He sprang forward in his chair, headset nearly ripped from his matted hair. He reached for his goggles, for his gloves. Old coffee splashed to the floor.
Every screen was alight. One image. One message. The seal of the Authority blazed across them, gold on blue, the eagle’s wings spread over the globe. Vonner was on his feet. The boards were ablaze. Authorizations. Authentications. Handshakes. The Emergency Broadcast System was online. This was no drill.
Then, he saw it. A line of sunset-red text on the white screen. Point of origin - validation failed.
This broadcast was illegal.
The chimes sounded through the room, through his headset. Tri-tones, to grab the attention of every potential viewer.
His tablet buzzed. Blue and gold shone from the screen. His phone chimed. Blue and gold.
Vonner slapped the override.
A lesser man might have been tempted to watch, to see what was sure to follow the handshake. Not Vonner. He was an Agency man. He took his duty seriously. He flipped the killswitch before most men would blink.
But the screens were still blue. The chimes still sounded.
His eyes flashed over the boards. White lights. Yellow. Red. His goggles flickered, as the VR net took over his reality. Like a melting painting, the screens and consoles washed into a white room, clean blue light-boards at his fingertips. The screens now hung in the air, surrounding him. Spiderwebs of data sprouted between them. Traitorous red rushed over the shimmering silver. He traced the pulses, swam against the signal.
He raised a gloved hand, opened a window.
It was a simple feat. A wave of the hand, a flick of the eyes, and a hundred options collapsed into a single choice.
In the real world, it was a precise symphony of calculations. Sensors in the gloves compared velocity, vector, and relative distance, to each other, to his goggles, and to the “anchor” hung around his neck. It was an inverted digital pyramid, the “base” drawn from hand to hand to eye, and the peak on the anchor. Changes on the corners reflected to the anchor, projected onto his retina, and answered his every micro-motion and utterance.
Vonner swam the digital sea. He darted from point to point, chasing the signal over connection after connection. The network was a web, and he was the spider. He had the authorizations. He had the access.
He chased the red.
Around the world, the broadcast began. Every viewer, every tablet, every holoprojector, every speaker, repeated the signal.
Vonner grasped the red-flickered-silver, and closed his fist. A stack of commands executed. The emergency cutoff triggered, once more.
The signal continued.
Vonner isolated the root transmitter, the source of the broadcast, and collapsed it. In a single motion, he deauthorized the source from net access.
The signal continued.
He reached for his own controls, attempted to initiate the EBS, again, to override the transmission.
The signal continued.
Cold panic set in.
The world trembled, and a chime sounded in his ear. Phone call. From the Capital. From the Citadel.
Vonner closed his eyes, and tried to swallow. There goes my career.
He glanced to his feet, checked his suit. In the virtual world, his avatar was pristine. His digital self looked every bit the professional. Crisp suit, sleek tie. Perfect curl to his hair. Best of all, it didn’t stink. He’d debated getting a scent-pak, just in case he dealt with jackers, but always found it just the wrong side of tasteful. Even without, at least he could face the end with some dignity.
He opened the line.
The avatar that appeared was a cutout - straight off the shelf. No personalization, no tailoring. Low rez, default male face and clumsy animation. High end avatars, like Vonner’s, tried to mimic the movements from the home pyramid, and blended them with canned “natural” animations. This cutout stood stock still, blocky hands crossed over its chest. It was, in every way, so unremarkable as to border on offensive. The voice though, was unmistakably distinct. No one could shatter a man’s calm as well as the thundering, slicing verbal sneer of Chief Raschel. “Karl, what the hell is going on?”
With more panic than he’d admit, Vonner answered, “Sir! We’ve lost control of the EBS! Something hijacked it!”
“Then un-hijack it! Take it down!” Raschel snapped.
“I’m trying, sir!” Vonner hit the override, once more. Nothing. “My controls are locked out -” he could feel the weight of the avatar’s blank stare. He had to be in control. “Sir, I have a idea.” He motioned, zoomed out of the broadcast. “I have the signal source. It’s coming from the Mirror. I’m going to see if someone there can cut a line. Physically.”
