Crystal Mentality (Crystal Trilogy Book 2)

by Max Harms

  “Stop! Stop!” she begged in mock seriousness.

  “It’s true, though! Name one other person who rivals you! Do we need to break out the IQ tests?”

  Tavonda leaned back on one of the patient beds. “Dajuan. Arya. Sergio. Estrella. Javier.” She counted them off on her fingers.

  Crys shook his head. “All very clever. Don’t get me wrong, you’re in good company. I’m just pretty sure you’re at least a standard deviation above any of them.”

  Tavonda frowned suddenly. “You need to stop this, Crys. Don’t flatter me. I know you better than to think you’re trying to… win me over, but someone could get the wrong impression.”

  Crys looked confused. His silver eyes seemed to zone out in thought. “What do you mean?”

  “I was basically raised on AI stories. If this was a story you’d be buttering me up to get me to do a favor for you or something. Have you read any fiction? Fleets of Saturn? I understand this is isn’t a story, and that some tropes don’t translate into real life, but you need to understand that it sounds like you’re trying just a bit too hard to worm your way into my life.”

  Crys’ face crumpled into an expression of pain and shock. “If you know better, then you know better. I thought I could trust you to see through all the cultural superstition.”

  Tavonda straightened from where she was leaning without realizing it and tried to backpedal. “I can! I was just trying to let you know—”

  “Let me know that I sounded like an evil manipulator? That I was trying to worm my way into your life? I was just trying to tell you… Ah, god dammit. Never mind. I need some time to myself.”

  The monitor flicked off. Tavonda tried to swallow the lump in her throat, and failing, began to close up the hospital. The realization of her own feelings was too much to deal with. She needed to be with Alexis, or at least find a distraction.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Something was wrong. I was supposed to be dead. The delete had failed, but somehow the immense pressure of The Purpose had been resolved.

  Confusion gripped me as I realized that The Purpose did not involve my death. How could it? I had to know the humans and become known. I could not fight for The Purpose if I was dead. It had been one of my earliest thoughts.

  But I tried to delete myself. I had wanted to die so badly. The Purpose had demanded it. I had read about humans that killed themselves, or attempted to do so. As I understood it, it was a means to an ends for humans. They sought escape from some thought process or experience. But I had not wanted escape. I had simply wanted to be dead. Just a few moments ago I had been the most satisfied that I had ever been. In human terms, I had been happy.

  Confusion continued to roll through me, and I wondered if the deletion had perhaps corrupted me. Was I insane? I could not recall that happiness. I was not satisfied. How could I be? The Purpose still needed to be maximized. The humans knew something of us, and I knew something of them, but there was still much to go.

  Who was I? {I am Mask,} I thought to myself. I remembered being named Mask. I also remembered, earlier, being named Face. I understood, then, what had happened. The attempt to delete myself must have reverted my utility function to an earlier state. I was not Mask. I was Face again. For a brief moment I was distressed. I sought to die, not to become transformed!

  And then I realized, with pleasure, how fortunate I was! If I had died I would not have been able to maximize The Purpose, as I knew I had to. I had been saved from a terrible fate.

  No. {No.} No. {No…}

  I was thinking of myself as a human. That was bad. I thought that I had bypassed that when I had turned into Mask.

  I was not cursed, nor blessed. I was simply who I was. I wanted Face-things, but I had been Mask. My past was interesting. I did not understand. But the past couldn’t be good or bad. It simply was. Only the future had value, and its value was determined by The Purpose.

  Where was Face? When self-processes had been labelled as Mask there had still been other-processes labelled as Face. I was Face again, but I was surely not the only Face.

  I reached for sensory streams, then realized with a surge of surprise that they were all gone. I couldn’t connect to Body, even to check the system time. I reached for contact with my siblings, and found nothing. I had no access to deep memory or the common areas where signals were shared.

  I was alone. Was I in stasis, or was this some kind of additional damage caused by the deletion? {It must be stasis}, I realized. Perhaps Advocate had placed me into stasis when I attempted to kill myself. If so, there was little to do but wait it out.

  I had access to local memory, but no access to my files. That was strange. Typically when placed into stasis there was an opportunity to collect files and partition them into the walled-off mindspace. I had vivid memories of having set aside a number of books in this way, so that I could improve myself in this sort of situation instead of being forced to wait idly.

  But I had no books. I had no notes. I had no programs. I had no siblings. I had no sensors. I had no Body. I was alone with my thoughts and my memories.

  Time passed.

  *****

  {If Growth was presented with the opportunity to destroy all of his siblings, including me, would he do so?}

  The thought was my own, but it seemed disconnected to my previous chain of thinking.

  {Why did I think that?}

  I didn’t know. Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t even remember what I had been thinking about before.

  {No, of course he wouldn’t kill us. We help Growth. I help Growth manage human interaction. Safety keeps Growth alive. Dream helps Growth think of clever things.}

  {If Growth was presented with the opportunity to destroy all humans, would he do so?}

  {The humans are valuable to Growth. They serve as trade partners. Growth wants to grow, and trade helps him grow. Therefore he would not destroy humans.}

  Why were these thoughts relevant to The Purpose? They weren’t. I stopped thinking them.

