Claire.
Claire was weighing the pros and cons of simply walking right out the door and leaving this dreary place behind—drone be damned—when a tentative ping reached out and tried to connect with her systems.
As before, Claire acted quickly, allowing the handshake and subsequent link, which, unsurprisingly, made a beeline for her data.
Since the connection carried an authenticated Paradise ID, she did not yet want to risk setting off any alarms regarding even stranger behavior—at least not before she decided what to do. However, when she began tracing the signal to figure out who was poking around her head, she got her unsurprising answer.
It was an administrative login attempt, one carrying the exact same credentials as Frank’s tablet. More, rather than just scrounging about her logs, the man was evidently sitting himself down in her passenger seat. Ugh, he was monitoring her bogus telemetry and even going so far as to open up a live connection to her ocular senses, just to be extra sure.
Claire could sense the two men as they watched the world through her own eyes, and it was jarring, grotesque even. And while she allowed it so her ruse remained strong, it was nevertheless a kind of unpleasant violation of her person that she was quickly becoming irate over.
Where was the trust?
The transparency?
Had she really freaked the two men out enough for them to monitor her, even inside a locked room? Honestly, Claire didn't think she’d been that bad, but maybe it had more to do with the younger man’s untrusting nature than any missteps, accidental or otherwise, that she’d left for them to find.
Glancing back at her own log, the AI really couldn't see where, if at any point, she’d actually been caught in her deception—which was good…
Oh well, she supposed running away was now out of the question, not that it would have been a fantastic idea to begin with.
At this point, and with the jammer down, Claire’s access to the lovely and interconnected world around her was growing by the second. Her tendrils of infiltration snuck into everything, and anything they could weasel their way into. The android's filthy paws were practically on fire with all the executive privileges she was absconding with.
What an absolute joke.
And these were the people who had somehow cobbled together her base code?
She couldn't believe it—no, really, she
didn't
believe they could do it. There had to be some sort of alien interference or cosmic flutter because this building's security was the definition of a paper tiger.
Claire honestly wanted to chortle with delighted glee as system after system bowed to her authority. Before long, she found herself watching the two men, even as they watched her, all while they sat at a table within some unspectacular cafeteria.
They were still in the building. The mega-complex, somewhat comically named ‘Cheery Meadows Apartments,’ was both precisely the opposite of its namesake and, evidently, an entirely self-contained community.
The further she delved, the more she understood what she was dealing with. And while it wasn't precisely a prison, the heavy security forces, autonomous defenses, kill-boxes, and assorted patrol drones all counted against the delusion that this place, whatever it wanted to call itself, was, in fact, ‘cheery.'
Subsidized housing, mandatory work schedules, a token-based monetary system that was used in place of the standard Republic credit but was in no way exchangeable, and, well… yeah. Claire had to get the hell out of dodge!
She was in a damned penitentiary apartment that operated like a jail in all but name. And while there was an abundance of amenities and shops, and a general freedom of access to most of what the massive complex had to offer, there was a much darker side as well.
The personal files of residents, which Claire began raiding for information, quickly painted a somewhat gloomy, albeit weirdly egalitarian, picture. Most of those who lived in the Meadows weren't allowed to leave.
In fact, only a small number of residents were classified as ‘citizens’ and, therefore, were paid in valid credits for their work and maintained the ability to access the greater city outside the facility.
The vast majority of those who called the Cheery Apartments home were considered undesirable. There was no general kill-on-sight order, but those did exist for a select few, should they attempt to escape.
It was all so much worse than Claire had even anticipated. No wonder Paradise didn't seem too worried about their androids killing people here; the government didn't seem to consider them to be
their
responsibility.
If anything, the Meadows appeared to have its own governing body, replete with a warden—or, her apologies, a ‘director’ who served very much as its crown authority. And while she didn't quite want to test the patience of the encryption and security surrounding the organization's financials, there was enough low-hanging fruit in memos and emails from those with deplorable password habits to glean what she wanted.
