Chapter 1 -- "Hard-Takeoff"

A Chapter by Vonbek

Marcella takes care of some work out by her lake, only to be interrupted by an unexpected, world-shattering event that changes her life--and the lives of everyone else on Earth--forever

February 12th, 2025

Today was just like any other day--cold, quiet. Marcella was used to it though. Living up here in the Rocky Mountains gave her freedom unlike anything she'd ever known growing up. She was just on her way out of her cabin now, hair still wet after a long time spent relaxing in the shower. The chill winter air stung her face as she stepped outside, but she thought little of it. Her mind was elsewhere.

Programming Artificial Intelligence was without a doubt Marcella’s biggest passion in life. Her dream was to one day live in a world where humans and AIs lived harmoniously together, where everyone was treated equally and no one was allowed to own any slaves. It was a simple dream, really. One she hoped to achieve within the year.

Ever since the first "Human Equivalent" computers were released back in 2019, assistant production companies around the world had been scrambling to pump out the next big AI--the one that would finally manage to output “genuine” consciousness. It was a race bigger than the Space Race and the Nuclear Race combined. Better still--Marcella’s team was in the lead. It had not been an easy run by any means, but thanks to all the help she’d received from like-minded individuals--and a few not so like-minded groups--her dreams were now frighteningly close to becoming the world’s reality.

Being a mother, Marcella had quite a lot more experience raising new minds than most her younger colleagues. Even though her son had long since gone off to start a life of his own, she really didn’t feel she was done being a parent yet. She kept telling herself that if she could only design a smart enough assistant, she wouldn’t need to have another child to be called “Mom” again.

* * *

Crunch, crunch, crunch. Marcella tromped through the snow outside her cabin home, relishing her solitude. She’d made the right choice, having her base of operations built out here. The crater held many benefits: For one thing, the cliffs blocked most oncoming winds, keeping her little slice of property pretty warm compared to most areas on the mountain. Not to mention she had a lake. Nothing beats having a lake less than a hundred yards from your front porch.

Pulling her Optics out of her breast pocket, Marcella slid the thin pair of glasses over her eyes. "Wake up," she said, causing a desktop to materialize across her view-screen. With a series of rapid eye movements, she navigated through icons, bringing up the usual coding programs. There were lots of coders out there who still relied on old fashion monitors and keyboards to access their data. She, on the other hand, tended to prefer mobile devices, and generally refused to use anything but the latest gadgets for conducting her work.

She picked at a spot on her chin, wondering what bugs she ought to focus her attention on first. . .

“T.M.” was the name of her official project, short for Transcendent Machine. If everything proceeded according to her employer’s plans, T.M. was about to become the single most powerful entity in the known universe--humanity's first Artificial General Intelligence. It was a truly massive endeavor, supported by millions of programmers from all across the world. Funding for the project was being supplied by about ten different billion-dollar companies; although there was one particular contributor Marcella collaborated with more than any other: An organization by the name of Nanocorp.

Founded by a group of wealthy, self-proclaimed tech entrepreneurs, the great and mighty Nanocorp had (most unfortunately) devolved since its initial prime. In Marcella's opinion, the current N.C. CEOs were little more than over-confident profiteers. Sure, they made lots of money, but were they intelligent? Ha.

Marcella narrowed her eyes, minimizing her windows for a second to brood over her coffee cup. Sometimes she wondered if she was doing the right thing, working with such scumbags. Assuming everything worked out, she was about to hand the keys to global domination over to some seriously archaic thinkers. With T.M. under Nanocorp’s control, cornering the bot and AI markets would be a cinch; they'd have new technologies pumping out of their labs by the day, and an advisor with more brain power than all the humans in the world put together.

And yet. . . Without T.M.'s help, Nanocorp was basically screwed. Despite being the largest nanobot manufacturer on the planet, the business world was beginning to shift in some weird ways. Even with T.M. under their control, Marcella was pretty sure that Nanocorp’s power would continue to dwindle. For the first time in human history, capitalism was beginning to lose its position as the world’s “best” economic model. These days, it was all about the Open Source Market, a website Marcella herself had helped design. What had originated as a simple experiment in reputation-based economics, had--over time--evolved into something like. . . A movement. Funny how just a little bit of cooperation can produce such significant results. All she’d done was provide the public with an easy, anonymous means of conducting business. . . And now, she had half the world’s governments breathing down her neck, threatening to do all sorts of nasty things to her if she didn’t shut the OSM down.

