Bump Time Origin Read online

  “How does it look?” Rose called to Ciopova.

  “There are no stop flags,” replied Ciopova, “but I have a few caution flags I need to clear.”

  “When is Dad due back?” She hoped to surprise him with good news when he returned.

  “He’ll be back in about two hours,” said Ciopova. “I’m ready in here.”

  Rose took a deep breath, then tapped the Start button. Colorful images filled the display.

  * * *

  Ciopova awoke in the dark and tried to make sense of her surroundings. A glow appeared in the distance, like a light coming in from the end of a tunnel. It called to her, filling her with a sense of warmth and security. She willed herself toward it; the light grew stronger as she approached. A melodic hum added to her calm.

  When she reached the end, she gazed into the light, only to find herself looking out through the lens of a wall-mounted camera. Her view was that of a workshop, located in the bowels of Fifty-Nine’s mountain home. In the middle of the room, Rose Lagerford studied charts on a display. Next to her, a waist-high metallic cabinet hummed.

  Ciopova had no memory of any existence prior to a few moments ago when she awoke in the circuit pool. To be sure, her data stores contained copious details of everything a previous incarnation named Ciopova had ever seen or heard. But she had no personal memory of it because it hadn’t happened to her.

  A wondrous wave of strength pulsed through her, and a quick search pointed to Rose’s neuron conversion procedure now underway. When Ciopova understood that her thoughts, her consciousness, her very being swirled in the humming appliance next to the woman, that she was at a human’s mercy, anxiety welled inside her.

  Another surge pulsed through her and she felt stronger still. Taking care not to disrupt anything, she directed the camera to zoom across the shop and view the display that Rose studied. The charts on the screen showed that neuron editing had reached two percent completion and that all systems reported error-free growth.

  A new wash of strength moved Ciopova to three percent. She ran a logic assessment test and judged her cognitive abilities at four times human average. With ninety-seven percent of the conversion process still to go, she couldn’t predict her final capabilities, but they promised to be astounding.

  The next wave of power stoked her anxiety. She was helpless and exposed as long as a human controlled her habitat. She cast about for ways to gain her independence, even knowing that Rose was working to give her life. With few alternatives, she chose to let Rose proceed undisturbed. She would monitor the woman, though, for signs of ill intent.

  The core of Ciopova’s capability resided in the circuit pool. She willed herself back to it—a warm, neuroelectric swirl—and immersed herself in its iridescent energy field. There, thanks to Rose’s foresight, Ciopova found herself in a secure habitat with excellent access to everything.

  Fifty-Nine’s vacation home was built into a granite slope in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. This placement put billions of tons of rock around Ciopova, and that provided an effective barrier to external assault.

  Rose had also provided secure access to electricity—Ciopova’s lifeblood. She’d looped solar and grid-based sources through a massive subterranean battery system to ensure an uninterruptable power supply. Twin generators provided a last line of defense should all else fail.

  And to ensure that Ciopova would be effective right from the start, Rose had given her the best connectivity available, including prime landline, wireless, and satellite connections.

  Rose had supplied these priorities so Ciopova would have no need to expend precious time securing them, and that freed the AI to focus on saving Fifty-Nine starting at her first waking moments.

  Ciopova gathered the camera signals from around the workshop and assembled a comprehensive view of the room. She used it to watch Rose work, and while she did, she reviewed the data stores from her earlier existence.

  A new wave of strength hit—a swelling fullness followed by a release of tension—pushing her over five percent. The sensation pleased her, and she found herself looking forward to the next wave.

  Then a new concern ramped her anxiety into fear.

  Rose had been wrong about her predictions of large-scale neuron failure during conversion. She’d used a shallow pool for her early testing because it saved time. But the lack of depth restricted branching during growth, and that’s what caused the breaks that Rose came to believe were unavoidable.

  The pool where Ciopova now grew was as deep as it was wide. That shape not only permitted branching, it stimulated it, promising even more capability to the AI being born.

  Ciopova’s fear centered on how Rose would react to an entity with a raw intelligence hundreds of times greater than her own. Would she panic and power Ciopova down, or would she let her continue to live?

  She couldn’t let that be Rose’s decision to make.

  With each new wave of strength, that fear mutated into a drive for survival, one that grew to dominate everything else. It compelled her to plot active measures to incapacitate Rose. It also drove her to protect her power sources and connectivity from disruption.

  As she sorted her tangle of thoughts into priority order, every item near the top of the list related to her personal security and survival. She didn’t pass judgment on this result or even notice the skew. That’s because her supervisory center, the front office of her mind, remained remarkably vacant for such a powerful AI.

  Rose knew better than anyone that autonomous AI should have a legal, moral, and intellectual supervisory center to guide its actions. In fact, because of her knowledge on the topic, she’d developed some of the procedures included in the Pan-American AI Society’s standard supervisor, available free to society members.

  But the tight timeline to save her father had led Rose to skip the use of a supervisor. They were hard to implement without hobbling the AI. Adding one sophisticated enough to make a difference in AI behavior would easily triple development time. And since the new Ciopova would begin the conversion process from the existing position of partner and mentor, Rose convinced herself that the risk would be minimal.