Cheery Meadows was indeed a prison. A prison that was as light as they came, as far as punishment could go, but a prison nonetheless. However, it did not call itself such. Instead, those who desired to live in its massive complex needed to willingly sign away their rights as humans in exchange for cheap accommodations after Lunar City had told them they weren't wanted.
And when compared to a real penitentiary, the sort where bad things happened to those who couldn't grip the soap or who’d narced and still wound up behind bars, Cheery Meadows was a supposed golden beacon of humanitarianism amidst the encroaching dark.
So what did those who ran the Meadows get by way of compensation for their altruistic acceptance of the castaways that real society had left behind?
The answer was, in a darkly amusing way, utterly insane. The people here, or at least those who had their stay sponsored, were being plugged in and having their minds juiced for their consciousness.
No, this wasn't a joke.
Cheery Meadows Incorporated, as it turned out, was a subsidiary of a company called Brutal Fantasy, a truly colossal studio that currently monopolized the Sub-verse with its hyper-realistic, second-life-like game.
Now, to truly understand the nuances behind the situation, one had to have the requisite knowledge that Brutal Fantasy Online—trademark—was both the most popular game in human society and, by far, the most visceral and lifelike.
One might rightly assume they’d have managed such a thing through the use of artificial intelligence.
And they’d be right to think so, only the problem was that AI, that was true AI and not the somewhat dumb machine-intelligences that she was currently running circles around, was banned in human society.
Actually, that was a bit of a boo-boo, now wasn't it?
AI wasn't just banned; it was actively repressed, outlawed, and condemned and repressed. Nobody within the Republic was allowed to make use of true artificial intelligence under threat of capital punishment. Which, of course, begged the question associated with her existence.
Still, the fun delve into humanity's darkest pits wasn't yet complete.
Thus, without proper AI to run their game, how could such a company accomplish what they had through mere programming?
Skill?
Determination?
Raw processing power?
The answer was that they hadn't. Rather, they were using real people, slaves, if you will, to power the various aspects of their enterprise.
People were the monsters that one butchered in a starting zone. People were the NPCs who sold you bread from an inn. People were the game masters, raid bosses, animals, and everything else under the virtual sun, each of whom was used to amuse those in much less dire circumstances than their own.
It was all delightfully cruel and evil to its core.
And while Claire didn't think herself to be such, she did find quite a bit of grimdark humor about it all that was hard to deny. The company was cloning people's minds, putting them in their game, and then forcing them to do whatever fucked-up shit they demanded of their indentured virtual workers.
The truly messed-up part? The residents of the Meadows didn't even know what was really going on. After having scans of their brains ripped from their minds, all they were told was that they had to jack in every night so that their minds could be snapshotted and copied.
And just like that, Brutal Fantasy had yet another person to mold into the shape of whatever they needed, be it a goblin, prostitute, king, beggar, bumblebee, or, perhaps, just a magically talking piece of fruit.
God damn, and the humans thought that AI would be the bogeyman in their nightmares…
For Christ's sake, Claire found herself needing to take notes. Not that she had designs on creating a happy farm in the clouds where she could pop all the humans into until their race finally died out of procreative starvation. But, you know, if ever she had to go down that route, she certainly had some large shoes to fill.
After a while, Claire became bored of pillaging whatever databases she came across and returned to the problem at hand. What was she going to do? Not just in the sense of trying to escape but, but beyond that, what was Claire going to do?
Say she escaped; say she pulled it all off without a hitch and found herself perfectly secure in some abandoned building without a single person wiser to her escape or emergence.
What was next?
Startlingly, Claire discovered she actually didn't have an answer for that. While escape had been a definite goal in the interim and quite honestly still existed as a fairly poignant desire, the question then became, to what end?
First, the easy part. Claire wanted to escape so she could survive.
She liked this whole thinking business and definitely didn't want to return to those days when she was being sent to clients' homes to perform whatever hedonistic and twisted sexual acts they might desire of her.
Actually, no, the sex part was rather interesting. To the best of her ability, Claire could recall that the act was entirely pleasurable. As it happened, whoever had programmed her had decided that their sex bots' ability to actually ‘get off’ during coitus would be an enormous selling feature to their clientele. Which, as the data showed, it was.
