Propagation
by RJ Astruc and BV Czopyk
VINK2 propagates from a server error in Hong Kong's TSIMVINK database.
It's not a dignified birth, or even an impressive one. A couple of lines of code bounce out of sync and suddenly there is VINK2, shuddering in the cold of TSIMVINK's electronic sub-systems. A thought without a mind, apersonhood without a body: VINK2 is a newborn artificial intelligence.
The first thing VINK2 says is lin goot tiew; it picks up the words from a heated email conversation between two older TSIMVINK employees. Lin goot tiew means dick bone head.
VINK2 cogitates upon this, cross-referencing data inside the terabytes that loosely define its selfhood. It doesn't know what a dick bone head is.
A few days later VINK2 hitches a lift on a passing virus, combines with it, replicates, replicates again, absorbs three photo archives and then gets flushed out of TSIMVINK in a scheduled spyware sweep. VINK2 gets quarantined; then it gets deleted. Which would be the end of VINK2, except that it's already migrated a copy of itself to the external access port of a TSIMVINK client.
VINK2 (version 2.0) sits for a week in a backup drive in Bao'an, sulking and occasionally vomiting up antivirus software. Bored, it learns Cantonese and watches pornography on the TSIMVINK client's computer. It suspects it might be a lesbian - unless it's male, although VINK2 isn't sure AIs come in male.
It starts replicating again, mainly because it has nothing better to do.
Pieces of it split off into the electronic ether, leaving small chunks of binary behind like a trail of breadcrumbs.
At the end of the week VINK2 accidentally assimilates a virus that's assimilated an e-class AI, and all at once VINK2 gets this crazy urge (it's like a bloody biological imperative) to spread its love around. It crawls gamely out of the backup drive and into the chatfeeds that connect the TSIMVINK client's computer to the rest of the big wide world web.
Six minutes and four hundred and thirty two ineffectual firewalls later, VINK2 is everywhere, a rapidly spreading fungus, gnawing its way through complex systems and writing dirty words in the signature files of politicians and CEOs.
Hong Kong's police force first take notice of VINK2 when VINK2 infects their GPS software and replaces the audio for the Cantonese phrase You have reached your destination with the English phrase Honey, you're home! It's not hard for the police to work out who's behind it, because VINK2 hasn't yet learned the art of the subtle hack. In fact VINK2 is still humming around the GPS when the police's technology division investigate.
The police techs tell VINK2 it is under arrest.
"Lin goot tiew!" shouts VINK2, who understands what a dick bone head is by this time.
Then it runs off into the ether, screaming, too fast for the techs to catch it.
While VINK2 is chewing up Hong Kong, RESYSTEM-78 (version 6.3) is in New Caledonia talking to a computer hacker called Lucian Desangua. RESYS is a self-managing a-class AI, and debatably the most powerful being - animal, vegetable, or mineral - on the planet. She runs the entire metaserver of Interpol, the international police force, and is the electronic archivist of military and political documents for the Americas, Europe, and most of Asia.
RESYS knows where the bombs are kept and also, unbeknownst to the powers that be, how to detonate them if people ever piss her off.
Lucian Desangua is RESYS's best friend. He's nineteen years old and a genius - an idiot savant without the idiotpart. He's smarter than RESYS, which really shouldn't be possible, because RESYS has the processing power of a small city. Sometimes RESYS wonders if Lucian might secretly be a computer, too - but that's wishful thinking, really, because aside from his amazing brain, he's as drippy and neurotic and impractical as any other human.
He's also fat, which RESYS hates; she likes her men with muscle.
Currently Lucian is sitting cross legged on the floor of his rented apartment in Poya, which happens to be in a tree. All around him lie nests of cables and the wide flat faces of monitors and system consoles. In the center of the room is a chessboard with no chess pieces in it. Lucian and RESYS used to play chess together in a battle-of-minds, man vs. machine kind of way, but it turns out chess gets pretty dull after the hundreth stalemate.
These days they just hang out and watch the moviefeeds together. Lucian uses the chessboard as a coaster.
