Repo Virtual by Corey White (read a book .txt) 📗

jazz, but Satchmo had been her father’s favorite. Enda sat cross-legged on the floor, bathed in the glow of a small radiant heater, waiting for her bone-deep chill to thaw.

“I want to see it,” she told JD.

JD glanced at Crystal quickly. “Are you sure?”

Enda nodded.

JD reached into his pocket and retrieved his phone. “Is that okay? Do you want to meet someone new?” he asked the device. He nodded and disconnected a datacube from the rear of the phone. “Here,” he said, and tossed the cube to Enda.

She snatched it out of the air and inspected it, felt the dense weight of the small cube. “What do I do with it?”

“Slot the cube into your phone; I couldn’t tell you how it’s going to manifest.”

“You’re talking like it’s a spiritual entity you’re summoning,” Troy said. “It’s definitely strange, but it’s hardly otherworldly.”

Enda slid the backplate off her phone, and slotted the cube into place. The phone seemed to grow warmer in her hand, but Enda dismissed it as heat from the bright filaments burning hot beside her feet.

“What are we talking about?” Crystal asked, sipping at her drink.

“This is the data I was contracted to retrieve,” Enda said.

Crystal moved off the couch and sat on the floor beside Enda, staring intently at the phone with her back against the wall, long legs stretched toward the middle of the small room.

“Am I going to have to download that game?” Enda asked JD.

“No, it’s not—it only went into the game because the game was there. What do you have on your phone that it might access?”

Enda shrugged. “Sudoku? My bank account?”

JD scrunched up his face. “I doubt it. We’ve been talking with it—it displays its responses on-screen. It will probably do the same for you.”

“I should call my contact at Zero,” Enda said. “I don’t have to tell them how I found it; I can leave out your name entirely. But they offered me a lot of money to track it down.”

Enda did not mention the blackmail, the Agency records they threatened to reveal. The file would see her extradited for her crimes. The provisional government that oversaw the area formerly known as North Korea zealously punished foreign agents they found in the rubble of the former autocracy. “I can split the money with you, more than you were going to get from Kali.”

“What about Soo-hyun?” JD said.

Enda put her cup down on the floor next to her phone. “We can call the police. Kali’s people killed Khoder and shot up Troy’s apartment, the cops will have to do something.”

“The whole city’s a disaster area,” Troy said. “By the time the police do anything, it might be too late.”

“Zero, then,” Enda said. “I make Soo-hyun’s safety a condition of handing the datacube over. They have private security on retainer, they can take care of it, and we don’t have to put ourselves in danger.”

“How long will that take? What if it’s too late?” JD said, voice thick with worry.

Enda nodded. She saw Khoder on the chair, the blood, the bruising, the ragged black hole of his mouth as he gasped his last breath. She’d seen worse—she’d done worse—but this image was fresh.

“I want to help you, JD, but we can’t do it on our own. It’s me, your wrench, and his philosophy degree against a pack of teenage monsters. But if we give it to Zero, we’ll have them on our side.”

“I don’t think we can do that,” Troy said.

“Why not?” Enda asked.

“Here we go,” JD said with a knowing smile.

Troy leaned forward. “I didn’t want to believe Jules at first, but I’ve talked to it, and … What if he’s right?” Troy said. “What if it’s an AGI? An honest-to-god strong-AI?”

Crystal sat up a little straighter, the information broker’s interest piqued.

Enda checked her phone.

>> Hello, Enda. Your name is a young name. Have you had many names?

“How does it …” Enda looked to Troy, and he only shook his head. “We don’t even know what we have here. If we give it to Zero, they can sort it out.”

“But if it’s an AGI,” Troy said, “if it’s genuinely intelligent, can we trust it to a corporation?”

JD nodded. “We’ve got no way of knowing what they could do with it, but we can’t trust any corporation with that kind of power.”

“I’m not talking about what Zero will do, or what the AGI can do—I’m talking about Zero’s philosophy.”

“He’s a philosophy professor, in case you didn’t guess,” JD told Crystal.

Troy continued. “Corporations abuse their employees and contractors, and profit off human misery. At this point in history we have enough data to know that those behaviors are endemic to the corporate structure. How can we justify giving them a new species to subjugate?”

“A new species?” Enda said. “I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.”

“The AGI—if that’s what it is—could be copied a countless number of times, the copies molded and mutilated to fit different functions. In no time at all, Zero would have a broad variety of intelligent machines that were forced to do their bidding, to follow their mandate.

“We’re talking about slavery, and I don’t use that word lightly. If it’s a truly intelligent machine, then it could be sentient. If it’s sentient, then it’s a person. And if it’s a person, then it deserves personhood, it deserves rights. Zero would give it neither. Do you want to be responsible for helping establish a slave species?”

“I hate to break it to you,” Enda said, “but there are already slaves out there, working in places where people’s lives are valued less than machines.”

“And that’s a fucking travesty,” Troy said, “but it doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for what we decide to do here.”

“Your line of argument only matters if it’s smart enough to know it’s a slave,” Enda said. “How do we know it’s sentient?”

“How do we know you are?”

Enda opened her mouth, then closed it. “I don’t want to get into a philosophical debate—”

“Too late,” JD interjected.

“—I just want answers.”

“What about the Turing Test?” Crystal