Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (10 page)
Read Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Online
Authors: Thomas T. Thomas
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #science fiction, #High Tech, #Hard Science Fiction
For surveillance on the people inside the party, the corporate security AI had detached another Little Brother to take side scans of the guests and service staff as they passed through the sally port tunnel, the only way into or out of the building. The scanning was done with two strips of innocuous-looking black tape stuck to the tunnel walls and ceiling that reported their ghostly images—against which hard points like weapons stood out in a blaze of sharp-edged contrast—directly into the Little Brother’s sensorium. The intelligence would then compare this imaging with the guest list, subtract the bigwigs’ own private bodyguards, and report the rest into the ear buds of Brandon and his inside team. They could discreetly watch and, if necessary, brace the offending party and lead him or her to the cloakroom for disarming.
That was about the only use security had for flesh-and-blood people anymore: the diplomatic stuff that required a firm but smiling presence in a social situation. Otherwise, security was now almost completely the work of AIs as vulnerability predictors and pattern sorters, guiding armed Rovers that interdicted physical problems and reactive software Bugs that interdicted cyber problems. In this respect, because Brandon was a dolt about cybers to begin with, he had learned to rely heavily on Penny’s experience. Together, they had founded a sideline firm—the very same Watch and Ward
®
—to safeguard other companies and government agencies.
Where was Penny, anyway? He scanned the crowd but could not find his wife. She should have been easy to spot, wearing a bright red, swallowtail British officer’s tunic from the colonial era, complete with gold buttons, epaulettes, and a black-leather shako with white plume, over a strapless pink ball gown with silk bodice and chiffon skirt, right out of a 1930s tea dance. He looked up and saw her dancing on the roof.
“Brandon to Penny,” he said subvocally into his throat mike. “Security check.”
“Penny to Brandon.” The figure up there didn’t pause in her gyrations. “Go get yourself a drink and then come up and join me. Over.”
“Do you have eyes on the governor?” he said.
“All fourteen, sir—on both of them. Over.”
He had forgotten about the Floaters—more data feeds for Little Brother—which doubled as party balloons. He wondered how many of them the company would lose when they rose above the parapets and the wind whisked them away across the Bay. Well, the tiny cameras were damned near disposable anyway.
“Brandon to Kenneth. Brandon to Anastasia.”
“Yeah, Dad,” answered his son, seventeen.
“Right here,” said his daughter, fifteen.
“Security check,” he murmured.
“We’re up here dancing within five meters of Mom.”
“Did you say hello to Gee-Daddy?” That had been their name for their great-grandfather since they were babies learning to talk. “Wish him a happy birthday?”
“Yeah, sure. First thing we got here,” Kenny said.
“Do you want us to check on him again?” Stacy was the more responsible of the pair. “Over.”
“I think it would make him happy,” Brandon said. “He’s proud of you both, you know.”
“Right away, Dad. Over.”
He had once tried to explain to his family that, with intelligently selectable bandwidth signaling, no one had to say “over” or “out” anymore. But they seemed to get off on that old-time radio jargon.
“Thank you, sweet pea.” He paused. “Over and out.”
* * *
The wedding was a small affair because Antigone Wells still couldn’t be sure of her face. Through exercise and physical therapy, her features—at least the lower part, around her mouth and nose—were more mobile, so she could eat without embarrassment and talk almost without impediment on those tricky labials and explosives. But she was still numb, so she could never know without looking in a mirror whether she was smiling or frowning. For that reason, Wells almost never appeared in public.
Until today, it hadn’t been much of an issue. She had moved back to San Francisco more than twenty years ago, after the building boom that followed the Great Bay Quake had, predictably, overbuilt the downtown area with luxury high-rises. She bought a four-bedroom suite in a condo tower on Market Street that had a view of the Bay, both bridges, and the Marin County shore. She paid cash for the place and never regretted it.
