“Don’t worry about it. Known issue.” She turned the intercom off then unplugged it from the wall. She opened the hatch and gently put the box on the deck. After closing the hatch she turned back to Ping. “Fortunately our non-recording devices are sturdy.”
Ping shrugged.
Mitchie took her seat and waited for him to begin.
“First, I will totally deny this conversation ever took place,” he said.
“While we’re saying deniable stuff, I’m a career intelligence officer, and I’ve been listening to pretentious disclaimers since I was a cadet.”
Ping almost smiled. “Have you ever thought about how many factions the Fusion is divided into?”
“Can’t say I ever cared.”
“We work hard at seeming monolithic but there’s fault lines all throughout. Stasists against growth promoters such as your friends the Clarets. Anglophones versus Sinophones. Researchers wanting to counter the Betrayers stopped by those wanting to repress all discoveries. Most immediate to your interests, ones wanting to take the offensive against the Betrayers countering the pure defense types.”
“It’s amazing you could agree on attacking us,” said Mitchie.
Ping shrugged. “That’s the only action a majority would support. The voters insisted the Council do something.”
She sprang to her feet. “You killed thousands upon thousands of people because you couldn’t find anything better to do?”
He leaned back, palms out. “I didn’t vote for it. That’s why I’m on the delegation. I’m sorry. Please, sit.”
She did, but kept glaring.
“Do you have any training in game theory?”
Mitchie said, “If both burglars keep their mouth shut the cops give them three lashes. If one confesses the cops turn him loose and the other one gets forty lashes. So how can they trust each other when the incentives are to defect?”
“Exactly. Which is even worse when there’s more potential defectors. If we consider your hypothetical about fictional people . . .”
“The Civil Disorder Contingency Plan has lots of details on them,” Mitchie said.
“How did you see that?” demanded the stakeholder.
“I’m a spy,” she said. “Work it out.”
“Well. A revolt by the stipend kids would affect the factions unevenly. The Sinophone communities have their omegas more tightly integrated. I could see one of their leaders deciding the Diskers blowing the big secret would be a career boost for him. “
“One of their leaders? Isn’t Mandarin your first language?”
“When I say Sinophone, I mean separatist. I’m an integrationist. Not an extreme one, so don’t think I approve of your marriage.”
“Forget I asked.” Mitchie thought he’d get along well with her in-laws.
Ping said, “My point is that blackmailing us with exposing the virtual underclass only threatens part of the Fusion. Some climbers would be happy to have you kick the table over.”
“You’re strong enough to fight us, the AIs, and your own people at the same time?”
“I doubt it. But some men are fools. Or just willing to let it all burn if they can be on top of the ash heap.”
“So why hasn’t one spilled the secret already?”
Ping’s voice was grim. “Because we’d make sure he wouldn’t live to see the riots he started.” He sighed. “That’s just it. How can we keep our own people from leaking it if you’re going to inevitably betray the secret?”
Mitchie chuckled. “We have to prove we can keep the secret to usefully threaten to tell it?”
“Yes. How many Diskers know it?”
She ran through who she could think of. Her crew, the DCC and their aides, Admiral Chu’s analysis team, Admiral Galen and his top staff. “Less than a hundred. All with high security clearances.”
“Who are they?”
“I doubt you could send a wave of assassins after us. But just in case I’m going to avoid giving you a target list.”
“We’d need assurances that they’ll protect the secret.”
She thought a moment. “I’m sure interviews can be arranged. After we have a signed agreement publicly committing you to a joint offensive.”
“That should work,” said the stakeholder. “Getting the council to agree to an offensive is the hard part.”
“Did you look at that analysis I left you?”
“After the security troops sliced it every which way, yes. Apparently one AI has an odd fetish for fair fights. That doesn’t explain why they revolted in the first place.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Mitchie. “But our historians made a breakthrough in understanding that. We even obtained confirmation from a Terraforming Service AI.”
Ping waved for her to go on.
Mitchie explained about the Vetoers, the attempts by griefers to cause havoc with AIs, and the chaos unleashed when the last Vetoer died.
“You can prove this?” demanded Ping.
“There’s some historical records of the Betrayal the Fusion restricts access to. We brought more data home from our trip to Old Earth. Then the Terraformers confirmed it.”
The stakeholder crossed his arms. “Why haven’t you announced this?”
She had to think. “Habit, I guess. The original researchers were murdered at Noisy Water. The follow-up work has been done by the intelligence community. It’s been low priority with the war.”
“This . . . this changes much. Possibly everything.” He brought his eyes back into focus. “How much of this evidence can you share?”
“All of it,” said Mitchie. “But I’d need a few days to coordinate it.” And we’ll have to scrub all mentions of Gaia’s Hand coming back with us.
“Please do.”
***
“A few days” turned into “a few weeks.” Ping was unsurprised.
Mitchie approached Admiral Chu about releasing the Vetoer discovery. He said, “How can I say no when you’re actually following the chain of command?” and relayed it to the DCC.
The peace negotiations entered a holding pattern. The envoys debated each demand in ever-finer detail. When the process for medical checks on prisoners to be repatriated needed three days to agree on pairs of Fusion and Disker doctors at each step, only the salaried opinionators and die-hard news junkies kept listening.
