It was, Bengali thought, a thing of beauty. Exactly the kind of thing that would get him properly noticed. Given enough training time, the bots did serious damage against humans. Granted, this was just a simulation. Bengali drummed his fingers – a tic he had picked up from one of his newly appointed guards.
There was still something missing. The bots seemed to work just fine, but the larger gestalt kept diverging from what he’d seen on the feeds. This difference was something he was eager to observe; in a short time, they would go live with another Big Match – and the real game was afoot. Bengali had already called up the university and made sure he still had sabbatical time remaining.
Observations of the Inhuman Race. He had already thought up the title. He would be the Charles Darwin to Hewage’s self-taught god, decrypting and predicting.
There was just one anomaly. A week ago, he had seen two bots meet over a soft boundary. Instead of falling to, both threw their weapons over to the other. They then traded places and threw the weapons back.
A peace offering?
The original Ministry logs suggested that the bots should take years to do what he had just witnessed.
‘I think it’s the network you gave them,’ he told Kushlani, excited, over their weekly call. Perks of being within shortwave radius of a network tower.
She sounded unconvinced. ‘But they wouldn’t know how to transfer data other than updates that I patch through. It’s not like I gave them drivers for full-on conversation there.’
Hmm. Yes. Of course. But then again, something that could learn pattern recognition could surely learn to apply it onto other things. This was his theory. Kushlani rejected it every week, partly because, he suspected, she still didn’t want to think of them as things that could learn something beyond her abilities. She was odd that way – she accepted that they might feel, or even approximate human behaviour, but learning she accepted only if it was limited to the childish and the tribal.
A human being spends sixteen years being unable to do much of anything, he thought. And much of that life we spend crying and reaching for our toys and our parents. And here, we have something that learns to hunt in packs by the seventh day.
‘It’s possibly swarm behaviour,’ he had said to Kushlani. ‘If I’m reading this module correctly, there’s a normalizing function applied to strategies, which might let everyone converge to a global mean much faster.’
‘You’re talking about the risk-penalty system,’ said Kushlani. Of course she had her own names for everything. Hewage hadn’t as much taught her as she had watched and reverse-engineered anything she could get her hands on. ‘That might be it.’
There. The place where he had left off. As of late, he had noticed that it was the girls – the Explorer models – that sparked the most interesting effects. Kushlani attributed this, in a very statistical way, to softer penalties attached to risk, and therefore a higher probability of outlier actions over a given time period. But Hewage, that old fox, had literally told him that the best stuff was in the Explorers. It had to be a different model altogether. Such a pity there weren’t enough of these bots around.
Kushlani, on the line: ‘You really like being out there, don’t you?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘No,’ she’d said. ‘When are you coming back?’
This was the pit he had to keep stepping around. ‘As soon as I’ve got enough data,’ he said. ‘You know I don’t have a lot of time left—’
She cut the line.
But Hewage gave him a different answer. ‘The Explorer model was meant to test the constraints of their environment,’ he said. ‘So think hierarchies.’
‘Eh?’
Bengali could hear the flick-flick of a lighter, even over the crackle of the line. ‘Think of yourself, a human in a group of humans,’ said Hewage. ‘Who do you go to when you need to know something? Obviously, the person who had expertise. You take their advice and then you act on it, and in doing so you become a little bit like them in the way you express yourself on the world. ’
‘Like the Explorers.’
‘Like the Explorers. Their function is to pick up new knowledge, because they keep taking higher risks and either learn or die. So eventually, the ones who survive … well, you’re going to see a lot of bots replicating their behaviour, aren’t you? After all, they’re successful. In an evolutionary sense, they have higher task fitness.’ A pause. ‘I’m still not giving you the training code.’
‘I’m not asking for it,’ said Bengali, hurriedly. ‘But Hewage, you know what this means. You know how big this is—’
‘Yes,’ said Hewage, and cut the line on his last words.
