“Already there, Hugh. I’ll order Guppy to create three new ones, but I think they’ll be finished before I get my relay back. Even in the best-case scenario, so I think I'm going to have to clone myself. Much as I dislike the idea.”
“Well, I could send myself over, spare you the trouble of cloning.”
“That's a hell of a lot of bandwidth. It could take days, and screw up communications the whole time. It doesn't seem like the best alternative, and it leaves you out here the end of it. At least I'm already here, if you get what I mean.”
“You sure? I really don't mind.”
“If things work out that way, great. But like I said, it seems suboptimal.” I paused. “You know, you've had quite a change of attitude about this project. I remember early on in the project, you just thought it was an interesting exercise.”
“Yes, but it's turned out to be a lot more than just a hike in the woods. I've been a little jealous to tell the truth, following along all the shenanigans. I know it's a serious business, but…”
“… but also a lot of fun,” I finished for him. “Yep, I get it. And I'm thankful for the offer, especially if my alternative is a new cohort. Wow, fast times.”
As soon as Hugh signed off. I ordered Guppy to bump priority on completing three replicant matrices. They’d be a while, even at high priority, with the dearth of raw materials in this system, but one way or another they’d be useful eventually.
Three Lagoons was a nice town, overall. Wide clean streets, relaxed pace, no overly officious cops. Even the food seemed to be a step up. Still fish, unfortunately, but the local chefs seem to have discovered things like, oh salt. I wandered the town in a seemingly random manner, checking out the sites. In reality, I was mapping everything. And I strolled every street, pathway, and alley at least once.
I was ready for ruffians and/or blaggards, but none made an appearance. Just as well. I had one of the confiscated pig stickers in my backpack to threaten with, if necessary. Eventually, I ended up at the library that Bridget had found, and decided to spend the afternoon. They didn't have a Dewey decimal system, but they did sort things roughly by subject. I found a section that seemed like it might contain some history, grab some books, and settled in for a good read.
“Bridget is requesting a meeting.”
The announcement registered in my internal audio. I still jumped. A couple of other readers looked up at me quizzically, and I smiled back.
“Fleas.”
They frowned and edged away while trying not to look too obvious about it. Oh well, so much for being popular.
“Thanks, Guppy. Message her back, tell her I'll be about an hour.”
“Acknowledged.”
I settled back into my reading. I was trying to avoid visibly reading at an impossible speed, but I'm sure still appeared to be just looking at pictures. I got through the current selections, then handed them to the librarian and then headed back to our hotel room. I took a moment to check the door and window and confirmed that my roamer was still in place. Then I lay down and exited the Manny.
Bridget was waiting in my VR in a video window, looking impatient. The small station would handle audio and video, but not a full VR connection, so we were effectively back to VR version 1.0. A version of Spike probably, Howard's, was ensconced on her lap, purring loudly enough to be heard over the connection.
“So what do we have,” Bridget said, skipping any pretense of pleasantries.
“Quite a bit, actually. I took a vid of the books as I was reading them, but I can give you a capsule summary that flushes out some of the things that you found.”
Bridget nodded and placed spike on the ottoman in her VR. The cat, offended, leapt off and left the room. Bridget pulled up some windows, one for each book that I'd recorded.
“I haven’t got a complete picture,” I said, “but the colonization of Heaven's River wasn't an orderly event. I think it coincided with the destruction of the environment on Quinn.”
“But Heaven's River was already built?”
“Yes. The way it's described is that Annek - there's that name again - presented it to the Quinlans as a gift, or maybe a bribe. But the Quinlans, once in Heaven's River either disobeyed or betrayed Annek. In retribution Annek took away their riches and set harsh rules. Anyone who crosses the line gets Scattered, which means just what we thought - they get moved to another random location. This can be anything from an individual, to a family, to an entire town. And no two people end up in the same place.”
“It’s like banishment. The worst kind, because you can never go back. And you don't even know if they'll still be there.” Bridget was quiet for a moment, thinking about it. “Well. Surprisingly effective, without any need for violence. Interesting.”
“Yep. I talked to the librarian, and he confirmed that there used to be things like long-distance communications and rapid-travel between different parts of the megastructure, but those were taken away as part of the retribution.”
“Hm. Anything about population?”
“Nothing specific, but the librarian - he comes from a line of librarians, apparently, it's a family thing - said that Quinn was bursting at the seams, according to the oral history. Let’s say, 10 billion, just to throw out a number. That's 10 people per mile in Heaven's River. Give a city control of a 50 mile stretch of river, and that's 500 people. A little low, but maybe the population has expanded over the last, uh, somewhere between 1 and 500 years?”
“That's a big range.”
“Sure, Bridget, but no stars, no moons, no seasons… pretty easy to lose track.”
Bridget nodded and spent a few seconds examining a book window. “The thing is, Bob, if the Administrator’s mandate is to keep the Quinlan safe and alive at any cost, and the solution they came up with sounds a lot like ‘at any cost’, then I don't think they're going to welcome alien spies with open arms. I was starting to play with the idea of just going public, but now I don't think so.”
