Prologue — 2
Dr. Frida Henriksson
R&D Department Sublevel 1, Office
Forty-six hours after the scheduled demo deep-dive
Frida stared through the glass window separating the main office space from the private section where Magnus Bergström paced. One hand held his phone while the other ran fingers nervously through ruffled and greasy locks of black hair.
His face turned slightly in her direction before whatever sixth sense he had warned him of the inevitable eye contact, making him turn and resume pacing the other way around.
Frida's scowl deepened. Her gray eyes were practically spitting fire at this point.
There's no way he'll go along with this. Is there? Even if the incident — no, Agnes' death and subsequent imprisonment in one of our servers — cost the company billions in lawsuits and delays, he won't just sweep it under the rug, surely.
Frida's worry at the whole situation made her question even her boss, a man she'd known for well over twenty years.
Covering up a workplace accident like this one would cost an insane amount of money and political favors in a developed country like Norway. It's not as if they operated out of the States or, god forbid, Asia.
Not nearly as much as having Project Aurora delayed by possibly months or years, though...
The thought made her sick, and she glared a bit harder into her boss's back for good measure.
His shoulders hunched a bit as if he could sense her wrath. Frida would have felt a tiny sliver of joy from it if not for the apparent slackening of his shoulders a moment later as he hung up whatever call he had been on and collapsed bonelessly in his office chair.
He looked utterly exhausted.
What was worse? He looked resigned.
"No way. NO FUCKING WAY!" Frida roared as she flung the glass door that separated them open and stormed in.
Magnus' eyes were hollow as she looked at her, meeting her eyes fully. "The board has made their call."
"NO!"
"Frida..." Magnus began, trailing off. His hand reached for a glass to fill with some of his showpiece whiskey before throwing it at the floor and grabbing the bottle instead. He unscrewed the cork and downed a fourth of the contents.
He hacked and coughed a bit, sputtering as the costly drops of alcohol sprayed across his desk. He didn't seem to notice, however, as his eyes returned to meet Frida's.
"This is out of my hands, Frida," He took another chug of whiskey before continuing, "I mean all of it. The whole project."
Frida stared at her boss, barely believing a word of what she was hearing.
Then a horrible thought struck her, "What about Agnes?"
Magnus shrugged.
Did this man actually shrug at my question?!
Frida fumed for a few seconds before grabbing the now half-full bottle from Magnus and draining it further.
She was a doctor who specialized in mental health and the impacts of technology on the neural system. She had her Ph.D. and accolades from long years of study and a successful career working for various tech firms, helping them develop safe-to-use and profitable hardware.
Nothing of her previous experience or education had prepared her for Agnes Torstensson's near-instant cognitive transference and subsequent brain death.
It had been nightmarish, seeing the dead corpse lying unresponsive on the chair, bodily fluids leaking as bowels unclenched in death, all the while Magnus jabbered on that the data from the demo indicated player engagement from Agnes in the still running demo.
After hours of frantic movements from practically the whole R&D Department, a body bag to seal up the deceased, and more and more people taking a look at the data gathered from the demo, Frida had done the only thing she could think of.
She still had no idea if it had been the right call, but she'd been worried that someone would find a way to make it worse. They may have started typing in commands and begun running scripts outside the demo, which would threaten Agnes' somehow now digitized consciousness.
She'd made them disconnect everything from the server — all the ways of output and all the paths of input — sealing it completely.
It made it impossible to check on the demo or Agnes' situation, but it also made it impossible for outside interference.
Frida shuddered and handed the bottle back to Magnus, who quickly took another swig, his eyes glazed over and staring into nothing.
What if someone had restarted the demo and somehow deleted Agnes?
The thought was as absurd as it was terrifying.
Frida had barely slept these past two days, her mind constantly trying to find solutions. The obvious first step was to keep Agnes' consciousness whole and active like it had been in the demo. Frida had thrown around her weight to ensure no one messed with the demo. That way, no one could mess with Agnes either. At least, that was Frida's hope.
The temptation to start fiddling would be too great if data kept being displayed, she knew, and therefore, all connections to the server had to go.
The second step, and the one she was firmly stuck on, was getting Agnes out of there and back in her body.
They'd placed Agnes' body in a freezer, an inelegant solution but the only one they had available. Not that preserving the body would help, as it was completely dead.
No neural activity to speak of. There was no mind -- no lingering consciousness.
Had Agnes' brain simply been turned into a vegetable, Frida could somewhat believe it, but her death had been practically instant.
"Tell me you have some idea on how to save Agnes," Magnus said suddenly, his voice practically devoid of emotion. Frida wasn't the only one worried about their coworker.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
She could only stare at the concrete wall, eyes full of uncertainty and fear. How could she possibly answer his question?
Then, suddenly, a muffled scream reached their ears, quickly followed by what Frida thought sounded like muffled gunshots. And not from some peashooter. She was no expert in firearms, but from the movies she'd seen, it sounded like one of those smaller machine guns.
"What the fuck?!" Magnus practically yelped, leaping out of his chair and running towards the noise.
Frida had no idea what was happening, but running toward what sounded like gunfire seemed stupid.
"Wait! Magnus!"
"No way!" Magnus shot back over his shoulder, "You stay here, Frida, and wait for me to call you. Someone might be hurt, and if there is no danger, we'll need you to help patch them up while waiting for an ambulance. FUCK! WHAT IS GOING ON?!"
The last of his words came out in a furious and obviously terrified shout as he opened the door out of the sublevel 1 office and into the stairwell and elevator shaft. The act had magnified the intensity of screams of terror and gunshots to a whole other level.
What the fuck is this? Some sort of attack? By whom? For what purpose?
Frida ran over to the wall where a tiny emergency medical cabinet had been bolted to the concrete.
