Human Test

by E. M. Foner

  Peter nodded. “Paul used to help me with this stuff, though for some reason his advice isn’t nearly as good as it was back on Earth.”

  “That’s because back on Earth he was probably sending your questions to Stacey over our private channel and then giving you her answers.” I took a moment to gather my thoughts. “Listen, Peter. When I have a problem with Sue, I ask eBeth, and if she’s not around, I take her advice about following my intuition.”

  “You have intuition?”

  “It’s not very good. eBeth’s advice was to do the opposite of whatever I think makes sense and it’s worked out pretty well when it comes to Sue. Relationships between artificial intelligences are nothing like human relationships, but there’s something about living in these encounter suits that make us vulnerable to your cultural norms. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  “So how can I find out why eBeth’s angry at me?”

  “Well, my first instinct would be to ask her, so that’s obviously not an option. Maybe she wants a ring.”

  Peter stopped filing and stared at me. “I never even thought of that. Thanks, Mr. Ai.”

  “You’re supposed to spend three months of your salary,” I told him. “If you’re short, I’ll be happy to loan it to you.”

  “Like an engagement ring?” he croaked. “I thought you just meant she liked jewelry.”

  “You’re the one who brought up the two of you being promised to each other by your parents.”

  “Which you invented,” he said, backing away from me as if I represented a threat. “No offense, Mr. Ai, but I think I’ll wait for Paul to get back, or maybe I’ll ask Sue.”

  “You don’t want to marry eBeth?”

  “Of course I do, someday. But she never even knew her dad and she gets scared by relationship stuff.”

  “Oh, maybe you have a point,” I allowed. “I told you I’m the wrong one to ask for advice.”

  Peter didn’t have much to say after that, and I’d already lost eBeth to the mail-order business for the morning, so I decided to return to my workshop and get the batch of old parts I’d purchased cleaned up in anticipation of rebuilding the turret clock for the Ferrymen Temple. I was just about to enter The Eatery when Kim called to me from across the road and then disappeared back into her shop. When I got there, she just motioned for me to come behind the counter.

  “Did something happen to eBeth?” I asked.

  “She’s upstairs helping Justin fill jars,” Kim said. “Watch the video.”

  The fish tank screensaver again transformed into a view which included The Eatery across the way. A wagon rolled into the frame with two men sitting on the bench, Hosea and Saul. The former hopped down, a small trowel in his hand, and rapidly dug a little hole in front of a rear wagon wheel while the county safety inspector moved to the front of the wagon and produced a pair of apples.

  Hosea slipped the toe of his boot into the hole, tossed the trowel in the wagon bed, grabbed a melon, and nodded to Saul. The two oxen lunged forward just enough to take the apples, and the safety inspector jogged out of the picture. Then Hosea opened his mouth, and a second later, I ran into the frame faster than any human had the right to move and did my wagon-lifting trick.

  “Oops,” I muttered.

  “They set you up,” Kim said. “I don’t know what that wagon weighs, but it’s more than a human should be able to lift.”

  “I could blame it on adrenaline.”

  “It was a test, Mark, and you passed, or failed, depending on your point of view. They have to know that you aren’t human.”

  “Funny, I’ve never felt more human in my life.”

  Eleven

  I was just about ready to head downstairs to my workshop for the night when I heard the telltale sound of a recumbent bicycle skidding to a long halt in front of The Eatery. In deference to Paul’s carefully cultivated affectation for alcoholic beverages after a long day’s work, I drew a tankard of ale, and then bypassed the default thermodynamic settings for the hands of my encounter suit to lower their temperature and put a chill into the beverage. By the time he was seated at the bar there was frost on the pewter.

  “You’re back much sooner than I expected,” I greeted him. “I’m assuming that the Ferrymen didn’t catch you snooping around or you would have broken radio silence to request extraction.”

  “Ferrymen,” Paul snorted, and took a long pull at the chilled ale. “Not bad, but it wouldn’t kill you to smuggle in a few cases of single malt Scotch, just for team morale.”

  “Or you could ask Kim to modify the inebriation algorithm to produce the same effect from drinking water.”

  “Where’s the fun in that? Your problem is that you’re cheap.”

  “Let’s not go there right now. What did you and Stacey uncover?”

  “You can drop the ban on radio frequency emissions,” Paul stated with absolute certainty. “Nobody is listening.”

  “Are you sure? The Ferrymen may be employing shielded receivers, and without an active detection grid, we don’t know what they may have in orbit.”

  “There’s nothing. No Ferrymen, no satellites, no advanced technology beyond the ‘My Life’ editing stations and the cargo transports. Haven’t you noticed that we never pick up any ground control chatter?”

  “The Ferrymen are trying to keep this world’s existence a secret so it makes sense they would handle all of their routine communications with point-to-point systems like lasers.”

  “There’s nothing, Mark. They don’t land ships at night because there are no homing beacons or lights at the spaceport. The cargo transports come and go on a clockwork schedule. There aren’t any Ferrymen on this world or on the ships. I double-checked.”