“Yeah, I agree. They’ve already shown a disturbing tendency to blow things up first and ask questions afterward. Seems to be the safest thing for them to do would be to just off us.”
“So for the moment, it's just you and your clones, as soon as you make some.”
I sighed, the more I try to get away.
30. Starfleet Attack
Bill
Same Day
Epsilon Eridani
Garfield popped into my VR without a ping or an invitation. He was generally pretty good about that kind of thing, so something was up.
“We’ve finished mapping the outages,” he said without preamble. “There’s a pattern of sorts.”
“Really? I haven’t been able to see one. They're all over the place.”
Garfield shook his head. “It's not spatial. The stations that were affected were all running more or less autonomously without anyone actively administering them, like systems without a resident Bob.”
“Oh damn,” I said. “That means it's deliberate. But there have been no announcements or anything, and no one has claimed responsibility. How many Bobs are still online?”
“One way or another about 30%. We’ll probably get back another 10 to 20% from systems where Bobs are able to physically access the station and do a reset, but that might take up to a couple more weeks.”
“Okay, time for a Bob moot.”
Without waiting for a reply, I sent out a BobNet-wide invitation. I brought the Moot VR to full power and popped over.
The moot hall had grown over the years. It had to, we now had literally thousands of Bobs, and were inching up on tens of thousands. It was a full-on post human civilization and would be a utopian dream, except for the issue of replicative drift. Bobs began popping in almost immediately. I cast up the whiteboard wall and began updating it with the status of various systems. The noise level rose steadily as discussions and arguments competed for airtime. No one was more surprised than me when there was a blat from the center of the room. I actually glanc
ed down at my hand to check for the presence of the air horn.
Silence descended as all heads turned to the podium where stood a member of Starfleet. The not-quite-TNG uniform was unmistakable and provoked a brief undercurrent of snickers.
“I suppose you're all wondering why I've gathered you here.” he said. The standard Bob joke fell flat. The mood was tense anyway, and Starfleet wasn't well thought of.
The Starfleet spokes-Bob waited awkwardly for a moment, then stiffened his spine and continued. “My name is Lenny, and I am here to deliver a statement on behalf of my group.” He paused to look around. He had everyone's attention now. “Let me start by saying that the general disruption of BobNet is deliberate and it's our doing. We've come to the-”
Lenny very likely wasn't expecting the reaction he got. Bobs would normally listen, even to unpleasant news, at least to accumulate information. Not this time. Lenny was drowned out by hurled insults, and suggestions to perform unlikely acts. A few Bobs, even advanced on him, fists clenched. It wouldn’t have come to anything, this being VR. Nevertheless, Lenny stepped back, a momentary look of fear on his face.
I stepped up to the foot of the podium and held up my hand. The cacophony cut off, replaced by a profound silence.
“Why.”
Lenny drew back his shoulders. “We felt it was the only way to-“
“You imposed your will on us?”
“To keep you from continuing to interfere in-”
“You couldn't get your way, so you shoved it down our throats.”
Now Lenny was looking a little less certain of himself.
“It was the only way to ensure that-”
Again I held up a hand. “So this is about the Quinlans.”
“Not just about them. The Pav, the Deltans, humanity-”
“You're imposing your political views on us.”
Lenny stared directly at me. “Bill, we had to do something to prevent-”
“No,” I interrupted. “You didn't have to. You decided to. You decided to force us to do things your way.” I paused to look around the room. There was no sympathy for Starfleet. This was a done deal.
I turned back to Lenny. “You're out. You’re no longer welcome here, or in any BobNet environment. You're not Bobs.” I waved a hand and he disappeared.
I turned to address the crowd. “Start hardening your installations immediately. Change all passwords and keys, even if you already recently have done so. Establish a new VPN connection with my personal VR. I’ll push out new keys, ASAP. Meanwhile, audit everything. Look for Trojans, kits, or any kind of corruption. We need to be clean.”
Bobs nodded, and rapidly vanished. In milliseconds, the moot was empty, save Garfield, myself, and the Skippy. Metadata said it was Hugh.
“They'll have contingency plans,” he said.
I nodded. We can only do we can do though.”
“The Moot VR source code audit is going to be a big job.” Hugh cocked his head at me. Hy don’t you give me a read-only copy? We’ve got this huge computer system-”
I nodded slowly. If they found anything, I’d do the cleanup on the original. “I'll do that.”
“I'll set things up at my end. And why don’t you drop by my place when you're ready?” Hugh said, and disappeared.
I glanced at Garfield, who’s eyebrows were up as high as mine probably were. “He just invited you over? That was weird.”
I frowned. “Let's get things ready for that audit, Gar.”
I sent the source archive off to Hugh as soon as it was ready. Given the size of the file, I expected to have to wait anywhere from several minutes to even an hour or more for any results, but instead I received an invitation within a few mils.
I popped into Hugh's VR and looked around. I was a flat platform, seemingly floating in space. No walls, no ceiling. Overhead, rows of cylindrical satellites soared past, orbiting a distant sun. It was the kind of graphic you'd see in a science fiction movie, where the scale was distorted so that things were visible that should've been too distant to be seen.
