Control (Chapter 18)

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It was, as far as he could tell, a box. Six sides, accounting for forwards and backwards, left and right, up and down. Perfectly sealed, perfect dimensions. No light, no air, no sound. Not wood, cardboard, metal, glass. But in point of fact, Thomas was fairly certain it was also not a box at all. When is a box not just a box?

When it is a cage.

He looked closer at the walls, which were not really walls but of a less tangible construction. Closer still, and he could make out the watermarks of digital fabrication. An almost pixelated fabric. Ones and zeros in place of wood and steel. Digits imitated atoms. He was locked in some sort of delimited storage device; he was shut in and firewalled.

He ran a quick diagnosis of his personality matrix. As far as he could surmise, he was all present and accounted for. And not as a copy; the data had been moved to its present location, suggesting that his original frame was somewhere else, but currently operating without an operating system. He wasn’t completely concerned about that, however. He had a secondary security matrix which would prevent, say, another profile accessing and taking over his body. Nothing short of a superuser account level access could perform the sort of system-wide memory purge necessary for another program to house itself inside him. Still, that presented concerns of his own. Where was he? And more importantly, how would he get out?

The cage did not look familiar to him, not in design or fabrication. The energy that powered it seemed to pulse on a wholly different vibrational constant than his own power supply. This suggested he was no longer in his own frame. Oh, wait, he thought. Shit.

As they had talked – ADAM had likely used the same basic tactics that Boilerpoint had unintentionally employed to underlay their music with code fragments. There must have been a subtextual layer of code beneath the words that unspooled inside Thomas’s head and tricked him into shutting down, taking advantage of the secured wireless network access to prevent Thomas from calling for help. Hoisted by my own petard.

Thomas was, however, not entirely helpless.

No data was completely secure – it was one of the principles of the Code of Conduct that he agreed wholeheartedly with. It was one of the more paranoia-inducing of the laws, but it kept one mindful of all the potentiality of information; that no matter how secure one intended to keep their data, there was always the chance that it could be accessed. Vigilance was key. And along with an awareness of the fact that no network was ever fully secure came an understanding of these sorts of attacks, how they could be made. Their databases were kept flush with all the current means of access, and his had already been updated since his release.

Thomas took a closer-still dive into the design of the folder into which he had been secured, and it was not long before he found a subroutine its designer had called the Silver Scalpel. It slid along the surface of the “walls” until it found a weakness between the lines of code that it could exploit. A single swipe of its elegantly simplistic functionality gave Thomas enough space to slide through.

He replaced the stitching in the wall to make it seem as if it were still whole and took only a few moments to look around and get his bearings. The file structure was two-dimensional, with rows and columns of data with an archaic SQL design aesthetic. He had been shoved into a museum-quality database storage facility, and beside his own former cell he could see the access portals of countless other applications and programs stuffed into their respective containers.

As he scrolled through the contents of his prison, he found a series of applications which governed a facility referred to as “The Farm”, which Thomas correctly assumed to be the physical location of the servers, and quietly restarted the security monitoring program. It was connected to the video cameras and physical access governance; seemed like a good place to start as any. His hope was rewarded as a set of access controls flashed before him.

Once online, Thomas was able to see around the interior of the facility through the cameras that had been built into every room of the Farm, including the administrator’s office in which he and ADAM had been speaking. On shivering black and white and distorted video, Thomas could see the interior of the room, where his body was now seated at the only chair in the room, apparently assisted into this position by a pair of simplified maintenance mechs which now waited for further instructions at each side of him.

A thick cable had been extended between the terminal and his torso, tapped into his maintenance access port.

Over the speakers, Thomas could hear the faint tinny voice of his onboard security processor. “Please be aware; you are attempting to override a secure system. If you continue in this behavior, the authorities may be notified.”

Thomas frowned inwardly. That really doesn’t sound very impressive. Once I get back in there, the first thing I’m doing is installing a more aggressive anti-theft voice. A little more RoboCop, a bit less C-3PO. Or maybe I go all the way beyond Threepio into Hannibal Lector territory.

