Virtua by Karl Olsberg

Author:Karl Olsberg [Olsberg, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

33.

When Daniel returned to the company, he felt depressed. Either Chen had been kidnapped or even killed by sinister forces, or he had tried to prevent the end of the world and failed. Either way, it seemed only a matter of months before Elijah’s grim prediction would come true.

Part of him stubbornly refused to see the danger as real, just as the founder had described it. But he knew all too well that this was a psychological mechanism that enabled him not to lose all hope even in the face of impending disaster. As Elijah had said, hope died last. His rational mind, on the other hand, told him that all the arguments were in favor of Elijah’s view. Apart from that, Thea was right: Elijah had seemed extremely smart and much more reasonable than Markus and Jonas.

The worst thing was that Daniel felt completely helpless. There was nothing he could do — neither to find Chen nor to prevent the end of the world. All he could do was sit uselessly at his desk and wait for something to happen. He canceled the staff meetings scheduled for the afternoon, fearing that in his current mood, he would do more harm than good.

In the evening, he called Thea and asked if she wanted to meet him again in the Deadspot to talk about the conversation with Elijah. But she said she had an appointment with her mother.

Yeah, right, his critical inner voice grumbled. She’s just trying to be nice.

He tried in vain to distract himself by watching TV, went to bed early, and slept badly. In the middle of the night, he woke up. In his dream, he had been locked naked in a glass box, watched by thousands of cameras all around. Trust me, Virtua’s artificial voice had whispered. Trust me, or I’ll kill you.

He tossed and turned for a while, finally gave up, and left for work at a little before six.

The air was cool when he arrived at the company at dawn. Instead of going directly to his workplace, he took a walk around the premises and finally stood in front of the entrance to the large hall that housed the computers running Virtua.

He remembered the virtual tour on his first day at work. The huge hall was basically a gigantic brain.

“Lisa, open the door!” he said, following a spontaneous inspiration.

“You are not allowed to enter the hall,” the virtual assistant informed him.

“What’s in the hall?” he asked.

“In the hall is the data center of Mental Systems’ Berlin subsidiary,” she replied. “If you want more information, please contact Markus.”

What if someone simply blew up the hall, he suddenly thought. It would probably have little effect. Virtua’s backups were certainly stored elsewhere. They would just build a new hall or run the AI in another data center.

“Once an AI like Virtua has spread to computer systems all over the internet, it’s virtually indestructible,” Elijah had said yesterday as they had continued to talk. “And she’s vastly superior to us.

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