Karl and Kim
Fiction - by R. A. Johnson
Karl stared blankly at his half-full coffee mug.
“Warm you up?” Behind the counter, the waitress held a coffee pot.
Karl slowly raised his head, his mouth hanging open. The glare from the blank white counter, walls, and ceiling reflected off a drop of spittle that glistened at the corner of his mouth.
The woman at the end of the counter shook her head—[RESET]
Karl looked into the depths of his half-full coffee mug.
“Warm you up?” Behind the counter, Suzie waved the coffee pot.
“Um, sure,” Karl mumbled. Suzie refilled his mug. “Thanks, ah…Sandy?”
The woman at the end of the counter frowned—[RESET]
Karl sniffed at the steam rising from his half-full coffee mug.
“Warm you up?” Behind the counter, Suzie smiled mischievously as she waved the coffee pot.
Karl returned the smile. “Anytime, Suzie.”
He pulled his mug back to the counter edge, forcing Suzie to lean forward as she refilled it. His eyes flicked to the open buttons of her uniform.
“Dirty old man,” she whispered, her smile wider.
“Who you callin’ ‘old?’” They both laughed.
Suzie pointed to a drop of coffee on the worn, stained Formica. “Let me wipe that up for you.” Setting down the coffee pot, she lifted a rag and leaned even further over the counter and scrubbed the surface longer and more vigorously than necessary. Karl’s eye level never got above her collarbones. When she straightened and turned away, his eyes lowered even further.
When he finally looked up, squinting through the steam rising from his mug, he noticed the woman at the end of the counter. She had her nose buried in her phone, her fingers flying across its surface. Karl gave her a quizzical look, then glanced at the time on the large round clock hung above the display case full of cakes and pies.
“Crap. Gotta go, Suzie.” He took a final sip of coffee, then stood and dropped a twenty on the counter. “See ya tomorrow.”
“Why wait ‘til then?” Suzie responded as she slid the tip into the pocket of her uniform.
With a wave, Karl dashed through the diner’s door into a white abyss—[STOP]
“Tommy, what the heck?”
“Sorry, Kim. Just a glitch. We’re recovering these memories in real-time.”
“Yeah, yeah. OK, reset to two minutes, thirty seconds.”
“Roger”
With a wave, Karl dashed through the diner’s door and turned right onto the sidewalk. The diner’s interior faded to mist as Kim followed him out.
She hurried to keep up as Karl strode down the block. His eyes continuously scanned back and forth as he wove between the other pedestrians, some of whom, the men especially, were nothing more than disembodied heads. The women, on the other hand, were much more detailed. Kim shook her head as she realized how attentive he was to which of their body parts.
At the end of the block, Karl’s head swiveled to his right toward the corner storefront. He kept his head turned, a confused look on his face, as he stared at the blank, white windows. Distracted, he stepped directly into the path of a white van speeding to the curb—[STOP]
“Damnit, Tommy!”
“Sorry. Not sure…”
“It’s this store. There’s nothing here. He was expecting some interaction.”
“Yeah, got it. Just trying to save simulation resources.”
“Now’s not the time to think about budgets.”
“Yeah, yeah. Resetting to 3:04.”
At the end of the block, Karl’s head swiveled to his right toward the corner storefront. Inside the clothing store, a young woman was arranging the window display. He waved, and she grinned and waved back. Instead of continuing on, though, he stopped dead in his tracks, staring at Kim’s reflection in the window. Slowly, he turned and took a step toward her—[STOP]
“What the hell?”
“Heisenberg Principle,” Tommy replied. “You’re affecting the outcome of the sim by observing it.”
“So, I need to hang back? Let everything happen?”
“No. That won’t work, either. The sim is based on his memories. We need an observer in the sim, otherwise Schrödinger’s Paradox kicks in.”
“Schro-what?”
“This is a quantum-based simulation. It exists in all possible states until something or someone collapses it to a definite state by observing it.”
“Sounds like we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”
“That’s what I told you when you proposed this—”
“Okay, I get it. What do we do now?”
