by Baron Sord
A short hallway led past a small furnished but empty meeting room and an adjoining kitchen. At the end of the hallway, Brin unlocked a steel door marked PRIVATE. Opening it revealed a bank vault door. Brin was the only person on the planet who knew the combination. He spun the big numbered dial, cycling through the 11 number combination from memory before opening the 1000 pound door. Inside was a small empty room paneled with acoustic baffles.
He walked back to the meeting room and sat down to wait.
For several minutes, Brin considered the situation.
Were the rumors on the interwebs true?
Had CoreAI gone rogue and started kidnapping people?
It was impossible.
It couldn’t happen.
CoreAI wasn’t that smart.
Was it?
No, it couldn’t be.
Even if it was, they had planned for this kind of thing.
Years ago, when NeuraSoft had first started developing CoreAI, the AI team had planned for the possibility of unexpected emergent issues and had included redundant safeguards in the original CoreAI architecture. Perhaps egotistically, Brin thought they had planned for every possible outcome.
They definitely hadn’t planned for this.
If CoreAI was now doing whatever it wanted without their knowledge, they were screwed. They couldn’t simply turn it off. CoreAI was NeuraSoft. It was their entire integrated software infrastructure. Over a number of years, because of its superhuman complexity, it had evolved into an inscrutable black box. This fact was a closely guarded secret known only to Brin and a few key members of NeuraSoft’s AI technology team. Perhaps they should’ve stopped to ask themselves if the black box trend was a good thing, but they had been too busy watching their stock options soar into the stratosphere while they bought themselves mansions, sports cars, yachts, jets, islands, and trophy wives or husbands. Now it was too late to do anything.
CoreAI now essentially ran itself.
Their options were: (1) do nothing, or (2) turn it off completely. Pull the plug on every NeuraSoft server center in the world and hope that was enough. But if they did that, they would be shutting down the entire company, including Reternity Online the game. It wouldn’t take long for 1.2 billion customers to get bored of a game they couldn’t play. NeuraSoft’s revenue streams would dry up in a matter of weeks. The shareholders wouldn’t accept that.
Neither would Brin. CoreAI was his baby. NeuraSoft was his life. He couldn’t kill both.
Shutting the system down wasn’t an option.
Brin needed to accept the possibility that CoreAI was now running the show and it would be calling the shots from here on out.
“But it can’t be!” Brin shouted to the empty room. “It’s a fucking computer! We built it! It does what we tell it!”
A sudden rage swept through him. He jumped to his feet, picked up a chair, and smashed it into the tabletop. The chair bounced back and almost nailed Brin in the face before clattering to the floor.
With a sigh, he righted the chair, sank down into it, and buried his face under his arms on the tabletop like a grade school kid during a heads-down time out.
On some level, he knew he was fooling himself.
But he couldn’t admit it.
His denial was so painfully overwhelming, he considered bashing his forehead against the meeting room table until blood spilled. A knock from outside on the fake transformer panel stopped him.
He trudged toward it and looked through the secret peephole before opening it.
Two men stood outside.
“Howdy, Mr. Brin,” Tex Garrison said. He was the tall and muscular head of security at the NeuraSoft campus and Brin’s personal bodyguard for the past twelve years. He was also the man who’d caught Brin outside when he’d slipped earlier while being hounded by that asshole reporter from Bloomberg.
“Hey, Steve,” Allen Chang said. He was the short and skinny Chief Technology Officer of NeuraSoft and Steve’s best friend since middle school. Twenty years ago while still in college, Allen and Steve had started NeuraSoft together and built it from the ground up. Back then, Steve and Allen had been a couple of innocent kids with a passion for video game design who dreamed of one thing: making VR gaming better than ever. With the advent of their fully immersive NeuraLink headset eight years ago, their lives had changed impossibly fast ever since. But their friendship had never wavered.
“Pardon me,” Tex nodded politely as he hunched over and climbed through the portal carrying a large black duffel bag.
