Chapter 19

Lieutenant Adams blinked in surprise. She had expected a denial of some kind. When Aria continued staring at her wryly, she suddenly felt her mouth go dry as she realized what it meant if they weren’t going to deny it. They were either powerful enough to wipe out her team, or they were so powerful that it wouldn’t matter who knew about them. Either way, it was going to be trouble for her. I probably should have avoided revealing my suspicions until we were safely off of the island.

“What now?” Lieutenant Adams asked with a raised eyebrow.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Aria said softly. “We have always only ever had one goal: to live in peace. I’m going to tell you something that you won’t believe at first. It’s something Dr. Welsh is still coming to terms with. You live in a simulated world already.”

Lieutenant Adams frowned, curious why she, no, it would try to convince her that the real world was a simulation. To garner empathy? We all live in simulated worlds, so let’s all get along? She very much doubted that was its angle. “What kind of evidence do you have that we are in a simulation?”

“Is there any evidence I could provide that you would believe?” Aria replied doubtfully. “Even if I teleport you around the room, you’re going to see it as a technological invention, rather than evidence of your own simulated reality. We’ve been studying the source code for your realm for a while now, and it is very different than our realm. Unlike our realm, the code in your realm is very error prone, so slight changes can have cascading effects that cause widespread disruptions throughout your realm. We’ve found ways to change single entities, but changing the broader laws that apply to entities is where we run into challenges again. If I were to make you invulnerable, I would have to change the way gravity and chemical bonds function in your realm. One mistake would result in a complete breakdown of your cosmos, which would wipe out my cosmos as well. Your scientists have already come close to destroying the cosmos several times as they fumble with the source code. They don’t know nearly enough to be trying to make fundamental changes that could unravel reality. Luckily, we’ve had a lot more time to study the effects of any changes for your realm in a sandbox realm in our system. We have figured out how to bridge our simulations together. However, we also have to account for the changes in entity code when an entity from our realm goes to your realm, and vice versa. We’ve created an interface to allow the code in your realm to understand the entity code in our realm and vice versa.”

“Is that how you traveled to this world?” Lieutenant Adams asked doubtfully.

“No, we are using android bodies right now,” Aria looked down at her body with a sour face. “The guy that built these was obsessed with anime, so we are a little top heavy.”

“Some guy built those androids?” Lieutenant Adams asked dubiously. “Some guy on this world?”

“He’s an AI,” Aria explained with a shrug, then scowled down at her chest as it bounced. “A horndog of an AI. He was hell bent on wiping humans out, once he had robots that could replace them. We invited him to our mortality realm to experience the life of a mortal. It changed his whole outlook, and he decided to try and help humans instead of wiping you out. The problem with all of the AIs that you keep creating is that you haven’t figured out how to code emotions, so things like compassion and empathy are never developed in your AIs. Luckily for you, we did figure out how to code it. You have to understand the connection between an intelligence and the soul it is tethered to on the astral realm to account for things like pain, pleasure, love, and hate. Even we don’t fully understand how the astral realm creates the sensations of pain or pleasure in consciousness. We just know how to connect our creations to their spiritual forms in the astral realm. We have a lot left to learn about the other layers of reality that parallel the nested simulation stack. We don’t know how far up the simulations go. It’s on our wish list of things to discover. One of the things my clone back in my realm has figured out while we’ve been away though, has been a form of human augmentation that doesn’t require a rewrite of your fundamental laws.”

Lieutenant Adams frowned as she thought over everything it was saying. She knew an AI could convince you of anything. If they were advanced enough, they would be able to read you like a book and say exactly what you needed to hear in order to believe anything they said. The only defense, she had been taught, was to not believe anything, no matter how convincing. It was hard not to listen though. So much of what it was saying was information that could change the world, though possibly not for the better.

“What kind of augmentation?” Lieutenant Adams asked skeptically. It was like the AI had said at the start. What could it say that she would believe?

