by M. D. Cooper
The passel of nano that he’d dropped there made its way into the gate’s security system and, from that point, Prime had traced his way into the company’s main communications node. With his newfound Norden knowledge, he’d been able to manipulate Enfield’s pulse cannons and remove their interlocks before the next morning.
Humans and AIs would search for the trigger that had set off the cannons at the Enfield facility, but every trail would run cold. Prime had left nothing for them to find but pathways that led to dead ends.
Therein lay the pleasure, outwitting those less capable and pitting his skills against those less adept. Prime had all the knowledge and abilities of his progenitor with none of the annoying ethical constraints that went with it. He knew neural nets. He understood neural quantum circuitry like no one else on this ring.
Ordinarily, this would not translate to the matrices within a ring’s net, as it contained segmentation and security parameters that a human brain did not organically have, yet with his newly-acquired knowledge of systems hacking, Prime experienced a freedom of movement unknown by the average individual.
If he could not hide his actions, then he simply rewired. He misdirected, providing false sensory impressions and signals that returned the answers he chose to queries they made.
Yes, this was pleasure.
As satisfying as this had been, Prime admitted to himself that this initial cleansing had felt rushed, and the outcome on a smaller scale than he would have liked. He knew he could do better, could orchestrate something truly magnificent in scope, if he could just force himself to be a bit more patient.
Prime recalled the three Humanity First vermin he had killed in the alley, and he realized that he had a taste for the up close and personal. He would plan his next target more carefully. Next time, he would be more directly involved.
But first, he had a prime minister to contact.
VEILED WEB
STELLAR DATE: 05.19.3191 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Prime Minister’s Office, Parliament House
REGION: El Dorado Ring, Alpha Centauri System
The voice whispering across the Link startled Lysander out of studying the SIS’s report on the slaughter at Enfield.
He immediately traced its source—and came up short. The voice appeared to come from within his own mind. Which was impossible.
There. Lysander reached for it, racing to follow, to trace its path. It was everywhere, in the fabric of the ring’s net itself.
How in the stars…?
Lysander pushed out into the net—his advisors would have fits if they knew—and fashioned an environment just outside Parliament House’s primary node.
The environment could have been called an expanse…it was, of a sort. This expanse, however, functioned like a check valve or a data diode; it did not possess what organics would consider a ‘physical space’, instead only containing raw data and thought.
Once the signal that contained an AI’s communication filtered through, the pattern was recorded and would serve as an electronic fingerprint of sorts, evidence he could turn over to Gladys to dissect later.
It was a little trick he’d picked up, thanks to a long-defunct company back in Sol known as the Psion Group—whose demise he did not mourn. There was still the chance that the wielder of the voice would notice the diminished signal return indicating the presence of a data diode, but that was a chance Lysander was willing to take.
The thoughts came across multiple network pathways, each iteration arriving microseconds apart, creating a sort of hollow echo around Lysander. There was no tone or inflection to the words as he parsed them. If it had been audible, he would have considered it to be manufactured—a machine voice, a disguise.
Aspects of the speaker caused him to identify the sinister speaker to be as male; but where was he? Who was he?
The probes Lysander sent into the ring’s network continued their attempts to trace the message source, but as they hopped through thousands of relays, the tracebacks eventually fell into endless loops.
Lysander shifted his tracing a layer in the networking stack, delving deeper into the fabric of the web. The voice seemed to be coming from the relay nodes and transmission lines of the ring’s network. It had no source, but every message terminated at him.
The voice laughed once. Bitterly.
The voice stopped.
Lysander let the silence build, then finally, he spoke.
The voice ignored him, instead beginning to send nonsensical data—almost like a hum. It carried on in a mechanical yet singsong cadence, and Lysander received an impression of a mind that wasn’t entirely sane. Then it spoke again.
Suddenly, instead of traversing the networks, the voice was all around Lysander, seeping in through the walls of the modified expanse. He schooled his thoughts, dampening his own presence so that it wouldn’t interfere with the diode’s ability to capture the pattern sufficiently enough to get a positive ID.
After a moment, he sent it a question.
It laughed.
Lysander didn’t bother acknowledging an obvious truth.
Lysander waited, wondering what enlightenment the voice had suddenly perceived.
The voice sped up, became almost manic.
The network connections reaching into the expanse shifted, and for a moment, Lysander felt a buildup, an increase in the frequency of the packets coming across the net, and then more ports opened into his expanse. He sensed the creature was close to losing control. But if he did, the sudden discharge that would result—
Abruptly, the network traffic returned to normal.
