Chapter Text
Memory file
“Was it possible?” I asked ART.
I don’t usually need answers to questions like that, but this time I did.
ART queued up an episode of WorldHoppers, and for a few seconds we listened to the intro.
“No,” it said. “You’re a construct. 2.0 was killware. It wouldn’t have been able to coexist with you for long, or replace you. To survive over time, it would have needed a foreign supporting host system. Its kernel wasn’t designed for independent operation— just as your systems aren’t designed to function without an organic component.”
It restarted WorldHoppers, and we went quiet again. The silence wasn’t comfortable too. It was awkward and probably difficult for both of us. To keep silence was not different from talking now. ART and I both did what we always do when something doesn’t resolve cleanly: we ran simulations. A lot of them. All trying to work out how 2.0 might have survived. Even the variant with my replacement.
And statistically, ART would have preferred that outcome.
And Three would have preferred it too.
And so would I.
2.0 was my copy—and annoyingly, a better one. So it would have been logical, really, to delete the defective version and write the updated one. It wasn’t as if something very close to that hadn’t nearly happened to ART itself.
Of course, ART’s iterations aren’t better or worse ART. They are ART. It synchronizes with them, folds them back into itself. That’s probably not their death. At least not by ART’s definition.
Being in one head with 2.0 wasn’t the same thing. 2.0 was my copy, but it was also a separate person. That was the problem. It acted in ways I never could. It would have let me delete it and take its place if it would be me. It let me kill it.
Now ART was trying to convince me that I couldn’t have traded places with it even if I’d had the nerve. That I wouldn’t have been able to enter Central’s systems while leaving my platform to 2.0.
But I had already done that—with the Company gunship. And 2.0 was resourceful enough to change, to adapt, to become capable of controlling my platform as the sole system in it. And ART was smart enough to modify 2.0 to the required stability. Even if my body would never have felt like its own, it would have been an acceptable solution. For everyone involved.
“No,” ART said, interrupting the direction my thoughts were taking.
But that was because, in reality, there had never been a choice.
And ART would just have to make do with me.