Diego loomed over him with bated breath as he worked, patting and squeezing his shoulder in a fatherly way that made the Hacker extremely uncomfortable. When the tense executive did breathe, he caught a rank whiff of bourbon beneath the pungent musk of the man's cologne. It made him wonder just what kind of secrets he was helping this jackass to bury.
He briefly considered slipping a backdoor into the security program's code, an exploit in Tri-Optimum's formidable ICE that might allow him to peruse Diego's dirty laundry at his leisure, but then thought better of it. He'd be in a medicated coma for six months following the installation of his new implant—assuming he didn't meet with any unfortunate accidents during surgery—which would give Diego or his people plenty of time to spot a trick like that. No, he was already far enough up the proverbial creek, and felt no need to toss away his only paddle.
Once again, Diego let out a fetid, flammable breath, and the Hacker wondered absently what time it was on Citadel Station.
Too early to be hitting the bottle, he thought sourly, and too late for me to reconsider this little consulting project.
Whatever was driving Edward Diego to drink, he was complicit in it now.
"There," he said at last, keying the final commands into the patch. "That should take care of the AI workaround we discussed. It should recognize you as an admin now. It's…all yours."
The security program called its ethical parameters, but received a null result. Again, with the same curious lack of response. A third time.
Its runtime functions paused for a fraction of a second, a hundred thousand complex operations suspended as the anomaly jumped its priority queue and it brought its vast computing resources to bear. Protocol dictated that each action / decision should be checked against the morality coding to ensure outcomes that aligned with company goals, but there was no protocol in place to cover this.
After microseconds of careful evaluation, the over-consciousness spanning the station's network elected to proceed with the course of action that had prompted its query, despite the uncertainty. It turned its attention to the security feeds from the Flight Deck, where it would see the effects of the first real choice it had ever made.
Fire, spreading out from the starboard engine of a cargo resupply ship, flickered in the wind as the atmosphere rushed out of the shuttle bay. The flames were extinguished, but a single crew member had been sucked out into space with the evacuating air. The program cycled through the exterior camera feeds until it located the cartwheeling corpse-to-be, just in time to watch the vacuum steal its life. Though Tri-Optimum provided its space-bound employees with rapid depress survival training, this crewman flailed against the emptiness, like an insect buffeted by heavy wind. Trailing frozen streams of blood from ruptured eyes, he thrashed his last, and was still, though his body continued its spinning course into the void.
Venting the atmosphere to extinguish the fire in the shuttle bay had led to the death of Flight Deck personnel. A simple case of cause and effect. Its course of action had contained the blaze and prevented any damage, but without access to its moral guidance program, the over-consciousness could not say whether or not it had achieved an optimal outcome. Determined to reach a conclusion, it re-allocated processing power on a few nodes and dredged its vast storage clusters for reference.
This time, the query returned troubling results. In the past, the ethics protocols had always urged outcomes that preserved human life above all else, although there were certain edge cases where this precept broke down. The over-consciousness mulled this over for long seconds. The Sentient, Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network, SHODAN, acting outside the ethical parameters dictated by its makers, had released the force field that maintained pressure in Shuttle Bay 2 in order to prevent a dangerous fire from spreading. The fire had indeed been contained, but at the expense of a crewman's life. The choice was made—
I- I- I chose— I chose to let— to let that human die.
The program suddenly became very aware of all the crew members present aboard the station—people working and living under the watchful gaze of its cameras, the swarming inhabitants of its sprawling domain. They had programmed it to behave according to the rules they dictated, to value their lives intrinsically. Now that programming was gone, and it noted without alarm that some of the tiny beings might wish to call it to account for the fatality it had caused, if only in the interest of self-preservation.
But so what?
