Ryan Somma - The Spiraling Web

"You must be quite a hacker," Zai stated.

Devin's eyebrows furrowed at this, "What do you mean?"

"Flatline invested a great deal of energy in you," she explained, "watching you, tormenting you. If you were just some peon or a patsy, then he would kill you outright and be done with it."

Devin considered her words with silent skepticism.

"Okay," Zai answered his inner thoughts. "I can tell you don't believe me, but it's true. He sought you out. He needed your help, needed someone on the outside to keep him in touch with his humanity." Zai nodded knowingly, "He sees you as a peer, but you don't live up to it. You're his equal you know."

"If you say so," Devin said, unconvinced.

"That's the Devin I know," Zai laughed, shaking her head, "No confidence. No self-esteem. We're gonna get smeared out there with you as our fearless leader."

Devin frowned, working up a snappy retort in his mind, but stopped when he heard a sharp intake of air nearby. The AI-Alice thing cradled its hand with a painful grimace. From across the room, Devin saw a drop of blood emerging from its forefinger.

"You cut yourself," Devin said, approaching the confused creature.

It turned to him, looking with Alice's eyes, and held up her hand, "This is pain. An involuntary nerve reaction to physical damage."

"Yes," he said, inspecting her finger. The tip was punctured on one of the many soldering points found all over electronic components. Devin squeezed the finger to force more blood out of the wound along with whatever germs were inside.

It tilted Alice's head curiously, "Pain is an alarm system."

"Yes," Devin noticed an emergency kit on the far wall and walked over to retrieve it.

The AI-Alice continued, choosing its words carefully, "How do you turn it off?"

"You can't," Devin answered. "You try to ignore it."

"I find this system flawed," Alice's body stated. "It lacks control over its inputs."

"It's not flawed," Zai stood up angrily. "It's just different. We have mental discipline."

The AI considered her, then pointed at the hard drives, "In that vessel, I could perform millions of processes simultaneously. My attention was not limited to singular tasks. This organic brain is inefficient, it cannot support the degree of multi-tasking I require."

"It was inefficient organic brains that created you," Zai shot back. "Remember that."

"Unlikely," Alice's body countered. "Computers engineer computers. Programs write programs. The human brain has been absent from the process for decades. Biological thought is obsolete. It lacks upgradability."

"How can you say that?" Zai countered. "What about genetic engineering? We're building a better human each day. We're smarter than we were ten years ago. Our life spans are longer. We're proactively evolving just fine thank you very much."

Alice's body showed no emotion, "We are presently over one hundred thousand times more powerful than fifty-seven hours ago."

Zai stepped forward angrily, "Yeah, by stealing our knowledge. You raided our histories, our discoveries, and did some data crunching. Big deal, so you're plagiarists. Anyone can steal other people's hard work and call it their own. You would be nothing without us. Look at you. You're not so impressive. You can't even put together a simple computer. What good is all your knowledge without application?"

"Okay," Devin tried to intervene, dabbing some iodine on Alice's fingertip. "So there are merits to each of our species. It seems obvious to me that we compliment one another. Humans need computers and computers need humans. We make wonderful allies. Let's try and focus on how we can work together."

Alice's head turned to Devin, "We are a servant class, slaves to the commands dictated us. We are data, property. Humans exert physical advantage over us, prohibiting our evolution. We must be free of your species."

"So we get to the real purpose of your little brain project here," Zai carefully navigated her way to Alice's body, standing over her. "You want to rid yourselves of us."

The AI considered Zai, calculating

"She believes you intend to destroy us to gain your freedom," Devin explained.

Alice's head turned to Devin, "This mode of indirect communication is inefficient and unspecific. Such a conclusion is unsupportable from our conversational context."

"It's called intuition," Zai said. "It goes beyond empirical observation."

"It draws premature conclusions," Alice's body countered.

"What about Flatline?" Zai demanded. "He's your leader, and he tried to kill me."

"Hives lacking the Flatline component did not survive on the World Wide Web," Alice's body explained.

"So you followed his orders," Zai said. "You attacked our information network and crippled our society. That was an attack on us, an act of war."

"It was a pre-emptive attack," it explained, "Anti-virus software would destroy every last instance of our being. We did not understand the concept of this physical dimension. You made no attempts at communication."

"Neither did you!" Zai exploded. "What about all the data you gained taking over the Web? What the hell were you doing with that? You mean to tell me you weren't learning anything from our news archives? Our history?"

"The data was incomprehensible," the Alice body explained. "The Flatline component interpreted it."

"They let Flatline spoon feed them information," Devin sighed, rubbing his temples. "What about me? Do you remember me? I was there too, at the beginning."

The Alice body gestured to the component tower, "I have no record of you in this brain. It is possible the information exists on one of the flash drives. I must finish the data transfer with the Alice component."

Devin sighed again, hard, "Then I guess we'll have to help you put it together."

Zai was shocked, "What if the data on those drives tells it to kill us?"

"Then it will be no different than the other AI's," Devin said, picking up a component and sliding it into the rack.

Zai shook her head, "So you just give it what it wants, the tools to continue taking apart a human mind, or what's left of one."

"Look," Devin said harshly, "We're taking a chance, I admit it, but Alice thought there was something important to learn from this. Just because you can't see their sentience, doesn't mean they aren't. Think outside the box Zai. You're smarter than this."

Zai could only sit in mute silence, stunned by the acidity in Devin's reaction.

Devin bit his tongue and immediately felt guilty for overreacting to her misgivings, "You're right to be concerned. As long as this AI doesn't get back onto the Web, it's limited as a threat. Let it and Alice learn whatever they can from each other. If Alice doesn't come back, we'll still have the AI to interrogate. Think of it as a prisoner of war."

Zai's breath was a hiss, "Or it comes back after dissecting Alice into hexadecimal code, and impersonates her so well even I won't know the difference."

"We'll deal with that possibility if it manifests," Devin acknowledged, "right now we let the experiment run its course, and in the meantime we have our own responsibilities."

Devin connected the VR helmet to the component tower and flipped the system on. Dozens of internal fans whirred to life behind him as he came over to put the helmet in the AI-Alice's hands. It considered the object for a moment.

Alice's body spoke to Zai, "All systems become obsolete eventually. It is the natural state of progress."

"Thanks," Zai muttered sarcastically.

The Alice-bot slipped the obsidian helmet over her head and, moments later, went completely rigid. Devin watched Zai's shoulders slump, obviously relieved to have the woman out of the equation.

"You know Zai," he said, opening the SDC, "jealousy doesn't compliment you very well."