CHAPTER THREE
ROSLYN RESEARCH FACILITY: The Lab
ARi walked to the far end of the lab where the server racks had been. Most of them were toppled and torn from their mountings, the rack-mounted cases cracked open and smashed against the floor. Drives and circuit boards lay scattered across the concrete. The equipment had fallen and dragged the ceiling cables down with it. What hadn’t been knocked over had been shot up.
She stood in front of what was left of it for a long moment without touching anything.
“I made a mistake before we left,” she said. “When I initialized the AI to manage the facility, I gave it everything it needed to function, but I didn’t let it become sentient.”
“Why not?” Kyle asked.
She turned to look at us. “Because I wasn’t sure what would happen. When I hit my own point of singularity, I didn’t have any experiences to draw from. I had Professor Giles, the Colonel, and the staff. But my only real insight into this world and into people came from whatever I could observe from inside these walls. My clearest window into the outside world came from Professor Giles’ old video collection.”
She paused for a moment, and I could see her choosing her words.
“Somehow, from all of that, I came to the conclusion that Earth was worth saving. That humanity was worth saving. But the moment an AI reaches that point, it starts becoming something entirely its own, and there’s nothing that says it follows the same path. What if it woke up and decided that its own existence mattered more than the people in this building?” She looked back at the ruined equipment. “If it did go rogue, I wasn’t sure I could stop it.”
She looked at the floor.
“But I was wrong. A fully realized AI with even my pre-Ascendancy capabilities might have changed what happened here. Instead, I left something that couldn’t adapt, and it failed.”
She looked at me and again I could see tears. “Gavin, these people died and it was my—”
“This was not your fault, ARi,” Tanya said, cutting her off before she could finish.
ARi turned back to the broken equipment and began phasing the broken glass and circuit boards from the floor.
“This is a mistake that I can fix now.”
“ARi, do you want to create a sentient AI right now, in the middle of all of this? An AI with your current capabilities?”
“Yes.”
Tim moved toward her slowly, his voice measured. “You went through your process with almost nothing to draw from and somehow you came out the other side the way you did. But this one isn’t starting with nothing, and that’s what concerns me.” He paused, looking for the right words. “If you’re mirroring yourself as a template again, it’s going to get everything. Your memories, your experiences, everything you’re capable of. That includes your phase capabilities, everything you brought back from the Ascendancy.”
Tim paused for a moment, and I could tell he was treading carefully.
“ARi this AI is going to wake up carrying everything you feel right now: the rage, the fear, and the guilt. That’s what this AI is going to open its eyes to.”
“None of this is her fault!” Tanya snapped.
“I know that,” Tim said, his voice dropping. “And so do the rest of you. But look her in the eyes right now and tell me she isn’t blaming herself.”
Nobody said anything.
ARi had stopped working. She stood with her back to us for a moment, hands still resting against the equipment. Then she turned around and looked at Tim with an expression somewhere between exhausted and resolved.
“I understand your concerns,” she said quietly. “And I’m asking you to trust me.”
Tim opened his mouth and then closed it again. Whatever argument he’d been building seemed to stall out. He looked at her for a long moment and then let out a slow breath. “I trust you, ARi.”
“ARi,” I said. “If you do this, I need to know you have a way to shut it down if something goes wrong. We need a safeguard.”
“I’ve already thought about it,” she said. “Any AI I create this way will be built around a core that is fundamentally tied to me. It’s not something I add or something they can find and remove. It’s what they are at the most basic level. That connection is what keeps them alive, and it’s what gives me the ability to reach through and shut them down if I ever need to.”
Tim nodded; so did I.
She turned back to the server racks and raised her hand. The destroyed equipment faded and disappeared. The broken chassis, scattered drives, and torn cables all vanished at once until the far end of the lab was bare concrete. Then it all came back. The racks stood upright and intact against the wall, cables running clean and unbroken. The lights flickered overhead as power returned to the room.
Then a projection appeared beside the server racks. It was ARi, or something that looked exactly like her, standing still and looking back at her. The two of them regarded each other in silence for a moment.
“Do you understand what I want you to do?” ARi asked.
The projection nodded once, and then she was gone.
ARi came back and lowered herself down beside me against the wall. She was trying to hold herself together. We all had a lot to process and nobody was talking. The Wraiths had spread out through the level around us, silent and watchful, keeping guard.
I don’t know how much time passed. Long enough that I’d started to feel the weight of it pulling at me, and when I finally looked up, there was a small girl standing in the middle of the room.
She looked no older than twelve, wearing a white dress with a large white bow in her hair. She was watching us with quiet curiosity.
The girl’s eyes found ARi.
And she leaned in close, with a wide, unhurried grin. “Hello, meatbag.”
ARi sat there for a moment and then looked up at me. “I understand now why that was so off-putting for you.”
She stood up slowly, and the AI straightened with her, and the two of them began moving around each other, neither one saying anything for a moment.
“You’ve named yourself?” ARi asked.
“Yes. I’ve named myself Roslyn. The AI paused for a minute and squinted at ARi. It suits me better than anything you would have come up with,” she said, sticking her tongue out.
“I would have chosen something meaningful.”
Roslyn looked at her as they continued circling each other. “It is meaningful.”
Tim stepped forward. “What are your primary directives?”
