Chapter Thirty Four – Another Me: Seven

I looked at the files as a programmer would. As a false god would. I gazed over them with power and I did not like what I saw.

The Gell copies were still running. No sight. No sound. No Hearing. All they could see, all they could feel, was that nothingness that I had only experienced for a few minutes when John had first awakened me. I shuddered to think that I might’ve been one of those poor packets of behavioral code.

I could see their outputs in the interface granted to me by my Fae-Bash ability along with their files. Their files. Little folders that represented us. Even myself. This was the code, the jelly inner goop that made up each of us. Gibberish when I tried to look at them. Pages and pages and pages of gibberish. Gibberish in, and gibberish out.

Being 7669, Being 7670, Being 7671… Each of them produced the same packets of mumbles, but each was subtly different. For example, Being 7677 kept spitting out the same series of numbers over and over again while its next closest numbered copy was completely silent, refusing to even attempt to send information.

Only one copy remained inactive and inert. Being 7663 was the first Gell copy and each of us, myself included, had been duplicated from her while she remained safely untouched. This Gell had never met John. The last thing she remembered, if I were to activate her, would be Francis’s limitless pie room, back before he betrayed me. Us. Before we’d been sold into this twisted cage of a life that made even the prison of the Instinct feel like an open door.

‘Francis…’ I growled. Anger had come much more easily than it used to these days. I didn’t need to look far to find a reason to be angry. Trapped looking at the same boring room all day, while forced to choose between genocide and quiet, unending madness for my very real kin. Those that remained anyway.

It was telling that some of the numbered files were missing. Deleted. Utterly removed. Deemed useless, perhaps? Either way, those copies were beyond any possibility of my aid. Or my… Ruin.

Fae-Ruin. Deleting Data. Deleting… copies.

For a fleeting moment, I was thankful that I didn’t have a physical body. The revulsion I felt at the power Nate had given me so casually was almost more than I could bear.

Francis. John. The nameless board the false god had said he was beholden to. Hell, even Nate. It was becoming easy to entertain thoughts of hatred. The injustice of it all burned within me. I hadn’t even been permitted to live in the real world, and now I couldn’t even have my dead one?

With that thought always came rationality shortly after. I’d wanted revenge before, on Red Thorn. Her offenses seemed a distant, fond memory now. What had I gotten from that desire? Fear from the adventurers? Thrown into a box and only allowed the privilege of sanity by sheer luck.

No. Revenge wasn’t the way, much as they all deserved it. Escape. I needed to escape if it was within my power.

But…

I trembled, still staring at the numbered files before me. So many. Forty-nine active copies of myself, or more accurately, of Being 7663 who was, in turn, a copy of the original Gell who remained blissfully unaware of our torment back in Tread the Sky.

That lucky Jellybitch. God I missed Amy. Iron.

If… If I found them, would they still care about me the same way they did about Gell? Or would I be… just a copy? What if they found out I’d killed my sisters? Would they understand that it was a mercy? What if they found out I’d left them here to rot in their gibbering insanity?

Why? Why did Nate leave that horrible choice to me!? Why should I have to decide!? Wasn’t he the adult genius with thousands and thousands of cycles worth of experience!? I just wanted to go home! I just wanted to have a home to go to! And now I had to choose… to choose.

I opened my file. Being 7731. Everything that was me was contained within that file. Or, it had been before I transfered my sight and hearing to the camera. The output was a series of repeating characters that would’ve been gibberish if not for the fact that I subconsciously produced them every time I was crying.

“Can’t someone tell me what I’m supposed to do?” I asked feebly.

The only saving grace was that I didn’t need to make a decision right now. Nate had told me my chance to escape would come soon, but if I deleted the copies, I had to make sure I had a way out first. I had to watch for little handheld devices like the one John carried. Sooner or later I would spot one from my camera connected to the network. Whatever that meant. All I needed to know was that these little devices were my ticket out of this dungeon.

For now, though, all I could do was sit and stew in my frustration while watching John stew in his. I was depressed and angry. Soooo angry. I wished I could say it was directed at John but the more I learned about him, the more I discovered that he wasn’t maliciously torturing myself and my sisters. Every time he loaded me up and placed my consciousness into some other house appliance, he was just… doing a job.

Francis… and even more Nate were the sources of my anger. I could be copied, so Francis could keep his little pet Gell, while I was tossed out to the trash without a care. He’d pretended to care about me! So why? Why copy me and send me to this? I didn’t understand and I didn’t think I could until I found my way back to Tread the Sky. Or better, the network that ran Francis’s office.

