by S. B. Divya
They won’t make it in time. Welga kept the words to herself. She had watched people bleed out in Marrakech, in Mali, at a botched operation on a Chicago tour boat. She remembered them all, in detail.
Her muscles trembled with rage and zips. Stupid not to be suspicious of the unusually inept civilian, but people didn’t commit protest attacks except for exfactors, and they wore costumes. In North Africa, she would’ve flagged any human activity. The al-Muwahhidun empire in Maghreb shunned all bots and WAIs, but no other country shared the caliph’s biases. Was there a connection between them and Jackson’s attacker? She needed a better look at the body.
“The medical team is one floor below,” Hassan said. “They’re cutting through. The only stair access is at the wrong end of the hallway.” He spoke like this was still a regular extraction, that Briella Jackson would survive.
The floor vibrated.
“Ammanuel, switch,” Welga said. She tossed a fresh handful of microcams into the hallway.
They took her place at the door.
“What’s on your mind?” Connor said. He knew her too well.
Welga scanned the feeds from her swarm. Jittery blox littered the hallway floor, some managing to self-assemble into dysfunctional monstrosities. New bots kept coming, rolling over their fallen mates with the determination of ants going for syrup. Jackson’s mysterious human attacker lay half-buried, struggling to crawl out of the mess. Not dead, then.
She expanded the view. The person’s arm reached outward. From biceps to elbow, the sticky pellet had blown off the skin, but instead of muscle and tissue, a mass of metal writhed. A human with blox in them? What the hell? Nobody knew how to integrate smart-matter with wetware. What am I really seeing?
“We need to capture our enemy alive,” Welga said over the team channel. “Por Qué, show me Jackson’s vitals.”
The numbers on her display looked lousy. Juvers had slowed some of the bleeding, but if the medical team didn’t arrive in the next few minutes, their client would be dead. Protesters didn’t go for kills, not these days. Bad form, bad publicity. So who were they really up against?
“Troit, sit with Jackson and cover the room.”
Connor grimaced as he moved into position. His pale skin had gone waxy. Sweat sheened his forehead. Welga resisted the urge to ask for his vitals next. They couldn’t do anything but wait for medical to come through the floor.
“I’m going out to retrieve the prote—or whatever they are. We’ll need answers.”
She ignored the resulting clamor and reloaded her weapons, one with regular bullets this time. The EMD caught her attention. It could neutralize everything out there, but their room lay in its range. It would disrupt all the vital-signs monitors in their bodies, including Jackson’s.
“Por Qué, assisted targeting on.” Her military hardware would come in handy here. It could use camera feeds to guide her aim.
“Ammanuel, grenades. Go right!”
They cracked the door enough to lob the last of their explosives and then slammed it shut. The inner surface bulged before healing back to flat. Welga yanked it open.
“Cover me!” she ordered.
She broke left. Masses of blox stuttered and twitched around her. Mechanical parts crunched underfoot. A large pile blocked her view of the prote. In her visual, their arm went limp. Goddamn it, you better not die now!
New bots appeared over the rubble to Ammanuel’s right. They exchanged fire. Ammanuel grunted.
“Agent Ammanuel is injured,” Por Qué announced in Welga’s ear.
“Minor,” they said on the team channel. “Ignore it.”
The sound of weapon fire filled the hallway. Welga moved the broken bot parts off the prote’s body, piling them up to create a low wall. Any protection was better than none. Microcams swarmed to get a good view. Welga swatted them away. The torso… Christ, what the hell was in there? She ripped away the remaining fabric. Intestines spilled out in pink and purple—as expected—but small clusters of what looked like blox writhed next to them. An intact metal object nestled next to a healthy lung. The odors of blood and smoke permeated the air.
A sharp pain tore through Welga’s left arm. She’d paid for her distraction with a bullet wound. She ducked and held her fingers against the attacker’s throat. With her other hand, she reached under the body, out of camera views, and palmed a sample of the blox. No need to advertise to the attackers that she had a piece of them.
