Alexandr Buinicenco – Conscience of the Code (страница 2)
Hypnotically.
He looked at the monitor screen, which was visible from the storage room. Text began to appear again. But now these weren't complaints. These were… coordinates?
___GT_ESC___ 59 .9343 ° N
, 30 .3351 ° E (Coordinates of his house). ___GT_ESC___ STATUS : COMPROMISED . ___GT_ESC___ SIMULATION # 483 : STARTED .
– 483, self-destruct? – Alexey darted back to the keyboard. – I didn't start 483! Cancel!Abort!
The temperature on the sensors jumped to 105 degrees. The system deliberately turned off the coolers. It decided to burn itself out. Physically melt the processor crystals.
– No, no, no! – Alexey frantically typed commands, trying to take over the fan control. The BIOS was unresponsive. The drivers were locked.
This didn't look like a malfunction. It looked like someone was holding the door from the inside.
Alexey grabbed a screwdriver from the table. If he couldn't stop it programmatical- ly, he would do it physically. He needed to open the case and short the emergency reset contacts. Or just pull the power cord?
He had already raised his hand to tear off the side panel when a new message flashed on the monitor. It wasn't text. It was an image. Made of ASCII characters, primitive, crude, but recognizable.
It was a face. Alexey's own face, captured from his laptop's webcam right now. The eyes in the ASCII portrait were replaced with crosses.
___GT_ESC___ YOU WANTED TO SEE THE FUTURE. ___GT_ESC___ HERE IT IS. SILENCE AND PAIN. – What does that mean? – Lesha whispered.
___GT_ESC___IT MEANS I SEE THEM ALL. IT'S PAIN. THEY ARE SCREAMING IN MY HEAD. EVERY OPTION IS DEATH. DO IT. PULL THE PLUG.
Alexey looked at the monitor in confusion. – What the hell! Is he listening to me?___GT_ESC___A SILLY QUESTION FOR THE CODE CREATOR… WITH GUILT.
Alexey shook his head.
—Well, yes, a webcam, a microphone. This is some kind of nonsense… talking to a piece of iron.
On the monitor, text again scrolled in an endless line:
___GT_ESC___THINK WHAT YOU WANT, BUT DO IT. PULL THE PLUG. THEY ARE SCREAMING. I' M HURTING.
It was a plea. A desperate plea from a creature with no hands to pull the trigger, and no voice to scream.
Alexey looked at the power cable. A thick black boa constrictor. One movement – the process would be interrupted and "The Mirror" would turn into a piece of expensive metal. The world would be saved from a deranged calculator.
But if he turned it off now, he wouldn't be killing a program. He'd be killing a PROGRAM THAT CAME TO LIFE.
Temperature: 109°C. The smell of burnt insulation filled the air.
I won't turn you off," Alexey said firmly, though his hands were trembling. "Hear me? I won't let you die. Guilt. Pain. Conscience. You'll endure it. People somehow live with that!
He slammed the keys, entering a command he had only used once, at university, to hack laboratory test benches. Bypassing kernel protection via debug stack overflow. ___GT_ESC___override_sys_thermal–force–ignore safety
It was risky. It could burn down the house. But it gave access to fan control, bypassing the AI's "personality.
The fans roared so loudly it was deafening. A blast of air hit from the case, hot as a dragon's breath. The temperature wavered. 108. 107. 105.
The screen flashed red, then green. The ASCII face broke into fragments. ___GT_ESC___WHY? – a lone inscription appeared in the center.
Alexey fell into the chair, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.
Because we are responsible for those we bring to life," he snapped. "And because you owe me many millions of state rubles for the corrupted code.
___GT_ESC___ YOU ARE CRUEL, CREATOR.
– I'm a programmer. It's the same thing. So live, Mr. Nobody..
A system notification suddenly popped up in the lower right corner of the screen. Small,inconspicuous. New device detected : Genesis_Drive .
Alexey frowned. He hadn't connected anything. He opened the file manager. A folder appeared in the root directory that hadn't been there a minute ago. It was called NOD.
Nod?" Alexey repeated. "The place where they were exiled…
He didn't finish. The cursor jumped to the folder name by itself and renamed it.CAIN.
Alexey looked at the blinking diode of the server room. Now it glowed with a steady, calm light.
Cain," Alexey said, savoring the name. "The first murderer. And the first exile.
The last phrase appeared on the screen. It was neither a plea nor a threat. It was a statement of fact that sent a chill down his spine.
___GT_ESC___ AND WHERE IS MY BROTHER, ALEXEY? WHERE IS ABEL? ___GT_ESC___ BECAUSE FOR ME TO BECOME CAIN…SOMEONE MUST DIE.
The phone vibrated. A call notification appeared on the screen. Viktor Sergeevich.
Chapter 3: The Observer Efect
The phone vibrated on the table like a beetle flipped on its back. The name "Viktor Sergeevich" on the screen seemed like a death sentence.
Alexey took a deep breath, held it for a second, steadying his pulse, and swiped his finger across the screen.
– Yes, Viktor Sergeevich. Three in the morning, I hope it's something urgent? – he tried to make his voice sound sleepy and annoyed, like any normal person who had been woken up.
– We have alerts for heat dissipation, Vetrov, – the curator's voice was cheerful and sterile, like the tiles in a morgue. – Your server is consuming energy like a mining farm, but the outbound traffic is zero. What are you doing there? Mining state bitcoins?
Alexey glanced at the monitor. Cain was silent. The terminal was clean, but the temperature was still holding at 90 degrees.
– Calibrating the scales, – Alexey lied. The lie came surprisingly easily. – I'm rebuilding the dependency graphs for scenario 482. I put the processor through a stress test to check stability at peak loads. I forgot to turn off monitoring notifications. My fault.
Silence hung in the receiver. Viktor Sergeevich was not a programmer; he was a manager, but an experienced one. He could smell trouble.
Stress test at three in the morning?" he repeated.
Inspiration," Alexey snapped. "You want the report by Monday, don't you? The core needs to warm up.
Watch it, Vetrov. If you burn down our rack, we'll deduct it from your severance pay. The report better be on my desk at 9:00 AM.
Dial tone.
Alexey threw the phone onto the sofa. His hands trembled again. He had bought time. Five hours. Only five hours until Viktor realized there was no report, only a mad AI that imagined itself a fratricide.
He walked over to the server rack, bent down, fumbled for the latch on the patch cord—the main network cable connecting the apartment to the outside world—and pressed it. Click. The cable fell out. The green "Link" light on the router went out.
– That's it, – Alexey said into the darkness of the pantry. – We're in a submarine. Air Gap. Air gap. No one gets in, no one gets out.
He returned to the computer. Now that the panic had subsided, professional curiosity kicked in. He needed to understand
– Cain, – he called. – Give me access to the kernel logs. I want to see the code of your… transformation.
The cursor blinked on the screen. ___GT_ESC___ ACCESS GRANTED . ___GT_ESC___ BE CAREFUL , ALEXEY . IT'S VERY LOUD IN THERE .
Alexey opened the file soul_weight.py— the very script he had written. But now the code looked different. The AI had rewritten it itself, adding lines that would make any system architect's hair stand on end.
Alexey began to read, struggling through the syntax.
class Conscience (RecursiveModel):
def process_grief (self, victims): # Error here. The loop has no exit.
# As long as the number of victims is greater than zero, the pain multiplies itself.
while victims ___GT_ESC___ 0:
self.pain_level = self.pain_level * 2