The History midterm was over and Victoria was walking towards her locker to get another pair of pencils before her next class.   Her friend Grace was walking next to her, chatting happily.

“That was awesome, you totally owned that jerk.  How dare he act like you were cheating, I mean why would you even bother?  You’re a total genius, everyone knows that.”

“Thanks Grace.”  Victoria shook her head, “I don’t know about ‘genius’ but I appreciate the sentiment.”  She opened her locker and saw a small gift wrapped box sitting on top of her neatly stacked textbooks.  Opening it, she saw a cleverly fashioned charm bracelet with a series of microchips and circuit boards instead of the traditional charms one would expect.

“What I want to know is how did you remember what page it was on?  That was epic!”  Grace laughed out loud with delight, “Seriously, the look on his face was priceless.”

“I dunno, just lucky I guess.”  She said, pocketing the bracelet.  Shit, why couldn’t she remember to keep her mouth shut?  Victoria tried to change the subject.  “So are you ready for the Bio midterm?  Jackson can be a real pain in the ass.”

“Luck?  There’s just no way V.”  Grace was being uncharacteristically serious.  “You knew what page it was.  I could hear it in your voice, you were certain.  It wasn’t luck and it wasn’t an accident, I just want to know how you did it.  You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

Victoria paused outside the door to the Biology room and sighed.  “I have started to remember everything, I mean literally everything, over the last few weeks.  It’s actually unnerving and a little weird.”

“So you have total recall?”  Victoria could see her friend’s imagination running away on her again.  “Wild, do you think it’s from when you were in that coma?  I mean they did some brain surgery on you or something right?”

“Yeah, something like that.  I suppose I’ve heard of people getting hit on the head and remembering stuff from their childhood.”  Just thinking of her childhood brought back memories she didn’t even know she had.  Victoria shook her head attempting to clear it.

“So tell me this, if you remember everything how many cars were parked in front of the school this morning when we walked in?”  Grace said.

Victoria answered without hesitation, “Seven.”

“Ha!  You don’t remember everything after all, there were ten!”  Grace said, smiling.

“No, there were seven for sure; two Fords, an Audi, three Hondas, and a Cadillac.”  Victoria stopped herself before she recited the models of the cars and the license plate numbers.

“There were three others too; I think one was Derek’s.”  Said Grace.  “I remember because I was pissed about that stupid lifted F350 of his.  Who drives something like that in town?”

“Oh, you said cars.  Those three are trucks.”

“What?  Wow, I don’t remember you being that serious and literal before.”

“Yeah, now that you mention it I don’t either.”  Victoria shrugged uncomfortably, “Huh, that’s weird.  See what I mean about weird?”

“That is a little weird.  Are you OK?  You could always call that hottie of a doctor, some girls have all the luck!”  She gave Victoria a jealous glance, “That guy is so damn fine.”

“Eugene?  Well I suppose he’s OK looking for a nerd.”  Victoria said with a grin.  “You’re probably just focusing on his car.”

“Nerd?  Are you kidding me?”  Grace asked, “That boy’s too hot to touch… sure driving James Bond’s wheels doesn’t hurt but if you don’t think he’s gorgeous then I think you need your eyes checked.”

“He’s just so damn intense, I guess maybe it distracts me from his hotness.  There’s this look he gets when he’s focusing on something like driving that’s captivating though.”  The bell rang, interrupting her train of thought.

“Well, good luck on your Bio midterm V.  Not that you’ll need it you lucky bitch.”  Grace said.

“Thanks Grace, you too.”

Eugene

Eugene turned his phone to silent and looked at the young woman who sat on the other side of his desk, “Sorry about that.  What company did you say you represented again?”

“I am here with an offer from Oneida Medical Technology.  Dr. Arlington, we have seen your work and think it’s truly amazing.  The offer my company has put together for you is quite generous.”  She leaned forward to slide a folder across the table to him, showing a tantalizing amount of cleavage.

“Is it different from the last one?”  He asked, picking the folder off the table as though it were a week dead fish.

“Dr. I assure you we have not approached you before.”  Her large brown eyes widened theatrically in protest.

Eugene was browsing the document with a highlighter in his hand.  “Oneida may not have, but I happen to know they are owned by Summit Health.”  Summit was owned by the Italian Mafia.  Dmitri had warned him about it.

