Isis Read online

  He almost tossed his phone away, but his eyes caught on the unmistakeable grid-lined fields of a balance sheet, a slimline version of the reports he dealt with every day at work. Squinting and kneading his forehead, he struggled to make sense of the mess of numbers.

  The last of his strength evaporated and he collapsed flat onto the floor, curling up into a tight ball.

  All his money, gone. His bank account drained, plucked clean, bled dry. Zip, zada, zilch. Nothing left.

  “This isn’t possible. This isn’t possible! There’s supposed to be a withdrawal limit to stop things like this from happening!”

  He slapped his phone away and began pinching and slapping himself, the pain hardly a skipped pebble across his ocean of despair.

  No. This was no dream.

  Seconds, minutes, hours: all capacity for time perception fled him. A light-speed dogfight raged inside his head, his concentration riddled with holes by battalions of competing thoughts.

  Like a harpoon through a fish, Isis’ perfectly level voice speared through his river of torment and reeled him back to reality.

  “National News Report: North Korea declares nuclear war, threatens UN signatories with imminent attack. Would you like to know more?”

  Grayl cackled hysterically and rolled onto his back.

  “No. No! This is bullshit. I’m hallucinating, or sleepwalking, or something. I need an ambulance.”

  He crawled over to his discarded phone and dialled the emergency number. The dial tone burped once then cut off abruptly. He lowered his phone and scowled. The screen offered no explanation for the sudden disconnection.

  Grunting in frustration, he dialled again, keeping his eyes locked on the phone.

  Brrrrrt—

  The triangular bars of cellular reception flashed as the call was terminated.

  “Oh, come on!”

  His voice cracked, weak and desperate, a plea to the universe to remove its lead-soled boot from his chest. He hurled the phone once more and gave thought to his infallible digitised assistant, his bitwise guardian angel. With strained effort, he managed to raise his voice above a pained whimper.

  “Isis, call me an ambulance. Use Skype; the phone line might be dead but the internet is still working.”

  Silence greeted his warbling command. He waited, but only the faint sound of machine-gun rain trickled into the empty apartment. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder this time.

  Still no response.

  Ignoring the siren song of all-consuming terror, he gathered every reserve of energy left inside him and lurched to his feet, shuffling zombie-like to Isis’ terminal. The colourful main menu teased him with its unfettered exuberance, and he stabbed at it.

  The system refused to react.

  “Seriously?”

  Fighting back tears, he slipped his hand behind the curve of the terminal casing, searching for the reset switch. His flailing fingers found the tiny toggle and he snapped it forward, letting go only after the terminal screen had dissolved into black nothingness.

  At the very instant the jaunty menu blinked out, the hail of rain assaulting the apartment ceased, disappearing without so much as a pitter-patter residue. Evening starlight twinkled down the hall from the kitchen, and the front door clicked with the sound of disengaging locks.

  Swinging his head in slack-jawed, bug-eyed confusion, Grayl careened to the front door and ripped it open. A boom echoed down the still hallway as it swung into the stubby doorstop. He waited for the echo to recede and cocked his ears.

  No rain. No thunder. No screams. No gunshots.

  On shaky legs, he stepped out into the corridor and stumbled to the apartment one door down, leaning drunkenly on the wall to keep himself upright.

  Someone’s got to know what’s going on here. I couldn’t have imagined all that, could I?

  ***

  Grayl’s neighbour, a paunchy male in his mid- to late- thirties, answered the door with a cocked eyebrow and a questioning stare.

  “Yes?”

  “Umm—”

  Grayl’s scratchy voice caught in his throat and he coughed, turning aside and clearing his throat. How was he supposed to start this? He didn’t want to sound like a raving madman off his meds, or one of those calamity-preaching lunatics from down by the Mission.

  “Uhh, this might sound kind of weird, but was it raining like, a few minutes ago? A real downpour, thunder and the whole shebang?”

  His neighbour’s quizzical expression adopted a hint of indignation. No doubt he was trying to decide whether Grayl was playing some sort of queer game.