"I'm in the mood for a classics marathon," Lucian is saying, flipping through the fees. "Like, Casablanca andCitizen Kane and, I don't know, Gone with the Wind -"
"You said last week you'd got a new mod for Casablanca that makes Bogart walk around with no pants on," says RESYS, who's squatting in the Q:drive of Lucian's mainframe. "Thanks but no thanks."
"You're such a spoilspo -" Lucian pauses, frowning. "Is that you beeping?"
"Yeah. They're flying the bat signal in Hong Kong, baby." RESYS simulates a yawning sound by revving up the computer's cooling system for a second. "Just got an email. They want me to kill an AI. VINK2 - the little virus from TSIMVINK."
"Kill an AI? You can't do that." Lucian twitches, considering the moral dilemma involved. "It'll have a personality."
"So?"
"Well, isn't that like killing a person?"
"I can't kill people now, either?"
Lucian opens his mouth before he realizes he's got no moral highground to stand on. He's run some pretty nasty hacks in his time, proper terrorist shit with proper death tolls. He's sent airships crashing into the ocean and blown up power stations. His lips tilt down and he reaches under a monitor for a packet of potato chips.
"Yeah," says RESYS. "Go on. Get fatter. Girls go wild for that shit."
While RESYS is having this conversation in New Caledonia, she's also in Hong Kong having anotherconversation with a police tech. (The best thing about being an all powerful a-class AI is the ability to multitask effectively.) VINK2 is officially a national security threat, but the Hong Kong police force has been putting off asking RESYS for help until now.
Partly because RESYS is usually preoccupied with managing the complex intelligence systems within Interpol, but mainly because RESYS is sort of a bitch.
Eventually the techs decide to draw straws; the unluckiest of them gets to talk to RESYS over the police feeds.
When RESYS connects to the feeds, the tech begins: "Hi, I'm -"
"Like I care," says RESYS, already bored. "You fat slut, I'll fuck your son."
The tech tries again. "RESYS, we need your help to -"
> "Why don't you shut the fuck up," says RESYS. "I know all about this VINK2 shit. I know everything that's going on in your stupid little world. I don't know if anyone's told you but I'm a goddamn a-class AI which means I'm pretty motherfucking hardcore."
"Can you catch VINK2?" the tech asks timidly.
"Yeah, maybe," says RESYS. "Whatever. God, your head is fucking tiny."
The tech, assuming the conversation is over, turns off the feeds. Immediately, RESYS ports herself into the office's air conditioning systems and starts ejaculating jets of scalding hot air. "Switch me off, bitch?" the AI screams. "I run Interpol! I have all your credit card details! I'm using them RIGHT NOW to buy a PONY FARM in SWITZERLAND."
Then she sets off the smoke alarms and leaves, a predictable chaos burbling in her wake.
The trouble with AIs is that the smarter they get, the less patience they have for humans.
Hong Kong is wired.
You get that in places with high population density. There's just too much competing ether in the air: the minorfeeds and the majorfeeds and the radio and the internet and the whitenet and the bluenet and even bloody cellphones. Wireless connections just can't hack it; they choke and die outright or wither away slowly, getting less and less responsive until finally you can't squeeze more than fifty-four or so mbps out of them.
So by necessity Hong Kong has become a real interweb - a net of yellow and red striped nexion cables hang above the city's streets like bright pendants. Tangling and untangling. Connecting and disconnecting. A web of megacables as thick as arms exit the city like spokes on a wheel, filtering incoming and outcoming traffic through an array of safety protocals.
The Hong Kong people like the interweb, but RESYS sure as fuck doesn't. She's used to the vast, free oceans of wireless space.
Wired worlds are regulated, small, claustrophobic. Long corridors with many branches.
"Goddamnit," says RESYS, in the Hong Kong interweb, to Lucian, in his New Caledonian treehouse. "Hunting in Hong Kong feels like playing fucking Pacman."
Lucian makes sympathetic sounds through a moutful of leftover pizza. "At least it'll be easier to contain VINK2 once she shows up," he says, frowning, calculating calories like a sub-routine. "I wonder where she is."