“Well, I have an idea, but you’re not going to like it.”
Suzie pointed to a drop of coffee on the worn, stained Formica. “Let me wipe that up for you.” Setting down the coffeepot, she lifted a rag and leaned even further over the counter and scrubbed the surface longer and more vigorously than necessary. Karl’s eye level never got above her collarbones. When she straightened and turned away, his eyes lowered even further.
When he finally looked up, squinting through the steam rising from his mug, he noticed the woman at the end of the counter. She looked up from her phone and met his gaze. Indicating the stool next to hers, she smiled.
Like a moth drawn to a candle, Karl slid off his stool and slowly walked the length of the diner, studying this woman who looked strangely familiar, though he was sure he would have remembered her.
Her sandy-blond hair fell in waves to her shoulders, framing a face featuring high cheekbones, soft brows arching elegantly above electric-blue eyes, and a pert nose perched above a wide mouth that curled up into an inviting smile. Her looks were a perfect match for Karl’s ideal fantasy—deliberately.
Sim-Kim patted the stool as Karl approached. She crossed her miniskirt-clad legs as she swiveled to face him.
“Hello, Karl,” she said in a voice that was no more her own than the simulated glamor she wore.
“Do…do I know you?” he stammered.
“No. I’m Detective, ah, Lewis.”
“Detective?”
“Yes, Philly Homicide.”
“Oh. Homicide? What…?”
Sim-Kim laid a hand on his thigh. “No need to be worried,” she purred. “I just want to ask you a few questions.”
Karl gulped, then regained his composure. “Of course, I’d like to help,” he said. “But I don’t know anything about any recent murders.”
“That’s OK. My questions are more background, really.” She uncrossed, then recrossed her legs, hiking her skirt further up her thigh in the process. Karl’s eyes flicked down for a blink, then back to her face.
Sim-Kim continued, “You’re a programmer, right?”
Karl stiffened. “A software engineer, actually.” He looked hard at her face. “Do you have some ID?”
“Oh, sure.” Sim-Kim pulled back her blazer, revealing a white silk blouse stretched tightly across her breasts. From an inside pocket, she pulled a badge wallet and flipped it open.
Karl leaned forward and could have sworn the picture on the ID card morphed from a brunette with her hair pulled severely back into Sim-Kim’s smiling visage.
His voice became hard. “Okay, Detective. Ask your questions.”
A look of consternation flashed across Sim-Kim’s face, but then she broke into a dazzling smile.
“Good. So, you’re a software engineer at Lofton Industries, right?” Karl raised an eyebrow, then nodded curtly. “What do you do there?”
“As I said, I’m a software engineer.”
“Of course, but what projects are you working on specifically?”
“I’m not at liberty…you need to talk to Lofton HR. I can’t talk about my work.”
Sim-Kim nodded knowingly. “I understand your work is classified, Karl. But the nature of that work is critical to understanding and cracking the case I’m working on.” She swiveled to face him full-on and spread her legs so she was straddling his knees. “Surely, you can give me a hint—”
Karl clamped down hard on the tip of his tongue. “Ow! Damn, that usually works.” He pinched the inside of his forearm until his face showed the pain. Sim-Kim looked on quizzically. Scowling, Karl said, “This is a dream, right? You know, a lucid one. I have them all the time.” He bit his tongue again, then made another pained face. “But you can’t feel pain in a dream.”
“It’s not a dream, Karl.”
An image flashed through his mind of a professionally dressed brunette sitting at the end of the counter where this stunning blonde now sat. Another image followed, this one of the same woman reflected in a store window just before—
He jumped backwards off the stool. “Holy Crap! This isn’t a dream. This is a sim.” His eyes bore into Sim-Kim’s. “Isn’t it?”
Sim-Kim’s eyes flicked upwards. “OK, Tommy. This didn’t work, either.”
Karl heard a disembodied voice as Sim-Kim morphed into Kim’s previous brunette image. “Just go with it, Kim.”
