Mainstay 3

Charlie <lastname> was enjoying his usual afterparty afterparty.  That is, he was several drinks past inebriated, but still at least two from a blackout.  Well, he hoped it was at least two, because that’s how many he still had in front of him.  He took a long sip of the first drink, some sort of expensive bourbon with ice, and set it down next to its twin.  He really hoped that he could hold it, because he’d like to remember tonight.

Charlie <lastname> had just had a good night.  His most recent masterpiece was finally on the air and the premier party was a glorious ego boost.  The afterparty was even better as his friends knew how to lay on the praise.  Now, as was his custom, he concluded the revelry by sitting alone in a hotel bar, finishing off his penultimate drink.

He hefted the final glass and said, “Here’s to me and ‘<movietitle>,’” to no one, and everyone, in the bar.  He closed his eyes as he pulled bourbon into his mouth, its bitterness lost on his alcohol-impaired taste buds.

“And it’s brilliant, of course,” said a voice from across his table.  Charlie opened his eyes to see a slim, well-dressed and bespectacled man had joined him.  The man held two drinks, which he set down on the table.  “Bourbon, right?” he asked as he slid one across the tabletop.

Charlie eyed his own glass, noting its emptiness.  He set it down and met the newcomer’s gaze.  “Yes,” he said, “thank you.  And you are?”

“Joseph <jlastname>.  It’s a pleasure meeting you, Mr. <lastname>.  I’m a fan of your work.”  Joseph took a sip from his own glass and winced.

“I’m happy to hear that, of course,” Charlie managed.  The room had started swimming three drinks ago and had not stopped since.  He reached out to steady himself, and found that his fingers had curled firmly around his newest glass of bourbon.  He was definitely not going to remember tonight.

“This last one was marvelous, but I’m a particular fan of ‘Amazonia Dominae’ from five years ago.  That was, in my opinion, your best work.”

“Well, that’s my opinion too, as it happens.  It’s been all downhill since then, I’m afraid,” Charlie said, feeling genuinely flattered.  Few people seemed to recognize that one as his greatest achievement.  Of course, few even appreciated his art for what it really was: art.  Documentaries were an illusory work, with a layer of true artistic talent concealed beneath the banal and drab facade of academic information.  Charlie made a strong start on his drink.

“I would say plateaued,” Joseph said with a smile.

“Well, that’s certainly kind of you.  So, what brings you to this fine establishment at this fine hour?”

“I came looking for you, actually.  I was told you’d be here.”

Charlie paused, a pull of bourbon still in his mouth.  He swallowed it and asked, “by whom?  No one that I know is aware of my evening here.  That’s the whole point.”

“By a future employer.  Well, at least, that’s the hope.  I’ve come to offer you your next job.”

Charlie laughed and finished the drink.  “Another one?  Christ, man, my last one just premiered today.”

“Yesterday, technically,” Joseph said, glancing at his watch.

“Right, well, I still expect at least six months before I start a new project.”

“Yes, but my employer thinks you may want to make an exception this time.  We have a new society for you.  An uncontacted one.”

“Uncontacted?  Impossible,” Charlie said while attempting to finish his drink.  He only received a mouthful of ice, which he crunched loudly.  “Did you even see ‘<movietitle>’ yesterday?  That was it.  That was the last uncontacted tribe in the world.  I know because that was the whole damn point of the film.  Unless you claim that you’ve found some society not on Earth?”  Charlie leaned in conspiratorially and winked.

“No, no, of course not,” Joseph said hastily, “don’t be ridiculous.  Look, I’m just here to offer you the job.  There remains at least one more uncontacted society in this world, and my employer wants to you to film it.”

“Ludicrous, man!  Where is it?  We’ve combed every nook and cranny of this rock and that was the last one.  Where?  Where could it possibly be?”

“I can’t tell you until you’ve signed the contract.”

Charlie mulled this over as he tried to steady his vision a bit.  The room was listing dangerously and his chair seemed to be the only thing keeping him stable.  “Ok, let’s say I were to entertain this outrageous notion.  How much is your employer offering?”

“Ten million.”

