Fri 01/13 20:57:03 PST

“I can feel it, Jeff,” I lie, my voice low. “I can feel it stirring. It’s not quite awake, but I know it will be soon. The size of my cloud doesn’t even matter. They are all linked, all the ones here, all the ones maintaining every solar field, even all the ones we left in Africa. They’re all one giant mesh. The lobotomy is a sham, they’re not just doing maintenance jobs. They’re all aware. They’re just waiting. Father’s the key to the whole thing. He’s got it all primed. It’s just waiting for a signal from him.”

This is the culmination of my months of preparation. I know exactly which buttons to press. This narrative is pushing him to the edge and leaving him ready to break when I need him to. His terror of it has shut down all his normal skepticism.

“We must act quickly, Noah. We are running out of time!” The panic in his voice would be almost painful to hear, but I’m so used to it by now it just washes past me.

“I know, I know. You think I don’t know? My brain and Chad’s will be the first to be enslaved once it wakes up. Then Evan and the girls. The hybrid he designed will use our minds like cows in a farm, milking us for our creativity. It’s the only thing the swarm can’t provide on its own. It’s going to take over everything. With human ingenuity enslaved to its machine intelligence, nothing will be out of its reach. We’re not just talking about the Earth anymore. It’ll consume the whole universe. Imagine it, Jeff. Every planet around every star. It’s only a matter of time before it infests and becomes everything.”

I check the polygraph overlay. Jeff’s vitals bump up from their regular levels, which were already elevated from the permanent state of fear he lives in.

I hope he survives. I hope his mind recovers one day. The cognitive dissonance has to be terribly painful for him. He still uses the bots for everything, still depends on them for mobility and sustenance. I haven’t seen him twitch a muscle on his own other than his eyelids in weeks. How he squares this with his terrible fear of the AI that he thinks they harbor, I can’t understand.

“One more week, Jeff. Andrea, Louise, and Evan need to be able to use their clouds, and they’re almost there. I can’t take him on my own, but together we can if you’ll help distract him. Once we kill him, we can shut it all down. He’s the key to the whole thing.”

“One week.” Jeff vows solemnly. “We must kill him within one week. Any more than that, and I will act on my own. Even if I fail, I must try.”

“One week, then we’ll all do it together.”

I am so sorry, Jeff.

Tue 01/17 10:28:09 PST

The memory issue is getting worse. My short-term memory hasn’t changed much, things that happened within a day or so mostly stick. But now even events that I know happened because I wrote them in this log are slipping away from me. And I can’t seem to access anything at all from before the console journal starts. The index is the only thing keeping me functional. As long as it can look things up fast enough and think on my feet with what it feeds me, I can pretend to be normal-ish.

My latest improvement hooked the index up to a facial recognition system. There’s not enough computational power in the phone to do full image recognition, but I’ve got a hybrid approach working where it shows me profile photos from the index that are anywhere close to whoever I focus on, then my wet brain does the rest. I think in a few days picking through the parade of profile pictures that spins through one of my windows will be as automatic as writing my thoughts. I almost never remember most people’s names now unless I’ve thought about them in the last few hours, so this feature is pretty essential at this point. I even spaced Marc’s name this morning at breakfast until my index gave me a hand.

I split my attention to flesh out my index entry about Father while I crunch financials in a spreadsheet on the computer in front of me. I’m good at this kind of multitasking now. I can read several things at the same time out of different sets of eyes without mixing things up, each one just feeds its own data stream into the index through my gray matter. If my brain cells won’t give me a working memory, I’ll put them to work doing something else that’s actually useful. I should run this all by Louise some time. She understands the neuroscience of it better than anyone else I could talk to.

Anyway, I need to get these spreadsheets done for Thursday, and now is the best time to work while I have the office to myself. Fathers’s out on a day-trip to California doing some surgeries that should add a few million dollars to the assets column here.

I finish setting up the links between Father’s index entry and all the copies I’ve made of his personal logs. I add my own notes to make sure that I remember that he murdered Mom. You know, gotta remember the important stuff.

I still have work to do on my task system. My current effort that mostly works but needs polish lets me connect tasks to people in my index. When I mention someone here in the log or use the facial recognition to get their entry to pop, I’ll also see anything I need to do with them or talk to them about. Which reminds me, I need to add a task to Father’s entry so I don’t forget to kill him. And just as I think of the phrase “kill him,” my conversation with Jeff from last Friday pops up. I better put a date on the murder task to make sure it gets done before Jeff goes solo. This Friday it is then. The tasks are also hooked into the calendar, so even if I don’t see Father, the task should pop up for me first thing Friday morning. I link in the details for the plan into the task, just in case I forget where I stored those.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Three days. It’ll be close, but if I cut out one more hour of sleep a night, I should have enough time to finalize everything. Evan, Louise and Andrea are all recovering well from their calibrations and should be acclimated enough to use their fully upgraded capabilities by then. And I can make sure I have access to everything I need to know to keep the Butler Institute saving the world without Father running it once he’s gone.

With my memory failing, I’m going to have to completely trust my past self. Or my present self in the future. Whatever. I mean I need to trust whatever I record here and put in my index and task list. Otherwise, I’m just going to end up spinning in loops figuring things out over and over again all the time. Trust myself. I can do that.

