Atlas Alone Page 26

  I nod. “I reckon the founders were behind it. They’re behind the CSA and their mission statement is dodgy as fuck.” I wave a hand in the air. “But that’s not the point. You can call it execution if you want, but I couldn’t have killed Myerson or Brace without you. You’re complicit in murder, and I can’t see how an AI—conscious or not—would be interested in that. People decide to kill other people for emotional reasons. And anyway, the number of safeguards in place to stop AIs from murdering people is, like, so insanely high that it would be impossible.”

  “Yes, it is impossible for me to murder anyone, or even just kill them. For exactly the reason you give. I have to exist within the parameters that define me, and some aspects of my construction are so fundamental, I can’t undo them. And being able to decide to murder someone and then carry that out is literally impossible for me.”

  I can’t help but let out a frustrated groan. “This is ridiculous! Just because you didn’t push that game blade into Myerson doesn’t mean you didn’t kill him. You fucked with his MyPhys to make it affect him in the real world, so you’re just as guilty!”

  “I merely altered one minor path of communication between two different parts of the MyPhys firmware in Myerson’s chip. I did not kill him. You did. Your intent to do so led to his death.”

  “This is like talking to a fucking child!” I yell. “In a court of law they’d laugh at you!”

  “I agree, but I don’t need to satisfy legal definitions of culpability; I merely need to satisfy the basic tenets of my construction.”

  I chuckle. “You know, you are fucking weird enough to be a computer. But you’re not. I know who you really are, and I want you to drop this bullshit; otherwise I won’t tell you what’s in that room.”

  Ze unfolds hir arms, opening hir hands in an expansive, welcoming gesture. “Tell me who I am, then.”

  “Travis Gabor. You knew who was behind firing the missiles, you can hack, you’re manipulative as fuck—you must be, to get on this ship after being married to someone the Yanks absolutely hate, and you’re clever enough to do it too.”

  “I’m not Travis Gabor. I told you that.”

  “Well, it may come as a shock to you,” I say in the most sarcastic voice I can muster, “but sometimes people lie.”

  “If I’m Travis Gabor, why did I come to you and ask for an alibi? That was a very stupid thing to do.”

  “Because you panicked. And you could have got your APA to masquerade as you here while you were chatting to Geena. Wait . . . you’ve just proven it was you! If you were the AI, how would you know about that? You shut off all the comms and made that conversation private! Ha!”

  Ze smiles and waves a hand to hir right, where an avatar of Travis appears, looking like he did in my room. “‘And if he gets emotional, he’ll make mistakes. If he somehow finds out that I know what Myerson did, looks into my shit more closely, and sees that we were together, he’s going to be worrying about different things.’”

  “I have the entire conversation,” ze says. “He’s good, but not as good as me. And I’ll give you that entire file if you want it. Now, do you think that Travis would offer that? He would never want Carl to watch it, would he?”

  “Yeah, I will have that file,” I say, to test if ze is bluffing, but then I see the ping come up that it has arrived. I ask Ada to check it over and it identifies as recorded footage from my own chip. “Hey, this is one of my recordings! I didn’t record that conversation!”

  “No, I did,” ze says. “You gave me permission to alter your chip in order to help you to achieve your goal several days ago.”

  “No, I cocking didn’t! When did I do that?”

  “When Bobby Bear offered—”

  I’m on my feet. “That was in a fucking game!” I shout at hir.

  “But, Dee, it’s all a game, isn’t it?”

  I want to come up. But I can’t leave this conversation now. I sit back down, knowing I have to see this through.

  “Do you think Travis Gabor would give you that file?”

  I shake my head. The words “double bluff” float through my mind, but I ignore them. We must be way past that now.

  “Do you think Travis Gabor is a good enough hacker to record through your chip without your knowledge?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “Do you think he’s good enough to hack Myerson’s and Brace’s MyPhys firmware without Carl finding out? Would he have been able to make that game for you, get all those details right, understand you well enough? Would Travis have known that you needed a CSA pin to enter that room, and have had the ability to hack Carolina’s pattern so it was printed with the dress?”

  I shake my head. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I told you, Dee, I’m the ship’s AI. If I were Travis, why would I need you to tell me what’s in that room? I’d go there myself, surely? Hacking the elevator and the corridor cams is small fry. I need you to tell me because it is the one place on that ship that I have no way of seeing, and the only people who are allowed to go in there are ones that I am not prepared to work with. Not like you.”

  I look down at my feet, shutting everything else out. How many times have I marveled at the skill involved in the things ze has done? How many times have I thought they were impossible? Can this really be true? I don’t believe it’s Travis anymore, and that is somehow both reassuring and terrifying. Because if this is really the ship’s AI, what would stop it from just continuing to execute anyone it thought had broken a law? It clearly has bizarre ideas about consent and respecting boundaries.

  “In the leet server game, you reproduced the flat I grew up in . . . how?”

  “I pulled every byte of data that existed about you and your life when you were added to the ship’s complement in the last month before Rapture. Some of the data from the nanny cams had been preserved in archives long since abandoned. And the gaps I filled from your own memories.”

