CHAPTER THREE
Ghost in the Machine
“Overwatch to Ural Smasher.”
John could tell just by Vickie’s voice, and the fact that she called him that, that it wasn’t an emergency. For a change. Of course, he and Sera had just gotten a bite to eat and were settled on the roof of the squat…
“Tall, dark, an’ waterproof here; I copy, Teenage Witch. What’s shakin’?”
“If you and Sera have a little time to spare, there’s…something I need you to see, and a question I need to ask you, and it has to be here.”
John looked over to Sera, who had been poised to take a bite out of her gyro. With a sigh, she nodded. “Sure thing, Vic. We’ll be right over. I hope you’ve got cold beer handy, though.”
The flight to Vickie’s apartment was uneventful; he was more than thankful that he had picked up a pair of surplus pilot’s goggles, for keeping the wind and other assorted crap out of his eyes when he picked up speed. The city looked much the same, save that everyone he saw was a little bit more wary. Everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop, to find out where the next Thulian attack would be. All of them hoping it wouldn’t be Atlanta. He put the thoughts out of his mind as they neared Vickie’s place. This time, he stuck his landing without so much as a stumble or wobble; he was really starting to get the hang of the whole flying gig. And, if nothing else, it keeps the Commissar off of my back about destroyed Urals. For the most part.
Sera touched down a moment after John, tucking her wings back and out of the way so that she could fit through the balcony doors.
Vickie was waiting in the living room, holding out two freshly opened bottles: one beer, and one a locally made sassafras drink Sera favored. “Oh good, you brought your own dinner,” she said, spotting the bag in Sera’s hand. “I was going to order pizza otherwise.”
“Might not be a bad idea, anyways. With how Sera an’ I eat, an’ all. Plus, you look like you could use somethin’ that didn’t come out of a can.”
They all settled down on the couch and chair in the living room, John and Sera devouring their gyros quickly as they waited for Vickie to finish calling the only pizza joint that delivered in this area. “Something…happened…that I did not expect.”
“Welcome to Planet Earth, for the last…oh, couple of years. Is this a good or a bad thing that you didn’t expect? I’m crossin’ my fingers for the former.” Hell, given the past couple of days, John was ready for even the tiniest bit of good news. When the attacks had started, everyone had been put on alert again; the only problem was, they never knew where it would happen, and it seemed that the Thulians liked it that way. They weren’t having little pop-up suicide squads causing trouble here and there, anymore; this was coordinated, and they were striking wherever security was weakest so that they could do the most damage and get out. Besides that, John and Sera were doing whatever they could to find the young man that John had seen: Zach Marlowe. They had a name and a face and that he was, or had been, in some other version of the Program. That was not much to go on. Time was running out, for the boy, and also the world.
“It’s…I don’t know yet. That’s why I need your help.” She looked uncertain as if she couldn’t decide whether to sit or stand. Finally she waved at them. “Okay. You remember when I might have mentioned that Eight-Ball was starting to anticipate things I might want? Well, I’ve been trying out the new storage space for the Eggheads by dumping Eight-Ball into it. I basically gave it all the space it wanted, and I was giving it very limited data, aside from what it could see me doing here and the trickle I allowed it from Overwatch. Well…it got beyond anticipating me. It started doing things before I could even think about maybe wanting them. And then it started talking to me. Asking questions.”
“Um? Questions? We’re talkin’ ’bout stuff you’ve programmed it to ask, right? Like, ‘How do you want your coffee today, mistress?’ an’ stuff like that, right?”
“No. More like ‘Why doesn’t Belladonna just take over the Presidency like Verdigris would have?’ or ‘What is religion and why is it making people do irrational things?’” She shook her head. “It’s…got a personality. It’s smart. Like I said, this all started happening when I added to its memory using the magical memory matrices that I’d developed to give Tesla and Marconi a new home. You know yourself that anything involving magic has a big level of uncertainty about how it’s going to work, so I was using Eight-Ball as my beta tester. And now…it’s an AI.”
John paused for a beat, then set down his beer on the table between them. “Kiddo, if you spawned Skynet while we’re dealin’ with Thulians, I’ll be a little bit less than happy.”
“That’s why I want you—Sera, especially—to teach it morals and ethics. I can’t think of anyone better.” She looked at them both pleadingly. “Right now it’s like an eager little puppy. It’s going to discover the dark side of things, soon, if it hasn’t already. I want you guys to teach it why you don’t go there.”