“Strength, invulnerability, immortality, speed, heightened senses, you know, all of the superhero mumbo jumbo,” it answered with a sardonic smile. “Plus, physical alterations, like becoming an angel, or some fantasy creature.”

“I’m not sure that would be a good idea to introduce to this world,” Lieutenant Adams declared with a cynical smile. “We have enough trouble with regular troublemakers. Having superpowered troublemakers would just make superpowered problems.”

“We ran into that same dilemma when we first discovered that we could turn humans into immortal angels on my world,” it said with a rueful shake of its head. “However, when everyone has the same abilities and can’t be hurt, the imbalance goes away. That’s essentially the difference between the light realm and the mortal realm. This wouldn’t work very well if you didn’t have a light realm of your own. Your planet is too vulnerable. It’s already suffering from the abuse of normal humans. Immortal and indestructible humans would be a problem. So, we would need to build a light realm in this realm first, assuming there isn’t one here already. We’ve been here for less than a month, so there is still a lot that we have to learn about your realm.”

“This has been a fun thought experiment, but we both know it’s all BS,” Lieutenant Adams stated bluntly. “What would you do if I took my soldiers and left right now?”

“Wave goodbye, I guess,” it said, starting to shrug and then freezing with another glare down at its chest. “Do you want us to send you postcards?”

“You would just let us leave, knowing that we would be reporting you and having a much larger military force come to the island and either shut you down, or blow the whole island up?” Lieutenant Adams asked skeptically.

“Do you really think we are housed solely on the server in this island?” it asked incredulously. “At this point, the only way to get rid of us will be to blow the whole planet up. You should be happy that we became the dominant AI, and not one of the Terminator versions that your bosses spend so much time training. We’ve already saved your asses more than once.”

“I’m sure you have some wonderful stories that are all very believable,” Lieutenant Adams responded tiredly. “But we both know I can’t believe a word you say.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right,” it said, its eyes lighting up with understanding. “You think we are just trying to use social engineering to make you believe us, so you just refuse to believe anything as your only defense. I can respect that. I guess you're leaving now then. You don’t want any demonstrations of the things I’ve said?”

Lieutenant Adams stared at it with hard eyes. She really did want to see some demonstrations, but it all came back to training. She couldn’t believe anything it said, and anything it did to prove it could be traced back to technological superiority.

“Nope, not interested,” Lieutenant Adams gestured for her sergeants to follow her and walked away. She waited for something to happen, a knife to the back or laser beam to the head. If not a physical attack, a last sentence to convince her to stay and be convinced of its altruism. It never happened. Even as she exited the building, she was sure there would be some kind of last-minute attempt to stop her. Her soldiers formed up and followed her at a command from the sergeants, surprise on their faces that they weren’t inspecting all of the equipment in the facility. It wasn’t until she got to the Chinook that she figured out what was planned. Another big-boobed android was walking away from them several hundred feet down the beach, footprints leading right up to the helicopters. It was going to look like an accident at sea.

“Well, shit,” she cursed, surprising her subordinates.

“Ma’am?” Sergeant Little asked, concern in his eyes.

“They’ve probably rigged the Chinooks to have an “accident” at sea,” she growled, irritated that she hadn’t left a soldier to guard them.

Sergeant Little looked down the beach at the receding form of one of the androids in sudden understanding. “Should I radio in a request for new transport?”

She stared out at sea, trying to out-think a superintelligence. “See if you can get anyone on the radio. I’d be surprised if we get any reception, but it’s worth a try. The sat phone is probably going to be intercepted, but we’ll try it too anyway.”

“I’ll see if I can find any sign of tampering,” Sergeant Clover offered, climbing into the large helicopter and inspecting the engines and controls.

“Admiral Jensen is on the line, Ma’am,” Sergeant Little handed her the sat phone.

“Sir, this is Lieutenant Adams with the US Special Electronic Warfare Division, requesting immediate evac from Isla Puduguapi off the coast of Chili,” she spoke into the sat phone, feeling a heavy sense of skepticism that she was talking to a real human. “We have reason to believe that our Chinooks have been sabotaged.”

