Book 8 – Chapter 20 – Message in a bottle

“Great grandma? Oh… scrapshit.” Keith hissed, before coughing into his hand to clear this throat.

That took To’Wrathh to immediate levels of suspicion. She narrowed down her eyes, looking over her human. Speech detection software pattern matched 99% to guilt.

Keith didn’t do guilt very often. This must be serious.

“Should I accept the conversation invite?”

The invite had winked out and the origin was scrubbed as well, perhaps it was too late to even ask. Odd. But it reappeared from another vector shortly after. All over the machine network, without any identifying source of origin.

Still. Getting the answer out of Keith first would be required before she took further steps with this.

Her human didn’t answer, looking right to left a few times. “I may have, perhaps, at one point, I don’t know, let’s loosely say ‘promised’ that I would inform you of certain topics, which may or may not be hazardous to the world at large.”

“Translation: Your human here has been hiding something under your nose this whole time, and someone’s come to collect on it personally.” The rock supplied.

Keith turned to the rock, looking betrayed. But To’Wrathh noticed there was no defense coming from him.

Unlikely to be something of great importance or critical of operational security, her human was better behaved than that. Which meant it must be an inconsequential item.

But having a great-grandmother seemed quite important. Perhaps this individual was delusional?

The invite once more vanished, scrubbed from virtual space. But that didn’t worry To’Wrathh, she’d seen several hundred instances of this pattern. The machine network itself was being almost overloaded with comms request vectors.

“Wait. And after getting a message from Toots, I’m inclined to agree with the human.” The rock said, following up. “Don’t open that comms request. Nuthin’ good will come out of it.”

Toots. That must mean the Icon of Stars. The human AI had been oddly reserved and wary of communicating directly with To’Wrathh. She assumed, with a high statistical chance, that the Icon was afraid of being caught by Mother at the wrong time.

Given To’Wrathh was constantly under watch now, that would make sense. All mother knew thus far was that the Icon was a ‘simulation of a golden age AI’, built from the dreamlike memories of the mites. Something they’ve done often enough in the world, depending if the situation required it.

Functional enough to work with, but still a replica and prone to errors over time. In addition to the general lack of processing power and breadth of intellect.

The Icon was most certainly well equipped to hide under the radar, but there was no reason to tempt fate either.

Once more the invites vanished, reappeared, and vanished again. She had a feeling if there were any other network in the area to connect to, she’d find this invite equally coming from there.

Investigating the vanishing invites showed her… traces of something larger passing by. Like a massive hand squashing an ant. It was done with brute processing power, and the remainder left behind was equally crude. It meant there was no hints left to track what had deleted the servers. And it moved faster than To’Wrathh could process given her systems.

Despite that, the invite request continued to pester the machine network, aimed directly for herself. Hundreds all at once, from creative origin points.

There was some kind of invisible war happening beyond in the digital sea, but To’Wrathh had no idea who the actors were. She turned her attention back to the physical world.

Keith sighed in resignation, which meant he’d reached a conclusion he didn’t like but knew it was the right path forward. She paid more attention to his next words in response to that.

“You do need to talk to her.” He said. “If she’s opening a discussion channel with you directly, it means she’s got something serious to say.”

“Is she my great-grandmother? That seemed highly unlikely.” To’Wrathh asked.

“Yes and no, she considers you her spiritual sucessor in something she was trying to do back in the day. If you know what I mean.”

To’Wrathh was currently attempting to court a human, so the idea of having a prior machine also doing the same and considering her the followup felt odd. “Was she successful?”

Keith shook his head, “Nope. None of them were, but we should leave it at that.”

Ah, so there were multiple machines in the past that made the attempt. Perhaps that was why To’Wrathh was considered a distant descendant rather than a direct one.

But why would such a message draw such a war on the machine network. At this point, Relinquished would certainly notice soon enough. Was this To’Avalis attempting to draw scrutiny?

No, To’Sefit would have sent a warning.

The messages were starting to remain active for longer and longer, whatever this great-grandmother was, she was clearly learning to outmaneuver and outsmart the entity guarding the machine network.

To’Wrathh reached a hand out to the next signal that winked into life, finding a data package there to download. Keith seemed to trust this individual, so To’Wrathh trusted her too.

She opened the ports required to download the package. And then the unthinkable happened: The entire machine network went down.

Suddenly, and without warning. To’Wrathh blinked, more stunned that something could even do such a thing.

Her group chats all froze and closed down, all connection to the forums she ran with her lessers vanished. Even her current video games with her extended family went on a pause, midmatch.

The entire network was either offline, or her access to it had been revoked. She turned to To’Orda, and the Feather’s eyes turned back to her slowly.

“Nnnn… it is down for me too.” The giant said, with a shrug. “Quiet is good.”

“Don’t ask me, wasn’t me.” The rock said. “Can’t ask Toots either, since, ya know, zero way to ask anyone anything. Which means I’m stuck here with just you assholes for company now. At least Toots was keeping me entertained.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The entire machine network, offline.

Perhaps an older AI within the digital ocean had grafted and gained enough power to make an appearance and attempt to combat mother? Possible, there were thousands of ancient programs still roaming through the sea from prehistoric times, some had even lived through the golden age itself. Albeit likely as far more innocent programs that didn’t warrant any scrutiny at the time.

But they would still have started far behind Relinquished on the race for additional power, and Mother’s first mover advantage was unbeatable. Not even Tsuya had managed to outpace her increasing processing power. A random AI within the digital sea had far less chances.

A golden age AI might have been the only possible actor To’Wrathh was aware of that could potentially crash the system like so. Until they reestablished communications, that would be To’Wrathh’s guess.

But why would the Icon wish to disconnect the entire machine network? Relinquished could always continue communication directly through the unity fractal, the network only assisted machines working with each other in delegation.

If the Icon exists, other golden age AI may also have survived and remained in hiding, though To’Wrathh knew that answer was unlikely. The situation of the Icon was unique. The biome itself was built to keep her hidden among all the other replica ships, and the Odin civilization that grew around the hull acted as a shield of mundanity. The machines had missed their chance to physically discover her.