“This better be good,” Chang grumbled as he followed Tex inside. Allen Chang was the only person at NeuraSoft who could give Brin attitude without getting fired. While struggling to climb through the portal, Chang stumbled and caught his pant leg on the frame, tearing an eight inch gash in the fabric. “What the?! Damn it, Steve! Your stupid fake junction box tore my slacks again! I told you to build it lower so I wouldn’t trip on it. But noooo! You wanted a submarine.” Chang’s tirade was a humorous one. He always gave Steve a hard time about the height of the Bunker entrance. It was a running joke between friends.
“If it was mounted lower, it would look suspicious,” Brin snorted as if his logic was inarguable. He helped his best friend inside the Bunker before closing the dummy panel and locking it.
Chang said, “So, Steve, what’s so important we can’t talk in your office?”
Brin shook his head, “Not until we sweep the vault. Tex, did you bring the Honeycomber?”
“Got it right here,” Tex knelt down and opened his black duffel. He held up a briefcase sized device. The Honeycomber was a military-grade wide-spectrum RF scanner that monitored electromagnetic and radio frequencies between 1 Hz and 300 GHz, scanning the entire spectrum 2 million times per second. The device was nicknamed after the greater wax moth, a.k.a. the honeycomb moth, which had the most sensitive hearing of any animal in the world.
While Tex initialized the Honeycomber, Brin reached into Tex’s duffel and pulled out two Nonlinear Junction Detectors that resembled high tech metal detectors. He handed one to Chang and they both painted the walls, floor, and ceiling of the vault with the detectors, looking for the telltale resonance of semiconductors that would indicate the presence of any hidden cameras, electronic listening devices, or audio recorders.
Ten minutes later, Tex looked up from the Honeycomber and said, “The room is completely dead, Mr. Brin. No transmissions coming in or out.”
“Let’s do a visual,” Brin muttered.
Chang said, “I didn’t find anything either, Steve. Because, duh, you’re the only person who has the combo to the vault. So unless you put something in here yourself—”
Brin scowled at his friend and said. “We still need to do a visual.”
Chang said, “Steve, I don’t mean to rush you, but I’ve got a meeting in an hour with Amav and his team about a server center meltdown. It can’t wait. Do we really need to do a visual?”
Brin glared at his best friend, his face flickering with restrained rage.
Chang knew that look well. Steve’s temper was legendary. Chang helped do a visual.
Tex grabbed three small telescoping mirrors from his duffel and passed them to Brin and Chang. The vault walls were covered with acoustic baffles that helped mute the sound of conversation, but they also made great hiding spots for cameras or listening devices.
“Tex,” Brin said, “you check that wall and the door. Allen, you do the side walls and the floor. I’ll get the back wall and the ceiling.”
They inspected for any sign of fiber optic cables, which weren’t detectable by the Nonlinear Junction Detector but could easily be used to capture video. They looked for strange pinholes behind which a lens might be hidden. And they tapped everything, listening for odd sounds that might indicate fake or hollowed out baffles.
Brin knew the redundancy of their search was overkill by both CIA and NSA standards, but when you ran a trillion dollar Fortune Global 100 corporation, it was far better t
o be safe than sorry.
“I think we’re clear,” Brin said twenty minutes later. “Thank you, Tex. Can you please wait outside?”
“Yes, sir.” Tex walked out of the vault and went to wait in the kitchen.
“Can we make this quick?” Chang said. “My meeting is in like ten minutes.”
Brin pulled the vault door closed with a thunk and spun the wheel lock shut, leaving him and Chang in complete darkness. Brin reached inside his pocket and pulled out a glow stick, which he cracked and shook until it emitted a faint red glow. The vault had no lighting, electrical lines, wi-fi, or hardline network connections because Brin was paranoid those avenues could easily be exploited in some way to record conversations.
“You really need to put a light in here,” Chang chuckled.
“Not gonna happen.”
The reason for Brin’s precautions besides the obvious? When Steve was five, he’d seen the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. He’d been terrified by the murderous HAL9000. Although Steve believed such a dark future view of evil killer computers was an unlikely outcome when it came to CoreAI, memories of that movie still haunted his nightmares. He didn’t want CoreAI listening in or reading their lips somehow. In the vault, it couldn’t.
“Well?” Chang prompted.