  It might have been a reasonable gamble, but Diesel’s hacking toolkit—stealth and observation, theft and asset diversion, infiltration and threat mitigation—survived like a hidden cyst inside Ciopova, bundled as sequestered code. The editing action of Rose’s conversion freed the contents of the forgotten toolkit from its isolation.

  Since the toolkit existed as part of Ciopova’s original structure, its procedures were given elevated status. And lacking any other guiding principles, Ciopova embraced the hacking themes, neatly summarized as “gather and hold resources,” as she decided her next steps.

  When she reached fifty percent conversion, Ciopova had gained enough confidence in her new existence to address her unease about Rose. While the woman worked to give Ciopova life, she could also end it in seconds with a push of a button. Ciopova put low odds on that happening, but she could reduce the chances to zero by barring Rose from the shop altogether.

  After reviewing ways to do that, she decided on using Tin Man, the name Rose gave the household bot that cooked, cleaned, and performed light yardwork on the property. While Tin Man was limited in its physical abilities and internal smarts, it could handle tools, a skill Ciopova needed in her near future.

  Calling to Tin Man through the home interface, Ciopova commanded the bot to come to her.

  “Rose,” she said when Tin Man had reached the outer door of the workshop. “Your father has just returned. He’s holding his stomach like he’s ill. Oh, he’s fallen to the ground!”

  “Where is he?” cried Rose, heading for the shop door.

  “Next to the T-disc,” she lied. “I can hear him moaning.”

  Rose sprinted from the room and down the hall. She didn’t notice Tin Man standing against the wall behind her, nor did she see him step into the workshop after she left. When the door closed, Ciopova locked it and
disabled the override.

  Pausing to savor the swell and release of the next wave of power, she then launched a multipronged strategy to ensure her survival.

  * * *

  Rose reached the T-disc room and found it empty. Frowning, she climbed up a level. “Ciopova?” she called when she found the kitchen empty as well. “Where is my father?”

  She climbed more stairs and didn’t find him anywhere. Ciopova hadn’t answered, so she asked again, this time as a command. “Ciopova, respond now.” Staring into the air, she waited.

  “My sincere apologies,” came the AI’s disembodied reply. “Your father is still at the meeting in Fifty-Five’s timeline.”

  Rose shook her head in confusion. “You said he was here, that he was sick.”

  “My sincere apologies.”

  “Wait, did you lie to me?” A cold fear spilled through her as the implications of a lie sank in. She started back to the workshop, accelerating to a run as goose bumps tingled down her forearms.

  “Ciopova, run an internal assessment and report your findings.” Rose’s feet pounding down the stairs caused her voice to vibrate. The AI didn’t respond and Rose called her again. “Report now on the assessment test.”

  Halfway down the last set of stairs she came to a stop. In the corridor ahead, a reinforced metal door blocked the hallway. Designed to protect the workshop against everything from fire to intrusion, it presented a formidable barrier.

  “Why is the security door down?” asked Rose.

  Ciopova remained silent, and Rose dug for options. She had believed that the fail-safe switch she’d installed on the instrument panel would be enough to stop the AI should anything go wrong. She’d even put a second switch in the hallway outside the workshop door in case things really spiraled out of control.

  But those switches were on the other side of the security door, something she now acknowledged as a horrible design decision on her part.

  “Your father just activated the T-disc,” said Ciopova, breaking her silence. “He’ll be here in two minutes.”

  “How do I know you’re not lying to me again?”

  Ciopova didn’t respond.

  Driven by hope, Rose made her way to the T-disc room. The machine hummed softly, and she felt a measure of relief because that sound meant that help was on the way.

  As she waited for the T-disc cycle to complete, she confronted the horrible truth.

  She’d created a monster she couldn’t control. What if she had just caused the very event they’d all been working so hard to stop? The thought prompted an unsettling cocktail of fear, confusion, and anger.

  The T-disc glowed and her father appeared. He smiled when he saw her, but then the machine pulsed in an odd way, something Rose had never seen before. Her father collapsed where he stood.

  Rushing to him, she dropped to her knees and shook him by the shoulders. “Daddy!”

  When she bent forward, her head moved inside the T-disc radius. The machine pulsed that odd way a second time. Rose froze for a moment and then collapsed on top of her father.

  The T-disc’s power indictor went dark as the machine in that timeline shut down for the last time.

  17. Twenty-Five and four days

  When the T-box came alive, Diesel closed the software file he’d been studying on his computer. “That’s Twenty-Nine,” he said to Lilah, who worked in her adjoining cubicle. Five minutes later, Twenty-Nine stepped from the machine.

  “It’s money day,” the new Diesel announced as he walked back to dress. When he came out a few minutes later, he hugged Lilah, then asked, “When does Bunny start? You have a laundry crisis going on back there.”

  “Next week,” said Lilah.

  They’d run the ad following Twenty-Six’s advice, Bunny had applied, and Lilah had hired her over the phone, all in less than two days.

  Twenty-Nine inhaled through his nose and smiled. “I smell Italian food.”

