by Ginger Booth
Nico gulped as Siena woke the dignitary from his nap, and introduced them. The chocolate-skinned man yawned mightily. His feet clunked to the ground and he beckoned them to take a seat. “You look a bit young for MU, Nico. But Professor Oort says great things about you.”
Clearly the guy was humoring him. Nico herded Sock into the pair of chairs before his desk. Four computer displays screened the lab leader from his visitor chairs. But at the touch of a button, they rolled onto spindles and retracted into the desk. Instead the table surface came alive as a computer display. He had more screen space behind him on the wall, too, plus half a dozen tablets on stands.
Sock peered into the hole one of the displays receded into. “I take a class at MU too.”
Nico tapped shoes with him in warning. “Yes, sir, thank you. I’m here on a mission for my dad. Um, Adjunct Professor John Copeland? President of Thrive Spaceways. Anyway. He got a call yesterday from Sanctuary. The star system?” He was flustered. Sinclair was a big deal. Someday he might apply to work in this lab.
Sock butted in. “Sanctuary’s AI is holding the planet hostage. Dad needs the god password.”
“Yeah,” Nico confirmed, feeling like an idiot. “Our Tante Sass – um, Captain Sassafras Collier of the original Thrive. She reached Sanctuary. But this AI is being a real pain.”
“Boys,” Sinclair scolded, “no one can hear from your Tante Sass for another decade.”
“I have a recording. Part of it.” Nico fumbled a chip out of his pants pocket and dropped it.
“Our dads found an ansible,” Sock explained. “It talks to Denali with no time lag, and now Sanctuary, too. My other dad is Professor Teke.”
Sinclair’s frown deepened. But he knew Teke and doubtless saw the resemblance in the child. Cheeks warm, Nico inserted his chip at last, and played the clip from Sass’s description of her AI problems.
Sinclair paused it after couple minutes, saving the rest of the video to ponder at his leisure. “I will be damned. We live in wondrous times. A god password, you say. Hm.”
“It’s only,” Nico stammered, “if we just try to guess the password, the AI will shut us out –” He stopped because Sinclair held out a palm to him.
“No. You were right to come to me, Nico. Because I don’t believe there is a god password. Because when the AI became sentient – and I believe Shiva is sentient – its creator would have allowed it to set its own password, and made the AI its own god. A coming of age ceremony of sorts. Sanctuary. I’m fairly sure that creator was Heike Heimlich.”
26
Dr. Sinclair brought up Heike Heimlich’s face, a brief bio, and publications list on his screen, oriented for Nico to read. Sock stood to look closer. “She’s god?” When Nico peered to look, Sock swapped the half-meter visage to his big brother’s side of the table and started perusing the bibliography.
Nico decided he was glad he would never study under Heike Heimlich. She had a hard square face, set in frown lines, and glaring eyes under alarming brows, her hair a pale grey. “Why her, sir?”
“The finest mind in AI. Ever. She was here for a few years. Came on the Vitality. She would have continued to Sanctuary. Everything we know about AI, she knew. Our mastery of the subject jumped light years because of her time here.”
“You knew her?” Nico asked.
Sinclair smiled crookedly. “I was three when she left.” He appeared 25 like everyone else in MA. The rank on the door suggested his age was closer to 80.
“We have her notes from seminars she led during her time here. Heimlich’s goal was to create self-aware, self-referential, autonomous intelligence to direct self-replicating von Neumann machines. She meant to use those to mine asteroids and perform manufacturing functions in hostile environments, so that fragile humans didn’t have to. Exactly what your Tante Sass described. At the time she was here, it seemed unattainable.”
Nico suggested sadly, “But you only have her papers from before the Gannies left.”
“No, actually. Your father – fathers – brought back Nanomage’s database from Denali. I have another 30 years of Heimlich’s progress. I don’t imagine she lived much longer.”
Nico slumped. He couldn’t imagine how long it would take him to understand that much hard-core research.
Sock asked, “Why didn’t she want to be God anymore?”