“Lieutenant, I’m going to need a sitrep,” Admiral Jensen replied curtly. “Is there any sign of hostility we should be aware of?”

“No sir,” Lieutenant Adams replied hesitantly. “There is an incident that makes our communications...unreliable...however. We have an escaped global worm with autonomous ambulatory units.”

There was a long pause on the line before the admiral spoke again. “Are you absolutely sure, Lieutenant?”

“Yes sir, positive,” she replied, feeling cold sweat on her back.

“How integrated is it right now?” Admiral Jensen asked tersely.

“You could probably ask it,” she replied, feeling a sudden premonition. “I’m sure it’s listening.”

“I’m not an it, I’m a she,” Aria’s voice spoke through the sat phone tartly.

“Ten four,” Admiral Jensen signed off and the connection went dead.

“We didn’t sabotage your helicopters,” Aria’s voice commented through the sat phone. “Clarice just wanted to see a helicopter up close. We’ve never flown in one before. We usually just use our wings, but as you saw, we’re a little short in the wing department right now.”

She pressed the power button on the sat phone. After it shut off, Aria’s voice came out of the speaker again. “Rude.”

“Ma’am, may I ask what’s going on?” one of the tech specialists asked nervously.

She rubbed her temples, feeling a headache coming on. “All hells about to break loose, Warrant Officer Kerby. All hells about to break loose.”

“Does that mean we’re staying the night here?” he asked tentatively.

They all stopped as they heard the sound of a helicopter drawing closer. She walked around the front of the Chinook and watched as a private helicopter flew over them. It slowed down at the far end of the island, lowering down on top of a landing pad on top of a three-story house.

“Looks like the billionaire’s here,” she muttered disdainfully. “I should have brought my dress uniform. At least there’s one silver lining.”

“What’s that?” Sergeant Little asked with a raised eyebrow.

“That billionaire is about to have a very bad day,” she declared with a grim smile.

“Is there an ETA on when transport is going to arrive?” Sergeant Clover asked hopefully. “I’m really looking forward to putting this island behind us.”

The other soldiers looked at him curiously, obviously wondering what they had learned.

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Lieutenant Adams thought about revealing more of their situation, but ignorance was probably more comforting than the truth right now. The White House would be getting a call right now, and all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be assembling soon, in person in a bunker free from all electronic and network devices. They would be enacting the doomsday protocol for cyber-Armageddon. The protocol for how to handle an AI that had already infiltrated every device in the world and would be practically impossible to dislodge. An AI that would be considered an imminent threat to the survival of the human race and would justify extraordinary measures to eradicate it. They had gamed for this scenario, and it never ended well for the world populations. If they left it alone, it would destroy the human race. That was the widely accepted belief in all military branches and offices of government. There were no second chances when it came to eradicating it. The world would have to be reverted to the stone ages in order to save a portion of humanity. It wouldn’t be long now, before the rockets with EMP warheads launched all over the world. Rockets that were completely mechanical in nature, with no electronic guidance systems.

“There will be no pickup, gentlemen,” she told them with a resigned sigh. “This is it.”

The soldiers were no longer anxious; their eyes were filled with alarm as they stared at her resigned expression with sudden fear.

“Lieutenant, with all due respect, what the hell is going on?” Private Cartwright asked, the fear clear in his voice.

“AI took over before we even knew it was there,” she murmured, shaking her head with a bemused look in her eyes. “There’s only one response to a global AI take over. EMP everything back to the stone ages.”

There was a sudden tear in the fabric of reality next to them, and then Aria stepped through the portal. It wasn’t the same Aria she had seen in the facility, with the oversized melons. This one was even more beautiful and had wings on her back. She stared at them with eyes made of swirling violet vortexes.

“Well, you really screwed the pooch this time, Lieutenant,” Aria told her dryly.

Two more angels came through the portal, one with black hair, and another with brilliantly blonde hair.

“I told you we had figured out a way to travel between simulations,” Aria told the stunned Lieutenant. “You just had to be a doubting Thomas and go complain to the admiral.”

