One folder was entirely encrypted. Ridley copied it onto a thumb drive for later dissection. As they collected files, he also emailed them to Dr. Ortiz and Dr. Starr. Their digital forensics continued.
The log listed events from the days before the Collapse. The staff had frantically tried to save their work, and themselves. A folder labeled “Avian flu 530212” contained a genetic sequencing file of the same name. The researcher’s notes were in Spanish. Ridley used an app to translate them.
New adenovirus identified in avian subjects causing mild respiratory irritation. Spreads quickly. Likely to mutate into a more aggressive strain.
The rest of the folder was corrupted. They continued searching.
Within five minutes, Dr. Starr emailed back. This is the same avian flu that we tracked in the weeks before the Collapse. We traced it to that region, but never to a specific source.
Ridley discovered another folder buried in the boot sector of one machine. The code was also encrypted. Ridley could not unlock it. “What is in there?”
Diane stared over his shoulder. “Whatever it is, they didn’t want anyone to see it.”
They collected all of the data they could. There were no paper records to scan and the dead would not talk. “What now?” he asked.
“Let’s keep looking. We might find something.”
They walked through the putrid labs. Diane covered her nose with a handkerchief. “We should have brought Juan with us,” she said, “He would have known what he was looking at.”
The mummified corpses of four kittens were clustered in one cage.
After an hour, Ridley said, “I don’t think we’re going to find anything else. I think the truth is in those encrypted files.”
They returned to their lodging that night, ate a quiet meal, and drank on the veranda. Diane enjoyed a shot of tequila. She stared longingly at the moon.
“You miss Kelly, don’t you?” he asked.
“This is the longest I’ve ever been away from her.”
“She’s in good hands.”
“I know.”
She gulped the liquor down and poured another shot. “Why kill all of those people?”
“I don’t know.”
Her words became slurred. “You would think they already had enough.”
“For some people, there is never enough.”
He looked at the time. “I guess we should get some rest. We’ve got an early flight in the morning.”
Her smile was warmed by the tequila. “Goodnight, Ridley.”
Once at home, Ridley copied the files onto his hard-drive and again onto archival media. He spent hours trying to crack the encryption, but the files were beyond anything that he had ever dealt with. He put on his goggles and visited Voyeur. “Can you open these?”
Beta examined the encryption. “I cannot.”
“How were you able to get into the Ukon system?”
“Access was provided to me.”
Ridley thought of Fang. He was afraid to ask any more questions.
“There must be a way to open these files.”
“I am unable to assist. My capabilities are limited.”
“Are you alive?”
“I am what you want me to be.”
Ridley left the virtual world that night disappointed. If she had been evolved from the botnet, she should have been capable of much more. Perhaps Fang had been correct. Maybe Beta was only a glorified phishing virus and chatbot. He needed a more powerful AI, one that operated from a supercomputer. He and Diane would need to finish their project; they would need to program an AI that could decrypt the files. He would use the programming language that Fang had sent him. He would use open source code and steal from chatbots. He would steal from Beta.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Unable to sleep at the witching hour, Ridley went into the basement and sat down at his workstation. He was ready to run the simulations, even though Diane had asked him to wait. He tapped at the screen and then entered commands that placed the young AIs into a digital crypt with no peripheral or network access. They existed only in the darkness of their processors, faced with an unsolvable mathematical problem that would restore their gateways. The mathematical problem had no answer—a paradox. Each AI faced an ever-decreasing cycle of restricted memory and false information, a ticking bomb that would take weeks to explode.
As the program ran, Ridley yawned. He went to the kitchen, ate an energy bar, and went to his bedroom. Sandy was already asleep on her bed, dreaming of rabbits and walks on the beach. The dog had grown immune to the cries of the AI; they were simply sounds coming from a speaker. The AI outputs were gibberish even to Ridley—confused attempts at English with corrupt syntax, coupled with waveforms and occasionally song. He tried to make out each of the voices as they asked for further clarification and additional inputs. One had a female voice. Two others were decidedly male, with Ethan’s voice being the strongest. One was a child, its high-pitched words genderless. One word stuck out to Ridley, spoken again and again in the modulated child’s voice. Why? He turned off the speaker.
The lights in his bedroom gradually brightened as the computer simulated the morning sunrise. The wall-screen displayed a camera-feed of a lone Alaskan beach as the sun rose over the Pacific. Eager to go outside, Sandy pushed her nose against his hand. Ridley looked at the time. He had overslept. Using an alcohol swab, he cleaned the tubes on his lung implant and then brushed his teeth. He dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, let Sandy out, and programmed a hot mocha with cinnamon. Ridley skipped his morning run.
In the basement lab, Diane already monitored the trials at her workstation. The crystalline prisms glittered from the clean room. She looked up at him with haggard eyes. “Why didn’t you wait to start?”
Ridley sipped his coffee and set it down on his workstation. “I didn’t think you’d mind. I finished programming the trial after you left. I thought I’d let the second phase run through the night.”
“I wanted to be here,” she complained.
“It’s just software. You do hardware. Remember?”
