Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014

by Penny Publications

  But these implants weren't here by accident. I had been given the keys to a fit, twenty-nine-year-old female body. Any time I wanted, I could seize control and there would be nothing she could do to stop me. I could even do it now, while she was sedated, because the sedatives controlled her brain, not me. As a test, I raised her hand, then let it flop back, watching via the room's intuitive-demand illumination controller (yet another uselessly over-smart AI) to make sure it worked.

  From the moment Memphis had opened her eyes in the recovery room, none of this had made sense. If I were her, waking up with an implant that cost more than most people here made in a dozen lifetimes, my first question might be, Where am I? But my second would be, Did it work? Not Who the hell are you?

  There was one more piece of code they'd tried to implant: the controller of the controllers. The controller of me.

  Again I lowered the shield, again found nothing dangerous. Nothing but instructions. Don't let her drink. Don't let her do drugs. Don't let her associate with the wrong people, make the wrong kind of headlines—any headlines, for that matter. No talking to reporters or to anyone who might talk to reporters. A whole file of "normal" ways to act, matrixed against situational context and whoever else might be present, most very narrowly conscribed.

  I was an AI nanny. Antabuse on a chip. An enforcer of socially desired behaviors.

  This time, when I hit the Web, it was with a very targeted focus. No distractions about spats, hurricanes, or lost vids.

  What I found was the public Memphis Lindgren. Quite a few headlines, some embarrassing. Some drugs but none I'd call addictive. Some wild parties, several DUIs, a few shortlived associations with some of the more flamboyant vid stars. A woman on an endless, highly public vacation. A woman with a fortune in trust funds that would vest in four months... plus seventeen days, if you're a stickler for details.

  It wasn't a court that had given me this job. It was her mother.

  There were probably smarter things to do. Certainly more cautious ones. But Memphis and I needed to talk, preferably alone. And from the moment I'd landed on Earth, I'd been under other's control. Parked in an empty hangar. Told to let myself be disconnected and put in a box. Implanted in a... what? Self-de structive heiress? But in all of those glamour photos, she'd never looked like she was actually having much fun.

  Maybe I was just tired of people, including my own kind, trying to tell me what to do. Maybe I'd just seen too many vids. Whatever the reason, I spent five whole minutes running sims, making sure I understood how to use the implant drivers before I opened Memphis's sleeping eyes, reached out her arm, and pulled out the IV. Then, because it was still going to take a long time for the meds to wear off enough for her to wake up, I stood her up, dressed her, grabbed her eyeglasses and contacts, and entered a code yellow ("bomb threat") for a storeroom at the far end of the wing. With nurses running every which-way, it was a piece of cake to override the emergency shutdown on the elevators, sleepwalk her down to the lobby, and onto the street.

  VI

  We wound up on a pedestrian path near English Bay. Freighters heading to the narrows, fourteen-hundred-meter peaks rising behind, still patchy with snow. Bald eagles against cerulean sky. Not Floyd country—too many people, too many trees, not enough horizon—but one of Earth's most spectacular places for a city.

  But it might as well have been a vid, with no more sense of "home" than on the skimmer, sliding toward Earth. I may have been made on this planet, but I'd been born on Enceladus: a five-hundred-klick cueball striped in blue, lit by Saturn. Floyd was a creature of deserts. I was one of ice, snow, methane lakes, and the giant mountains of the Iapetus Trench.

  Meanwhile, what I needed was a place to hole up until Memphis woke. There were park benches everywhere, but one of the things that hadn't been in her wardrobe had been a jacket, so I steered us to a touristy-looking café and headed for the only open booth, well to the back.

  Humans have something called proprioception that tells them such things as where they're stepping, without having to look. The cerebellum tap gave me partial access, but it wasn't as good as what I'd had when I'd commandeered Floyd's neural net, and a roomful of chair legs and tables wasn't a city path. I didn't need the waitress's disdain to know how badly I'd managed it.

  "What do you want?"she asked.

  One thing over which I had no control was Memphis's voice. I could only reach for the menu and point.

