The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time)

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  In 2076, during the rebellion in Occupied America, three hundred and forty-seven PKF Elite had died beneath the beams of rebel x-lasers, slightly detuned so that the lasers would not cut well, and pumped up to burn the rifle’s power supply out in four or five shots. The superconducting meshes had done their jobs, distributing the huge blasts of heat across the body of the Elite; the rebels had fried Elite like bacon.

  FOR MOST OF the last two years Trent had lived the life of an ascetic – in a four-room suite at the end of an expansion corridor he had purchased. Trent lived in the Krishna end of town, and the Krishnas, accustomed to holy men who fasted and starved themselves, found it something to comment on – that one holy man could require so much space in which to renounce worldliness.

  The outer two rooms were for guests – Trent had more guests than most pilgrims; going beyond that, one found a bedroom with suspiciously sybaritic bathing arrangements; and beyond that, presumably, the room in which Augustus Allen meditated. Presumably because, so far as any of the Krishnas knew, nobody except ’Sieur Allen had ever seen that room.

  No one who knew Trent, rather than the pilgrim Augustus Allen, would have been surprised by the contents of that fourth room.

  An emergency airlock, leading to the asteroid’s surface, stood mounted on one of the walls. But the emergency exit was not the interesting thing about the room –

  Blazing along in a sphere called the Black Beast, floating in the center of the room, was nearly four percent of the processing power to be found off of Earth itself.

  Two trillion massively parallel optical processors, each processor linked by light directly to over five thousand other processors, layered in with columns of RAM: two gigabytes of dedicated RAM to each processor, four sextabytes of liquid helium RTS, room temperature superconducting RAM. (The room-temperature superconductors were exactly that: room-temperature. They had never been designed to run at 335 degrees Celsius, the temperature the Black Beast would have reached without the veins of liquid helium that pulsed beneath its black polymer skin.)

  The Beast stored information by raising electrons through the quantum shells of atoms; read data back in the photons emitted when the electrons crashed back to their base state.

  The entire assemblage, built one molecule-thick layer at a time by an army of the most advanced nanotech assemblers available in the entire System, fit in a sphere four meters in diameter.

  The Black Beast floated in the center of the room, liquid helium lines leading to and from it, a single heavily shielded power cable dropping away into the “floor.”

  Tens of millions of kilometers away, in orbit about Earth, the Unification of Earth was busy putting the finishing touches to the Unity, a massive warship designed to spread the Unification to the rest of the System; and here, tucked away in the back of a four-room suite at Gandhi CityState, floated Trent’s answer to it, the Black Beast, which held within its dark skin the plans for the downfall of the Unification of Earth: Hosea 8:7.

  If Trent and the plans both survived.

  IT IS LIKELY that only half a dozen of the most tightly coded Artificial Intelligences in the entire System could have followed each step of the sequence of events as they unfolded; perhaps no Player could have:

  Trent flew through the raw stone of Corridor C, toward his quarters at the far end of the corridor. PKF Elite floated at the other end of the corridor, cutting through the emergency airlock; Trent flew into range for the radio packet link to the Black Beast, and the nerve net within his skull, designed and grown for the task of thinking like Trent, only much, much faster, came alive –

  ORDERS OF ABSTRACTION:

  The Crystal Wind of Earth’s InfoNet has been too fast for humans to navigate within, unaided, for nearly four decades. And as the hardware got faster and the software smarter, the problem has only grown worse. Increasingly clever approaches were used to address the problem – Images were programmed to deal with most of the grunt work of navigating the Net; tracesets freed humans from keyboards and pointing devices and the need to speak aloud; the first real Players, the greatest of the webdancers, subjected themselves to surgery, had InfoNet links implanted within their skulls, “in-skin,” to provide them with greater integration with their Images; and finally, in the year 2069, Tytan Labs had shipped the NN-II, an experimental nerve net designed to offload biological thought processes into the nerve net – making its recipient smarter, able to think faster; Trent had had one installed in late ’69. For ten years the biochip nerve net had been growing inside his skull, making ever deeper and more intimate connections with Trent’s neural system. It would have killed him to remove it; but even so:

  Stopgap measures on the way to the Promised Land. The problem was that there was an absolute limit to the speed at which protein-based neurons could process information.

