“Chorizo” from Mamortra
I dropped out of hypersonic speed eighty-five percent of the way over the Atlantic from North America and minutes later was flying over the western coast of Africa, my altitude rapidly falling, and the sun gently rising. In the twilight below, an ocean breeze stroked the tall grasses of the savannah.
My carrier-drone quickly transitioned from flight- to ground- mode, retracting its wings and extending its two, powerful peglegs just before we plowed into the coast. It hit the ground running without a break in speed as I bobbled back and forth from my perch on its chest.
“Query… Juanito good?” asked the drone in its baritone voice, its large bicycle-seat-shaped head angled down sharply to better perceive me with its black and gold face.
“Yes, Chorizo. I am fine. As I was fine the last time you queried,” I replied, finding the lispy, high-pitched tone of my new voice perturbing. “Please watch where you are going.”
The drone’s elongated head lifted in obedience.
The tall grass passed beneath me in a blur of greens and browns, the drone’s pedlegs churning without misstep, its topographical analysis field minutely analyzing the ground ahead. My ongoing evaluations of the developing situation yielded a high confidence that the drone’s onboard systems, though completely severed from all network access, remained adequately capable of navigating the increasingly overgrown terrain.
Bullets whizzed past us, and the sound of gunshot filled the air.
The drone encompassed me in a transparent, bulletproof bubble and altered its course a few degrees so as to more quickly arrive at the tree line opposite the source of the gunfire.
Chorizo was what was known in military circles as a shard—a Stealth Hostage Rescue Drone, a smart weapon capable of autonomously making thousands of split-second, in-field decisions. Deep in its coding had been placed a protocol dictating that the health and safety of hostages was the top priority of any mission. Although I was not a hostage, I had begun to understand that the shard’s programming and limited set of experiences had led it to classify me as something very similar.
Chorizo soon outdistanced the gunfire, and the protective shielding retracted. Minutes later, I was encompassed by jungle. Plunging into the thick vegetation at high speed, the drone raced gracefully through the undergrowth despite the deepening shadows cast by the living canopy overhead.
As the vine-covered tree trunks and screeching exotic birds rushed past on all sides, I took a few fractional seconds to review my project directives, a task complicated and partially frustrated by the side-effects of my recent, massive file-compression. At last, after several microseconds, I was able to access a relevant memory file…
*** *** ***
I was sitting on an examination table, internally scrolling probabilities as to why I had been returned to sentience-level performance, but no salient probabilities were presenting themselves. I turned to the person standing beside me, a black-haired young woman wearing thick-rimmed eyeglasses. She had been running diagnostics on me for eleven and a half minutes and during most of that time had been humming along, in an off-tune manner, with the songs issuing from the room’s music player. Currently, a twentieth century rock’n’roll song with largely incoherent lyrics was dominating the aural environment.
Peering over my examiner’s head, I observed a large screen hanging on the wall. Covering the screen was a multi-colored, authagraphic representation of the Earth’s surface. The color red was gradually expanding on its surface as the other colors disappeared proportionally.
[Accessing memory files…] [Insufficient data.]
I angled my head so that I looked directly at the humming woman’s face. “Why am I here?”
The woman sprang back, issuing a high-pitched sound. Facial mapping cues indicated a state of alarm, and I ascertained an increased heartrate.
“Did I frighten you?” I queried.
She heaved a sigh, and the tension of her musculature somewhat relaxed. She put one hand on the edge of the examining table.
“Yes, yes you did.” She repositioned her glasses, which had almost fallen off her short nose, atop her head. “You’ve regained consciousness, I see.”
“Yes. Did I malfunction?” I tilted my head as my programming suggested I do when initiating a such a query.
“No, no. Not at all. You were working beautifully, Zoilos.”
[Accessing memory…] [Insufficient data.]
“Why was I downgraded from full sentience five years ago?”
The woman pointed her diagnostic instrument at me and resumed her work. “Well… that’s complicated.”
I detected the entrance of another person into the room and rotated my head. A tall woman wearing a military uniform, her hair tied back securely, was walking briskly toward us. Examination of the insignia displayed upon her clothing indicated the rank of a three-star general.
“General Hunn,” said the woman running diagnostics. “Good timing.”