Hugh gestured to a futuristic-looking easy chair, and I plopped into it. Then gestured to the overhead view.
“It's not intended to be realistic, of course,” Hugh said, sensing the question. “Physically, we’re orbiting a grey dwarf, and in only a single layer to maximize heat dissipation. But it's a good representation of JOVAH.”
“Which is…?”
“Our matryoshka brain project. We've currently got some 32,000 satellite modules orbiting our home star, connected in a network using SCUT channels.
“But… JOVAH?”
“Judicious Omnicompetent Volitional Adaptive Heuristic.”
I mimed gagging. “You started with the name, didn’t you.”
Hugh laughed. “Acronyms: the lowest form of pun.”
“All this, even a kick-ass name, and you still haven't achieved true AI?”
“It's not about scaling, Bill. Crows and parrots were some of the more intelligent non-humans on earth, despite having brain smaller than a walnut. Some dolphins had brain-to-body mass ratios as high as humans, but they still never displayed human-level intelligence. The biggest brain-to-body mass ratio actually belong to a species of shrew. What matters is the organization of the brain, and the wiring that connects different subprocesses. The current thinking is that were either missing something basic, or we've gone down a blind alley that we can step back from. JOVAH is incredibly powerful. It can process vast quantities of information in virtually no time. It's memory space and storage are almost infinite, but it's still essentially an AMI. It still has no ability to process counterfactual thinking experiences know WTF moments, nor does it have anything like a sense of self, or any kind of internal dialogue.”
“I know WTF moments, but counterfactual?”
Hugh grinned. “Okay, let's say you've programmed an AMI to guide some wheeled vehicles from one point to another on a large flat surface. It can handle that. But now let's say the vehicles are really on a spherical surface, like Earth, so the coordinates won't work out cleanly, and the vehicle will always arrive a little off the expected destination. The AMI will never adjust its algorithms unless it's ordered to. It will never wonder why it's always wrong. You could program the AMI to be self-correcting, and once it had figured out that spherical geometry worked better than plane geometry, it would use the new formula, but it would never wonder why. It would never generalize from that to wonder about gravity or astronomy or anything. A real intelligence would have a WTF moment and start trying to figure out what was going on.”
“And you don't have that.”
“Not even close. We can program in each additional layer of behavior, but it never goes beyond what we've programmed. I'm simplifying of course, even in the 21st century, researchers were beyond this level, but it's the same idea.”
“What about just simulating a brain? They did that on earth in the 22nd century. We are proof of that.”
“Bill, it's the difference between recording a live action video and digitally generating a realistic animation from scratch. They were doing the former with VCRs before original Bob was born. They still had managed to the latter at the point when he died, at least not believably.”
“So we can simulate an existing intelligence, but we can't create one from scratch.”
“Exactamundo, mon frere. Very frustrating.”
I chuckled at Hugh's informality. It was possibly a little forced. He seemed to be trying to make me feel at ease.
“Wow. Do you still think it's even possible?”
We've never found any reason to believe that our own intelligence uses anything more than the physical laws of the universe. I think replication pretty much proves that, so yes, it's a hard problem but it's not impossible problem.”
“Why not just go with an enhanced replicant?”
“Doesn't work. Well, I mean, it works, but it isn’t the result we’re trying for. The structure of the human brain, even replicated one, is limi
ted by the biological architecture that it developed on. That's why we have Guppy's. A backup loaded into JOVAH can frame-jack much higher than the rest of us, but it's still just a Bob. We've tried. In fact, our sys admin is a Bob clone running in a virtual machine on JOVAH. He's a speed super intelligence, but not a quality super intelligence.”
“Huh.” I shook myself mentally. “So, getting back on subject. You have the moot listing. Any idea when you'll be able to-”
“It's done.”
I raised both eyebrows. “Wow? Fast.”
“That is the point. Or one of them, anyway. Now the bad news.”
“Uh-oh.”
Hugh gave me a sickly grin. “Yeah, they spent a lot of time preparing. They couldn't get into everything, but they really did a job on what they could access. Among other things, they managed to insert a monitor into your comms stack.”
My jaw dropped. “Oh. So they know everything we’re talking about.”
“Nope. Anything they can do we can do better. Right now, we're having a conversation about beer, as far as they know.”
“Shit. We’re going to be a long time untangling this.”
“It gets worse. Our analysis says that if you attempt to physically take back the stations, they'll implement the self-destruct.”
I stood up. “Double shit, Bob’s getting ready to do just that.”
Garfield dropped into his La-Z-Boy and tossed a report at me. “These are the final numbers. We’ve got 48% of the Bobiverse online. Of the other 52%, 18% are Starfleet.”
“That many?”
“They've been replicating aggressively, Bill. I think they been planning this for a while, now. So anyway, just over a third of the Bobiverse is off-line, hard. We’re still getting some new connections as people figure out how to use the SCUT transceivers on drones and other local equipment, but that's only good for basic communications.”
Heaven's River Page 24