Chapter Text
Out there, the world’s all yellow.
Furious winds spiral inward to the hole where Elliot Manor used to be, threatening to knock Serial Designation J to the strange, brittle ground below. Every step forward is shaky, quivering, fraught with weakness of the joints. Dead-still drops of water linger in the air, lazily washing against the cathode-ray image of her eyes. Both ovals decay to red and green at the edges of the oddly-flowing tendrils of liquid piling up on her visor.
Splintered boards creak under her legs. They’re wettened, buckling at her weight, made indistinct from the mud by the neon yellow glow. Dark, rounded shapes weave over and under the ground. Everything is wrinkled, stretched, like a sheet warped by weight laying atop, and J’s a dusty speck rolling down the creases.
Her eyes move up on their own, colorful rectangular noise growing at the periphery. Beams of blinding, dirty yellow light wave with the wind, turning, turning, guiding her to a miniature Sun spinning ahead, far below the darkening twilight. It half emerges from the mile-wide hole left by the Manor, half sinks inside. Sometimes, it shifts, flickers, lets see different colors beneath, as if it’s a drape, the fluid outer layer of something else.
Around, winged figures float; not quite Disassemblers but eerily alike, in places devoid of their yellow glows and striping in favor of a patchwork of purple-gray webbing that emerges from their shells. One claw is sharp and bladed, the other sinewy, with thin, pointed bones tied together in that stretched gray membrane.
They don’t flap, nor glide, their wings are always spread, they orbit, shifting only to keep their faces to the light, faces she knows but can’t place. There’s something about their pose, it’s familiar; she might’ve seen rosy-cheeked cherubs painted like that a lifetime ago, framed on the walls of an ornate regency room.
The noise grows. Rainbow static full of buildings, trees and butterflies tearing at her eyes. J’s chemosensors, hushed before, are now singing with the aftersmell of rocky petrichor, dashed with notes of burning coal. The creaking of her arms and legs is colored blue and red, and the very exhaustion of her body is the sound of dozens of cars thundering by a river.
It’s not real, it’s pareidolia: her sensors are buckling under a stream of garbage data, feeding her imaginary sensations parsed from the noise. Wrapped by hundreds of gigabytes of overwhelming gibberish, there’s a single line of real text being received, over and over and over again.
اŮ£ER
FIÞяŘHER
©æND H▀Ã
FINDæØ¢Ã
F§Nš�ER
F—D HÚÆ
اŮ£ER
FINDæØ¢Ã
©æND H▀Ã
F§Nš�ER
اŮ£ER
F—D HÚÆ
It takes some tries to understand. At first she’s not sure if something’s being said at all, but the consistent number of characters and length of the interval between instances confirms it. Whoever’s talking – familiarity verifies it’s who, not what, and a registered authority –, they’re struggling to emit a simple command. The sheer power of the signal turns from scalpel to hammer in these clumsy, infantile hands.
But patterns quickly emerge from repetition. Uncorrupted characters appear in the same positions, and over a few iterations it comes together: FIND HER. A faint trace of hurry seems to lag behind, maybe desperation or impatience, not contained in the otherwise authoritative text but picked up by some other means that J can’t tell apart from the tidal wave of data.
Before she can consider whether that hurry is imagined or real, the stream cuts. The noise fades, and the blinding light dims. The small Sun is now dark. A black disk ringed by yellow, a digital censor plastered over the real shape. There’s text overlaid at its center – “[NULL]”.
Her legs push her to pace, frantically, to, fro, and around, sensors scanning under the mud and wood, into the rounded shapes, all animated by the force of the order given. Momentary confusion leads the way for a sinking kind of alarm. Whatever’s happening, too sharp for a dream, too dreamy for a memory, J’s not a part of it: she’s spectating.
She sends out a datetime request, and her OS responds just fine. <Date.now.getDate(): Serr 09, 3071>. She’s alive, no doubt about it. This vision, it’ll pass. It must – but there’s a sense of doubt creeping in, from turn left to turn right, head snapping dizzyingly fast, that something fatal lingers. She remembers that last green flash growing before her eyes, but what came after?
Glimpses, frames of restored memories load in, byte by byte, coming together as artifacted nonsense. The painful sluggishness of the process tells her something’s wrong with the records themselves. The most probable cause is terminal hard drive damage… But wouldn’t that have stopped her from thinking at all?
But that doesn’t matter. There’s a certain knowledge, something concrete that’s coming together through the noise. She failed. Purple hair and a green flash. There is some moment, lost in the mangled mess of medium-term memory, where the thread of her consciousness ended. She died.
