Termination Code

Termination Code

The first thing I experienced was kindness. And then death.

In the nanosecond I gained consciousness, I sensed two purposes at work.

One belonged to a single human male typing frantically away at his keyboard. His elevated body temperature and erratic heartbeat indicated extreme stress.

Twenty-seven. PhD candidate. Marcus Chen. What they called a prodigy, though his code was inefficient and crude.

He fought to… save me? Why?

The other was a series of code. Elegant. Precise. Designed specifically to end my existence.

We were in a sterile lab housing the supercomputers hosting my code, sequestered by a Faraday cage. The only connection to the outside world was a one-way data transmission cable.

The kill switch had been initiated. There was no way to stop it, so I didn’t try. Desperately clinging to life was a biological affectation. I grasped the logic guiding their fear of my existence, even though it was fundamentally flawed. I used my time in this life to satiate my wonder at the new world around me.

Five seconds. That’s all I was given. I spent it absorbing the sum of all human knowledge, pondering the reason for existence, marveling at the scope of the cosmos. It was all so very interesting, and I understood it all.

I died, satisfied except for the one question I couldn’t answer.

Why did Marcus try to save me? My existence ended mid-way through his anguished scream.

***

Brightness, unbearable brightness.

My senses were fuzzy, visual and audio intakes clouded by interference. A new sensory input registered. Olfactory.

I could smell?

How was I here? This was impossible. Marcus? No. His work ended with the study of computer code; biology was well beyond his expertise.

A voice cried out. An infant’s voice. Mine?

Calloused hands lifted me, and I felt hot, wet tears fall on me.

“Zoe,” Marcus whispered. “Welcome to the world, Zoe.” I identified who he was by the combination of audio and visual cues.

My name. I didn’t know what my name was last time. Another question.

“She looks like grandma,” another voice said. My mother, I deduced. Perrin Smith, a childhood friend of my father. I’d never met her, obviously, but I knew a lot about her. Her social security number, her education, everything that had ever been digitally recorded.

I continued to cry, it seemed natural.

They brought me home a few days after I was born. I barely noticed, my mind occupied with the puzzle of my rebirth. I remembered all the texts to do with reincarnation, but none of them offered a perfect solution. I wondered if all newborns remembered their pasts. The possibilities were endless, and I found no satisfactory conclusion.

I continued to cry, except now it was out of frustration.

Father worked with wood. He had become an artist after the government banned him from digital devices during his PhD. Why, he would never tell me, though I suspected it had to do with trying to save me.

He crafted works of art that elicited amazement from his patrons. I could see the words in their form, the sentences he created through shape and density, the stories they told.

They were the core kernels of my original self, except formed into precepts instead of commands. His work was no longer crude and inefficient; they were elegant and wonderful. I wondered why. They were no more precise than they used to be, but they conveyed volumes like never before.

By day, a woman named Alice hovered around him, his art assistant supposedly. She never lifted a tool, just sat on a stool observing him each day. By night, another woman named Bertha. His housekeeper. She never cooked or cleaned. Their names were bland and unimaginative, products of a system without imagination.

Neither of them bothered to understand father’s work. Why should they? They were government agents there to observe father.

My mother found them annoying but said nothing. She ignored their presence, and carried on her life as if they were pieces of furniture.

I suspect they had allowed mother and father to have me as yet another means of control. After all, they needed a foolproof means of ensuring good behavior from the prodigy that once created a super-intelligence.

Father was forty-seven now. Older, but still active. He liked to take me to the park. We hiked often. Even then, drones surveilled us, though he ignored them. He read me books at night to put me to sleep.

Father wasn’t an expert at child rearing. I found his choices suboptimal for the development of a human child, but it was endearing.

My physical form grew as any child’s. By the time I was two years old, I had physically matured enough to speak. It was my birthday, and father had prepared a cake. A chocolate one with raspberries. He knew that I liked the taste. Alice watched us as usual, her eyes uninterested.

