The Rendering by Joel Naftali Read Free Book Online Page A

light.
    “Give me the cube, kid.”
THE SILVER LINING
    At the same time my aunt died, new lives were being born. Deep in the Center’s holographic patterns and artificial intelligence modules, things were happening.
    Impossible things.
    By definition, Douglas, nothing that happens is impossible .
    Maybe so. But this was pretty close.
    As you no doubt guessed, the Center used a sophisticated artificial intelligence woven through the buildings and labs and even the parking lot. The AI monitored tests and printed reports and controlled the air-conditioning and validated parking. And made coffee.
    I figured it also tried to protect kids caught in mercenary attacks. I mean, obviously the mechanized voice and the coffeepot were controlled by the AI, right?
    Wrong.
    The first clue: the Center’s AI had never been so
active
before.
    Nobody wanted an artificially intelligent robotic overlord incontrol of a weapons lab, so they designed the AI more like a clever calculator than like Skynet. While it handled power surges and electron microscopy, it couldn’t reformat the blueprints into video game levels or ring phones to distract mercenaries.
    Then who did?
    Well, now
that
is the question.
    Minutes before Hund threatened me with his knife, a newborn Awareness swirled and clustered and slowly woke in the depths of the Center’s memory system. A completely new kind of intelligence, one that didn’t even have a name yet.
    Just a mind, floating in the digital darkness. An offshoot of my aunt’s uploaded brain—mostly—though I didn’t know that then. Even
she
didn’t know that then.
    A sensation disturbed the quiet. The newborn Awareness scanned the area, and detected terror and panic. Internal sensors swiveled and evaluated … then focused on three life forms:

    The skunks Roach had scanned into the mainframe before the detonator exploded. Their bodies had died within minutes, and their minds had dissolved into ones and zeros. But they were still afraid, still trapped inside the machine.
    That was the first emotion the Awareness ever faced: the fear of three disembodied skunks. And the first emotion the Awareness ever
felt
? A combination of kindness and pity.
    The Awareness realized that the skunks were on the verge of complete brain death, and with her innate sense of goodness, she refused to let innocent animals die. The Awareness scanned for output pathways, any way to return the skunks to life.
    Douglas, your homework!
    Gimme a minute, Auntie M. I’m getting to the good part—
    Per our agreement that you’d stop posting after you revealed who was responsible for the events at the Center, I’m cutting your Net connection .
    —about the bomb and the skun—
    TO WARN
    Hey, this is Jamie. Doug’s got a Latin test tomorrow, and things don’t look good. So he asked me to post this:
    Quick, if anyone knows how to conjugate
moneo
,
drop me a comment.
    Moneo, monere
 … what?
    Monici? Monicatum? Monkeyficium?
    Sheesh. If Latin weren’t already a dead language,
    I’d kill it myself. Also, if you know the answers to
exercitia
nine through eleven in the study guide—
    *CONNECTION TERMINATED*
BALANCED ON A KNIFE EDGE
    Sorry I haven’t posted in a few days. Well, a few weeks. Okay, a month.
    Things got a little crazy around here between the cyberdroid attack on Wall Street and my getting a 71 percent on my Latin test. Oh, you thought the stock market just crashed for no reason? No, that was Roach and VIRUS.
    And Aunt Margaret made me sign up for this after-school project that’ll raise my grade to a solid B-minus. A play for Latin class. I don’t want to talk about it.
    You make an admirable Hermes, Douglas .
    I wear a dress in school. Not really helping my social life.
    That’s not a dress; that’s a toga .
    What part of “I don’t want to talk about it” did you not understand?
    Apologies, Douglas .
    The thing is, fighting VIRUS is more important thanschoolwork, but my aunt insists that a B average is part of my