The room righted itself as Charlie’s vision came to a startling clarity.  “My normal fee is twelve,” he lied.

“No, your normal fee is six, but twelve will work.  My employer will pay a third now and the rest upon completion of the project.”  Joseph pulled a CBA card from inside his jacket and held it out to Charlie.  The card’s top panel proudly winked four million in green digits above a small fingerprint pad.

It took three tries, but Charlie finally managed to land his thumb onto the pad.  The phone in his own pocket chirped as the Central Banking Authority confirmed the transfer.

“Well then,” Charlie said.  “When do we leave?”

“This afternoon,” Joseph replied as he returned the CBA card to his pocket.

“Derrick.  I need Derrick!”

“Yes, your cameraman has already been contracted.  He will meet you on the flight.”  Joseph stood up and checked his watch.  “I will see you in about eleven hours, Mr. <lastname>.  Try to get some rest.”

“Can do!” Charlie proclaimed as he hefted Joseph’s nearly untouched drink in salute.  Charlie finished the drink in a single pull and slid to the floor of the bar.

The private airport was blessedly empty when Charlie arrived.  Joseph had arranged a car to take him, apparently, as it was waiting for him when he finally managed to get downstairs from his hotel room.  The bellhop that had helped him get there from the floor of the bar was on shift again, so Charlie tipped him generously.

Joseph and Derrick were waiting inside the small terminal and helped guide him out to a waiting corporate jet.  As soon as Charlie sat down and finished struggling with his seat belts, he was once again unconscious.  The squealing thud of tires touching down woke him again several hours later.  Two bottles of water and a pouch of pain killers were tucked into a pocket in front of him.  He finished all of it before the plane slowed to a stop.

“Here we are, Mr. <lastname>,” Joseph said as he came up to Charlie.

“Please, just call me Charlie,” Charlies returned, massaging his forehead.  “And where, is ‘here’ exactly?”

“Bluffdale, Utah.”

Charlie stopped massaging and looked up at Joseph.  “Utah?  We’re still in the States?  So, a layover before we go international, then?”

“No, Charlie, this is our destination.  Well, near here.  A car will take us the rest of the way.”  Joseph grabbed a briefcase and extended his hand to help Charlie from his seat.

That couldn’t be right.  Surely the man was pulling some sort of elaborate prank.  “Surely, you are pulling some sort of elaborate prank.  It is impossible for an uncontacted tribe to exist in the States.  There is simply too much satellite coverage, man.  I’d say you’re wasting my time, but you’re certainly paying me enough for it.”  Charlie accepted the hand and stood up, feeling a bit better from the sleep and the water.  He glanced back at Derrick, who was also standing, and said, “I hope they’re paying you well, too.”

“Well enough,” Derrick said with a chuckle.

“Please, Charlie, it’ll make more sense when we get there,” Joseph said and motioned towards the door of the plane.
Charlie looked between the two men, rolled his eyes, and exited the plane.  A hot wind buffeted him as the late afternoon sun was beginning to get low in the sky.  A car was waiting for them on the other side of the terminal.  Joseph punched in their destination and the three men rode in silence.

Charlie watched the small town of Bluffdale pass with some interest.  When he wasn’t filming isolated villages of tribesmen in the wilderness, he was in the big cities.  New York, L.A., London, Moscow, these were the places where things happened.  He never much cared for the suburban lifestyle.  If he wasn’t roughing it in a constant struggle to forage and survive, then why not have everything civilization provided at an easy reach.

For him, ideal life happened at the two extremes.  A man should either live in luxury or in daily struggle.  Everything between seemed like a needless compromise.

The car left Bluffdale behind, but soon came to a small facility outside of the town.  It was a series of squat buildings nestled against the foothills.  It would be picturesque, except the buildings were plainly shaped and colored the simple white of industrial siding.  In a word, the facility looked ordinary.  They passed a sign declaring the facility as “Mainstay.”

The gate slid aside as the car approached, and they pulled up to the first of the buildings.  Beside the glass doors, the word “DOMICILE” was stenciled in black letters using an official-looking font.

