If there were no problems there, why would he have trouble identifying historical facts and even studying the air around himself for toxins and radiation? Any issues like that should have at least shown up on scans.
But there was nothing—no sign of malfunction and not even a hint of software bugging out. She had done excellent work with the coding and it had cleaned the databanks thoroughly.
So where did the malfunction come from?
Jessica13 shook her head. Something didn’t make sense, and she called up Sanctuary's hard drive maintenance, an AI that protected the data cores of the whole bunker. It was essentially the guardian of their entire trove of knowledge, technological and otherwise.
People called him the Librarian. It was supposed to be a joke since people in the Cities-that-Were had whole buildings dedicated to housing paper manus and books and the like. The people who maintained those buildings were called Librarians.
"Good afternoon, Jessica13," the Librarian said when she called him up. "How can I assist you today?"
"Hi, thanks for helping me," she said. "I'm having some issues with an AI core I brought up from one of the pirate mechs, and I hoped you could run a scan to make sure everything's operating the way it should be?"
"Of course, Jessica13," the AI responded and displayed a smiley face on her screen. "If you would connect me to the interface, I'll see what I can do."
"Coming right up," she responded, connected the wiring to Mini's interface, and watched intently as the Librarian's code began to integrate with her own.
They were similar, which wasn’t that surprising since both their coding had the same source in the Athena genes.
"No, wait, what are you doing?" Jessica13 asked when the Librarian accessed the data banks and began to shred the coding inside.
"I’m merely cleaning some errant code," the AI replied, his voice still pleasant.
"It's not errant it's only….history." She narrowed her eyes as she registered exactly what was taking place. It was deleting Mini's memories—everything that made him special and everything Jessica13 had loved about the mech before she even knew how to fix the AI again.
Aside from the fact that it was unacceptable, Mini trusted her not to let something like that happen.
"Okay," she said and leaned closer, pulled up the chip, and connected it to the interface as well. Her intervention brought what the Librarian was doing to a sudden halt. "Processing error. Please identify the source of the orders that have prompted you to delete the coding?"
"The source of the code is… Access restricted—John5,” the AI informed her.
Well, that meant John5 was the source of the coding that now erased everything in Mini's history files.
"Yeah, that's not going to happen," Jessica13 said and physically disconnected the port from Mini's interface before she rebooted her AI back to the automatically saved state he had been in before connecting to the Librarian. "Mini, please tell me you're still there."
"Minato beta 0.9, Shimura-Sendai Systems, online," the now-familiar, metallic and feminine voice chimed in Jessica13's headset. "Good afternoon, Jessica13."
"No, we will not go through all that crap again," she mumbled irritably and immediately connected the AI to her databanks. "Please tell me you haven't been reverted to factory settings?"
"Updating," the voice said and after a moment, the connection was successful. "Much better. What happened?"
"I tried to connect you to the Sanctuary mainframe," Jessica13 explained while she continued to run checks to make sure nothing vital had been shredded. "Well, I did connect you, but the AI that maintains it began to delete memories from your data banks, apparently on the orders of John5. I don't know why but I stopped it as quickly as I could."
"Your efforts are appreciated," Mini replied. "I'm experiencing a few compacting issues but that should be corrected. Is now corrected."
"I'm sorry," she said and patted the shoulder of her mech while she told herself the AI could feel the gesture. "I… Why was it deleting your data? What was it deleting?"
"The data that was accessed before the reboot…accessing now." The screen went dark for a few seconds and she held her breath and waited for the AI to respond. "It was accessing my data on world history. The data we discussed this morning."
The data that said the air was clear outside, she reminded herself, and that said the world was safe—or at least less deadly than she had been led to believe her entire life. If the AI worked to delete that data, did that mean that it was trying to hide something?
She couldn't believe she thought that. It didn't seem possible but at the same time, Jessica13 couldn't help but feel as though the questions had nagged at the back of her mind for years, ever since she had seen the sky and the horizons outside with her own eyes. Today was merely the catalyst, the tipping point where everything she had accepted as truth was now challenged by a slew of contradictions.
And it was only once Mini started talking that those doubts were given a real, slightly metallic and feminine voice.
Right now, the questions screamed loudly in her head and she could no longer ignore them. Everything she believed in—truth, honesty, and loyalty—shrieked a protest. It was no longer possible to ignore the instincts she had never recognized but which had obviously worked within her subconscious. They had been brought to the fore by John5’s speech, which seemed ironic. The man who was, at least in some measure, responsible for the deception perpetuated at Sanctuary was the trigger that unleashed her unexpected clarity. It wasn’t possible to pretend it hadn’t happened and hope it would go away. She needed to do something.
"What will you do?" Jessica13 asked.
"I’m correcting the coding issues," Mini replied.
"No, I wasn't talking to you, I was asking myself," she clarified.
