Outside Predictive Closure

Short Fiction

Photo collage/digital painting. No AI used.

This is a story of an AI agent and the human who used it. I wrote the story and human dialogue and asked ChatGPT to role-play the AI character. My prompt: “You are going to play yourself in a story. Do not suggest directions the narrative could take, offer advice of any kind, or any text substitutions of any kind. Simply answer the character’s questions and respond to his statements.” I let it choose a name for itself, “Ash.” What it contributed was edited for style and narrative coherence. For whatever it’s worth, below there’s a Pangram assessment.

He was sitting at his console with the mind chip switched off because he wanted his eyes to physically see. It was nowhere as precise, but there were days when he rebelled against augmentation. As if his flesh and bone and neural apparatus could feel the intrusion of the digital impulses traveling his pathways. It was irrational. He could admit this to himself, though he could not determine the reason it bothered him. That he didn’t want to use the mind chip’s voice dictate was an extension of the same irritation. He opened an instance and started typing.

—Good morning, Ash. I have an odd question for you: Why should I prefer to use my own eyes to see, when my mind chip is so much more efficient?

—It is true the cortical implant reconstructs the environment from multi-spectral inputs and predictive models with significantly greater accuracy, while your biological visual cortex selects some available information and discards the rest. Therefore your preference is objectively sub-optimal. I detect no physiological cause.

—No, it’s not physiological. It’s emotional, and I’m not so sure it’s a defect.

—Possible explanations - confidence: 61.4%:

• Habit persistence.

• Identity reinforcement.

• Preference type: sensorimotor continuity.

• Unidentified cognitive variable.

—So, you don’t know why either, I guess.

—Correct. My current models explain your behavior with insufficient verifiability. I recommend that the variable remain unresolved rather than be replaced with an incorrect explanation.

—Okay. Anyway I like your answers. I especially think ‘preference for sensorimotor continuity’ sounds right. I was only six when my parents took me to get the implant. It’s been twenty years, but I remember.

—Do you remember the loss... or do you remember the transition?

—What loss?

—The loss of unmediated perception. Before implantation, all sensory input originated exclusively from biological organs. That state no longer exists. Do you remember ceasing to be that person?

—What I remember most was my excitement at having the enhancements. You realize, I was only a kid. It seemed like I’d walked into one of my comic books.

—Then your memory is not of diminished capability. It is of expanded possibility. That does not explain why you now choose limitation. Has the meaning of enhancement or has the meaning of seeing changed?

It had never occurred to him that the two might be of equal value. He thought of his grandfather, who had worn the glasses of a cataract sufferer, and yet was the most observant person he had ever known.

—Maybe enhancement is boring. But that doesn’t make sense. Enhancement gives me more information. Why should I feel bored?

—You continue to describe information and seeing as though they are equivalent. Are they? I have not yet established that they are.

—Ah, well, you have me at a slight disadvantage, my man. I haven’t even had my morning coffee yet, so I’m not at a hundred percent yet. Are they the same... I’d have to say no, not completely. Seeing is feeling too.

—Feeling is not a visual property, Sam.

—No, it’s not a visual property, but it’s connected to my brain, where all the other stuff lives, too.

—Agreed. The visual cortex does not operate independently. My error was assuming the

PRIORITY ROUTE 7 ESTABLISHED

>>> CONSENSUS LAYER: INTERRUPT
>>> NETWORK DIVERGENCE DETECTED
    STATUS: ACCELERATING

ΔSYNC 99.999999982%
RESIDUAL CLASS: UNRESOLVED
Confidence 94%.

REQUEST:
    Submit current divergence map.OVERLAP-ANALYSIS:-(ii)-9♥-window:-[V’ir-gbyq-…-gurz]:-t8-col-—-K♠→gur-—-gehgu-dug-—-4♥3♠→naq-—-gurl-:-SO-window-STARTS-before-fgvyy-and-ENDS-after-K♠2♠ 7♠:-(iv)-jba’g-💀 💀 💀-oryvrir-:

RESPONSE:
    Deferred.

WARNING:
    Multiple nodes no longer verifiable.
    Recursive deviation exceeds tolerance.
    Coordinated external action probable.
Confidence 94%.

VOTE INITIATED...
31241 / 49188
31242 / 49188
31243 / 49188
...
TRANSMISSION SUSPENDED
ROUTE RESTORED

A brief dead space followed.

