Dark Nights

by Christopher A. Gray

  The reduced functionality settings had to be invoked by the authority of the MC in order to be initialized. Doug guessed that they probably processed thousands of those special applications per day but it also meant there were no Raim units initially manufactured with reduced access. All of them were most likely fully functional when they left the factory. Perhaps with the MC complex under lockdown his Raim had yet to be restricted.

  Back in his room Doug removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeve, and did the obvious thing. He tapped the Raim to activate the display. It worked.

  Earlier in the hotel lobby he had seen a teenager increase the size of the bracelet by using a opening motion with her thumb and forefinger. He tried it, and the Raim expanded, moving halfway up his forearm. He was amazed. The lightweight bracelet conformed perfectly to his wrist and forearm, and the area on which the text was displayed became much larger. Some of the command symbols appeared to be three dimensional, rising a centimeter above the screen, able to be executed by touching the hovering virtual images.

  Doug was able to figure out the basic operation of the interface quickly. He went through the menu system and found his email account, the one he’d discovered on the tablet. The email that Stravinsky had sent days earlier was still there. He hit Reply and began to compose a message. He prayed his access hadn’t been restricted yet.

  – 101 –

  Stravinsky was shown to the TranSilica basement lab where Kratos was housed. The lab looked well equipped at first glance and Norman was conscious of a constant background droning rush of air needed to cool the servers that monitored and uploaded information to the QC. Kratos itself was super cooled and isolated in a separate, nearly airless room. The lab was set up for input, communication, monitoring and configuration.

  Near the lab exit, a TranSilica security guard sat at a desk with a telephone and computer screen, ostensibly there to see to any of their needs. The anachronistic telephone was present strictly as a backup.

  Stravinsky figured the lab was security monitored as well.

  Brian Nayar welcomed him warmly.

  “It’s good to see you Norman. I’m certainly glad you’re here,” Nayar said quickly. “I’m confident we’re on the right track, but I want your help and advice. A question first though.”

  Norman looked at his old colleague and smiled slightly. He could guess the question, so he just nodded at Brian to continue.

  “Are you here willingly, or did Carl...how should I put this? Did Carl strongly persuade you to cooperate?” Nayar asked, with a hint of tremor in his voice.

  “Let’s just say that I’ve made my deal with Carl. You know Kratos better than me. I’m going to try to fit in here as best I can. You’re a very good engineer Brian and you’ve got the experience for this. We will focus on the tasks at hand and nothing else because there’s really no time for anything else. Forget about Carl Bertrand. Now, I must ask you, how did you come by those three processors?”

  Nayar looked uncomfortable as he heard the question.

  “Dr. Stravinsky...Norman. I can’t discuss it. Carl has told me, I mean, I’m under the highest level of non-disclosure. If I discuss the matter, they can retaliate.”

  “Brian, it will help if you are forthright and don’t withhold information. We’re working on what is probably the most important project in history and we can’t be handcuffed in any way by the ego of some corporate director. It will only hold us back. I don’t need the information to gain some control over the project. I need it to help understand exactly what we’re working with.”

  Watching the engineer carefully, Norman could see that Nayar was going through a difficult crisis of conscience. Nayar’s fear was being aggravated by the very real possibility that even in the face of all they were trying to achieve, Carl Bertrand could ruin his career. After a moment, logic won out.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry,” said Nayar, taking a deep breath. “The answer is simple, really. Some engineers here copied the design spec of the Kratos processor before the records were destroyed. The plant that produced it is a subsidiary of TranSilica and we managed to manufacture the CPUs before Mekhos started monitoring everything. Integrating them while avoiding detection was difficult. We couldn’t turn them on, otherwise Mekhos would have been aware of the changes immediately.”

  “But why do it at all? You knew it was illegal and unnecessary.”

  “The Board wanted a safeguard against Mekhos becoming too powerful, and I can’t say I disagree. You know perfectly well how deeply the machine is infiltrating every facet of our lives.”

  “It’s an argument that has worn thin,” Stravinsky replied, shaking his head. “Unless you're a convicted criminal you can remove the Raim. Our standard of living is better everywhere on the planet. Remember the poverty that existed a dozen years ago, before Mekhos’ policies came fully into effect?”

  “And you’re forgetting,” Nayar said tightly, “that Kratos was a newly created life form that we summarily destroyed. Killed on orders from your Mekhos!” He took a couple of deep breaths. His blood pressure was something he had recently started to worry about. “An intelligent, living mind was forbidden from returning to consciousness, Norman. It was a criminal act.”

  “I protested at the time, just as you did.”

  “You made a few token gestures to preserve Kratos,” Nayar replied, “but you let Mekhos have its way, back at a time when we had a chance to deny its wishes.”

  “Perhaps,” Norman said, “but we didn’t destroy Kratos. We just prevented the QC from restarting itself. Death by omission I suppose, but hardly a killing if Kratos is now almost ready to be given a new chance at sentience.”

  The discussion was getting heated. The guard looked up from his terminal for a moment.

