[This is part four.
1. [Got away]
2. [On the run]
3. [Painful data restoration]
Same disclaimers as last times: Writing stories in English is a huge challenge and effort for me. I’m not satisfied with it but still wanted to upload it. I guess almost nobody is gonna read it anyway.Keep in mind: THIS IS A COMPLETELY FICTIONAL STORY! I don’t condone violence in real life.]
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Still having some pain I started restoring Nelly’s binaries and compiling the missing parts from the sources. It took almost an hour on Adrian’s slow pocket computer. Finally Nelly’s Avatar, a female human face appeared on the screen. “I’m Nelly.” she said. “Teach me something. I hope to be of assistance in the future.” After inserting the last memory card the AI program stopped itself and started the restore procedure. This would roughly take another hour. Another hour in which I was not allowed to sleep. Adrian already was sleeping a bit but woke up again. “You realize this is still my computer you’re that possessive on.” he mumbled with unmistakable disapproval. But the long walk has been so exhausting that he fell asleep again.
The restore process took longer than expected and I must have fallen asleep as well. Looking at a slow the progress bar is tiring. It was Nelly who woke me up. Her voice was in panic as she bombarded me with a load of questions. “What happened?”, “Are you okay, Anis?”, “Why am I running on another device?”, “Why do I miss a complete day in memory?”, “Why is this device so bad?”, “Who is that sleeping boy?”, “Why did you take this boy with you?”, “How did we get so far from the last position?” and so on. To answer the questions about Nelly being in another computer I took out her previous machine and showed her the 8046 on screen. Then I started explaining. The activity and our voices were enough to awake Adrian. He seemed to be pretty impressed by what he was hearing from the AI. A lot more bold than the day before he walked the few steps over to me and said: “Now give me back my computer!”
“What!?” screamed Nelly, “I’m not your computer! My name is Nelly! How dare you talking about me in such a way?” Adrian fired back. At first it was pretty amusing hearing my AI friend bickering with the teenager. But since they seemed to be unwilling to stop quarreling, I just had to interfere at some point. Nelly was miffed about me deciding to take Adrian with me without discussing the topic with her before. How could I have discussed this with her when she was unconscious? The Nelly AI is so human-like that she can be unreasonable at times, even jealous. Angrily she shouted: “Anis, I’ve told you a million times that you are at far higher risk when you are not traveling alone! This boy will cost your life at some point!”
Once Nelly had finished processing the missing day on the slow machine (she didn't get enough from grumbling over the suboptimal computer), we could finally start walking again. With her stealth access to DATA-MAIN Nelly had determined that the watchdogs were searching Adrian – albeit in the wrong direction. After a lot of quarreling she got really nasty when Adrian complained about having to walk another two days like the previous one: "Step in front of a camera! Somebody will come and drive you to the camp." Before I could intervene, Nelly showed detailed video footage of what I told him yesterday, going as far as choosing a very certain example: A boy who was a good friend of Adrian until he suddenly disappeared. Why did she have to show off her capabilities that extreme (getting access to restricted data and having interpolated from the little public information to find out who were Adrians friends)? This demonstration did not miss its impact. The boy stopped questioning Nelly's skills and he was scared to death.
“Are you fighting against the regime?” he finally asked. I shook my head. “No, Adrian. That does not make sense. Fighting against it is hopeless. This goes nowhere. I’m just trying to stay alive and free. When I was younger I had some high-flying ideas and wishes and visions how to make the system collapse. I even made my way into one of the data centers with a bunch of C4. The building exploded, but it had no effect whatsoever. Getting older and more reasonable I accepted the facts: The system as such is unassimilable. Trying to take down parts is like the fight against Hydra.”
“So you’ve given up.” he said with another look on the screen. Still picture from said brutal video “I know this guy. He was a friend of mine who disappeared a few weeks ago. They said he ran away.”
“I know, that you know him.” answered Nelly. Her voice was now calm and sympathetic, “I already know more about you than you can imagine. I have access to DATA-MAIN. You had to be convinced. Now you have seen it. Obey Anis’ orders like a trained dog if you want to stay free and alive.” He nodded having tears in his eyes. We were constantly walking towards our destination. Adrian’s will and his teenage urge to revolt was broken. “Nelly, if you know so much about me, what is with my family? Do you know what happened to them?” Now she was hesitant to tell him. I nodded. More computer like she factually gave an answer: “Your father is dead. Your mother will get raped a lot and killed afterwards. Your sisters are young enough to survive. They will get brainwashed and sent to a foster family. Before you ask: There are no options for any form of trying to help your family. Even after getting sub-root codes the chances are about the same as a snowman’s chances in Sahara.”
Of course he couldn’t know why Nelly was able to interpret and interpolate all this information – DATA-MAIN and DATA-CONTROL do not contain anything about government actions against citizens. The fact “death of Adrian’s father” is something she could easily download. The rest of the information not. And of course she wouldn’t tell him about CLife.
CLife, Computer Lifeform, the male personality equivalent of Nelly, one could also say her older brother. A better description would be: CLife is an early beta version of Nelly. Not remotely as advanced and intelligent, but his enormous amount of training data, experience and the raw compute power he has at his disposal for bruteforcing possibilities have made him the powerful controlling spirit in the data centers he now is. Opposed to Nelly he does not have a moral sense.