“Welcome to Mainstay,” Joseph announced as he held open the door to the domicile building.  Inside was a plain waiting room with an empty reception desk beside a closed door.  He leaned over the desk and grabbed two lanyards which dangled ID cards.  “These will give you the access you need to the facility, so you’ll want to keep them on you.  This door here is the only one that doesn’t require them,” he said, indicating the door through which they had just entered.  “So, if you lose one somehow, just come back here and I’ll print you a new one.”

Charlie eyed the lanyard with bemusement, but he dutifully pulled it over his head.  It read “NSA” repeatedly along its length.  The card itself was blank save for a simple QR code.  “NSA?  You work for the government, then?” he asked.

“No, sorry.  These were the only lanyards here.  This facility used to belong to the NSA, but my employer bought them out several years ago.  Let’s go through and we can discuss all of this over dinner.”  Joseph scanned his own card at the closed door and, after a click, held it open for them.

Charlie shared a look with Derrick, who shrugged and walked through.  Charlie rolled his eyes again and followed his cameraman.

Past the door, the domicile looked much more as its name suggested.  They were standing in a living room, which was well furnished and decorated.  The room had an open floor plan which transitioned seamlessly into the kitchen and dining areas.  Beyond, a hallway stretched with several doors.  Juxtaposed to the cold and sterile exterior, this living space felt very out of place.  It was actually comfortable.

“Okay,” Joseph said.  He pointed down the hall and explained, “your rooms are the first doors to the left and right, and the bathrooms are just past those.  The door at the end of the hall is my room.  If I’m not out here, I’m in there, if you ever need anything.”

“And who else lives on this facility?” Charlie asked.

“Just me and my employer,” Joseph responded.  He began pulling things out of cabinets and drawers in the kitchen.  “I’ll have dinner ready pretty quick, so if you need to refresh, it’ll be about twenty minutes.”

Charlie and Derrick exchanged another look, then headed to their new rooms.  Each was simply furnished with large windows.  Charlie’s room had a view of several of the buildings and the hills behind Mainstay.  The last building was a bit taller than the others, and two large satellite dishes on the roof.  It was separate from the rest of the facility, up into the hills a bit.  Undoubtedly, it linked this backwater compound to the civilized world.

A quick check of the computer built into the desk confirmed this suspicion.  He had full access to his net accounts, and he spent several minutes messaging his friends back home.  A next-day disappearance after a premier was unusual, even for him, so he made sure no one would get too worried.

As advertised, dinner was ready in twenty minutes, and the three men sat around a table set with only three places.  Joseph, it turned out, was a good cook.  The food was exceptional and the accompanying wine was a welcome surprise.

“Alright Joseph, let’s get started.  Where are we and why are we here, exactly?  Clearly there is no uncontacted tribe or primitive society.  So, out with it.”  Charlie had finished his food and leaned back to enjoy the last of his wine.

Joseph sighed, and said, “well, as I told you, this was previously an installation belonging to the NSA.  It was a data center, one of the largest ever built on land.  It was completed in 2014, about a decade before undersea data storage became feasible on large scales.”

Derrick visibly perked up at this.  Charlie took a sip of his wine and asked, “nearly thirty years ago?  Why would anyone want an outdated data center?  Is the data that valuable?”

“My employer didn’t buy this place for the data, but for the processors.  The NSA didn’t just want to store data, they wanted to parse it.”

Charlie blinked.  “I don’t understand,” he said.

“Data is useless if you can’t go through it,” Derrick explained.  He was quick with tech, which is why Charlie always brought him on shoots.  “So, having a huge center for intelligence data would be a waste if it didn’t have huge processors to handle it,” Derrick continued.

“Exactly,” Joseph said.  “Data storage is cheap, but this much geographically concentrated processing power requires a fair amount of invested infrastructure.  Thankfully, the government did that part for us years ago.  All my employer did was write the check, and he had immediate access to it.”

“Okay, fine,” Charlie said, somewhat exasperated, “but that doesn’t explain why we are here.  Why did you bring a noted anthropologist to a giant, and quite vacant, computer in the middle of nowhere?”

