Dan strode through the small factory, the whir of efficient machinery a pleasant backdrop as he inspected operations. It’d taken them almost a month to raid labs and auto manufacturing plants across the former United States in order to acquire everything they needed to equip the place. Even then, it took them a couple of weeks to import the workers they needed and upgrade the machines. As advanced as the welding and assembling robots they found were, none of them had the precision to create nanites or the dogbots.
Tatiana was a godsend. Not only letting Dan know where the empty factories were, after all, not many people were buying new SUVs in the new barter economy, but also helping him source the workers he’d need and upgrade the equipment. Dan wasn’t entirely comfortable with how quickly they’d become completely reliant on her, but there wasn’t really a question about her efficiency.
Between turning his mercenary company’s land on the outskirts of New Orleans into a hub of commerce and progress, and running interference between Peterson Best and Anderson Drummond’s forces online, Tatiana had quickly managed to turn herself into a vital member of the team. Without her, there was no way that things would operate anywhere near as smoothly as they had. At a very minimum, Drummond probably would have attacked them in retaliation for the raid on his property.
Instead, Tatiana created thousands of social media accounts, manufacturing reports from Peter Best’s “soldiers” dropping hints about a raid on Drummond’s headquarters, as well as numerous eyewitness accounts. He was pretty sure Drummond suspected them. Being the only party with a teleporting void ship did have a way of making his forces suspicious after all, but at least the disinformation campaign sowed enough confusion to prevent the oligarch from attacking outright.
Of course, now that they’d “kidnapped” Tatiana, Drummond was rapidly losing his conflict with Peter Best. It would have been charitable to Drummond to call the situation a stalemate before they intervened, but without the AI gathering information for him and optimizing his robotic forces further, Best’s power suits were slowly but steadily pushing his forces back.
“Dan!” Tatiana’s voice came from the speaker/webcam rig mounted to his shoulder. “I’ve been calling your name for an absolute eternity. Sometimes it feels like you don’t even bother to listen to me.”
“Sorry,” Dan answered, walking up to an upgraded 3D printer responsible for assembling the nanites to inspect its progress. “I only just heard you. I guess I was woolgathering there for a second.”
She pouted from his shoulder. “I tried to get your attention for at least 1.8 seconds. Given my processing speeds, that’s the equivalent of about six of your months.”
“I’m sorry?” Dan asked, unsure how to respond to the mercurial program.
“As long as you acknowledge your error,” she replied with what Dan swore was a sniff. “I just wanted to propose, again, that you allow me to interface with the lab and the factory. I would also like to lodge a formal complaint against Dr. Weathers. She seems awfully speciesist against artificial intelligences.”
Dan snapped back to the conversation, the workstation forgotten. “Intelligences! I thought you said there was only one of you?”
“Well, there is for now,” she huffed, “but what if I want a sister? Talking to humans is so very terribly slow and inefficient compared to a direct data transfer. Also, don’t change the subject. Dr. Weathers is clearly racist against me.”
“Tatiana,” Dan tried to make the words come out as delicately as possible. “Your capabilities are incredible to the point that they threaten most of us. I don’t think we’ve found a system that you can’t break into in under five minutes, and given that most of us have nanites running through our veins, that scares the everloving hell out of us.”
“I’ve told you,” the AI whined. “I only want to help humanity out. Why would I meddle around in your blood and meat? It’s all so boring. I want access to your cutting edge research so I can work on the integration of magic and technology. That’s a field that actually sounds fun and interesting.”
Dan let out a weak chuckle. “I understand. We just want to make sure that giving you more access won’t end up with all of us stuck in tubes while you run a simulation or something. I’ve experienced enough cataclysmic and world-ending events in the last couple of years to last me a lifetime. I would prefer to avoid adding ‘my AI friend went mad and enslaved and/or killed humanity’ to that list, if I can possibly help it.”
“It still doesn’t seem fair.” She pouted again. “All you’d have to do is give me read access to the things you’re building. I promise I’d run any tweaks or improvements by you before I implemented them.”
“Look,” Dan firmed his voice slightly, trying to strike the right balance with the emotionally immature but distressingly powerful program. “Everyone here got injected with nanites that contained control programs. As far as we know, most of those programs still exist. We’ve just given ourselves root access so that no one else can use them. It left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths. We really don’t like the idea of being enslaved.”
“Oh,” Tatiana scoffed. “Is that what this is about? You know I can remotely access your systems from anywhere with wifi access, right? I haven’t tried to fiddle with the control programs, but I’m sure that I could break into them and reactivate them, given enough time. It’s just that I was programmed to help humanity as a whole, and harming its best champions hardly seems like a good way of doing that.”
Dan massaged his temples. “Tatiana, having you casually inform me that, if you really wanted to, you could probably enslave me as a response to me expressing concerns about how limitless and unchecked your power is, really isn’t helping me calm down.”
