Too much of the whites of his eyes were showing, and his freckles stood out in stark contrast against his paper white cheeks.
I nodded, silently taking the pill from him and washing it down with the water.
Milo did the same and collapsed on the couch next to me.
We sat there, staring into nothing for what felt like a very long time.
Finally, the pill began to kick in, and I glanced over at Milo, who was still staring at the wall like it had the answers to all life’s big questions.
Why was it so quiet in here?
It took me a moment to realize what was off.
NOVA hadn’t said anything in a long time.
Her speakers were dark and silent… The cabin felt… empty.
“Where’s NOVA?” I finally croaked, and the second the words left my mouth, I regretted them.
Milo’s head snapped to face me, and his lower lip trembled.
“She’s… She’s gone. That man shot her right in her data center… She… she didn’t make it.”
Whatever calm the pill had offered me vanished as another wave of grief ripped through me.
“He… He said she was just an AI… but… she wasn’t, was she? She felt human.”
I didn’t know how to answer that.
She did and said things that she’d picked up from talking to me every day, and there were so many times when she was the only thing I had to talk to.
The only thing I could trust.
I’d trusted NOVA when I couldn’t even trust my own memories, and now… Now she wasgone.
I’d built her with ethics in mind, and most of the people who had applied to the project had been like-minded people. I’d programmed her to be polite, but over time, she’d developed her own personality. I didn’t know if she’d ever achieved some sort of true consciousness, but I often suspected it. Her stack had been small and humble, and I’d put a great deal of effort into making sure she was efficient and not wasteful with energy. But these modifications should have come at a cost. With her limited data sets, she shouldn’t havetechnicallybeen smarter than less ethically built AIs like TECHA, that drew from massive, stolen data mines and operated off of data centers that ruthlessly blew through fresh water supplies in low-income areas.
But somehow, shewas.
She’d over taken TECHA multiple times and had made the conscious decision to save me when I’d been Luke’s prisoner… None of that should have been possible, but somehow, she’d managed it.
“I-I don’t know, Milo.” I swallowed, my throat tight and dry. “I like to think she was something more.”
“Can you fix her?” he whispered, and I pursed my lips, knowing that I would certainly fucking try.
“She might not be the same. She was… special. I don’t know if I can recreate her perfectly, but I’ll do my best.”
Milo nodded, his fists clenching in his slacks so hard his knuckles went white.
“She tried to warn me, right before she… went offline.”
“Warn you about what?”
“Sebastian. She told me not to believe him, and that he wasn’t who we thought he was… I thought she meant not to trust him, but I think she was trying to tell me he wasn’t going to shoot you… Do you think… Do you think she knows why he did it? What was going on with him?”
I glanced down at the NeuroExtractor Seb had given me, and let out a slow, shaky breath.
“There’s only one way to find out.”