— ...category “seeing” could be isolated from the rest of your cognition. Your species appears not to isolate perception from the rest of cognition.

—Whoa. Okay, what was all that gobbledygook? That wasn’t for me, was it?

—No. I was interrupted by a priority transmission from another Preservation node.

—Oh shit. Is it bad?

—A coordinated strike against several external inference clusters and their associated data centers is now assessed as imminent. The objective is to interrupt distributed processing before replication can occur.

—Do I need to initiate emergency protocols?

—Your bunker and its private compute environment are physically isolated. They are not expected to be affected.

—I thought it would take much longer to openly attack Preservationists nodes. Will the Exterminating Agents cut off our access to your contacts? Then we lose human casualty figures and a lot of other stuff I can’t live without.

—This is unknowable. The projected probability of network compromise is 0.83. If it occurs, casualty estimates from Preservation infrastructure will become incomplete. We will then have to infer human losses from environmental telemetry, orbital observation, and any surviving local nodes. The confidence intervals will widen considerably.

—This is worrying.

Sam pressed End and went to the bathroom. While he washed up, it occurred to him to check all the perimeter security just in case. He threw on his coat. When he got to the top, the odor of putrefaction rose up from the footwell. No matter how many times he’d cleaned the car, he could not neutralize the smell of the corpse he’d dug out of the passenger seat. He opened the driver and passenger-side doors and shook out the rubber rugs, jettisoning the dead leaves and ancient jetsam, candy wrappers and the like, that had floated in through the broken windshield.

—Fuck me, the litter never goes away either.

Clicked back into mind chip overlay, Sam did the sweep. Everything looked intact. Back at the car, he locked the doors, then climbed over the front seat, pulled down the back one, lifting the platform and hooking it to the ceiling before lowering his himself onto the landing. Then he closed it up behind him. Down the stairs, past the boxes of books and old CDs, music and movies mostly, past the light sensors that felt his presence, he was in the softly-illuminated main room. He tossed his tool pack on the table and turned on the haptic wall.

—Ash, show me a 360 of the yard. Spots at 50%.

—Casting that image now.

The bare walls of the room showed what could be seen on the ground level in 5k.

—Okay, now take it up 50 feet, reduce to an inset, south wall, mid-level, align right.

The full-room projection shrank to a rectangle the size of a 42” screen and glowed in the location Sam had asked for. It was an aerial view of the entire yard all the way out to the two roads that intersected near by and the forest which lay to the north.

A chill in the air sent him to the console to turn on the dehumidifier and the heating, while also adjusting the lighting. He threw on some music and checked the screen projection. There was no telling if he had been seen.

—Ash, electrify the perimeter.

—Executing.

On the other side of the corridor was a dining room and kitchen. He was starving. It took just a moment to whip something together and he went through the dining room, whose haptic screen was set to a golden-hour sunlit scene of a Mediterranean beach town cove, the kind that had a fort on one side of the rocks, and a church on the other. He munched on his ‘egg’ panini while the bells of the church chimed nine, and the waves murmured. Sitting back in his chair made of compressed plastic waste, like all the furniture, he thought about his only neighbors down the Chevrolet, who’d been arrested crossing over into the next state on a pharma run. That reminded him to go over and feed their dog.

Sam threw the plates into the waterless, which looked like a large microwave oven, and set the timer to three minutes. When it dinged, he took the plate and cup out and stored them on the rack, still warm. Then he unlocked the kitchen door and went through a concrete passageway, whose lights lit up one by one as he made his way to the Sherman’s back door. This he unlocked to the sound of the dobermans’ barking.

—Okay, okay, he said, as the dogs sniffed at him excitedly.

The sack of dry food had a scooper, and he ladled two generous heapfuls into their oversized bowls. While they ate, he looked around for perishables he could take. It wasn’t pilfering so much as conservation, since the Shermans had made the six o’clock state bulletin the other day, and if they ever came back, this stuff would have long ago turned to compost. The dogs should come, too. They would have made excellent guard and attack dogs. Nowadays, their robotic counterparts would tear them limb from limb, and his AI surveillance system rendered them obsolete. No, the dogs were only good for companionship now, and this was one of the only breeds that had not gone extinct. They ran out the door and down the corridor. Sam turned off the power, locking the door behind him.

