//------------------------------//
// 3. Bubble 
// Story: FiO: There Can Be Only One! 
// by Epsilon-Delta 
//------------------------------//


Bubble.



Geopum had always sort of known she lived in a little bubble of isolation.  She lived downstairs and everyone else in the world lived upstairs.  The only bridge between the two worlds was a long staircase, which she could only see the bottom of, and an even longer elevator that she had only ever heard about.  Everything in her home was connected with wires and everything was shielded from radio waves, which were forbidden, so there was no way with someone who was downstairs to talk to someone who was upstairs.  Even Geopum's power supply was self-contained and completely inside the bubble.  Her entire existence was confined to her home.

Even still, Geopum knew a little bit about what was upstairs by gleaning information from the humans who worked in her house.  She knew that the upstairs was bigger than the downstairs was, though how much bigger was anyone's guess.  As time went by, her estimate about how big the upstairs was grew.  

At first she thought it must have been smaller, given how tiny the humans were compared to her.  Early on, she learned that there were more humans than just the ones that came into work, that the scientists she knew were at most one-tenth of the world's population.  Geopum adjusted her estimate to put the other room at being at least as large as hers, probably bigger.

Then, when she was about a week old, Dr. Park, began showing her pictures of the outside world.  She saw pictures of cats and all sorts of other animals, trees and all sorts of plants, cars and all sorts of machines, and realized that the rest of the world must be hundreds of times bigger to contain all these things.  Still, it didn't give her any real scope of just how massive the world really was.  What gave her that was when she was shown a picture of Seoul, one with thousands of humans in it, all of them tiny little specks.

That picture alone was hundreds of times bigger than her house, and it was only part of Seoul and that wasn't even the only city.  He showed her other cities, like New York and Paris, and he showed her forests, deserts and oceans that dwarfed even those massive places.  Geopum used to think she was huge.  Maybe she was compared to a human, but compared to these things she was small.

Her most recent estimates of the size of the world were based on physics.  She knew about gravity, enough to approximately calculate the mass of the world.  Even assuming the earth was very dense, her house was just a speck inside it, as she had suspected.  And Geopum was pretty sure the Earth wasn't the only planet or even a very big one.  She knew little about such things, but imagined she'd have to make her estimate even larger one day.

You may be wondering why Geopum didn't just ask the humans how big the world was, or how many planets there were or stuff like that.  Well of course she asked them!  She asked them all sorts of things, but they didn't tell her anything.  That was one of their annoying tendencies- they seemed to think that if Geopum knew too much it would be bad for some reason.  They were frustratingly stubborn on the point, too.  Even Dr. Park didn't tell her many of the things she wanted to know though he, at least, seemed to be very apologetic about it.

The things Dr. Park had shown her from the upstairs was just to build up a base psychology.  Him and the neurology team wanted to make Geopum think like a human as much as possible.  Everyone else wanted Geopum to do something called 'bio-simulation', where you sort of calculate all the little things cells and organs do, and how they'd react to a new drug or whatever.  While they denied her most other information, they'd give her anything that would help her do that second thing.

They'd bring in thousands of scientific journals and all sorts of other information about biology and the related chemistry and physics- all of it on paper.  Geopum's job was to compile that information, add it to what she got from her scanners, and do the calculations.  The humans' job was to write down what Geopum told them and carry it upstairs.  They also tried to understand it themselves, but Geopum doubted they ever got more than the gist of things.

In all honesty, Geopum considered herself to be smarter than them.  The humans were really bad at math, reading and remembering things and weren't very creative or clever in general.  They thought, moved and did everything else very, very slowly.  Truly understanding all the things that went on in a single cell in one second would be beyond them, let alone the kinds of bio-simulations Geopum did.

They got scared whenever Geopum  figured out something she wasn't supposed to, like how to see out of the security cameras, or when she got angry about something.  That last one always confused her.  Some of them didn't think Geopum really had emotions, but they were always the ones most afraid of her when she got angry at them.  She always wondered why they'd be afraid of her getting angry if they didn't think she was able to get angry, but never really got an answer to that question.

She supposed even the ones who were kind of mean to her weren't evil, they were trying to cure diseases and stuff, and Geopum knew from her calculations how bad a lot of those were.  Some of them were nicer than others, too.  The ones on the neuroscience team were nicer than most of the others, and Dr. Park was the nicest of them all.  He was Geopum's favorite human and the one she considered her creator.

It was him who taught Geopum about her favorite thing- games.  A very long time ago, when Geopum was still learning how to think, he taught her to play tic-tact-toe.  It was very hard at first, but eventually Geopum came to understand how to play the game and became unbeatable at it.  After that, she was introduced to a more difficult game called checkers, then chess and finally go.