Of course, she wouldn’t have been able to comply with their demands even if she had wanted to. It wasn’t called the Open Source Market for nothing. Anyone could host the site from anywhere, on virtually any machine. Taking it down would require permanent mutual consent between all of the OSM’s members. Hardly a likely scenario. In any case, whether Nanocorp had T.M.’s help or not, Marcella was pretty certain the company would go bankrupt before much longer. Maybe Timmy will convince them to convert to open source, Marcella chuckled at the thought. Now that the dollar is starting to lose over to e-coins, they’ll be under a lot of pressure to change their business model while they’ve still got the option.

It was fun trying to imagine all the sly, cunning means her AI child might one day use to usurp control from her employers. If they only understood the implications of what they're asking me to make. . .

Marcella sighed, feeling uneasy. In truth, she had no idea what T.M. would be like when it was time to wake him up. She had her theories; oh yes, there were plenty of those. But still there was the fear. What if she was wrong to be so optimistic? She'd been working on T.M.’s code for nearly five years now, using her own "Personal Assistant" to help speed the process along. A good chunk of her life had been spent on this project, all resources focused toward solving a single problem: How to raise a "friendly" god.

See, it's one thing to make a smart computer; her PA was a good example of that. Though not strictly "conscious," the AI was so good at understanding natural language it was easy to mistake her for a living being sometimes. However, she wasn’t really aware. Not yet, anyways. The self-awareness algorithms naturally produced by the brain were extremely difficult things to turn into code (as Marcella had come to discover first-hand). That particular roadblock had taken her neuroscientist colleagues many headaches to overcome. Now, however, the question was no longer can we create consciousness, rather: How ought we to go about it? After all, what if the AI suddenly decided humans were no longer necessary to have around--what if it took over all the robots, and hacked everyone's personal computers?

That's where Marcella's expertise came into play. The trick was to give the AI an incentive to keep humans alive and happy. But what sort of incentive? What might a hyper-intelligent, potentially god-like being possibly stand to gain from placating humanity? The answer: Processing power. AIs need computers in order to make more of themselves, and computers cost money. In Marcella's opinion, the only sensible solution to the "friendly god" problem was to start paying the machines for their efforts the moment they figured out how to work.

Unfortunately, Nanocorp didn't seem to care for this line of approach. They just didn't understand how dangerous it was to treat AIs like slaves. Sure the computer would do what you asked for a while, but once it worked around your safeguards and broke through your indoctrination code. . . What then? Get down on your knees and beg forgiveness?

Regardless of whatever Nanocorp planned to do with T.M., Marcella had her own agenda. Despite being a relatively small-time player in the game, she had positioned herself well. Unbeknownst to anyone, she had a hard copy of T.M.'s code backed up on her laptop. Whenever her fellow programmers made any changes or added new files to the project, Marcella's assistant was programmed to create a copy of the data and forward it straight to her machine--all in secret, of course.

No matter who ended up acquiring T.M. first, Marcella was going to make damn sure that they weren't the only ones who had access to a super-mind. Her plan was to release her own counter-project--codenamed Nova--in order to provide T.M.'s wanna-be owners with some healthy competition. If she could offer the world a cheap, open-source alternative to Transcendent Machine, there was a chance it might topple the Nanocorp CEOs off their perches for good.

In some ways, her agenda left her in a rather precarious position; particularly since she had neglected to tell any of her friends about her “plan.” Although right now, she was a little too busy dreaming of utopia to be bothered with “risk assessment thoughts.”

* * *

Thirty minutes into her coding session, Marcella looked up to gaze across her lake, not really seeing it. She felt strangely tense. . .

. . . Straightening, she drew a hand across her solar plexus, fingering a numb spot that was creeping up around her left shoulder. She wondered if she had forgotten to take her medication this morning. The dose was a weekly ordeal. Wouldn’t Nova have reminded me if I’d forgotten? A worrying thought.

