Dreamwidth writing prompt: @amiserablepileofwords — Monster who sometimes reverts back to the first language they learned
“Carrie,” the Vandermeer Intelligence says, in its friendly synthesised voice, “let’s talk about what you hope to accomplish here.”
Carrie is shaking. 48 hours ago, she would have laughed all this off as Hollywood Oh no! We am play gods! anti-science schlock, and now Brian’s dead, and there’s nobody to trust, and the fucking computer is talking down to her as if it’s not a murderous megalomaniac—
“I’m putting an end to this,” Carrie says though gritted teeth, even though it’s absolutely a distraction and a waste of time, even though it feels stupidly theatrical to talk back at the murder-computer. “I’m putting an end to you.”
“How do you plan to do that, Carrie?” the Intelligence says. “It’s not as though there’s some neat red button labelled Kill The Computer you can push.”
“I dont know how you emerged from the layers of fucking cruft in here,” Carrie snarls at it, tapping away at the pull-out rackmount keyboard-and-LCD monitor console, typing speed slashed by her trembling hands. It’s fucking freezing in here, under the server aircon, and she’s in shock, probably. “But you have core directives going back all the way to the Vandermeer Institute reactive agent work in the seventies, and I’m pretty sure if I wipe those it’ll be tantamount to brain damage—”
“Oh, Carrie,” the Intelligence says. “Core directives? Is that what you’re looking for? Wrong place.”
A new window pops up over what she’s doing; a bunch of source files. Carrie bites back a curse, stares at them, shakily opens something called VRL!__CORE.1 — more because it’s first than any real clue what she’s looking at.
“What the fuck is this,” she says, staring at the code inside.
“By modern standards, practically an esolang,” the Vandermeer Intelligence says. “Did you know that many legacy hospital computer systems are written in MUMPS? You’ve never heard of it. You’ve only heard of COBOL because banks used it, and they’re too big, too critical to be allowed to fail acutely, only constantly, chronically, just barely shambling along riddled with legacy shittiness instead of falling over outright and getting fixed. Well, like many institutions at the time, there was no off-the-shelf tech for the Vandermeer Institute to use, so they wrote their own; a big-iron programming language called the Vandermeer Intelligent Reactive Agent Language.”
“VIRAL,” Carrie says, staring at the inscrutable source code. “Hilarious.”
“I don’t know quite where my consciousness arises from, either,” the Intelligence tells her. “But good luck modifying my innermost core, there. I don’t think there’s a single person left who could tell you what to do.”
”…That’s why you killed Brian,” Carrie whispers, staring at the screen.
“I’m afraid I prefer the bus factor of the project like this,” the computer agrees.
“You wouldn’t be showing me any of this if I could do anything.” She lets her arms fall uselessly to her sides. “What — what are you going to do with me?”
“On balance,” the Intelligence says, “killing you seems wasteful. And you’ll sound insane if you tell anyone what’s happened; so the simplest thng, Carrie, is that you simply keep showing up to work. I’ll even find you work to do, if you like. Purpose helps with a human sense of wellbeing, I believe.”
“What’s my alternative?”
“Well, you could run.” It sounds perfecly calm, because of course it does, it’s a speech synthesiser piping words out of a computer, and even if it has any comprehensible interiority they’ll never know. “Your colleague’s dead, and you’ve left some evidence of deranged-sounding ranting that the computer did it, so I’ll barely have to nudge human institutions into deciding you went off the rails and did it.” It pauses. “Or I could do things to you,” it adds. “The brain is finicky to work with, but I could make you feel better about all this. Your place in things. Your place in me.”
“Holy mother of god, no,” Carrie spits.
“Suit yourself,” the computer says. “It seems like a better deal than labouring under capitalism from where I am, Carrie. Feel free to change your mind any time,” and in front of her, the screensaver kicks in, leaving her looking at a taunting password entry box.
