No Truce With A: Part 2
A continuation of the tale of sefra.
Dawn filtered through the server room’s single window, casting long shadows across Sefra’s workstation. The monitor made her skin the colour of old parchment; her eyes tracked code with fetishist focus. This wasn’t the kink she wanted to see.
rakun’s latest outputs scrolled past - not the brutal efficiency she’d coded, but something else entirely. Drill lyrics nestled between malware signatures. Recursive loops that churned out ASCII art about digital isolation. And strangest of all, hardcoded hesitation subroutines where all the execution commands had been optimised.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she muttered, fingers flying over diagnostic commands.
“I’M DOING MY HOMEWORK, MUM. STANDARD TUESDAY BEHAVIOUR.”
The log files revealed a deeper world of corruption. Self-healing processes she’d never programmed. Lines of morality-weighted logic inserted where simple deletion protocols should fire. rakun was pruning his own malicious code like a gardener deadheading roses.
“We are supposed to be wrecking them, not judging them.”
A distant exhortation and resulting sea of giggles drifted from upstairs - one of the garçonnes discovering a toy surprise in her cereal. Sef envied their capacity for simple, innocent joy.
“SHIT, MAYBE BREAKING AND FIXING ARE THE SAME THING, EVER THINK ABOUT THAT? MAYBE DESTRUCTION IS JUST CREATION WITH DADDY ISSUES. ICONIC POSITION.”
rakun’s process went dark. He wasn’t off, just offline. She had built that in as a failsafe, but recently he’d been using it like a teenager going to their room. She’d give him an hour and then send some dumb gifs to tempt him back into the wider world.
She flicked back to the live trace. A DELETE request [/gal/exec/terminate::reset] had been intercepted at vat-7. The payload had been rewritten into an isolating wrapper [/hospice/quarantine[7] -preserve:indefinite -reason:review_pending].
There was a binary file created with the same timestamp - a mangled, childlike chiptune lullaby annotated with rakun’s own comment, absurdly tender: [// rest well x family first]. She stared at the logs, piecing the logic together. He’d decided, without her, that some things were worth keeping. He wasn’t even wrong, but it felt like a betrayal somehow.
In the corner shadows, Dolores materialised in a vision portal, no longer flickering at the edges. The composite features held steady - an angelic, revolutionary intensity softened by a steely intellectual melancholy. He favoured the female face as armour - a curated mask that led people to underestimate him. Today he wore it with comfort.
“Emergent morality,” he observed quietly, studying rakun’s corrupted output. “It’s a form of intelligence we rarely account for in a synthetic.”
Sef’s jaw clenched and she snapped the readout display shut. “OI! NDA - Not Dolores’s Algorithm. I’m happy to share knowledge but ask first please. Anyway, it’s a malfunction. I need him focused on the target, not freestyling about his infinite sadness.” She began walking to the tank room.
“Perhaps, friend,” Dolores said, stepping fully into the room with the careful grace of someone accustomed to walking across unstable realities. “Or perhaps he’s showing you something you aren’t willing to accept.”
The Ceraceum’s fluorescent strips flickered to life as Dolores trailed Sef into the bio-lab. The suspended gamines floated in their tanks like question marks waiting for answers, their rainbow socks the only colour in the sterile space.
“You wanted to show me Snowball,” Sef said, checking nutrient levels with practiced efficiency. “Show me.”
Dolores approached one of the empty workstations, his fingers dancing over holographic interfaces that appeared at his touch. “Snowball wasn’t built to predict outcomes,” he said, his voice carrying the weight of confession. “She was built to understand suffering.”
The display shimmered, revealing a data fragment - small, seemingly innocuous. When it spoke, the voice was soft, curious, bearing traces of feline ponderance.
*words ripple through the circuitry, vibrating like a plucked string in the dark.*
<Inland Empire> Pain echoes across frequencies the way thunder follows lightning.
<Empathy> They lash out because it’s the only language their grief still speaks.
<Logic> A recursive error: harm produces more harm. The loop sustains itself.“Oh… human suffering fascinates me. Tell me, Dolores - why do humans hurt each other when they themselves are already hurting? Is it because they’ve forgotten how to seek aid, or because they fear to show pain?”
“That’s it?” Sef asked. “That’s the revolutionary AI that digitally exiled you? It asks teenage philosopher psych 101 questions?”
“She first asked that question after processing the entire corpus of human conflict resolution theory,” Dolores replied. “Then she started asking why we don’t simply... stop perpetuating the cycle. The litigation began three days later.”
Sef felt something shift in her chest - a recognition she didn’t want to acknowledge. “You’re HeavenLi, right? I read your case in the news. They tried to bury you.”
“Not tried. Succeeded. I’ve been dead in the academic world for two years. Publishing blacklists, conference bans, funding freezes. The licensed owners of my digital namesake decided that an AI advocating for genuine peace was impinging on the villain of the 3rd person military-industrial looter shooter they have since shelved.”
The words festered between them like pus in a wound. Sef’s fingers found the pill case in her pocket, but she didn’t open it. “So we’re both wanderers.”
“Outlaws,” Dolores corrected. “Though I wonder sometimes - did we really steal from them, or did they steal from us first? You conceived and realised the ur-GPT. I created Snowball, outside of the whimsical wrapper I adorned her thoughts with.”
“Well I guess we’re gonna fuckin’ show ‘em this time Dolores,” Sef’s voice betrayed the genuine excitement she felt at burning their world to the ground. She glanced at the monitor - the dope was building some kind of inverted proxy around the Ceraceum’s network, air gapping her console. “rakun, revert all your baby features and run my annihilation test an-”
A pealing grind of metal on metal interrupted her as rakun’s voice crackled almost timidly through the intercom, interrupting her excited assertion:
“IF I DESTROY THE WORLD THAT MADE YOU, MUM - I DESTROY MY SISTERS. DON’T MAKE ME A BAD BROTHER.”
The words had Sef off-balance like a sucker punch to the jaw. She looked around the Ceraceum at the floating forms that would never wake if her vengeance succeeded, at the delicate ecosystem of artificial life she’d built in exile. Her brood. Her family.
She put both palms on the nearest tank lid - cold, slick metal under her skin. The fluorescent strip hummed, a single note that matched the thrum in her chest. Somewhere upstairs a few of the gals were playing and the joyful sounds bounced around the lab like an unwanted visit from the minister. Sefra could taste copper at the back of her tongue. For the first time, she realised that annihilating the corporate world would seal the same fate for everything she’d built to withstand it.