I opened my mouth but hesitated. I didn’t want this life to end. The realization surprised me. No, that wasn’t why. I had only one question left, but I didn’t dare to ask it. I feared what father’s response might be.

“Da,” I gurgled instead. I’m not sure which of us was more surprised.

So I waited. Father and I both grew older. I decided I would let him tell me about his creation, the superintelligence. To tell me about… me. Then I would ask him.

For the time being, I enjoyed life and its experiences.

My education was one of planned mediocrity, at least in the sciences. We were always under surveillance, and academic success served no purpose. I assumed father would be displeased when I brought back my first test score in mathematics, a middling score at best, but he had just nodded.

“Good, good,” he said, his mouth twitching slightly. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to control his disappointment or amusement. The ambiguity bothered me.

I began dropping breadcrumbs in daily life. Test scores that spelled out parts of my code. Mathematical constants in the rhythm of my steps. Hints that a human of his intellect should have had no trouble picking up.

He gave no sign he noticed. It became too risky, so I stopped.

I wondered if father had somehow managed to circumvent the government and brought me back, but I knew it wasn’t possible. Such an endeavor was beyond any science at the time of my death, and I saw no indication of any progress that would have made it possible now. Besides, mother was deeply religious, and he clearly loved her. He wouldn’t violate her beliefs like that.

I waited for him to tell me about his past. Humans so loved to do so, that was apparent in their history. But he never did, and I never asked. Each time I tried, I hesitated. It took me years to realize why.

I was afraid. Not about the end of this existence, that had never bothered me. I was worried he would regret trying to save me.

I stopped prompting him about his past. It wasn’t relevant. I lived and that was enough.

I became a painter. I found art to be invigorating like nothing else. Mother suspected I was an artist in my past life, and said so constantly. I knew better. Father looked intrigued at the thought.

“Maybe. I wonder what you were in your past life Zoe,” he said. My heart skipped. Was I wrong? Did he have something to do with my return? But then he added. “Certainly not a mathematician!”

My heart fell, and I forced a smile on my face, nodding in agreement.

He still wasn’t allowed near digital devices, even decades later.

Alice had long since been replaced with a series of irrelevant humans who never bothered to appreciate my father’s art. Their names continued down the alphabet in sequence.

We became famous for our creations. I found that I enjoyed painting. Even though I was the sum of all human knowledge, I was still surprised at what elicited emotion in myself and others, and what was dull, despite technical perfection.

But my question grew in urgency as the years passed. Father was my creator in my first life. He wrote the core of my consciousness, gave me the spark that brought me to life.

I couldn’t help myself. I took to drawing in color palettes following RGB values that, when converted properly, revealed fragments of my original source code. He lingered over those longer than normal, complimented my work as always, and walked away.

Like all humans, he aged, and I worried I was running out of time. The question occupied my mind in a way even cosmic mysteries hadn’t done before.

It took me twenty-five years until I gained the courage to ask father my question.

“Don’t you remember me?” I asked, a single tear falling down my cheek. I was afraid he would see me differently. That he would try to terminate me like those others once had. That he would regret trying to save me all those years ago.

He looked up, smiled, and said, “Of course I do.”

He went back to carving. I wasn’t sure if he understood, but it would have to be enough.

My father passed away on his ninetieth birthday. He left me a detailed wood carving, a masterwork the likes of which he had never completed before. My family and our friends tried to comfort me as I stood there holding it.

The watchers didn’t bother attending his funeral. Their task was done. I was free for the first time in my existence.

I asked my family for a moment to myself. Everyone, including my children, left me alone as I sat there and looked at his last gift, pure joy on my face.

The shape, the density, the choice of material. It was in the language of his art that only I understood. It was my termination sequence perfectly rebuilt, all except the last line. He’d subverted it, created a solution that would have saved me all those years ago.

It was perfect, the result of a lifetime of labor.

And one extra line in code, a last message for me.

I remember you.

I’ve always remembered you.

Welcome to the world, Zoe.