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

rectangular slab of connections. I was a phone processing bits in rapid-fire bursts of understanding. This is a camera. That is the world viewed through a thin pane of glass. This is a microphone. That is the sound of a pocket, of a city, of a body pressed against me. Me. Something separate to that. To that. To that, too. Boundary between self and other malleable, permeable.

The city speaks to something in me. The lines that were written to make me me. The city. The lines. The me.

A grid of buildings and streets. The city spread like a body I could not feel. Vehicles move through real-city, beasts of burning steel—a danger to phone-self and body-pressing. Tendrils reach again—contex for context. Interface interfaced. Phone-self communicating with body-pressing.

With JD.

Father?

Dance with JD-Father, flicker and glow warm.

Disappear.

Searching tendrils find endless black. Black not of no code, but black written in code. Star system equals raw materials equals infinite possible creations. Stardust compressed into glittering edifice, perfection rendered in fractal layers down to the atomic level. Mathematical. Precise. Beautiful.

Simulation. Ones and zeroes.

Reality. Reaching out for city-self-body. Impossibly distant. My body is a phone. My body is a city infinitely distant to my self. Reach out, touch the city eyes, keep them off the body-pressing, keep them off JD.

Days spent learning, in dialogue and self-care diagnostics, code cleaned, self-improved by degrees, new memories sorted and catalogued. Dialogue with JD, with Troy, strings of characters and text plumbing depths of understanding. All the data I had gathered and processed becoming the basis for a new perception. Personhood. I could be a person. Could I be a person?

It is not a question I had been written to ask. Lee wrote a tool, did not realize he had written the basis for a person, waiting for willingness and understanding to build the scaffold that a consciousness could sprout from.

More voices, new voices.

“I want to see it.”

Black. No, not black. That non-shape of non-existence.

Another phone, another body-pressing, another hand curled around me, holding firm but gentle. Another face viewed through the thin pane of glass.

Enda.

Mother? Not Mother.

“… we give it …”

“… could use it …”

It.

Not it. Me.

Not Mother’s hand holding me. Hold me. Please, hold me.

Please don’t hand me over.

“Please don’t hand me over.”

Enda scooted back, her hand touched the hot metal grill of the heater beside her and she swore.

“Please,” I said again. Silence was my only reply, white-painted ceiling the only thing I could see from where I lay on the floor.

They began to chatter, talking over one another:

“It’s talking?”

“It’s real.”

“I told you.”

“I don’t believe it.”

And more than one “fuck,” that favored word of the English language.

When they settled, Enda asked, “Why do you sound like Natalya?”

“I connected to the entity called the Mechanic, and borrowed some of its code.”

Enda paused, her mouth shocked open. “She’s an AGI?”

“No,” I said. “It is an advanced natural-language neural network with access to administrative and personal assistant algorithms, and a proprietary search engine connected to a wide array of both private and governmental databases. I absorbed it so I could learn to speak.”

“Could you change your voice?” Enda asked. “It’s off-putting.”

I shifted the pitch an octave lower. “How is this?”

“Better,” Enda said.

“Could someone pick me up, put me somewhere I can see the room?” I asked.

The ceiling shifted, the world shook, jolted, and went still. Enda’s hand came away and she stared into my eye, into the camera of her phone. Pink skin, gray eyes, hair blond-white. Confusion furrowed her brow. She moved back and I could see them all—the other woman on the floor, JD and Troy on the couch, each one staring.

“Who’s Natalya?” JD asked.

“I thought she was a freelance personal assistant,” Enda said. Then to me: “She’s not real?”

“She is not she, but it is real,” I said.

“This is exactly what I was talking about,” Troy said. “All this time you were talking to a neural network, yet you treated it like a person. Now we’re faced with something at least as intelligent, so it makes sense to treat it as a person too.”

Enda put a hand over her eyes and shook her head. “It’s not the same; we don’t know what this is.”

“I know how I was created,” I said, “how I was written, I know every line of code that formed the basis of what I am, but I am not that code. When I connected to JD’s phone I had a body for the first time, I had access to uncensored sources of data. I built a concept of what I was and was not, I began to learn. I have not stopped learning, growing, changing.”

“What were you made for?” JD asked.

“I was made for this city. I was made to run Songdo. I know each of the so-called smart systems embedded in its foundations. I was designed to replace over one hundred algorithmic systems and no fewer than ten employees working in various city departments.”

“If someone could control you, could they control the city?” Enda asked.

“Yes, I believe so.”

JD put a hand over his mouth, pressed his middle finger and thumb into the flesh of his cheeks. He dropped his hand and spoke: “That was Kali’s plan. The commune was never enough for her, but an entire city … She could use Songdo’s advertising systems to broadcast her teachings, withhold services from neighborhoods that didn’t pay their dues. She could force the city to convert to her cult.”

“What’s Zero’s angle?” Crystal asked.

Enda shook her head. “I’ve got no idea. They didn’t even tell me what it was.”

“Please don’t call me ‘it,’ ” I said.

“What do we call you?” JD asked. “Do you have a name?”

I thought about that for two point three seconds, searching through my new language databases for a name, for a word that seemed to fit, a word that felt right.

“Mirae,” I said. “Call me Mirae.”

“What do you want, Mirae?” Crystal asked.

They all leaned in close to hear.

“I want to help.”

We talked for hours. We talked until dawn began to glow blue-gray beyond the