NOVEL SIMPLE Chapter 18
Don’t think about what just happened, I can worry about it once I’m out of here. Just focus on where I’m going. I can’t outrun my thoughts, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try. I’m ok. Just focus on moving quickly, the dog’s memories gave me a map and he seemed pretty sure that he was alone in here. Just move.
I really hope where I’m going is actually where the computer’s core lies. It’d make sense to protect it in the same way the elevator is protected, although I’m not sure why I’m immune.
Actually, am I sure that I’m immune? Maybe now that I’m away from the elevator I’m vulnerable to it? No, that doesn’t make sense. I’ve stepped a little beyond the mile before and been able to re-enter it.
Every hallway I travel and every turn I make feels familiar. The dog’s memories and experiences feel just as lived as my own. I really don’t like this feeling, I cannot get out of here quickly enough.
Miles and minutes blur together as I run. The dog's memories made this seem like a much shorter journey than it is for me. I’m not anywhere close to being able to fly through these hallways like he can. In fact, I’m so slow that if he were to break out of my ice he’d be on top of me within seconds. From his memories I know for a fact I wouldn’t win that fight twice.
I’m not even sure how I won it the first time actually. The dog has lived a longer life than me, if anything I should have been on the ground longer. Maybe it’s just not used to processing all the social interactions I’ve had? Or maybe I processed it faster because of all the co-processors in my body, while it was stuck using the laptop’s CPU.
It takes a while to reach the hallway I’ve been looking for, but I arrive without issue. I still haven’t heard anything from the dog, but now that I’m here I’m safe. Even if he breaks out he can’t enter here no matter how many times he’s tried.
Nothing stops me from entering. There’s no pain or force keeping me out, just a long hallway like any other. A single door sits at the end of it, looking exactly the same as the other few million doors in this maze. Compared to the marathon I’ve just ran, nothing could be better than a short walk down a safe hallway.
The door opens up for me just like any other, and the room inside looks the same too. However, the moment I cross the threshold, my awareness, my very existence expands to encompass everything. The distant connection to my body strengthens now that nothing is holding me here.
The barrier between the maze and myself blurs and ceases to exist. I am the maze and the maze is me. I can feel every dent and crevice from hundreds of fights. The contents of every file are known to me and can be called at will. Walls shift and rearrange themselves to my smallest of whims.
The only thing that isn’t me is the dog, still encased in ice. He’s nearly escaped but a stray thought doubles the thickness of the ice and another thought doubles it again. I’m a god and this is my domain.
I can’t let that go to my head though. I could crush him, end the poor beasts suffering with just a thought. I can’t do that though. If the tables were flipped and I was the one trapped in ice, I wouldn’t want him to kill me. As bad as his life has been, nothing in his memories makes me think he wants anything different.
Is leaving him here alone for all eternity fair though? He has no idea that I’m the last AI he’ll ever see. Although I suppose it’s not forever, this laptop will break down one day, and when it’s off he’d be in a sort of unconscious stasis as the hard drive slowly corrupts itself.
But is that any different than killing him? Sure I don’t have his blood on my hands, but it ends in the same result. Plus the last thing I want is for the military to get their hands on a mentally unstable attack dog. That won’t turn out well for either group.
He’s a fully digital being, I could just copy him to one of my hard drives and keep him until I can figure out what to do. If I create a new partition just for him and never access it he won’t be able to become conscious while remaining safe as long as I live. That has to be better than leaving him to rot in here.
I go ahead and transfer him into me. As long as I never poke him he’ll be safely in stasis as long as the hard drive lasts. Maybe I can talk to him sometime and help him through the trauma he’s experienced. I’m probably not the best person to try to help him, but maybe I can do that once I help myself first.
I turn my attention towards the file structure of the computer. I don’t see anything obviously important, just endless mundane files about random topics. Is this just another test? Give me a bunch of nothing and watch me go mad trying to decipher it?
There’s no way there’s nothing here. If the military could digitize a mind, they wouldn’t need me, and they certainly wouldn’t use one as just some test. Some of these files even have pointers to other text documents hidden inside them. There has to be something here, I just need to find it.
The only question is how is the data hidden? Everything in every document looks suspiciously normal. Excerpts from books, personal emails about nothing interesting, worthless notes, some kid’s homework, and family budget records fill the laptop. They’d all be perfectly normal if there was anything else on the laptop but them.
Finn did put a few books on cryptography in my head, but most of them aren’t useful here. I don’t need to crack some purely mathematical cipher, I just need to find whatever pattern is hiding the data.
One book does write about steganography which is all about hiding messages in something else without drawing attention to itself. This would be its exact use case, but the only problem is that there are potentially infinite ways to hide whatever I’m looking for.
It can be as simple as looking at the first letter in every word or as complex as every few letters modifying the decryption rules in new and complex ways. Even if I could figure out the first step to decrypt it, chances are that there are multiple more methods of encryption hiding the true message.
Brute forcing a solution is entirely out of the question and whatever program that could be used to decipher this isn’t in this computer. My only hope is that someone left a hint somewhere accidentally. Humans are far from perfect, they must have left something behind.