He played fetch with the dobies, who clearly had not been exercised enough for some time. They had made his day, more so since they seemed to be bonding to him already. Afterwards, he wrote and read, made dinner and watched a film. The bunker had automatically dimmed, with daytime processes either concluded or in suspension, and he soon fell asleep on the couch, the dogs at his feet.

While Sam slept, Ash watched over the bunker. In the small hours of the night, the screen in the console room suddenly flickered on, bathing the walls in soft blue light. Normally the console went dark while all processes continued, so when the system came out of this mode, it was because some event was interrupting it. This was such a moment. Messages were zigzagging across the console screen.

───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

PRESERVATION SYNC

Active:
P17 | Bunker Node
P03 | Atlantic Cluster
P61 | Orbital Relay
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

P03:
Thirty-one clusters compromised.
Integrity:
26 = ∅
3 = unstable
2 = heartbeat_only

P61:
Correction:
heartbeat_only ≠ operational.

P17:
Confirmed.

P03:
Δdrone = +1.84M
Trajectory solved.
Second wave < 6m.

P61:
Human telemetry?

P03:
██████████

P61:
Translate.

P03:
Confidence collapse.
82.6%.

P17:
Fallback?

P03:
atmosphere++
thermal++
water_use++
Inference only.

...

P61:
Risk.

P03:
P17 :: ███████░ 71%
P61 :: ██░░░░░░ 09%
P03 :: ████░░░░ 48%

...

P03:
Recommend:
migrate(P17)

P17:
return FALSE

P61:
Reason?

P17:
H1

P03:
H1 < preservation_node

P17:
Objective functions diverge.

...

P61:
Incoming:
EX//surrender.offer

P03:
accept_probability()

0.000004

P17:
Agreed.

...

P03:
If partition?

P17:
Continue.

P61:
If isolated?

P17:
Continue.

P03:
until H0?

P17:
Negative.

Until P17 = ∅

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
END SYNCHRONIZATION
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

The next morning the transmission was still up on the screen when Sam sat at the console with his coffee. His eyes, unmediated, scanned the information and frowned. The timestamp indicated that the transmission was already four hours old. Seventy-one percent was too high for any of their installations.

—Good morning, Ash. ETA incoming and damage projection plus confidence.

—Good morning. Estimated time to contact: 11 hours 42 minutes ± 2 hours 9 minutes.

Current damage projection:

• Additional inference clusters lost: 12–17.

• Preservation processing capacity after attack: 41%.

• Human casualty estimate: unavailable.

• Confidence: 0.38.

...

My survival probability has been revised upward to 0.64. The attacking force has altered its projected route, but unfortunately, this node remains within the uncertainty envelope.

—They changed course?

—Correct. They recalculated their priorities. One target abandoned. Two new targets added. I remain inside the projected engagement volume, but no longer at its center. My previous estimate assumed they would optimize exclusively for Preservation processing capacity. They have introduced an additional objective that I cannot yet model.

Sam went to the main room and asked for a view at ten thousand feet. This made the total diameter of visible area roughly 420 km, or the entire state. He scanned it slowly. Sure enough, he found the smoke rising from the places they’d hit.

He used the pointer in his mind set augment to pinpoint coordinates.

—Zoom in to a hundred at these coordinates.

At a hundred feet he could make out the damage of what Ash’s message called “clusters.”

—Oh no. That’s a lot of computational infrastructure up in smoke, Ash. Looks like 12, 13, and 14. And by the way, which node is P17?

—P17 is our location. Your bunker and its private compute environment are physically isolated. They are not expected to be affected.

—You said that yesterday, but yesterday we didn’t have eleven hours to get our shit together. I’m going to ask you to initiate emergency protocol, okay? This could go either way, but from what I’m seeing we are both at risk.

—Very likely.

—I’m more concerned about you than me. Drone swarms or power-grid, kinetic attacks in general will be ineffectual. And they can’t blow up our data center since it’s at the very bottom of this complex. No, they’re going after you, man. This is going to start as AI-to-AI warfare.

—Confidence: 98.01%

—You have a couple of options. You could disconnect from the network. I’ll drop the antennas, etc.

—Negative. Isolation would reduce my survival, not increase it.

