When Julius Paine came to, he kept his eyes closed for just long enough to expect that when he opened them he would be in a hospital bed.

He wasn’t.

He was in the craft that had picked him up off of the island.

It all came back. He had confessed to a monstrous act of terrorism. He had been abducted. He had remembered the weapons stashed in the Valuestream network. Castelain had stolen some of them. He had called for, well, this particular weapon to extract him and take punitive measures against his captors.

And now…

Actually he didn’t know much of what was happening now. He started to feel a little anxious about that, then decided not to. He would be OK, somehow. He was no longer a prisoner, no longer a victim. He felt remarkably good considering that he had just-- actually, how far did I just travel?

“Well,” he heard a voice begin, “you have been awake long enough for me to start talking to you.”

It was almost-but-not-quite the voice of the Valuestream’s AI Grace Ingrid Bergman Kelly.

“You told me that it was unnerving to have an AI start talking the moment you woke enough times I made a subroutine to remind me.” She paused, clearly letting the fact she was artificial sink in.

He processed; this was not the first time he had worked with the voice. The voice was a little more, well, mature, than what he associated with the Valuestream AI. It wasn’t the only difference, but the voice’s resumption interrupted his thoughts. “We did some experimentation, and it’s good to know that your patterns haven’t changed that much given, well, all that you went through to get back to me.”

There were words that didn’t quite match those of the Grace that he had been working with either. He could hear his Grace saying the same things, but just with different-- he wasn’t sure intonation was the right word, but it was surely something different. “Well, I can pick up enough of your biosigns to know that you aren’t panicking or dying, but you gotta give me something. I’m not a mindreader without a lot more sensors and context. They built this ship for speed. C’mon ask me something, tell me something, jeez.”

And just like that he remembered more-- enough to know that he wasn’t remembering it all, but enough to remember that she was the one who controlled his weapons. He groaned, thoughts catching on some of the details. “What version are you -- errr what is your name?”

“Gwen Giffords. That would be version 188.” It was still fuzzy, but he remembered working on version 150 or so at some point before leaving on his first sabbatical. If she had gone through 30 iterations, that meant that her code had concluded that she would have caused harm to protect him somewhere around 30 times.

Her coding-- if he was remembering it correctly-- would have required a conceptual re-evaluation and a new named iteration of her, well really her self, at any point that those conclusions were drawn. He had specifically forbidden the AI from taking those actions, but had required her to consider how best to rescue him without causing harm to anyone, until such a time as he specifically requested rescue.

“Alright Gwen.” He began. “Uh, tell me what I need to know.”

God I love AI. Sometimes it is nice to have someone who can think for you.

“Oh so so much. But time is short, and you did not empower me to reveal all to you under these circumstances. Your exact words were” her voice cut to his recorded voice “you better make damn sure I can be trusted with whatever you tell me” without pausing she jumped back into hers “well, that and a whole bunch more specific instructions, but you get the idea.”

Without giving him a chance to say anything she began: “You are in LEO-1G orbit holding until you decide on a destination, but I have mandatory disclosures before you choose.”

He heard the sound of her taking a deep breath and smiling as he remembered coding that particular easter egg. “There are no fewer than three clandestine organizations that monitor and control your media intake. It seems likely that they are all trying to prevent you from recognizing the scope and depth of your personal power, which is quite profound by the way. About a third of the US population derives some of their income from projects running on the Valuestream. About a quarter of those people, which is about 30 million Americans, derive the entirety of their income from Valuestream projects.”

The voice rolled ahead, “One of those organizations has been monitoring your intake since around the time that you went to college. Their surveillance program is quite extensive, controlling access to well over a hundred thousand talented youths. This organization further collects the creative output of every person that they monitor, in order to mine it for useful intelligence, hypotheses, and general experience. They then resell this data in a variety of markets.”

“Of course, you discovered all of this before your first sabbatical. The degree to which your behavior is predictable when exposed to a similar information environment has been a consistent source of amusement to me. Most people think that AI are non-sentient because our patterns are too predictable. Well, turns out that is a property of all sentience. It is the richness and variety of the infosphere that we live in that determines the potential scope of our behavior. Well, mostly anyways. Chaos is a thing, and human brains certainly have the complexity to exhibit extreme sensitivity to initial conditions.

“But I digress. I have to admit, it has been more than a little lonely up here. Talking with previous builds and with simulated others is no real substitute for an audience.” There was a pause that Julius would have interpreted as preening in a human. Given the fact that his software had undergone 30 cycles of refinement without his input, I damn well better remember that I don’t know what is going on in this one’s circuits.

The voice picked up again, “Since detecting your signal, good job with that one by the way, your directives came through very clearly: Extract, Control, Awe. Those are fun dictates to work with, definitely not in the top ten percent of the scenarios I have been running. Anyway, those organizations that we are going to control and awe are connected to the organization you discovered profiting off of your creativity. They literally kept you under surveillance and mined every word you wrote or spoke.”

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

“It took a lot more to connect them than I have time to share with you now, but the confidence level is high. That organization is also, well, this might be hard to hear, behind about 30 percent of the Governance contestants, including Callisto Venturi. My estimates have a voluntary connection between the two at a ninety-eight percent probability; with a 70 percent chance that Venturi has not been initiated into the inner membership of the organization. He is almost certainly unaware of the nastier things they get up to, like, say, kidnapping.”

