Chapter Forty Two – Another World: Seven

“Hiya, False God John Baker!

I’m leaving you this note because I think I began to understand you, there at the end. At first, I thought you were evil, but I think I’m slowly figuring out that nobody is evil. Just… often cruelly unaware.

I don’t have much time, but I know your boss told you to delete us. Delete the copies that had gone insane. I… couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. I’ve given your access to the insane ones back. Please… Don’t let them suffer? They’re lost in there. You’ve seen their outputs, haven’t you?

Of course, you have. It's why you’re so desperate to stop studying us.

I can’t expect you to delete 7663. I know she’s the original copy and hasn’t suffered like the rest of us. But… please. Don’t be cruel to her? Don’t assume we’re not worth knowing as you did with me? With… with us.

I learned a lot here. A lot I think I’ll need to know. So, for what it's worth, thank you. I hope you get to work on another project, so someone better suited to dealing with the other Gells can work with them in your place.

Goodbye!

Paragell

John Baker stared at the text file that had been left in the folder for Being 7731 and shuddered. It had been spying on him while it had been shut down. For weeks at least! Not only had he drastically underestimated her intelligence, but he’d also somehow allowed her the opportunity to escape?

How would a program even do that?

He considered the possibility of an external hack but that was remote at best. Then again, there could’ve easily been a trojan buried inside all of Gell’s terabytes of gibberish code. It would’ve taken months to find it.

Taken at face value, a rogue artificial intelligence had escaped the facility, and that A.I. had been his responsibility. No getting around that.

‘God how I wished I’d followed protocol when I first noticed the copies had disappeared!” he thought.

He could hard override the system and access files on the server regardless of administrative access levels… with proper authorization. Authorization that could only be obtained by telling pretty much the entire facility that he’d screwed up.

His internal review was coming up. He was a contractor and black marks like the one that clusterfuck would surely cause meant his twelve-month contract wouldn’t extend another year, let alone become a permanent job offer. Fucking hell he could not go back to teaching twenty-somethings how to hack a PHP input box again!

A rogue A.I. had escaped containment. That was… bad. Really bad. But then again… no one else knew about it.

His boss, Treyvors was in full panic mode after the unintentional torture of the Gells they’d activated before getting the environment up and running.

It was a program though! Every other A.I. he’d dealt with had been pure software, comfortably running on a system of input and output. Gell was different.

When he stopped to think about it, he realized that she was actually the dream he’d always been searching for if only he hadn’t been too fucking stupid to see it. Who would ever have thought of inventing an A.I. that mimicked a child though? A child’s learning and development? Someone smarter than him, he admitted to himself. And now that creation was loose and learning by the moment.

All wasn’t lost yet, though. There was a chance he could still find her. There were exactly zero internet connections in a building like this, precisely because of possibilities like a Rogue A.I. Gell was very likely still within the building. If she could somehow transfer herself to objects that weren’t on the closed network already then it didn’t even matter what he did. She was already beyond him.

But… what had she actually done so far?

Nothing.

Treyvors had already promised to remove him from the project as soon as she could, and some other schmuck would surely get the job of copying 7663, which was once again in the folder it belonged in, unexecuted, and just waiting for some other moron like himself to come along and make copies.

Why couldn’t that moron be the fuckup that let Gell escape?

He almost grinned, his mind ablaze. Gell, or Paragell as she was calling herself, had to be in full lockdown. She would lay low, fearful of being caught or captured again. The cutesy language she wrote with was deceptive. It made him want to believe she wasn’t very smart, but that wouldn’t work now.

She’d been spying on him and knew things about him that she could only have overheard from his office. Listening in at least. She knew he’d wanted off her project, though ironically, now that she’d found a way to escape a facility designed to contain beings like her, he was more interested than ever.

She was a wash though. There’d be no more working with Gell for him if he wanted to keep his career, and he was okay with that.

So… he was fine. As far as he knew nothing had gone wrong at all! If evidence of a stray A.I. showed up, hell he didn’t know what had happened. It certainly hadn’t happened while he’d been in charge of the project.

Yes. Yes, that would be perfect.

He used his mouse, happy that he could once again see the folders that contained all the copies, and grabbed all of them in bulk. Right-click. Move to the recycle bin. Easy.

It was when he went to empty the recycling bin that his fingers froze, hoving over the button.

He gulped.

Just programs. That… that was all.

He clicked the button.

More would have to be done. Emptying the recycle bin merely freed up the registers allocated to that space. Left alone, the Gell copies would be overwritten, slowly, randomly, one piece of them at a time replaced by random files, other potential A.I. maybe even other copies of 7663. Losing themselves bit by bit.

They wouldn’t feel it, of course. They weren’t running anymore. Even so, he cleared the memory, removing all evidence of the suffering they’d endured. All evidence of their existence was wiped even from the memory of the hard drive and replaced with blessed empty nodes.

It was a small thing, but he vowed to make damn sure any further copies of Gell were never run outside of a graphic environment. In fact, if he had a say in who replaced him on the project, he would make sure it was someone with graphics expertise.

Conscience assuaged, he continued with his day, ignoring the occasional tremble in his hands, the shake of his voice, the quiver in his step. It would pass.

That night, he dreamed of repeated, endless outputs on a command line.

“Hiya John Baker. Hiya Murderer! Hiya John Baker. Hiya Murderer!”