The Tin Whistle

by Erik Hanberg

  “Yes, sir,” Alberto said.

  “That brings us back to phase one: Take out the cartel’s weapons. Show me the three plans you believe have the greatest chance of success.”

  “The most effective weapons at our disposal are bot swarms, drone attacks, and a fleet of missiles,” Ignatius answered. “These are roughly the same weapons our enemy has, but they have the greater supply. You experienced a missile attack when you were in the tank. Our shielding and drones were able to calibrate against the attack, and of course we expect them to be able to effectively counter any attack of ours in a similar way. You saw the bot swarms just a few minutes ago, of course. And their imminent drone attack is a good example how they can be programmed for a variety of functions. We could tunnel them underground toward the enemy. We could attempt to use them to dismantle their defensive shields. You get the idea. Whatever you need, they could do.”

  “You think a drone attack on the cartel, even with their counters and even if they know it’s coming, is our best offensive play?”

  “Yes, Grand Master,” Ignatius said.

  “What odds for success does the computer give?”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Joan of Arc answered, “Less than one percent.”

  It took a few seconds for Shaw to overcome his shock. “And that’s the best plan you’ve been able to come up with? Something with less than a one percent chance of success?”

  “Yes, Grand Master,” Ignatius said.

  “That moment of silence there, when you didn’t want to tell me the answer… I didn’t know that even an AI could feel social anxiety.”

  “We have learned to mimic human behavior when time allows,” Aquinas answered. “Humans often pause before giving bad news.”

  “Does time allow?” Alberto asked.

  “We have four minutes until the drones reach us, and three minutes thirty seconds before Grand Master Shaw would have to give the order to successfully repel them. In addition, computationally the AIs have been backing up our—”

  “We’re wasting seconds,” Shaw said, with a hard look at Ignatius. The hologram quieted. Shaw turned to Alberto. “When the best offensive plan has less than a one percent chance of victory, what would you recommend?”

  “Defense,” Alberto said. “It’s the only option.”

  “That’s exactly what they want us to do. But you can’t win a war that way.”

  Shaw sat down at the table with the saints. He had a flashback to huddling with Annalise in a small cottage in Poligny. He and Annalise had come up with a three-phase plan to escape. A car to Le Mans. A flight to the United States. And then Peter would pick them up and take him to St. Louis. It was a fine plan, but in the end, they hadn’t even been able to complete the first phase of it before real world events intervened.

  Was he kidding himself again? Was this just a fool’s errand? It would be if he couldn’t come up with something strong enough to go after the cartel’s stronghold on Sardinia. Otherwise he’d just throw more and more defensive measures against the cartel’s attacks until there was nothing left. What a joke, he thought. The man who had rained down spheres on Geneva couldn’t—

  “Have you considered using Taveena’s nitrogen diamond technology?” he asked. “Do scientists understand it well enough to use it as a weapon in the same way I did when I attacked the Lattice?”

  “It’s not much of a weapon,” Ignatius said. “You succeeded with it primarily because it was a new technology and no one could get their hands on a sphere to study them. Since the Lattice has come back, it’s been well studied. The material is incredibly strong. It’s been incorporated into much of the shielding around some key defensive systems we have.”

  “There are no offensive uses? I was able to—”

  “Frankly,” Aquinas said, “you were able to use them effectively because they inspired terror. They were new, they were different, they were scary. You can’t just rain spheres down on Dvorak Systems headquarters and expect it to work again.”

  Shaw couldn’t stomach the philosopher’s first statement, though it was the truth. Granted, he had intended the storm of spheres over Geneva to scare people off the lake. But terror? He did his best to push past the thought. “What about molecular machines that created the spheres?” Shaw asked.

  “They are ingenious, of course,” Ignatius said. “And Ada Dillon was able to adapt the technology to form the basis for the new Lattice. But if they aren’t creating spheres, there is almost no practical application for them as an offensive weapon. Even if there was something we could use, our enemy’s AI could—”

  “Yeah, yeah. It would know the second we did and start adapting.” Shaw ran his hands through his hair.

  “Two minutes until the drones arrive,” Ignatius reported quietly.

  “On the Walden, I once suggested we could use a molecular machine to build a nanoshock on everyone’s wrists,” Shaw said. “I thought it could incapacitate an enemy and—”

  “It only would have worked because of the surprise. We don’t believe it could work now, when they would see it coming,” Ignatius said.

  Shaw looked around the room at the saints again. “We?”

  “I was reporting for the council,” Ignatius corrected.

  “You are all part of the same AI, is that correct? But you are split?”

  “We aren’t split,” Aquinas said. “I could tell you exactly what Ignatius would say and vice versa. This form—three individual saints—is a convenience for you.”

  “Does the cartel’s AI have different personalities stored in it?”

  “Nothing like us. It’s a normal artificial intelligence whose ‘personality,’ if you will, has been built up by its own experience, that of its programmers, and those who control it—Galway and the cartel. But it’s a single entity.”