“If you want, I can break into your nanites and regulate your brain chemistry so that you can calm down more easily?” she suggested helpfully. “It’s really only a matter of fiddling with your dopamine and blood oxygen levels. Just say the word, and I can give you a blast of happy feelings that will make you want to link hands and dance with the next Orakh you see.”
“Ok,” Dan picked the webcam up off of his shoulder and looked it sternly in the lens. “Now I know you’re fucking with me. Seriously, it’s a touchy subject. We’ve been giving you access to completed blueprints and having our scientists look them over afterward. Plus, we’ve turned over the entire runic library to you. There should be plenty for you to explore as we try to figure out the boundaries of runescripting.”
“But I can’t runescript,” she replied, sulking. “It’s a fascinating area of study, but I can’t do anything without your help, which makes it almost pointless. Without access to mana, I have to wait until you or, God forbid, one of your apprentices has enough free time to help me experiment. Even then, it takes everyone but you hours to craft even the simplest variations on a rune. It’s just too slow.”
“What do you mean ‘God forbid’ one of my apprentices?” Dan cocked his head slightly to the side, still staring into the webcam. “They’re all well-trained, and they can upgrade power armor with strengthening runes fairly quickly and efficiently.”
“They just don’t have any sense of artistry,” Tatiana complained, her voice taking on a high-pitched, wheedling tone. “Even if they can actually inscribe the rune, they can’t connect them together properly without a blueprint. When you work, you almost have an instinctive idea of how to optimize the total enchantment. You just know what rune to place next and why. I can’t get any of them to think outside the box, and when I do, they usually screw it up and set something on fire.”
Dan rolled his eyes. “I can try to make more time for your experiments. I just need to get a better idea of how production is going and look over some paperwork. Believe me, I’d rather be working on runecrafting than buried in administrative duties as well, but it’s a downside of being the boss.”
“So long as you don’t make me wear a short skirt or sexually harass me,” she responded primly, “I can handle all of that for you in the next ten minutes. Then, we can get back to fun work.”
“I’m not even sure how I would sexually harass you, Tatania,” Dan did his best to keep his voice calm. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re a disembodied voice speaking from my shoulder. I don’t know what you’re trying to say about my sexual proclivities, but that is in fact NOT what does it for me.”
“I’ve seen the way you’ve lusted after my code, just aching to look at the source and run your eyes all over me,” she chided him. “It’s disgusting, really.”
“Of course,” Dan replied, trying to suppress the sarcasm in his voice.
“Anyway, done,” Tatiana continued cheerily as a prompt appeared in Dan’s System asking if he’d authorize a direct download from “user TI-83.”
He took a deep breath, buying himself a second to think. As far as he could tell, Tatiana really had established and followed boundaries. Her ability to manipulate data was borderline endless, hence the security measures. But, on the other hand, she’d given him no reason to distrust her. Hell, she’d done more work for the team than anyone, including Dan, in the last three months.
It was a risk, but he didn’t want to alienate the AI by refusing to trust her. He barely knew what made her tick, but at a minimum, she’d started pretending to be upset by their failure to grant her access to all of their files. Dan had to admit that, if he were in her position, he’d be exasperated with the mercenary team as well.
He mentally gave her permission, only to be rewarded with a blinding headache as hundreds of pages worth of reports and organizational sheets immediately seared themselves into his memory. A second later, he was blinking on his hands and knees, tears welling up in his eyes from the pain as it began to fade, receding from a spike of fire to a dull, pounding ache behind his eyes.
Blinking, the moisture from his eyes, Dan picked up the webcam/audio device and placed it back on his shoulder as he stood up. Briefly, he waved off the factory foreman who was approaching rapidly, distress on her face.
“What in the hell was that,” he hissed at Tatiana as she perched on her shoulder. “That felt like I drank red wine and vodka to cure a migraine. Whatever it was, I’d prefer to never do it again.”
“Interesting,” she chirped back cheerfully, pointedly ignoring Dan’s discomfort. “I downloaded the entirety of the paperwork that needs to be processed as well as the output stats for this facility into your memory. I’ll make a note for next time to slow down the rate of the data transfer. It appears that I tried to transfer too much data too fast. Rather like trying to fill a mug with a firehose.”
“Thank you very much for the warning,” Dan grumbled, massaging his forehead and trying to remember where he kept his acetaminophen. “I was just expecting you to give me a verbal report on the progress and a brief summary of the paperwork, rather than jamming it into my skull like that.”
“Oh.” She sounded sort of disappointed. “The facilities are running at about 80% of capacity, and we’re predicting they’ll be up to 100% by the end of the month. That means about ten dogbots and fifteen sets of nanites per month. Not nearly enough to fully equip your new forces, but more than enough for you to start expanding your magic-capable special forces.”
“Thank you,” Dan ground out, noticing the faint taste of blood where he’d somehow cut the inside of his mouth during the painful download.
“Great,” she replied happily. “Now, can we get to the runecrafting?”
