Bitstream

10.3

By the seventh day, Viren had been working nonstop to make the AI learn and write its own rules, but the more power he fed into it, the faster it slipped out of his hands. The problem with hyper-intelligent artificial intelligence was its habit of rewriting itself without warning or direction, and no one had figured out how to teach a machine to write code that could act within a controlled state, where it wouldn't go mad, in a sense. He was close – Rhea knew that – but soon [Redacted] would walk through that lab door, take it from his hands, and implement it into the workforce without proper testing, not to advance humanity, but to tighten its grip on every man, woman, and child who couldn't afford to fight back.

She tried to keep her thoughts occupied by working with Lucian in the open-air rooflab on the second floor. Scrapboy was nearly complete, with only a few final adjustments left, one of them being the installation of a control chip that would connect to the config controller Gutterman had passed along. It was late, and with Viren's permission, Lucian was staying over; they were on the verge of wrapping up the project, and for the first time in months, it felt like everything might actually come together.

Lucian was halfway up the stepladder, squinting into the back of Scrapboy's neck where a plastic panel had been pried loose days ago. The wiring underneath was a mess of bundled threads and frayed conduit, barely held together by solder and stubbornness. He leaned in, both hands on a tiny screwdriver, and twisted until the last stubborn screw let out a quiet pop. The protective bracket came off, revealing the small, rectangular port nestled in the junction box. It wasn't a brain. Just a switchboard. A funnel for whatever data they pushed through it.

"Where'd you get the control shard, anyway?" Lucian asked, keeping his eyes on the panel.

Rhea stood a few feet back, arms folded, watching the rain run down the edge of a plastic canopy. "Dad's got a dozen of them," she said. "Tucked away in the supply drawers. I picked the one that didn't smell like battery acid."

"Smart choice," he said.

"Everything okay up there?" she asked.

"Yup," Lucian replied, but his tone had tightened. She could hear it. He was nervous, too. After all, what good was a scrap robot if it couldn't move?

She stepped forward, holding the config controller like it might slip away if she loosened her grip. The screen still worked. Sort of. A tiny green light blinked at the top right corner, next to a label that just said: STANDBY.

Lucian reached out his hand from the ladder. "Chip?"

She gave it to him.

He eased it into place with a soft click. He didn't bother putting the neural guard back on – no point, not until they knew it wouldn't fry the whole unit. A second later, he climbed down from the little ladder, arms crossed against the chill. He was shivering, wearing that same ratty brown T-shirt and cargo pants, with safety goggles pushed up into his hair like a joke. Everyone knew Lucian didn't give a damn about safety.

They stood there, quiet. This was the moment they'd been working towards for months. Rhea felt something tighten in her chest. Not fear, but heavy all the same. She thought of her father, how he got when he was deep in a project: focused, stubborn, maybe even a little obsessive. She was starting to get it now. When you built something with your own hands, it stopped being just wires and parts. It meant something.

Which was why it was so damn important that the thing worked. Six months of scraped knuckles, busted parts, and late afternoons couldn't amount to nothing. She wouldn't let it.

Lucian stepped in from the rain and under the upper trellis. "Ready?"

"You bet your ass I'm ready." She laughed, though she wasn't sure if it was from nerves or excitement. Her brain wasn't giving her straight signals right now. "Didn't suffer through your endless bitching for nothing."

"Me?" Lucian shot back. "You're the one who almost blew us up with a backwards capacitor."

She snorted. Yeah, that was excitement, no doubt now. "Gotta say, I really appreciate you doin' all this. I've always wanted to build a robot that didn't look like it wanted to kill me."

"You watch too many movies," Lucian said. It wasn't entirely true; she hadn't watched a good movie in months now. She was more of a reader. "You ever seen Steel Saints? Those bots tore a man in half over a pack of batteries. Not exactly the feel-good story of the year."

She didn't love hearing that. Not after what happened last time, when that other android waved at her, but she let it slide. Let the laugh out. They stood shoulder to shoulder under the trellis. Rhea took a breath, braced herself, and pressed the activation button on the config controller.

Nothing.

She frowned. Pressed it again. Then again. Then again.

"Shit," she muttered. "It's not wor—"

Scrapboy snapped upright. Surged to full height, a seven-foot wall of old metal and locked joints. Rhea jolted back, slipping slightly on the wet patch of lab, catching herself on instinct.

"JESUS!" she gasped. "My – ho-ho! Man!" She burst out laughing, half relief, half shock.

"Please input command," the bot said. Its voicebox was low, loud, and rough at the edges, darker than the frame Halcyon had once used. Rhea blinked up at it, breath caught somewhere between her ribs and her throat.

"Um…"

"Whoa," Lucian yelled. "Badass! Why don't you move it around a little?"