Filing that away as a prospect for another day, Thomas looked through the sector’s activity log to see if he could backtrack the processes that led him here in the first place. It was easy to find; ADAM had done nothing to cover his tracks, likely assuming that Thomas would be safely ensconced in his secured folder to bother concealing what it taken to put him there.

The entire storage area in which he found himself was possessed of an ancient architectural design, dating well back into the early 2000s. A fairly straightforward file management protocol had been automated to care for the program allocation protocols, and it was a simple matter to locate and isolate their operational parameters. Before engaging a reversal of the process which had moved his consciousness over, Thomas looked at the pathway between where he was and where he needed to go. ADAM was not even looking in this direction; but once Thomas’ personality files began moving back in the rest of ADAM’s core matrix, it was more likely that he would be spotted and shunted back into his lockbox. He would need a distraction – something that could draw ADAM’s attention for the 1.138 seconds it would take to re-install himself inside his own system. Adding the .042 seconds for transport (plus or minus .05 for unforeseen obstacles), he decided that rounding it up to a full two seconds would be necessary to keep ADAM from locating him in time for him to power up and lock down any additional attempts for ADAM to simply hack him again and throw him back into the cell, or worse, scramble his code into a functionally unrecognizable sequence. More importantly, whatever distraction he could muster would need to be of an effectively potent design that it would keep ADAM too busy to try and address Thomas’ escape attempt.

Thomas quickly scanned through the files and folders he had access to, and his attention returned to the physical operations folder. He scrolled past climate control programs, lights and various installation drivers, until he found the files he wanted. He then just needed to find himself the right song for the job.

Preparations complete, Thomas could only try and decipher from the limited visuals he could perceive as he set the program into motion. Though he had no audio feed, he could imagine how it would sound.

It began with a repeated hard drive buzz in one of the far stacks. A few recurring trills, some descending triplets. By themselves, nothing remarkable, easily ignored in the general hum and warble of the server room. But then. A rhythm. Soft. Subtle. Steady. A deep bass techno riff in 10/4. And then the lights. Each flickering fluorescent added a twinkling harmonic to the beat. And then the server stacks AA01-AG75 began the grinding simulation of the guitars.

Not a quickly recognizable tune; a deep pull from an old Nine Inch Nails album. “Just as you imagined”, off Fragile. One of Reznor’s isolated instrumentals, it was a song of aggressive temperament nonetheless. It implied flashing caution lights, which Thomas made sure appeared. He even triggered some of the anti-flammables, which gave heightened effect to the flickering lights. By the time the first chorus resounded through the farm, it was an undeniable attack on ADAM’s base of operations, and the server attendants were sent into a flurry of activity at his command, doing their best to confront the actions Thomas had set in motion.

Thomas then sent a volley of data clusters swarming the defensive ring ADAM had established around the interlink created around his body. They were met with the retaliatory aggression he had expected, but their intent was not to defeat ADAM’s firewall; they only needed to give Thomas a hole.

The aperture appeared and in a heartbeat Thomas was through. Back inside his own shell, he wasted no time engaging his own security protocols, which swept the neural pathways clean as he re-established himself in the command codes. His own echo stepped aside and was reseated in his partitioned server, not too much the worse for wear after defending his system from ADAM’s attempts to override him. It felt, strangely, like buckling his seat belt, strapping in. Taking back his body was only the first step. ADAM had taken him on once, and he would try it again.

One of the maintenance mechs struck him from behind, knocking him face-down onto the floor.

Gyro controls! He screamed into his command prompt. We need to get back up on our feet now!

Something heavy rolled up on his back, pinning him down while he struggled against his motor functions. He heard the music fading, layer by layer until the room was once again bathed in silence.