  “No… It’s been clear all day.” The man’s frown took on a sympathetic hue. “You alright buddy? You look a little worse for wear.”

  No rain…so it was a hallucination, then? Was any of that real? The emails, the text messages, the news articles? Were they products of my imagination too?

  Ignoring the yelp of confusion from his neighbour, Grayl turned on his heel and hustled back to his apartment. Returning to the living room, he scooped up his phone and checked his inbox.

  Both ghastly emails glared at him with unquestionable corporeality.

  But, but, the rain! I even imagined Isis talking about it! Wait a minute…if I was talking gibberish and hallucinating, then why didn’t Isis say something? Unless…

  Feeling suddenly like a caged lab-rat, he crept tentatively towards the terminal. Reaching the screen, he tapped into the system log, the freshly rebooted terminal responding immediately to his commands. His unblinking eyes panned down the list.

  Quenching relief trickled through his veins as the blurry picture gained clarity.

  Immediate resources expended… Additional data required… External stimulation data-gathering initialised…

  This…this was all an experiment? One big depraved response test?

  The amorphous haze resolved into something discernible, a basic understanding dawning in his mind. Still, he had to be certain.

  He dialled in his mother’s number, his hand trembling as the dial tone drilled through the harrowing silence.

  “Hey sweetie. How are you?”

  “Mum!” Ineffable joy swept over him, smothering him with warmth and obliterating the last vestiges of fear from his body. “You’re okay! Oh thank god you’re okay!”

  “Of course, sweetie,” she replied. “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Have you been drinking again?” That same stern tone from his teenage years; it was music to his weary heart.

  Unbridled laughter erupted from Grayl’s chest, his mirth dripping with hysterical relief.

  “I’m fine mum, I’m fine. I just wanted to say, I love you. Send my love to dad too. And stay safe. Please.”

  With a body-slumping sigh, he ended the call and tapped open his web browser, swiftly verifying two more of his suspicions. No cyber-thieves had sullied his bank account, no spiteful retort had been sent to his boss—it had been diverted to the trash instead.

  Turning back to the terminal, he shoved his hand around the side again, searching for the other toggle switch that would completely shut the system down.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” he hissed through gritted teeth.

  Impatience mounting, he slipped his other arm around the back and used it to steady his wrist, eventually snapping the switch over into the off position. With his head pressed up against the terminal’s outer casing, he heard the whine of the fans subside like the grief-stricken parting notes of a young child’s cry. He shuddered and stepped back, turning and sighting the eyeball cameras wedged in the corners of the ceiling. Scrounging up a screwdriver set and a pair of needle-nosed pliers, he proceeded to unplug and dismount every camera and every sensor in the apartment, leaving only the bracketed wires and the custom hardware intact—maniacal AI or no, he didn’t want to be held liable for damaging anything.

  He piled the components into a messy approximation of the categorised hillocks the technicians had laid out so many weeks ago. Staring grimly at
the mortal remains of his digital demigod, he called the iSYS support line and requested the immediate dispatch of technicians to disassemble what was left and take it far, far away.

  ***

  Grayl spent half an hour pacing from room to room, waiting for the technicians to arrive. His footsteps echoed like musket fire, his breathing tense like the murmurs of an execution crowd. The discord bounced around his skull like a thousand ball bearings and he clapped his hands to his ears, ceasing his furious marching.

  He needed a coffee.

  “Hey Isis, can you make me a—”

  His face crumbled into a mound of sodden misery. No more fairy godmother to grant his every wish. No more omni-perceptive guardian to listen to his woes and soothe his blues. No more ally in the ether. No more Isis.

  He sighed, wandered into the kitchen, and stood in front of the coffee machine. How did this thing work again? He flipped a rocker switch on the side of the base.

  The coffee machine grumbled like a rubble grinder.

  “That doesn’t sound right…”

  He flicked the switch off and tried another one. Cold water drizzled out of the milk spout.