Wells had moved her online business—research on case law and precedents, strategy formulation, and legal advice—from Oklahoma without a hitch, as her clientele was spread all over the country anyway. That fit into one of the bedrooms, which she remodeled as an office, communications center, and library. Over the years since then, she had become a sort of legal AI. Except that she had a better resume, stronger strategic skills, almost as much information at hand, considering the online databases at her fingertips, and a pretty picture of herself to put up on the website, allowing her clients to know they were speaking and texting with a real, live human being.
She also continued with her physical fitness regimen, doing karate
kata
s and weapons training in a second bedroom, which she fashioned into a small
dojo
with a hardwood floor, full-length mirrors, and a ballet barre. One day, she thought she might find herself a local karate school and return to teaching classes. But that would come after her face was fully healed. Until then, she kept limber, toned, and balanced with her daily workouts—which was not bad at all for a woman who was ninety-seven years old!
The two other bedrooms in her condo both had master baths, and she took the one with the best view for herself, for sleeping. That left the other, and Wells thought it would be a shame to use it as a junk room. She didn’t need a guest room, because she didn’t entertain guests, and when her sister Helen visited the Bay Area she stayed with friends in Berkeley. … But Wells did get lonely.
The solution to that problem had been someone whose reactions she could trust, someone who was raised with her and would not think it sad that her kisses lacked warmth and her smiles never rose to the level of her eyes. Wells had also wanted a daughter for herself, just as John Praxis had taken their son Alexander, but she realized that a nuclear family brought with it too many questions. She wanted a girl who would not go haring off one day, looking for her birth father.
So, instead, she had returned to Parthenotics, Inc., signed on to the old account she had created with John—but applying for their services singly this time—and specified a female baby. When the question of parentage had come up for the birth certificate, Wells consulted precedents, state and local codes, and Parthenotics’s own legal staff. Together they had determined that it would be acceptable to make the genetic donation on both sides confidential. And then, when young Angela had been old enough to understand, Wells told her—with Helen’s connivance—that she was the daughter of a fictitious and much younger brother who had died in a car accident with his wife soon after the girl was born.
Antigone Wells had then managed to lose the Parthenotics documentation as soon as Angela received other pieces of paper—Social Security card, passport, school records, driver’s license—that would prove her identity. Which was a good thing, because the county clerk’s office normally required a birth certificate—that damningly anonymous testament of her real heritage—in order to grant a marriage license. But in its place, luckily enough, those other documents had proven satisfactory.
Being by now long past any thoughts of love and marriage for herself, Wells had never imagined Angela would eventually want to get married. She had always believed the girl would join her as a lifelong companion when she no longer qualified as a ward. Indeed, at the age of sixteen, Angela had sworn to remain celibate so that she could lead the first mission to Mars, as and when it was finally scheduled. But at nineteen, while still a sophomore at MIT in Boston, Angela had met a young man, David Appley, and fallen desperately in love. At her “aunt’s” request, Angela consented to wait until graduation before making the commitment of marriage. Unexpectedly, David had agreed to wait, too—and that lasted until Angela couldn’t wait any longer. Finally, Wells had run out of excuses and subterfuges. So here they were at City Hall on a warm day in early May, completing the paperwork and taking their vows before the Commissioner of Civil Marriages, with Antigone Wells standing behind them wearing a hat with a veil.
For their wedding reception, she had bought out the Garden Court at the Palace Hotel for the afternoon. The venerable hotel had by now withstood two great earthquakes and rebuilt its famous stained glass dome over the central court. Although she would not attend the reception herself, Wells had sent invitations to everyone Angela and David cared to name. It was her gift to the girl upon starting a new life.
But that left a complementary gift which Angela would have to return, because Wells had already altered the terms of her living trust and filed it with the county.
“That locket you’re wearing,” she said, pointing to the silver heart shape on a chain around Angela’s neck. “I’ll need it back.”
“But, Aunt, I thought that was mine to keep!”
“I gave it to you to wear as a little girl.”
“But it’s so pretty, and I love it.”
“You don’t need it anymore.”
“Need? But … I don’t understand.”
“You have David to take care of you now.”
“All right.” Angela gave her husband an uncertain smile. “If you say so.” She unfastened the chain’s clasp and placed the heart in her aunt’s hand.
