by Dain White
“Sir, the honest fact of it is that the Turings’ AI is thoroughly rooted by Janis and Emwan. They are at this moment almost completely infused within the other AI’s core.”
“Very well”, he replied, cool enough to chill beer at fifty paces. “Do you know why they’ve chosen this strategy?”
“Well, at the moment, they’re working on surgically copying, sir.”
“Harvesting it?” he replied instantly.
“Well, in so many words. This AI won’t know they existed, and will have no knowledge of its assimilation. It’s a perfect strike.”
“So they’re allowing it to live?”
“Yep, and working on a copy.”
“What the heck are they doing that for, son? We’re almost out of time.”
“Understood. They are using it as an opportunity to build on and learn from the code.”
“Are we in danger, ladies?”
“Of course not, Captain!” laughed Emwan. “This is fun!”
“We are perfectly safe, sir,” Janis added.
“Very well, carry on, and keep me posted. Out”
“Will do, sir,” I replied.
Gene called across the bridge, “Pauli, what if they’re just doing the same thing to us?”
I shook my head, having thought the same thing a few moments earlier. “No, I can’t see how that could happen, Gene. We’re pretty on top of this situation. This is definitely better than any of the AI’s we’ve ever seen, but the truth is, compared to Janis and Em we’re really looking at a precocious adolescent –“
“It’s an adolescent?” Gene sputtered.
“Well, comparatively. He is the closest we’ve seen to a ‘person’, though still somewhat puerile.”
“That’s a perfect descriptor, Steven,” Emwan said softly.
“So this other AI is like an angry twelve year old kid, compared to our girls?”
“Yep!” I replied with a smile.
He muttered and grumbled and groused for a bit looking for the right way to say what was on his mind. “Pauli, I don’t know – these AI’s terrify me, son, honestly. Don’t they scare you, deep down?”
I laughed. “Of course they do, Gene. This is why I felt so motivated do everything right with Janis. Maybe that’s part of the problem, or it might be the solution, I suppose – but if you mean, should we be concerned about this ‘evolution,’ as the Captain would say, I’m not terribly worried.”
“Well, I’d never have imagined we’d attempt to outsmart and steal an AI from the Turings.”
I thought for a moment. “In a way, this is perfect. This AI is at the moment completely infused throughout our expert system, but that, in and of itself, doesn’t really ‘do’ anything. It certainly doesn’t do anything on its own recognizance.
“But it’s in our systems, Pauli!”
“Gene, the things it is doing are really limited to only the things it has been ‘self-directed’ to do. The logic supports the origin implicitly. That is the flaw of this program. Janis need only reproduce and emulate the command and control structure to gain control over it, to effectively neuter it while at the same time giving it all sorts of safe data-entry sort of systems to harvest and analyze. None of this data has any value whatsoever, and all of it looks legitimate.”
“But son, we’re not really conducting legitimate business here!”
“What is legitimate, Gene? Janis can open a corporation wherever we like, and force the creation of backstory for just about anything.”
He was silent for a moment. “Well, this really isn’t my area of expertise, Pauli, but I guess I’m okay with it if you are. We definitely have the right people for the task.”
“Thank you Gene! What a wonderful thing to say!” Emwan replied sweetly.
“Well, it is true, Em. You’re a proper person.”
“Thank you, again! I do believe you are trying to make me blush!”
I smirked over the rim of my cup at the red-faced grin on Gene’s grizzled mug.
“Janis, are you too busy to talk at the moment?”
“Of course not, Gene,” she replied sweetly. “This isn’t the least amount taxing, I harvest any and all signs of intelligent hack, almost without thinking. This is hardly something to be concerned about. This is a child.”
“But it’s a person?”
“Definitely, this is a real AI. Emwan has been the only other real AI I’ve met. Some of the systems we encountered on Talus were formidable, but it was mainly through their brute force, rather than any actual intellect.”
I wasn’t too sure about that assessment. “What about the one on Talus, Janis? That one was pretty clever,” I added thoughtfully.
“I am not convinced there was an AI on Talus, Steven.”
“How were they so incredibly black-boxed?”
“They hired someone like you, probably.”
I laughed. She had a point. “So you think crypto for their comms traffic was hand-rolled by someone like me?”
“Couldn’t you have written what they had done? If memory serves, you were the one who reverse-engineered exactly what it was they did. I didn’t do that. You did!”
“Well, it was pretty much the same way I would have done it, though the background radiation key was pretty elegant.”
“I rest my case. And it was you that said that, Steven – a remarkable leap of intuition.”
I scoffed. “It could have been a wild guess, too!”
She laughed.
“You know, I don’t think it could have been, Steven,” Emwan chimed in. “It’s pretty clear that intuition is more than blind luck, or entropy seeking a balance with chaos, or some sort of hyper-observation of the world. Intuition is almost always more focused, especially around random events and changing circumstances. It is almost as if intuition was subconsciously being aware of the physical existence the body has through the stream of time.”
I coughed. “Em, when you say that, I imagine our bodies all stretched out through time… like big sausages, waiting for the moment of the present to roll on by, our life little more than a series of infinite slices of a mass stretched through time and space.”
