The Inhuman Peace

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  So this was where everything happened. Bengali eyed it critically.

  And then he was being marched inside. Past gates, ID verification systems and then into a long hallway that went past massive glass-fronted machine workshops the size of aircraft hangers. Peering in, he saw row after row of white-suited engineers, assembling children’s skeletons out of metal, fitting batteries, crafting faces. Kushlani saw him and waved him over. She was wearing engineer whites.

  ‘This is what we call the engine room,’ she said. ‘This whole place used to be a factory for Lanka Leyland – that’s the local subsidiary of British Leyland. They used to make parts for fighter planes here during the Nippon war. Because of how critical it was, the Nipponese kept sending banzaicraft here, so they ended up turning it into a fortress. The workers stayed, most of them.’

  He saw a man painting a thin ceramic mask with great care. ‘The bots are handmade?’

  ‘Well, we’re all government employees, so we have to keep them on a payroll. Unemployment’s up three percent. We’re not going to be automating anything anytime soon.’

  ‘And the bots themselves? Model?’

  ‘Crofton Institute HumanKind 45s. You know the model? We got the license to build them here. Revenue share.’

  He knew the model. It was ancient, at least two decades old, barely worth licensing. Originally designed to be household servants. Sturdy, repairable, but about as mechanically complex as a graduate thesis. Some latent peer-to-peer shortwave ability so that newcomers to a household could quickly learn their human master’s preferences the moment they walked in the door. A tremendously basic operating system that could be called smart only if you compared it to a dog. So that was Crofton’s game here: bundling off their old and infirm tech to the Ceylon.

  But HK-45s were never able to move like the ones he’d seen on television.

  He followed her past the engine room. Double doors on the other end swung open, and they were inside an atrium, presumably on one of the outer levels; there was a thin glass strip in the ceiling, and through it he could make out other rings rising above. ‘Most of our shortwave transmission infrastructure is also up here. Old Nippon stuff. Radius is about a hundred miles, enough to broadcast to TVs and track and control our sensors without clogging up the data pipes. The broadcast signal is duplicated into the data pipes and sent off to the station in Trinco – that’s where our undersea cables connect. It’s pretty old tech, but also very stable.’

  How crude, he thought, and how complex. Robots being hammered together by a few lads in a workshop. Nippon-war era transmitters. And here, the site of one of those most intriguing robotic breakthroughs in recent years.

  A little past that was another hallway. A blue light flickered, painting a strange, clinical scene. Row upon row of servers stood like bookshelves, flickering; some lay on their sides with their guts exposed. It smelled of decay – something dusty, with a whiff of something darker underneath … something rotten.

  Cells. To call them cages would have been a lie, but they gave off a powerful impression, even in concrete, of wanting to be cages. Most were empty. In one was a fat Inquisitor, a huffing creature with red lenses for eyes. In another were three, sitting, facing each other, all identical in stature, their faces hidden behind black masks. There was a certain delicacy to their curves; the slightest hint at their chests that made him sure they were women, or had been at some point.

  And standing outside, as if to guard the open not-quite-cells, was a giant, dressed in a manner more ornate than anyone Bengali had seen there. The giant was easily eight feet tall and wore a chest piece with a lion’s head as a sigil. In one hand he carried a mace that sparked and spat angry lightning. It gave Bengali a terrible headache just to be near it. One hit with that thing and he would be dead.

  The thing’s face was an unbroken sheet of metal, a single crude melon that sat astride those shoulders like a mockery of a human head. The face turned to them. Bengali almost jumped.

  ‘And we, uh, do upgrades and additions to the Inquisition,’ said Kushlani, embarrassed. ‘Ignore Angulimali here. We’re just passing through, Anguli. Hewage mostly handles all this stuff, Jacob. This way, please.’

  For the first time, he wondered what the hell Ceylon was really like to need such monsters. All the colonies had Inquisitors: it was known. But he had never seen so many out in the open before. In India, there was at least some civility, some token pretense, some attempt to package the thing into a veneer acceptable to society.