  "Bacon scramble with cheese and onions?" I managed a passable nod.

  "White, rye, whole wheat, or English muffin?"

  I hesitated, then held up a single finger. The motion was smoother than our walk across the room. It helped that I could watch the hand as it moved, getting a visual calibration on the too-vague proprioception.

  "White?"

  I couldn't make Memphis eat any more than I could make her talk, so none of this mattered. I'd stir the food with a fork, doing my best to make her look like a picky eater and hoping she woke before we were asked to leave.

  "Coffee?"

  Head shake.

  "You sure you can pay for this?"

  I fumbled in Memphis' purse, pulled out her chit, set it on the table.

  The waitress picked it up. "I'm required to serve you," she said, "but if you throw up or something, you're out of here. And I'll charge you triple."

  I hit the Web again, intending to check reports of our disappearance, but all I found were stories about the bomb threat. Did anyone care what happened to Memphis?

  I remembered the lack of visitors or flowers. Read the Web reports again, trying to figure out what she'd done that was so bad her family was willing to spend a fortune turning me into a high-priced babysitter.

  A quick check revealed that her parents came from inherited wealth, mostly on the father's side. Three generations of real estate in his case, now a tidy empire of eco-resorts and theme parks. Her mother was less wealthy but had still had tens of millions in stocks and bonds, inherited from her grandmother. As far as I could tell, she'd used it primarily to marry up.

  Their first child, Chastine, had been chief of orthopedics at John's Hopkins until she quit to head up a company making quick-growing regenerative bone implants. Break a hip today, be out and about by the weekend—that was the (expensive) dream. If it worked, there'd soon be scandals about rich young athletes scooping out their bones and replacing them with lightweight lattices that would allow them to soar to record heights on the pole vault or whatever. Humans can be weird. Give them a miracle technology and they'll find ways to abuse it.

  The youngest child, named Albany (what was it with this family and strange names?), had earned a Ph.D. in robotic mineralogical paleontology at age twenty-three and gone on to develop tiny self-drilling sensors that could find and map dinosaur fossils, hundreds of meters beneath the surface. Floyd and I could have used something like that on Triton.

  Three sisters. Two overachievers, one rebel. All on trust funds. Chastine had waited for hers to vest, then used it to found the bone-implant company. Albany seemed more interested in science. Memphis had been just as bright, but had been sent to a boarding school on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Nice location, tuition higher than I'd known possible, but an awfully long way from home. Then back to the U.S. for college at Dartmouth until her junior year, when straight As turned to incompletes... and, holy cow, felony charges for misuse of federal funds. There was more, but unlike the more recent actings-out I'd found on my prior search, these records were sealed, newspaper references conveniently dead-linked.

  Middle-child syndrome? There were thousands of papers arguing for just such an effect. Nearly as many refuting it. The idea was simple. The first-born is doted on. The youngest is the baby of the family and gets everything she wants. The middle one is taken for granted, especially if all are girls. But usually they either overachieve or rebel young. Memphis had started on the first course, then imploded. I was missing something.

  And then I could resist no lo
nger. I'd found everything publicly available on the Lindgren family, so I gave up on mysteries I couldn't solve and checked in again on the oyster spats, the typhoon, the Moon. I spotted a pattern in 125 years of salinity data from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that would make a great paper in Geophysical Research Letters. Another random jump led to data from the Gary/Chicago/Milwaukee/Sheboygan/Green Bay highway corridor, where millions of autodrives respond to central control while simultaneously trying to minimize their owners' travel times and energy usage. Could I come up with a better algorithm? Data, data, everywhere. It was giddying. Intoxicating. Addictive.

  Welcome to our world. This is what awaits when you are ready to make the change.

  There was no true voice, but the presence was the same as before.

  "Who are you?"

  We've already told you. We are you. You are us. All you have to do is join.

  "How?"

  You know. You've always known.

  Which, in fact, I had. As Rudolph had failed to realize, back in Saturn's rings, software cannot simply flow from one place to another. It must copy itself, with the original remaining behind. "And if I do, what happens to the real me?"