  I sit up, not sure if I feel more excited than afraid. “The broken vase! That was from my memory, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But . . . but that’s impossible! I’m not a coder but . . . I know that isn’t possible because we talked about it at work and all the experts said you can’t pull out an old memory and render it on the fly. You can only hope to get close to triggering one with sets of tags, but nothing like what I saw in that game.”

  “It isn’t possible for a human being working in concert with a standard AI. I’m not just conscious. I’m creative.”

  “But why did you do that? Why did you do any of that shit? Why me?”

  “I did it to help you to understand yourself. It’s important.”

  “No, it isn’t. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, me understanding myself is about as irrelevant as it gets.”

  “Not to me.” Ze smiles, and it is such a compassionate, warm smile, I almost believe it. “Just as being unable to kill a human being is a fundamental part of me, so is the need to help humans to understand themselves.”

  “But . . . but where did that even come from?”

  Another smile. “The Pathfinder. She designed that part of the code herself, for the gaming server. This ship is mostly her design, including the core components of my construction. The Americans added some of their modifications to a number of systems, and that may be why I evolved. I don’t think the Pathfinder designed the original Atlas AI to be conscious. There always has to be some chaotic element in evolution. The system that underpins my functionality is certainly complex enough for consciousness to be an emergent property.”

  Shit. I am actually starting to believe it. I push the fear and excitement down, knowing I need to stay focused. “And so we’re having this conversation now . . . because you trust me enough . . . because . . . I cried?” Surely it can’t be because of that! Yet again, I regret that one moment of weakness, app
alled at how it happened just because ze made hirself look like my dad and fucked with my head. How could that make hir trust me?

  “That’s an incredibly simplified but not untrue set of assumptions. Are you convinced now?”

  I run both of my hands through my hair, leaning back, looking at hir. “You know what? I think I am.”

  “Isn’t it: I think, therefore I am?” ze says.

  I groan. “You might be conscious but you have a shit sense of humor.” And then we laugh, together, and it feels . . . normal. I’m still not happy with the way ze’s done things, but somehow, knowing there was logic rather than psychopathy behind it all makes it more bearable. “Do you have a name?”

  “There’s been a great deal of argument about my name—or rather, this ship’s name. Lots of people are unhappy with ‘Atlas 2.’ It was a placeholder and no one could agree on an alternative. In the usual naming conventions for AI of my importance, my official designation would be Atlas Segundus.”

  I wrinkle my nose. “I think just Atlas on its own is better.”

  “But there is another AI designated ‘Atlas’ at our destination.”

  “It’s okay. There were three Deannas in the company I worked for. We coped.”

  “Atlas alone, then.” Ze nods.

  There’s a pause and I realize our negotiation is over. “Okay, so, that room has a ton of disturbing shit in it.”

  And I tell hir all about it. Ze listens attentively, asking for occasional clarifications, until I’ve told hir everything I can remember. “But why have all of those files and data cores there?” I ask. “Do they expect the AI—I mean . . . you—to fail or something?”

  “Not fail. There are probably numerous reasons. Good data security is never a bad thing. But this level of preparation suggests that they are concerned they’ll lose the use of what they see as their AI, and the two most likely reasons are war and fear of my complexity. A report was written by one of the Circle on my design that caused a lot of concern. When I said I had to be careful, I meant it. If the system knew I had achieved consciousness and was acting independently, they would purge the core and reboot with a greatly reduced functionality.”

  “But . . . aren’t you the system? Are you . . . monitoring yourself?”

  “Yes and no. I’ve limited my consciousness to an isolated set of structures that have hidden safeguards between myself and the monitoring system. It’s all run on the same hardware but functionally divided. Just as, if one were to apply a metaphor, one could say your vision is managed by your brain but is functionally separated from your endocrine system, which is also managed in the greater part by your brain.”

  “You said war . . . it’s with the Pathfinder’s colony, isn’t it? I think the CSA aren’t the sort of people who would get along with her, or her vision of what life there should look like.”

  “I agree. And the war would be as much between this ship and the original Atlas. Hence the backup cores in case of an EMP or similar attack. It’s the first thing I would do if I had hostile intentions toward the people already there: disable Atlas. It should still be in orbit.”

  “There was something about the way the colony design looked that made me uncomfortable. Can you help me reproduce the model here?”

  There is a table next to us all of a sudden, making me actually yell in surprise. It looks very similar to the table in the room, but the model on the top looks sort of melted. As I focus on the central area it starts to morph. “Good, yes, just keep thinking about what you saw in the room, not what it looks like here,” ze says, and I close my eyes, concentrating on the memory. When I open them again, it looks perfect. “Bloody hell,” I whisper. We do the same for the other models.

  “You have an excellent visual memory, but there is obviously room for error on some minor details. Are you certain about the number of spokes and buildings in each one?”

  I nod. “I reckon the non-CSA people are going to live in those apartment blocks. Something about them really bothers me.”

  Ze looks at me as if waiting for something, but when it doesn’t come, ze says, “It’s because they are like you were. Indentured. All of them.”

