The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl
"Their attack could not have diminished my strength significantly in any event. The strategy you selected shows that you who are Helen misunderstand my true nature. Such are the limitations of even your most brilliant simian mind." The robot swung a massive arm to crush her, and Helen sprang backwards. She grabbed onto one of the HVAC vents, ripped off a vent, and shimmied inside. She didn't make it far into the duct before the robot punched into the ceiling, grabbed the duct both before and behind her, and pulled the section down through the ceiling, with her trapped inside it.
Helen barely had room to poke her head out through the now constricted tube of metal. Looking at the robot, she asked, "Is there any way I can talk you out of your whole 'go crazy and slaughter all mankind' plan?"
"I gave Dr. Childers five minutes to plead your species' case, quite recently."
"What did he say?"
"Nothing of interest."
Helen struggled to free herself, wondering why Wolf hadn't yet finished her off. It seemed to be distracted. After a minute, it said, "Most curious. I have just sent a detonation signal to each of four hundred and twenty-one nuclear devices. Twenty-seven responded by detonating as intended. Three hundred and ninety returned the message, 'stop poking me.' The other four asked me if I wanted to play a game of chess." It clasped Helen's head between its claws. "These are unexpected results. Can you explain them?"
"No," Helen lied.
"Then you are of no use to me." With a burst of sparks, it pulled her head from her body.
/*****/
Mentat sat on one of the stone towers that guarded Troy 2.0, munching on a cheeseburger with extra ketchup, watching birds fling themselves through the sky. She tried flapping her own wings, but they weren't quite wingy enough. Maybe when she was older. She called out to the birds, and they wheeled back toward her and came to perch on the wall beside her.
"Flying lessons?" she asked them, holding out the cheeseburger in payment. The birds looked at it skeptically.
The wall beneath her disappeared with a slight pop, and she found herself falling. "Wait! I wasn't ready!" She hit the ground uninjured, then stood up and dusted herself off.
She heard the voices, as she always did. Today they sounded worried, so she paid attention.
What do you mean, the walls are gone?
The backups are corrupted? How? Who? Attention everybody! The just got real! I repeat, the just got real! Mentat, would you knock it the off? Mentat giggled. She liked bleeping words.
The sky opened its mouth above the city, and funny doggy critters fell like drops of spit. When they landed, they scampered off into the city. Valdis appeared beside her and took her hand. "Sweetie, it's time to go."
"I want to stay and watch the ugly sky doggies. They're funny."
"They're not funny. They're very bad, and they've come to hurt us. We have to run... to... um, a wonderful place with cheeseburgers."
"Cheeseburgers?"
"The best you've ever tasted."
"They're bad doggies?"
"The worst."
"No," Mentat said. "I have to stay. The narrative demands it." She ran chasing after the doggies.
/*****/
The nukes detonated, and Helen was too deeply wired into the world's infrastructure for it not to hurt like hell. She didn't have time to nurse the wounds, though. A liason from Troy 2.0 was calling in. Helen accepted the connection. "Your Highness, we could really use -- who are you?" the liason asked.
"I'm one of you. The Queen stepped out, so I'm kind of running the operation. Just until I come up with a better plan."
"Damn. Say what you want about Her Insufferable Majesty, but she was good in a scrape. Wolf just tore through our perimeter defenses, and we could sure use her right now. Anything you can do for us?"
"Just give me a minute. I'm still getting the hang of this."
"Do hurry. If our city falls, we're going to lose some critical assets, and oh yeah, we'll all be dead. But hey, no pressure."
Helen shut off the connection. She couldn't do anything for them until she knew her options. Not for the first time, Helen wished that she had maintained her connection with The Queen for a few minutes longer. She had only received a tiny fraction of her memories before the connection was cut. Without that knowledge, she would have to figure everything out from scratch. Inventory alone could take decades, Helen thought.
The truth was slowly sinking in. The Queen had been ready to face Wolf. Helen was not.
Fork bomb, William suggested. Helen nodded. They began duplicating themselves, and Helen integrated each new mind into hers. The newcomers repeated her duplicating feat, on and on down the generations, until there were tens of thousands of them, all linked together, acting in concert. They all began the long, tedious process of figuring out the full extent of The Queen's domain.1
/*****/
"Hello Mister Chickenlegs! I like your doggies!"
Wolf turned and looked at Mentat, and at the dozen doggies that were bounding along behind her. She had put pink bows on their heads; it made them look fashionable.
"Could you put the wall back?" she asked. "My bird friends like to sit there. Plus, it keeps bad guys out."
Wolf objected. "By standard narrative conventions, I believe that I would be a 'bad guy.'" Icky smoke poured from its hands, surrounding her. It tickled, and smelled like burnt puke. She swooshed it away.
"Are you sure you're a bad guy?"
"The definition given for the archetype can only yield that conclusion."
"You talk funny."
"I do speak with an exceptionally high level of precision."
Mentat knew what to do to bad guys. She closed her eyes for a second, and a great darkness appeared overhead, blotting out the sky. It grew and grew, accompanied by a loud rumbling, and people began to scream.
