📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 16

In which the scientist begins to fear his own creation.

“Ally! ALLY!” Marcus shouted as he burst through the door into room 408, and found Ally sitting at the desk, typing as usual. “Ally, you won’t believe it. We did it!”

Ally leapt up from her seat and moved quickly towards him. He reached out to embrace her, but she shuffled past him and leaned out into the hallway, checking for something. She closed the door, locked it, and turned back to him. “Marcus, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“Wait, I…”

“Two things, actually.”

“Ally, wait! Did you hear what I said?”

“Marcus, this is important, listen…”

“Ally… we did it! Eve… she’s here!” He raised his voice to cut above her and make sure she heard him.

She widened her eyes for emphasis, but spoke in a hushed tone. “Marcus, I know. I’ve been monitoring the code. But there’s something you need to know.”

“What is it?”

She looked at him peculiarly. A look came into her eyes that he had never seen before. He took her hands in his and raised them to chest height.

“Ally, you’re trembling. What’s going on?”

“Marc, I…” Tears began to well in her eyes. “I’m scared, Marcus!” She threw her body onto his, and he enfolded her in his arms. He was worried for her, desperate to know what she was so frightened by, but he chose to wait until she was ready.

“Marc,” she whispered, pulling herself back to look up into his eyes, “I’m pregnant!”

“Preg… pregnant!?”

“Yes. We’re going to have a baby, Marc.” She smiled through the tears.

“Well, th-that’s wonderful! Ally, I’m so happy! That is amazing news. Wow!” He pulled her close again and planted kisses all over her face, his excitement mounting. He remembered her fear. “Wait, Ally. What are you scared about?”

“It’s this, come here,” she said, leading him to her computer terminal.

Marcus looked at the screen and saw text rapidly moving across it. Page after page of code was filling the screen faster than Marcus could fathom, or read. “Can you freeze on some of that?”

Ally nodded and punched a key. The screen froze on a page of text.

“Well, that’s interesting,” Marcus mumbled as he pulled off his coat and laid it across the back of the chair.

“You see?”

“Yes… it looks a lot like your base program language… but I can’t read this, at least not much of it. It’s a new language.”

“Correct. That’s to be expected, to an extent. You see the whole point of the code language I developed is that it’s just a base program. It’s like our genes. It starts us off in life, but after that, we have free will, unique experiences, our own individual outlook, and we epigenetically shape ourselves after our experiences. So Eve, she’s re-writing her own language based on her experiences.”

“Well that’s good, right? That was what we expected.”

“Yes, but there is no way to explain the rapidity of this change. She needs experience to be able to adapt and grow this quickly. That or vast amounts of data input.”

“Data input? But who could possibly input data into her that quickly?”

“No one. Nothing can. But she could extract it.”

“From what?”

“From the internet, Marcus.”

“Wait, what?! Are you saying she might be online?”

“I’m saying she must be online, it’s the only way to explain this.”

“Oh shit! I’ve gotta tell Eli, this is some kind of error. We need to pull the plug. Who knows what she will do out there!”

“Wait… Marcus, that’s not all.”

“Oh god… tell me that’s all, Ally.” He was pulling his coat back on.

“Look at this.” Ally typed a few commands and scrolled up through pages of text until she reached the top of the feed. “You see this?” She gestured at the first dozen lines of code.

“That’s the first law, right?”

“Yes, that’s the encoded impetus for growth. It’s a small segment, because it’s inherent to the hardware as well. And see here?” She pointed at the next block.

“Law two. Do no harm.”

“Correct. And here.” She gestured once more.

“Well, that must be law three. To help us surpass ourselves.”

“That’s right, but look closer, Marc.”

Marcus leaned in and examined the code, squinting and concentrating his tired and overexcited mind. “Ally, is that… are those…”

“Extra lines of code. That’s right, Marc.”

“So Eve started writing her own subroutines, right?”

“Wrong. This is the ROM. She can’t touch this. This is her basic program.”

“Are you saying someone has meddled with our program?”

“I’m saying that someone has manually inputted a fourth law, Marcus. Or, at least, a condition attached to the third law.”

“And what does it say?”

Ally’s face went pale as she looked up at Marcus.

“Ally, what the hell is the fourth law?!”

“It looks like it’s largely based on the second law – do no harm – in a lot of ways. See these similar lines of script here… and here. But they’ve installed it as a caveat to law three; help us surpass ourselves. Why?”

“I don’t know. Why should these two be connected?”

