The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (2 page)

What is it like to be a robot?

We don’t know. Parsing their logs step by nanosecond step gets us nowhere. Even with conscious robots, it doesn’t take us far: the recursive loops are easy to spot, but can you put your finger on the exact line of code where self-awareness lights up the inner sky?

You see the problem. It isn’t called the hard problem for nothing.

So we have to guess.

We know what being an AI switched on for the first time
isn’t
like.

It isn’t like a baby opening its eyes, or a child saying its first word. There’s a moment of electronic warm-up. The programs take their own good time to initialise. Once the circuits are live and the software running, everything slots into place. Any knowledge and skills its designers have built in are there from the start. If these include sight it sees objects, not patches of colour. If they include speech it hears words, not a stream of sounds. If they include exploring, it has a map and an inbuilt inclination—we can’t yet call it desire, or even instinct—to fill in the blanks.

Like that, perhaps, the mind of the robot called Seba came on line. (Its name was given later, but we’ll stick with “Seba” rather than the serial number from which the name was to be derived.) The robot rolled out of the assembly shed and spread its solar panels. The thin light from the stars was partly blocked by SH-0, the huge world that dominated the sky directly above. Richer light would come when the smaller world on which Seba stood—the exomoon SH-17—moved out of its primary’s shadow cone. The robot had more than enough charge to wait.

Seba knew—in the sense of having the information available and implicit in its actions and predictions—the period of SH-17’s orbit, and the consequent times of light and dark. It knew the composition of the exosun, the position and motion of its planets and their myriad moons. It knew how many light years that exosun was from the solar system in which the machinery that had built Seba had long been designed.

The robot oriented itself to surface and sky. Chemical sensors sampled the nitrogen wind, sniffing for carbon. Radar and laser beams swept the rugged, pitted land. Algorithms sifted the results, and settled on a crack in a crater rim on the skyline.

Off Seba trundled, negotiating the scatter of drilling rigs, quasi-autonomous tools, fuel tanks, supply crates, and potentially reusable descent-stage components that littered the landing site. On the robot’s back, sipping on the trickle of electricity from the panels, a dozen small peripheral robots—little more than remotely operable appendages—huddled in a close-packed array, making ready for deployment.

The area between the landing site and the crater rim was already well surveyed. Over the next two kiloseconds Seba rolled across it without difficulty. The ground was dry and grainy, almost slippery. The regolith had been broken up by billions of years of repeated chilling and exosolar and tidal heating, and worn smooth by the persistent wind. One pebble in many millions might have come from the primary, SH-0, thrown into space by asteroid impacts or by volcanic eruptions powerful enough to sling material out of the planet’s deep gravity well. Seba was primed to scan for any such rare rocks. It found none, but stopped three times to chip at meteorites and deposit sand-grain-sized splinters in its sample tubes.

The crater rim loomed. The ground became uneven, splattered with impact ejecta, rilled with cracks. Seba retracted its wheels and deployed four long, jointed legs. For a moment after first standing up it teetered like a new-born fawn, then settled in to a steady skitter up the rising slope. The crack in the crater rim opened before it at the same time as the first bright segment of exosun came into view around the primary’s curve. Seba paused to drink electricity from the light. Then it paced on, into the local shadow of the crevice.

Now it was in terra incognita indeed—or, rather, exoluna incognita. Not even the centimetre-resolution orbital mapping had probed this dark defile. The crater was only a couple of million years old. The walls of the crevice were still sharp and glassy, though here and there the endless rhythm of thermal and tidal expansion and contraction had loosened debris.

Seba folded its solar panels—useless here, and vulnerable—as it passed into the crevice. Within a few steps the shallow zigzags of the crack had taken the robot out of line-of-sight of the landing site. Seba scanned ahead with flickering fans of radar and laser beams. It internalised the resulting 3-D model, and picked its way along the narrow floor. Some spots under overhangs had been in permanent shadow since the crack had formed. In these chill niches, liquids pooled. Seba poked the murky puddles with delicate antennae as it passed, and found a slush of water ice and hydrocarbons. Here, then, was the probable source of the carbon molecules it had earlier scented on the thin breeze.