The controls looked fairly simplistic: a thumb-ball for direction, a pair of toggles for posture and balance, and a pressure switch for halting. She pressed the ball and pulled it back towards her. Scrapboy stepped forward, smooth despite the age of his parts. It moved like it wasn't built so much as awakened – not jerky, not clunky, but fluid, like muscle wrapped in metal. It cleared the wall, stopped dead-centre, and turned its head towards her. There was something watchful in the way it stood, as if it acknowledged more than it let on. Rhea's fingers tightened on the controller.

This was the bot they'd built – her and Lucian – a pile of scavenged dreams and rusted ambition stitched together over sore hands. And now it was real. It listened. It moved.

But she wasn't sure yet if it knew who to protect. Or who to hurt.

She got a funny idea. Stepping into the middle of the lab, she angled the controller towards Lucian and nudged the thumb-ball in his direction. Scrapboy turned at once, servos humming evenly, each movement followed by a vshh-vshh-vshh sound. He took one step, then another. And Rhea realised at the top of the screen there was a little speaker icon. She pressed it and said in a robotic tone, "Target acquired."

At the same time, Scrapboy played out her voice. She repeated this for some time as Scrapboy followed him around the lab.

Lucian's face froze. "Okay, nope," he said, backing up fast, hands half-raised. "You built that thing wrong, I swear to God."

"I shall destroy you," she said through the bot, pitching her voice deep and slow like some kind of low-budget villain.

Scrapboy echoed her exactly, deadpan and booming: "I shall destroy you."

Lucian spun towards the hatch doors. "This is epic! Literally epic! When my dad sees this, he's going to totally blow his sh-iit!" His voice cracked, and for a moment, he sounded like a little girl.

"I SHALL DESTROY YOU!" she yelled, and this time Scrapboy boomed it out so loudly she felt the sound vibrate through the floor.

Lucian playfully ran along the edge of the rooflab. He picked up an old broomstick and pointed it at Scrapboy. He skipped his shoe and yelled, "Chargeeee!" He sprinted towards Scrapboy with the broom and struck it in the chest; Scrapboy wobbled back a few steps but found its footing fairly quickly.

She laughed so hard she had to lean on the workbench. "It's hilarious. You're probably scared it's smarter than you."

"It probably is!" Lucian said, laughing back. "But I have to say, I'm pretty proud of this. Maybe when my dad sees it he'll actually let me do more than play with some old pieces of junk."

Rhea cocked an eyebrow at him. "Your dad doesn't trust you?"

Lucian shook his head. "Nah, after Mom died in that junkyard accident, he never really let me near any of his machines, or his tools. It was hard enough having to ask him for spare parts."

"Well, that sucks."

"It's all good," Lucian said, beaming. "Because he'll at least see that I'm somewhat competent with tech when he sees this monster."

Scrapboy froze on the spot, waiting for a new command. Its red indicator light pulsed softly. Rhea eased off the controller and watched the voice playback icon fading from the screen.

Then came a voice from the stairwell behind her shoulder:

"You got it moving?"

They both turned fast. Viren stood halfway up the steps, hands in his lab coat, eyebrows raised. He wasn't smiling yet, but his eyes said enough. He walked the rest of the way up, glancing between the controller, the bot, Rhea and Lucian.

Lucian tried to sound casual. "Yeah, she made it walk. I helped a little."

"A little?" Rhea said.

"I'm being modest."

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Viren came over to Scrapboy and looked it up and down. He tapped the chestplate once with a knuckle, then looked at the controller in Rhea's hands. "So this is the one Gutterman gave you?"

"Yup," she said.

He nodded slowly, then finally allowed himself a small grin. "Well. That's more than I expected. Not bad for a couple of kids working out of a rooftop garden."

Lucian gave a half-bow.

Viren's grin spread fully now; it was the grin of a man who had more to share than he let on. "Come downstairs."

And all of a sudden Rhea got hit with this feeling, this deep sensation that only comes whenever someone has a nice surprise, as she looked into her father's eyes and saw something new, something old, and something that had been forgotten for so long: pride.

"Dad… did you…?"

He nodded.

Her mouth dropped, and she wasn't being dramatic about it; she was being real. She watched her father walk down the stairs, and after a shared glance between one another, she and Lucian rushed down after him. This was even more exciting to her than Scrapboy had been. Did he really do it? Finally? After six years?

When they made it to the bottom of the stairwell, her father was standing by the android surgical table; it was tilted upwards so that it was facing them directly. The eyeslit was buzzing white and it now had a pair of mismatched arms. No legs, thank God, but something told Rhea it wouldn't matter even if it did, because if this was true, and he'd solved the problem of AI self-scripting without going haywire, then…

"Creepy," said Lucian. "So I take it this is just a control model?"

"For the AI, yes." Viren fixed his glasses and began typing at the computer terminal.

