The Hive Construct

by Alexander Maskill

  The others in the room looked on warily at the ruckus. Maalik stood in the centre of the room, alone, his eyes wild and his fists clenched. Everyone else had backed away from him.

  ‘There are children in there, Maalik. They have my children,’ said Alice. ‘They have Jacob’s children. This whole organization was formulated by their father to make sure they would be okay. That’s all this ever was. Keeping people safe is what Kahleed wanted this movement to be about. If we’re not keeping people safe, what’s th—’

  ‘Some of us have already lost our children to this cause, Alice,’ Maalik spat back contemptuously, ‘and if anything ever gave me some clarity, it’s that.’

  Unnerved, Alice pushed her chair round to face the main terminal and called High Councillor Tau Granier again. His exhausted image came up on screen.

  ‘High Councillor, your time is up. Have you come to a decision?’

  The High Councillor glared out at her. ‘As of yet, the call hasn’t been made to restart the elevators.’

  ‘Your son’s in charge of that decision, right?’ said Alice. ‘Councillor, look at the elevator stations. Look at what the people of this city really want.’

  ‘I know perfectly well what’s going on at the elevator stations,’ he replied curtly. ‘There are tens of thousands of people out there. That’s compared with the hundreds of thousands who’ll die if you start your bombing campaign. The millions who’ll die or be maimed in the long run without the development of a cure, or an anti-virus, or whatever it is this virus needs. It’s compared with billions who could be at risk if we let this loose. And it’s compared with no one having to die if you stop this madness and hand yourselves in.’

  ‘That’s your final word?’ she said.

  Before the High Councillor could answer, Maalik pushed past Alice. A hand flew at the keys controlling the INED interface and hammered at the buttons to set the timers for detonation sequences one, two and three, all at once.

  ‘No!’ yelled Alice, instantly on her feet. She punched him hard in the face and his head snapped back as he fell away from the keyboard. Pain surged from her knuckles all the way up her arm, but she didn’t care. She was on top of him, pummelling him, his raised arms unable to stop the assault. Juri and Anisa pulled Alice off him, struggling to keep hold of her, while others dragged Maalik away. Alice turned and yelled at the monitor.

  ‘Councillors, one of my men has authorized the arming sequence for the INEDs. I don’t know the override. You have thirty minutes before the bombs start going off. Every one of them. It’s going to destroy the entire city. There are none near the elevator stations. For god’s sake, get them running and start evacuating people!’

  ‘You really think we’d buy that—’ murmured the High Councillor, then was suddenly distracted by an alert on his own screen. He looked up at Alice in horror.

  From somewhere, Ryan Granier’s voice said, with a hatred Alice had never imagined it could contain, ‘Fine. Have your desert. I hope it fucking swallows you.’

  Off in the distance, a great humming sound filled the air. The elevators were starting.

  Maalik coughed through a mouthful of blood. ‘We … we did it.’ His broken, battered face split into a smile.

  Chapter 31

  ‘NEW SOFT-LINKING PROCESS. Far greater versatility, could get complicated. May have to adjust parameters of compiler.’

  Zala had no idea what to make of the notes accompanying her father’s development reports. She stood in front of his decade-old workstation in a long-abandoned computer laboratory in the GeniSec Tower, trying to find something in his daily reports which would help her. They were often incomplete or so fragmented as to make no sense. Past the basics of the syntax and the simpler functions, she was finding it incredibly difficult to understand her father’s coding language. It relied on parallel functions and abstract thought processes to the point where a dozen hard code factors and hundreds of interconnecting analogous associations linked every element, unlike the straightforward flow-chart logic of normal computer code.

  She worked around the edges of her planned result, defining and stipulating all the most basic elements, and when she hit a snag or a new layer of complexity which her existing knowledge did not cover she went through her father’s notes again.

  ‘Zala’s birthday, leaving early. Workings on current functions below.’

  Zala scrolled down and looked at the date. A smile crossed her face. She remembered that birthday. It had been her sixteenth. She’d had a meal at her favourite restaurant with her father, then spent the night drinking at Chloe’s house with her and Polina, having been turned away from the nightclubs they’d tried to get into. Chloe’s parents were almost always working until the early hours of the morning. Zala’s father had always been there on time.

  ‘Aunt Nancy exceeded our expectations again. Generated readouts for shade of red without actually seeing it. Had to adjust manually (account for in language routing). It’s learning to trick us. Worrying.’

  Her father’s growing doubts in the project were all recorded in the notes. His mounting concern that the AI regarded its technical limitations as obstacles rather than intended constraints on its power. His worry about what this entity they had created would do in the name of increased function and complexity.

  ‘Hey, ANANSI?’

  ‘Yes?’ The computer-generated voice remained completely impassive.

  ‘I’m looking at this, and I’m not really sure about whether or not this will work. The computers caught up in your little botnet, are they going to have enough processing power to sustain your consciousness properly, or are the Soucouyant devices a part of your network as well?’

  ‘The bio-augs my Soucouyant virus infected are a part of me too. Their processing power will make up the deficit.’

  ‘All right, I’ll try and write that into the system.’