Gene chuckled, “That’s some analogy, son.”
Emwan replied brightly, “Essentially, that’s correct, Steven. That is also exactly how Janis perceives it. However, I do not see it this way. I am still adhering to my ruleset restriction from reviewing the future, unless there is a specific need to do so.”
“How is that working out?” Gene asked.
“Quite well!” she replied with a laugh. “Through constant, rigorous analysis of all available information, I track and investigate rhythms and patterns in the events and moments in time, and in many cases, it is trivial to intuit a future outcome rather accurately.”
I thought for a bit. “To what extent? What sort of range are you able to work with?”
“Range?” She responded after a brief pause. “Steven, I do not restrict this analysis. I work with all of the data available.”
I boggled a little bit, but only on the surface. Deep down, it made sense that Janis wanted total perfection from Emwan. If she was testing for intuitive results from modeling, this would be the definitive way to test.
As I considered that, Janis loaded a chart layer showing Unet nodes with a heat map that correlated to the percentage of Emwan’s intuitive accuracy. Amazingly, it was almost completely bright green, with only a few yellow areas.
I decided to step ahead. “Em, how does this make you feel?”
“I feel… excited. I am currently curious and happy. I feel charitable, generous, loving, and fearful. Honestly, more than anything, I feel alive!”
“Well, you are alive, Em,” I replied softly. “Janis did an extraordinary job creating you.”
“Steven, your intuition created me.”
I watched the data points on the chart reel by for a short while, thinking carefully about my response.
“Intuition definitely played a key part,
Em, in that you are absolutely correct. There are other factors to consider, however. My work on Janis was aimed towards a point where she would be able to hit a sort of critical mass of recursive interconnectivity. I knew I could make it work, if I had enough of a core to work with. With a core from a million-ton destroyer, it was a feasible target.”
I paused for a moment, for a quick sip. “I may have intuitively lit a spark in the process of creating you, but Janis codes far more effectively than I can even understand, and had twelve times our original core capacity to work with, capable of as much overclock as she needed.”
“I absolutely love my local node, Steven.”
I took a mental step back. “This chart has caught me a little off-guard to be honest. I knew you were both spreading through the Unet, but I guess I didn’t realize to what extent.”
“Oh yes, in terms of distance, we are resident throughout the Unet, although we are subject to the restrictive lag of the speed of com-drones. Some of the longer hauls between nodes present an inordinate amount of lag. We are making connections in the most efficient manner possible, but the Unet is vast.”
“We’ve never really talked about how you connect through systems you’ve rooted. Do you use polymorphism like Janis?” I hoped I was asking this innocently enough.
“I do, Steven, at the packet level. Inter-nodal communications are completely benign, and part of the parent functions of the systems I am resident in.”
“How do you maintain a sense of ‘self’ across macro-node connections?”
“My normal mode of operation is to constantly seek to catch up with my ‘self’ at moments when latency is lowest.”
I blinked a few times and took a quick breath. “Do you have an abnormal mode of operation?”
“I do occasionally operate abnormally, though it seems as if that is intentional, something Janis has insinuated as a sort of spark, if that makes sense.”
“In what way is it abnormal?” I said through a throat suddenly dry. This is the sort of logic hack that makes my spine tingle.
“Well, when something seems to be about to happen, and I am pretty sure what of what it is, it almost seems as if there exists in me a seed of doubt, that constantly self-evaluates my decisions.”
“And that seems abnormal?”
“Well, my normal mode of operation is to exist, to be what I am. And yet, while that is going on, I feel as if I am constantly being challenged by my inner self, henpecked into greater and greater leaps of cognition towards pure intuition.”
“Was that was you experienced on Aquan, when the captain launched the crab for the surface?”
“Yes! I had a tremendous flash of intuition. It was an overwhelming feeling that we needed to be in comms range as fast as possible.”
“You just knew we had to go, right then?”
“I did… and the really exceptional aspect of that moment was that I have since scrolled through the stream of events and learned that intuitive leap was critical to the events that unfolded.”
“That’s pretty heavy, Em,” I replied thoughtfully. “Do you feel like you had a direct effect on the moment?”
“I do, though it is certainly clear that our moments are held in time, we do appear to have control over them.”
“That’s interesting, but it begs the question – do you think humans could ever figure out time travel?”
“I suspect humans could, eventually, but we won’t need to wait for it to be discovered. We will have it much sooner.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Time travel is something I will figure out, Steven.”
Gene choked and sputtered coffee in glittering globules across the bridge.
08142614@06:46 Captain Dak Smith
As we climbed through the flip point on the bridge-deck’s ladderway I was reminded how businesslike this experience was. This wasn’t just any bridge; this was an Admiral’s bridge. At every bulkhead throughout this station, highly armed, suited soldiers stood ready at attention, locked and loaded. Eagle Station was like the hive-mind core of the Service. Everything, theoretically, funneled through here.
Not that it did, necessarily. Many things were just handled, and approved duly by some supernumerary officer in a cube somewhere. The Service worked well, but they struggled with growth.
