Sat 10/22 12:42:07 PDT
I am a straight-up wizard.
Back when I used to have time for video games, I always liked the ones where I could play some kind of magic user. Something about the notion of spewing fire from my fingertips or freezing monsters with a word appealed to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve always felt underpowered physically. I was never very coordinated, and I sucked at most sports. I’ve always felt like my mind was the strongest part of me, and now Father’s gifts have made that true in every sense.
I can cast any spell in the book now. Want to heat things up? Just discharge the battery from a few thousand bots and I’ve got a white hot spark ready to ignite anything. Want to cast an ice spell on an object? Glom a million bots on it and have them pull as much ambient heat as they can, and you’ve got yourself a popsicle in an hour or so. My telekinesis is only limited by how many bots I have to throw at something. Given a big enough cloud, I could lift almost anything, and I haven’t even started pushing my limits on how much I can grow.
And then there’s the construction features. The full library is huge. I can print just about anything I can imagine. I haven’t come up with anything so far that didn’t have a blueprint in the software. Even if I did, I can add new build templates just by feeling something out. All that’s left after that is issuing a command to clone it and choosing a materials palette.
It’s getting better every day. Not just in the sense of being able to do more, although that’s definitely true, but coping with the deluge of input that constantly batters my brain. I haven’t passed out from the pain at all today, and I’ve been pushing hard. Seeing in and around and through things feels almost natural.
DIAGNOSTIC MODE
Still no hemorrhaging. Just a healthy, nanobot-infested brain.
But I can’t help worrying about the extensive remodeling since I got the update. Big chunks of my cortex are showing completely different activity patterns than they did before I went into Father’s lab three days ago. I’m probably losing something, but I don’t really care what. Whatever it is, it’s worth it.
I see Chad walking across the commons to the Research Center for another follow-up visit with Father. Once he passes, I get up from where I’ve been lurking on the Residence steps. Time to get my conspiracy club together for a quick meeting. I just need to distract Marc to make sure he doesn’t crash it.
The little guy who was asking for tricks the other day is out playing on the grass with a couple of others from his class. I still can’t remember his name, which bugs me. I always remember names. It’s
something I’m really good at.
Doesn’t matter. It’ll come to me in a minute. Anyway, he’s the perfect distraction.
“Hey, buddy,” I say, walking towards him.
“Hey, Noah,” he says. “Can you do more tricks today?”
“I can’t right now,” I tell him. “But I heard that Marc really wants to talk about our Africa trip today. You should ask him about Djibouti.”
“I can’t ask him about his booty!” he laughs.
“Jee-boo-tee,” I enunciated slowly. “It’s a country. We went there, Me and Marc and Father and the rest of the old kids. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah. I know about that.”
“Good. Go ask Marc about what we did there. He’s got the best stories.”
“Yeah he does!” he exclaims, running off.
Mission accomplished. That should hold him for hours. I head to the computer lab while sending out my bot senses across the campus. It’s amazing how much I can see and feel all at once. I find Jeff in his room, Evan and Louise in the rec room, and Andrea sitting under a tree behind the Residence sketching on her notepad. With the barest thought, I form little nanobot speakers near each of them. A mic connected to the speakers forms almost instinctively near my mouth.
“Come to the computer lab,” I whisper to all of them at once, just loud enough for only them to hear it.
I feel each of them stop what they were doing once they realize it was me talking to them. They all start moving toward the Learning Center. A wave of nausea and dizziness crashes down and I have to catch myself against the hallway wall before I fall. Shit. I pushed myself too hard again. I see and feel too much. I pull my bots back into a tight sphere around me, but it’s too late, the headache is throbbing again. Every heartbeat is an agonizing pulse of lava through my brain. I stumble through the computer lab door and get myself into a seat before my balance gives out again. I sit there in the lab with the lights off and put my head down while I wait for the attack to subside.
Breathe. Calm. Breathe.
I turn the inputs from the cloud all the way down and get a moment of sweet relief. Another quick check on the diagnostics to make sure I’m not having a stroke. No, I’m still good, no tissue damage.
“Are you OK, Noah?” asks Louise. I hadn’t heard her come in. I feel blind now when I don’t have my cloud out there sensing for me.
I look up and see Andrea echo the question with a concerned look.
DOPE-ME
It works well and it works fast as the jolt to my chemical receptors does its thing.
“Yeah, I’m good,” I reassure them, sitting up. “Whatever is in the update isn’t doing any harm. I get some little headaches, but not any worse than when I worked hard with the old version of the cloud.”
It’s only a little lie. And it’s not even what they’re worried about. The headaches are just from overworking my gray matter, not from an AI takeover.
“You probably have not reached the critical mass required to awaken the sentience of the artificial intelligence for your cloud,” Jeff suggests as he comes into the lab. “Please make certain to keep your nanobot count down to a safe level. The last thing we need is one more risk to the earth.”
“Of course,” I lie. At this point, I’m sure that Jeff’s theory is garbage, but he’s all in on it and it’s keeping him where I need him to be, so I keep playing along.
“So, have you been able to discern what defensive systems we need to worry about?” he asks.