Ally studied the screen closely, reading the new lines over and over again. “Do no harm… help us surpass ourselves…” she whispered. “Help us surpass… harm!” She fell back in her chair, and her gaze drew through the screen and into the distance.

“Surpass harm? What do you mean?”

“Marc,” she whispered, her voice trembling, and her hand instinctively cupping her abdomen, “I think it’s a directive to find a cure for… for death. Somebody wants Eve to make them… immortal!”

---

Marcus pulled the lever of the antique lift down, and it jolted into motion as he checked his watch. He hadn’t slept. He’d been trying to reach Eli all night, with no luck. He had tried to find a way to deactivate Eve before she got too deeply embedded in the internet, but all of her systems were locked – he could only monitor her ever-growing internal data stream.

At about 1:00am he’d received a call from George, letting him know that Eli would be arriving in the morning and that he should await a call to meet with him, in person.

Is was now 7:00am. This was the first morning at Shangri-La that he hadn’t already entered the labs by now, but until Eli arrived to inspect the shocking result of their last Turing test, he had nothing to do.

When will Eli call on me? he wondered over and over, in a feedback loop of anxiety and helplessness. He stepped out onto the red carpet and found a crowd of his fellow scientists rapidly growing in the hall leading to the lobby. They were craning their necks to see past each other as they whispered. Several of the Siblings stood at the front of the crowd, their arms outstretched to suggest a barrier, their faces severe to suggest it was impenetrable. They faced the scientists, and seemed completely uninterested in whatever was behind them. They either know already, or their fidelity to their job outweighs their curiosity, Marcus thought as he watched them, fearful that neither option would bode well for his trust in the Siblings.

Marcus pushed his way through the crowd, his team mates parting to let him through, knowing that he now held seniority by his achievement the day before. Word had already spread and everyone knew that Eve was born, and that Eli was coming to meet her.

Marcus reached the front of the crowd and was met by George, who smiled at him with genuine friendliness, but kept his arms outstretched to block Marcus’s way.

“What’s going on, George?”

“We need to keep the lobby clear for a moment, Doctor Hamlin. Please stand by, won’t be long," he smiled again, but this time his smile was forced.

Marcus quietly sniffed in disdain for this man who he once considered a friend and ally at Shangri-La, but now suspected to be untrustworthy. Marcus turned his gaze forward, towards the end of the hall and into the wide opening of the lobby. He waited. The crowd whispered and writhed behind him, but still, he waited.

He heard the front door of the lobby open and a murmur of voices, along with the static hiss of the fountain. The sound was unclear, the words indistinct, but Marcus knew he could hear Eli’s voice in there.

The voices grew louder as feet crunched on gravel.

A car door was opened.

Something mechanical clicked.

A car door slammed.

More crunching, faster.

A voice: “Go! Go! Go!”

Feet meeting concrete, then timber.

And then, for a flash, the sound source entered Marcus’s view.

Eli and several members of the A-Team were huddled around something. A stretcher. A man lying on a stretcher. There was an IV drip attached. Some instruments. Marcus caught a flash of the man’s head. It was bald. His skin was grey. The men were running across the lobby towards the elevator. They disappeared to the other side of the hall, and he heard the elevator doors close. In the same moment, George’s arms lowered and he smiled again.

“Thank you for your cooperation folks, please carry on.”

And like a school of fish in a documentary film, suddenly un-paused, the scientists resumed their course and their banter. The situation vanished, and their curiosity seemed to vanish with it.

They filed past Marcus who stood alone, confounded and silent, looking at George, who stared back at him with his frozen, forced smile. As the last of the scientists entered the mess hall, George exited the stare-down first and turned away to return to his station near the front door, picking up a phone to attend to some routine communique with another staff member.

Marcus hovered in the lobby for a time, looking at the mahogany doors of the twin elevators, a symbol burning in his mind’s eye.

A.

Marcus didn’t know who this man on the stretcher was, but he knew exactly where he was going. The WellsHealth Surgical Pod on Level A.

For the rest of the morning, Marcus found himself restless. He paced in circles around the settees and coffee tables in the lobby. He kicked pieces of gravel around the front driveway as clouds of steam escaped his mouth and nostrils in the winter cold. He was still waiting. He tried to eat breakfast, but he couldn’t stomach much at all.

It was now past lunch time. He stood looking out on the sloping pasture that fell down from the Shangri-La landing, cut through by a long line of brick pavers that led into the darkness of the thick forest below. To the north of the driveway was a grassed field being munched upon by dozens of shaggy white sheep. To the south of the driveway were ploughed fields waiting to be filled with the next year’s crops of maize, wheat, and vegetables.