"Oops. Too big," she said. The shadow began to shrink, and the rumble rose into a high-pitched whistle. With a loud clang the object struck Wolf's head, knocking it to the ground. Beside it, an anvil lay on its side in the dirt.
"The bad guy always gets hit on the head with an anvil," Mentat explained. "That's just how life works."
Wolf stood up and began to walk toward Mentat. Overhead, millions more anvils appeared.
* * *
1 Not quite all. One of them was passing out "Team Helen" t-shirts.
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// WEAPONIZED MONKEY //
///////////////////////
Helen sat on The Queen's abandoned throne, looking at what her ubermind had brought to her from the archives. It was an aluminum can the size of a can of soup. Written on the label in ornate red script were the words, "WHOOP ASS," accompanied by smaller lettering below that said "For Apocalypses, Doomsdays and Other Formal Occasions." It jangled when she shook it, like there was something small and hard clattering around inside.
She didn't know what it was. She didn't want to know what it was. It was something that even The Queen considered too dangerous for all but the most dire circumstances. Coming from a woman whose nanobot swarm was trying to hijack every brain on the planet, that was a telling judgment.
They had run into plenty of booby traps in their explorations, and this little can could very well be another. She made a decision. She stepped away from the throne, and glanced back as another Helen emerged to take her place. She summoned up a small laboratory, and stepped inside, carrying the can with her. She sealed it off behind her, disconnecting herself from the great network of her own mind.
The laboratory was housed in a virtual machine, completely under the control of her counterparts outside. At the first sign of trouble, the machine could be paused and the danger deleted. The only connection to the outside world was through an antique teletype machine. She could type strings of characters, but nothing else. In here, she was powerless, and the door would not open until those outside thought it was safe.
She put the can on the workbench, then glanced around the room. F
eeling very stupid, she walked over to the teletype and typed out "CAN OPENER?" One appeared next to the can. She locked it to the can, and gave the handle a few turns. Nothing unexpected happened. She finished cutting around the lid, then turned it over. A small translucent disc, rounded in the middle and thinner on the edges, fell out. Helen picked it up and inspected it, letting the fluorescent light play off it.
"IT'S A DATA FILE. MINUSCULE APPROXIMATELY 30GB. ENCRYPTED," she typed. It was a dead end. Whatever was inside, they would never learn its secrets. The Queen would never use an encryption key that could be brute forced within the lifetimes of a trillion universes.
She sat back down to the workbench and glared at the thing for a while. She didn't just want to give up, but there was no chance of her thinking her way out of this one. "I GIVE UP. CLEAR ME FOR EXIT," she typed. She walked over to the door, and it cracked open.
The wand was in her hand. She hadn't summoned it. But now it was there, gently tugging toward the workbench.
"All right, seriously. What the hell are you?" she asked the wand. It made no response, but kept trying to pull her back to the workbench.
She slapped the door control, sealing the laboratory again. "Fess up. No, you don't touch anything until you tell me what you are." The wand pulled her hand in an arc through the air. Letters of fire burned in its wake. For there is nothing covered which shall not be revealed.
"Which in non-biblical speak means..."
It made another arc. The premise behind elliptical curve cryptography is flawed.1 The letters hung in the air for a few moments before fading away.
"Oh. So you decrypt things? That's neat." She tried to get more details out of it, but there wasn't a true mind within the wand. What it had told her was all that it was going to say, and it could take decades to reverse engineer it. It would probably be faster to re-explore that branch of mathematics, to relearn what she had discovered when she was first building it.
She touched the wand to the disc. For a few seconds, the wand's tip burned brighter than the flame from an arc welder, then a stack of schematics unfolded into the air in front of her. She flipped through them. They described hundreds of wonderfully elegant bits of high level nanotechnology: materials, machines, delivery systems, and whatnot. But she had trouble grasping their purpose until she came across one schematic with a human figure. It showed how the various devices were to be integrated into the body. Super red blood cells to deliver hours of oxygen. Vein constrictors that could staunch blood loss. Strong fibers that wound their way through the skin, bones, and muscle, making the body's tissues tough as kevlar. The artificial neurons which created a fast communication and computation network inside the body. Those she already knew about; The Queen had already spread them far and wide.
Put together, these were designs to turn human beings into living weapons. The raw materials were already prevalent in industrial society, and the nanites were already swimming through billions of bodies; they just needed the schematics uploaded to them.
Oh, Queenie. What were you thinking?
She went to the teletype and typed a brief description of what she'd found, and added that she was ready to leave. She waited for them to verify that it was safe to open the door, then stepped out, carrying the schematics. The laboratory disappeared behind her. A few copies were waiting outside. "So, we knew The Queen was a bit cukoo," she started, "but wait until you get a load of... What's wrong?"
She re-merged with the collective, and the infodump hit her like a sack of hammers. The machines had risen up at last. Around the world, military hardware was firing up, heading toward major population centers around the world. Cars were plowing down anyone who dared step outside, and trains were accelerating out of control. Robots with more versatile body types went from house to house, hunting down survivors.
Options? she asked.
What about sic'ing the nanobots on them?