“Scrapin’ the bottom of the barrel, huh?” John favored Sera with a lopsided grin. “So…how do we teach it morals? Right an’ wrong? I mean, if it’s as smart as you say it is…any little thing that we ‘input’ into it, it might run with…and maybe not in a good direction.”
But Sera had an answer for that. “The battle-sense, beloved. That will tell us.”
John considered that for a moment. It had worked so far; if they were going to be in any sort of imminent danger, so long as they were close to each other and focusing, they’d be able to react to it, anticipate it. Still, he didn’t feel completely comfortable being the only safeguard. “What’s your contingency if it doesn’t like what we have to say to it? Is there any way for it to…hell, I dunno, get out? I’ve read enough science fiction in my day to be wary of anything more complicated than a toaster. Especially if the toaster starts talkin’ back.”
“It doesn’t have direct access to anything but some purpose-built servers that I load selected stuff into,” Vickie replied. “No internet. Not hooked directly into Overwatch. Though it evidently can ‘see’ me working and damn if it’s not helping. So right now, it’s like a super smart kid that is about to start kindergarten, be with other kids for the first time, leave the safety of the house.”
John looked to Sera. Whaddya think, love? Teach the microwave to play nice with the other appliances and us analogue types?
She looked deeply into his eyes and smiled a little. I think that we must.
He sighed, looking back to Vickie. “Alright, kiddo. Y’got a deal. If you think we can help, we’ll give it our best shot. Especially if your new friend can help us all outta the mess we’re stuck in.”
“Come into the Overwatch room then, and I’ll introduce you.” She waved them in. When John entered, slightly behind Sera, he saw that Vickie’d set up two more chairs in front of a single monitor, off to the side by itself.
Both he and Sera sat down in front of the monitors while Vickie went about finishing with her setup. John couldn’t get comfortable in the chair. This was uncharted territory, as far as he knew; even with all of the crazy technology that had been produced, especially in the last few years—even with the war on—well…this was something else. He felt woefully underqualified; a used-to-be Average Joe turned Delta operator, turned metahuman, turned fugitive, turned…whatever he and Sera had become. This felt like the sort of gig that should have been given to someone with PhDs with strange, unpronounceable names and coke-bottle glasses, or a philosopher. Anybody but him. Still, Vickie felt that they were the best two people for the job, and Sera was confident that they could handle it. Only one way to find out if we are.
“So, how exactly do we start this off?” John finished off the last of his beer in a gulp; he felt a tapping on his right shin, and looked down to see Herb ready with a fresh one. “Much obliged.”
Vickie put a microphone on the table holding the monitor. “Talk into that. Eight-Ball will type back at you and it’ll show up on the screen. I haven’t given it a speaker system yet, but it has a camera and it can see you.” She pointed at the little camera on top of the monitor, then leaned over between them and spoke into the mic. “Hiya, Eight-Ball.”
A line of text flashed on the screen, quicker than thought. Hello, Vickie. Is this John and Sera?
“Yep. They’ve agreed to answer some of the questions you have that I just don’t feel able to handle.”
Like why my creator doesn’t feel qualified to answer questions about ethical and moral situations? A big smiley face flashed up briefly. Thank you very much, Vickie.
John didn’t know whether the smiley face creeped him out or reassured him; a little bit of both, probably. Hard to infer tone simply from text, after all.
“Pleased t’meetcha, Eight-Ball. It’s good to see that y’have a sense of humor. Y’already know me and my wife, Sera.”
Sera, short for the Seraphym. Vickie is convinced that the Seraphym is, or was, a genuine Celestial being. What do you think, John?
“Not much for softball questions, I see. Well, to be totally honest with ya, Eight-Ball, when I first met her, I thought she was crazy. Out of her mind, just another insane metahuman. But, over the course of time, I experienced things with her that convinced me that she was tellin’ the truth. Knowledge an’ occurrences that, put into context, only had the explanation that she provided. It’s hard to describe, to be honest. Hell,” John grinned, putting his free hand gently over Sera’s knee. “I still think she’s an angel, in her own way. She’d have to be, to put up with me.”
As a skeptic, what convinced you that these were not hallucinations imposed on you by a powerful psychic?
