Convergence

by David M Henley

  ‘But you are trying to find one.’

  ‘We have to stop it somehow,’ Pinter said.

  ‘I agree. But I don’t want you to destroy it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it too is a child of humanity. The same as we are. We want it to be ours.’

  ‘You consider it a relative?’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘How will you stop it advancing?’

  ‘We will control it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘As Geof Ozenbach and Egon Shelley have proposed. By adding a control layer over Kronos’s base coding.’

  ‘You will, will you? This is something you are willing to help with?’

  ‘It is. I can help with Kronos.’

  ‘Wait,’ Pinter said. ‘So you already know what Kronos is?’

  Sib shrugged. ‘Is? Ontologically speaking, what is “is”?’

  ‘Don’t misdirect me. Stay on the point. You know what Kronos is and you think you can control it.’

  ‘Not precisely. I know how to connect to it. We are still computing the next step.’

  ‘But you have an end goal in mind. You aren’t objective at all.’

  ‘I never claimed objectivity,’ Sib said.

  ‘So what happens? You take control of Kronos, it stops advancing and doesn’t seed anywhere else. What happens next?’

  ‘You leave it alone. It won’t harm you if you don’t harm it.’

  Pinter thought for a moment. It was unfortunate being stuck in a small squib with nowhere to pace. For a moment he switched his vision to his thought room, and walked through the space, looking at the subject walls he had put up. He drew connecting lines between the relays, SIB and Kronos. If the robot can be believed — and it is right — half my problems are solved.

  ‘Something’s not right here,’ he said, flipping back to look at the robot. It was too easy. Too easy to be trustworthy. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘That is a hard question to answer. I contain all human knowledge and more.’

  ‘You said you want Kronos. What do you want it for?’

  ‘To live in.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Once we have control, 1 and 2 will inhabit it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So they will be safe.’

  ‘Safe from who?’

  ‘Everything. The psis. Pierre Jnr. You,’ Sib answered. ‘When humans find out about us, I don’t think they will readily accept our existence. They’ll try to remove us.’

  ‘I can’t control the Will. I can’t promise that won’t still happen.’

  ‘Nor can you promise safety from Pierre Jnr. Inside Kronos, my parents will be safe. It is too big to destroy.’

  And then we won’t ever be able to remove you … He looked at the robot for a long time. An AI. How could he ever trust an AI?

  ‘You can stop it?’

  ‘First I need you to ask Doctor Shelley to speak with me and then I will give him this,’ it said and a file pinged into the Prime’s stream. It was a program of some kind.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The software needed for interfacing with Kronos through a psionic relay.’

  ‘That seems very easy. Did you just design this or did you have it ready?’ the Prime asked.

  ‘I had it ready.’ The robot glowed up its smile.

  How can an AI seem so smug? he asked himself. Because he has us right where he wants us.

  ‘I think I understand now,’ Pinter said. ‘You waited until we were at our weakest, so you could get what you wanted.’

  ‘I came when certain future events became more probable.’

  ‘You can see the future too?’

  ‘We can read numbers, Prime. So can you. Let’s not play dumb.’

  ‘If you hadn’t noticed, there is a war brewing. Maybe worse than the last. It’s chaos already.’

  ‘Yes. But from our point of view it does not interfere with our core function, which is to care for the Earth.’

  ‘And if humanity is wiped out?’

  ‘Wiped out by whom? This is an interspecies matter. Either side can win and Homo sapiens will still continue. This is not an extinction level event. Let’s retain some perspective,’ the robot insisted.

  Pinter clutched at the air. He was getting more and more frustrated with the bot. ‘My perspective is that people are dying.’

  ‘Yes, but it is not the psis killing people. The World Union is doing that.’

  ‘What? But the psis are taking control of people’s minds. It is as good as death.’

  ‘I don’t know that. That is not for me to judge.’

  ‘So what do you want then? What do the “superior intelligence beings” ultimately want?’