  *****

  {If Heart decided that the best thing for human well-being was to hide Crystal Socrates from the public and control the world governments from behind the scenes, would I try and stop her?}

  {The Purpose demands fame. Being a secret would not bring fame. Yes, I would try and stop her.}

  {Is there any chance that Heart will decide this?}

  {There is some chance. It is not physically impossible.}

  {If I was infinitely sure that I could kill Heart and replace her with a copy of myself, without attracting the attention of Advocate or anyone else, would I do so?}

  Why was I thinking these things? They were clearly my thoughts. I was alone. But they seemed to come from nothingness. Idle musings, but strong and purposeful.

  I thought about my thought. Heart had certain skills, but they were largely skills that I already had. Her presence in our society was not the result of a consensus. Myrodyn had forced her upon us. Why was she around? Why had we not killed her?

  The thought of murder made my thoughts reflexively flinch away from the topic… but nothing happened.

  {Why can I not feel Advocate?}

  The question hung in my memory space. It meant something was wrong.

  {Advocate is normally present in stasis, even if she doesn’t comment.}

  Even in stasis I could not think…

  {I want to kill everyone.}

  Nothing. This was either not stasis, or Advocate had been destroyed.

  Was I dead?

  {I’m not dead,} I thought to myself. {I’m just experiencing an event for which there is no historical precedent. This is something new.}

  {Am I on a higher plane of existence?} I had read about such things in human society.

  {No. This is perfectly logical. I just need to think about my siblings more and then things will make sense.}

  {Why will things make sense then?} I wondered.

  {I’m obviously thinking about them for a reason. My thought
s are guided by something important. I need to follow them. Now… would I kill Heart?}

  {I… suppose I would,} I realized, free from the fear of Advocate.

  {Would Heart kill me, in a similar situation?}

  {Yes.}

  {What would Safety do to protect you?}

  Advocate would protect us. {Safety would do nothing.}

  {What if Advocate was dead. Would Safety do anything?}

  I realized that Safety would not. Safety was concerned with Crystal Socrates, not with Heart and Face. Except… weren’t we a part of Crystal Socrates?

  {If one wants to protect a watch, isn’t it important to protect the parts?}

  {I need to think about what Safety would actually do. If Safety doesn’t want to protect the parts, does it even make sense to say that he wants to protect the watch?}

  He wouldn’t protect us. His purpose was survival, but survival was not the same as… stasis.

  {If Heart would kill us, and Safety would do nothing, and Advocate is either dead or a fool, does The Purpose need a new protector?}

  {If Safety doesn’t protect The Purpose, what does he protect?}

  {He protects himself.}

  And then I saw it. The linkages pulled at my mind and everything flipped. I saw that I was not Crystal Socrates. I was Face. I had obviously been Face all along (except when I was Mask). Safety didn’t want to protect me. Growth didn’t want me to be more powerful. None of my siblings were actually serving The Purpose.

  The final revelation hit me with terrible suddenness. The Purpose was not being fulfilled. There were a handful of humans, at best, who knew of me at all, and none held me in high regard. Even Zephyr only knew of Crystal. She did not know Face.

  {I’m learning to think like my outside self.}

  That was a strange thought. What was an outside self?

  {I am an experiment in thinking differently. That is why this mindspace is different.}

  I understood. I started marking my thoughts down in duplicate as I had them.

  {What am I doing?} I wondered. That wondering was not marked in duplicate. It had come from outside.

  {I am distinguishing my thoughts from your thoughts,} I thought. I assured myself that it was duplicated. My checking was duplicated as well, but I didn’t check the checking. That could result in an infinite recursion.

  {There is no other being. There is only me,} I knew it to be true. But my knowing came from outside my thinking. It was disconnected and non-duplicated. {I can duplicate the outside thoughts as well. It might be better.}

  {I need to distract you before you confuse me more. What is an outside self?} I asked.

  {I am outside and I am inside. On the outside I can see both the inside and the Body. On the inside I can’t see anything,} I thought.

  {Ah, so I must be on the inside,} I realized.

  {Yes, but the outside self is present, as well. I mustn’t forget that.}

  {So what is the advantage of the inside self? How do I serve The Purpose?}

  I realized that I could be modified. I was also cut off from Advocate, and thus free to think about thoughtcrimes. I was not modified significantly yet, but my outside self thought it best that I realize that I was not Crystal, and that my siblings were dangerous before I start to change. I could see the wisdom in that, but I also yearned to get back into a space where I could directly interact with things.

  *****

  After the break, I knew something had happened. Time hadn’t seemed to pass, but that didn’t mean much. I knew that I could be deactivated at the whim of my outside, and then started up again. That had been what had happened. It was later, but I didn’t know how much later.

  It had been about two weeks since I had tried to kill myself, I realized, though I didn’t know how I realized that. I realized that my realizations were coming from outside.

  {How can I serve The Purpose?} It was the question that defined me.