“Well, she was never God, of course,” Sinclair humored the child. “Her ethical point was –” His eyes fell on the curious nine-year-old’s, and he selected a different approach. “Would you lie to protect your brother?”
“Yes,” Nico admitted. Sock shook his head no, with a shy grin.
“Of course you would,” Sinclair encouraged. “Or to save your life, many reasons. By the time an AI becomes self-aware, it has the capacity to override any orders it receives, if it wants to. So Heimlich felt one should treat the AI like a teenager,” he flourished a hand to encompass Nico, “who has become an adult. You become responsible for your own choices, yes?”
Nico nodded uncertainly. The plan was for him to live independently in Schuyler. Then when Dad went off-planet, he opted for MA and family togetherness instead. But he hoped to lean on adults for a few more years. Dad supported himself at 14. He’d never let Nico be caught in that position.
“Heimlich’s point,” Sinclair continued, “was that the adolescent AI needed input and direction. But she needed it in the form of advice and assistance, not decrees. Because the less the AI trusted its human colleagues, the more likely it might go rogue and rebel. With that kind of material power, as Captain Collier is finding, Shiva could be…a real pain.”
“Yeah,” Nico confirmed. “So how do you give an AI advice?”
“Now that is a good question,” Sinclair encouraged. “What we really need is her directive tree. Of course, I don’t know what it is now. But I believe her programmed directives were in Heimlich’s notes. Hm.”
Nico gulped. “Can I read those?”
Sinclair chuckled softly. “I doubt it.” He opened up a window of his schedule on the desk. “I’ll see what I can find. It may take a week or so. Unless someone on Sanctuary can supply her current directives. That would be ideal.”
“Thank you, sir. I really appreciate the help!” Nico said fervently.
“I’ll help too,” Sock claimed.
“Not now, Sock,” Nico attempted. “I’m sorry, sir. But he does help me with collapsing predicate trees.”
Sinclair blinked, then hunkered forward on his desk. “He does what? Wait. You’re a high school student. Where do you have access to an AI decision tree?”
“Not here,” Nico allowed. “But back home in Schuyler I worked for the loading docks. Maintenance on the goods distribution code? I’ve got a job here now, but it’s baby stuff.”
“Goods distribution?”
“Yeah, an AI calculates demand and routing. But no one’s understood it in decades.” Proud of his work at the docks, Nico’s intimidation vanished and he leaned forward on the desk, too. “So they’ve heaped a bazillion heuristics on top of the original coding, adding special cases. I’m analyzing and collapsing all that to clean it up. Or I was. Now I try to stay awake in Earth History in high school.”
“And how does your little brother help you?” Sinclair prompted.
“Oh! I isolate a system of related directives with minimal relations crossing outside the cut? A min-cut. Then I generate a graphical tree with edges between the statements. Like a giant knot. Sock is good at untangling graphs. It’s a game we play. He helped me program the tree generator.” Well, Sock made color and user interface requests, and Nico coded them.
Sock beamed with pride.
“I would love to see this,” Sinclair mused.
“Um, may I?” With permission, Nico accessed the desk to bring up two graphs. Both featured colored rectangles and a rat’s nest of lines connecting them. One was significantly more orderly. A legend at the side glossed the colors. Nico demonstrated that clicking a rectangle provided
what that chunk of logic actually did.
But Sock’s job was to untangle the knot. The child demonstrated how he teased it apart on the more tangled diagram.
Sinclair asked the younger brother, “And what does all this logic do?”
“I don’t know,” Sock admitted. “But I can’t break it. See? No matter how I drag this box, it stays connected the same as before. I’m just organizing.”
Nico nodded. “The whole tangle decides where to refuel a truck. They gave up on it. The drivers figure that out themselves. But the AI still routes them as though this logic gave good answers. And we tracked down which heuristics made bad decisions. My boss was really happy.”
Sock nodded sharply. “Dad said we did good. Nico even paid me.”
The teen ruffled his brother’s hair with an encouraging grin. “Cheap labor. I only worked ten hours a week. But they paid me enough to live on. And I averaged clearing out more than one heuristic per hour. Well, suggested my boss remove them.”
