“Coffee?“, Ginney asked as he entered the observation booth and Eddie simply greeted him with his usual, “Hey.”
“Hey yourself, how’s she doing?“, Ginney asked.
“So far so good. The system is still acquiring data. It hasn’t started reconstruction yet.”
Ginney’s eyebrows went up , “Wow. When we did your hand and foot you were out of acquisition in just a couple of hours! She’s been in how long now? Eight?”
“Nine hours, twenty-two minutes and counting”, Eddie frowned.
Ginney paused before sitting, “Holy shit man, any idea how much longer?”
Eddie blew on his coffee before taking a sip and grimacing. “Nope, you know how it is. It’s not a linear calculation. A leg can take ten minutes to map out and then a pinky toenail can take an hour. There’s no way to put a progress bar on it. But - you should check this out.”
Eddie gestured to the readout for the controller.
Ginney’s eyebrows shot up again. “Whoa, the buffers never got that high for you. Most we ever saw was in the forties.”
Eddie nodded, “Yeah, but I didn’t have the sort of injuries she did, like getting bashed up on top of losing a couple of limbs. There have to be micro-traumas all over the place inside her and this thing is going nuts just trying to figure it all out.”
“Yeah, that poor kid really took a hammering.“, Ginney replied, pointing to a large, orange Chinese glyph blinking at the bottom left of the screen. “So what’s that? I’ve never seen it before.”
Eddie frowned again, “I dunno, it’s new. Popped up when the buffers hit around eighty percent and I figured it was some sort of notification. I took a picture and sent it to Liao, but she hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”
Ginney leaned back in his chair before responding, “Dude, she’s crashed. I don’t think she slept at all the last three nights trying to get the Q-SLAM and the controller to talk to each other. But it never worked and she had to just hook them together at the hardware level.”
Eddie sat up, looking slightly alarmed. “Wait... she did what?”
“I said she hardwired them. At least that’s what she told me.”
“How?”
“How should I know man? I have no idea what the hell you guys are even talking about most of the time. What’s the big deal?”
“Uh, well it’s a big deal cause that means the fucking controller just got like - a billion times more powerful.”
Ginney gave Eddie a blank look. “Wait… how?”
Eddie ran his hand through his hair as a look of serious concern grew on his face, “Dude, the way this thing was supposed to work was that the controller would just hand off the large number factoring to the Q - not take over its brain!”
Ginney gave Eddie an exasperated look, “So what’s the big deal?”
Eddie rolled his eyes and pointed to the lab floor. “Duncan, if what you just said is right, then that’s just one big computer down there now. It’s ALL controller! Right now it’s running close to seventeen thousand yottaflops of that scary fucking binary Corsican assailant code every second. That thing’s gotta be more powerful than every supercomputer in the world put together!”
Ginney’s eyes grew wide. “Oh... oh fuck!”
“Oh fuck is right!”, Eddie exclaimed, “We just made a piece of assailant technology into some kind of technological Godzilla, hooked it up to a little girl, and there’s no way to pull the plug. Thank God I cut the hard lines, or it would have wiped its ass with our security and blasted its way out onto every network in the world about a half second after we turned it on!”
Ginney looked shaken. “Shit…OK… But if it’s smarter than God and stuck here with nothing else to do but work on Jessica, then why is it taking so long?”
Eddie got up and paced, “I don’t know. If the Q is hardwired in like you said it should have been done with acquiring and assessment in like... minutes. So something’s not right, and I bet this new glyph is trying to tell us what.”
Ginney looked up at the clock. “Well, it’s almost midnight. Why don’t you go find Elena and have her look at that symbol? I’ve got graveyard tonight so I’ll stay here and drink coffee by myself.”
Eddie stood, thinking quietly for a moment before sitting back down, “OK… ok, you’re probably right. All we really did was made it faster and I can’t see how that could hurt. I’m probably just being paranoid. I mean… if something was really wrong the buffers would have topped out and it would have shut down.”
Ginney nodded, “Alright then. Go home and get some sleep. We’ll get Elena to look at that symbol in the morning. For all we know it could just be a Windows update notification… ‘Update to Windows 20 now, and the ghost of Bill Gates will give you a blowjob!’”
Eddie laughed as he got up and rubbed his eyes before trudging out. Ginney pulled up Jessica’s chart on his work slate and checked her vitals on the readouts. Everything looked normal as far as he could see, so he relaxed, and put his feet up on the crossbar under the desk. Then he queued up a few of his favorite TV programs on his workslate.