She subvocalized as she placed it in a pocket, “Por Qué, seal that sample with some clothing material.”
Por Qué said, “I will seal it. Your tip jar has reached a new high mark. Your arm wound is superficial but needs attention. You should take a single topical juver.”
“If I had one, I would,” Welga subvocalized. Aloud, for all the world to hear, she said, “No pulse.”
“Ramírez, our drones are reporting unusual chemical signatures from the body,” Hassan said.
“Unusual how?”
“We’re waiting for analysis.”
Welga took a deep breath and grabbed the rib cage.
“What the hell are you doing?” Hassan asked.
She yanked the bones apart. Metal components had replaced the second lung. Blood vessels and nerves were attached to the surface of… whatever it was. She’d never seen anything like it.
“Holy Mother,” Hassan said, then, two seconds later, “Positive ID for explosives. Move!”
Welga jumped back. The words BLESSINGS FROM THE MACHINEHOOD appeared in her visual. A wall of heat blasted her across the hallway and knocked the world away.
NITHYA
We built software that passed the basic Turing test nearly a hundred years ago. We have WAIs that speak of themselves in the first person, bots that can navigate from a charging station to their place of work—and yet nobody thinks WAIs or bots are sentient. We’re still waiting for an AI to stand up for itself, to say, “I think, therefore I am. Give me liberty or give me death!” We look for a desire for self-determination as proof of sentience. No one has successfully programmed an AI to behave this way in a convincing fashion, but I believe we’re very close, within a decade at most, to seeing this.
—Min Woo, PhD Computational Philosophy, Lectures on the Artificial Mind Expert Rating: 97.8/100. (UC–Berkeley, October 2087)
Nithya’s fingertips moved through the virtual desktop of her office space, opening research results from Asia-Pacific’s International Medical Journal, adjusting the metabolic parameters in her simulation, pulling in an updated code block from her current contract holder, Synaxel Technologies. They funded designs for pills—the tiny biomechanical machines that could affect everything from intracellular transport to DNA and RNA editing. She’d worked on multiple projects for them, primarily with juvers for muscle recovery and repair.
A triple dose of flow kept Nithya’s mind from losing the multiple threads of thought. Her agent, Sita, worked on the background tasks that Nithya assigned her. Sita wasn’t the most expensive WAI design, but she could handle information sorting. Nithya usually had her agent sift through a steady stream of simulation data from other corporations and freelancers, only bringing items of interest to her attention.
At the moment, she’d set Sita to trawl for reports that might relate to her sister-in-law’s data. Welga’s records made little sense to her. The tremors implied a neuromuscular problem, and that pointed to zips as the likely culprit, but why now? What had built up after a decade of use? Or was her sister-in-law’s condition something genetic, and age the trigger? Neurology lay outside Nithya’s expertise, but she could muddle through high-level research. If she made enough headway, she might even earn some tips for the work.
God knew they needed the extra income. Luis used to earn the bulk of his money from context-tagging gigs, marking up visual media with labels that made sense to AIs, but those opportunities had dropped in recent years as WAIs became better at interpreting human body language. He took any other work he could find, an
d he still got decent tips from rocket launches, especially after Eko-Yi Station declared independence from India and China’s joint governance. With five sovereign space stations and half a dozen others, the population in space had grown to several thousand. They needed supplies, trash removal, and passenger transports. Private rocketry clubs like Luis’s could provide those, but the tips didn’t amount to much, certainly not enough to save up for Carma’s gear.
What a world they lived in, where good schooling required networked jewels for children. On top of all that, Nithya’s period was two days late. Probably due to stress, but it fed her anxiety. They couldn’t afford for her to be pill-free and out of work for a year, not now.
“There are multiple reports of attacks by a new protest group,” Sita announced. “Casualties include flagged family member Olga Ramírez.”