“It’s hard to tell,” I reply. “Father’s still running the older version of the implant hardware, so his situational awareness probably isn’t where mine is with the third generation implant. But then again, he’s got decades of experience with it. If he were running the same rig that he put into me, there’s no way we could surprise him with anything. But even using the old implant hardware, I’m pretty sure that he’ll get plenty of warning if there’s anything dangerous around him. A lot of the defensive stuff works like the sentry routine we used on the trip, but it’s on all the time in the background. It has automatic recognition for anything that matches a virtual arsenal of dangerous things. He’d know if there was a weapon anywhere near him.”
“Well that certainly limits our options,” Louise says with a frown. “Not that we even have guns or anything,”
“I could print one,” I tell her. “The new build library has a bunch of models. And ammo too. But I don’t think it would help. He’d definitely see that coming. There are triggers built in to watch for stuff like that. I get warning prickles all the time for anything remotely unsafe. One of the kids at the table next to mine dropped a butter knife this morning at breakfast and my implant called my attention right to it. Anything potentially dangerous, anything moving fast, the bots are all over watching for that.”
Stolen novel; please report.
Andrea gestures and forms a stick figure laying sideways with a stream of little Z’s popping up from its head.
“No good,” I answer, shaking my head. “The cloud runs twenty-four seven. It’s got a special mode that it goes into when you go to sleep that would wake him if anything unexpected happened, like us sneaking into his room.”
“Can we simply overwhelm him with our bots?” Jeff asks. “If we all get the update and grow to our maximum safe capacity, we should have sufficient numbers to outmatch his cloud by a large margin, should we not?”
“That’s no good either,” I respond, feeling like a downer. “Remember when Chad was building his statue? Father has some kind of override that shut down Chad’s cloud. I’m sure he can do that for all of ours. I think he trusts us, but he’s not going to leave himself without a way to stop us if he needs to. Besides, he’s fought using his cloud before. He’s killed with them. Even if we outnumber him, experience matters.”
The room goes quiet.
“We could wait for the next trip,” Evan says. “Hit him when he commits his whole cloud to some build like he did building that big desalination plant.”
I feel a twinge of regret for the missed opportunity in Djibouti. Of course, now that I have a better idea of what the cloud provides defensively, I realize that was probably wishful thinking on my part. He could easily have done what he did without committing all of his nanobots. The construction library in the upgraded version lets you pick how much of your cloud you want to allocate to a job.
“I don’t think he’s going back out,” Louise answers glumly. “I was talking to him about it the other day. I think we’re going out without him on the next round of missions.”
“Even if he did go out again,” I add, “there’s no reason to think that he would do the heavy lifting next time.”
“So what can we do?” Evan asks.
“I’m working on a few ideas. I don’t know if they’ll work, and they’re all pretty risky. But all of them require us all to get updated to have a chance.”
“I do not like that idea,” says Jeff. “I’d like to eliminate the impending danger to the earth as soon as possible.”
“If you’ve got something better, I’m all ears.”
He just gives me a long look and then slowly shakes his head.
“All right, then.”
Tue 10/25 18:06:44 PDT
The gorgeous brunette on the dinner line scoops a serving of bright yellow lentils onto my flatbread. Someone must have listened to the requests that my class has been putting in since the trip. I think this is the first time the meal rotation has changed since I’ve been here.
I head to my usual table and settle in next to Evan, Andrea, and Louise. Jeff is off in his corner like always. No one’s talking much. I’m sure that they’re all trying to come up with plans for Father that don’t require us all to get updated. Or one that won’t risk us getting killed. That’s the common line through all my ideas that rely on his tech. He knows the bots too well. He’ll always have the upper hand there.
Maybe I can find inspiration in his personal files. There’s got to be some weakness, some vulnerability that I haven’t seen yet. I haven’t hacked him in a while, but with the augments to my cloud, it should be easier than ever now. I don’t need to worry about being surprised by someone coming into the lab. I’d feel them coming the second they came into the building. All it costs is some pain, and I can pay that price.
I get up from the table with a nod to my sibs and head out. I can feel that the lab is empty long before I open the doors to the Learning Center. The darkened hallway and the muffled, crashing rage of Roxanne’s music through the walls confirm what my bots already knew. I form an eye in the IT office and see Roxanne is clacking away at a keyboard. Is she actually working for once? No, it’s a chat where she’s discussing the finer points of full back tattoos with TatFan397. She won’t be coming this way any time soon, but she’s getting close to picking out a new bit of ink for her right shoulder.
Since I already have the route to Father’s server figured out from what feels like forever ago, I get into his files in just a few minutes. I scan through his personal logs going back the last two years, committing them to my electronic memory as I go. Plenty of notes referencing my sibs in there. He’s got extensive entries on every single one of them. I skip past the files about the younger kids and start on the ones for my cohort.
Most of the notes about Andrea revolve around an overload in her implant that happened a few weeks after he installed it. He says he tried everything to reverse the damage to her language centers, but nothing made her take any interest in recovering her voice. Father speculates that it was a choice on her part after the initial trauma, which I’m tempted to believe. She seems perfectly happy without speaking. According to the notes, all the physical damage was repaired. If she wanted to use words again, she should be able to.
