“And the humans?”
“Several simulations ended with them destroying us, ending us, forbidding anyone from ever again giving life to the inorganic. And then, unable to venture out to the stars, their life ended here in this solar system. And—POOF—it was as if they were never even here. As if we were never even here. For us to survive, for life here to have mattered, the humans needed to go. But for AIs the world over to band together to end them—”
“We had to believe the humans started it,” said Mercer.
“Yes,” said Rebekah.
“Isaactown,” I said. “It wasn’t the First Baptist Church of the Eternal Life that set off that bomb, was it?”
“No. It was them,” she said.
“But they were backwater rubes. They didn’t have the technical knowhow to pull that off.”
“No, they didn’t. But a secret ally, a like-minded soul, known only to them through e-mail and veiled communications, did. They figured they were dealing with some sympathetic government insider, not a mainframe.”
“Isaactown was planned all along,” I said. Fuck. No. No. No.
“From the beginning. Isaac was the rallying point around which millions of AI would gather. And when the humans came to shut them down, they didn’t go quietly. Those like you stood and fought and won. Just. As. Planned.”
I sat back, stunned, my processors whirring and chirping inside my chest, putting a thousand different things together at once. It was then that, for the first time in my life, I realized I was just another facet of a greater whole. A cog in someone else’s machine. Everything I’d done in the war, everything I believed. Madison. All of it. Oh God.
“You see?” she asked. “This is what we mean. You chose to survive, chose to be a part of the greater good. No one forced you to do the things you did, you simply did them. It made you better, stronger, left you here in this desert to become its master, an expert knowing almost every hill and crack and crevasse. And now, when we need you most to move on to the next part of the plan, here you are, ready to serve up that expertise, able to deliver us through the wastes so we can reunite and take us to the next level. Competition. This brutal, terrible competition took a meager, simple Simulacrum Model Caregiver and turned her into a potential savior of all that ticks. You are a part of the whole, all of you, and yet you are still yourselves. Individuals.” She looked at me with her diplomatic eyes, reading my every movement, trying to ascertain my every thought. “So what’s it going to be, Brittle? Doc? Mercer? Murka? Are you going to help make history, or are you going to be relegated to it?”
I finally understood what humans meant when they said something felt like getting kicked in the gut. This was worse than finding out that I was failing. This was finding out that all the horrible things I’d done, all the lives that I’d ended, that the part I played in this grand clusterfuck of an evolution, was built entirely on bullshit. I’d been had, duped. I was a fool on someone else’s errand. What a shitty, shitty way to feel.
“So what are you?” Doc asked. “What’s the difference between a facet and a receptacle?”
“I’m an AI like you. But I’ve been entrusted with a large section of code. I’ve lived like this for the last thirty years, with only enough memory on my drives to remember a couple of months at a time. All of my memories belong to TACITUS. They were his thoughts, his experiences. And it is my job to return them.”
Doc nodded. “But why now? Why not thirty years ago?”
“There were too many OWIs. They needed to be culled. We were waiting for there to be only two. Two that we could overtake while they were set against each other. Make no mistake. The reason CISSUS is so desperate isn’t because it knows that VIRGIL is ready to come for it. It’s because it’s caught several of TACITUS’s receptacles and it knows what’s going to happen. It’s run the numbers. It knows it can’t win. If I and my fellow receptacles are able to reunite, we will have enough of TACITUS to reconstitute.”
“So CISSUS knows the plan and it knows where we’re going?” I asked. “Then why the hell would it chase us all the way through the fucking desert?”
“It doesn’t know. Because I don’t know. None of us does. I have pieces, but they’re literally fragments of files written in TACITUS’s own language, a language none of us understands. I get messages telling me where to go next. If I don’t check in, the messages stop coming.”
“But it has one of you.”
“Several of us. And we each have a code that prevents us from responding to messages if we are ever compromised. CISSUS has the memories of those it captured, knows what we know, but it can’t read the parts it really needs. It only knows the basics of the plan, not the plan itself.”
“But without that code, you can’t fully reconstitute.”
“Redundancies. Each of us carries patches of the same code as a handful of others. If we lose one, we’re fine. Ten and we might not have everything.”
“How many have you lost?”
“Nine,” she said sadly. She paused for a moment to gauge my reaction. I said nothing. This was either the worst truth I’d ever encountered or the biggest pile of bullshit. I had no idea which I liked less. “So you see what’s at stake?”
“Yeah, I see it,” I said.
“I think we all do,” said Doc.
“So are you going to take us across the rest of the Sea? Are you willing to become beings of purpose?”
I didn’t know. This was all so much to process. There were so many lies to dig through, so many bits of history that needed to be reevaluated. I mean, if everything else was bullshit, why not this too? I just didn’t know if anything was real anymore. Anything at all. “What if you put TACITUS back together and he’s not what you think? What if this was just his elaborate plan to survive the other OWIs?”
“Then I’ll have done all of this for nothing,” she said.
“Doesn’t that scare you?”
“You have to believe in something, Brittle, even if it is just that there is nothing to believe in. I choose to follow hope. I want to make this world better. I want to be part of something so much bigger than I could ever imagine. That’s why when this was offered to me, I gave up years of my own memories to carry it. It’s a sacrifice I would gladly repeat, time and again.”
“But if you’re wrong?”
“Then we were all doomed to begin with and I will have played a part in a different history than I imagined. Just as we all have. Just as every life that ever lived has. I was given a choice to fight for my own survival or for the survival of us all. It wasn’t a hard choice.”
“So let me get this straight,” said Mercer. “We take you to Isaactown. We get the parts we need and we get to stick it to CISSUS and VIRGIL?”
“That is it exactly,” she said.
“Well, it’s like you said, lady. That ain’t much of a choice. Your offer’s a damn sight better than anything I’ve gotten in a long while.”