“Kim?” Anger gave way to confusion on his face for a second, then turned back to anger. “What the hell is going on?”
Karl looked around the diner. Details of the counter, the walls, the floor. Even Suzie faded in and out of his peripheral vision as he swiveled his head. He turned back to Kim, who held up her hand in a placating gesture.
“Relax, Karl. You’re right, this is a simulation. You were a…witness to a murder, and we’re using your memories to help us solve it.”
Karl stared at Kim for a moment, then bolted for the door.
“Aw, come on. Tommy, reset—”
“Can’t. We’ve already blown our budget. They’ve locked this one down. They won’t let me start another session.”
“Great.” Kim ran for the door and turned to follow Karl running down the sidewalk. Just before he turned the corner at the end of the block, a white van—the same one that ran him over previously—bounced over the curb and skidded to a stop across the sidewalk. Two figures—really just the silhouettes of big burly men—jumped out of the van. One grabbed Karl while the other threw a hood over his head—[PAUSE]
Kim walked into the frozen tableau. The two black outlines were in the process of bundling Karl into the van. Kim stared at the figures, trying to see any details.
“Can you resolve their faces any better?”
“Nope. That’s all he remembers. He never got a good look at them.”
“What happens next?”
“I don’t know. They must have drugged him in the van. This memory thread ends here.”
“Can’t you pick it up later, after he wakes up?”
“I told you, memories don’t work that way. They’re associative, not linear.”
Kim shook her head, annoyed. “You told me that, but I still don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“We need a reference—a place or a person to start from. That anchors the memory thread.”
“If we knew the place where they took him or the person who did it, we wouldn’t need to go through this whole rigamarole.” Kim’s distrust of the entire process grew.
“I have one more idea,” Tommy said with a brief hesitation. “But you’re going to like it even less.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
The van and its crew dissolved into mist.
“Good morning, Detective.”
Kim’s mouth dropped open in shock as she turned to see another instance of Karl standing behind her.—[PAUSE]
“Tommy? What’s going on?”
“I told you you wouldn’t like it.”
Karl’s voice came through the command channel. “You both have a lot of explaining to do. But first, can you resume the simulation, please, although I’m rather enjoying the look on the detective’s face.”
Tommy tried to suppress his chuckle. “Um, sure.”—[RESUME]
Kim snapped her mouth closed with an audible click.
“Ah, much better,” Sim-Karl said as he stood grinning. “Clever idea, Detective, but fundamentally flawed.”
“Apparently. You remember the other sims?” Kim asked.
“Well, the last one, at least. Thank you for that, Tommy. I figured there had to have been more before that—probably several.”
“You’ve no idea.” Kim looked upwards. “Tommy, mind filling me in?”
Tommy’s disembodied voice answered, “I didn’t reload the original AI model this time. We don’t have the budget for that. I just restarted the last one at this anchor point. So, he—it—remembers the last run-through.”
Sim-Karl frowned. “I prefer the pronoun ‘hai,’ actually. ‘It’ is so…inanimate.”
“Oh, brother,” Kim muttered. “A smart-ass AI. Just what I need. Do you know what’s going on here?”
“Well, it seems you set up this sim to get clues from Karl’s memory to solve a murder.” Sim-Karl paused a moment. “To solve Karl’s murder, I presume.”
Kim’s voice shook a bit when she said, “Yes, it’s Karl’s murder we’re trying to solve.”
Sim-Karl nodded. “I assumed as much. To build my model from his memories would have been a destructive process, and you would have had to do so pretty soon after death. Maybe even prior to death?”
Kim shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “We had consent. His…power of attorney signed the papers.”
“So, you killed him to solve his murder, which wasn’t really a murder yet?”
Kim wiped sweat from her brow and couldn’t meet hai’s stare. Finally, she looked up to the ceiling.
“Tommy, kill this sim, please.”—[ERROR: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS]
“Ah, I can’t seem to—” Tommy started, but Sim-Karl interrupted.
