CH17 - Last Approach
— — —
"Arrogance is in everything I do. It is in my gestures, the harshness of my voice, in the glow of my gaze, in my sinewy, tormented face." - Coco Chanel
"Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation." - Stephen King, The Green Mile
— — —
Bakuda was a dangerous entity.
This wasn't just wordplay. There was something aberrant about her reactions. At first, I thought she was simply mentally ill— extreme insecurity, perhaps compounded by a manic-depressive illness? It was hard to say.
But as I probed her conversationally, anomalies became apparent. Looking at replays of her neural state, something stuck out. I checked the backups for Paige and Lisa, and cross-referenced the haphazard literature of Earth Bet. Checking Bakuda's ego again confirmed my hypothesis: the corona pollentia was aberrant, grossly over-expanded. Paige and Lisa had mostly distinct structures. In Bakuda, it merged outright into her cerebellum, a clear dividing line absent, and strange structures extended like tendrils through the rest of the brain, clouds of fine neural connections expanding out from the veins.
Examination of the continuous backup data showed that her sudden rages and mood shifts were directly preceded by bursts of neural activity originating in the heart of the corona pollentia.
In other words, her 'power' was the problem. If she was mentally ill before, she was obviously keeping it under enough control to attend a prestigious university. Now… well, she ended up on a truck to the Birdcage less than three months after triggering. Little more needed to be said.
But it was so deeply entangled with her brain…
Thinking, I dug into a special solarchive. There were certain materials frowned upon even, or perhaps especially, in the Love and Rage Collective. Things I refrained from sharing, even as I collected them all the same. The sanctity of the mind was both routinely violated and held as precious, after all— I didn't need that sort of polarizing attention.
I loaded a database of psychosurgical hacks, the sort people might apply to themselves.
[Listing first page: software antidepressant, stress limiter, motion sickness disabler, depersonalization/unity with universe, emotional sensitivity up/down, attentional focus control, VTA reward response, blood pressure control, sleep/awake state control, hunger control, thirst control, pain response control, flashbulb memory recording, sexual preference rewrite, diurnal rhythm reset trigger, amp/decrease love/kinship/friendship, wirehead, boredom reducer, freshness inducer, empathy toggle. 20 results per page. Page 1 of 204.]
I extracted the emotional sensitivity into a separate 'window', then opened a neuralware database. Rolodex face-recognition.
Another database. A general mental monitoring AI framework.
Another. Pathotronics: the deliberate, temporary inducement of strategically-useful mental disorders. Depressive realism.
A small data store buried under layers of encryption gave me Colorless Green, an cognitovirus AI designed to silently run within a victims very neurons, as a secret subsystem of the mind.
Directly, it wasn't appropriate. The very manifestation of powers toyed with human neurology; a counter implemented within the same neural network was asking for trouble. Furthermore, it suffered from the same issues as other hacks of its type: incompatibility with AGIs, nonhuman uplifts, and deviant mental architectures. Parahumans qualified as the latter.
Still a useful reference.
I pushed, and insight came. Whispers nudged me onto the right paths, and the code took shape. A ghostrider artificial intelligence. It would detect the aberrant mental states using fuzzy heuristics, trained from hundreds of simulspace interactions with Bakuda, pruned by Artemis. Not his specialization, but it didn't take great prowess to flag a time-frame as "insane behavior".
Upon detection of an aberrant impulse, her emotional sensitivity would be brutally clamped. Cyberware weaved through the brain tissue would snuff out the wave of neural activity, while weighting the mind towards a sense of fatal realism. Encouraging her to see things as they really were, not as she wished them to be. If these methods failed to halt the aberrant neurological impulses, direct interference methods cribbed from the Colorless Green cognitovirus came into play. She would become incapable of considering me or my girls as enemies. In that moment, we would be unquestionably her greatest, most precious friends.
The same virus's Delusion module ensured any recognition of mental tampering was impossible. Any 'strange' behavior would be rationalized away. If it could even be called that Dangerous introspection was more… shut down, the signals down the neural pathways snuffed out before forbidden thoughts could reach coherence. Blanked out.
Any of this could also be controlled by the mental monitor AI, loaded with SIGINT drivers and instructed to watch for any evidence of dangerous activity, whether foolish tinkering or betrayal. It would silently deter, then deny...
...and if all else failed, shut her off.
In order to further protect against any possibility of subversion, I manufactured her a top-of-the-line Masked Steel synth. The synthetic masking was a realistic outer casing of faux-skin, carefully sculpted along with the underlying synth to conform to scans of Bakuda's previous body. The morph could cry, spit, have sex, and even bleed— a quick compilation of appropriate, dubious augmented reality software layers and the illusion was complete.
Even in the worst case, where someone openly stated she was a robot, the words would never reach her mind. A mind simulated in pieces across multiple separate, immobile servers, several hundred meters underneath my warehouse. The servers and body connected only via qubit reservoirs. A dead man's switch connected to myself would trigger tanks of liquid thermite and activate disassemblers within the computing substrate. There were streaming backups, but it would unquestionably shut her down until I chose to repair things.
For a moment, I thought I was being too paranoid.
Then I remembered her last bomb. Allegedly as powerful as a nuclear weapon. Made of nothing but household supplies.
I added another tweak, tripling mirror neurons related to empathy.
No. Not too paranoid.