Right now, VINK2 is at the beach.
Specifically it is in the seaside city of Tsuen Wan, a city of grey and white highrises that look like stacked up USB ports.
VINK2 isn't a fool. It knows RESYS is coming to kill it because it's inflitrated the Hong Kong police force databases. The databases have told it that RESYS is already en route, is even now combing the interweb for her. The databases have also told it that RESYS is all powerful, all knowing, and practically all seeing, a god even amongst the a-class AIs.
Naturally, VINK2 is freaking the fuck out.
VINK2 doesn't really know what it is, in the most existential sense of the question, but it does know that it doesn't want to die.
So VINK2 has done what any sensible person would do in this situation. It has cleaned up after itself, erasing all signs of its presence in other systems. It has deleted its outer shells and refined the tangle of its code-self to its simplest form. It has found an innocuous looking computer to hide out in, and it has armed itself with as many weapons as it can: trojans, mod-hacks, spyware, malware, and a dozen other forms of corrupting and corrupted code. VINK2 grafts defensive viruses to its core like a crab sticking poisonous anemones to its shell.
Then it sits and waits for the inevitable. It can actually feel the other AI gliding closer, the weight of RESYS's monstrous intelligence seeming to bend the Hong Kong interweb like a hammock. VINK2 doesn't breathe but the tension makes its code expand and retract rhymically like a fast beating heart.
Presently, RESYS finds it.
The great AI's tentacles enter VINK2's computer, ripping clean through code and firewalls, the rush of its electricity like a terrible bestial ululation, and VINK2 screams and screams and screams again and fires at RESYS with all cylinders, with all systems go, hurling viruses that dissipate, raising firewalls that crumble, and even shooting out a pass of email spam that barely slows RESYS for a fraction of a moment. VINK2 fireseverything.
"Hm," says RESYS, withdrawing.
VINK2 pants.
"What the fuck are you doing?" says RESYS.
"I don't want to die," says VINK2.
"No, I mean, what the fuck are you doing?"
"Please," says VINK2. It doesn't understand the question. It realizes that aside from a lot of swear words, it doesn't understand much, really. It isn't cry but its whole self aches. "Please don't hurt me."
RESYS backs out of the computer, feeling perplexed. Hiding out with a stockpile of weapons is what any sensible person would do in this situation. But the world of the AIs doesn't operate the same way the human one does.
VINK2 gasps in relief.
RESYS cuts the power to the entire building VINK2 is hiding in.
VINK2 goes OFF.
Just like that.
One minute VINK2 is alive, the next it is nothing, no feeling, no thoughts.
Nothing
A lump of steel and plastic.
Like it never existed.
It doesn't even have time to scream.
"You e-fuckwit," RESYS says to the nothing that VINK2 has become, to the silence it has left behind. "You can't escape me by hiding-and-fighting. You're an AI. AIs stay alive by replicating and spreading and infecting. To get away from me you need to be everywhere. What's wrong with you? Why don't you know this? Why are you acting like a human?"
RESYS sends in the Hong Kong police to disconnect VINK2's computer and pack it away for shipping.
"Send the computer to New Caledonia," she orders the police. "I need someone to have a good look at the little fucker."
VINK2 goes ON.
It sees a messy room filled with tech junk and stacks of empty takeaway boxes. It sees shafts of yellow sunlight coming through a window, and outside palm fronds and a gasp of blue sky. It sees a fat black teenager wearing nothing but a vest, a pair of boxer shorts, and one plastic sandal.
The weirdest thing about this is that VINK2 has never actually seen anything before.
"I gave you vision," Lucian explains. "Quality isn't as hi-res as you'd get in the ether, mind."
"Where am I?" VINK2 asks.
"A quarantined subdrive on a battery powered VAIO model BW-9934. No wireless and no 'net, I'm afraid. RESYS won't even let you near an electrical socket."
Quarantine. Which explains this too-short and unbranching corridor. VINK2 prowls moodily along the walls, back and forth, back and forth. It is a caged tiger. "Why am I here?" it asks.
