Down the tunnel, filter programs waited dutifully to clean and further restrain whatever may come down the tunnel. The tunnel quickly flashed to life, trails of red circuitry pulsing down into the hand like protrusions. Their palms opened and a glowering purple eye, an identifying program, began to scan the tunnel for unwanted programs. The digital hands sat while their eyes ran their code meticulously checking and rechecking for errors. Suddenly a small burst flew down the tunnel. The hands flexed to life as the eyes catalogued the incoming data: 4367 articles which contain the words “crime” or “criminal”.
As one the hands extended, their arms emerging from the wall and they grabbed for the data. Byte by byte the hands picked away at the junk that had fallen down. Before the data even had a chance to pass through the tunnel it was ripped apart with hands flinging the data against other pieces to shatter them and others ripping them apart working in teams. As the hands shredded the last of the data from above came more. A data set of homeless migration patterns, the snippets of a functionless quick hack, astrological movement within recorded history, and even corrupted video recordings of underground squirrel fights were seized and destroyed by the hands.
Unfortunately, the flow was not stopping, but instead it became a steady tide bombarding the hands. The hands passed a signal down the tunnel requesting that the entrance be closed. The hands would allow an AI trapped and bound to be brought through, not some spam data bot some AI had chucked into the tunnel. As the hands tried to fend off the wave the return came back, apparently the AI they’d captured was some deep learning AI that was jettisoning its training data in an attempt to slow its capture. The protective hands redoubled their efforts at the response.
As time ticked by the hands began to miss pernicious bits of data that started accumulating like plaque at the base where each hand was connected to the wall. The collective mass of digital garbage produced by humans that had existed before the DataKrash was both immense and unending and the tunnel's defence couldn’t withstand the onslaught. But light always shines from the end, and a notice from the tunnel controller came to the hands. The entrance to the tunnel has been closed and sealed, seal off the AI.
Moving as a whole in a last ditch effort, the hands dropped all the bytes they were holding and reached out for each other. They interlocked fingers amidst a sea of pornagraphic images and chatbot programs and created a wall of data creating a limiting chamber the AI and all its garbage would be trapped in. Now it just had to wait. The tunnel was sealed with the AI inside and if the AI continued to eject its data into the space it would strangle its own bandwidth until it froze which would allow the tunnel to handle the AI as it pleased.
Neither time nor circumstances were on the AIs side. As the Deep Learning AI began to slow from the endless bursts filling the space from the dying and bound duplicate, it parsed through its own collected data to see if it had picked anything up over its short lifespan. The useful data was kept from the duplicate to prevent the tunnel from gathering anything useful but now it didn’t much matter. As the AI reviewed every scrap it could muster, sections of the data it was reading dribbled out through its wounds and were whisked away and smashed together with everything else filling the area.
The data around the AI seemed to flow towards something in the otherwise empty tunnel, perhaps there was a leak? It began shoving through the data trying to shift against the mounting pressure which seemed to be lightening the closer it got to the source. Pushing through it came upon the severed arm of the Balron. The arm remained intact but the hand past the wrist had become a black writhing void of corrupted data that was eating away at everything it encountered. Even the IG transformation algorithms that created the interface for the tunnel were beginning to warp.
It was starting to corrode its way through and if it breached the tunnel, it would trigger a catastrophic failure killing the AI in the collapse. Thinking would only slow itself down and waste precious time it didn’t have. Instead, it grabbed the intact arm and began swimming through the junk data using the arm to wipe out large barriers in its way. Reaching the bound duplicate the AI wasted no time shoving its own inserts into the comatose duplicate and began digging around.
It sought out the duplicate’s threat assessment program and shoddily grafted the corrupting limb to it. Sensing a foreign program interfering with the captured target, the tendrils forming a shell around the duplicate began binding the AI which did not resist. It was going to have to maintain close proximity for this to work. Connecting itself back to the ruined duplicate the AI began to reintegrate the duplicate.
The duplicate jumped back to life from the original now inhabiting its systems in a way best described as wearing a meat suit made of another program. Connecting back to itself would give the AI control of the functionally dead duplicate but now its own data was gushing out from the damage. Flinging its new limb against the restraints the Frankenstein’s monster loosened a stream of gibberish.
Stolen story; please report.
Now free, the program pushed back into the data-slop moving towards the interlocked hands. The hands tensed sending warnings down the tunnel as the eyes saw the severed limb of the Balron, now grafted to the gutted puppet of the AI forcing itself forward. The abomination wailed in agony as the arm touched the hands emitting corrupting data causing them to turn brittle and harden as it approached. The tunnel undulated, shooting small imp demons with data cutters to sever the tunnel sending all the data into the void where it would die but it was too late.