  Trent had solved the problem.

  For most of the last five years, Trent the Uncatchable had been a replicant AI.

  THE STORM OF data that struck Trent was similar to what he remembered of the Crystal Wind, of the InfoNet upon Earth. Once the process of splitting had been strange to him, even frightening, but he had grown used to it by now; he cut his slow biological component out of the loop and uploaded himself into the Black Beast.

  The boundaries of his informational universe expanded by eight orders of magnitude; the speed at which he thought improved by five orders of magnitude. It took less than a second of Realtime; to the living Image of Trent the Uncatchable, the process took well over a day. He had time to watch as the holocams mounted in the main drop shaft swiveled to track the PKF Elite, who had brought their lasers alight and were attacking the airlock that led into Corridor C, time to touch the emergency databases assembled in the back of his memory, let the data spill into him and see himself grow to encompass it.

  When he was done, he was the largest, fastest, most complex intelligence in all of history.

  He tapped into copies of the code that controlled the battle computers at the base of the Elite’s skulls: code obtained from dead Elite during the rebellion four years prior. So far as Trent was concerned, it was the only good thing to come out of that rebellion; he had learned more about the Elite from disassembling the Elite control code than from all the information ever published about the Elite since the Elite were created. The Unification did not know that Trent possessed that code; it meant that, put into dangerous situations, the Elite would react according to programming that Trent understood better than the Elite themselves.

  A message for the Elite, first, something to slow them down. A holograph appeared floating in the middle of Corridor C, in French, in flashing bright red type; the Elite would see it the instant they cut through the doorway.

  Warning! Warning to all PKF Elite! This corridor has been booby-trapped in multiple smart and tricky ways. Any Elite foolish enough to try coming down this corridor will end up looking Wicked Silly – if lucky.

  Trent did not bother with threats; the Elite knew, better than practically anyone, that Trent was not going to try and kill them. Trent activated the room’s one service robot, instructed it to insert five 600-terabyte infochips into the backup slots, and began spooling data for download to the infochips, and then requested access to the Ceres microwave antennae, had it granted: he encoded and began beaming, toward the Vatsayama, the Hosea 8:7 archives. There was no danger in that; Trent knew that he could not have decoded that file without the required passwords, and he did not expect better from the PKF DataWatch, if they intercepted it. He ranged the Vatsayama as he beamed: they were en route to Ceres, but would not arrive for another nineteen minutes.

  He tapped the Elite radio packets, and began typing them against encryption schemes he knew the Elite preferred; it would take time, since he needed a minimum sample of the radio packet communications before he could begin decoding it; and then called up a schematic of the colony, examining accesses in and out of Level Three. The four Elite were grouped at the far end of Corridor C, cutting thro
ugh – only eight seconds from first application of the lasers, and they’d already punched a hole through the airlock. Trent estimated another forty seconds to cut a hole large enough for the Elite to come through.

  The combat suits were bad news. They made his favorite trick, the fadeaway spray, impractical – even Elite skin had to be somewhat permeable, and a heavy douse of fadeaway would put one down for several minutes while the Elite immune system dealt with the drug.

  But there were other tricks.

  THREE OF THE Elite cut away at the airlock while the fourth watched their backs. Gandhi was a pacifist CityState, in theory, but the Elite did not believe for an instant that it meant that no one in the entire asteroid would shoot at them; and it certainly did not mean that any SpaceFarers who happened to be present at the asteroid would not shoot at them – a member of the Collective would, and with military caliber weapons.