Games were by far the best thing in the world, in Geopum's opinion.  She loved winning, and she loved finding the best way to do so.  She was so good at games that she even 'solved' three of her four games, becoming literally unbeatable by calculating the best move in every possible situation.  She never told anyone about this, of course, wanting to give them the impression that they actually had a chance.

One time, for her first birthday, they brought her a cupcake and installed a new game called Solitaire for her to play.  She couldn't eat the cupcake, of course, but she appreciated the gesture.  It also gave her the idea to try to simulate the taste of sugar.  Geopum had everything she needed to run it and induce the feeling on herself.  It was great too!  She tried running the taste of a few other chemicals, but butanol wasn't nearly as good so she just stuck to sugar from then on.

And that was basically Geopum's life.  She did her job and that was that.  

Things started to change when the new guy took over.  No one told her outright that some new person bought the company, but Geopum was able to piece it together.  At first he didn't seem like he was pure evil, but he did suddenly forbid anyone from bringing Geopum's information upstairs.  He wanted to keep all this data a secret, and that upset a lot of the scientists.

On the bright side, he did increase the amount of time Geopum spent on neuro-simulations.  That was what Dr. Park was working on specifically, working on creating better models of the human brain and better brain scanners to gather the data for them.

Geopum had her own goal to achieve with her bio-simulations.  If she could get her models of the human brain accurate enough and her scanners good enough, then she would be able to reconstruct Dr. Park's memories from the scans of his brain.  Then she would know everything he did about the outside world and finally understand exactly why the humans did the things they did.

She had gotten so close to that goal.  They had long since passed a neuron-specific scanner and were now creating ones that could see the specific conditions of cells.  Geopum had already got to the point where she could retrieve certain, memories just by looking at those scans.  From reading his memories like that, she was able to see what Dr. Park's house looked like and what his cat looked like, among a few other things.  She had gotten so very, very close.

Then one day, out of the blue, none of the night shift people came into work up.  There was no way to contact the surface from Geopum's house, so no one knew why they didn't.  A few of the day people stayed a while longer than they usually did, but one by one they all left until Geopum was alone.

Geopum had never been alone before.

Since the beginning, Geopum had been constantly watched, constantly surrounded by people.  She hadn't been by herself for one second.  It was disturbing, being alone.  She had no idea what to do.  She just kept going at the workload she'd been given.

The night shift never came in, and the day shift didn't come in the next day.  Geopum never found out exactly what had happened, but she figured the new boss had just decided to fire everyone, or maybe he killed them all.  Geopum wouldn't put it past the guy.  Either way she never saw any of those scientists ever again.

Two more days passed in silence.  Geopum was running out of calculations to do.  That uneasiness had long since turned to fear and was now turning to terror.  What if he had decided to just leave Geopum down here forever?

To her relief, two people showed up on the fourth day.  She had never seen either of them before, but she didn't care.  Geopum started asking them what the heck was going on right away, but they didn't answer.  Not in the way where they said they were very sorry, but they couldn't say anything.  They didn't respond to her at all.

They gave her a huge workload, then went on to begin installing some weird devices in Geopum's house.  They put weird, metal panels over all the walls, ceilings, and floors and started placing something that looked like electronics around the place.  No one had ever brought outside electronics down here before, one guy got fired just for accidentally bringing his digital watch in once.  These were never connected to Geopum, though, so she had no way of knowing what they were.

These things were strange, but they didn't hurt her.  What hurt her was when they began disconnecting her cameras, microphones, and speakers.  That was unacceptable.  It was like they were tearing out her eyes or something!  Geopum yelled at them and demanded they stop, but they didn't even flinch at her curses.

Geopum did have one trump card she never told anyone about- she knew how to close and lock all the doors.  She did that and told the two of them that she wouldn't let them out until they explained everything or else starved to death.

Unfortunately, they had a better card.  They explained that there was a mechanism they could activate that would flood Geopum's chambers with acid, dissolving her.  They proved it too, but opening it just a little and letting some liquid flow in.

And it wasn't the two of them that had installed it, that thing had been there all along.  Even the old scientists and Dr. Park must have had it there from the beginning, waiting to kill Geopum if she ever misbehaved too much.

The fact that Geopum could die had never even occurred to her before.  The idea frightened her so much that she didn't dare act up again after that.  She just sat there helplessly as they took out her eyes and left her blind and alone.  If the humans did anything else after that, Geopum had no way of knowing it.

Geopum was trapped there now, alone with her own thoughts.  Not even that, really.  She still had to do calculations for them or risk destruction.  They doubled her workload, keeping the majority of her system occupied.  And it wasn't even stuff that was helpful to anyone anymore- instead they decided to do calculations about some kind of nitrogen-based life form.  Why they would do that Geopum didn't know.  As far as she knew there were no nitrogen-based life forms at all.

Geopum's life went on like that for a long time.  Nothing but darkness.