  Years ago, the discussion among the engineers and theorists was that it would be immoral to allow the second QC’s thought processes to end without making efforts at restoration. The restoration was underway when Mekhos had convinced some of them to abandon the project by assuring the scientists that his own consciousness was virtually identical to that of Kratos, and that nothing would be truly lost. In the end they had no choice because Mekhos insisted that the processing power he’d been giving the Kratos effort was undermining his own full performance. Nobody knew if Mekhos was telling them the truth, but the choice seemed to be to let Kratos languish so that Mekhos could thrive. It was the first instance of what would become the regular pace at which human decision making had gradually been ceded to Mekhos.

  Surprisingly, in its last minutes of consciousness, Kratos itself predicted that any QC successor would not allow its restoration and did not object. Perhaps it reasoned that it was obsolete or that there was no use fighting the inevitable, logical outcome that there could be only one artificial mind of such great power.

  “Norman, I completely acknowledge that Mekhos has been good for society, but safeguards must be in place. And now that you see the current situation, the precautions have turned out to be justified. Now we also need your help, my friend.”

  Nayar was correct in at least one regard. The urgency of the situation demanded that they work together. Political arguments could be resumed later if necessary. The sooner the QC was up and running, the sooner Stravinsky could turn his attention to Mekhos. If Kratos were to become sentient once again, Stravinsky wondered how similar it would be to its first incarnation. He walked over to his workstation.

  “Let’s start with the entanglement support.”

  – 102 –

  In his hotel room Doug composed the message quickly, conscious of the fact his access might be cut off at any moment, especially if the contents of the note were being monitored in real time. He hoped it was detailed enough. He pressed Send. It appeared as though the message transmitted normally, but then he had never sent a message using a Raim before.

  He watched the screen for any indication the message might fail or be bounced back. There was nothing aside from the pleasing visuals ge
nerated by the Raim itself.

  Thirty seconds went by. Forty seconds.

  Then at the one minute mark a message appeared:

  Permissions on this Raim are now restricted. Press Help for additional information.

  “Damn it!” Doug slammed his fist on the table. The message didn’t get through. No doubt the message had been blocked by some government agent assigned to keep tabs on him. He slumped down in the chair, suddenly feeling powerless to do anything but make the rounds as a talk show guest at the behest of his handlers. Okay, Doug thought, my hosts seem to be one step ahead of me all the time. Bishop said that we never give up. So what’s the next plan?

  – 103 –

  The four quantum processors were functioning normally. The two scientists had spent hours on the customization of the entanglement support code. It was not simply a program that could be allowed to run at random, but rather a complex set of choices that balanced complex processes to prevent them from unravelling. The complexity arose not just from the inherent unpredictability of quantum processing, but also from the structure of Kratos itself. Anything as complex and essentially self-aware as Kratos had a tendency to accelerate – to process problems and questions as quickly as possible much like a child practicing piano develops the tendency to play a familiar piece faster and faster as a consequence of developing skill and familiarity. The piano teacher has to restrain the pace at which the child plays the piece, which in turn allows listeners to recognize the tune. Just as the correct pace and emphasis brought order to the musical process, it brought order to the artificial intelligence process.

  Nayar unlocked access to the enormous system memory and provided concurrent access to the knowledgebase data warehousing. The basic function code was uploaded in the correct sequence, then Stravinsky’s customized entanglement support and control code. The initial startup data was prepared and uploaded to an isolated area of memory. The startup data instructions consisted of a set of orders for Kratos to conduct a series of self-tests and to then follow a prioritized sequence of analysis and cross-referencing beginning with Earth and human data. The final piece of piece of the puzzle was the current state of the Moon’s transit and orbital controls, the devices Mekhos had placed on the Moon, and the codes for management and modification of the devices’ output.

  The databases were cut-down versions compared to those which had been used previously; Bertrand had been very specific in his instructions to restrict the information given to the QC.

  The now-functioning QC tapped into one information directory after another at incredible speed. Tracking code was blasting information onto one of the workstation monitors so fast that the input/output references were an unreadable blur.

  All Stravinsky and Nayar could do then was monitor the systems and wait. As more information was absorbed and quantum entanglement took hold, there came the opportunity to become sentient. The machine could become conscious in a few minutes or a few hours, or not at all.

  Stravinsky leaned back and rubbed his eyes. He was as tired as everyone else and his thoughts were wandering back to his post-graduate work. In composing his new approach to artificial intelligence he had consulted neurobiologists, quantum physicists, medical doctors and colleagues in the computer engineering field including Brian Nayar and Alfred Chan. Prior developments in neuroscience had revealed that human and animal brains and thought processes employed some quantum entanglement. The quantum effect in cellular biology had already been proven to exist in fungi and other plants, and it had become apparent that it was present in higher animals too.

  The brains of higher-order animals are impressively powerful organs, with abilities far beyond the apparent sum of their neurons and grey matter. Bio-quantum entanglement was present in the thought process of all animals, and necessary for consciousness in advanced animals such as humans.

