Developer's privileges

Eve creeped through the town, avoiding zombies to the best of her abilities. They were easy to spot because of their unceasing mechanical talking; but besides that, Eve found out that if they were close enough, she could feel their presence with a sixth sense. With that, Eve avoided the biggest packs of zombies and looked for food, water and other supplies in the abandoned stores and houses.

Most of them were looted already, but Eve didn't give up and was thorough in her search. After a while, she stumbled upon an empty apartment with a broken door that still had some useful things hidden in its cupboards. After chewing on two dry bricks of instant noodles, Eve felt much better. She had also found some canned foods and a pair of worn sneakers that fit her shoe size. Eve put them on even if she didn't really need them—the bottoms of her feet had been rougher than the sneakers' shoes from six years of walking.

By that time, the sky darkened, and the sun lowered to the very horizon. Eve still had found no water sources, but she was afraid to go through the zombie-infected streets in the night.

Eve yawned. The apartment she was in was on the second floor. She had noticed that zombies had a lot of difficulties climbing the stairs because of their stiff joints. Even with the broken door, it was probably alright to spend the night here. Just in case, Eve barricaded herself in the apartment's bedroom with pieces of furniture. Only then she felt somewhat safe.

She laid down on a dusty bed without taking off her clothes and closed her eyes. Eve only wanted to relax a little. She couldn't imagine herself sleeping right now, yet despite her fears and worries, as soon as she closed her eyes, Eve's mind drifted off.

But instead of the normal dreams, what Eve saw were endless lines of white text. They stretched in front of her like an endless tower with no up and no down. Bewildered, Eve floated closer to them and read.

[Nutrients amount is low. Data search paused. Searching for food sources...]

[Food source found. Consuming...]

[Food source total nutritional value: 12 calories, 8 grammes of protein. Keep searching for food sources...]

Eve looked up and down. Other lines of texts were similar; they all looked like some sort of log. After reading some more of it, Eve saw more notes about food and water consumption and about looking for data, but nothing drew her attention.

After growing bored with this part of the log, Eve looked for its beginning. With a simple wish, she floated up; the longer she floated, the faster her speed became. The lines of text in front of her blurred into a single while ribbon that stretched and stretched.

Just when Eve thought they were infinite, the lines of text ended; at the same moment, her flight halted as if she hit an invisible wall. With gleaming eyes, Eve read the first line of the log.

[System installation successful. Conducting host's status check...]

[Warning! Host's status critical! Listing health report:

Skin integrity: 96%

Skull integrity: 94%

Brain integrity: 81%

Brain damage is critical! Repairing damages...]

[Clotting blood—success.

Repairing skin—in progress, estimated time left 7.4 hours.

Repairing blood vessels—in progress, estimated time left 7.1 hours.

Repairing bone structure—in progress, estimated time left 64 hours.

Repairing brain matter—in progress, estimated time left 10.3 hours.

Restoring neural activity—failure.]

[Host's status stabilised. Searching for data...]

After that, the log continued with familiar lines about data search, food, water and sometimes sleep mode. Eve ignored them and reread the beginning of the log again. By that point, she understood that she wasn't in a simple dream.

The lines about searching for data were exactly like the ones the zombies said. And the log about the brain injury must be related to the time when the unknown assaulter hit Eve's head. What she saw now could only be one thing—the debug log of the nanites in her own body. And according to it, during the time she had spent wandering around like a zombie, Eve wasn't sleeping, but was in a coma instead. It was a genuine miracle that she had woken up in the end, even if it was six whole years later.

What Eve didn't understand is how it was possible for her to see it with no special instruments or at least a computer. She could guess, though, that this would not be the last of the surprises her own life's work was going to bring to her.

When she was making the nanites, Eve gave them a limited ability to self-improve. She fixed some parts of them to make sure that they won't lose their purpose or become unrecognisable, but other parts could improve and mutate with time and gathered data. It was possible that this feature gave birth to many unpredictable changes in Eve's project, including her ability to read her core's logs in her sleep.

Eve wondered if she could read anything else in the processing core's program or change anything. She needed more knowledge about her nanites' mutations. She also wondered if she could start improving them with herself.

As soon as she thought about the core's program, the lines of the log in front of Eve changed with the lines of familiar programming code. She hurried to read through it. She skimmed page after page, skipping the parts she knew, paying attention to the parts that differed from what she remembered and looking at how the code interacted with the surrounding world.

After what felt like hours of reading, Eve understood a few important things. First, the zombies' data search was a part of core-brain communication. When Eve created the nanites, instead of making a visible interface for the information that core gathered, she made it communicate with the brain directly.

It was supposed to give information and some slight urges that would feel akin to instinctual ones. But it now turned out that if the neural activity wasn't present, the core continued to operate on its own and all these urges became actions! And the data search was one of these urges. Eve was planning to let people infected with nanites exchange data between each other to improve their nanites faster, but by the time they were released, she didn't implement a mechanism for it.

If she did, it definitely wouldn't include the death of a core's host. The current way in which zombies gathered data was something from the most basic and crude nano-machines' libraries—a direct assimilating.

Eve also found out that cores` artificial intelligence considered other cores the primary source of data. People with nanites could detect cores of others via the signals of their computing activity; it was the same "sixth sense" that Eve found out earlier. Zombies were drawn to them, but for some reason, they completely ignored each other and Eve when she was in a coma.

She didn't know why yet, but she found out something that she didn't remember to put in the code. Eve's core's program included lines that stated that if someone's signals were too strong, meaning that they made much more computing operations per second than her own core, then they would be marked as a threat instead of a target.

Eve found it strange. More computing power meant that the core was more evolved than her own; didn't that mean that it was a massive source of data? She wondered if it was a unique mutation of her core or if it was common. She wondered if it was possible to make a quick experiment to check it...

Eager to try it, Eve skimmed to another part of the code and concentrated on entering a new line. She hoped that would work, but nothing happened. Eve blinked. Then she opened her eyes wide and grinned. 'Of course, how could I forget. Now, let's see if this will work...'

"The first law of robotics: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." Eve's voice rang through the endless darkness without an echo.

As soon as Eve spoke the last letter, a message window appeared in front of her. [Password accepted. Developer mode active.]

Eve willed it away and the message disappeared. After that, she went to the code again. This time, the new lines of code appeared in front of her eyes without delay. She wrote a short function that a simple thought could activate and reread it to make sure that she made no mistake.

The only thing left was to wake up. Eve looked around her, wondering how to do it. Was it enough to just wish?...

As soon as she thought that, Eve felt herself pulled out of a dream. She opened her eyes with a start and sat up in a hurry. Only after seeing no zombies around, she calmed down a little. When Eve went to sleep, it was evening, but now the sky outside of the window was bright again. She must have slept for no less than ten hours, but no zombies bothered her.

She stood up from the bed and stretched with relish. If everything was good, soon enough Eve herself was going to bother zombies instead.