Wells put the thing in her pocket and smiled. Angela was no longer required to prove her identity to anyone. She was the world’s problem now—and David Appley’s.
2. The New Generation
Jeffrey Praxis, grandson of the founder of the largest engineering and construction company on the West Coast—maybe even in the world by now—was making one his few supervisory tours of MOLE 2 as it chewed its way through the sedimentary rocks 150 meters, almost five hundred feet, below the San Joaquin Valley floor. Even though the mole’s control room was actually more of an observation platform stationed three meters behind the cutting head, it offered nothing for him to see. Nothing much to control, either. The panel had a few dials and readouts left over for humans who liked to look at numbers. But the real work was done by the embedded intelligence, called simply “Moley,” who was boss of the rig and executive controller to all of the autobots that scurried around in the rig’s wake.
One crew of ’bots took spoil from the cutter head and trucked most of it back to the last access shaft for disposal, somewhere east of Buttonwillow. They left a calculated percentage of broken rock for grinding in the batch plant, which was run by one of Moley’s Little Brothers. A second crew of ’bots brought in water and cement powder to mix with the ground spoil for the tunnel lining. And a third crew placed tunnel-lining forms, pumped concrete, shifted the forms, pumped concrete, shifted again … all the livelong day, twenty-four by seven by three-six-five. That was what intelligences and their machines did. Given the softness of the rock ahead, the rig had been making seven meters a day, right on schedule.
“How’s your alignment?” Jeffrey asked the AI through a headset boom. Of course, he already knew the answer—the only possible answer.
“We are on course, according to the last transducer blast,” Moley replied through Jeffrey’s sound-blocking earphones.
So far underground, the rig could not navigate by taking signals from the Global Positioning System of satellites above the horizon. Instead, Moley sensed the shockwaves from seismic charges fired once every twelve hours by transducer ’bots, which walked on the surface ahead of the rig, taking their position from the GPS signals and their own internal reading of the construction plans. Between these shots, which were spaced in time to keep the neighbors happy, Moley interpolated his position.
“Any problems?” Jeffrey asked.
“The ground is thickening a bit,” Moley said.
“Tehachapi Mountains up ahead,” Jeffrey confirmed.
“We’ll be going deep again,” the rig said. “Before the end.”
After years of dithering, and sometimes losing sight of the project altogether, the State of California had finally decided to complete its bullet train connecting the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles Basin. Some time after the Great Bay Quake, the High-Speed Rail Authority had finally decided to scrap its scattered pieces of surface route, with all the inherent problems of maintaining grade separation in three busy transit corridors, repairing damage due to blowing sand and annual flooding, and minimizing elevation changes in the half a dozen mountain ranges that separated its two termini. Instead, they had gone deep, on the model of the English Channel Tunnel, but with air-curtained sections between the stations that could be partially evacuated to lower wind resistance for the trains.
The project had gone to Praxis Engineering & Construction eighteen years ago. That was just a few years after Jeffrey had signed on with the family firm in its current incarnation.
He knew the awful history, of course. How the first PE&C had collapsed right before the war, when Jeffrey was still in high school, and how the collapse had split the family. His father Richard had gone to Texas and nurtured some kind of slow feud with his sister Callista ever since. Jeffrey himself had left school to fight in the war—on the side of the new Federated Republic and against the family’s interests. After the war, he had taken his veteran’s benefits from a grateful nation, completed his GED, and gone to the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas in Austin, where he studied civil engineering. After that, he vagabonded around the central part of the country, taking junior engineer and section lead positions on various construction projects, until the quake in California.
With better building codes and more precise fault mapping, the loss of life and total cost of damage had been less severe than expected. But still, a quake magnitude of 7.1 and duration of two minutes, thirty-seven seconds, had guaranteed that the damage would be widespread and extensive.
