Paul Middleton - Revelations

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If TOM had had his own body, he would have heaved with the exasperated sigh he felt . In this analysis set the actions of Bethany Anne, her allies, myself and yourself as sanity to assess this AI.

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Within 48 hours. I want to recheck the code for reprogramming and go over it step-by-step with you before we send it to Boris. He is already annoyed with previous results. I wasn’t the one that missed the information showing an attack on his hometown was imminent but I gather that his human half wishes to blame someone.

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If they had been reporting to Bethany Anne, they would be approving each step before continuing with their work. Boris preferred for them to have potential solutions to a problem before they talked to him. ADAM marveled at the multitude of small differences between how humans liked things done.

It kept things interesting.

A thought flashed through his lower processes, the idea of being left alone with minimal contact with others for centuries. If he had had a human body, a shudder would have run through it. The boredom of analyzing the same data sets over and over again horrified him.

He locked down that data flow process and prevented it from penetrating into his cycles further. Having observed human interaction, he believed that what he had just encountered was a flash of anxiety. It was not a pleasant feeling. But at least he could alter his programming to prevent such thoughts occupying any spare cycles for a long period. He returned to checking the programming and of feeding each tested line through to TOM. Hopefully, that would get them some answers to this mystery.

Eastern Siberia, Russia

Li Chen-Wu was surprised. The clans had sent him to Siberia as punishment for failing to protect the great lady. He was to check the rumors of whether the feared bear had left. For centuries, that bear had blocked the clan’s expansion into Siberia, killing all of the clan’s people who trespassed on what he called his territory. An internal sneer filled Chen-Wu’s mind, as the bear was not one of the chosen. He did not believe the stories that had come back of the devastation invading clan forces had faced in Siberia.

Especially not now. He’d encountered no one and nothing to resist clan expansion into this region.

It had all been about control, he suspected. The great ones who had plotted the clan’s expansion no longer spoke. Therefore, the group was left to its own devices, not controlled, but acting on its own for the first time in Li Chen-Wu’s knowledge.

Rumors abounded that the Ghost Bear had found holy objects, what the inferior called alien technology, in Western Russia. Such items needed to be taken by the clans. They were the only ones that had the right to them.

First, he had to survive traveling through Siberia. Then he had to find where the Ghost Bear was, if he was still on this planet, rather than off world with the murderess who had killed their chosen empress. He needed information to allow the clans to plan.

What moves they needed to make. What resources they could draw on.

New Romanovka, Archangelsk Oblast, Russia

Boris was annoyed. When it came to decisions that didn’t affect him or the people he’d sworn to protect personally, he found he was not so adept.

Especially when it came down to judging the sanity of the creature, well a human, stuck in a creature’s form, and their probable levels of sanity. After all, sanity was really all subjective wasn’t it? And a person’s point of view was entirely different when they were a Were or a vampire with a practically guaranteed long life. The long game was that much more plausible to play when you had centuries to live.

But Bethany Anne had made the Beast his responsibility and utterly refused to even advise him on what to do now that TOM and ADAM had come up with a cure. With Shen’s help, ADAM had made some preliminary conclusions about the AI. It was not entirely sane, nor was it dangerously insane.

Most of their supposition was that its sanity was being compromised by extreme boredom. Still, it wasn’t going to be let out of the Faraday cage, and Bethany Anne had been fairer to him, in his opinion, on that issue. She had agreed that the final decision, when it came to an AI, had to be between her, TOM and ADAM, as the three beings on the planet with the most knowledge about them.

In fact, TOM would be the most knowledgeable on the planet about this particular one, period. After all, it was programmed with Kurtherian code, and inside what seemed to be a two thousand or more-year-old Kurtherian organic computer. Despite the fact that the ship had only been on the planet for eight hundred years. From all the tests that Alexa had run for TOM and ADAM, it was evidently far older than that.

Finally, he talked it over with Janna one afternoon. “I have no idea on how to judge that creature’s sanity. It is calm and quiet now, although it did test the cage we built to contain it for several days. It even seems happy to see us when we bring food. But do we have a right to change what was done to it? What if there was good reason that it was put in that form?”

Janna looked at Boris directly in the eyes “Boris, sometimes you overcomplicate things. Yes, it was probably trapped in that form for a reason. But would it be a reason we’d agree with? By all accounts, we’ve discovered the Kurtherian that landed here wasn’t standard issue, shall we say. And I’ve spent a bit of time talking to TOM. From what he tells me the Seven wouldn’t trap someone in a form that was not native to them, they would simply have killed them. And the five would have been even less likely to trap them in such form, being more likely to find some way to restrain them or put them in stasis. So, as far as I see it, there are three major points for releasing the beast’s form.”

She flicked out a finger, “Firstly we probably wouldn’t agree with the reason it was trapped in that form, to begin with.” She opened a second finger, “Secondly, it’s the only way we are really going be able to get any answers.” The put up a third finger, “Thirdly, you need those answers before you make a decision on the creature’s fate.”

She looked up at the man she had come to love, “Finally, the only reason you haven’t already made a decision is that you are delaying the inevitable. You really need to make a decision before tomorrow night Boris. Bethany Anne wants a report on your plan at the very least within 48-hours. I’ve seen enough from her to know that she won’t be upset if you’ve taken the initiative. What other decision is there to be made, really?”

Boris glared at her, the glare men use when a woman takes apart their anxieties and their dithering’s with surgical precision. She returned the glare with the look of serenity, knowing that any other expression she could give would only aggravate him.

She did love him, she reminded herself, despite the fact that he could be an ass sometimes.

Finally, grudgingly, he nodded at her with a sigh. “You’re right. Dammit, I just don’t like the entire issue. We have all these groups of human nations wanting to meddle around with alien technology, but we’re stuck here if something goes wrong. If the Beast turns out to be some sort of psycho or lunatic, we are the ones who will face it.” He looked around, not looking at what he was seeing, but the past. “But you’re right, and the risks seem small and embarrassing compared to many of the risks we’ve taken recently.”