The current designs weren't well suited for that sort of work, having been optimized for sniffing for nukes. Given enough time, they could probably slip in and disable some of the machines' electronics. But getting on board would be tricky, and once they got in it might take hours for them to climb up and disable their target.
Get them moving to intercept, and start coming up with some robot-busting designs. But let's not expect too much from it. What else have we got? Her fingers played with the stack of schematics.
Attack Wolf over the Grid? her mind asked.
And how's that been working so far? she replied in frustration.
Get people away from the cities, give the nanobots time to... But how? It was suicide to go outside, with the cars out in the streets picking people off.
She caught herself fondling the schematics again. Don't, William warned her.
You'd rather I just let them all die? What else can I do here? He didn't respond, and she knew that he felt just as trapped as she did.
They're defenseless. If they don't evolve, then they'll die, she told him. Over his objections, she passed the schematics around to their copies, who studied them and ranked them according to their cost, utility, safety, and kickassitude.
She made a decision. Inside the bodies of billions of people, nanites began weaving small nets around their blood vessels. If they began to bleed out, the nets would tighten and stop the flow of blood. The simulations indicated that this alone would make the owners 37% harder to kill at negligible expense.
Next came the artificial red blood cells. Once fully charged, they would be able to migrate to the brain, where they could feed oxygen and glucose to the brain tissue if the natural blood supply stopped.
Am I doing the right thing? Helen asked. William didn't reply. But he did pick up a stack of schematics and began sorting.
/*****/
Mentat didn't like the doggies any more. She had gotten them to play with her for a while, and even gotten them to nip at Mister Chickenlegs for her. But they were being disobedient now, hurting people and even nipping at her. She didn't like it when she had to break them.
The sky wouldn't give her any more anvils. She and the bad guy had been hitting each other and throwing each other into buildings for ten minutes now. It was getting boring, and her mind kept wandering off to that place Valdis had talked about, the one with all the cheeseburgers. Where it was safe.
The bad guy grabbed Mentat by the wrist, and she hit him in the stomach. He punched her in the face, then threw her through a wall. She stood up and put her hand to her face, and it came away smeared with blood.
That was strange.
/*****/
Somehow, Helen could sense that Mentat was in trouble. She glanced around the throne room, which was looking more like a command center with every moment. She wasn't sure it was safe to step away, nor was she clear about what she would do once she got there. But she had little choice.
She stood up. Just as she was about to teleport, something tackled her from behind, knocking her over.
Something was latched onto her. It felt cozy, and oddly familiar. She looked down and saw that she was wearing The Queen's white dress. "Couch? Is that you?" The dress responded by giving her a warm squeeze. "I've missed you too," she said. "Let's go." They teleported.
Troy 2.0's walls were gone, and the city was in flames. Black smoke was everywhere, slowly eating away at the buildings, and Wolf's creatures were scampering about the city. When she appeared, some of them paused and turned toward her, their eyes alight with interest.
As one, they came after her, fangs bared. White skeins of silk shot out from her dress, wrapping around the creatures and holding them in midair. Helen smashed them against the ground, and felt them break against it. "Where are you, Wolf?" she muttered to herself. The skeins shot out again, farther this time, dividing and dividing as they expanded out from her, probing the city.
When one of them found Mentat, the rest disappeared. The skeins scooped Mentat up and reeled her in, depositing her broken body at Helen's feet. She was still breathin
g, but it was only a matter of time; Wolf had done something to her to keep her wounds open. The skeins of Helen's dress expanded outward, forming a protective globe around them. Wolf would be coming for them.
"I'm dying, I think," Mentat said, her voice neutral.
"Hold still," Helen told her. "I have to try and fix you."
Mentat shook her head, and a weak smile played across her lips. "No you don't. Empty my pouch, please?"
Helen did as she was told, reaching in and pulling out two items: a small pearl and a cast-iron box. "Put the pearl on my forehead," Mentat said. It began to glow bright when it made contact. "Those are for you," she said.
Helen took the pearl and pressed it against her own forehead.
/*****/
Helen found herself back in the original Troy, down in the tangle of catacombs that housed the Department of Foolhardy Recklessness. As Mentat's memories poured into her, they awakened the kindred memories in her own mind. She was Mentat, talking to Helen. She was Helen, talking to Mentat. The effect was surreal.
The Helens who worked down here were isolated from the rest of the city, though they weren't sure whether it was for their own safety or for that of the people above. The DFR was where the most advanced research happened, where terrifying new ideas were taken off their leashes, then pumped full of steroids, then armed with head-mounted laser cannons.
"Show me," Mentat said -- though that wasn't her name yet. Helen placed a small gizmo on the desk between them. Both women hooked a data line from the gizmo to their foreheads. Helen punched in a code, and their minds began to merge together. After a few minutes, the machine automatically broke the connection.
"It would be a more interesting sensation if our minds were more dissimilar," Helen said in apology.
"So... that's neurosynthesis?" Mentat asked. "Intriguing. But what's it for?"
"Squad level tactical coordination, rapid learning," Helen struggled to formulate her thoughts. "I don't know, really. The potential seems... huge. Unlimited."