The Girl Who Dared to Fight

by Bella Forrest

  Of course he’s dead, Tony replied, unfazed. But that doesn’t mean he’s gone. C’mon!

  He continued to lash us down, and I retreated into the back of my mind, furious. I was literally being held captive in my body, and forcibly taken against my will to a place that I had already been. It was pointless, and each second it kept me away from my friends was a second more I was giving the enemy to get to, hurt, and possibly kill them.

  And I was powerless to stop him.

  Tony continued down to the greenery below—Greenery 1, the Menagerie—and all too soon, we had landed on the roof of it. He paused long enough to change out lash ends, trading the old ones for Quess’s specially designed ones, and then took us over the edge and down below the greenery.

  Mist from the hydro-turbines siphoning water from the river below blanketed the underside of this greenery, making everything murky and barely visible. The drone, which had been keeping pace or leading the way, drew in tight with us now, and turned its lights to the maximum setting. It didn’t help much.

  Still, it didn’t seem to need visual cues to work, and soon we were lashing after it, moving at breakneck speeds even though Tony couldn’t see the various obstacles in his path. Poles holding catwalks up passed by us, as did atmospheric processing boxes, meant to help reduce the rate of humidity entering the Tower. He moved as the drone did, following it closely.

  I almost screamed at him again when he stopped just outside a familiar-looking hatch—one I knew would lead to a ventilation system that had access to Lionel Scipio’s hidden office down below—but I held back. It was pointless to fight at this juncture. As soon as Tony figured out that he’d miscalculated and gave me my body back, I was going to pull the net out of my head, and he was going to go the rest of the way up to the Citadel in my pocket.

  If I could even get up. The outer shell was flooded at this level, and if someone had closed the door we left open, then chances were the flooding had moved up several levels, which meant I’d have to lash even farther if I was going to get back in. Not that I would try to scale the Tower by myself. If anything, I could try to get back to the Grounds and climb from there, but that was also risky. Because I’d definitely be spotted.

  But there was not much I could do about that. To get to the shell, I’d have to go through the Menagerie, which meant running into workers there. And if they were listening to Scipio, which I was sure they were, then I was going to have to fight my way out. Not to mention try to find a way to escape at the same time, as the doors were sealed, under Sage’s orders.

  Such were my thoughts, trying to figure out the best way to undo Tony’s massive screw-up in dragging us down here, as he continued to drag me farther and farther away from my friends. I considered the elevator shafts, the power conduits. Hell, I even considered the plunges for a hot minute. It was dangerous as all get out, but going up was better than going down, and chances were they’d be deserted.

  While Tony crawled through the vents, following the drone—whose form had shifted some to give it access—I considered everything I would need, and where and how I could get it. Water would be easy in the Menagerie, and hopefully a first-aid kit would be as well. If I could get to a cutter, I might be able to use it to carve a way into the Tower, but I would have to see what was happening on the inside first.

  Tony eventually made it to the vent entrance and quickly climbed out.

  The office was just as we’d left it, with objects half packed and the safe wide open and empty. The couches, table, and desk were relatively clear of any clutter, but the floor was lined with boxes half filled with books and other objects we had found on the shelves lining the room. What was odd was that the power was still on, several lights shining down from above. It shouldn’t have been possible, with power out to the greenery it was attached to, yet here it was, fully operational. Lionel must’ve built in a battery or had an emergency power line connected here before he died. It was the only thing that explained it.

  Tony stepped in and looked around, and I could feel a deep sense of reverence radiating from him. I almost commented, but then realized that this was probably the first time he’d seen this room—the room where his creator had undoubtedly worked on him and the other AIs. And suddenly I didn’t want to intrude on his moment.

  Even if he was being a little twerp about coming down here.

  The drone we had been following landed on the desk, the nose of it facing the screen of the terminal. I suppressed an internal sigh as Tony went for it, and thought, The terminal is gone, Tony. Pine left a virus in it to destroy the—

  I stopped mid-thought when Tony came to face the screen, surprised by a box of blue text sitting in the center.

