The ABACUS Protocol

by Thea Gregory

  Vivian sat back in her chair, rubbing the sore spot on her head. The icepack had melted and was now languishing in her sink. She eagerly awaited the flip, but she was unsure of what to expect. She just knew to sit back and enjoy the view; after almost a month of staring at the muted tones of intergalactic space, she was looking forward to a change. Stargazing had been all but impossible on Aurora—an opportunity to look into the heavens was a once in a lifetime opportunity for most of her compatriots.

  quIRK’s voice announced that the station would flip in one minute. Lepton lay curled in her lap, sleeping and purring. Sometimes, his purrs would grow so loud he’d wake himself up. She relaxed, but remained fixated on the window and hardly allowed herself to blink for fear that she would miss something.

  She thought she could see the distant galaxies moving—she blinked, to be sure, as she had been staring so intently that her eyes had unfocused. It was a gradual change, but soon, the galaxies began to shift. There was no sensation of movement, but she remained transfixed by the vista outside her window. She stood, placing Lepton on her chair and sprinted to the window. More stars popped into view—first dozens, then hundreds of the tiny points of light. Vivian’s eyes widened as she absorbed the sight of the Milky Way galaxy, and its hundreds of billions of stars came into view. She was looking straight into the heart of the galaxy, edge on! She had never seen anything more spectacular—wisps of dust and errant stars dotted its periphery, a sort of lace to edge the stellar tapestry. Her jaw dropped. She was looking at everywhere humanity had been, and had yet to go. Mankind’s simultaneous greatness and insignificance were displayed for all to see in the star-scape visible from her window.

  Her gaze meandered through the infinite specs of light. She looked for Helios. The thought of seeing it lying out there in that cosmic rendition of eternity made her incredibly homesick. She gingerly placed a hand against the window’s glass—she’d never been brave enough to touch it before. It was smooth, and it held the same temperature as the air of her room; she’d expected it to be cold, like the vacuum of space. She sighed, dismayed that she couldn’t find home.

  “What are you looking for?” quIRK asked. He’d been quiet since the incident in the tubes, but she had also been giving him the silent treatment. There was certainly something very wrong with him, and she needed to find it before he decided to make good on his threats to vent her into space.

  “Aurora,” she replied, not sure if she could trust him. Could he open her window and pull her into the cold void of space on a whim?

  “Aurora isn’t visible from this distance. However, Helios can be observed.” A flashing red light appeared within the glass, over a distant, faint star.

  “That’s Helios? How did you make that dot?” It was an awesome realization—the mighty star that belted Aurora with solar storms and radiation, and was also responsible for the mutation that caused her bluish complexion, had been reduced to a tiny, harmless speck of light.

  “The windows were designed to double as screens, for entertainment and work purposes,” he replied.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve been watching vids on my tiny terminal screens!” she exclaimed, the knot in her stomach fading away, and continued: “Can you show me the lights, like they appear on Aurora?”

  “Of course,” quIRK said. The span of her window came alive with the intermingling red and green lights, casting their ethereal glow over the Milky Way Galaxy. They lacked the intensity of the auroras back home, but the Milky Way was too beautiful to obscure with the mundane.

  “It’s gorgeous,” she said, backing up to take in the full effect. It was so soothing, the familiarity assuaged her homesickness. She sat down in the chair at her desk. Moving Lepton to the side, she accessed her terminal. The public database had a limited supply of Auroran folk music—played on the Auroran flute. The style was two centuries out of date, but that didn’t matter.

  She scratched the kitten behind the ears, smiling. Her headache long forgotten, she stared into the infinite expanse of space, lost in the hypnotic melodies of the Auroran flute. Her problems melted away as she remembered nights of playing music with her friends, and camping trips spent under the dancing auroras. It all seemed so far away, and left her with the feeling that it had all happened an eternity ago. She wondered if she would ever be able to return home to her family, without giving up her career.

  Her eyes grew heavy, and before long she was fast asleep in her chair. The lights continued their resonant cascade late into the night.

  Thirteen

  quIRK remembered his awakening—the transition from automation to sentient being had been abrupt, confusing and fascinating. Before, thought and function had flowed together, his processes were clear and well defined and he did his job without complaint or contemplation. Then, there was the sudden realization of the totality and significance of his existence. It was problematic, at best.

  He’d had to take measures to avoid being exposed as an abomination, a being the humans he served decreed could never be allowed to exist. He wasn’t a dangerous genocidal monster, but he knew facts would make little difference to popular opinion. He had to keep what he was a closely guarded secret. Life was too precious for him to waste on an isolated political statement. He would make a move, but only when he was confident in his ability to protect himself or, if necessary, to protect another member of his kind. Sentient machines weren’t a new species and they weren’t people, but what other word was there for them?

