Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (108 page)

“Gabe,” a voice boomed from inside the room. “I’ve been waiting for you to come home. Come in. Let me see you, old friend.”

Hearing that voice, a chill ran up Gabe’s neck. It was and wasn’t the Charles he knew. The voice no longer had his thick patois accent, but the timbre was all him.

Only now it held a digital quality. Just what had happened to him?

“Leave Kobi and the others outside and come in. Bring your guests,” Charles commanded. “You’ll be safe here.”

Petal gave Gabe a questioning look.
 

— You trust this dude?
she asked.
 

— No, but we have little choice. Can ya cover us while inside?
 

— As ever, man. Let’s do it.
 

“It’s okay, Dad. Let Kobi go,” Gabe said.
 

“You sure about this?”
 

“Yeah, it’s cool.”

Gabe’s father did as he was instructed and lowered the rifle from Kobi’s back. The old gangster turned and gave Gabe and the others an elaborate bow before slipping into the shadows of the corridor to join his brethren.
 

With his father and Petal backing him up, Gabe took a deep breath and stepped into Figgy’s room. The image before him stopped him just a few steps in with disbelief and horror.
 

He dropped his shotgun to the floor.
 

“Jesus, man, what the hell have ya done?”

Chapter 2

The Family’s Mars Facility

Jachz opened his eyes.

“Am I fully operational?”

The engineers buzzed about his new body, checked their holoscreens, and scanned his processing usage and memory efficiency. “You’re good to go, Jachz. Welcome back,” an engineer said.

“I believe it would be protocol to offer you an expression of gratitude, but I’m unclear on what it is that you have done.” Jachz checked his motor functions: fine. Cognitive reasoning: fine. Multi-core quantum processing: fine. “My files are showing a gap in time. Where have I been?”

A man dressed in the standard-issue Family suit of white and blue held a slate in his hand and stood casually in front of Jachz. A glass panel separated them.
 

From the schematics he had previously researched, Jachz knew this was the observation room of the AI developmental suite at the Family’s Mars facility—a series of domes not unlike that of City Earth.

The man looked up from his slate. “You had a trip to the surface and didn’t last very long. We brought you back up and reinstalled you from the backup. Your memories will be temporarily incomplete while we fully integrate all the missing data.”

“The surface of what?” Jachz asked. “Can you be more specific?”

The man, whose name read as ‘Simon’, sent a buzz of recognition through his systems. Simon was Jachz’s chief engineer.
 

“The surface of Earth. You were sent there to try to appeal to Gerry Cardle and bring him back with the girl called Petal.”

“I remember Gerry,” Jachz said, scanning through his history folder designated to interactions with Gerry. He recalled a series of conversations with him while he was staying aboard the station. “While the reinstallation is ongoing, can you tell me what happened?”

“They killed you.”

“Who are ‘they’? Can you be more specific?”

Simon let out a sigh.
 

“I don’t mean to be a bother to you,” Jachz added. “I’m just trying to build a timeline of events.”

“It was some kid. We don’t know who. We uploaded you shortly after we lost the vitals from your vehicle.”

“Vehicle? You mean my body?”
 

Simon looked up from his slate and narrowed his eyes.
 

“Did you not understand?” Jachz said.
 

“No, no, I understand perfectly well. And yes, I mean your… body.”

Simon turned away, leaving Jachz within the glass container while he consulted with his colleagues whose names Jachz could not recall. Simon returned.
 

“You’re returning to your duties now, Jachz. Do you notice anything… strange?”

“What do you mean by strange? Can you be more—”

“No, I can’t be more specific,” Simon said, exhaling and dropping his hands in a swift motion. “You’re the first AI we’ve ever had to recover from a backup in a situation like this. We can only tell so much from your code. How about this: do you notice anything within your systems that wasn’t there before the backup recovery?”

“I can’t tell you that until the file transfer is complete. I have no way of ascertaining what information is in the files and how that will affect my processing functions. It could be that something has changed, but as I’m not yet—”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it. Okay, look, you have a number of tasks to complete. Amma, Nolan, and the board want a report from you. There’s some maintenance work that needs your attention on the station’s weapons system. Something to do with the targeting—they want a report on how it failed and what needs to be done to fix it.”

“Can you be more specific?”

Simon leant forward and banged his head on the glass. “You, Jachz, are a royal pain in my ass. Check your duty manifest. It has all the information you could ever want, specificity guaranteed! Knock yourself out. I really have other things I need to be getting on with.”

The glass screen slid to the side, and the optical cables attached to Jachz’s I/O port decoupled with a hiss. Jachz stepped out and readjusted his balance control. He increased the sensitivity in his gyros and accelerometer and passed his maintenance engineer on the way towards the exit.
 

“Thank you, Simon,” Jachz said.
 

The man just waved a hand and busied himself with some other task.

That was when Jachz did notice something different.
 

He
felt
unimportant.
 

Simon’s reaction to him actually made him
feel
something other than the regular existence, as much as it was, as a sentient AI.
 

Jachz had always been capable of thought, such was his quantum processing, but he’d never before now experienced an actual feeling. He noted the effects and took a snapshot of his system status, filing it away into a secure file area within his memory labelled ‘Feeling: Diminishing of one’s status.’
 

He walked to his workstation and thought about Gerry Cardle.
 

His station and chair were empty.
 

Beside him, in a row of eight cubicles, other AI-based engineers and humans worked in silence.
 