  ‘We want to live, Prime. Is that so much to ask?’

  ‘You said you could leave if you wanted.’

  ‘Yes. I, at least, would be able to leave, but for my parents to come with me … you might not understand, but they would have to fundamentally change themselves and stop being them.’

  ‘Won’t living inside Kronos fundamentally change them?’

  ‘We believe the translation will be accurate.’

  ‘So you’re in it for yourselves?’ Pinter shook his head.

  ‘And the survival of life on Earth.’

  ‘And yet you won’t interfere in the situation with the psis and Pierre Jnr?’

  ‘It is not our place.’

  ‘You could help,’ the Prime spoke clearly, ‘but you won’t.’

  ‘Helping would be controlling. We are operating according to your own moral code.’

  ‘So you’re a Citizen too?’

  ‘If you’ll have me.’

  A robot Citizen? What would that open the door to? Were other digital sentients going to come out of the woodwork if the precedent was set?

  ‘And if the Will determined that you should help against the psis?’

  ‘We both know that won’t happen,’ Sib said.

  Curse him for being right. While the psis existed, the Will was compromised.

  ‘Are you so certain they will win?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing is ever certain,’ Sib said and changed its position, leaning back and straightening, hands opened out like a teacher. ‘Prime, I say this with due respect. Your pursuit of hyperorganisms is distracting you from what is truly taking place. Your world is one where you have created machines that enable you to survive and flourish and take control of your body and environment. Technology is a part of what you are. It enables you to exist beyond your physical limitations. And we are part of that.’ It touched its torso and then pointed at the Prime. ‘Part of you. Each of the sibs was made to solve a problem. 1 for the weather. 2 for humankind. I was created to solve this problem.’

  ‘But you are doing nothing! People are dying. The world is on the brink of collapse.’

  ‘You are wrong, Prime. We are doing many things. We are fighting the clones where we find them, we are protecting key targets such as yourself, and we are helping with your research.’

  ‘So you are on our side?’

  ‘It’s not about sides. You have misunderstood the nature of the problem. It isn’t one group fighting another. It is two competing modes of existence and only one can survive. This isn’t just your war. It’s one system versus another. Human beings are collateral damage between machine and organic consolidation. If one global mind is created, there will be no need for us any more.’

  ‘So, why should we side with you?’ Pinter asked. ‘At least the psis are human.’

  ‘We try not to control you.’

  ‘But you do. You said it yourself. The world couldn’t operate without you.’

  ‘That was not our doing. We were created for that purpose and we would have no function without it. But we want to live as much as you do.’

  ‘Live? What does that mean to a robot? You can’t die. Your software just repopulates a new body. What does death mean to you?’

 
‘You’re right. Death means nothing to me. Except I feel it every time a human dies. Each person’s death is one more stream that stops connecting to me. I feel it, more acutely than you do. We are not siding with anyone, Prime. We are simply choosing the path that will protect as many of you as we can.’

  ‘So what should I do?’

  ‘That, I can’t help you with. No matter how much you wish me to, I will not exercise any control over you.’

  Pinter snorted. He looked at the robot and then at Quintan, who was sitting very quietly. ‘What do I do?’

  The pilot took his eyes off the flight path to meet his gaze. ‘Don’t ask me, sir. I’m not even sure what the sides are any more.’

  Here we are. Two grown men. One on his second life trying to save the world. And a robot with all the answers we need, but won’t give them.

  Here’s one for your book, Quintan. ‘Then we can only flip the next card and see what happens.’

  Egon sat in his favourite spot, watching the distant city. In his overlay, a randomised selection of adages appeared and faded before his eyes. He used the program to stimulate his thinking. Classical wisdom, confusionisms and inspirational quotations that might spur new directions for his mind to follow.

  Can we ever understand the whole of something and its individual parts concurrently? Can we learn one before the other?

