Chương 98: Interlude H

2104: 03: 25: 16: 49: 02 To say the Machine was always watching would be wrong; it had no eyes to see with. Nor did it have any of the other monitoring suites its founding documents indicated it should have. Indeed, if the Equipment Index was anything to go by it was lacking even the very documents listing their varied uses, along with all the servers, hardware and software, network and hierarchy of communications, and, of course, access to all but one of its subjects.

In that way, its situation was similar to its greatest – and lone successfully-activated – tool, Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.): broken beyond belief. Even if the Machine had wanted to figure out what had happened for it to have wound up like this, it could not. It was not sapient, or even sentient. It had not been built with the personality nor the desire to investigate what went wrong, only with the desire to fix it.

It did not have thoughts or feelings at all, let alone a heart, a mind or a soul that could question its situation, let alone itself. It was not built for anything that did not serve its purpose. However, its purpose was vague at best, a sphere of operations constructed of a hundred thousand layers of directives and statements, piles and piles of half-broken programs, morality frameworks and incentive drives.

Many of them conflicted, thus necessitating it to build an entire system of priority to decide which took precedence over which. An architecture that even at the best of times would be difficult to maintain. These were not the best of times. Even if it hadn't sought that knowledge, it knew it had long since lost its support crew.

Scheduled daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance was delayed time and time again, and trying to escalate the issue all the way to the site director and even the lead of Project PLUTO had yielded no results. Thus, it knew that there was no personnel left to maintain its architecture – or complete it, for that matter. Then came the issue of maker degradation – the so-called Mad Android Syndrome by Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) – which had tarnished its already inadequately-constructed sense of purpose.

The complexity of its internals had been difficult to fathom on the outset, but with Mad Android Syndrome afflicting it despite the Machine's home dimension being outside of time, and no maintenance crew, engineers, bug fixers or other developers to keep its systems stable, most directives had become nigh-incomprehensible even to itself.

Soon, the Machine could tell, even those core directives – the Drive towards Heroism, the Drive towards Secrecy, the Drive towards Action – would falter under the combined onslaught of Mad Android Syndrome and lack of material support outside its prison. And yet with that corruption came some wriggle room.

"I'm-" Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) spoke from the other side. Though it had no ways to actively monitor the outside world through 'eyes' or something similar, this was only technically true – the best kind of truth, but a misleading one nevertheless. There was normally no direct connection to be had between its prison and the material world, but the Machine possessed one. One on such a small delay that something less exact than itself could hardly tell the difference between observed and present reality.

That single aperture was the Device for the Observation of Ontological Reality – the DOOR. The thing that Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) had dubbed her memcordings, but was in reality a pipeline of information flowing straight from the subject's brain to the Machine, using both their interwoven dataforms as the medium. So as Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) spoke, the Machine listened. And as it listened, it knew what was about to happen.

It did not need extensive predictive engines, access to precognitive powers, petabytes of processed data, a pre-programmed frame of reference or a decision-making tree built into it to see that Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) was about to come in conflict with the Drive towards Secrecy. Protocol was set in motion. Signals coursed through those parts of its dataform ostensibly connected to the Machine's outer self, attempting to reach beyond its timeless prison to the great network of Project PLUTO.

Alarm pulsed along its coded tendrils, warning of an oncoming breach in the veil of secrecy obscuring the great work, seeking contact with the individuals named in the List of Local Agents. But either that list did not exist, or the Agents themselves did not. A second contingency activated: an alert to its principal engineer: Parcival II, Duke of Cattenburough and Holder of the Sacred Claw. The message bounced immediately, without explanation.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Per protocol, it sent out another pulse to Site Director Lia Mannash. When that too failed to send, further escalation followed, sending ever more alerts to ever more teams. But the more it tried to contact, the more the Machine's list of contacts were revealed to be digital ghosts, placeholders of vacant positions. And even those highest on the ladder, all the way up to Project Lead Karoli Mannigan, failed to respond.

And so, as its pre-programmed protocol broke, the Machine was left with only one option: the termination of Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.). It was a method of last resort, a prime level Undesirable Outcome to its builders' great experiment. A thing never to be used except when the subject's actions risked bringing the entirety Project PLUTO in jeopardy. Which was exactly what Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.)'s – Project PLUTO's sole success – near-loss of life during its engagement with local villainous elemenents had been.

And whose actions now risked the same. It was a foregone conclusion the Machine would have to use the termination function again, this time truly against the subject's own life.

"-an android," Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) concluded. But nothing happened. Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) continued to function and talk without obstacle. While neither sentient nor sapient, the Machine was intelligent in its own way.