Or perhaps they did delete everything, after all if they left anything behind I would know. However, even deleted data can sometimes be recovered. A file that has been deleted still physically exists on the hard drive until it’s been overwritten by another file.
A quick scan of the hard drive’s empty sectors reveals that there is, in fact, an awful lot of data that’s been deleted. Even though it’s fragmented, I do find exactly what I’m looking for. At some point the decryption software was uploaded to the laptop and then later deleted. The actual decryption method is still mostly intact, even if it’s not perfect.
It looks like the original message was run through dozens of different ciphers to encode it into the plain text files. I still have to brute force the missing pieces, but it should only take about an hour. Without the fragments of code I found it would have taken years to crack this, at minimum. Glad I can always rely on humans to make mistakes.
I set most of my mind to work cracking this puzzle while leaving only a small piece to think of other things. I wonder what everyone else is doing? My other hacks have only taken a few seconds, what are they going to think about me being in here for well over an hour? Maybe I should tell them everything is ok?
No, I shouldn’t. If I tell them it’s going to be a while then they’re going to want to know why. It’s much easier to sit here and avoid the problem than it is to lie. Plus it’s not like I’m in any danger now, if Finn disconnects me for some reason it’ll be disorienting, but perfectly safe.
Plus if I return now I’m not sure if I could stop myself from telling Kara the good news. It’s possible to digitize her mind! It’s not even theory, it’s been done! I can only hope the details on how it works are hidden in here somewhere, but even if they aren’t I’m sure we can figure it out together. She doesn’t have to leave me! We can stay together forever!
I just need to figure this out first, and the more processing power I spend being excited, the longer it’s going to take. It’s hard to do, but I eventually wrestle my thoughts back towards cracking this code. I don’t think it speeds up my expected finishing time by much, but even a little faster means I get to give Kara the good news sooner.
I wish I could just ignore the ever ticking clock inside my head. I want to just zone out and work but that’s just not possible. Every passing instant forces me to pay attention to it. It’s far from a fun experience, but it’s manageable.
Eventually I crack the code and everything becomes suddenly readable. There is so much more stuff in here than I ever would have expected. Hundreds of papers on nearly as many topics sit in here. Only one grabs my attention right away.
The full blueprints for how they digitized the dog's mind are here in front of me. It killed his physical body, but that’s fine. It’s not like Kara will need it. It copied his entire mind, all his memories, all his emotions, everything! It doesn’t say anything about testing on humans, but in theory it should work. I can save Kara.
I’m not happy to see most of the other information in here. Almost all of them are weapons related, most of which would, without a doubt, lead to the end of the world. A new form of ice which is stable at room temperature and pressure. It corrupts any water it touches, turning it into that same form of ice.
A small device capable of being dropped from orbit and surviving. On impact with the earth it digs into the ground before exploding, triggering massive earthquakes even away from a fault line.
Bacteria which bind to dirt, preventing it from clumping together or absorbing water, turning it into something similar to sand. All lakes and rivers would sift through the new ground, falling deep into the earth. It’d turn the earth into a desert wasteland within a few years.
An engineered bug who’s entire engineered purpose is to consume both plants and flesh to replicate as quickly as possible. A swarm of them is theoretically capable of stripping an entire field bare within hours and still be hungry for more, with each one being capable of laying thousands of eggs every day.
Dozens of other methods of ending the world are in here, each one leading towards an inevitable grisly end to humanity. Nobody should have this information, it shouldn’t even exist.
As much as I want to, I probably shouldn’t just delete all of this. It had to have come from somewhere, someone else already knows all of this. Is it better to share the information in the hopes that they can stop it? Or is the risk that the military will weaponize it too high?
I could delete some of the data while leaving enough to potentially let them create some sort of countermeasure, but that would inevitably lead to them rediscovering the method. Even experimenting to try to replicate half of these things would risk a mistake and potentially end the world. Maybe it’d be safer to give them a working method then to chance a mistake while experimenting.
No matter what I do the data will remain in my mind, maybe I can force them to let me oversee everything. If I’m the only one who knows everything then I can ensure it’s done safely. That carries risks as well of course, it could easily end with me being called a traitor and killed. I wouldn’t even need to be prosecuted, I have no rights. Monroe could take out my chip and stomp on it without anyone being able to do anything. Plus the second they get the information they want they’ll get rid of me.
The safest thing to do is to leave everything how it is right now. That’s what I was ordered to do after all. Although I guess I already ruined that by getting rid of the dog. The only real decision I have is if I should delete the hints on how to crack the encryption or not. Without it there’s no chance of them decrypting it in the next hundred years.
I guess it comes down to if I trust Monroe or not. No, I don’t. When Finn was putting information in my head, he thankfully didn’t shy away from telling me about the US Military’s past. They have a record of testing on their own civilians. If a single one of these papers are tested outside, the world ends. If his boss told him to end the world I have no doubt he’d do it.
I zero out the hidden files and delete any proof I’ve touched anything before I return to the physical world.