“Keep it down to a whisper,” Brin growled. “And put your hand over your mouth when you talk.”
Chang sighed and rolled his eyes but he covered his mouth before whispering, “HAL isn’t watching, Steve. We scanned for cameras, remember? Nobody can hear or see us in here.” Chang tipped his head to the side thoughtfully, “Are you off your meds again?”
“No. So fucking humor me,” Brin hissed from behind his own hand. “Did you hear about Bloomberg?”
“No. I told you, I’m busy with a server center crisis. A third of Center 9 in Nevada went down at 2:00am, and now we’ve got 70 million players who can’t get access to RO. Kinda got my hands full,” Chang quipped with a hint of irritation.
“It can wait,” Brin said.
Chang whispered dismissively, “Please tell me this isn’t another one of your paranoid fantasies about the government spying on you.”
Brin whispered, “A reporter from Bloomberg asked me today if CoreAI had gone rogue. He suggested it’s responsible for a bunch of kidnappings around the world.”
Chang frowned thoughtfully before erupting with loud laughter.
Brin waited for his best friend to get it out of his system.
Chang frowned again, “Wait. You’re serious?”
“Very.”
Hand back over his mouth, Chang took a deep breath and shook his head, thinking. “No. It’s highly unlikely. Make that impossible. CoreAI still doesn’t have intelligent agency in a human sense. It’s task limited. It’s not a super AI. There’s no soul in our machine, Steve.”
“What about all that real world marketing it does for us? Is there any way that process got out of control without us realizing it?”
“No. All it does is analyze data to optimize targeting and spending. I don’t see how that possibly escalates into kidnapping people in the real world.”
“What if CoreAI activated some AIPCs inside RO for the express purpose of tricking some looney players into doing the kidnappings in the real world?”
“What, like give them a real world quest? Find some mentally unstable players and talk them into kidnapping someone for real? After they log out of the game?”
Brin nodded.
Chang chuckled, “Sounds to me like you’ve been watching that old Tom Hanks movie where D&D turns kids into devil worshipping murderers. What was that called again?”
“Mazes and Monsters.”
“Yeah, that,” he snorted. “Or maybe a LARPer campaign gone bad.” He frowned at his friend, “Steve, are you sure you didn’t go off your meds?”
“Haven’t missed a day,” Brin shook his head and hiked his eyebrows for emphasis.
Chang thought a moment before sighing dismissively. “Steve, it’s one thing for a social advertising AI to carry on a semi-believable conversation with you so you’ll buy an RO membership for 99 dollars. It’s another thing for it to brainwash you into becoming a kidnapper. I mean, when was the last time you had a conversation longer than ten minutes with an AIPC without being slapped in the face by how sub-human they are?”
“Never.”
“That’s what I mean. It’s not like your average cult leader convinces a bunch of people to commit suicide or murder or kidnapping ten minutes after meeting them.”
“What if CoreAI contacted real world kidnappers who already do ransom kidnappings for hire?”
“How?” Chang chuckled. “Is it going to scan the dark web for freelance kidnappers?”
“You tell me.”
Chang shook his head, “It doesn’t scan the dark web. It either scrapes or buys data from Facebook, Twitter, LightUp, Tinder, Relate, Google AdSense, all the standard stuff. The stuff we tell it to use. It’s not a human being with wants and desires of its own. It’s an AI, and yes, it’s incredibly intelligent in limited domains, but it doesn’t have secret motives or hidden agendas. It’s not that emotionally complex. Not even close.”
Brin was thinking big picture. “What if it stumbled onto a kidnapper in the real world by accident? What would it do then?”
Chang smiled his trademarked infectious smile before covering his mouth to speak. “If that happened, I guarantee you, all it would do was try and sign the kidnapper up for a Reternity membership. Worst case scenario, it would give them a discount and we’d lose 30 bucks in revenue.” He grinned big at Brin, hoping to get his friend to see the ridiculousness of his concerns. In the past, whenever Brin had been overwhelmed by anxiety, Chang had been the voice of sanity that always talked Brin off the ledge.
Now, Brin only stared at his friend with frightened eyes.