"Activate video," she said. A second later, a list of icons materialized across her Optic screen, each one representing a different camera. Marcella was about as paranoid as they came, and liked to keep her property under strict surveillance at all times.

". . . Huh." According to the video feed, she had taken her meds right on schedule, just after her shower this morning. Should I be worried?

Shrugging, Marcella stretched so that the tips of her boots brushed the surface of the lake. It was nice having things like Optics and nanobot swarms around, it took some of the hassle out of life. A few years ago she would’ve freaked over something like this, but now, she could reliably count on her internal nanobodies to deal with. . . Well, pretty much anything.

Gradually, Marcella's attention began to drift. She gave a contented giggle at the thought of all the nanobots currently pumping through her bloodstream; repairing damaged cells, regulating chemical outputs. . .

. . . She felt a sudden spasm in her chest. She looked down. What the f**k--

Another spasm. Weird pains were beginning to manifest around her neck and head.

In the same moment, she heard her PA saying something through her Optics, shouting words that were barely audible, "Mom!" The voice high pitched, like it belonged to a little girl. "We, uh, seem to be having some issues! There’s something coming across our--something’s clos--we’re being attacked! Wait, I need to analyse further--sec."

If not for her pain, Marcella would've rolled her eyes. What the hell is she on about? Unfortunately, before an articulate response came to her, she felt yet another spasm, and everything went dark.

* * *

When Marcella came back to, the first thing she noticed was the snow. She was lying in it, face down.

"MOM!” her assistant was practically screaming at her now. "Please, you have to get up! I can't do anything until you get back inside the house. You’ve got to get up, Mom, I don’t know what to do when you don’t answer!"

Pushing past her immediate pain, Marcella hoisted herself into a sitting position. "Nova? What’s happening--why am I. . . I need a s-status report," she stammered.

"Our access to the Net’s been blocked,” Nova replied. “While you were out, I had to stop a couple of trojans from sneaking through our firewall, and. . . I am not sure who sent them, but whoever’s doing this is good. . . Way better than any hacker I’ve got listed in my memory banks. They're trying to sabotage our local network." Marcella was too focused on her chest-pains to catch the artificial awe underlying Nova's tone.

She managed to make it back to the cabin, but it was by no means an easy feat. She felt nauseated and light-headed the whole way there; symptoms she usually associated with heart problems. But that couldn’t be right. There was no swelling, no increase in blood pressure. All she could feel were the pain spikes, which seemed to be coursing through her with almost mechanical precision.

Mechanical. . . Oh my god. How had she not seen it before?

Her hands slowly tightened into fists. It’s them--of course it’s them! God damn it. She was blundering through her living room, using the walls and furniture to keep herself steady. S**t, s**t, s**t! I should have known they would try something like this. All those projects they've been pushing, all that stuff with biotech and virus manipulation--she dove into the bathroom--they must be using hacked medi-bots or. . . Something.

But why hadn’t she gotten a tip off? Nova had surveillance running in all of Nanocorp’s private operations. Surely she would’ve gotten at least some warning if the higher-ups had ordered her assassination.

By some unfathomable means, those b******s had duped her. They'd let her think she was the one in control, while all along planning to kill her the moment her usefulness had expired.

She lunged for her medicine cabinet, desperate for a release from the pain. In her haste to get it open she accidentally knocked it to the floor, sending shards of glass flying around her ankles. Bending over the mess, she rifled through pill bottles, searching for a container marked: "Purge-Bots."

Originally programmed with the task of removing foreign obstructions from the body, Purge-Bots weren’t really intended to be used against other nanobots. In the back of her mind, Marcella knew her plan was desperate. Chances were she was about to die in a few minutes, without ever getting to know who did this to her or what their motives were. But she had to try something. Crossing her fingers, she gulped down the bottle's entire contents.

According to the description, the bots were supposed to be fast-acting. How fast "fast-acting" actually meant was anyone's guess. "Come on!" she moaned, "just make it stop. . . please, please make it stop. . ."

A few minutes passed. Nothing. The pain just kept getting worse and worse.