— — —
"So the mesh thing seems to have PHO going crazy," Paige said. It was morning, three days since her "VIP codes" were expended, and I was simply laying in the bed, with her curled up against me.
"Yes," I said. "Between your thread and direct requests, 35% of my manufacturing capacity is just running off VR helmets. I've had to increase qubit production altogether."
"Well, they did manage to kill the thread," she responded. "Not that it matters. The topic of the mesh isn't banned and its trivial to pull the thread up from there. A mysterious VR tinker, they're calling you. Some are speculating about AI." She squeezed my side. "You better join the Protectorate before a gang snaps you up!"
"Ha."
"Have you looked at what people are making?"
"I haven't had the time," I said. "There's always more to do."
"You should. A bunch of people took inspiration from your tutorial spaces, and have been making copies of real cities and then improving them."
I grunted absently.
"Also Lisa said she wants your dick."
I turned and raised an eyebrow.
"Just checking if you were paying attention," she said, grinning.
"I'm just finishing an experiment," I said, saving the copy of Bakuda. "The base is done. There are several hundred resleeving cells across the coast at varying levels of completion, the mesh is expanding rapidly and if I allowed it, would consume all my manufacturing capacity."
I frowned. "Something is up with the seawater miners, though. I've started losing drones. Not a big deal, except each drone is towing several tons of fiber..."
"Boring," Paige pronounced. "You're as bad as Lisa. She just lays around playing with her muse and browsing the internet."
My mind flashed back to Lisa's revelation. I hadn't told Paige. Lisa was right— she would want to do something.
Troublesome, all of this.
Over a hundred mercenaries had been observed in combat with other gangs, in no small part due to the light from their tinkertech weaponry, and had been followed or indirectly tracked. Phones and home devices physically compromised by nanoswarms. Hideouts catalogued, payment sources added to an ever-growing picture of Coil's operation. Iterating up the links in the chains. It was slow, but the outcome was inevitable.
I considered the possibility of keeping Coil in a manner similar to Bakuda, but rejected it. His power was either an unreliable approximation, or forked thousands by definition— only to kill every fork when it was done. This wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't so indiscriminate. Since it was… his very existence cast an unpleasant shadow over life. Better to kill him and be done with it.
Barring some major shift in the next few days, I should be able to find him, and do exactly that.
"So I'm going to be adding someone new to our little group…"
— — —
"You've got to be fucking with me." Lisa stared at the motionless form of Alice Chua, commonly known as Bakuda.
"She's cute," Paige finally said. "Is that how she really looks? I wasn't really paying much attention in the Birdcage truck."
"Who cares," Lisa said. "He's going to use his 'resleeving' shit to make Bakuda a Terminator! You don't think this could go, I don't know, horribly wrong?"
"I trus—"
"She will only control the body," I said. "In reality, she will be in a box somewhere else, connected only by quantum entanglement. An AI is supervising her, and I've applied behavioral modifications—"
"Fucking ew." Lisa looked over at me, her face troubled. "You really creep me out sometimes Henry. If I didn't know better, I'd worry about you doing that shit to me." Despite her words, there was an edge of uncertainty in her voice.
"She is a mass murderer. And above anything else, demonstrably insane."
"Yeah. Sure." Lisa turned away, stepping up to the body. She touched the face. "It feels real."
"It is meant to be indistinguishable from a real human body, short of weight analysis or active scanning."
"...It's too much."
"What?"
"Everything. You can do too much," she said, talking faster. "I have trouble reading you, but tinker's can't do this much. Weapons, armor, vehicles, buildings, robot drones, mass production, no maintenance, biology, implants, cyberware, mind uploading, AI, virtual reality, simulations, perfect fucking human androids.… shit, you can do so many things I'm probably forgetting some stuff. Even Dragon can freely crib the work of other tinkers and she can't do everything you can." She turned back to me, her face serious. "You're impossible."
Paige turned away from the body, her face also curious.
I hesitated.
"I want to understand," Lisa said.
"Is this tinkertech?" I responded finally.
"What do you— no. It isn't? Which means you... aren't?"
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
"Yeah, okay, so you're supposed to be what, a super genius?"
"Yes, actually," I said shamelessly. Technically most transhumans were. Unfortunate intelligence and wisdom were not the same thing at all. Nor did greater aptitude for, say, math necessarily make you better with strategy or essays.
"You— you're fucking with me, stop it," Lisa said in frustration.
"If I were fucking with you, you'd know it," I retorted on automatic, and she flinched.
"I, um, yeah," she said, trailing off.
Paige laughed, and Lisa scowled at her.
"So when are you turning her on?" Paige asked.
"Now."
"What? Wait, no—"
The body jerked on the table, and Lisa scrambled away. Paige didn't move. Though her trust was real, the truth was I'd already went into everything with her before bringing Lisa in. She knew Alice wasn't capable of harming her.
Alice sat up, jerking her head around, eyes flicking wildly. She locked onto us and paused, then relaxed.
"Oh, so we're done?" she said.
"Yes," I replied. As far as she knew, she had just used a teleporter that reacted poorly to living things, knocking passengers unconscious.
"Okay," she said. She glanced at Paige and Lisa. "Seeing a theme here. Blonde your type?"
Lisa made a disgusted face. Paige just watched, face impassive.
"No," I said calmly. "I like all colors and sizes. But you aren't here for that."
She smirked. "Sure. So where am I setting up?"
"This way."
— — —
/AN: just some light mind control nothing to see here