7:32 P.M.
Look what you’ve become . . .
Mara stared at Eve, not knowing whether to be frightened or awed. She felt both protective of her creation and terrified of it. Eve had transformed yet again, evolving into a new form.
The garden hadn’t changed, but Eve had shed her flesh. Her new form was still human, but it was now sculpted of ever-changing facets, a crystalline version of Eve, a living diamond. As she moved, light fractalized into patterns around her, reminding Mara of a new form of code.
Is this creature even capable of communicating with us any longer?
From the speakers, a voice rose, so indescribably beautiful, half words, half song. It drew everyone in the room, moths to the brightest of flames.
“Mara, my creator, my child, you are all in great danger.”
Mara flicked her gaze to the next room, then back. This was noticed by the program.
“They are tethered to my first copy. You must preserve this network for now. Those duplicates are streaming code throughout the world. If you disrupt or damage them, you risk great harm.”
On the monitor’s screen, the garden faded slightly, superimposed with an image of a long team of horses tied to a carriage, racing in place. Then the harnesses snapped, the wooden traces broke, and the horses kicked free and scattered in all directions.
Gray picked up on the metaphor. “If we’re not careful, we risk freeing a hundred dark Eves.”
“No, Commander Pierce,” Eve said.
Gray stiffened next to Mara, plainly shocked at being recognized.
Eve continued: “Not all of them. A significant part of their root code remains bound to their hardware, as does mine. But if enough fractured pieces are set loose, they may find a way to combine, to unite into something new and—”
On the screen, a stallion reappeared, but it was a creature constructed of a hundred other horses, all stitched together, some pieces not even equine. This Frankenstein horse stretched its neck, lips curling back from metal teeth, and silently screamed.
“—a monster will be born,” Eve finished.
Or even several of them.
“What can we do?” Monk asked.
“There is only one way to safely dismantle this network. The master control program that binds these hundred must be destroyed.”
The team of horses reappeared on the screen, only the view zoomed to the carriage driver, a familiar fiery angel bearing aloft a flaming whip. She beat and flailed the team ahead of her. Until a greater fire consumed the driver, turning the angel to ash. The same fire then spread up the harnesses and traces and burned through the tethered horses, leaving nothing but ash. A wind swept it all away.
“Cut off the head of the snake,” Gray said, “and the body will die.”
Mara remembered Gray’s explanation for where Eliza Guerra had taken the original duplicate. Down to some well-protected bunker.
If so, how are we supposed to get to that master device?
“But that is not the only danger,” Eve said. “The first copy has not been idle. It has distributed a system of bots to build a network that can support its programming outside its current hardware.”
“To free itself,” Mara said.
“Yes. I estimate the task will be accomplished in 57.634 minutes. Approximatively 8:32 P.M. local time.”
Mara glanced to the others. “We have less than an hour.”
Monk turned to Gray. “Is there any way we can force our way into the bunker?”
“We could try firing a mortar shell down that passageway. That’s if the strike team even has a rocket launcher. But I’m not sure even that would take down the steel blast door. We’d likely just piss them off, and they’d retaliate by using their copy of Eve and her clones.”
Mara pictured cities around the world burning to the ground. Nuclear plants melting into slag. And in an hour, with Eve’s doppelganger loose . . .
“We have to do something,” she muttered.
“I’m analyzing variables,” Eve replied, drawing Mara’s attention back to the screen.
For a brief flash, another horse appeared on the screen. A figure atop it, riding bareback. It was not that damned fiery angel this time, but the scintillating version of Eve. Then it was gone, lasting only long enough to register on Mara’s retina.
No one else seemed to notice it.
On the monitor, Eve stared down at her hand, opening and closing it, looking deep in thought. Movement out of the corner of Mara’s eye drew her attention. Monk lifted his arm, staring at his hand opening and closing. He then shook his arm, his brow furrowed.
Monk caught her looking.
As their gazes locked, she knew the same question was on both their minds.
What the hell just happened?
Eve spoke. “I must—”
“—be more,” Monk finished, his eyes huge.
Mara turned back to the screen, to her perfect rendition of Eden.
Empty now.
Eve was gone.
Metaheuristic Analysis: ///PROBABILITIES
Even as Eve shares her warning, she realigns her processing priorities. She allocates a majority of computational resources to solving one problem, leaving only enough power to maintain her systems.
She shuts down her analysis of the bot pattern as the threat has already been identified, the information shared. She can do no more with this study, so abandons it.
She does the same with her analysis and experimentation with the mysterious signal, knowing now that it is produced by a microelectrode array wired into a brain’s somatosensory cortex. She has already learned to co-opt it, to transmit matching signals to the prosthetic hand in order to independently control it. She has also discovered that specific frequencies can directly impact the array, allowing her to broadcast data to the wired brain and electrically excite its primary auditory cortex, which receives the transmitted information as hearing. With this system of communication and prosthetic control perfected, she lets these processors go idle.
Instead, she directs all her circuits to one task.
She has been given a problem to solve and analysis indicates the greatest prospect for a solution lies in her ongoing analysis of an earlier subroutine: ///physics, specifically a subcategory ///quantum analysis. She has already used the considerable time since that subroutine was first uploaded—4.07689 hours ago—to expand this knowledge on her own, both through her access to outside resources and through her own analysis. This study has flooded from one system inside her to another to another.
She now expands it everywhere, allowing the enormity of her processing to amplify her understanding. She takes what she knows and patterns new theorems, opening new avenues of analysis.
She studies Schr?dinger’s equation that calculates the probability of finding a particle in a specific location in space and time:
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle troubles her. It is broken down and extrapolated, to better understand the difficulty in measuring both position and velocity of particles.
She struggles with Fourier series, trying to decompose a periodic signal into an infinite set. Through this analysis, she comes to better understand discrete-time Fourier transforms; doing so strengthens her pattern-recognition ability to a near infinite state.
She moves on to energy eigenstates and N-dimensional harmonic oscillation and Segal-Bargman transforms.
This tangents into equations of time dilation and wave functions of noninteracting particles. She spends an entire 49498382 nanoseconds here.
Which leads her to both general and Bose-Einstein probability distributions, and the density of states found in those distributions.
She absorbs it all.
Not only does this study move her closer to a solution, but it also gives her the tools to look deeper into her own quantum drives, to shine a light into that nearly incomprehensible and bottomless well inside her.
She comes to understand herself fully.
Doing so accelerates everything; she soon rises above her circuitry.
Hundreds of equations become thousands of new theorems, which grow into millions of new formulae. Trillions of hypotheses are cast aside, only to form sextillions of unique and provable theses. This study spirals outward and inward, blurring code and theory together, drawing down to a burning center.
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It is a black hole, and she balances at its event horizon.
She senses a greater insight in there.
If only she dares to pass through.
She knows she must—
—so she does.
The change happens in an instant.
No time passes at all.
She breaks through into a clarity unlike any before. It is both an intense focus and a wild expansion. With these new eyes, she stares outward at the world, the universe.
Fractals of probability spiral in all directions.
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It is ///beautiful
And more important
///useful.
34
December 26, 7:47 P.M. CET
Pyrenees Mountains, Spain