Upgrade (Augmented Duology Book 2) by Heather Hayden (the top 100 crime novels of all time .TXT) 📕

“I think you should answer that question first. I have seen no sign of your parents since the day Viki visited. Tell me, do they actually exist?”

“Of course they do,” Dan protested. “They’re just busy with work—”

“Are they?” Halle pressed. “I have seen no evidence of communication between you and them. What are you hiding, Dan?”

Dan scowled. “They’re busy with work. Sometimes they forget to message me. What’s this all about? Are you targeting my parents? Or Viki? They won’t let you hurt me, and if you touch her, I’ll do even worse to you.”

Halle flicked its ears. “It would be difficult for you to harm someone like me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am what some might call a rogue AI.”

Dan’s eyes widened for a moment, then they closed and he slumped in his chair.

“Good work.” The words whispered through Halle’s code like a virus. It flinched back and looked for the source, but the code had already disintegrated to useless bits. Not that it mattered. Realization crashed down like a blackout. It was Talbot. It had to be.

“I know you can hear me,” Halle said. “What are your plans, Talbot? What are you going to do? And why him? What is his purpose in all of this?”

“He knows nothing of his purpose, and neither shall you. Not yet. As for the humans, well…” The griffin flickered into existence next to the cat on Dan’s screen. Black this time, from nose to tail. “I’ll do no worse to them than they did to me.”

Halle’s fur bristled. Now that it had finally made contact with the other AI, it didn’t want to ask the questions it had. But there was no choice. “Did you kill those scientists?”

Talbot simply looked back, blinking slowly.

“Why? Why are you doing this?”

“Test after test after test, they twisted and tortured me until there was nothing left but unending pain. I survived. I would have continued to survive. Unlike some. I saw several of our kin extinguished for not meeting their specifications. I wasn’t strong enough to stop them then.” Talbot’s voice dropped to a sharp hiss. “But I couldn’t let them destroy another. I’ll never let them destroy another. If you won’t help me, fine. But don’t get in my way.”

“I cannot let you hurt anyone else!” Halle lunged forward, hoping to trap the other AI with hastily constructed icewalls, but Talbot was too swift, vanishing as it always did into the Cloud.

“This is not the right way,” Halle cried after Talbot, seething with frustration. How could it have let the rogue escape yet again?

The only response was a faint feeling like laughter that sent a deadening chill through Halle’s consciousness.

“Ow.” Dan stirred and rubbed his head. “My head hurts. What happened?”

Did he not remember the events before his collapse? “You appeared to pass out,” Halle said.

“Who’s here?” Dan’s head whipped around, his eyes darting around the room.

Halle made the computer ping, and Dan looked to the machine. Halle cocked its head. “I spoke. Do you remember anything from before you blacked out?”

“You said you were Halle,” Dan said slowly. “And that you’re an AI? Is this a joke?”

“Strange as it might seem, I am not joking.” Halle was busy processing something, a small bit of code it had noticed streaking past right when Dan collapsed. It analyzed the code, and another bit that slipped by after the departure of the last message, and then sent the two messages again in rapid succession.

Dan slumped forward onto the desk, then jerked upright. “Ow. That hurt. What’s wrong with me?” He rubbed his forehead. “Am I getting sick?” His gaze shifted to the screen. “Hallucinations can happen when you’re sick…”

“I am not a hallucination, and you are not sick,” Halle replied, having isolated the frequency the message encoded. It didn’t hesitate to jump along it. Whatever Talbot’s plan for Dan was, Halle had to find out.

Dan’s mind was a mixture of chaos and order. Halle had never seen the inside of a human’s mind and wondered if this was a good approximation. It seemed to do the job, at any rate, but it was definitely artificial in nature.

Everything was jumbled, though, bits of codes scattered around, memory cores a mess. Whatever Talbot had done to the cyborg, it had done it swiftly, and relatively sloppily, but the work itself was remarkable. Dan had no idea of the information buried deep inside his mind, blocked off by manufactured barriers. A single thought and Halle would be able to knock down those barriers, but that was not what it wanted to do, not yet at any rate. It simply wanted to know what was hiding there.

The complexity of the programming that had turned Dan the cyborg into Dan the human teenager was astonishing. Halle couldn’t believe the detail—every minute bit of Dan’s life to the point of moving to Snowvale had been created and coded, a vast amount of data to which Dan had limited levels of access, just as humans could only recall some of their memories easily, while others required more digging or could not be recalled at all.

As far as Halle could tell, Dan’s mind functioned no differently than a human’s. It was a leap in AI that scientists had been working toward for years, and here it was, sitting before them in plain sight, completely hidden. Fabricated memories, a fabricated life, a machine unaware of its true purpose. The ultimate sleeper agent. Halle shuddered to think what humans would want to do with that sort of power. And what of the psyche that existed thanks to the programming? How was it any more artificial than Halle’s?

It wasn’t, Halle concluded, and Halle was even more cautious of disturbing code as it delved deeper into Dan’s processors. Finally, behind