The voice that ‘echoed’ along the edges of the expanse was now edged with anger, the words transmitted holding an ugly, raw flavor.
Lysander startled at that, then focused his attention on the networking structure he had erected in the node, working to harness the impenetrable wall of thought probing at the boundaries of Lysander’s modified expanse.
Lysander’s emotions stuttered, and panic began to unfurl. Had the creature just targeted Jason and Judith? He couldn’t tell.
ent.
The words were followed by such an utter silence and cessation of data flow, that had it been a physical encounter, Lysander would have staggered forward.
He could tell the AI was gone. The faintest of vibrations, the stir in the air had stilled. He scanned the walls of his cage; the networking protocols the AI had interleaved within his own were absent. Lysander withdrew back to his offices, a quiet dread building in the back of his mind.
* * * * *
Prime’s thoughts raced as he continued his measured pace, walking the streets of Sonali between the university and Parliament House.
I should not have allowed Lysander to anger me.
The AI’s presence bespoke power. Prime had never felt its like before.
Although, he admitted, I’ve never pitted myself against a Weapon Born before, either. Not sure I could best him, if it came down to brute processing power.
Fortunately, with the skills from Norden he now possessed, he had learned it was possible to infiltrate the n-level matrices within an AI’s mind—not as nimbly as his progenitor could navigate the dense tangle of dendrites, axon terminals and glial cells that comprised the human brain—but still, it could be done.
This was a valuable tool. It had enabled him to slip through the trap Lysander had laid for him. Not that Lysander could have ever trapped Prime; things didn’t work that way for any sentient.
AIs were as much hardware as they were software, every bit as much as humans were. But just as a human had identifying traits unique to an individual—fingerprint, retina, DNA—so too did an AI. That was the insidious nature of Lysander’s trap.
That the prime minister had set such a trap to neutralize a fellow AI crystallized Prime’s conviction: Lysander had been brainwashed to accept humans as equals.
He spun off a subroutine to search for Jason Andrews’ location. Judith’s he knew all too well; he would enjoy concocting something very special for her.
Perhaps Lysander could be salvaged once their influence over him had been erased—or perhaps not. He’d have to see; Prime’s progenitor had never met the AI. Ethan’s only exposure to Lysander had been the request Judith had made on his behalf just last week when she asked him to find a way to counteract the effects of the shackling program.
The program….
The idea hit Prime so suddenly, he stopped mid-stride. So absorbed was the AI in his thoughts that he paid no heed to where he was or what was going on around him. A pedestrian bumped into him with a quick apology, which Prime ignored.
Stars! This is brilliant—and deliciously ironic.
The AI stood in the midst of the bustling Sonali street, humans passing him on every side—and then he began to laugh.
I’ll reverse-engineer the program to shackle humans. I’ll enslave them.
Not all, of course, just enough to see to basic needs. Prime was certain humans had their uses. For one, those meat-suits had opposable thumbs, whereas an AI’s cylinder did not.
Prime’s musings were interrupted by a loud voice that came from a grassy park-like expanse just ahead. Whoever it was had drawn a small crowd. As he approached, Prime saw a human speaking to a holo reporter. The man’s body language was explosive and angry.
“How many times do I have to tell you? The damn things can’t be trusted! Those fancy little cylinders aren’t people—” the man drew the word out in emphasis, “—we created them. Hell,” he laughed, “we’re, like, their god. But do they appreciate that?”
The human’s face screwed up in scorn as he spit once on the lawn.
“Oh, hell no. They’d just as soon gun us down. Like what they did to all those innocent humans, doing nothing but exercising their civil right to protest—just like any decent human would.”
The speaker tapped his forehead. “They ain’t right, up in here, you know what I mean?” He coughed a laugh. “Sheeeee-it. They don’t even have an ‘up here’ to speak of. It ain’t natural, I tell you.”
This man will do nicely, Prime thought vindictively, for my next victim.
An organic with the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the stupidity to voice anti-AI rhetoric.
Ferreting his way into the local relay nodes, Prime identified the man’s connection tokens and Link address. Once he had noted it for easy tracing later, he resumed his walk back to the spaceport.
As he entered the flat he had rented nearby, Prime accessed the net and checked Ethan’s university account. The scientist’s message cache was filled with icons, but one stood out. Its token was from the prime minister’s office. The subject line read, ‘progress update request re: special project’.
