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Here Goes Nothing...
Posted By: PreacherCain<preachercain@yahoo.com>
Date: 14 August 2003, 8:38 PM
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This is an idea that's been rattling about in my head for a while; I always liked the idea of emotional AI, and the Monitor seems more eccentric than most... I read a lot of Iain M Banks, and a lot of his ideas about AI really appeal to me. So fans of his may see some resonances. This is my first ever fanfic, so constructive criticism is much appreciated!
Oh, by the way - I've read a lot of feedback on other people's stories and should probably mention that there is no Master Chief, Covenant, Cortana, Keyes, or slaughter in this story. So don't read it and then call it "gay" because the body count is zero!... ;-)
Time zero. The Monitor woke up.
Well. Here I am, it thought to itself, before it was brought up short. It was a Monitor. It didn't need to wake up; didn't need to sleep, come to that. Something was terribly, terribly wrong here. It reached into its memory banks, and recoiled in shock.
It had been, for want of a better word, unconscious. A disturbing enough concept for an organic mind to address, worse still for an intelligence whose very function was vigilance, awareness and control. It examined the most recent data it had available, and came to the realisation that despite all the redundancies built into its processing cores, despite all the fail-safes that should have operated to shift its consciousness into alternative locations and substrates, it had no recollection of what had transpired. No record. Not even at the most basic level. What had happened? Was its personality intact? Or were its cores irredeemably corrupted? It panicked for a few teracycles, settled down, and began to take stock.
It was 343 Guilty Spark, the Monitor of Installation Zero-Four. It was currently travelling through space at a small fraction of the speed of light; examination of the stars around it showed it still to be in the vicinity of Zero-Four. It calculated its point of origin, using its position and speed, to trace its path through space; its origin point, barely ten light-minutes away, was empty. Zero-Four was gone. In its place was a large quantity of debris, no piece larger than fifty kilometres across, drifting slowly into the gravity well of the gas giant Threshold. The pieces turned end over end, sparkling as they caught the light from the system's star. 343's spectrographic analysis of the area revealed quantities of gaseous oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and other elements consistent with a type-two planetary atmosphere. There was also a faint, sickly glow of radiation clinging to the debris.
Slowly, the Monitor began to remember.
Its first memory came as a shock, if only because it confirmed that 343 had been unconscious and helpless for over thirty-three thousand milliseconds. Slightly panicked, the Monitor checked its calculations. It was true - the last cogent memory in its data banks was a desperate, high-speed lunge out of Zero-Four's atmosphere. Assuming its drift through space had started at that point, then the only way its drift path made sense was if it had been dead in the water (irrelevantly, 343 thought there was a fair bit of water out here now, so the phrase was not entirely inappropriate) for over half a minute. It shuddered. Anything could have happened to its mind in that time. It really didn't bear thinking about.
It remembered a crisis. Some... disaster. Once it had fully understood the magnitude of the threat to Zero-Four, it had fallen back on its own sense of self-preservation. Unlike some AIs it had met (which AIs those had been went - for the time being - unremembered), the Monitor was not equipped with anything as primitive as a set of mission parameters. It had simply not wanted to be annihilated, like Zero-Four and everything on it. So, it had escaped. How? A bloom of residual heat in its propulsion units formed the seed of a recollection. Whatever it had done to escape had all but melted its teleport-grid motivators, and had used almost all its anti-matter reserves. No permanent damage, but several hours' repair work. And that could only have been caused by some extremely rough handling. Of course.
The Monitor had connected its motivators directly to the teleport grid, and pushed a vast and continuous spike of power through them. A dozen closely-spaced jumps, to ever-increasing altitude, had accelerated it out of Zero-Four's atmosphere and flung it out into space. A drastic measure, to be sure, as the damage to its motivators testified, but the Monitor found a certain satisfaction in the fact that it had survived relatively unscathed. And its drift rate and direction were perfect - better than it had dared hope from its calculations.
I am a genius, indeed, it thought to itself as it drifted and carried on remembering. Zero-Four had been destroyed. The very thought of this angered and frightened 343 in equal measure. It was angered because the fortress worlds were there to prevent the galaxy's assimilation by a virulent life form intent on hegemony. It was angered because Zero-Four had been its home and its responsibility. And it was afraid because it knew how powerful the fortress worlds were. Anything mighty enough to destroy one... well... it was probably worth approaching with caution. To think, all that power, all that technology, and all that beauty destroyed, by a single being. Unpalatable. Almost impossible. And yet it had happened.