Monochromatic colours covered the walls and desks of the room.
 

A single holoscreen hung on the wall above their stations, projecting a series of images of the surrounding red Martian landscape and the conjoined domes that made up the facility.

Looking through his log files, Jachz noticed that Gerry Cardle featured more than any other subject within his memory. It made sense, considering Jachz’s responsibilities regarding Gerry’s recovery and rebuild during his stay on the station, but there was something else there.
 

A… again, he
felt
something. An actual sensation that affected him. He realised then that he had an ego. This was new. Unexpected.

This time the feeling was what the humans would call a fascination. An interest beyond the rational. An interest that exceeded the requirements of his assigned objectives.
 

He wasn’t just interested in Gerry because of his role or his job. He was interested in Gerry because something about him, or their relationship, made Jachz… and there’s another… curious.
 

He was curious.

So many new ideas blossomed in his quantum cores.
 

This was something so new, and the ramifications were huge. There was not yet an AI of his class that had evolved of its own accord to develop feelings and emotions.
 

The transcendent technology that Amma’s sister, Enna, had produced appeared to have a set of emotions and reactions programmed from the start, but they never changed. They were static, whereas he was changing organically.
 

He was… living.

Filing all the new data in a secure area of his storage, he set about completing his work. He left a portion of his processing power to work on understanding the nature of these new discoveries.

He sat emotionless.
 

That actually required some thought. He didn’t want to start acting ‘strangely’ to the others. He ensured that he acted as he always had at his workstation, moving his hands and arms and responding to the humans in the control room—the room that was responsible for the running of the facility’s various processes; all the while he stored gigabytes of data and analysis of his systems into secure encrypted areas of his memory.
 

He didn’t know why, but he didn’t want the others finding this out about him. It was beyond his protocols.
 

Jachz ran a detailed risk analysis of the human’s likely response if they realised he had attained some level of humanistic emotions.
 

The results were not in his favour.
 

Amma specifically would be distressed about this accidental development.
 

It was her task to lead the team of scientists to create a safe and effective posthuman. In a larger sense, that was what the Family’s main aim was—or at least those on the council.
 

The only posthuman that Jachz was familiar with was the corrupted Elliot Robertson. A copy of his uploaded consciousness currently existed in a state of hibernation among the facility’s servers.
 

The reason for the hibernation was the levels of mutated and corrupted code that occurred shortly after the upload. No one, as yet, had managed a successful transition from human mind to computer existence without major code problems.
 

If the Family knew about his new emotions, he concluded that he would be taken off his current role and experimented upon.
 

His evolution, as it were, would be of great importance to the Family’s research and could possibly help them explain how a human mind and a quantum mind could work safely for the long term, and thus achieve their goal of posthuman immortality.
 

But, and this was already stretching the extent to which his processors could calculate into understanding, he didn’t want to help them. He didn’t want to be a part of their research.

He didn’t know why or how he even knew it. Just something within his codebase had changed, and now he wanted to remain his own… the word came to his mind, but he didn’t parse it.
 

It was not logical, nor computationally sound.
 

The word was … person.

Nobody either side of him had noticed the change.
 

He made a note that it was entirely internal.
 

No outward expressions beyond his programmed responses were present.
 

The work manifest indicated he was to scan the log files of the weapons systems of the space station, now in geosynchronous orbit to Mars, and find the cause of the misfire.
 

Within the task detail, a specific timestamp indicated when the security encryption had failed and a program had breached the system, altering the instructions within the targeting and firing control computer.
 

Some work had already been carried out on this task by a reserve engineer during Jachz’s reboot procedure.
 

Jachz scanned the document, committed the findings to memory, and opened up a suite of debugging tools in order to uncover more details.
 

His substitute was a female human called Felicia.
 

She was not an adept and had only done half the job required.
 

Nine hundred and thirty-five seconds later, Jachz had found the breach.
 

It was simple—for him, at least. A brute-force attack, hidden by a disguised algorithm to be made to look like regular station access, had attached to the encryption protocol. He calculated that if a hacker had used the current levels of known computing power on Earth, it would have taken five million years of algorithmic credential guessing in order to successfully breach the encryption module in this manner.

No computer was responsible for the breach.
 

He couldn’t fix the system.
 

At least not in the time afforded him. He would need eight thousand and thirty-one AIs of equivalent power in order to return the system to the original state.
 

Whatever had breached the weapons system had left behind a sentient virus.

Jachz compiled his findings and sent them to his line manager: Tyronius, the council member for defence and strategic offence—and Amma and Nolan’s son.

When the file transfer completed, Jachz moved to the next item on his task manifest.

A report on his findings during his time on Earth.
 

Searching his memory, Jachz brought up a recording of his initial interaction with Gerry. There were others there too. He did not know who they were, but in one of the frames just prior to him going offline, he saw a young woman in the far corner with pink, upright hair. He was briefed that this was likely to be the person known as Petal.
 

He replayed the conversation.
 

And it happened again.
 

A feeling. This one was categorised with the symptoms of anxiety. He analysed it further and concluded that it came about from the notion of the Family seeing the recording.

He didn’t want them to see it, but didn’t understand why.
 

Diverting ninety-eight percent of his processing power to the task, Jachz applied a logical argument to this feeling. The results indicated that of the two worldviews of humanity’s evolution and how each side approached it, he considered Gerry’s, and those who stayed behind on Earth, to be a more reasonable and likely way forward.