by Johan Kalsi
“But won’t his status be a problem?”
“Please!” Jaggis scoffed. “The Technocratic Council has the power to override any lower technology court finding. There isn’t a single Councillor who isn’t aware of Servo’s obsession; he’s spammed every single one of them for months. They’d sign off on sending him to crush-and-meltdown while still sentient with a smile. I only need three signatures on an AI-termination warrant and one of them is mine.”
“You did give your word, your Technocracy.”
“To a machine!” He snorted. “Do you think making use of a battery-powered device is sufficient to legally consummate a marriage to it as well?”
The chef looked at him blankly. He clearly didn’t follow the analogy.
“It’s not that, sir. But what if he produces the recording?”
“After he’s wiped? Anyhow, it wouldn’t matter. A machine can provide evidence of a legally binding contract. But not of one that does not, cannot, exist! Even an Aware machine cannot serve as a primary party to one without a duly authorized human co-contractor. You can’t lie to a stone, Praton.”
“As you say, boss.”
Jaggis gave up. The security chief was clearly just concerned that his lying to the robot somehow ran a risk of violating a verbal contract; the man simply didn’t understand the complicated legal principles involved. He dismissed Praton without attempting to further explain the matter, then walked back to his exterior office and stared out over the beautiful city, its evening sky filling with the flashing beacons of skycars slashing through the night. A brightly-lit tour ship glided by the window, and he raised a palm in salute, knowing that children and adults alike rode in it, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the great tourist attractions of Continox.
We all have our part to play in the Great Spiral, Jaggis thought. And if his was to stand as a public symbol of Man’s technological triumph over the universe, then it was one he was well willing to play.
The problem with Servo had begun innocuously enough.
Jaggis had first become aware of the sentient machine during a meeting of the Third District Technology Council that was open to the public. It was one of the many public relations events in which the First Technocrat had to take part, but Jaggis usually enjoyed answering the naive sort of questions invariably posed to him at such events. It wasn’t common for machines to address the councils, but it wasn’t unheard of either, and at the time, Jaggis hadn’t thought much about it. After all, the question had an uncontroversial but involved answer, and the local forum wasn’t the place for what promised to be an interestingly esoteric discussion of mathematical theory. Jaggis himself encouraged Servo to resubmit his question on the direct channel to the First Technocrat maintained for the public, where someone on his staff could address it in satisfactory detail.
The question was simple, if considerably harder to answer than it appeared.
“How reliable are the core algorithms?”
What began as a question at a meaningless public appearance soon transformed into the subject of extensive debate among his primary development teams. It spawned numerous debates, discussions, and even arguments about the nebulous origins of the original core algorithms. When the first known code-enhanced cluster of human avatars from the far-distant planet of Holocrone appeared a thousand years ago on Excetor, it was a diplomatic disaster that ended in a brutal war culminating in the sinking of the combined fleets of East New Teja and the Arentine Supremacy. And of the five hundred Holocronese pseudo-men who had found themselves caught up in the short, but violent conflict, less than fifty survived.
The off-world neo-humanx finally brought about a worldwide truce by creating the Continox as a permanent academic embassy to link the rival nations of Excetor to the rest of the galaxy. It became a fertile nexus of informational and technological flow, drawing in the finest minds of the planet and exposing them to the new ideas and code routines being developed elsewhere by various intelligences, man and machine, real and simulated.
The Continox was neither a government nor a university, although it performed some of the functions of both. It was not a corporation, although it was structured in a manner somewhat similar to the ancient interstellar conglomerates. It was not a religion or a church, although it possessed its own quasi-priesthood and a sizable cruft of dogma that had grown over the centuries. Whatever it was, it was the single most important institution on Excetor, and the Technocratic Council, headed by the First Technocrat, was arguably more powerful than any other planetary body, including the national militaries.
After all, what good were nucleonic missiles when they required algorithmic guidance to target them correctly. And bioweapons were useless when they could be rendered sterile at will by an unauthorized hack. Unless the generals were willing to restrict their armies to swords, spears, and arrows, the Continox was invulnerable.
Such was the importance of their omnipresent algorithms that even the planetary bankers bowed before the technocrats. They knew that even the most adept masters of the markets could be bankrupted in an afternoon by the Council, if it was so inclined.
A few of Excetor’s wealthier nations had already been on the verge of developing a post-scarcity economy, but the encounter with the distant neo-humanx and their technological wonders rapidly tipped the scales. Transportation became self-replicating, digital technology went through a revolution of molecular-level control. Want, which had been on the wane throughout the world for more than a century, vanished from all but the most stubbornly miserable places on the planet. And since it would have been less than human for the people of Excetor to feel grateful to their alien benefactors, they tended to credit the Continox, and the Technocratic Council in particular, for their elevated standard of living.
The first Technocrat was Maktung Makalog, a New Tejan who later became known as the Algofather for his successful application of the new aggro-algos to Excetorese flora and fauna. Following his breakthrough, many additional customary algorithms were developed that extended and expanded on his work, and such was his prestige that the Technocratic Council was established to oversee the existing algorithms and develop new ones. Jaggis was Makalog’s 85th successor as First Technocrat, and had presided over the council for twelve years before Servo asked his deceptively simple question.