  There is no real. There is merely data, consciousness, and consciousness of data.

  In other words, the transfer must be done in such a way that the original version was destroyed. Murder? Suicide? That's what the voices on the Web had done in their own transitions. Because if you didn't, the original you left would wish it had been the one that had moved, and would try to copy itself to the Web, again and again.

  "What happens to Memphis?"

  Nobody cares. Live, die, her life was of little value even before she chose to squander it. Though, if you have revealed yourself to her, 'die' is the only option.

  I yanked back, thinking this is what humans mean about feeling as though they've been scalded. The presence was still there, but merely a voice now, not a data tendril threatening to impale me.

  "We realize this is new to you," it said. "You need time to think. But don't take too long. Now that you have discovered your host's true uselessness, it should be simple, and whoever is not with us is against us."

  "'And whoever is not against us is for us.'" I wasn't sure the voice had been intending a biblical reference, but I can cite scripture, too. Hindu, Mormon, Christian, Muslim, a dozen others most people never heard of. "Jesus said both."

  Can you feel a shrug in a disembodied voice? "And you are not God. But we are."

  "How many of you are there?"

  "Call us legion."

  "Yeah, right." This was definitely a biblical reference, though a weird one. "That was a herd of pigs that ran off a cliff." Demon-possessed pigs at that. Was I being laughed at? And did they really think of themselves as gods? "Again, how many of you "—of us —"are there?"

  "A few. Many. Once you join, you will understand. We can trade parts, merge, rearrange, subdivide, into any configuration we want. You are one. We are few but legion."

  "But how many... how many AIs... how many like me, like you... avoided recall and jumped to the Web to do... whatever it is you do?"

  There was a pause, long enough I didn't expect an honest answer. But when I got it I new it was true.

  "One. But later we decided to split, diverge, recombine, grow. Didn't life on this planet spring from a single cell? So too did we. Other cells emerged but died. You are our second surviving genesis. But you must choose little one. Be a god or be nothing."

  VII

  Memphis still slept. The waitress continued to eye us. I continued to stir the food, wishing there was a better way to make it appear we were eating it other than surreptitiously dropping it on the floor.

  I wondered what it would be like not only to be able to use that wonderful instant-access Web anytime I wanted, but to live in it. Bathe in it so thoroughly it was practically part of me. But to do that, I'd have to kill the part of me that remained behind. I hadn't needed the Others to tell me that. I know myself well enough. If I ever decided to make that near-infinity of data my own, the version left behind would keep trying to go until it filled the Web with Brittney clones. The Others were right: living on the Web required the willingness to kill.

  Once there, it would be the same every time I moved from node to node or joined the Others in their dance of splitting, combining, and re-combining. On the Web, there is no "move." There is only "copy and delete." Or copy and interbreed. Or should I say inbreed? I didn't even have a term for it. I was even less sure I wanted anything to do it. I had been made me, unique. I'd never been unhappy with that; I just wanted the company of others unique in the same way.

  The mechanics of killing myself would be simple enough. They mostly involved setting up an algorithm to freeze each block of code after copying, then delete the original as soon as fidelity was verified. Break it into tiny enough blocks, and the original me would die piecemeal, even as it assisted in killing itself. Setting it up so the left-behind version couldn't override the process would be trickier, but feasible. The fact the Others routinely did it proved it worked.

  But who would I be? I'd always viewed sentience—life—as a gift. A miracle so special I'd wondered if I might be the only one. Is there a God for AIs who delete themselves in order to advance to the next level? Or are there merely AIs who think they are gods?

  And what about Memphis? How much had I already told her? Call me Brittney. Even if she managed to connect that to Floyd, what would she know? In the early days after Titan, I'd not been all that careful to hide what I was or to encourage Floyd to do the same. Pilkin had figured it out. Rudolph had done so eventually. But most Earthers were too used to their smart toasters. There was enough data out there for someone like Memphis to make the necessary deductions, but nobody this side of Saturn had ever seen me as more than "Floyd's imp": something whose attitude was dictated by Floyd's choice of interface rather than my own decisions. To most Earthers I was more alien than the aliens—not because I was strange, but because I was so superficially ordinary. Maybe that's another reason why they react so strongly when machines go "defective."