Many buildings remained upright, but with miles of broken wiring and water pipes, along with twisted elevator rails inside the high-rises, they had become uninhabitable. Roadways were ruptured, both by landslides in the East Bay, on the Peninsula, and in Marin County and by fallen highway bridges and overpasses. The Caldecott Tunnels and the East Bay MUD water conduits through the East Bay Hills were severed at the fault line, causing a water famine in the East Bay. And the Hetch Hetchy pipelines in Newark were temporarily shut down, halting deliveries to San Francisco and Peninsula customers via Crystal Springs Reservoir. The eastern span of the Bay Bridge was shut down indefinitely when the anchor rods on bearing pads and the structure’s shear keys snapped under the stain. Part of BART’s Transbay Tunnel was jarred out of alignment, which separated the caissons and flooded the tracks.
Of the 9.8 million people in the nine-county Bay Area, 350 had been killed outright, 10,000 injured, 3.5 million rendered homeless or jobless, and the economic lives of the remainder disrupted for at least two years while the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments attempted to coordinate rebuilding. Idealistic efforts to “build it better” and “control population growth and access,” along with funding, became limiting factors.
Whatever the bureaucrats might have decided, Jeffrey Praxis could see that reconstruction of this mammoth mess would be a growth industry for the next couple of years. So he went to San Francisco, bent the knee to his grandfather, pledged fealty to his wicked aunt, and swore peace with his cousins Brandon and Paul, who had fought in the war for the other side. In fact, swapping war stories—and quietly trying to figure out if any of them had ever gotten the other in their sights—had been a major part of their bonding process.
Jeffrey became rich along with the family company and soon was a project manager and member of the executive team. When the time came for PE&C to apply for the Bi-Cities Rail Transit job, he was a natural to take charge. Except … by that time most of the work was done by computer intelligences, with human beings like him standing around watching, making the occasional policy and money decisions, and asking insightful questions.
Now, as he rode the cab of MOLE 2, Jeffrey sensed the need for one of those questions. When Moley mentioned “the end,” he was talking about the end of the line, when his cutter head had completed the tube under Los Angeles. So it was time for the human member of the team to tread delicately.
“You still have a long way to go,” Jeffrey said. “Through some difficult ground, too.”
“I know that,” the intelligence said. “I calculate twenty-three more head changes before the end.” That was the process where MOLE 2 backed away from the rock face by about a meter and directed a team of ’bots in exchanging worn carbide teeth and planing surfaces for new ones. “And after that …”
Jeffrey wondered what an artificial intelligence’s conception of death might be. Moley had to know that a rig assembled and operating so far underground would never see the light of day. Once it reached its terminus in Los Angeles, Moley would be instructed to drive a hundred meters further on and fifteen meters further down, stop digging, and set the batch team to backfilling the rig’s working cavities and the tunnel space behind it. They would create a plug of solid ground where before there had been a working machine.
“After that,” Jeffrey said, trying to sound jovial, “we’ll find you, your brothers, and your ’bot teams another project to run. Maybe a steam shovel in a nice open-pit mine, someplace above ground, in the sunlight.”
“I was coded for this tunneling project,” Moley said somberly. “Its parameters are part of my essential data structures.”
“But you can learn, can’t you?”
“I have projective capacity.”
“Well then, there you go.”
* * *
“Yeow!” Jacquie Wildmon retained just enough sensory awareness to find the cutoff switch to her cortical leads and just enough motor control in her left hand—the side of her brain
opposite
the amped inputs—to flick it. The blinding swarm of kinetic images, nonverbal facts, random symbols, jumbled words, numbers with impossible decimal places, and blurred data streams died inside her head.
“That
hurt!
” she said aloud to the empty laboratory.
“Do you require medical assistance?” Vernier asked.
Intelligences didn’t need names, of course, just access numbers for protocols and routing. But humans usually needed names for addressing the machines verbally. Jacquie had chosen this name because, like the sliding device on a graduated scale or caliper, the intelligence had a special subroutine that allowed it to throttle its own cycle speed at will. Vernier was a test engine for a new kind of interface.
“No, just a minute to sort out my thoughts,” Jacquie said. And after that minute, “Maybe a couple of aspirin, too.”