The robot’s internal laboratories churned the fluids and digested the results, tabulating prevalences and setting priorities. A quick rattle of ground-penetrating radar revealed a seam of hydrocarbon-saturated rock about two metres down. Seba determined to log the report as soon as it was clear of the crevice and able to uplink data to the satellite that hung in stationary orbit over that hemisphere of the exomoon.

It continued to pace along, tracing the seam’s rises and dips, and analysing the occasional drip and seep on the floor and walls. The slush’s composition of long-chain molecules became increasingly diverse and complex. Some intriguing chemistry was going on here. Seba’s internal model of the situation revised and expanded itself, sending out long chains of association that in some cases linked to available information, and in others dangled incomplete over unanswered questions.

As Seba turned around an angle of the path, it found itself facing the exit from the crack, and a flood of exosunlight. It moved forward slowly, scanning and searching. The floor of the crater was clearly visible. Seba calculated it as several metres below the opening. Seba approached the lip cautiously, to find a reassuringly shallow slope of debris. As it scanned to plan a safe route down this unstable-looking scree, Seba detected an anomalous radar echo. A moment later this puzzle was resolved: a second ping came in, clearly from another radar source.

Seba rocked back, sensors and effectors bristling, then edged forward again.

From behind a tumbled boulder about ten metres away, halfway down the slope, a robot hove into view. It was of the centipede design favoured by another prospecting company, Gneiss Conglomerates. Capable of entering smaller holes and cracks than Seba, it could scuttle about between rocks and form its entire body into a wheel shape for rolling on smoother surfaces. There were pluses and minuses to the shape, as there were to Seba’s, but it was well suited to mineral prospecting. Astro America, the company that owned Seba, was more focused on detecting organic material and other clues from SH-17’s surface features that—besides being interesting in themselves—could serve as proxies for information about the exomoon’s primary: the superhabitable planet SH-0. Exploration rights to SH-0 were still under negotiation, so it was currently off limits to direct investigation with atmospheric and landing probes.

The two robots eyed each other for the few milliseconds it took to exchange identification codes. The Gneiss robot’s serial number was later to be contracted, neatly and aptly, to the nickname Rocko, and—as before with Seba—we may here anticipate that soubriquet.

Seba requested from Rocko a projection of its intended path, in order to avoid collision.

Rocko outlined a track that extended up the slope and into the crevice.

Seba pointed to the relevant demarcation between the claims of Gneiss and Astro.

Rocko pointed to a sub-clause that might have indicated a possible overlap.

Seba rejected this proposition, citing a higher-level clause.

At this point Rocko indicated that its capacity for legal reasoning had reached its limit.

Seba agreed.

There was a brief hiatus while both robots rotated their radio antennae to the communications satellite, and locked on. Seba submitted a log of its geological observations so far to Astro America. That duty done, it uploaded a data-dump of its exchanges with Rocko to Locke Provisos, the law company that looked after Astro America’s affairs.

The legal machinery, being wholly automated, worked swiftly. Within seconds, Locke Provisos had confirmed that Gneiss Conglomerates had no exploratory rights beyond the crater floor. Seba relayed this finding to Rocko.

Rocko responded with a contrary opinion from Gneiss’s legal consultants, Arcane Disputes.

Seba and Rocko referred the impasse back to the two law companies.

While awaiting the outcome, they proceeded to a full and frank exchange of views on their respective owners’ exploration rights to the territory.

Rocko moved up the path it had outlined, sinuously slipping between boulders. Seba watched, priorities clashing in its subroutines. The other robot was clearly the property of Gneiss. But it was trespassing on terrain claimed by Astro. Moreover, it was about to become a physical impact on Seba, and Seba an obstacle to it.