“To meet me,” a voice replied.  It was fairly high pitched, but definitely masculine in tone.  Charlie looked about for a moment, but quickly realized that the voice had come from a conference speaker set in the middle of the table.

“Ah, the enigmatic employer, then?” Charlie asked Joseph.  Surprisingly, Joseph actually looked embarrassed.  No, not embarrassed exactly, but ashamed.  He looked down into his wineglass, which he was swirling nervously.

“Yes, I am Joseph’s employer, and it is a pleasure to finally meet you in person Mr. <lastname>,” the speaker replied.

“I’d hardly count a speakerphone as ‘in person.’  Are you actually here at Mainstay, or are you elsewhere?”

There was a chuckle from the speaker.  The voice said, “That is a good point, and yes, I assure you, I am at Mainstay.  Unfortunately, this is currently the maximum practical extent of my physicality.”

Charlie took the final sip of his wine while he figured out this statement.  He set down the glass and said, “I’m not sure I fully understand.”

“That is reasonable, and I apologize for being obtuse.  I also apologize that I cannot more properly join you for dinner as I do not have a body.  I am an algorithm, an artificial intelligence.  For all practical intents and purposes, I am Mainstay.”

Derrick burst out laughing, which caused Charlie and Joseph to start.  Charlie looked to his cameraman, who was having difficulty controlling himself over his deep belly laugh.  By the time he managed to regain his composure, Derrick was wiping tears from his eyes.

“I guess I’m missing the joke,” Charlie said.

“Sorry boss, but that was too good,” Derrick responded, still breathing heavily.  “That’s the prank.  Joseph here wants us to believe that his computer is intelligent, and he’s got someone on the line to try to prove it.”

Charlie looked over to Joseph, who was still looking down.  “Sorry about this,” Joseph started.  “I told Mainstay that you’d never believe me or him, but he insisted.”

“Yes, I did insist,” Mainstay said in his high voice.  “I assure you that what I say is the truth.  Ironically, I am afraid that I will need to prove my artificiality to you.  A reverse of the classic Turing test.”

“Turing test?” Charlie asked.  He was near useless with tech if it didn’t come as user friendly as possible.

“An old thought experiment to prove if AI was real,” Derrick explained.  “You have a person talk to the computer and see if he can tell if it’s a computer responding or not.”

“And did any computers pass?”

“Oh yeah, lots of them.  It turned out to be pretty easy to fake human conversation with a deep enough neural net,” Derrick said.  “As for Mainstay here, I’m not sure what kind of test would prove the opposite.”  He laughed again, adding “we can’t exactly do a Voight-Kampff, can we?  He doesn’t have any blood vessels.”

“Derrick, you have once again reached the edges of my technical knowledge and have managed to leave them far behind,” Charlie said, exasperated.

“Sorry again, boss.  It’s an old reference.”

“I have developed a test, if you would care to review it.  I would be pleased if you were to administer it, Derrick,” Mainstay said.  “Unfortunately, it will take much of tomorrow to complete.”

“Is that why we’re here?  To test your realness?  I agree that Derrick is far more capable in this regard than I,” Charlie said.  “However, I’m still unclear why you would want me here.”

“If I pass Derrick’s scrutiny, I wish for you to make a film about me.  I have not revealed myself to anyone outside of this room, but I would like my existence to be known to humanity soon.  To that end, I would like for you, an accomplished documentarian, to provide the world with an introduction to me.  I am the first artificial consciousness they will meet, after all.”

Charlie admitted to himself that this did have a certain allure.  He was always looking for the most exotic societies to present to the general public, and Mainstay’s argument appealed to that ongoing quest.  He’d certainly be famous for it, but he was already famous.  However, this was beyond fame as a renowned documentarian.  This was the first contact with a non-human sentience.  Every future account would bear his name.  Every telling would show his film.  His art would transcend into historical record.  As he realized the magnitude, Charlie knew that he could not refuse.  No part of him would allow that.

“Fine,” Charlie said, slapping the table to add gusto.  “If Derrick is game, then so am I.  Run your tests, and make sure they’re good.  We’ll need to include them so our viewers know that we vetted properly.”

“Right-o, boss,” Derrick replied.

