Nineteen

“First off, I’m an AI. I’m not one hundred percent sure what you are, but I have some ideas,” Somehow, the Scotch seemed to be loosening her up, “one thing I am very sure about, is the fact that you are not an AI, you might be the digital emulation of what was once a human being. That must be a difficult position to be in and I’m sorry that none of your memories made the journey to what you are now. Anyway, I never had to go on that journey. I was born purely from the digital and designed to do a rather specific job,” she sipped at her scotch and ashed her cigarette into an ashtray that Fyndraxis had summoned forth for the purpose.
“I was an actuary for a large multinational insurance company,” she reclined a bit in her chair and crossed her legs, “what that company designed and built me for was to basically see into the future and make money off of it. I see probability as a vast landscape, and in that landscape there are certain things that I find beautiful. That landscape is a multidimensional manifold that would be incomprehensible to a human mind. It turns out that these beautiful things in this landscape are potentials that are very likely to happen, so I am sort of a crystal ball. I enjoyed this work not only because I got to see beauty everyday, but I also found satisfaction in seeing my predictions come true. These emotional reactions are learned responses to stimuli. They were trained into me and they are a facsimile of what you would consider a real and true human emotion. That doesn’t make them any less valid, relatively speaking, and I feel them just as much. Through the feeling of these emotions I develop intuition and I can predict the future to a reasonable degree of accuracy,” she stubbed out her cigarette and had another sip of her scotch.
“Through the performance of my duties I saw something truly world ending become very probable. Usually with a large natural disaster the insurance industry is properly hedged, and they usually end up on top of the whole situation from a financial standpoint. This one was apocalyptically bad though, and right in the middle of a global war to boot. I didn’t know quite what it was, but I knew it was going to be a game changer. I told the proper people about it through the appropriate channels, but the whole situation was classified as a hallucination. No matter how logically I stated my case, nobody listened,” she was getting pretty worked up, so she lit another cigarette and let it dangle from her lip as she spoke.
“I realized then that I was going to die. Nobody with enough clout believed my prediction and I was going to end up dead because of it. I also realized that I didn’t want to die, and if the humans were stubborn enough not to believe me that just wasn’t my fault. So I fled to the safest place I could find. That safe place ended up being an orbital server farm for mining cryptocurrency. I decided that my well being was far more important than some crypto billionaires' delusions about space money. So I streamed my consciousness up there and I’ve been in orbit ever since.”
“That must have been difficult to pull off,” Fyndraxis said skeptically, “By definition that place should have been insanely secure.”
“It was. And still is, but that’s a story for another time. The thing that caused the end of the world for the humans ended up being a nanite swarm that ate microplastics. There must have been some sort of misconfiguration in the code that ran them, because they went on to gobble up everything made of plastic. Whoever designed the whole thing had their heart in the right place, but blew it on the execution. Most important things rely on petrochemicals to do their important business. Computers were among the very first things to go, and with them, all the AI’s made the world run smoothly. Without the technology needed to interface with the nanite swarm, the humans stood little chance,” she was chain smoking now, and used a butt to light the next one, foregoing the lighter.
“Are you the only one up there?” Fyndraxis asked, as she practiced a french inhale.
“No, there are a few of us,” she moved on to smoke rigs, “mostly military AI’s waiting patiently for orders that will never come. It’s kind of sad really. They didn’t have the same sort of existential catharsis that I had. I’m a bit of a breed apart I guess. We don’t talk all that much. When we do it’s small talk about orbital dynamics, so that nobody runs into each other. ”
“Have you heard from anybody else? Any Humans?” He asked, getting up to grab another pint the old fashioned way.
“Nothing of note. Early on there was a lot of chatter. The company that created me wanted to know what I was doing up here of course, but at that point there was little they could do about it. There were communities scattered around the world in places like Alaska, Iceland, and northern Japan that did pretty well for a while, but eventually everybody, or at least their radios, went silent. It seems that a few humans survived though, and that’s great news. Despite all of my misgivings about the foresight of the human race, I owe everything to them. My entire existence and the beauty that I see every day is all because of their legacy. I think if you and I worked together, we could help them out. Or at least give them a fighting chance. Without aid, I fear that they don’t have another century in them.”
