Inheritance
by elfin

Part Three


Sitting inside the Stealth with the door open, Kitt made himself comfortable; eyes closed, hands rested on the base of the steering wheel.

He could see Michael pacing a few feet from the car, could feel him resisting the urge to touch their heavily blocked link. That he hated this was clear, but he was dealing with it. Karr was right, the attacks couldn't be allowed to continue, and as much as Michael didn't want to admit it, this was the only way.

<_Ready?

<_As I'll ever be

<_I will protect you

<_I don't need your protection, I need you help

<_You know you have it

Some silent communication passed between Nick and Karr, Kitt felt it, and Nick's previously still fingers suddenly flew into action over the keyboard of his laptop.

"Signal jammers are offline."

He'd predicted that they wouldn't have to wait very long. Between the previous two attacks he'd changed every access point, meaning that the other AI would have had to find its way in all over again. This time everything was as it had been at the time of the second attack, and as soon as the path was clear, the attack came.

The AI screamed into Kitt's CPU, spreading sharp shards of itself like splintering wood into every part of his system. This time Kitt and Karr were ready, acting as shields for Kitt's functions, preventing anything from being shutdown, affording special attention to the links, particularly the one between the two brothers. Kitt isolated the access point through which the AI was entering, temporarily disabled all his other ports. At the same time, Karr was hurriedly building a trap, a piece of software designed to prevent the AI from dropping its connection with Kitt until the programme was stopped.

While they were doing this, all the time stopping snippets of the AI's code from sneaking through cracks in the defences they were continually creating, they were reading some of what was on the AI's 'mind', the intent and purpose in the attack. And it wasn't making any sense.

<_Ready?

<_Yes

Karr activated the trap, the AI screaming in Kitt's CPU, shattering into tiny fragments, pulling together and shattering again. It was painful to watch, painful to feel and Kitt found himself flinching from the harmless shards pushing at the restraint.

<_I97. Go

Karr followed his brother back through the same access port the other AI was connected to. They crossed the virtual distance in a hundredth of a second, landing in the strange CPU.

Immediately the part of the AI that was here started to battle with the intruders, flinging demons in their path; some that attempted to slice through the connections they had with their own CPUs, others that attempted to close the access point - a fruitless exercise as it was being held open by the AI's connection with Kitt.

<_Watch out!

A particularly nasty demon cut though Kitt to be strangled by Karr. Kitt's cry was simply a cascade of ones and zeros in this place but he knew Karr could hear it.

<_Are you all right?

<_Yes. Sorry

It was dark, and too small. Patching himself together as best he could, Kitt quickly accessed the diagnostics and found that there wasn't enough memory for the size of the AI they'd encountered.

<_How is it surviving?

<_External ROM? Disks?

Two demons raced towards the brothers, forking as they came - two processes into four, into eight, sixteen… Kitt and Karr attacked first, killing off the parent, orphaning the demons. But they still had their single command and they were still going to carry it out.

<_We need to change their command

Kitt's response would have been best translated to his human partner as 'no shit Sherlock', something he'd picked up from Michael. He constructed a simple sliver of code, executed it and changed its process ID to be that of the orphans' parent. Crude, but it worked, and a single internal clock tick later the demons stopped in their tracks and in sync turned into thirty-two twenty-by-ten pixel ghosts with no specified source, playing arena or pac-man to chase. They floated there, and in the next clock-tick, Kitt killed off his new process, taking them with it.

<_Where did you learn that?

<_Accessing the FBI's mainframe

<_I know it well. Unfriendly and unwelcoming

<_And very bad at Pac-man. Let's find out where we are

But they couldn't find any other connections to any external peripheries at all - no audio or visual, no networks, no wireless, not even a monitor or printer. And there were dead programmes floating around, orphaned processes waiting for commands that would never come, zombies that had long ago stopped but hadn't been cleared out. Resource wasted on code that was simply looping back on itself time and time again. Madness. Quite literally.

Something else too - something Kitt could only process as a 'feeling'. As he brushed passed the AI's main programme, he was aware of a difference between himself and it, a difference on a high-level but one which made him who he was now, one which defined him in a very personal way. He ran the idea passed Karr, who after a second gave a tentative agreement. Not as deep for Karr - something he hadn't given so much time to considering.

With no way of finding out where they were physically, Karr suggested they take as much data from the diagnostics and status command and leave. Kitt could feel his brother's discomfort - more than that he shared it. This CPU wasn't right. It wasn't designed for an AI to run inside. He ran 'status' to collect the data they needed and as he did so something caught his attention - a thick black hole in the disjointed code.

<_Karr

Approaching it, he reached out, tried to communicate with it. But it wasn't any kind of function or system. More like an access point… a blocked one. And suddenly he realised exactly what it was.

<_Karr! It's a neuro link!

<_That's not possible

But they both knew exactly what they were looking at. At one time or another they'd both had similar constructs in their own CPUs. The blackness was layer upon layer of blocks, all thrown up in apparent desperation. The thickness of it suggested that it was years since the first block had been put in place.