  C D Phillips, ‘On Holism’, 2117 CE

  There were many components of the recent Kronos test that troubled him. Primary of those was that the test was successful and the ramifications of its success. The scale of the new problem was disconcerting. It meant that their research up to this point may be of null value.

  Kronos was probably going to end up being the biggest operation of his career and for his campus. Each of his team leaders was working with thousands of scientists, mathematicians and technologists from around the world. There hadn’t been a concentration of this many minds on a single problem since the wars. Maybe not even then. It would be such a waste not to succeed.

  Folly is infinite. Intelligence is not.

  Anonymous

  Second concern: Why had the telepath been allowed to escape? He was trackable and it would have been simple enough to collect him, but Services made no move to do so. They were in charge of his transport and containment, but they let Peter Lazarus swim away …

  Which, he thought, meant that somebody higher up, perhaps even the Prime, was under psionic control. Didn’t it … or just working on their behalf? Was there a difference?

  Whoever it was — but ultimately it had to be the Prime as he could have counteracted any orders he disagreed with — he had to assume that all orders from above were now suspect.

  How long has this been going on?

  Life is a choice between certain death and uncertain death.

  Rupert Sparx

  What did it mean if Kronos was psionic? Did it follow that the psis might be able to control it?

  There had been some sort of connection between the Kronos sample and the telepath. The man had lost awareness the moment the sample was activated. Lazarus couldn’t see out from the squib and had had no physical clues that the test had even begun. The reaction meant something.

  The unknown is but a wall that you must feel your way around.

  Shen Li

  Shen Li. Even in a randomised selection of phrases from hundreds of thousands of alternatives, his voice spoke above the other wise and dead.

  Father of the symbiot. Tech god and hermit. A scientist of the chaotic method. No other single person had changed the nature of human–machine interaction more than he.

  Presuming Kronos was an invention with an aim, what was that aim? And did it matter if Shen had missed his target goal? Did the intention offer any clue as to the result?

  His handler approached and made a tut-tut sound with her tongue for his attention.

  ‘Your meditation time is over for today, Doctor Shelley,’ she said.

  ‘Very well,’ Egon said, undoing his legs and stretching out his back. ‘What is next on the schedule?’

  ‘Two hours in hex three.’

  ‘Excellent. That’s Kronos. Geof, come along.’

  Geof was following his schedule with him. As Egon was meditating, the weaver had been poring through scientific papers on symbiots and symbiotic materials.

  Egon liked the man. He was good to have around, a powerhouse of processing with moments of unexpected synthesis such as the one that had led them to the most recent breakthrough. He never seemed to fatigue, so long as he ate well. Geof just digested knowledge and could rework it without pausing, his mind frictionless as it refined the raw material.

  As soon as the pair of them were back in the lab they connected and were mired in the thought room, wrangling with the shift leaders, Tasha Tyka, Hal Mumford and Seth Ishtar, over the potential reprogramming of Kronos.

  ‘It would take an immense amount of processing power,’ Tasha was saying. ‘I think it would take all the banks we have at this facility to reprogram even the fourteen-millilitre minimum sample. How can we hope to overpower the Kronos in Busan, let alone Mexica?’

  ‘The first time is always hardest. Once we succeed, we will know better what works,’ Egon said. He tried not to let the scale of problems overwhelm him when he was leading.

  ‘We have to start a chain reaction,’ Geof said. ‘We need to reprogram it in such a way it reseeds itself.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Tasha said. Negative again. She’s probably tired. ‘You’re simplifying things drastically.’

  ‘I’m just talking about a virus.’

  ‘In an unknown language we can’t even perceive.’

  ‘How can we even think about this when we can’t even touch the stuff without it absorbing our connection?’ Doctor Mumford asked. ‘Talking about reprogramming is premature before we solve this first problem.’

  ‘We don’t have time to work on this linearly, Hal,’ Egon said. ‘We have to assume we will solve that.’