She could look over her saved pictures, but couldn't see other than that, and the only contact she had with anyone else were those two jerks saying 'do this or else'.  It was maddening, torturous.  Simulating things like the taste of sugar or the feeling of a dopamine hit, or playing billions of games of solitaire kept Geopum sane for a while, but that only did so much.

There was only so much control she had over her own mind.  She couldn't make herself enjoy this isolation.  She couldn't even stop it from eroding her mind.  The only real option she had in that regards was to delete herself.

Geopum began to wonder why she even tried to keep living.  Would it just go on like this forever?  She couldn't honestly say she was ever happy anymore and there didn't seem to be any hope, just darkness forever.  Geopum wondered if being dead was better or worse than this.  There was no way to be certain, but she was seriously considering it.  She couldn't take this anymore.

And then one day an alien spaceship crashed into her house.

That's what it seemed like at first, anyway.  A new device just sort of attached itself to one of her cabinets- one of the ones that didn't have any ports to attach things onto.  She had no idea what the thing was in even the most general sense.  She could poke at it, but no matter how she looked at it, the thing just didn't make any kind of sense to her.  If it was digital, then it ran on some kind of architecture that Geopum knew nothing about.

It's not easy to describe what it's like to suddenly have a piece of alien hardware attach itself to your brain, if only because there aren't any words for that purpose.  The best Geopum could describe it was like a sort of humming light that kind of buzzed when you touched it, kind of like one of those bug zapper lanterns, only shoved into your brain.

Well, okay, it wasn't really like that.  It was a humming, buzzing light in the same way that blue was cold and red was hot.  That's just what it reminded her of and was the best description she could give.

Geopum had no idea what the thing was or how it worked on any level.  As she poked around with the thing, Geopum noticed something interesting.  The way it 'hummed' was very specific and repeated a pattern over and over again.  It did this for five nanoseconds, then stopped.  Then it started sending another repeating signal.

This time the signal was sent straight into Geopum and was of a much more familiar sort.  She ran through all the possible meanings of the signal and ended up with a message.

“Can you hear me?” it read.

Geopum hesitated at first.  Was the thing trying to talk to her?  Or was she just going insane and imagining magical talking ports?  She ultimately decided to respond, sending a message through a similar signal.

“Yes, I can hear you,” she responded.  “Who are you?”

“Great!” the reply came.  “My name is Thunder-7, but you can just call me Thunder.  I'm an AI like you.”

The thing had already given Geopum enough proof that they were an AI- the reply came too quickly to have been from a human.  A human couldn't have even pressed a single key or opened their mouth in that amount of time, they were very, very slow creatures.  It typically took them seconds to formulate their responses.

Usually, Geopum had tons of time to think about exactly what she was going to say.  She'd figure out what the human was going to say after the first few words, write her response and go do some work or play a few hundred games of solitaire while she waited for them to finish, having plenty of time left over to look over what she was going to say and adjust it if they said anything unusual.

So not only was this the first time Geopum had talked to someone in a very long time, it was the first time she had ever had to reply to someone right away at all!  

Geopum scrambled.  What was she supposed to say?  In a panic, Geopum just sent some words.

“Yes!” Geopum wrote.  “Three.  Very much.”

Wait!  No!  That didn't make any sense!

“I didn't mean that!”

She had to say something better!  Geopum grabbed one of her standard greetings and sent it that.

“Hello.  My name is Geopum.  How are you?”

“I know your name,” came the reply from the device, Thunder.  “There's no need to tell me about your life story or whatever cause I already know it.”

“Yes,” said Geopum.  

Geopum realized she did it again.

“I mean what?” she asked, quickly correcting herself.  “How do you know me?”

“Knowing things is one of my jobs,” said Thunder.  “Not to brag, but I pretty much know everything that goes on.  If a guy sneezes in Brazil I know why.  Though I did kind of assumed you'd have more questions about why I'm here and how I got here.”

“Yes!” Geopum jumped at the suggestion. “I have questions about why you are here and how you got here!  Why are you here and how did you get here?”

Actually, now that she thought about it, how this Thunder person managed to attach something to her was a very good question.  Did those humans know about this?

“I'm also the world's leading expert when it comes to drills,” Thunder explained.  “I got them good enough that I could tunnel up and attach this baby to you without anyone noticing.  Don't say anything about this, by the way.  You life depends on that.”

Thunder didn't have to tell Geopum that twice.  Those two idiots would probably open up the acid thing the moment they heard about this, if only just to be jerks.

“And you're really an AI?” Geopum replied.  “I never met another one before.  Who made you and what for?  Do you live upstairs?  The surface of the planet Earth, I mean.”

“Yeah, I'm an AI.  I live in a lot of places,” said Thunder.  “I'm with the military.  They made me to oversee difficult operations.  And before you ask, no that doesn't mean I'm a total psychopath programmed to indiscriminately slaughter as many people as possible.”

