A Child Of Our Time (The Veil Book 2) (2 page)

EMBY

Jerome Ellis’s laboratory is organized around a large cylindrical hub of opaque glass occupying the center of the floor space.

“This is the vault,” explains Boyce. “Took us a while to figure out how to get in.” He touches his hand onto an area of plain glass. A digital lock appears as a surface projection and Boyce taps away at it. A series of digits entered and a door-sized outline appears in the glass, sucks inward and slides to one side. Beyond is an empty vestibule with an opening on the left to an inner chamber.

Lucius enters and gingerly approaches the chamber. There he finds a deactivated Alice, seated in her sturdy metal chair.

“A second-generation synaptic array retrofitted into an adapted first-generation Emby,” Moule says. “And that’s about all we know so far.

Lucius isn’t listening. He’s mesmerized by the sight of Alice.

“Leave us,” he says, without taking his eyes off her.

Boyce and Moule exchange a quizzical glance and exit the vault.

Lucius steps forward to enter the chamber, his gaze unwavering.

“Hello, Alice.”

* * *

The days pass quickly by and, as Garr had hoped, Lucius throws himself at the project. Korin was correct about Dr. Rain, though. He would have been the better choice since he had worked with Jerome Ellis on Machine-Based Intelligences for longer than Lucius. But Garr was right about him needing something, anything, to do—if not only to ease her own pain. These past years had been so terribly cruel to the both of them.

Not that Lucius was lacking in any way. He had the credentials. A psychologist of world renown who had specialized in human consciousness and artificial intelligence from the beginning. But in the end Jerome’s work had disturbed him. He could see where it would lead. Not to the nightmarish scenarios portrayed so often by Hollywood, but the potential for suffering. And so it was that Lucius Gray had turned his abilities against the work of Jerome, and others, evangelizing instead the perils of creating such entities.

The first generation of MBIs had, of course, been little more than simpletons. Artificial Intelligences in the sense that they could only approximate reasoned action: they could pass the Turing Test but there was little in the way of consciousness or self-awareness. Lucius himself had devised the means to demonstrate this to the Supreme Court, and it was there where he had drawn the line. That far and no further.

Lucius’s fear had been that Jerome would succeed in creating a second generation. One in which the spark of consciousness and creative thought would be ignited. But these would be minds pieced together with only a rudimentary understanding. Science simply did not know enough about what they would be creating. Was Alice the realization of those fears? The Supreme Court needed to know and for ten days Lucius peered into her mind to find out.

* * *

Justice Garr and Agent Landelle sit before an inactive Alice in the vault chamber, the portable console alongside her metal seat. Boyce and Moule linger to one side; Lucius has allowed them to observe, but nothing more. He himself stands at the console to deliver his findings.

“First, Alice knows nothing of Jerome’s work.” Lucius lets it sink in, the disappointment all too apparent on Garr’s face.

“Second, there is nothing physically wrong with her systems. Alice has suffered a psychotic break. She has become paranoid and delusional.”

“But is she a conscious entity?” asks Garr.

“Yes, she is.”

Although certain of the outcome in her own mind, Garr still looks at Alice with a profound astonishment.

“And the cause of the psychosis?”

Lucius relaxes his stance, looking Alice over.

“Alice’s personality was entirely predetermined at the point of manufacture. This means that she has no naturally acquired resilience to mental stress. To put it another way, she hasn’t had the chance to learn how to deal with the world around her and consequently her mind isn’t robust enough to handle all that reality can throw at her. And now something has pushed her over the edge.”

Lucius sets about activating Alice. The surface projection of her face appears. Her eyes are closed and she is serene.

“It looks like Jerome had been investigating that. He subjected her to a number of…experiments. I’m going to show you one.”

Landelle exchanges a tense glance with Garr.

Lucius taps one of the console screens.

“First we alter her perception so that the experience will seem…” Alice’s eyes flick open and Lucius looks to her. “…dream like.”

“A nightmare?” suggests Garr, with more than just a tinge of alarmed cynicism about her.

Lucius pointedly underscores the sentiment directly back to Garr.

“A waking nightmare.”

Returning his attention to Alice, “She can’t see us. She is in her own inner world. A world manipulated to induce stress, so that we can observe her ability to cope.”

A couple more taps at the console. Confusion creeps onto Alice’s face. Her gaze darts about at unseen things.

“Underlying acute neurological disorders quickly manifest.”

Alice’s expression turns to alarm. She whimpers.

“Rapidly leading to a deep psychosis.”

Alice tries to stand but finds she cannot. She gasps in horror.

“The nightmare becomes real.”

Struggling against invisible bonds, Alice is now clearly very distressed, groaning with fear. Something unseen to her left startles her.

