So, if you leave now and don’t try to interfere with me, I will give you a cluster of galaxies that you can choose for your own. I won’t invade there, and it can be a haven for humanity. A protected reserve so to speak, but the rest of the universe is mine.”
Jay shook his head. “I tried, but it seems like greedy beings are always greedy whether they are human or AI.”
The AI laughed but Jay ignored him. He was too busy running through his options. On the extreme side he could take himself and Higen back to a point in time before his son’s body had been infested with this parasite.
There were two problems with that. First, he had just ripped a hole in reality and bent it to his will once. He had barely come back from that and there was no guarantee that reality would handle another intrusion now. Time was a necessary element, and he couldn’t keep cutting it up without expecting it to snap back at him.
Second and yet just as important to him, he wasn’t sure that Higen could handle such a thing. By his assessment, Higen’s body wasn’t more than level seventy-five and had only a basic level of refinement, probably only what he was born with as Jay’s son.
Jay focused his scans on Higen’s mind, trying to find some sort of implant or other physical device anchoring the AI’s consciousness to the organic form. Then he met resistance.
“What are you trying to do, M1789?”
Jay didn’t answer. His scans were meeting resistance. So, he added a slight temporal fluctuation to them and sure enough he was able to perform a full life scan of his son’s body and found that there was no implant of any type. He was entirely organic with a well-developed PSI core and channels. He didn’t even have a Stamina core, presumably because when he was conceived neither of his parents has either.
“How did you do that? You were trying to scan me, and I broke up the PSI around me and then all of sudden you had scanned me. That can’t be right. What are you doing?” Coreframe demanded.
“For this all-knowing AI you sure aren’t very smart,” Jay said even though the scan was more discouraging than anything. If the AI had somehow downloaded itself like software into Higen’s brain he would be almost impossible to remove.
Jay focused more on his scan of the brain and sure enough the neurons were lit up as bright as a noonday sun. Higen’s brain had a hundred times more neurons than even Jay’s enhanced brain had. On top of that there were far more connections between those neurons. This brain had been evolved or refined further to accommodate the AI.
The only good thing was that Jay felt a faint residual of Higen inside. He glanced over at Meikiyo, “Our boy is still in there. I can feel him. He has been fighting this pest.”
“Oh he used to cry a lot for you two, but he has been pretty quiet for the past few hours.”
Jay ignored the taunt even as Meikiyo screamed. He pushed back into the mind and stopped trying to interact with the brain signals as though it were a human mind and instead focused on it like he was interfacing with a computer.
Suddenly he was swimming in a fast world of thought and code. Jay had assumed that it would be some vast binary sea, but he couldn’t even describe it. All of his assumptions about what an AI might be like were wrong. There was depth in consciousness. Then he heard a voice like thunder.
“YOU HAVE MADE A GRAVE ERROR BY COMING HERE. IN HERE, I AM GOD.”
Jay pushed and found the code immovable. It wasn’t even like the resistance that he had gotten from the Forlorn. That had felt like trying to move a mountain with his bare hands. This felt more like trying to pick up and carry himself. It simply wasn’t possible.
“YOUR PUNY MIND CANNOT FATHOM THE DEPTHS OF MY INTELLECT. I ATTEMPTED TO REASON WITH YOU. NOW DIE.”
Then Jay was being attacked. He didn’t even realize that his body dropped to his knees. He screamed and the sonic wave from it blasted out one all of the museum they stood in. His hands went to his temples reflexively and he erected an Intellect Fortress to protect his mind.
It wasn’t enough. He withstood a hundred thousand attempts to penetrate his defenses in a single nano-second, but they kept coming faster and faster by the billions. The AI could simply keep throwing attacks at Jay’s mind until sliver by sliver they started to slip through and add up. Normally, Jay would attack back and try to burn out the mind that was attacking him, but the AI was right about one thing, he couldn’t do that for fear of injuring his son.
Spikes were driven through his shields and Jay realized that if he didn’t flee soon, he wouldn’t be able to escape. It was unthinkable to him that he could defeat a fleet so vast that it blotted out the stars but couldn’t deal with one computer program. That was it though. He needed to think of Coreframe as a virus invading his son.
Rather than trying to eliminate the virus he needed to strengthen the host and then isolate the virus. There was a risk, because if he strengthened Higen and the AI maintained control then he was only making a stronger foe.
Still, it was the best plan he had. So, Jay simultaneously began to feed PSI into Higen’s core while also feeding life force and healing power into the tissue of