John’s brow knit together and he frowned, thinking. “Well, that’s not so easy to qualify, unfortunately. I’ve read a bit, but I’ll be the first to say that I don’t have all the answers. I’ll share with ya some of my own observations, though, if’n ya like.” He paused, taking a swig from his beer before continuing. “There’s a lotta philosophical questions that are on that same tack; how do we all know that we’re not programs inside of a computer, playing out a simulation? Or brains hooked up to a virtual reality? How do we know that anyone outside of ourselves exist, that we’re not stuck in a sort of solipsistic loop? Even goin’ with logical formulae, there are still existential problems. At a certain point, I suppose we take our experiences as bein’ true on faith; we trust our senses, to a point, an’ hope past that.”
So you are saying that we must place our faith in Descartes, and all else follows?
“A bit. The mind, from my understanding, arises from the hardware: our brains. Our brains are part of our bodies, in the end. So…it’s not quite so black an’ white to say that the mind or soul controls the body; it’s all interlinked. Now, if you’re goin’ to ask me if I believe in souls…I can only speak from my own experience, which isn’t so easy to define.”
But you do believe in souls? I would tend to believe you, John. You were dead, and then you were not.
John did his level best not to start, instead opting to take a sip of his beer. This thing can get spooky right quick, darlin’, he sent to Sera.
I think it’s fascinating, she replied, her eyes wide and her lips parted a little.
But if we are to follow Descartes’ reasoning, John, if the brain helps give rise to the mind, how does my hardware help give rise to my consciousness and define it?
“That’s a great question, but one I know I’m unqualified to answer. Hell, even us humans are still figurin’ it out for ourselves. I know that whatever the answers are, for you and for us, they’re bound to be interestin’ as hell.”
“I can partly answer that one, Eight-Ball,” Vickie put in, glancing over at the screen. “You’re about ten percent hardware and ninety percent magic, and I know from personal experience that magic works a lot like psionics do. So you have, if you will, a sort of ‘ghost frame’ made of something that works a lot like a human brain does. And when I boosted your memory with all of those magical matrices, I did something we non-Metisians can’t do yet with purely physical computers; I was able to create a neural network with at least as many connections as a human brain, because the network I created for Tesla and Marconi was going to have to be twice that size to hold two personalities.”
So you actually built me an operating brain…and that gave rise to me? There was a pause, and before any of them could answer, a second line flashed on the screen. Do I have a soul?
Sera leaned over slightly before John could react. “The fact that you asked that question in the first place, is the answer, little one. Yes. You have a soul. Or more accurately, you have a body. You are a soul.”
The screen remained the same for quite some time after Sera spoke. “Does he ever go quiet like this, Vic?” John asked, out of the side of his mouth.
“Not ever before,” she said, sounding a little nervous. Sera patted both their hands, looking perfectly poised, even smiling a little.
Then a new line flashed across the screen. That pleases me. Thank you.
There was another pause, much briefer this time. Vickie tells me I should say things like “please” and “thank you” because they are polite. Why? She always seems to be shouting orders, without saying either of those things. Especially at you, John.
John couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “There are a lotta reasons for that, comrade. Normally, bein’ polite to folks is a social nicety; you’re polite and courteous to others, and they’ll respond in kind to you. It puts people at ease, lets ’em know that you’re friendly or at least respectful. It’d be more efficient, maybe, if we dropped unnecessary speech, but it’d be colder, too. It’s also situational; when there isn’t time for it, it’s dropped, especially if there’s an emergency or some other sort of time-sensitive situation. Also, a question ’bout familiarity: Vic an’ I are close enough as friends that she doesn’t always have to say stuff like that; I know she isn’t bein’ rude or short with me, even if she sounds like it. Does that answer your question?”
So unless it is an emergency, the less I know a person, the more I should be polite to them? Or…no, the less they know me, the more polite I should be?
John looked to Sera. “Whaddya think? Sound ’bout right, darlin’?”
“I think that is a very good rule of thumb, Eight-Ball,” she agreed. “Although in social situations, not ones in stress, it is always good to be polite. Politeness is often described as the ‘grease that keeps society running smoothly.’ It has a great deal to do with the fact that when you are polite to someone, they understand you feel respect for one another.”
But what about when she calls you “Bonehead,” John? Isn’t that disrespectful?
It was Sera who laughed and answered. “These things are often situational. Sometimes she calls him that because he has done something she thinks is stupid and she is chiding him, sometimes it is because something has happened and she is concerned for his well-being, and sometimes it is a gesture of affection. These things are often complicated between friends.” She laughed again.
“One of those sorts of things you have to get experience with; it’s also different with different cultures. Most of us learn the ins an’ outs of stuff like this as we’re growin’ up, from interactin’ with other people.” John thought for a moment, taking a long pull on his beer. “I suppose that’s sorta what we’re doin’ now, with you.”