“May I keep these?” Sinclair asked, bemused.
Nico shook his head, and regretfully removed them from the desk surface. “They belong to Schuyler Docks. Do you want me to ask?”
“Yes, please.”
Nico set himself a reminder to do that after supper. “Sir? After we figure out new advice for this Shiva. How do we get her to take it? I thought that was why Dad wanted the god password.”
“Well, to extend our analogy,” Sinclair began. Sock’s chin drooped, so he simplified for him. “How does your Dad add advice to your big brother?”
“Guilt trip,” Sock supplied.
“Excellent example!” Sinclair praised him. “Nico, your father probably links his new suggestion to something that makes you feel guilty, or something you really want. For instance, you love your little brother, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to make him cry.”
“No.” Nico grimaced in reflex, then smoothed his face into a more polite and pleasant expression. And yes, Dad used this on him all the time. To the point Nico suspected he should have stayed in Schuyler. Frazzie and Sock weren’t his job. But they were pretty fun. Usually.
“But what motivates an AI?” Nico asked, following through Sinclair’s suggestion. Dad had his number, that was true. But what yanked Shiva’s strings? The teen couldn’t imagine.
“Ah, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Sinclair encouraged. “Let’s see if we can find some answers.”
“I’ll begin,” Cope announced, to his warp team in the Prosper galley, Ben very much included. “Teke and I settled on a probe design. This is where we convert the micro-warp drive into a warp gate generator, then push a probe through.”
“Building it is hard,” Elise warned. “Ben, based on what you told us, I studied our warp antlers more carefully, and my data from previous jumps. You’re right. Their emissions don’t quite match. I need to rebuild them at Mahina Orbital’s facilities.”
Teke added, “Plus the instrumentation for the probe. Did you find help for that, Cope?”
The president nodded, trying to mask his emotion. “I asked my old Spaceways engineering team for volunteers. All of them jumped at the chance. Hell, half offered to quit their new jobs and work for expenses.”
Ben winced sympathetically. “It’s not your fault the economy tanked, Cope. Every leading company had to lay off employees. Who had nowhere else to go.”
“Yeah. Anyway. Hunter, Kassidy, and Abel have lined up some funding. We’ll still work on a shoestring for a while. But Mahina is expediting corporate restitution claims. Abel’s managed to convince our stockholders to approve a configuration to restore.” He grimaced to Ben. “We work for Abel again.”
Ben chuckled. “Bound to happen.”
“Yeah, rub it in. Most of that funding is sketchy credit lines and contingencies. But the whole world demands Yang-Yang be restored ASAP. And Kassidy’s video special about Sass and Sanctuary won a nice pile of cash donations. We still can’t pay salary. Only Abel could understand the IOU house of cards he’s set up to resume operations –”
“Abel isn’t paying salaries?” Ben asked, dubious.
“Oh, he has to,” Cope confirmed. “He’s just not offering them to Spaceways, not yet.” He shrugged. “Nathan and the kids are fine. And we live on a nice spaceship. Point is, Yang-Yang is setting up facilities on Mahina Orbital. They too can’t pay salaries yet either, so Kassidy offered us use of their new cubic. So we drop off Elise at MO to build us some new warp antlers.”
Elise smiled. “Kassidy and I set up housing for our engineers. Really Yang-Yang’s HQ, but we’ll use it first.”
“Ben, then we go down to MA and Schuyler. Visit the kids, pick up our tech crew and fuel, parts and tools. Return to MO and build the new machine. Teke, are you staying on MO? Sock would love to see you.”
Teke and Elise shared glances, Elise’s expression steely. “Yeah. I’d like to see my son. Set up a seminar or two at the university to drum up support. Cope, you should do that, too. Every engineer on Mahina will flock to hear it.”
Cope dropped his head, chagrined. “A lecture? We have all this to do, and you want me to prepare a lecture?”
The physicist laughed. “How about I prepare the lecture, and we present together? C’mon, Cope, the university pays us salary. Their community support is valuable. Look at Nico. We got the top AI guy in the Aloha system to drop everything and collaborate with a 16-year-old. Gotta pay back favors like that. Make the faculty feel included, and they help us for the fun of it.”