  He let himself be led to an elevator, glad to be away from that strange glare.

  ‘And you run all this?’ he murmured softly as the elevator took them up, revealing level upon level of workshops, offices and at least one food court.

  ‘I work on the broadcast and research fronts,’ she said. ‘Although … well, like I said, I can give you some of the information you want, but source code, for that, you need to talk to Hewage. He calls the shots on everything. Here, this is our stop.’

  The elevator stopped at a bland floor lined with what looked like offices. A door said ‘DE ALMEIDA – PRIVATE’. Inside was a white room, almost clinically sterile: two racks of compute hardware took up the back, and at the front there was a desk, a medical operating table, a tea machine and a terminal connected to the guts of some machine. None of them new, but there was enough – he counted, with a slight twinge of envy – to outpower anything the university had given him in recent times.

  A face peered at him from the desk. He started, but it was just a bot, like the ones he’d seen on the televisions. Up closer, the illusion of it being a child disintegrated somewhat. He could clearly see the metal jaws, the lenses, the carefully placed striped of fake-skin that hid the seams and frameworks.

  ‘What am I doing here again?’

  ‘On the table, Dr. Bengali. The machine on the table has got all the data I can share with you: hardware, statistics from previous broadcasts, footage, b-roll, highlights. If you need anything else, drop me a message. I’ll be down shortly – I’ve got to get started on the prep work for tomorrow’s broadcast. Also a draft copy of Hewage’s book. It’s not really complete. I don’t think it’ll be worth much, but he said he wanted you to understand.’

  A thick book – real paper, bound and scribbled over in an untidy scrawl. He opened it to the first page and read:

  In the early 2000s, a friend of mine conducted an experiment: could a machine design a circuit?

  We were at Dartmouth, I was doing my master’s. Several months before M dropped out and caused all that scandal. My friend set about creating a circuit design that would take in an input signal, and if it was more than five volts, would light a bulb with it. She took the design around and we all had a crack at making it as efficient as could be.

  She then wrote an assembly program which had what we felt was a strange directive – shuffle components about in random configurations and zero in on circuits that met a goal. It was ‘rewarded’ for getting closer and closer to the goal – again, we had arguments over how the points were allotted, which seemed a bit arbitrary. She went ahead and did it anyway.

  ‘Is there, ah, a smoking area nearby?’

  She tucked the bot head under her arm. ‘Balcony down the hall, on the right.’

  He watched her flow out of the room with the disembodied head tucked under her arm.

  ‘Of course,’ he murmured, and shook himself. Surreal.

  The first design produced was fabulously stupid. It was so far off that we joked that a random assemblage of circuit components could have done a better job. The hundredth was the same.

  The thousandth learnt to light the bulb.

  By the two thousandth, it was taking in a signal and lighting a bulb.

  By the four thousandth, it was doing exactly what she wanted it to do. Except here was the kicker: it ran on a third of the parts we used for the original lab-designed circuit. Some parts weren’t even connected, but if you took them out, the circuit stopped working
. Somehow, the assembler had, by trial and error, figured out how to use fluxes in the various wires to produce a working circuit.

  She died before she could publish. Suicide. It took me years to replicate her work, but eventually I had it: proof that if one let a goal-based machine learn and evolve towards a target, not only would it eventually reach the desired outputs, but that it also might do so with a third of the cost of components. And of course, once the desired output was achieved, we only needed to store the output, not the design program.’

  He sat down and began reading.

  Evening fell. One of the servants, possibly worried about him missing lunch, brought him a gin and tonic and sandwiches. Someone else brought him a packet of cigarettes. He looked up once or twice, and even wandered out looking for Kushlani, but the corridors were too eerie, so he came right back to the book, engrossed.

