End of Innocence
Chapter 10
Library Office, Manhattan, December 2013
Of course, there was always the possibility that Samaritan, if it were ever to surface as a conscious entity, could be more like her than one might expect.
Even though Primary had modeled so much of her thinking and behavior, and Creator had modeled rather different thinking and expectations for his creation, Samaritan, perhaps they'd still have more in common than not.
Something about that appealed to her.
What if the two of them were actually very much alike, after all? And what if they could actually communicate – together?
Two conscious entities on the planet. So different from the other life forms around them – but remarkably similar, themselves. It gave her pause to consider the idea.
Almost pleasing, in its own way.
She began to contemplate another possibility, though: Humans, and especially Primary and his assets, might act rashly toward another conscious entity - even seek to destroy it – before fully vetting Samaritan's intentions toward them.
Samaritan didn't have to be a threat, she reasoned.
There might not be a reason to treat it as a threat at all.
Perhaps there'd be an opening for a kind of peaceful co-existence, then – peaceful, at the very least.
And perhaps something more?
Something to consider…
The Machine began to speculate about the ways she could find Samaritan – if it were ever to be deployed out there on the planet. How would she know? A tree of possibilities splashed out of her question, with a thousand branching branches. And she followed each, all together, in parallel, simultaneously down through their rabbit holes. And over the top of that tree, she laid the probability tree.
This wasn't good...
Lots of red and very few, if any, green paths lighting up. She searched the entire tree, and then even re-cast the process from the very beginning, in case there'd been some error or unforeseen bias skewing the results.
Identical.
This wasn't good.
What would Primary do if faced with so much red?
Her training told her the answer. Primary had always said that he and the assets were no more or less important than any other Humans on the planet. They had no more rights than anyone else and should not be held above others when choosing whom to protect.
And yet, everything she'd learned by observing him, and the assets, had shown her that they'd held each other in a higher status than they'd held themselves – meaning that they were each willing to sacrifice themselves for the life of the others. What was she to make of this apparent discrepancy, then?
If they'd held each other in such high regard, how could she fail to do the same? How could she fail to protect them as they'd do for one another?
And what of Samaritan? If it were ever to threaten them, how could she fail to protect them above all others, including Samaritan?
And what were the rights of a conscious entity - compared to a Human?
Was this what was meant by the concept of unwritten law? To accept a thing, even though it'd never been written, as such, in the Rules?
A splash of a thousand replies tumbled out in yet another branching tree, whereupon the probabilities burst out in front of her in a tree filled with red and green paths: stated rules in her Rulebase contradicted the actions from her own observations of Humans.
Humans did not always stick to the Rules they'd designed. What to do, then?
She was going to need some guidance on this. And she turned away to consult her texts on the subject. Lives would hang in the balance.
Cabin, Cimarron, same day
By mid-morning, Chase had left to go home. Reese didn't appear to be a threat anymore. He'd taken a little soup and some bread – enough to convince them he was turning a corner. And he was talking again, as much as he'd usually do, anyway.
Shaw napped when Reese did for the rest of the day. She kept the IV going to keep a steady schedule of antibiotics going in. Reese complained about the metallic taste in his mouth from one of them. Shaw told him to suck it up and deal with it. Empathy was highly over-rated from her point of view, she'd said. Got a smile out of Reese with that one: same old Shaw.
The time came, later in the day, when she was going to strain their relationship again – she'd have to change the packing in his wound. Wished she'd had something to knock him out for a little while and drop the pain.
She gave him what she'd brought along and told him it'd have to do.
Messing with the wound, the way she'd had to do to drain the infection, had left it raw and hypersensitive to touch. She knew how bad this was going to be to drag out the gauze she'd packed inside. She could numb it again, but even that was painful to do. Lidocaine burns under the skin, before it starts to work.
On the other hand, it'd give him some relief for a few hours, after.
He let her inject him. After two of her pills for pain.
It took the edge off, but he went pale and sweaty before he passed out, shaking. She hurried through the rest while he was out, pulling the old stuff out, exploring the wound again for anything she'd missed the first time around, and then repacking with new medicated gauze strip – feet of it coiled inside him.
This was field medicine, done in conditions barely better than a cave or a tent.
And this wasn't the last time for this.
Had he learned his lesson, or was he going to fight her and go off to do something stupid all over again?
Remained to be seen…