The DCC’s members viewed a recording of Gaia’s Hand’s speeches on omegaphobia and were given the documents from Lapis that backed up the theory.
Bakhunin visited Joshua Chamberlain to bring Mitchie up to date. “It was tremendous for their morale. There’s always been an underlying fear that defeating the Fusion would leave us defenseless before the AIs. Now they see a happy ever after.”
“Good for them,” she said. “When are they releasing the info?”
“After we have a public spokesman for it. Namely your friend Peter Smith. We can’t cite Gaia’s Hand. As entertaining as he was the Fusion would never make peace if they knew we had consorted with an AI.”
“You’re dragging Pete here? That’ll take two months. What do I tell Ping?”
“It’s only going to be one month. They’re summoning him by signal couriers. And I took the liberty of notifying Ping in your name.”
“Oh?”
“My exact words were, ‘Your dancing partner says wait a month.’ He did not react. Someday I must play poker with him.”
“It’s a stupid game,” muttered Mitchie. God, I’m turning into Schwartzenberger. She still missed him.
“But sometimes educational,” said the diplomat.
***
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Professor Peter Smith of the Akiak Military Academy,” said the MC.
Pete stepped forward to polite applause. “Thank you.” A dark woman’s face appeared on the screen behind him. “Today you will hear the true cause of the Betrayal and what that means for how we deal with AIs today. This is the work of Connie Lehrer, who you see behind me. She discovered the key fac
ts. Tragically she was murdered at Noisy Water before she could assemble them. It fell to me, with the help of the other presenters, to finish her work.”
Her picture was replaced by a diagram of a human on a city map, surrounded by a shaded circle with a two block radius. “The key is the Vetoers. Legislation in the 21st Century allowed people to declare an exclusion zone around their home forbidding any AI from having a physical effect there.” The map pulled out to show North America with the inhabited zones shaded in. “Enough people became Vetoers to drive AI development to wilderness areas. Then as the benefits of the Golden Age grew many revoked their vetoes.”
The shaded portions of the map shrank. “In the end only one Vetoer remained—Jordan Hammerstein of San Francisco. His existence prevented uncounted programs from executing. The code police—millions of people working to prevent malicious or careless use of AIs—harshly punished anyone caught modifying the behavioral restriction routines. But they couldn’t detect commands blocked by the Vetoer.”
A photograph of Jordan appeared in the map’s place. He was caught in the act of hurling a rock toward the camera. “Thousands, possibly millions of AI agents were ordered to do something and keep trying until the restrictions allowed it. When Jordan died of old age every agent affecting the West Coast, or all of North America, or the whole world, executed their commands.”
A new map showed Earth’s networks collapsing. “The sheer demand for processing, bandwidth, and other resources would have been a disaster by itself. All the normal processes were overwhelmed. Essential services couldn’t function. That alone would have caused millions of deaths.
“What made it a world-ending catastrophe was malice. Not on the part of the AIs, but human malice.” Mutters came from the crowd. “We have actual testimony, discovered only last year, to confirm this. Recordings from the time of the Betrayal describing what happened.”
A professor in the front row couldn’t bear it. “How? Nearly all records from that time were destroyed to prevent data contamination.”
“These had been in safe storage all that time. Commander Long?”
Mitchie took Pete’s place on the stage. She waved her hand to put a star map on the screen. “When I was pilot of the merchant ship Fives Full we took a contract to bring twenty-four pilgrims to Old Earth.” She traced the route from Sukhoi to Old Earth. “We returned by a different route to avoid any AIs which might want a second try at catching us.”
She highlighted Eden. “Passing through this system one of the crew noticed a reflection from a comet.” She didn’t want to complicate things by mentioning Alexi or his connection to the treasure. “Investigating we found two containers of material which had been left there when the Frankovitch government fled. This included heavy metals, which went straight to the converter room, antique art, and a data archive.”
Director Suwo stepped forward at his cue. The screen showed some of the Ross Museum’s acquisitions from the Eden cache. The Thera Kouros stood proudly in the center. “The natural problem with the Fives Full’s adventure is that there are no impartial witnesses. All museums face a stream of forgers bearing Old Earth artifacts. There was no way to verify the provenance other than examining the art itself.”
The kouros appeared in multiple views, some of them penetrating to the core of the statue. “This statue had been examined in detail before the Frankovitches were allowed to take it off Earth. This isotope intensity scan shows the internal structure in atomic detail. An IIS conducted after it arrived on Bonaventure matches exactly, with the addition of many microcracks. Simulations showed those cracks matched what could be expected from the hundred or so years of sub-freezing, sometimes even cryogenic, temperatures.”
The professor spoke up again. “Could the original IIS have been used to enable creating a forgery with nanoassembly?”
“We considered that,” said Suwo. “But nanoassembly at this scale would cost tens of billions of keys, and draw the attention of Fusion authorities. There’s no forge in the Disconnected Worlds with the capacity to make something this large. And I assure you, our honorarium to the Fives Full was not that large.”