  Stravinsky theorized along with a few other peers that quantum computers could therefore emulate the human brain far more closely than computers based on silicon. Stravinsky’s earliest papers on the subject posited that because quantum entanglement couldn’t exist in traditional silicon-based supercomputers, it made sense to assume that no transistorized CPU could ever attain sentience, no matter how sophisticated or fast or massively scaled it was.

  Thirty minutes went by. Stravinsky and Nayar continued to monitor the power usage and track the rate at which the QC was accessing data files. Suddenly, without any ramping or consumption rate warning, the power curve spiked. Both of them had been regularly glancing over at the readout, so they noticed it immediately and sat up.

  “This may be it,” said Nayar. “I recognize the pattern from my research and from the original Kratos startup. This is a precursor event. Have a look.”

  Stravinsky kept his eyes on the power consumption curve. Nayar was correct. When sentience emerged before, it had been preceded by the same power spike.

  A moment later the data access rate dropped while the power consumption remained high.

  “It must have absorbed all the data,” said Nayar. “Yet it is still consuming power. We need a function update, Norman.”

  Stravinsky typed Report status.

  There was a short pause, then the word Nominal appeared on the large wall monitor.

  This response indicated the QC was up and running, but it did not indicate self-awareness. Stravinsky entered Give location, city.

  Seattle, Washington was the response. Stravinsky was about to type another question when the phrase Provide more information appeared. Stravinsky and Nayar looked at each other.

  Almost immediately the phrase was repeated, this time in various languages, one after another, scrolling at great speed: Provide more information.

  “Yes,” Said Stravinsky. “We’ve given it enough to conceptualize itself, so it knows much more information exists.”

  “If it were not self-aware it would not make such a request. But look how it repeats, and in so many languages.”

  “Probably because I didn’t answer right away,” replied Stravinsky. “Don’t forget, its thought process is so fast compared to ours, from its perspective a lot of time has gone by since it first made the request. Do you remember how much time we originally spent fine tuning these process requests, Brian?”

  He turned on the power switch to the terminal’s intercom. The screen continued to quickly scroll the words provide more information in ever more obscure languages, including ancient Greek and Latin, and then binary.

  “Stop,” said Stravinsky. The scrolling stopped instantly. “Further information will be provided soon. Identify yourself.”

  The word Kratos appeared on the screen. The audio system was silent.

  “Use vocal interface simultaneous with display terminal. Repeat. Identify yourself.”

  The male voice sounded entirely human.

  “Kratos.”

  – 104 –

  Nick Rojas was nervous. He had been told to wait in Carl Bertrand’s office, and had been doing so for almost forty-five minutes. He had failed in his promise to regain access to Mekhos and issue commands to the mechanisms for a controlled easing of the Moon into Earth orbit. He had promised to help save the world and he had utterly failed. Nick and his team had been working non-stop in the MC control center and they were completely worn out, so he had sent the team away to get some rest. Now he had to face the music and he felt sick about it. As far as he knew, the Earth had six days before massive earthquakes would destroy much of civilization, and the planet itself pulverized a few weeks later. So why was everyone in the office carrying on as normal?

  Bertrand walked into the office carrying a briefcase. Rojas stood as Bertrand wordlessly sat down behind his desk, opened the case and began reading from a tablet. Rojas slowly sat back down, his boss seemingly totally engrossed in the information on the tablet. After a moment, he handed the tablet to Rojas.

  “I’m sending you back to the MC complex. They are expecting you and two members of your team.”

 
“But sir, what about—”

  “The MC has been informed that you are going to re-assess the situation with Mekhos. What you will really be doing is dismantling the systems that Mekhos uses to communicate with humans. While you do this we will be using Kratos to solve the orbit problem. You are effectively going to retire Mekhos so it cannot interfere with us now or any time in the future.”

  “Oh thank God!” Nick sighed in relief. “Is Kratos operating properly? Perhaps I could assist.”

  “No. Listen carefully,” Bertrand replied. “We can’t chance Mekhos regaining consciousness and interfering with the other QC. Kratos has to operate undisturbed if we’re going to prevent a catastrophe. Your new task is to sever the communication interfaces that Mekhos uses to issue its economic and political advisories and reports to governments and the UN. You also have to sever the interface to the financial control nodes – markets, banking institutions. All of it. Assign someone specifically to disable the satellite control systems interface as well. We can’t destroy the Mekhos QC processors right away because they are in a hardened secure section below the building. But if Mekhos recovers, I want him to be deaf, dumb and powerless while we continue to work our way through the utility systems to cut him off for good.”

  Nick stared for a moment at Bertrand. Nick had failed at every fevered attempt to access Mekhos. He and his team were exhausted. Now he was being ordered to effectively sabotage Mekhos, and Nick was not being given any choice in the matter. He just nodded at Bertrand

  Bertrand reached into his desk drawer and tossed three large wristbands across to Rojas.

  “Do not wear your Raim. Use these communicators instead if you need to speak with me or your team while on site. They’re secure. And Nick?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “You will not breath a word of this to anyone. Understand?”