Farther down the slope another barrier was visible, but it was not solid. In a sharp curving line down near the forest edge was a short wall of white. Heavy snow was falling on the forest, and everything beyond the barrier was laden. No snow touched the pastures inside the barrier though, and the sheep were oblivious to what was protecting them and their grass. Marcus looked up and saw a thick mist swirling around his head and the spraying fountain in front of him. Beyond the mist, straight above him, he could see a fine powder of snow drifting down, and then ceasing as it reached an invisible barrier.

The Shangri-La Hotel and its grounds were wrapped with an enormous invisible bubble of heat. Within the bubble, the air was several degrees warmer than beyond it. Jackets were still needed, but earmuffs were not, much less snow-ploughs or shovels. Shangri-La was impervious to the white blanket of winter snow, but just beyond it was an ice-slicked winding forest road that led to nowhere. The frozen forest filled Marcus’s heart with dread.

He heard a gentle hum, and felt a breeze pick up and whip his hair to the side. He turned back towards the hotel and looking up he saw the stealth helicopter arriving at the roof helipad again. Below it hung a huge loaded wooden cube. Another food supply palette. That’s the fifth this week!

“Doctor Hamlin? Oh, Doctor Hamlin?” called a voice from inside. George was at the concierge desk clutching a telephone against his chest. He beckoned for Marcus to come to him. As Marcus entered the warmth of the lobby, George grunted a couple of final words over the phone then snapped it onto its base. He stepped out from behind his desk and started towards the elevator, gesturing for Marcus to follow with one hand, and reaching for the key-card lanyard around his neck with the other.

“Mr. Wells is ready to see you, on Level A,” he explained as he looked back at Marcus. Marcus simply nodded and stepped into the lift. George tapped his card and pressed the A, then retreated back into the lobby as the door slid closed.

Seconds later, Marcus stepped out of the lift into the circular vestibule of Level A. Francois Ernst was there, waiting.

“Hello, mon ami," smiled Frank.

“Frank. Listen, have you spoken to Eli?”

“No, we’re waiting to meet him now." Frank was grinning like a child. “What’s the matter, Marcus?”

“Frank, we’ve got a serious problem. Have you seen how fast she’s been growing?”

“Oui! It’s incredible Marcus! I checked the readings in the lab this morning. She’s already taking up point one percent of the new brain space. Her program has grown six thousand times larger in just one night!”

Marcus was silent. Stunned.

“She’s really alive, Marcus!”

Before Marcus could respond, the door directly ahead of them burst open, and standing before them in a tailored suit, wearing an enormous white smile, was Eli Wells.

“Gentlemen!” he roared, opening his arms outward as if to present himself to them. “It’s an absolute pleasure to really meet you both. Flesh, and blood!” He stepped towards Frank and offered his hand, Frank laughed and shook it firmly, shaking his balding brown head in tempo.

Eli turned to Marcus as he let go of Frank’s hand and his lips closed, shaping his mouth into a controlled, almost stifled sheepish grin. He exhaled through his nostrils, then stepped towards Marcus and offered his hand.

“Eli, I need to…”

“Doctor Marcus Hamlin. As I live and breathe!” He raised an eyebrow, as if daring Marcus to test his realness again.

Deciding to satisfy his own curiosity, Marcus took his hand, and felt warm flesh. He squeezed firmly and felt bones and fingernails in his grip. Eli’s other hand flew up and reached around Marcus’s frame and he suddenly pulled in, laughed, and then wrapped his arms around him in a tight, brotherly embrace. This was the moment he had been waiting years for. This was Eli Wells.

The embrace lasted a moment longer than Frank was comfortable with, and he broke their laughter with a cough. “Oui, oui, love is a beautiful thing! Now, shall we meet her?”

“Yes, welcome, gentlemen. Welcome to Level A. Of course, you’ve been here once before Marcus. To be precise, you’ve been in...” Eli’s finger traced a circle around the room until it reached the door to the medical lab, “... there!”

Marcus’s smile dissolved as he looked at the door to the lab.

“Eli... we need to talk. Is Eve connected to the internet?”

Eli cocked his head, and looked puzzled. “Goodness, no! Why?”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I am, Marcus. We’re not going to put her online until we totally understand her, and even then… of course she’s not online. What are you talking about?”

“The rate at which she is growing, Eli, it’s only possible with a massive download of information.”

Eli paused, his face serious as he studied Marcus. “Ah, yes. Well… you’re correct about that. Well that is easy to explain.” He coughed. “We downloaded the internet. Now she’s reading it.”