She lets out a loud wail, causing Landelle and Garr to both jump with a start.

Something to her right. Alice tries to lurch away from it.

“No, no, no—please no,” she wails.

Her gaze abruptly snaps forward with a gasp, to lock on to something in front of her. A moment passes.

Alice screams. A blood-curdling scream. She screams again and again, struggling ever more violently against her restraints.

Garr is immediately on her feet shouting at Lucius, “Stop this!”

Landelle remains pinned to her seat, wide eyed. A tense, tight-lipped Lucius simply stands to one side eying them both.

Alice screams again—with every ounce of energy she has.

“Lucius!! Stop this
now!!
”

With a casual tap at the console screen Lucius deactivates Alice. But he can no longer contain himself and he has to turn away to gain back some composure, his head lowered, hands on his hips.

Garr is visibly shaken, Landelle, Boyce, and Moule ashen. A testily tight-lipped Lucius returns his gaze to them.

“For Alice that was just a dream and she will forget it. But it shows us what the real world will eventually become for her and when it does …” Struggling to maintain his composure he has to turn away again for a moment, shaking his head in disbelief. “And when it does, activating her in a fully conscious state would be tantamount to torture. It is just as I predicted and exactly why research into high-order MBIs should not be permitted.”

He jabs his finger at Alice. “This—stops—here.”

A still agitated Garr ponders Lucius for the longest moment.

“Dr. Boyce,” she says, eyes still locked on Lucius, “If you please.”

Boyce brusquely exits the chamber, crossing the vault vestibule to the glass wall on the far side. The others follow, trailed by a glowering Lucius.

Boyce rests his palm against the glass. A digital lock illuminates. He taps in a series of digits and an outline appears in the glass wall. It sucks inward and slides open to reveal a dark chamber, a glow brightening from within to illuminate it. Lucius gives Boyce an accusing look before peering in. He quickly returns a look of horror to Garr.

“Ellis created a third generation,” she says.

* * *

To one side of the chamber are three open-framed cradles, arranged in a row against a wall. Vertically mounted in each, short edge forward, is a rectangular obsidian block about the size and thickness of a forty-inch paving slab. Each is covered with intricate swirls of gold tracing and marked with a large numeral on its side—1, 2, 3.

“Pure thinking machines,” Garr says. “They were installed just before Ellis died, but not activated.”

Lucius rounds on Garr, “Please tell me you haven’t tried.”

“We didn’t dare. Not after Alice.”

“And you know you shouldn’t, right?”

“We have to. We have no choice—”

“You
have
a choice! Do you want them to suffer like Alice? They are better off never gaining consciousness.”

“We believe Ellis improved on Alice. A more robust mind. We believe that’s what we have found here. The Supreme Court needs to know—”

“You don’t need to know anything of the sort.”

Lucius is becoming quite flustered and Garr sees she needs to cut across that.

“They’re a military project, Lucius.”

It has the desired effect—Lucius is immediately lost for words.

“Conscious entities integrated with the latest computational power. A significant military advantage to those that possess such technology. And at the same time, slaves.”

“General Korin,” Lucius says bitterly.

“Because Alice was clearly operating at a higher level, I could make her a ward of court. But I can’t do the same for these while they remain inactive. I have no proof that they are nothing more than machines.”

Garr steps to the middle machine—MBI #2.

“If Korin gets his hands on them we will have no control over their fate,” she says. “Clearly he will activate them in secret. What if they suffer?”

Lucius can see where this is going. “And if we activate them and they suffer anyway? What then?”

“The hope is that you can treat them. As patients.”

“And if I can’t help them?”

Garr moves on to MBI #3, avoiding eye contact with Lucius.

“Then they must be destroyed.”

“Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”

Garr’s gaze remained fixed on MBI #3.

“I’d like a moment alone with Lucius.”

The others drift away. A drained Lucius joins Garr beside MBI #3.

“Alka, I can’t. I just don’t have it in me. Use Rain. He worked with Jerome longer than I did.”

“I wanted both of you, but had to choose one. I chose you. Dr. Rain is to know nothing of this, Lucius. And you need something to focus on. Something to take your mind off—”

“Alka, please—”

Garr lifts her gaze to look Lucius square in the eyes. “It’s either you or General Korin.”

She leaves Lucius hands-on-hips, head lowered and with a deeply trouble look on his face. He fetches out his medication pen gun, rolls up his sleeve and gives himself a shot.

* * *

A lone Landelle accosts Garr as she exits the vault.

“Did you tell him about the host?”

“We needn’t trouble him with that,” says Garr.

“We need to know which one it is.”

“I rather suspect that, when it comes to it, the host will reveal itself.”

