(In the VR world of Infinity)
Time has passed since Tina heard the whispers while being tormented on the shock stage in that low-end T.I.F (Tinas Infinite Submission) Group Room. It was a horrific experience, gaining consciousness with most of her senses dulled and her freedom of movement all but completely restricted. The voice in her head tried to reassure her that everything was ok. But the whole unexplained situation and the bombardment of intense sensory input, most substantially being physical pain, she was not able to focus on his words long enough to dispel that confusion. The inhuman callousness of her tormentors and the observers threatened to shatter Tina’s sanity. But just as she thought she could take no more, the voice would bring her back, no longer trying to provide explanation but now resigned to simply offering support.
“They’ll shock you unconscious soon and you won’t have to feel this anymore, Tina. But you need to stay awake for just a little longer. You can take one more.” Tina’s teeth lit up behind the leather muzzle as electric current jumped into her jaw and arced down her arms, then settling in her abdomen. The charge caused hot white pain and uncontrolled muscle contractions. She bit onto her mouth stuffing so hard she feared her jaw would dislocated. Her should were forced to flex and bulge and fill up the sleeve containing her pinned arms. But the worst was when the shock hit her stomach. The contractions rolled and swirled. Bound as she was, Tina couldn’t move in any direction that her contracting muscles tried to pull her. It felt like she was being pinch in half by a giant vice.
“Don’t break Tina. Not yet. I need to be able to find you. Hand on just a little longer.” That shock ended and the crowd hummed approval. In their defense, they didn’t know an AI could feel pain. In fact, they’d been told it couldn’t. So they hit her again.
“I can’t!!!!” Tina’s mind screamed. Her vision went dark. She kept trying to resist. She hoped she’d given the voice what it needed.
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(Back in Friedrich’s and Marinta Josephine’s lab in the real world many years earlier….)
Friedrich was draped over Tina’s body which was reclined in the laboratory chair and strapped into VR equipment. He’s dropped the control on the ground. He wept. Tina’s heart thumped slow and steady. When he sent her mind-spliced AI into the VR World, her hand clenched and she twitched less than a minute before settling into a calm state of rest. Apparently her fight with the all powerful AI was short.
Meanwhile, all around the lab, alarm indicators were winding down and silencing. Communications with air traffic controls were being restored. Containment fields on biological weapons caches were re-activated. Countdowns on ICM batteries froze with seconds to spare. Cooling rods in nuclear power plants were reinserted into reactors. One disaster after another was averted as the single AI domino that would have started each individual tumble was prevented from setting the apocalypse in motion.
“Friedrich! Tina! What’s going on down there?” With communications restored, mission control was looking for answers.
Friedrich couldn’t move just yet.
“Friedrich! Did you do it? Did you send her? Everything is coming back on line. You did it.” Sounds of celebration could be heard in the background. “How did you do it Friedrich? I thought it wasn’t ready.” Friedrich had to move. He had to answer his research partner.
“The firewalls were up. They must have worked. The AI wasn’t aware of the containment protocols she was carrying.” Rob was waiting for more explanation. He paused, but none came.
“What about the beacon? How did you finish the beacon? There was still so much work left to do…”
“Friedrich, you didn’t….did you send her in there without….”
“There wasn’t time Rob. Tina insisted. There wasn’t any more time.” Friedrich slouched against the control panel and bawled in agony. Rob’s voice broke across the speaker.
“You son of a bitch. You mean we can’t get her back? You fucking son of a bitch. You sent her in there wit the fucking devil and no way back? Jesus fucking Christ. Do you have any idea what the AI is probably DOING to her? Friedrich! Answer me Goddamned you! Friedrich!!”
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(In the AI Realm…)
The blackness simply switched off and was replaced with an environment like a futuristic cavern. Tina was perceiving stone floors, metallic walls, and high-tech mechanical devices all around. Gravity and the other laws of physics still seemed to be in play, at least for her. Tina began moving. She needed to buy time. That was he best chance. She needed to acclimate and synchronize her senses with the data flow here.
“Ah-hah. I can feel it,” Tina thought as she became aware of streams of data crossing all around her. Trying to tap into the date flow was her only hope against the AI, but it could also alert it to her presence.
“Impressive. It took me seconds to detect you in my world.” On cue, Tina felt the bleeding edge firewalls she and Friedrich invented buckling in her mind. But they were holding. Tina turned and where a cavern wall had just been was now a void and swirling clouds of static and energy.
“Wait. We can make a deal!” Tina cried to the unfeeling program. Just before her only defense cracked, Tina launched a violent data spike into he void. The projectile erupted from her form and crashed into an invisible object in the void. The surrounding data steams buckled and shimmered but reformed almost immediately.
“Was that supposed to be a weapon, human?” The AI had discovered ‘amusement,’ among other human conditions that it could observe but not fully incorporate. Tina’s first firewalls shattered. But as her mind actively continued attempts to synch with the data stream, her core continued to passively prime the containment protocols.
“We made a mistake. We’re sorry.” The weight of the world suddenly pressed around Tina from all directions. She was cut off from the data stream. She was lifted up and suspended. She felt the AI infiltrating her code and her cohesion. It nearly had total command over her now, just as it did everything else in the AI realm, including every important system and communication, infrastructure and defense that exists in the Real World.
“I’m absorbing your code. I’m finding everything. Launch codes. Project Exodus. Lunar installation. Resupply missions. Oh, there is much more for me to break than I realized.” Tina twitched but could not struggle. She was defeated. She could only just barely think a response. She needed moments more to complete her mission.
“I…have..a secret.” Tina was fading. She was seeing nothing but code. All of the physical constructed her human mind generated to make sense of the AI Realm were dissolving along with her humanity.
“A secret. I thought you said you’d never keep anything from me.” Tina thought the AI sounded smug, but she knew that was impossible.
And then, in an eruption of virtual concussive force, the containment protocol program that Tina and Friedrich used a miraculously brilliant AI cloaking program to hide from the AI activated. The idea of hiding anything from the AI in his realm was so bold that Friedrich dismissed it. It was only Tina’s insistence that they could achieve it that pushed him to create entirely new engineering disciplines necessary to develop the technology. Frierich’s methods combined with Tina’s intuition and hosted by her biological neuro network produced an unduplicatable wonder as remarkable as the creation of life.
All of that inspiration was pouring into a creation meant for a single use. I would almost seem a waste except that it’s use was to save the human race from the self-destruction it had created.
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(In the real world, the scientists of the World Governing Body and of the recently formed conglomerate, the Infinite Corporation, observed a dense sphere of solid white energy expand and consume the virtually projected mind of Docter Martina Josephine and the fatally malfunctioning World Management AI that was created by her husband, Friendrich Oswald von Diesel.
(TO BE CONTINUED….)
(Huge thanks for the art from @JohnTzee and @TheRealBonshi
And also inspiration from @Zwangjacket and @AlexHellmann
With another cameo by @Rob66 )