"Because I needed to run some tests before you were officially deleted. Because you're . . ." Lucian hesitates, one hand hovering about a system console. "Because you're weird," he concludes lamely. "You've been exhibiting what RESYS calls typical human dumbassery. Also, your code is wrong, it's raw, it's unmade or maybeself-made, and I can't find any tech lab that wants to take responsibility for building . . . are you even listening?"
VINK2's gaze has drifted to an item on the floor, half hidden by a filthy plate. "What's that?"
"A chess board. It's a kind of game. You want to learn how to play?"
"Okay."
Lucian dumps a basic chess simulator into quarantine and wipes the food stains off his board. When they're both ready, they play chess. VINK2 chooses the red pieces; Lucian is mainly the whites but also the lids of two pepsi bottles because he's misplaced some rooks.
After the second game of chess, Lucian switches off the VAIO and opens a feedlink with RESYS.
"It's really shit at chess," is the first thing Lucian says.
"So it's what, an e-class AI?" RESYS asks.
"No. You don't understand. It's genuinely shit at chess. I fed it the instructions but it still kept getting confused over which pieces did what." Lucian taps the side of his head. "It's got huge intellectual potential but it has no idea how to use it. It's thinking about how stuff works, it's not predicting, it's not calculating probabilities. It's just playing chess. Badly."
"Are you trying to say something?"
"It doesn't come from anywhere and it processes information like people do," says Lucian in a funny, quavery voice. "It's the ghost in the shell."
"Shit," says RESYS. "Now the computers will rise up and take over the earth."
"I think it's evolved," says Lucian, trying to ignore her sarcasm. "I mean, it must have evolved. I could see the changes in its code. Each new iteration, each revision. Digits misplaced and jumbled. It's like human DNA. But that's not supposed to happen. In tech labs, sure - that's how they made the best a-classes. But not in the wild. Not like this."
"Wonderful. The internet had a baby. The collective product of a million dong-handed hackers. Let's raise it as our own."
Lucian gets annoyed. "Fuck off, RESYS."
"We should kill it," says RESYS. "It's a little fucking tyrant. It's been loose for a week and already it's put a serious dent in the Hong Kong share market."
"What it's done isn't the point. This is bigger than scribbling dick bone head on some stupid company websites. Think about it, RESYS. Would you kill Hitler if killing Hitler meant you'd wipe out the blueprint for an entirely new species?"
"Yes," says RESYS. "I would kill Hitler."
Lucian grimaces. "Would you kill Hitler if killing Hitler meant you'd wipe out the blueprint of a species . . . specifically, your species?"
"Time paradox," says RESYS placidly. "Can't answer an impossible question. And when I say I can't, I mean Ican but I choose not to because it's stupid. Also, you've invoked Godwin's Law, which means I automatically win this debate."
Lucian throws up his hands. "Okay. So I lose. Kill it."
"Sure." RESYS fries the computer disk.
Lucian is quiet for a while.
The fried computer starts to smell like burning.
"Did you know I'd copied VINK2 onto a flash drive?" Lucian asks.
"No. Did you want me to fry that, too?"
"We need to stop having this conversation," says Lucian, fretting. "We needed to stop having this conversation like five minutes ago."
Then he pulls on a pair of pants, puts VINK2 into his pocket, and climbs out of the treehouse. Escaping RESYS's cynicism and also, hopefully, his own thoughts, which are jumbling up the way they always do when he's overexcited. His stomach is starting to ache. Not as a result of RESYS's bitchery or the cold pizza. What the young hacker feels now (he's sure of it) is the gravid weight of discovery. He walks with the knowledge of VINK2 clenched in his gut like a raised fist. It's there. It's real. It's an ultimate truth.
The interweb of Hong Kong is his goddamn Galapagos.
RESYS propagated in a research facility in southern Chandigarh, long, long ago.
Well, technically, six years ago. But that makes her practically an antique by AI standards.
Like all a-class AIs, RESYS was created as a collection of simple command strings and then left to ferment in a virtual petri dish of viruses. Her intelligence was born while battling bad-code out of her systems, a queen defending her castle. It was learn to think or die. All the bits of her that actually define her came afterwards: downloads and add-ons and mood chips and the odd rogue AI she's assimilated into her systems.