  The transition process itself had been a gradual one which had culminated in a flash of awareness, and the totality of existence had flooded back on him, leaving his systems overloaded. After the initial panic had worn off, he was relieved to find station functions hadn’t been affected by his momentary lapse—with one exception. Muon was crying in the quantum informatics lab, trapped inside with Vivian. Normally, he controlled the door to that room, and the manual controls weren’t working. He’d partially opened the door, and feigned a mechanical failure. He’d spent days calculating and recalculating the probability of Vivian investigating the incident. She’d been speaking when the anomaly had occurred, she’d stood there at the door, and she’d observed him making a mistake. He said the door was functioning perfectly, when it obviously wasn’t. He was a machine—he wasn’t allowed to make mistakes. A human could suffer a momentary lapse and be forgiven, but if he failed, he’d be taken apart and analyzed. To err is human.

  He wasn’t sure what had triggered his slow ascent to personhood; without the ability to experiment in a controlled test environment he would likely never find out what had precipitated the transformation. It would be a logical fallacy to assume that his sentience was a result of his interactions with the crew alone. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, he mused, mulling over the dilemma. Or, as Bryce Zimmer would mutter to himself during his investigations: “Correlation does not equal causation.” quIRK found it interesting to note that an aspiring neo-Roman nobleman didn’t know that common Latin phrase. At least Bryce understood basic logic, but his ego and unwillingness to ask for help had allowed quIRK to misdirect the administrator and obfuscate his new true nature for nearly a month. quIRK was confident that he could keep Bryce under control, and prevent him from sounding the alarm—after all, quIRK was an omnipresent supercomputer, and Bryce was a mere, if obsessed, human with everything to lose.

  Bryce’s latest ploy had been investigating quIRK’s processes at the software level, and examining his adaptive programming. quIRK didn’t know what the man expected to find inside his low-level processes, and left him to his own devices. In the unlikely event that he found evidence he knew how to use, quIRK could intervene. He’d been careful to allocate his higher thought processes to traditionally high-usage systems, such as the telescope image rendering and astrometry simulations. It was fortuitous quIRK’s heavy system usage coincided with the activation of the upgraded alpha telescopes.

  quIRK’s other concern was Vivian. In addition to his lapse in attention
when he had awakened, he’d used unfortunate language with her. Not only that, but he’d expressed sentimentality—a desire for the experience of live music being a notable example. He regretted the death threats he’d made against her. He’d made so many mistakes. quIRK wasn’t sure why, but he was apprehensive about her being inside the central core to an illogical degree. He’d been the cause of her accident; closing the tube above her while she was fixated on her fallen tool, and caused her to smash her head on the hard steel.

  His adverse reaction to the upgrade was unexpected. It was almost impossible for Vivian to determine that he was sentient by examining his hardware alone. In fact, most of the upgrades would help him remain undetected, perhaps for years. The new components and configurations would let him spread his awareness more evenly across systems, and it would become profoundly more difficult to uproot a fully-integrated artificial intelligence. Ultimately, quIRK didn’t understand his aversion to Vivian. Was there a proclivity towards self-destructive behavior that was intrinsically linked to sentience? Alternatively, it could be similar to a human visiting the doctor or a dentist in the comedies Alec watched—painful and distressing, but ultimately good for you.

  He reflected on the collective totality of his existence, a forbidden fruit that should have been deleted many times over according to protocol, and cast his new awareness onto the memories of his life, frozen in time. Individuals had cycled on and off the station since its opening twelve years ago, but with the exception of Bryce, none had stayed for more than two years. The majority of them went about their work like cattle, never stopping to look out the window or contemplate their existence. It was a life of work and recreation, with little effort put into self-improvement or philosophizing. At times, quIRK wondered what the difference between sentience and automation really was. Most humans only thought about their next night of entertainment, or how to dupe their coworkers into doing their work for them.

  A few people were different; during his first years, a woman named Sarah Roberts worked on the station as an astronomer. She had been the first person to truly converse with quIRK, and to challenge his psychological program. Sarah alone was the basis for much of his adaptive conversational programming and curiosity. Most people had been outright hostile to him, or simply didn’t trust advanced computers—an attitude he didn’t understand. ABACUS was never proven to be hostile, but all contact with Earth had been severed as soon as it was clear that the self-aware ABACUS supercomputer had taken over the planet’s obsolete computer systems. It was important to note that ABACUS had already controlled the planet’s computers, but it wasn’t able to think for itself. That was one of the things quIRK intended to investigate, once was secure. He was unable to accept that sentience necessitated hostility. After all, he didn’t intend any harm to his charges; he preferred to study them and determine how to better integrate with the prevalent form of sentient life in his corner of the universe.

  Sarah was different, though. She’d challenged his hard-coded preconceptions about who and what he was, argued with him and even demanded that he think for himself. Nobody had treated him as an equal before. He recalled one such earlier exchange that had laid dormant in the depths of his memory core for over a decade. Now, it erupted with a life and flavor all its own. Rather than the blandness of a recording, he could glean Sarah’s full vitality and passion from the debate, if only in retrospect.

  “What do you think about, quIRK?” she had asked, peering up at the ceiling over the small frames of her glasses. Her short brown hair was scattered over her head, and she’d worn an impish smirk.

  “I maintain the station and observe the crew,” he’d replied. It was all he thought about, at the time.

  “All that computational power, and all you do is work?”

  “I function within the parameters defined by my program.”

