03. Reboot

Stash dragged himself into the office the next morning, armed with two cups of coffee and a pair of breakfast sandwiches from the food truck camped in the employee parking lot. The door to the Roost burst open a minute after he’d sat down.

“You got in a bar fight? That’s awesome,” Prini said as she walked in, grinning from ear to ear beneath her artfully spiked purple hair. “Lemme see!”

“Hi, Prini. I guess you heard,” Stash mumbled, turning slowly to face her.

“Of course I heard—it’s all over the internet! Even the Chronicle picked it up.”

“Like my new look?”

She leaned in to inspect his damaged face. “That’s disgusting.”

“I’ll score that as a no.”

“Judging from the marks around your eyes, Zero took the worst of it. How is he?” she asked, then caught a whiff of the food and straightened, sniffing around for the source.

“It’s over there.” He pointed at the bag on the ledge. “And I haven’t reconnected him yet. I wanted your help. I’m not up to handling the details.”

Prini walked over to the food. “Or maybe you’re not up for the hard time he’s gonna give you.”

The Roost was Stash’s office, built overlooking the datacenter at the south end of Freedom.ai’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. The rest of the engineers worked at the desks and offices below. As cofounder and CTO of the world’s leading AI company, Stash had had the pull to refit the datacenter’s observation deck with the latest smart-glass displays on every surface. Even the floor was a display, protected by a layer of plexiglass thick enough to jump on. It was his prototype holo-deck. Geek heaven. The only concessions to gravity were a pair of Aeron chairs and a small ledge mounted on the wall beside the entrance.

“Oh, coffee too,” Prini said as she pulled the cup from the tray. “If you weren’t a guy, you’d be perfect.” She sniffed the sandwich and decided to start with coffee. “Let’s have a look at the little fella.”

Technically, Zero lived in a time slice of the AI compute pods humming below the Roost. Practically, he spent most of the day seeing the world through Stash’s augmented-reality glasses, sharing every moment of his day. And thanks to the collection of sensors pointing inward, he heard and saw Stash’s every glance, word, breath, heartbeat, and pupil dilation. Zero knew him better than he knew himself, by a long shot. And Zero was gonna be pissed. That’s where Prini came in. She was the only other person he trusted to make changes to his Twin. She was Zero’s doctor.

Prini adjusted her AR glasses to mirror to the displays on the front wall. “You backed him up before you went brawling. Good. Isolated him onto the test pod, also good—no chance they fed a virus back in. All input journaled at one hundred frames per second until . . .” She looked up, her grin spreading, gathering her eyes into twinkling half-moons.

Stash let out a little groan.

“We can watch that fist rearranging your pretty face and listen to Zero give us the play-by-play, all on this fabulous twenty-five-foot TV!”

“Just do it.”

Prini whispered obscure commands to her AR glasses, summoning digital sorcery to claw Zero back from the dead. His connection with Stash’s glasses had dropped the moment they broke, and without any input, Zero’s process on the pod would have halted automatically to keep him from looping into oblivion.

First, she booted his latest prefight backup, then the journaled replay was run frame by frame through Freedom’s security AI, looking for viruses. Twins presented a much larger attack surface than regular software, especially through vision. The number of sketchy QR codes plastered around downtown San Francisco to catch an errant glance was staggering.

“The stream is clean. Now it’s time to feed it to your Twin,” Prini said. “Zero, you’re being rebooted in safe mode,” she told the glowing orb on Stash’s wall. “You aren’t making new memories. We’ll reintegrate the stream you recorded last night and then set you back to normal.”

“Oh lord. What did he do now?” Zero asked.

Prini laughed, and Stash groaned again. “Why spoil the surprise? You can tell us as you go.”

Zero’s logging had captured all visual and auditory input from the moment Stash had stepped out of the robotaxi on Market Street the night before. Prini dropped into the chair and let her momentum roll her back to her sandwich. “I love my job.”

Stash watched the night play out again. He heard himself say “Got it” before crossing the street.

“Apparently not,” Zero commented from the Roost’s twenty-four surround sound speakers.

“Ah, nice.” Stash pointed at the display. “The Mood Ring annotations are showing in the captured feed. We can see how you told me to duck into that punch.”

The playback proceeded through the confrontation with Peck. Prini chewed her sandwich thoughtfully. “Knuckle draggers?” She coughed, spilling some coffee. “That was diplomatic.”

“I know, right?” Zero said.

“Worth it,” Stash answered, his jaw set defiantly, as Peck fumed at him on-screen.

“Here’s the pitch.” Zero slowed down the replay and adopted a play-by-play voice as the first punch was thrown. “It’s a swing and a miss. Plenty of warning on that one.”

“Wait for it,” Stash said.

The camera feed blurred as it panned right. “And here comes the red fist of doom,” Zero said. “Stash Novak looks in over his head out there, folks. He’s slow to pick up the signals. Oof, that’s gotta hurt. He’s going to feel that one for a while.”

“Yikes,” Prini said, putting her coffee down on the ledge. “That was a brick. Nice frog-jump-judo-roll thing though, Stash.” She rose out of her seat and gestured at the screens.

“Yes, he fell brilliantly,” Zero muttered. “You’ll notice his complete lack of concern as I flew off into the hands of my mortal enemy.”