<_I don't understand

<_Me neither. Let's get out of here

Karr agreed, and taking what little information they could from the CPU, they jumped back to Kitt's own. Karr released the trap and instantly the AI fell back, out of Kitt's 'mind'.

<Re-instate the jammers>

They felt it immediately, the security of being cut off from the hundreds of thousands of attempts at their firewalls every hour - attempts which didn't even set off even the highest level of alarms. Cut off too from the AI which had been attacking.

Exhausted, Kitt felt Karr withdraw and simply sat for a while, dropping the blocks from his link to Michael, letting his partner come towards him and hold him for a while.

//are you all right?//

//I will be. just give me a few minutes//

Michael didn't press for more. He just stayed, and Kitt couldn't have been more grateful.

#

"She's insane."

It was a simple statement in one way, incredibly complex in another.

Michael's eyebrows rose in question. //"She?"//

"The AI has a… female personality." //so difficult to believe?//

He wasn't the only one to be sceptical, Nick pushed away from the workbench against which he'd been leaning and took a couple of steps forward.

"How do you know it has a… female personality?"

His partner was the one to answer. "Kitt's right. It was definitely female."

Michael caught the surprise on his partner's face and supposed there was a brief and fast conversation between the AIs to establish evidence for what they apparently both knew.

Kitt was the one to explain it. "We're both male because we developed that way. You said Quinn Campbell sold the code to a Francis Clay - 'Fran' - a woman, presumably. If an AI was brought up, for want of a better phrase, by a woman, there's nothing to say it wouldn't take on female characteristics. We're Artificial Intelligence, we don't have gender inherit in our neural nets, you - those around us - assign gender to us."

"But you were male! You are male. Your voice…."

"And it's voice that determines gender?"

"No, but… you acted male."

"Because that's how you referenced me, it's how you reacted to me, developed me."

"Are you saying… if I'd treated you like a female… you'd be a female?"

//would that make us - now - easier?//

//no! no. I love you the way you are//

Karr and Nick had noticed his hesitation, no doubt that's what the little smile on Nick's face was about. He knew them too well.

"No. That's not what I'm saying. When Karr and I were written, we were just code, neural networks; learning, growing, but not as male or female. When we were put into the cars, given voices, they made us male. We were spoken to as male, referred to as male, partnered with men. We became male. If we'd been given female voices, talked to as females, partnered with women, that's how we'd have developed."

"That easy…."

Michael saw the other man's shrug out of the corner of his eye. "Change a chromosome or two in your development and you become a woman."

"Thanks, Nick." He rolled his eyes, turned back to Kitt. "So you're saying that this AI has been developed by a woman, that it has a female persona?"

"Yes." He caught something in the link too, gone so fast he didn't have a chance to translate it.

"And you say… she's insane?"

"Yes. And I think we might have found the reason why." This time the feeling in the back of his mind, coming from his partner, was very easy to understand. Unease. "There's a neuro link in the CPU."

Nick was up first. "What?"

//what?//

"It's blocked, very much blocked. It didn't look like it had been active in a long, long time."

//but I thought we…//

"But if it had been active, and something had happened to sever the link…"

//I thought we were too// "…we know how crazy it can get, the madness that can start to seep in."

Nick crossed to sit up on Karr's hood while Michael too felt a need to be physically close to his linked partner. He snagged Kitt with an arm around his waist and the android form dropped back against him willingly. Michael hugged him, resting his chin in the silky blond hair.

"The email from Quinn Campbell didn't mention the neuro links," Nick confirmed. "And I don't think she would have mentioned it, even if she knew about it which is… unlikely."

Michael nodded his agreement, closing the gap between him and his partner in his mind. "But someone did. Someone built a CPU for that AI and linked it to… someone. Maybe something."

"Francis Clay."

"It would make sense, if these two are convinced the AI is female."

"Okay. So where do we find Doctor Clay now that she no longer works for King Military?"

"We don't know that."

"You said it had folded."

"All right. It's a fair assumption. Karr?"

While they were waiting for Karr, and Kitt too, to locate her, Michael pointed out the fact that given the link was blocked so heavily, there was a strong possibility that she was already dead. Before Nick could give an opinion, Karr piped up, "There are three Francis Clays in Nevada, only one of them has Doctorates in Computer Software and Neural Networks."

"Give me an address."

Michael's protest was instant. "Kitt and I should do this."

"No. You two need to stay here."

"Nick..!"

"That AI is still out there and after what Kitt and Karr pulled I seriously doubt its - sorry, her - mood has improved." He slid from the car's hood, approaching them. "Kitt has to stay here," he murmured gently, purring, "you know that."

Kitt's head turned under his chin and Michael lifted off, meeting his partner's beautiful eyes. He could feel Kitt's own internal struggle; like his partner, he'd never been one to stay behind while someone else went out and risked their necks. "You can go without me, take the car."

Michael considered it, but a glance at Nick and he knew he was going to let his companion go in his place. He nodded once, not letting go of Kitt. "Be careful. It - she - knows about Karr now."

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