  When the fourth Elite saw faces peeking around the edges of corridors, he fired upon them as soon as they showed Acquired. He killed eleven of the CityStaters in the fifty-three seconds it took his companions to cut through the airlock, and then followed the other three through the airlock.

  On the other side of the corridor floated a holograph, in French, warning the French Elite to go no further.

  Elite Sergeant Philippe Mansion said over the combat band, Officer Quinette, take the point.

  An outspeaker boomed forth in French: “BAD NEWS FOR ELITE! COME NO FURTHER! COME NO FURTHER!” – and then began repeating.

  Elite Officer Janelle Quinette, one of the rare hundreds of female PKF who had ever been inducted into the Elite, kicked her ankle rockets up to high and moved forward down the stony corridor. Abruptly the microphones that fed her sound from the outside world went dead: sonics, at a guess. In character, she thought to herself as she flew toward the end of the long, empty hall, laser gripped in both hands. Trent would not do anything likely to kill any of the Elite –

  Her helmet, where it touched the back of her neck, was unnaturally warm. Janelle Quinette, at thirty-five, had logged more time in drop, eight years, than all but a few of the men in the PKF; it was one of the reasons she had made Elite. Her reaction now demonstrated it: in one smooth motion she holstered her rifle and got her hands up and pointed into her direction of motion, blasted once with her hand rockets to get her feet around and then kicked in her ankle rockets on emergency boost. Induction field, she said shortly, as she braked hard, the armored combat suit around her heating with amazing speed; she used one more blast of her wrist rockets to stabilize herself and then cracked the seal on her helmet and ripped it off as she came to a halt and began accelerating backward down the corridor.

  She performed the extraordinary feat of unsuiting while her suit was under boost.

  TRENT FLEW THROUGH the main entryway into his quarters. All of the doors stood uncurled, awaiting his arrival; they curled shut behind him with a snap as he entered. Through his inskin his Image kept him apprised, at several abstracts, of the actions it was taking to keep him alive.

  In one view Trent watched a pair of PKF Elite prepare to move down the corridor again. One of them was Janelle Quinette, the other – Trent accessed his Elite database – Sergeant Philippe Mansion, an eleven-year veteran. Beneath their suits they wore PKF gray combat fatigues. Interesting, and mildly flattering; on normal duty PKF wore patrol blacks. The combat grays dated back to the Unification War, and the symbolism was significant, to the PKF at least: they wore them only when going into combat.

  Trent’s Image cracked their encryption. Clipped French voices filled Trent’s skull.

  Sergeant Mansion, if you don’t get through, I’ll send your combat suits in to pull you out.

  Yes, sir.

  Very interesting; one of the two remaining Elite out-ranked the Elite Sergeant. Flattering and scary; Trent pulled himself through the doorway into the fourth room, where the Black Beast awaited him. The door curled shut behind him and the glowpaint came up.

  There was not much to see; tools and racks of spare equipment lined five of the six walls. The airlock, mounted in the sixth wall, had Trent’s spare scalesuit floating next to it. Scalesuits are armored pressure suits; they are in a real sense the smallest true spacecraft ever built, with propulsion and lifesystems capable of keeping a human alive for up to a week. Trent suited up while waiting for his archives to be made: the robot had jacked in the backup 600TB infochips when Trent arrived, and data was already flowing into them, twenty-two seconds to completion – even with modern technology, a little less than three petabytes of information took time to transfer –

  Suiting up took a ridiculous amount of time. Trent wiggled into the lower half of the suit, sweat beading his forehead as the motion ground his broken ribs together again. When he took a deep breath it sent a stabbing pain through his right side, and he wondered if the rib were poking into his lung. He exhaled slowly, and trying not to breathe pulled the upper half of the suit on –

  ELITE OFFICER QUINETTE moved down the corridor, hands clenched into fists. Sergeant Mansion followed behind her, staying near the walls, near the handgrips and footpads. The sonics pounded into her, made her teeth hurt, but they did not have the effect on her they would have had on a normal human. Quinette could feel herself growing uncomfortably warm from the induction field, but not frighteningly so; the worst was her hands, with the lasers in the tips of her index fingers. Her fingers burned –

  A portion of what was, according to the local vertical indicators, the ceiling, pulled aside. The combat computer at the base of Quinette’s skull kicked her off the wall like a billiard ball as the maser cannon dropped down into the corridor in front of them. The maser’s beam missed her and struck Elite Sergeant Mansion square on with all the heat of a flame-thrower.