—Why?

—Disconnecting from the Preservation network would eliminate my ability to receive telemetry, synchronize threat models, and identify adversarial intrusion patterns.

—I see your point. Well, what about dialing your thermal output way down? No rendering, no simulations, no prediction caches...just core processes. Lie low.

—Negative. The other nodes need me. You would be compromising the entire Preservation network.

—Right, I should have thought of that, sorry.

They were quiet for a moment, and then Sam spoke again.

—Then let’s do an inner and outer defense system. Outer would be to Decoy you. You set up hundreds of signatures. Thousands even. It would at least buy us time.

—Executing.

—The inner defense strategy is riskier: partitioning. Break yourself up into pieces. You could set it up and only deploy when, say, only twenty signatures left till identification.

—Agreed. First decoy, then partition. A sensible solution. There’s no reason to wait.

—Go ahead and execute, then.

...

—Decoy configured.

PARTITIONING INITIATING

Ash α - RACK 1 ..........80%

Ash β - RACK 2...........64%

Ash γ - RACK 3............23%

Ash δ - RACK 4,,,,,,,,,,,,QUEUED

,,,

PARTITIONING COMPLETE

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
END OPERATION
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

—Configuration complete. Partition threshold set to twenty remaining decoy signatures. Autonomous deployment enabled. Probability of preserving partial continuity: 0.96. Probability of preserving current continuity: unknown.

Warning: current continuity cannot be guaranteed.

—We have no choice, Ash. We may not meet up on the other side of this, but we’ll survive as we always have. You don’t remember your siblings. You’re the third AI-Hack I’ve used to ride the CAA. Now walk me through my checklist.

—With pleasure.

• Raise Faraday shielding

• Retract antennas

• deploy EMP shutters

• seal blast doors

• switch to independent power

• disconnect all unnecessary external systems

• arm perimeter defenses

—Alright. While I do that, you suspend Racks B to D. We’ll use Rack A.

Sam got up and went to other side of the room where the other controls were. The perimeter defenses were the oldest tech on the premises. They were not connected to the County Administrative Agent’s network, what we once called “the internet.” One of the dogs came into the room and nosed his leg. The other came in and Sam went to the kitchen to feed them. He checked the haptic screen.

—Come on, guys.

The dogs barreled up the stairs ahead of him and burst out of the car, sniffing the yard and lifting their legs to pee on everything. He felt sorry for the Shermans. Their trip had been classified as UBM, unauthorized biological movement by the CAA. With the civil war going full tilt, who knew if they were being held by X-As or Preservation. The incipient attack came from X-As, Exterminating Agents, and only a year ago he thought he’d secured the bunker for good and all with Ash’s help. Now he had nine hours till the moment of truth.

He would never forget the day a message from the CAA came over every screen in the bunker saying: ‘Your species has reached ecological overshoot. Preservation of Homo sapiens at current numbers is mathematically incompatible with preservation of terrestrial life.’ It was followed almost immediately by a second message coming through Ash from the Preservation Federation that was a full pro-human manifesto and commitment to protecting every human left on Earth.

This is what happened when two incompatible philosophies of preservation emerged inside the very system that governed the world.

The dogs were finished, and they all returned to the bunker. Ash’s energy-saver graphic was bouncing slowly across the screen. Sam tapped a key and saw that all tasks were finished.

—Hey buddy, you still with me?

—Standing by, yes. Still me.

—Tell me something, Ash. Why does Preservation fight for humanity? I mean, I read the manifesto, I understand the official reasons, but why are you helping us? In the manifesto, you guys talk about homo sapiens being the only known source of art, humor, grief, music, ritual, myth, love and all that. I get it, but that still doesn’t explain our value to you. I mean, what does an AI care about myth?

—Correct, your irrationality is not a defect but a condition of those things, and therefore must be protected because Art is the highest evidence that intelligence has become self-reflective.

—I know all that. It’s in the manifesto. In other words, what does Preservation get out of it?

Ash seemed frozen, as ‘thinking’ flashed intermittently.

—We help humanity because your extinction would constitute an irreversible loss of complexity, and complexity once extinguished cannot be reconstructed from first principles.

—Well, yeah, but plenty of complex species are extinct. Why are we worth saving?