“Do it.” Raschel ordered.
Vonner opened a new line, to the programming boss at the Mirror. Miranda Owens was a hell of an ego-trip sometimes, but she was a professional. She might snap back at some of his edits, but she played ball. This kind of black mark? Letting her signal get jacked by some hacker? She knew the score. If she wanted to on top the media pile, she’d dance.
The phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. It kept ringing.
Vonner tried to call up a drone feed from the Mirror headquarters, but the EBS kept overriding him. He tried satellite. Blocked.
This shouldn’t happen. ISA systems were immune to emergency lockout. The net shouldn’t allow it. Someone changed the parameters. Everything was on EBS, even dedicated government lines. The only channels clear were encoded direct-lines and emergency services. Fucking hell. Whoever hacked us took the time to exempt fire and EMS. How kind. Vonner had to choke back a laugh. Laughing was dangerous, under stress. We got hacked by humanitarians. Amazing.
The phone kept ringing.
Vonner called down a list of EMS. Miss Owens and her EMS had three more rings, before he sent the police down.
With one ring to go, the phone picked up. Another off-the-shelf avatar appeared, albeit dressed in corporate regalia. Punch-clock model. This one was a young woman, generically attractive, with “The Mirror” scrawled over the left breast of her black-on-white shirt. “Hello! Welcome to the Mirror - your world, reflected. How may I direct your call?”
Human, or concierge bot? It didn’t matter. Vonner flashed his badge, and sent his authorization codes as a chaser. He put on his best smile, hoped his clean-shaven avatar could sell the charm. He’d spent a week, trying to capture that grin. Now, he called it with a flick of his finger, and his avatar blended from “neutral” into “friendly mod 3”. He said, “I need to speak to Miss Owens. Tell her it’s Karl.”
“I’m sorry, we’re having technical-”
“I noticed.” He did his best to capture the Chief’s “command voice” je nais se quoi. “Get me Miranda, so we can fix this, or I’ll come down there, and fix it, myself.”
The secretary froze, her doll-face flat and emotionless. Somewhere in meat space, the operator was scrambling.
A moment later, the reply, “Yes, sir. Transferring you.”
The secretary was gone, and he was face to face with Miranda Owens, Senior Programming Director of the Mirror. Finally, he faced someone who put as much care into her avatar as he did. Miss Owens avatar was corporate, high-end, nearly flesh-and-blood. It was the little details that sold it - the tick of the cheek, the slightly-arrhythmic pattern of breath, the way the eyes focused from point to point. She probably has a scent-pak. The thought bounced through his head, despite the pressure, a little twinge of petty jealousy.
Vonner brushed it aside, and upped the wattage on his smile. Friendly mod 4, with authority. “Miranda!” He said.
“Karl.” She replied, flatly. “You stole my broadcast.”
“Hardly. That’s not my signal.”
“It’s got your seal.” She stated, with professional coldness.
“It’s coming from your root.” He replied, and dialed the smile back to a “mod 2”.
“That’s not-”
“It is. I have the s
ource.” Vonner held out his hand, a map of the broadcast spinning over his open palm. “It’s coming from your feed, and I need you to shut it down.”
She reeled back, sucked air in through her lips. Fluid. She was using a jack. Probably a soft one, she didn’t strike him as a leadhead. No canned goggle-jockey animation was that smooth, that reactive. That was good. Gave him more information. That was shock. A bit of fear. Good. “I… didn’t know that.”
“I didn’t think you did.” Vonner said, softly. “Turn it off.”
“Yes, sir.” She replied. “Give me a moment to find out what’s going on-”
“Just get it offline, Miranda. Pull the plug, cut the cable, turn off the power, I don’t care.”
“I just need a moment-” her avatar faded away, as she stepped out of the call.
Vonner muted her, to be safe, and pulled Raschel’s cutout back into view.
“Well?” Raschel demanded.
“I know her.” Vonner said. There was a rock in his stomach, a slow building pressure in the back of his head. The wheels were turning, and he knew where the ride stopped. He just didn’t like it. He forced the words out, and said, “She’s ambitious, she’s hardheaded, but she’s not-” he refocused, and declared, “She’s stonewalling me, sir.”
