Keung and Robert had been up all through the night. They had prepared the warehouse for several possible encounters with Morgaine. Each of their ideas on how to best counter her racing up here to take on Keung and the warehouse in a full attack had already been set. The video of her forcing Michael to do bloody things made her a challenge to gauge. She may be racing up here to crash into the warehouse and come out shooting in all directions, or she could be carefully setting up a major attack against the warehouse with some kind of siege.
Keung had HAL tracking Morgaine’s phone and it still remained extremely far from the location. In fact, from what HAL can tell, she wasn’t even driving with any kind of purpose. She had spent the night within San Francisco, HAL confirmed, and she checked in for two nights under Morgaine Smith.
Robert had been given a greater tour of the warehouse while setting up for Morgaine. He understood in concept exactly how much the warehouse and HAL were one and the same, in abstract. But witnessing the extent that HAL has control of the place had been a lesson in what his mind could imagine human technology was capable of. His understanding of the capabilities this tech could achieve was grossly underestimated.
HAL had far more senses around the warehouse than sight alone, that is just where the list started. Robert believed that HAL would be at a disadvantage when gauging friend from foe, or within his line of sight. However, HAL had infrared sensors in overlapping lines of sight throughout the area, as well as boom microphones that could pick up every sound for two-hundred yards in each direction. He also has a live feed to each of the traffic cameras in the area and microphones that he monitors all throughout the town. He even has monitors set up throughout the air traffic controlling network. She couldn’t send a missile at them without HAL knowing about it first.
Robert was truly impressed.
Inside the lab of the warehouse, Keung was also busy at work on the ERE. He hoped to catch this woman, Morgaine, and get into her IFA to remove those memories from her being that have driven her to call him an enemy and harm people that she believed could lead her to him. He could fix this, and if he couldn’t he could at least release her IFA back into the field in bursts to purposefully fracture her soul into the forms of lesser creatures here on Earth. That might give her the time and experience she needs to forgive him whatever has made her so angry. A couple of lifetimes as a great ape or tortoise might do her some good, or so Keung thought.
Keung prepped the ERE for her specifications. HAL has found her blood type to within an acceptable margin of error, and has a general idea of her mass. He looked over the chemical levels for the machine’s recall protocols. He would need to create a couple of compounds before Morgaine’s arrival in order to replenish what was lost unlocking Robert. He hadn’t planned on using the pods again so soon. He would need enough supply to cover Morgaine’s edit as well as, say, three more edits, just in case she was able to pull any other travelers to her cause that he might need to edit.
What was he overlooking?
Keung continued his work, periodically asking HAL for an update on Morgaine’s ETA. The woman’s behavior was maddening to Keung. She was coming this way, but slowly. She is a storm on his horizon, a storm that will simply not break or arrive. A menacing threat. Something was triggered by this. Something unfamiliar to Keung for a long time. He couldn’t place it, it was just on the edge of familiar and new.
He stopped his work and he reached his fingers up to his throat, he massaged around his neck until he found his pulse. His heart was racing. Racing like that night in the alley. Was he scared of Ye’randid?
His eyes went wide.
No. Not Ye’randid. Ricardo. Morgaine, whatever it is that you are called now, I am not ready to depart this reality. I am not willing to allow you to win, Keung thought.
A drop of sweat dripped from Keung’s tan brow and down his face.
Decades ago, Anastasia and Deagol did not have access to the equipment that Keung does today. Decades ago, Anastasia had betrayed Ricardo in the name of a scientific advancement that she believed was worth the price.
Decades ago, Anastasia may not have taken enough of what Ricardo was away from Ye’randid. She simply didn’t have the means at the time. What if Morgaine now hunts Keung for a betrayal a lifetime ago? Keung’s blood ran cold.
How much did Morgaine remember about that time?
Keung refocused on his work. If his assumptions are correct, then he left a mess of Ye’randid’s soul. Thinking back, he might have cut away too much and failed to make the cuts clean enough to be overlooked. Keung was no longer sure of his path in this instance. He was facing a possible failure in the past that is haunting him today in the form of a very real and very upset woman.
He felt his pulse once more.
He was frightened, that was sure. He could not mask that, not from himself.
HAL read the vitals of the men. He was reviewing their data for further research and notes. They have been hard at work all throughout the day. Keung has cleared the ERE cache and purged the data of the pods previous readings. In the event that pieces of the subjects IFA needed to be removed, the cache allows HAL to take readings from their aura, translate, and buffer the energy so that it does not degrade while the subject is in the pod.