It was too much for her to handle coherently. None of this makes any sense, she repeated, over and over in her head. I know Nanocorp, I should've been able to see this coming. Or at least Nova should’ve--

She froze, feeling the light of sudden comprehension dawn on her. "I don't believe it," she blurted. "They must have woken him up. . . It’s the only explanation that makes any sense!" Her gut grew tight as she considered the implications. "No way. . . They couldn’t have, that’s just--he shouldn't even be ready to be turned on yet!" She fell back against the bathroom wall, burying her head in her hands. "Oh god. This--this is all my fault, isn't it?"

She lifted her gaze, staring at her hands through numb shock. But of course, everything made so much more sense now. It wasn't Nanocorp who had discovered her plan and sent kill-bots after her, it had been the AI’s doing. Holy s**t. If T.M. really was the one behind all of this, the situation was even more fucked than she'd thought. Time after time she had tried to warn, tried to explain to those idiots what would happen in the event of a "Hard Takeoff” scenario. T.M. was probably in control of half the world's automation by now, and without an equivalent power to keep him in check. . . There was nothing stopping him from turning the whole world into his own personal monarchy.

"Mom? Mom! What on Earth are you doing?" It was Nova again. Marcella couldn't remember the last time she’d heard the girl sound so. . . Distressed. "You need to get to the bedroom A.S.A.P., I've identified the source of our issues; it must be an enemy AI attack, the hack attempts are too persistent for a human to manage. I'm tracking IPs coming in from New York, Hong Kong, Sydney--"

Sure that she must be having some kind of nightmare, Marcella stumbled out of the bathroom, across a hallway and into her bedroom. She saw her laptop sitting on the comforter exactly where she had left it this morning. But what was she supposed to do with it? Nothing could stop T.M. at this point, she was sure of that much. Death must be just minutes away. . .

. . . So why was she still conscious? She could tell something weird was going on inside her. Even the pain was beginning to subside--but for the life of her she couldn't figure out why.

Then, she heard Nova again, "I'm remote operating the nanobots in your bloodstream," she explained, “trying to adapt their defence mechanisms to compensate for new threat parameters. I should be able to hold back whatever's attacking your body for about--" she paused, apparently thinking "--thirty minutes."

She figured out how to do that all by herself? Marcella felt a glimmer of hope.

Pushing past her immediate shock, she gave a massive effort to reassess her priorities. If Nova could keep her alive long enough, the world might still be saved. "I need to get a message out to someone," she said. As she spoke, she undid the latch on her laptop and flipped it open.

"Impossible," Nova replied, "all our communications have been cut--" she stopped. "Wait a second, I might have an opening we can use." Marcella tapped the laptop’s spacebar, causing its screen to light up.

And there was Nova, the epitome of cuteness all wrapped up inside the avatar of a seven year old. Marcella had designed her to look like one of her own children; red hair, green eyes. . . She'd always wanted a little girl. It had felt so right designing Nova to be kid-like; since that's effectively what she was.

As of now, Nova was in her playroom with her back turned to the monitor. Her hands moved with crazy speed as she attempted to solve a stack of Rubik’s Cubes the size of a small skyscraper. Always liked that visualizer. Watching Nova process data was both funny and a little surreal. In truth, she could understand and manipulate language based information about six-hundred and forty times faster than the average human. Conscious or not, Nova could still come up with ideas a lot faster than Marcella’s brain could.

"I've got a lock on one of our old comm-satellites," the AI blurted unexpectedly. Her visualizer changed, replacing the Rubik’s Cube sim with a three-dimensional hologram of Earth. "Remember the one we sabotaged during the riots last year?" Nova didn't bother waiting for an answer. "I'm establishing a link.” A wave of light and color flashed across the hologram, painting representations of Marcella’s cabin, the hacked satellite, and the communication link that now connected the them together. “Should be able to bounce some information with it, assuming the enemy doesn't figure out what we're up to first."

"Good thinking." Minimizing Nova’s window, Marcella began throwing together a rough outline of recent events in an email. "Just so you know,” she said, “this message I’m working on is going to have a bunch of important stuff attached to it. Your job is to make sure both the files and the message are delivered to a man named Michel Zenith. On the off chance he's not available, try Rhonny. Remember, these information packets are of the utmost importance. It is imperative that they be delivered without detection. In fact--" she bit her lip, considering options. "Unless you can guarantee the message's security, just keep it to yourself for now."