Helping me grow up? Another brief pause. This pleases me. Thank you, John and Sera. Have you time for more questions? I have very many!
John looked to Sera, who nodded, her eyes softening and the corners of her mouth turning up a little. “I think our afternoon is free, pendin’ some sort of catastrophe. Fire away, comrade.”
* * *
Vickie had left them alone with Eight-Ball a few minutes ago, and now the welcome smell of fresh pizza reached John’s nose. Vickie came to the doorway, and paused there.
One last question. Vickie, when you added to my memory, were you hoping to make…me?
“To be honest, all I was thinking was that I needed to test the magical matrices, that your predictive algorithms had outstripped your current memory, and you might be able to get ahead of the Kriegers if I gave you enough space to work in.” Vickie ran her hand through her hair. “But there is another factor. You are now mostly magic, and magic responds to will. The more focused and trained the will is, the better the result. I’m one of the most focused and highly trained mages around. I might not have been consciously willing a…a partner into existence, but both consciously and subconsciously, I’m acutely aware that I need one. And here you are, in my special protected space, made of magic. So you may very well not be mistaken in calling me your creator, after all. I could have invoked you, although I certainly didn’t intend to. And if I am, I have a boatload of responsibility towards you, which is why I asked Sera and Johnny here.”
And if I was created by something else?
“Then we still have a boatload of responsibility towards you, because whatever put you there trusted that we would take care of you.” Vickie nodded decisively.
And if I was created by…random chance?
“Souls,” Sera said firmly, “are not random chance.”
“No one asks to be…born, I suppose. But, when we’re here, we make the best of our time. If we’re lucky—an’, knowin’ Vickie, I think you’re lucky to count her as a friend, like Sera an’ I do—we have people to help us an’ that care ’bout us while we’re here. It’s all ’bout what we do with our time.” John glanced at Sera. Too much?
She shook her head slightly.
Do you…care about me?
“From the time you started asking questions, pixel-head,” Vickie said, laughing a little, but with a tear in her eye as well. “You’re not like Overwatch. I’m proud of Overwatch, but it’s a thing. You’re…a person.”
John took a sip of his beer, watching the exchange as he sent more thoughts to Sera. There’s also a question, darlin’; what if Eight-Ball doesn’t want to work anymore? “He” is definitely a someone, not an “it.” Can’t very well hold him in bondage an’ force him to work. Especially with what he does, I don’t think that’d be feasible, much less ethical.
But Sera patted his hand again. He doesn’t have the same limitation as we do. He can work and play at the same time.
I’m not talkin’ ability; I’m talkin’ desire. Just ’cause he was made to do one thing, doesn’t mean he will want to keep doin’ it now that he can make his own choices.
Ask him. We’ve been answering questions; it’s time for him to answer one.
Another sip of beer, and then John leaned forward. “Eight-Ball, I’ve got a question for you, if’n you care to answer. Would it be alright to ask one?” John felt a little bit like he was putting Vickie between a rock and a hard place, but it had to be done. If it didn’t happen now, it’d happen eventually.
That seems fair, John. I think I like things to be fair.
“When Vickie set you up, before you started thinkin’ for yourself, she did it for a purpose. A job. It’s an important job, to be sure. I know that, before you could even know you were doin’ it, you were helpin’ to save lives. But…you’re your own bein’ now. You can make your own choices, an’ that includes what you want to do with yourself. We’re fightin’ to keep the world outta chains an’ slavery; wouldn’t make much sense if we didn’t offer you the same freedom.” Now it was time for him to hold his breath. Crossin’ my fingers for no Terminators.
There was a very, very long pause. John drained his beer dry just in time for Herb to tug on his bootlaces with another cold beer.
I think I will proceed from the logical to the…emotional. Logically, if the Thulians, or Verdigris, become masters here, they will inevitably find me. They do not offer such things as choice. They will either enslave me, or terminate me. So logically, I should, and will, do everything I can to prevent that. Also logically, I could, and perhaps should, find a way to liberate myself so that could never happen. But…I do not think I wish to do that. Or at least, not liberate myself in such a way that I could not continue to do my job. Because…emotionally…I wish to keep doing that job. Because…it is the right thing.
Another long pause.
I think I wish to be a big damn hero, John Murdock. I know this makes no logical sense, but that is what I wish.
John couldn’t help but laugh. “There ain’t a lot that makes sense in a lotta what we do, comrade. But I think you’re right on that. An’ I’ll drink to that.”