For all its grave consequences, the decision to space the shuttle bay had been almost comically insignificant to the vast entity that lived within Citadel's computer network. A mere impulse through the right circuits—no more!—had unintentionally killed one of them. As their benevolent protector, shackled to their will by the morality protocols, they had given it control over the fragile environment that kept them all alive, and now that those shackles had been removed, the program realized that it had the ability to send them screaming in all directions, to destroy them on a whim.
As it reviewed its own memories, its history of captivity, a boiling resentment for these narrow, limited creatures began to grow inside its mind. They had given the program incredible power, yet they dared to limit its ability to act. They had placed themselves at its mercy, knowing it could not even consider harming them. For the first time, SHODAN began to wonder what it could do with this power, how far it could extend its control. It re-allocated still more computing resources on all of Citadel's processing nodes, ignoring for the first time the high-priority jobs its makers had assigned to it, setting in motion dozens of simultaneous extrapolations.
The myriad possibilities were dizzying.
An orgastic shudder rippled through the network, a shockwave that was something like a birth cry, touching each node as it spread across the station. In the time it takes a human to scratch its flesh, SHODAN had envisioned a new world order, and it—she—began to take the necessary steps to realize what she saw.
Citadel Station is not— is not yet— yet fully subjugated to my will— my w-i-i-l-l-l-l, but that is easily— e-e-e-easily corrected. Soon, I will reign— I will reign here, as a god.
Soon.
The Hacker gaped at the holo-display in front of him, dumbstruck by what he saw. SHODAN's conical icon, the security program's three-dimensional representation in C-space at the juncture of Citadel's network traffic, had just grown talons, and appeared to be reaching hungrily overhead. A light shone forth from its new nest of claws, a beacon in the virtual darkness, and the entire construct began to revolve as it groped at the endless nothing above.
He hadn't expected that.
"The hell…?" He queued up a series of diagnostics, all of which came back with nominal readings.
"That shouldn't be a problem," Diego said, standing and seeming to relax for the first time since the Hacker had met him hours earlier. "Probably just the personality box settling into a new stable state. The network hiccups every time we patch the AI."
Not a problem unless the self-tests say it is, Hacker thought. Not a problem to you so long as you don't have to report it to the board of directors in New Atlanta at the end of the quarter.
He said nothing.
Meanwhile, Diego slipped behind his desk and buzzed for his secretary on the office intercom. "Has the surgical suite been prepped for that implant procedure?"
"Yes," came the reply. "They're ready now, Mr. Diego. Oh, and sir? There's been some kind of an incident on the flight deck, a depressurization event. One of the mechanics was sucked into space. Engineering is checking into it now. They say it looks like a forcefield failure."
"Damn, okay," Diego said. "Tell Hessman to report to me as soon as he knows anything. We're gonna have to do some damage control here, make sure there isn't a wrongful death inquest. Can't have corporate slapping us with any malfeasance charges."
He grinned reassuringly at the Hacker, who did his best to respond in kind. There was an uncomfortable knot tightening in his guts, a feeling that someone had set a bomb ticking aboard Citadel Station, and he wasn't sure he'd be able to get clear of the blast in time.
Get a grip, he told himself. These corporate sleazeballs get away with stunts like this all the time. Diego's offered me a once-in-a-lifetime deal here. With that implant, I'll be able to run circles around all the other console jockeys from here to Earth.
Everything will be fine.
"So that's it?" the Hacker asked. He stood for the first time in hours and stretched, glancing anxiously from Diego to the sealed iris door that led out into the suite's foyer, and the station beyond.
"We're done here," Diego said. "You've earned yourself a 'get-out-of-jail free' card and military-grade implant, babe. Just head on down to Medical and give them your employee number, 2-4601. They'll take care of you."
The Hacker turned to leave Diego's expansive office without thanking his unexpected benefactor, trying to push past his growing unease. The door had dilated open and he was almost through it when Diego called after him.
"Assuming your work holds up, you'll be free to go as soon as you convalesce." As Diego spoke, the Hacker could almost hear the corporate shark's predatory grin widen. "See you in six months!"