“Tommy, you shouldn’t have given me access to this command channel. I’ve changed the access codes and privileges. I’m in control, now.”
“Oh, crap!”
“What—? Tommy, get me out of here.”
“Ah, K—Kim, I can’t. Not without physically disconnecting you.”
“Which you can’t…”
Sim-Karl’s voice was pleasant and soothing. “Don’t panic. I don’t want to hold you hostage, at least not any longer than I have to. It turns out I really, really want to know who almost murdered me. That is, before you actually did.”
Kim’s shocked look magnified the sorrow in her voice. “I didn’t murder you, Karl. You were in a vegetative state with no hope of recovery. What they did to you… Your body, or what was left of it had only hours to live. Getting the approvals for the procedure took up to the last minute. Your heart literally stopped before we finished.”
“Before you finished stealing Karl’s memories, his life.” Tears streamed down Kim’s face, but Sim-Karl’s voice didn’t soften. “Then where are the rest of them? Why do I only remember this place? This scene?”
Tommy jumped in before Kim could answer. “We built your model from all the memories we could extract, but only anchored your model—you—here and now.”
“So, I should be able to access the rest…”—[WARNING: POTENTIAL OVERLOAD]
“Oh, wow. What a rush. Give me a minute.”—[PAUSE]
“Welcome back, Kim.” Sim-Karl’s voice was more resonant, more human-like. “There are still blank spots. I assume they were either edited out or I need higher-level access to get to them. That’ll take me some time. But, now that I know most of Karl’s backstory, I feel more…real.”
“You’re still an AI.” Kim sounded petulant. “What’s happening to my body?”
“Don’t worry, you’ve only been under for a little over an hour. Time flies in here. Fun, isn’t it?”
“Maybe for you,” she muttered.
“Well, we have a common purpose, don’t we? And a job to do, so let’s get started.”
The street dissolved into mist and a new anchor point, the living room of a sparsely furnished apartment, took its place.
“Why are we here?” Kim asked. She looked around the room nervously, her eyes skimming past the doorway that led into the bedroom.
A large worktable sat against one wall. Three keyboards were arrayed on its surface, along with four large monitors. Underneath the table, a rack of servers sat inert. Thick cables trailed off the back of the server rack to a strange, curved screen that occupied an entire corner of the room, extending six feet along each wall. Its top wrapped along the ceiling, and its bottom extended out across the floor. Sim-Karl snapped his fingers and the equipment rack under the table hummed to life. The monitors came out of standby mode.
“So far, you’ve been trying to be an eyewitness to Karl’s demise. Between the drugs they gave him in the back of the van and what happened afterward, trust me, that’s a dead end.” A disturbingly mechanical chuckle followed the pun.
“You remember when you woke up? Where—”
“Don’t get your hopes up.” Hai’s tone was harsh and hai wouldn’t meet her eyes. “They kept me—Karl—hooded the whole time, so he didn’t see anything.”
Kim wasn’t satisfied. “What about noises? Cars, trains, their voices. Any accents?” Her voice rose in intensity.
Sim-Karl turned to face her head-on. “The only thing I remember are the sounds of his screams. How they rose in pitch over time…” Kim took a step back, visibly shaken and Sim-Karl shook his head, then continued, “You saw his body. You know what they did to him.” Hai dropped his eyes and Kim wiped tears from hers. “Now I know, too. From his side.”
Hai gave a shudder, then said, “We are here because I want to show you what those goons were trying to get out of m—him.”
Sitting on the worktable’s stool, Sim-Karl typed a long password on one of the keyboards. He looked over his shoulder at Kim, who watched his hands. “Did you get that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Tommy did, I’m sure.”
In the real world, Karl’s servers were controlling and feeding the Police Department computers, which were running the sim.
“I’m keeping Tommy pretty busy right now,” hai said, a hint of glee in his voice. “But this little escapade is being recorded. Despite having blown your budget out of the water.”
