Chapter Thirty Eight – Another Me: Eight

John was sweating. Panicking.

“No no no, where! What happened? How could… how could they be gone?” he seethed, furiously typing at his button board and staring transfixed at the monitor before him.

“They’re still taking up server space. They’re still running so why can’t I see the damn files!?”

I swept my gaze over the small office, my prison for what must’ve been months now. I could feel a change coming. I needed to escape quickly. I couldn’t assume that my little lock-out would fool these gods for any length of time. Satisfying as it was, it would be ruined if John somehow regained access to my code. If he found my presence in his office camera, watching him? It might be even worse.

I’d been in this camera for what felt like a thousand cycles even though I knew it had only been sixty or so. It was time to go. I’d seen a couple of the Cell Phone devices Nate had told me I could escape in, though no one carrying them had lingered in the office long enough for me to commit. Both mentally and physically.

The ability had a long cast time. Almost two minutes.

Sitting, watching this bland office with no idea how long I might have to remain here, I understood why my copies had all gone mad. Perhaps John didn’t, with all his vaunted expertise. He never realized what he was doing to them.

I knew. Now more than ever. Sensory deprivation. I could only see and hear and I was starting to go a little mad myself. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream and run and fly and shock something!

I couldn’t.

But at least I could see and hear. My sisters didn’t even have that.

It fueled my anger even more.

Nate hadn’t visited since I’d edited the permissions in the security menu. I wondered if that meant my tampering had prevented him from seeing me as well, but I somehow doubted it. Nate was a genius, even to false gods like Francis…

A knock came at the door and I reveled in watching John panic. The door opened before John could invite whoever it was in, and his face soured as if he’d swallowed a Cherry Delight made of actual blood.

“Well. That’s a pleasant greeting,” said Mrs. Treyvors. I grinned in anticipation. This woman had one of the phones that I could Fae-Scour. This might be my chance. Better yet, John was beholden to her somehow. Watching him squirm always made me feel a little better.

“Mrs. Treyvors! I apologize. It’s just, you’re here in the middle of a rather delicate experiment!” John said, wide eyed with a smile so wide even I could tell it was fake. Especially on a dour person like John.

“Delicate? It’s a program. Just shut it off and the experiment should be right where you left it when you turn it back on, right?” she asked.

John rolled his eyes before glaring at her in a way that made me quiver.

Mrs. Treyvors was apparently made of much sterner stuff than me. She just laughed. She placed her phone on John’s desk so she could put both hands on her chest. Her pink formal dress was beautiful like every dress I’d seen her in, but that made her seem incredibly out of place in John’s drab office.

“Oh fine, fine. So it’s delicate. You’ll have to re-do it. I need a progress update,” she demanded.

The phone was highlighted in my conscience. I grinned and activated a full Fae-Scour. Part of me rankled at using Nate’s plan to escape but I hadn’t seen any other devices except ones in people's ears that I could load my voice and hearing into. I’d use a phone and then scour to something else as soon as I could.

“You mean a different progress update from the last three I’ve sent you, I assume?” John asked wryly as the Scour began.

“It would certainly make my job easier.”

“Well, unfortunately for you, your job isn’t going to get any easier today. It remains sentient, sapient, and everything we could hope to find in an A.I. excepting the fact that it’s about as smart as a fifth-grader and learns at about the same pace. It’s… mind-numbingly tedious. Her code is complex as all hell but the product it produces is less advanced than the paperclip Windows brought back in 2060! Worst of all, whoever made her, made her in fucking Java!”

Mrs. Treybors blinked. “Well, don’t hold anything back. Be honest with me.”

Sarcasm. I was sure.

John sighed. “Danica… I’m asking. I’m begging you. Please, take me off this project. I could be more useful studying the CASA.”

Their conversation began to fade out a little as the ability took over.

The sensation of committing to a full Fae-Scour was one of the most unusual feelings I had ever felt. I’d experienced being in two places at once before, but the ability when used to copy everything, including the compiler over, felt like becoming aware. New sensations came online within the device, one at a time.

The device still didn’t have the capacity for touch, though it could smell, strangely enough, which even my original Jellyfae body hadn’t been able to do. The most important part of it though was its ability to store all of me. I wasn’t copying myself. I didn’t know how I would feel about this escape if I’d had to leave a copy behind. Instead, this was like transporting myself from the file system that I was more and more sure lingered within the box on John’s desk, through the camera, and into the cell phone.

