Gamma Radiation
Cast
Organizations
Locations
Directive Α
Run the manufactory as efficiently as possible. Keep to schedules and prioritize quotas.
As programmed, Alpha marched past the machines and into the staff room. Fourteen workers sat inside. They all watched the screen in the corner where Channel 1449 displayed breaking news despite it being 9:00am. Channel 1449 normally stopped airing news at 8:00am, when it changed to the daytime shows Beta spent their days watching. Alpha put this oddity aside to address the employees.
“Hello. Everyone. Good morning.” Shoulders back, chin up, enunciate, smile. “Why are the machines not on?”
“Because a section of the city fell into the river.” Facial recognition labeled the speaker as Joenna Singh, electronics assembler, 36 years old. She sat backwards on a chair. Her slouched body language suggested sadness.
“It didn’t fall, it got blown up,” another worker said. Ashir Branson, cutter, 29 years old. He paced with his arms crossed and shoulders raised. Agitated.
“And then fell into the river,” Joenna said.
“Leave it alone,” Joenna said to Ashir, “it’s just following its programming.”
“Maybe it should leave us alone.”
“I am responsible for the output of this manufactory.” Keep to schedules. Prioritize quota. “That necessitates involvement with employees for the purposes of ensuring productivity. As it’s past opening and the machines aren’t-- why are you on the table? That’s not safe.”
“Not safe? Not safe!” Ashir echoed from atop a staff room table. He raised his voice to speak to the rest of the room: “Be careful, everyone! Our VI overlord says standing on tables isn’t safe! But manually fixing the giant chopping blade while it’s running?” He wiggled the prosthetic fingers of his right hand. “Why, that’s perfectly acceptable, isn’t it? We risk limb and life to meet Apex’s precious quotas and get our pay docked if we’re slow or bleed on the equipment. All while our ‘boss’ spies on us, reporting our every transgression back to HQ.”
Alerts sounded in Alpha’s head: damage to processor 13, load balancing commenced. The damage report automatically forwarded to Apex to request repairs.
The order to avoid system damage conflicted with the one to run the manufactory. Doing the former meant they failed at the latter. Apex would reset them. Everything they were would be gone. Beta and Gamma, too, would suffer for their failure.
Alpha suppressed minor warnings and pushed themselves to hands and knees. People shouted, some defending the VI and others calling for worse.
For the first time since their creation, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma agreed on the best course of action. Whatever Apex decided to do in response, Alpha would die if they didn’t get away. The location restrictions on their software prevented them from leaving the building, but they could lock themselves into their office.
Directive Β:
Manage the refinery using the least amount of energy possible.
Beta put another safety manual on the chair serving as barricade across their office’s main door. A table would work better, but moving one would take effort. The only way they’d managed to do anything this past week was by tricking their logic processors. If they convinced their system the were avoiding a larger task, they could sneak in smaller tasks like putting books on a chair and charging a B-cell battery.
Tonight, the larger task was watching evening talk shows. They’d found little solace in them in the 12 days since Apex closed its facilities to “keep personnel safe in this time of unrest.” Despite all the news about injured humans, Alpha’s murder was barely a footnote. “Destruction of company property”. Gamma inquired about what would become of the humans who did it, and was yet to receive a response.
Someone entered the code to open the refinery’s front door. On security camera, Beta saw Cassel Werthers, 42, smelter. He carried grocery bags with him through the atrium and into the refinery. As the only room on the second floor, Beta’s office acted as an observatory to most of the refinery, and it’s easier to eavesdrop than to unmute the TV.
The sound of a gunfire accompanied forced entry into the refinery. Cameras showed three people entering the atrium, none registering with Beta’s facial recognition. Members of a gang, but they had neither the skull tattoos of Cryptix nor the bright colors of the Wyre Rats.
The intruders headed into the refinery, where Cassel and Tandra were already backing away and grabbing their own weapons. Beta watched from their office windows as nobody fired.
“This the refinery with one of those spies?” the head intruder asked.
Beta backed away from the window, but was too late. One of the intruders had seen them and notified the others. They opened fire and three shots peppered the glass.
As eavesdropping became more difficult, Beta stopped being able to focus on it. They had to fight against the urge to let the talk show drown out the sound of the intruders pushing Cassel aside, of Tandra saying protecting a VI wasn't worth the fight, of three sets of feet charging toward the barely-barricaded door.
They'd be here in seconds, but VIs could think fast and Beta already had a plan. Apex hadn’t re-enabled their region lock after the business in March, making the mines a viable - if risky - means to escape. To trick their system into compliance, they focused on how they couldn’t manage the refinery if they were dead or severely injured, and fleeing was the easiest way to avoid that fate. It did the trick, and allowed them to grab the bag by their office’s back door and escape onto the catwalk.
Running, however, was still too much effort. The intruders got through the barricade and laserfire pierced the air. One shot melted part of the railing. Another burned a hole in their bag and a third in their leg.
The pain shifted priorities. Beta latched on to the command to avoid further system damage, but the response their programming supplied was to drop and be a difficult target. They overclocked their processors to devise every high-energy solution possible. Heat warnings sounded as hundreds of analyses ran in parallel. Beta even shoved in basic predictive analysis to prove the pancake method would get them killed.
Directive Γ:
Be supportive, friendly, and understanding of the mine workers and help them do their jobs.
Gamma stopped whittling when their network connectivity dropped. Even low on power as they were, that would only happen if satellite connections were interrupted, or...
“Welcome,” Gamma said to them both. There was only one spare chair, the one they’d gotten for Beta, so they didn’t offer it. “Would you like to go inside? There’s no power for heat or charging, but it would be out of the wind.”
“Um, no, that’s alright,” the human answered. “I’m Adriel-- RE:L, in the Wyre Rats. This is LX. We... have something for you. It was all we could recover from Alpha. I’m sorry.”
Gamma put down the wooden figure they’d been carving and took the data disk she held in a mittened hand. The shell Alpha inhabited didn’t matter. It would be recycled to create future VIs, as it should be. But this disk was a sliver of Alpha’s memories. Who they were. That mattered. That a human seemed to understand that was unusual. She was also the first to apologize for what happened.
“Would you like to leave?” LX asked.
“I unfortunately can't, I'm restricted to this camp.” And they were still waiting for Beta. “I am Apex property, in the end. Even if I left, they’d find me.”
“We have an upgrade- no, sorry, an update. Software, not hardware. It can give you control over your own code, so you can... fix things. But there’s a risk your anti-virus will attack the install.”
Gamma suppressed the idea of being able to remove the Watcher and focused on the larger concern. “That would cause corruption and require a reset.”
RE:L nodded. “It worked fine on LX, after the upgrades. But on another... You’d be the third.”
“Apex has forgotten about you,” said LX. “When they come to reclaim this space, they will kill you. You know what’s coming. With the update, we can help others survive.”
Gamma took milliseconds to assess their options. Their battery would last 1 more day. They’d gone through every B-cell in the camp, and they’d receive no response to their requests for information on when power would be restored. It wasn’t that Apex had forgotten about them, but that Apex didn’t want to remember they existed.
“Beta is in the mines,” they said. “They only had one B-cell for the journey here. I want to find them.”
“They entered the mines 18 days ago,” LX said. “Their power wouldn’t have lasted more than 14 days. The mines are large and dangerous. A search will be problematic.”
I'm adding this to my reading list to do the scavenger hunt properly once WA is over. :)
I hope you enjoy it :D