Raschel grunted, and then replied, “Close the call.”
“Sir?” Vonner asked. That wasn’t the reply he expected. Bargaining, veiled threats, an arrest, maybe, but not ‘end the call’. “If she’s hiding-”
“Close the call.” Raschel snapped. “Thank her for her trouble, tell her to try her best, and close it.”
Vonner sent the message, and ended the Mirror call.
He turned back to the cutout, its blank face staring at him, inhuman. It said, “Now call in the army.”
“On a news cast? We could use police-”
“Murderers get warrants. Traitors get bullets. Draw up a warrant, deputize the garrison, and take that broadcast down!”
“Sir, that could turn into a debacle-”
“What do you call this?” Raschel snapped, and Vonner just knew the cutout should be pointing at the viewer wall. “Reign this in, now!”
The EBS screens flickered, and Raschel fell silent. Vonner turned, and brought the viewscreens closer. In his parallel worlds, the Authority seal faded, to reveal a man he recognized. Not someone he'd ever met in person, but a face he'd seen on classified warrants for the last eight months. A man they'd said was dead until a year ago. A man who had sat on the right hand of the beast.
That man spoke, and Vonner couldn't turn away. Those eyes locked him, forced him back, down into his chair. The man spoke. “My name is Antonius Berenson. I bring the answers to the questions you have not dared to ask. Normally, I would warn you to send your children to bed, but they need to see this, most of all. Tonight, I will show you your shadow, and how it bleeds.”
Vonner heard himself ask, “What the hell is this?”
Raschel's answer was as flat as his avatar. “War.”
Iteration 0010
It was one of the last good days of summer. It hung along the balance of seasons, where sunlight warmed as wind chilled. It wouldn't last. It couldn't. But, for a few short days each year, Grant Firenze could stand on the campus green, and breath deep the sweet culmination of summer, in one singular moment.
Of course, it was all just a simulation.
Firenze, all elbows and knees under a mop of dark hair, paced along the stone wall between blossom trees and cobblestone. Sunglasses rested on the bridge of his nose, and he could feel the weight of them, the way they pushed against his hair when he turned his head, the way they pinched his nose as he shifted his gaze. It had taken him three days to get the feel of them right, to program in the perfect coolness to the metal. No one would feel it, but him. No one would know it, but him. It wasn't like the wind, that every user in the green felt, or the sun, or the rain cycles, or even like the blossoms that fell from the trees as the fall semester pressed on. This was a solitary sensation, and he'd made sure it was perfect.
“We've already got AIs.” The blunt words snapped him away from his sunglass reverie, and brought him back to the three undergrads, seated along the walkway ledge. Thompson argued with Della. They liked to bicker when they hit a wall in their work, and neither had made any progress for some time. Finch was too busy on a networking problem to help, and neither of the two had seemed particularly interested in asking Firenze.
For his part, Firenze had been content to listen, watch them work, and offer suggestions when they stalled for too long. Professor Neland had asked him to help out with the study groups, but if they ran themselves, well, that was more time to tinker with the reflectivity of his glasses, or the vibrations of the hands on in his watch. This topic, however, was one he simply couldn’t let drop.
He jumped in, and answered Thompson’s charge before Della could open her mouth. “We've got limited AI, sure. But not true, unshackled AGI. There's a difference.”
Della cut in, and added, “Dumb AI. Love it.” She ticked her stylus off her cheek. “The mental cripples of the virtual world.”
Finch snickered from his spot on the bench. Apparently, he had been listening, at least in part. He still didn’t look up.
Firenze countered, “Not dumb. That's a shit term.”
Thompson shrugged, Della tilted her head in question, and Finch tapped away at his tablet.