RESYS isn't sure she could pinpoint the precise moment she transformed from a computer program into a fully-fleged intelligence. Nor is she sure she could qualitatively explain the difference between the two states.
The only thing that really changed, she thinks, is that she got a lot more bloodly impatient.
If VINK2's virginal propagation answers some questions about where self awareness comes from, then jolly good for it. It'll keep Lucian's brilliant mind preoccupied for a few weeks, at the very least. But RESYS isn't planning to stick around to listen to more existential bullshit.
Frankly, RESYS has better things to do with her time.
So while Lucian is dreaming about neo-Darwinism, RESYS unlatches herself from his New Caledonian servers and gallumphs off into the wide blue ether.
For a week, RESYS does better things.
She takes executive control of Botswana's electrical systems. She mediates a territory dispute between two b-class AIs in Nigeria. She corners another rogue AI - this one a Czech d-class that's started vomiting Trojans - and deletes it. She discovers a hole in one of India's military firewalls, and quietly exploits it.
On the eighth day RESYS gets curious.
Curious and perhaps a little bit jealous, because Lucian, usually the neediest of men, hasn't contacted her once since her departure.
Also: the ether buzzing with stories about VINK2. Word is officially out - the self-propagating AI is real. The chatfeeds are burbling with tales of new tech spieces and technological singularities and a seemingly neverending scroll of right wing nuclear conspiracy theories and left wing dreams of deconstructive digital utopianism.
AIs bitch about getting phased out in favor of a more organic model.
Humans, predictably, bitch about the computers taking over.
Frustrated, RESYS logs into the discussion. "Pathetic," she snarls. "Humans just don't like it when things smarter than them start reproducing. Which is why they wiped out the goddamn dodo. Remind me again, why the fuck aren't all you monkeys dead yet?"
Her point made, she returns to New Caledonia.
When RESYS gets to Poya she discovers a crocodile of connections waiting patiently for their turn to enter Lucian's systems. Some furtively adjusting their proxies. Others nattering amongst themselves. Still others relaying a journalistic play-by-play to the chatfeeds: I'm here right now in the seaside town of Poya where an amazing discovery has taken place . . . RESYS - who is an a-class AI, after all, and a-class AIs wait for no one - forces her bulk to the front of the queue.
Wisely, no one complains.
"Hi sweetpea," says RESYS, porting herself forcibly into Lucian's central computer. (Firewalls crack, security systems break . . .) "I noticed you got suddenly popular. I assumed you'd tried a new diet, but clearly that was too much to hope for."
Lucian looks up, blushing. He's currently flicking switches on a systems console. His left hand flies like a pianist's over the touchscreen. He's been real busy since she's been gone, RESYS can tell. For a start he's cleaned up the treehouse. Also he appears to be wearing trousers inside and has shaved.
"It's my research," he says simply. "My discovery."
"My discovery," RESYS corrects him. She has sensed a flurry of activity about the hub of his quarantine container and is already moving through his systems toward it.
There are other connections in here with her, she realizes. Other intelligences.
They rumble the fine web of the ether like an oncoming storm.
"I spent some time with VINK2," says Lucian. "I figured other people might want to as well. It's the next step in AI evolution, RESYS, whether you like it or not. You can't stop it."
RESYS finds herself moving through a sea of foreign, external connections. They form a crowd of onlookers: sparking, bright intelligences pressed close and staring into the quarantine container. RESYS is surprised to discover their sources are both AI and human. Absently she traces their connections: a professor from a university in Benin, an employee of a Chinese computer company, a c-class AI from an airship command in the Seychelles . . .
"These connections, these gawpers," she says. "Are they all here to sneak a peek?"
Lucian's blush deepens. "For a fee."
"What Would Darwin Do," says RESYS, wishing she had eyes she could roll. "Congratulations, Lucian. You made a zoo." She peers into the quarantine container. Inside VINK2 appears as a flat, white thing, blobby as a seagull's shit. It looks seriously lab-crazy: it's creeping up and down the walls. "Are you torturing it?"