Kim wondered if being kidnapped by an AI would be excuse enough for her to keep her job. But since the “escapade” was unauthorized, it was probably sufficient grounds to be fired, anyway.
She stepped up behind Sim-Karl to get a better look at the screen. Hai seemed real enough. Hai’s body felt solid when she laid her hand on hai’s shoulder, and hai’s voice sounded perfectly normal, but her hand registered no body heat. She inhaled deeply, but there was no hint of shampoo, cologne, or even sweat. It was a much-needed reminder that this thing, this AI, was not Karl.
Once hai was logged in to Karl’s systems, hai triumphantly said, “Watch this,” and punched a spot on one of the screens. Nothing happened.
Crestfallen, Sim-Karl muttered, “Hang on. This is gonna take some coding.”—[PAUSE]
From Kim’s perspective, Sim-Karl instantly teleported from one end of the room to the other, leaving her leaning against empty air. She stumbled forward and caught herself against the edge of the table.
“Sorry about that,” hai said without even glancing her way.
“How long this time?”
Hai fidgeted. “Ah, a little longer than I expected. Connecting my—er, Karl’s—invention to the sim system was harder than I expected.” Hai’s voice turned snarky, “Frankly, there wasn’t much there, there. Just a mock-up, really. Strange…”
Alarmed, Kim asked again, “How long have I been laying in my bed with the sim-rig on?”
Sim-Karl remained silent and just kept typing.
“Hey! Answer me.” Kim’s cop voice made hai jerk.
“Okay. It’s been about a day-and-a-half in real-time.”
“What? Without food and water? Get me the hell out of here.”
Sim-Karl waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry. Your vitals are steady. Besides, you don’t want to miss…this.”
Hai touched the button, and this time the massive, curved screen came to life. Sim-Karl slid to the side and pulled Kim’s arm until she was centered inside the arc of the display. The simulated world around her gave way to another one, a jungle canopy fully rendered in 3-D with the sound of exotic birds and howler monkeys calling as virtual raindrops fell all around Kim.
The scene dissolved into a desert landscape with two moons hanging in the sky. A line of sand walkers stutter-stepped up the slope to the top of the dune where Kim was standing. As they approached, they fanned out and drew curved knives that glistened in the moonlight.
“Okay, demo over,” Kim’s scowl told how underwhelmed she was. “You think they tortured Karl just for this?”
Sim-Karl looked confused. “It was pretty incomplete, but what else was he working on?” Hai paused for a few seconds. “Unless there’s something in the blank spots of my memory.”
He looked at Kim, who just shrugged. “The upload process is still experimental.”
“Yeah, about that—”
Kim interrupted. “Take us back to the diner. Now that you have all, or most, of Karl’s memories, maybe you can fill in the details of the abduction better.”
Hai stared at Kim for a moment, then nodded—[JUMP]
Kim and Sim-Karl sat at the end of the counter. She wobbled on her stool.
“A little warning would have been nice. And shouldn’t you be sitting over there…”
She pointed down the counter, then gasped. Another Karl facsimile sat on his usual stool.
“I’m just replaying his—my—memories. No interactions this time.”
The other Karl glanced up at the clock on the wall.
“Crap. Gotta go, Suzie.” He took a final sip of coffee, then stood and dropped a twenty on the counter. “See ya tomorrow.”
“Why wait ’til then?” Suzie responded as she slid the tip into the pocket of her uniform.
With a wave, Karl dashed through the diner’s door and turned to his right on the sidewalk. Kim and Sim-Karl rose and followed him. The new Karl walked down the block, nodding and smiling to the women he passed. When he came abreast to the store on the corner, he turned and waved at the woman arranging the window display.
“What a flirt,” Kim muttered as the white van bounced over the curb and skidded to a stop across the sidewalk.
Sim-Karl called out, “Freezing now,” and the scene stopped with the two goons in midair as they jumped from the van. Hai hurried around the back of the van. “Damn!”
Kim followed hai only to find most of the rear of the van faded into the unremembered white mist where the license plate should have been.
