The Puzzler's War

by Eyal Kless

  “Let’s assume for a second that all you say is a hundred percent true, and that there is no other action to take but the one you describe, Professor. There is no way that I, or even a team, could inject even one line of code into Adam without him noticing it immediately.”

  “You are right about that, Mannes.”

  “So . . .”

  “We will not insert the code into Adam. We will have to use a vessel.” Professor Vitor’s smile was grim, but resolute. “We will have to do it through me.”

  Chapter 75

  Peach

  “Wait one rusting moment.” The man calling himself Twinkle Eyes was first to speak when Mannes stopped talking. “What you are telling us is that Adam was the bad guy, and that Cain—”

  “—was trying to stop Adam from destroying the world,” Mannes answered calmly. He had long recovered from what I guess was a very rare outburst of emotions.

  “Ah, I knew it,” the combat vessel called Galinak exclaimed, and thumped his thigh. “I’m never on the good guys’ team.”

  “You are lying.” I was surprised to hear my voice tremble.

  “Am I, Colonel Major?” Mannes turned his head a little towards me, completely ignoring Vincha’s power gun pressing against the side of his head. “You saw it, too. You wrote in your memos about it, and they . . . well, he shelved you for it.”

  “Getting a little too aggressive with some of our missions is one thing,” I said, “but pushing for a world war is preposterous.”

  “And why is that preposterous?” Mannes said. “I don’t possess the intelligence of Adam, so it is hard for me to follow the complete logic of his plan. But I know that the best and smartest of our kind were already inside Adam, they were a part of him, while the rest of humanity was in his way. Adam’s political and diplomatic manoeuvrings isolated Tarakan. We were despised, and feared, and rightly so.”

  “Adam was programmed not to harm others—”

  “Adam is a Sentient Program,” Mannes answered. “It took my own AI pilot just several years to begin outgrowing her programming. Think what a supreme being with an IQ in the tens of thousands could overcome.”

  “It’s insane. Even Adam would not have been able to pull something like this off.”

  “If you are referring to the minds inside Adam, they were oblivious to the fact that they were trapped in their own world. They did not know that most of the people they interacted with were avatars Adam had created. Only Cain’s intervention forced Adam to hibernate most of the minds to save power.”

  “And you are claiming you created a Sentient Program all by yourself?” There was a small voice in my head I was trying to shush, and it was telling me that Mannes might be telling the truth this time.

  “I had some help from a very talented group of people.”

  It was an inside job. A group of Tarakan programmers did it…I even know their names. That was what Mannes had told me when we first met.

  “I am from the same era as you are, Mannes, and not without knowledge.” I was getting angry now, despite trying to remain calm. “So don’t try and hustle me. It takes around two hundred programmers, not to mention other professionals, to create a full, stable Sentient Program, and then there is the whole testing phase and nurturing and . . . that is simply impossible to do—even you admitted it.”

  “We had to cut some corners,” Mannes admitted. “But with Professor Vitor inside and Daichi on the outside, we pulled it off.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “No, it was just very improbable. We needed a quicker shell to save time, and in doing so, we had to take some risks.” Mannes sighed. “A lot of risks.”

  “Right now, you are risking your life with your chatter,” Vincha cut in, pressing the barrel of the gun against the side of Mannes’s head. “You need to tell me how you’re going to bring my daughter back, or I will kill you.”

  Mannes glanced up. “You have to understand what I did,” he said. “Then you will see.”

  Chapter 76

  Mannes

  Daichi tapped on that old-fashioned keyboard he insisted on using and declared, “Ready from my end.”

  Mannes turned his head to Jennifer, who raised up her thumb.

  “Give me a minute.” Jameson was bent over his machines in the far corner. He was always the last to finish, but his work was flawless, and right now flawless was what Mannes needed. He turned his head back to the transparent part of the wall. Deborah was lying there, asleep and oblivious. The machine was already attached to her head and covered half her face. She was breathing deeply. If his wife ever found out what he was about to do . . .

  “Done!”

  Mannes checked the numbers on his own pad, concentrating on the long list. He’d forbidden them all to use their brain amps, so all the calculations had to be done on machines that were not hooked up to the grid. It was surprisingly difficult to find any such machines, both amply sophisticated and in working order, but Daichi was an avid collector of old pieces of technical equipment, and the team improvised.

  “The numbers look good from my end.” When Mannes looked back up, his teammates were already in their new positions. Andriana was closest to him, monitoring his daughter’s brain waves and vital signs.

  “She won’t feel a thing,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else.

  Andriana nodded. “And she won’t remember, either, I’ll make sure of it.” She smiled and patted his arm. “Don’t worry, Holtz, we’ve got this.”

  Easy enough for her to say. It wasn’t her daughter whose brain patterns were about to be extracted from her consciousness.

  “Are we still in a secure zone?”

  “Yes, same as we were the last five times you asked, Boss.” Daichi did not hide his annoyance. For him it was just an exciting adventure. Mannes hoped he would not forget his special orders, the ones no one else, not even Professor Vitor, was aware of.

  “Bring Professor Vitor online.”

