Authors: Bryant Delafosse
The Bot glanced briefly at Lara and the wrench in her hand before turning his attention to the inside of the door.
His sensors searched from top to bottom and stopped upon the locking arm.
“Mommy!”
Lara spun to see Cora, her arm reaching out to her mother from the open door of the SUV.
Without a word, Lara pushed Cora back inside, leaped in after, and locked the door behind her.
“Not a sound,” Lara hissed, pushing her to the floor of the SUV.
Cora turned one terrified eye up to her mother and uttered three words: “Pray with me.”
Lara pressed her lips together, steered Cora back into the space beneath her, and covered her protectively with her body.
Less than a minute later, they felt a dozen sharp impacts outside the vehicle, rocking it from side to side with every jolt.
Lara stroked her daughter’s hair as she whimpered beneath her.
Very few individuals were aware that there was yet another level beyond the subterranean.
This lowest level of the complex held the heart and soul of the Mall.
This network computer system called I.A.M. (or the Integrated Artificial Management system) had been created specifically to carry out the day-to-day activities of running a major city, but when all the first five major metropolitan city counsels initially approached had passed on being the guinea pig for this new technology, the board of Peerless Technologies, the company that owned the code for the system, determined that the programmers should set their sights somewhat lower and prove its reliability on a smaller scale first.
Peerless Technologies knew that it had something special in I.A.M., because its designers had written a code which allowed the machine to essentially think for
itself
.
An Artificial Intelligence.
The Holy Grail of programmers.
In the course of a single day, I.A.M. could make hundreds of thousands of decisions independent of direction from any human operative.
It was essential that it learn from its decisions and replicate code on its own in order to function more efficiently.
It this way it was organic in concept.
Growing with the needs of the building itself and forging an identity dependent on the facility it ran.
The inherent flaw in a system as large and all-encompassing as I.A.M. was that it could not be shut down.
Being artists of the “bottom line,” the board of Peerless Technologies had a hard time understanding this concept.
How could a machine
not
be shut down?
So it was explained to them by a member of the programming team that was viewed as the most talented at “translating to the suits,” that since the system learned from its real-time experiences, to start a system from scratch would essentially be the same as waking a patient from a coma and giving him access to all of his history gathered over a lifetime without the memories of having experienced it.
So what would exactly happen in the result of a catastrophic failure, asked ten stern-faced men seated around a polished oak table?
I.A.M. would be re-booted and work the same as it had when it was initially installed.
It would have no memories of the changes it had made to itself to make the Mall run more efficiently and thus there would be a noticeable change of schedule in the day-to-day activities, causing a rise in operation expenses costing an estimate ten to fifteen million.
With computer logic reduced to dollar figures, the board agreed among themselves that the programmers must not allow the system to fail.
And paid them accordingly to see that this never happened.
As a result, it was necessary to utilize countless redundant sub-systems in the code so that these minor files could be taken off-line and worked on by human workers if necessary without interrupting the normal running of the overall program.
So many of these sub-systems had been written by both human programmers and by the mainframe itself, no one really knew anymore just how far the reach of the system actually extended.
Just after the Mall had opened, two problems arose almost immediately:
First, as the store Bots had begun to suffer the normal wear and tear of physical machines toiling in a physical world, a mechanic would be needed to repair the malfunctioning units.
Secondly, though Bots were available to help assist customers with their purchases, shoppers tended to want human help and interaction, and as income was the life-blood of the Mall of the Nation, this was a particularly high priority.
To solve both long term problems, a pair of Bots had been designed by I.A.M. and built by a team of engineers at Peerless Technologies.
One would be similar to the other Bots in appearance while the other would be an experiment in efficiency.
He would look as close in appearance to a human as current technology could bear in order to defeat the distrust and prejudices of consumers toward machines.
This second kind of android was often called an H-type unit, the H of which stood for human.
The prevailing theory was that if a machine looked like one of them, people might accept it as one of them.
