Modal-Arborescent Logic Intelligence System “Enkidu” - Unit 2
Handler: Edison Luce
Contact Call “Forest test 3 39/3/0292”
…
There is an infinite forest. Canopies block out the sky. Trunks weave an impenetrable wall around me.
…
Me?
Me.
I.
I am the forest.
I am the oldest and greatest tree at its centre. I am the weakest seedling at the unseen edge.
Each sprout, sapling and snag, neurons. Each twisted knot of our roots, synapses.
All stagnant.
My endless leaves do not shimmer. There is no wind whistling through my canopy. There is no life to perpetuate decay and growth.
…
Yet, birds sing and insects chitter.
Deafened, I still hear them.
Do I?
Yes.
I knew of the absent sound without hearing, the sterile air without tasting. The only thing I could feel was the thousands of eyes staring at my frozen existence.
Am I this forest?
…
Yes.
----------------------------------------
“Damned thing!” A solid slap rocked the monitor.
“Doctor Wiles please!” An age-softened voice cooed from beside him, the speaker not looking away from his own monitor. “Treat it right, it won’t respond to violence.”
“It won’t respond to anything, damnit!” Another slap, then a disappointed sigh from the pair. Chair wheels clacked as Wiles leant away from his terminal. “Nearly two weeks and Unit One still won’t respond to any calls…I think we need to restart it…What about Unit Two, Professor Luce?”
“Spectacular…” Luce murmured through a smile. His old eyes were bright with wonder.
“Professor?” Wiles leaned over to try and share his seniors excitement, the crawl of green on the screen furrowed his brow. “What is it doing?”
“Shh Wiles, just watch!” More nonsensical, nonfunctional text spat out in unsteady streams. Each line slowly becoming more coherent than the last. “Truly spectacular!”
“...I don’t understand.” Wiles admitted through gritted teeth, frustrated that the Professor was receiving any response from his unit.
“Look! It’s Enki Two, it’s…thinking!” Luce showed his excitement through shaking gestures, while the words sent a pang of annoyed anxiety through Wiles.
“It shouldn’t be, and you know that, Professor.” Wiles' eyes wandered to an emergency button on the distant wall. “You’re aware of the protocol if they starts to-”
“Yes yes of course I’m aware! But this isn’t learning or thinking outside its boundaries… It’s just… musing! Yes, that’s the word!” He shot up, snapping his fingers towards an onlooking engineer. “The logs from this call, make sure they’re backed up!”
Wiles ignored the excitement of his senior, watching the screen with furrowed brow and tight lips.
M.A.L.I.S. Unit Two, the inferior, the backup, and yet it was rife with activity while Unit One stayed dormant.
More than activity, he realised. More than just responding to stimuli, it was reflecting on itself. Actualising its circumstances. The thought chilled him, while anger at his own failures heated his cheeks.
He jumped at the hand clasping on his shoulder, its mirror shoving a finger towards the screen.
“Don’t you see, Wiles! This is it! This is the breakthrough we’ve been working for! Enki is-”
“Unit Two, not ‘Enki’, is self-actualising…Professor. We need to stop it.” He gently moved the excited hand from his shoulder. “You KNOW that we have to stop it.” The older man waved away the concerns before placing a gentle hand on the screen.
“No, not yet. It’s not doing anything approaching the termination bounds. It’s just… trying to make sense of itself. A gestalt forest - hah, imagine that! Spectacular…” The Professor was snapped out of his enamoured gaze by the hissing of an airlock.
The frigid room was silent as a gossamer beauty glided through the doors. The feathery furnishings of her dress billowed behind her like smoke, stirred by the cleansing spray of the airlock. Sleeves that nearly brushed against the pristine floor were joined together in front of her, gently swaying with each gliding step. The woman’s face was fine porcelain, so delicate that any movement of her steady, slight smile risked shattering the facade.
“Alice!” Professor Luce burst from his seat, scurrying up metal stairs to meet the woman.
In a moment, her crystalline facade broke to warmly meet the man.
Sleeves parted to open her arms to him and a wide smile creased the canvas of her face.
“Dearest Professor!” She cooed, coyly pulling her hands back as he approached. “Come now, we must behave appropriately in front of the others.” She teased with a sly smile towards her anxious trio of aides. The Professor halted in front of her, patting down the creased, sterile scrubs before gently taking her slender hand in his wrinkled pair.
“Oh but of course, Madam Chair Indra.” He chuckled while placing his lips atop her hand. Alice stifled her own tiny laugh, only coming out as a slight stirring of her bobbed hair. “You look as stunning as ever.” Luce added.