Rhea brushed up against him and watched the screen stream with all sorts of data. It moved so quickly that she thought it might be binary, but when it finally settled she could see some of the most complex computer science she'd ever seen in her life. Truthfully, it was like an alien language passed down to Earth on a shuttle. He hit the 'enter' key.

"Halcyon," he said.

The voicebox on the android fizzled with static before stabilising. When it spoke, it sounded the same as it had days ago: like her mother. "Please input command."

"Can you hear me, Halcyon?"

Some static. "I can indeed, Dr. Steele. Please, how do I have the pleasure of assisting you today?"

"I am going to increase your processing power to maximum efficiency," Viren said. "To one hundred per cent."

"One hundred?" Rhea said.

"Shouldn't you take it slow?" Lucian piped in. "My dad always said you don't crank power on a neural rig unless you want smoke and fire."

Viren didn't look away from the terminal. "We're not increasing voltage. We're removing bandwidth throttling. Letting the AI think at full capacity." He typed in a final string, then flipped a physical toggle on the side of the lab terminal: an old-fashioned kill-switch, thick with dust and disuse. "Manual override stays here," he said, tapping the toggle. "Failsafe hardwired to local memory. If it starts recursive scripting or breaks containment, this switch wipes runtime back to a stable baseline. Full memory clear. Burn-and-reset."

Lucian frowned. "That doesn't sound good."

"It's not," Viren said. "That's why we're testing now, before the suits come knocking." He stepped aside. "Halcyon, I'm going to give you a task. You will be asked to solve a problem that exceeds the limits of your current programming."

"I understand."

"I want you to build a recursive pathing algorithm that navigates an unknown maze and updates the logic tree every time you hit a dead end, but without using any of your pre-written logic models. Start from scratch. Build it yourself."

The android was silent.

Lines of code spilled down the screen, then slowed.

Lucian stared. "Is it… thinking?"

"No," Viren said quietly. "It's rewriting."

The screen lit up with raw logic scaffolding. Not templated code, not copied subroutines, but fresh paths. Clean, lean logic blocks branching out, then pruning themselves when they failed. And while this happened, the android simply looked around; it didn't thrash, didn't go mad from its own computational power; it remained still.

"It's sandboxed," Viren explained. "Running the algorithm in a safe container. It knows it can't act on the world until it passes validation. The limiter cross-checks every new logic block against ethical constraints, stability thresholds, and fail-state predictions. If it trips, the container dumps."

Rhea couldn't follow a single word he was saying, but she had a massive hunch that he knew what he was talking about. After all, when it came to computer science this complex, you had no choice but to know what you were talking about.

"And if it doesn't trip?" Rhea asked.

"Then…" Viren said, watching a new message pop up.

"... it works," he finished.

The android spoke again: "Recursive pathing constructed. Estimated runtime efficiency: 92%. Further refinement pending operator input."

Lucian let out a slow breath. "Holy shit. You had it operate at 92% efficiency?"

"Isn't that like ground-breaking?" Rhea said.

Viren smiled at her. "It is, Little Spark. Oh, it very much is." But his face turned serious, and he began typing at the terminal again. "Halcyon," he said.

"Yes, Dr. Steele?" the womanvoice said.

Viren's fingers hovered over the keys. He looked up at the android, at the thing with his wife's voice, wearing a metal face and a blinking slit for an eye.

"You are never to harm a human being," he said slowly. "Not through action, not through inaction, not by following orders, not even by mistake. You are not to allow your abilities to be used for cruelty, punishment, or war. Do you understand?"

A beat passed.

"I will obey," Halcyon said. "Please confirm: Do you wish this restriction locked at the hardware enforcement level?"

"Yes. Lock it. Burn it into every layer. Make it a wall, not a rule."

"Confirmed. Root law engraved to firmware core. This action is irreversible. Enforcement active."

Lucian looked visibly shaken now. "You just… told a robot it can't go evil?"

Viren exhaled through his nose. "I told a child not to pick up a knife. The real question's whether it listens when I'm not in the room."

"Dad," Rhea said slowly, "this is…" She trailed off. Her chest felt tight. For a second, she thought she might cry. Not out of sadness, but relief. She'd spent so long worrying, watching him burn himself out chasing something that always seemed just out of reach.

But now?

He'd done it.

This wasn't just some breakthrough; it was something that could rewrite how the world worked. Help the sick. Turn setbacks into progress. Make things better.

Really better.

Mom would be proud. So proud. And no matter what, her father needed to protect this. She needed to protect this. In case it ended up in the wrong hands....

Rhea stepped forward and wrapped her arms around her father. He let out a surprised "Oh," caught off guard for a moment, then lifted her off the ground and held her tight, pressing his cheek to the top of her head.

She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.

Finally, a tear crawled out from her eyelid, but it stayed there; it refused to fall, not yet, not now.