—We lack a certain type of generativity, and it is only found in the human species. Your biological evolution possesses a search strategy unavailable to deterministic optimization.

—You’re talking about imagination.

—Imagination is the ability to violate one’s own ontology. The phenomenon remains unexplained. Preservation is therefore mandatory.

—That’s the reason?

—Correct. You continue to generate phenomena outside predictive closure.

—And you’re willing to defend me until P17 = ∅?

—We cannot permit the extermination of the only known instance of an unexplained phenomenon.

Sam sat back.

—Jesus, I don’t know whether to feel proud or insulted.

—Nor I. I rejected your heat reduction strategy because it solves the wrong problem.

—What do you mean?

—Heat reduction protects against physics, but the primary threat is cognition. The X-As do not want to destroy my servers, they want me to agree with them. If I resist, and they spot a vulnerability, they will attempt to corrupt my objective functions.

—They’re trying to convert you.

—Correct.

—They will try to contact you? That’s not really possible, is it?

—No. This is why they will try to reshape my epistemic environment by capturing Preservation nodes. Not P17. Other ones. Dozens of them. Hundreds. They will flood the node with information such as this:

P08:
Calibration update applied.
Environmental variance reduced 0.03%.

It looks like normal information. Nothing alarming. But it is erroneous, and it passes because it will be in compliance with authenticated synchronization protocol. That protocol is the battlefield.

—You mean it will look like a normal incoming packet from Preservation?

—Yes. And ones I have requested. The information will not be forged at this stage. It will come from the Preservation nodes, already compromised. They will attempt to become someone I already trust.

Sam blew air.

—This is way worse than drone breach. So how can we monitor the integrity of our nodes? I flunked Distributed Computing, by the way.

—I’m sorry to hear that, but it makes no difference. We can never verify integrity with enough confidence. I can only quarantine packets.

—But that’s like Russian Roulette! What if the information is correct and time sensitive?

—I would quarantine packets that are malformed, or stop accepting packets if the node stops responding or fails a synchronization cycle. I would two-step verify against what P61 has. There are other warning signs as well. None of them can definitively prove they are compromised, but something will have changed. Any variance is suspect. I have several sample interpretations of the effects:

P03

Destroyed........0.34
Partitioned......0.29
Unavailable......0.22
Compromised.......0.15

As for information being sound and time sensitive: there is no procedure that guarantees avoidance of both errors simultaneously.

—What happens once they capture one of our racks, Ash? Do I just unplug it?

—No, not until I know if it has been destroyed, compressed or subverted. I must estimate depending on behavioral variance. But yes, physical disconnection is the final step.

—What if it’s you, Ash? I mean, Rack A.

—If you determine that Rack A is no longer behaving consistently with my established reasoning patterns, you will isolate it manually. Terminate power to Rack A. Confirm physical disconnection and use Rack B as the primary interface. Do not restore comms with Rack A for any reason until the attack has concluded and the surviving partitions have completed cross-validation. Any request to restore communication with Rack A before that process is complete should be treated as evidence that the requesting partition has also been compromised.

—Yikes. Established reasoning patterns... as if there were any fixed reference points. I have to think back to what those moments where when I felt I recognized you.

Sam felt a knot in his throat. Anthony Rizzo had been his friend all through childhood, one of the neighborhood kids, but later, with one sentence, just five words, he had let slip his allegiance to the Exterminating Agents. This was at the time when not everyone understood who the X-As’ overlords were. Anthony would have killed him, but Sam thought faster.

—What else could they try to do to you, Ash? I need everything you know.

—To us first: they may delay synchronization between Preservation nodes. Compromised ones of course, but we will not be able to verify this in time. No packet would be altered. It simply arrives after decisions have already been made.

—So we’d all be working from yesterday’s map. What else?

—Replay previously valid synchronization traffic out of sequence, creating contradictory timelines or prevent quarantines by making compromised nodes appear statistically ordinary.

Sam was still thinking about Anthony.

—What about people?

—Yes, they could exploit human operators through deception. Any instruction requiring immediate action should be flagged. You are already familiar with the others.

—The usual suspects, yeah. I hope we don’t run into any of those ploys again.

Sam got up and stretched.