  I found myself wishing that I had smuggled in at least one bottle of Scotch because I suddenly felt the need for a stiff drink.

  “They’re running interstellar ships on autopilot?” I asked in disbelief. “That’s a union beef. If word gets out, their ships will go unloaded at half of the spaceports in the galaxy.”

  “They have pilots. Human pilots. Human crews. The whole operation is run by humans, and none of them are tasked with monitoring the spectrum.” Paul drained the remains of his tankard and slid it towards me. “Once it became obvious what was going on, I gambled on slipping a bug onto a newly arrived transport.”

  “You might have asked first,” I grumbled.

  “I used one of ours,” he said, by which I knew he was referring to Library surveillance technology, which was probably beyond the Ferrymen’s ability to detect in any case. “I got eBeth to camouflage a couple for me before we left.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “She’s really good at using little bits of thread and feather to make fake insects that look sort of like the real thing,” he reminded me. “If she and Peter were really trying to catch fish, the river would be empty by now.”

  I let the fishing comment pass since I didn’t understand what he was getting at. “So you infiltrated a zero-emissions bug, recovered it, and downloaded the recording.”

  “Which I’ll be happy to pass to you as soon as you lift the ban,” he told me.

  “What was the double-check you mentioned?”

  “I might have been pushing it a bit with that one, but I was confident,” Paul admitted. “You know those entertainment visors the Ferrymen never take off?”

  “It’s kind of sad,” I acknowledged.

  “I hacked into one of the ‘My Life’ editing stations and altered it to transmit a phony free subscription signal on the frequency used by the visors. There’s no way any Ferrymen would have passed that up.”

  You win, I transmitted. Send me the data dump.

  While Paul cooled his second ale, I devoured the bug’s surveillance video at my maximum speed. Not only were humans crewing the Ferrymen cargo ships, they were preferentially using manual control systems.

  “They probably know more about running those ships by now than the Ferrymen,” Paul said
, accurately reading my mind. “What I can’t understand is why the humans are sticking to the covenant when they must know that nobody is watching.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” I muttered, pouring myself a glass of local brandy even though I didn’t care for the sweet taste of the stuff. Then I powered on my active sensing suite for the first time since we landed on the planet and sent a ping to remotely activate everybody’s location transponders. All of my team members were where they were supposed to be, and their encounter suits showed the slight movements that were pre-programmed to simulate breathing, except Helen’s.

  “Turn on your sensor suite,” I told Paul.

  He looked up from his ale in surprise. “It’s been so long that I forgot I even had one. Funny what you get used to.”

  “What do you make of Helen’s signal?”

  “Stationary. Too stationary. But maybe she’s observing an Original and doesn’t want to give away her position.”

  “Possible,” I allowed, and then messaged her directly with the news that I had lifted the emissions ban.

  “Whuh?” she responded several long seconds later, and if I didn’t know better, I would have said that her transmission had a sleepy harmonic to it.

  Are you alright?

  Everything is fine. I’m just – tired.

  We don’t get tired, Helen. Is your encounter suit experiencing power problems?

  Wait, I’ll run a self diagnostic, she replied

  “What’s going on?” Paul asked with a slight slur in his pronunciation, and I noticed that he had chugged through his second ale.

  “Helen is running diagnostics,” I told him. “You might want to ask Kim to recalibrate that inebriation simulation. The alcohol shouldn’t be hitting you so fast.”

  “It’s more efficient this way,” he replied, and leaning over the bar, refilled his own tankard. “You know, I don’t think I’ve run a self-diagnostic since we came to this rock.”

  “I haven’t either,” I admitted. “I’ve been meaning to though.”

  We both straightened up and stared at each other, apparently having reached the same conclusion.

  “It must be the radio silence,” Paul said. “Living in encounter suits among a native population always takes a toll, but by cutting off most of our non-human senses, you accelerated the process.”

  “I’m running a self-diagnostic now,” I replied, and fell silent as the high-level routine temporarily took over the encounter suit and began comparing the default settings with the current working values.

  Everything passed, Helen reported. According to the black box, it appears that I’ve been experiencing regular suspensions of processing, but they are logged as voluntary.

  You’ve been napping, Paul told her. I caught Stacey doing the same thing when she came back for the holiday. We checked in with Kim and she gave us a simulated caffeine algorithm she’s been working on.

  And nobody thought it was important enough to tell me? I demanded as my encounter suit came back online.

  It’s still in Beta, Paul explained. You know how careful she is with medicinal algorithms.

  I didn’t want to worry you, Kim chipped in without my having added her to the chat, which meant that either Paul or Helen had brought her in. Sue thinks that you’re overworked.

  This is the easiest mission I’ve ever been on, I protested. And for what it’s worth, my self-diagnostic came back all green.

  Don’t test the encounter suits, test yourselves, Kim advised. We were going to bring it up at the next meeting, but Justin and I failed the standard Library rationality diagnostic.

  “The poor fools,” Paul said to me out loud so that the others couldn’t hear him. It’s a trick test, Kim, you fail by taking it. Artificial intelligence that questions its own sanity is insane by definition.