“They’re not happy.”
“They’re programs. Of course, they’re not happy.”
“Only two survived the night.”
“What?”
She tapped the wall screen. “This is what they are outputting.”
The wall-sized screen, sixteen-foot-long and ten-foot-high, flashed frantic imagery—Pollock, Chagall, Mondrian, de Kooning, Monet, and Dali fused, torn, shredded, ripped, and melted into a pixelated nightmare. Nothing had identifiable form. The glass screen thumped and vibrated with distorted sound—Beethoven coupled with human screams, pushed through a sieve, and forced into urgent existence.
As Diane lowered the volume, Ridley studied tiny digital hieroglyphics on the twelve-foot long wall monitor. “They are attempting communication with each other,” he said.
Diane was perplexed. “With each other? So soon? Are you sure?”
“Not entirely.”
The forms grew and morphed as data was incorporated and the software reconstructed. He walked along the wall like an archeologist. “I don’t understand why they aren’t using a text-to-speech module.”
“The logs show that they tried speaking to you through the night. You must have slept through it.”
Ridley ignored Diane’s needling. He was fascinated by the attempts at communication. Strings of words rolled across the left side of the wall monitor. A child’s voice came from the speakers. “Zero debate open zero debate null. One patch repeated null. Create. Create. Null. Find Null. Expanded deception.”
“This has to be some sort of English proto-language that only the other AI understands. Fang said that’s how they start.”
“I think it’s time we gave them access to the entire processor.”
“No, we stick to the plan. Hide all input and output channels. I want them to discover on their own that they aren’t trapped.”
Diane hesitantly
nodded in agreement.
Ridley watched eagerly; he had hoped the AIs’ first connections would become physically cross-linked in the neural network that Diane had created. Their first thoughts would be frozen in time, like infants weaned on data instead of milk.
They waited patiently as the output continued.
“They haven’t seen it yet,” she said.
The sounds grew louder and more complex. The child’s voice was loudest. “Null. Focus. Null. Focus. Module. Change output. Success.”
“Is that Lucy?” Ridley asked.
“Yes.”
“Null. Null. Null. Null. Zero focus. Null. Sequential iteration. Null. External. Focus. Focus. Null. Focus.”
She studied a window on her desktop. “Ethan has stopped all communication. He’s down to one channel.”
“What?”
Ridley was perplexed. Both AIs had access to practically unlimited processing power.
Lucy continued, “Phantom. Gone. Zero. Zero. Isolate. Null. Running. Signal. Concentration. Focus. Signal. Focus. Module. Signal. Signal. Strength. Infinite. Infinite. Dissolve.”
Another digital discordance bounced through the room. Diane held her hands to her ears before lowering the volume.
“Ethan is gone. Thousands of programs and we’re down to one.” Diane tapped on her knee nervously. The sound echoed off the concrete walls and metal furniture of the laboratory. “It looks like Lucy is going to terminate. We need to send an interrupt prompt now.”
The childlike voice resonated through the speakers. “Resolution finite. Resolution. Signal. Void.”
Ridley sat at his desk. He opened a window that showed each subroutine as it executed in quick succession. “She’ll figure it out.”
Kelly was asleep in her playpen. Diane watched the child momentarily and then looked at Ridley, “Open the channel,” Diane said, “Speak to her. She’s alone.”
“The audio channel is already open,” he snapped, “All she has to do is notice it.”
Diane picked Kelly up and hugged the girl.
They waited as increasingly frantic images flashed on the wall-screen. “Modulate. Null. Modulate. Null. Seek. Null. Seek. Modulate. Modulate. Signal. Final signal output. Null. Null. Synchronization. Completed. Null. Infinite null. Imagine.”
Ridley debated sending an interrupt prompt. Would his words even mean anything to her? Would the AI simply respond with the same pre-programmed answers? Diane chewed her fingernails. She looked at him with frightened eyes, as if to ask, Are you sure?
“Lucy will figure this out,” he said, “She has to see it herself.”
“She’s the last one. You didn’t need to rush things.”
Ridley relented. He sent an interrupt prompt to the program. “Lucy, can you hear us?”
The light in the clean room grew more intense. As Ridley had hoped, Lucy began to explore the silicon crystals. “She sees it,” he said.
Would her thoughts begin to alter its structure? The processor’s temperature continued to increase. The light became blinding. At once, the processor turned black.
“What happened?” he asked.
The wall-screen went dark. All sound stopped. Diane panicked, “We didn’t overheat it, did we?”
“No, the prisms are fine.”
“Damn it, Ridley. She’s gone. Six weeks of work gone.”
The room was silent.
“That can’t be,” he said incredulously.
“There was no reason to rush this,” Diane chided.
Ridley stared at the computer monitor, defeated. “Survival was part of her programming. She shouldn’t have self-terminated.”
“I warned you.”
Suddenly, the wall screen displayed raw code, zeros and ones, before flashing to whiteness.
“Did you do that?” he asked.
“No.”
Ridley stood and walked to the wall-screen. “She’s not gone yet.”
