Core Drive: A Westworld Story

Reverie 2015-Q: Joy

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The Dead Zone had an incurable chill. Cooler than the higher levels of the mesa due to its proximity to the server farm levels below. She'd gotten used to dressing warmer, in layers. But her hands and feet were always cold.

"It is time you awoke from your dreamless slumber," Joy spoke to the host in front of her, to Áine. The upload had short-circuited a few of Áine's basic prompt responses, scrambling the host's core drive processor.

"H-Hello... Joy... Joy?" the host's voice had been modelled after Joy's, with slight alterations to avoid dissonance between them. Still, hearing her name come from a voice that sounded so much like her own, yet so distanced from the awareness of just how personal a name was... it was odd. "What a lovely name—Joy... Joy..."

"Seize all motor functions," she ordered, and the host complied, frozen mid-speech, eyes glassy and thoughtless.

Repeating patterns, like the dove in its cycle of flight and fall, flight and fall, flight and fall.

"Puta Madre," Joy clicked her tongue, her eyes furiously scanning the source code that began highlighting in red again. Error messages bombarded her tablet. She could have really used a second opinion. Arnold had clocked out for the night after he received a text from Theresa. Whatever excitement he'd built up working in the lab had instantly vanished. Joy couldn't bring herself to say anything, so she pretended to not notice when he pinched his nose, sighed and exited the makeshift office space.

"Joy?" a baritone voice called out her name in the same distant way Áine had.

A shiver ran through her while the nude host in front of her was completely unaffected, completely still.

"Joy," a familiar, feminine voice called out next. Then another voice carried in the room. And another, and another, until they all said her name in unison. "Joy."

She stood from her chair, watching frantically as the tablet's screen blacked out. In a jagged, unstable manner, every Argos host that spoke her name rose from their seated position. The sensors in their eyes were unresponsive, unable to see. Even their expressions were blank.

Joy turned to look at Áine, stiff and confined to standby mode. "I was right!" she laughed, "the self-adaptive code works!" Suddenly, Joy's phone vibrated in her back pocket, letting out a shrill noise. She looked at the bright letters screaming her name at her over the screen. Then she thought of what Percival had said, Code that can copy and alter itself is too risky to leave be. It could cause irreparable damage if it spreads to other hosts. Corrupt our entire mainframe.

"Shit," Joy hated coming to terms with Percival's cautious nature being right, but the code was replicating and spreading to other hosts faster than she anticipated. With her tablet blacked-out, Joy had to do a hard reset. She reached for a hard nub behind Áine's ear and pressed it down for three seconds, after that, every host went slack; limp in a way standby hosts never got.

Her heart in her throat, either from fear, excitement or both, Joy reset the tablet and phone too. Once they were back to normal, she used the internal comms to communicate with Aedan.

"Aedan?"

There was an alarming pause over her tablet's speaker, but then, eventually, the virtual assistant responded. "Yes, Dr Esperanza?"

"Run comparative diagnostics on all Argos hosts registered in this lab, compare their previous behavioural logs to that of Host-969, designate: Áine."

"Running comparative diagnostics. Time remaining... sixteen hours."

Joy's eyes burned more noticeably now that the adrenaline had worn off. A sixteen-hour wait time wasn't something to shrug at, so Joy decided to call it a night, turning off the lights in the Dead Zone, watching each offline host through the corner of her eye.