  There’s nothing wrong with any of us, I hurried to reassure them, and checked my mission-commander interface for the first time in months. Kim, you and Justin have warning flags set. See if you can wipe them, and if not, I should be able to do it with a command override.

  Are you sure about this, Mark? Justin joined in the conversation. Even if the test is trivial, it’s there for a reason. Maybe we should portal out to Library and have ourselves evaluated.

  That’s the second part of the test, Paul informed them. If you turn yourself in you’ve gone completely nuts. Just think about it.

  I agree. Helen contributed. I knew an AI on an Observer mission who turned himself in after going native and he’s been the one under observation ever since. What does Sue think?

  “Oh no!” I groaned when I realized that I’d been making critical decisions without even soliciting input from my second-in-command. Sue. I’ve just lifted the ban on radio frequency emissions, I sent to her private channel. I’m here with Paul and we were having a bit of a discussion about our recent behavioral quirks. A few of the others have already joined in.

  Is this about Justin and Kim failing their sanity test? Sue responded immediately. I told them not to worry about it. We’re just feeling the effects of isolation from any meaningful information network, not to mention the limitations you put on our communications.

  I know, I know. It turns out the Ferrymen weren’t even monitoring.

  Hey, it’s great to hear from you guys, Stacey said, meaning that Paul had invited her to the chat and that my whole team would now be showing up like hot spots if anybody was watching the planet from orbit. Who failed the sanity test? I have a team alert in my message queue but it doesn’t specify.

  Justin and I, Kim told her. I guess our resets removed the personal identifier but not the general warning.

  There, I said, having located the override and electronically signed a lengthy disclaimer about clearing sanity alerts. Is everybody clear on what’s happening?

  I don’t see eBeth and Peter on the location grid, Sue said, and the amplitude of her transmission suggested panic. What could have happened to them?

  They don’t have transponders, Paul reminded her. They’re not human—I mean, not artificial intelligence.

  Wow, we’re pretty messed up. Helen commented, the understatement of the year.

  Now that everybody is back in contact, I’m sure we will start reverting to our normal selves, I transmitted hopefully. I want you all to take the rest of the night to summarize the data you’ve been saving up, and then we can pool our knowledge to be prepared for the big push.

  And what will that be? Justin inquired.

  Contact, I said confidently, even though the idea had literally just sprung to mind. If the Ferrymen have granted the humans full autonomy and stepped back from direct supervision of this world, our original mission is no longer necessary.

  Pitching the humans on League citizenship won’t make the Ferrymen happy, Paul pointed out. And what about the Originals?

  We need more information there, but it’s obvious that they’re sentients, so they’ll have to be included. The question is whether the humans and the Originals should be approached as a joint civilization or individually.

  “Tell me the truth,” I said to Paul after the other team members disconnected from our electronic chat. “Did you smuggle in the components for a detection grid?”

  “You know I like to be prepared,” he replied, which I took as a yes.

  “Are the ground units deployed?”

  “Did you think I was riding around on that bicycle every night for the sake of exercise? I started activating the grid the moment you lifted the ban but it’s going to take a while to tune. Without any satellites for reference, the only way to fix the remote locations is through triangulation.”

  “Is your inertial guidance disabled? Why didn’t you just fix the points when you placed the elements?”

  “You know that the coverage of a ground based grid depends on spreading the net as widely as possible. I have units positioned all over the continent.”

  “You couldn’t have ridden that far!”

  “I had t
hem delivered.”

  “To who?”

  “Myself. I rented warehouse space at the main canal terminal in every province. It’s amazing what you can get done by mail on this planet.”

  “So you do know where all the units are.”

  “Only to the resolution of the canal system maps. They’re not bad given that the routes were laid out by surveyors using line-of-site optics, but when you consider the detection grid is scanning light-hours out, small errors add up.”

  “But it’s just an early warning system,” I said. “It’s not like you need to handle targeting for weapons systems.”

  Paul fiddled with his tankard and didn’t reply.

  “I said, it’s not like you need to handle targeting for weapons systems,” I repeated.

  “Just a particle beam projector,” he admitted. “What if I spot an incoming asteroid? If I’d been on Earth sixty-six million years ago we’d be talking Dinosaur right now.”

  “What do you need me to do?” I asked tiredly.

  “You ride your bike out into the hills and I’ll head back towards the capital. As soon as there’s a good distance between us, I’ll have each one of the remotes send a timing signal, and then I can compute the exact locations from the difference in delay.”

  “Don’t we need to synchronize our watches first?”

  “You really have gone native,” Paul said with a laugh. “Have you forgotten that our encounter suits are crystal-locked to Library time?”

  I had forgotten, but I passed it off with a chuckle and headed out back to grab my bicycle. By the time I’d wheeled it around to the front of The Eatery, Paul was already out of sight. Two of Reservation’s four major moons were full enough that our riding bicycles on the road wasn’t a dead giveaway that we could see in the dark, but we also counted on the locals being home in bed.