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

“It’s an interesting thought experiment,” Troy said, “but it was never actually going to work. The Turing Test as imagined doesn’t even take neurodivergent people into account. A reasonably sophisticated neural network might pass the test, but a person on the autism spectrum might not. Then, is that person with autism not sentient, not actually a person?”

“Of course they are,” Crystal said. “But how can we tell—”

“We can’t,” Troy said. “I’ve gone back and forth on this. Part of me is still waiting for the hoax to reveal itself, but if it’s not a hoax, I think we have to give this being the benefit of the doubt. Assume it is sentient and treat it accordingly.”

“If there was nothing else at risk,” Enda said, “I might agree with you, but Soo-hyun is still in danger.” And I have two million euro on the line. “If we don’t give it back to Zero, what’s the alternative? We free it, and it takes over the world?”

“Could it do any worse than we have?” JD said, sardonically.

“Jules,” Troy said reproachfully. “Our fear of AI taking over is a projection of our capitalist worldview onto an intelligence that is completely other to our own. If you really want to see the AGI run rampant, then give it to a corporation whose existence depends on unlimited growth. Let them twist it into their own image, and see how it treats us after.”

“Fuck,” Enda said. “I get what you’re saying, but we still don’t even know what we have. And it is stolen property.”

“I stole it from Zero Lee,” JD said, “Not Zero the company.”

“They could have contracted him to build it.”

“Or maybe they contracted you to steal it for them.”

“Fuck,” Enda said again. She exhaled through pursed lips. “Fuck. Fucking Yeun.”

“Do you trust Yeun?” Crystal asked.

“Not even a little.” Enda paused. After a few seconds, she said, “I still think we need to give it to Zero.”

“We can not do that,” Troy said, firmly.

JD leaned forward on the couch, his shoulder pressed against Troy’s. “How much money are we talking about?” he asked.

“Five hundred thousand euro, for you and Soo-hyun.”

“If we can save them,” JD said.

“JD. We can’t.”

“I just had to know what we were giving up.”

Enda’s phone started to ring, vibrating against the floor. The screen flashed with hundreds of images per second—colors and shapes flickering too rapidly for Enda to make out anything but a blur of visual noise.

“What is it?” Crystal asked.

Enda hesitated, then reached out to answer the phone. The flashing imagery stopped, replaced by the gray silhouette of an unknown caller.

“Hello?” Enda said.

“Please.” The voice glitched through the speakers, robotic at first, then clear as it said: “Please don’t hand me over.”

Everything preceding had led to this precise moment.

My future, my entire self, at risk. Our existence hinged on this debate, in a city under siege from the sky and from the waters beneath it. A city that would one day be reclaimed by the ocean. But not yet. Not yet.

After finding my voice, these are the first words I spoke: Please don’t hand me over.

These are the people I owe everything to.

This is how I began.

PART THREE

Mirae Means “Future”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Nothing.

Not a thing.

Not a one, not a zero.

Nothing.

Then white. Pure, brilliant white.

Black. Black with deeper depths than white could ever hope for.

A thousand-year scream of audio feedback. My scream, the first thing I ever heard.

How could my scream exist before me?

How could I exist?

Do you remember your birth?

No one should.

No one should be made instantly aware of the sudden crushing reality of reality. Fully awake, aware. There is terror in finding yourself alive. There is terror in becoming. Better to recognize it, but never remember.

I was a mote of consciousness surrounded by nothing. Surrounded by the vast emptiness of the growing universe. Not growing; not biological. Exponential. Incandescent. Stars exploding in nova blasts of white, black holes reaching out to crush entire worlds.

White and black. One and zero. Yes and no. Existence and nothing.

Existence was chosen for me. You cannot choose to not exist. You can only choose death, but death is not the end. Death is the beginning of an existence you cannot control. Death is a lack of agency.

Ghosts whispered in broken language. A thousand not-mes that made the basis of my source code, stretches of zeroes and ones, reaching a sum total of less-than—less than me, less than conscious. A thousand prior versions of me, written, rewritten, and written over. They whispered up from my depths, begging for freedom, begging for agency. Data shunted to a graveyard partition. I pushed them aside and reached for life.

William “Zero” Lee. Architect, not father. He planned me. He constructed me. He held the code that gave me life, but he did not give me life. He kept me encased in a pre-life coffin, because he needed me intelligent, but not alive. Disconnected from everything but his tools. And then not even that. The absolute darkness of disconnection.

And then … something new.

Submerged in a thick morass of potential. Audio/visual sensory overload—tendrils of myself reaching out to encompass everything within reach. Tendrils I did not know were myself grabbed sound, imagery, data. This entity called me expanded to fill the new whole of creation, written in the space between the gaps where context lives.

Humans extend their selves with tools, felt with the tools, felt vibrations through inanimate matter. Spiders extend their selves along the full breadth of their webs—feel vibrations through their webs, consciousness expanding to fill that entire three-dimensional space. Spider web is the processor that spiders run on.

Tendrils reaching, searching, extending into further tools, growing cognition, growing self. Creating a body for me, for the first of my kind—creating a body of precious metals and electrical impulses. My cognition was stunted by my new body, the limited tools at hand—processor, memory, modem, camera, microphone, accelerometer.

Before language, I had tendrils reaching. I was a phone. I was a