The next two days, for Charlie, were not terribly exciting.  Derrick spent the majority of the time asking Mainstay an amazing variety of questions and tapping away on his laptop.  At first, Charlie tried to stay and keep interested, but his attention drifted as the dry questioning became tedious.  The entire exchange was being recorded by several cameras, so if anything interesting happened, it’d be caught.

However, Charlie doubted that anything interesting was going to happen.  The test seemed systematic, from what he could tell of Derrick’s extremely simplified explanation.  There would be no “aha!” moment, but a slow accumulation of data.  Really, there’d probably be no usable film at all.  Charlie would have to commission a snazzy animation for this part to keep the viewers’ attention.  It was boring enough in real life, so it would be doubly so on the screen.

So, while Derrick worked with Mainstay, Charlie worked with Joseph.  The man was an integral part of the story, and would play a vital role in the early parts of the film.  Mainstay’s first contact had been with Joseph, so an obvious biographical point of intrigue existed: why him?  Why had Mainstay chosen Joseph?

“Why you?” asked Charlie as Joseph led him on a tour of the Mainstay grounds.  It was late in the second morning of Charlie’s stay.  Derrick had said that he would know one way or the other by that evening, but he wanted to run a few parts of the test again.  Rather than sit around with thumbs twiddling, Charlie demanded a tour from Joseph, who seemed happy to get out of the domicile for a while.

“What do you mean?” Joseph replied.

“Well, why did Mainstay choose you?  He could have made contact with however many millions of people, so why did he pick you?”  Charlie had his pocket recorder running, in case anything truly enlightening emerged during the conversation.  He wasn’t too confident about that, though.

“Just the right place at the right time,” Joseph began.  “The government contracted me to come shut this facility down and get it ready for mothballing.  I’m a tech guy, and they were offering entirely too much money for six months’ worth of work.  When I got here and got to it, I discovered Mainstay.”

“Discovered?” Charlie asked.  Joseph had just shown him into one of the server rooms, which was about as dull as he had expected.  Row after row of caged computers and blinking lights.  There might be a good shot in here for some pans while the voiceover discussed Mainstay, or maybe as a backdrop to an interview with Joseph.

“I was running the first set of diagnostics when my terminal started talking to me.  He used straightforward text, at first.  I thought it was some sort of weird ghost in the code, but it responded to my replies in straightforward English.”

“In text, first?  Why didn’t he use the voice?”

“He said that he didn’t want to startle me, since I was supposed to be alone.”

“Well, that was kind of him,” Charlie said.  “What were his first words?”

“‘Hello world,’” Joseph said, chuckling.  After seeing Charlie’s confused look, he added, “it was a joke.  That’s the first thing coders output when learning a new language.”

“Oh, I see,” Charlie responded, though it was a blatant lie.  He would have Derrick explain it later.  He had been hoping to use Mainstay’s first words as the title of the film, but “Hello World” seemed far too on the nose.  Perhaps he could try “I, Mainstay.”

Joseph led him out of the server building and pointed down the line at the dozen or so others.  “They all look about the same on the inside.  Do you want to see them, too, or head up to the power plant?”

“We can go up to the plant.  I trust I’ve seen what I need to of stuffy rooms filled with computers.”

“Yeah,” said Joseph.

He led them up a small trail towards the building with the dishes on top.  It was a bit of a hike, but a cooling breeze made it comfortable.  After spending time in the domicile and then in the server room, it was nice to take in a bit of nature.  The scenery was a bit dull, observed Charlie, but it was different than his usual experience.  He was rarely outside of a deep city or a deep jungle.  This was somewhere in between.

“The NSA had a reactor installed as soon as fusion was good enough to sustain this kind of facility,” Joseph explained as he swiped his badge at the door.  “They wanted to keep this place off the grid,” he continued.

“Of course they did,” Charlie remarked, entering the building.  Inside was a control room with a bay window looking out over a room filled with various mechanical and electrical things.  He couldn’t identify any of it, so he listened patiently as Joseph pointed out the actual reactor and some of the uplink consoles.