A housekeeping ’bot—an entity shaped like a scorpion with corrugated rubber on its pincers, sticky pads on the tips of its eight legs, and a prehensile tail that ended in a data-and-charging plug—scrambled across the floor, climbed the wall under the first-aid kit, opened it, and retrieved a bottle of pain pills. It brought her the bottle but forgot a glass of water to wash the pills down with. AIs didn’t have throats, didn’t need to swallow, and so sometimes forgot the mechanics of the human body if that knowledge wasn’t part of their programming.
“Thanks,” she said anyway and popped two of the pills dry.
Jacquie had worked at Tallyman Systems ever since her father, Richard Praxis, brought her into the company, which was as soon as she got her degree in mechanical engineering. That was during the war, and she had stayed on after the peace because she found the subject of computer-mechanical interfaces—loosely, “robotics”—interesting. And then, as the computing half moved into the realms of autonomy, self-direction, motivation, and human emulation, she graduated from mechanics to heuristics, or the science of problem solving, discovery, and learning based on past experience instead of programmed formulae.
Early on, she had consulted on the periphery of Tallyman’s experiments with stochastic-evolutionary programming. According to rumor, that department had contributed greatly to ending the war. From her own personal experience, she also knew that the department’s work had later forged the original link between Tallyman and her father’s old company, Praxis Engineering. That link had nearly come apart when her father died, for reasons that were still a mystery to her.
But then the link had been made stronger—and had made both companies rich—by the big earthquake up in San Francisco. In its wake, rebuilding the water, sewage, transit, and electrical grids in nine counties had relied heavily on her company’s proprietary Stochastic Design and Development
®
software package. But at the same time, the earthquake had been a net setback for Jacquie’s own field. The disruption created a major recession in the country and created an instant demand for thousands of human hands to dig out, rebuild, and reorient the damaged area. Nobody much wanted to hear about how to give this work to teams of ’bots guided by primitive intelligences that needed hours of teaching and training to learn how to pick up a brick
here
and put it over
there.
Without the quake, the domain of artificial intelligence might have grown slowly and opportunistically, built stature for itself, and expanded into the surrounding society—like any new, evolving species. Instead, the whole field was put on pause, strangled for funding, and left almost stillborn in the laboratory—except for a few diehards like Jacquie Wildmon. Tallyman and its competitors in heuristics had to wait years, until the economy recovered. Then growing businesses could find other, more interesting jobs for all those willing hands that had picked over the rubble, and the rising demand for human-scale knowledge and skills opened the way for artificial intelligences and their mechanical hands to continue their soft infiltration of the higher-level job market.
The heuristic machines had started at the knowledge end of the information, manufacturing, logistics, and service sectors. At first, they replaced human analysis, which was largely dependent on hunches, unreliable insights, and slow-moving analytics based on outmoded spreadsheets, visual graphing, and painstakingly programmed computer models. But after a couple of decades of continuous development, the machines could also perform in those free-form, figure-it-out, real-world jobs—find the brick, pick it up, put it over there—that defined hands-on work in sectors like medicine, construction, agriculture and food processing, hazardous-waste cleanup, disaster recovery, and a thousand similar functions. Metal hands were cheap and easily replicated. Electronic minds were even cheaper and easier to copy and clone.
During the lull in her career right after the quake, Jacquie had met Alexander Wildmon at a robotics convention, married him, and produced two children—a boy Stephen and a girl Valerie. Then, when the heuristics market picked up again, she renewed her interest in and dedication to her job, fell out of love, divorced Alexander, turned the kids over to a series of nannies, and eventually sent them off to boarding schools. Except for Mother’s Day, Jacquie considered the whole family thing to have been a career hiccup.
That whole
human
thing … People still wanted to
control
the intelligences. They would consult with them, give them instructions, dictate the focus of their problem solving, and then accept or reject the solutions the machines produced. Humans still wanted to treat the machines as servants. That was the wrong approach. At the highest, most sophisticated level, intelligences were not servants but colleagues. And for some tasks—especially those involving monomaniac persistence, inhuman speed and breadth of access to data and analytical functions, undirected inspiration through stochastic evolution and evaluation, and tireless recursion of test parameters and process adjustments—they were clearly superior. They could be guides to human progress, if not the masters of it.