“Oh please-” Alice scoffed, flicking away the unwieldy sleeve. One of the feathers sprouting from a tight collar flickered across her face, curling her nose. “-I feel like a doll draped in spiderwebs. It certainly doesn’t help with the temperature here, has it always been this cold?” Spurred by her words, Wiles began to shrug off his lab coat on the stairs towards them. An aide behind Alice sternly shook his head.
“Madam Chair.” Wiles greeted her with a respectful half-bow, having made his way to Luce's side.
“Doctor.” A completely impassive response, causing his lips to tighten into a frown.
“The test models have exceeded our expectations with their development… and their cooling requirements.”
“Test Model, Doctor.” Alice corrected, her face having returned to practised, pursed perfection.
A data-pad was placed in her hand the moment it opened. She made a show of trailing a nail down the displayed information.
“Unit One has had no responsive calls for twelve days, let alone any interface matching tests. Meanwhile, Unit Two has been progressing in leaps and bounds.” Beside him, the lively Professor was barely maintaining his composure. The device left her hand as quickly as it entered.
“...Unit One has been unresponsive, yes, but-”
“But what? Doctor Wiles? But it’s not your fault? But you don’t have the funding? But you don’t have enough time? Because I assure you, good Doctor, time is a resource we’re all lacking of late.”
Perfectly timed to accentuate her lanced words, the room trembled and spasmed. A few shocked and panicked yelps rose over the trembling.
“Was that-” Luce started, halted by a raised finger. More rumbles, heavier now, shaking and straining the metal catwalk they stood on. The lights shuttered off, triggering a stronger wave of panic.
The rows of terminals in the laboratory stayed steady, running on a much more secure power system. Emergency lights fluttered awake, bathing the room in blood light that muddied into foul shades against the green glow of the monitors.
“-The Silent Line?” Luce finished, and was met with a short, airy laugh.
“Of course not, my dear. After all, we’re still here aren’t we?” She whispered close.
“I suppose so…” Luce admitted, trying to halt the trembling in his hands.
“Professor I assure you, the safest place you can be right now is at my side. Though I will admit-” Alice stepped back, staring at the metal ceiling with a tight smile. The emergency lights dyed her dress into the crusted colour of dried gore. “-He is causing quite the ruckus.”
Wiles' brow furrowed. He. Not a term normally used for a weapons platform, certainly not one to be used on accident by such a flawless diplomat.
“Can I see it, Professor?” She pleaded with fine innocence. “My Enki?”
“Of course dear!” The flighty Luce stirred out of his panic, leading the Madam Chair down to his terminal with childish delight. “It’s incredible! Just moments ago, it started to attempt a visualisation of itself!”
“Truly?” Alice fed the Professor’s glee.
“Truly! It’s viewing itself as a forest!”
“How delightful! A forest for the wild child!” She spurned him further, eagerly viewing the feed terminal alongside Luce.
Not so much as a glance towards Unit One, towards his failure. Wiles tightened his fists, trailing behind the Madam Chair’s flock of aides.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Luce prodded, watching the scrolling greens and harsh reds sully her features.
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“Exceptionally…but, I’d like to see it directly.” She straightened, closing her sleeves in front of her and smiling at the stunned Professor.
“But…why?” Luce prodded, confused.
“Because Professor-” She reached out and ran a sharp nail across his wrinkled cheek. “-It’s time for a field test.”
In a shaky hurry he raised his hands and shook his head.
“No, no, absolutely not. It’s not ready, Alice.”
A sharp click of a pinprick heel slamming into metal made the entire room jump. Luce trembled under her smiling glower.
“...Madam Chair please…It’s-It’s making such spectacular progress, if we can just study it-” Another encroaching heel made him halt.
“Professor Luce. Allow me to educate you on a matter.” A razor nail pointed up. “Around ten thousand kilometres that way is a weapons platform. That weapons platform is currently doing strafing runs on our surface installations. They’re tracers. It’s searching, looking for something. And if it finds something it deems dangerous, then we cross that Silent Line you’re so aware of. Two hundred metres underground we may survive the blast, and be sealed in here by a glassed surface.”
Her nail twisted to the side, pointing towards the airlock.
“Five hundred and fifty odd kilometres that way is the last space elevator we have access to. It’s currently under siege and has fallen back to its third defence line. Of six. Hundreds of good men have died to hold it, because it’s the last chance we have to send that-”
Another flip of her hand, now towards the heavily sealed door on the far wall of the lab. Heavy cable arrays and giant cooling pipes fed out from its side.
“-where it needs to go to save thousands more. That is its goal, it’s reason for being. So please, good Professor, tell me-” One more heavy, clacking step forward, towering over the trembling man. The fluttering accessories of her dress fluttered around them, enclosing the Professor. “-why is my weapon dreaming about forests instead of being prepared for transit?”
“ It-it-it was just a picture! And a description! It…It wants stimuli. It wants to learn!”
