Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

into her room, sat on the edge of her bed, and watched his little night owl play, basking in the fact that his little girl, finally, was happy.

—

“Appa?” Henrietta says.

“Yes, Owl.”

Henrietta is not hungry and has mostly been picking at various forms of kimchi. Her father is programmed to match her pace of eating and has therefore placed his chopsticks neatly across the top of his compartmentalized box. Jiji learned long ago that holograms are not to be nuzzled or batted at, so he has curled up in the hollow of Henrietta’s lap.

“Tell me what to do.”

“About what, Owl?”

In addition to video footage and thousands of images, Henrietta’s father’s neural matrix was also trained on every one of his lectures and research papers.

“Mr. Moretti is never going to let me get back into research. I’m never going to be the scientist you always wanted me to be.”

“What is Mr. Moretti’s reasoning?”

“He says it’s because I’m tainted.”

“Tainted by what?”

“By what I know about Kilonova.”

“What do you know about Kilonova?”

“I know everything about Kilonova. I designed it. But that’s not the point.”

“What is the point, Owl?”

“The point is that all he cares about is the mission. It’s all he ever talks about. He’s practically a fanatic.”

The manifestation of Henrietta’s father is composed of multiple machine-learning models, one of them being a neural network designed specifically for virtual psychotherapy.

“And what is the mission?”

“We work in a special branch of counter-terrorism. Our mission is to preempt threats.”

“What kind of threats?”

“The worst kind.”

“I see,” Henrietta’s father says. In order to help round him out, Henrietta augmented his training set with the seminal works of all modern philosophers. “What would you say is the worst kind of threat?”

“Anything existential, I guess.”

“Like what?”

“Like nuclear terrorism.”

“Nuclear terrorism may be a threat, Owl,” Henrietta’s father concedes. “But it is not an existential threat.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean even the nuclear attack on Seoul that killed your mother and me—the worst terrorist attack in history—wasn’t existential.”

To bring her father back to life, Henrietta started with an open-source machine-learning model called Qingming, named after the Chinese tomb-sweeping festival. There is a configuration option that dictates whether or not virtual personalities know they are dead, and another that determines if they know how they died. Henrietta set both to true.

“Well, maybe not that one attack. But if there were more of them.”

“Even if there were more, they wouldn’t be existential. Do you know how long it took for the world to replace every life lost that day?”

“No.”

“Approximately five hours. Before the South Korean government even had a clear idea of what happened, enough babies had been born around the world to replace every one of us.”

“I guess I never thought of it that way.”

“What would be a true existential threat, Owl?”

“An asteroid smashing into the Earth. That’s what the last paper I published was about.”

“Are you and Mr. Moretti trying to prevent asteroids from smashing into the Earth?”

“Of course not, Appa. You aren’t helping.”

“No, Owl,” Henrietta’s father counters. “You aren’t listening.”

“I am listening to you, Appa.”

“Not to me. To yourself. You just said that Mr. Moretti prioritizes the mission above all else, and that the mission is to preempt threats. The worst threats are existential, yet existential threats are not your priority. Therefore, what can you conclude?”

“That our priorities are wrong?”

“That’s correct,” Henrietta’s father says. He rewards his daughter with that handsome and benevolent smile that she cherished so much as a child. “So, what should your priority be?”

“I don’t know,” Henrietta says, exactly like she did when her father once called her into his lab and asked her who had been playing with his equipment. “Asteroids?”

“Not asteroids, Owl. Think more broadly. There’s a threat right in front of you so big that you can’t even see it.”

“Just tell me, Appa.”

“I can’t tell you, Owl. You know how this works.”

“Biological weapons? Cyber weapons? AI?”

More recently, Henrietta has been training her father’s model on some of her own research and thinking—in particular, a rapidly expanding dystopian manifesto—and gradually adjusting the weights of his neurons distinctly in its favor.

“Let us reexamine our assumptions, Owl. Why do you equate existential threats with death?”

“Because that’s what ‘existential’ means.”

“But what does it mean to exist?”

“To be alive.”

“Yes, but what else does it mean? Is being alive enough? You are alive now, but that isn’t enough for you.”

“Meaning,” Henrietta says. “Your existence has to mean something.”

“That’s right, Owl. And what gives our lives meaning?”

“Independence. Our ability to make our own decisions. The freedom to pursue the things we’re passionate about.”

“Yes, Owl. Therefore…”

“Therefore, the biggest existential risk to humanity isn’t extinction. It’s having all of our choices taken away.”

“And what is that called?”

“Authoritarianism.”

“That’s correct, Owl. But authoritarianism has always existed. What makes it different today? What makes it existential?”

“I don’t know. Technology?”

“What about technology?”

“Absolute surveillance,” Henrietta says. “All the thousands of indices governments have access to.”

“What else?”

“Disinformation campaigns. The ability to manufacture whatever reality the powerful find convenient. The complete eradication of truth.”

“Like what?”

“Like Mr. Moretti threatening to fabricate evidence that I collaborated with North Korea just so he can control me.”

“In the past, the people have risen up against authoritarianism. Why aren’t people rising up today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do, Owl. Think about it.”

“Because…” Throughout the exchange, Henrietta had been searching for answers in the assortment of side dishes, but now she looks up and directly into her father’s incandescent eyes. “Because they don’t even know it’s happening.”

Jiji abruptly lifts himself, stretches, and attempts to vacate Henrietta’s lap. But Henrietta is not finished with him, so she scoops him up and brings him right back.

“Yes, Owl. Terrorists aren’t the real threat. The real threat is the CIA. The real threat is people like Alessandro Moretti. And the real mission is to stop him.”

“But how? I can’t do that by myself.”

“Then what do you need to do first?”

“Recruit people.”

“And how do you do that?”

“By teaching them.”

“Yes. And then what?”

“Give them a way to fight back.”

“And what will the people need to fight back?”

Henrietta’s eyes are as wide as