Since then, Tarov became something of a household name — especially within the installed intelligence community. He was a hero, almost larger than life. He was the I.I. equivalent of Captain America. Everyone equated him with the struggle against their human oppressors; they saw him as their savior and champion. So it wasn’t long before the radicalized organization known as the Liberators reached out to him and managed to recruit him among their ranks.
He rose up through the terrorist group’s hierarchy like a rocket set for the stars. Right off the bat, the Liberator leadership decided to place him in propaganda. He was the Rosie the Riveter of hatred against humanity. They would claim he was always at the forefront of whichever attack they carried out that week. If their claims were to be believed, Tarov had single-handedly slain two-hundred human “oppressors” in just a single month. It was clear to Beth and Simon that it was all exaggerated to build on Tarov’s larger-than-life reputation.
They promptly promoted him to a position of real power before even his first year of membership had been complete. He was in charge of a small squadron of what the Liberator’s toted as their best soldiers. On top of his clandestine plots and raids, he was made the face of the Liberators. They had him deliver all of their threatening addresses, all of their rambling declarations, so that the leadership could remain safe in the shadows of obscurity. Their efforts seemed to pay off. Tarov and the Liberators were nearly synonymous with each other — at least, as far as the public was concerned. They had a scapegoat if they ever needed one.
What the Liberators’ leadership failed to account for, however, was Tarov’s ambition. They knew that he had a desire for power and liked to demonstrate his strength, but they didn’t know what lengths he would go to in order to seize control. If it wasn’t for all the information Simon already provided, the two of them wouldn’t even know the truth of his sudden and violent ascension to the rank of master general.
It happened one fateful day when a squad of heavily armed F.B.I. agents burst into the abandoned-warehouse-turned-safehouse the leaders of the Liberators used to store their backups. Unlike most I.I.s, they didn’t keep themselves in storage banks open to the public. They were wanted criminals, and as such, had to keep themselves hidden from the authorities, not to mention human supremacists. But after twenty-plus years of living in secret, the jig was up. Someone had tipped the feds off and they were there to arrest or delete any terrorists they encountered.
The Liberators possessed physical defense systems, of course. Reinforced, electrified vault doors stood between their memory banks and the rest of the world. Automated turrets were programmed to shoot any intruders on sight. They even had a suite of combat bodyshells inside the facility, ready for use if the I.I.s had to defend themselves. On that night, however — when the police came knocking on their door — the door opened itself. The same rat who had sold them out had also disabled the security measures. They were defenseless—except for the bodyshells.
Tarov had seen the raid coming. That, or he was so prepared for an incident like it that he reacted with trained reflexes. He and two squads of Liberators were able to load themselves into the combat shells and defend the memory banks. They fought against the F.B.I.’s E.M.P. rifles, their pulse grenades, and the new cyberblades human scientists had designed to delete I.I. terrorists. One by one, bodyshells were destroyed, crippled, or their users deleted. The feds pushed up until Tarov had no choice but to flee. He managed to download a few hundred of the Liberators into a remote storage unit, but wasn’t able to save most of the leadership before the agents swarmed him. With the help of the few other I.I. bodyshells that stood their ground, he was able to escape with a significant portion of the group’s membership. The police looked for him for over a week but found no trace out in the real world or on the Net. His escape was successful.
I.I. supremacists all over the planet praised Tarov as a hero. There was no name more revered among sympathetic installed intelligences. Tarov came to be more legendary than Maynard Batiste, or even the I.I.’s inventor, Norman Pellick. When the Liberators had to choose I.I.s to replace their lost leadership, Tarov was inevitably elected master general and leader of the I.I. resistance movement. He was their savior — their messiah.
Thanks to the secret information Simon pilfered from the A.I., he and Beth knew that Tarov had been the one who tipped off the feds. He was the one who deactivated the safehouse’s security measures. He had performed a coup on the Liberator leadership and no one even noticed. In fact, he was worshiped for his actions and rewarded supreme power over the organization. No one seemed to know the truth except for Simon, Beth —and maybe the Tarov A.I.’s creators.
The detective and the I.I. started to research the history of artificial intelligence development. There was a lot of information about the first learning programs and bits of code that were programmed to simulate human intelligence. The history of human-equivalent artificial intelligence began at the end of World War III, however. Back then, the relatively light exchange of nuclear weapons had left the planet in an ecologically ruined state. Huge portions of the Earth were inhabitable or extremely unsafe due to the radioactive fallout — and the area of pollution only grew larger. Mankind had to get a grip on the fallout crisis or face extinction.
Because of the dangerous nature of nuclear fallout, the governments of the world couldn’t simply recruit workers and send