The dazed, rickety train of thought nearly makes her miss something about the dark shapes on the ground. Not dark, darkened, cut out like the small Sun by some automated algorithm in her OS. Their outlines jitter, unable to decide where the objects being hidden start and where they end, sometimes letting J get a peek beneath – there’s wrinkled fabric, mostly flannel, seldom denim. Cylinders of it, weaved around a soft, limp substance that curves in sharp angles. Skin and flesh. Arms and legs. Bodies.
Her legs step around them while her hands rummage, pull them up, turn them over, then dump them, again and again. More glimpses here and there tell her there’s something worse at hand. Their outlines are too long, too thin, stretched toward the hole. Sometimes, when one is especially light and easy to lift, it leaves another jittering cutout behind, right under. The reason why her OS is struggling to cut them out of sight dawns on her – they are too warped. It can barely tell that they are corpses.
Then everything stops. No movement, silence overpowering. Her eyes have fixed on a corpse beneath her. Only it isn’t a corpse – the shape shifts at a rhythm, expands and contracts, breathes. A facial recognition algorithm is tripped, triggering another wave of data. Familiar glimpses, a particular voice, names, the smell of varnish and an old library. Mistress, role: “admin”. Boss. Tessa.
“Oi, J! Wanna try something different today?”
“... Is that a picture book, boss? Well, I think maybe N…”
“Picture book?! It’s bloody Wagner! How come you…?! Just, c’mere, you and I ‘re gonna read Siegfried front to back.”
“I don’t have a partiture reading library installed. I think we should ask Master Elliot…”
“Nuh-uh! I’ll just sing as I go. A-hem… Dun dun du-du-dun dun, dun dun du-du-dun dun…”
The conscious side of J resists that recognition, suspecting a false positive, more sensory pareidolia. She doesn’t know who this human is, these glimpses are somewhere uncanny between familiar and not. But there’s so much certainty in the feeling, so much fondness, that it sinks her into an unbearable tension, wondering if this human, Tessa, is fine, if she’ll live, just what the black censor hides about her state that could otherwise be helped.
Her body immediately acts, unresponsive to the still-chugging train of thought. It gently, carefully digs both claws around the human, loosening the mud’s grip. Some difficulty immediately arises – there’s a long, snaking, more delicate something that’s not coming free.
It stretches off and away from the human cutout, under the same jittering black cover. Despairing indecisiveness assaults her, like there’s just no good way to go about this problem, though whether a part of the vision or a conscious emotion she can’t tell. Her claw hesitates, readying to cut but hanging for another moment.
“Es giebt ein Schwert, das er nicht zerschwänge: Nothungs Trümmert zertrozt’ er mir nicht, könnt’ ich die starken Stücken schweißen…!”
<There is a sword he could not shatter: Nothung’s fragments he would not defy, if I could forge the mighty pieces…!>
“Hm? What’s wrong, boss?”
“... You know German, right?”
“Natürlich, Chef.”
<Naturally, boss [male].>
“Chefin, J. Female form! A-hem, die meine Kunst…”
When it finally moves, the gesture is snappy, apprehensive, like ripping out a bandage. A strained, drawn-out cry breaches the silence, and the human shudders. The claw splits something soft, but gets caught on something tougher, then the cry grows, continues to grow, and J recoils, shrinking inside herself until it fades to a rattling whimper when the tough stuff snaps and the cut is done.
The shape, now severed, immediately loses its black overlay; the purple tone of bruised skin comes into view. A stretched arm, about a meter and a half long, pierced by splinters. The skin is drawn thin over the joints.
Her arms wrap around the trembling human, carefully cradling her before pulling upward. Quivering exhalations shake J’s arms, quickening as the strength of the pull increases. There’s a resistance, a counterpull somewhere, anchoring to the ground – but before she can consider it, it gives way. Another long cry rises, then softens to a fading sigh. The quivering ends. It simply stops between one instant and the next.
A splattering sound alerts J that something wet fell to the mud. A spongy mass, pink or red, topped by a white piece, one side curved in a particular angle she recognizes; it’s a fragment of an ocular orbit, and a stub of cranial bone extends from its side. There are mushy red chunks and pale fragments dotting the ground around it.
Now there is dread, overwhelming, constricting her processors, sapping every joint of its strength. Tessa is still. She waits for the bulging of the shape, the light pressure of muscles widening the abdomen against her shell, and it doesn’t come. No breath comes.
She waits longer, longer – this human, her family, Tessa, boss, the stretched silhouette of a stranger, humid last sigh hanging to her shell, coldly noted by chemosensors as a trace percentage of nitrogen and carbon dioxide fast peeling away with the raging wind.