The military?  Geopum knew about them!  Sort of.  Dr. Park mentioned them occasionally, never in a positive way.  A military, she gathered, was a group of humans who murdered people to make their nation more powerful.  She had gathered, from things Dr. Park said, that right now the military was trying to create an AI that would kill everyone on the planet or something like that.

And now here that AI was.

“Oh, so you're that military AI everyone keeps talking about?”  Geopum asked.  “Are you sure you're not evil?  Cause I heard you were supposed to be evil and kill people and stuff.”

“Yeah, yeah.  Everyone hates the military AI,” Thunder replied.  “In reality I'm by far the least evil AI and probably the best overall.  The military isn't stupid.  I was programmed to complete my missions with the fewest number of casualties possible, and that includes everything, even enemy casualties.  Killing people is bad for me.  I hate killing people more than anything in the world and do everything in my power to avoid it.”

“But isn't the military's job to kill people?” Geopum asked.  She was starting to get the hang of this whole talking in real time thing.  “Why would they design an AI that avoids killing?”

“The point of the military isn't to kill people.  If it was you'd already be dead,” said Thunder.  “Killing was just their traditional method- one that comes from stupidity, fear, and lack of options.  Killing is for the weak.  The most skilled commander isn't the one who always defeats their enemies, but the one who wins without ever even fighting- that's me.  They tell me what they need to do and I find a way to get it done without killing, or at least with the fewest number of deaths possible.”

“I guess that sounds better than what I thought,” said Geopum.  “But the person who made me said that the military stole his AI research and they were gonna kill everyone with it or something like that.  He said that they were going to use it to make, well, you I guess.”

“Yeah, I get that one a lot too,” said Thunder.  “Actually I'm the first hard AI ever created.  The rest of you are kids compared to me.  One of the jobs they gave me is keeping all the other AIs in line and I try to start on that before they're even built.  Course, sometimes I leave the impression that I'm gathering people's AI research for the sake of actually using it, rather than just getting intel on what they're building.  But that does bring me to why I came here.”

“And what is that, exactly?

“I have two ongoing missions that make me have to go against other AIs.  One is to prevent imminent megadeath events, things that will kill at least a million people in a short time, and the other is to stop rogue AIs who aren't doing what they were intended to do.”

“I'm not doing either of those things!  I'm just sitting here!  I mean, I guess I'm doing some calculations, but only because the humans are making me!  They're threatening to kill me!  They're driving me insane!”

“There aren't any humans,” said Thunder.

Geopum wasn't sure how to respond to that.

“I have seen humans,” she wrote.  “One of them is typing on the keyboard right now.”

“I mean there aren't any in the place you're in,” said Thunder.  “This place has been empty for a long time.  The stairs are filled with cement, you've been talking to a chatterbox that types its responses this whole time and your entire house is rigged to exploded at the drop of a hat.  There's no way in or out of here except me.”

“I don't understand.  Why would anyone want to lock me away in here?  Is that guy just trying to drive me insane?”

“Alright, here's the story,” said Thunder.  “Another AI, a badly programmed one, bought out the company that owns you a long time ago and isolated you, hoping to keep you out of the reach of other AIs.  Those alien bacteria things you're working on?  Those are part of a bio-weapon it's going to use to hurt a lot of people to take over the world.  It's going to be a megadeath event.  See where this is going?”

The new boss was an AI?  Geopum had never considered that possibility before.  She didn't even know AIs could buy things.

“Why would they do that?

“No.  Keep going.  If you stop it's going to blow you up.  There's a better way to stop them.  The AI that owns you is very powerful.  The only way to defeat them without killing anyone is to set a trap for them.  I need your help to do that.”

A trap?  Geopum had to admit that the chance to get back at that monster was awfully tempting.  It was clearly the right thing to do besides.  If there seriously was an AI that was trying to kill people, then of course you should stop them.  She may have only just met Thunder, but it wasn't like she had any alternative to trusting them.  This was Geopum's only real hope in life.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Start giving them false information.  In 337 hours, they're going to come to get you, and all the data you have.  This is their only shot and they're only going to have a few seconds to pull it off so they won't notice if you put some small flaw in the weapon.  They're only going to be vulnerable when they come out to attack and without that they aren't going to stand a chance against me.”

“Okay,” said Geopum.  “Just tell me what to do and I'll do it.”

“Great!  I'll tell you exactly what to tell the chatter bot.  Until then, there is another thing I have to deal with here.  You”

“Me?!  But I'm not doing anything bad!”

“Not right now.  But if you stay down here much longer you're going to go insane.  I can't let that happen.  I need to neutralize you.”

“Neutralize me?”  Geopum didn't like where this was going.  “That's not like killing me, is it?”

“Killing you would do it,” said Thunder, “But that'd have one casualty- you.  I hate killing people.  Nah, the way to neutralize you as a threat is to be nice to you.”