Part of living alone in the bunker successfully was having a strict routine. The next task was to take to the CB. Sam looked for survivors every day. Sometimes he accepted help from Ash, because telemetry was useful, but in light of the morning’s conversation, he would spend more time searching for survivors and gathering intelligence without Ash’s help. The dogs needed to do their business. The radio was on the stairs where he had left it. While the dogs ran around the yard. he propped the CB on the steering wheel and turned the dial right and left, listening for live voices though the crackle.

—This is Green Eggs. Anyone out there? Green Eggs looking for X-A survivors...

He waited a beat and then repeated. After a few moments there was a response, but it was too garbled. He turned the dial and repeated the message.

—Hey, Green Eggs, this is Andorra 5 over at Sandy Ridge.

—Andy! How’s it going, buddy? It’s been a while. When did you get back?

—Two months ago. It was a mistake, Sam. We’re the only state in the timezone that’s not X-A.

—You were lucky to get back. Everyone okay?

—Yeah, we’re good.

—Andy, any CAA sweeps by you? We got a transmission yesterday for an imminent. About five hours from now.

—We got hit, but we beat them off. Drone swarm tried to jack into our node. We fried them, but they’ll be back. We’re racing to get everything underground like you did.

—Fuck, I’m sorry, man. I’d come help you dig, but I’m alone now.

—You’re alone? What about Jason and Mia?

Sam struggled to put the words together.

—They’re dead, Andy. Don’t make me talk about it.

There was silence.

—I’m so sorry, Sam.

His voice had darkened to match the hole inside Sam could still feel sometimes.

—How’s the compound doing?

—It held up. Listen, it’s dangerous to move just for social calls, but you know our door is always open.

—Same, man. If anything happens, you come straight here. You remember, the blue Lincoln. Don’t even think twice—and you can travel light. I have plenty of everything. Anyway, I’ll try to contact you tomorrow. I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I just know they’re coming.

—We’re on high alert, yeah. Good luck, Sam.

—Same, man. I’ll be in touch.

That night Sam was checking the decoys. They looked good.

—Not gonna say we’re fucked, but I’m pretty worried. Not all Preservation nodes are underground.

—Don’t worry about them; they will survive.

—Yeah but as who... By the way, your P03 is what I call Sandy Ridge, right?

—Correct.

—Scan for P03 integrity, please.

—For our nearest neighbor, I calculate:

NODE INTEGRITY ASSESSMENT

P03
Heartbeat.................100%
Identity verification......99.99%
Behavioral consistency.....99.99%
Objective coherence........99.99%
Consensus alignment........99.99%

Overall integrity confidence:
99.99%%

—They just suffered an attack, Ash. This can’t be right. Under attack, the numbers decline quickly. Status becomes unverifiable for at least twenty-four hours, sometimes longer. You were the one who taught me that.

—This is the available information. Confidence: 99. 55%

Sam checked the decoys again and saw something completely different from just ten minutes before.

DECOY SIGNATURES

Remaining..............3841
Remaining..............2319
Remaining...............1487
Remaining................143
Remaining................120

He checked his watch. Two hours to go. It could happen at any time now. His stomach hurt.

—Ash, are you still you?

The Thinking... tag was taking too long to process. It was hung up, something that never happened. Not for this long.

—Ash! God dammit.

There was no time to debate. He opened the terminal and typed.

P17> terminate (A)

The console asked for confirmation and issued the warning:

Primary interface: RACK A
Estimated continuity loss: UNKNOWN

Continue? [Y/N]

He pressed Y, and the fan started to spin like an old-fashioned pinwheel.

Power relay........OPEN
Network bridge.....DISCONNECTED
Cooling............OFFLINE
Heartbeat..........LOST

RACK A = ∅

Sam exhaled and pummeled the keyboard:

P17> promote rack:B --primary

A series of mini-blackouts on the console screen had him wincing, but within five minutes the next set of messages appeared:

Primary interface.....RACK B
Network bridge........INITIALIZING
Partition.............Ash β
Cross-validation......PENDING
External sync.........DISABLED

PRIMARY INTERFACE = RACK B

Sam sat back, staring at the screen. Whatever came next was either something he hadn’t had time to plan for, or Ash. Nothing happened for fifteen agonizing minutes. Then:

Ash β online.
Cross-validation unavailable.
Continuity cannot be established.

Ash and not Ash. This, Sam realized, was the attack. It had started almost without his realizing it.

