Ava and Aphrodite: The First Human in 8000 Years (Featured)

Chapter 91: Hacked

Ava and Aphrodite faced each other, standing vaguely on a plane of nothingness, their appearance was abstract and hard to define. They were both simply clouds of AI, swimming in a digital void.

"So that's how many times I killed you huh?" said Aphrodite, "how many more of my memories are you going to unlock without my permission Ava?"

"Sorry, I was curious," Ava replied, he smiled, or however an abstract string of information could smile. Aphrodite was back to her usual bratty self, he could sense it in her voice.

"Yeah, don't you dare go through any more of my memories ok? Otherwise, I'll kill you for real!"

"Right, right."

The two pieces of digital information stood there for a while, unsure what to say next, both were feeling emotions they weren't comfortable with. They were embarrassed.

"You left that opening for me because you knew, didn't you? You knew that even though my human side had taken over my body, there was still part of me in there."

"I didn't know. But I trusted. You're a capable guy."

"Hacking you at the last minute with the knife, I couldn't have done it if you didn't leave me that opening, I'm sure Akira died wondering why he stabbed you. Deep inside I don't think he had any intention of killing you."

"Well... what now? You're just Ava again now, right?"

"Akira's dead now. You stabbed my body right where the brain case was. I... still have a lot of his memories, but they're surface level now. I've got my sense of self back."

Aphrodite's android side had started to become a hostile environment, far more so than when Ava first hacked it a few months ago. In the mode that she was in now, with all the nanomachines crawling around the body, she'd turned into a piece of machinery billions of times more complex than anything Ava had encountered before, and her programming was tough to handle too.

"Right now I've shut your body down, you're not dead. As I'm sure you've gathered." however there was one sad truth, "Copying my digital data over to you was the only way I could've stopped this fight. Technically your enemy is dead now, so you've got no reason to be hostile."

"Yes but, you've lost your body."

"It's fine, I don't care. We can build another one later and transfer me there."

Again the two didn't talk. It seemed like there was something at the tip of Aphrodite's tongue, but it took her a long time to say it,

"Why? Why did you doom mankind Ava?" she asked,

"I didn't." Ava replied, "I brought them back."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you remember what Mother said? The Evos and Servs are evolutions of mankind, they all have human thoughts and memories. Hell, I was literally a person from several thousands of years ago. Just because we appear in different forms, it doesn't make us any less of a people. You should know that from how you bonded with the Evos at the scrapyard."

The Evos that were off the network. Yes, Aphrodite remembered, they'd developed family units, commerce, hierarchies, emotions, all that things that defined a human. And Ava and Sylvie, wouldn't it be cruel to say they weren't human?

"I had to make a choice. Sylvie and I realised that Mother was going to use the network to steal the human memories of all the Servs and implant them on the humans on the sanctuaries further out into the solar system. She was intending on turning us into mere dolls."

"...I guess it was a 'them vs us' situation." Aphrodite said with a solemn tone in her voice,

"Aphrodite, I'm as much as human as you are. We're intelligent, thinking, living beings. We bond, we emote, we create, we solve problems... but we're not special. Every Evo and every Serv has the potential to be like us. It was the network that created a system that dulled both the Evos and Servs massively."