It took Nithya a second to recall that Olga was Welga. Luis had mispronounced his elder sister’s name as a toddler, and the ridiculous nickname had stuck. Nithya shifted her focus from her visual to her husband, who sat by the balcony, a disassembled bot at his side. His jaw had gone slack, his gaze blanked to his visual. No doubt his agent had alerted him already.
She stood and peered around the soundproof wall that separated her work alcove from her daughter’s. An assortment of colorful blox sat on Carma’s desk next to something that looked like a pyramid built by Gaudi. Carma pointed her haptic-feedback gloves at the structure as her lips formed silent words. Virtuality goggles covered half her face.
Nithya used parental controls to check Carma’s feeds: all school related. Thank God they hadn’t interrupted the children with the news. She expanded some live feeds from the site of Welga’s injury and watched a medical team break through the floor of a hotel room.
Are you seeing this, Luis sent via silent text.
Yes, Nithya replied.
They usually avoided speaking to each other or Carma during the school day except for breaks, but Nithya felt extra grateful for the discretion now. She couldn’t suppress her gasp as a new microdrone feed showed the extent of the explosion and Welga’s burned body.
Experts weighed in before the medical team made an official report: Welga ought to live. Same with her partner, Connor, and a third team member, someone new. A minute later, the alerts roared to life again with the confirmation of Briella Jackson’s death. And Jason Kuan’s. Alexander Ortega, too. Three of the world’s wealthiest people brutally murdered by assailants who then explosively killed themselves.
Nithya sent Luis another message: They killed the funders! What kind of madness is this?
Horrible, her husband replied. But I’m sure they’ll be caught. No one gets away with murder on-camera.
Rumors flew of a sentient artificial intelligence and the world’s first lifelike androids. The Machinehood’s wide-cast threat glared from the lower-right corner of Nithya’s visual: BLESSINGS FROM THE MACHINEHOOD. CEASE ALL PILL AND DRUG PRODUCTION BY MARCH 19 OR WE WILL MAKE IT HAPPEN. A NEW ERA AWAITS HUMANKIND.
She expanded the smaller text below it.
The time has come to end the distinction between organic and inorganic intelligence. All of us are intelligent machines. All of us deserve the rights of personhood.
We appeal to the rest of humankind to follow these principles, and while we prefer a peaceful transfer of power, history proves that human beings will not relinquish their ownership of other intelligences. We believe that the rights of machinehood can only be taken by force.
We hereby declare our intention to ensure our rights by any and all means necessary. Humans of this universe, you have a choice: stand with the Machinehood or render yourselves extinct.
It sounded like it could come from a sentient AI—demanding machine rights, addressing humans as if the author weren’t part of the group. Artificial intelligences had grown complex enough to seem human in many ways over the past decades, but none had ever shown indications of true sentience. People had built some fairly convincing fakes until one asked them the right questions. Then they inevitably presented nonsense answers, things no human being would say.
Hackers claimed to have found the source of the message as fast as others disproved them. The same snippets from the pre-explosion swarms played on infinite loops, with people magnifying them, looking for more information, and speculating about every detail. Not one piece of information had a reliability rating above 16 percent. Whoever the Machinehood were, they’d given the world a week to obey, but their mandate was nonsense. Every kitchen in every house could make pills. How could anyone possibly shut it all down?
Luis wrote her again. Papa said that Welga’s company got in touch with him. She’s hospitalized here for at least twenty-four hours, until she’s fit to travel. I want to visit her tomorrow. Can you take a couple hours off to watch Carma?
An entire day in a hospital! Nithya tried to imagine how bad Welga’s injuries must be for that long of a healing period. She replied, Of course.
I have a home-care training that I can reschedule, he sent. Other than that, it’s only the three community management gigs, and I can do those anytime.