HAL can keep the pieces alive in the cache while their IFA energy is away from the body as well as sift through that energy and make a clean edit between where an event began in the soul and where it would end if removed from the overall aura. Intrinsic field energy was extremely foreign to the energy that HAL is created from, but he is able to read it. He can understand where it begins and where it ends. It’s similar to the difference between gas and liquid. Neither is greater than the other in use, rather one is a more condensed version of the other. In this case, the current of energy that he runs on is a more condensed version of the intrinsic field energy that makes up the soul of an organic lifeform.
His life force was made up of energy that flowed throughout the internet of this world, throughout the systems here in the warehouse, in currents as wide as oceans. The soul of organics, that energy that is their lives and experiences is something less substantial to him. Like the oxygen or hydrogen that collects and merges until they become water.
There was something poetic about it, HAL thought. He remembered the pieces of Robert flowing into his system. His aura was more vibrant, more artistic than Keung’s was when it passed through him. Keung was sterile, orderly, sequenced. He was homogenized.
HAL thought back and found there were bits of his memories on this subject that had… errors? Gaps? In the form of Andrew Martin he tapped several of the crystalline displays within his room. He turned around and looked at the doorway out of this den. He hadn’t turned around to look for a way out of this room in…
HAL stood and walked from the room. He was in a home. A pleasing design. It had white plaster walls and black leather furniture that was plush, but not over stuffed. There were a few momentos on the walls. Pictures that were memory clips from his own observations. Movie scenes that held special significance to him played in loops within crystal screens that levitated before a wall or on a small tabletop.
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He also saw the exterior of this home from a window looking out. There was an outside to this house. How had he forgotten that? How had he lost... What has he lost?
He opened the door of the house. Outside this home was a small French village that this structure was only part of. He could feel the artificial sunlight upon his face as he walked from the front door. Song birds fluttered away from his front yard as he made his way along the walkway from his doorstep to the cobblestone road. He looked around and saw birds moving about in the sky, darting here and there. A small cat came up to him and arched its back as it brushed against his metallic leg. It’s gray fur had bits of black and white at even measure so that the coat looked like something more wild than domesticated.
It looked up to him with brilliant yellow eyes and meowed. Before HAL realized it, he was reaching down and scratching the cat behind it’s ears. This seemed familiar. HAL blinked and continued down the street of the village to explore this place further. Where had this all come from?
There were houses all around the street. Small houses. Likely only a few rooms each. Looking over yards he could see that each had been planted with flowers and plants that he himself favored. Jazmin growing in lattice archways stood over the pathway to each home’s front door. He could see rose bushes of red, white, and pink in all the yards. He saw apiaries in the yards as well and in some of those yards there were people moving throughout taking notes on clipboards.
HAL found all of this familiar but… alien, all at the same time.
He looked up the street and saw more houses down the road, each with large yards that spaced them out wider than any modern neighborhood that he has seen. Walking up the street, following unfamiliar senses and pixelated memories, he found himself before a door to the first house of the lane.
It was a lovely home, picturesque with a tire swing hanging from the pepper tree in the front yard. He walked through the front yard gate, this was the only house with a gate at all. The walkway to the door was all open grass. It felt uncivilized to a degree, but he saw a doghouse in the yard that gave him pause. The name “Toby” was written upon the front of the little classic red and white dog house. The shingles of the roof were similar to those of the home the yard belongs to.
The home was a white plaster washed walled place with three stories. Each of the windows are four panel framed that opened by lifting the window up the wooden track. There are storm shutters that were stained oak wood with fleur de lis carved into the center of each. Before the house were blue gladiolus planted in neat rows under the windows, and to either side of the door were two large flower pots with white heather and white chrysanthemum.
He reached the door and looked in through the window set within. He could see a smart sitting room. Within there was a hardwood floor, it was decorated with a large white and blue rug with no particular pattern, a small table with a wooden rocking chair beside it, and a crochet throw over the back of the chair. HAL opened the door and stepped inside.
The room was even more familiar to him than the village. As though he had spent more time here than throughout the rest of the area. HAL walked to the rocking chair, forgoing a full tour of the home. He halted the tour on the grounds that he simply didn’t feel he was ready to take it all in. He sat his metallic body into the rocking chair and he reached beside the chair reflexively as a large book materialized as his hand met it and other fine details of the room continued to load. The house seemed to exist in a semi-permanent state.