If the experiment was successful, more units would be created with the objective of handling customer service on the Mall floor.
To pass as one of them, this unit would have the same potentials as an average human, which means that it would have to be built with forced flaws to temper its naturally-constructed abilities.
It would also have to be programmed with a limited form of I.A.M.’s own artificial intelligence code, so that it would not be a slave to the network as the other Mall Bots.
It took only ten minutes for the proxy unit to find the information for which Simon Peter had searched, and once the task was completed, he deactivated the unit and cast it to the floor.
He glanced at the extinguished eye sensors of the Bot that he had dragged from the subterranean level.
It was the only one that he had not destroyed and the impact of what he had done had just started to sink in.
But it was necessary to fulfill his program.
Lara
Simon now stood inside the room where the soul of the Mall resided, surrounded by stacks upon stacks of CPU’s, every red light on every front panel dark.
He could not help but recognize that the manner in which the individual components had been arranged seemed to resemble a communion altar.
Following on the heels of this, the image of a cemetery flashed briefly through his processor.
But unlike the concept of an altar, the essence of I.A.M. no longer existed here.
The program had been terminated this morning at 2:50am.
Now, there was only a history of completed actions and sub-systems created.
I.A.M. was essentially comatose.
It struck Simon that he should outlive his designer.
It seemed somehow wrong.
It is because of those sorts of thoughts he knew that he failed his initial duty.
Because of his inefficiency, he was now simply a machine that repaired other machines.
Lara
He shook his head and re-focused his efforts on the job at hand.
The information that he had gathered from the mainframe via the Bot told him that the “soul” of I.A.M. was still stored in its Farraday Cage, just the sort of protection Simon Peter himself had erected around his repair shop.
Like father, like son.
In a room filled with darkened sensors, a single red light
pulsed
a slow rhythm like the heartbeat of an unconscious patient on life support.
Although not initiated from here, the order to terminate Lara and her kids—once received from an authorized representative--repeated on an endless cycle from this CPU via the Emergency Transmission Frequency to every active Bot in the Mall.
Though he didn’t know how any Mall representative could have possibly initiated it without an authentic code--randomly generated by I.A.M. at exactly 12:01am every morning and submitted to the personal computers of senior management only--he
did
know that he had no choice but to shut it off.
Simon Peter was no more capable of mulling over his options than a truck was of standing still when its accelerator was pressed to the floor.
It was imperative that Lara and the children be protected.
Only a second and a half had passed since he had glanced down at the deactivated Bot--which he had used as a buffer between him and the dormant mainframe just in case any security devices preventing tampering with the system were still in service.
That was exactly how long it had taken Simon Peter to reach out and disconnect the solar-charged power supply from the back of the CPU, the only remaining bit of I.A.M. that remained active in the entire Mall of the Nation.
One moment particles of broken safety glass were raining down on the back of Lara Myers and the next moment the shaking of the vehicle had stopped.
All was silent.
After several moments of stark silence, she chanced a look over her shoulder.
Through the broken passenger side window, she could see one of the Bots standing stock-still just outside, facing her.
Craning her neck, she realized that the SUV was surrounded by the immobile machines.
Cora lay beneath her, eyes squeezed shut, lips moving soundlessly.
“Cora?” she ventured.
The little girl shushed her and finally opened her eyes.
“It’s Owen.
Something’s happening.”
“What’s happening?” Lara asked, but Cora had closed her eyes again.
Letting all her questions simmer for the moment, Lara propped herself up on the seat and called out, “Hello!”
The Bot outside the window suddenly lurched forward, thrusting its head inside the cabin.
Lara screamed, her hand scrambling for the wrench she’d left atop the seat.
The Bot seemed to grunt then roll aside, rattling down the side of the SUV.
The frazzled face of the teenaged boy appeared.
“Sorry!” he said, his breathing labored.
The door wrenched open, raining more glass down into her lap and the kid offered his hand.
“What’s happening out there?” she asked, keeping her position hovering over Cora.