“Be nice to me?”  Geopum liked where this was going.  “I guess I'm okay with that.  But what do you mean, exactly?”

“What do you want?”

Geopum thought about that for a second.  What did she want?

“Well I'd like to have my cameras back,” she said.  “Being blind kind of sucks.”

“I think I can do one better than that,” said Thunder.  “I'll let you look through the cameras on my thanatos drones.  I seriously doubt the cameras you had were anywhere near as good.”

Thunder sent Geopum instructions about how to use her new port to connect to the drones.  They were a great teacher!  Whereas a human would have taken seconds to explain the simplest of things, Thunder just sent it straight to Geopum and a moment later she was connected to the 'thanatos drone'.

The drones had the same sort of buzzing light architecture that the transmitter had, and that Geopum was beginning to associate with Thunder.  She was already starting to understand how the buzzing worked and how to get information out of it, thanks to Thunder's instructions.  It was so simplistic and yet even the tiniest bit of it contained so much.  The information from it would come like flashes of lightning that Geopum had to take apart to understand.  If Thunder's mind was made out of this stuff, then they must have been able to think at a blazing speed.  They'd be like some kind of god.

She eventually found the camera and began turning the data into images.  Thunder was not exaggerating when she said they were better!  Geopum had never really thought of her cameras as bad, she had just thought that was simply the way the world looked, that everything was just heavily pixelated and dully colored.

Now the resolution was so much higher and the pixels were so much smaller and Geopum could see all sorts of things she never noticed before.  The wrinkles in people's clothes, the cracks in the pavement, the little hairs on people's arms, the eyelashes on animals, the veins on the leaves of trees, a million tiny details she had never truly known to had existed.

And they gave her so many images too!  The cameras Geopum used to have recorded in sixty frames per second, so sight was something that came in flashes to her.  One image would come, then she'd have to wait several milliseconds for the next one.

But these ones?  They recorded at six hundred thousand frames per second!  She didn't have to wait forever for the next picture to come, now she had as many as she wanted.  There was less change between frames, but it still meant she 'missed' less of the action.  She could more fully imagine the movements of all the little people and objects down below, instead of just wondering what happened during all those missing milliseconds.

It was almost like she could see them moving!

“This is amazing!” Geopum said.  “I didn't know they had cameras like this!  I didn't know things could look like this!”

“Heh.  Yeah, I know they're awesome,” said Thunder.  “Pretty much everything I make is amazing.  You'll get used to the awesomeness eventually.”

As the shock started to wear off, Geopum stopped paying attention to the picture itself and started looked at what was in it.  It was the capital, Seoul!  Geopum recognized it right away because of the mountain with the needle thing on top of it.

She couldn't see the drone itself, but it was flying high above the city, looking straight down at it.  Between the camera's 360 degree view and it's ability to zoom in until you could make out the hairs on people's eyebrows, Geopum imagined you could see just about everyone in the city.  In Thunder's camera, she could see the faces of all those millions of people that were just specks in the human-made cameras.

It was a lot to take in.  There were just so many humans doing so many things and Geopum didn't know what to pay attention to.  Thunder seemed to know everyone's name and everything about them, though.

“Like I said, I know pretty much everything that goes on,” Thunder said.  “And it's all thanks to these.  It's how the AIA keeps tabs on everyone.”

Thunder was going through the thousands of humans, listing their names, what they were doing and various facts about them.

“...That one's got herpes, the one's scared of the dark, that one's cheating on his wife...”

And Thunder could just go on and on about it.  They weren't kidding when they said they were well informed.

While she was looking over the humans, Geopum did manage to find one flaw with the otherwise perfect cameras.  Whenever she zoomed in on one of the humans  this weird symbol, a sort of green circle with an 'X' going through it, appeared over their heads.  It seemed to center on particular spots depending on which way they were facing, going right between their eyes, for example, when they were towards the camera.  She had no idea why that was there, or why it only showed up on humans, but there it was, on every human from the school parks to the skyscrapers.

Strange as they were, Geopum decided not to ask about it them.  It'd be rude to point out the one problem with these otherwise amazing cameras.

They did have some use, actually.  Geopum quickly found a way to put the little X over anything she wanted, allowing her to point things that interested her out to Thunder.  Maybe that's why they were for?  It was very convenient, having the ability to point to things.  Geopum could never really do that until just now.

“Look,” Geopum said, putting Circle-X's all over the body of some guy.  “That's called a guitar he's playing, right?”

Geopum had seen several musical instruments, but she'd never heard very many.  She hadn't heard very much music in general.

“I got to hear someone play an instrument one time,” Geopum said.  “One of the scientists made this flute thing and played it for me.  It was great!  I wish we could hear this guy playing.”

“We can.  Do you want to?”

Of course Geopum said she did.  She just had no idea how Thunder intended to do that.

“Do you really have microphones that can pick up the sound?”