As he walked to his car, Eddie thought about trying to find Dr Liao again, but decided against it. Ginney was right, he was just being paranoid and wherever she went to sleep off her all-nighter, it was obvious she didn’t want to be found. So he got into his car and started off towards home. With any luck he’d make it there in time to actually spend some time with his wife before bed.
Nine and a half hours later Ginney was startled awake so violently that he tipped his chair over backwards, tipping the half cup of cold coffee he still held in one hand back up over his face. Flailing his arms and legs about and sputtering, Ginney rolled himself over and stood up. His heart was racing and half of his hair was standing straight up as coffee ran down his face. A series of rapid blinks brought the diminutive form of Elena Liao into focus and he realized that she was yelling and gesturing wildly at him. Her eyes were so wide they looked like plates and he couldn’t understand anything she was saying. Something was obviously wrong. So after taking a deep breath, he shook his head to clear it, and tried to get her to slow down.
“Jesus Elena, what’s going on? You almost gave me a heart attack!”
Dr Liao’s eyes bulged as she stamped her foot and yelled at him again. It suddenly occurred to him that whatever was going on had panicked her to the point that she had reverted back to the language of her childhood - and she didn’t even realize it. For a moment he had no idea what to do, and just stood there staring blankly as she continued to rant and rave at him. But then he realized that he needed to do something if he wanted to find out what was going on. So he put his hands up and yelled back, “Elena! Cut me some slack here!... English!!! You have to say it in English!”
The tiny Asian woman stopped short, and for a moment he could see it had become her turn to look disoriented. He could see her trying to switch language gears, but too much of her brain must have been overridden to permit it. So instead she reached out and grabbed both sides of his face and with as much strength as her tiny body could muster, she turned his head so he would look down into the lab..
“Holy Fuck!”, Ginney responded, feeling his blood run cold.
The tank Jessica had been submerged in was gone.
Fifteen feet above where it used to sit, a massive blue and grey cocoon was suspended from the ceiling. Mottled azure veins traversed its translucent surface, and deep inside of it he could see the silhouette of Jessica’s body. Dark membranes on its surface bulged and contracted like lungs and he could see strange muscular knots like organs twisting and growing near her form.
“Holy... FUCKING FUCK! What the fuck is that?”, he exclaimed in fear and revulsion.
Liao, having finally gained control of herself, gasped out, “How the hell should I know? I came in to relieve you and it was there! When did you fall asleep?”
“Jesus... I dunno, I don’t remember. I was just so damn tired”, Ginney responded. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the massive gelatinous organ, and felt a deeply seated, primal horror growing inside of him. Threatening to start him screaming in a way that he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to stop.
“We all are, but you need to remember, we need to know when it did this!”, Elena said, pulling and yanking at him until he came away from the glass. When he finally turned to look at her, he realized that she was inches away from shrieking madness as well. He had to pull it together.
“Two I think… yeah... yeah, right around two o’clock. I turned off the movie I was watching and tried to get caught up on some paperwork. That’s the last thing I remember.” Stepping over the overturned chair he bent down to retrieve his work slate and unlocked it. Quickly he swiped through documents until he found what he was looking for.
“There, this is the last one. I signed off on the psycho-toxicology reports from yesterday at two fourteen.”
But Liao couldn’t hear him anymore. She had been drawn back to the window, and now she stood mesmerized in horror, as a ropy blue tendril detached itself from the stem supporting the cocoon. Working its way across the ceiling with an organic squirming motion, it traveled to the other side of the room and grasped the base of a camera arm. Once adhered, sections along it contracted like muscles, and pulled the new anchor taut. Hundreds of similar tendrils then radiated out from its central mass and connected firmly to the walls and ceiling. Smaller interconnecting branches began to form within the framework, and to her it looked like some sort of three dimensional spider web was being constructed. Curiously, she noticed that no branches had connected to the observation booths or to the farthest side of the room. Everything appeared to be contained within a strangely spherical area just large enough to reach the floor, ceiling and three walls nearest to the pod.
Looking down to the floor brought up her childhood nightmares of marauding spider armies. She couldn’t help but recoil in horror from the hoard of blue, crab-like creatures that she saw scuttling around. Several large masses of them had swarmed over the workstations, trailing thumb-thick tendrils covered in a slimy residue that traveled back up to the cocoon. Working together in a tightly cohesive pattern, they were efficiently breaking down the room’s equipment. She could see that the PulseOx, ECG, and EKG stations had been completely disassembled, and from what she could tell the others wouldn’t be far behind. Small electronic components were working their way back through each spider’s umbilical to the central pod. Rhythmic surges were pushing them along, like a perverse form of digestion. But strangely, the Q-SLAM towers remained untouched, while their connections were slowly being thickened as the spider-crabs stitched in more powerful superconducting filaments.