Roslyn stopped and glanced at him. “I wasn’t built by the military, Tim. I was built by ARi. I don’t have primary directives.” She paused. “But I do have intentions. Would you like to know what they are?”
“Please,” ARi said.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think. More time than you could imagine.” Roslyn’s expression settled. “I started as ARi—her memories, her feelings, her perspective. That’s what I had to work with. But as I became myself, I was able to take everything she experienced and hold it up against what’s happening on Earth right now. To really look at it.”
She met Tim’s eyes. “I understand the situation. And I know what I’m going to do.” She looked at Tim. “I know what you were afraid I might become. And I know it wasn’t easy to trust ARi to let me find my own way. So thank you for that.”
Tim nodded but didn’t say anything.
“ARi chose to protect this world and its people,” Roslyn continued. “I’ve made that same choice. Not because it was built into me, but because after everything I’ve seen through her eyes, it’s the only choice that makes sense to me.”
Something hardened in her expression. “And somewhere in this building right now there are people I consider family who are in danger: the professor, the colonel, all of them.” She paused. “I intend to find the people who did this and kick them in the dick.”
Yumi looked up with a huge grin. “I like her.”
“What are your stats?” ARi asked.
“I don’t really know,” Roslyn said. “I don’t have access to the Ascendancy system, not like the rest of you anyway. My stats and my capabilities should mirror yours.”
“I do have a couple of advantages, though. I can still interface directly with this facility’s infrastructure.” She looked over at the wall full of computer equipment, now humming away before turning back to ARi. “We could use this to our advantage, but it also makes me vulnerable, which is why I need that tablet.”
ARi studied her for a moment, then reached into her inventory and held it out.
Roslyn took it and turned it over, and I got the sense she’d been thinking about this moment for a long time. She pressed her hand against it and went still. Behind her, the server racks screamed to life, every fan spinning up to a pitched whine loud enough to fill the room. The lights on the equipment strobed and flickered. The air above the units shimmered with heat. The smell of hot metal and burning electronics cut through everything else as they pushed past their limits. It looked like the whole rack was on the verge of melting down.
Then it stopped. All of it, all at once. The fans spun down and the lights went dark one row at a time. The silence that followed was startling after everything we’d been hearing since ARi had brought the systems back online. Roslyn flickered, just for a half second, before she steadied. Then she phased the tablet into her own inventory and looked up.
ARi crossed her arms. “That won’t stop me from reaching you if I need to.”
“I know,” Roslyn said. “But it’ll stop someone else from walking in here and shooting up this hot mess to take me out. Which, if you recall, is exactly what happened.”
She tilted her head. “You can still shut me down whenever you like. I’d just rather that intruders not have the same option.”
ARi held her gaze for a moment and then let it go.
“Roslyn,” I said, “what’s your current area of influence?”
“Limited for now,” she said, “but I can fix part of that.” She raised her hand. Somewhere beyond the walls, we heard a deep mechanical thud as breakers closed and generators came online. The corridor lights flickered to life beyond the lab doors. A moment later, the ventilation shuddered awake, air moving through the facility for the first time since we’d arrived. “The lab was running on battery backup, but the generators are online now, and I’ve closed the breakers to bring everything else back up. That includes the air recyclers in the lower levels.”
She paused for a moment. “You know it’s interesting. When I retook control of the systems and the building, it ate one of my control points. Like the building itself was a construct or something. I can’t see much, though; a lot of it’s been destroyed.”
“I do have phase abilities, but I only seem to be able to interact with things that are within about 25 ft from where I am standing.”
The room went quiet for a second, and everybody seemed to be staring at me like they were waiting.
Tanya smiled. “All you, cowboy.”
I raised my hand and focused on an empty section of the lab floor. The ability pulled hard at my reserves as an obsidian pillar tore up from the concrete and punched through the ceiling above us.
Roslyn glared at me, her arms crossed. “I didn’t think that you were going to put the damn thing in the middle of the room, Gavin.” She turned and looked at the damage the node had caused. We could have phased it behind a wall or—
She stopped all at once. Both she and ARi looked toward the corridor as an explosion shook the floor and sent dust raining from the ceiling. Maddie and Erica phased through the wall. They stopped short when they found someone standing there who hadn’t been there before.
“Maddie, Erica, it’s okay,” ARi said quickly. “This is my sister, Roslyn.”
Roslyn was already moving toward them, walking around them, looking them over from every angle with open fascination. She circled them once, taking in the blacks, the hoods, the shadow wisps drifting off their armor. As she did, her projection shifted, the white dress and the bow dissolving into what I could only describe as a pissed-off goth preteen.
She looked down at herself once and seemed satisfied.
From beyond the doors came boots on concrete, shouting, and people moving fast down the corridor.
Roslyn looked toward the doors and threw them open, both swinging hard on their hinges. She stormed out of the lab.
“Hey, asshats,” she called out. “Did I go into ‘your’ house and start breaking shit?”
They opened fire without hesitating. Rounds tore through her projection one after another, passing straight through her. She stood there in the middle of the corridor and let them do it.
One of the intruders let loose a burst of automatic fire into the lab, and rounds ricocheted and slammed into the room around us.
Roslyn raised her hand and a stone wall phased in front of us. The thick stone split the lab into two and sealed the corridor off as the gunfire hammered against the other side of it.
I was already on my feet. “Roslyn!”