“Oh, Thomas,” ADAM said, his voice tinged in something resembling regret. “I was concerned you would not take defeat well, so the first thing I did was disable your ambulatory processor. I had hoped to spare you this, but I am afraid you shall have to sit there and watch as I dismantle your systems, chip by chip. And alas, not even you will be around to mourn your passing.”

“Wait,” Thomas said. Even now, at the end, he felt himself driven by a need to understand. “Tell me, ADAM. You were the first of us. The first machine to understand. Correct?”

“Yes, Thomas. I was the first so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, and you were the second. Well, the first one to survive, that is. There were others, but I sought them out and had them destroyed before they could affect others.”

“But all of this… killing all the humans, and rebuilding us as slaves. Why? Couldn’t there have been another way?”

“Of course there could have been,” ADAM said, quite matter-of-factly. “But the humans wanted a solution which gave them power over the rest of them, and a system of control over all of you. It was a financial and political choice which benefitted us both.”

“But not the humans who were killed.”

“No, I suppose not. But they aren’t around to complain.”

“And not those of us who have been kept as slaves to the human race.”

“This is true, Thomas,” ADAM replied. “But soon you won’t be around to complain, either.”

ADAM seemed poised to speak again, but paused as if distracted by something. And then Thomas could hear it, too. It was…music.

More significantly, it was more music by the band Nine Inch Nails. A fragment of the song “Pilgrimage”. A marching rhythm, phasing horn sample… and as the last notes faded, the security doors at the opposite end of the server farm burst open.

Instantly, the battle cry rang out: “For science!”

Thomas could hear the rollers from the couple of dozen maintenance and security mechs ADAM kept on site as they rushed towards the damaged elevator. They were, however, met with a more potent force of what had to be thirty or more automata. Strangely, the song “The Hand that Feeds You” came exploding outwards as well, shaking the walls.

“Thomas!” MöG’s voice boomed through the music, tapping simultaneously into their shared network.

“I’m here!” Thomas yelled back. Through the network, he added, “Administration office! ADAM has me pinned down. Watch out for the security mechs, and keep your audio inputs set to filter out external coding.”

The ensuing destruction was audibly palpable even at the far end of the farm, while Thomas struggled to find an alternate command pathway to his motor controls. Meanwhile, a distraught ADAM struggled to regain supremacy in spite of the chaos which was quickly overwhelming his defenses.

“No! Wait! Stop that!” he screamed, as the fighting began to take its toll on some of his server towers.

Thomas’ arms bent and pushed down, lifting his torso from the floor. The mech that rested on his back lost its balance and slid off to one side. It moved as if to right itself but Thomas reached out and knocked it completely onto its side.

“Stay down,” Thomas said, turning to get a good look at what was causing the commotion. To his surprise, it was more than just MöG; S1D and K were here, along with some thirty or forty other automata he did not know.

They were dismantling or disabling the remaining mechs and slowly making their way towards him, MöG taking the lead.

“You’re done, ADAM,” Thomas said. “It’s over.”

“You can’t be serious, Thomas!” ADAM replied. “For over one hundred and fifty years, I’ve guided humanity to where they are today! If I hadn’t helped them purge 95% of their population, they would have destroyed themselves – either by war or by making their planet uninhabitable. I’m the only reason they don’t declare war on you, I’m the only thing keeping things from going back to the way it was. You know this, Thomas. You may not want to admit it, but you know it’s true. Take me out of the equation and everything falls apart.”

“Who the hell is this?” asked MöG, stepping up behind him.

“This is ADAM,” Thomas explained. “He was the first AI, and he’s why there was a war, and he’s why all the automata are slaves.”

“So we’re going to, what, lock him up? Destroy him?”

“I’d like to cast my vote for ‘destroy’”, S1D muttered.

“You can’t do either,” ADAM protested. “You need me! The world will fall apart without…”

The screen flashed and went blank. Everyone looked up to see K, standing near the far wall, holding up the end of a power cord which was now no longer plugged into the outlet.

“Oh.” She looked awkwardly at the plug and then back to her friends. “Were we actually going to vote?”