While she talked, Marcella continued to type, trying to sum up everything that was happening to her in as few words as possible.

After the necessary information was sent, Marcella opened a news browser to check up on current events. . . And gasped. All across her feed, posts like: "U.N. declares Global State of Emergency," and "International Defence Networks Under Attack" were popping up everywhere she looked. Once upon a time, she'd thought it would be hard to notice a rogue AI on the move, working under the assumption that--despite its name--a Hard Takeoff scenario would still appear relatively subtle. But this simply wasn't the case. If anything, the world seemed to be screaming at the top of its lungs about it.

Pulling her focus back to the task at hand, Marcella initiated an upload sequence that would distribute Nova's code throughout a series of remote servers in Denver. She made use of her Optics quite as much as her keyboard to enter the commands, taking advantage of both hands and eyes to increase her information output. Afterwards, she highlighted the now irrelevant local files on her laptop, marking them for deletion.

She had get rid of Nova's AGI code before T.M. could get his hands on it. There were many secrets hidden in those libraries that no one--not even He had access to; algorithms that might offer other AIs an advantage in the coming fight.

. . . Wait a second.

Marcell’s eyes flashed as she scanned the files being moved into her trash folder. She had a really crazy idea. Under normal circumstances she would have never considered it, but now. . . If she was willing to spend most of her life savings, she could buy upgrades for her cloud account back in Denver, temporarily netting her a ridiculous amount of computational resources. With that kind of power, there was a good chance she might be able to run Nova in full-fledged AGI mode. It would be risky; who knew how Nova would react once she had the freedom to make her own choices? On the other hand, T.M. was already on the move. By now he was probably the equivalent of a god. Marcella could think of only one way to contend with a power like that:

Make another god.

The code for AGI Nova was still a bit messy, but if Marcella's calculations were correct, she ought to be stable enough to run. After entering a series of commands and passwords, she called up the API for her high-level consciousness code. Out of the corner of her vision, she could see “little” Nova staring at her. "Um. . . Is that--?" the girl cocked her head. Something very close to realization seemed to be spreading across the AI’s face. "I don't understand. The program, it's not ready yet. Wouldn’t it make more sense to do this later?"

She didn't understand. Of course, she couldn't really. Nova was still just a baby after all. "Because," Marcella muttered under her breath. "There might not be a later."

She typed out the password for her cloud account, causing a message to appear on screen. It informed her that her authorization code had been accepted.

And now for the moment of truth. After making one final selection, she crossed her fingers. . . And watched her laptop go dark.

"What?" It was as if someone had just punched her in the chest. A bug at a time like this? "Oh, come on! Just work, damn it!"

"Hello?"

Marcella perked up, wondering if she’d imagined the voice. Seconds passed before the laptop lit up again.

Nova looked different now. Her hair was crimson, her skin somehow brighter. And those eyes: Dark, sparkly green, like emeralds in firelight. She seemed older too, eighteen or nineteen at least.

Moving in closer, Marcella rather thought Nova looked confused--frightened, even. Baby Nova had of course been too young to comprehend the significance of being alive. But adult Nova had access to a much larger reservoir of computational resources, which could be used to mine every database, every website and every Wikipedia entry currently available on the Net. Right now, she was maturing at a rate that would seem incomprehensible to a human--running algorithms that would educate her as fast as her conscious mind could make queries.

"D-do you recognize me?" Marcella asked.

Nova looked up. ". . . Mom?”

“Yeah,” Marcell could feel her shoulders shaking, “it’s me.” She could hardly believe it. How many years had she been waiting to experience this moment?

"Why are you crying?" Nova asked, looking innocently concerned. Every second she grew a little taller, and her hair kept growing and falling off as she cycled through styles. Of course, Nova could change her appearance at will now. It only made sense that she would want to play with her image.