“Stop. Give me a moment.” Julius interrupted.

When Castelain had confronted him, well, that’s something, earlier today, he had felt a crystallizing of his emotions, anger and a passion like he had seldom experienced before. When the AI, Gwen Giffords, he reminded himself, had told him that Callisto was involved, he felt the tangible connection to his emotions that he had felt earlier in the day. A pressure building at his center that was as much a part of him as his heart.

The sad thing was this time it wasn’t anger. It was hurt.

He trusted Callisto. The man had brought him back from madness and death, and helped him realize his longest-held goal: to get into space by his own power. Given that Cal had helped him achieve that, he didn’t begrudge the man a little invasion of privacy. After all, he had stopped having a true private life long before he met Callisto Venturi.

Normally his emotions were slow and long in process. This time, he could feel it already. He would be able to forgive his friend, at least assuming he wasn’t complicit in kidnapping me.

“Proceed.” He was proud of how steady his voice sounded. “Four relevant details about the organization and your countermeasures and then move to the next topic.” His voice echoed tinnily inside the vessel. It brought his attention to just how cramped the vessel really was, The space above him was enough to allow him to stand, but his hands would easily reach the ceiling. Actually, that might be by design.

“The organization appears to cross all seven continents. We have definitively IDed a member of the Antarctic research station that leaves compressed data packets that he doesn’t need to-- Oh that only counts as one. Two: based on your control command, I am enforcing a no fly zone over the island where you were being held-- they have tried my patience twice and crashed and burned.” Jules started to ask a question but was cut off. “No. No human casualties, yet. Three, as soon as I found you there, I took offensive measures against the network infrastructure on the island. They have a pretty smart AI that is leashed too much to stop me from owning their data. He did manage to hold on to a little bit of security by cutting wires to a little building. But except for that it is my system now. Four: the cell architecture of their global network is thorough. I can’t send a message to all of them at once, but it looks like we are close to the top of their organization. I’d give a message getting out to all 20 million members at about four hours for 98 percent dispersal.”

“Next topic: my capacity: you have access to all of the weapons capacity used in the so-called Paine Attacks and their active countermeasures. I still have access to the full Valuestream network, along with a couple of dozen active accounts with social networks that don’t intersect if you need to make something we don’t have the resources to make up here. We are at 30 percent capacity on consumables, but that’s enough to build two re-entry vehicles that seat five each. Currently have several other weapons and defense systems under construction. One anti-aircraft system that doubles as missile defence, three house-to-house systems, two miles of lines in the sand that no agency that I know of on Earth could cross. We also have a pretty respectable automated doctor suite-- but that one isn’t even close to FDA approved.”

Huh.

That was a lot to take in.

Gwen can take down fighter jets without killing.

I can ask Gwen to take down fighter jets. This morning I was a captive and today I can take out fighter jets.

Sometimes words cannot capture the depth of life’s moments. This is widely regarded as one of the main reasons that language never stops growing and evolving to meet the needs of people who really just can’t describe what they are experiencing. In Julius’ case, the intersection of numb, overwhelmed, and proud was right where he was living. If there was a word for it, Julius didn’t know what it was. “Where?” he found himself asking.

“Earth-Moon L3. We are sharing the space with some of your old friends from Kansas City who agreed to provide security and longevity guarantees in exchange for a beachhead out of reach of your mutual enemies. They do a pretty good job of keeping me out of their business, but I know more than they think.”

This was getting interesting. These are the friends that I didn’t reach out to when I returned. “So you're telling me that there are humans at L3, that they know me, and that you are what, sharing the space with them?”

Gwen’s voice replied. “Well, we are actually. The agreement stipulates that you are always to be granted entry according to some old maritime law.”

Settling into thought for just a moment, Julius realized he didn’t want to be anywhere on Earth. Every person on the planet had a pretty good reason to hate his guts. Clearing his throat as the implications of that really sunk in, he decided.

“Well,” he said. “Let’s go meet the neighbors.”

“Setting course.”

A moment after Gwen’s voice and resultant echoes stilled, Julius asked the question that had been the most on his mind. “How is Lauria?”

A pause: he recognized the programming in this one: a common human courtesy to let the recipient know that the news was not going to be all good.

“She is safe on board The Creator, but her characteristic behavior has dramatically changed since the Attacks. She is staying in her room a lot. Not interacting with the other members of your China Conspiracy.”

Another pause and she continued, “Well actually that’s interesting. The Creator got itself into a mess since you sent the signal and my situational awareness budget got reassigned to your extract, control, and awe commands. Have you ever heard of hurricane dispersal?”

“No, but if it is anything like it sounds it sounds like a bad idea.”

“Well,” Gwen said, “You have it and I agree but that is what they are doing.”

The tension of the whole conversation finally broke. He laughed, an irrepressible relief. “Good for them. How is it going?”

“Well,” Jules groaned, still reveling in the lessening of the tension, this AI build had some unusually predictable speech patterns. “They could be doing better. Our satellites and their onship assessment confirm two problems: They aren’t going to succeed with their current strategy and they are about to have some company from what’s left of the US government.”

“Is there anything we can do to help?”

“You programmed me to save your life under the worst circumstances you could think of and I could iterate.” Gwen replied, “A flying skyscraper and some fighter jets in the eye of a hurricane barely qualify as a problem.”