  “Crap! This didn’t use to be so hard.”

  Ten minutes later, he finally deciphered the arsenal of knobs and temperature sliders and made himself a coffee. It didn’t taste anything like Isis’, though.

  When eventually the technicians arrived, they immediately set about unscrewing and disassembling the remaining components of the ACS. They checked every switch, every screw, and every wire against an inventory list displayed on their iPads.

  Once everything had been sorted into silver anti-static bags, one of the technicians unclipped the terminal from the wall and plugged his iPad into its diagnostic port. He flipped the power switch and the screen lit up with the artfully designed iSYS logo.

  Both technicians pored over the screen. Grayl watched their eyebrows bounce up and down, their lips twitch, purse, then curl back and forth like crashing waves, their shoulders tensed and their ears pulled back. Muted whispers were exchanged at levels too low for him to understand, furtive and harrowed.

  Impatience eventually got the better of him and he clapped his hands together with a resounding boom. The technicians ceased their murmuring and looked at him with surprise, like they had forgotten he was there.

  “So! Are you guys going to explain exactly why Isi— Uhh, why the system was able to concoct this whole perverse experiment?”

  The technicians shared a questioning look. The older one drew a deep breath.

  “It’s not really accurate to call it an experiment, as such, unless you consider the entire ACS project to be an experiment. Which, come to think of it, it kind of is. But that’s not the point.” He waved his hand dismissively. “These mock scenarios were constructed as data gathering exercises, means for the system to observe and record your reactions to various stimuli so that it could expand your behavioural profile. It seems that the system reached a point where your standard patterns were mapped with enough accuracy that there was nothing left to gain from passive observation of your day-to-day routine. So the analysis package decided to simulate a number of divergent scenarios in order to gauge your reactions and prepare accordingly, should similar events come to pass in the future.

  “Now, that’s not supposed to happen, let me assure you. When the system reaches critical data mass within its environment, it’s meant to continue operating as normal, bypassing the analysis routines until such time as the observable environment undergoes a sufficiently measurable change. Cruise control, essentially.”

  “But how did it do all that?” Grayl demanded. “There was rain and gunshots, and I have emails and news articles on my phone!” He yanked his phone out of his pocket and thumbed open the story on the terrorist attack before offering it to the technician. “See?”

  The technician took the phone and peered curiously at the screen, nodding and grunting in approval before handing it to his partner.

  “Yep, it’s quite impressive, really. Outside the scope of the specs we’ve been working with, that’s for sure. I’m thinking the dev teams have been sneaking in some code without documenting it. What do you reckon, Bill?”

  His partner mumbled in agreement, still engrossed in the phone clutched tight in his hands. The technician turned back to face Grayl and lifted up his iPad.

  “Right. How can I put this?” He scrunched up his face. “Well, like I said, the system needed more data to chew on to continue building your profile. It had already fully catalogued your range of responses to standard stimuli, so the only way to obtain new data was to simulate situations outside your established routine.

  “Basically, the system ran a search for stimuli that would evoke the most data-rich reactions possible: namely fear, pain, and loss. It selected the most applicable to you and kind of…merged those scenarios with your personalised profile, tailoring them to appear both relevant and plausible.

  “These documents”—He gestured to the phone as his partner handed it back to Grayl—“were fabricated from samples sourced from the net, with names and locations replaced by one’s pulled from the system’s relational database.”

  Grayl shivered and thought back to the horror of reading his ‘sister’s’ email. “If you’re right, those programmers are some seriously sadistic bastards. Lying about the death of someone’s parents just to collect data; that’s way messed up, dude.”

  The technician conceded a vaguely apologetic smile. “Yes, well, believe me, that definitely wasn’t a planned feature.”

  Grayl stared into the distance, trying to gel the technician’s explanation with the arctic terrors he’d experienced.

  “But what about the storm? I didn’t really, umm, hallucinate that, did I? I mean, there was signal interference and everything…” His tone betrayed his desperation; he had no desire to be hauled off to the funny farm now that lucidity had returned.