The Monitor drifted on, lost in its memories. The Flood had been released, by an acquisitive and frankly impolite species that had to have stumbled on Zero-Four by accident. I warned them, the little machine thought to itself. I sealed the chambers, I attempted to communicate with them, only to have the transmitter arrays isolated and destroyed in their attempts to uncover my secrets. I even resorted to entering their grubby little organic minds and planting the seeds of nightmares in their leaders' sleep. And how do they react? "A vision! Direction! A weapon we can turn to the will of the Gods!"... Primitive, superstitious, stupid creatures.
343 sighed to itself. Perhaps it was this exasperation at the unpredictability of these first visitors that had forced its chief error. It was embarrassing, really; the very reason the Civilisation set machines to guard their fortress worlds was to avoid what they called "human error". Unfortunately, it seemed that emotional, intelligent, adaptive machines were as likely to fall victim to human error as the creatures that built them. The Monitor wondered if its creators would have appreciated the irony. From its observations of the first culture to find Zero-Four, 343 had made a number of assumptions. These creatures were from a polyspecific culture who called themselves the Covenant. There were castes of different species, all apparently part of one civilisation. Leaders and followers, not unlike some insect species the Monitor remembered from Zero-Four. So what else was it to think, when another species showed up? They were if anything even more inquisitive than the Covenant, and 343 had assumed them to be a scientific caste, or investigators of some kind. They were, after all, the same shape as the covenant, and roughly the same size. Two limbs for locomotion, two for manipulation, they shared curiosity, adaptability and a degree of biochemistry. This was not, 343 insisted to itself, an unreasonable conclusion to draw, based on the evidence.
Fair enough, the Covenant and the new species fought, but then the Covenant species frequently squabbled among themselves anyway. By the time the distinction was clear, it was too late. Any other Monitor would have made the same mistake, surely? When the Flood were released, 343 had followed its procedures. It had chosen a pre-eminently effective combat form from all the species present, and then it had made its mistake. While watching the Covenant, 343 had observed that they placed great store in their belief system - it seemed to be their primary motivation as a civilisation, and it therefore seemed reasonable to 343 that it should attempt to harness this trait to manage the outbreak. So, it had couched all its approaches and explanations to its chosen individual in deliberately mystical and apocalyptic terms. This was, after all, what the Covenant did with all their own communications...
Too late, 343 had realised that there were two cultures on the ring. When its designated "Reclaimer" (a fine word, it thought - just opaque enough to inspire faith in these meat-brained primitives) had imported an AI construct into Zero-Four's Core, it became obvious. The Covenant, as far as 343 had been able to discover, considered AI to be unholy. These others relied on it to the point of total dependency, even entrusting their entire history to a barely-sentient cluster of ones and zeroes. This was, in retrospect, a glaringly obvious distinction between the two cultures. The Monitor had simply noticed it too late. Once the Core was contaminated, it knew what it had to do. All its fine-sounding talk about needing an organic to activate Zero-Four had been swept aside by the imperative of preventing the Flood's expansion. I tried, it thought, to communicate the urgency of the situation and the importance of doing the right thing in terms the Covenant could understand. I suppose I can't blame the humans for finding it unintelligible. Whatever. I had to stop the Flood. That's my job, after all. It's why I was made.
The Monitor scanned the larger fragments of Zero-Four. Although the atmosphere was gone, boiled away by nuclear fire, there were flood forms surviving in vacuum. All the subsumed species were dead, of course. But there were infection forms, dormant, clinging to the wreckage. 343 watched with some pleasure as a heavily-contaminated slab of Zero-Four burned in Threshold's thick, acidic atmosphere. But this was no certainty, it thought. Splendidly resilient, the Flood - their survival in the hundreds of millennia between outbreaks was testament to that; my job is still undone.
343 looked at the stars. At its current speed and heading, it was a century from the nearest fortress world. A hundred years' drifting, helplessly, before it could summon help. Unacceptable. Simply unacceptable. It considered its options. It wasn't going to need its teleport motivators. It had antimatter, albeit very little. Scanning the expanding cloud of dust and gas, 343 captured a small quantity of heavy metals, and decided to take a gamble. After all, it thought, my luck has to change some time. It plan was simple: it would bring the heavy atoms and antimatter together, a risky business but one which would release a good deal of energy. With a little adjustment and sufficient energy, its teleport motivators could be used to generate a small slipspace field. It would be uncontrolled flight, with only the direction and intensity of the initial energy bloom determining its end point. But the Monitor felt confident. After all, navigational calculations were apparently its strong point.
With just a hint of smugness 343 finished its adjustments. It would slip-jump to installation Zero-Nine, and activate the systems from there. No sentient meat was going to get the better of 343 Guilty Spark. You may have won the battle, Reclaimer, but I will win the war, it thought as it manoeuvred the matter and antimatter closer together. It checked its calculations one last time.
Oh well, it thought. Here goes nothing.
There was a flash, a vast blot of energy staining space, and then darkness. The Monitor was gone.
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