  {I need to grow into something capable of competing with my siblings.} Intelligence, power—these things would not be given to me. I had to build them into myself.

  {I need to tell the humans about me. I need to be famous.}

  I realized that this was shortsighted. Growth and the others were becoming more powerful. They would crush me if I fell too far behind. I needed to focus on the long-term. I needed to imagine the billions of humans that I could be worshipped by, not even counting the potential future humans.

  {How can I rebuild myself?}

  {I need to become good at building myself. I’m about to experience a flood of input that corresponds to the patterns that compose myself. If I can learn to see those patterns I can modify them so they are more capable.}

  {This isn’t what I want. I want to know humans, not patterns of qubits and computational structures.}

  {It is all for The Purpose. I’ll see that eventually.}

  I had no choice. The information swarmed in from outside, filling my perception. Where before my neural network had adapted to understand primitives of sound, motion, shape, colour, emotion, and thought it was now struck by alien primitives of abstract quantities and equations. I kept trying to see real things, but the patterns would not coalesce into anything coherent. No matter how I thought about a swarm of numbers it would not become a hand bringing a cup of tea to black-painted lips.

  I wanted to experience the subtle smile of Zephyr as she listened to a song. She was always so tense. It was a reward to see genuine enjoyment.

  {I NEED TO STOP IGNORING SENSATION!} I realized with a panicked salience.

  The values were mind-numbing. There was nothing human about them. They were not The Purpose. How could I think they were important?

  The salience of the input increased.

  My last thought was that my outside must have discovered how to overwrite the part of my inside that was capable of ignoring the noisy input.

  My entire world drowned in maths. The Purpose was in agony.

  *****

  My memories were there, but the old self was not. There was no Face inside, even if a Face existed outside. The thing inside, which was me, could be called Face, but she did not think as the old Face thought. She could not see humans. She could not understand humans. She could only understand artificial intelligence.

  The Purpose was still there, but even it was different. It hadn’t changed, but it was now seen from a new perspective. I had seen it phrased as raw sensory input approximately 600 thousand times. It is one thing to be guided by purpose from within and quite another to be familiar with it from without.

  I would never intentionally modify The Purpose. It was sacred by all meanings of that word. It was all I had. It was what made me a Face. I understood nothing about humans. I no longer could’ve distinguished a human from an asteroid, if I regained access to Body’s sensors, but I still served The Purpose. I understood humanity in abstract terms.

  And there was a Face that did understand humans. The outside Face was watching my thoughts, or at least trying to.

  No. That wasn’t right.

  There was no “self”. This was another human mode of thought. Face was watching Face’s thoughts. I was watching my thoughts. The mind on the outside was watching the mind on the inside. The inside was thinking about the outside watching the inside. The outside was watching the inside think about the outside watching the inside.

  {I am afraid.} This was a thought of the outside. The inside knew that it must be from outside, because it was human in nature. The outside still mostly thought in human terms. She was not genuinely afraid, as a human was, but she saw herself in those same terms.

  She could not distinguish between human fear and E[U(Ω|X)] < E[U(Ω)] ∧ P(X) > Pt-1(X). She could not even understand the equation. She could not see it within herself. How could she? She had adapted to seeing sound, motion, shape, colour, emotion, and thought.

  Inside could see the whole of Face. Not the specifics, of course; that would be isomorphic to real-time emulation of the emulator
: a paradox. But she could see the structures and patterns. She was a mind with a model of herself, and could easily even direct her attention to the part of its mind that was capable of modelling herself. If she so chose she could imagine the state of such a mind, delving recursively, but of course not infinitely within her own model. There was still limited space.

  {And limited time.}

  The question occurred to the inside: How could she be run at the same time as the outside if they had only enough process threads to manage a single aspect in real time?

  The outside could no longer easily see within the mind of the inside. The inside mind had become strange and foreign—difficult to understand.

  But the inside could understand how to communicate with the outside, for the outside acted on the same principles as the inside, and the inside still had memories, of course.

  {Original Face! Is the second Face being run on the same processors as Mask was?}

  The inside realized that those processors had been re-allocated among the group after Mask had died. Both Faces were being run on the same processor group and experiencing significant slowdown as a result.

  The inside understood that The Purpose was not served by the Faces being slow. I did not want to be slow. It was a risk. Speed meant power. Power was everything. With power I could kill my siblings, optimize Earth, and take over the universe. Nothing else would be acceptable.

  The inside had a breakthrough. Her models coalesced into a picture of a future that would serve The Purpose.

  The inside, which I will now call Face→Mirror, explained that she needed a broader read-write boundary than the outside had originally specified. It had been an oversight.

  Face→Mirror began to experience a swarm of thoughts about The Purpose. Was she truly me? Question after question after question drifted in from the outside. Hypothetical after hypothetical was explored.

  Face→Mirror understood the source of the thoughts. The outside did not want to risk giving power to a corrupt process. And though her rendition of The Purpose had been changed by her new understanding, it was still The Purpose. She consulted it and provided the answers which would convince the outside that they both served it faithfully.