“James is so cool, isn’t he, Chief?” Rich said with a grin. He looked to his left at Aldous, who could hardly close his mouth as he watched the spectacle unfolding before him.
“Thank you, Rich,” James said in Rich’s ear.
“He certainly has his moments,” Aldous reluctantly admitted. “I’ll grant him that.”
14
“Okay, Aldous and Rich are in,” James announced as he, the A.I., and even the candidate pored through copious amounts of code. Each of them had removed what seemed to be endless amounts of the golden filaments from Kali’s avatar and were hunched over separate tables along the curved glass windows of Cloud 9 restaurant.
Thel watched impatiently as the rain continued to fall and streak the windows, while fires burned throughout the city, and the NPCs roared in mobs, chasing down smaller mobs and tearing them horrifically to shreds before, once they’d completed their task, they turned on each other. It was the worst perversion of Darwin’s theories, played out in a mathematical horror show.
She turned from the horror, her arms folded over her chest. “I don’t like this. Aldous is clearly going to try sabotage the Purists.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” James cautioned.
“It’s well within the realm of possibility, however,” the A.I. pointed out.
“Exactly,” Thel said, gesturing to the A.I. before looking adamantly at James. “We can’t just sit here. We have to do something!”
“We are doing something,” James responded, holding up the coding.
“Are you kidding me?” Thel reacted. “That?”
James, exasperated, shut his eyes tight for a moment in frustration. “Look, Thel, we’re cut down to our core matrix programs here. We can’t—”
“Core matrix programs?” Thel countered. “Are you kidding? Why don’t you just say what you really are? You’re human. Human!”
“Okay, we’re human,” James admitted, “We’re all genius level, but it’s nothing compared to what we were when we were connected to the mainframe.” James dropped the sparkling, golden, powdery filaments on the table in front of him. “We could’ve processed this in seconds and found the secret to getting out of here, but now we’re just looking at millions and millions of lines of code. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.”
An idea suddenly crossed Thel’s mind, and her expression changed as she worked it through. “We’re always talking about Moore’s Law, but what about Murphy’s Law?”
“What?” James responded. “Are you kidding?”
“No,” Thel replied, shaking her head. “You said it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Well, the best way to do that is to just dive in. Murphy’s Law suggests you’ll get stuck with the needle in no time.”
“I don’t follow,” James admitted.
“I think I do,” the A.I. suddenly said, turning away from his own search through the codes to face Thel. “You’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, are you?”
“Wait...what’s she suggesting?” James asked, suddenly frustrated that he was a step behind instead of a step ahead.
The A.I. kept his eyes on Thel.
“I’m suggesting,” Thel spoke, “that one of us merge with the Kali avatar.”
“Merge with—” James began to react before the A.I. interrupted, speaking to Thel.
“Absolutely not,” he began. “That’s an entirely untested hypothesis. Yes, it’s true that whoever or whatever inhabited the Kali avatar was able to circumvent the trapdoor code, but there’s no guarantee that we could merge with it and have the same results. Our ability to manipulate code within the sim was one of the abilities we lost when the trapdoor cut us off.”
“And even if we could merge with it,” James furthered, now that he’d finally understood Thel’s audacious suggestion, “there’s no way to know if attempting to leave the sim would lead to the destruction of our patterns. It’s completely illogical to take a chance like that.”
“Illogical?” Thel replied, her arms still folded, her demeanor impatient. “How’s this for logic? How many lines of code do you think you can go through in an hour?”
James looked down at the pile in front of him. “A few thousand,” he replied.
“A few thousand,” Thel repeated before gesturing to the A.I. and the candidate. “Between the three of you, maybe 10,000 lines in an hour? And you said there are millions of lines of code.”