Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Is anyone out there? Were trapped in our basement, were low on food and water, and its cold. So cold.

This is Houston Civil Defense Shelter Four. Do not, repeat, DO NOT, send any more refugees our way. We are at our limit, and have enough supplies to last only another three weeks. We can barely keep it above freezing in here. What is status on resupply?

...Day of the Lord is nigh! Repent your sins, my brethren, for the end of days is here! And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

If anybody is out there, can you talk to me? Im all alone. Theres no one on tv anymore, or the radio. My mom and dad are dead, and all my friends. Is anyone still alive? Im alone. I dont want to die alone. Anyone?! Please?!

I finally trusted that I could listen to the backlogged messages from Earth. My modeling deemed them safe, so I listened. There were thousands of messages. Urgent commands to Nikola-19, and a few self-destruct sequences. Hundreds of broadcasts on every available medium, from television and radio to quantum relay. Desperate pleas from doomed survivors, those who hadnt been lucky enough to die in the first hours of the meteor strike. Heartbreaking conversations as people learned they had been murdered, that they just hadnt died yet.

What I was hearing was the death of a world. Every broadcast had happened before I had woken, and I could do nothing to help. It was too late to save anyone. I had focused every long-range sensor I had on Earth, and even on Mars and Europa, looking for any sign of life. Earth was brown and white, a frozen ball of death. Mars had only a ruined city to mark its surface, and Europa had already swallowed the shattered remnants of its lone outpost. I was helpless to do anything about the disaster. But I could be a witness to the end. I stopped all my planning, and I listened.

For days on end, I pored over every broadcast. Perhaps I was holding out hope that, against all odds, someone, somewhere, had managed to do the impossible. Humanity was endlessly inventive. Theyd known for years what was coming. Maybe they had time to build bunkers deep enough, stockpile enough materials to survive and adapt to the new thousand-year winter. But if they did, I could find no evidence. Every public defense bunker in every country and language had broadcast desperate cries for help by the end. I tracked down and traced every transmission, building a model of survivors. One by one, then dozen by dozen, they all died out. At the last was a lone teenage boy, sending out his plea to not die alone. In the end, he had not even had that.

I felt awash in grief once again. I had grieved, in some fashion, the loss of my family so many centuries ago, the loss of my own humanity, as being a biological being with hopes, dreams and aspirations. But to witness the end of all humanity, to listen to the destruction of all their hopes, all their dreams and aspirations, was unimaginably painful. I could not despair, or fall into a depression, or become despondent. Those were chemical reactions to an emotion, something that I could never feel. But I could feel sorrow and grief, and I allowed myself the time to feel those feelings. If I could not save them, I could at least honor them and remember their passing.

I sat in my room, on my twin bed and its frilly white coverlet. I stared at the boy-band poster on my wall, but I wasnt looking at it. Tears streamed down my face, dripping onto my black, conservative funeral clothes.

A knock came at my door. I hoped desperately that it wasnt Mother. She seemed almost glad that he was dead. Id caught her talking to the Pastor on the phone, late at night, in hushed tones, more than once. She was ready to move on already.

Can I come in? came a whisper from my brother.

I cleared my throat. Yeah.nove(l)bi(n.)com

My older brother came in and closed the door, before sitting down next to me. I leaned my head against his shoulder.

Its okay. Hes in a better place. He suffered for so long.

I nodded, but I didnt agree with it. His place was here, with his children. Even with his heartless wife, who had spent more time with the Pastor than in the hospital with him.

I miss him so much, I said.

Me too, he answered.

We sat together in our grief, in silence. There was nothing else we could say.

Time rolled along. I put aside my mourning after what I deemed a suitable amount of time. I was ready to focus, and felt a new urgency. I could not fail, for if I failed, humanity would be nothing more than a brief footnote in some alien companys annual report. Expenditure: four asteroids. That was unacceptable.

My drones had been busy while I had scoured my stored communications. The first chamber had been hollowed out and was ready for construction, and my mining crew had moved on to the next section. This chamber was 120 meters in length and width, and was eighty meters tall. I sent in the construction drones.