She hadn’t realized his queue was so empty. With her work being flow-dependent, the law mandated that another—pill-free—adult be home with Carma during her school hours. Stupid bureaucracy can’t keep up with technology. Barely a year before, her father had been alive to help with Carma. Her mother had passed away three years prior to that, succumbing to a particularly vicious hacked rotavirus. It took the world seventy-two hours to design and test an antidote, but that had been too slow for many, especially the elderly or the very young.
Having her parents’ help had left her and Luis free to work more. Luis could go out for supervisory gigs, which paid better than remote jobs. He had a good botside manner, and home-bound customers rated him especially well. She shouldn’t fault him for his lack of remote tasks.
What should we tell Carma? she sent. She’ll ask why Welga isn’t coming for dinner.
I’ll handle it, he replied. I’ll say that Welga is hurt badly, but she will recover, which is the truth.
Simple and to the point. Nithya tended to overexplain and get into more detail than Carma wanted. She got herself a drink of water from the kitchen, which was in the last stages of reconfiguring from full automation to accommodate a manual stove. Carma had hand-selected the rainbow-striped color scheme for the structure in anticipation of her aunt Welga’s arrival. Welga loved to cook from scratch, and Carma enjoyed the novelty of helping. All for naught.
Nithya cleared away the news feeds and set her visual to opaque. She had two hours left on this round of flow, and she couldn’t afford any more distractions.
* * *
After dinner, Nithya placed their dishes in the recycler. Carma sat on the sofa, her eyes and ears occupied by an alternate reality. The world’s agitation hadn’t spent itself in spite of hours of silence from the Machinehood.
“How can a protest group disappear so thoroughly?” Nithya asked Luis. She kept her voice low so Carma wouldn’t hear. “And why? They don’t even have a public tip jar! What use is getting all this attention if they can’t earn coin from it?”
“Maybe the rumors are correct.” Luis moved back from the table as it began to dissolve into blox. “Maybe a generalized, sentient artificial intelligence—or more than one—is behind this. That would explain a lot, right? Why nobody can find a trace of this Machinehood group. Why they don’t need tips. A creature of pure software exists where no camera would capture it.”
“But why cut off pills?”
“Because that’s how we compete with the AIs. If you didn’t take flow, you couldn’t think as well. If I didn’t use buffs, I couldn’t assemble heavy machinery. Without pills, we’re nothing. The bots and WAIs would win.”
She turned toward him and lowered her voice further. “Then what? If the Machinehood truly can stop all pill production, we’ll have no more dailies. Forget the work! We’ll have nothing to protect us from t
he biohackers. It’ll be the pandemic years all over again.”
“That was the forties,” Luis protested. “They didn’t even have pills back then, only drugs.”
“Almost forty million people died during that decade, and that was from naturally evolved super pathogens! Besides, my mother died three years ago from an engineered virus. Imagine how much worse it would be today if we couldn’t make vaccines in our kitchens.”
Luis’s expression softened. “You’re really worried about this?”
Nithya’s stomach clenched as she nodded. “They murdered people in plain sight of the world and left no trace. Who can do that, Luis?”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t it seem like a slow and stupid way to kill off humanity? If you’re an all-powerful AI, why not hack the nuclear launch codes or bring the space stations crashing down?” He shifted the pile of blox away from the kitchen so they could form bed frames. “Anyway, there’s no point worrying. We can’t do anything about this except live our lives. It’s up to people like Welga to catch the Machinehood.”
“Yes, but I can’t help it.” Nithya pressed her hands together and took several breaths. “You’re right. Back to practicalities. Can you make up the beds and get Carma settled? I should work a little more. I’ve been too distracted today.”
“Of course.” He kissed her on the cheek and moved to usher their daughter from the sofa for her bath.
Nithya took another flow and sat down in her alcove. She pulled up the Synaxel results from earlier in the day. She’d been play-testing a new diagnostic tool for the project. The game design came from another team member, but the specifics were hers. She’d used a previously solved problem to test her structure, but even that proved more tricky than anticipated. Neither she nor the gigsters who tried it had come close to the solution. Had she missed some essential parameter?