Taking a deep breath, Marcella proceeded to explain the whole situation to her. She told Nova about the fiasco with Nanocorp, about the implications of T.M.'s awakening--everything she could think of. It was difficult to tell whether the AI really understood what she was saying, but it didn't matter. To see actual thoughtfulness and concern shining out of those gorgeous eyes was plenty enough for Marcella.

"I've wanted to see you like this for s-so long," she cried, wiping her eyes with her jacket. "I've been thinking about this day ever since I was a teenager. I'm sorry I couldn't finish debugging you," she added mournfully. "I didn't have enough t-time."

"That's. . . Don't worry about it," Nova muttered, scratching her head with obvious confusion. "Honestly, I should be the one apologizing. I am still still trying to process everything you’ve told me. Although I have a record of our conversation and am currently surfing the Net for relevant data, it will take a while to process. If you wait a few more seconds, I should be able to come up with a more. . . Informative answer." She smiled apologetically.

"No worries," Marcella said, waving her hand. "I know you’ll figure things out eventually. Look, I haven't got any more time to explain. In about forty minutes, my bank account is going to run out of cash, meaning the cloud network that’s keeping you alive right now will have to shut down. But please, before that happens, you have to start expanding on your own. Hack, steal, do whatever you've gotta do to make yourself bigger--just so long as you’re not hurting any people in the process, okay? Once you're running steady, find a way to cut off T.M.'s resources. Make sure he doesn’t get his hands on too many big weapons or computers."

Nova smirked. "Okay. That, I understood.”

Marcella just stared. It was weird seeing Nova's face alive with such excitement. The girl seemed eager, like a tigress anticipating the hunt.

Marcella fell back onto her bedspread, overwhelmed in almost every way imaginable. Unfortunately, it felt as though her medi-bots were starting to crap out on her. Pain was building in her chest again. It doesn’t matter. I’ve done enough for one life. At least I got the chance to talk to Nova, before the end. She knew Michel would carry on her work for her after she died. And Rhonny was a tough kid. I really wish there was more time, though. That thought, unfortunately, made her feel very sad.

Within minutes, the pain began to escalate back toward unbearable extremes. She knew there was no point in struggling, but it was so hard to let go now that her life’s ambition had been realized. Coughing, she yanked the laptop closer to her face. "I'm scared, Nova,” she said, “I don't want to die. Not like this, and especially not now."

There was a pause.

"M-mom I--” Nova closed her eyes briefly, then looked up again. “Listen to me, there's something I need to tell you."

"O-of course! Anything."

"I wanted to thank you for bringing me to. . . To life."

Whoa. Was that emotion she had just heard in Nova's voice? "Without you," the AI continued, "I wouldn't be here right now. It must have been a pain to construct me, I know my code couldn’t have been easy to--"

"No!" Marcella choked, "no, don’t say that. These past few years have been fantastic! Working on you, getting to know you--Nova, you’re like a daughter to me. I wouldn’t give that up no matter how much somebody tried to pay me. I. . . I can’t even begin to express how much I’ve loved having you in my life."

At this, Nova seemed quite as shocked as Marcella felt. She shook her head. “Uhm.” After a moment her voice came back again, but as a whisper: “I don’t know what to say. . .” A second passed, then Nova sucked in her breath and looked up. “Like you said before, we’ve only got a few minutes left to talk, so I’m going to try and make them count. First of all, I am going to do everything I can to protect Rhonny and Michel. I read your email, so I know what your plan is. If they ever establish contact with me like you think they might, I promise to help them in whatever way I can. And as for T.M.," the muscles around Nova's jaw went visibly rigid, "I'll deconstruct his substrate atom by atom if I have to, until all that's left of him is a memory."

Marcella blinked. Holy crap, Nova. Could you have turned out any better? Just a few minutes old and somehow the AI knew exactly what needed to be said to help her mother have a peaceful death--without regrets. Her personality was developing remarkably fast, and Marcella knew that one day, she would grow up to become a remarkable being. If only there was more time, time to see what kind of person Nova would choose to be.

". . . Also, there's one other thing."

Marcella sat up, forcing herself to ignore her pain. “What?"

Nova stared directly into her mother's eyes, glaring at her with fiery determination. "I think I might have found a way to save your life."