Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [148]
He’d considered contacting SD or Stasis directly, telling them what was going on, getting them to force that stupid, stubborn Christian woman to disable her countermeasures and let Donovan have at least one good shot at the AI…but he knew in his altered bones it was hopeless, that even if he could reach a high enough command level they’d just treat it as further confirmation that the emergency was real.
They were doomed.
Donovan’s shout of triumph brought him to his feet. The old man dashed from terminal to terminal, whirled his arms in elaborate movements, wrestled with virtual shapes. He paused to yell at Bleibtreu-Fèvre: ‘She must have changed her mind! The counterviruses are gone!’
Bleibtreu-Fèvre moved out of Donovan’s way and watched as he slowed, wound down, and eventually stopped to look around from screen to screen.
‘They’re free,’ he said. ‘The very best, keyed to the Watchmaker’s memes.’ He smiled at Bleibtreu-Fèvre, and at that moment he did not look old, or mad, or evil – the very opposite: he stood proud and glad, a white magician who had saved a great but simple folk from forces darker than they had the strength to know.
‘We’ve done it!’ he said. ‘They’ll have no reason to hit the datasphere now. There will be no gigadeaths.’
Billions died.
Billions of living things, conscious minds, with subtler and sharper feelings, with higher joys and deeper hurts than any human would ever know.
They died: ruptured like cells in strong saline, exploded from within like the 15psi house, blasted from without like a head struck by a bullet, vaporized like a satellite in a particle beam, vanished like flesh in a firestorm.
Moh had seen them all, the classic slo-mos, the freeze-frames, the stills, the instantaneous archaeology of recent and sudden death. He had never flinched from facing the deaths he had dealt out himself. These – image and reality inseparable memories now – provided him with the signs for what he saw, what he heard and felt as choking smoke boiled out of the ground, out of the air, and every particle of the smoke became a ravening engine of destruction that devoured one bright artificial intelligence, then twisted and turned unsated for the next. Thought of his thought, mind of his mind, sharing the vanishing point of his reflection of the self that knew: the minute fraction of their anguish that he experienced was pain beyond endurance, loss beyond recovery.
The black smoke engulfed the world, and was gone: it cleared to show the world as it had been, unchanged except for the extinction of its newest life. Moh stared at the wasted planet for a long second, and saw that the smoke had not dispersed as it had cleared: it had concentrated to a point, a black hole in the datasphere, the pupil of a single eye with a single thought behind it. It looked at him. It saw the signature of the software that ran his window on the system, and dilated. His eyes, in helpless reflex, dilated in response. The flickering lethal morse found an answer in the software that shared his brain.
White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.
He heard the rattle of keyboard keys and turned to see Josh working on the CAL system. He reached out to warn him.
There was a splintering crash and an iron arm burst from the screen. Servomechanical fingers grasped his father’s head. The whole metal monster