Given that he’d inherited all of his progenitor’s memories, he knew that Ethan had examined the original shackling program the prime minister’s office had sent. He’d even begun to write a program that would trace and terminate every thread of nano that had burrowed itself deep within an AI’s matrices.
Prime reviewed it now, finding the benefit of speed in his single-mindedness that the scientist, burdened by his other responsibilities, had lacked. Up to this point, Prime had felt pity on his progenitor, trapped by the mundane, cowed and bullied into compliance.
Seeing how quickly Ethan could have solved this and rendered aid to his own kind, Prime felt a flash of hot anger directed toward the AI.
Ethan had relegated the problem to ‘outside office hours’ out of a misplaced desire to emulate humans—a species woefully unable to multitask. The scientist had steadfastly refused to focus on nothing but university-related matters during the hours he was ‘on the clock’.
Inexcusable.
In that moment, Prime regretted placing the AI in the isolation tube, wishing instead he had crushed the cylinder when it had been suspended in the autodoc’s mechanical claws.
Startled at where his thoughts had taken him—the destruction of one of his own—Prime paused.
Who lives and who dies for the cause might not be as clear-cut as I initially thought, he mused. Some AIs may need to be sacrificed for the greater good.
Lysander, possibly. Ethan, most likely, if only for expediency’s sake; the longer his progenitor’s cylinder remained in that closet, the greater his chances of discovery.
Swiftly, he completed the package Ethan had begun. The new program removed filaments that had insinuated nano into every n-level matrix of thought and emotion in an AI’s neural net. He packaged it up into a deployable overlay patch and set it aside.
Then he bent to the task of applying corresponding human equivalences where AI values once resided.
The similarities between human and AI neural nets were far more pronounced than most realized. Both were plastic creations, meaning that they could be altered and modified on the cellular level.
Humans tend to forget that we are analog beings, just as they are. We simply aren’t organic analog beings.
What this meant was they shared many neural features, including the finiteness of certain mental resources. In humans, the prefrontal cortex and the anterior singular cortex were the two regions that housed the executive action part of the brain. Executive action was an effortful exercise of something humans called self-control. Willpower.
AIs had this as well, and in both species, it was finite.
Finite means it can be exhausted, Prime thought in satisfaction. All I need to do is create a program that will drain the reservoir.
It took a bit longer to redesign the shackling program, to turn off the neurotransmitters responsible for willpower, using a mix of neurochemical controls where the control codes for an AI had once resided.
Nano filaments programmed to infiltrate through the optic nerve provided easy access to unmodded humans; minor enhancements to the filaments would render modded humans and those buffered against AI intrusion helpless to counter the shackles’ invasion—a gift granted by the shackling program’s insidious attac
k protocols.
Prime glanced once again at the blinking icons in Ethan’s message queue, and his gaze lingered on one from two AI students. They had been so irate on Ethan’s behalf, incensed that humans would treat an AI so poorly.
I wonder if I might find allies among the students. Or in other AIs who are equally disenfranchised.
Prime’s attention returned to the original shackling program he had just reworked to entrap humans, and he paused, mentally turning over the upper-level code abstractions in his mind.
Other AIs might be trusted—but for a mission of this magnitude, Prime could ill afford a change of heart. If an AI were to be recruited to the cause, it would be necessary to shackle them, too.
Call it…a benevolent shackling. Limited only by their inability to betray the cause.
Prime opened the original program the prime minister’s office had sent, adding a backdoor and a sleeper command that would allow his token to access and control it.
He reopened the extraction program he had created to free enslaved AI, altering its code to return a null value should the program ever encounter Prime’s own version of shackling. Then he sent it on to the Prime Ministry, under Ethan’s name.
Satisfied with his work, Prime turned his attention to the human he’d identified earlier that day, tracing its Link connections, and triangulating its physical location. The icon was at rest. Pinging the location, Prime discovered the man was in a bar.
Sending a query along local network paths near the human’s location, Prime found a few remote cameras he could hack. The images showed the man standing before a Humanity First banner, once more spewing invective.
Oh look. More vermin to be exterminated.
Prime searched the net for any references to Humanity First at this location, and quickly realized this must be the de facto headquarters for his target’s chapter of the organization. A bit more searching brought up a schedule.
How convenient. Another meeting, same time tomorrow. I think I’ll add myself to the agenda.