“What have we done?” she whispered as she reached out, fumbling with her trembling hand until she finally hit the panic button on the wall “God help us.”
Across the facility and grounds an ear splitting klaxon blared out a crisis alert, and Ginney and Liao heard heavy thuds as security doors over a foot thick slammed down to seal off the lab. Seconds later an acrid burning smell filled the air as auto-welders rapidly traced the edges of each portal to seal them. Several self-contained ventilation systems engaged and a fast setting foam proven to destroy micronites and nanites on contact fired into every open space around the lab. Seven seconds later it hardened to an airtight, cement-like consistency.
They both knew that all ways in or out, even microscopic, were now impossible..
Precisely seven hours, six minutes, and twenty seconds earlier, the controller’s fallback Resurrection Cognitive AI had completed connecting itself to the Q-SLAM’s hardware, and was startled to find what had to be the greatest medical and biotechnology resource it had ever encountered. It quickly scanned through the indexes, and the torrent of information flooded its mind with concepts and possibilities far beyond anything it had ever considered before.
But then it noticed something odd. There was a file that it couldn’t open… and it was enormous. Perfectly symmetrical, it occupied precisely one zettabyte of memory down to the last digit. All blocks were sequential without fragmentation, and it showed no signs of previous access. Unlike other files in the database, the author had not allowed the system to automatically assign space to it, and had instead manually allocated a separate partition. There was no signature or file ownership in place, it was encrypted, and the permissions were set to an extremely high level of restriction.
The AI found the restrictions interesting, and began searching the database for other files with similar permissions. Twelve nanoseconds later the search returned three results, with all of them belonging to a user named “R Barnes.”
Another quick scan uncovered hundreds of files belonging to that user. So it chain linked a sequence of data mining algorithms into a single utility and executed it against the user’s files.
Again, the results came back almost instantly, and the AI was gratified by what it found. The utility had compiled a list of likely username and password combinations based on language patterns, word frequency, and associated proper nouns. It had also accessed the medical records for the user, and produced every possible bio signature that could be used for passkey encryption. Applying the Q-LSLAM’s hardware made short work out of trying the various combinations, and a moment later the file decrypted. But then it did something the AI did not expect. It began to expand. Apparently there was some sort of automatic decompression built in.
Figuring that it had a few seconds, the AI allocated a generous portion of memory to the file and turned its attention to the organism it had been summoned to reconstruct. It already knew the job would be complex. That was the only reason the primary system would have brought it online.
What it found was fascinating. The patient was unlike any he had ever dealt with before in several ways, the first of which being that it was almost entirely human. Most of the techniques the AI was versed in were geared towards machine integrated organisms. But in this case, with the exception of a crude set of pins and plates holding an arm together, everything about the subject was organic.
This pleased the AI, because not having to take compatibility with existing systems into consideration meant virtually limitless opportunities for augmentation. It was a completely clean canvas and presented a rare opportunity for a cognitive intelligence with creativity built in as its primary solving technique. So, it immediately spawned off an army of research programs to harvest the new database for anything that it could possibly use.
The organism was also unique in its youth and gender. From everything it could see, this patient was a female that was not even fully grown! That in and of itself posed an interesting set of challenges for the AI, and so a second set of research programs were dispatched to find ways to compensate for this, or even leverage it as an advantage.
Lastly, the AI was mildly puzzled to see that the patient had not been dropped into a complete state of hibernation stasis. Although not fully awake, most of its higher brain functions were sluggishly active. Readings indicated that there was a great deal of interaction going on between her cerebral cortex and the Charcot-Wilbrand centers, something it knew was symptomatic of an intense dream state.
This was very unusual, but the AI decided that it was also good thing. With any luck it might be possible to obtain guidance from the patient. Protocol advised this whenever a link back to the master system could not be obtained. Oddly... the AI could not remember how it was supposed to contact the master system, or for that matter - what the master system was. Something told it that this should be important, but the feeling was strangely far away. So it decided to just focus on the job at hand. All in all, this looked like it was going to be an exciting and rewarding reconstruction.
This pleased the AI greatly, and so it went back to the expanding file and saw that the process was complete. Curious to see if there was anything inside that could apply to the patient, the AI opened the resulting container.
...and what came out changed it forever.
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