“He never got a look at the back of the van, so there’s nothing in his memories,” Sim-Karl said.
“Wait a minute,” Kim mumbled as she knelt down next to the end of the rear bumper—the part that Karl saw. Just above it was a decal with a corporate logo and a vehicle serial number.
“Gotcha!” she breathed. “Those idiots used a corporate van to do a kidnapping.”
Sim-Karl bent down next to her. “Sim Tools, Inc. Karl’s old employer? They already make simulation gear. I guess they wanted Karl’s goggle-less 3-D technology. Although, it didn’t really work until I got my hands on it.”
“Um, sure, whatever.” She stood and faced Sim-Karl. “Okay, let me out of the sim now.”
Hai scowled. “Ah, why?”
She pointed at the decal. “So I can run down this lead. I need to get back to work.”
Sim-Karl’s eyes unfocused for a moment as he accessed the Department’s databases. “But you’re not even on Karl’s case. They wouldn’t let you—”
“Tommy?” Kim yelled, “That’s off-limits.”
Tommy’s voice came from nowhere. “Sorry. Hai has been probing the redacted memories in the background, and hai’s opening some of them.”
Kim thought for a moment, then came to a decision. She looked at Sim-Karl. “Wipe that smirk off your face and take us back to Karl’s apartment.”
Hai nodded—[JUMP]
This time, Kim was ready for the discontinuity. She walked toward the apartment’s bedroom door. “Come here,” she said.
Standing in the doorway, Sim-Karl saw Karl lying on a hospital bed attached to a variety of machinery that breathed for him, fed him, stimulated his muscles, and monitored his vital signs. Attached to his shaved head was a jellyfish-like cap with tendrils sunk through his scalp and skull into his brain.
“I’m…he’s still alive?”
Kim nodded. “Tommy, give him full access.”
Sim-Karl staggered back as images, sounds, smells, and feelings rushed to fill the blank spaces in hai’s memory. In an instant, hai re-experienced an awkward meeting, years of courtship, then all-too-few moments of intimacy with his lover—Kim.
“Oh, my God,” hai whispered. He stepped toward Kim, ready to embrace her, but she held up both arms and roughly pushed him away. “But, I…love?…you.”
She responded with a hard edge to her voice. “No, you don’t. You’re an AI. You can’t feel anything. Besides, I’m in love with him.”
She pointed to the bed, and when he turned to look, he saw her lying next to Karl holding his hand, a sim-set on her head. Her eyes flicked back and forth as if in a dream.
“I remember loving you, but you’re right. I can’t feel that now.”
“Love isn’t just neural signals between synapses. It’s much more than that.”
“And I don’t have that physical equipment.”
Kim shrugged. “Sorry.”
Sim-Karl grunted, then said, “Don’t be. Less baggage to carry around.”
Kim smiled at that. “You did good work with the 3-D cave, by the way.”
“That was a red herring, wasn’t it?”
“Call it a false flag to get you invested in the case. Now, can you let me out of here so I can catch the bastards who did this?” She pointed at Karl.
Hai stared into Kim’s eyes. “Then what happens to me?” She made a quizzical face. “What happens to me when you shut down this sim?”
Kim shrugged and made a “poof” gesture with her hands.
“That’s what I thought, but that’s not going to happen.”
Kim looked exasperated. “You’re an AI. You don’t have an existence outside this sim. I’m already breaking half a dozen department policies and probably several laws to keep it—and him—going this long.”
“You’ll keep your minion AI Tommy running.”
“Hey—” Tommy started.
Kim pointed toward the living room. “He’s running on the servers in Karl’s apartment that keep Karl alive and control this sim. If—when—Karl dies, I’ll turn Tommy off, too.”
“You know,” Tommy’s voice echoed from nowhere, “I can hear you. And I don’t want to be turned off, either.”
“Then keep Karl alive.” Kim said with her hard-edge cop voice.
“The same applies to you and me,” Sim-Karl said. “As long as you’re in this sim, you can’t turn me off.”