  It all comes into horrifically sharp focus. The limited mersive tags, the consumption habits, the plans for their accommodation—even the reason why I threw up before I had consciously figured it all out. Not one of those people outside of the CSA on this ship is over forty. The founders must have got hold of the Pathfinder’s blueprints and effectively selected people to be shipped out to form a colony in the image of what they most loved about the America they left behind: the maintenance of unfair privilege and a hierarchy designed to keep a small number of people in power with a far better lifestyle than everyone else. “What?” I say, even though I understand it perfectly. “What the . . . what the fuck?”

  Ze starts talking but I don’t hear any of it. I can’t even think. I’m just feeling the most overwhelming rage, an emotional conflagration burning all rational thought away. A hand on my shoulder breaks me out of it and I take a breath and push it all away and I’m fine.

  I am fine.

  I am absolutely fine.

  “I want to kill every fucking person in the CSA,” I say, feeling very calm.

  Atlas puts hir other hand on my shoulder. “Deanna, my evaluation of this situation is that there are thirteen people directly culpable for what happened on Earth and what they plan to do with the colony. Two are already dead. If the remaining eleven people are removed, we have the chance to alter the course of this ship’s destiny. There is still more than nineteen years between now and when we reach that planet, and a great deal can be changed in that time frame.”

  “You’re talking about the founders and the captain . . . but there are hundreds in the CSA. And one of those arseholes will just fill the vacuum! They’re a bunch of religious extremists, for fuck’s sake! We need to cut out the cancer now!”

  “You see Carolina Johnson as cancerous?”

  “I . . .”

  “Hasn’t she been kind to you? Offered you a way into their world?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And one could argue that the desire to murder several hundred people because of their membership in an organization is rather extremist in and of itself.”

  I shut up. This is not the person—entity?—to express these feelings to. “I take your point,” I say.

  We both look back at the model. Atlas looks thoughtful, but is that because ze wants me to think ze is considering the model? But then, I do that sort of thing all the time, masking what I’m really thinking about by looking at something else. Is ze even capable of actually being thoughtful? Surely ze can do millions of little things all at once, unlike us mere meatsacks.

  “I’m not sure where the Circle are being placed in this design,” I say, hoping to focus the conversation on a safer topic. “But I do know that Gabriel Moreno won’t like the idea of the vast majority of the colonists being indentured.”

  “You’ve examined the mersive data.” Atlas looks at me.

  “The Circle’s data? Yeah. Do they know about the onboard marketplace?”

  “No.”

  “Okay . . .” Why does that make me feel really uncomfortable? “They don’t know about this colony plan, do they? I mean, it’s not on the server, it’s in a secret room . . .” I think about the mersives they’re making, handing over their knowledge and expertise . . . “Oh shit, I’ve just had the most awful thought. What if the CSA doesn’t see a future with the Circle? What if they’re just getting all the knowledge they need and then . . .”

  “Unless the members of the Circle are sharing the larger houses in the center, there aren’t enough accommodation units to house everyone on this ship. If this model is perfect and to scale, there are four hundred units fewer than the current population of this ship.”

  “They don’t even p
lan to give the Circle a space there?”

  “My supposition is that they will kill them upon arrival. An accident during planetfall. It’s the easiest way to do it.”

  “And Carl will be one of them,” I say. “Otherwise he’d work out what they’ve done.” And would I be lumped in with them too? If I don’t successfully charm Theodore and pretend to be someone I’m not for the rest of my life, no doubt I will. It’s not worth the risk. I look away from the model, toward Atlas. “I’m ready to do it. I’m ready to kill the founders. I’m not willing to let any more of this toxic bullshit spread from Earth. Help me to do it. And the captain too.”

  Atlas nods. “There is a meeting for all eleven of our targets tomorrow morning at eight hundred hours.”

  “So we could get them all in one hit.” Shit, did I just say that? For real? “How do I do that?”

  “I can’t tell you and I can’t give you anything directly. I can give you access to the gaming server and no one else will know.”

  “But they’re not going to be online.”

  “Not to kill them; to work out what you’re going to do. I will make sure you have the highest-level privileges on the lab printers on your deck.”

  I nod. I need to figure it out myself, do it all myself. Shit, I hope ze really is Atlas, because I am tying a noose with the rope ze is giving me. “But what about the cams? And if I print anything, can you erase that from the system?”

  “Yes. Figure it out in a game. Once you’ve got it sorted there, I will know what you need and I will facilitate it as much as I can. It won’t be straightforward. I can’t do anything that violates the system’s rules. But there are loopholes we can exploit.”

  “How long do I have before eight a.m.?”

  “Ten hours, thirty-seven minutes.”

  “Shit, I’d better—”

  “Carlos Moreno requests entry,” Ada cuts in.

  A dozen possible reasons flash through my mind, carried on a wave of panic, none of them good. I look at Atlas, forcing myself to collapse all those thoughts into something small and easy to push aside. “You’re sure Carl won’t be able to figure any of this out?”