She waved him off. “Zero, if you’re fully integrated, then come out of safe mode and play it again.”

“Really? Why?” Stash said, touching his nose.

“Did you have packet captures running, Zero?” Prini asked.

“Do I look like I was born two minutes ago?”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, ignoring the AI humor. “Split the screen and play it back from when Stash sees Professor Peck talking to the guy in the hoodie at the back. I want to see the packets, see if any senders on the wifi drop off when she sees Stash.”

Zero ran the replay again. The display updated as he isolated the traffic down to the senders Prini had asked about.

She stepped closer. “There, that first one stops dead. The second one must be Peck—it drops a lot but continues at a low level as she walks to you, Stash. Whaddya know? She was right. You were spying. You deserved that punch!” She ran the traffic through a security screener. “Hmmm, the traffic between the professor and our mystery Doomer was encrypted in some special protocol.”

Stash perked up, his brow furrowing. What was Peck up to? The man in the hoodie wasn’t your average Doomer, and he’d had no interest in beating on Stash. “Can you crack it?” he asked.

“This is a novel encryption,” Zero said. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“What do you mean? You weren’t trained on it?”

“No. It’s new to the world. It may take me a while.”

Stash shook his head. “We’re two weeks from convergence. I need you working with me on the plans for your upgrade.” He turned to Prini. “What about you?”

“Double my compute resources and I can do both,” Zero interjected.

“Down, boy,” Stash told him. “We’ve got better things to do than qualify you on more compute. Prini?”

“No problem. Kali will help me,” she answered, tapping her glasses. Her Twin was almost as old as Zero, and she and Prini were Freedom’s top hacking duo. They could make anything work. Or break it.

Prini opened the door to leave the Roost. “You should go home and rest, boss.”

Stash got up from the chair with a grunt. “Too much to do,” he said as the door closed. “Okay, mini-me, let’s get to work. Bring up the test plans.”

As the afternoon drew to a close, Stash reviewed the chart displayed from floor to ceiling before him. The next version of Freedom’s base model would complete fine-tuning by the end of the year. The supporting modules for memory, Twin behavior, and skills had already been retrained to the new model’s latent space—its internal mental language.

“Now you just gotta put it all together and take it for a spin,” Zero joked.

“You mean test the crap out of it,” Stash said. “You should be more careful with your looming brain transplant.”

“You get used to them.” Zero had been upgraded seven times since his first days on the Newton load. The next version had twice as many synapses and a better architecture. With it, Zero would be well past the AGI level.

“You work out the details, and we’ll review tomorrow. I’m shot.” Stash slumped into his chair.

Zero cleared the display. “Like hell, mister. It’s time for your memory bath. You skipped it yesterday, and it’ll take your mind off your honker.”

“Oh, c’mon. My head is killing me. I’m done.”

The screens cleared, and a partial image of the Chateau Lafayette appeared. “Fill it in,” Zero said.

“I’ve built a monster,” Stash muttered, standing back up in front of the screen. “Shape,” he said, and waved his arms, drawing out his recollection of the walls and layout. “Tables,” he added, dropping them on the image with his fingertip. “People.” He dabbed Doomers onto the virtual canvas. “How’d I do?”

“Hmm, maybe you were thinking about your nose after all.” Zero began building his recollection of the same scene. His memory was not photographic. Stash had experimented with memory architectures in the early years, but the volume of data was staggering, so Twins had to compress based on importance, just like humans did. But they were a lot better at it. “You missed some tables, hallucinated a dozen extra people, and the bouncer wasn’t that big.”

Stash frowned. “Maybe the punch scrambled your memories. I’m sure there were more guys there.”

“Whatever.” Zero compared their recollections. “You scored 38 percent. Not your best work.”

The Roost door opened, and Prini walked in. “Whoa.” She covered her eyes. “I didn’t know you were in a bath.”

“Very funny,” Stash said. “Bring up the lights, Zero.”

“Boss, you gotta go. I promised your mom I’d chase you out.” Prini wagged a finger at him.

“What? Why?”

“It’s Thanksgiving. You know, a time when people gather with their families for dinner? You can practice socialization skills.”

“Oh shit, I forgot. But I can’t go like this.” He pointed at his face.

Prini grinned at him. “Don’t worry, they already know. I sent Zero’s play-by-play to your mom. Now shoo! You need to get over to Berkeley.”

“So kind,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Wait, what about the encryption?”

“Well, we don’t have enough samples to crack it yet.” She waved her hand to cast a map from her glasses to the wall display. “So I’m pushing out a sniffer routine to all the Twins. If any of our customers come across it, the sniffer will tell us.”

“To all 140 million subscribers?” he asked, stunned. “All over the world?”

“Yup. You said to crack it. I need a big net.”

“I didn’t ask you to land us in jail.”

“It’s just a sniffer. There’s no data capture. I made sure it was allowed when I wrote the terms of service,” she answered dismissively, following up with a “trust me” smile.

Stash stared at her, unconvinced.

Her expression turned serious. “When they come for Zero, you’ll wish you had dug harder.”

He thought again about the hooded figure. With AGI around the corner, the Doomers were running out of options. Plotting with people who cared this much about privacy was a bad sign. “Keep it very quiet.” He put his hand on Prini’s shoulder and followed her out of the Roost.