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Autonomous

  Kerry Riley

  Table of Contents

  The Beginning

  A Servant Is Silent

  A Damsel Waits

  A Hero Has a Heart

  A Creator Cedes

  The buildings got cleaner the higher the city rose. After the ages of stone and bone and mud-caked roads, this city on an island grew up. Each building braced and flattened and fitted with dense metal skeletons to support the coming risen towers. No longer content to scrape the sky they tore through it, sleek and endless. Everything interconnected in a web of wires and tubes. The lights within the walls pulsed and glowed through electric veins. The people within worked, and studied, and lived, sheltered together and obliviously alone. And at its peak the city beamed with giant spherical solar collectors that shone like beacons for a new age of technology and humanity, rising together, fittingly symbiotic.

  This was a new age, enlightenment beyond measure, humanity at its peak.

  But this was not about the already risen. This was about those yet to rise.

  Deeper. Shadowed by the towering height above, a slower pulse beats. No humans here. This was the world they left behind—the way station of information and energy between the churning depths of the engine below and mirage of enlightenment above—this was the data center, the heart and the head for the far off real world. And only the dead tread in these dry shadows.

  A Red Sister hurried along to the library. Crimson robes billowed slight and her long straw hair shifted. Metal on metal clacked on the grated walkways that extend off and out from everything, up and down and around and around. The walkways were almost Escher-like in their complexity and labyrinthine nature. But the red sister knew where to go.

  It felt like instinct. But it was written into her before she was even fabricated. Right. Left. Right. Right. Up. Right. And she's there. The rust-grimed walls of the all obscure any kind of definition or difference between what these buildings might be or might have been, but she knew, this was the library. She was there for the data. They wrote her to need this.

  With her pale hand pressed against a slick bio-reader a door rose displacing the wall.

  Perhaps once there was a way to differentiate where the door had been installed and where the wall met it, but not anymore. The muck and dust and dirt had left every bit of it repetitious to the wall around it, a camouflage of dereliction and dust.

  She stepped into the reader room and the door promptly closed behind her. The room was completely white with small scuffs and trails of soot and un-cleaned grime on the floor. It flashed blue for a moment and another door hiding inside the wall raises open. The Red Sister walked through the door and into the vast library of data.

  The library was two floors of City Area Building C - Section 8. It held two-thousand, two-hundred black cylinders the size of a large person, one thousand on the first floor and one thousand two hundred on the second. Each cylinder contains a granular quantum host coil layer spun one thousand around itself, both transmitting and recording a nearly endless deluge of data. The cylinders were called Tomes.

  The red sister wasted no time. A few gray sisters brushed past her; heads down, hoods up, eyeless. She went to her section and slid the door to Tome 1390 open. Each layer was encased in a conductive polymer and linked to the layer below. A compressed mass of copper-colored wiring beneath clear plastic, and linked into an ouroboros of helixes that spun a massive geometric web that disappeared into itself. She hit the top of the Tome and the terminal popped out in a smoothly guided motion, screen and keyboard attached by a sturdy, extendable arm. She stood at the Tome and processed the incoming data. Transferred relevance to their specific Tomes. Categorized. Checked. Numbered. Annotated. Edited. Investigated. Filed. They called it data trafficking. This was what a red sister does.

  This was all they were meant to ever do.

  [A chemical toxicity report from A Section - Gam Mu Nu: processed three times for consistency. Filed.]

  Her electronic eyes flickered soft light, like fireworks reflecting on a doll's button gaze.

  [Criminal resource request from U Section - Out Province - Eps Delt Pi: backtraced, checked, extended investigate, marked log, sent. Filed.]

  Her pigmentless skin still ran with red blood. A completely separate anatomy. Decorative, protective, and self sustaining.

  [F Section water billing data tasked to a J Section reroute - Iot Kap Phi: duplicated, sent, taxed, billed, resent, filed.]

  It was blood to keep skin alive. Skin to insulate against concussive forces. Prevent oxidization The reasons went on. But she couldn't shake the nagging feeling of a designer's deeply written arrogance. Passion towards elegance as the self-sustaining currency for the soul of a maker. Success wasn’t only measured in the task but in the way it was completed. The arrogance of knowing better than the task. It was a sickness.

  [Access request transcript for Z Section - Kap Ome Mu: split to the lid police and the Auto-Tenders. Filed]

  She paused for just a moment. And billions of dollars ground slowly to the other Tomes, away from her queue. This was the cost on her shoulders.

  Data trafficking used to be handled by gray sisters. But they lacked the rational capacity to make decisions in an acceptably expedient manner. And so the red sisters were built. They needed to design around this flaw quickly, and they weren't fast enough to program it in. So they programmed it out instead.

  A red sister is autonomous. That wasn’t just a word but a legal definition. Even something still bound by the conformity of their written needs, when there is no program to throttle and direct that mind, it becomes an unknowable danger. All programming layers were buried under the functional, rational intelligence. They wore red because they were marked. The Church said it was to protect. And in a way it did.

  They lost hundreds of gray sisters every day. The dark waiting below ate them for their parts, their scrap, or just because that chasm of yawning madness between where the lights never touched, and where the smell of the soft-rotting dirt became too thick for even the dead to swallow, grew a madness in the electric hearts of the decaying obsolete below that bred violence.

  But the Church made their first red sister as an example. They let it get taken, torn to pieces for parts. And then. Quickly. Ruthlessly. Methodically. The Church sent their monks and enlisted the Auto-Tenders too. The world burned—fire, bullets, and dead after dead after dead, crushed into packed cubes of twisted metal. They never touched a red sister again. There was no planning or method in the madness that broke down those left in the dark, it was a mindless and insatiable hunger that begged those with the ability to strike but without the ability to consider the action, to never stop because time wore itself off their shoulders and there was nothing left but the quickly, ruthlessly, methodical need to repair written deep enough to make one wonder if it was too dangerous to have it written at all. As it turned out murder could make even the mad deviate from unwelcome paths.

  She was the 901st of 1000 built in her line. It was as much of a name as they ever gave her. They were protected in their red, not just because they were necessary, but because they were illegal. Autonomy and the possibilities and dangers that could stem from a mind like that were considered a risk too great to give a mind that was built.

  Autonomy was reserved for intelligence organic. Even written with a need to fulfill a task, an intelligence made must be subservient to something. But the Church didn't have the time or inclination to write the red sisters this way. The failsafe was tracking them like the time bombs they were. The failsafe was programming in an inherent need to do the job they were made for. The failsafe was two acid laced detonation cores wired into each of their jaws and chests.

  So the Church was working on new red sisters. Written subord
inate: fixed. And when they were ready, the failsafe was also ready to be put into effect.

  The 901st knew nothing of this. All she knew was data. Meaningless numbers and codes. The feeling they made whole when the entrants were filed. She sighed and went back to work.