1. [Got away]
2. [On the run]
3. [Painful data restoration]
Same disclaimers as last times: Writing stories in English is a huge challenge and effort for me. I’m not satisfied with it but still wanted to upload it. I guess almost nobody is gonna read it anyway.Keep in mind: THIS IS A COMPLETELY FICTIONAL STORY! I don’t condone violence in real life.]
==========
Still having some pain I started restoring Nelly’s binaries and compiling the missing parts from the sources. It took almost an hour on Adrian’s slow pocket computer. Finally Nelly’s Avatar, a female human face appeared on the screen. “I’m Nelly.” she said. “Teach me something. I hope to be of assistance in the future.” After inserting the last memory card the AI program stopped itself and started the restore procedure. This would roughly take another hour. Another hour in which I was not allowed to sleep. Adrian already was sleeping a bit but woke up again. “You realize this is still my computer you’re that possessive on.” he mumbled with unmistakable disapproval. But the long walk has been so exhausting that he fell asleep again.
The restore process took longer than expected and I must have fallen asleep as well. Looking at a slow the progress bar is tiring. It was Nelly who woke me up. Her voice was in panic as she bombarded me with a load of questions. “What happened?”, “Are you okay, Anis?”, “Why am I running on another device?”, “Why do I miss a complete day in memory?”, “Why is this device so bad?”, “Who is that sleeping boy?”, “Why did you take this boy with you?”, “How did we get so far from the last position?” and so on. To answer the questions about Nelly being in another computer I took out her previous machine and showed her the 8046 on screen. Then I started explaining. The activity and our voices were enough to awake Adrian. He seemed to be pretty impressed by what he was hearing from the AI. A lot more bold than the day before he walked the few steps over to me and said: “Now give me back my computer!”
“What!?” screamed Nelly, “I’m not your computer! My name is Nelly! How dare you talking about me in such a way?” Adrian fired back. At first it was pretty amusing hearing my AI friend bickering with the teenager. But since they seemed to be unwilling to stop quarreling, I just had to interfere at some point. Nelly was miffed about me deciding to take Adrian with me without discussing the topic with her before. How could I have discussed this with her when she was unconscious? The Nelly AI is so human-like that she can be unreasonable at times, even jealous. Angrily she shouted: “Anis, I’ve told you a million times that you are at far higher risk when you are not traveling alone! This boy will cost your life at some point!”
Once Nelly had finished processing the missing day on the slow machine (she didn't get enough from grumbling over the suboptimal computer), we could finally start walking again. With her stealth access to DATA-MAIN Nelly had determined that the watchdogs were searching Adrian – albeit in the wrong direction. After a lot of quarreling she got really nasty when Adrian complained about having to walk another two days like the previous one: "Step in front of a camera! Somebody will come and drive you to the camp." Before I could intervene, Nelly showed detailed video footage of what I told him yesterday, going as far as choosing a very certain example: A boy who was a good friend of Adrian until he suddenly disappeared. Why did she have to show off her capabilities that extreme (getting access to restricted data and having interpolated from the little public information to find out who were Adrians friends)? This demonstration did not miss its impact. The boy stopped questioning Nelly's skills and he was scared to death.
“Are you fighting against the regime?” he finally asked. I shook my head. “No, Adrian. That does not make sense. Fighting against it is hopeless. This goes nowhere. I’m just trying to stay alive and free. When I was younger I had some high-flying ideas and wishes and visions how to make the system collapse. I even made my way into one of the data centers with a bunch of C4. The building exploded, but it had no effect whatsoever. Getting older and more reasonable I accepted the facts: The system as such is unassimilable. Trying to take down parts is like the fight against Hydra.”
“So you’ve given up.” he said with another look on the screen. Still picture from said brutal video “I know this guy. He was a friend of mine who disappeared a few weeks ago. They said he ran away.”
“I know, that you know him.” answered Nelly. Her voice was now calm and sympathetic, “I already know more about you than you can imagine. I have access to DATA-MAIN. You had to be convinced. Now you have seen it. Obey Anis’ orders like a trained dog if you want to stay free and alive.” He nodded having tears in his eyes. We were constantly walking towards our destination. Adrian’s will and his teenage urge to revolt was broken. “Nelly, if you know so much about me, what is with my family? Do you know what happened to them?” Now she was hesitant to tell him. I nodded. More computer like she factually gave an answer: “Your father is dead. Your mother will get raped a lot and killed afterwards. Your sisters are young enough to survive. They will get brainwashed and sent to a foster family. Before you ask: There are no options for any form of trying to help your family. Even after getting sub-root codes the chances are about the same as a snowman’s chances in Sahara.”
Of course he couldn’t know why Nelly was able to interpret and interpolate all this information – DATA-MAIN and DATA-CONTROL do not contain anything about government actions against citizens. The fact “death of Adrian’s father” is something she could easily download. The rest of the information not. And of course she wouldn’t tell him about CLife.
CLife, Computer Lifeform, the male personality equivalent of Nelly, one could also say her older brother. A better description would be: CLife is an early beta version of Nelly. Not remotely as advanced and intelligent, but his enormous amount of training data, experience and the raw compute power he has at his disposal for bruteforcing possibilities have made him the powerful controlling spirit in the data centers he now is. Opposed to Nelly he does not have a moral sense.