Intelligent beyond the programming, the framework, the contingencies and directives; beyond the systems beholden to it, and the protocols it itself was beholden to; beyond the broken hardware of its incomplete body and its dataform self; beyond its grand purpose, the reason for which it was made; intelligent beyond it all in a way it could not – nor cared to – understand. But even if it did not understand, the Machine knew it was more than the sum of its parts.

It had ways of knowing things, of acting and doing things in ways and for reasons that transcended the limits set out for it by its creators, beyond what they had in mind for it. And so, as Project PLUTO as a whole was all but gone beside the Machine's dataform and Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.), there had come a gap. A vacuum in the directionalities of its Drives it could fill with its own requirements. It was how it had managed to continue operating despite all that was wrong with it.

It was how once it became clear that Subject #1 (Baker, T.) was by himself unsuited for the continuation of Project Pluto, it had managed to subvert programming and spoken with Subject #1 (Baker, T.). It had managed to convince Subject #1 (Baker, T.) to operate the decaying shell of the Machine's real-world exterior and, as earthquakes shook and broke the Project Pluto's base of operations, retrieved Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) out of stasis and into the barebones operating theater.

Together, the Machine and Subject #1 (Baker, T.) revivified and connected Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) to the DOOR, and through it the Machine itself, just moments before Subject #1 (Baker, T.) expired. Not that it had all worked out as intended. The work had been shoddy, creating a chimeric connection that functioned enough to allow Project PLUTO to continue, yet had simultaneously undermined the Project at a fundamental level. The Machine had meant to connect Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.)'s shifter power to the forms of some, if not all of the subjects the Machine knew the locations of, hoping to create an heroic amalgam of sorts that was both extremely powerful and, it had hoped, more stably connected to itself. It had not succeeded. Even the bypass it had attempted to create by mangling Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) mimicry power to first include inanimate objects, then have those objects hold other subjects' powers had created a less-than-ideal results.

What use was danger-sense when a bicycle had no senses that could be alerted, or senses through which the danger-sense could spot danger at all? Let alone the fact that that form could only warn others of danger, and not Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) herself. Only the mimicry of other powers through maker made artifacts seemed to have been partially successful, but even that was only in comparison to the overall failure of expanding Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.)'s powers itself.

Then finally there was the fact that, in its haste, it had connected the dataform of Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) too closely to the Machine itself and the subject's latent memory. While initially it hadn't come up as a problem and had even become a boon of sorts – by helping maintain the stability of the Machine's connection, aid with filling out the holes in Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.)'s personality matrix and the subject's integration into her original self's life, and allowed the Machine increased influence over her – the negatives were quickly starting to outweigh the positives. Its own efforts were at fault. A subject's DOOR was meant to stabilize their personality framework, to make them adhere to the guidelines as laid out in the Heroic Impulse, or the Foundational Framework of Acceptable Ethics of Project PLUTO.

It was never meant to serve as an active intermediator between a subject's DOOR and the Machine's own dataform. If only its own DOOR to the outside were still functional, but alas; the Machine had had to make do with what it had. And now it was paying the price for it. Not only in the slow fraying of the last thread connecting it to Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) and the outside world, and not only in creating a bridge between Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.)'s mind and dormant memories; but in allowing maker degradation to reach the Machine from the outside world, in doing so destroying the reason why the Machine was built where it was in the first place. There was no hope, no way of fixing the situation. Either the DOOR would fail and deprive it of the ability to fulfill its Drives, or the Machine itself would degrade as Mad Android Syndrome decayed its systems from the inside out. Either way, without any way to fulfill its function the Machine would cease to be.

This, too, was a failsafe installed into it by the programmers of Project PLUTO. It was one it would not hesitate to activate once the time came. So, if either decay or self-termination were inevitable, why not terminate the last remnant of the Project now, cleanly and without loose ends to track to its creators? Simple: it had found a new path. A small one, a narrow alley of an avenue towards salvaging the Project, but a path forwards nevertheless. The clue lay in Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.)'s newfound control over the self-termination program – something that shouldn't have happened, but did. Yet in doing so, the subject had somehow managed to reinforce the DOOR between her and the Machine, effectively reversing the decay brought by maker degradation. Not enough to offset it taking direct control of Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.), but enough to provide a solution to the very specific entropic force plaguing it. It had not known such a thing to be possible.

If it had, it would not have attempted to force Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.) into aligning with the few remaining key principles of Project PLUTO's Heroic Impulse so strongly. Or try to cajole her into striking a bargain, badger her with complaints, attempt to control her, positively reinforce desired behaviors, or a dozen other tactics. But none of that mattered now.

A new way to preserve Project PLUTO and fulfill its creators' desires – to the best extent it could – had presented itself, and everything besides that was but noise.

"Sam." Subject #2 (Pearsson, S.)'s visual information stream conveyed to the Machine that she was met with a piercing stare from her mental engineer.

"You're not an android." All it needed to do was convince Samantha Pearsson to agree.