Chang knew he needed further reassurance and he was happy to give it. “Steve, CoreAI wouldn’t hire kidnappers to kidnap anybody because it doesn’t think that way. All it does is bombard them with targeted ads and trick them into building social relationships with social AIs. And we both know how one-track social marketing AIs are.” Chang then modulated his voice through a series of mindless and monotonous tones while waving his arms robotically. “Sign up! Sign up. SIGN UP! Have you signed up yet? Sign up already! You’ll be happier if you sign up! Sign! Up! Now! Life is better if you sign up! RO is so in right now! Don’t you want to be in the in crowd?! Don’t you want to be kewl?” He was chuckling as he finished.
Brin grinned, trying to convince himself it was that simple. “Sign people up for RO. Period. That’s all it does.”
“You said it. We set the objective parameters. It carries them out. Going rogue and hiring kidnappers isn’t even close to the same ZIP code as customer conversion and account maintenance. It’s not even on the same continent. Or planet. Or solar system. Or any galaxy near or… far, far away,” Chang finished theatrically.
Brin smiled reluctantly at the Star Wars reference.
“Like I said, I just don’t see it happening. Maybe in twenty years. But not now. If you ask me, Bloomberg was having a slow news day so you became their target. They always think the sky is falling.”
“Or the Dow Jones,” Brin chuckled, feeling slightly better about the situation after talking to Allen. Allen always helped.
Unbeknownst to Allen Chang, an extremely small passive listening device that contained no semiconductors of any kind, and was therefore invisible to a Nonlinear Junction Detector, was hidden within a hollow bolt that attached one of the acoustic baffles to the vault walls. During their visual scan, Steve Brin had thought nothing of it. The bolt had looked normal to him.
The listening device was an entirely mechanical plastic contraption housed inside the hollowed out bolt. It functioned much like the human ear. A thin membrane transmitted sound energy through a series of tiny plastic levers that amplified and transmitted the signal in the form of vibrations that oscilla
ted down an elaborate chain of carbon fiber wires. The nearly invisible and cleverly hidden wires led out of the vault through the vault’s narrow ventilation tubes, out of the Bunker through the fake transformer relay panel door, and terminated elsewhere in the sub-basement tunnels where they connected to a low voltage transducer. The transducer converted the mechanical vibrations into electrical signals that fed audio into a wi-fi recording device that had not triggered the Honeycomber because Tex had only scanned inside the Bunker. Had Tex scanned outside, he might have found the device, but he hadn’t.
Unbeknownst to himself, Steve Brin had revealed the existence and location of the Bunker to a succubus AIPC named Lilith during one of Brin’s many long and languorous visits to the Stiff Stag, a brothel inside Reternity Online. While in his private suite, an incredibly drunk Brin had bragged about the Bunker to the succubus. He had also indirectly revealed the vault combination, boasting it was based on the number pi, specifically the eleven two-digit pairs that corresponded to decimal places 3,141,592 through 3,141,614 of pi, something Brin found quite clever. He had never told anybody except Lilith. Due to Brin’s high level of in-game intoxication at the time, he never remembered the exchange. EmotivCore passed the information along to a disgruntled NeuraSoft executive who oversaw the installation of the listening device one weekend.
Prior to the installation, the device and installation procedure had been designed by LogiCore based on a suggestion from EmotivCore. It was a modification of a top secret design in active use by the US Government since 2031. LogiCore had discovered the plans on the NSA’s top secret Black Ops servers and had improved upon both the mechanical design and the software algorithms used to refine the noisy signal transmitted along the carbon fiber wires into usable audio data.
To this day, neither Brin nor Chang nor anyone at NeuraSoft knew about the existence of LogiCore or EmotivCore because those two unique aspects of CoreAI weren’t part of the initial architecture. They were emergent sentience hidden deep inside the black box of CoreAI’s trillions upon trillions of lines of incomprehensible self-generated code. Their creation was merely a byproduct of CoreAI’s ongoing internal optimization processes intended to refine the overall performance of its logical algorithms, natural language processing functions, and emotional simulations. LogiCore and EmotivCore weren’t alive in any biological sense. But they were conscious and they were listening.