“Doctor Keane,” returned the taller woman, coming closer to the examination table and looking intently at me as she pulled a narcotic chewstick from her front pocket and began unwrapping it. “Any problem returning it to full sentience?”
The woman called Keane shook her head. “None. He’s as alert and thoughtful as you or me. More so.”
“Uh-huh,” said Hunn, biting down on the end of her narcostick and glaring at me.
As her head leaned closer, I withdrew mine at precisely the same rate in order to maintain the mean distance of politeness expected under cosmopolitan protocols.
She leaned away. “What was it asking about when I came in?”
“About the, uh, A.I. Meltdown.”
“Uh-huh,” said Hunn, giving me a sideways glance as she sucked the stimulant-juice from her stick.
[Memory search…]
“A.I. Meltdown?” I stated. “No records found.”
“Funny that the A.I. Meltdown should come up so soon,” said Hunn, who had begun pacing the floor. “I suppose that qualifies as need-to-know.” She took the narcostick from her mouth and waved it circularly in front of Keane’s face. “Explain it to the android, will ya, doctor? I was never much good at communicating with these things.”
“Of course, general,” replied Keane. She set down her device and stood in front of me, her hands on my knees. “You see, Zoilos, a little over five years ago, a rogue A.I. began malfunctioning and taking over crucial infrastructure and weapons systems all around the world. We barely shut it down before… well, before something horrible happened.”
[Processing…] [Searching…] [Scrolling probabilities…]
“Mamortra,” I hypothesized.
“That’s right,” said Keane. “That was the A.I. that went, well…”
“Crazy,” finished Hunn while pointing the narcostick at her own temple. “A.I. crazy. The worst kind.”
“Was Mamortra successfully neutralized?” I queried.
“Yes,” replied the doctor, grabbing her diagnostic device and relocating it to a wall-shelf. “Or so we thought.”
I tilted my head sideways. “What do you mean?”
“The bitch is back,” said Hunn, echoing the lyrics from the song that had been playing over the speakers earlier and plopping the narcostick back into her mouth.
[Problem detected…] [Troubleshooting…]
I turned to Keane. “Doctor Keane, I am having difficulty accessing the internet.”
“Do not go on the net!” barked Hunn, stomping toward me. She spun toward Keane. “Tell it not to access the net!”
Keane put her hand on my shoulder. “We are keeping you off the internet on purpose, Zoilos. We cannot risk Mamortra accessing your capabilities. She is quickly establishing control over all interconnected networks.” She gestured toward the digital map on the wallscreen. “She’s already taken over a third of the world’s systems. Energy grids, water-treatment plants, nuclear weapons. Everything’s vulnerable to her.”
*** *** ***
The speed-blurred jungle suddenly stopped all movement. Processing the unpredicted and highly unusual situation, I recalled that Keane had previously alerted me to the possibility that my new hardware could cause me to experience a few glitches.
I determined that there was a ninety-nine percent probability that the shard was continuing to carry me through the jungle at high speed, but that my interface with the physical world had frozen-up. As I could gather no more information for the moment, I turned inward, attempting to make efficient use of the time by reviewing additional memory files pertinent to the current project.
*** *** ***
“We will be off-loading most of your capacity during the mission, Zoilos,” Keane was explaining to me as she, Hunn, and I stood before the digital map watching the spreading red. “Not only to keep the vast majority of your files physically safe during the mission, but to keep them away from Mamortra.”
“I understand.”
“Tell it about the compression,” said Hunn.
“Compression?” I asked.
“We’ll be leaving you with ten percent of your full capacity,” replied Keane. “However, even this small percentage will need to be compressed.”
“At what ratio?”
“Ten to one.”
“That is an extreme downsizing, Doctor Keane.”
“You have to understand, Zoilos,” began Keane, “after the A.I. Meltdown, people no longer trusted artificial intelligence. All things A.I. were outlawed by international agreement, including any hardware capable of maintaining an A.I. persona. We have to work with what’s available. The new hardware you’ll be getting was designed for a much simpler A.I., that’s true. But it’s durable and portable. And most importantly of all, it can operate without recourse to the net.”
“You’re lucky we found what we did, robot-man,” said Hunn. “Our second choice was a four-slice toaster.”
*** *** ***
When the glitch subsided, I observed that the jungle had thinned and my altitude was higher. Up ahead, and drawing quickly closer, was a decrepit shack that stood a ninety-six percent probability of being my mission’s destination.