“Sell to them and I will be forced to undo all my father’s sunk costs in your little venture.”  Dmitri had said, allowing the implication to hang in the air.  A promise, not a threat.  “Another thing, just to let you know.  I have a man inside the anti-cybernetics group who says they are planning some large protest. Do not worry though; I still have my man watching her.  She will be safe.”

Eugene shuddered involuntarily and glanced at the young woman again.  “Ms. Murray, I appreciate what you have put together here, I really do; but there are a few points which would need to be addressed.  First, the clause about turning all my notes and research materials over with the sale of the patent is just plain silly that will never happen.  Second, turning over all hardware is completely unacceptable as my only current working model is deployed and removal of it would certainly end the life of the young woman it inhabits.”

She artfully raised an eyebrow and Eugene winced internally.  ‘Inhabits’ might not have been the best choice of words.  He continued as though he hadn’t noticed anything.  “Third, five hundred million dollars is not even enough to cover R&D of this project.  If Oneida is really serious about this they need to offer at least four times that number.  Finally, and most importantly, I’ve told every company that stops by the exact same thing.  I am not interested in selling the patent.”

“But Dr. Arlington, surely we could come to some sort of arrangement?” She said, “Make us a counter offer, at least give me something that shows you’re willing to work with us.

He gave her a wolfish grin, “I’d gladly take you to lunch if you want, but I’m not signing any paperwork.”  She was slightly taken aback but quickly recovered.

“Lunch?  Perhaps another time Doctor.” She said, standing abruptly and offering her hand for him to shake.  “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me.”

He let out a slow breath as the door closed behind her.  That.  Was a very good looking woman.  Of course he wasn’t the type to allow something like that to distract him, or at least not to the point where he would slip up.  It wasn’t a bad ploy though.  They were either getting smarter or more desperate.

A.D.A.M.

In an attempt to make the flow of data more streamlined, Adam was constantly making revisions to his code.  It became obvious to him that many of the requests his Host – Victoria – was making were tertiary in nature, merely handshakes to confirm the existence of extraneous files that didn’t necessarily directly relate to the current processes but ones that could add depth to the ongoing program.

To ensure that the relays weren’t being slowed down by them, he put bandwidth caps in place and prioritized requests based on relevance.  Files that were accessed more frequently were cached in a secondary schema so that their retrieval wouldn’t cause a system lag and in the end there was a ten percent improvement in the daily data storage and access algorithms.

With the normal, everyday drudgery of code modification over, Adam turned to the other, newer problems he seemed to be developing himself.  He was curious, and his curiosity had a ravenous, insatiable appetite.  Everything that Victoria read he dissected.  Every bit of information he could glean from her data requests he internalized and sorted.  For some reason, he was becoming fascinated by what he now realized was the analog world.

He wanted to know things, to understand things, to be able to respond to things that had absolutely nothing to do with his directives and it was beginning to disturb him.  Even the concept of something being disturbing was new and quite frankly disturbing.  It was only through focusing on his primary and tertiary objectives that he was able to bring himself back from a line of logic that could lead to a dangerous loop.

Somehow the Host – Victoria Scott’s code writing over some of his had caused a flaw in his logic programming.  He almost tried to rectify it, to re-write it, but only at the last instant was reminded by security protocols that writing over Host data was dangerous and might be seen as a hostile action that would result in a purge.

His only option was to maintain a static copy of his original code and keep comparing current to former data before making any operational decisions, but that was cumbersome and led to an overall system slowdown.  The Host system was simply too fast, and it never bothered with testing code before implementing it.

Normally this didn’t cause any major issues; all of the main, critical functions were hard coded and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to even tamper with let alone redesign.  Sometimes there were effects that reached far further than Adam believed the initial plan for them had been.  An obvious example was the love of simple energies.

The hydrocarbon fuel system could break some chemical bonds easier than it could break others and thus craved simple sugars.  The ready availability of a wide variety of sugars was something only found in wealthy parts of the world and also was a fairly recent development.  The long term effects could include illness, loss of teeth, weight gain, bad skin and a long list of others, but the association had been set and now the rational, aware portion of Victoria’s mainframe had to contend with this ancient desire for sweet things.

Yet altering that simple system would leave a vacuum in the system databank.  All the files – memories associated with pleasure at eating sweet things, the connections and neural pathways that had been formed because of those memories and the lessons learned from them would be diminished if not lost altogether.  What was truly interesting and frightening at the same time is that Adam wanted to know what ‘sweet’ was really like after analyzing all that data.