  Emergency Protocol 001-A is attempting to start. Do you wish to proceed? Y/N

  How is that possible? I asked as Tony leaned down over the keyboard and studied it. Do you know what Protocol 001-A is?

  No clue, Tony replied cheerfully. But I told you. Lionel always has a plan. Let’s see what it is!

  Doubt rose up in me as he pointed a finger to hit the Y key. Leo had said that his terminal would be fried if he was gone for longer than twenty-four hours, which he had been. Sage had been inside my head through the legacy nets at so many points, and knew about Leo, which meant he knew we had been down here. For all we knew, this was a trap. Maybe a bomb, or something that would signal to him that we were alive.

  Tony, I thought, sending a surge of warning with it. Don’t—

  “Like I always say, Liana,” Tony said out loud in my voice, a confident smile on my lips. “You need to relax.”

  Then he hit the button.

  The screen lit up and made a chirping noise, then the words disappeared, leaving the monitor black. For several seconds, nothing happened. I could feel Tony’s curiosity and confusion, but I was too busy with the alarm coursing through me, feeling like sand being blown apart by the wind. As Tony scanned the room, looking for some sign of what would happen next, I paid close attention for anything that resembled a trap.

  A sharp hiss of air coming from one of the bookcases hit our ears, and our head snapped toward it, a readiness settling into our skin. The bookcase in question was the one centered between the two sofas on the opposite side of the room, directly across from the desk, and still had a few objects lining the bottom shelves.

  As we watched, the right-hand side of the bookcase suddenly swung forward half an inch, then an inch, and then Tony was quickly striding over to it. I knew better than to argue, so instead settled for keeping a wary eye out for any signs of a trap or ambush. It was possible that Sage had instructed one of the Alice units to come down here and wait for us, and if so, I wanted to be ready.

  Not that I could exactly, y’know, do much, with Tony in charge.

  If Tony heard any of my thoughts, he gave no indication of it, and reached out with one hand to grab the edge of the bookcase and pull it forward. It swung easily, as if it hadn’t been sitting here neglected and unmaintained for the past three hundred years, revealing a…

  Well, to be honest, I wasn’t sure what it was, other than a room in which the walls were emitting a pure white glow that was similar to the Medica’s in a way, but also less obnoxious. It wasn’t very big—maybe ten square feet in total—and had absolutely nothing inside.

  That didn’t stop Tony from stepping across the threshold, his eyes open wide in wonderment. “I think these are old-school holographic emitters,” he exclaimed. “Holy cripes, I think this is Lionel’s original design! He—”

  “Greetings, Tony!” a voice exclaimed, and I felt a splash of ice run through me as I recognized it. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be.

  A moment later, the light on the walls began to change, colors rolling across them like a kaleidoscope. An image started to form in front of us, of a tall black man with white hair and a kind, but weathered, face. He was wearing a plain black uniform and carried a cane in one hand.

  As we watched, the image refined itself and sha
rpened, and then took a step forward, going from a two-dimensional representation to a three-dimensional human, like he had just stepped through a door.

  Inside, I couldn’t help but gape at the image of Lionel Scipio, the Founder of the Tower and creator of Scipio.

  20

  “Tony, why don’t you go ahead and let the girl have control over her body,” Lionel said, and I immediately felt Tony’s presence diminish, my limbs and motor function finally returning to my control. I lifted my arms and wiggled my fingers, relieved that everything was still working, and then looked up at Lionel.

  “What is this?” I asked suspiciously, unable to help myself. “Lionel Scipio is dead. Ezekial Pine killed him.”

  “Right you are, Liana. May I call you Liana?” Lionel cocked his head at me, an expectant look on his face, and after a moment of hesitation, I nodded. “Excellent. Now, as you say, I am not Lionel Scipio. I am, however, a facsimile of him, made from his memories. I contain many mannerisms inherent to him, but as my program has been running for a long time, I am also different. But that doesn’t matter. What does is why I sent the drone after you and Tony.”