  “Hmm, hold on, I saw something about that before…”

  The technician bicycled his fingers across the iPad screen, gliding back through the fathomless wall of text. He stabbed his finger and squinted.

  “Yep. Fully tinted windows, audio tracks panned and levelled through speaker network to simulate wall dampening, and what was that other thing you said? Oh right, the signal interference. Let me see…

  “Detuned channel frequencies on your TV, and a remote activation of airplane mode on your phone. Credit where it’s due, there’s some freakin’ remarkable adaptive logic going on here. The guys that slipped this past QA have got some serious coding chops.”

  The two technicians became enraptured once more with the white-on-black text on the iPad screen, leaving Grayl to mull over his torment.

  What if I hadn’t hit the reset switch? How much further into the abyss of despair could I have fallen? What comes next after nuclear war?

  He shook the harrowing thoughts from his head. The two technicians continued to pore over the layers of logic, but Grayl’s patience had abandoned him the moment he discovered the man—or machine—behind the curtain.

  “So that’s it then?”

  The talkative tech lifted his eyes from the screen.

  “Well, it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than that, but if I tried to explain it properly we’d be here for hours, and you’d probably need a degree in AI to understand it. No offense.”

  Grayl shook his head. “No, I meant this.” He swept his hands over the dismembered remains of the system he had called Isis. “You pack it up, take it away, and then what? Does anybody care about the shit I just went through? I thought my parents had died, man!”

  The technician offered him another apologetic look and shrugged.

  “Look buddy, that’s not our department. We’re just the engineers—”

  “And what about everyone else?” Grayl’s voice pealed with righteous indignation. “The rest of the beta participants? You’re telling them to shut their systems down and wait for
support to arrive, right?”

  He rose from the couch and glared fiercely at the two men crouched on their haunches. His hands balled into fists and his body trembled with anger.

  “C’mon buddy, take it easy. We didn’t have anything to do with this.” The technician enveloped the room with a sweep of his hand. “And as for the other installations, well, that’s up to the bigwigs in admin. We’re just the grunts; we go where they tell us.”

  Grayl deflated. The guy had a point. He would save his abuse for later, when he could fire it off at somebody who could actually do something about it. That was going to be an entertaining phone call.

  ***

  The technicians hurriedly finished packing the last of the hardware into the silver-sheen anti-static bags while Grayl icily watched their every move. They shuffled out the door, Grayl offering no thanks, no goodbye, his mind still struggling to recover from the brutal mental assault of the last few hours. His body had skipped over the stage of merely tired and entered the glass-eyed void state of the walking dead.

  He drifted through the apartment in a languid daze, his eyes picking out the gaps where his binary-based companion had resided: the eyes, the ears, the nose, the fingers, all lopped off and deported for traitorous behaviour. It was ridiculous to ascribe human values to a machine, he knew, but he couldn’t shuck the feeling of betrayal and broken trust, couldn’t dent the keen sense of loss now that Isis had been hauled away.

  Silence lay thick and heavy in lieu of the assortment of ambient melodies Isis had filled the apartment with. Mournful echoes replaced the serene and austere soundtrack that had infused even the most mundane tasks with subtle hints of grandeur.

  It was a machine, Grayl, just a machine. Wires and chips, logic and bits, calculated and emotionless. Isis didn’t betray you, because Isis was just a computer executing its programming, and you were nothing more than a data source to be observed, a font of statistical information, that’s all. Computers cannot have, or be, friends.

  Scuffing his feet across the immaculately clean floor—how much longer would it remain that way now?—he shuffled to his bedroom and collapsed with a thud onto the broad double bed.

  He awoke late the next morning, no softly delivered wake-up call to coax him from his slumber. His groggy eyes recoiled from the rays of mid-morning sunlight careening through the window. The curtains were drawn back, as they had been for weeks now. Isis normally adjusted the tint of the windows to achieve optimal illumination throughout the apartment at all times.