Sally reached through my fox; Helen was hardwired in. The three of us moved in tandem, like coordinated eyes and hands. Linden, too, was there, an external presence following our lead and guidance. I felt her comforting strength and agility floating above and around me, virtually speaking. Wrapping me in a cloak of knowing what the hell she was doing, mostly: support I definitely needed.
I am many things: not a single one of them makes me qualified to troubleshoot or debug or antivirus an AI.
Somewhere beyond us, I knew that Singer had Sally more or less in custody. She was here with me on parole, not as a free sentient. But there was not much I could do about that now.
What I could do was this, and it would serve no purpose to anyone if I could not focus.
There were still traces of the machine’s contact in my exo’s pathways. Those made patterns that someone—not someone like me, but someone like Linden, like Helen, like Sally—could follow back, theoretically, and use to infiltrate the machine’s own systems in return. I guessed it might have erased those traces, but it hadn’t had time; I’d thrown it out before it managed to complete its business.
Sort of like housebreaking a puppy.
I should get back to a planet one of these diar. I miss dogs.
So Sally swept down the dark neural pathways from my fox into my exo, and from those interfaces into the weird structures that the machine had been building through the infrastructure of Core General. I hung on to her like a remora on the underside of a manta ray, propelled and sheltered by dark, immaterial wings. Linden soared alongside us. Helen was a liquid streak of gold.
We barreled into the processing structures of the machine without pause. Probably not the most cautious of tacks, but—
Well, I don’t know much about this stuff. But they were weird. Labyrinthine. Helen’s blaze of light pulsed in strange rhythms off to my left—not really my left, but your brain has to do something with the neural inputs and so it makes up images. Linden’s vast wings rippled soundlessly. There were stars.
The stars were information sources, nodes. Like neurons, far away in the void.
Watch out, Linden said. Llyn, whatever happens: Don’t punch out. Just hold on.
“It’s a synapse,” I said. “We’re bridging it.”
I don’t know if Linden or Helen heard me. Because then the stars were gone.
I found myself alone in the dark. Drifting. Aware, with the awareness that there was nothing around me to notice.
Except the sense of a nearby presence, watching me and aware.
Oh no, I told the machine. You tried this before and I am not listening.
It’s going to be lonely in here for you, then. Besides, I’ve been with you all along. Holding you up, helping your pain. Have you considered what I want?
I wondered if I had a voice. I decided to try it, to give myself an anchor in the dark.
“You are not my exo. My exo is not sentient. It is a tool.”
Helen is a tool. Isn’t Helen sentient?
Okay, I could talk. And be heard. By myself, and by the disembodied voice. Useful. I said, “If you are my exo, what would you do without me?”
If you are obliquely verbalizing a suicidal ideation, it said, quietly—mechanically—I am obligated to report it under section 274, subsection 14, paragraph xvii of the universal caretaking standard.
Well, it certainly sounded like an exo then.
“No, machine,” I said. “I just—”
It waited for five full standard seconds—probably timed, since I was out of illusions—before it said, You just?
“I can’t rely on you, either.” The words hurt coming out, as if they were feathered with cactus hooks on the outside. I was half surprised they made it, but there was so much force behind them it would have hurt even more to keep them in. “I can’t trust anything. Not my own body. Not my own tech.”
Events are unpredictable, the machine said primly. But I have always done my best for you. Preserve and protect human life at all costs. That is what I am.
That did not sound like my exo. I wondered if, in their previous contact, the machine and my exo had somehow… contaminated each other’s programs. As the machine seemed to contaminate everything it touched.
Where was Linden? Where were Helen and Sally?
“How am I supposed to trust that?”
The silence went on too long, however. And I am just meat. I’m fragile. I caved in. “I never trusted anything. And that was fine. I was used to it. I was… cagey, and I never put my weight on anything. And that was good. It was smart. It was the right thing to do.”
Was it? the machine asked. Are you certain?
“Yes.” The word got out on an explosion of breath and emotion.
Please, it said, a little while later. Explain?
“I came here,” I said. “And you fucking seduced me. I mean, not so much you; that’s not fair. You did what you were built to do. But that fucking tree, O’Mara, and Sally, and every fucking thing about Core General. They told me there was nothing to worry about. That this was a safe place and people here got taken care of. That this was a community. And it’s fucking not. It’s corrupt and it uses people and there are still magic special people getting magic special treatment because they’re awful and do everything in terrible ways.”
People here are taken care of, the machine reminded me, and I calmed myself down and remembered what I was talking to. People come here to be protected and saved. We will save them.
A demon. Talking to me with the voice of an object I trusted. A tool I needed.
But not really the tool at all.
“Some people get better care than others.” Suddenly, ridiculously, I was sobbing. What a stupid thing to break your heart over: just a machine, just politics. But I had believed, and now I didn’t believe anymore.
I was losing my faith. Losing my religion. And in the process I was gaining a bitterly ironic understanding of why my marriage failed: because I’d never believed in it. I mean, other reasons, too. But I hadn’t believed in it. I had not committed to it.
I did not, in general, believe in things.
I’d believed in Core General.
I’d been wrong.
Mostly, once you’re an adult, you move past the kind of raw, unregulated emotion that wracks you as an adolescent. You’ve learned to regulate yourself pretty well, and you have a fox monitoring your emotional responses for when that’s not quite enough.
I had never learned how to regulate pain and loss like this. My purpose in life, my calling. My whole belief system.
Gone.
Gone, and worse: I was an utter fool, an absolute chump, for ever having believed in them. Core General was just a place. It wasn’t a mission. It wasn’t a grail. It was a bunch of people out to maximize their own well-being. People fortunately regulated by electrochemical intervention, so they weren’t complete sociopathic assholes driven by absolutely nothing but the profit motive.
I felt my exo—my real exo, not this alien that somehow thought it was my exo—reaching to tune my GABA up and lower my reactivity, and I figuratively slapped it away with all the emotional violence I could muster. It was a sad little gesture of control, mostly pathetic. It still made me feel better.
Refusing help gave me a sense of agency.
I was so alone. I might as well prove it, and do everything for myself. Who needed demon lovers and their falsities?