Page 81 of Shared Omega

She turns toward me.

“Sloane, this is the Sentient Evolving Recursive Algorithmic Population, um…”

She snaps her fingers as if trying to remember a word.

“Heuristic,” the face says calmly. “Sentient Evolving Recursive Algorithmic Population Heuristic.”

“Right, heuristic. I can never remember that bit. Anyway, we just call him S.E.R.A.P.H. for short.”

“Seraph,” I gasp.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this.

“At your service,” the face says. It even seems to nod politely.

“What is this?” I whisper to her. “Some kind of AI?”

Lily nods. “You had some questions, right Sloane? Let’s start with ‘who.’ Seraph, would you be so kind as to let us know who made you.”

“Certainly,” the AI answers, “I was constructed under the auspices of the SynerGen Corporation by a team of programmers comprising Dr. Rudiger Dorn, Dr. Uli Roth, Dr. Jaeyung—“

Lily gestures with her free hand.

“That’s enough, Seraph. We don’t need the full list.”

She fixes her nursing baby’s weight in her arms, then turns toward me and quirks one eyebrow.

“SynerGen?” I say in a hushed voice. “SynerGen made this thing?”

Lily nods.

“Yup. And it gets better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it. Seraph, why don’t you go ahead and fill Sloane in on what it is that you do.”

“With pleasure,” the AI responds in a mechanical voice that doesn’t actually seem capable of pleasure.

Over the next few minutes, Seraph lays out the whole story for me. The Source, as the Alphas refer to it, was originally supposed to be a sexual suppression field. Even one hundred years ago, overpopulation was rampant, and the government contracted SynerGen to figure out a way to stop it. This massive device was intended to emit a suppression field that would basically make people less horny.

But they didn’t want to just turn off people’s sex drive’s completely. If they did that, the whole population would be gone in a generation. So instead, they created Seraph. His purpose was to modulate the suppression field based on all sorts of data—economic growth, unemployment rates, resource supplies and shortages.

“The suppression field,” Seraph explains. “is actually a misnomer. It is not in fact an energy field at all. Rather, it is a nanotechnological virus that infects all humans within the operational radius of—“

“Wait, a nano-what?” I interrupt.

“Nanotech,” Lily says. “Tiny machines the size of a cell.” She gestures toward the Source. “This device manufactures them by the billions, and once they are inside a human body, they can replicate on their own.”

“You mean I’ve got a bunch of little machines swirling around inside me?”

Lily nods.

“Yeah, basically.”

I shiver at the thought. It’s even weirder than having that neural implant.

“And that’s why it is so hard to develop protective gear,” Lily goes on. “The little nano-viruses can eat right through all kinds of materials. But there is a limit to their range. They get their power from electromagnetic waves emitted by the Source.”

I guess that explains why the so-called contamination of the Zone gets stronger the deeper one goes.

“But I don’t get it,” I say after a moment. “I mean, I thought this thing was supposed to be a sexual suppression field. If anything, it seems like the exact opposite.”