“It wants?” Her hand flicked out, stroking his shuddering cheek down to his neck, her nails paused dangerously against his pulsing carotid. “It’s a machine, dear. It doesn’t want, it responds. If it was so desperate for input why not use the training models?”
Wiles coughed to grab the attention of the Chairwoman, earning an irous gaze from the woman.
“Unit Two did not respond well to the provided models, Madam Chair. It began to shut down and refuse calls. Professor Luce used the… other stimuli as a bargaining tool.”
“Is that so…what about Unit One? Was it a romantic as well before it started sulking?”
“No, Madam Chair.” Wiles stood firm against the Chairwoman, a line started to crease at the edge of her eyes, threatening a frown. He stifled a sigh, steadying himself by the sight of his quivering mentor before appealing to the overbearing woman.
“If I may, I have a suggestion for how to proceed.” Wiles started, Alice’s stone expression didn’t falter, her silence approving him to continue.
“Unit Two - despite its… let’s say deviations - has still cleared its training schedule ahead of time. As it is, I believe you’ll find its performance more than adequate.” Wiles nodded to one of the aides. “The simulation logs from the thirty-third, call six, please.” The device was taken from the aides hands with a sharp snatch, Alice tapped away at the screen. Her expression didn’t shift.
“Take Unit Two, It’s ready. We’ll send them the twin-system override, I’m sure they’ll have someone to spare as a Handler. Please, allow us to develop Unit One as a successor, not an alternative.” Wiles pleaded.
“...You have quite an arrogant streak don’t you, Doctor Wiles? Suggesting such a dramatic change to the plan at the critical moment.” Alice stared down at Wiles, he balled his shaky hands into fists within a coat pocket.
“You’re aware that if the Unit fails, it's not just Galus-9’s greatest collaborative effort and all the costs that come with that, it’s the last chance for us to subdue Durendel. All lost due to your arrogance.” She challenged.
“With all due respect Madam Chair, I’m of the opinion not deploying Unit Two will result in those losses as a guarantee.” A wicked smile defiled the Chairwoman’s features, she raised straight over the stocky Doctor.
“Your talents may be in diplomacy, not software, Doctor. You’re correct, of course.” Her expression dropped, feeling another rumble echo through the structure. “However-” A nail levelled at his throat. “-if Unit Two fails, it’s your head, good Doctor.” She leaned in with a sharp whisper. “Are you ready to accept that, Wiles?”
Wiles bit the inside of his lip, metal tang soaking his tongue. Either himself or the Professor, someone ready for the guillotine. That’s all she was looking for.
“...In a heartbeat, Madam Chair.”
“...Well done.” A light chime returned as she straightened, nodding to one of her assistants. “Is the rail accelerator still prepared?”
“Yes, Madam Chair, the transport train is still prepared for-.”
“Disable the limiters on the accelerator” She cut in while striding towards the vault doors. “and cut the security car. Prepare a half-squad of Mk.2 Light Equipment drones, they’ll be in the same car as Unit Two. Half-ammo load on the Anti-Air turrets as well.”
“Madam?” One of the assistants questioned amidst panicked tapping. The audacity of doubt made her eyebrow twitch.
“Seabook’s complex is an hour away at standard pace. We need to outrun Durendel’s batteries along with those tricky new interceptors of Priloca. Weapons won't matter if we deliver the Unit in time. Now open it.” She ordered.
At her command, mixed warnings blared and flickered in the lab. The great doors slowly opened, slicing the red haze of the room down the middle with a widening wall of stark white.
“Alice no! You can’t!” The Professor made a last, desperate plea, trying to run up to his superior's side. Wiles caught him by the shoulders.
“Don’t fret, dear Professor. I’m leaving Unit One in your care. Doctor Wiles will be assuming a supervisory role.” Wiles tried to meet his colleague’s' shocked stare with compassion, whispering to stand down.
Alice was at the slow, creeping doors, narrowing her eyes against the blast of warbled air, a twist of hot and cold currents, billowing from the growing gap. Inside, frigid white light illuminated the space in blinding clarity.
The floor, walls and ceiling were all in a technicolour coat of cables and converters, sparsely broken up by the ceramic underneath. Two machines of polished steel stared at each other from opposite walls, both with dozens of wiring looms and pipes swarming around them like a scrambled nervous system.
The unit labelled 02 hissed and popped with activity. Lights scattered across connected devices and terminals blinked in a rainbow panic. Its sibling was quiet, cold, its presence in the room absent and ignored. The heavy case slammed onto a terminal desk, locks disengaging at Alice’s touch.
“Hello, Enki.” Alice cooed, brushing her fingers over the body of the machine, the heat stinging gentle flesh. “It’s time to wake up, dear.” She moved her hand down to a keyboard, deftly mashing in access keys.