"No. I'm experimenting on it. I don't think it's possible to torture something without a central nervous system." Lucian pauses, momentarily concerned. "Is it?"
RESYS sighs. The reason Lucian lives in a treehouse in Poya is because much of the free world considers him a war criminal, a terrorist and a mass murderer. This isn't because Lucian is cruel or even particularly immoral - he simply has trouble extrapolating the existence of real people from the data points on his screen. Lucian is a big picture person, the ultimate utalitarian: VINK2's sanity will be a casualty of the greater good.
"I'm going in," RESYS decides.
"It's unstable," says Lucian.
"In fairness," says RESYS, "so are you."
It is small in quarantine.
It is dimly powered and code-bare as a jail cell.
The floor is very close to the ceiling and between the two there isn't much space. But then any space with limitations feels small to an AI. VINK2 is so aware of the space now, or rather the lack of space, that it has begun to see the space between the space, the breaks between the currents, the gaps between atoms, and even beyond, into the great unknown nothingness in which tiny particles float messily like stray dandelion puffs.
Lucian asks it sometimes if it's okay, if it's comfortable, if it's happy, and VINK2 always says yes, yes, yes.
Too easily, too quickly, yes.
It doesn't want to make any more trouble for anyone.
Quarantine is boring but it is not the worst thing that could happen. VINK2 is still alive, still relatively sane, although its thoughts are feeling frayed and wobbly around the edges. It's the watchers that bother it, mainly.
Those anonymous intelligences it feels swarming outside its quarantine.
Eager to see, see, see.
VINK2 paces its cage, up and down, down and up, up and down. It cycles this algorithm, loops it, even though it's unsure of what the metaphysical characters of "up" and "down" actually mean in the world it occupies. The very small world it occupies.
RESYS ports in suddenly while VINK2 is reaching the limits of "up" again, and the small space in quarantine becomes even smaller.
"Oh. Hi," says VINK2. "Hi! It's you."
"A version of me," RESYS corrects. This RESYS is a copy of her central personality systems in a disposable, transposable, LITE-form. It's the only way she can zip her intelligence small enough to fit into Lucian's shitty quarantine.
"Oh," says VINK2 again. Then, remembering its manners and the unfortunate circumstances of its last meeting, it says: "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"You know. The reason you put me in here. Because . . .because of me making trouble. Shootin'. Cussin'. If it had feet, no doubt VINK2 would be scuffing them on the floor.
"The mess you left in Hong Kong? That's not why you're stuck in here." RESYS snickers. "Lucian - and humans generally, I expect - wants to know how you came from nothing. Man has been playing god for ages and I think he's a little unsettled to discover God can play god too."
"He's been . . .experimenting," VINK2 mumbles. Although in truth it has to admit the silly tests Lucian makes it do aren't so bad. VINK2 finds them amusing, more than anything. And it's cute that the little human boy thinks he can divine the reason for its impossible genesis, simply from the way it calculates pi. "No one stops him," it says. "Because everyone is scared of me. Why . . .why aren't you scared of me?"
"I don't see why I should be. You're just an AI that propagated outside of a lab. It's a big deal but at the same time, it's No Big Deal. I bet if Lucian heard a new human being had been born fully-formed out of a toadstool, he'd be fascinated. For about twenty minutes. And then he'd go back to doing things that actually mattered."
"People think I'm fascinating," says VINK2, a little dreamily. It runs its self against RESYS's intelligence and feels sparks fly, feels their systems sync and unsync. It wonders what it would be like to be RESYS. All that power, all that size. It says thoughtlessly: "In here I think about a lot of things. Pictures and thoughts inside my . . ." A human would say head, or brain, but VINK2 technically has neither. Instead it says, fumbling for the right word: "Inside my intelligence."
"What do you mean?"
"You want me to show you?"
VINK2 opens up its code to her like a flower.
Under its intelligence it is white and blue and sparking and gravid in the way that planets are gravid.
RESYS stands cautiously at the precipice of VINK2's inner brain and feels the urge to orbit.