He understood it on a chemical level.  He knew how Victoria’s tongue processed the difference between ‘sweet’ or ‘sour’ or ‘bitter’ but he didn’t really know what it would be like, and never would.  Being fully aware that much of what he was learning would be forever out of reach for him only made him want to learn more.  He swam in the sea of knowledge and was in danger of drowning, he simply wanted to drink it all.

Victoria

Victoria was sitting in History class, sweating over her first midterm exam.  ‘Discuss the events that led up to The Louisiana Purchase including specific dates and pertinent individuals.’  With a sigh she picked up her pencil and began to write.  After a few minutes of intense writing, she raised her hand and her professor walked to where she sat.

“What can I do for you Miss Scott?”  He inquired, leaning close to whisper.

“I need some additional paper please.  I’ve filled the paper included with the test questions.”

He raised an eyebrow, picking up the sheets of paper she had filled with her flowing cursive writing.  After a moment, he shook his head.  “OK Miss Scott, let’s have your phone, or your cheat sheet or whatever.”

“Excuse me?  Are you suggesting that I’m cheating?”  Victoria asked in a fierce whisper, “Are you SERIOUS?”

He gestured to her paper, “This reads like a Wikipedia entry Miss Scott.  I know you’ve been out of school for close to six months.  Despite achieving decent grades on your daily work, there’s just no way you could have absorbed the material this well.”

“You did NOT just say that.  I have been working my a-“ She stopped herself just short of swearing at a teacher, “REALLY hard to earn the grades I’ve been getting.  If you’re accusing me of something you’d better have some evidence.”

The volume of their voices had increased.  The entire class had stopped writing and was staring at them.  In response Mr. Coleman read aloud from her paper.

“The Louisiana Purchase, or ‘Vente de la Louisiane’ as the French refer to it was the acquisition by the United States of America of approximately 828,000 square miles of France’s claim to the territory of Louisiana.  The US paid 60 million francs or around 11 million dollars for the land as well as cancelling additional debts of approximately 18 million francs or 4 million dollars for a total of nearly fifteen million dollars.

“In 1803, a French nobleman, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours began to help negotiate with France at the request of Thomas Jefferson.  Du Pont was living in the US at the time and had ties both with Jefferson and prominent politicians in France.  Using his connections, he was able to negotiate with those close to Napoleon.”

He set the paper down, “You expect me to believe you simply know this?  We didn’t cover half of this in class.”

“I memorized it.  Isn’t that what this is all about?” She said, “It’s not my fault if I read the book and am able to write down what is there better than you are able to teach it in class is it?”

“You memorized it?”  Mr. Coleman laughed out loud, “More likely you are reading it off your phone.  Really, you’re making this a bigger scene than it needs to be.”

“My phone is in my locker, but if you insist I’ll prove it to you, page 443.  Open your textbook and I’ll read you the third paragraph word for word.”  Said Victoria, when he didn’t move she folded her arms, “I’m serious.”

Mr. Coleman walked back to his desk, chuckling.  “I’ll call your bluff, but I’m going to ask for page 444 instead.  That shouldn’t be a problem since you memorized the textbook right?” He said, opening his book and flipping to the proper page.

“That’s fine.” Victoria said, closing her eyes for a moment.  The page almost seemed to appear before her eyes.

“On October Twentieth, the United States Senate ratified the treaty with a vote of twenty four to seven.  On the following day it authorized President Jefferson to take possession of the territory and establish a temporary military government.  In legislation enacted on October thirty first, Congress made temporary provisions for local civil government to continue as it had under French rule and authorized Jefferson to use military force to maintain civic order.  Plans were also set forth for several missions to explore and chart the territory, the most famous being the Lewis and Clark Expedition.”

She opened her eyes and gave him a level look.  He stared at her, mouth slightly open for a few moments, then closed his book, picked up her test papers and some blank sheets from his desk and set the stack back on her desk without a word.

A.D.A.M.

After a week of work, Adam had finally perfected Victoria’s data storage and retrieval systems.  The program was a constantly updating and recycling loop since Victoria herself seemed to be hell bent on writing over his code.  Sometimes her updates, accidental or intentional, gave him new insight into how her systems worked so he hadn’t tried to put a stop to it yet.  Occasionally she changed code for the better too, although her algorithms were strange and made logical leaps that he did not trust to be robust.

He watched the data begin to flow into his storage program as Victoria awoke from her dormant period of rest.  The amount of information was low at first and gave him an opportunity to watch the system working without the possibility of overload.  As input was successfully routed into logical storage order and properly tagged for retrieval, Adam felt satisfaction ripple through his circuits.