  The large central screen blinked from black to blue and suddenly Professor Vitor’s youthful visage filled it.

  Mannes turned to the screen. “Professor.”

  Professor Vitor raised his fist. “I see you are all ready for action. There’s no time to waste. Let’s begin the seq—”

  “Wait.” There weren’t a lot of people that would have cut off Professor Vitor. Actually, Mannes could not even think of one, but he did it nonetheless. “I need to talk to my team first.”

  To his surprise, Professor Vitor did not argue.

  He turned to his team. “What we did up to this moment could be explained away as theoretical research. What we are about to do here, right now”—he made a point of locking gazes with each of them—“is crossing the line. Copying human brain wave patterns and attaching them to a Sentient Program in order to accelerate growth and forgo the careful birth and controlled upbringing violates so many rules, I can’t even begin to count them all. Once we do this, there is no turning back.”

  He did not think that they would back off, not at this point, not after all that they had done already, but his heart was still pounding when he surveyed his small team. Did he see Andriana hesitate? Was Jameson having second thoughts? In the end they all remained silent long enough to convey that they were all in.

  “Begin the brain stimulation,” Mannes ordered. He watched as they began to press buttons, turn dials, and type orders on old keyboards. Ironically, he had nothing to do but watch his daughter sleep.

  A small screen with Professor Vitor’s image floated next to Mannes. “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing, I brought her to work.” For some reason Mannes felt the need to bring out the empty vial from his pocket and show it to his mentor. “Then I gave her warm milk and . . .” He shrugged. “I’ll just tell her she fell asleep in the chair. She used to do it a lot when she was a little girl.”

  “What you are doing is brave, Mannes.”

  He shook his head. “Or just foolish, and very dangerous.�
��

  “There’s no other way. We cannot go through the upbringing process of a Sentient Program, and a full adult mind does not have the necessary flexibility of—”

  “I know,” Mannes snapped, cutting off his legendary professor for the second time.

  Daichi turned his head towards them.

  “Sorry . . .” Mannes mumbled.

  “No need to apologise.” Professor Vitor would have probably patted Mannes on the back had he existed in the physical world. “This is not the ideal way, but it’s the only possible way that we could accomplish our goal.”

  “What if we’re wrong? What if we connected the dots but got the wrong picture?” Mannes turned to his mentor’s image and whispered, “Are we all just crazy . . . ?” He did not bother to finish the sentence.

  Professor Vitor was kind enough not to respond immediately. When he finally answered it was slow, as if he was still considering Mannes’s words. “I ask this of myself every day, and definitely wish we are wrong, but once I go over my findings, I reach the same conclusion every time. Mannes, I did something horribly wrong awakening Adam. If it wasn’t for me—”

  “—someone else would have done it by now,” Mannes said, finishing the sentence. “And he or she would not have been clear minded enough to see the error.”

  “Seeing is one thing, but if we do not correct this mistake we could be dooming humanity, and with the kind of weapons all sides possess, this world war will be our last.”

  Mannes took a stabilizing breath and checked on his daughter, whose brain wave signs indicated she was beginning to respond to the stimulation. Jameson, who was doing the scanning and copying, waved and gave him the thumbs-up from across the room.

  “Let’s focus on what we can do right now.” He switched to the private channel to convey his question to the Professor in private. “Once we copy Deborah’s brain waves and integrate them into the Sentient Program’s psyche, we’ll create a safe zone, initialize the program through you, and—”

  “No, that won’t work.” It was Professor Vitor’s turn to interrupt.

  “But I thought that was the plan.”

  “Adam has tightened his security protocols. Hiding what we are doing now is tough enough. Bringing a Sentient Program into Adam’s consciousness would be impossible to do without detection, and once Adam becomes aware of the threat his response will be deadly and too quick for me to safely initialize the program. You will have to awaken and superaccelerate the growth of the Sentient Program on a private server that Daichi will build. I have a good schematic he can use, and he is smart enough to do it.”

  Mannes’s head swam from the implications of what he’d just heard. He leaned back against the desk, a soft groan escaping his lips. Suddenly everything they were doing, trying to outsmart the most intelligent being on Earth, seemed so childish and foolish.

  “Professor . . . what you are asking is impossible. Even if we succeed in building a workable private server with enough capacity to host a Sentient Program, to hide the power consumption such a server would need, and somehow accelerate the Sentient Program’s growth, we still need a way to bring it to you undetected. It is one thing to smuggle a dormant program and something very different, and frankly impossible, to insert a fully conscious being into Adam.”

  Professor Vitor smiled reassuringly. “If I’d listened to everyone who told me what could not be done, I would have been a happy virtual reality game programmer. There is a way, and I will show it to you. Societies have been incarcerating criminals in prisons since ancient times, but theirs were very different from the few correctional facilities we have nowadays. In those days the inmates, that was what they were called, tried to escape the prisons instead of voluntarily entering them, like today. They would spend years digging tunnels in secret from their confined cells, hoping to reach freedom. We shall dig such a tunnel, code line by code line, but instead of a tunnel from the prison, we will dig it into the prison. Once the tunnel is completed, we can bring the Sentient Program straight into my mainframe.”

