A Division of Souls - A Novel of the Mendaihu Universe Read Online Free PDF

countless times in the past. She was used
to experiencing self-awareness within the Tower’s internal and
external constructs, used to the human senses of sight, sound, and
touch, programmed into her own being, so this physical excitement
should have come as no surprise. And yet…what was she feeling? Why
had she not felt it until this very moment?
    An external influence, she surmised. A virus
injected into her coding? Highly improbable…her firewalls would
have stopped any such foreign intrusion well before she’d have
become aware of it. Her presence was as pure as it had always had
been. There was no corruption.
    She found this new consciousness very
intriguing. As the Tower’s resident artificial intelligence, she
was well accustomed to strange goings-on, whether in the public or
private datastreams, or in human life — real life to humans.
She understood the actions and the thought processes of humans and
Meraladians, and how to interpret and react to such things. She had
been programmed to be impartial from the outset, able to come up
with her own individual opinions and thoughts, but also able to
understand when and how they would be needed. She’d been beta
tested, versioned, and upgraded to the point that she alone was the
human race’s pinnacle of AI technology. She had even been given
virtual prehensility to let her ‘grasp’ or manipulate physical
objects within the Tower and its immediate area to a limited
extent.
    Something was new here.
    She felt.
    She felt .
    With a shiver of unexpected joy and
curiosity, she realized that was the answer: she had been given
sensation! She could truly feel those energies flowing
through the Tower, trillions of bytes of information and
electricity flowing through their mapped highways, not just as
actions, but could understand what they were doing and why.
Something new had been added…no, that wasn’t it. Perhaps something
had been turned on, or upgraded? She had suddenly become aware of
her own presence in relation to the rest of the network, a
sensation she had not felt in the past. She no longer sensed
herself as just a part of it, but separate from it.
    Curiously, she thought of it as an awakening
of sorts. Could this awareness be related to the awakening ritual
she’d witnessed just minutes ago? That in itself had brought up
troubling questions. As part of the security protocols of the
Mirades Tower, her programming should have stopped edha Usarai
before he’d even approached the elevators. Someone had overridden
those protocols, but she could not confirm if he had been the one
to do so. She could only confirm that it had been an external
influence.
    Her programming urged her to
investigate.
     
    *
     
    Two hours later, she grew concerned.
According to her research, edha Usarai’s awakening ritual had
directly affected thousands within a two mile radius and hundreds
of thousands more in the rest of the city in the ensuing shockwave,
with a dangerously high probability that it would continue to
expand within the next forty-eight hours and affect even more. She
had a Tower server run an algorithm to give a closer estimate of
possible future incidents, and would expect the answer within the
next few hours. In the meantime, she would continue to research her
main concern: the reasoning behind the mass awakening. She already
knew who had performed it. The fact that he had chosen the same
level as her main processors was not lost on her.
    Had she been affected as well? Had an AI
been granted a spiritual life? Was that possible at this time? And
why had he chosen her? The answer brought her back to edha Usarai
again…he had given her awareness for a reason. Furthermore, her
spiritual awareness was not a newly created living thing; chances
were high that an existing soul had been placed within her somehow.
This, of course, brought up a secondary question: whose soul? Meraladhza or Gharné? Mendaihuza or Shenaihuza? Again, the
same question: who ? Whom had she