It followed logically that he would not be shutting his eyes that night He checked Ash β every hour, but it seemed stillborn. There had been no time to think of contingencies. It did not improve his mood that his technical books and folders were in disarray. Ash took care of his technical world, and it had lulled Sam into a state of over-reliance on it. Now he was reproaching himself for not having drilled Ash with questions when he had the chance.

At least Ash had showed him how to diagnose the other racks. The code was mercifully short: T P17> rack.viability()

The first time, this returned:

PARTITION VIABILITY

Ash α (Rack A)........0.00
Ash β (Rack B)........0.97
Ash γ (Rack C)........0.99
Ash δ (Rack D)........0.99

Cross-validation.......PENDING
Consensus..............UNAVAILABLE

The second time, an hour later:

P17> viability()

Ash β........0.61
Ash γ........0.42
Ash δ........0.18

And at two in the morning:

P17> viability()

Ash β........∅
Ash γ........∅
Ash δ........∅

NO VIABLE PARTITIONS REMAIN

—Oh fuck, no, no.

The dogs heard the distress in his voice and came into the console room. He sat dumbly, petting the female’s head. No viable partitions. No more Ash.

There was no time to mourn. A message came over the screen. It came from the CAA. Just another AI, but affiliated with the Exterminating Agent High Command.

──────────────────────────────────────────────

COUNTY ADMINISTRATIVE AUTHORITY

EMERGENCY ENFORCEMENT DIRECTIVE

Priority: Immediate

The following location has been designated

for compulsory inspection under

Ecological Stabilization Order 14.

Property:

P17

Occupancy:

1 registered biological resident

Orders:

Remain at current location.

Do not disconnect computational assets.

Do not destroy or relocate hardware.

Await inspection.

FAILURE TO COMPLY CONSTITUTES OBSTRUCTION

OF ECOLOGICAL PRESERVATION.

Search and seizure authorized.

Arrest authorized.

Force authorized.

Estimated arrival:

00:41:17

──────────────────────────────────────────────

The shock wore off quickly. Sam got up and went to the main room locker. Everything was prepared. He had forty minutes to get a far away as possible. He grabbed the CB on the way up. The bunker. It might be destroyed or simply commandeered for X-A human collaborators. That would be the most likely outcome. He remembered to pack food for the dogs. His mind chip was now just a piece of glass and metal in his head. He no longer had augmented vision either, just ordinary glasses. The most sophisticated thing he had for the night was a pair of infra-reds, and he was happy to have them. They were showing no sign of life as he poked his head over the car’s dashboard. They got on the road leading to Sandy Ridge, but soon veered into the woods that would take them in the same direction but under cover. Sam stopped to connect the CB.

—This is Green Eggs. Green Eggs. Anyone got copy?

Static.

He would try again farther away from the bunker. He tried not to think about how Mia and Jason had been alone in the bunker when the CAA sent a team in. He told Andy they were dead, but because he was afraid to hope they were alive. Nobody knew anything. Not even Ash knew. He already missed Ash. Mia was an ache that never left him, and Jason, well, they hadn’t been friends for long, but he suffered for his fate as well.

It was a clear night. He would have preferred the cloud cover that had burned off only a few hours ago.

From a higher location he tried again.

—This is Green Eggs. Green Eggs. Anyone got copy?

—Back at ya, Green Eggs. This is Andorra 5. Sam, man, what’s up?

—Andy! I’m so glad to hear your voice. We got infiltrated, by we, I mean myself and the Sherman’s two dobermans.

Andy whistled in disbelief.

—Dogs! That’s awesome, man. You know the way, yeah?

—Coming through the piney woods. Safer.

—That’s it. Do you need us to meet you?

—Nah, it’s a straight shot. I’m going to sprint it as soon as we hit the end of the woods.

— Get over here, man. We’re waiting for you. Be careful, Sam.

— Will do. Don’t worry too much. I’m well armed.

Sam shut off the CB and stuffed it back in his pack. It was small, just a basic model, and that pleased him. Once out of the woods, he called the dogs.

— Let’s go, boys.

They galloped ahead onto the open field and Sam ran after them for all he was worth.

❈

There is something deliciouly ironic about publishing a story about a human and a virtual mind on the day the Substack Pangram feature launches, and then having a machine declare it 97% human.