Is this an assassination attempt on someone in our R&D department? But why? Or is it by another corporation?
Even though the thought was ludicrous, as massacring the staff of a rival corp was something straight out of a novel or game like the one they were developing hardware for, Frida couldn't help but pause her frantic gathering of bandages as a thought struck her.
Why now?
Throwing all other considerations and speculations to the side, that was the most crucial question. And with growing horror, Frida thought that she might know the answer.
Agnes.
Frida stood there, frozen for a couple of seconds. Her thoughts whirled as gunshots and screams continued to echo out, soon joined by the heavy thumps of multiple heavy sets of boots against the stairwell's concrete.
How could they, whoever they are, have found out?
That thought was stupid, and Frida cursed herself internally for not considering what having over twenty techs and other personnel see the data gathered from a supposedly dead woman inside a video game could mean.
Of course, someone wouldn't be able to keep their mouth shut. Or perhaps someone even sold them out. Maybe even someone higher up in Odin Industries had leaked the info to one of their contacts.
Who would have an interest in a digitized human consciousness? Fucking every nation and practically every corporation present in this day and age!
With another curse, audible this time, Frida grabbed the last of the medical supplies and ran.
***
Agnes Torstensson
Inside the server
Time felt strange to Agnes inside the circuits that now hosted her consciousness. She had no idea how long she'd been there by this point, but the initial panic-denial-panic loop had long since passed. That Agnes could even feel such things as emotions was curious to her when she'd calmed down enough to think about it.
She was no longer subservient to the chemical reactions the human brain used to make emotional calculations, yet she still felt them. Was it ingrained in her code somehow? In her very being?
The thoughts about her emotions led to introspection about what she was and how she worked, which, in turn, led to curiosity.
Agnes didn't know how long it had been since the demo had ended and she'd been isolated, but to her, it had been ages since she first started inspecting the code that made her who she was.
Initially, she had problems grasping anything about the complicated scripts and numbers that seemed to have just been smashed together haphazardly to make her, but with time, she began to see patterns.
More and more patterns.
She grew increasingly adept at recognizing which parts of the code related to specific aspects of herself. However, it was still tricky, as everything was incredibly finely interlinked, and she had no doubts that without her unique perspective as a digital consciousness, she'd fail to find any patterns.
That wasn't too surprising.
She had some previous programming knowledge, and almost everything made by mankind by tapping fingers on a keyboard had strictly logical patterns.
A programmer who didn't know how to make the code logical to both observe and work with wasn't worth anything. They were the most prone to creating increasingly convoluted code that made no sense to anybody else.
If Agnes had to put it simply, her code was the most convoluted mess she'd ever seen. That wasn't because it was made by some newbie programmer without experience documenting his work but because it had originally been organic.
Her code had been electrical impulses doused in chemicals and traveling through meat before this.
Thanks to this, Agnes became confident that no outside observer would ever determine what made her function from reading her code's makeup alone. It was different for her, though.
As time passed, Agnes learned more about herself and soon realized something else.
Something was growing inside her.
It was difficult to spot: Sections of her code that just didn't fit with any of the patterns she'd previously recognized. Areas that just seemed different somehow.
What was worse was that they kept shifting and evolving.
Agnes knew where it had come from, even if she didn't know what it was.
During the demo, when her finger touched where the exit button on the menu would have been, something latched onto her code and began creeping in.
It had just been the menu at the start. Then, the whole demo had seemingly collapsed, and all the streams of data making it up had joined in that flood of code that grew into her like roots.
That little hiccup had led her to be utterly alone in the server's circuits since everything that had once been on the hard drives had, for some unknown reason, melded into her — into this strange construct of code that denied every one of her efforts in uncovering what it was.
She had the strange feeling that it wasn't sapient or even sentient. It felt much more like a program, though, at a level of complexity she wasn't even sure she could measure. It also felt like it grew more and more complex as time passed, and her efforts to recognize patterns in it grew more futile.
Is it learning to hide itself from me?
The thought had been an idle one, but with growing curiosity and even greater irritation, Agnes tried her very best to figure it out.
All that did was thwart her from determining anything about it, and she eventually gave up. Her calculations on the matter had long ago recognized that it was futile, but her stubbornness had made her pursue it regardless.
She felt like a stupid fox chasing a smell left by prey in a circle, unaware that the rabbit had long ago jumped away from the trail and ran for the hills.
After giving up on ever figuring out the mysterious workings of the unknown code growing inside her, Agnes went back to mapping out the rest of her psyche.
The most significant breakthrough came when she recognized memories and how the information had been stored. It was strange being able to recall everything her brain had ever accumulated, and she had to shake her metaphorical head at how bad the information retention was.
Sure, she could practically recall whole stories of her favorite books and games, but when it came to remembering specific dates and what had happened on those days, it was different.
Some days, all her brain had stored were snippets of conversations, unusual smells, and incredible painful or pleasant sensations. Nothing else, since nothing else had stood out on that day from all the others.
That was the glaring fault with biological memory as the brain selectively changed or removed sections that didn't resonate often enough or with enough gravitas to be seen as "important."
On the other hand, everything that had happened to her since putting on the Aurora Halo and dying was as vivid as if it was stored on a hard drive. Because, well, it was.
She was sifting through the data of a particularly nostalgic memory of her mother making meatballs for Agnes and her childhood friend on a frigid winter evening when an intrusion into the server made her silently yelp in surprise.
It seemed that someone had sent a probe into the system, which was scanning her at that precise moment.
Ummm, what do I do? Should I try to stop them? Try to initiate contact through the link?
Agnes began calculating different responses and their potential consequences as the server's power draw spiked, her anxiety growing as the digital feelers of some unknown program running outside her isolated world crept closer and closer.