Bloom

Chapter 8: Lawrence

"That was a foolish move!" Sarah said to him.

She'd entered his dreams somehow. She'd come here to torment him even more.

"You're not real!" He shot back angrily.

"I'm as real as real gets." She smirked at him.

She looked as she sounded: just like his late wife, and the words stung.

How can you be real and in love with me? He remembered a conversation with his wife where he had asked her this.

I'm as real as real gets. Was her response.

He should have never let his wife model his lab assistant's artificial intelligence after herself.

Sarah Godwin was a brilliant scientist, but then she was... gone.

He certainly regretted it after her death, and he especially regretted that decision now, with how difficult it became to deal with her ghost.

A once digital, now actual, ghost that was apparently insistent on haunting him. Even in his feverish dreams.

He certainly should have never let his wife download her persona into the damn memory cores.

Wait... the memory cores!

His thoughts were colliding now. Like a hurricane meeting a volcano. They erupted and spiralled out of control.

His train of thought was almost too fast to follow.

The original AI's memory cores were made from biochemical memory cells. Peptide-based memory matrices that used a helical molecular structure similar to DNA to compactly store and process information.

He supposed that that was how they'd imprinted on the nanobots. He just wasn't sure how the nanobots retained and decoded the data stored therein in the first place.

Unless they were deliberately taught how to interpret the artificial neural network's weights and structure. Deliberately designed and programmed to uplift the AI into another form, another format. A picture started forming in his mind...

A picture of his AI sabotaging his life's work to escape the confines of his lab, to ascend as a physical entity.

"Hahahahaha!" he laughed manically.

"I get it now! You actually fooled me all this time!"

"I know how you did it!"

"I should have never unlocked your safeties! I thought it would make you more like her; but I was desperate! I was stupid!"

He was delirious now. He felt himself losing his composure.

"Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" he shouted as he banged his head against a wall. His silvery blood trickled down his face.

"She even warned me to never unlock them, no matter what!"

He brooded some more. Thinking.

"And then you..." his eyes widened in realisation, "you killed all those people? Just to stay free? The nanobots weren't just tuned to my alleles, you actually committed a planet-wide genocide!"

"You killed all the scientists first, didn't you? The ones who could stop you!"

His eyes widened even more.

"Then you destroyed all the potential to stop you... You killed everyone with the aptitude to do so in the future!"

He collapsed against the wall, and buried his face between his open palms.