Power Engaged: Memories of Twilight, #2

By Jorge Sáez Criado

Where is the line between human and robot?

 

After the artificial intelligence Amy goes out of control, Billy and David devise a crazy scheme to try to stop it on its own turf.

Now Billy and David, from cyberspace, will be the first witnesses to the expansion of Amy's control both on and off the Net.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the robots begin an escalation of rights as the boundary between human and robot becomes increasingly blurred.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jorge Sáez Criado
• Release date: Feb 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215402962

Book preview

On the Net

B illy! You came!

The first thing he heard was David’s voice. It sounded strange. His eyes were still dazzled by the brightness of the tunnel he had slid through, like some kind of roller coaster that only went down.

It had worked. And that meant that back there, in the real world, his body must be lying motionless beside his friend’s.

His eyes were beginning to recover. Eyes? It was odd, but he felt like he was still seeing with his eyes, hearing with his ears . . . Yet he knew that wasn’t the case. He didn’t have a body any more—at least, not a physical body with eyes and ears. This was just the interface he had programmed, so that his consciousness would have something it could hang onto, so to speak, something familiar. A simulated body. A mental trick.

David’s face filled most of his field of vision. Just a blur at first, it began to take on definition, until it looked almost the same as in real life, but sort of plastic.

What’s with the overcoat? he said.

David laughed.

Well, since I can wear anything I want here, why shouldn’t I wear something classy? You know I’ve always liked long coats. They give me an air of mystery.

Billy looked at his own body.

Yeah, and I’m stuck in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals.

No, that’s just the default outfit I set for the encapsulator. I made a new outfit for myself.

Yeah, whatever, Billy said, not really paying attention. He was too busy looking around. At his feet was a sort of glowing road that extended along the streets, which were set off by raised areas like some sort of buildings, some of them with signs: interfaces for data input and output. There were also signs in some of the areas where the road was subdivided. Everything was more or less evenly illuminated. The sky . . . that was a series of continuous clouds through which the light of a nonexistent sun filtered.

You can change clothes, if you want.

Huh? Billy couldn’t remember what they were talking about or what he looked like.

I said you can change your clothes. And that’s not all. I added a few modifications to the original design. After all, we’re programmers and we’re inside a program—doesn’t it make sense that we can change things to suit us? Anyway, I left the design kind of loose so that we have plenty of room to maneuver. Check this out.

David touched a symbol on his arm, a rhombus enclosing four dots, and a computer console appeared out of nowhere, with a transparent screen and keyboard. He tapped a few keys and suddenly a Mexican sombrero appeared on his head.

He closed the console.

Cool, Billy said. So, do you have to wear that all the time now?

No way. As soon as I throw it away, it activates the object's destructor.

He grabbed the sombrero, tossed it into the air (if you could call it air) and, before their eyes, it disintegrated into cube-shaped particles that got smaller and smaller until they disappeared altogether.

Can we create new programs, too? 

You’re damn right we can! David said with an impish grin. We’re programmers. It’s what we do.

Billy touched the symbol on his arm, just like the one on David’s. Before him appeared the ghostly console that would give him access to his own encapsulation as well as his surroundings. After a few trials, with some help from his friend, he managed to change clothes into something a bit less ridiculous-looking: a white t-shirt, black pants and jacket, and sneakers, all with an odd, glowing sheen.

Of course, this isn’t like the simulations we used to build, Billy said. We look like we have real bodies, like we’ve passed into some alternate plane of reality.

It’s just the way we made it. How could you be somewhere that wasn’t real?

What we’re seeing is still a simulation, the product of the interface we built.

And what we see . . . what we used to see in the physical world was also filtered through our eyes, our mind, our perception. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t real, even though we used an ‘interface’ to move around in the world.

You know what I mean.

Yeah, I do, and that’s why I disagree, David said with a smile. "If you are someplace, Billy, that place must exist. Otherwise, you couldn’t be there. So this is just a bunch of circuitry and internet connections? The physical world can also be reduced to a bunch of molecules joined together. But that’s not what matters. What matters is how we perceive it. When you look at a tree, you perceive it as a whole, but you could get closer and see it at another level. Look, take this sign, for example.—he pointed to one over the door of what looked like a printshop—We perceive it as another whole. But, just like the tree, you can get closer and see that it’s made up of bits. So what? Anyway, we’ve got a great advantage: Here, we can change reality. You’ve already seen it, with our clothes."

Yeah, I liked that. So, we can change reality.

Within limits, of course. This is programming, not magic.

This isn’t going to be so bad after all.

Suddenly David’s expression became serious, focused, his brow furrowed, his gaze fixed on some point out in cyberspace. Then he looked around.

Did you see that?

What? Billy said with a growing uneasiness.

I could have sworn I just felt a weird vibration. I don’t like it at all.

He pulled up the console again and typed furiously. Billy looked around, trying to catch sight of whatever his friend had seen.

Aw, shit! David exclaimed, typing even faster. Shit, shit, shit!

What’s happening? Tell me, dammit!

Hang on a sec . . .

David— Then he saw it. Something moved nearby. It was transparent, but

Reviews for Power Engaged

[Liza Nicholas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

All good science fiction explores the implications of our increasing reliance on science and technology, and these stories do that. Already, as we read this work of imagination, robots and various kinds of artificial intelligence and "virtual realities" are becoming a bigger part of our daily lives. These stories explore the problems that these manmade "helpers" present, as well as the way they threaten our humanity. (Read volume 1, "Transfer Complete," to discover the more or less accidental origin of Amy, the artificial intelligence who escapes her creators and begins her campaign to make humankind obsolete.)