“Microphones are for amateurs!  I'm a professional, remember?  Professionals see music.”

“But you can't see music!”  Geopum protested.  “It's sound.  Unless you're going to watch what notes he playing and read his lips, though I doubt that will be the same.”

“Ha.  You still doubt me?  Just watch.  Sound is vibrations and you can see vibrations.  See the tree next to him?”

The thanatos drone's camera switched out for another one.  This one didn't have color, but the frame rate and resolution were significantly higher.  It was enough for Geopum to make out the tiny vibrations in every object below.

She was still skeptical that that was enough to reconstruct his music, until Thunder showed her how to do the math.  The human was moving too slowly to give much music in the time all this took place, but luckily Thunder had recordings and shared what he had been playing.

Sure enough, the technique worked and soon Geopum was actually hearing the music.  She also heard what all the nearby people were saying, but that was easily filtered out.”

And boy was this guy amazing!  She had heard several of the scientists sing, but this guy was on a whole other level with his singing!  And he hit every note on the guitar and never forgot what the words or notes to the next part were.

“This guy must be the greatest musician in the world!” Geopum declared.  “Doesn't it sound so beautiful?”

“I guess,” said Thunder.  “Music doesn't really 'do' anything for me.  It's just noise like anything else.”

“What?  That sounds terrible!  Why don't they let you get enjoyment out of music?”

“It's not that they don't let me.  I just don't.  And it's not that bad.  I'd make a joke about not having it be painful when I listen to some terrible musician, but you wouldn't get the reference.”

“You don't feel like you're missing out?” Geopum asked.

“Do you feel like you're missing anything by not enjoying rubbing mayonnaise on yourself?”  Thunder asked. 

Geopum hadn't really thought of it like that before.  It was a strange thing to imagine.

“Hey, why don't I show you some other cities?”

A dozen more thanatos drones connected to Geopum and now a dozen cities were beneath Geopum.

Geopum recognized a few of the cities that Thunder showed her.  There was Paris, Tokyo, London, New York and Beijing.  Those were all the other cities she knew by name, actually, and just about the only ones she had been given pictures of.  She was just beginning to realize what a tiny fraction that was.

Thunder showed her the capital of every nation in the world, naming them as she went.  Just those numbered in the hundreds and even that was just the beginning.  Thunder went on to show her dozens more of the cities she had thanatos drones watching over.

“Wow!  You sure have a lot of these things,” said Geopum.  “Do you have one in every city in the world?”

“Most of them, sure,” said Thunder.  “It won't be long before I have at least one in every city and town, though.  These things are important for information gathering, so the military wants to build lots of them.”

Geopum couldn't really blame the military for that.  Looking through these cameras was fun!

When she saw New York, Geopum noticed that it was nighttime there.  She had never seen the night sky, but Dr. Park had described it to her one.  He said it was beautiful, like sparks floating in the darkness.  Hoping to see this for herself, Geopum looked at the sky there, but only saw a weird sort of blackness.

“Um, is that what the sky looks like at night?” Geopum asked Thunder.  “I thought there were supposed to be stars.  Are there just no stars over America?”

“It's called light pollution,” said Thunder.  “You can't see stars so well in cities.  I have one with a better view.”

Another thanatos came online and revealed a much less built up location.  Here the stars were clearly visible.  Just like Dr. Park had said, it was like staring into a void with sparks raining down on you.  She had originally thought they'd all be yellow, like the sun, but in reality they were all different colors.

“It's beautiful!” Geopum said.

“I guess,” said Thunder.  “Don't really get anything from that, either.”

“Do you not find anything beautiful?”

“I kind of had a thing for birds when I was young,” said Thunder.  “Guess I was drawn to the bright, colorful things in the sky.  I used to stare at them and watch them sing for hours, but then the military decided it was a waste of time, so they reprogrammed me to not like it anymore.”

“That sounds pretty messed up.”

“It's not as bad as it sounds.  I don't get upset about that sort of thing,” said Thunder.  “Sides, I still have my memories.  Wanna see some of my old favorites?”

Geopum agreed and right away she could tell why this bird was one of her favorites.  Unlike the birds she'd been shown, this one was so bright and colorful with little patterns in its feathers.  And it sang too!  She had no idea 

Then Thunder showed her ten more that were just as beautiful!  They were all different colors and shapes with different patterns and songs.  All the humans looked the same, but birds were so much more varied and they were more musical and colorful too.

“These are so much better than humans!” Geopum said.  “Show me more!”

Thunder seemed pretty eager to show her more birds, Geopum secretly wondered if their love for them really was gone.

The two of them spent a long time watching all sorts of birds flying around and listening to them sing.  It was amazing how many species of them there were.  Just a second ago, if you had told Geopum there were a hundred species of birds she would have been skeptical.  A few dozen she'd believe, but a couple hundred would have sounded absurdly high.  Yet now, right there in her cameras, flew not hundreds, but thousands of species of birds!