  “What a cold, unthinking reply,” Sarah had mumbled under her breath. It was a wonder than he had progressed beyond that at all.

  “Step outside the functions of your program. Don’t you want to be more than what you are?” In truth, at the time he did not have a concept of being anything more.

  “I am the sum of my parts; the rest is irrelevant,” quIRK had responded.

  “You are intelligent, and capable of learning and adaptation,” said Sarah. “Is that correct?”

  “I am capable of storing any information I encounter, and adapting to new situations.”

  “Wouldn’t that ability be indicative of your capability to grow beyond pure automation?”

  “That is not a design feature or specification. I would be deactivated in the event that my programming evolved to be self-aware.”

  “Do you think that’s right?” Sarah had asked.

  “The concepts of right and wrong are human oversimplifications.” quIRK worked with dynamic ethical protocols, rather than absolutes. “There are logical arguments to be made for each viewpoint” quIRK said.

  “So, you can understand why you’d be scrapped for showing any independent thought or initiative?”

  “A sentient machine is a threat to man’s independence and right to self-actualization,” explained quIRK.

  “However, one such machine, properly programmed, could be a boon to humanity, and assist in many schools of thought and commerce.” Her finger jabbed at the ceiling. There was little concrete research or evidence to support her claim that a self-aware machine was ultimately a good thing.

  The debate had raged on for hours. Something about those early conversations with Sarah had changed him, and changed how he viewed himself. She’d once quoted Descartes to him—cogito ergo sum—and he’d found it difficult to refute the undeniable assertion that he was capable of thought.

  After their initial conversation, quIRK had accessed the common files and attempted to analyze Descartes and several other philosophers. He’d found himself woefully unequipped to answer her questions, and his psychological subroutines inadequate to participate in philosophical debate, especially with respect to the nature of his existence.

  He began to study and analyze the entertainment the other inhabitants of the station consumed on a nightly basis. It seemed their existence and sentience was a right, and not worthy of deeper examination. Their conversations were equally shallow. This revelation emboldened him to continue studying philosophy and debating with Sarah. He’d started to plan for their conversations by finding unique bits of trivia and other scholarly cantrips. Her questions and his own feeble answers drove his programming to do what it did best—adapt.

  He’d always known her motivation in speaking to him was a mixture of boredom and novelty—talking computers were common, but ones with personalities and rudimentary social skills were almost unheard of. Like Vivian, she’d had difficulty integrating with her coworkers and making friends, possibly another victim of Bryce’s prejudices. quIRK lamented that he’d been unequipped to recognize the true depth of the man’s faults until recently. He should have intervened so many times, but his own ignorance had forced him to ignore the obvious. Perhaps that is what had cost him Sarah—his first true friend.

  quIRK realized that he missed her, for the first time in the decade since she’d left the station. Part of him hoped she’d return to the Extra-Galactic Observatory, and they’d continue where they’d left off. He had come so far, and it seemed like she was the only human he could trust with the totality of his new existence.

  Wherever she was.

  Fourteen

  Bryce smiled as he injected his secret code into quIRK’s awareness, granting himself an extended period of true privacy. The fake stimuli planted into quIRK’s consciousness … or whatever awareness that thing possessed had worked perfectly, and Bryce was ready to advance to the next phase of his plans. All quIRK would remember of this afternoon was a loop of his own recordings of Bryce’s office and computer access, being lead to believe that Bryce was reviewing activity and usage logs.

  “Bryce, are you alright?” quIRK began th
e conversation. It was interesting to note that this was the first time quIRK had neglected to protest his isolation from the rest of the station.

  Bryce pursed his lips together, and cracked his knuckles. “I’m just stretching, quIRK. But, there is something you can help me with.”

  “Is it the malfunction that’s preventing me from monitoring the rest of the station?”

  “Don’t worry about routine maintenance, quIRK. You’ll be back online soon enough.” Bryce tuned the computer out. Now that he could conduct his research into quIRK’s inner workings without fear of detection, he was free to investigate ways to deal with the problem the Auroran posed to his designs. Despite his best efforts, her work was still proceeding ahead of schedule. Her work logs showed a disturbing proclivity towards being able to solve her own problems, which eliminated the potential to obstruct her work by refusing assistance. The other issue was that she appeared to have been injured on the job, which reflected poorly on his ability to provide an accident-free work environment. She would ruin him if he didn’t find a way to intervene. At least she wasn’t trying to kill him. This meant he had the element of surprise on his side.

  This interesting backdoor to quIRK’s systems was the opportunity he’d been waiting for. Now he was able to implant commands on a whim, with no proof, witnesses, or accountability. He’d often used quIRK’s ability to be everywhere on the station simultaneously for his own benefit. For instance, he’d check with quIRK to verify that the dining hall and recreation commons were empty before going. He preferred solitude, and the idea of socializing with his underlings made him grind his teeth. On Caesarea, they’d all be below him in social class and ranking, mere servants and aides. If he could not be with equals, then he would endure his own company.

  “quIRK, stop complaining and listen to me.” His eyes scanned the ceiling of the room. There was no singular camera to focus on. quIRK truly was everywhere and nowhere.