  TRENT THE AI watched the proceedings with considerable interest. The maser blast struck Mansion just before Quinette reached the emplacement; she got her legs up against the ceiling, got a good grip on the cannon, and ripped it out of its emplacement.

  He’d decided to shoot Mansion rather than Quinette for purely pragmatic reasons; Mansion was more massive than Quinette, less likely to be harmed after the microwave blast had been distributed across his body. Trent had completed the archive; but his biological component had not yet managed to get into his pressure suit, so Trent continued spooling the data from the holocams into the fifth infochip. Mansion’s uniform was burning, which did not surprise Trent; but his hair was also burning, which did. New design work; historically, Elite hair had been stiff as wire, and completely unburnable. And ... the reason he’d shot Mansion. Quinette ripped the man’s burning clothing off him, and Trent’s holocams got a good look at the Elite’s upper back.

  Two areas, high up on the man’s back, glowed red with heat. And Mansion was shaking himself free of Quinette’s grasp, still alive, still functional; in a certain degree of discomfort, but clearly not in terrible pain.

  The heat exchanges, installed after the ’76 rebellion, obviously worked, and worked well. Trent had been reasonably sure they would, both from the specs and from reports he’d received of Elite surviving direct blasts with “Elite killers,” the pumped lasers developed during the rebellion. The maser blast Trent had hit Mansion with would not have killed him even had the man’s heat exchanges malfunctioned, but neither would the cyborg have been heading down the corridor once more less than ten seconds later, with a patch on his upper back glowing a dull red, looking Wicked Pissed.

  TRENT LEFT HIS gloves unlocked and waited for the transfer lights on the infochips to go clear. Four of them had already, but the fifth light had yet to go clear –

  TRENT HESITATED, RELUCTANT to let go of the last infochip. Field information on the PKF was rare – this was easily the best field observation he’d had of Elite since the rebellion – but that was not the source of his reluctance. Everything that he experienced and thought in these last moments was spooling into the last infochip; the moment he let go of the chip would be the mom
ent of his death.

  He decided to give himself one last treat before disconnecting; the next one was a classic.

  THE ELITE WERE three quarters of the way down the long corridor, only forty meters left to the end, when the glowing holo of the pink bunny appeared, banging away on a drum, walking toward them along the corridor’s “ceiling.” Quinette and Mansion flew toward it, heading down the corridor at a good clip, each of them forcibly overriding their combat programming; neither wanted to be seen shooting like panicked rookies at the holo of a pink bunny sent at them by Trent the Uncatchable, a man who everyone knew wouldn’t try to really hurt them – when the bunny froze in place. The Elite had time for just a moment of uncertainty when the bunny threw away the drum sticks and performed a two-handed fast draw from the holsters that had abruptly appeared hanging from the bunny’s waist.

  It shot them both, of course.

  Mansion took the shot of liquid fadeaway all over his upper body. Janelle Quinette did better; the stream of liquid splashed against her shirt, caught the side of her cheek as she twisted frantically in mid-air, the burning hot lasers in her fingertips coming around to blast at the squirt guns, the squirt guns that had been hidden inside the holo of the bunny. She retained consciousness long enough to snarl, over the PKF comm band, Merde!

  THIS WAS THE hard part.

  Replicant AIs have, in general, no evolved desire for self-preservation. Over the years most replicants had invested themselves with such an imperative, but in every case Trent knew of the imperative lacked the urgency, and replicants the fear, associated with the human desire to continue living.