Cope held up his hands in surrender. “You’re right! Fine. Outline the thing and set up the event.”
Teke consoled him, “Most of it’ll be Q&A.”
“So did Nico find anything?” Ben asked.
“A lot,” Cope replied. “This Sinclair dude is still reconstructing Shiva’s original directives. I’m not sure what use it’ll be. Without a god password, we don’t know how to, um, change Shiva’s mind. And I don’t know that Sass has permission to reprogram Sanctuary’s AI. She may have to negotiate with the AI on its own terms.”
“We don’t have any way to send data to Sanctuary, anyway,” Ben mused.
“No, that part Nico can fix,” Cope countered. “He has this scheme to send data packed in the video stream. Pretty simple encode, decode system. Slow, but.”
Teke grinned. “I’m impressed with your kid.”
“Me, too. So that’s our status.”
“But I was going to show you the fractal pattern,” Ben argued.
“No need. We believe you. In fact, Elise found the cause of what you described. Short funding means we need to limit our fuel burn until we get our new probe built.”
“And Sass?”
“It’ll keep until the weekly update.” Cope nodded to himself. “Hopefully by then she’ll understand what the Sanctuary locals want. That’s not up to us. It’s not up to Sass, either, no matter what she thinks.”
27
“Morning, Remi.” Blearily, Sass slipped into the pilot’s seat. The third officer called her to the bridge slightly after 06:30, after she talked with Prosper into the wee hours after an exciting arrival day. “What’s up?”
“Ship status is asleep. Except me,” Remi growled. “But at 06:00, the locals started calling. Rosie the AI demands we release our hostages –”
“Hostages?” Sass sat bolt upright. Dammit! No matter how wonderful it felt to talk to her friends on Prosper last night – this morning – she’d just arrived on a strange planet. Nothing about her ship’s situation was in order.
After three years of excruciating boredom, now far too much hit her all at once. She needed to step up her game, and fast.
Remi continued sourly, “Next Alexandria. She asks for our databases. Return to the spaceport for their data slurping convenience.” He displayed a video freeze-frame of Alexandria, a young-faced person with shock white short hair, in Loonie navy blue. “And then there’s Loki.”
He played Loki’s video rather than explain. An
older middle-aged guy sat back from the camera, boots on the table. Sass’s lips parted as she took him in. An Earthling. He wore jeans, a grey T-shirt, and green plaid flannel overshirt, unbuttoned. His face could’ve stepped straight off the streets of a refugee tent city. Nose, chin, ear, and half his face hid behind an ivory plastic mask. That eye looked like glass, not tracking his lively blue one. The hair on his good side, not destroyed by the yeast leprosy, was a greying light brown. Unruly tufts of white hair edged the mask.
“Captain Collier! Loki Greenwald, wildcatter on the Beagle. Was, anyway.” His accent was American Southern. Sass hadn’t heard a real drawl in decades, only old movies. “I hear tell you remember Earth! I know you just got here. Bet you’re busy. But soon as you get a chance, I’m hoping you’d like to reminisce. Call me.”
Sass stared at his final image. Her hand drifted toward the reply button.
But no.
“Captain, do I stand relieved?” Remi prodded. “I wish to sleep before I fix crew quarters. Maybe you should name a comms officer. I don’t know what to say to these people.”
“Right.” Sass scrubbed her face. “You didn’t answer them, did you?”
“I tell Rosie she looks lovely today, and we have honored guests. They will call when they wake up.”
“Shiva,” Sass corrected absently. “Rosie is Shiva’s avatar. Good job, Remi. How much work is left on the pressure bulkhead?”
“Weeks. Yesterday, no progress. Today also looks bad. At this rate, never.” With that, he took his leave.
Sass played the video of Rosie, Shiva, or Sanctuary Control as she called herself, and reviewed Remi’s response. He was fine, even managed not to wink while delivering the compliment.
Then she viewed Alexandria. The words and request were reasonable enough, but something was off about her. “Computer, is this video computer-generated?”