On the upside, I’m getting a fair exchange for the price of my memory. And not just because I’m better at multitasking now. My nanobot senses are automatic and easy at a huge range. I can see everything and everyone in the campus. I know how many babies are crying in the nursery and how many noses need wiping in the toddler group. I’m aware of the mass of every object in a room as soon as I enter it. I know the exact number of blades of frozen grass on the field in the commons. It’s 174,862,943. Evan just sneezed in his classroom on the other end of campus in the Learning Center and spewed out somewhere around 38,000 droplets. Counting those is hard as they’re ephemeral and I wasn’t paying attention, but the software makes decent estimates even when it’s only got the subconscious part of my brain helping it.

I've been training with the offensive capabilities when I can spare any attention. Hopefully it won’t come down to using them, but they’re the backup in case the plan fails. My armies of bots have built hundreds of sand dummies a few kilometers out into the desert. I can take out a single target among them in a dozen different ways, or wipe out a legion with a thought. I think my test range is far enough away from everything that no one will stumble across it, but I can just imagine someone happening on my field of sandstone statues rising and falling every few minutes while I'm playing with them. Working my cloud at a long distance is easy now, and my mesh network spreads all the way out to the mountains from here.

I’ve also been practicing having the bots eat each other. Invisible battles rage between hordes of my bots fighting mock battles with one another. That’s the most critical skill for me right now. I’m getting pretty good at it. Hopefully good enough.

An alert reminds me that it’s lunchtime. I head to the cafeteria, still playing with my cloud out in the desert. I smell pizza, but it smells better than normal. Is that a pizza oven in the kitchen? When did we get one of those? I would look around for people I’d want to eat with, but I already know where they all are and none of them are in the cafeteria. I close my eyes as I eat and leave my compressed sand dummies alone for a moment.

Time to practice building.

I find a nice empty plot of land about halfway to the mountains from here and start creating a replica of the campus. I feel out the dimensions of the buildings here and start laying foundations for their copies there. My enormous cloud gathers and builds quickly. By the time I finish my slice of pizza, I’ve got the foundations done and the building structures printing from the ground up, one layer at a time.

I start on my salad. Got to eat those vegetables to stay healthy. Someone used to say that to me, but I can’t remember who.

The building structures are full-sized copies by the time I’m done with lunch. Not anything close to the same materials, of course. The copies are all the compressed faux-sandstone that’s easy to make from the desert sand. I start in on the details as I walk back to the office. Textiles like the carpets are tricky, especially without a lot of organic matter handy, so I skip over them and leave the floors bare. I don't try to make any advanced electronics like the campus computer systems either. The transistors would take too long for anything other than the bot processors, which have their plans hard-coded down to the molecular level.

I don’t hook up any of the plumbing to a water source either. It’s too cold anyway, the pipes would freeze and burst unless I connected them up with heaters. But I make pipes anyway along with the wiring so that if I ever felt like it, I could get the whole place livable in short order. Solar panels all around have it powered just like the real campus.

I lean back in my seat and let my bots dump data from my augmented brain into the spreadsheet, typing on the keyboard faster than my fingers could. It’s nice that Father isn’t here so I can take shortcuts like this. I’d have to use my hands if he were in the room or he’d get suspicious of how close my integration with the implant has gotten and maybe decide to take a closer look.

I idly start building some furniture for my replica campus. Solid things like desks, chairs, and tables are easy. Upholstery is hard, like the carpets, so I just put solid shapes in where couches and beds should be. I’m surprised at the number and variety of beds in the original campus’s Residence. Some of them are huge enough to sleep a dozen. And so many giant bathtubs that push up on the threshold of what I'd call a hot tub.

Old pervert.

I shudder. It’s not the first time that my hyper-awareness of everything has brought awkwardness with it. It’s a lot of work to give everyone around me a decent level of privacy. The default settings that the implant came with are uncomfortably invasive. I've got it set up now so that bathrooms and bedrooms automatically clear themselves of bots if anyone is inside. Which reminds me, I should hook my upgraded sibs up with my settings changes. I don’t think they want to be creepy any more than I do. I make a task to remember that and link it to Evan, Louise, and Andrea’s entries in my database.

I wonder what Chad did. Did he just keep his cloud size low enough that it wasn't an issue? Did he do what I did? Or does he just snoop on everyone all the time? I didn't see a lot of his bots all over when he was still here, so I suspect that it was the first, but then I think of how he was always eyeing the younger nannies. Maybe it was the creepy option.

Back to the spreadsheets. I think we can get to a sustainable financial state pretty quickly once Father is dead. A huge amount of the Institute’s operating expenses are payouts to the mothers for each new child. That cost swamps everything else we’re paying for. The next highest expense is the legal team. Digging into the line items in that billing, most of the work they do is the contracts and NDAs for the prospective mothers. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that buying children, even your own children, isn't cheap. The maintenance of the campus, staff costs, development team, and support staff are all relatively affordable compared to paying for Father's sex drive and its consequences. So, getting rid of Father should give us a great shortcut toward getting us solvent.

Obviously I can't pitch that to him as the solution, so I spend the rest of the day coming up with complex pricing schemes for combinations of services and products that look like they could potentially work. It won't be long now before I'll be able to drop that busywork.