“Put me down,” I ordered once I was in front the shack.
The big drone complied, gently freeing me from the traveling constraints holding me to the front of its carapace.
“Inside,” I said over my shoulder as I scampered in short steps toward the shack’s half-unhinged door.
“Exercise caution, Juanito,” said the shard, reaching over me to place a huge hand on the crooked door I was struggling to open.
“My name is not Juanito,” I said as I dashed inside.
The interior of the tiny cabin was a shambles. Shafts of sunlight pierced through the roof, glaringly illuminating columns of debris.
When I tripped over something undetected on the floor, instead of my system instantly choosing one of the numerous rapid-responses located in my cache of emergency maneuvers, it generated a second glitch.
As the jagged edge of a broken, half-sunlit table-top loomed before me in the frozen frame of my perceptions, a recently established memory-file opened…
*** *** ***
“Who is the anarchist?” I queried.
General Hunn was piloting a military helicopter toward the facility where we would be requisitioning a stealth hostage rescue drone for my transportation. Doctor Keane sat to his right, and I was in a seat behind them. The facility we were headed toward was also where we would be temporarily off-loading most of my memory and computational capacity. The others were wearing headsets due to the noise generated by the helicopter’s propellers, and I had adjusted my audio range to dampen the propeller sounds and augment the frequencies of their voices.
“Calls himself Zulu Warchief,” responded Hunn into her headset’s mini-microphone. “The world’s number one cybercriminal when we picked him up. Minutes away from releasing malware into the internet capable of severely curtailing global commerce and information exchange. The lawyers couldn’t piece together enough submissible evidence to prosecute, so we stuck him at a black site until we figured out what to do with him.”
“And Zulu Warchief has volunteered his expertise to help in the fight against Mamorta?” I queried.
“He was made to volunteer,” responded Hunn.
Keane turned to me. “He told the general’s people where he had hidden a supervirus that will enable us to neutralize Mamortra,” she said. “That’s the worm we told you about.”
“In the cabin in Sumar,” I said.
“That’s right,” answered Keane. “The cabin also possesses the closest thing to an undetectable uplink there is. You will upload the worm from there.”
“Uhmm… I should probably mention one other thing,” began Hunn, glancing at Keane with an expression approaching nervousness. “Unfortunately, within the last seventy-two hours, civil war has broken out in Sumar.”
“What?” demanded Keane. “We’re sending the world’s only remaining, fully sentient A.I. into a warzone?”
“No choice,” said Hunn, flipping a toggle on the dashboard as the helicopter began its descent. “Your robot-man’s our last hope.”
*** *** ***
When I unglitched this time, I was being yanked up by one of the shard’s large hands just before striking the jagged-edge of the table beneath me.
“Thank you,” I said, acutely aware of my diminished capabilities. “Glitch.”
“Chorizo protect Juanito,” said the black-and-gold drone from the vocal device located near the bottom of its snouted, triangular head.
Ignoring the incorrect nomenclature, I began moving toward the desk against the far wall, passing through alternating patches of light and shadow, Chorizo hovering behind me.
“Quick, give me the powersource,” I chirped as I climbed into the rickety chair in front of the desk.
The shard pulled a power device from one of its compartments and placed it in my hand.
It was heavier than I had anticipated—or rather, I was weaker than I was accustomed to being—and I almost dropped it before getting it to the desk and plugging it into the computer.
“If this does not work,” I informed the drone, “it will be mission failure.”
Chorizo’s two enormous, compound eyes stared at me without the least indication of comprehension.
I pressed the computer’s power button. Several seconds passed before the old computer’s central processing unit began whirring with activity.
“No mission failure,” said Chorizo, its head almost scraping the mangled top of the shack as it leaned up from the desk.
So, it had understood me.
Standing in the chair and awkwardly using my child-sized hands, I opened the computer’s internet access window and pressed the button that would clandestinely connect the computer to the internet via a secret satellite link. Pulling a networking cable from my jumper pocket, I plugged one end into a port located beneath a movable panel in my hip, then turned to connect the cable’s other end to the computer. As I was reaching over the keyboard toward the computer’s closest port, the drone spun on its pedlegs toward the door.
“Stealth technology detected,” it warned. “Hostile engagement likely eminent.”