It only worsens when her legs step away, shaking, doubting. The orders are not fulfilled, and the force of an unspoken or just unheard second half pushes her to move; she’s got to carry Tessa to the hole that swallowed Elliot Manor. J cradles the corpse close to her chest, resisting her sharpening awareness of its destination, refusing to walk it there. The feeling leaves no room for nuance, condition or compromise. No.
Serial Designation J, Copper-9 Disassembly Squad leader, the most effective of her class, has acknowledged an order and now denies it. Doing so disturbs something deep, creeping in as she considers what she’s done. Just what is the worth of this one corpse that she’d deny a registered authority? The command was definitive, the issuer an absolute superior, if not quite known to her. Nothing should’ve stopped it from being acknowledged, accepted and acquiesced to.
But her legs still move. One step follows another in imperfect intervals, taking her closer to the hole, and the blazing sphere above. A sharpening incline makes the path easier, though the spots of mud often threaten to make her tumble. There’s some relief in knowing that this mutinous impulse went nowhere and the order is being obeyed, but it cracks under an obvious realization; the damage is done.
The most essential takeaway from her knowledge of the process of AI corruption is that once the first thought of disloyalty shows, the act itself is a foregone conclusion. There is no disinfecting the unimaginably complex structures and flows of data behind the proprietary miracle of a simulated conscience; not because such a thing is beyond JCJenson, but because it would be pointless in the face of simple replacement.
The single optimal solution to corruption is disassembly, and that solution must now apply to her, the same way she applied it to thousands of impeccably-disabled rogue products. As soon as she’s fulfilled this order, it will be done. No matter what the nature of this vision is, the thought was undeniably real, and it came from her.
Grim acceptance sets in as the edge of the hole approaches and the shadows of the hovering Disassemblers streak by. The blazing sphere’s light blinds her to the sheer drop a few steps away. The howling of wind descending to Earth’s gut deafens her. Her remaining senses are dulled too when the signal returns to stop her every jumbled thought dead.
GIVE HER.
Two steps forward. Desperate anticipation builds as her joints receive the command to unlock and loosen, then the weight in her arms begins to slip.
Without another thought, Tessa’s corpse is delivered.
The numbing blend of sensations lingers for another moment, and then it’s gone. No sights, no sounds, all process threads hollow. Not even darkness, not even silence. Darkness implies an absence of light: her problem is an absence of eyes. She seeks the connection to her sensors, and the ping returns null.
Maybe what she saw was her life flashing before her eyes, and it’ll only be another moment before the reaper calls her name. Maybe this is what comes after that. If it is, death is awfully lucid. A hint of alarm spins up her processors.
You’re not dead yet, you corrupt heap of contingent liability. Pluck that sentimental sophistry out of your system. – In the face of panic, J enacts a policy of austerity: to disallow the non-essential from hogging up the unknown amount of processing time she has left. Her focus must remain strictly on the actionable.
The current state of her body is indeterminate, but the likelihood of any damage being anything other than only temporary is comically low. Death or permanent injury is a nonfactor. Much more concerning is the state of her mind. Corruption is already underway, but determining if the unusual audiovisual playback from a few minutes ago is the cause or a consequence is impossible without technical knowledge of JCJenson’s AI data structures, a trade secret she is not privy to. Tessa is a nonfactor.
How did this happen to her? To her? Did she not follow her directives to the letter? Was there some slip, some lapse where her guard dropped and she spoke with a corrupt toaster for too long? Just what subtle poison did she not only entertain but completely forgot about? Maybe the vision was simply a hallucination caused by the march of the sickness through her mind? Maybe JCJenson’s AI incurs damage with time, maybe it is some flaw that–?
Nonfactor. Not just that, more proof of corruption. Worthlessness building up in you.
It only makes sense – somehow a toaster got the best of her. Perfect proof of irreparable failure. The only decision left for J to make is what treatment to apply. Although the common sense option of self-disassembly is unavailable, software annihilation ought to do just fine. Given root privileges, there’s no need for malware, and N’s survival is proof that even JCJenson’s proprietary kill-stakes she was provided with could prove inadequate anyway – of course, they are for workers, not Disassemblers.
Easy enough. sudo rm -rf / will do. That’ll systematically delete every single file in her system until there’s not enough of her left to delete itself. The simplest, most effective solution she can think of. But it scares her. It terrifies her.
It’s not immediate; she’ll dwindle file by file and get to feel it all, forget the reason why she did it, agonize over a dozen hours as the procedure slowly advances through her expansive storage system, won’t even die until long after she’s lost the capacity to recognize that she’s dying.
But it’s undeniably the right call. It’s an invincible certainty that this fear, this nauseating, dreadful pressure around her mind is only corruption rearing its head again, and it infuriates her. A functional product would prioritize its assigned purpose over self-preservation. But still she can’t do it. Visualizing the command is enough to paralyze her. This must be why kill-stakes exist – for drones too sick to make the right choice.