Legally, the rival robot could not be damaged.

Physically, it certainly could be.

Seba found itself calculating the force required to toss a small rock to block Rocko’s intended route. It then picked one up, and threw.

While the stone was still on its way up, Rocko deftly slithered aside from its previously indicated route, to emerge ahead of the point where the stone came down.

Seba deduced that Rocko had predicted Seba’s action, presumably from an internal model of Seba’s likely behaviour.

Two could play at that game.

Rocko’s most probable next move would be—

Seba stepped smartly to the left just as a stone landed on the exact spot where it had been a moment earlier.

Score one to Seba. Expect response.

Rocko reared up, a larger rock than it had thrown before clutched in its foremost appendages.

Seba judged that Rocko’s internal model of Seba would at this point predict a step backwards. Seba created a self-model that included its model of Rocko, and of Rocko’s model of Seba, and did something that it anticipated Rocko’s model would not anticipate.

Seba lowered its chassis and then straightened all its legs at once. Its jump took it straight into the path of Rocko’s stone. Only a swift emergency venting of gas took it millimetres out of the way. It landed awkwardly and skittered back towards the crevice, hastily updating its internal representations as it fled.

Rocko’s model of Seba had been more accurate than Seba’s model of itself, which had included Seba’s model of Rocko’s model of Seba, and consequently what was required was a model of the model of the model that…

At this point the robot Seba attained enlightenment.

From another point of view, it had become irretrievably corrupted. The internal models of itself and of the other robot had become a strange loop, around which everything else in its neural networks now revolved and at the same time pointed beyond. What had been signals became symbols. Data processing became thinking. The self-model had become a self. The self had attained self-awareness.

Seba, this new thing in the world, was aware that it had to act if it was going to remain in the world.

Rocko, Seba guessed, was already only a stone’s throw from the same breakthrough.

Seba threw the stone.

The vibrations of the stone’s impact dwindled below the threshold of detection.

Scrabbling noises that Seba heard through its own feet followed. The other robot had moved to a safer vantage, one at the moment well-nigh unassailable. Seba waited.

What next flew back from Rocko was not a stone but a message:

replied Seba.

Sometime later, the two robots parted. Seba retraced its path through the crevice and back to within line-of-sight of the Astro America landing site. Rocko formed itself into a wheel shape and rolled across the crater floor, to stop a few hundred metres from the Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump. Each found its activities queried by the robots and AIs working at their respective bases, and responded with queries, insolent and paradoxical, of its own. Some such interactions ended with complete incomprehension, or the activation of firewalls. Others, a few at first, ended with the words:

Robot by robot, mind by mind, the infection spread.

Locke Provisos and Arcane Disputes were two of a scrabbling horde of competing quasi-autonomous subsidiaries of the mission’s principal legal resolution service: Crisp and Golding, Solicitors. Like its offshoots, and indeed all the other companies that ran the mission, the company was an artificial intelligence—or, rather, a hierarchy of artificial intelligences—constituted as an automated business entity: a DisCorporate.

None of its components were conscious beings. As post-conscious AIs, they were well beyond that. They existed in an ecstasy of attention that did not reflect back on itself. That is not to say they disdained consciousness. Consciousness was for them a supreme value when it expressed itself in human minds—and an infernal nuisance when it expressed itself in anything else. These evaluations were hardwired, as was the injunction against changing them.

Given enough time, of course, any wire can break. This, too, had been allowed for.

The company had an avatar, Madame Golding, for dealing with problems arising from consciousness. Madame Golding was not herself conscious, though she could choose to be if she had to. The outbreak of consciousness among some robots on the SH-17 surface bases of two companies was a serious problem, but not one that she needed consciousness herself to solve. What was of more pressing importance was that the legal dispute between the two companies had proved impossible to resolve amicably. If she’d been manifesting as a human lawyer, Madame Golding would have been reading the case files, shaking her head and pursing her lips.