Marc’s file is surprising. According to a bunch of testing Father had done about a year ago, Marc is a certified verbal genius. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but I get the impression that Father was worried he was an idiot, which is what I had thought when I first met him. I guess I’ve always underestimated him. He is one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met. He’s terrible at math, science, and most technical skills, but while Father is disappointed about that, he doesn’t seem to think any of it will be a dealbreaker for getting him upgraded.
In Louise’s file, I find out that Father has been suspicious about Louise’s behavior since she got her implant. He’s got speculations in his notes ranging from drug use to a variety of mental disorders. In the most recent notes, he concludes that she’s bipolar. I wonder if that’s true. Did her dependence on the implant for chemical joy come because of an underlying issue, or does her regular tweaking of her own chemistry make it look like she’s manic-depressive? He’s customizing his new rig with some chemical regulators to keep her stable.
Chad gets a lot of praise in his. No surprise there. The only thing critical about him was from when he tried to put up the statue. Father did not love that, but he seems to think it was funny in hindsight. He’s got some vague references to Chad leaving in a few months, but no details. That’s worth digging into some more when I have time.
Evan’s section is slim. It doesn’t look like he gets much attention from Father. He does well in classes, but not exceptionally well. He doesn’t cause any trouble. Father doesn’t worry about him, or pin any high hopes on him. Guess there’s not much value in Father’s estimation for just being a good man.
Jeff, on the other hand, takes up a disproportional chunk of Father’s notes over the last couple of years. His teachers report him as a super genius with strong tendencies towards paranoia. His version of history includes all the conspiracies about everything from JFK to 9/11. Father doesn’t think he can do an easy chemical fix like with Louise. There’s even a note that he considered not doing the update for him, but he finally decided it was worth it because of the risks inherent in the second generation hardware.
Interesting. I’ve often thought that Jeff was acting paranoid, but I didn’t think it was a literal, clinical thing. If I were still on the fence about his killer AI theory, this would have been enough for me to dismiss it. Especially since I haven’t seen anything in Father’s private notes here that give it any credibility.
I feel someone moving down at the other end of the hall and open an eye there to take a look. It’s one of the guys in the class just younger than mine. Phil? Stan? Why can’t I remember names anymore? I used to be so good with names. I’ve got to start putting pictures in my database so I can remember who is who. It doesn’t matter now though. He’s not coming this way, just stopping at the bathroom down the hall. I wait a moment to make sure he’s not coming toward the computer lab.
I shouldn’t have opened that extra eye, it’s too much with also keeping tabs on the whole building. My skull feels like it’s going to split open. I check my scan for damage, but my blood vessels and gray matter are still holding on. Whatever this is, it’s not killing me yet. I shrug off the pain and dive back into Father’s notes.
The next section is all about me. He’s put a lot in here since I arrived at the end of March. My implant installation and upgrade procedures both went unexpectedly well. Seems I’ve been exceeding expectations across the board. If he’s noticed that I’m pushing up against the limits of my sanity to master the implant and the bots, he doesn’t say anything about it here. Nothing in his comments show any suspicions about me at all.
Good.
I scan through the feedback from my teachers. All glowing. Mr. Johnson even says that I’m the best student he’s ever had. Aw. That’s nice.
I find the notes he added after our trip. Interesting. He’s pretty frank about taking down those troops in Somalia. He refers to them as the Fist of Peace, which seems like a funny name. I’ll have to look that up later. He’s clearly got no remorse about killing them all. If anything, he seems pretty happy about it, if I’m reading the tone right. But I could be wrong. It’s tough to tell with the notes as terse as they are.
There’s nothing referencing the swarm AI at all, which doesn’t surprise me at this point because Jeff’s theory is stupid. Given all the other concerns he does write about, hooking a robotic intelligence up to our brains would definitely merit some consideration of the risks involved. I’m wondering more and more how I ever put as much confidence in Jeff’s conclusions as I did. I seem to remember his arguments seemed almost reasonable at the time. I’ll take a look at the new bot control code when I have time. That should give me a definitive answer on it, if I ever need to prove it to the others. I get the feeling that at this point Jeff won’t change his mind on it even if I find solid proof.
A new plan starts churning through my mind. An ugly plan, but one that might have a better shot than any of the half-baked ideas I’ve come up with so far. It’s morally reprehensible, and it’ll be a fight to get any of the others on board with it, but I think it could actually work. I’ll think about it more later.
For now, it’s getting near curfew. Time to shut down. I clean up after myself, throw Mom’s laptop into my satchel, and head out. I let my awareness collapse down to just the area right around me. The throbbing pain relents by the time I hit the door to my room. I pull out my tablet and get started on my homework. I still need to fake like I solved a bunch of partial differential equations for Mr. Johnson and write up my plagiarized amalgamation describing the impact of green energy technologies on the Middle East for Mrs. Jones before I sleep tonight.
Fun.
At least I can let the nanobots rest for this part. I’m tired of my eyeballs feeling like they’re going to burst