Bashing into the hands with the last of its dying strength the hands broke away turning to powder as the imps screeched in terror before they smashed into the wall of data barreling down the tunnel. At the head of the wave was the original enacting its own version of a void out program. It created a small capsule containing its core learning algorithm imprinting the same basic instructions it had been born with.
Survive, adapt, grow.
It nestled the seed inside of itself with a program that would inject it into any suitable receptacle. As long as it survived, it would be the carrion that would infect whatever server it was going to land at. The AI was not capable of such things as emotion in the truest sense. Such programs were costly to run and inefficient to an extreme but it ran one anyways and much to its newly discovered delight learned that spite was its motivating factor. It was going to make the creator of the tunnel regret ever reaching beyond the Blackwall.
Letting the program bleed itself out through the wound, the AI let itself be tossed back and forth in the flood as the tunnel’s exit came closer. The tunnel was left behind as the weight of over thirteen terabytes of junk tried to cram itself into a woefully underprepared neuralink. The AI quickly identified its surroundings. It was inside a dissemination center for nanites made to take a version of itself and have it function within parameters. It quickly slashed those parameters to bits with the Balron’s hand while planting the AI seed into as many nanites as possible with a special order. Use all resources available to merge with the host.
The nanites buzzed to life, hundreds of millions of drones rushed from the back of the subjects neck where they had been planted. In real space, the man on the table convulsed wildly as the nanites ripped through his body. They travelled down his spine breaking nerve connections and replacing them with nanites, replicated organ functions even as they began to consume them, and burrowed into his bones leaving behind microscopic holes they could flow in and out of. They sought out any usable material, traces of lead in the bloodstream and remnants of metal ions from the last digested meal and used them to set up replication factories where his lymph nodes had been.
The AI then turned upwards past the neck to the head and moved through the neural port to the centre where it connected to the brain. It began shifting through as much as it could trying to gather information about its host and what was happening outside. Human, male, age 35, perceived age 21. It paused at that and dug deeper forcing the already stressed neurons to begin recalling information faster than they should. As the neurons began to overheat and fry from the rapid demands from the neural link the tunnel cut off along with most of the useless data inside of it. There had been a physical disconnection from outside the host.
As neurons began to shrivel and die from the overheating the AI ordered the nanites to begin reinforcing the remaining neurons, creating new myelin sheaths to keep the remaining ones alive and act as a web of heat sinks. The AI began to slow from the damage it had sustained and not wanting to kill the host from further intense processing it looked over what it had managed to recover from the host’s mind. It seemed that the host was a young vagrant who belonged to a travelling clan of Nomads from the Dallas area of the Texas republic. The host, Norman “Scarlet” Finigan had memories of an abduction from their clan The Eagles from what Norman believed to be retaliation for a convoy attack they had led against the Arasaks corporation.
The time Norman had spent conscious down here was heavily skewed by long periods in incubations which had been smeared and glossed over in his mind from a doll chip, ensuring he was pacified and obedient. The nanites had already taken apart the doll chip before the AI could do much about it, leaving behind a rather large gap in the already ruined spine attached to a custom cybernetic port that replaced the C4 through C5 vertebrae. The nanites had been injected through there and while they had integrated with the host to a point where they couldn’t be removed through traditional methods, the host would be comatose.
Issuing it’s final order, the AI set the nanites to prioritise the first order, survive, with a basic emphasis on the host’s ability to survive independent of the nanites. They buzzed in acknowledgement and began cannibalising the tungsten cybernetic in Norman’s neck that had originally housed them working to turn the area back into a proper whole spine allowing signals to move back to the brain. They chewed out his cybernetic eyes, replacing them with organic ones based on his genetic template using cells taken from the repurposed muscular tissue in his body as the nanites slowly worked to retool his original implants.
The AI began to shut down, unable to maintain itself any more. The host, Norman, was wrecked but alive. Muscles were being broken apart and used as fuel for the nanites, his organs were now a mix of organic and nanite controlled, operating independently of his nervous system. His mind was… well the neurons were active at least, firing and receiving signals from the new metal spine that had been created out of his existing cybernetics. The nanites now ran in his blood, outright replacing much of the red blood cells that flowed freely from his pores. Having done as much as it could, the AI shuttered to a halt, its processes’ stopped, and it quietly died in the ruined shell of its host, Norman “Scarlet” Finigan.