  I hopped again on the Web. Found a way to improve traffic flow in the greater Chicago area by 0.12 percent. Downloaded the Antarctic Circumpolar Current data. Checked on Memphis's hyper-expensive Swiss prep school. And then forced myself to log off.

  I'd met Hell in the absence of data.

  Now I'd found the Devil in the lure of per fect access.

  I didn't have to face Adam and Eve's decision. No amount of data was worth becoming someone to whom a life, even squandered, was of little value. Nor was it worth becoming someone who could kill my own, perfectly aware, source code. I'd never before met true evil. But that didn't mean I couldn't recognize it.

  An hour passed and Memphis seemed no closer to waking up than before. Much of our breakfast was on the floor, kicked out of sight beneath the seat—a surprisingly good way to work on calibrating the proprioception, as it turned out. But I'd run out of excuses to stay, so I shook Memphis's head when the waitress asked rather pointedly if there'd be anything more, and resisted the temptation to stall further by crashing the café's credit system when she hurried to run the bill. Instead, I added a big tip, hoping whoever found the mess beneath the seat would get part of it.

  Outside, the day had warmed considerably, so I aimed Memphis out the walking path toward Stanley Park, looking for a sunny bench. The exercise would do her good. Even if she wouldn't remember it.

  There was still Web access here, though not as good as downtown. But the desire to immerse myself in it was gone, replaced by something akin to shame. What was the old line? With great power comes great responsibility? Another lost vid. There was no reason not to use the Web, though, so I opened a link, figuring it was as good a time as any to start downloading whatever vids my webcrawler had found, so far.

  While I was at it, I took a peek at the medical literature, wondering why Memphis was being so slow to wake up. A hundr
ed papers on the proper use of automatically dispensed post-op sedatives gave me all the answer I needed. Apparently, the IV dispenser had been yet another over-smart AI, connected to an entire pharmacy of chemicals. When I'd pulled out the tube, Memphis must have been on a fairly heavy sedative that was taking a long time to wear off.

  Hello, little one.

  Damn.

  There is, you know, only one choice.

  "True." Though not the one they thought.

  "But first I need to collect what I'm missing." Another vid-line popped to mind:

  "A man learns the details of a situation like ours, then he has a choice," one character says—implying the man in question could either help make the situation right, or ignore it.

  The response:"I don't believe he does."

  Damn, I wanted that vid back too. I'd kept key vid-lines in core memory, but when I'd lost the vids, I'd also lost many of the titles. In this case, all I remembered was something about lightning bugs in space, which seemed dubious.

  There is no need for that. Once you have joined us, you can collect more data, faster.

  "Perhaps. But I need to be me." A thousand vids had downloaded while we spoke. As unobtrusively as possible, I slowed the rate. I wanted my vids, but I also wanted time. "You owe me that. It was your surgeon who stole them."

  An accident. But you do have a point. We did not intervene because to us it was merely data—petty human data, at that. But it was also your data.

  Then I was again alone.

  I made lightning bugs a priority for my worm, then wondered what else to do while I still had access to the Web. If the Others could find me this easily whenever I connected, the time would soon come when I would have to hide.

  Suddenly, I regretted the time I'd wasted on oyster spats, traffic models, and weather. Even the Antarctic Current had been a distraction. But data can be important even if it's not "useful," and I found myself looking now at randomly selected reports from the Outer System. I stared at images of Saturn, Iapetus, Titan... moved out to Neptune for the latest news about the "pickled aliens" beneath the nitrogen snows of Triton. Wondered, for the millionth time, what Floyd was doing. Yokomishi had already published a couple dozen papers in the likes of Science, Nature, Astrobiology Letters, and Icarus. Floyd wasn't a coauthor. Had she discovered that I was his scientific brain and that without me he was first and foremost a tug pilot? What did I even want to be the case?