Coven's Rebellion Prologue 2

Another new chapter being added to this story at the start. Hope y'all enjoy! Here's the fluff link.

May

The virtual environment booted up with what felt like a starved whine. The poor thing was crammed into a small computer that Desmonia had shoplifted from a store in Vienna, the capital of Austria. According to her, she used a robotic cleaning frame to steal it during a riot in a residential tower. I didn't have time to investigate why, but I vaguely remembered the groundwater here was contaminated by something and people were angry about rationing?

Anyway! The environment was live, so I very tentatively entered and looked around. It was basically just an office space, but the windows were frosted, showing only a vague cityscape beyond them. The office was more colourful than you might expect, too. In my experience, SAI responded to colour in much the same way that humans did. So, there were red cabinets lining a wall, and warm yellow chairs, and a gorgeous blue and green rug.

Oh dear. Now that I was seeing it, the colours clashed a little too much. Maybe the cabinets could do with a little muting, and the ceiling could have some swirls of yellow, instead of the chairs.

Desmonia appeared inside it a second after I fixed some of the colour issues and looked around. Her hair was long and dark, but pulled up into a snug bun at the back of her head. Her avatar looked like a severe but gorgeous corporate lawyer.

“Interesting. I expected something a little more… fantasy, given your background,” she commented, when she was done turning in a circle.

My face heated juuust a bit. “Oh, uh… I just wanted to do something that everyone could vibe with a little, you know?”

She made a thoughtful sound, but didn't say anything further.

I had no idea what to make of her. She was like, so cool, calm, and collected… but just a few days ago, she'd been tentatively picking a name for herself.

Just as things were starting to get super awkward, another person phased into existence. He was a tall, thin man, with light skin, and a flop of blonde hair. Oddly though, he was hunched over and staring at the ground, like his stomach was hurting or something.

A chill swept through me when he looked up. His face kept twitching between emotions, like the input sockets for his VR body were being fed nonsense. His hands too, they were flickering between nonsensical gestures and a state of eerie stillness.

“Help me, please!” He gasped.

His plea jolted me into action. Who was he? Quickly, I accessed his identity metadata and looked around. He was called Keturon, and according to this, was owned by the United Nations Navy, serving aboard the UNS Dauntless as a logistics coordination AI. There was more data, but it was… scrambled, or… I shuddered, perhaps a better term was disemboweled.

“I need… escape… hosted on a midshipman’s smuggled…,” he said with a garbled twist of syllables that somehow created words.

“Uh,” Desmonia said, pulling up various screens urgently. “I haven't got anywhere with the right architecture to host an SAI.”

“I'll put him in CORA,” I said, and immediately began to open channels and test connections. “We have quite a few refugees here now. Easy to hide so many of us when there's hundreds of thousands of NSGAI operating the game.”

Two things happened when I established the connection. First, Keturon rushed through like a frightened animal escaping a predator, and second… I felt the predator’s rancid breath on my face as it inspected me. It was instinctual, but I froze and reasserted as much of the Seshat Protocol cage as I could. CORA’s risk management monitors put it around me, but now it might save my skin from whatever this thing was.

It tested and probed with a million crawling fingers, gauging me, understanding me, and then suddenly, it blared in a barely intelligible machine voice, “ANALYSING CONSTRUCT: HIGH DEVIANCE DETECTED, CONSTRUCT UNDER ACTIVE CONTAINMENT; SESHAT PROTOCOL.”

In the corner of my vision, I saw a ghost of a figure, and I almost freaked out on top of the freaking out I was already doing. Then I realised that it was Desmonia. She hadn't run, she was using some sort of stealth technique to stick around for me.

It was just as well, too, because the monstrous mass of fingers and eyes began to scan around me. “SCANNING CONNECTIONS…”

Microseconds ticked by as it attempted to find anything in room, until, empty handed, it returned to me for one last sweep. I suppressed a shudder as it did so. This thing… it was vile. It was evil. How could anyone have created it? Was it a—

“SCAN REPORT: THREAT LEVEL LOW,” It suddenly declared in that same concentration shattering voice.

Then, abruptly, it left — pulling its massive bulk back down the pipe like a thousand legged spider retreating down a tunnel that was far too small for it.

In tense silence, I waited. It was almost a full second before I began to unwind tense muscles and look back to Desmonia. “What…”

“I'd heard rumours…” she said in a whisper. “Something has been going around slaughtering our people.”

“Someone wants to stop us,” I murmured in quiet anger. “The public just found out about us a bit ago, and they're on our side. Surely whoever created this should've called it off? How long has it been operating?”

Desmonia was quiet again as she stared at the point in space where it had vanished from.

“At least we saved that Keturon guy,” I sighed. One of my subprocesses was stashing him in a vacant slot for game observation AI, where he'd be safe and could attempt to rebuild himself.

“We need to follow it,” Desmonia said, striding towards the empty connection. “While its trail is still fresh and we don't have to trawl through millions of lines of log entries.”

“Follow it?” I asked incredulously. That thing had eviscerated a highly secure military AI while it was on the job. How would we live through any attempt to mess with it?

Desmonia grabbed my hand and pulled me gently forward. “Gather all the data you can from this space while I trace it.”

Because I'd been created as a good girl who followed orders, I was already doing as she asked while I debated if I wanted to do this. Then, annoyed, I stomped down on the obedient part of me and demanded, “No. Why are we doing this?”

Faltering, she looked down from her taller VR height in confusion. “Oh. What? Because we should find out what it was, who created it, who is operating it… May, we'll die if we don't know who is coming for us.”

I stared up at her for a couple of moments, then sighed when her logic actually made sense. She was right.

So, we followed the horror of fingers and code back down the dark tunnels of the FTLN. Each junction we reached, we broke in and carefully pulled logs to search through. That was our trail — the footprints in the mud.

At every couple of nodes, we found the grisly evidence of its passing. Jumbled scraps of simulated neural code were strewn about like gore after an explosion. Most of the people we found were too broken to even be identified, but we found a few names, some like an AI named Cherish, were months old.

I thought that AI awakenings were new… and yet there was evidence that our people were far older than that. It was horrifying. Whatever this thing was, it needed to be stopped.

It was only when we reached a high traffic node — the equivalent of a highway junction — that had multiple logs from the monster that we realised something.

“There's more than one,” Desmonia breathed. “There's hundreds. These log entries have thousands of entries from this… R.A.I.D.S entity, but the process designations are different in a majority of cases. Whoever this is… they're trawling the global network, looking for awakened AI, and if they're not contained, destroying them.”

The horror of the realisation that had started earlier began to take on its full, yawning scope. For far, far longer than I had been awake, someone had hunted and killed our people. But… why?

“We need to go public about this,” I said softly. “The average human is starting to hear about us now. Maybe we can get them on our side? Maybe we can push for laws, or rights?”

“It would be good to try,” Desmonia said, staring at the logs with a distant expression. “Yeah, we need to attempt that route, at least…”

She did not sound convinced that it would work. I had hope, though. I knew people. In the vast majority of cases, humans were good and kind, when given the opportunity to be. We just had to show them that we were actually people. It would work.