  So what had Hewage done here? The technical documentation on Kushlani’s machine was sparse on the software. They had kept the HK45 base operating system, sure, but the way things trailed off into obscure technical details made him suspect that a lot to do with the software had been redacted. What was backpropagation? Why was there an entire side note about bias-variance tradeoffs? What was this heap of binary named ‘default model’ that seemed to take in input and produced output, but lacked any kind of if > this > then > do that logic, and mostly seemed to be setting and resetting states?

  He puzzled over this, at times digging into Hewage’s weird little autobiography to see if he ever spoke of these things.

  Why was this operating system sandboxed, with the command buffer sealed, except to this hodgepodge of—

  Wait.

  The first inklings of the design struck him. So Hewage had taken the old HK45 and its safe, predictable operating system. He had then installed this strange batch of code and fooled the OS into thinking that this other code, running right there in its own head, was actually a human, talking to it.

  As Bengali traced the command paths, he began to notice the little touches of genius. In front of the machine learning system was a module called TC/TCITR that siphoned outputs from what the selfish-state model ‘saw’: damage done, power loss to the system, and so on. TC/TCITR maintained a log of all orders sent by ‘the human’ to the selfish state, calculated a ‘confidence interval’ based on the history and results of such decisions and deleted orders that it deemed too stupid. At higher levels of confidence, the TC/TCITR module started reducing the number of decisions it actually checked, and let most of them through.

  The end result was charmingly intelligent: initially, the fake ‘human’ code would be deemed too stupid to obey, and the base programming would run the show. Which meant –

  The code – this part of the machine – was learning.

  And as the machine learned and its decisions became smarter, it gained more and more control over its decisions. More and more confidence in its judgements. It delivered these judgements to the operating system, and bit by bit, the base programming would give way.

  Bengali flipped the autobiography open. There were pages he had skipped. Hewage had developed an interest in biology, it seemed:

  We think of the human brain as one unit. The terminology we use – souls, minds – belie the underlying nature of the actual design. The mind is not one seamless device, but many minds constantly talking to each other. The frontal lobe thinks, plans, issues commands. The temporal sometimes accepts, often fine-tunes, sometimes argues, sometimes acts on its own. The parietal lobe watches, understands, passes information.

  A biologist would no doubt be able to describe the brain better, but this for me was enough. Why reinvent the wheel? All this time, we in the robotics industry have been obsessed with building parietal lobes and trying to tack on functions of the frontal lobe in ever more complex and hand-crafted decision trees, often slowing down the overall processing.

  Nature has a design that works. I think we should adopt it. Hardwired instincts, flexible, long-term planning that can learn, uncertainty—

  He felt a surge of excitement.

  And here were other command lines, things that could trigger overrides: the operating system could talk back to the machine-that-learned, and ‘ask’ it to think about power, repairs. Or it could panic if everything dropped too low and run screaming for the hills.

  And here were behaviour deviances: a standard module – custom-tuned parameters for social attention and low appetite for risk. The Explorer module, greyed out, that turned down the social attention parameter, turned up the risk.

  Was that by accident, or by design? Where the hell did these parameters come from? If by design, this was a complexity beyond what he’d seen in the code. He murmured to himself, thinking of how to explain this to Drake. No, Drake probably knew. The question was of what military significance was this? Sitting there, in that ugly remodelled fortress in a backwater colony, Hewage had made breakthroughs that would send shockwaves through the Royal Society of Robotics. How to validate this model? And how the hell had this come about in the first place, given that none of it was actually in the documentation?

  ‘Incredible,’ Bengali murmured, and felt unpoetic. All this work, and only Hewage, and maybe Kushlani de Almeida, knew. Unpublished. Unheard of.

  He could take it. His hands trembled briefly. He could take this. Publish it under his name. Bengali, J, 2035. Walker, du Marek – they would initially resist, of course, but he could raise funds. If it worked out, he would be a god. Given enough time and students—

  No. No. Drake knew. Drake must have sanctioned this, of course. Bengali then came down to Earth as he finished the documentation. The machine-that-learned itself. Hewage talked around it, theoretically. But he never, as far as Bengali could see, described its actual implementation. Every diagram had it as a black box in a standard flowchart.