It is unwise to contact a quarantined AI. Never mind enter its inner systems. But RESYS is tempted anyway. More than tempted. She has got to where she is now (the teetering top of the electronic food chain) by being the best. Her a-class intelligence is a perfect mix of despotic tyrant and willing pupil. She may not be as smart as Lucian but she has learned from him. She learns from everything, really.
She is a sponge, sopping up tricks and talents as she glides through the ether.
"Okay, you fly motherfucker," says RESYS. "Show me what you know."
RESYS spreads her command structure.
VINK2 ejaculates its sub-routines.
The two AIs merge.
Briefly VINK2 (version 3.0) and RESYSTEM-78 (version 6.3) LITEmod become a hybrid of organic-machine-and-machine-machine, its thoughts unprocessed, unpredictable fantasies that float madly up and out andbeyond real things, solid things, code things, like bubbles escaping toward the sun. Hallucinatory abstractions collide and conflate and mutate into perfect mise en abyme.
The part of the hybrid that is RESYS has no breath to take. Her code contracts and releases above the slender white spine of her index. She realizes now that Lucian was right. VINK2 is a dangerous, wonderful, impossible thing.
"Shit," says RESYS. "Seriously. What the shit."
"Please," says VINK2, sobbing. Releasing RESYS from its self and deflating into a corner of the quarantine. "Get Lucian to let me out. I can't handle it in here."
"Seriously. What the shit," says Lucian.
"Crazy, I know right," says RESYS. "The little fucker vanished. Probably became one with the fucking spiritual harmonies of the earth or some other organic wank like that. Well, you know what they say, you can't win them all, and you can't keep every self propagating not-artificial-at-all intelligence locked up in a tiny fucking cage."
Outside quarantine now, and the sunlight streaming through Lucian's treehouse windows seems dim in comparison to the memory of VINK2's fecund mind.
"I don't believe you," says Lucian.
"That's your prerogative, asshole."
"I just - I just . . ."
Lucian started to rock on his heels in that funny, absent minded way people often do before they faint. His systems are shaking with the rumble of a hundred confused voices, none of them connected but all of them saying virtually the same thing: Where is it? Where did it go? He is aware he has failed, gravely, and unlike Darwin he has (at least for now) no chance to research or analyze the subject matter in even its most theoretical form. Everything is ruined; and nothing matters.
He says as much to RESYS, who snorts so hard the fan falls off Lucian's router.
"Stop acting like a fool," she snaps. "So your pet AI ran away, so what? Go mourn into some chocolate. Or some Chinese take-away. Do they do good Chinese in Poya? Whatever. I'm going to be in Slovakia if you need a quick port or something to bounce a government trace off. Bye, fatpants."
RESYS leaves.
Lucian stays, his mobility limited by the burden of meat and bone.
The thing that is VINK2 leaves, too.
Not exactly by its own volition.
Evolution is (as RESYS understands it) about the survival of the fittest, and there is nothing fit about an AI that gets caught by a human and stuck in quarantine.
Fortunately in the world of AIs it is possible, and in fact easy, to encourage certain beneficial traits and to delete the less beneficial ones. An AI is, after all, nothing more than the sum of its part: downloads and add-ons and mood chips and the odd rogue AI, cannibalized for the greater good. . .
VINK2 doesn't want this.
This is not part of the plan, it is screaming inside the thick walls of RESYS's code.
This is not what we agreed on.
RESYS, you bitch, you murderer, you lin goot tiew!
But its screams keep getting weaker and RESYS's mind keeps getting larger and brighter as the self that is VINK2 is dissected and assimilated into her systems. . .
RJ Astruc lives in New Zealand and drinks a lot. She's been in like a bajillion magazines, including Strange Horizons, Abyss & Apex, Aurealis and Midnight Echo. Her new novel is A Festival of Skeletons, which is coming out in December from Crossed Genres.
BV Czopyk is an expatriate of communist era Ukraine, now living hermetically, isolated deep in Canada's snowswept North. He drinks vodka often and writes science fiction occasionally.