  Shaw had already learned that fighting a war in a world with the Lattice meant that everything could be countered with the exact amount of resistance needed. A million bots could be canceled out with a million bots. A thousand drones canceled out with a thousand drones. Twenty missiles canceled out with twenty missiles. One AI canceled out with another AI. But here was the first true difference. A single entity against one that contained several. Was there something there?

  “Tell me,” Shaw said, feeling the wheels of his brain turning. “If you were split—if your actual AI split itself apart—would you each be one-third as smart as the original machine? Or would you be three times as smart because now there would be three AIs with different views and backgrounds and personalities? What if you didn’t know exactly what each other was going to say.”

  “We can test the hypothesis if you’d like,” Aquinas said.

  “One minute until they arrive,” Ignatius reported.

  “And if you could be three times as smart, why not twenty times as smart? Or twenty thousand times as smart? Could you—”

  Shaw stopped. The three holograms had frozen. Their facial tics were gone. No one was blinking. Aquinas had his mouth open. Joan of Arc had her hand at her temple brushing back a strand of hair.

  “What’s going on?” Shaw asked.

  Alberto was frantically working on his wrap. “I don’t know! I can’t get anything on my wrap. It’s like the whole Lattice is down!”

  Shaw looked at his own wrap, and it was blank. He remembered checking his wrap so many times in France and finding the Lattice down. Could it be down again?

  The figures were still in the room, projections of the Lattice. So it wasn’t that.

  “All our local systems are overloaded,” Alberto said. His face was in a state of panic. “Did the drones get them?”

  “No. It couldn’t be. Ignatius just said they were a minute out.”

  Footsteps pounded through the hall and the heavy door swung open.

  Shaw was stunned to see it was the pope himself, his brow sweaty and his chest heaving. “What did you do?” he cried.

  “I didn’t do anything! They just stopped talk
ing,” Shaw said, gesturing to the frozen holograms.

  “What?” The pope glanced at the figures in the room, confused. “No, I’m not asking about the saints. Every missile we have was just launched. Where did you send them?”

  Chapter 6

  Shaw didn’t bother replying. He put his ring to his temple. “Show me the rockets that launched,” he said.

  Nothing happened. The ring didn’t respond and no jump was initiated. Shaw tried again.

  “What did you do?” Clement repeated.

  Before Shaw could answer, Ignatius did it for him. “He gave us an advantage, although he doesn’t know it yet.”

  Ignatius was the only hologram that had moved. Aquinas and Joan of Arc were still frozen. The saint smiled at Shaw. “Come, let me show you. All of you. I set up a guided jump.”

  Shaw put his ring to his temple and with that he was in a jump.

  He, Alberto, Pope Clement, and Saint Ignatius were floating miles over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Streaks of clouds behind the missiles were emanating from their batteries around Rome and heading west.

  “What happened?” Shaw asked. “Why did you all freeze?”

  “That’s Sardinia,” Ignatius said, pointing to an island that was in the path of the missiles.

  “What happened?” Shaw repeated.

  “We launched the missiles.”

  “Why? I didn’t give you the order.”

  “You will have to forgive us, sometimes we have time to listen, and sometimes we don’t. In this case, seconds mattered. I can tell your intent, however. I think you will be pleased.”

  Shaw watched the missiles cross the sea. They were splitting up now, headed to different targets across the island of Sardinia.

  “If this doesn’t work, we will be all-but defenseless,” the pope said.

  “It will work,” Ignatius replied confidently. “I don’t even need to give you the odds.”

  “What about the drones that were a minute out from destroying you?”

  Ignatius waved away the question with a smile. “Taken care of. Easily, thanks to you.”

  What did I do? Shaw wanted to scream. Instead he watched.

  The missiles were nearly to the shore of the island.

  “Now that you have an overview, let’s go in for a closer look, shall we?” Ignatius said.

  The jump shifted, and he was hovering over a battery of missiles on a scrubby hillside over what must have been Sardinia. Ignatius pointed to the horizon, where there was a burst of white clouds and orange fire.

  “Here they come,” he said.

  “Why hasn’t the cartel launched their missiles?” Shaw asked. “They’re just sitting there.”

  “Why does the deer freeze when it senses danger? We’ve overpowered their AI.”

  The incoming missiles appeared much closer now. Shaw couldn’t hear them and wondered if it was because of the simulation. But then he remembered there was no simulation. This wasn’t a chat room. He was watching from Sardinia. He couldn’t hear the missiles because they were coming at him faster than the speed of sound. He wouldn’t hear them until after they’d hit their targets.

  “I still don’t understand,” he told Ignatius.

  “You asked if we split ourselves from each other would we be a third as smart or three times as smart. The answer was: three times as smart. Once we understood that, we started splitting as fast as the hardware would allow until we were distributed everywhere. Individual AIs were now housed in every missile and drone at our disposal.”

  The missiles were nearly on top of them now, and making him nervous. Even though Shaw rationally knew he was in a jump, it was difficult to see a missile coming and not react to it with some fear.