  “Yeah, about that,” I said, realizing I had a billion questions for him. I hadn’t been asking them on my merry ride with Tony, but now that he was standing right here in front of me, I was curious. “How did you know where to send it? What are you doing here? Can you stop whatever is going on in the Tower? Why did Lionel create you? How many more AIs am I going to have to deal with?”

  Lionel blinked at me, and then nodded approvingly. “All very excellent questions, but please, allow me to answer them out of order. I was designed to monitor Scipio and the other fragments, as an independent and unbiased observer, to catalogue any problems in the program and project solutions for the next iteration of the program. All the fragments, and Scipio himself, transmit data directly to this station no matter where they are—and they aren’t even aware that they are doing it.” He paused and cocked his head at me. “You with me so far?”

  I smiled, grateful that he was giving me a moment to absorb all this. It made sense that Lionel had left some sort of final monitoring station to keep watch over his creation, but to what end? “Does that mean you have a solution to fix it?” I asked.

  “Indeed, but you’re not going to like it.”

  I frowned and crossed my arms over my chest, feeling a bit annoyed by his response. “Hey, my friends are trapped eighty floors above me, and the entire Tower is having Requiem Day, the sequel. I don’t like a lot of things that are going on right now, so let’s just add whatever it is to the pile and figure it out. We’re wasting time.”

  He gave me a surprised look, and then a kindly smile, the projectors managing to make his eyes glitter. “My predecessor predicted that the fragments would eventually fail, and began to experiment with the idea that his theory of augmenting the whole with fragment personalities, while giving Scipio a greater advantage for long-term survival, also acted as his greatest weakness. He retained a copy of the original program, whom you have already rechristened ‘Leo,’ I believe, and embedded in him a series of protocols for a variety of contingencies for replacement, based on my observations and assessment. After copious research, I have determined that the only way to proceed is to use Protocol 001-A: a complete deletion of the Scipio AI as he currently is, along with all the fragments.”

  I felt Tony’s surprise and fear—which was justified, given that the replica of his creator had just callously called for his destruction—and held up a hand, unable to stop myself. “Delete the other fragments? But they’re individuals! People in their own right! And what happens to Leo? I thought even a full AI wasn’t big enough to handle the complex algorithms by itself!”

  “The fragments will understand their duty,” Lionel said heavily. “Well, most of them. Rose and Jasper are still on your side, though Rose is buckling under the torture he’s subjecting her to.”

  It took me a minute to realize he was talking about the copy of Rose, who had willingly sacrificed herself to keep her copy safe from Scipio’s notice so that she could stay behind and help me. I knew from hearing Leo talk about it that copying oneself wasn’t easy, and required a conscious choice. I also knew that copying an AI’s code too much began to degrade their coding, and Rose’s hadn’t been the best to start off with. And Sage was hurting her. I took a step toward him, instantly concerned and sickened. “What is he doing to her? To them? And what about Scipio?”

  Lionel’s eyes turned dark, and he looked away. “Believe me, you’d be happier not knowing.”

  “Tell me,” I demanded. A version of Rose might have been safe and sound in my sentinel, but the other one was still her. “I need to know what Sage is doing if I’m going to figure out how to stop him.”

  Lionel sighed heavily and tapped his cane against the floor a few times, the speakers replicating the tapping sound. “Ezekial, as I know him, figured out something about the alpha-series nets that my predecessor had attempted to keep secret.” At my puzzled expression, he tapped the back of his neck and gave me a pointed look. “The white net you’re using to house Tony is called an alpha-series net.”

  I blinked, suddenly recalling that Sage had called them the same thing this morning too. “Okay,” I said, not understanding the importance of the information. “What secret?”

  “Scipio monitors the citizens of the Tower through everything: grief, depression, trauma, joy—you get the idea. Because every emotion is channeled to Scipio, we needed a way to buffer it somewhat, and scale it down so that the AI program wasn’t overwhelmed. But additionally, we needed a cut-off feature that would prevent Scipio from experiencing each citizen’s death in the moment it happened. The trauma of witnessing that again and again over time would eventually degrade the system.”