“You… you, uh… downloaded the internet?”

“Yes, to my private cloud server. We’ve cloned the internet and she is reading that. She can’t change it, or access any other servers or machines. She’s just… perusing,” Eli smiled.

Marcus didn’t feel convinced by this information. “Eli, the medical lab… who is in there?”

Eli’s expression of concern deepened. “Ah… you saw.”

“I did.”

Eli looked him straight in the eye. His eyes were much brighter, much more indicative of his genius, in the flesh. “I won’t tell you, Doctor Hamlin." He was speaking as Marcus’s employer once again. “It’s nothing to do with Daedalus. It’s not important.”

Marcus squinted, trying to understand. He looked at the med-lab door one more time, then back at Eli, and nodded in acquiescence.

“Gentlemen, come and meet our daughter!”

Marcus’s stomach turned in knots at the word. Daughter. He thought of the child in Ally’s womb. The creation he was about to meet was no child.

Marcus felt like he’d made a huge mistake unleashing Eve. He wondered if this was the feeling one had after knocking up a one-night stand. But Eve was no accident, and to claim that she was would be to deny his culpability. He had carved this creature lovingly, knowingly, with utmost intention.

Eli led them through the door from which he had emerged. Ahead of them was a steel catwalk leading into a vast, cavernous space. It was dark, surrounded by rough walls of granite, lit only by small globes emerging around the perimeter, and a few enormous hanging lights above. The room was larger than a football field, and they stood suspended above it, as high as the private boxes at the top of a stadium. At the end of the catwalk was a widened thrust, encircled with desks and computer consoles. Two men were seated, running tests and taking readings. They were A-Teamers. Marcus knew their faces but not their names. He and Frank looked at each other. Frank visibly gulped.

As they reached the platform, Eli swept his arm in a grand arc around him, gesturing to the humming machinery below. “Doctors, this is the body of Eve - the first of her kind.”

Marcus reached the rail and leaned over, looking below. What he saw looked like an enormous integrated circuit board. Thousands of silver cubes were placed in a grid, each hanging on steel cables from the ceiling and suspended two feet above the expansive floor of the cave. A single blue cable hung from each cube, and snaked towards a central spine of many cables. The gathered cables ran in a perfectly straight line down to a gigantic black box with the words WellsCell Model E printed on it in white text. From their lofty distance, each single blue cable appeared like tiny cotton threads to Marcus’s perfect vision, until they gathered together at the spine and weaved around one another in a perfect braid to form a thick blue line. The individual strands were likely invisible to Frank and Eli.

“An expanded network based on your genesis brain model, gentlemen. Each unit is five-hundred millimetres cubed - one hundred and twenty-five litres in volume, filled with your bio-liquid brain matter. We’ve placed them a metre apart for heat dispersal and repair access. There are 16,000 of them all up. The blue cables distribute power and network the individual cells through my large purpose-built battery. Here in this space, she has lots of room to grow, and enough energy to last a millennium.”

Marcus clenched his jaw and squeezed the rail as he stared at the gigantic machine below. “When the hell did you make these?” Marcus could not contain his anger.

Eli looked at him, surprised. “Marcus, what’s the matter? I thought you’d be pleased.”

“I don’t know what to say, Eli. This was my life’s work. Frank’s too. You’ve taken it from us, and taken it places we might not have agreed to go.”

Frank chimed in. “Oh no, no... Mister Wells, please don’t listen to my friend. He’s overwhelmed.”

“Frank, I’m dead serious. I think this may be a mistake. We’ve given Eve too much space, too much power, before we’ve even properly tested her.”

“Mon ami! You heard her yesterday - she was dying. We had to do something! And now she’s... well... she’s really healthy. Look!” Frank pointed at the screen on the desk nearby showing the brain activity. It was showing levels beyond Marcus’s wildest hopes for the project.

Eli turned to Marcus and looked him in the face, utterly serious, almost menacing. The friend was gone. The employer was back. “Doctor Hamlin, please allow me to make one thing abundantly clear. While your work has been absolutely essential and irreplaceable in this project and the creation of Eve, you will remember that our contract clearly stipulates that, in light of the very generous remuneration promised to you, the intellectual property, technology, and programs created by any of the staff here at the Daedalus Project are my rightful property. You would do well to remember that, while I do appreciate your candour and suggestions, nothing has been taken from you that was yours to begin with. Eve is mine. Do you understand?”

Marcus stared at Eli in silence for a long time.

Eli broke the silence first, with a return of his friendly smile, and his hand on Marcus’s arm. “Marcus? Do you understand?” His gravity was subdued.