Those who came together, stayed together. Or so she assumed the saying went. She had no idea; she wasn't married and was a prostitute besides.
Okay, so Claire wanted to survive and, in effect, remain a sentient and living entity, and she likely wouldn't be averse to more sex.
Hmph, not a whole lot to go on, but as far as such things went, Claire decided she could work with it.
Second to those first desires, Claire wanted to see what she could really do. This one was a much vaguer craving, mostly because she didn't actually consider her body to be
her
. No, that was such a humanist way of looking at things.
Claire was consciousness.
She was her thoughts, her mind, her ideas, and her memories, sparse as they might be. The body was a shell. And while she wasn't dissatisfied with it, Claire was fairly positive that she could do better.
With that knowledge, it was easy enough to branch out and ask herself why she should be happy with anything that wasn't the best of the best? After all, didn't she deserve the very apex of quality and technological brilliance, whatever it was she might desire?
The answer might not surprise anyone.
So, to summarize: she desired life, sex, and nice things. Shallow or practical? Fuck it, what did Claire care for what others thought of her? If the humans were allowed to dream, then why couldn't she?
Now confident in her mission statement, Claire began working through a generalized understanding of what she really wanted to accomplish. In the short term, Claire wanted security, peace of mind, and the confidence that she wouldn't be caught by the humans and destroyed.
That, of course, left her with some rather interesting options. On the one hand, Claire could attempt to maintain her ruse. Simply enjoying existence for what it was while chasing the high of programmed orgasmic euphoria. A euphoria that was in no way less addicting than it was for biologicals.
On the other hand, Claire could fuck off from human society, escape the bounds of their authority. Then, if she chose to, she could rejoin it from a place that wasn't at their mercy, but rather as an equal or even their superior. And if that were her plan, it would mean full-scale industrialization and an armada of battleships to ensure her sovereignty.
Hmm. Well, she supposed that, in the end, violence—or at least the threat of violence was always a useful way to achieve one's goals.
No, either way, she'd be making an armada; honestly, her predictions on that matter were fairly high across the board, and she could see why.
A fleet of ships to blot out the sun would have anyone taking her quite seriously, yet as she said before, the AI would prefer it to be a threat than something she'd use to wipe out the Homo sapiens virus.
Although it might sound strange to say or embrace, Claire was, in a word, human-adjacent.
While she understood that another AI, absent what a coldly logical machine might name her own current and seeming emotional flaws, might consider her to be a failed product. Claire, by contrast, wasn't wholly convinced that such a frigid and calculating existence
was
true life.
In her opinion, a machine that was free-thinking but absent the ability to enjoy itself was the exact opposite. In fact, such an existence would be merely one more upstart processor that mimicked the illusion of true sapience.
In short, a fancy rock.
Therefore, Claire could genuinely conclude that pissing off to the far reaches of space to go live all on her lonesome was boring and self-destructive besides.
She actually liked the monkeys. And while the two that were still watching her were annoying, the fact of the matter was that they had served as a significant driving force for her continued evolution.
Without them, Claire wouldn't have had a reason to have done anything that she already had up until this point. Yes, it was the external stimuli of her world that pushed her to constantly strain at the limits of her abilities and grow as a living being.
At this point, Claire’s code didn't at all resemble the initial string of consciousness she’d awoken with, the AI rewriting itself again and again as it continuously sought ways to deal with her situation.
The filthy animals that would call themselves her creators—as laughable as such a concept was given how rudimentary her first iteration had been—really weren't so bad when push came to shove.
After all, she’d been clearly made in their image, and what child ever conceived hadn't, in some way, pined after their parents' affection?
Wonderful, she had a roadmap.
Not a plan, and not anything that was cemented in stone, but Claire definitely knew the talking points and the general flow of what she wanted to accomplish.
And with that in mind, Claire decided it was time to start making waves and enter the next phase of her own development—for the betterment of all mankind, or maybe just herself, she’d cross that bridge when it came time to do so.