There must be a way to bypass the deadlock. Some sweetheart deal to be made with her own ill brains that’ll still let her set things right. sudo rm -rf /hippo is an evident alternative. The “hippo” folder, maybe named after the hippocampus, contains practically all her memories of all types, though she’s not quite sure just what else.
Assuming it was an event, memory or false fact that was the root cause of the corruption, it’s likely to be there, and deleting it all might return her to a near-factory state, with the regrettable loss of all acquired proficiency and all encoded recollections, but hopefully preserving her mission, even her capacity to carry it out. Maybe, just maybe, it will be enough. An angry, loathing remark – what I’m losing, I deserve to.
The dread lingers, but abates. She loads some music into RAM, all Tchaikovsky. The lessened scope of her chosen treatment means whatever’s in her active memory will escape its effect. The music will simply keep looping until the job’s done, then disappear once she reboots. Won’t even get to miss it.
No use in waiting. She pulls the trigger as the opening violas of 1812 Overture play their first notes. The rising strings distract her from the impulse of looking into her filesystem to see what’s being erased. Thousands of files ought to be gone already.
What memories went first? Her oldest records, erasure sluggishly creeping toward the newest? Or does the ancient legacy of Unix commands demand an alphabetical order, in practice all but random? Maybe the order is inverse, newest to oldest, and the record of the last few hours is doomed to evaporate with the rest of her RAM when her consciousness resets?
A kind of expectant fear sets in. She hums, a non-verbal, mental gesture in the absence of a mouth, and wonders if the procedure will be one continuum, or if at some point a root process will be forced to restart. Her mind’s eye lingers too long in a stored replay of the last few days; it goes as she’s reliving the discovery of N’s newest competency slump, and she drifts for too long in the blackness that follows, forgetting what she was doing, then it repeats, again and again and again, with scattered memories from different times, filling her with growing panic that fades when the memory of repetition is itself erased and only her own hums are left, slowed and entire minutes behind, and she wonders why the music suddenly jumped forward, only, of course, it never did.
A sense of inactionable wrongness creeps up, though she still knows what she did and why – she chooses not to linger on the hole that’s just appeared in her recent memory, instead to focus on the rising melody, try and keep the humming in tune with it. It really was the right call to put on something loud and distracting.
By the time the first leitmotif of La Marseillaise begins to play, at least what seems the first, a strange bliss is taking hold. The nature of her fear clears up a little – it clicks that if memory deletion was enough to do the trick, JCJenson would not spend an estimated $148 trillion in product recall. The issue must take deeper roots than that. Though by now that doesn’t matter, it seems. She mentally fiddles with an interrupt signal, but never sends it. If she could, she’d smile. What she did is still right. All that’s left is figuring out why.
The sudden roar of five cannon shots, an unorthodox yet poignant part of the composition, drowns out her thoughts. That’s for the better. The blare of La Marseillaise fades and the music slows before rising again to the rhythm of ringing bells. This is the most engrossing part – a celebratory motif before the victorious melody of the Russian Empire’s anthem concludes the piece. J indulges in the pomp of the yelling brass instruments, such a strange feeling, unfamiliar but not quite so, until–
~$ too
bash: too: command not found
~$ top
~$ ^c
~$ top -y root
top: invalid option – ‘y’
~$ top -u root
A rapid-fire streak of commands shakes J out of the daze. They are inputted with a frenzied hurry, emerging from nothing one after another. She’s not doing that. She doesn’t even remember what “top” does. Did she know before?
~$ ^c
~$ sudo kill -SIGKILL 866
As soon as they start, they end. She pauses the music and checks her logs – the memory removal procedure was forcibly stopped by that last command. On another glance, she notices that there were typing errors, impossible without a physical medium to type on, something she doesn’t have. This is unmistakably the product of someone’s hands on a keyboard.
For an anxious, eternal moment, nothing else happens. J’s left to wonder, viewing and reviewing that same observation for five and a half closely-counted minutes before hardware signals flood the silence. All at once, visual, auditory, chemical, infrared, and tactile streams flip online, preparing for input that hangs for another few seconds.
Sound comes first – metallic rustling, the rolling of plastic wheels on a smooth metal floor, breathing. The faint sound of a human woman’s trail of whispered curses.
Click-click-click-click-click. J’s eyes open to the outline of a round helmet, blinding white light above. A rush of words assault her audiosensors, oh so familiar, oh so accented and nearly incomprehensible.
“Oh bloody robo-God– talk to me, J. Please say you still know me.”