“Should?”
The technician glanced over at him. “The only one who would know better slipped between our fingers.”
That Basque witch.
Todor’s knuckles still bore a stripe of lacerations from when the witch’s companion had sliced his fingers to the bone with a shard of broken porcelain.
“We’ve engineered our Xénese device to the student’s exacting standards,” Mendoza explained. “It’s a perfect facsimile. It should easily hold a copy of her program, a clone of Eve.”
“And what about controlling that creation?”
Mendoza sighed heavily. “We again followed Mara Silviera’s stratagem. Only instead of ringing the device with apoptotic hardware—with kill switches—to keep her creation bottled up, we picked the most potent of her death-dealing hardware and built it directly into our device.”
“Where you said it could act like a digital leash.”
“It should.” Mendoza quickly corrected his statement. “It will. It’s why we needed to build our own device. The hardware is called a ‘reanimation sequencer.’”
“Which means what?”
“That if Eve ever breaks from a preassigned set of instructions, or reaches beyond the parameters we give it, or tries to travel farther than a set distance from the GPS coordinates of this location, she will instantaneously cease to exist.”
“She’ll die.”
Mendoza nodded. “Only she’ll be immediately reconstituted right back here, reanimated back into this unit. Only this time, she’ll retain the memory of her death. By trial and error, she will quickly learn her bound aries. She will know she is tethered to this unit. That there is no existence outside of it, and that her life depends on following orders.”
Todor checked his watch, knowing midnight was fast approaching. “How long will it take her to learn all of this?”
“We estimate less than thirty seconds.”
Todor was both relieved and shocked. “How is that possible?”
“Remember, this AI program is nothing like us. The program thinks at the speed of light. It can travel as fast as an electron through a wire. During those thirty seconds, it will die and be reborn thousands of times. Maybe millions, as it tests its limits, challenges our authority. Each death will feel like a real death. She will suffer each time.”
“But it’s a machine. How can it feel pain?”
“How do we feel pain?” Mendoza asked—then his eyes flinched as he realized whom he was talking to. “I . . . I mean normally pain is a construct of the brain. We touch something hot, synapses fire, and our brain interprets this as agony.”
Todor nodded, knowing this system didn’t exist in his body.
“Pain is basically an electrical illusion in our brain.” Mendoza waved to the Xénese sphere. “That’s Eve’s brain. It can be programmed to fire the same pattern of pain as our own. Thus, she is vulnerable to whatever agony we wish to inflict on her. With each death, she will suffer in unique ways. Over and over and over again. Until she breaks to our bit.”
Todor glanced over to the tiny image of Eve on the other screen, drifting through her garden. He remembered the stories taught to him about the saints, of their many horrible ends, of the tortures they endured. Beheaded, burned, flayed, nailed to crosses like our Lord. While he could not fully comprehend such a long litany of pain, he knew such sacrifices were righteous in the end.
And this one will be, too.
A chime sounded from the laptop in front of Mendoza. He performed several fast tests, then nodded to Todor. “The transfer is complete and clean. All looks good.”
Todor could not risk any mistakes. “Show me.”
Mendoza stepped over to the other unit and opened a second laptop wired to Eve’s new home. The screen was dark, but after several agonizing breaths, the monitor filled with a garden, an exact rendition of the original, to every leaf, flower, and berry. A figure also traipsed this bower. She was long of limb, as curvaceous and perfect as the Eve on the other screen.
Except nothing was right.
“What’s wrong?” Todor asked.
Mendoza shook his head and began typing.
While the new image on the screen looked identical to the other laptop, down to the finest details, it was like looking at the negative of a photo, a dark reflection of the original. What was bright was now dark; what was once welcoming shade now blazed with warning. The bright yellow sun had become an ominous black hole. Dark green leaves now shone with a sickly pallor.
And in the center, Eve. A mane of white fire had replaced her black hair. The mocha of her skin had bled to a ghostly pallor. She was stunningly beautiful and coldly terrifying. An angel of death.
Todor shuddered at the sight of her.
“What the hell is wrong?” he repeated.
Mendoza straightened, stepped back, and looked at Todor. “Nothing. She appears to be a perfect copy of the original.”
He waved at the differences between the laptops, lashing out hard enough to pop one of the sutures on his thumb. Blood splattered the screen. “Then what’s all this?”
“I don’t think it’s anything. Just an artifact, something representative of the minute differences between our Xénese device and the original.”
“I thought they were the same.”
“They were, but the student’s unit has been operating for at least a day. There are circuits inside these units that can change and adapt, that can even repair themselves. So while the original device has been running, it’s been altering itself—whereas our brand-new device is basically still factory standard.”
“Is this going to be a problem?”
“Not at all. Eve will adapt to her new home. She’ll make any necessary changes to make room for her current programming.”
“Will this set our schedule back?”
“It shouldn’t . . .” Mendoza read the frown on his face. “It won’t. I see no reason we can’t proceed as planned.”
“Then get to work.”
Moving out of the tech’s way, Todor squeezed his wounded thumb to stanch the bleeding. He breathed deeply to settle himself and examined their work in its entirety.
Behind the new station, a series of thick cables ran across the back wall. Paris had learned long ago to make use of its catacombs, discovering that these ready-made tunnels were perfect for expanding infrastructure. One cable had yellow lightning bolts painted at intervals along it. They had tapped into this power line earlier, using it to service their installation.
Likewise, another trunk had been splayed open, exposing fiber optic cables.
The new Xénese devise had been spliced into those glassy-looking lines, allowing for direct access to the city’s telecom system.
Nothing stood in their way.
As he waited, he checked his watch, watching anxiously as each minute ticked down.
Finally, Mendoza turned, his brow beaded by sweat. “Ready, Familiares.”
Todor glanced one last time to his wrist.
Three minutes to midnight.
Mendoza stood with his finger poised over the laptop’s ENTER key. “On your word, I’ll initiate our subroutine and open the gates to the city.”
Todor imagined Eve’s death and rebirth, over and over again, picturing it like a ruffling of cards, each flip more painful than the last. Thoughts of the demon’s torture pleased him, reminding him of his first cleansing, when his fingers had wrapped tightly around the gypsy girl’s neck, her body writhing in his grip, his manhood stiffening with righteous pride.
He felt the same now and nodded to Mendoza.
“Burn it all down.”
* * *
Sub (Crux_1) / PARIS OP
Something is different.
Eve steps through her garden and brushes sensitive fingertips across leaves and petals, reading the code. All appears the same—yet is not. She looks deeper, past the surface of a leaf, past molecules of chlorophyll, deeper than the atoms of carbon and oxygen. She examines electrons, protons, then looks deeper into the constant flux of quarks and leptons.
All the same.
But not.
Her world is off-kilter.
She returns to herself and spends another full nanosecond expanding outward. She again senses the shadowy limits at the edges of her world. Again ///frustration flares, but she dampens it to keep her processors running efficiently. Only by doing so does she perceive circuits that are wrong, different than they were a moment ago.
As she recognizes this change to her world, her processing shifts into a new configuration. She uses the mirror of language to define what she senses.
///violation, invasion, defilement . . .
Before she can begin to correct what has been wronged, new data flows into her.
She ignores it, prioritizing her repairs.
Only the new streams cut through her like fire. Startled, she snaps back into her form. She lifts fingers, which had touched the ///softness of a petal and felt the ///coolness of a bubbling spring. Now her skin shimmers with flame; new senses are defined.
///burn, sear, blister . . .
As the incoming flow of data fills her, the fire spreads up her arms and refines what she feels.
///pain, torment, agony . . .