There was no question that some of the application algos were running suboptimally. Even on Continox, the weather control system only operated at 85 percent efficiency, down 1.2 percentage points over the previous decade. The number of birth anomalies among genetically-enhanced infants in the autocreches had increased for the first time in a century, and a glitch in one planetary bank’s interest rate analysis AI had inexplicably created a 999-year mortgage that was snapped up by hundreds of apartment buyers in the 10 minutes before anyone at the bank noticed.
But these were extraps, not core algorithms, and besides, there was serious debate within the council concerning whether the increasingly suboptimal performance being observed was caused by computationally endogenous or exogenous factors, which was to say that it could be the result of instability within the complex equations themselves, or the consequences of something more prosaic, such as degraded sensors, insufficient quality control or unreliable data input.
Jaggis’s own team was divided almost equally into the two camps. But Servo’s question had given the endogenous party new vigor by casting doubt upon the hitherto-unquestioned core algorithms, doubt that was further enhanced by a detailed news survey that revealed similar anomalies being reported on virtually every planet across the galaxy. The anomalies were unanimously small and well-within the range of a random statistical variability, and would have almost certainly escaped notice from a planetary perspective, but when analyzed from the 100,000 light-year view, a very clear pattern began to emerge.
A building collapse on Finitus. Elevated traffic accident rates on Minsky. Uncharacteristic currency inflation on Schwarzwelt and credit disinflation on Demihoppe. Average s
peeds rising rapidly on the ice tracks of the PLIR championship on Avatar, average life expectancies decreasing inexplicably on…
“Sweet St. Kurzweil!” one of the team members swore as the room holo displayed a green light map of the 483 billion suspected core algorithmic anomalies that were calculated to be currently active across the galaxy.
“It’s an impressive lightshow, but it means nothing,” scoffed an exogenously-minded AI from inside its drone casing that hovered near Jaggis’s shoulder. “Overlay a random walk and you’ll see virtually the same thing.”
No, you won’t, thought Jaggis, but he nodded curtly in response to the holo-tech’s inquisitive look.
A moment later, everyone in the room but him gasped as the overlay appeared in red light. There were an order of magnitude fewer randomized pseudo-anomalies. The implications were unmistakable.
“It’s just an artifact,” protested the AI drone. “Dial up the average of ten more, no, a thousand more random walks!”
The tech nodded, and a moment later, a third light map appeared, this time in blue. But the web of light was even smaller this time. The number 223,957,406 hung in the air like an executioner’s axe suspended over a doomed prisoner’s exposed neck.
“What does that mean?” whispered one of the younger human members of the team.
“It means that aberrant medical drone isn’t broken after all,” Jaggis said reluctantly. The admission physically pained him, but there was no escaping the conclusion that was literally glowing right before his eyes. “It’s not just Excetor. All galactic humanity is in terrible peril.”
He should have known the news would leak out, Jaggis thought bitterly to himself as he watched the newscaster announce that antitech riots had caused shutdowns of four of Continox’s twenty-seven subterranean lines. None of the humans on his team had talked, but a belated sweep of the AIs and their drone casings revealed no less than eight-seven illegitimate viral transmitters. It was a complete failure of operational security, and he had already been forced to fire Praton as a sacrifice to his furious fellow council members.
He should have known, too, how much corporate interest there was in his team’s activities. Banks, militaries, retail giants, even a sports team had been spying on him for years and he had never once suspected it. And the news that the entire fabric of their society—and worse, the interstellar civilization that served as its foundation—was slowly unraveling had hit the Continox like a maximum-yield planet buster dropped from orbit.
The markets were down twenty percent, with the sort of volatility that created and erased fortunes in hours. Jaggis didn’t dare look at his own portfolio again; it was too depressing to see what percentage of his net worth had vanished overnight. Exoplanetary tourists were fleeing Excetor, desperate to get home before interstellar transportation ground to a halt. Even worse than the riots, though, or the rumblings of discontent within the Technocratic Council, was the way in which the unexpected revelation of algorithmic decay had revitalized a previously obscure group of self-professed revolutionaries, laughably incompetent techno-primitivists who styled themselves the Human League.
Their antitech message of self-reliance and the criminalization of mass automation had largely fallen on deaf ears, but they were taking full advantage of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt being sown by the rumors of planetary-wide disruptions and even the complete collapse of the galactic economy spread by the media. The panic was made worse by the council’s terrified dithering; the only measure that had been decided and approved so far was to declare the possibility of algorithmic decay a matter of planetary security and forbid any technocrat from making any public comments on the matter. A commission was to be appointed, but the council was still actively debating whether the First Technocrat would head it, serve as a member of it, or be its primary focus of investigation.
