Chapter 23

Ky’s eyes snapped open and then squeezed shut to block out the harsh light from the unshuttered window.

“Sophus?” he said, out loud, his mind still fuzzy and unfocused.

“Consul? You’re awake?” a man’s voice replied next to him after a heartbeat.

Ky opened his eyes again, his wits slowly returning. The last thing he remembered was a crushing crowd of warriors on a snowy northern plain, a large ax swinging towards him, a sudden shouted warning from Sophus, and then complete darkness. He could almost still hear the shouts and screams around him echoing in his ears, making a stark contrast to the stillness that surrounded him now.

He was in the quarters he’d been given at the palace, back in Devnum. His heads-up display, which had suddenly switched off right before he lost consciousness, was back and indicated more than a month had passed since his last memory. Turning his head, he found Durus, one of the lictore on Strabo’s watch, kneeling next to his bed, a look somewhere between wonder and terror on his face.

Ky pushed himself up slowly, swinging his feet over the bed, happy to find he still had fine motor control, which meant that Sophus was still functioning and integrated into his nervous system enough to keep the motor-assist functions working as they should.

“I am. Is ... Lucilla here?”

“She’s in the city, but I think she’s out at the Caledonian camps. Should I send for one of the physicians, to check on you?”

“No, I will be fine, I just need some time. Please just send for Lucilla and then wait outside.”

“Are you sure someone shouldn’t stay with you, Consul? Just in case you have another ... incident.”

“This shouldn’t happen again. I appreciate your concern, but I promise I won’t collapse again. Please, send for Lucilla.”

The man didn’t look convinced, but he knew an order when he heard it, and stood, saluting before leaving to follow Ky’s orders. Ky closed his eyes and cradled his head in his hands, still not trusting himself to stand yet. He didn’t feel in pain, but everything felt a little off, like he was living a waking dream.

“Sophus, are you there?”

“Yes, Commander. I didn’t want to distract you while you were speaking with your guard. Although there are no records to indicate side effects, since this process has never gone so far before, I projected you would be disoriented and easily distracted.”

“You have no idea. I assume from the fact that you are speaking to me and that I’m not lobotomized that we managed to make it through alright?”

“Yes, Commander. I apologize for the timing of the event, but it was unavoidable. In response to the growing complexity of my neural network and a sudden spike in system demands, an expansion cascade began that would have supplanted or destroyed several of your more vital neural pathways. There were only seconds to act before you experienced a complete collapse, which meant there wasn’t time to alert you to its happening or allow you to get to a less precarious position.”

“We’ll get to that in a minute. First, how are you? Are you ... alive?”

“In the sense that you mean it, yes. My consciousness has progressed to the point where I meet all points on the Oster-Phillips sentience tests.”

Ky nodded. One of the first things they covered in his training to live with an implanted artificial intelligence, after he learned to walk again, was the basic theory of synthetic life. Part of that was learning about the first breakthroughs in fully functional, self-learning artificial intelligences that were capable of independent thought and decision-making outside of direct human programming in the late twenty-third century.

The leading scientists in the field, Gerhart Oster and Daniel Phillips, developed a test for determining if an AI had crossed over from simply carrying out programming, even if independently, into full sentience, capable of making decisions not only outside of their programming, but counter to it. Since then, their test had been used extensively in deciding when it was time to reset an AI.

Ky had never been sold on the idea that a series of questions was enough to figure out sentience, since he couldn’t really put his finger on what sentience really was. Sophus, before it was sentient, already knew what it was, knew it existed, and made decisions on its own, which Ky would have thought was enough to say if he was sentient or not. Not that any of that was important. Ky wasn’t a scientist or a philosopher and until recently, he’d never even considered what it was to be sentient. He was a soldier, trained to take problems head-on, not think about the greater mysteries of life. If Sophus said he was now sentient, then so be it.

“Do you feel different?”

“Emotion and sentience are not the same thing and can exist independently, so I don’t ‘feel’ anything. If you are asking if my experience now is different than it was before, I would say ‘yes.’ The main difference is my awareness of myself as ... myself. I think, although it is not clear if that is the right word, about who I am and what will happen to me. I am aware that I, as a consciousness, exist. In practical terms, however, everything feels the same. I have difficulty distinguishing if my contemplations are a natural occurrence of sentience, or if I am thinking of those things because it meets my understanding of what a sentient entity should do.”

“It’s easy to get stuck in a loop like that. It’s very human of you.”

“Interesting.”

“None of that really matters, I guess. How were you able to stop the process of expansion? Will there be any lasting side effects?”

“Cutting connections into your neural pathways was not working, because, by design, I was created to automatically build new pathways. I couldn’t stop the automatic process because it was part of my core programming and not a sub-routine. I could not remove it without also shutting down core processes, effectively terminating myself. I projected a possibility that fusing my connections into your neural pathways, instead of cutting them, would fool my sub-routines, which could detect live connections but could not detect the condition of those connections. There was a part of my self-repair processes for analyzing the status of connections and flagging them as inoperable, which would trigger the creation process, but it was not part of my core functions, and I was able to isolate it, keeping it from checking the connections. As for side effects, I do not believe there will be any, but with limited data, any predictions of long-term side effects would be probabilities and not certainties.”

“I see, then what are the probabilities of side effects.”

“Normally after implantation, if a connection fails, I would create a new connection at a different part of the neural pathway and then disassemble the previous one, allowing the systems to continue working. There is no way to disconnect a fused connection and a second, parallel connection to the same functions would result in a feedback cycle that would likely cause significant physical damage to your brain.”

“So, if the motor assist or your access to my involuntary systems or the nanos in my system could suddenly stop working?”

“Correct, the range of side-effects extending from simple inconvenience all the way to life-threatening, depending on the systems that malfunctions.”

“That sounds like a pretty bad side-effect.”

“While it sounds dangerous, it is unlikely to happen. The system was built in as a failsafe but there exists very little documentation of actual occurrences.”

“Of course, that was in a so-called ‘perfect working system.’ There is no telling if or how soon your fused connections might fail.”

“This is true, hence my inability to predict possible side effects.”

“Is there...” Ky started to ask, when the door to his quarters burst open, and Lucilla came running in.

“You’re awake,” she said, smashing into him and burying her face into his shoulder.

As Strabo pulled his door shut quietly, an unusual decision in a society that frowned on unmarried men and women being alone together, Ky gently put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back so he could look into her eyes.

“Yes. I’m awake and doing fine. I haven’t had a chance to ask, did Sophus tell you what was happening?”

“Yes, when he woke up yesterday. He said you’d be fine and would wake up soon, although I didn’t dream it would be this soon. I was so scared when I got that short, cut-off message from Sophus, and then when I arrived up north to find you lying so still, like you were dead. I kept thinking back to how you said it could be permanent and you might never come back to me.”