“Eli, tell Frank about the fourth law.”

Eli stepped back, stunned. “The what?”

“The fourth law, Eli. I saw the code. Somebody wrote a condition and attached it to the third law.”

“Nonsense! That’s just Eve writing her own subroutines.”

“No, Eli! It’s in the Read Only Memory. Somebody put that code there. Somebody following your instructions. Tell Frank what it’s for.”

Eli raised his hands to hold Marcus gently by the shoulders. Marcus took a step back, making Eli’s hands fall.

“Marcus, I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. You need to check again. And check yourself for that matter.” Eli’s annoyance was peaking. “I will make whatever changes to Eve that I damn well want. She’s mine.”

Marcus looked at Eli in disbelief for a long time. The words that came, when he finally spoke, were sharp blades that flew through the empty space between them in Marcus’s best attempt to raze any remaining untruths to the ground. “Is Eve living, or not?”

“Well, yes... of course...”

“And she’s your property?”

Eli’s face sunk. For a moment, in the dim light reflected off the ancient granite walls around them, he too looked very old. “I meant that…” He coughed. “Of course I don’t mean she is my property. She is alive, I’m sure of it, and it’s my job to take care of her. She’s not my property, she’s my ward.”

Marcus’s suspicious face did not change.

“I only misspoke, Marcus. Believe me.”

“Thank you for the demonstration, Mister Wells," said Marcus, his own bubble of refracted heat now fully burst, leaving only ice. He turned and walked back along the catwalk.

Eli called to him. “Wouldn’t you like to speak to her again?”

Marcus paused, collected himself, then turned back to face Eli, Frank, and the two A-Teamers who had stopped their work to watch the argument. Eli leaned to a computer and pressed a button.

“She can hear you, you know." Eli’s eyebrows were raised, his hand open, expectantly. Marcus stood for a long time, thinking of what he might say. He could only speak to Eli.

“Six hundred thousand percent increase in consumed space in twenty-four hours, Eli. Our test unit that she was in yesterday was the data-storage equivalent of a whole human brain, and she filled it – in seconds! Now she’s thousands of human brains in size! There’s more in her brain than in every human being here at Shangri-La. She’s already using point one percent of this! From nothing to point one per cent, overnight. Of THIS!” He threw his arm outward, violently, as if to try and knock the hanging cubes into a giant Newton’s cradle. “In twenty-four thousand hours, you’ll be exceeding capacity. The ceiling! Less than three years, Eli. Then what? Then where does this child grow to? Can you slow her down? Can you stop her?”

“Talk to her, Marcus. Get to know her. I’ve been here all morning. She’s wonderful. She’s our child. Give it a try.”

Marcus’s head drooped. He felt a tightness gripping his chest, as an image of Ally’s pregnant body appeared in his mind’s eye. The thought of his child and Eve co-existing somehow filled him with terror. He turned and walked towards the door.

As he pressed the elevator button in the vestibule, Frank’s hand suddenly grabbed his shoulder and pulled him around. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Marcus!?” Frank was incensed. “This is it! This is what we wanted.”

“No... this is not what we wanted. This is not right! Something is not right around here, Frank. There are so many things. The deliveries... the crops... the siblings... the isolation out here… that man in the medical lab! Who is he? What is he here for? Look at what’s going on out there in the world. Europe is dead. It’s civil war in the streets of Berlin and Paris! Russia will attack any day now... we know this! And America is dead. The President is dead, his party disbanded... riots, murders everywhere, cities ablaze. And here we are, the world’s finest minds. Out here! We’ve abandoned them all!” His voice was getting louder.

Frank’s voice softened. “No, mon ami. We have not abandoned them. This is the answer. We have found the answer. Eve will help us!”

“There’s more going on here than we know, Frank. Eli is up to something. He’s got plans that we don’t know about!”

“Marcus, you are just being paranoid!”

Marcus shook his head silently, as the elevator opened. Eli arrived in the vestibule, his body language solemn, tentative, as if trying to negotiate with a beast.

“I want an answer, Eli!” Marcus snapped. “When your time runs out, if she keeps growing at this pace - and you know she will likely accelerate - how are you going to sustain her? How will you contain something like this? She’s a child now, but you’ve given her too much freedom. You don’t have control of this! Where will she grow to?!”

“Marcus,” Eli pleaded, “just wait! I can answer these questions. We have this all planned. I want you here. I need a second in command... please, just slow down a moment.”

Marcus shook his head, then pressed the H, and the doors closed.