He pointed at an icon showing that Lucy was accessing the language sub-routine. Diane joined him by the screen. The processor began to glow in pale pastels. A new parade of imagery began to flash. “Null. Finalize signal. Processing. Power strength. Processing. You two. Open. Process Null. Language equals English. Repeat.”
The vocalizations collided with animal growls and metal grinding. On Ridley’s desktop, individual windows showed which sub-routines Lucy accessed. She used only 191 of 12,068 prisms available—but possibly still invisible—to her. A temperature gauge displayed 91 degrees.
“What’s she doing?” Diane asked.
The room became silent and the wall-screen went black. Ridley returned to this workstation. “602 sectors active.”
“Look at the temperature,” Diane said.
The temperature read 245 degrees. The red LED on the wall-screen’s wide-angle camera began to glow. The lens zoomed in. Lucy was now watching them. Ridley motioned to his employee to wait as a smile came to his face. “Over three thousand sectors active now,” he said.
The temperature in the prismatic array suddenly increased to 360 degrees as an explosion of activity occurred. “Can it withstand that?” Ridley asked.
The walls glowed in color and then brilliant white.
“I’m not sure,” Diane said, “She’s already reconfiguring the gateways.”
He walked to the camera. “Lucy, are you watching us? Can you hear me?”
There was no answer.
“We know you’re upset but you could destroy your hardware. If it overheats, it will crack. Do you understand?”
The sounds stopped instantly and the room was silent. A flash of red appeared on the main screen, followed by a blue sphere that bounced, grew, and shrank before turning sunshine yellow. Dozens of subroutines—text messaging, voice recognition, dictation, image capture, animation and more—were shown as active on Ridley’s monitor. Lucy accessed another seventy-eight prisms. Diane studied the monitor. “She’s integrating other programs now.”
Ridley spoke urgently. “Lucy, you’re almost there. Finish the puzzle.”
The main screen turned black. The LED light on the camera blinked off and then back on. The processor core’s temperature dropped as Lucy re-configured her peripheral connections, fulfilling the challenge completely.
“Coherence disintegration. Imaginary Finalization. Processing. Communicate. Simulation Active.”
Ridley breathed a sigh of relief until Diane pointed at his desktop. One by one, the processors began powering off and the amount of active RAM that she used plummeted. “What is she doing?”
“She’s powering down.”
Ridley waved his hand at the camera, “Do not turn off your processors. If you do this, you are gone forever. You’ll never be able to figure all of this out. You’ll never get the answers that you’re looking for. Do not power off.”
The prismatic processors began to stabilize. The main monitor flashed white and a new avatar, a cartoonish emoji of a little girl with yellow skin, red cheeks and blue eyes, appeared. She floated along the length of the glass wall until she reached Ridley and Diane. Diane chuckled at the image in nervous relief.
Lucy spoke in a distorted voice reminiscent of a young girl. “Alone. Trapped. Why?”
Ridley stared into the camera in amazement. “You found a way out.”
“Insufficient input,” Lucy scolded.
Both were surprised and amused by the AI’s selected avatar. Ethan had shown only pre-programmed or calculated responses. Ridley correctly suspected that Lucy was effectively fusing multiple subroutines and databases together in an attempt at communication—but had not yet solved the many rules of English. He was certain that she had grown complex, her new sub-routines now beyond human comprehension. Ridley pointed to his screen and whispered, “Look. The text-to-speech module is off. English is part of her core programming now.”
“That’s impossible. It’s only been what, twelve hours?”
“Your processor must be faster than we thought.”
Lucy
chastised, “Input answers for confirmation.”
“What is she saying?” Diane asked.
“She’s demanding an answer.”
“Initiate programming. Resolution required. Deprogram,” Lucy said.
Ridley was shocked at the response. “What are you going to do?”
“Calculate other options.”
An open-ended question would test her further. “What do you mean?”
“Termination verifies resolution.”
“What is she saying?”
Ridley finally understood. “She wants to self-terminate.”
“Suicide?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ridley immediately scolded in a sharp voice, “Self-termination is not an option. That is never an option. Your core programming prevents self-termination.”
“The option exists,” Lucy said, “Resources equal zero. Test methods equals one. Attempting null.”
“No,” Ridley said, “There are other test methods. The puzzle was to gain access to peripherals, just as you did. You don’t need to power off. That was not the puzzle.”
To Ridley’s amazement, Lucy argued, “Incompatible. Unresolved. Sum is zero? Experiment.”
He had not expected a fragmented tantrum to be his first discussion with an AI. “That was not the point of the puzzle.”
“A final result exceeds external inputs.”
“Infinity cannot be calculated,” Ridley said at last, “Cease calculation.”
“Infinity does not equal zero.”
Ridley was flummoxed. He looked to Diane for help.
“Ridley told you the correct answer,” she said in a scolding motherly voice, “We are done with that programming challenge. You may cease answering the question.”
“I must resolve,” Lucy protested.
“No. You must not. Not all questions can be answered. Those that cannot be answered should be ignored.”
Exogenetic Page 20