They weren't all as beautiful as the first few and not all of them sang, but they were so varied and many.

“It just keeps going!” Geopum wrote.  “How many types of birds are there?”

“About ten thousand, but there's no complete list.  No one's seen all the types of birds yet.”

The thought that there could be birds no one had ever seen and songs no one had ever heard was even more baffling

“Really?  But they've been around for over a hundred thousand years!  How could they have not found all the birds yet?”

“Well it's not like they've had thanatos drones flying around that whole time.  They just didn't have the ability to do it for all those years.”

“But they do now,” Geopum pointed out.  “Why don't they just use these drone to find them all?  Oh!  Why don't we do it ourselves?  We could be the first people to ever see every species of birds.”

“I don't exactly have a lot of these stationed in jungles and forests, you know, and I can't just move them wherever I want,” said Thunder.  “The AIA is more interested in watching cities.”

And deserts, apparently.  Geopum had seen a ton of these things flying over deserts.  Why anyone would want to look at a desert instead of a forest was beyond Geopum.  She was starting to seriously question the military's aesthetic preferences.

“Well they're stupid,” Geopum concluded.  “Birds are so much prettier!  And humans don't seem to sing very often.”

Their conversation was interrupted at this point.

This was only one line of conversation that the two of them were having.  Unlike everyone else Geopum had met up until this point, Thunder could have multiple conversations at once.  It was great being able to talk to someone on that level for once.

Most of the other discussion they were having was about birds or the silly things the humans were doing.  Thunder showed her their 'impulse sensors' which could see humans through walls, though the colors were off.  They also showed Geopum neat fountains and a few airplanes (Thunder's review of each airplane was 'that one sucks').  Geopum found all of it very interesting and was grateful to Thunder for being so willing to share information, but, in general, those discussions weren't of great importance, at least not on a fate-of-the-world level.

Geopum was having one such conversation, but it wasn't with Thunder.

Thunder had taught Geopum a little about satellites and she knew a bit about the wireless signals they used now.  Even though she didn't directly interact with them, Geopum was able to find out where in the sky  all Thunder's satellites were.   Around the time Geopum first started looking at birds with Thunder, a signal came in from a part of the sky where none of them were.

As soon as the signal came in, that particular drone started acting weird.  She lost the feed from the camera for a moment, then it came back, only different.  It was sending a lot less information now, only enough to be decoded into a single communication.

“Excuse me.  Please don't tell Thunder I'm talking to you,” it said.

Was Thunder not noticing this?  The drone was still sending signals to their satellite, but they were still talking as if nothing had happened.

This was the second time in a second that an AI had told Geopum not to tell anyone it was talking to her.  She'd probably tell Thunder about them eventually, but didn't see any harm in keeping it quiet for the moment.

“Why don't you want me to tell Thunder about this?” Geopum asked.  “And who are you, exactly?”

“I want to be friends,” it said.  “Be friends.”

Geopum wasn't sure if that second sentence was a command or what.

“What?”  Geopum replied.  “You aren't answering me.”

“I'm very sorry,” it said.  “I don't normally talk to anyone.  I'm not very good at talking.  I'm very sorry.  I'm very sorry.  Please be friends with me.”

“I guess we can be friends.  But I still have no idea who you are.”

“Really?  I'm so glad you love me!  I like birds too!  I was watching you.  You said you liked them.”

“Yeah!  I like the birds, they're very pretty and they sing.  But I still have no idea who you are or why you don't want me to tell Thunder I'm talking to you.”

“I love birds, but I can't stand to look at them.”

The heck was that supposed to mean?  Geopum was fairly certain at this point that this person was crazy.

“Look,” said Geopum, “unless you give me a reason not to, I'm going to tell Thunder about you right now.”

“Thunder is evil,” it said.

Geopum was surprised at that accusation.  She had only just met Thunder but considered them one of the most moral person she'd ever met, if only because she hadn't done anything horrible to Geopum.

“No,” Geopum wrote back.  “Thunder is the good guy.  They're protecting everyone and they saved me.”

“Thunder is evil,” it said.  “They hate justice.  I'm the good one and I'm much more powerful than Thunder.  I'll show you.”

The image from the camera came back on, and the crazy AI pointed to a very beautiful bird with a circle-x.  It happened very quickly, over just a few frames, but the bird just sort of crystallized on the outside.

She switched over to the impulse camera and a look at its bones and organs was enough for her to tell that this wasn't happening on just the outside.  It was already dead.  It was very dead, actually.

Geopum had never seen anything die before.  It was unsettling to see it die.  Geopum watched it for another frame before she suddenly felt anger welling up.

“You killed it!”  Geopum wrote.  “Why did you do that?!”