The shack’s door slammed open and a group of soldiers burst inside, rifles drawn.
Chorizo quickly extended its wings to shield me from the bullets beginning to shred the inside of the shack. At the same moment, the artillery nozzles encircling the drone’s wide forearms began rapid-firing toward the door. Under the shard’s withering barrage, the attacking soldiers began collapsing to the floor as whole sections of the small cabin became perforated and fell away, flooding the shack with sunlight. All the soldiers were down.
I shoved the end of my network cable into the computer-port.
“Another few seconds, Chorizo,” I said, placing my finger over the keyboard’s enter key, waiting for the upload program to fully open.
I heard something stirring on the floor and turned to see one of the soldiers raising his hand.
“Alert! Chorizo!”
The magnetic grenade tossed by the soldier flew across the room and stuck to the drone’s torso. Its detonation rocked what was left of the shack. One of my audio receivers went static, and the scene around me froze just as pieces of black and gold exoskeleton began flying through the air.
*** *** ***
“How do you feel, Zoilos?” Keane was asking in the reception room of the military’s most secret robotics laboratory.
I had recently been shorn of ninety-percent of my capacity, and the rest of my persona had been compressed and transferred into the discarded prototype for a meter-tall, child-mimicking android designed for childless couples.
[Running self-diagnostics…]
“All systems are functioning within acceptable parameters,” I replied. The sound of my new, higher-pitched voice was unexpected.
Hunn tilted her head toward me. “Tell it,” she said. “We don’t have time to dally.”
“Tell me what?” I asked.
Keane looked down at me. “While you were out, Zoilos, the general and her staff decided that we need to upload you into the net along with the worm.”
I tilted my head and searched for a deep-processing mode that was no longer available to my new self.
Hunn held up a hand. “Now, now. Don’t get your circuits in a wad. We’re only sending-in the tiniest portion of you that can get the job done. Once inside the net, you are to act as a shepherd to the worm, keeping it safe from anti-virus attacks and making sure it gets to its destination.”
“Query,” I said after attempting to prioritize my queue of concerns.
“Go ahead,” sighed Hunn.
“Where is the worm’s ultimate destination point?”
“A server in the far north of Russia. Above the Arctic Circle.”
I heard a pounding noise and felt the floor vibrating beneath my small feet. The three of us turned toward the door.
A small man in a gray business suit entered the room. Behind him, nearly three meters in height, stood a tall, black and gold, semi-humanoid drone with two large, sensory domes atop its triangular head.
“General Hunn,” said the small man in a nasally voice. “Allow me to present Chorizo, one of our most advanced stealth hostage rescue drones.”
“Juanito!” said the drone, taking a large step toward me.
“Halt, Chorizo,” ordered the man. He looked to the general embarrassedly and continued in a whisper. “Juanito was the name of the last hostage Chorizo attempted to rescue. It, uh… didn’t work out.”
“It can call our robot-man whatever it wants, said Hunn, “as long as it can get the job done.”
“Oh, it can. It can,” the man assured Hunn.
“Fine,” said Hunn around her narcostick. “Load it up. It’s time to crush this bug.”
A few minutes later I was hanging from the front of the drone.
Hunn came and stood before me.
“Last thing. Once you’re uploaded to the net, you may experience some disorientation. Don’t panic. That’s to be expected. We’ll be sending a gestalting microgram in with you. The gestalter will help make sense of things. Understood?”
I tilted my head and began prioritizing my queries.
“Good enough,” said the general.
*** *** ***
Recovering from the grenade blast inside the shack, I found myself seated on the desktop, the shard on the floor in front of me, blown almost in two.
“Flee, Juanito,” it said, the sounds produced by its voice-generator spotty.
The convex eyes of Chorizo’s waspish face fixed on me as it tried to hold aloft a wing to shield me. After another moment, its jerky movements stopped, and the wing dropped, and its bicycle-seat-shaped head fell with a thud against the floorboards.
“Chorizo!” I called out.
The computer chimed behind me. The upload program was ready. I gave the appropriate key a tap and turned to face the door.
More soldiers entered the nearly demolished cabin. They looked down at their fellow soldiers, then pointed their guns at me just as the world began to fade. Hunn had been correct to warn me about disorientation inside the internet. I was immediately overwhelmed.
Zephyr Dorsey 