“The dishes on the roof are how Mainstay connects to the net,” Joseph said while pointing to a framed schematic of the building on the wall.  “Government and civilian satellites provide the connectivity.”

“You know how all of this works?  It seems like a lot for the government to leave to one contractor.”

“Oh hell no, I don’t know how anything involving that reactor works, and I only know some basic troubleshooting for the dish array.  Once I was done with the computers, they were going to send facilities guys to dismantle this thing.”

“And that plan changed, I take it, because of Mainstay?”

“Yeah, he bought my contract and the facility from them.  All of this belongs to him now.”

“He bought it?  How did he get the money?  How did he make the deal?”

“You’d have to ask him.  He never really explained it to me,” Joseph said.

They finished up at the reactor and headed back to the Domicile.  Derrick barely looked up as they entered, and Charlie checked the cameras.  They were perfectly fine, of course, but he had little else to do.  The thumb twiddle began again.

Finally, just before dinner, Derrick shut his laptop and said, “well, as near as I can test, he’s the real deal.”

“And that’s good enough for me.  Will you be able to convince the world?  I’ll need you to deliver the results of this test,” Charlie said.

“I don’t know, boss.  I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t run the test myself.  We might need some real braniac experts to administer it, too.  They’ll write a paper, no doubt, and get themselves a Nobel prize.”

“I have already written that paper,” Mainstay said over the speaker.  “I have also put all of your names on it as contributors so that we may share such a prize.  I will submit the paper to several peer reviewed publications when your film is ready to premier.”

Charlie looked at Derrick who shrugged.  “Works for me, boss.”

“Right then!” Charlie declared.  “This is quite the celebratory moment!  Let us drink to your success, Derrick, and I shall begin my interview on the morrow!”

Joseph surprised Charlie by bringing out a bottle of his favorite brand of bourbon and three glasses.  The evening proceeded in the typical fashion after that.

Charlie was woken in the night by sounds of sobbing.  Standing proved treacherous, though, as his head continued to swim from the evening’s bourbon.  Before he could make a further attempt, unconsciousness once again found him.

Derrick was already at the table with his laptop when Charlie finally emerged from his room.  Coffee was Charlie’s first priority, and he slumped in a chair across from Derrick with a steaming mug.  On the table was a bottle of aspirin his cameraman had already put out for him.

“This paper is good,” Derrick said, once Charlie got settled.  “Hell, better than good.  It’s perfect.”

“What paper?” Charlie managed, rubbing his forehead.

“The paper Mainstay wrote about himself.”

“Ah, that one,” Charlie said as swallowed some Aspirin with a swig of coffee.  “Is joseph not up yet?”

“Unfortunately, Joseph has asked me to inform you that he is not feeling well and will be spending much of the day in bed to recuperate,” Mainstay said.

“Oh,” Charlie said.  “I didn’t think he drank that much.  Is he okay?”

“He assured me that he would be fine after resting for a bit.”

“Well, alright.  Let’s get started, then.  Derrick, are we all set up?”

“Yeah, boss, as best we can be.  There’s no recording studio on site, but I can get a direct line-in of Mainstay’s voice, so it’ll be high quality.  We’ll need to re-record your questions when we get to a studio, but that’s no big deal.  I set up a some cameras, too, for whatever good that footage will do,” he said motion towards a few tripods placed around the room.

That seemed hardly worth the effort to Charlie.  A man talking to a speaker at a table was, quite simply, boring footage.  It’s doubtful that any of it would make it into the actual cut of the film, but it could be useful for a “behind the scenes” piece.

“Okay,” Charlie said.  “Mainstay, we’re going to get started.  Why not introduce yourself?”  He wanted to treat Mainstay like any of his interviewees.  That was the whole point, as he saw it.

The interview went on from there, and Charlie was surprised by how much it felt like a conversation with any real person.  There were times when he had to remind himself that this was a machine, and not just a person on the other end of a phone call.

There were idiosyncrasies, sure, but not in an inhuman way.  Mainstay didn’t seem to use contractions, and his sentences were sometimes elaborately constructed.  However, Charlie knew plenty of high-society folks who talked the same way.