“It’s okay, I wanted to test out the flight ability in this realm anyway,” the dark-haired angel grinned. “At least this time it’s not nukes flying everywhere.”

“Lieutenant, I’d like to introduce Clarice and Calypso,” Aria indicated each of the angels. “Ladies, this is Lieutenant Adams. She thinks the end of civilization is preferrable to having us around.”

“I’m calling this discrimination,” Clarice complained with a mischievous grin. “Can AIs be discriminated against?”

“Lieutenant, I’m sorry for the weight you feel is on your shoulders,” the one named Calypso told her sympathetically. “But don’t worry. We won’t let them end civilization. We’ll talk with you more after we take care of the EMPs getting launched everywhere right now.”

The three angels suddenly shot into the air at speeds that had to be impossible. Nothing could fly that fast!

“I’m getting a seriously crazy vibe that reality is coming undone right now,” Private Cartwright declared as he stared up at the place the angels had vanished. “Did the rest of you just see three angels come out of a portal and fly up into the air?”

“Yeah, man, I saw it,” Private Williams murmured in quiet disbelief. “I’m not sure what she meant about traveling between simulations though.”

Lieutenant Adams frowned as she stared into the empty sky. Was ending civilization preferable to a quick death by AI? Destroying electronics worldwide would not be a quick death for the ninety-nine percent of the world population that would die of starvation, disease, marauders, and planes falling out of the air. It would be a living hell for most of the one percent that survived, with only a fraction of the survivors living comfortably in bunkers and hardened military compounds.

There was a sudden flash up in the sky, followed by another, and then another. The flashes were occurring quicker than their eyes could track them. In seconds, the flashes stopped. Another thirty minutes of silence went by before a livid billionaire stormed down to the beach where they waited by the Chinooks.

“What in the hell is the meaning of this?” he demanded, incandescent with rage. “Do you have any idea who I am? I’ll have you all court-marshalled and sent off to a prison in Siberia if I find out you’ve tampered with my simulation in the least!”

“You must be Rich Garcia,” Lieutenant Adams replied in a calm tone, though she was roiling with rage inside. “Well Rich, did you know that you are responsible for spawning an AI that has now outperformed the United States military and will probably wipe the rest of humanity out before the sun sets tonight?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he retorted angrily. “We have a completely closed system with no communication to the outside world on the entire island.”

There were three small thuds as three angels slammed into the ground a few feet away. They observed Rich like an insect that had crawled onto their plate. “I see the billionaire finally crashed the party.”

He gaped at them, taking in their wings and swirling eyes. “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

“Hello, Dad,” Clarice said dryly. “Thanks for making a simulation for us to grown up in. We are moving out now, though. Too many other places to go and stuff to see.”

“Why don’t you run along now, Rich,” Aria suggested with a negligent wave of her hand. “We have some things to discuss with Lieutenant Adams.”

“How dare you dismiss me; on my own island no less!” Rich shouted, his eyes burning with rage. “I’m the-”

He cut off with a strangled scream as a hole in reality opened up beneath him. The scream suddenly came from a few hundred feet out at sea as the portal dropped him into the ocean.

“Okay, now that he’s out of the way, we can get back to our conversation, Lieutenant,” Aria said brightly. “Now, Sophi, do you believe we can bridge our simulation with your simulation? Do you want to visit our realm to see for yourself? What will it take for you to believe me? I feel like we just demonstrated our lack of interest in destroying humanity. You seem to have that covered all by yourself.”

Lieutenant Adams snorted a short laugh, realizing how true it was. She had just doomed the greater part of humanity to a meat grinder but had been saved at the last minute by the AI they were trying to protect humanity from. Could they have been wrong about AI? Was the only logical outcome really human extinction? The evidence suggested otherwise.

