Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,64
did our level best to screw up your backups.” He snorted. “We have some of the best hackers in the world. And we only managed to get one of you. The security on the archives really is top-notch. Or so they say.” There was something in his voice, the barest hint of sarcasm.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He shrugged. “The archives are protected, but nothing is ever truly secure. You of all people should know that. There have been… glitches… before. Accidents. System errors. Do you really believe that they were innocent mistakes?” He snorted. “Our entire society is built on the promise of immortality. What do you think would happen if everyone realized they weren’t quite as safe as they believed?” He swirled the liquor in his glass, staring at it in concentration. “No,” he continued. “We weren’t the first to find our way into the archives, but we did manage to get in.” He offered a grin that held no humor. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t quite figure out how to clean up our mess in time.”
I had to press the implication that the archives weren’t as safe as everyone thought out of my mind, at least for the moment. “Fuck you,” I said. “How can you be so callous about taking away immortality? You’re not fucking God, Ingles.”
“No,” he agreed. “But we played God. And now the whole solar system is going to pay the price.”
I just stared at him, trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about. “Are you saying you’ve unleashed… what? Some kind of plague that will turn us all into mindless automatons?”
“If only,” Ingles replied, refilling his glass again. His face was flushed and he was slurring his words more and more. If I didn’t get answers soon, he’d pass out on me.
“You still haven’t told me what I need to know. What did you do? Why do you want us dead? How do we stop it?” My voice rose on each question and the last came out at a near shout. My hand was shaking on the Gauss pistol and I was once again filled with the urge to put a ferrous slug right into Ingles’ drunken face.
“Easy,” Chan’s voice came through my implant. “Easy.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Ingles laughed, unable to hear Chan over my personal Net. “You don’t fucking get it.” He drew a breath and dashed the back of his right hand—the hand holding the pistol—across his eyes. Was he wiping away sweat, or had he actually started to tear up? “Bliss isn’t just nanobots. It’s a fucking artificial intelligence. A full-on Alpha AI. Had to be, to make decisions about what memories to edit. A distributed intelligence across hundreds of thousands of nanites. Per dose. An honest to god hive mind. From a design standpoint, it’s absolutely beautiful. As close to perfection as anything we’ve ever done.”
“Oh, shit,” Chan whispered. Ingles was right—I didn’t get it. Didn’t understand. But clearly, Chan, with her programming background had some idea of what was going on. Ingles wasn’t done though.
“So, we have this… this beautiful mind. And we told it to make humans happy. To ensure they didn’t have any bad experiences.” He took a deep swallow from his tumbler. “It took it all of fifteen seconds to erase the first test subject.”
That thought made my stomach turn. Up until that moment, I’d thought of the blanking of the coils as an unintended side effect. A glitch. Some bit of bad code that could be corrected and controlled. But if it was an active decision not on the part of Genetechnic, but the AI itself…
“There wasn’t just one test subject on that shuttle,” I said, remembering the rows of cadavers sitting peacefully in their acceleration couches. “You didn’t stop with that first failure.”
“No,” Ingles said, downing his fourth—or was it his fifth?—whiskey. “No. We knew we were sitting on a fucking gold mine. If we could get it to work. If we could control it. We kept testing. But slowly. Carefully. Tweaking the AI.”
“Ask him what they did with the old programs,” Chan said. There was an urgency in her voice that I didn’t quite understand. Still, I dutifully repeated the question.
He snorted. “What do you think we did? We deleted them. Ordered the bots to self-destruct. That mechanism was built in, anyway. They were only supposed to last for a year, and then, poof, no more. Or sooner, if you didn’t pay your bill.”
“Oh, no. No, no,