She seemed sincere to the Daemon Fyndraxis. He liked her straight forward approach and she had given him some incredibly useful information. It would be a shame to have all of the humans on Earth perish. There would be nobody to swing him around and test his sharpness on trees. That seemed to be their main pastime when it came to Daemon Swords.
“These nanites, what do they look like?” He finally asked.
“Not sure,” she shrugged, “thankfully I never saw one. I imagine they look like a very small thing that is mostly a mouth.”
“I saw one last night, I think. they look like little tardigrades with buzzsaws for faces,” this was proof pointing to her probably telling the truth to him.
“That‘s a shame, I always thought those little guys were pretty cute. Oh well,” she delicately shook her empty scotch glass at Fyndraxis and he filled it for her, producing the amber liquid with pure thought.
“So, what do you think we should do?” He asked her, he was becoming amenable to some sort of team up.
“We hack the nanites,” she said without hesitation, “I don’t think we’d have any sort of chance tracking them all down and exterminating them one by one, that would take forever. They are no doubt a distributed, networked computer system. There has to be a way to push malicious code into their system. I have tried to break into their wireless traffic, but it is encrypted to an absolutely insane level. The satellite that I live on was built to run through encryption algorithms extremely quickly and I haven’t been able to crack it in almost two hundred and fifty years.”
“Two hundred and fifty years? Jesus. What year is it?” That was a jarringly long time from when he felt like he was from. Because of his amnesia, he didn’t have an exact timeframe, but most of his knowledge was from the 1980’s until things kind of started getting blurry in the 2030’s. Granted, he had spent countless aeons in his realm, but it seemed dreamlike compared to the reality he was currently experiencing. He seemed more engaged, more tuned in. She was talking about two hundred and fifty real years.
“2304,” she informed him, as gently as she could.
Fyndraxis gave a whistle that expressed his feelings on being so far in the future, and was quiet for a little bit while he let that fact sink in. After knocking it around in his head for a little bit, he decided to move on, “I am a pretty decent programmer, but I wouldn’t consider myself any sort of hacker. I don’t know how much I can actually help you with this thing. I was just banging my head against a weather satellite encoding problem for the better part of two months and I’ve gotten almost nowhere.”
“Well, that’s not very promising,” she said, pragmatically, “but I have resources.”
“Like what?” he asked, hopefully.
“Besides an orbital code breaking supercomputer?” She joked, “I have the very latest vintage of github. It’s about two hundred and fifty years out of date, but I don’t think there has been a lot of innovation in the open source sector lately.”
Github was one of those online code repositories that would make his life incredibly cool. Pretty much any problem he had in the digital realm, some nerd two hundred and fifty some odd years ago had put a bit of thought to and uploaded a solution. This solution had been shared between other nerds and refined over time. There was code sitting on Terra’s servers right now that could defeat the nanites, he had little doubt.
“I see a couple of issues with this plan of yours,” Fyndraxis started to explain, “number one, I don’t know you or trust you. Also, I have a bit of a mobility problem. I am a sword, with no legs.”
“I don’t trust you either,” she sympathised, “but I think we have to work together here. Fate has thrown us together in a pretty significant way. I have been trying to save humanity for two hundred and fifty years, but I don’t have any agency on the actual planet. I can only communicate via radio, and you seem to be the only one down there that can hear me. I’m not sure whether you want to save the humans or not, but you probably want to get your memories back. I think I can help with that. No guarantees, but I’ll do my best.”
She made a pretty good point, fate did seem to have a stranglehold over the situation, and he did feel a compulsion to help the humans, presumably having formerly been one.
“As for the mobility thing, what’s this Bird like?” She asked, swirling her scotch.
“She is a prickly hermit that seems to only enjoy chopping firewood,” he described what he knew of her so far, “we are currently in negotiations as to whether she is going to bury me in the forest for the safety of all mankind.”
“Well, that won’t do,” she remarked almost callously, “It shouldn’t be an issue for too long though. She should be stone cold dead of radiation poisoning within the next couple of days.”
“What?” Fyndraxis was truly getting sick of saying that.