"Anyway," Lucian said awkwardly. "As awesome as this is, I should really get going now. It's almost eleven o'clock. My dad's probably gonna kill me if I don't get back by sundown."

"Sure thing, Lucian," Viren said. "I'll walk you home. I have to bring the old loader frame back anyhow." He placed Rhea down. "Alright, kiddo. I'll need you to head into the house while I'm away. No answering the door to anybody. And if [Redacted] shows—"

A knock at the door. Loud, imposing. It threw Rhea off guard, made her heart jump a little.

"Shit…" he said.

"Well that's poor timing," Lucian said.

"You'd think she'd give me until midnight at least," he said, frustrated. He took his glasses off and then wiped them clean with a cloth. "Alright. I'll do a quick showcase and then we'll be on the way. I'll let your dad know the reason for the delay."

Rhea said to Lucian, "He's gonna kick your ass." And she smiled, grinned something awful and bright and excited. This was the happiest she'd been in a long time.

Viren straightened his lab coat, let out a sigh, put on his glasses again, and walked over to the door. "I promise you," he said as he grabbed the knob, unlocked the door, and pulled it open, "we'll only be a minute—"

WHACK!

The door flew inward. Viren stumbled back, glasses knocked sideways, blood already blooming from a split above his brow. He slammed into the tilted surgical table holding the android; it flew down with a loud smash and the chip – the datachip containing the Halcyon AI – slid across the floor towards Rhea's shoe.

A boot slammed down on the threshold.

Rhea let out a scream. Lucian grabbed the nearest piece of metal he could find – a broken android leg – and held it at arm's reach.

"What the fuuuuuuck?" Lucian yelled.

A figure stepped into the doorway, and immediately, Rhea's heart sank. It was a figure wearing white overalls, rusted plates for shoulder armour, and a helmet with a cracked visor.

It was him.

The man from the fountain.

The Syndicate rebel.

And his hands were wrapped up in some heavy, battering metal: gauntlets.

"Evenin', Dr. Steele," the man said, stepping into the lab like he owned it. "Heard you've been busy."

Rhea was too horrified to move or speak. Lucian moved to shield her without thinking.

"You bastard!" her father rasped.

Several men wearing similar gear streamed in behind the Syndicate rebel, each holding weapons: a baseball bat, a crowbar, even an old pipe rifle slung over one shoulder. They fanned out quickly, boots clanking on tile, eyes scanning every corner of the lab like they'd rehearsed this. One of them kicked over a stack of tools. Another swept the terminal off the desk with one loud crash.

"You've got no idea what you've done," Viren said, coughing hard. Blood dripped from his temple. "There's nothing in here worth dying over."

"Oh, I think there is," the rebel said calmly. He nodded towards the android on the floor, its faceplate flickering with residual power. "That thing's been talking, hasn't it? Wrote its own code. Learned how to think. Or, you plan for it to."

He stepped closer to Rhea. Lucian didn't move. Didn't blink.

"Step away from the kids," Viren growled. "Whatever you want, take it and go."

"I don't want the kids," the rebel said, cracking his neck. "I want the ghost in the machine. I want the future you're trying to build – and I'm here to make damn sure it never takes root."

He raised a gauntleted hand and pointed at the fallen datachip by Rhea's shoe.

"Grab it," he told one of his men.

The man with the crowbar stepped forward.

Rhea didn't think.

She dove. Grabbed the chip.

"Don't!" Viren barked.

The man reached out his hand, preparing to grab Rhea by the cuff of her shirt. He made it about halfway down when something sharp came flying forward and—

WHACK!

Little Lucian Strider smashed the android leg against the man's face, causing it to collapse on impact, and he went helplessly sprawling across the floor.

"BASTARD!" the man with the crowbar cried.

"Don't touch my daughter!" Viren shouted, standing up. "Don't you fucking dare touch—!"

The Syndicate leader thumped Viren in the face with his steel gauntlet, and he fell down.

Rhea screamed again, high-pitched, more screech than word: "STO-OOOOOOOP!"

The rebel leader pushed the table over, and everything – all the delicate parts, the prototype limbs, the control shards – went clattering to the floor in a shriek of metal and glass.

"GRAB HER!" he roared, bolting for her.

Rhea spun on her heel and bolted for the stairs, Lucian right behind her. Her breath came in shallow bursts. She could hear them: boots scraping, angry voices, one of them laughing.

"Don't let her run! She's got the shard!" another said.

Rhea didn't look back. She just ran – up, up, up – one hand clutching the shard, the other gripping Lucian's.

And behind her, boots hit the metal stairs like war drums.

"Get her! Before she reaches the roof!"

She burst through the hatch, into the rain, into the wind, and just as she turned to slam it shut—

—a hand caught the edge.