He thought he understood Hewage, finally, and all the secrecy. This was, by god, the most incredible thing on the planet right now, and no amount of leeches could make him think otherwise.
FOUR
It took Kushlani de Almeida less time than she had imagined to assume control after Hewage; and also, by the same mark, less time to begin feeling utterly and completely alone.
First came the party. Or rather, what her family called a party, which in this case was a dinner at a hotel that was expensive in its architecture and fundamentally seedy in its service; where they waited for what seemed like hours to pile endless varieties of rice and mashed potatoes and Chinese-style chicken onto their plates, and the uncles got drunk and the aunties started congratulating her, only to follow it up with ‘so when are you getting married?’ and ‘now that you’re somewhere, it’s good to settle down, no?’
Eventually, her mother, who had allowed herself a couple of glasses of wine, began introducing her to various cousins from far-off branches of the tree – all male, and all suspiciously fair, and whose opening lines seemed to be entirely about what school they went to, and how amazing university was ‘in England, don’t you know’, and how much land they had. Her father, who had always been the quiet and restless type, immensely disliked what was happening, so he threw himself in the middle of these conversations, and with a look of patient suffering nodded at her to get out. Two hours later, she watched and rewatched a videogram from Lady Joanna Crofton, brought there by courier. Crofton was congratulating her on her appointment, underlining the Ministry’s affiliation with the Crofton Institute and uttering a generic set of supportive noises that made Kushlani feel like a low-level flunky on her first day at work.
That was done. Then came the accounts. The organization charts, the official notes and notices on the branch that she would be running, the plans of the Watchtower, the broadcast contracts and spectrum licenses and the reporting structure under the Ministry of Reconciliation, all these little fiefdoms of managers and civil servants and bureaucrats. It shocked and thrilled her to realize just how much she had already been running. In her mad rush to get the update network done, she had trampled all over so many of these nice boundaries and bent them all to her will.
But not all boundaries bent. The Bandaranaikes, for one, held grudges. Hewage assured her that for now they were too busy fighting off Penhaligon, but some day, at some point, they would look around for people and things they could wage a proxy war on, and she would have to step up and fight on her own.
It shocked her, but not in a pleasant way, to see just how much of the funding and the lab infrastructure actually went to Hewage and the work he did for the Inquisition. Technically, it was a completely different department, but physically coexisted right alongside her newly inherited operation. An operation which, she now realized, had grown out of military work, not the other way around. Here there were hard boundaries. Lines she could never cross, doors that would never open for her key.
No wonder Hewage was content to give her the broadcast operation. It was just the shell around the crab. The meat was deep within and inaccessible.
This wasn’t the first time she wondered who the hell Hewage was to have achieved this much with no family name to back him up. Bengali – she still could not bring herself to think of him as Jacob; that n
ame sounded just too pompous for a brown man – seemed to think he was some kind of genius. That much was clear from their hurried radiograms to each other.
Time had changed a lot about those two.
And then came the loneliness, and the weight of it, crushing down. Sitting there, at the top of the Watchtower, looking over all those control banks, walking down to the cafeteria, seeing how technicians she had once sat with and bitched about Hewage to were now a little too quiet around her; a little too eager to please her. They became abstractions to her – salaries, sick days, weighed against revenue from broadcasts, licensing deals, the stipend-like investments that poured in from the Crofton Institute and the money that went right back.
Bengali’s calls were reprieve. Sometimes. Sometimes, when there was nothing much going on in whichever disease-ridden perimeter plot he’d parked himself in, he’d listen. Sometimes, he’d have advice, and it didn’t really hurt to know how to outmanoeuvre people in Oxford or Goa, even if it didn’t quite fit. But increasingly now, he was away, chasing his T-zero obsession and recording everything. He was already talking about how he wanted to present it.
Their time together, she thought sometimes, was coming to an end, and neither one of them cared enough to do much about it.
