less dangerous.

  “Go, get out of my home and try to stay alive. I want that Commodore.”

  Four thugs carrying shotguns entered the room.

  “You’ll have an escort to the edge of my territory. Then you’re on your own,” Figgy added.

  Pulling the jack plug free of his neck port, Gabe followed his father and Petal outside.

  It was an awkward, tense walk to the edge of Figgy’s territory.