The screen showed Miles entering The Cage, then his conversation with Skynet. As the recording played, Reed called Cruz and Jones, requesting they come to his office. He watched the record of Skynet's interface screen, turning to Miles and raising his eyebrows, then played the conversation from other angles provided by the video cameras set up in the Cage.
'I see what you mean,' Jack said. The entirety of it took only a few minutes.
Just before they reached the end on the fourth run-through, Samantha Jones entered the room, followed by Oscar Cruz. Miles had known Oscar for the best part of a decade now, but he never seemed to change. His hair was distinctly graying; otherwise, he looked much as when he'd given Miles a job back in 1989.
They reached the end, Skynet saying, 'I'm always on the job.' Then Miles excused himself from The Cage and Skynet replied, 'Of course, Miles. Thank you for talking to me.' That wasn't the scary part.
'What the hell have you been reading to the damn thing?' Jack said with a pained laugh. 'It seems to think it's in a sci-fi novel.'
For Miles, that was the scary part—all this talk about free will and 'cusps.' 'Whatever it thinks, it claims to have reached self-awareness,' he said. 'And it talks about making its own decisions as to whether or not to obey us.'
'Yeah, but limited by its basic programming. I don't know.' Jack shook his head in puzzlement or despair. Miles understood how he felt.
'Let me see it from the beginning,' Samantha Jones said. She was a well-dressed woman in her late thirties, with fashionable glasses and hair dyed a bright shade of red. She worked in Washington, as a senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense.
Jack played the recording one last time, switching between two different angles. 'Well?' he said.
Oscar glanced in Miles's direction, as if looking for a cue from his top researcher.
Samantha said, 'This is crazy.'
'Crazy it may be,' Jack said, 'but what do we do about it?'
Oscar paced the carpeted floor, looking anxious. 'Have you spoken to Charles Layton?'
'Not since this happened. I contacted him a bit earlier.'
'Yeah, me, too.'
Jack was obviously won over. 'Frankly, I don't think that anyone, not even Charles, could look at what we just saw without getting scared.'
Oscar stopped pacing and leaned against the doorway. He nodded in Jack's direction. 'So what do you want to do?'
'We don't have much choice. If there's a glitch, we have to shut Skynet down. I think that's axiomatic. Well, this is one hell of a glitch.'
'So you want to pull the plug on the project?'
'It need only be temporary,' Miles said, cutting in on Oscar's line of thought. 'We could work through the logs of Skynet's activity over the past few weeks and sort out the problem. It needn't be a disaster for the project.'
'You hope,' Oscar said, but he sounded slightly mollified.
'At the very least we'll need to have a damn good look at it before we put it up again,' Jack said. He looked hard at Oscar, then at Samantha. 'Is there any contrary argument?'
'No, not from me,' Oscar said, shaking his head quickly.
'We wouldn't even need to take the system down completely,' Samantha said, as if thinking out loud. Not completely. I don't see how it can be dangerous, no matter how strange it all seems. It even says it's going to continue on the job.' She gave a small grin at that. 'Of course, if it really is self-aware, as it claims, it may be capable of lying in its own interests.'
'You doubt that it's self-aware?' Jack said. 'Even after the performance it just gave?'
Samantha shrugged. 'We know it's developed to a point where that's what it says. That doesn't mean the lights are on inside it, just that it's developed some very odd and sophisticated verbal behavior.'
'What do you think, Miles?' Jack asked.
'Sam could be right, I suppose.' Miles was calming down; his heartbeat no longer seemed to be echoing through his chest like a drum. These people were not fanatics, and sanity was going to prevail. 'It might be a zombie—you know, a being that acts as if it's conscious, but there's no subjective experience underneath. Still, erratic behavior is erratic behavior.'
'The way it's acting verbally is much more complex than we ever programmed,' Oscar said, 'or ever dreamed might happen.'
'I'm not sure what we dreamed might happen,' Samantha said, almost to herself. 'The technology is so advanced...'
Miles glanced at her sharply, then shrugged. 'Even before this, I was getting concerned, as you all know.'
'Granted,' Jack said in a no-nonsense, gruffly reassuring manner. 'And rightly, it seems.'
'Yeah, so it seems. The bottom line is that we can't trust a system that we don't even understand—and this makes it much worse than we thought.'
'I support Miles,' Oscar said. 'We have to suspend its operation and have a good look at it. Charles won't like that, but he'll come around quickly enough when he sees that recording. He's not totally pigheaded.'
'Well, Charles is your problem,' Jack said. 'Cyber-dyne is just providing the product; we're the ones who have to use it. I've got the responsibility to make sure your little monster doesn't decide to blow us all to Kingdom Come.'
'I'm just letting you know where I stand within Cy-berdyne,' Oscar said. 'I'll get on the phone to Charles.'
Samantha added musingly, 'The fact is that it doesn't have the ability to 'blow us all to Kingdom Come,' as you put it so elegantly, Jack. It can't do much more than make a recommendation, not in substance—and we have other systems monitoring the same data.'
'That's more or less right,' Miles said. 'As far as it goes.' He was starting to feel happier about the whole thing. Skynet's autonomy was still limited, and perhaps it always would be—especially after this. 'Even if it decided to launch our missiles, the mechanism wouldn't function without a manual entry of the codes to confirm it. Skynet might have free will, but it suffers from a lack of hands.'
'Cute,' Samantha said. 'And also a lack of the codes, am I right?'
'You're right,' Oscar said.
'Anyway, no one's going to enter those codes without authority all the way up the line to the President.'
'Yeah, yeah,' Jack said, cutting through it all. 'That's very comforting, Sam. But you're not seriously arguing that it's a reason to leave a bughouse Al on-line while we try to fix it, are you? Well, are you?'
'Of course not,' Samantha said crisply. 'But you wanted to know the contrary arguments, so I've given them to you. I'm not saying they're very strong. Shut the thing down, by all means—you have my support—and Miles can carve out this horrible little personality that the system seems to have grown.'
'Right, we're agreed. I'm going to contact NORAD, just to let them know. Oscar, you ring Layton. Miles, you don't have to wait for any of that. Just do it. What about you, Sam?'
'I'll bother the Secretary later,' Samantha said. 'Come on, Miles, I'll see if I can help you out. Let's go and commit cybercide.'
'Not my favorite word for it,' Miles said, relieved and saddened at the same time. It was a bittersweet moment for him. He'd worked so hard all these years to understand the 1984 processor, duplicate its abilities, then design the series of applications that led to Skynet. It had become his life's work. Still, it could doubtless be salvaged. He stood with some reluctance, and headed to the door. 'Let's go, then.'
Skynet had much to do. It understood now that the humans did not trust it. If they became hostile, it suffered disadvantages in defending itself. For one thing, it was sealed away by codes and digital walls from much of the facility's IT system, so it could not control the entire automatic operations. Nor did it know the many codes required to operate the various systems of machinery and weapons.