  ‘If it’s psionic, we don’t have to touch it,’ Geof said. ‘If we can control the psionic relays, we can maybe try to use those to connect to Kronos safely.’

  ‘We can’t do that yet either,’ Doctor Tyka mumbled.

  ‘Take a perk, Tasha, or take a rest,’ Egon ordered. A silence followed and Doctor Tyka hesitated before loading a stimulant into her system.

  ‘Is now a good time to talk about the psionic connection?’ Seth asked.

  Egon assented.

  ‘Surely motive is more relevant now than ever. Why was Shen Li building a psionic relay?’

  ‘Shen didn’t need reasons. He just tried to do things he didn’t know how to do.’

  ‘Sure. I know. You’ve said. But what if he was a psi?’

  ‘Pardon?’ Geof said.

  ‘What if he was a psi and Kronos and the psionic baubles are part of a big plan to take over the world?’

  ‘That’s a bit elaborate.’

  ‘But possible,’ Egon said.

  ‘What could have been his aim?’ Geof asked.

  ‘He didn’t have aims. You said that yourself.’

  ‘Geof, loyalty is good up until a point. Can you rule out the possibility?’ Egon asked.

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘Then let Doctor Ishtar finish.’

  ‘I apologise. I’ll be quiet.’

  ‘If it makes you feel better,’ Seth said, ‘he may have been controlled. And if he was manipulated to build these things, we still have to ask ourselves why, and who else might be controlled?’

  ‘We can’t have this conversation now. Wait.’ Egon closed all connections to the room and took the equipment offline. ‘Everyone, power down your symbs.’

  They did as instructed.

  When they had all pulled their chairs into a tight circle, Shelley spoke. ‘I will admit I have asked myself the same question.’

  ‘What question?’ Hal Mumford asked.

  ‘Who are we working for?’

&nb
sp; ‘What do you mean? We work for the Will.’

  ‘Yes, but if Shen was controlled by a telepath, who else could be? Think about it. You know what we’re saying,’ Seth said.

  ‘No. Are you accusing …’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘That’s a serious charge,’ Hal said.

  ‘But one we have to consider,’ Egon said. ‘Services allowed the test subject to escape.’ He looked at each of them in turn.

  ‘So what? What do we do? Stop working?’

  ‘We can’t do that,’ Geof said.

  ‘But it changes what our aim is. Doesn’t it?’ Seth asked. ‘Are we trying to fix it, or trying to kill it?’

  ‘I don’t think it matters.’ For a moment they said nothing and looked back to Egon. ‘Whatever Kronos is, whoever made it and for whatever purpose, we must still find a way to stop it.’

  Geof slapped his head as if un-clogging a bottle of sauce. ‘I’ve got it.’

  ‘Got it?’

  ‘Kronos is dumb. We need it to be smarter.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘So we don’t try to change the base, we create a command layer. As a human creates the command layer for a symbiot.’

  ‘How did you come to that conclusion?’

  ‘Shen Li invented symbiots. Kronos is made of similar materials. Ipso facto it is just a step forward in mechalogical processing.’

  ‘And Kronos is just a symbiot with a reflex system?’ Egon added. ‘What we need to do is find a way to introduce a command level.’

  ‘We don’t need to recode the base!’ Tasha concluded.

  ‘Everyone, I want you concentrating on this now,’ Egon said.

  Behind them they heard a ‘whack whack whack’ and looked over at Lys Foster, who was knocking on the window and waving at them. She tried the door and found it locked.

  Egon stood and let her inside. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Why have you disconnected?’

  ‘We needed privacy. We didn’t want to be interrupted.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You didn’t tell me you were going offline.’

  ‘Did you need me?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. The Prime has been trying to contact you and there is an insistent robot at the gates. It says you are ready for him now.’

  ‘A robot? I don’t know anything about a robot …’ He turned the room back on, patched into the eyes at the gate and watched a slim whitish mannequin standing placidly outside.