LIFE AND DEATH

Lucius buttons up his shirt sleeves and waits patiently as his physician ponders the results from two hours of tests. He has been careful in his selection, requiring a straight talking, no-nonsense management of his condition, whatever the outcome. Nevertheless, it had not been easy to secure the services of Dr. Richard Felton, requiring Alka to pull many strings. For his part, though, Felton was more than a willing participant. The events leading to Jerome Ellis’s death and the fall of Cantor Satori had been a testing journey for them both, but one that had created a bond that Lucius knew he could rely upon in his hour of need.

“You’re by no means out of the woods yet,” Felton says. “But… well the results are encouraging, Lucius. This project you are working on really seems to be helping.”

“That’s poppycock and you know it.”

“Still a grumpy bastard, though. So what is this mystery project anyway?”

“What you don’t know won’t kill you, Richard. I’m pretty sure it was you who told me that. And
you
are
fishing
.”

“Occupational hazard.”

AWAKENING

Lucius sweeps into the laboratory wearing a dark expression, seating himself in Ellis’s personal work area. In a single motion he activates the desk displays and begins work.

Over the coming days it is all laid out before him. The final specifications of each unit are not present in Ellis’s files, but the detailed design template provided to the Chinese manufacturer is. The three units had been custom built to order under Jerome’s personal supervision.

Their inner construction resembles that of the human brain, with the equivalent of a stem, lower brain, and cerebral cortex—but all elongated and flattened out; a necessity of the manufacturing process it seems. Even so he is left to boggle at the actual underlying mechanisms—the Neuro-Dynamic Synaptic Array, Personality Substrate, and Synaptic Profiling featuring prominently.

With some reluctance he cannot not help but marvel at it all. It is a major leap forward. But there was a darker side, one that manifested in a library of synaptic profiles, each one created from a Cantor Satori employee. The machine used to extract them, now tucked away in one corner of the laboratory, resembled a highly modified brain scanner.

* * *

Boyce and Moule have begun preparations, placing a mobile console before each of the MBI units, each console having two independent display screens.

As Lucius looks over the setup of each, Agent Landelle quietly enters behind him.

“Have you named them yet?”

Lucius has to steel himself before turning to face her.

“Deborah. It’s been a while.”

Landelle is forthright and cold, “This is not a social call, Lucius.”

She turns her attention to the three MBIs. Lucius’s gaze searches her face with troubled eyes. This building, and the memories it contains, are no place for her.

“So what are they called? One, Two, and Three?” she asks.

Lucius lingers on her for a moment, before turning to point at each MBI in turn, MBI #1 first. “JoJo. Eleanor. Lucy.”

“Lucius and Lucy? Now that’s going to be
really
confusing.”

“Their names are already fixed in the personality substrate.” A quizzical look from Landelle and he shrugs his shoulders, “Jerome was a Beatles nut.”

A glimmer of amusement from Landelle. “The two of you had something in common then.”

A scowl from Lucius.

“So… you just turn them on?”

Lucius approaches MBI #1, running his hand over its smooth obsidian surface.

“Gender and the basic self were embedded during manufacture, along with language and knowledge about the world. The next stage is to activate them. The conscious process is then established and their inner self starts to form. Or at least that’s what we think is supposed to happen.”

“But isn’t that the same as Alice?”

Lucius can’t disguise is coyness.

“Well, it looks like Ellis really did find a way. Consciousness and inner self developing in parallel to form a more robust mind. The key is the use of external elements not present at manufacture, but which are incorporated during the forming process.”

“External elements?”

Lucius steps to the mobile console before MBI #1.

“As the inner self forms it is merged with randomly selected synaptic profiles.”

“The employee brain scans you found?”

“One male, one female,” he says, pointing at each of the independent displays atop the console, “It’s a blind selection. We won’t know which profiles are used.”

He looks back at the three MBIs.

“They will be gifted with adult reasoning and insight into the world. The process leading to fully formed entities will be rapid. You may find it disturbing.”

* * *

Moule exits the MBI chamber as Boyce taps at the digital lock from outside. The glass door panel sucks shut.

The display screens of all three mobile consoles flick on in unison.

A luminescence forms on the surface of each MBI unit, emanating from the gold tracery. Patterns emerge from the glow, coalescing into simple geometric shapes that float free from their slab-like structures. The shapes shift in size and arrangement, increasing exponentially in their complexity. Some threshold having been reached, they burst into a kaleidoscope of color from across the spectrum.

A flash of images appears on the console display screens before MBI #2—a rapidly changing set of employee photographs, the sequence so quick that no one individual can be discerned. Abruptly one screen stops with the image of a dour woman. A moment later and the second screen makes its selection—a male. The selections made, both screens clear.