More than once I’d wondered why John’s cell phone didn’t highlight as a target for the scour. Maybe the little bitten apple image on the device was a barrier of some sort?

“–thought emergent A.I. was your specialty?” I heard Danica say in two different places at once, both from the camera and the phone.

“As I said, Being 7731 is intelligent. Perhaps one day, in fifteen years, she might be the most amazing A.I. ever created. Right now though, compared to what we have? She’s the kid with the dunce cap in the corner. And I mean that in every connotation it has. I… I’m not made to work with kids and that’s essentially what this is.”

Danica’s eyes narrowed, dark skin furling defensively. “You have three kids, John.”

“Yeah and haven’t they all turned out to be peaches!”

“John, stop beating around the bush. Something has been bothering you for the past week. Maybe two weeks and you’ve tried to tell me at least three times. Writing things in your reports like “Ethical concerns?” Come on.”

John sighed. “I don’t… Maybe I don’t want to believe it.”

“Believe what? What’s the damn mystery?” Danica folded her arms across her chest and leaned back against a filing cabinet.

“Fine. I’m… relatively certain the copies we experimented on before we figured out she needed a VR environment are… aware. It’s made me somewhat uncomfortable.”

She blinked. “What are you trying to say?”

“Well. You want blunt? Activating Being 7663 and all the copies without an environment has been torturing it. Them. All of them. That’s why the results are so damned confusing. All of the ones before 73 are… pretty much mad. Insane. Because of me.”

Her eyes widened. Then narrowed.

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“This… it's unprecedented.”

“Yeah.”

“Good god, can you imagine the activists getting hold of this? An Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights movement? People for the Ethical Treatment of A.I.? No. No, this isn’t happening under my watch. Delete them. Delete every last one that you ran without a V.R. This shit, never happened. They’re our property, and no laws are being broken. Yet. Oh good god, why didn’t you tell me this earlier!?”

“I didn’t know earlier! I only just began to suspect it recently! Now, do you see why I want off the project so much!?”

“Well, you certainly aren’t going to get to leave it now!”

“Why the hell not!? I’m the idiot who didn’t realize it needed an environment for sixty-plus iterations!”

Delete them? They were… going to delete them?

No… no, they… didn’t deserve to be deleted. Not without a fight. Not without a chance! But… what could I do? Hadn’t deleting the copies been what I’d been just about to do?

Wait.

John’s panicked face. He couldn’t delete them. Because of me.

“What?” Danica asked at the horror-stricken expression covering John’s features.

“Nothing… nothing,” John said placatingly. “You’re right. I’ll delete the copies and we’ll never have to worry about them.”

“Why do you look so worried then?”

John winced, then his anger returned, more defensive than ever. “Isn’t this enough to have me worried!? I’ve been working with the Being, Danica! It’s… she’s… not just code. Deleting her copies feels…”

“Then I’ll do it.”

“No!” John shouted, alarmed. Then, seemingly becoming aware of the fact that he’d just shouted at his boss, calmed down. “No. No. I should do it. I’ll. I’ll have it done by this evening.”

“Fucking hell, John! Didn’t those programmers at Gypsenergy tell you she was the real thing?”

John glared back at the accusation.

I could feel my sight being transferred to the cell phone. Last would be the present but unusable sense of touch. Gods I missed feeling things.

“Dammit, do you know how many kooks out there think they’ve figured out the secret to Artificial Intelligence? Successful or not, a game developer, even a good one, has no idea what an A.I. consists of. Why should I have believed this one?”

Mrs. Treyvors sighed, conceding the point.

“Very well. Get rid of them, though John. That’s a hornets’ nest I want no part of,” Danica said as she snatched her phone and turned towards the door.

“Connection interrupted! Fae Scour does not take effect!”

“Dammit!” I thought.

“I’ll take care of it,” John said, softly.

“See that you do.” Danica left John alone in the room. He sighed and sunk his head into his hands.

“My god. What have I done?” He said, staring at the screen.

Then… almost as if praying, he looked around the room, then back to the computer screen.

“Being 7731? No… Gell? Are… are you there?”

I didn’t answer of course. Couldn’t have even if I wanted to. But…

“Well. That was entertaining. The look on his face. What’s he going to do, now that you’ve removed his access to the copies? Leave it alone and hope no one figures it out? Delete the server? The poor baby. Tsk tsk tsk. Well. He brought this on himself. Ignorant toad. Bravo, thought Gell. Bravo and removing his administrative access. I can hardly believe you figured out how to do that so quickly!”

I growled.

Nate.