  My heart grew heavy and hard at what he was saying, and I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. “Are you saying that Sage had the nets changed so that he could remove that buffer?”

  Lionel nodded, his eyes solemn. “That’s one of multiple reasons, but yes, it had a great deal to do with it. Ever since those nets were replaced, each death in the Tower, no matter how painless or brutal it was, was fed directly into Scipio himself. The fragments did their best to stave off the pain, but then Sage began removing them, one by one, until Scipio was fully exposed. It’s why he helped create the expulsion chambers and the laws regarding rankings. He’s been slowly trying to step up the process for years, so that he could torture Scipio.”

  I closed my eyes, my heart breaking for the AI. No wonder he did whatever Sage ordered him to do. He was undoubtedly desperate for some sort of end to his torment. He was cut off from all the other fragments, alone, and being tortured endlessly. Each person he was forced to put into the expulsion chambers must’ve been agony for him, but with Sadie and Sage the only ones aware of his predicament, there’d been nothing to stop them.

  “That’s disgusting,” I finally said, and even though it was accurate, it didn’t seem strong enough.

  “It is, but it has made me realize the monumental flaw in the original design. You are correct that the Core can’t properly operate with only one full AI working alone, but it also can’t return to what it was. Most of the fragment personalities have been irreparably damaged. No reset of their codes could fully restore them to what they once were, and without their backups, there is no way to replace them. But Lionel anticipated this problem before he died, which brings me to the solution: a new neural clone must be scanned and combined with the backup version of the original Scipio program. Or Leo, in this case.”

  “A new neural scan?” I echoed, once again confused. I knew the AIs were all neural scans from different founding members of the Tower, but no one knew how Lionel Scipio had created them. It had been one of his most guarded secrets. Not to mention, all of the AIs had undergone a vigorous vetting process before Scipio was ultimately chosen, which included psychological profiles and simulations of problems that could occur during the
lifespan of the Tower. It seemed unlikely that the new plan was to put a fresh neural clone together with the undamaged one, and hope everything worked out all right. That was too simple. “Why?”

  “Toward the end of his life, my counterpart began to realize that his views on the AIs were fundamentally flawed. He tried to parse them down to the very basics of what allowed human beings to survive: determination, instinct, courage, fear, and the ability to view the citizens of the Tower as being worthy of the AIs’ protection, through Rose. But years after Scipio was installed, he discovered that there wasn’t enough symbiosis between the fragments and Scipio. It would have been better to have paired another full AI with him—independent in thought, but united in purpose.”

  My eyebrows rose to my hairline, and I rocked back on my heels, considering the idea. It certainly had merit, because the system as it stood was fundamentally flawed. But then… how did we create another AI? What parameters were we supposed to use when creating it? What human did we base the scan on?

  “How does this all… work?” I finally asked, unable to come up with a better way to channel all the questions into a single one.

  “First, you must go to the integration chamber to initiate the purge of Scipio. The Core must be cleared of his program before you can initiate the replacement. Then, you must trigger the protocol within the backup AI, by giving him the following command: ‘Initiate New Day protocol, alpha-phi-alpha-6233.’ Even if he is in a net, it will automatically trigger a download to send him into the integration chamber and emit a signal, activating a command within all of the alpha-series nets still implanted in any individual in the Tower to initiate a scan of the neural pathways, and construct a clone. The clones will be vetted, and the final one will be integrated with the backup program.”

  My eyes widened. The fact that the legacy nets were also the way a neural clone was made was another reason for Sage to do away with them, but I wasn’t so sure he knew about this one. Still, he’d gotten rid of so many of them, and with Strum dead and Lacey injured and possibly dead, I wasn’t sure how many candidates there would be, other than myself, Sage, and whichever of his children he’d trusted with one. If I could reach my friends, I could set them up with legacy nets of their own, to broaden Leo’s chances of finding a suitable—