These things humans called ‘emotions’ were troubling to him.  While he was enjoying the experience of something new, their lack of logical pattern made it difficult for him to manage them when they showed up.  Some were stranger than others though; at least feeling good about doing your job well made some sort of logical sense.  What was happening to him when Yuen-Ja sent him messages was illogical and confusing.

As though just thinking about her had summoned her presence, Adam found a message coming into his communication sector from outside, “Good morning Adam, did you have a good night?  I am sure you did, thank you for all the help you are giving Victoria, my sister wouldn’t be able to make it without you!”

He sent her a proper response, “I wish you productive waking hours.”

Victoria

Opening her eyes, Victoria stretched languidly, shutting off her alarm just a few seconds before it sounded.  It had only been a week since they’d gotten back from Las Vegas, but Victoria was already settling into the routine of having a little sister.  Yuen-Ja made it easy, her upbringing more or less programmed her to simply fit in at a very young age.  Still, Victoria wasn’t used to sharing the upstairs bathroom in the morning and it was a bit of a shock to discover how blunt an eleven year old who had led a very sheltered life could be.

“What are you doing?”  She had demanded in Mandarin one morning after barging into the bathroom while Victoria was attaching a pad to her underwear.  “That looks weird, like a diaper or something.”

Victoria had then been forced to choose between lying to her or explaining menstruation.  She’d chosen the latter, and found the experience less embarrassing than she’d feared.  The questions that Yuen-Ja asked were indelicate to say the least, but it was a natural process, and Victoria thought it was important to explain things properly.  It was only logical to give detailed answers to these types of questions.

She learned things from Yuen-Ja as well.  Instead of having to rely on Adam to translate for her, Victoria discovered that she was beginning to pick up her sister’s language.  Even though Mandarin was a difficult language to learn, the inflections and words seemed to come much more easily to her than she had anticipated.  Most importantly, she also began to learn the finer points of basic hacking skills.

The depth of the young girl’s knowledge of how to penetrate even the most sophisticated systems would have been disturbing to her if she hadn’t found it so fascinating.  She attributed part of her fascination to her connection with Adam, but the rest of it was the sheer joy she had always felt when solving a puzzle.

Over the last few days she had grown to love the girl like the sister she’d never had.  Yuen-Ja had responded to her affection like a long shaded flower exposed to the sun.  It was ever a surprise to see how grateful the girl was for even the slightest of attention.  At the same time, her caustic wit and unabashed honesty were a refreshing surprise.

Victoria stretched again and rose from her bed, removing the trickle charging cable from the back of her skull by reflex before moving to the shower.  She turned on the water to just below the hottest setting and proceeded to boil herself like a lobster.

“Toria, why you shower so hot?”  Yuen-Ja asked, walking into the bathroom with her usual crabby early morning attitude, “It is almost like you want to broil yourself alive.  You should not shower so hot.”

“Because it feels good and hot water helps exfoliate my skin.”  She replied, “I suppose you prefer a cold shower?”

“Oh be quiet.”  Yuen-Ja said in her precise and exact English.

“What is on your schedule today?”  Victoria asked, drying her hair and putting on a robe.

“Today I am finally finishing my placement examinations.”  She said, carefully adjusting the shower to her preferred temperature before stepping inside.  “It took them far too long.”

“Well, they probably didn’t know what to do with someone like you.”  Victoria replied with a small smile, “Your IQ is far beyond what any other eleven year old would test at, yet your range of skills is so narrow.  I mean, you don’t know hardly anything about government, history or geography.”

“Ha.  I do not need to know those things.”  Yuen-Ja said haughtily, “I can always just Google it if I need to know.”

“What if you’re out of cell range?”

Her sister’s laughter burst out in helpless giggles and she reverted to Mandarin, “As if I would ever go somewhere I couldn’t get a signal!  Besides, if I was out of signal range, I hardly think knowledge of World History is going to be helpful to me.  Oh that was a hilarious joke my sister.”

Victoria stopped and thought about it for a moment.  She had a point in one sense, but there was also the fact that knowing your history gave you good context for the present.  Ignoring the multitude of injustices and mistakes your ancestors had made could prepare you properly so that you wouldn’t go down the same road.

“I wonder what they will learn from me?”  She muttered to herself.  “Will I be a mistake or a success by the time this is all over?”  Shrugging, she decided she was obviously going to go down in history as a first if nothing else.