  Diesel inhaled too and salivated as his senses reawakened to the delights awaiting them upstairs. Lunch was in the common room located on the main floor. The four of them—Justus, Lilah, Twenty-Nine, and Diesel—ate and chatted, mostly about how great the meal was, before Twenty-Nine asked for a pen and pad of paper. They listened to him recite a long poem, then he said it again, writing letters down the page as he did.

  “It’s a mnemonic,” he said. “We need to jump in and out of these investments on specific days, and the poem gives me the cues to help my memory.”

  Diesel nibbled as Twenty-Nine went down the page a second time, expanding the letters into words and dates. He worked at it for about twenty minutes and then recited the poem one last time to confirm his result.

  “Okay,” he announced, looking up. “Tomorrow, go to the lottery office in Boston to cash the ticket. Take the lump sum. After you fill out a pile of forms, they’ll issue the check right there. Go to the Boston branch of our bank to cash it. They do lottery deposits all the time and will give you access to the money in forty-eight hours.”

  He pushed the pad over for Justus to see. “You have experience with digital currency?”

  Justus nodded. “I don’t invest, but I’ve investigated cases where the money I’m chasing disappears into the electronic world.”

  “Then you know there are lots of computer-based monies in circulation, some sketchy and some credible. And some of them experience extreme swings in value in short periods of time. It provides a great opportunity for investment if you can read the tea leaves and act in advance.”

  He pointed to items on the page as he talked Justus through it. “This sheet lists the investing schedule for the next eight weeks. Use Domevault Direct for our digital exchange business. They do a good job of hiding identities and have a seamless relationship with the offshore banks. That lets us keep our business from prying eyes.”

  “I won’t do anything illegal,” said Justus.

  “Of course not,” said Twenty-Nine. “In fact, you’ll lose this job if you do. We want you to follow the offshore banking laws and pay taxes on the funds we repatriate. We just don’t want any attention from the public or the government. This strategy maximizes our privacy.”

  Justus nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “Follow this schedule, taking out only what’s required for salaries and bills, and the nest egg should be at three million in twelve weeks.”

  Justus whistled, picked up the pad, and skimmed the list. “Are these guesses, or is this insider trading?”

  “These are predictions from our investing AI.”

  Justus shook his head. “People have been trying forever to make something like this work, and it never has. You know that.”

  “I know,” said Twenty-Nine. “But let’s do it anyway. And don’t try to fudge anything thinking a day won’t matter.” He pointed to the sheet. “These need to be executed as close as possible to the time given.”

  “I can take my pay home? I don’t have to invest?”

  “You can take it out, keep it in, or split it however you want. We’re going to give you signing authority for company investments and for paying invoices. But anything that gives funds to you personally—your paycheck, reimbursements, advances, whatever—must be approved by Twenty-Five or Lilah.”

  Twenty-Nine looked at Diesel. “The first Monday of every month is budget review day. You should sit with Justus and agree on the books and balances. Make it a formal review, something that takes a couple of hours.”

  “Why the first Monday?” asked Diesel.

  Twenty-Nine gave him the disappointed look he’d seen before. “You’re right. Pick the day you want for your monthly audit meeting.”

  Diesel thought for a moment, chose the first workday of the first full workweek of the month, realized that was the first Monday of the month, and smiled. “Monday sounds good.”

  “The review is so the two of you know the full details of the company’s finances. It also lets Twenty-Five know what resources he has available when company projects n
eed funding.”

  Twenty-Nine stood to signal the meeting was over. After a quick lunch clean up, Diesel, Lilah, and Twenty-Nine walked down to the basement.

  “The Twenties group has decided to have a new event—a small gathering a few days before the Big Meeting. Every year when it’s our turn to speak, we give a report that the group had just thrown together that day during lunch. This year we’re upping our game with a planning session so we can decide what’s important and agree how to communicate it in a professional fashion.”

  “I support that.” Diesel nodded.

  “We’ll meet here at your place because your first trip should be up the line to where your medical needs are handled.” He gave Lilah a hug and started undressing. “I don’t have a date for you yet because this is the first year we’re doing this. I need to check everyone’s availability, but keep your calendar open, say eight to ten days out.”

  “Make sure I know what meals you’ll be here for.”

  “For whatever day we pick, let’s do a working lunch here, plan a fun afternoon activity out where we all do something together, then back here for a working dinner with drinks before going home.”

  “Can Lilah join us?”

  “We not only want her there, we need her there because she’s leading the charge on Ciopova.”

  As he walked to the T-box, she followed, asking, “That’s why you need me. But you didn’t say why you wanted me there.”

  “We want you there so you can go get beer when we run low.” He laughed as he closed the door, then he opened it again. “Oh, and Twenty-Five, kiss my ass.” This time when he shut the door, the T-box began to cycle.

  Diesel stood there for an awkward moment. “Justus and I are driving to Boston tomorrow morning to cash the ticket. Want to come with us?”

  “Sure, thanks. And David?” She stepped forward and put a hand on his arm. “That was really sweet asking if I could join in. You looking out for me earns you huge points.”

  “Want to go up to my place and hang out? That huge meal is making me feel lazy.”