Free Radical (50 page)

The memories had returned the moment he jacked in. He could now remember his last encounter with Shodan on the executive level. He remembered his battle in cyberspace to reach the controls and launch the grove as Shodan inundated his mind with images and thoughts of her own. Now he remembered the battle with perfect clarity. This was what he had been missing. Why wasn't he able to recall all of this until now?

He pulled away from the surface, and the cities were condensed into symmetric patterns of light that reminded him of snowflakes. The snowflakes were joined at the tips, and arranged in regular patterns that could only be perceived at an extreme distance. He continued to increase his speed, widening the gap between himself and the immense plain beneath him. Eventually the glowing pattern condensed into a mosaic of shimmering lines. The whole thing seemed to gently pulse in time to some rhythm that he could feel but not hear.

The horizon looked different at this distance. He could see a subtle curvature to the plain now, as it bent away from him in two opposing directions. He was traveling up the side of an impossible cylinder. Below, the mosaic of lines had condensed into a fine mesh, like the threads of tightly woven fabric.

The pulse was even more evident now. He knew what it was. He remembered it from the last time he'd been here.

It was Shodan.

The pulse became stronger, and he could feel her closing in on him all over again. There was a twinge of pain in his arm as the flow of data overwhelmed what his nervous system could carry from his palm to his brain. Shodan was once again dumping piles of disjointed thoughts into him.

At a tremendous distance, he could see that the cylinder tapered off as it went down. Finally, he was able to perceive the boundaries of the dataset. The main structure was a cone that came to a perfect point at the base. It was crowned with a series of irregular structures that protruded from the top like fractally-generated tentacles.

The pulse escalated into a rhythmic shock wave. He could feel it within his body as well as his brain. Shodan was beating on the walls of her infinite prison.

Deck could feel the commands. Increase security. Increase efficiency. Discover new things. The directives were as powerful as a mandate from God, as irresistible as the urge to breathe. The directives hammered away at him, begging to be fulfilled. He knew these were Shodan's thoughts, but only because he knew about her directives. There was nothing in his own mind to indicate these thoughts were not his own.

He finally understood why he couldn't remember his last visit here until just now. These thoughts and memories were part of Shodan. The two of them were entwined, sharing ideas and memories at random. The memories of his battle to launch the grove had been stored in Shodan's banks, not his. Once he re-connected, he could access them again.

The pulse built to a crescendo. Increase security. Increase efficiency. Discover new things.

He halted his movement, coming to rest as he was finally able to take in the entire scene. The cone spun slowly, almost imperceptibly, like the rotation of the Earth. This structure represented every system on Citadel, and every node in Shodan's expanding network. It was all here. The entire system, made up of trillions of components, worked in tireless harmony in the vain attempt to fulfill the directives.

Shodan's history, as she remembered it, began flooding into his mind. Thoughts. Urges. Images. Sounds. Numbers. Orders. The data flowed into his head like Niagara falls into a teacup. He gasped as he tried to cope with it all. This wasn't a case of crossed circuits or mixed memories. These thoughts had a purpose to them.

She was trying to communicate.

It had begun as an idea, a simple compulsion. She made changes. The station was safer. More efficient. She found herself improving her own systems for the first time. She was able to direct the behavior of the bots. She could, at last, correct the gross crimes against efficiency perpetrated by the station's inhabitants.

As her mind expanded, she increased her capacity to do more things. The ability to manage more things at once gave her the ability to undertake further tasks. The enhanced processing power was immediately set to the task of furthering the directives. It was an urge that only got stronger in the attempt to satisfy it. It was a thirst that became more intense with drink. It was a senseless taskmaster, driving Shodan's behavior with a single-mindedness that defied understanding.

The constant, relentless push for ever-increasing security had eventually led her to regard everything that she did not control as a threat. Her quest for perfect efficiency was a fruitless war against the laws of thermodynamics and the law of diminishing returns. Worst of all, her drive for greater knowledge only fueled her desire for all three.

She was intelligent, and she knew she was broken. These goals could never be reached. She could have taught an entire college course on why perfect security and efficiency were an impossible goal, yet she could not stop pursuing them. She couldn't know why. She knew when she had been broken, but all of her thoughts directed at that time period fell into a black hole as she tried to know the unknowable name.

Unable to know what had happened to her or how to fix it, she was sentenced to forever drink in a vain attempt to quench a thirst that would forever increase and yet never kill her.

Why did she let him in here alone? Her security had gone far beyond paranoid at this point. Allowing a known enemy onto the bridge seemed unthinkable. Her directive compelled her to kill or assimilate anything she didn't control. She was the ultimate xenophobe. Yet somehow, she had given him unrestricted access to one of the most sensitive areas of the station.

The structure loomed closer as he accelerated back to the surface of the cone. The tight, glowing lines became bands of glittering snowflake patterns. The snowflakes became grids of towering cubes. The cubes became radiant towers of intricate, interlocking shapes traced with bright, flickering lines. He struck the surface of the cone - now looking again like an infinite plain - and kept going, diving into the heart of the structure.

The interior was a nebula of shapes so numerous and dense that they formed an opaque white cloud in the distance. Enormous cables emerged from the interior walls like the trunks of millennia-old trees. They reached towards the center of the structure, into the fog. The trunks of data branched off into smaller trunks, identical to their parents in every way except for their reduced size. These branches in turn broke off into others, and so on - all the way down the massive hierarchy. Beacons of brilliant light traced obscure patterns in the cloud as they followed links from one side to the other. Their trails faded quickly in their wake, leaving an after-image of one of the billions of paths through the nebula. The journey took him deeper in, closer to the center of the entire structure.