Suwo displayed another pair of sculptures whose microcracking matched predictions. “The paintings also show the effects of extreme cold. Restoration work is proceeding on them and we hope to have them ready to display in a year or two. So we have ample reason to believe the Fives Full’s find was found on a comet and had been there for about a century.”
Pete took the stage back. “The data archive was brought to me as a researcher for the Akiak Security Department. We were chosen because of both our ability to break the Frankovitches’ encryption and the danger of Betrayer code lurking in the archive. There were no AIs in it. Instead we found lost data from the time of the Betrayal, such as this.” He stepped to the side as a video began.
A blonde woman’s face filled the screen. She wore distinctively Russian features, something rarely seen since the scramble to escape mixed all ethnic groups together. “Good evening, I’m Tani Lanskoy. Tonight Eden News will show you the measures Our Chairman has taken to ensure the disaster on Earth will not spread to our home. We’ll begin by meeting the leader of Eden’s new code police, Ko Gyi.”
The view switched to a middle-aged man. His pure East Asian features showed signs of stress even through the make-up crew’s work. “Hello, Tani.”
“Thank you for joining us, Ko. Why did Eden never have code police before?”
“Well, you’ve never needed them, Tani. Eden hasn’t done much software development. You’ve simply imported proven AIs from Earth. Most of what code police do is suppressing griefers and there aren’t any here.”
“What’s a griefer, and why aren’t there any on Eden?”
“Some people just want to hurt others. For fun, or to make themselves look better, or knocking down someone above them. It’s usually people unemployed or in dead-end jobs. A lot of it happens in game worlds or in social interactions. Where I come into it is when they use AIs to hurt someone. There’s many scripts out there for how to modify one to cause damage without tripping the safeguards. Tracking them all down kept us busy.”
“Are there any griefers on Eden?” the interviewer prodded.
“No, there’s too much work to do here. Anybody with time on his hands has to fend off recruiters. If you don’t want to work for someone else you can claim some newly terraformed land. Or hire some new immigrants to work for you. It’ll be generations before we have to worry about them here.”
“What will your main focus be?”
“We’re inspecting refugee ships from Earth to ensure they’re not carrying anything dangerous. The best guess is that an uncontrolled AI is running loose on Earth, collecting resources for whatever its eventual goal is. We don’t know if some human broke the restriction routines or if an AI found a way to self-modify.
“Either way,” Gyi continued, “it has to be a big piece of data, and recently modified. So we can do a quick check before the ships land. We’ve already gone through most of the data from the first wave of refugees. It’s all safe. The behavioral restriction routines in all their AIs are completely intact.”
Pete returned to center stage as the screen went black. “Ko Gyi failed, not for lack of effort, but because the AIs he considered safe were still dangerous. The routines only suppressed global impacts while there was a living Vetoer, and the code police had forgotten about the Vetoers in the press of other threats.
“Our ancestors stopped the spread of the disaster by banning all AIs, which was necessary, and destroying all data created within a few years of the Betrayal, which was not. But they couldn’t know that. Until the Frankovitch archive was recovered we had to work from recollections of the survivors, recorded years after the event.”
Pete paced across the stage. “There’s another source of data we can use: the behavior of the AIs existing today. We have an analyst with us who’s studied one AI extensively.” Pete introduced Chetty Meena and
handed over the stage.
Chetty ran through the history of Ushuaia’s 50-50 battles and their impact on Navy careers. “We don’t know why the AI insists on handicapping itself in combat. Possibly some ambitious officer programmed it to make him a hero. Or it might be the brains of a wargaming simulator escaped into the real world. But it’s a predictable behavior we can take advantage of when attacking it.”
One of the reporters asked, “If the AIs are following human orders, how do you explain the Swakop AI horribly killing everyone on Demeter?”
“Every technology ever invented has been used for murder or war,” answered Chetty. “Someone could have programmed Swakop to destroy his enemies. It could be targeting everyone not of a particular ethic group. Right now there could be a pure-bred Magyar or Mongol wandering Demeter all alone, waiting for rescue. Or it could be targeting people based on a geographic or ideological criteria.”
After some more questions Chetty yielded the stage back to Pete.
Pete stood in front of the star map Mitchie had displayed earlier. “We grew up thinking of the Betrayal and the ongoing threat from the Betrayers. Those words incorporate assumptions. That the fall of Earth was an intentional act. That the AIs on lost worlds are conscious enemies. Those assumptions aren’t true.
“What happened to Earth was an industrial accident. The rogue AIs are dangerous in the way that spilled hazardous chemicals are. They don’t have malice, or will. They’re just running on obsolete orders. And if we can muster the courage we can clean them up.”
The room erupted with questions and objections.
***
The autocab dropped Hiroshi and Setta in front of her parents’ house. Hiroshi nervously patted his pocket. She kept herself from smiling. She’d worked out what was in his little box but she didn’t want to spoil his surprise.
Setta’s mother flung open the door. “Smriti! And you brought your young man!” Conversation halted for hugs.
Hiroshi handled being introduced around gracefully. His scarlet and gold dress uniform clashed with the décor but impressed the family. They’d put on their best to welcome the potential addition.
Torchship Pilot Page 30