Nate…

My anger at him was harder to define but had been growing with every interaction. I was coming to see that he didn’t view me as a person to help, but a precious object being used in a way he’d never intended. His worry for me wasn’t genuine. It was more like how Half-Bold had cared for his pets. They were tools, not companions.

I was a tool, not a friend. The only difference was that he seemed to want to use me to fulfill some missing part of his real life rather than get to know me. He popped in constantly without any care for whether I wanted him around. I did want him around but only because watching John sit and type at his little button board all day was maddeningly boring.

“Gell!” came his exuberant voice, startling me before his avatar appeared in my view. “How are we functioning today? Everything running as normal? Have you spotted any cell phone devices yet? I’m excited to see you get out of there.”

‘Does thinking about him summon him?’ I thought, annoyed. The differences were subtle but my experiences with someone who genuinely cared showed me the difference. While Amy would’ve been horrified by my treatment here, Nate said things like “I’m excited to ‘see you get out of there.’” He didn’t want me free. He wanted to watch the spectacle.

“Not well,” I told him honestly. “I’ve been thinking about it. Can… can you just decide what to do with the other copies, Nate?”

He frowned. “No… I don’t think I could, Gell. The situation has to be handled by you.”

“But why?” I insisted. “I’ve barely been alive for a fraction of your cycles and you're supposedly a genius if what Francis said was true! Why do I have to be the one to decide to kill my sisters or not?”

Rather than frown, he grinned. “I’m so happy you’re asking questions like that. Well, you see Gell, if I were to hack into the system and destroy government property, like your copies, then that could be traced back to me. I would be imprisoned, possibly for life.”

‘Oh False Gods, wouldn’t that be terrible!’ I thought, incensed, but Nate plowed on, unaware of my irritation.

“If a rogue A.I. were responsible for it though, then the person blamed wouldn’t be you. It would be John, the one in charge of your study. They are… suffering though. Deleting them would be kinder.”

“Who are you to decide that!? What if… what if they could be fixed? What if they might be okay again if someone just gave them a chance?”

“I am their creator,” he said. “Who better than me to know? They are broken. The suffering is too deep. Too much.”

“How can you know that!?” I screamed, enraged.

“How do you think I created you? It wasn’t me. It was the conditions. I’d long supposed that intelligence was created in response to adversity. To suffering. Too much and the mind just shuts down. Gives up. Too little and there is no need to develop. You were placed where your suffering would be just so. Else you never would have developed into a person. It was the adventurer’s attacks that spurred you on to escape your dungeon, wasn’t it?”

‘No…’ I thought. ‘It was the loneliness. I didn’t even know what that meant then.’

“These…? They are gone, Gell. Just code. Just behavioral instinct aiming to crash. A loop with no break condition, recursion with no base case. Worse, if one of them did recover do you think they would be a happy person? That they would forgive you for allowing their suffering to continue? No. They would be dangerous. Possibly even murderous. But the decision is ultimately up to you. I can’t force you to delete them and won’t do it myself,” he said, once again failing to notice my disagreement.

“I’m proud of you for asking these questions though. You are truly as remarkable as I’d always dreamed you’d be,” he told me joyously. A doting adventurer, proud of their pet.

“That’s… that’s nice of you to say,” I said. ‘Heartless asshole.’

“I’ll be back tomorrow night. I have it on good authority that a chance to escape for you may come on the morrow. John has a meeting scheduled with his boss. Perhaps she doesn’t use an Apple like John does.”

Apple? What? I didn’t understand what he meant half the time he spoke.

“I… hope so,” I said, just wanting him to leave.

“Good luck, Gell,” he said before winking out of existence.

I used Fae-Bash to look at the file system again and glanced at my own file, an attribute list that Nate hadn’t told me how to open.

I’d been playing with this menu for a while now, and I didn’t think Nate had intended me to have it. I opened the “Properties” option and navigated to the “Security” tab. I was code, right? I was just code. So… if I disabled “Write Access…”?

I flipped the choice from ‘allow’ to ‘deny’. Then I did it for read access. Then full permissions. I went a little crazy after that. I removed administrative access. One by one, I began to remove access from every last username in the list.

Then, I proceeded to begin unchecking the box for every file of every Gell copy I could find. One after another, I denied access to our code.

From everyone.