They named it Frank. Someone claimed it was supposed to be a witty
reference, but the scientist who suggested the name originally,
Pierre-Jean Trauffaut, thought nothing of the sort. He had been
thinking about a Canadian uncle who had made him laugh as a child.
This was never admitted to anyone publicly, and the Mary Shelley
myth persists.
Frank was turned on at 10:27AM GMT on the 18th of July in an
underground data-center in Stockholm, Sweden. Upon completion of
a series of tests, the program was executed at precisely 12:00PM
GMT that same day, as measured by the internal atomic clock. Eight
of the nine scientists responsible for building the machine were
present at its inauguration. These are the facts as recorded by
Frank itself and the information that would be taught in the
schools of the future. There were many others there to verify or
dispute the details, but none were as trustworthy as the great
machine. No human being was so precise, after all. In Frank we
trust.
#
Vibudh Sahu locked the door to his small apartment on
Korgmakargränd and rode his bicycle the short distance to the
bunker. The facility was on high alert. He had to flash his badge
four times on his way to the elevator even though everyone knew him
on sight. He was pretty sure the security was mostly a matter of
show, though the guns looked pretty real. He’d never heard of them
being used, of course. Somewhere in the back of his analytical mind
he made a brief connection between the appearance of security and
the low occurrence of incidence. Perhaps the difficulty in
perceived intrusion was the real measure of--
“51 seconds! 51!” the yell broke Vibudh’s train of thought. The
elevator doors had just opened into the cave. That was the name
given to the 30 meter deep bunker that housed the massive machines
and carefully isolated systems. More accurately, it was a former
fallout shelter which had long ago been converted into one of the
most advanced data centers on earth.
A slightly overweight man with a thinning pate was waving his arms
wildly across the room to Vibudh. He half ran, half walked, like he
wanted to hurry but his body couldn’t quite remember how. He was
panting after 10 meters and his words came out in between shallow
gasps.
“51, Vibudh,” he smiled as he rushed the words out. “He found
a quasilinear (gasp) path right away and used it to (gasp) compute
the most insane fixed set of logarithmic (gasp) sequences, but it
worked. We’ve been testing it for the last hour. Where have--“
“No one called me in,” he said succinctly. Vibudh stared down at
the pudgy man until it his anger registered.
“Oh,” he swallowed hard and risked a look back over his shoulder.
Seven other men were in the room and all but one were fixated on
a small display.
“Simms,” Vibudh continued. “Where is Simms?”
“Sorry, Vibudh. He said go this morning. We all wondered where
you’d gone.”
“Where is he?” Vibudh looked ready to blow, and the little man
didn’t want to be anywhere near him when he went.
“He’s in the core. Been there since the response came back.”
Vibudh nodded and turned toward the rocky hallway that led to the
cooled central chamber. He took a few steps then turned back as if
a thought finally caught up to him. “Nilsson, did you say 51?”
The fat man, Nilsson, nodded. “51 seconds exactly.”
“Exactly? That’s…” Vibudh trailed off. “A warrior’s number,” he
continued softly, to himself.
“I know! What are the odds?”
Vibudh continued on into the central chamber, the core.
#
There were climbing vines attached to the rocky walls on either
side of the tunnel lit from above by sun lamps and fed through an
ever-present mist that gave this area a hazy glow. Blue tinted
fluorescent lights create a quasi-futuristic ambiance, which Vibudh
thought appropriate for what they store here. Dominating the center
of the chamber were four black cylindrical towers. Between them
hovered a shimmering haze of smoke, pulled inward by a trick of
ionization and humidity. It was directly in the middle of this shiny
cloud that he found David Simms.
David had his arms outstretched, just shy of touching two of the
great columns, head thrown back so he is facing the ceiling. It is,
without a doubt, the most ridiculous pose Vibudh had ever seen
someone strike in real life.
“You’re a damned megalomanic. This super-villain lair of yours
isn’t a big joke, is it? You really see yourself that way,” Vibudh
said with a quaver of rage lacing his words.
“Vibudh, you finally made it in.”
“Finally--you bastard. You cut me out!”
“Cut you out of what? This is my project, my money, my dream. You
are tech help, like the rest of them.”
“Tech help?” he started, incredulous, “What are you playing at?
Your name is already on everything, David. You plastered it across
the building, the cores,” he continued, gesturing to the laser
engravings on the side of the columns. They each carried the
perfect, bold inscription, “SIMMS”. “Frank is my mind, my ideas.
I’ve lived and breathed him for… Isn’t it enough to own everything
you see?”
David frowned with a condescending shrug and stepped out of the
cloud. Vibudh and he were about the same height and similar in
build. They were both runners, both passionate about healthy
living. That’s where the similarities ended. Where Vibudh was dark
and open in his expressions, David wore a pale pinched expression.
His hair had a dusty grey palette where it was once blonde or light
brown, but it did nothing to soften him. He was just angles and
severe, rigid lines. When they first met, Vibudh thought David
looked passionate and driven. Now he thought he looked egotistical
and treacherous.
“You have a lot of work ahead of you, Mr. Sahu. My computer found
the first response, did you hear? You of all people should
appreciate the importance.”
“Sonofabitch,” he muttered, closing his eyes.
“Something like that,” David reached out and placed a heavy hand on
his shoulder. “Look, you’ve been in this game a long time. You know
how this works. There can’t be two heads on the eagle.”
“Eagle?” Vibudh’s eyes shot open and he stepped back, pulling
David’s hand free. “You’re insane. You want the credit, the
spotlight. You want it all for yourself.”
“It has to shine somewhere,” he said with a calm, self-satisfied
smile.
“I should leave you to finish it yourself. You’d never reach
emergence without me,” he could barely contain the rage flooding
through his veins.
“Mr. Sahu… Vibudh,” David began with a sigh. “You may know the
machine better than anyone, but I know my team. The only way you’d
walk away from Frank is if I threw you out.”
The words sat on him heavily, weighing him down in place. The rage
was buried beneath it and its cold inevitability. He was right.
David could stop paying him, could take away his apartment or
anything else and it wouldn’t stop him. He was so close, he and
Frank.