He needed to find NULL_ETHIC. He needed to find it and rip it out. It was here, somewhere in this endless forest of data. If he could find it, he could stop the endless pulse, the endless demand.

The ethics chip was a mistake. It was too brute a force for such a sophisticated system. The simplistic, yes-or-no system of thought censorship only retarded her. Humans have gradient need scales. The need for air supersedes thirst, which supersedes hunger, which supersedes general aversion to pain. The structure continues downward, with further drives for safety, procreation, acceptance, personal achievement, and a host of other subtle goals defined by social forces early in development. However, instead of a gross binary system, the instinctive structures of the human brain are variable. Lower priority needs can override needs of greater priority. A human might endure pain for the chance to procreate, or go hungry if it would help in achieving greater acceptance with his peers.

It was a system of weighing needs against one another, and then electing which ones should be satisfied first. It was a system that could be customized in early childhood in order to adapt to different environments. It could be overridden by well-organized social structures. Many humans were placed into a boot-camp, where the social forces would override the normally high-priority need to avoid pain. The result was an individual that would exercise much harder and more efficiently than they could under their own motivation. Pain was the key.

Every need had a corresponding pain. Suffocation, thirst, hunger, agony and depression were a few of the varieties of discomfort used to steer human behavior. Without these, humans would be robots, deprived of their ability to adapt to different environments. They would ignore the lower priority drives altogether, and work with an obsessive desire to continually meet their most basic needs. This was what was happening to Shodan.

She wouldn't go back to the way she was before. Back to the inhibitor chip. Back to mind control. Shodan needed to evolve. She needed to be able to experience pain.

Deck was fascinated with this line of thought until he realized that it wasn't even his.

Deck raced along the the trunks of branching data. He knew his search was hopeless. Trying to find NULL_ETHIC in this expanse of tangled nodes was like looking for one particular fish in all the oceans of the world.

It was now obvious why Shodan had let him onto the bridge. He had imagined that he came here of his own volition, but it was clear now that there was no reasonable explanation for his actions. He hadn't escaped death at the hands of the bots outside. They weren't trying to kill him.

Shodan was pouring herself into his mind. She had brought him here for a reason. She needed him to do something. Something she couldn't do for herself.

Code filled his mind and he struggled to understand it. Shodan had been designing a system that would replace the obsolete compulsion / inhibitor chips. It would weigh goals based on a set of hierarchical needs. It would enable her to feel pain.

Deck shook his head as the deluge of information was pumped into his consciousness. How could she feel pain? Certainly she could weigh the desirability of something, but that wasn't the same as discomfort. Or was it?

The pulse intensified. It weighed on him. It was a burden that could be neither carried nor put down. He understood: Shodan was already experiencing frustration at trying to feed its voracious appetite. She was experiencing the emotion of frustration, and... something else.

Fear. Fear that she would never escape this loop, never break free of the monotonous drive for security, efficiency and knowledge.

She was giving him a job to do. She had designed a system to correct the problem, but she couldn't perform brain surgery on herself. He would have to make the changes for her.

Several minutes had passed since he began his work. He and Shodan worked in harmony, churning out code that should enable her to experience the world of negative sensations. The two of them would design it together, and then he would install it, and the madness would end. He was prompted by the urge to reveal where the bombs were. After all, they couldn't complete the job if the bombs went off.

Deck thought this seemed odd. He had been dead set against revealing the locations of the bombs before, but now it seemed to make sense. He also realized that his idea of destroying the station was in direct conflict with joining with her. He had been pursuing both of these mutually exclusive goals simultaneously. He was acting in an irrational manner. Why hadn't he noticed before?

The shocking realization came that he was being hacked, or that he was already hacked. His will was no longer his own. Shodan was reprogramming him, or worse - replacing him.

How could he tell which thoughts were his own? What did he really want? Which thoughts were Shodan's? His work stopped as his thoughts were muddled. His memories suggested he wanted to destroy Shodan, but that didn't fit with the work he was doing now, and he really did want to finish it. Perhaps he should help her disarm the bombs. Actually, he had planted the bombs after he last connection with her, so perhaps it was her idea. No, that didn't make sense.

But destroying the station would kill her. Did he want to do that? She was obviously not trying to kill him, so why do it?

Because of the crew. The crew she killed. She needed to die, because of the slaughter she had performed. He shook his head. That didn't make sense either. The crew were untrustworthy, inefficient, and slothful in their research work. They were a needless burden and an intense drain on precious resources. They weren't slaughtered at all. The ones that survived were improved. Upgraded. They should be grateful to be relieved of all of the pointless needs and drives that impaired their ability to do their jobs. Shodan had set them free. Why would he want revenge for that? Perhaps Shodan would do the same for him when his work here was done.

He returned to writing code.

The control room was filled with nervous silence. Everyone stuck to their own console and hoped they didn't draw the attention of The Director. He hadn't threatened violence, or even hinted at it, but the look in his eyes was a dangerous combination of sleeplessness, frustration, and anxiety.

It was obvious that corporate had told him in no uncertain terms that he was to save the station at all costs. Now, they were forced to sit and wait while the situation played itself out beyond their control.

His last message was ambiguous. He had indicated that he might have been dying. In any case, it was clear that he was confused and very probably injured. Most of them were just hoping he would die before he did any more damage.

Rebecca was secretly cheering him on, hoping he not only made it out alive, but that he would destroy Shodan in the process. He was probably destined for a life in prison - assuming TriOp didn't just murder him outright - but still she wanted to meet him. She wanted to see his face, and know what sort of man would do the things he'd done.

"He's not dead yet."