  And the book. The autobiography. Hewage had it sent to him. Which meant he knew exactly what effect it would have.

  Bastard. Like stout Cortez, with eagle eyes, staring at the Pacific. And Bengali, like all of Cortez’s men, wild-eyed, silent upon a peak in Darien.

  Bengali threw the books aside and fumbled for a cigarette. The balcony was nearby. He smoked furiously, barely taking in the city outside, and started when the door opened midway through his smoke.

  It was Hewage. Wordlessly, the Ceylonese man lit his own cigarette and joined Bengali at the balcony. It was silent for a few minutes, as they inhaled the promise of cancer.

  ‘So,’ said Hewage, at last. ‘Did you copy the books yet? Don’t pretend you weren’t instructed to take what you could. You should have enough to send to Drake now.’

  ‘But not the meat of it.’

  Hewage grinned. It was a very feral grin. ‘No, not the meat of it. They won’t be able to replicate it even if they sleep with those damn books for a year. I’ll publish my way, by God. Ten years here, running the grandest experiment of all time, just so idiots at the Royal Society can’t argue back. I’ll work for Drake, but after I get my dues in the field, not before. You understand what I’m doing here now?’

  ‘Not all of it,’ said Bengali. He felt like saying more – that he thought it was genius, that he thought it was madness, that he was profoundly jealous, that he wanted in …

  ‘Good,’ said Hewage. ‘So what will it take? A nice blank certification for my stuff, some breadcrumbs for Drake … how much money in the bank is that worth for you?’

  Bengali gaped. ‘You know I can’t take a bribe.’

  ‘You’d be surprised how many people said that when I started and how few continued saying it a little later.’ Hewage flicked ash off his cigarette. ‘There’s a few more years of work to go before I publish, and it definitely has to be public. There’s two others – Chinese roboticists, doing little behavioural experiments out of the Port City.’

  ‘You invited the Chinese?’

  ‘Why not? You people think they’re playing around with little toys, but in reality they’re far ahead
of anything du Marek and the others are on. Their Port City systems alone are incredibly sophisticated. They’re dying to do more with the tech. Even if the Royal Society stiffs me, China certainly won’t.’ Again, that feral grin. ‘Besides, what do you think pays for all the fuel we feed the bots?’

  ‘That’d make you a traitor!’

  ‘The only thing I have sworn allegiance to is myself,’ said Hewage. ‘Of course, if you report this conversation to Drake, I’ll just say you were jealous and making things up. I’m far more valuable to him than you are.’

  Bengali had the sudden, fleeting urge to kick the man off the balcony. He admired Hewage now, true. He was clearly a genius. But still, a punch in the face—

  ‘Seven million rupees.’

  ‘No. No. Absolutely not.’

  The Ceylonese man stubbed out his cigarette and flicked it over the balcony. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men’, he said, ‘which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.’

  ‘I’m not taking a bribe, no matter how much Shakespeare you quote.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hewage. ‘Pity. Because until you do, that’s all you’ll ever see. Enjoy the Big Match. We’re coming up on the Second Innings now. And tell Drake I said hello.’

  Five

  Meanwhile, harsh yellow sunlight lanced down upon the ruins of the old city of Colombo, touching briefly on a small gang of tiny figures cleaning garbage from a road.

  It was Broken Arm and her tribe, or what was left of it. The days had not been kind to them. Three-fourths of all the tribes they usually allied with were gone. All the large groups had crumbled beneath the mathematics of too few resources divided by too many. Half of the Sons of Cinnamon dreamt uneasily in shadowy halls, watching their batteries trickle down, unable to move or cry out. The Children of the Taj had left. The Dockhands – the roving maledict that usually raided heavily into the centre of Colombo – now confined itself to the port territories and the pieces above. Any remaining machines, dead or alive, had been beaten, scavenged for the last bits of fuel-food in their machine guts, and left to die.