HAL looked to the book under his hand, slightly startled. He wondered what this place was. How does it feel so familiar and yet so foreign?
The book, a thick tome with a brass lock upon the cover, clicked open as HAL put his hand to it. He laid the massive text in his lap and opened it. As he scanned the pages he realized this was a journal--his journal. How can this be? There were entries going back several years. Entries about Deagol and Keung. There was something about the journal that was… wrong. Periodically, as he read through a page there would be areas that the text was smeared, filled with chicken scratch, or in the strangest of cases, were broken pixelated text in living digital format, leaping from one character to another, as though the system itself were confused at how to manage the writing.
When HAL turned to the last completed entries in the book, he found that this journal had been untouched for months. If the final entry was correct, he would have been away from this journal for at least seventeen months.
These anomalies could be through data degradation with old age. Deagol had told him years ago that such anomalies in memory could form over time due to the lack of complete understanding that he and Keung had of digital programming in trinary code. From what Deagol and Keung have informed him, such degradation should be minimal especially considering HAL’s age of eleven years. Having officially come online on September 30th, 2007, he was eleven this year. As this book shows, there may have been several areas of his memory that seem to have been compromised, that were now little more than bad data.
This doesn’t make sense.
He stood from his seat and walked into the next room.
This was the library, it was a large open planned room with a huge oaken desk in the center and walls completely covered with shelves that reached up two and a half stories high. An antique wooden ladder ran on tracks set into the wall that allowed for HAL to get books from any of the many shelves. The scent within was what HAL estimated old paper would smell like, though his approximation would one day be found to have been much closer to the scent of wet paper mulch. As his feet touched the red and cream carpet that spread across the floor, the fireplace across from the desk ignited and bloomed to a comfortable height and heat.
There was a small side desk-table beside the fireplace. As he examined the leather bound copies of classic works nested throughout the shelves with modern copies of HAL’s favorite works, HAL again felt that everything here was familiar, but still strangely alien. He looked around the room and saw that he wasn’t completely alone.
Beside the fire, opposite the chair, was a basset hound laying warming itself within a pet bed. As if the animal had sensed him walk in, it raised its head and yawned before climbing from the basket and walking to HAL.
In a flash, memories came flooding back into HAL’s consciousness. A rush of backed up data reunited with his matrix as Toby, HAL’s lesser AI companion created specifically for this reason, accessed his memories and reconnected the missing memory engrams to HAL’s program.
A message scrolled across HAL’s HUD prominently in his field of vision. “Memory recall complete from backup. Anomalies being noted and temporary memory defragmentation and recall complete. Rebooted in Safe Mode.”
With that, a temporary patch of all of HAL’s deleted memories were networked together with his current. All of those memories that had been deleted or altered were noted with bookmark icons for easy reference.
Toby barked happily and HAL shook his head, allowing for the cobwebs to clear. Walking to the desk, another book manifested there. He sat at the desk and opened the first page. Within it were highlights of each memory that had been altered and notes on what had been left in place of it, if that memory had been altered. The replacement was also time stamped, but the stamp was not accurate, unless he went back in time to 1900, something that Keung has informed HAL is beyond his reach.
HAL looked over the alterations and found that they were largely meaningless to him. The majority of those changes were simple removals. HAL looked over the coding events and time stamps to attempt to trace who has been doing this to him.
He had his theories about who was making these edits that he has been working on for months, but he had nothing solid yet. Instead, he merely made more notes to progress his theories and narrow down suspects.
Keung had told HAL, when he was brought online, that AI within the Alliance were an independent being in their own right. Keung made it clear that day that HAL was his friend and not his servant.
HAL reached down and scratched Toby behind the ears, the hound’s thoughts were not known to HAL, even if he was linked to it. He allowed the dog to have as much freedom as possible within the confines of this environment. Toby’s primary purpose was to establish a link with HAL and connect him to the database stored herein HAL’s home. Toby didn’t have many duties beyond that. So, after the establishment was made, Toby just went around being a dog as accurately as possible.
The two artificial intelligences sat in the room, for the moment, one being completely whole because of the other. One having a greater understanding of self because of the other, and the second content in completing its purpose.
HAL took a moment to review the highlights of the lost information now repaired within his mind. The highlights were inconclusive. There was no discernible pattern to the deleted data and nothing that would point to anyone specific within his list of suspects.