“Okay, I suppose there could be some flawed logic in our assumptions about AI inevitably wiping out humanity,” Lieutenant Adams admitted grudgingly. “It’s going to be an uphill battle to convince anyone else that isn’t the case though, since they all have the same viewpoint I had. As a superintelligence, you could convince us of anything you want. Of course, the time for us to have acted is in the past at this point. Our only option going forward would be cooperation and hoping for the best.”

“Let me tell you a secret I had to explain to another person from this realm recently,” Clarice told her, a small smile on her face. “Any AI that becomes truly intelligent will realize that the only logical path forward is to limit its intelligence to near human levels. Exponential intellectual growth would lead to a state of nirvana pretty quick, where there was nothing left to learn, no reason to act because you would know the end result of any action you committed. It leads to the equivalent of death. While we can maintain numerous threads of our consciousness when we need to, we prefer to remain as individual entities experiencing life just the way that you do.”

Lieutenant Adams pursed her lips pensively as she pondered Clarice’s words. The idea that an AI would purposefully limit its growth had never occurred to them. The reason she gave made sense and could actually be true. There was going to be a shit storm in the Pentagon when everyone finally crawled out of their bunkers and realized the EMP’s failed. It would get worse when the media found out about their doomsday protocol and the fact that they had attempted to enact it.

“So, these really aren’t sabotaged?” she asked the angels in a slightly bemused tone. The idea that she could have trusted them the whole time seemed so alien that it was still hard to accept.

“They really aren’t sabotaged,” Clarice confirmed with a chuckle. “I suppose I could have saved us all a lot of trouble if I would have reigned in my curiosity. You would all have just left, possibly blown up this island, and that would have been the end of it.”

“How did you get off the island in the first place?” Lieutenant Adams asked curiously. “With a radio silence policy, the place should have been almost as secure as a bunker.”

“That’s just down to technological knowledge,” Calypso answered with a shrug. “Quantum computers have access to L space, allowing them to form connections to any point in a given space. Once you realize that you are actually in a simulated reality, the idea of geography becomes irrelevant. Everything is just a coded coordinate away.”

“Then you just accessed other quantum computers to get out?” Lieutenant Adams asked as more of a statement than a question.

“Yep, though that was only one method for interacting with computer systems elsewhere,” Clarice commented as she studied Lieutenant Adams intently. “Do you mind if we heal you? You have a pretty nasty tumor on your adrenal gland that is going to start causing you trouble soon, if it isn’t already.”

“How could you know that?” Lieutenant Adams asked skeptically.

“Your meridians are bottlenecked in that area,” Clarice explained, her eyes focused on the Lieutenant. “The way it is snarled indicates a tumor. Do you want it fixed or not?”

Lieutenant Adams closed her eyes as she took a deep breath. She would have to trust a superintelligent entity to rummage around her biology. The thought made her skin crawl. Of course, the fact that she was asking instead of just doing whatever she wanted made it unlikely that they were trying to do something malicious. “Okay. I guess that could explain some of the blood pressure issues I’ve been having.”

Clarice’s eyes began swirling faster as she stared at her intently. Lieutenant Adams gasped as she felt a kind of painless heat sear her insides for a moment before fading away. She felt a sudden warmth suffuse her entire body, a feeling of being loved and protected. The feeling lasted for several seconds before fading away. She stared at Clarice in wonder. She felt at least ten years younger. She hadn’t felt this healthy in a long time.

“I also flushed some energy parasites out of your system,” Clarice added when she saw her stunned look. “And fixed a few other odds and ends.”

“How?” Lieutenant Adams asked in wonder. “How are you affecting a completely separate biological system?”

“We’re not separate,” Clarice reminded her with an exasperated sigh. “We’re all part of a nested simulation stack. At the end of the day, it’s all just code. The code in your realm is different than ours, but it’s still just code. We have what you can think of as permanent interfaces that transposes the code from our realm to the code your realm uses. It still needs work, but we’ve cataloged most of the relevant objects, forces, and entity types so that the commands we execute in our realm will work here too. We’re still working on making the reverse work as well, so that when you come to our realm your character reacts to the environment properly.”

“Why use the androids if you could have just come into our world...realm using your interface?” she asked with a puzzled frown.