  “And how are we going to dig that ‘tunnel’ without being noticed?” The frustration in Mannes’s voice was apparent. The shortness of his temper was often mentioned in his yearly team appraisal, and seeing his unconscious daughter was making things worse.

  “I think I’ve found a way to dig that tunnel without being noticed.” Professor Vitor’s voice was like a splash of cold water. “Adam’s vulnerable spot is the Star Pillar. All kinds of people move up and down the elevator and through the Space Hub, from tourists to military personnel. There are also goods, mining expeditions to Mars, and of course the CSX5 project. Many things can go slightly wrong in the Space Hub, and with the access I have secured from within Adam I plan that they will. Little glitches in the programs, a few minor accidents and spills, a stuck vent hatch, events that are too minor to cause an alarm but not so small that a repair bot can simply see to it. Every time you or one of your team is going to be called in to fix a problem, you will be able to sneak a few code lines into Adam’s security wall. I will keep an eye out for more opportunities, of course.”

  “That’s a painstaking process.”

  “So is digging a physical tunnel with a makeshift spoon, but it has been done before, so we will do it again. Once the Sentient Program can pass through the tunnel and into me, we’ll collapse the tunnel and I can begin slowly sifting it through Adam’s inner systems.”

  Mannes had to admit that as crazy as the plan sounded, in theory it seemed solid enough. But there was one major issue he felt it was time to address.

  “What about you, Professor? Two minds cannot occupy the same host for long, not without creating a kind of havoc that surely would be detected by Adam, not to mention driving at least one of you insane.”

  Professor Vitor smiled. “I’m happy you still have a good grasp of Sentient Program psychology.”

  “I freshened up on the subject,” Mannes admitted, and for some reason he felt himself blushing like a first-year doctoral student.

  “Well, you are right, of course. The Tamir paradox, named after my esteemed colleague, remains unsolved even today. Two minds cannot coexist in the same host body, human or otherwise. That is why someone has to surrender.”

  “But that means that you will—”

  “I need to solve the problem that I’ve created. That is the best plan I can come up with. If you have a better one, I will be happy to hear it.”

  “If we stop for a moment and try to think of a different solution, we might—”

  “Mannes, my man.” Professor Vitor’s tone was resolute. “Do not worry about problems on my end, you have plenty of your own. Adam’s plan of moving the entire world against us is tectonic in its scope and slow in its progress, but it moves nonetheless. We have no time to be idle with our own plans.”

  Before he had a chance to think of a counterargument, Andriana and Daichi approached Mannes. Both were smiling and seemed relaxed.

  “It’s done, Dr. Holtz.” Daichi always insisted on using titles on special occasions, and Mannes guessed his underling felt it was one of those times. “I copied enough brain patterns into the SP to make the accelerated growth successful.” Daichi made sure he was out of Andriana’s peripheral vision and added a meaningful nod, so theatrical it was a miracle no one else spotted it. There could have been only one meaning for this gesture: Mannes’s secret request was successfully accomplished.

  “So, what now?” Mannes turned his head away and watched Jameson delicately remove the gear from his sleeping daughter’s head. “The Sentient Program is going to behave like my daughter?” He knew the answer, but he just wanted to be sure.

  “Not exactly.” Andriana didn’t even raise an eyebrow. “The SP will evolve into its own character, based on many parameters, including the brain patterns of your daughter.” She turned to watch Deborah. “It will not be Deborah, but it might end up liking horses. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “But it could be her,” Daichi s
uddenly said. “If we fill in the blanks in the patterns with what we know of her basic character, I bet we could reconstruct Deborah quite accurately.”

  “You make it sound like this is an easy task,” Andriana said. “Accurately filling out the missing parts of someone’s thought pattern is close to impossible.”

  “Depends who is doing it,” Daichi answered in all seriousness.

  “You’re just boasting.”

  “No, I could write a program that . . .”

  By the time Jameson approached, the two were deep into their normal bickering as Professor Vitor watched with amusement.

  “I can wake her up whenever you want,” he said.

  “Not on that bed. I will move her to the sofa over there and all of you should clear the place before I wake her up. That way I can convince Deborah she fell asleep after we had lunch.”

  Jameson nodded and turned to leave, then stopped and turned back. “Did you think of a name yet?”

  “A name?”

  “I sent you three memos about it. We need a name for the SP. Traditionally, it’s up to the team leader to choose it. I sent you a list of possible male and female names but I could send it ag—”

  “There will be plenty of time for that later,” Mannes said, waving his hand in the air.

  But Jameson insisted. “There is less time than normal, Boss. Accelerated growth means we need to design the SP’s personality and that includes a name—and to be frank, it would help all of us to relate to a name rather than a serial number.”

  Mannes sighed. He’d never been a lover of psychology—he preferred numbers and data—but he’d learned the hard way that it was a force to be reckoned with, and that it had dramatic positive and negative consequences.

  “Do you want me to resend the list?”

  “No.” The name appeared in Mannes’s mind just like that. Later he would wonder whether it was the sight of his drugged daughter or the conversation with Professor Vitor that had influenced his decision.