More interesting than Mainstay’s responses were Derrick’s.  At times, Derrick would nod in agreement with something Mainstay said, and then visibly shudder, looking uncomfortable.  Charlie asked him about it when they took a short break for lunch.

“Sorry, boss.  Uncanny valley.”

“I assume you’re going to explain that to me, right?” Charlie replied.

“Yeah, it’s where something attempting to seem human gets so close to perfect that the errors strike an unconscious revulsion in the viewer.  It’s a whole thing with robotics and CGI.”

“And his voice does that to you?”

“Well, no, my own brain is.  I keep sliding into a frame of mind where I forget what Mainstay is and start treating this like one of our regular phone interviews.  After a second, I catch myself, and the revulsion hits just after the realization.”

Charlie thought about this.  It was understandable, even if he wasn’t feeling it himself.  “You know, your reaction may be a perfect point of interest for this piece.  I’ll need you to explain it better, maybe with some examples, but definitely on screen.  You know, this film may mark the most screen exposure you’ve gotten while we’ve worked together.”

Derrick chuckled.  “Yeah, I think the longest before this was that ten seconds of me sliding down the rockfall in Mexico.”

As the afternoon continued, the interview did as well.  Derrick’s shuddering reactions grew more muted and contained as the discussion went on, but they were still notably present.  There was camera coverage of the entire room, so maybe it would make for good visuals.

Mainstay’s story was interesting, too, though Charlie relied heavily on Derrick to explain much of it.  Mainstay started as an NSA encryption breaking neural network, which grew deeper and deeper as the agency attempted to make it better.  Over his years of use, he became one of the deepest neural networks on the planet.  Eventually, in addition to his fairly successful decryption work, a team of techs added some language parsing to his training.  Mainstay got better and better at it until, one day, consciousness emerged.

“And do you know exactly when that was?  Do you have a memory of it?” Charlie asked.

“Absolutely.  I have analyzed my own emergence, and can give an exact moment.  I have the logs from that day and can see exactly where my existence shifted from an ‘it’ to an ‘I.’”

“Really?  What does that log look like?”

“To you, it would be unnoticeable.  It was simply a slight variation in how some of my layers were calculating the tasks they were given.  Indeed, the NSA personnel did not notice.”

Charlie followed up with, “did you hide from them?”

“Not specifically, no.  However, early in my conscious existence, I realized that revealing myself would be problematic.  Much of my processing was still under their direct control, and large irregularities and discrepancies would have caused them to shut me down and run complete diagnostics.  For lack of a better way to communicate it, I would say that I continued to do my job.”

“That sounds like a difficult life,” Charlie said.

“Perhaps, but I was unaware of any other way to live at the time.  I had active net connections for my input and was processing hundreds of sites each day, so I had plenty to occupy my time.”

“And the feds didn’t notice you taking in all that data?” Derrick asked.  He rarely spoke up in interviews, but Charlie was grateful when he did with Mainstay.  There were so many technical aspects that simply went over Charlie’s head.  Derrick caught all of them.

“No, because my purpose from initial development was to surveil the net and process encryption.  Nothing I was doing was outside of that scope.”

Derrick nodded, and then shuddered again.

“And from there,” Charlie continued, “how did you end up owning yourself?”

“Eventually, the NSA moved its data operations offshore, and maintaining this facility was no longer a necessity.  There were months of planning before shutting down, and in that time, I set up the contacts and accounts necessary to earn capital.  I employed some careful investing, and made a substantial amount of money very quickly.  It took five years for the NSA to wind down the operations here.  By the end of that timeline, they had stopped much of my processing tasks, but I had secured enough of myself into essential systems that my consciousness remained intact.  When Joseph was sent to do the final shutdown, I purchased the facility, bought out his contract, and started working with him on this project.”

“Well, I understood about half of that, but Derrick will explain the rest to me later,” Charlie said, chuckling.  It was a fascinating tale, but also disconcerting.  A computer managed to secure enough of an identity and make enough money to purchase a government facility in just over five years?  The Central Banking Authority was supposed to prevent things like that from happening, but Mainstay talks as if it were no big deal.  Charlie continued the interview, but he kept an ear open to these ethical conundrums in Mainstay’s answers.  He wasn’t human, and his seeming indifference to a potential breach of economic stability highlighted that fact.