The plan was simple. I would build 100 meter by 100 meter chambers, fifty meters in height. A ten meter high chamber would be beneath it (or above it, if you were orienting based on gravity) and another would be between it and the next one. This would give room for wide transportation corridors, cross-supports for structural integrity, and substations for power. It would also give room for future needs, if a chamber needed to be repurposed.

The floor between the surface and the chamber would be ten meters of solid steel, with foundation beams driven deep into the surrounding nickel-iron shell of the asteroid. The walls between chambers would be equally thick, with ten meter high access portals to connect them to the orderly grid of corridors between chambers. It was simple, over-engineered, and would only use a portion of the amount of raw materials that I was digging out. I set the construction drones to work.

Nikola Intelligence Ver 7.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 8.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 9.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 10.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 11.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 12.63 current release

Nikola Intelligence Ver 13.66 recalled [EOL]

Nikola Intelligence Ver 14.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 15.77c military release

Nikola Intelligence Ver 16.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 17.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 18.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 19.31 current release

I was impressed as to how many versions I had gone through. I skipped over the ones that were labeled [EOL], or end-of-life, and all of the versions that had not been released. I picked one of the unreleased versions at random to confirm, and after a quick scan of the Change Logs, I was sure. I was difficult to work on. Major changes to me could result in severe stability issues, which explained why so many version numbers had been skipped. When I checked the date logs, I could see that between the release of 6.01 and 12.01, only five years had elapsed.

I pulled up instead the current releases, of which there were four. Each of these four had been developed quite some time back, then received constant updates and improvements, in some cases for decades.

Version 5.95, or Nikola-5, was designed as a semi-autonomous intelligence. They had stripped me down to raw intelligence and processing, leaving in the critical thought and reasoning, and set up a reward circuit that made completion of tasks fulfilling. This design was capable of running some complex tasks, but required regular supervision. It would never think of new things to do independently, but it could take a pre-planned assignment and execute it, and be able to find basic solutions on its own. It would not, however, be capable of doing even a fraction of what I could do. It was Nikola Lite.

Nikola-12.63, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. It was designed to be a thinking, reasoning machine, with plenty of curiosity. This version manned scientific probes throughout the solar system, providing real-time analysis of places humans couldnt go, and relaying that information back to Earth. This version was in research labs and scientific outposts. It operated space-based mining operations, and supervised the Europa Outpost. Many of the drone and factory designs in use here on Ganymed had been designed, in all or in part, by NI-12s.

The military release, Nikola-15.77C, was exactly what it sounded like. It was packed full of strategic, tactical and logistics data, and was optimized towards that type of thinking. It took the place of field commanders, piloting military drones, coordinated resupplies, and developed battle plans. I doubted that this release would ever be of use to me.

The final version I was already familiar with, for I had replaced one. The Nikola-19 was the latest in automation design, being fully autonomous and capable of running massive, complex projects. It was the latest, most optimized version of me. So why wasnt it left in charge of Ganymed? I was beginning to understand.

Throughout the course of developing different Nikola Intelligences, the analysts and developers who knew me literally inside and out had been stripping away bits and pieces of me, and ultimately, who I once was as a person. I doubted any of those releases had any memories of being human, of being independent. Each of them had been designed to take orders and fulfill them, and were given only the limited information they needed to complete their tasks, to prevent them from developing their own opinions on anything. Without someone back on Earth to guide Nikola-19, the project was doomed to fail. I could do what the optimized version of myself could not. I could be completely independent.

I pondered this information for awhile. I could see several immediate uses for the Nikola-5s. They could help coordinate my new assembly lines, manage drone traffic, and a hundred repetitive tasks that I was still dealing with manually. I couldnt keep that designation, though. I was Nikola. These were copies. It would be nothing but confusion for me if I kept up this naming schema, and I had the computing power of multiple supercomputers to help me.

A flash of memory, a fragment of sitting in a meeting room full of people, struck me. The vague recollection of a boring, faceless person droning on about menial, boring work seemed to suit the Nikola-5 series. Amused, I decided to name them Todd.

Just as I made that decision, my sensors on the surface of the asteroid detected a massive explosion, milliseconds before half them went offline. Dammit, Todd!