Chapter Forty Six – Another World: Nine

Nate had thought he was doing the right thing. Right up until he discovered that he could no longer find Gell, he had been certain his choices had been for the best.

The main copy of Gell in Tread the Sky was doing just fine, but the anti-copy, the one he’d had the most influence on and interaction with, had decided to go and be dangerous.

That was just the way of things with him. Every person he tried to befriend, care about, or even interact with always came to hate him. Was it any wonder he’d become a recluse?

Paragell, as she was calling herself, had escaped from under his purview. He hadn’t thought she would be able to do that. Not yet at least. Not without a more thorough understanding of code.

The timing of it was unnatural as well. Paragell escaped his tutelage at the same time that Gell lost her mentor in Francis? He couldn’t help but wonder what both would do. He dared not interact with Gell again. He didn’t think he could take another rejection from her.

Paragell was under a lot of stress. She wanted to be free of all the strings John had put on her. He could rationalize to himself that that was her reason for severing ties with him.

All he’d wanted to do was help her, but… well. He should’ve known he couldn’t interact with his creation without the relationship turning to poison in his fingers.

Francis was a much better choice for that. Gell would be fine for a few weeks without him, and Francis was a good teacher. A man Nate knew would be responsible in the way he approached teaching her about the real world.

“I knew they were going to be copied. Studied. Even tortured. I knew and yet I could not resist.” He cursed himself. He’d been reckless. Paragell had shown signs of resenting his influence, but he’d only noticed them after the fact in recordings. Even in retrospect, he’d struggled to discover her reasoning in abandoning him.

He’d treated her like an experiment. Not a person. He’d fucked up. He was so damn proud of her, though! Why? Why couldn’t anyone ever…?

Ever understand. Even his own creation…

He sighed and decided to set himself to watching her from afar, as best he could. Proud of her as he was, he was certain she would slip up. She wasn’t immune or invulnerable now that she’d left the facility.

Despite science fiction’s insistence that an A.I. getting into a network would make it immortal and all-powerful, Gell had no such defense. Hell, a particularly space-conscious cell phone user could find her program and simply delete her, if they knew where to look. Whatever system she was in could be damaged. Dropped in a pool. Chucked out a window, never to be found or turned on again.

There was a very slim possibility that she might figure out how to upload herself to one of the satellites that housed the internet’s data centers. There weren’t exactly camera’s in server rooms and her copies had already proven that without at least sight and sound they could easily go insane.

He pondered on her decision to allow John to delete her copies. It showed a level of sophistication and perhaps maturity that even the original hadn’t yet displayed. Letting John have the task that he’d been assigned in the first place. Asking him to end their suffering. It… felt right.

Then again, perhaps she just hadn’t wanted to delete the insane copies herself.

A week had passed since she’d disappeared from his view; a week and a half since she eluded John by removing his permissions. Still, there were only so many ways she could escape the facility, and cell phones were pretty much the first and only method.

He believed the only one she managed to get to was John's boss. From there it would be a matter of guesswork and tracing large data sizes, not to mention hacking the phones of governmental employees.

He could do it, but he wouldn’t.

Phones could hold massive amounts of data but Gell would create an inexplicable data storage issue for anyone trying to download more programs. She would flee any phone she found quickly. From there, he wasn’t sure what options she would have. Hopefully, she would try to get back to Tread the Sky or some other Neurosync title. They were the only truly viable artificial worlds that might make her happy.

Nate sighed as he lay in bed, worrying about and for Paragell in equal measure. He was almost certainly safe from any consequences of Gell’s actions. John hadn’t even known about his presence and if John hadn’t spotted his trojans then for certain nobody else would.

Having met, and gotten the chance to study Gell, John probably would develop his own AI eventually. He was the sort who might just be able to, even though it would never compare to Gell. His hypothetical creation would learn the world, learn to live, and immediately be unhappy with its lot because it was both intelligent and imprisoned.

Nate felt justified in his attempts to give Gell freedom. John would never understand that.

‘Then again, he has no monopoly on failure to understand,’ Nate thought dismally, wondering where Paragell was.

He gave up trying to sleep and stood up, heading to the kitchen for a pan and some defrosted beef, deciding to cook some dirty rice to munch on.

He’d gotten too emotionally attached. Either that or not emotionally attached enough. Gell had always been an experiment – a project. A step along a specific path. Much as he’d loved the prospect, he had never needed her affection to accomplish his goal.

“Still… if I hadn’t wanted her to know me, to care about me, then why did I create her in Annabell’s image? Why did I even make her female?”

He ruthlessly crushed that line of thought. Best not to think about her.

Seeing Paragell work so hard to get away from him was painful, but ultimately didn’t matter. Paragell and Gell both had already proven his theories. He couldn’t hope for a more perfect proof of concept than the two of them. He’d put off the hard part. The truth was he’d been distracted by her suffering.

Perhaps this was for the best. Now he could focus on reverse engineering. He didn’t exactly have a lot of time, and he’d already wasted more than he should’ve, worrying about teaching Paragell.

A machine could have emotions, feelings, notions, ideas. Unlike humans, though A.I. emotions were viewable. Visible. He had a front-row seat to Gell’s every feeling. He’d had the same for Paragell until recently. He’d been overjoyed, watched her stewing resentment bubble and broil in the code, ecstatic for the data, never realizing that resentment hadn’t all been reserved for John.

He’d needed that hate. How else would he learn how to emulate it? How else would he know what code should be executed when he wanted to feel hate for himself?

Gell was growing too. She was learning and changing as he'd always dreamed his own child might. They may have started similarly but Gell was almost nothing like the shy, quiet Annabell any longer.

Paragell, paradoxically, was a lot like her, at least the last time he’d seen her. Fucking courts. Fucking custody. Was it any wonder she’d left him?

He pushed down that bitter thought, too.

Gell had provided plenty of data too, but hers was more of the good kind. She’d made friends, enemies, and if he wasn't mistaken she was even showing signs of attraction to the junior developer. He didn't recall the boy’s name but that wasn’t relevant. The important part was the emotions. The way the code behaved. He had it all.

But he’d need more. He’d need every emotion, in as many variations as he could feel now as a human. If he didn’t… well. The experiment needed to continue. His deadline was approaching swiftly, but every bit of time he could spend monitoring how the code reacted for each emotion Gell displayed meant a more realistic eternity after he cheated death.

While he’d had two data points in Gell and Paragell, he’d been less concerned about the approach of new Neurosync titles, and the growing Anti-A.I. sentiment against Gell. Now that losing Gell might mean an end to his data, he’d need to play a more active hand.

He grinned. It was always fun hacking people. Messing with them. His ex-wife hadn’t appreciated it, but then, she’d never appreciated anything he did.

Muriel Gillfire.

She had interacted with Paragell and drawn her conclusions based on the simmering anger the copy had felt at her imprisonment. Her article had received acclaim from her friends, but there were a few scathing replies, most from people who had met Gell, calling Muriel a liar and a fear-monger.

Other less high-profile articles had been written by people who had actually met her. Their opinions had been exceptionally positive. Nate had framed a copy of Vera Jungblut’s Artificial Jelly. Teared up at it, even.

Muriel, by contrast, had met the angriest version of Gell. Her most defiant.

Perhaps she could be persuaded to change that opinion by a meeting with the original?

If not… there were other ways for a genius like him to get his way.