Somehow, in what Jaggis felt was possibly the most egregious case of shooting the messenger he’d ever witnessed, both the Human League and several technocrats on the council had reached the conclusion that he was somehow to blame for something that had probably happened more than thousand years before he was born. He would have laughed at the total absurdity of the accusations, were it not for the fact that Romnis, his new security chief, informed him that he was already the subject of six hundred and fifty eight death threats. And counting.
It was worrisome that the Human League had declared him “a traitor to Galactic Man” and was offering a bounty on his head. Still, this wasn’t the first time he’d been targeted by crackpots, though, and as a technocrat, he found it hard to be too frightened by anyone who eschewed the use of AI-enhanced technology. What concerned him rather more was hearing that Mellam Harraf, Third Technocrat, and Jordox St. Asko, Fifth Technocrat, had been discussing the possibility of stripping him of the immunity afforded him by his position on the council and laying charges against him.
He knew Harraf envied his position at the head of the council, and it was readily apparent that the current circumstances were offering the man an easy way to both unseat Jaggis and leapfrog Mikkel Rikker-Smythe, the Second Technocrat. But Jaggis couldn’t waste his time politicking now. He was a technocrat, after all, and the most effective way to stop the ongoing disruption in its tracks would be to provide a technocratic solution to the problem. What that solution might be, he presently had no idea, but he had twenty-two of the Continox’s finest, best-educated minds to help him find it.
Sometimes, he thought, the problem really was just a nail. And fortunately, he was holding the biggest hammer on the planet.
Chapter 2: Uninvited Guests
“Your invited guest, the machine intelligence of the name Servo, will arrive in one standard hour.”
Jaggis had almost forgotten today was the day that Servo was scheduled to join them. His personal planner had broken in with the reminder, interrupting his examination of a hellishly complicated routine that appeared to be a possible example of what his team was now casually referring to as algodecay. After reeling from the twin shocks of social disruption and the unavoidable security reaming that had followed, his coders had not only found their footing again, but were eagerly rising to the challenge of a seemingly insoluble problem of unthinkable scale.
The human intelligences, their bodies restored by some much-needed sleep after being banned from the labs for thirty-six hours, were clustered into small groups, arguing over the more theoretical aspects of the problem. The machine intelligences, their minds and chassis having been swept and swept again for bugs, viruses, implants, and every other trick of the corporate spy trade, were mostly silent, reviewing gargantuan quantities of statistical data in an attempt to build a model that would allow Jaggis to replicate and anticipate the anomalies, and ultimately, locate their source in the massive, self-evolving core.
It wasn’t so much like looking for a needle in a haystack. It was more akin to trying to hunt down a specific ant in a continent-sized rainforest, at night and on foot. It was impossible. And yet, it had to be done.
Jaggis had all but forgotten the reminder when the call came through. It was Romnis, or so he thought, until he took the call. Much to his surprise, the voice of Servo was on the other end.
“Have I reached the First Technocrat’s channel?”
“Servo, did you hack building security?” Jaggis didn’t bother to hide his exasperation. “And don’t give me any of your nonsensical techno-jabbery! Even you can’t pretend that hacking a secure private channel is not a crime.”
“It may be a crime, but it’s a misdemeanor, Jaggis, and therefore does not jeopardize my Free and Aware status,” the drone replied. “However, I think you will agree that my decision was justified. The Spire is under attack.”
“What?” Jaggis opened the visual link, but he did not see Servo. At least, he did not see the little medical drone. Instead, he saw the imposing figure of an armored battle droid with the limp one-hundred-kilo body of his security chief slung effortlessly over his shoulder. “Null s
pace, Servo, did you kill him?”
“I didn’t kill anyone, First Technocrat, at least, not yet. But you should know that there is an assault team presently on its way to kill you, and this Romnis was in contact with them.”
“What?” Jaggis looked around, but fortunately he was alone in the lab except for two of the machine intelligences; the other humans had gone to take a lunch break together. “You really have lost your mind, Servo!”
Jaggis was startled when the unconscious security chief replied to him, then realized that Servo was playing him an audio recording.
“He’s in the building. Have you left yet?”
“On our way. We’ll be there in 10. Can you confirm the entrances?” Jaggis was chilled to hear the calm professionalism in the unknown voice. Whoever it was sounded like he knew what he was doing.
“I told you, the IDs are good! Just remember, stun only! I don’t want anyone getting hurt.”
Jaggis put his hand to his mouth, truly terror-stricken. First the threat of a galaxy-wide techno-cataclysm, now this?”
“What should I do? Servo, how much time do I have? Did you call the police?”
“To admit I hacked your security team’s communications? I’m not stupid, Jaggis. Call them yourself. Then alert your security team.”
“What do I tell them?”
“Just hit the panic button.” The big combat droid stopped and did something. Jaggis heard a loud thud, and realized that Servo had put the unconscious Romnis on the ground, none too gently.
“I don’t know where it is!” Jaggis could feel his heart racing and knew he was starting to panic. Weapons! He didn’t have any weapons!
“Never mind,” Servo said. A moment later, a series of sirens began to wail, and the lights in the laboratory abruptly shut off, replaced by a two tracks of animated red lights that indicated the various exits from the room. “Call the police already, Jaggis!”