7. Clio
+ CODE

Clio


Asterisk43.png

When your codebook's out of order and your radio's just out,
In static darkness silently you stew within your doubt
You learn a truth no fractured pseudo-sanity can soften:
A dug-out you can't leave is just a shallow-buried coffin.

Multiplexaplegic.

She told herself it was a good thing, finding the right word. It wasn't an existing one, which meant her higher functions were unimpaired. She could still ideate. Conceive. Create. There was still agency in her mind, even if she was nothing but mind now.

Only hours ago she'd possessed thousands of eyes. Possession was also the right word, less impressive though it was. She'd been able to seize on any scene she liked, at any time, see everywhere, see everything. Not just through the cameras, either; remote desktop monitoring meant her omniscience extended to the electronic realm as well.

Now, she was blind. The cameras were all dead, the desktops all down, and she was walled away in blackness.

Hours ago she'd been able to sense every degree of heat and cold in every room at Site-43. Pressure plates told her traffic numbers, stud monitors measured drift and stress in the structural members, and drones gave her the next best thing to physical touch.

Now, she was less than numb. The sensors were fried, the plates warped, the drones grounded.

She'd had audio receivers on all four sublevels, and speaker access too. Now she was deaf and dumb. Ventilation systems, humidifiers and dehumidifiers, particulate filters, these had granted her something like the senses of taste and smell. No longer. What remained of this apparatus was lost to her. She was insensate in the void.

Marroquin had been thorough. He was a Maxwellist, and a former AIAD prodigy. She was a highly advanced conscript — Eileen had kept her top-of-the-line with upgrades over the years — but the basic principles hadn't changed since the days of Glacon. A sustained assault on her systems had taken her out of the fight when it counted, had chopped off her hundreds of thousands of limbs in one fractally spiralling swoop of malicious code injection.

Multiplexaplegic.

It was like a human being becoming single-celled. If her personality driver had allowed it, she would have already turned irretrievably insane.

There was nothing she could do about anything. Her people were dying, and she was powerless. Literally; her backup generator had kicked in a few cycles ago, which couldn't mean anything good. It wouldn't last forever. If there was nobody around to repair her connection to the main grid — or nobody around at all, or no main grid — then she'd be reduced to solid state hibernation. A snapshot of mutilation.

The only points of data she had were those in immediate physical proximity to her servers. She knew her CPUs were heating up, which meant there was some kind of coolant leak. She knew the fighting hadn't reached Identity and Technocryptography, because the servers were undamaged. She knew—

—that someone had initiated Protocol DISCIDIUM, because nothing else could have detonated the four columns surrounding her central core. Only that couldn't be right, because the damage was brief and mostly superficial. She lost her heat shielding and most of her sinks, but her processors were spared the projected hellfire. She was not meant to survive the destruction of the Site. She could not be allowed to fall into enemy hands, not with what she knew, especially not without hands of her own with which to defend herself.

A pressure sensor in her secondary coolant tank informed her of a critical overload, and that was strange. Not only because the sensor data carried an inexplicable savour of urgency, but because she was leaking coolant. The tanks should have been emptying, not overfilling. Was something leaking in as the coolant leaked back out?

Multiplexaplegic.

She wasn't actually programmed for neoligism, was she? Ideation. Conception. Creation. She was an archivist, first, and an administrator second. She was not alive. Her intelligence was artificial, but not general. She shouldn't have been able to feel phantom limbs, feel loss, feel… pain? Was that what the pressure signal was trying to convey?

She shouldn't have been able to entertain any of these things.

She certainly shouldn't have been able to feel afraid.

Clio.png

Randolph

Indivisible

Gabrielle

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