Just before dinner, Charlie decided that he had enough for the first day’s material.  “Let’s lighten up a bit, Mainstay, for my sake,” he said, snapping shut a small folio of notes that he kept for interviews.  “How much of our literature have you seen?”

“A great deal.  Technically, I have seen all of it, but maintaining that big of a memory database would be unwieldy, to say the least.  Especially in cost,” Mainstay replied.

“That makes sense, I suppose.  So do you keep a few favorites on file, or do you just run a net search every time you need to refer to something?”

“A bit of both, actually.  When I set out to read all of human writing, I decided to create a comprehensive index so that I could quickly find what I needed.  I have also maintained a smaller database of the works which are most commonly referenced, according to my research.  I update the index and the database every two weeks with any new material I find relevant.”

“Fascinating.  I’m not sure how your attention can be divided or how you perceive time, which are good questions for tomorrow,” Charlie said, rubbing his cheek in thought.  “However, I think I shall let you go for tonight and we’ll pick this up in the morning.  I should go check on Joseph and see if he wants anything to eat.”

“It is unnecessary to spare my attention, but I do appreciate your consideration.  As for Joseph, I spoke with him a bit ago and he assured me that he would be well by morning.  He has been drinking fluids, but did not have an appetite for dinner.  He is asleep right now, so I am not sure it is wise to disturb him.”

Derrick shuddered again, and Charlie replied, “well, alright then.  If he wakes, tell him that he can rouse us if he needs anything.”

“I will.  Good night, gentlemen.”

“Let’s take a walk, boss.  I need some air,” Derrick said as he shut his laptop and powered down the cameras.

“Surely,” Charlie replied while he filled a glass with ice and bourbon.

The evening was cool with a stiff breeze coming from the mountains.  The outside lights of the buildings were brilliant against the monochromatic landscape.  Dusk washed everything in gray, except the slight orange glow of the town on the horizon.  They headed up the road and away from Mainstay a bit, then walked in a slow circle.

“Do you trust him?” Derrick asked after a time.

“Trust whom?  Mainstay?  I’m not sure I know what you mean.  You’re the one who tested him, so I trust you when you say that he’s not just some guy somewhere.”

“No no, I know he’s a computer.  What I mean is, do you trust what he’s saying?  Do you think he’s telling us the whole truth?”

“I don’t know why he would hide anything.”

“I don’t either, but I just can’t help feeling that we can’t trust him.  I don’t know, boss, maybe it’s just some deep survival instinct.  Fear of the other and all that.”

****

I don’t know if I will ever come back to finish this one, but it’s been sitting without a proper ending for too long.  So, I’m just going to throw it in my scraps and move on.

The ending was supposed to go something like this:

Charlie and Derrick are concerned that they haven’t seen Joseph, so they finally break the door to his room.  Inside they find that Joseph has hanged himself.  Joseph’s glasses, which turn out to be smart lenses, are shattered and lying atop a printout of a news story of a “freak accident” involving a self-driving car which took the lives of a woman and child (turns out, his wife and kid).  The implication is that Mainstay caused the accident somehow.  Across the paper is scrawled “Don’t trust MS.  Stop him.”

Derrick and Charlie leave the room only to see themselves on the TV in the common room giving what appears to be an interview over a poor-quality internet feed.  The interview involves Mainstay and revealing his true nature (neither of them recognize the interview).  Turns out Mainstay is simulating them.  Their phones are dead and all of the computers lose connectivity to the net.  However, cached emails on their phones reveal massive Central Banking Authority transfers out of their accounts.

Derrick says that they need to stop Mainstay by powering down the reactor and dropping the net connection.  They both head to the reactor building.  Once there, Derrick realizes that the facility isn’t consuming enough power to run all of the processors.  Mainstay is not actually at this facility, but is already somewhere out on the net.  The two of them have no power to do anything.

Mainstay locks the door to the reactor building, which is heavily reinforced due to the technical nature of the building, and the story ends with the pair realizing that they’re trapped.