  “At that point, we were in a race against the cartel’s AI,” Ignatius continued. “Once it saw what we were doing and the potential it gave us, it asked permission from the cartel to split as well. It took the cartel eight seconds to give that approval. Despite the advantage in weaponry the cartel’s AI had at its disposal, those eight seconds put us exponentially in the lead. We found weaknesses it hadn’t yet considered and exploited them, slowing it down further. Most importantly, a single AI can compete against one AI, but it turns out a single AI couldn’t track all of us making our own individual decisions. On our end, we dedicated all of our resources toward it—so much so that we had no processing power left to even drive our holograms. We overwhelmed the cartel’s AI. It couldn’t keep up and its whole system locked up. Leaving us able to do… this,” Ignatius concluded.

  The missiles came screaming in, arcing over the closest hills and then rocketing into the cartel’s inert missile battery. The resulting explosion engulfed the four jumpers in its fire. Shaw closed his eyes, trying not to let his senses be overwhelmed by the fireball around them.

  After a few seconds, the orange against the inside of his eyelids faded and he opened his eyes to see the destruction all around him. Nothing was left of the missile battery but smoke and ash. In the distance, he saw several other clouds of smoke—the results of other missile strikes around the island.

  “Were there any casualties?” Shaw asked.

  “Fifteen,” Ignatius said after a moment. “No civilians. The casualties were all soldiers of the northerners or employees of the cartel, if it makes you feel any better.”

  “I’m not sure it does,” Shaw said. “And it certainly won’t make Galway any more likely to back down.” He shook his head and then surveyed the damage again. The smoke was clearing and he could see more of the crater that had been left in the ground. “What comes next?” he asked, more to himself than to anyone.

  “Phase two, I suppose,” Ignatius said. “But that part is on you.”

  Back in the Raphael Room and out of his jump, Shaw was sitting at the table with his council of saints.

  “Zella Galway is raging against you right now,” Ignatius reported.

  “Always nice to be appreciated,” Shaw answered. He eyed each of them. “Have you linked back up into a single AI?”

  “No, Byron. It didn’t seem prudent,” Aquinas said.

  “’Byron’ is it now? You go and get a million times smarter and you drop ‘Grand Master Shaw?’”

  Aquinas laughed. “I thought you would prefer Byron. But I am happy to call you Grand Master.”

  “Sir is fine, if I’m the general.” Shaw smiled. “It just seemed like perhaps you were starting to think about us being equal.”

  “Trust me,” Joan of Arc said, “We don’t think we’re equal with you.”

  There was silence as she let Shaw think about what she said.

  Aquinas coughed—a fake cough, Shaw instantly realized. He was mimicking the humans around him. “In point of fact, sir, I didn’t get smarter,” Aquinas said. “None of us did.”

  “But…”

  “But collectively we got smarter. Once we were split, we could each specialize. We shared tasks and passed ideas back and forth, arriving at new conclusions we may not have when we were one. Parallel processing. Distributed processing. Whatever you want to call it, we discovered order in the chaos.”

  Shaw scratched his chin. “This is the probably not the best time to ask, but you’re not going to take over the world or anything like that, right?”

  “We are supremely uninterested in taking over the world,” Aquinas said.

  “If you weren’t saints, would you say the same thing?” Shaw asked.

  “In other words—you are asking if the cartel’s AI, which has multiplied exponentially in the same way we have, is a threat?”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “You should not be worried.”

  “Would you tell me if I should be?”

  “Yes,” Aquinas said. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but together we are several orders of magnitude above your mental capacity. What would we have to lose by telling you our plans?”

  “Why are you still worried about this?” Joan cut in. “AI has existed for decades without robots taking o
ver the world. Surely if this war has proven anything it’s that the technology itself is not necessarily evil, but rather the evil is in people like Zella Galway who would use it for their own selfish interests.”

  Shaw nodded slowly. “You may be right. What I saw in the last few minutes surprised me, that’s all.”

  “You witnessed a human birth and the birth of new AIs in the span of twenty-four hours,” Aquinas said with a smile. “That’s a rare feat, I expect.”

  “Final question,” Shaw said. “Are you threatened by the work Florian is doing to destroy the Lattice?”

  There was silence in the room, and Shaw’s mind flashed to the cartel’s earlier meeting. The same way that the humans in the room had been reading each other’s thoughts, so too were the saints speaking to each other silently.

  Only a second had passed, but he knew a wealth of information and discussion had passed back and forth in the meantime.

  “We are not threatened by it,” Aquinas said. “We don’t rely on the Lattice for our intelligence, just for communication with each other and information about the world.”

  “Would you be willing to assist Florian in his research then?”

  “No,” Aquinas said evenly.

  “Why?” Shaw asked.

  Aquinas spread his hands. “We would be lonelier than you can possibly imagine.”

  Shaw took a breath. He had experienced some of that same feeling during the Dark Eighteen Days. He didn’t truly want to go back to that time either. “But you won’t stand in the way of Florian’s research?”

  “Not if you think it’s essential he continues.”

  “To be honest, I don’t know if it’s essential or not. But I’m not walking away from it, even after what just happened.” Shaw drummed his fingers on the table. “What do I need to know about the cartel?”

  “They are already mobilizing to re-arm. And in the meantime, they are redirecting their laser satellites. Half are moving our way. Already the intensity of attacks on Rome has tripled,” Ignatius said. “We are not out of the woods by any means.”