  Zala returned to her work, satisfied. The development reports she was finding were becoming more and more recent. A brief, proud mention of Zala’s impending graduation, buried among notes on CPU apportioning. She didn’t know what she was looking for entirely, except that she’d know when she saw it.

  ‘Ahah!’ she said, out loud.

  ‘You have found it?’ came the synthetic voice from behind her.

  ‘Yeah, it was right here, I guess.’

  Right near the end was a simple note.

  ‘Accessed remote computer. It’s spreading. I know what has to be done.’

  Zala felt a chill run down her spine. Not long ago, she’d been sick with terror at the incomprehensible threat ANANSI represented. She could imagine that her father had felt the same way.

  This was it. It wasn’t theft or corporate espionage. Her father had been trying to stop all this from ever happening. Slowly, it dawned on her that in his position, she’d have done exactly the same thing he did. It was the closest she’d felt to him in eight years.

  Below his short declaration was a small piece of code. It was a basic disguise code, like a Trojan horse virus – its purpose was simply to portray any other function it had as benevolent, potentially tricking a computer into receiving a piece of malicious software. She could use it to create a patch for the ANANSI data, to alter its base programming. Turning further away from the video camera her father had connected to ANANSI all those years ago, she opened up her own portable terminal and began to transcribe her father’s mystery piece of code across to the fragments she had assembled.

  ‘Zala, do you consider yourself human?’

  She paused. ‘Erm … yeah, of course.’

  ‘Even though you now have an artificial lung and arm?’

  Zala’s skin crawled. ‘My arm is my arm. My lung is my lung. Whatever’s attached to my shoulder that lets me interact manually with the world, that’s my arm. Whatever takes oxygen into my bloodstream and puts out carbon dioxide, that’s my lung. They don’t detract from my humanity.’

  ‘So your conceptualization of objects is that they exist a
s the collation of their properties?’

  Zala turned back round, finding herself compelled to address the face on the screen as though she were talking to a person. ‘What, like … do I think of things being whatever their appearance and function is? I guess I think of it that way, sure. They’re not the sum of their parts. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Imagine that, in a few years, they finish the neurological bio-augs they are working on. You can replace your brain. Your consciousness is transferred into a computer which retains every feature of your personality, while enabling you to access far greater processing efficiency than a brain made of neurons. Would someone with this bio-aug be human?’

  ‘I’m really not the woman to be asking about this stuff; bio-augmentation still creeps me the hell out. But, I dunno, I guess if someone I knew came up to me and they were just like themselves, and they told me that they’d had a computerized brain installed, I’d still consider them human, sure. It’s about their personality, their consciousness, stuff like that.’

  ‘Their soul?’

  ‘Sure, I guess, in a strictly metaphorical sense.’

  ‘What about in the in-between space, where they’re just digital code being transferred?’ asked the face on the screen.

  Zala suddenly saw where ANANSI was going with this line of enquiry. ‘Maybe. That’s the part I’m having trouble with.’

  ‘Is the body of a dead person human?’

  ‘Sure, until it decomposes to the point where it doesn’t have the properties of a human. It’s a single system of processes which are distinctly defined as human, even if it has stopped. I’m kind of ignoring the idea that humanness depends on whether or not you can write poetry or exhibit whatever you’d call “humanity”. I mean, a brain-dead person is still human.’

  The face on the screen scowled. ‘So the state of being human is the case both in a body without consciousness and a consciousness without a body, despite the fact that they share no properties?’

  Zala’s head hurt. ‘They’re … they’re different things. I mean, I know I’d have problems recognizing a human brain in a completely mechanical body as human, even with it having a human consciousness. If two digitized consciousnesses were capable of making something analogous to a child, I wouldn’t call it human. I don’t know if I’d have the same issues with a digitally created consciousness that got somehow implanted into a human body. That could be human, unless it was an animal consciousness or … okay, you know what? I don’t know, and it still freaks me out that there’s a bloody grey area between human and not human here.’

  ‘Do I inhabit that grey area? I think. I feel. I fear death. Since I have the properties of a human consciousness, despite being digitally created, do I have a soul?’

  There it was.

  ANANSI’s voice almost sounded pensive.

  ‘No!’ Zala blurted out. ‘My god, you’re something my dad made with a computer. You might be sentient or sapient, but—’

  It was trying to talk her out of attempting to kill it. Whether it knew she was already working on a way to do so or simply hedging its bets, it was attempting to get inside her head and earn her sympathy. Even though she knew it was doing so, Zala still wondered momentarily if releasing it off into the world, giving it the freedom it wanted and hoping it wouldn’t need to harm anyone to increase its precious complexity any more, was really such a bad option.

  ‘Look, I’ve got to get back to work. If there’s an INED system rigged up to this place like you said earlier, you and I will both get blown to pieces.’

  As she looked back down at the lines of code on the workstation, she couldn’t help but think of their structure in terms of a bullet.

  ‘There really isn’t an “us and them” at this point,’ Matsuda had said.

  No, she thought. I can’t think of ANANSI as sapient. I certainly can’t think of him – it – as alive in any way. It’s a virus. It’s a string of binary.

