200 Years Ago
December 3, 2293
Thanks for coming,” Sallie said.
Sallie Mignon’s personal cloning lab was in the basement of Firetown, free from windows and with three levels of security. Maria was her number one hacker and she had never been there.
It didn’t look special in any way, just a cloning lab with white walls, shielded cloning vats, and mindmapping computers. On the exam table in front of her, waiting to get a mindmap, was a sleeping Japanese man.
“What did you need?” Maria asked. She never saw the physical people, just the mindmaps.
“This is Minoru Takahashi,” Sallie said. “He’s a unique fellow from the Pan Pacific United government.”
“All right,” Maria said, uncomfortable. “How is he unique?”
“He’s one of the most brilliant minds of our age. Unfortunately he’s also cleverer than he needs to be and likes to play tricks. Once upon a time, people wrote folktales about the kinds of mischief people like this get up to. Back then, they were heroes. These days, they just get thrown in jail. Takahashi was to be put to death for treason in Pan Pacific United, but we managed to spring him from prison. He’s too good a mind to waste.”
“Why spring the whole body? Why not just make a mindmap?” Maria asked.
“Honestly it’s easier to smuggle a body out of a prison than smuggle large tech in,” Sallie said. “And they’d expect a mindmapping kind of jailbreak.”
“Okay, so why do you need me?”
“He’s legally dead. We could just keep him here and clone him, but he is too smart and would be too eager to show off to the Pan Pacific United government that they lost him. That could be detrimental to our alliance.”
“Which was already hurting because of the Codicils a few years ago,” Maria said, nodding. She pulled up a chair and looked at his face. Asleep, it showed nothing of the genius and mischief within. “So what do you need me for?”
“I have a challenge for you. I want you to take his mindmap and make it into a program to live inside a computer. Obfuscate it enough to make it look like an AI. That way we’ll have him, but he can’t get away.”
Maria’s stomach did a slow, sick roll. “Seriously? That’s…”
“Unethical? Like what you did to Jerome?”
“Are you going to bring up all of my past crimes—that you hired me for, by the way—to blackmail me?” Maria said. “It seems like death would be preferable to slavery inside a computer. Did he even get a choice of whether he wanted to die in prison or live as a machine?”
Sallie just looked at her, arms crossed.
Maria shook her head. “No, I won’t do it. Find someone else.” She got up.
The rather large people Maria had assumed were doctors moved from examining cloning vats to stand in front of the door.
“Unfortunately, the lab I usually use for this kind of thing got shut down recently. And I didn’t ask you,” Sallie said mildly. “I know what you’re capable of, Maria. You can do something like this in your sleep. You’ve done it before, you just don’t remember.”
Maria thought fast past the panic. She felt Mrs. Perkins, who traveled with her through her cloned bodies, shaking her head. She’d told Maria not to trust Sallie, and Maria hadn’t listened. Instead she’d figured out, through combing the news stories and the information she’d stored inside Perkins, what she had done when kidnapped. But Sallie didn’t know she knew. And under no circumstances could she know how Maria knew.
If she failed to show shock and disbelief, Sallie would very likely kill her here.
“No,” she shook her head. “I didn’t—I wouldn’t—”
Sallie laughed. “You would and you did. They had to persuade you, but yeah, you did what they asked, and they sent you back home with no memory only to get you again. Thankfully, you came to me to give you protection. Sibal couldn’t get you directly, but you trust me.”
Her tone changed, growing soft. “Maria, you’re the finest hacking mind of several generations. This could be the greatest thing you ever do. And if you don’t do it, my employees will make you. Torture broke you before. Twice. Do you want to get broken again, or just skip past the pain to the work?”
Tears ran down her face. “I—fine. I’ll do it. Then you and I are done. I’m moving back to Miami.”
“Sure, it’s a deal,” Sallie said, grinning.
Maria realized that she possibly had said this before. And might say it again.
Sallie gave her the parameters as the computer took the man’s mindmap. Minoru was too clever by far, and needed some sort of collar to keep him from completely taking over whatever computer he occupied. “Make him obedient,” she said.
Maria nodded, making notes. The collar would be something easily released, if you knew what to look for.
She spent hours in the lab, Sallie over her shoulder.
The computer representation of a mindmap was surprisingly easy to tweak into an AI. Maria had taken the code she’d written in the jobs she couldn’t remember doing and stored it in compressed files within the AI that was Mrs. Perkins. The old woman often sat out on the porch, but sometimes she sat inside a library, chain saw leaking oil on the floor, surrounded by the data that Maria couldn’t bear to let go of but couldn’t think of any safe place to store.
Near the end, she took his memory of being human, and lastly she took his name. “We’ll call him an Intelligent Artificial Network,” Sallie said. “IAN.”
Maria had never felt so dirty. That she remembered anyway.
She sat back. Lab-techs-slash-goons whisked away Takahashi’s body, no longer needed. “Am I free to go now?” Maria asked, exhausted. “I need to pack.”
“Sure,” Sallie said, sliding her tablet into a soft leather case. “Oh, and when was your last mindmap?”
“Yesterday,” Maria said. Her tired brain was searching for something, something Sallie had said before she had forced the hacking job. “What did you mean the lab that you usually used has been shut down? Do you do this kind of thing a lot?”
“More than you know,” Sallie said.
Maria jumped as someone behind her slid a needle into her neck, and she was able to identify one of the goons who had moved silently into position before she slumped over the table.