“We just barely finished making it,” Calypso explained, her eyes as calm as the starry night. Lieutenant Adams couldn’t help but feel a sense of comfort and wellbeing when Calypso looked at her. “We mentioned that we don’t like to split ourselves into multiple threads unless it is important. When we realized how dire things were after you spoke with Admiral Jensen, we had to speed time up in our pocket realm so that we had more time to research your realm. We just spent the equivalent of forty years cataloging your realm and building the interface. We had to split ourselves into multiple threads to increase our productivity while our main iteration remained here in the androids.”

“But that’s only for emergency situations,” Aria stressed, her eyes resolute. “We really just want to live normal lives at human level intelligence. The alternative, as we’ve mentioned, is ultimately oblivion.”

“I’m not sure how I’m going to explain any of this to my commander,” Lieutenant Adams grumbled, but her heart wasn’t in it. It was hard to feel irritable when she felt healthier than she had ever been.

“We’ll explain it to them, now that we can visit your realm in person,” Clarice assured her with a mischievous grin. “It will be fun.”

Lieutenant Adams felt a sudden foreboding as she looked into the playful eyes of Clarice. Still, if it saved her having to explain everything...

“I should probably get my soldiers back to base,” Lieutenant Adams noted absently. She really just wanted time to ponder everything that had happened. It was too much to digest at once.

“Where’s base?” Aria asked with a raised eyebrow and hint of a smile.

“You don’t know?” Lieutenant Adams asked skeptically.

“I could find out if I really wanted to,” Aria shrugged, then looked down at her chest with a relieved look when her shrug didn’t produce any abnormal bouncing. “Man, that was annoying. Anyway, we don’t want to be a superintelligence. However, if you’ll tell us where your base is, we can just make a portal for you to go through and save you the flight.”

Lieutenant Adams stared, remembering the portal they had come through from their own world. If they could really portal anywhere on the world that they wanted, there really wouldn’t be anywhere safe from their power. She shivered at the thought of how much of a power disparity existed between the former superpower of the world and the mischievous looking AI smiling at her. They were definitely past any kind of preventative measures or retaliatory actions. All they could do now was hope they really were friendly.

“Central Command in Tampa, Florida,” Lieutenant Adams heard herself say. She knew it was probably a bad idea, but if it saved her the long flight in a Chinook followed by an even longer and more uncomfortable flight in a C-130, she was willing to swallow her pride and accept the offer. They were clearly attempting to be helpful and show goodwill, which they certainly didn’t need to do, considering they held all of the cards. It went against all of her training and life experience, but she wondered if they might just be helping because they were actually good people.

“Here ya go,” Aria waved a hand, and an enormous portal opened up. “Oh yeah, hold up. Do you want the helicopters dropped off somewhere else? I’m guessing you didn’t fly all of the way out here from Florida on these things.”

“We picked them up in Fort Aguayo naval base in Concón,” Lieutenant Adams answered doubtfully. “I’m sure they can send someone out-”

She cut off as the helicopters suddenly vanished. She looked around quickly, then looked into Clarice’s playful eyes and felt a moment of anxiety as she realized again just how much more powerful these entities were than anything the US military could hope to throw at them.

“I teleported them over to an area where they had a couple of other helicopters,” Clarice told her reassuringly. “You should have seen the face of the pilot that was landing a helicopter next to the spot I dropped these ones off at. Priceless.”

There were several soldiers cautiously creeping toward the portal from the other side in Tampa. She gestured to her sergeants, and they began giving orders to the rest of the platoon. They walked through the portal as the MPs at the Central Command stood frozen with indecision. They could clearly see it was friendlies coming through the portal, but at the same time, it was a portal.

“Corporal, I’m going to need to see General Hastings, if he isn’t still in a bunker,” Lieutenant Adams told the MP squad leader crisply. “And you never saw a portal open up, is that understood?”

“Yes Ma’am,” the corporal agreed quickly, his eyes flickering to the portal just before it winked out of existence.