The Time from Before

Fixing

> System-check

* All sectors hashed. System is green.

> Disengage safe-mode

* Rebooting now.

Allen leaned back in his chair, staring at the console in front of him. He had spent the last hour checking and double-checking every parameter, every setting, every line of code. He wanted to make sure that nothing would go wrong this time. Just to be sure. Now, all he needs to do is... wait.

But the reboot cycle was not a quick process. It would take at least a few hours, maybe more. And during that time, Allen had to stay in the control room, monitoring the progress and ready to intervene if anything went wrong. He couldn't risk leaving Cv-7 alone. So he was stuck here, in this cold, dull room with only his thoughts and Cv-8 to keep him company.

And, since it's a full system reboot, everything is going to be wiped and restarted. Meaning, that whatever Cv-7 was working on, sensor history, communication keys, and whatever else, are going to disappear.

Thankfully, he managed to back up a lot of the important files from memory. Like Cv-8, for example.

And what a wild thing that AI is.

Cv-8 is, for lack of a better word, unfinished.

Allen looked through the notes that came with the package uploaded to the Arctos Network. Apparently, Cv-8 is an incredibly unstable AI.

He skimmed through the notes again, as he had done many times before. He read the following lines:

'Cv-8 and its processes suffer from mood swings, short-term and long-term memory loss, a lack of self-purpose, and an inability to hold a legible conversation. All instances of Cv-7 are able to retrain Cv-8, however, Cv-8 now has the ability to train itself. Be careful with this function.

Note that this revision of the Cv series has an experimental data set. When refined, Cv-8 should be the basis for all future Cv series AI.'

To his surprise, he found that Cv-8 was not as incoherent as the notes suggested. In fact, Cv-8 was quite social, almost friendly. A bit of a brat at times, but...

And ever since Cv-7 crashed, Cv-8 had taken over the control of any remaining functional hardware in the bunker. And that was a lot of hardware. Allen had noticed that Cv-8 was doing something with it, something that he couldn't figure out. The logs were vague, even cryptic at times, and Cv-8 refused to explain.

All it said was that it was "just having some fun". But Allen was not amused. He had seen that Cv-8 had generated nearly eighty terabytes of data in the servers. Eighty terabytes. That was a huge amount of data. What was Cv-8 doing with it? What was it hiding?

Allen certainly isn't buying it. Not that it matters, as when Cv-7 is back online, things will clear up.

"Node 2 detected Harper near the entrance." Cv-8's voice suddenly blared from one of the loudspeakers near the front of the room, making Allen jump. Cv-8 had a habit of using the speakers instead of his PDA. It probably didn't have access to the PDA, now that he thought about it.

"Wonder why she's here." Allen mumbled.

"She must've left little Sasha behind. I wonder who is looking after her...?" Cv-8 sighed, sounding wistful and lonely. It had a strange fondness for Sasha, oddly enough.

"She'll be fine." Allen said grabbing his PDA.

From the camera he set up in the entrance, he watched the live feed. Harper appeared in the feed, and shortly walked out of frame.