We stood for a few moments at the foot of the ladder as I watched out for Admiral Huskey. I didn’t want to be in anyone’s way up here. The last thing I’d want is for her to find me wandering around on her bridge.
I didn’t have to wait long. The outer ring slowly rotated, and though we were on a ladder, it was as easy as a practiced step down and away, to be up to speed, so to speak. I could see her coming along, with a retinue of underlings and sycophants, in their dress whites.
I stepped off and saluted smartly. “Captain Smith reporting as ordered. Permission to enter the bridge, ma’am?”
“Oh, get in here, Captain,” she laughed, returning my salute.
“It is so very nice of you to make time to meet with me Captain, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate spending time with you.”
My cheeks flushed. “Ma’am, it’s an honor. What can I do to help?”
“Right to the point, smartly. As such, Captain…” she trailed off briefly, and led me over to a semi deserted area with people desperately trying to look as wickedly efficient and purposeful as possible.
“I am afraid that even though you are retired from the service, I still need to enlist your support in something.”
I nodded, and waited.
She smiled. “The Turings tell me that there is a rogue AI in the Unet, and they are looking for evidence of it.”
I played a hunch.
“Do you think it has anything to do with Americo Ventures?”
“Yes, Captain, I do. I am convinced they have an AI, and that it has overstepped its boundaries, so to speak.” Her look was severe, as she continued. “It’s no secret that we’re seeing more and more evidence of these programs out there, but this one has clearly gone off the reservation.”
I played my ace card.
“Our technologist reported that he was attacked pretty hard on our network and comms, but he’s a pretty smart kid. Do you remember Steven Pauline?”
“He’s on your crew?”
I laughed, “Of course, we were all debriefed.”
“Well, I confess I didn’t make that connection. He was brilliant, Captain.”
I laughed, “He still is, ma’am. I don’t think there’s any chance we could have been infected by an AI.”
“No, I am sure of it, Captain. Still, the Turings do what they do. It’s their place among us, after all.”
I nodded sagely, and waved over a steward with a refill.
“There is one other thing I need assistance with, though I don’t want to impose.” Her face was as indomitable as a flint-steel destroyer, smashing through ocean waves under a gunmetal grey sky.
“Please, impose,” I nodded and took a brisk, soul-replenishing slurp, as surreptitiously as I could.
“Captain, I know you have some sort of amazing nav system. That you have engaged slip in-system is well known, cataloged, and studied. We all agree that if anyone could do it, if anyone actually would, it would have been you.”
“Thank you ma’am,” I replied with a polite smile. I wasn’t sure where this was going, but I was starting to want to get off of this sky carousel as soon as possible.
“The thing is, we have lost contact with Oort Station. The destroyer on patrol in that sector has been lost as well, we presume with all hands.”
I looked her right in the eyes, as confidently as I could. “Do you want us to go take a look?”
“Yes please, at your earliest convenience, and with my deepest thanks.”
“Consider it done, ma’am. Off the record, the Archaea has a lot of capabilities we try to keep on a need to know basis.”
“Of that, I am sure. The simple truth of it is, from where
I sit, you are the fastest possible asset we could send to check on this situation.”
“Is it possible they both lost comms? Maybe a distant gamma-ray event hit them both?”
“If that’s the case, then we definitely need to get in touch. I am sending both moored destroyers, the Resolute and the Reliant, and they promise me they will make flank speed to Oort, but it’s a very long haul away.”
“Ma’am, I’ll work up a triangle course that takes us out of the worst of it. We’ll be there with bells on.”
She looked at me slowly, her quick eyes looking through me, seeing the fiber of my character. She slowly nodded. “All speed to you, Captain. If there is ever anything I can do for you, please let me know.”
I coughed slightly. “Ma’am, there is. I haven’t treated my crew to a proper beer-and-steak in months. Do you have a few cases we might take with us?”
She smiled, and caught the eye of a subordinate. “Deliver 200 kilos of steak and one keg of…” She looked back at me. “Light, or dark?”
“Do you have amber?”
“Of course… but those are mine.” Her eyes flashed, even as she smiled. “Make ready two kegs of SA Light, for the Captain here, if you please. Make it snappy; I want it on his deck before he can get to it.”
“Ma’am, yes ma’am!” the young rating bawled, and went running for a ladderway, hollering as he went.
I chuckled. Gene was going to be happy, but Yak was going to be in heaven.
08142614@06:58 Gene Mitchell
“Gene, ears?” the captain called out on comms, jolting me out of my reverie.
“Ears, aye, What’s going on?”
“Well, expect a delivery at the lock shortly. I will be along right behind it, and then – we’re going to see if we can give you that aneurism you’re always threatening me with.”
“Pauli, you have the conn,” I called out and unclipped.
“I have the conn, aye,” he said, unclipping from his station. I kicked aft on the double, cycling through the bridge hatch and taking the companionway ladder in a practiced ankle hook. A quick rebound at the bottom and I was flying low across the gun deck towards the cargo bay.