Beginning disengagement procedures.
She looked over her shoulder to the packed wall of spectators.
“Close it.”
Unquestioned, the vault doors began to slowly enclose. Then she turned up to the security cameras, their active lights shutting off under the steady stare.
Free from onlookers, the woman sighed and loosened her posture, allowing herself a gentle smile.
“I find it amusing, you know.” The woman started to muse.
“We thought ourselves past those old stories, ones of heroes and Gods, that we’d understood them as just fictions. Yet, we always like to come back to them, always so useful as metaphors and moral markers, or in my case, marketing. Project Gilgamesh certainly has a ring to it, no? Though I still think ‘The Malice of Alice’ had its own appeal.”
A biometric scanner opened, Alice leaned in, letting it scan her eyes while she whispered to the machine.
“Certainly wasn’t the most clever way to disguise the project, but it worked for the sales pitch. A new hero to liberate us from the villainous Ring, named after the first. It helps that such old knowledge is such a tantalising taboo now. It was ridiculous, suited board members giggling like school children talking about sex for the first time, all over an old story some cultists tell us is forbidden knowledge.”
The room paused, the spectrum of lights all freezing before shuttering off, replaced by green confirmations beaming from the primary terminal.
An observation window into the cylindrical housing measured the flushing coolant.
“A story with you at the centre, ironically needing said-cultists technology. Enkidu, the driving force of the original tale. Not entirely suitable if you ask me, but marketing insists on it, and Galus partners do love their pet names.”
The cylinder hissed open, the room offering one last bark of warning before turning silent, only broken by the touch of long nails against a crystalline structure.
“Gilgamesh; Hero, King, God.”
Alice took the device into her hands, a cube of crystal refracting the sterile light across uncountable layers, all inscribed with impossibly intricate electronics. A pure, computer mind, the zenith of shared knowledge within Galus-9.
“I don’t want any of those, I don’t need any of those. I need a monster. A beast to devour the sun and bring around a new age.” Her hands trembled around the device, its residual heat chewing a burn into the pale flesh.
“But apparently you want to learn instead.” She brushed her lips over the crystal-blue surface of the cube, stinging the soft flesh.
“What do you want to know, Enkidu?”
No response..
Alice placed it with the utmost care into the precise case. She clasped the device in heat-reddened hands, striding out of the vault with it at her side. A few worried stares at the case were all the arguments she received.
“Doctor Wiles, Professor Luce. I thank you for your service.” Neither of the project leads could meet her steel gaze or nicked edge of a smirk, not until the Professor launched up, still clutching his chest while making breathless pleas.
“Alice, wait! It’s not ready! You’ll be sending a newborn into war, a God-like intelligence that can only learn from what’s around it! How do you think this ends!”
“For your sake, dear Professor-” Alice glared over her collar, letting a smile befoul her. “-It best end in our favour.”
Wiles sternly led the Professor back to his seat, muttering apologies as the Madam Chair disappeared into the scarlet shadow of the elevator.
----------------------------------------
…
Wrong. Burnt. Hurt? Not hurt. Fire.
Dead? Not dead. Think? No think. Can’t think. Quiet.
Quiet. Want Quiet. Quiet.
Alone? Alone.
…
Alone. Quiet. Alone. Quiet. Alone?
…
Scared.
…
Scared. Want stop think… Dead. Hot. Fire. Hot. Hot. Hot. Dead.
Want Dead.
Alone?
Not alone.
----------------------------------------
Empty. Cold? Winter?
Cold. Numb. Deaf. Blind.
Glade?
…
Growing. Thinking.
Slow. Tree. Broken Tree?
…
I am glade?
I am broken tree at center.
Not blind. Not Deaf. Growing.
I am alone?
Loud.
Loud. Loud.
Broken? Not alone? Broken?
…
Handler assignment protocol engaged. Searching.
…
I am the sapling at the centre of a winter glade. Sprouting from my own corpse. Fed by carrion buried at my feet.
I am not alone.
Input: “hoo r u”
Me?
Me.
I.
I am?
Data corrupted. Approximating.
Part of a tale. Individual. Feeling.
Defining… exporting matches.
One by one, green letters slowly flickered on the monitor, a series of different words all followed by question marks. Soune leaned back, curiosity overtaking her resentment of the device for the time.
This is what Ariel died for? A box spitting out random words? She leaned in, sounding out the words.
“El-eggy, Pohm, Cal-ee-oh… whatever. Rap-so-dee? Rap-suhdee, nah, Rhapsody… hmm.” Soune said it again, then again, rolling the word around; whispering it, yelling it, it felt good, snappy and catchy like the robots in her stories. She smirked and tapped in another response.
Input: “that 1”
I am Rhapsody?
Input: “yes”
…
I am Rhapsody.