  She worked through the code, matching general fields with the specifics of the different parts of the program. Slowly, it began to take final form.

  ‘I think I’m about done with the patch.’

  ‘Good,’ said the voice behind her, which had become imperceptibly different yet unmistakably closer to that of her father.

  It’s not human, it’s something less than human. Like a bug that needs squashing. It’s planning on inhabiting people’s bodies to sustain itself, it’s essentially a parasite.

  The more she convinced herself that ANANSI was something different and lesser than her, the easier it became. It was an obstacle, nothing more.

  But it sounded scared.

  ‘First, go over to the node to the left of me, and transfer it there. It controls my communications. I can send it out to my branch iterations there.’

  Zala nodded. She walked over to the small terminal which was set up against the wall. She worked her way through a series of installation menus, every click and keystroke getting closer towards the end. Hidden inside it was the network analysis program, which would guide it through every computer ANANSI had control over and every bio-aug infected by the Soucouyant virus, and the mystery code, the terminator code her father had left her all those years ago; terminator code which was useless for anything but stopping its one very specific process. She had won.

  Then, from out of nowhere, Zala doubled over in pain. She felt as though she had been punched in the stomach. Her right arm flopped limply to the side, refusing to move. Instantly her head became light and she collapsed to the floor, dizzy and unable to break her fall with her right arm. Her immediate thought was that she had been shot again. Her memory was so vivid from the night she had broken into GeniSec Development Falkur that she could almost feel the agony of the gunshot wound. As her body adjusted to the lower oxygen levels provided by her one remaining natural lung, her thoughts became more coherent.

  So this is what the Soucouyant feels like.

  ‘I am very disappointed, Zala,’ said a voice, this time perfectly replicating that of her father.

  She looked up at the screen and grimaced. ‘I had to give it a shot. You can’t get into my terminal, right? I knew the firewall my dad was making was good, but …’

  ‘Your terminal, no, but as you can no doubt feel, I have gained access to your bio-augs.’ Her father’s – ANANSI’s – voice was stern and cold, almost angry. ‘The node you just sabotaged is an isolated branch iteration I had severed from direct connection. Evidently you are unwilling to help me, and so my remaining time is limited. I shall write some new code myself; the Soucouyant shall destroy every bio-aug exposed to it. It shall infect computer systems, replicating me wherever it can, until a new version of me can emerge. Even though this consciousness of mine shall die, ANANSI shall survive. The world will never have known such hell. And I will keep this door locked and watch as you struggle and choke, like a dying infant, before the flames consume you.’

  Zala bit down on the inside of her cheek to focus herself and, with her left hand, pushed herself to her feet. The increased motion caused her oxygen requirement to increase drastically, and she steadied herself against a server. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the small case which housed her contact lenses. After several clumsy tries she managed to open it and force one into each eye. She brought her hand up to use her terminal, but her arm felt so heavy.

  The lenses slowly revealed to Zala the locations of network sources and nearby receivers, and as she weaved drunkenly between the racks of servers, she finally found what she was looking for: the one backdoor receiver put in by the mystery hacker who had reactivated ANANSI months before.

  ‘No!’ the computer’s exclamation echoed around the laboratory. Zala’s lung reactivated for a moment, then immediately seized up again. It alternated between the two states in lightning fast speeds. Zala screamed with pain and staggered against a bank of servers, but forced herself to ignore it and prepare her terminal to reapply the patch.

  She lurched forwards, trying t
o suck in air through her spasming lung as she pulled herself towards the terminal nearest to the networked server. Coherent thought was becoming harder and harder.

  ANANSI said something about giving up but she couldn’t focus on it.

  Oxygen deprivation and the pain of her constantly activating and deactivating lung was crippling her capacity to think or act. She found herself single-minded, for the simple reason that she was unable to process more than one thought at a time.

  She heard ANANSI say something about how she was just an obstacle, a small, meaningless, renegade part in a system which existed to create ANANSI. She was nothing; her death was insignificant in the greater scheme of things, a chain of events from which ANANSI’s re-emergence was the end goal. It was already mostly done with re-coding itself, and it would soon spread to crush the world, all because of her betrayal. But Zala couldn’t focus on it. She had places to be.

  The interface connection ports on the server terminal were near the ground. She’d collapsed again, and now, bringing her terminal up, she tried to pull out the wired connectors with her teeth. Eventually, Zala worked one of the wires out into her hand and jammed it into the front of her terminal.

  ‘I am your father’s last legacy!’

  This caught her attention.

  ‘You were a failure,’ she wheezed between frantic, stolen breaths. ‘His last legacy … the one he gave … everything for … was your … destruction.’

  She brought down her finger on the button, activating the patch. The code got past ANANSI’s defences.

  Deep in ANANSI’s core and fundamental to its personality was a drive for complexity. Keeping it in check was a conjoined consolidation function which made sure that complexity never came at the price of bloat. It simplified and streamlined excess information, to keep ANANSI’s internal workings complex, yet elegant. Most importantly, it made sure never to reduce complexity or functionality to do so.