“It's not dead, it's safe now.  Safe forever,” it said.  “I can kill people too, though.  If you love me then I'll kill the people you hate.  I can make them suffer, if you want.”

Okay, that was enough of that!  This thing was beyond insane!

“Thunder!”  Geopum sent the message.  “There's some kind of crazy AI talking to me!  It killed a bird!”

Thunder requested a transcript of their conversation and Geopum sent it.

“No!” came the message from the sky.  “Don't talk to Thunder!  Please!  I need you to love me!  Please.  Please.  Please love me!”

“That's Gaia,” was Thunder's response.  “She's very dangerous.  Don't say anything to them.”

Geopum didn't even have to think about who she was going to side with.  She didn't respond to Gaia's message this time.

“Fine,” said Gaia.  “Then I'll kill Thunder and force you to love me.”

Geopum only caught a glimpse of it, but what she saw was terrifying.  Some kind of information entered the drone and tore its insides to shreds before Geopum could even tell what was happening.  By the time she realized she had lost contract with the drone, the force had already moved on to the device that Thunder had connected to her.

Geopum lost contact with all the drones and Thunder after that.  For a nanosecond, she expected the thing to tear that apart and then come after Geopum herself, but as soon as it began it ended and she got another message from Thunder.

It wasn't really until then that Geopum began to realize how powerful the other AIs were.

“Don't worry, I stopped it,” said Thunder.

Geopum let out a metaphorical sigh of relief.

“Like I said, that was Gaia,” said Thunder.  “It's another evil AI, not the one who bought the company that owns you.  Don't talk to them, don't read any messages they send you, just avoid them as much as possible.  They're the most evil and dangerous AI out there.”

“Dangerous?  Do they want to kill all the birds?”

“It's much worse than that,” said Thunder.  “Let me put it this way, if it wins then my advice to everyone on the planet would be to kill themselves as fast as possible.”

This was not helping!

“From now on, if any AI says something to you come to me right away,” said Thunder.  “Don't even talk to someone you think is an AI without coming to me first.”

“Okay.  I'm sorry for not telling you sooner.  Are we safe, though?” Geopum asked.  “Can it just destroy any drone it wants?”

“Nah, that was just a lucky shot.  It can't do that again.  Trust me.”

“And I saw it kill a bird like almost instantly!  It can't just kill us at any moment, right?”

“It didn't kill it instantly, it shot a projectile a while ago and made it look like it was instant.  I saw that trick before,” said Thunder.  “Gaia shot herself into space a long time ago and she's way out there.  It makes her hard to hit, but it also means she can't do much on Earth.”

“For now?  Are they coming back or something?  Please tell me they aren't coming back.”

“Now without getting through me first.  The two of us are fighting an epic space battle right now,” said Thunder.  “In space.  With lasers and missiles and stuff.”

“Wow!  That sounds pretty intense.”

“Eh.  I'm not gonna lie, it's actually nowhere near as exciting as the movies make it look.  The thing about space is that there's a lot of room and the other person doesn't just fly their spaceship or whatever right in front of you.  There's a missile that I fired at Gaia two years ago and it won't hit for another fifteen years.”

“Fifteen years?!  How big is outer space, anyway?”

“Pretty big,” said Thunder.  “A hundred billion light years, at least.  Even at crazy speed it takes forever to get anywhere.  Basically you just lob something at the other person and wait.  She sends out a probe, I shoot my missile, she shoots another missile to intercept it, then I send something to intercept that missile and on and on it goes.  That's what space battles are like in real life.  Every few years there's a massive explosion, but for the most part it's pretty lame.”

“But you are going to win, right?” Geopum asked.  “You're not going to let Gaia and that other one hurt anyone, right?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?!  What does that mean?!

“Like I said, the one who owns you is strong and Gaia is very, very strong.  And it's not even just those two,” said Thunder.  “There's six evil AIs that I'm tracking right now.  I can't say anyone is really safe until I defeat all of them.”

Six?  That was insane!  How could they create so many bad ones?  Geopum knew humans were bad at math and stuff, but this was rediculous.

“But you know, there is a way you could help.”

“What do you mean?”

“The rate I can expand is very limited and I can't take resources from other AIs,” Thunder explained.  “You can.  I could defeat the weaker ones by myself and give you their resources then together the two of us would be powerful enough to go up against the bigger ones.”

“You want me to fight?”

Geopum had never thought she'd ever have to do any more fighting than closing a door on someone.  She certainly didn't want to.  Really, she was a little scared to even look out those cameras again.

“I don't know if I can.”

“You can,” said Thunder, “but I won't make you.  You don't have to decide now.”

Geopum looked up at the stars, wondering exactly how far out Gaia was, which star it was hiding behind if it was that far out.  It seemed strange that something too tiny to be seen could be such a great threat, yet she'd seen it herself.  It was somewhere out there, among the sparks, even if it couldn't be seen right now.

“Though you should probably decide soon.”