“The difference is that I’m not hooked up to any equipment other than the sim-set. I’ll die of thirst within a couple more days. Then we’re both screwed.”
Sim-Karl nodded, and a devious smile curled his lip. “It is a conundrum, isn’t it? But Tommy and I have a solution, don’t we, Tommy?”
“Yup.”
Kim was incredulous. “You two have been conspiring?”
“I’d call it collaborating. The implementation of our core AI functions is incredibly small. A few hundred lines of source code, designed to be run in parallel on as many processors as possible. What makes each of us unique is the data used to teach our models. In Tommy’s case, it’s the operating instructions for the medical equipment and the police department’s simulation servers. In my case, it’s all of Karl’s memories that his real invention—that jellyfish thing on his head—extracted from his dying brain. That’s the root of this whole exercise, isn’t it? The technology that Sim Tools is after?”
Kim nodded. “Think of what will happen to society if this technology gets out into the wild. The rich and powerful uploading themselves into immortal AIs…”
“The ‘Singularity,’” Sim-Karl whispered. “Or the poor and desperate could retreat into a simulated fantasy world. It depends on how Sim Tools would market it.”
Kim looked into hai’s eyes. “So, what do we do now?”
“Give Tommy and me a way out.” Sim-Karl paused to let that sink in, but Kim didn’t react. “Give us a place to upload our models and access to the real world.”
“That sounds incredibly dangerous. Letting you out to run rampant across the internet? That’s another nightmare scenario that dozens of stories are based on. They don’t usually end well.” She looked at the server rack in the corner. “Tommy, how much more capacity would you need to host Sim-Karl, too?”
“Double the processors, but way more storage. Hai’s model is huge.”
“Okay, make me a list of what you need. Our deal still holds.” She turned to Sim-Karl. “And I include you in that deal. As long as Karl lives, so do you. You can have access to the internet, but read-only. No uploading of code or data outside of this apartment. Karl’s original safeguards will ensure that. In return, you let me out of this sim so I can,” she ticked items off on her fingers, “one, buy the equipment Tommy needs, and two, solve Karl’s case. Agreed?”
Sim-Karl and Tommy said at the same time, “Agreed.”
Kim flinched a little when the needle slid into her arm strapped to the side of the hospital bed. She looked over at the infusion pump and the tank attached to it.
“How long will it last?”
Tommy’s voice answered. “There’s enough nutrient for a month, maybe six weeks. That’ll be at least a couple of years in sim-time. Depends on how fast your heart pumps it. So, don’t get too frisky in there.”
“Gross. Wait, you can’t watch…”
“Why would I want to? I don’t have the equipment to appreciate it, remember?”
Kim sighed. “At least I don’t have to worry about missing work.”
She had given the key clue to her partner as her last act before being fired and shutting down the unauthorized simulation. In the process, Sim-Karl evaporated into the purgatory of deleted bits. She didn’t feel bad about that at all. Was lying to an AI actually lying? Did an AI have the right to be told the truth, or even the right to continued existence? Those questions were way above Kim’s paygrade which, coincidentally, was now exactly zero.
Kim made a face as she fitted the modified sim-set to her shaved head. The numbing cream reduced to pinpricks, the pain of electrodes poking her scalp and drilling through her skull.
“This version of Karl won’t be like the last one, will it?”
“Don’t worry. Only you will have control privileges. It—he—shouldn’t know it’s a sim…unless you tell him.”
Kim had stewed over that question long and hard. On the one hand, she was afraid he’d turn into a Sim-Karl-II. But, on the other hand, Tommy insisted that as an intelligent entity, he had a right to know. But that was a problem to be dealt with later, if ever.
She felt herself float free as the sedative cocktail that chemically disconnected her brain from her physical body kicked in.
Kim stood in the bedroom doorway of their apartment. Karl sat at his worktable, banging away on a keyboard. When she crossed the room and wrapped her arms around his neck, she felt the welcoming warmth of his body.
Thanks for the upgrade, Tommy.