In fact, she was now reading his notes. Paragraphs of boring minutiae, with questions to himself – S2 and S1 interchange patrols. S2 seems to have higher default orbit than S1. Reason??
And then, about the bot. The Explorer model. The girl. On that, he wrote pages.
E-2 (I was mistaken earlier, there was an E-1, but it looks like it was attacked and died) seems to be an extremely canny operator. So far, sole E model still alive. Operates primarily from rooftops, prefers high vantage points. Seems to spend an equal amount of time with three, maybe four clans in the Colombo 03-04 regions. No idea what benefit they get from her or how she fits in, but some clans – Sons of Cinnamon, esp – have started to move more on the rooftops and have thus become more successful. In return, she seems to have picked up their tactic of throwing stones to disorient targets – I noticed that after she stayed a day with the Children of the Taj, they seemed to have picked up this trick as well. My best guess is that she’s operating as an agent of knowledge transfer, and is somehow bartering knowledge for …what? Cannot see what she gets out of this.
She won’t be getting anything out of it, thought Kushlani. That’s the point. That was the difference. That was what the Silent Girl had done different. All those memories of staring at the sunset, of sharing without expectation, building trust, softening lines until she could fuse them. And Broken Arm after her. The girls gave and gave and gave, and the others grew to trust them.
Hot on the heels of that: the Silent Girl. The memories of that surgery, and that little life she had watched, painfully recreating something so close to humanity. Out of pity, Kushlani had sent her out again, jaw repaired, and she had still come back, renamed, a head dangling from Eliott Grimme’s hand.
Shit, she should have removed all the Explorer models before sending them back in.
She stared at Bengali’s notes again.
She looked around. No Explorer head there, no fake girl-child-doll staring at her in accusation. Must be at her old office. The door still said Kushlani De Almeida, and she barreled in. Nothing. She paced in the old familiar nexus, trying to remember.
Grimme had brought it to her. She remembered him holding up the head. And then what? It was so long ago.
That rest of the day was a blur of towers and testing.
But did it even matter? They had wiped the bots, all of them. Petabytes of video content and extracted inferences had either been flushed away or, for a small random sample, archived for highlight reels.
Back up to the big dome. Back to Bengali’s notes. A suspicion began to crawl up her spine, and wouldn’t stop. That Broken Arm, somehow, had been reincarnated; that she had managed to survive, and for some reason, had not been deleted.
Well, there was a way to fix that. She rolled her chair over to the console. Towers: operational. Signal strength: good. Queue update. Queue DELETE LTS+CACHE. Queue REBOOT. She paused with her hand on the enter key.
This would seriously upset their stream schedule. A year of work, at the very least.
Before she could regret it, her fingers dashed out, and plunk – DELETE. Phew. Instead, she typed in a new set of commands.
First to call was Hewage. He’d noticed. Of course he had. The radiogram lit up in red. High priority.
‘First Big Match, I hope you’re on top of it,’ he said, curtly.
‘I … should be,’ she said, and immediately disliked the stammer in her voice. ‘Wanted to see how well our system worked. Better safe than sorry.’
Silence. ‘You hired anyone to help?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Do yourself a favor. Hire good people. I did,’ he said. He cut the line.
It didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like she had just been in a fight. Her hands shook slightly.
Bengali was next. Even across the staticky line, she could hear the excitement in his voice. ‘We’re starting?’
‘We’re starting,’ she said, and was pleased to find herself smiling. But her hands still shook slightly. And maybe it was the aftermath of the conversation with Hewage that made her say, in a very careful tone, ‘Be careful.’
‘Of course,’ he said, cheerfully.
She said her farewells and cut the line before he could. His notes on the desk mocked her. She tossed them away with a wave of her hand, watching them fall all over the consoles. Something else will pick it up in the morning, and then, because she was a responsible adult and not a child, she went over to pick them up and read through them again.