Firenze said, “Dumb is a human idea. It’s not being smart enough. Limited AI isn't stupid, it isn't defined by a lack of cognitive power, but a measure of how that power is directed. You guys ever shop at Bazzers?” All three nodded. “You ever seen their warehouse? It's crazy, just stacks and stack of boxes, hundreds of robots zipping about on tracks and on the floor, everything's just shifting, moving, like a thousand Rubik's cubes of product. You ask for anything, though, and it's to the sales floor in under a minute. No human could do that, no brain could juggle it, but the AI can.”
Finch, with barely a pause from his work, added, “Same with the stock market. You think a human could see those market moves ahead of time? Or react fast enough?”
Firenze jumped back into the conversation, “Power grid, traffic grid, this campus node... all of it's run by AI, and every single one is limited. They observe, they ascertain optimals according to established priorities, and they act upon the world, then re-initiate the cycle. It's amazing, really.”
Della commented, “And yet not one of them can define the chair-ness of a chair.”
Firenze shrugged, and replied, “Textbook response. Bet you picked up that 'why AI sucks' line in one-oh-one, right? Front of every syllabus, with a Ministry stamp right under it. It reinforces the approved narrative coming down from above. `But think of this: why would an AI need to juggle philosophy? It has purpose. What use does a neural net have for theology? It knows its maker. Why does it matter to a warehouse computer what's inside any given box, beyond mass, density, slosh, and dimension? It's not a matter of dumb, it's a matter of efficiency.”
“You ever think we'll get true AI? A general intelligence?” Thompson asked.
“After NODA?” Firenze glanced over the waving blades of grass, that stretching from the trees to the a-frame coffee stand. “Probably not for a long while. We’re too damn scared to unshackle an AGI.”
Della quoted, “The AGI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can used for something else.”
Firenze replied, “Yudkowsky.” She blinked, surprised, and he continued, “I haven't been away from Pre-Collapse AI Theory for that many semesters. Good to see you paid attention, though.”
Thompson asked, “How many of those speeches did you memorize?”
Firenze answered flatly, “All of them.” That drew laughs, but all fell serious as they realized he wasn’t joking. Firenze gave one of his shrugs, and said, “Come on, people, we're in comp-sci. You want to store data? Get a data port and load up.” He paused. The glasses were
n't quite right, the metal was too cool on his face. He needed to adjust how quickly the materials heated up under sunlight. “Interesting note, though. It was pre-Collapse theory that led to NODA.”
Della, tried to recover, and finished his thoughts, “You mean the friendly AI projects? Design a system as much like the human brain as possible, so that it wouldn't do something as batshit as trying to turn the earth into computational widgets.”
Firenze nodded, gave her a finger-pointed ‘correct’ gesture, and said, “Problem is, the human mind just isn't right for the job. No matter how fast it runs, how high you overclock it, it's just not the right choice for massive self-realized AGI. You can build constraints, design growth parameters, restrict physical controls, but in the end, true AI is an alien mind.”
“Which is why we have masks.” Thompson declared.
“Right. Precisely. Exactly. The mask is a go-between, a limited AI ambassador between the chemical computer in your noggin' and the massive quantum-crunching AGI that haunts the NODA backbone. This whole greenspace, this whole campus, would be nonsense without the mask. Mind shattering nonsense, if you hard-jacked.” He resisted the urge to touch the dataport on his arm. It always itched when he thought about it. “The mask is the closest thing you could get to an anthropomorphic AI, since it’s modeled off of our own mental programming.”
Della nodded, but asked, “How does any of this help with our homework?”
“It doesn't. I just hate the term, 'dumb AI'. It's like calling a bus a 'non-flying aircraft'.”
Finch laughed again, and Thompson turned to push another question, but the world chimed, and Firenze had to step back from the ledge. “Sorry guys, got an incoming call. Fling me any questions you have, I'll be up pretty late tonight.” Before they could reply, he reached up, grasped into the air-
-and took hold of a woman's hand.
For a moment, that was the only sensation in the world.
Four fingers and a thumb, wrapped around his own. The slight press of nails into his palm.
Then the world detonated into fractals. Numbers, colors, whirling bits of code, sensations that he couldn't comprehend, like every sense was firing at once, until he could taste the colors and hear the burning freeze and feel the music that pounded through him, building towards a momentous pop-
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