FIVE
The next day, Bengali sat under an ashen sky, coughing as he puffed furiously on his beedi. The tobacco was unfiltered, grown in some ramshackle army base nearby, and thus absolutely horrible, but it was also the only thing keeping him from screaming and running around and waving his fists.
They had moved to a row of ruined houses, just on the outskirts of the Colombo perimeter fence. There it was, bisecting the dust and scrub and chunks of old road. He had already stalked over and kicked it and screamed his frustration at it.
The soldiers next to him were tired and rather uneasy. They carried their guns – cheap Chinese autopistols and assault rifles – with sweaty hands. One of them was small and painfully young. The other two were twins in their late twenties, with long hair and taut muscle – they tracked back and forth occasionally, trying to keep an eye on all the tiny lanes that snaked into the pitted road they were on. The last, approaching Bengali on his log, was a potbellied man with eyes of steel and a huge Enfield sniper.
‘Sir,’ he said to Bengali, though from the way he carried himself, it was clear that he was in command. ‘What is this moping going to achieve?’
‘I’ve lost all of this week’s fucking progress, that’s what! Stupid fucking computer!’
‘Voice down,’ said Potbelly. His name was Dharmakirti, and he happened to be a veteran of the Grimme Reaper’s campaign, and was well aware of what could happen to a loud man too close to the bot perimeter. Towards the end of that campaign, the bots had gotten too cunning, too vicious and too damn good. Now, they were supposed to be safe, but he could have bet on his mother’s life that they still kept a grudge. He pointed with one stubby finger towards the foot of something that might have been an office building. He gestured the others down, raised his sniper and sighted.
Arms, legs, a head, wrapped in what looked like rags … but the arms were too large and too long, and the faces were masks of ceramic and metal. They moved with odd precision, their moves smooth and devoid of the sudden jerks and randomness of humans. Metal glinted off their bodies where the rags failed to cover them completely. They both had a flashlight each and what looked like a cross between a grappling iron and a spear.
Both of them stopped and looked straight
at the men.
Dharmakirti cursed in the vilest old Sinhala and squeezed the trigger. The first bullet hit one straight in the chest, where the power cells were. The round burrowed deep into the metal beneath the flimsy cloth, hit the cheap circuitry beneath and detonated it with a force that instantly turned the machine into a flaming skeleton. The other bot instantly threw its spear at Dharmakirti in a smooth, overarm motion that was too fast for human eyes to follow, right over the perimeter fence. Dharmakirti, moving faster, pushed Bengali off his log and fired again. This was not the first time he’d done this.
The shard of metal landed, quivering exactly where Bengali had just been sitting. They all stared at it.
‘Something’s got them spooked’, said Dharmakirti.
Bengali almost snapped at him, but the man had a point. Some part of him – the part used to setbacks and dealing with random people treading on his career – had already planned ahead. It wasn’t the end of the world. He still had his data. He just had to get it out of the Chinese computers and back onto something reliable. Technically, he was still ahead.
Technically. As his old lecturer was fond of saying, technically was the difference between the glass half full and the glass half empty. And technically could make or break careers.
Damn shitty gear though, he thought. And now, he was going to miss the most important moment, when the Big Match started and the Port City slowly started rationing the bots.
None of them noticed the thing that was running as quiet as a shadow, and leapt upon them from behind.
Bengali screamed. Screams and gunfire echoed around him. Inhuman frames swarmed out of the lanes they had thought were deserted, leaping on his men, ripping them from limb to limb. He saw the kid screaming wildly, firing the pistol point blank into a face that looked like that of a blonde woman. He briefly though, wait, what? Then, something slapped him in the face and he saw one of the twins outlined in a spray of gunfire, standing over the corpse of his brother. He saw them cut down like rice stalks. Dharmakirti wheezed in pain and tried to reach for his rifle, and then his arms weren’t moving anymore.
The Inhuman Peace Page 19